When he’s not riding cross-country on his Harley or on a crazy trip with Heath Kirchart, you can sometimes find Kynan Tait in his hometown of Victoria BC, a quiet island city an hour and a half ferry ride away from Vancouver.

As Willie Nelson played and Kynan lit his first of what would be many cigarettes, our conversation meandered through meeting Patrick, crashing on Arto Saari’s couch, his love of motorcycles, and working behind the scenes on Epicly Later’d.

It’s been a little over a year now since Epicly Later’d returned, but in Patrick’s interview with us, he sounded uncertain the show would come back. When did you know it was coming back?
It’s funny we’re doing this for Jenkem, because I think that interview had a lot to do with the show coming back. He said he wasn’t sure because Vice was going through some financial troubles and may be shutting down or being sold; the future was really uncertain. And in that interview I think he just said “I don’t know, but Vice has all my tapes, and I’d love to get my tapes back.” After seeing that interview somebody [Sergio] from Vice hit him up, and sent him a photo of all his tapes, and said, “Hey, I found your tapes, do you wanna do some more episodes?” He called me to see if I was available, and we got Heath involved, and that was that. It was basically because of that Jenkem interview.

Did you feel any stress from Patrick about the show being so up in the air with Vice?
I have never felt any stress from Patrick whatsoever. Patrick is a very unstressed kinda guy. I haven’t felt any pressure from him about the show when it’s on, about the show when it’s not on, he just kinda rolls with the punches.

photo by: Daniel Efram

The earliest episode I saw you in the credits for was the Antwuan Dixon episode. How was that experience?
I don’t even remember working on that episode really. Patrick was still doing a lot of the work himself at the time, like all the stuff of Antwuan on that Baker tour Patrick filmed mostly himself. I wish I could have been a bigger part of that episode. I think Patrick really wants to revisit him, like try and film Antwuan these days, because he’s skating again. Maybe I’ll get to work on that one.

Out of all the episodes you’ve worked on, is there one that stands out?
The Ali Boulala one was pretty important to me and Patrick. Ali was back in Stockholm, recovering from his injuries and the story hadn’t been told from his side yet. There was a lot of hate out — sort of understandably, to some extent — at that time. He was on people’s shitlist. Nobody had heard from him, he hadn’t done any interviews. For Patrick to be able to do that, and for me to join and help tell Ali’s story was pretty huge, and I feel pretty lucky to have been able to do that.

Now that you guys are back and releasing episodes, is there a recent one you’re most excited about?
Ben Kadow. Patrick and Heath [Kirchart] and I all kinda fell in love with Ben. We were super interested in his skating, and super interested in him as a personality. We really wanted to see the footage, and we couldn’t wait for Vice to edit the episode.

Heath [Kirchart] and I begged Patrick to let us edit it instead, and Heath and I spent almost a year doing it — on and off because we’re both doing our own thing at the same time. We showed it to Patrick and Vice and they were just like, “Yeah, this is great, we’ll run it.” I think it’s the first episode of the show that hasn’t been edited by Vice.

photo by: Kynan Tait

What projects were you working on when Vice wasn’t producing new Epicly’s?
I’ve bounced around and done the best I can to try and do creative work where I am on Vancouver Island, which can sometimes be challenging. I hate this term, but I was a ‘content director.’ I can’t stand the fact that any art these days is referred to as ‘content’, but that was my job title. I worked for a photo licensing agency whose headquarters are in Victoria.

I do work here and there with a camera crew for a production company that pretty much exclusively makes Lifetime and Hallmark movies. Victoria has a pretty active indie film community, but as far as making money it’s a Hallmark movie or bust [laughs].

You’re also an avid photographer. When did you get into photography?
Right around the same time I started skating. I saw that John Waters movie Pecker, and instantly wanted a classic film camera like that. There was this stoner at my high school who was known for stealing things and selling things, and he showed up to the skate park one day with, to my eyes, exactly the same camera from that movie – just like, a black and stainless steel manual SLR camera.

I bought that camera, and as soon as I started taking photos I realized that it completely changed my memory. I realized that I have a horrible memory, and I wouldn’t remember times or events but if I took photos of them I would remember the photos. So it became a compulsion to photograph everything so that I would remember. I was instantly addicted to it.

photo by: Kynan Tait

You first met Patrick O’Dell on a motorcycle / skate tour, right?
Yeah. While planning a road trip to Mexico with my friend Harvey [Foster] we came upon a post somewhere about Emerica doing this trip called the Wild Ride with Harley.

They were posting all the campsites like, “Come camp with the Emerica team” and we were like, should we just do this instead? One of the locations was in South Dakota, and we figured we could make it there in like four or five days so we rode like crazy to meet up with them.

Patrick was on that trip filming for Epicly, driving a van with some of the kids on the tour. He wanted to learn how to ride a motorcycle, and because Harley donated all these bikes for the trip people were just like, “Take it. I don’t care if you crash it, whatever.” So he learned how to ride on that trip, and then he quickly bought a bike and we did the Vancouver trip the next year, and then Doin’ it Baja for Vice.

photo by: Arto Saari

How soon after did you start working on Epicly Later’d with him?
I started spending more and more time down south after those first couple trips. I met Arto Saari on the Baja trip, and he lived in Hollywood at the time, and he was an easy friend to crash with. I would go for a few days, crash on his couch and hang out, and then I started staying longer and longer until I was pretty much spending like half the year down there at his place.

I stayed in touch with Patrick and he was always looking for someone to help film the show. So I would film the odd interview here and there. I think the first episode I ever worked on was with Lizard King. It wasn’t until later, maybe 2014 or 15, that I filmed the majority of an episode, which was Ali Boulala. But it was always in hiatus, we would work on three or four episodes and then not do anything for a couple years, and then pick it up again. It was constantly in limbo, depending on whenever Vice hit him up to do more.

photo by: Kynan Tait

What was it like crashing on Arto’s couch in California?
That was a pretty special time for me, and obviously I’ve been a longtime fan of Arto’s skating. He was starting to go through a bit of a transition in his life, because he was always injured and had a lot of downtime, so he was picking up other hobbies.

He was really getting serious about photography, so we bonded over that, going through his negatives and organizing things. He started meeting commercial photographers, and he started getting work. And because I was around a little more during that time, I became his tagalong helper, more or less.

A lot of the work was skate related, like video work for Flip, shoots for CCS, and I would assist him and do behind the scenes. I was drifting a lot, at that time. I had my motorcycle and I’d do these long distance trips, and go in and out of LA. He always gave me a place to stay, always had some interesting job that he was more than happy to have me come out on. He really gave me a purpose, and a place to be at the time in my life when I really didn’t have that.

Seeing that you could have a life doing fun creative photography work was foreign to me, being from Vancouver Island. So being able to stay with him and see that kind of life was possible was really exciting and inspiring to me at the time. It still is.

I saw a story about you taking a photo of Mac DeMarco’s balls. Why were his balls out?
[laughs] He was just starting to blow up, and he was filming a music video. We all had too much to drink one night and we went bowling. He might have been bowling naked or had his balls out in the bowling alley or something, and I caught a photo of him on a bench outside the bowling alley with his balls out.

Who’s more rowdy, skaters or musicians?
Skaters without question. When Mac was just starting to blow up, he was rowdy in his own way, but it was pretty good natured and it wasn’t totally debaucherous or anything. I would call it fairly tame, whereas skaters tend to be a little more out of control, in my experience anyway.

photo by: Kynan Tait

Tell me about your video diary for the Mississippi River trip. Who’s idea was that trip? A month is insane.
That was Patrick. I’m very lucky to know people who have designed their lives in such a way that they’re free to fuck off down the Mississippi River for a month. Those people are hard to find. I do not take it for granted. It’s one of the great gifts of skateboarding. There’s a shared sense of something in people that are drawn to skateboarding. A reckless, devil-may-care sense of abandon. That’s a beautiful quality that I don’t find exists in all the same ways outside of skateboarding.

So Heath had retired from skating and he had gotten into doing all these weird adventures. We have a mutual friend, Jeff Vallee, and their gimmick was doing these trips with very little planning and no prior experience. One of their trips, they were trying to sail from San Diego to Baja. So they built a little sailboat and set out on the ocean. It went horribly wrong, they got caught in a storm, the boat sank, and they both nearly died. They were rescued early morning hours, basically treading water to stay alive, and the trip was a total failure.

I think Heath was embarrassed-slash-motivated by this failure that he set out to do it again, but he wanted to row a rowboat down the Baja Peninsula. Around the same time Epicly Later’d got picked up for TV, and Patrick was doing an episode on Heath. So he flew down to meet him in Mexico, and Epicly Later’d rented another boat to go and film him on the water, and Patrick came home from that just like: “I wanna do that, I wanna go on some rowboat adventure.”

photo by: Jeff Vallee

Why the Mississipi?
I don’t know why he chose Mississippi, it just seemed like something to do. Heath already had the rowboat, Patrick wanted to do it in a canoe, and I actually was working for a photo licensing agency in Victoria at the time, but it was technically a remote position, so I was like, “I can do it, but I need to be able to have meetings. So I can’t be rowing a boat, I can’t be in a canoe paddling, I need something else.” So in my own research to get ready for the trip, I found this Dutch fishing company that made these rectangular floating fishing platforms made for like, Dutch lake fishermen. They were big enough that you could put a tent on the raft. I saw a picture of it and was like, “that’s it, I need that.”

I wrote to the company and asked them: “Can this thing go on the river? Can you put a motor on it? Do you think it would survive living on it for a month?” And this company told me they don’t know, they’ve never even sold one in America. I told the company I’ll take the risk. It arrived the night before we were set to leave. I think Patrick and Heath had a bet like, this wasn’t gonna work, I wasn’t gonna make it. But the raft showed up, and I had to figure out how to drive a big fucking rectangle down an industrial shipping channel.

You’ve done so much shit that there’s no way we could touch on it all in this interview, you would probably have to write a book to cover it all.
I’ve been really lucky to have made the friends I’ve made in skateboarding. I like to think that I’m decently self-motivated and adventurous, but it’s hard to do on your own. So being fortunate enough to be friends with a group of people – it goes kind of hand-in-hand with skating – that are similarly adventurous and always wanting to do something new and exciting and challenging, I’ve been really fortunate to be a part of a lot of trips that if it weren’t for skateboarding, I likely never would have never done.

photo by: Scott Smith

What’s the key to life?
Wow, that’s a heavy one. The key to life for me is to learn to enjoy being uncomfortable. It’s really easy to stay where things are comfortable, to never leave your town, or never leave your state, or country, because you know how everything works there. But all the memories you make, or the memories you will go on to cherish, are the times when you were uncomfortable. Whether you overcame them or not, just making it through something that was uncomfortable is what memories are made of.

Interview by: Eden DaSilva
Header Photo by: James Jeffery
Photos Courtesy of: Daniel Efram, Jeff Vallee, Scott Smith, Kynan Tait, and Arto Saari
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