JASON DILL WEEK DAY 5: EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW

Welcome back to the last installment of Jason Dill’s Vans Rider Week. If you live under a rock without Internet and you missed the rest of the week we suggest you go back and check out Day 2’s 23 Jason Alien Workshop ads, Day 3’s look at ace photographer, Anthony Acosta's, photos of Dill and the stories behind them and yesterday’s Double Feature of videos..
Most importantly for today you should go back and read the past 18 years of Jason’s interviews from Day 1 so that you’re up to speed for today’s exclusive interview with Dill. We try to avoid rehashing old topics already addressed in those early interviews while still tipping our hat to Dill’s storied career. Today Chris Nieratko and Dill discuss Jason’s real name, addiction, recovery, 101, his shirtless Sheckler ad, his constantly broken wrist, his upcoming Vans video part and a number of other topics in this lengthy chat. Enjoy and hope you had as much fun as we did this week

JASON DILL INTERVIEW

If your real name is Donald Jason Dill why are we calling you Jason?
It’s kind of funny, there’s a good lady friend of mine that calls me Ice Don. That’s her nickname for me. That’s a sick nickname and I think it’s rad but my mom hates when anyone calls me Don because it’s my father’s name. My father got locked up when I was 8 and he wasn’t around much to begin with; same old sad spiel of a white person. The thing is my mom would always get bummed when people called me Don and Chris Carter would always be like, “What’s up, Don?” Because my original name is Donald Jason Dill. Then my mom got super-bummed on everyone calling me Dill, which started in grade school. I was bummed on it at first.

Were there a lot of pickle jokes?
More dildo jokes. I have heard the word dildo more than anyone. But then at a young age I watched The Crying Game and the beautiful she-male, transvestite, brown girl is named Dill and I was like, “Damn, that’s sick.” And then in To Kill A Mockingbird there’s Dill. Anyways, it always reminded my mom of my father. She named me Donald Jason Dill, that’s my name, but she wasn’t about to call me Don or Donald so she always called me Jason.

So many f’d up dads have no clue the psychological damage they do to kids they abandon. I went through the same thing. What was your old man locked up for?
Shit, possession and intent to distribute. We had a police informant living at our house by the name of Jack. I used to get picked up at school so many different people from Eddy to Charlie to Guido to Mario, sometimes it would be Jack the police informant with the giant red moustache; all these different people that my dad was involved with. Shit was weird back then in Huntington Beach. It was a smaller community back then so they really threw the book at my father. They really made an example out of him. What he was trying to do was to do this computer parts distribution company but use the money from an illegal deal to go straight. That mixed with my uncle’s kidnapping and larceny charges across state lines didn’t really work very well. My father is the only one on the Dill side I know. All I know of them is they were Irish travelers/psychos in the Ozarks. Snake handling, very weirdly religious. I don’t blame my father, he comes from a very, very, very fucked up family.

How long was he locked up for?
You know what? I don’t know. I lost contact with him. I do know this, for any dad that’s going to go to jail in the future: don’t create a pyramid scheme of fraudulent stock and sell them to someone that’s going to get out before you do because he’ll come after your family. Thanks, Don.

Was he getting high on his own supply?
I know I did and would.

Do you think that addictive side of your personality stems from that?
No, because my mom always told me that I was a better drunk than the old man by tenfold. That’s a big compliment. He couldn’t hold his liquor very well.



Ok, Don, how long have you been getting boxes of Vans for?
Well, when I was 12 years old I was on the team. It was sick back then because it was all made in California so you could order whatever color you wanted. I could get sand colored soles on Half Cabs and then chocolate brown tops or black tops; it was sick. But if you grew up in Southern California Vans is a constant in your life. It just is. But as of recently I’ve been getting Vans for a bit. I wasn’t really skating much or doing anything and then I decided to see if skateboarding would give me one last go-round. Boy oh boy it’s been fun. So it’s been a couple years now. For years I’ve been coming to California to visit from home in New York and every time I would come I would link up with Anthony [Van Engelen] and we’d skate together and I would ride whatever he rides: the boards, the wheels, the bearings. He would be like, “Here, put this together.” I don’t know how many times I’d come to California with no board. I don’t know the dimensions of the boards I ride, I just ride what he rides. I know it’s over 8”, he knows all that shit for me. I just ride whatever AVE rides and that’s how it started with the Van stuff too.

Was Vans your first shoe sponsor ever?
Yes, they were the first people to tell me, “You’re with us! You’re doing it!” It was Vans.



Does it trip you out that over two decades and having lived a million lives since then that you’re back on Vans?
Let me tell you something, Chris, being on the phone with you and being awake trips me out. Being alive trips me out. Everything on an everyday basis trips me out. It’s nuts. I don’t know what’s happening; everything is crazy. It rules! There’s nowhere else that I could do what I’m doing but at Vans. It took me this long to get everything I represent as far as sponsors to be completely cohesive. It took me a long time but finally it happened. With Alien it’s me and AVE. With Vans it’s me and AVE. then there’s Syndicate and Supreme as well, so it all works together.





You had a Syndicate shoe come out earlier this year. What was the silver snakeskin shoe story?
Yeah, that was a little project that Syndicate asked me to do and that’s pretty much when I started hanging out with a lot of the Vans guys and they were like, “You have good ideas, we like your ideas,” and that’s where we went from to where we are now. But I had ridden for this one shoe company and I had them sample up these shoes that I wore in a video in 2004, they were snakeskin with a clear sole. They looked super-cool. I just thought if any skate nerd was paying attention that when the Syndicate shoe came out they’d be like, “Oh! That’s the shoe he sampled and wore in that Skate More video.” And plus I’m afraid of snakes and I was facing my fears.



You were on the team with and even had a semi-naked ad with Ryan Sheckler.
It was so funny because I remember Carroll coming up to me and I love Mike Carroll. He’s, like, the greatest skateboarder ever pretty much, top 3 styles in skateboarding without a doubt, and I remember Carroll going, “What is going on there?” And I was like, “It’s a fucking joke! I got no shirt on and I’m with Sheckler in front of his Range Rover!” I guess people thought it was serious. I thought it was funny.

Did yous guys get soaped up and wash that car together?
I didn’t have the sexy physique I have now back then. I had more of the drunk/drug addict physique. I thought it was a funny joke. Look how corny that company was and I was trying to do my best to play into it and be funny like, “Yes, I’m doing this for the money. I know.” It was the first time I’d ever dome something strictly for the money and I’m admitting to it. It’s lame when people do something just for money and trust me, I paid dearly for that mistake. Not the ad, but for the decision. It took me a long time to come back and make everything right. But I thought that ad was funny and I stand by it. I don’t know the kid for nothin’, I hear he’s a nice kid and at the time he was super-cool and I thought it was cool that he went along with it.



Ryan’s a child star all grown up and ripping. Nyjah Huston, child star growing up and you, Jason Dill, already sponsored at 11, a child star. You’re the prototype of child street stars.
Wow! You just lumped me in with so many people that no one would ever lump me in with! Not saying my experience was any better or worse but back then I was riding for Lester Kasai; I wasn’t really riding for a board company. There was no money involved. You skated to survive. It was just survival. You did what you were doing so you weren’t doing something else bad. I don’t know what their experiences were necessarily and I haven’t really paid attention to what they went through, I only know what I went through but it is very strange having your entire adolescence, pre-pubescence documented. Then you grow up and you fight to get away from whatever that was because you think you were corny and you didn’t know anything, which is true, and you change and you evolve and you look at your past and what you liked back then but then you get old enough and you realize why you liked it. And you realize it made you what you were and I’m way more comfortable with it these days.



Do you think there’s a chance one day we’ll see a Nyjah or Sheckler living in New York living the artist’s life?
Don’t call me an artist! That’s the last thing I am. Let’s just get it out of the way; when I went to New York when I was 16 I went to Supreme I was welcomed with open arms. Those guys pretty much helped raise me for the rest of my life. They were all older than me. I went on to live my own life in New York and met a lot of people that had nothing to do with skateboarding. A few of them ended up being gigantic artists. A few of them died. I’m no fucking artist.

Acid Drops - Episode 1 - Jason Dill from Matt Box on Vimeo.

I just heard a story about one of your paintings—
Wait! What? I don’t paint. That’s a falsity in itself.

I just heard this story about you painting a pair of Fucking Awesome Etnies for a Vice ad that got shot down.
Oh. I didn’t paint them. I tried to do an ad for a pair of shoes I made that were supposed to look so bad that I wanted people to think they were Chinatown, Canal Street Fucking Awesome shoes, which they did look like. They did look fake. They weren’t supposed to put their name on it and they were all on board. And I was like, “I get to do the ad however I want.” So I jerked off all over the shoes and I took photos of the shoes after I did three rounds. I just thought that would be the best ad, these fake-looking Fucking Awesome shoes covered…and they didn’t think it was so funny. And they most certainly didn’t run the ad. It wasn’t to be shocking, it was to be funny.




That’s what I like about you and can relate to. Skateboarding wasn’t always so vanilla, people spoke their minds and had a good time and fucked with people. I remember reading Grosso and Jason Jessee and Neil Blender interviews as a kid and thinking, ‘these guys are insane! I love them!’
Everybody’s situation is different but it seems people are more afraid now to say anything at all because they’ll have to answer for it. But you can come up to me in the street and ask me if I said it and I’ll tell you if I said it or not. There’s no glowing screen for me to hide behind. I’m me. If I said some shit, I said some shit. I’m just as surprised as you are that I’m still here so have fun with it. Whoever pays attention to this weird bubble that is skateboarding, great. But I grew up on photos of Mark Gonzales, Jason Lee and Matt Hensley that were so beautiful so of course your flip in-flip out doesn’t do anything for me and so of course your interviews do even less for me. What the fuck are you people talking about? Monster Energy Drink? Fuck you. Fuck where you came from. Fuck what you’re about. Fuck everything. I don’t care. I’m too old to care. If anybody pays attention to anything I do, god bless you.









Both of us are pretty surprised to still be alive. I didn’t think I’d make 30.
I always thought I was going to die before 30; it was just a thing. It wasn’t like, “Live fast, die young.” I hate that statement; it’s so corny. I just liked doing stuff to myself that usually makes you not live.

I know. And at the time I knew it could only end one way…
And it hasn’t ended! Nothing has ended! I keep saying it, there’s no more future. We’re in the future. It’s happening right now.

How do you think you survived everything you did?
All luck. All luck. All luck! Everything in my life! I don’t know who did it or who you are up there, I don’t know if I’m being protected by some very sympathetic Native American heyoka or what but boy, oh, boy have I been lucky! I’ve been one lucky son of a bitch! And any time on any day of my life that I’m bitching and complaining I should be struck down by lightening and murdered by nature because I have been so lucky it’s insane. I’ve had some hard times. I’ve had some dear, dear friends die and that sucks and that’s been the hardest to deal with. I had a woman I loved very much leave me because I mistreated her because I was an alcoholic. And she left me ten times so that was ten times tough. But aside from that all I’ve been is lucky. I can’t believe I’m still here. It’s wonderful. Whatever you are Allah, Buddah, Ganesh, Krishna, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King; thank you.



When we discussed your Alien ads you briefly mentioned you were hospitalized in New York for drugs and alcohol. What was the situation?
I did it for a long time. It’s what I did. It was my identity. I was probably running away from whatever childhood skateboard stardom and I was in New York and people were doing things that had nothing to do with skateboarding and I did the things with them and it filled the days and it filled the nights. All we were really doing was filling time. Filling empty spaces and time we had on our hands. I threw myself into it as if I was a dedicated member of some sort of society that that’s what you do. The booze and drugs caused me to have a major gastric hemorrhage and jaundice. What a gastric hemorrhage is is that you’re bleeding from the inside and I didn’t know I was bleeding from the inside and I had been for a while. When it became apparent that something was very wrong it happened very violently. All the blood that had been going through the hole in my stomach and becoming rotten blood and killing me started coming out. It’s like when women die in labor, that’s what the doctor in New York told me. They’re bleeding from the inside. I never thought I was going to get clean because I loved it. I had a great, great time and so many good nights and so much fun and met such beautiful people; I loved bar life. I’ve said it a hundred times. I loved the women you meet and the smells and the certain feelings that those times of night give…I don’t mean to sound all so romantic but for me it was. I liked it. Then once I was hospitalized and they said, “The only people we’ve seen come in this bad are in their 50s and 60s and they’re usually homeless,” that freaked me out. I still didn’t think this was it; I’m going to quit and be some square, sober person. At the time I thought being sober was square. I didn’t know much about a lot of things. I had a strong marriage to a certain lifestyle. But then you spend a couple weeks in a hospital, unable to move or walk, I couldn’t sneak out to get a cigarette because I was so weak…it makes you think. Then my good friend died and I said, “Fuck it! I’m done.”



Did you collapse? What happened to send you to the hospital to find out about the hemorrhage?
I started throwing up blood and it wasn’t throw up; it was just blood. There was nothing mixed with it, just dark, dark blood. I’ve talked to enough old drunks over the years and if you start puking blood, then that’s it. Blood has come out of me, out of every orifice before but this time it was gigantic. It was all over my apartment. Six in the morning, I had this French girl living with me and I just sent her home. I was yellow, my eyes were yellow…I wasn’t paying attention. I never called 911 in my life and I called, had a convulsion and woke up in the hospital. It’s not some epic drama. I got really good photos of what I came back to weeks later. The blood everywhere had congealed. But I was completely honest with my doctor, Dr. Jeron, at New York Downtown Hospital. He was such a good guy and I still have not called him to tell him I haven’t picked up a drink since. I’m such an asshole. I was in the emergency room for a while and then they transferred me to intensive care and this guy went out of his way to come up and visit me in intensive care every night. He was like, “You’re definitely going to die. If I let you go and you go back to it, you’re dead.” It wasn’t regular doctor talk. It was a dude being honest with me. Over time I learned he barely got through medical school because he was so shaky and drunk and fucked.

But even that morning, if you don’t call 911, you’re dead.
I don’t know. I’m not going to say that. Like I said, I’ve been so lucky in this life I probably would have pulled through then too. I don’t like to say. I think it all sounds very dramatic and silly.

I’m just trying to sell your book rights. So what happens after you get out of the hospital?
I had to fight to get out of the hospital. I don’t know what this means but they told me I had half the hemoglobin count that I’m supposed to have. I was like, “Look! I don’t have enough money to be here any longer. I have no insurance. This is going to cost me a fortune. I have to leave.” But at that point I could barely walk. I couldn’t just get up and run away. Both my arms were purple from two IVs in each arm for weeks. Basically, my friend Dash came and took care of me. He got out of rehab and it was so great to see him all healthy and clean. I had never seen him look that good since he was 19 and for days on end him and his girl took care of me. And then he died. I was devastated. That was my last running around partner. New York just made me sad so I had to leave.





Ballpark number, what’s a three-week vacation in a hospital with no health insurance set you back? Six figures?
Let’s just say I’m still paying for it over three years later. If you combine that stay and my wrist breaking four times, yeah, we’re over six figures.

What is the deal with your wrist? It’s always broken!
The thing that happened with my wrist was four breaks in a row. I just celebrated a year in June of one whole year without breaking my wrist. I’m basically one-handed now and it really sucks. I can do push-ups but they don’t really work. I have a metal plate, three screws and all these pins in my hand. I can still handle myself in the streets.

A year without a break. How long are you sober now?
Well, I’m not AA sober but I don’t drink. And I haven’t had a drink in a few years. Like everything else, this new healthy lifestyle that I took upon myself since I’m so hardheaded I do it my way. But I’m in the best shape of my life. I happy and I’m stoked.



You and I hate to fly; do you still take pills for flying?
Yes, but that’s where the big separation is. There’s people that are fully sober and they take it very serious and I respect that. But I hate flying so I take Xanax to fly. I started flying without it and I can’t stand it.



I’m not going to get into the Berra thing with you. I think it’s been said and done enough. But I did have one question, reading your old interviews I saw you rode for Blockhead with Berra in the early 90s. Did your dislike for him start back then?
Yeah, because he was an asshole to me when I was young and I took it with me. It wasn’t like how Rick Howard would mess with me when I was young; I appreciated that because it helped me become the person I became. I never had much respect for Berra whatsoever. I just want to say The Master will win an Oscar... Apparently Megan Ellison is my new hero.



You mention Rick Howard. Right around the time you and Gino joined 101 everyone left World and Plan B and started Girl. Any part of you wish that you were in that camp?
Oh, I was insanely jealous. Not jealous, envious. So envious. I wanted to be with the cool dudes. Of course I wanted to be with the cool dudes. And Gino did too. I feel like half the reason that Gino stayed on 101 for so long was just for me because I was like, “Please don’t quit and go ride for those guys! I know they want you to. Please don’t leave me!” I just split my ACL in half, I was only 17, I just turned pro and I wanted to be with the cool guys. I was bummed. Now I look back and see what I really had over there, working with Natas and having Gino and producing that amount of skateboarding in that short amount of time; it was sick. I’m so happy I did it and had the opportunity. For god sakes, Natas Kaupas turned me pro. How many people can say that? I’m so proud of that. I appreciate everything that’s happened to me in skateboarding. Just because I say, “This is skate shit isn’t forever and I’m going to go away one day,” that’s just reality. This shit ain’t forever. I’m stoked for every part of it but one day I’m going to leave this shit alone and be happy that I did. There’s nothing wrong with that. Musicians do it.



What do you think you’ll do when you leave it behind?
I have no idea and that’s the best part. That’s the only way I’ve ever lived. Sometimes I think about it and I get freaked out. Sometimes I think, ‘Am I driving myself crazy so I do become homeless one day and I don’t have to deal with any of this as a self-destructive mechanism?’ I think I might have been doing that at one point and not realizing it.

In your first Transworld interview you said you were going to get your GED. Ever get it?
I said that to shut my mom up. But then I paid her back taxes so, mom, you’re going to have to live with it. I was a drop out, I am a drop out, I will always be a drop out. And if you show me another drop out that paid his mom’s back taxes I’ll high five him too.



In your recent Syndicate interview with AVE you said Timecode is internally hated at Alien Workshop. Why?
I don’t know because it’s incredible. That’s why Alien rules! They’ll never put Memory Screen on DVD. It’s the greatest video, it’s what inspired Harmony Korine to make Gummo and they will not make it on DVD. Timecode rules and they hate it! Photosynthesis never on DVD. I love it. I love that, “Nope, we’re putting our foot down. Fuck you, fuck off, fuck what you think.” And so much of that in me comes from Chris Carter and Mike Hill.



What is it about Carter and Hill that makes them stand by guys like you and Freddy and Ave who were monumental train wrecks at points? They just always stand by their guys.
Well, look what they had to deal with before us. Bo Turner? Scott Conklin? Dyrdek was no walk in the park either for Carter when he was younger. Just Bo and Scott alone…I’d like to thank Bo and Scott for being such psychos because we seemed like diet psychos compared to them. Some of the Bo and Scott stories I’ve heard over the years are insane. I can’t even tell you. There might still be cases open, investigations; I’d have to change the names. They rule! I love Bo Turner and Scott Conklin. But I think that’s why Carter and Hill were able to deal with this new breed of psychos.

Vans video. How is your part coming along?
I have five tricks, thank you very much. I’m my worst enemy. I’m so critical upon myself. Any time anyone mentions Mindfield I’m still upset at my last trick. I didn’t do it good enough. I didn’t do it good enough. I didn’t do it good enough. That part was a terrible example of some bullshit. So these five tricks, I’m real critical of myself and these are blood, sweat and tears tricks and I’m keeping them. But it’s a big video! I get nervous filming a line because I don’t want to be on the screen for more than 20 seconds because I’m taking up time that the young kids could be in it. I’ll be very critical of myself through this whole process but I’m doing it. I am doing it and I like where it’s going.