Marc Johnson, a Bay Area skateboarding icon, is dead. He was 49.
“As I write this, the reality still hasn’t fully set in,” Louie Barletta wrote in a statement published by Thrasher on Tuesday (May 26). “It was less than a month ago that Marc came to San Jose to hang out. He was sober, healthy and full of life. We had a blast reminiscing about the old days. He seemed genuinely excited about the future.”
Barletta, who first met Johnson when he was 17 years old, went on to say that the San Jose visit concluded with him handing over a list of his “hopes and dreams for the future” spanning three pages.
“Marc was a genius and a tortured soul,” Barletta, who cited Johnson as “the single most influential person” in his life, said. “He told me he wanted to be remembered for his skateboarding, not for his failures or shortcomings.”
Born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Johnson turned to skateboarding at the age of 13, ultimately heading to California on a whim less than four years later.
“I’d been skating for three and a half years, so from 13 to, like, 16 [or] 16 and a half or whatever you wanna say,” he recalled in a 2017 interview with The Nine Club. “Then I got just a random fucking opportunity to get in a car that was heading back to California.”
In subsequent years, Johnson would build a massively influential legacy that remains celebrated to this day. His creativity-driven ethos, notably, also extended beyond the world of skateboarding.
“Everything he did was art,” Barletta wrote in his Thrasher tribute on Tuesday.
Jose Rojo, Geoff Rowley, Mike Mo Capaldi, Chad Muska, Ishod Wair, and more also paid their respects.
RIP.
