My name is César R. Carpanez. I was born in São Paulo, Brazil and have been living here ever since.
I started skateboarding at the age of 10 after watching Back to the Future I on the movies. After leaving the theather, I knew exactly what I wanted to do for the next 15 years of my life. A few weeks later I got my first board and started skating everywhere I could.
After a few months I was competing in a downhill competition.
A few years later I started competing as amateur and in 1992 I became pro. At that time I was already really involved with music, starting bands to cover my favorite groups like Bad Religion, TSOL, Misfits, Pennywise and etc.
In 1993 I joined a band of friends called Cold Beans which also featured my friend Fernando, another pro skateboarder. We used to pratice at his house which was about 5 blocks from this giant concrete skatepark. Those guys were really into praticing ALL DAY on saturdays and sundays. That wasn't for me, I wanted to pratice and skateboard as well. There was a great skatepark right next to us for gods's sake!!!
Anyways, we recorded a demo and started playing anywhere we could. We recorded 5 songs for waht was supposed to be a self released 7 Inch but all of a sudden all the vinil factories seemmed to be bank rupting. We had no choice but releasing it as a CD, and it became the very first independent CD released in Brazil by an independent punk band(or skate rock, like we liked to be called).
It was already 1995 and I went to Canada to compete at Slam City Jam. Most of my favorite skateboarders were there including Natas Kaupas, Colin McKay and Mike Vallely. I didn't go that well on the competition like I went in Germany 2 years before and I realised at that time that I wanted to quit skateboarding professionally.
Anyways, still in Vancouver I bought my first video camera only to videotape Agent Orange's show! They are definitelly one of my favorite bands of all time and it was a money well spent. This Fat band called Good Riddance was going to play as well and I have never heard of them before, but since they were from Fat, I decided to videotape their show and years later they became another band that I always mention on my list of favorites.
Tilt, Trigger Happy, DOA (with No Means No drummer) and DBS (a canadian band with a brazilian bass player) also played that day. I got a yellow flyer about a show that this band "Foo Fighters" was doing with Mike Watt (!!!) as special guest. I went crazy when I saw that, not for FF to be honest, but because of Mike Watt since he was in Firehose! I ended up not going since NONE of my skateboarding buddies wanted to go with me! That was the time when they started putting hip hop songs on the videos and punk wasn't "cool" anymore.
Before coming back to Brazil me and the guys who were on the team flew to California and spent a week visiting our brazilian friends living there and skateboarding.
I asked one of my friends to take me to a music store and I loved a red Guild Bass which I ended up buying and bringing to Brazil.
When I got here I quit Cold Beans and started a new band called Lack Of Reason (name inspired by SAMIAM) which I used to sing and play bass. A few weeks later one of my favorite brazilian bands was breaking up. TUBE SCREAMERS were having problems with their bass player and they decided to start a new band. They asked me to join them and we started AGAINE.
I will continue soon... This is getting too big right?