Mike Pearson

One Step Beyond: a Teenage Odyssey in 1980s Los Angeles Mike Pearson 1st edition

One Step Beyond; a Teenage Odyssey in 1980s Los Angeles is a fast, fun, coming-of-age story that captures the spirit of West Los Angeles at the turn of the 1980s. Times were changing from '70s, good-time, party-rockers, to glitzy, manic, punk and new-wavers of the '80s. Just as Dogtown and Z-Boys did for '70s L. A. surf/skateboard culture, Mike Pearson captures the zeitgeist of the New Wave era in the story of his tumultuous, humiliating, and triumphant teen years. It's a nostalgic and bittersweet look into the teen, pop-culture world of L. A.'s beach cities in the early '80s. There was freedom, fun, and liberation, but also a recklessness and abandon that sent many kids down a dangerous dead-end path.