My Footage of Mat Hoffman and the First BMX 900 in a Contest

I stumbled across this a couple of days ago and linked it on FB, so some of you have seen it.  I won't go into the details right now, I'll do that next post.  But this is footage I shot in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada (eh) in early 1989, as a cameraman for Unreel Productions, the Vision Street Wear video company.  It's the first 2-Hip King of Vert of the year and there was still snow outside, as I recall.  Mike Dominguez, who pioneered the 900 attempts, and pulled a couple on his own ramp, was retired.  As you can see in this clip, Brian Blyther and Dave Voelker both hucked 900 attempts in this contest.  But it was Mathew Hoffman, then 16 or 17, and still an amateur, who landed one.  It's at the very end of this clip.  As you can tell by the crowd reaction, the 900 was a huge deal then.  Twenty-seven years later, they're still a pretty big deal.  I have a lot of stories from this contest, which I'll go into in the next post.  For now, just enjoy the hilarious commentary by Eddie Roman and friends in the beginning, and the first 900 (in ANY action sport) at the end.

I have new blogs now, check them out:

The Big Freakin' Transition- The future and economics

Crazy California 43- Weird and historic locations in California

Full Circle- Writing and the writing life

and a fiction blog- 

Stench: Homeless Superhero

Eddie Fiola flatland

During the summer of 1985, while I was living in Boise, Idaho, I went on two trips.  Both of those trips were made possible by my "freestyle family," the Bickels.  First they took me to the Venice Beach AFA contest in June of 1985.  Later that summer we went to a then little known town called Whistler, British Columbia, for a freestyle contest held in association with the BMX World's races. 

Jay Bickel and I spent a day and a half staring out the windows of his parents' Mercedes station wagon looking for sasquatch in Idaho, Washington, and British Columbia.  We didn't see one.  We arrived in the ski resort town of Whistler which was pretty much empty in the summer of 1985.  That was fine by us.  Since it was the Bickel's vacation, they landed us a two story suite in the main hotel which had a sauna in the suite among other things.  Once we unpacked, Jay and I took our bikes to the town square area where a bunch of Canadian riders were hanging out.  We soon learned what a Norklifter stem was.  A company in Canada called Norco made knock-offs of all the main parts, including the Redline Forklifter stem, which was real popular then.  There were 40 or so Canadians, a really fun bunch to ride with, and a group the freestyle world didn't even know existed.  Rob Dodds is the one name I remember, though I ran into other Canadians I met on that trip in later years.

Much to our surprise and delight, the GT/Brittania summer tour rig rolled up the second day we were there.  Out of the RV popped Eddie Fiola, the original King of the Skateparks himself, and East Coast pro Chris Lashua.  They had a few days off while doing shows at the World Expo (or whatever) happening in nearby Vancouver.  That night, with no ramps set up, we got the typical flatland jam circle going.  Much to everyone's surprise, Eddie Fiola rode out and busted out a bunch of flatland we didn't know he could do.  He wasn't known as a flatlander at all to us kids who relied on FREESTYLIN' magazine as our lifeline to the sport. OK, I think he got a cover doing a gut lever once, but that was all we'd seen.  But having done shows for several years already, he had a smooth and very well dialed bag of tricks.  The one that blew us away at first was his rolling moonwalk.  We'd never seen that.  We all started yelling when he busted that out.   We all looked at each other, "Fiola rips on flatland?  Really?"  His tricks weren't super hard for the most part, but he did everything smooth and with his characteristic style.

There is one flatland move of Eddie Fiola's that always blew me away, though.  He would either rollback off a quaterpipe or snap a front wheel 180, then he'd roll backwards standing on the back pegs, and then go up into a backwards, 1 foot nosewheelie.  And he would always get nearly upside down on those things, and he could ride them quite a ways.  No one did that trick like Eddie Fiola, and I never even came close to learning it, though I tried for a while.

The few days we all had both riding and just hanging out with Eddie and Chris Lashua were epic memories for our weird, mostly unknown, group of riders from the Northwest.  I wasn't part of the industry then, I wasn't that great of a rider at all, but Jay and I had a blast hanging with that Pacific Northwest and GT/Brittania posse.  Even with all the cool stuff that came after, that's still one of my best riding memories.

My main blog now is about building creative scenes, check it out:
The White Bear's Making a Scene

The S&M Bikes BS20 Neon

I had another story from the 90's in mind for today.  But Rich Bartlett had a post on Facebook with a pic of him testing the single blade Kastan forks back in about '89.  That photo instantly took me back to one of those epic nights in the tiny, one bedroom apartment we called the Winnebago.  In about 1991, Chris Moeller, founder of the fledgling bike company S&M Bikes, lived in a tiny apartment on Alabama Street in Huntington Beach, California.  An enterprising apartment owner had taken 8 feet off the back of a few garages and made it into a long, narrow, completely unpermitted apartment.  The whole thing would have fit into a semi trailer.  First you had to walk through a gate into a private backyard, and then to a door that shouldn't have been there.  The door led to the tiny living room, which led to the tiny kitchen, a hallway passed a tiny bathroom on one side, then the small single bedroom.  A door out the other end of the bedroom led to a single car garage.  That garage was the home of S&M Bikes in 1990-91.

Chris Moeller, pro racer, amazing jumper, BMX Action/Go test rider, entrepreneur, and certifiable weirdo, lived in the bedroom.  After getting fired from my job at a video duplication company while working on the first S&M Bikes video (Feel My Leg Muscles, I'm a Racer), I wound up sleeping on the floor of the living room.  Shaggy, an East Coast transplant who looked like a real life Shaggy from the Scooby-Doo cartoons, slept on the two cushion couch, with his legs hanging off the end.  The weird apartment had the dimensions of the inside of a motorhome, hence the name, The Winnebago.  We could literally lay on the living room floor and touch our hands to one wall and feet to the opposite wall.

For those of you who remember 1991, it was a time of national recession, and a full on depression for the BMX world.  At the bike trade show in early 1989, a mantra was repeated by the whole bike industry, "BMX is dead, mountain bikes are the future."  Unfortunately, no one asked us BMX racers and freestylers if we minded if they killed our sport.  The corporate money pulled out of BMX, many pros lost sponsors, and only us hardcore riders were left.  We struggled along, making our own videos, starting our own little companies, and promoting our own contests, and getting really good at making multiple types of meals out of ramen.

In those years of the late 1980's and early 90's, a few new ideas hit the BMX world.  Linn Kastan, the guy who gave us tubular forks, Redline V Bars, and Redline Bikes, became enamored with the single sided landing gear on small airplanes.  He decided that by making single sided BMX forks, riders could get rid extra weight on their bikes.  Hey, it worked for airplanes weighing a couple thousand pounds, why not a BMX bike?  Well, BMXers quickly answered, "small airplanes don't do tabletops, Leary's, and 360's."  Kastan got a few racers to try the crazy forks, but it didn't last that long.

Around the same time, my old bosses Todd Huffman and Bob Morales came up with the Auburn BMX bike, which had a bolt-on, replaceable back end.  The idea was that you could quickly change to a longer or shorter back end of your bike depending on riding conditions.  Unfortunately, they never made any alternative back ends.  Hey, I rode an Auburn for a couple years, as a freestyler, and I liked the bike.  But the whole bolt-on back end idea didn't go anywhere.

So one night, Moeller, Shaggy and me were sitting in the tiny living room, probably eating spaghetti or ramen, and drinking 40's of Mickey's.  Chris started going off about all these crazy bike ideas people had come up with.  Then the magic happened.  "We should make the most ridiculous bike possible and see if kids would actually order it."  I think this was around the time that Steve Rocco and crew at Big Brother magazine came out with the Big Brother Brick.  They put an ad in the magazine for a normal brick with a Big Brother sticker on it, and charged $400 (+ shipping & handling, of course).  The word was that they'd actually sold three or four of them.

Anyhow, Chris grabbed an old pair of forks, a hacksaw, and cut one leg off.  We were off to the races, literally rolling on the floor laughing half the time.  A couple hours later we had the prototype for the S&M Bikes BS 20 Neon.  The single bladed fork came with front wheel drive, a bolt-on front end (your choice of the Weak Link or Missing Link versions), a single bladed rear end (I think) and the high weight/low strength S&M Herbal Tea handlebars.  Once we had the pile of junk bolted together, we opened more beers and the next step was obvious, we needed to make an ad for it.  The ad above actually ran in some magazine.  Maybe more than one, I really don't remember.

My stomach hurt from laughing so hard.  I think Chris and Shaggy's did, too.  But that wasn't the last laugh.  We actually got three or four orders from really stupid kids when the ad came out.  What can I say?  I (kinda) love the 90's.  We did send really sarcastic letters to the kids to tell them it was a joke.  At least one kid was totally heart-broken.  Sigh.

As of the late summer of 2023, I'm going in a new direction with my writing.  Check out my new stuff on my Substack.  

Steve Emig: The White Bear's Substack

History Lesson

Oddly, I can't find a video clip with BMX Action magazine in it.  But here's a bunch of classic BMX Action photos of R.L. Osborn and Mike Buff in the early BMX Action Trick Team days.  In true Gork fashion, it's all set to Metallica.  Off to never, never land...

On the last day in July in 1986, I got on a plane in San Jose, California with much of my bike in an odd-sized box, a suitcase (with my wheels in it so I wouldn't have to pay the airline bike fee) and $80.  I was so nervous about taking the job at Wizard Publications, that I had developed a serious case of the hives.  Not knowing any better, I laid out in the sun one day, making the hives even worse.  I wore a long sleeve, button-up shirt for the fist two weeks at the job.  The whole time my arms, chest, and legs were in red blotches.  On one hand I was stoked at the amazing opportunity of working at the magazines.  On the other hand, I had more hang-ups than Kim Kardashian's closet, more issues than the National Geographic magazine warehouse, and I was afraid I'd screw up the job somehow.

I made the short flight to LAX, where I was met by Andy Jenkins, Mark "Lew" Lewman, and Gork.  We threw my stuff into Gork's van, and instead of heading to the apartment I'd be sharing with Lew and Gork, we headed straight to the Wizard Publications office for an evening session at work.  By some weird quirk of fate, the BMX Action magazine 10 year anniversary party was that weekend.  So while Andy and Lew went to their offices to work on FREESTYLIN' magazine, Gork asked me to help him out.  Following his lead, I climbed up on the warehouse shelves, and we started digging through a bike box full of old slides.  Back then, in the olden days, the color photos for magazines were printed as slides.  Each roll of film (remember film?) ended up as a little yellow box with of slides of each photo.  Gork and I had the job of going through this huge box of slides and finding the best ones for a slide show that would play at the anniversary party.

The crazy thing was, I only got into racing in 1982, and hadn't seen a single copy of BMX Action until late 1983.  Only BMX Plus was on the newsstands in Boise, Idaho back then.  It was only when I started hanging out at Bob's Bike Shop (and Lawnmower Repair) did I see my first issue of BMX Action.  So I was clueless about the history of BMX.  Gork, as I quickly found out, wasn't.  He'd been racing since the late 70's, I think.  So as I checked out slides, I'd show him the interesting ones, and he'd fill me in on who the riders were, what their story was, and where they fit in the BMX history.

I seriously couldn't have had a better introduction to working at the home of BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines.  In a few hours that first night, I got an overview of the history of BMX, something I didn't know anything about.  Of all the slides, the standouts in my mind were early skatepark rider (and later MTB hero) Tinker Juarez.  He was blasting big jumps out of early bowls that blew my mind.  The other one I remember most was Trash Can Morgan.  This kid was testing bikes, jumping them while riding old school leather combat boots, and doing these crazy kicked out cross-ups three-four-five feet off the ground, which was huge then.  He earned the nickname "Trash Can" because that's where most of the bikes ended up after he was done with them.

Like all kids who came out of obscure places, (Boise, Idaho is where I got into BMX), I thought I was a better rider than I actually was, and I thought I knew a lot about BMX.  Gork's informal history lesson that first night really opened up the early years of the sport to me.  In the weeks that followed, I didn't have a lot to do at first, so I just started digging out old issues of BMX Action and reading article after article... and getting paid to do it.  Jealous?  You should be.

Each one of us plays a little role in a bigger timeline, and that first night at Wizard really made that clear to me.  Thanks Gork.

Freestyle BMX Tales: The Book

This is Freestyle BMX Tales: The Book, part 1.  That big square up top is all the pages of part 1, (20 full size pages) laid out.  I'm calling this "the coffee table book of BMX zines."  It's either one of my greatest ideas... or one of my worst.  I'm never sure.

Here's a few excerpts:

"On another street, I followed Rick Thorne between two big rig trucks, both of which were moving slowly.  Unfortunately for us, they were moving closer to each other.  We both hit the gas, cranking hard to get past them.  Rick pulled up his front wheel and turned the bars to squeak through the narrowing gap.  I did the same thing right behind him, yelling in excitement as I cleared the trucks."

"The sound wound up, and with a yell, Scot came screaming around the corner of the warehouse racks on an 80cc dirtbike.  Jay and I looked at each other, wondering if that was a normal thing in the SE warehouse."

"A few weeks later, completely out of nowhere, Andy (Jenkins, editor of FREESTYLIN') called me up at home, in San Jose, one afternoon.  He asked me if I was planning to go to the next AFA Masters comp in Tulsa, Oklahoma.  I told him I was.  'Would you like to cover it for us?'  I grabbed a putty knife to scrape my bottom jaw off the floor.  'Uh...yeah.' I muttered somehow."

"This punk kid sailed 25 or 30 feet down the hill, head high, blasting a huge no footer.  Nobody jumped like that back then.  Those were the first photos I saw of Chris Moeller..."

"'Uh-boo-buh-kuh,' Andy told me, I don't know what the trick is or how you spell it.  He's coming here in an hour and you'll be driving Windy and Ron to the photo shoot.'"

I got into BMX in a trailer park outside Boise, Idaho in the summer of 1982.  I saw my first local freestyle show in the spring of 1984.  BMX freestyle became my thing, and I dreamed of being a pro rider someday, getting free bikes, and touring the country.  I never did become a pro, but I did get some free bikes and managed one skateboard tour.  I didn't have the guts or charisma to start my own company in the 80's or 90's, so I became a kind of wandering sidekick, the right hand man to some of the top people building freestyle.  I became part of the Golden Gate Park scene in 1985, getting to know Dave Vanderspek, Maurice Meyer, Robert Peterson and the rest up there.  My zine landed me a job at Wizard Publications, where I worked with Andy J., Lew, Gork, and Windy.  I went on to work for AFA owner Bob Morales, the guy who turned trick riding into the sport of BMX freestyle.  That led to video work, and I worked for Don Hoffman at Unreel Productions, the Vision Skateboards/Vision Street Wear video company.  A lot of BMXers don't know Don, but he made several of the first freestyle videos, and his parents owned the legendary Pipeline Skatepark.  I went on to self-produce a video called The Ultimate Weekend, in 1990.  The next year, young Chris Moeller, who ran S&M Bikes out of the garage of a one bedroom apartment at the time, called me up to make their first video.  I became his sidekick/roommate for quite a while, and also lived in the P.O.W. House during the early 90's, rooming with guys like Dave Clymer, Todd Lyons, John Paul Rogers, Alan and Brian Foster, and a bunch more.

I have a lot of stories.  I'm putting the best ones into a weird book of sorts.  It's a handmade thing, a D-Ring binder, filled with 20 pages to start, all hand laid out by me, zine style.  It comes with a few custom stickers and a couple of 11" X 17" copies of my drawings.  Each book is signed and numbered, and I'm hand numbering the pages of every copy.  Part 1 of Freestyle BMX Tales:The Book is out now, and costs $20.  Every 4 to 6 weeks, I'll have another 20 pages (and some goodies) for $10.  I've got a lot of stories of those old school days of BMX freestyle.  I'll keep putting some on the blog for everyone to read.  But the best collection of my stories, thoughts, and lessons from those days will be in the book.  You can order yours today at my Go Fund Me page.  The books are numbered as the orders come in.  #3 is up for grabs as I write this (11/262016).  Order yours today.

Mike Dominguez's Best Public 900 Attempt

In 1988, the 2-Hip King of Vert Finals was literally a backyard affair.  Technically, I guess Ron Wilkerson's Enchanted Ramp was in the front yard, so it was a front yard affair.  I'm pretty sure I was a judge for this contest. I was there for two or three Enchanted Ramp contests, and judged at least two of them.

All that aside, this is about the 900.  There was a battle on for this trick.  Back in 1987, I think, Mike Dominguez told people he had landed a couple of 900's on his own ramp.  As crazy as it sounds to kids today, back then, we just rode.  We rarely shot video.  VHS camcorders and the new 8mm ones were expensive, and not many people had them.  So there was no video to prove Mike's claim.  But he WAS Mike Dominguez, the highest flying pro at the time, and the craziest vert rider around.  So even as early as the AFA finals in 1987, people were hoping to see him land a 900 in a contest.

Mike was the first person to claim to have landed one.  But all of us in the freestyle scene and industry had bets on who would land it first in a contest.  Personally, I was always betting on Brian Blyther.  Brian had the most consistent and smoothest 540's, so I figured he'd win the 900 race.  What I didn't understand then was that the 900 was really a "Fuck it and huck it" trick.  Brian went high and smooth, but hucking crazy tricks wasn't his style.  He tried some 900's, but wasn't too close.  Dave Voelker tried some, but didn't land it first.  Dennis McCoy was still struggling to land smooth 540's then.  I can't remember if he hucked any 900 attempts in '87 or '88.  He did land his first in Indianapolis in 1990, and many more after that.  As weird as it sounds, Mat Hoffman was still an amateur rider, and just coming up in '87 and '88, so most of us figured someone else would land the first contest 900.

To be brutally honest, a lot of us in the industry weren't really sure if Dominguez really had landed the trick.  He said he had.  And he was Mike Dominguez, but it seemed like he would have had somebody shoot video at some point.  And then came this final 2-Hip King of Vert in 1988.  Expectations were high that Mike would try the 900.  Sure enough, in his last run, at 4:57 in the clip above, Mike went for it.  As you can see, he made the rotation, he landed on his tires, and just had his weight a little too far off to roll away from it.  Everyone around that ramp that day was blown away.  First, it was so close, that us doubters truly believed he had landed the trick at some point.  Second, he damn near did it in front of us.  We joked that he was so close, if he had even farted mid-900 we would have finished the rotation more solid and ridden away from it.  But, it wasn't to be.  It was, however, on the table.  We all knew it was possible.  Sure enough, about six months later, in Canada, Mat Hoffman landed the first 900 in a contest.  That was a changing of the guards.  Mike faded from the contest scene, and Mat became the new daredevil trying the craziest of tricks.  Mike Dominguez opened the door on the 900 and landed the first couple on his own ramp.  Mat Hoffman brought it to the public.  But man, it would have been soooooo cooool if Mike had ridden away from this one.

I have two new blogs now:

Crazy California 43- This blog's about weird, cool, and historic locations that have an interesting story.

WPOS Kreative Ideas- This blog's about creativity, writing, art, blogging, and promoting creative work, and anything else I feel like writing about.   

Oz taught me how to sweep

August 1st, 1986 was on a Friday.  That was my first day of work at Wizard Publications, home of BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines.  It also happened to be the day before the BMX Action Ten Year Anniversary party.  I flew in Thursday night, as I recall, and after doing the basic new job paperwork Friday morning, I was helping get ready for the party.  There were a bunch of rental tables set up in the warehouse, and one of the jobs I got was to sweep the warehouse.  So I took the push broom and started pushing it in a straight line across the warehouse. 

I heard a noise behind me, and it was none other than Bob Osborn, the Wizard, the Great and All Powerful Oz of BMX, my brand new boss, telling me I was sweeping all wrong.  Loudly.  It scared the crap out of me.  On my first day as an editorial assistant at the magazines I was in trouble for sweeping the floor.  I didn't know what to do.  Andy J.peaked his head out of his office, wondering how the new guy managed to get in trouble on his first morning. 

Oz asked me if I'd ever swept before.  I nodded stupidly.  Then he said something like, "I was a fireman, I'll show you the right way to sweep."  I handed him the broom, and he demonstrated how I should sweep one stroke, then step sideways, sweep the next stroke, and keep doing that across the small warehouse.  By the end, I'd have one long line of dirt that I could sweep into a pile and scoop up.  So I started sweeping the way he taught me.  He watched for a minute to make sure I got the idea, and then went about his business. 

In the years since, I've swept parking lots for freestyle contests, big warehouses, huge stages on movie lots, and even an airplane hanger we used as a stage.  I learned to sweep switch to help fight fatigue on the big jobs.  I used Oz's fireman sweeping technique every time, and taught it to my crew on the set of American Gladiators.  Oz scared the hell out of me that first day, but I'm glad he took the time to show a BMX kid the way firefighters sweep.  It really came in handy. 

The Birth of Club Homeboy

The Birth of Club Homeboy

 By late 1986, I'd fallen into the rhythm of working at Wizard Publications.  Gork, the editor of BMX Action, and Lew, the assistant editor of FREESTYLIN', were my roommates.  We had moved into a three bedroom apartment in Hermosa Beach.  Andy Jenkins FREESTYLIN's editor, and his wife Kelly, lived half a block down the alley that our apartment faced.  Most mornings, after a quick breakfast, we'd pile into Gork's van, he'd crank up Metallica, and drive to the office.  Some days we'd ride our bikes the three or four miles or so to the Wizard office.  On an average day we'd end work around 5:00 or 6:00, pile back in the van, and head home.

Check out my epic blog post explaining why action sports exploded in popularity when they did 

"The Rise of the Action Sports"

After our bachelor suppers, Lew and I would jump on our bikes and head down to The Spot, our riding area on the north end of the Redondo Beach Pier.  Like any riding spot then, there were a handful of locals.  Most nights it was Lew, Craig Grasso, Chris Day, and me.  Gork came down to do some flatland 3 or 4 nights a week.  R.L. Osborn came down to ride on a regular basis.  Andy skated down a couple of times a week.  That was our core crew.  In addition, McGoo, the CW freestyle team manager at the time, showed up now and then, sometimes with Dizz Hicks and Ceppie Maes.  We'd practice our flatland and goof around for a couple of hours.  Some nights we'd take off and do a little street riding, jumping curbs or hitting local banks.  The Spot wasn't much different than most of the small freestyle scenes at the time, except for a couple of things.

One, we were right by the Pacific ocean, so we could hear sea lions barking off in the distance, and the ocean breeze brought a lot of moisture that made our brakes really sticky.  The second thing about the spot was that Andy and Lew had mentioned it in FREESTYLIN' from time to time, so every rider in the world knew it was there.  When an AFA contest was happening, we could roll down to the spot and find 75 riders from across the country riding there.  Everyone had to make a trip to The Spot when they came to Southern California.

One night, after our session, Lew and I rode over to Andy and Kelly's apartment to hang out.  Lew was a man of continual, and often pretty crazy, ideas.  On that particular night, he decided he wanted to find a name for The Spot locals.  I sat on the couch sipping a Coke as Lew and Andy threw different names around.  As I recall, Lew was getting into rap music at the time, a pretty new thing then.  But the term "posse," used often by rappers, didn't seem to fit our group.  Then, out of nowhere, Lew said, "How about Club Homeboy?"  They didn't like the name at first.  A few other names were tossed around, but Lew came back to Club Homeboy, and the name stuck.  So Lew, Gork, Me, Craig Grasso, Chris Day, Andy, and R.L. Osborn were original members of Club Homeboy.

For a few days, we just said the name as a little joke.  Then one night, Lew bought some sticker paper, and that night we stayed late working, giving him time to assault the Wizard Pubs copy machine.  While Andy, Gork, and I worked on magazine work, or petted Cosmo the factory watch cat, Lew flipped through a bunch of random, non-BMX magazines, lying around as creative inspiration.  He found a photo of this weird old guy.  He typed up the words, "Feelin' Nifty" on a typewriter, and started blowing up the words and giving them some distortion.  Half an hour later, the first Club Homeboy stickers were made and cut.  Long, skinny stickers with the weird old guy's face and "Feelin' Nifty" beside it.  He handed us each a few.  When we went home that night, I put one on the underside of my helmet visor, where it stayed for well over ten years, until I lost that helmet.

A couple nights later, Lew got some more sticker paper.  Flipping through a Japanese magazine called Popeye, he found the photo of Buckwheat from the Little Rascals.  Lew's amped up imagination went to work, and by the end of the night, the iconic Club Homeboy stickers with Buckwheat's face were being handed out to all of us.  That first batch was white, paper stickers.  A few days later, Lew found a place to buy neon green sticker paper, and he made a few dozen Buckwheat CHB stickers. 

The funny thing was, we were not supposed to use the copy machine for non-work activities.  So we actually hid Club Homeboy from Oz, our boss and the owner of Wizard, for quite a while.  But Lew went to the first 2-Hip King of Vert contest, in a barn in Wisconsin (or was it Minnesota?) soon after.  In any case, Lew took dozens of the Club Homeboy stickers with him, and slapped them all over the barn where the contest was held.  Nearly every top pro rider had a Club Homeboy sticker on their frame after that.  From that point on, random riders were always asking Lew for the stickers.

When I got laid off a couple months later, then end of December 1986, Club Homeboy was still, "officially," just The Spot locals, though other riders were asking for the stickers, putting them on their bikes.  A couple months later, Wizard hired Spike Jonze, who was a BMXer/skater kid, barely 18 years old.  He'd worked at Rockville BMX back east, then hopped in the Haor tour van, and became their roadie.  He wound up living at Ron Wilkerson's Enchanted House, with Kevin Martin.  

I wasn't the right fit for the Wizard office, and Spike Jonze definitely was.  As he got going in his first real job in California, Club Homeboy was evolving.  Oz finally asked Andy and Lew what Club Homeboy was, since he kept seeing the stickers everywhere.  They told him about it, and Oz liked the idea.  With his backing, suddenly little ads and mentions of Club Homeboy began popping up in FREESTYLIN'.  Already popular among the pro riders, and SoCal riders, it quickly took off and became an actual, paid membership organization.  For $20 or whatever, riders got a CHB T-shirt, a zine, a few stickers, a membership card, and a coupleof plastic wristbands.  

I was working down in Huntington Beach, at the AFA then, and I asked Lew for a T-shirt the next time I talked to him on the phone.  As an original member of Club Homeboy, that seemed like a reasonable request.  But in the few months I'd been away from Wizard, Club Homeboy  had morphed into something much bigger.  The original idea of it being locals from The Spot had faded away.  I kept bugging Lew, and finally got a Club Homeboy T-shirt for free.  But I never got the other stuff, or a membership card.  Being the uptight dork that I was then, I had some sour grapes against Lew for a while, over the Club Homeboy thing.  But I got over it, eventually.

As the next couple years went on, I heard Club Homeboy had thousands of members, and the "Chuck Brown" T-shirt, the Charlie Brown design, sold thousands of shirts.  The Club Homeboy Buckwheat logo wound up being one of the most iconic logos of 1980's BMX freestyle.  It's up there with the Haro chevron logo, the GT letters, and the Vision Street Wear logo in image recognition.  

If you google "Club Homeboy BMX" and search images, dozens come up.  Looking back from 34 years later, the cool thing about Lew's weird little idea turned icon is that it is a BMX freestyle thing.  The hardcore racers of the day don't get it.  And the Old School skateboarders, inline skaters, and snowboarders from that era don't know about Club Homeboy.  It's a freestyle thing... you wouldn't understand. 

I have a new blog now, checking out bike, skate, art, and other interesting spots, check it out:

The Spot Finder

 The Spot Finder      #thespotfinder

Freestyle BMX Tales: The Book

You can see me shooting video in this clip, on the far side of the left deck.  I was half asleep.  I spent the night before in the Phoenix airport with the $50,000 betacam camera in its case, between my legs.  A canceled flight left me stranded for the night, hoping the betacam wouldn't be stolen.  I got off the plane and took a cab straight to the baseball field where this contest was being held and climbed up on the deck right as practice was ending.  I think Mat's (1 footed) 900 here is his second ever 900 in a contest.  Someone, I never heard who, was making up names on the scoreboard for each rider.  A good day.

Freestyle BMX Tales: The Book (sort of) is coming February 1st, 2017.  You can order one of the limited run of 250 today.  Check back a little later for the link.

Generation Evel

For most of us kids in the 1970's, it started like the  kids in the clip above.  I never jumped anywhere near that far on my banana seat bike.  But I did jump it on a regular basis.  Inspired by daredevil Evel Knievel, we jumped tree root sidewalk lips on our mild steel banana seat bikes as little kids.  Then we moved up to scrounging bricks, concrete blocks, and random pieces of wood lying around our garages, and building rickety wooden jumps.  For most of us kids across the country, we went through the 70's not knowing that a handful of crazy Californians had started modifying their Schwinn Stingrays and started racing bicycles motocross style.  Bicycle Motocross was below our radar until the late 70's.

For me, seeing the Schwinn Phantom Scrambler in red and black in the window of a bike shop in Plymouth, Ohio in 1979 started the idea.  I never did get that bike.  In fact I moved to Carlsbad, New Mexico the next year, 9th grade for me.  I had a cheap ten speed then.  I used to ride it to an area called The Flume, where there were a bunch of off road Jeep and motocross trails.  I wished I had that Schwinn Scrambler then.  I still didn't know BMX actually existed.  One kid in 8th grade told us about it, but he was a hillbilly kid who lied all the time, so none of us believed him.

As luck would have it, I bought my first BMX bike, a Sentinal Exploder GX, for $5 off my friend Mike, a few days before we moved away from New Mexico.  It was red, mild steel, of course, and had curved, blade forks, and six spoke aluminum mags that I later realized were heavier than Motomags.  It was a piece of shit.  Even worse, it had a coaster brake that was all messed up.  Sometimes the pedals would go all the way around twice before it would catch and turn the back wheel.

We moved to Boise, Idaho, and my Exploder sat in the garage for a year.  Then my parents decided to buy a double wide mobile home and move to a trailer park outside of town.  The idea was for them to save money for a year so they could buy a house.  Little did I know that my Sentinal Exploder GX would change the course of my life while in that trailer park. 

Yes, folks, Freestyle BMX Tales is back... for a limited run, until February 1st, 2017.  More on the reason in the next post. 

Martin Aparijo's Quaterpipe Session

I'm continuing on with my 25th anniversary look back at my 1990 self-produced bike video, The Ultimate Weekend.  Today's bit is a short but great session at Martin Aparijo's house.  It starts at 29:08 in the video above. 

As I've said a few times before, when I started taking my video camera different places to shoot video, several riders wondered what the hell I was doing.  Back then, as a rule, only established companies made videos.  But as spring turned into summer, word got around that I was making my own BMX freestyle video, and I got offers to go shoot different places.  I don't really remember how it happened, but I think I ran into flatland legend Martin Aparijo somewhere, told him I was making a video, and he told me he had a quarterpipe, and that I should come by some day and shoot video.  Something like that.  So I did. 

I went there with Keith Treanor and John Povah, and we pulled up at someone else's house first, to find Steve "Bio Air" Bennett and another guy playing "Dueling Banjos."  I pulled out my camera and started shooting.  Steve Bennett was a early skatepark rider, as you can tell from his yellow ASPA shirt.  That stands for American Skate Park Association, which was what Bob Morales created when he first put on bike contests at the skateparks.  The ASPA was the predecessor of the AFA.  So that T-shirt was already old school in 1990.  I'd never met Steve B. before, so that was a cool bonus. 

Then we drove over to Martin's house nearby.  Martin (white helmet), Todd Anderson (black cap backwards), and Jess Dyrenforth (turquoise shorts) were already there riding.  Keith Treanor (black cap forwards), and John Povah (white cap) joined the session. 

The ramp was a weird one for that time.  It was about six or 6 1/2 feet high, and under vert.  At a time when no BMXer anywhere had a mini-ramp yet, and when vert halfpipes were usually 9 to 10 feet high, this ramp was odd.  But that led to a great lip trick session.  Keith's ice pick was a pretty new trick then, as was Jess's nose pick to fakie.  Todd's barspin abubacas were something I'd never seen before, as was Jess's peg disaster.  Then Martin blew all our minds by flying out on the roof.  Most of us 80's riders think of Martin as a pure flatland rider of the time, but he was a former magazine test rider and a good jumper.  In fact, for years Martin claimed to have done the first front flip off a jump.  It was a steep jump with a really soft landing, he said, and as was typical then, no one shot video.  It seemed ridiculous at the time, but he swore he landed one or two.  Of course, now we know that front flips and even front flip variations are possible, so Martin's story is more believable.  Hell, they even front flip motorcycles now, which is beyond insane. 

In any case, this little QP session got me a few more firsts on video, and added Martin and Steve "Bio Air" Bennett to the list of riders in the video.  Strangely enough, years later I ran into Martin, after not seeing him for quite a while, and his first comment was, "remember when you shot video on my ramp that day?"  This short but awesome session stuck out in his mind as well. 

A Different Kind of Pool Party

I'm continuing with my 25th anniversary look back at my 1990 video, The Ultimate Weekend.  We're up to one of my favorite sections of the video, the Nude Bowl section.  This week's clip is at 26:56 in the video above.  I'm skipping the wall fakie bit.  After the flyout jumping in last post's segment, there's a section of Keith Treanor, John Povah, and Alan Valek with a small ramp against the back of a shopping center in Garden Grove, CA.  I think John built the ramp, and they'd been sessioning this spot now and then, so I went along to shoot video.  Keith's wall fakies here are about as big as anyone was doing wall fakies at the time, and I was pretty amazed.  John and Alan add their own style to the session, and then some dumbass neighbor called the cops.  Typical.  By this point, I made it a rule to always keep the camera going when police showed up, which was actually a pretty new idea then.  Few guys were shooting video then, and rarely did we shoot somewhere that could garner a call from the 5-0.  This cop turned out to be about the coolest one we ever ran into, which is part of why I put him in the video.

OK, then we get to the Pool Party.  When I was editing this, halfway through the week long edit session in the back of a video store in Hermosa Beach, I decided I wanted to make this section an actual music video as much as I could.  For the young kids out there, there used to be this TV network called MTV, and back in the olden days they actually played music videos all day long.  But there had been no video with BMX freestyle on MTV.  Only Tom Petty's "Freefallin'" and a single obscure punk video ever showed skateboarding in a video.  So I was determined to make this section as a stand-alone music video that I was going to try and get played on MTV.  That was my thinking while I edited.

First, let me tell you about this song and band.  Believe it or not, it all starts with street skating legend Mark Gonzales.  He walked into an indy record shop, probably Vinyl Solution in HB, and found a punk album and bought it just because he liked the cover art.  When Unreel needed the skaters to find music for a skate video, Mark brought the album in to Unreel Productions, Vision's video company, where I happened to be working at the time.  The album was by a Toledo, Ohio punk band called The Stain, led by musician Jon Stainbrook.  So someone at Unreel called Jon to get permission to use the song in a video.  At the time, Unreel was searching all over for underground bands to get music to use in videos.  People didn't really bootleg music then, particularly professional production companies like Unreel.  Some of the "unknown" bands Vision approached for music rights included Agent Orange, Anthrax, Joe Satriani, musicians from Oingo Boingo, No Doubt, The Offspring, Big Drill Car, The Descendents/All, and many others.  Some bands were totally stoked to have their music in a skate video, and some bands were complete assholes and wanted absurd amounts of money to use a single song.  Then there was The Stain.

Jon Stainbrook was a positive thinking part of the punk scene, and nearly every band traveling through Ohio stayed at his house while in Toledo.  So while The Stain wasn't one of the best known punk bands in the late 80's national scene, pretty much every other band knew Jon and The Stain well from their travels.  But unlike many, Jon also had a businessman side to him.  When Unreel called about the rights to a single song that Gonz liked, Jon saw an opportunity for make some money to finance his own pursuits.  He sent us tapes with a whole bunch of tracks to choose from, and asked a reasonable price for the rights to use them in videos and TV shows.  Since his musicians, namely Mark and Jeff were incredible musicians with varied tastes and abilities, The Stain became composers of all different kinds of music for Unreel.  I was just a peon at Unreel, but it seemed to be a really good deal for both parties.  So for a couple of years, I was dubbing tapes with many different variations of music by The Stain on them.  When it came time for music for my own video, I was way too afraid to bootleg music, which became the norm a couple years later.  I called Jon, and he sent me a wide variety of tracks and we set a price.  Full disclosure, I never did pay him all the money I owed him, but I paid about 2/3 of it.  So if I ever win the lottery, Jon is one of the first people to get a check.

When I first listened to the tape he sent me (remember cassettes old timers?), the song "Pool Party" was my favorite.  When I asked him about it, he said he wrote it for some skater friends.  But it worked perfect for a bike pool party as well.

Months before all that editing and song picking took place, I would join forces with riding buddy/photographer Mike Sarrail, and the then unknown and chronically unemployed rider Keith Treanor, and we'd go shoot video somewhere almost every weekend.  I first heard about the Nude Bowl, and saw footage of it, from the Vision skaters.  That was one of the best perks of my job at Unreel, I made copies of every piece of raw footage that came in.  So I saw new pools and spots when they were still secret, and often the skaters would tell me where they were.  That's how I learned about and the directions to the infamous Nude Bowl.

As the legend has it, the Nude Bowl ruins the bikers and skaters loved had once been a nudist colony high on a desert hill in the general area of Palm Springs and Desert Hot Springs, California.  For some reason, the nudist colony went out of business, and skaters found the pool and began spray painting and sessioning it.  The great thing about the Nude Bowl was that you could drink beer, camp out, light a fire, and nobody gave a damn.  It was in such an obscure place, that police didn't care what happened there, unless the couple neighbors on the entry road got pissed off for some reason. 

This trip in this clip was my 3rd trip there, and I was totally stoked I got skatepark legend Brian Blyther, and his friend and Pipeline local, Xavier Mendez to show up.  It was between 100 and 105 degrees out that day, and it was scorching weather to ride in.  The only drawback to the Nude Bowl was that there was no shade.  In any case, I got out the video camera, Mike got his still cam, and Brian, Xavier (long hair), Keith, and John Povah sessioned the pool.  After shooting from several different angles, I had to get on my bike and ride myself.  Although I could never do a decent air to save my life, I loved carving pools.  To give you an idea of the gnarliness of the pool, you'll notice that Brian only gets about three feet out.  The pool had a weird transition, about nine feet including a foot of vert, and pool coping.  Although Keith, John, and Xavier could do do decent airs on ramps, none got very far out of the pool.  We sessioned, drank water, and sessioned some more for two or three hours, and all had a good ol' time.

When it got down to editing this segment months later, I realized that the other riders were just riding the Nude Bowl like a quarterpipe.  That's cool, but it's a POOL.  You gotta CARVE.  So I used a few clips of myself carving (in the Vision Street Wear shirt) to fill out the segment and show some carving.  At that time, in 1990, there were NO skateparks in Southern California.  To the best of my knowledge, there were no pools open to bike riding ANYWHERE in the U.S..  Underground legend Mike Tokemoto was out there sessioning pools with a couple friends, but no one else was. 

All in all, I was pretty stoked on how this Nude Bowl segment came out, although I never did find a way to get it aired on MTV as a music video.  Mostly, I just wanted to remind BMXers that there were a few empty pools still out there, and that they were a blast to ride.  Mission accomplished.

Freestylers Dirt Jumping in 1990

Like Hannibal from The A-Team used to say, "I love it when a plan comes together."  I'm continuing on with my 25th anniversary look back at my 1990 bike video, The Ultimate Weekend.  As luck would have it, the Boozer Jam 360 is happening tomorrow at Sheep Hills in Costa Mesa, California.  Dirt jumping has evolved incredibly over the years, as the old schoolers looking back at this, then watching the riders tomorrow can attest.  Today's clip starts at 23:15 in the video above.

Before the jumping, though, is a quick shot of me.  There's a quick triple shot of me doing 50/50 grinds (aka double peg) on a little painted ledge at a shopping center on Beach Boulevard in H.B.  At the time I shot this, double peg grinds on street were pretty new.  I kept myself out of this video for the most part because I knew the guys I rode with were better riders than me, and the weird tricks I was learning then weren't very popular.  At the time I shot this video, I was doing 7 or 8 foot half Cabs, full cabs (rollback 360 bunnyhops), lookback half Cabs (which I've STILL never seen anyone else do), 8 or 9 foot rollback bunnyhops, and I'd been trying bunnyhop tailwhips for nearly three years, but never landed one clean.  Looking back, I really wish I would have put those tricks in the video.  But I didn't.  What I did put in was these 50/50 grinds.  I learned them at about 3 am somewhere in the middle of Texas on a skateboard tour with Mark Oblow.  We stopped for gas, we were both delirious from long hours on the road, and Mark found a little ledge on the back of the gas station.  He started ollying up to 50/50 grinds, which gave me the idea.  After a few tries I did a double peg stall.  Then I kept going at it faster until the stalls turned into little grinds.  The next day we picked up am vert skaters Mike Crum and Chris Gentry, and later met up with Buck Smith and did three weeks worth of demos across the South.  Just for the record, the grinds in the video I did with knurled, screw on pegs that were tiny by today's standards.

And then comes Oceanview, one of the coolest flyout jumps ever.  I first got to know Keith Treanor and John Povah at that jump one day, and we started riding together a lot.  This video came out the year before Sheep Hills was built, just to put it into perspective.  In the late 80's, there were two distinct kinds of jumpers.  There were freestylers who liked flyout jumps and doing crazy and usually unstylish tricks.  Then there were the racer jumpers, who jumped double jumps mostly, rarely did 360's, and jumped with more style but less crazy variations.  At the first King of Dirt Jam in 1987 that Gork from BMX Action and Rich Bartlett put on, the split in styles was obvious.  But as street riding contests started happening soon after, the styles started to merge.  Racers started doing crazier variations, and freestylers (some of them, anyhow) learned how  to pedal and started jumping farther and with more style.

This segment at Oceanview includes Keith Treanor (black T-shirt), John Povah (blue tank top), flatland legend Woody Itson (turquoise shorts), vert superstar Josh White (white T-shirt/shorts), and the most surprising to me at the time, H.B. local flatlander Andy Mucahy (jeans).  Now this jump, on the corner of Warner and Gothard, is the only flyout jump I've ever seen with a concrete runway up to a seven foot high jump... to flat.  Early in this clip you see Keith blast the jump for height, going an honest nine or ten feet off the deck.  I've seen Keith go a full two feet higher off that jump, but never caught it on video.  He had this crazy habit of showing up somewhere and going way bigger on his first hit then ever again.  It got to the point where I would actually turn the camera on in the car and point it at Keith because he did that everywhere we went.  The cover of the video was a photo Mike Sarrail shot and I made high contrast of Keith jumping over John's outstretched hand, like he does in this segment. 

This segment  backed by The Stain's "Flashing Red" song, one of my favorites in the video.  The riders go through the gambit of freestyle jumps at the time.  360's, one hand 360's, no footers, no handers, tailwhip attempts, and a decade attempt by John Povah.  The air they're getting seems tiny today, but this was serious freestyler jumping at the time. 

Near the end you see Josh White almost land a tailwhip.  There's a story there.  In '88 or '89 (I can't remember exactly), there were some jumps where the condos above Sheep Hills now sit.  I learned about them when Mike Miranda took Rich Bartlett there to shoot photos for a Vision ad, and I shot video of the photo shoot.  There was a good sized (for the time) hip jump, a couple small doubles, and a ditch jump.  Since the spot was literally only a few blocks from where I worked at Unreel Productions, I started riding over and jumping during my lunch break and after work.  I loved me a good ditch jump. 

One day I rode over and ran into Josh White.  As good a rider as Josh was, he hadn't learned tailwhips off jumps, and that's what he was trying that day.  I was also trying to learn them then, so we took turns missing tailwhips until my chain broke as I rode down into the ditch.  Big, painful faceplant slide, and I scootered my bike back to work, half of me covered in dirt and blood.  I didn't run into Josh for a year or so after that.  When I did run into him, he was at Oceanview one evening... trying again to learn tailwhips.  He'd still never landed one.  I had my camera, so I started shooting video as he got closer and closer to nailing that trick.  The one you see in this clip where he almost makes it and then runs off the bike was the second to last one I shot.  The next try, Josh White landed his first tailwhip over a jump... and my camera battery went dead while he was in the air.  I shit you not.  I missed it.  Josh was so bummed.  I was so bummed. So Josh's first tailwhip was one of the things that didn't make it in the video.  Sometimes things work out, and sometimes they don't.  It still really bums me out that the freakin' camera battery picked that exact instant to die.  But that's life.

Primo and Diane's Backyard Ramps

I'm continuing on in my 25th anniversary look at my 1990 self-produced bike video, The Ultimate Weekend.  Today's clip is at 19:40 in the video above.

Looking back now, it's easy to say The Ultimate Weekend was lame in many ways.  But at the time, there were only a couple of rider-made videos out.  The concept of each rider having there own section was kind of a new thing, and just one of many ways to make a video.  The few of us making videos at that time were just making this shit up as we went.  Eddie Roman made a low-budget action movie with Aggroman.  Mark Eaton chopped together amazing flatland on two VCR's in Dorkin' in York.  My idea was to show a group of us going to every amazing place possible in one weekend of riding.  This was at a time when halfpipe contests for bikes had only been around for three years, and street contests for two.  Believe it or not, this video was the first bike video to include riding on mini-ramps.  Seriously, the first mini-ramps.  So I was totally stoked that Gary Laurent got us permission to ride at Primo and Diane's house.  For those who don't know, Primo and Diane Desiderio were the first couple to do synchronized freestyle skating.  Primo was probably best know then for the Primo Slide, where he would go up on the side of his board and slide long distances.  You can see one a few seconds into this clip.  At the time I shot this video, they performed in a show at Sea World in San Diego.  I actually met Primo and Diane the weekend I flew down to interview for FREESTYLIN' magazine.  Gork and Lew took me to a skate contest at Oceanside, where I saw Mark Gonzales and Christian Hosoi ripping in street and met Primo and Diane.  I knew them and worked with them a few times at Vision, but Gary was also in the Sea World show then, I think.  He was the only BMXer that rode their ramps, and even though they were away on that particular day, they let us ride.  Perhaps the most amazing thing about their ramps was that none of the wood was stolen.  If you look close, you can see the name "Jack Files" near the coping on the tallest ramp.  He was a guy they knew from church that donated most of the wood to build the ramps.

Keith Treanor, in the black T-shirt, had never seen a set-up like this.  There were no skateparks... AT ALL... in California at that point.  We were freaking amazed when we saw that multi-ramp set-up.  Gary Laurent, in the black tank top, obviously had the ramps pretty dialed.  Keith was trying everything he could think of on this original set-up.  In addition, you see me doing a dodgy tailwhip footplant, and Mike Sarrail airing the hip... sort of.  And you also see the girlfriends.  One was Mike's then-girlfriend Paula, I think one was Gary's girlfriend.  Neither Keith or I brought a girlfriend that day, so I can't remember who the third girl was.  Anyhow, they sat there, bored out of their skulls, the whole two or three hours.

In addition to being the second mini-ramp in a bike video (the first was the H-Ramp at the beginning of this video), this was the first time BMXers riding a spine ramp had ever been in a video.  Spine ramps were also a new thing back then.  Gary had his familiar lines dialed on it.  Keith struggled a little at first, getting used to such a steep landing.  But whenever Keith was around a really good rider, like Gary, he always wanted to step-up his game.  Gary had never done a 360 over that spine.  After hearing that, it became Keith's goal for the day.  As you can see in this clip, he was a little sketchy on the first one, but landed a better one later on.  With the 360 thrown down, Gary stepped up his game and landed his own first 360 over the spine.

I really like this section of the video for several reasons.  First I did the little jump cut editing as we were walking into the backyard.  I stepped up my editing game a bit.  Second, I was showing the BMX world how cool a backyard could be if you could come up with a bunch of wood.  This scene was the second mini-ramp in a bike video, the first spine ramp in a bike video, and the first 360's over a spine in a bike video.  Riders today take all this stuff for granted, but somebody had to come up with it in the first place.  And someone else, me in this case, had to show the BMX world what people in the skate world were doing in their backyards, and spread the idea of mini-ramps.  In 1990, videos weren't just showing guys landing their hardest tricks, they were showing brand new ideas and concepts.  It was a cool time to be a BMX freestyler. 

2-Hip BMX Freestyle Show

I'm continuing on with my 25th anniversary look back at my 1990 BMX video, The Ultimate Weekend.  Today's clip is a 2-Hip freestyle show at 16:54 in the video above.

In the early and mid 1980's, each of the action sports like BMX racing, BMX freestyle, skateboarding, snowboarding, etc, was it's own entity.  There was crossover between them, of course.  But we didn't see them as one big movement then, we just saw weird, new emerging activities that were kind of turning into sports.  One thing that set BMX freestyle apart from the very beginning was the emphasis on going out and putting on shows.  From Bob Haro and R.L. Osborn in the earliest days, to the wave of mid-80's BMX freestylers across the country (and world), shows were an important part of what we did.  Some guys, like Ron Wilkerson and Dave Vanderspek in the San Francisco area, really promoted shows and turned them into a business.  Ron Wilkerson hooked up with Haro as a sponsor, moved to the San Diego area, and blended his trick team shows into the rest of his business endeavors. 

Myself, as a lowly editorial assistant at Wizard Publications in 1986, I did an informal survey of nearly all the riders I met, asking them how they got into freestyle.  Almost all of them told me it started with seeing a live show of one of the traveling teams, often a factory team.  Now, 30 years later, there are only a few professional and factory trick teams out there, and this may be one of the reasons there are fewer young kids getting into the sport.  Something for all you bike company owners to think about...

Somehow, through the freestyle grapevine, I got wind of this 2-Hip show somewhere in San Diego.  I think Gary Laurent let me know.  Mike Sarrail, his then girlfriend Paula, Keath Treanor, and I headed south to San Diego for a couple days of shooting video.  Mike's the tall, skinny guy who's always flipping me off in the video.  He didn't really want to be on camera, so every time I pointed the camera at him, he flipped me the bird, thinking I wouldn't use that footage.  Much to his dismay, I did.  All that aside, we caught this show featuring Ron Wilkerson himself (white helmet), Gary Laurent (yellow helmet), and a couple of flatlanders who I didn't know.  I didn't bother getting their names for some reason.  Sorry guys.  Mike went off to shoot photos, I was shooting video, and Keith and Paula parked themselves on the tailgate of my truck, affectionately known as Blue Hell.  I bought the truck off of Mike, and still owe him quite a bit of money for it.  I plan to make that money with The Ultimate Weekend II one of these days.  Anyhow, Keith and Paula were soon joined by a wandering, drunk homeless guy.  I learned a big lesson on action sports video making that day:  interview bums whenever you can.  This may be the first homeless guy featured in a BMX video, but many more found their way into action sports videos after that. 

I don't know who the show was actually for, it wasn't a bike shop or any kind of festival.  What I do know, and what I captured on video, was a lot of little kids being thoroughly stoked by seeing Ron, Gary and the guys bust out on their bikes.  That's how it grows.  I'm glad I got this show on tape to add to the video.  The riders weren't doing the biggest or craziest airs of their lives.  The flatlanders weren't the best in the world.  But they took BMX freestyle to some new people that day, and that is a huge part of what freestyle is all about. 

Magnolia Jumps

Last October was the 25th anniversary of my 1990 video, The Ultimate Weekend.  I'm continuing on with the look back at it, today at 14:00 in the clip above. 

Jumps.  When most of us look back to the early days of riding our bikes, even before many of us knew about BMX, there were the jumps.  There's just something amazing about taking a bicycle, made for human powered transportation on the ground, and making it fly.  That second or two of  weightlessness somehow makes us seem like we are getting away with something.  We jump our bikes and get a momentary reprieve from the Law of Gravity.

There had been a lot of jumps built in an around the Huntington Beach, California area.  I've heard tales that Greg Hill and other legendary racers hit jumps in the Bolsa Chica mesa area of northern H.B. in the late 70's and early 80's.  When I moved to H.B. in 1987, there were jumps at Hidden Valley, nestled in an actual little hidden valley (hence the name) behind the shopping center at Beach and Adams.  Those jumps are great in the winter, when many other places flood, and they were around in 1990, though not as elaborate as they are today.

The best known jumps in 1990 were at Magnolia, in the wetlands just south of the big power plant on Pacific Coast Highway.  So that's where this little session took place.  Sheep Hills, the now infamous jumps of that area, weren't built until about a year after this video was made.  We start off this session with a local kid named Mike jumping the style jump.  Rhythm sections had yet to take over.  In 1990, most jumps were trails where you pedaled a lot then hit the jump.  The style jump was 14 1/2 feet tip to tip, and happened to be the biggest double jump I , personally, have ever jumped.  In this clip we see Mike bust a one hander over it.  Keith Treanor does a 360 over it, and that was a pretty big jump to 360 in those days.  John Povah jumps it, and then gets pissed when he can't pull some trick over it.  We've all thrown and maybe even kicked our bikes in frustration at times.   But when John kicked his bike in this clip, he hurt his foot... for a month.  Sometimes it's the stupid things that get you hurt.

The guy with no shirt is a guy we met out there that day.  He said his name was Luke and he'd just come back from the Marines as I recall.  I think this may actually be the guy we know as Carter Holland today, but I'm not totally sure. 

After the style jump, we see a dork session of the guys doing a bunch of different variations over a little bump.  Nowadays, this kind of thing would never make it into a video.  But I specifically put this in to show our lifestyle of riding then.  We weren't always doing the biggest, baddest, most technical tricks.  Dork sessions were a fun and normal part of riding, and I wanted that in my video. 

Then we hit a flyout jump up on the canal bank.  At that time, I'd been trying bunnyhop tailwhips for about three years, and never landed a clean one.  I did manage a few toe-dragger bunnyhop tailwhips in late 1989, but never got the trick dialed.  Bill Nitschke brought that trick to us later that year.  But the idea of tailwhip jumps was out there, and we were all trying them... and not landing them.  On any given day of riding at the Huntington Beach Pier, we might decide to ride down to Magnolia and session a while.  And what's in this video is a pretty typical session.

The funniest thing that ever happened at Magnolia when I was there happened between Mike Sarrail (the tall guy who does the little kickout over the bump) and myself.  He was shooting photos one day of another jump at Magnolia, where we'd ride down off the canal bank, hit a little berm, and then hit a jump.  Mike and I were giving each other a hard time, and he started throwing dirt clods at me to try and make me mess up.  At one point, he threw a small rock at me as I was coming out of the little berm.  The rock went right between my arms and hit me square in the nuts.  I did a kind of rolling dead sailor and piled into the the ground.  It was the most accurate rock Mike ever threw, and he was laughing his ass off as I lay on the ground in pain grabbing my balls.  Aaaaahh... the things we remember about our sessions after time passes. 

Then next session after Magnolia is us riding some banks somewhere in an industrial area, either in Orange or Garden Grove, I can't remember.  That was the only time I ever rode there.  In that section we see John Povah trying, and then making the long manual.  Keith Treanor is going for the footplants.  I think it's Alan Valek who does the tailwhip on the bank, which was a pretty new trick then. 

Unlike today's videos where everyone gets a section and they spend months trying to land their absolute best tricks, in The Ultimate Weekend, I just wanted to show real riding.  No one had really done that yet.  Most of the mainstream videos up until then had guys riding in uniforms and flatlanding with helmets on.  I wanted to show what our world of BMX freestyle, jumping, and street riding really looked like.  I just happened to be one of the first guys to do that.  A tidal wave of other videos followed in the early and mid 90's, taking riding to new places.

Pierre Andre

I'm continuing on with my 25th anniversary look back at my 1990 self-produced bike video, The Ultimate Weekend.  Go to 13:30 in the video for today's clip.

After the wall ride session with Keith Treanor and Randy Lawrence (and Alan Valek spectating), I continue on my ride to the Huntington Beach Pier.  At the time of this video, I lived on Sims Street, off of Warner, in the apartmentland near Huntington Harbor on the far north end of Huntington Beach.  I made the 3 to 4 mile ride to the pier every weekend that there wasn't a competition somewhere.  The main bike locals at the pier in 1990 were Mike Sarrail (inventor of no-handed and barspinning Miami Hop Hops), myself, and Randy Lawrence.  Many others came by now and then.  For the freestyle skaters, the main locals were Pierre Andre' from France, and Don Brown from England, as well as amateur freestyle skate Jeremy Ramey, an HB local.  We took turns sessioning and gathering crowds all day long every Saturday and Sunday on the empty patch of pavement just south of the pier.  That's where the outdoor seating for the lower level restaurant is now.

Unlike today's riders and skaters, we rarely had video cameras with us.  Actually, that really bums me out now, because I don't have any footage of our weekly sessions at the pier.  It just seemed too average then, so I didn't bother even shooting it.  Big mistake.  Anyhow, Don Brown was out of town on that particular weekend, to I asked Pierre if I could shoot a little footage of him for the video.  We went to the bike path loop just north of the pier and shot this footage in a few minutes.

Now, to put this in the context of the time, none of us had much money.  Pierre was the top freestyle skater form France, and was living off a small income from Vision, who owned Sims, his board sponsor.  One day, Pierre walked up to me and said, "I got a shoe manufacturer in France talked into making skate shoes."  "Cool," I replied, not thinking much of it.  That skate shoe company was named Etnies.  At the time of this video, Etnies was a tiny start-up company.  A lot of people thought it was Natas Kaupas' company, because he was the best known guy wearing the shoes then.  But Etnies was Pierre's baby, and he bought out the French company two or three years after this video was shot.  That shoe company grew into Sole Technology, which produces Etnies and E's shoes (and formerly Emerica shoes), 32 snowboard boots, Altamont clothes, and has a huge facility in Lake Forest, CA, where they built the city's skatepark, one of the best in Southern California.

Long before that, though, Pierre was a skater and friend I hung out with every weekend.  He gave me one of his old boards at one point, and I learned a bit of freestyle skating.  I remember one particular day, early evening, when I was sitting near the pier, with my back to the warm gray wall as dusk approached.  Pierre was skating in front of me.  I suddenly wondered where all of us bikers and skaters would be in 20 or 30 years.  We were just dirtbag kids to most people then, spending all our time on kid's toys like skateboards and freestyle bikes.  I had this sense then that some of us dirtbags would actually do some pretty cool things in the future.  But I had no idea what.  I just sat there content after a day of sessioning, watching Pierre perfect his skating.

These days, Pierre Andre' Senizergues is known as the founder/CEO/president of Sole Technology, and last I heard their annual sales were somewhere around $200 million a year.  That makes the company about four times the size of Vision Skateboards, which Pierre and Don skated for, and I worked for in the late 1980's.  Although he doesn't spend much time in the spotlight like other former bike/skate people such as Spike Jonze or Tony Hawk, Pierre is one of the most successful skaters in the action sports world.  The big lesson here is that when a kid commits thousands of hours to learning some activity, especially a highly creative activity like skateboarding, you never know what that kid may be capable of later on.

Pierre is not just highly successful and innovative, he's also just an all-around good guy.  The last time I ran into him was when I was driving a taxi, several years ago.  I saw him talking to some Japanese guys at the Huntington Beach Hilton.  I yelled out a "HI."  He left the Japanese guys, who happened to be his major distributors there, and walked over to talk to me for a couple of minutes.  Don Brown is now vice president of marketing at Sole Tech, and also helped me tremendously when I wound up homeless in SoCal.  You never know where your bike or skate friends will end up in the future.  

Dan Hubbard and Team Pro Motion

I'm continuing with my 25th anniversary look back at my 1990 video, The Ultimate Weekend.  Today's clip begins at 12:20 in the video above: Team Pro Motion.

I  met SoCal local rider Dan Hubbard, or Danny as we called him back then, in 1986 when I worked at Wizard Productions.  Dan was a high school kid then, and had a 8 foot high halfpipe at his parents' house in Palos Verdes.  P.V. is a sort of hilly peninsula of upscale houses that juts out into the Pacific between Redondo Beach and Long Beach.  Gork and Lew took me to Dan's house, I think we just went up to ride.  Dan's halfpipe was my favorite ever for one reason.  It's the only ramp I ever got air on.  That's a long story, which goes back to this sketchy quarterpipe I bought from some skaters in Idaho.  My QP was six feet high, had a foot of vert, and had this gap in the plywood between the transition and the vert.  On my driveway, the vert was actually over-vert.  So I couldn't do actual airs, I would do airs a foot below the top of the ramp.  Somehow, that turned into a weird mental block for me, and from then on, I couldn't get out on any ramp.  Except for Dan Hubbard's halfpipe for some reason. 

In any case, I met Dan in '86 at his house, and he was a super clean cut kid and a hardcore rider.  He was at all the AFA SoCal local contests and was known for having a totally dialed, super clean routine.  He could ride flatland and vert, but flat was where he dominated.  He did well in contest after contest, hardly ever touching his foot down.  In fact, I remember one contest where a bunch of us were so sick of Dan's flawless routines, that we joked around about putting Vaseline on his rims so his brakes wouldn't work, just so we could see him screw up for once.  But we never did that, we liked Dan, after all. 

Like so many other riders in the mid-80's, Dan formed a trick team and did shows.  But he was one of the few that turned his trick team into a legit business, and by 1990, when this video was shot, Dan was a professional rider promoting his own shows.  The other two riders in this segment are his teammates, Jeff Cotter, with the long hair, and legendary Camarillo Ramp rider Todd Anderson. 

For this section, Dan set up his ramp in a parking lot on the North side of Redondo Beach, with Palos Verdes in the background.  I shot the three riders from a whole bunch of different angles, so I could show off my editing skills when put this segment together.  Dan and Jeff were local SoCal riders at the time, not very well known on the national scene.  Todd Anderson, on the other hand, was already a legend, and I was really stoked to get them all in my video. 

Years later, Dan told me that this was the only bike video he'd ever been featured in.  And I have him riding to my lame-ass song, "Cottage Cheese Disease."  I'm really sorry about that Dan.  In any case, the three of them busted out that afternoon.  Dan did his signature flawless flatland combos and a cool fakie on the ramp.  Jeff showed off his flatland chops, including the Pop Tart, a jump up to a bar ride, which was a pretty new trick at the time, and still seems insane to me.  Todd Anderson, of course, showed off his classic ramp style.

In the time after this video was shot, Dan continued to run his trick team, and still does today, as far as I know.  He has one or two teams doing shows for kids and promoting freestyle around the U.S.  Jeff Cotter went off and joined the Ringling Brothers Circus after this was shot, and hung out with Jose Yanez, the guy who did the first backflips on a BMX bike.  Jeff was the first freestyler to learn flips, and did them into water at the end of this video.  Todd Anderson rode for a while longer, then went on to shoe horses for a living, which I believe he still does today. 

I addition, Dan Hubbard went on to become a successful Hollywood stuntman, and got past his squeaky clean reputation as a rider, and has done some really crazy stuff over the years for TV shows and movies.  One of the best things about looking back at this video for me is seeing where all these riders have gone since this was made. 

The Blues Brothers Wall

I'm continuing with my 25th anniversary look at my 1990 video, The Ultimate Weekend.  Today I'm talking about one of my favorite riding spots of all time, The Blues Brothers Wall in Huntington Beach, CA.  Go to 11:20 in the video above. 

This story starts with mid-80's BMX ramp legend, Josh White.  I was riding at the Huntington Beach pier one weekend, in 1988, I think.  Josh White rolled up and started talking.  He said he'd heard about some walls at the beach that were great for wall rides.  He asked if I knew where they were.  The funny thing was, I had no idea.  I'd ridden up and down the H.B. bike path nearly every weekend for a year, and I had no idea what Josh was talking about.  So we went looking for them.  We headed north from the pier on the bike path.  Once around the condo complex, we started up a hill on the bike path.  I rode that section every weekend.  But instead of following the bike path up, we took a sandy dirt trail I'd never taken.  Despite my nature of exploring every nook and cranny looking for things to ride, I'd never taken that lower road by the sand. 

A whole new world opened up to Josh and me.  Immediately, we saw one of the retaining walls he was talking about, but it was sandy at the bottom, not good for wall rides.  We kept riding north, and below the main bike path, but above the sand, there was this level, 40 foot wide ledge, with a bunch of painted retaining walls.  I'd ridden on the bike path just above those walls for a year, and never knew they were there.  Several of the walls had murals on them, the murals you see in this section of the video.  Finally, even with about 14th street, we found The Blues Brothers Wall.  It had two main murals, one of the Blues Brothers from Saturday Night Live and movie fame, and a big mural of the Three Stooges.  There was also a painting that said, "green eggs and ham, Sam I am."  That quote, of course, is from Dr.Seuss. 

That particular wall had fairly well packed dirt up to the base of the wall, perfect for getting speed to wall ride it.  In addition, someone had built up a good lip of dirt on the very left end of the wall, and a smaller lip farther down the wall.  Josh and I immediately started trying wall fakies, a trick I'd never done before (or since).  Perhaps the best aspect of that wall was that it was slightly under-vert.  It's maybe 80 or 85 degrees, steep enough to still be a wall, not a bank.  But it's just mellow enough to allow HUGE wall rides.  I loved that wall from the start.  Within a few minutes, I was rolling up and doing smooth wall fakies.  Josh on the other hand, was rolling straight up the wall, then pulling off and doing a lookdown out of the fakies.  Josh's riding amazed me many times over the years, and that was another instance.  I'd never even heard of anyone doing a lookdown out of a wall fakie at that time. 

Then we started doing wall rides.  Within minutes, I was hitting the small lip to the right, and riding three or four feet up the 11 foot high wall.  Up until that time, I only really did wall slides, where I'd bunnyhop off a bank and touch both tires to a wall, but not really grip the wall.  On the Blues Brothers Wall, I could totally ride the wall.  It was so much fun.  At least until Josh started doing wall rides.  Within a couple attempts, hitting the larger lip, he was riding about 7 feet up the wall, going twice as high as I did.  We had a blast that day, and I started riding that wall nearly every weekend on my way to the pier. 

That leads to the short clip in The Ultimate Weekend.  Riding the wall are myself (red shirt), Keith Treanor (black shirt), and Randy Lawrence (white tank top).  The quick over/under double wall ride is Randy up high, and me below.  I think that was the first over/under wall rides ever in a video.  In the clip, I do a fakie, and Randy and Keith both take their shots at no hand fakies, which were cutting edge riding at the time.  Then Keith and Randy to some big wall rides.  Also, there's a shot in the intro of the video of me wall riding over my sister's head while she's sitting.  That's also on this wall. 

Then we see Keith practicing a rail slide, just below the wall, with Randy holding him in position.  This looks really stupid today, but that's what we actually did back then, before anyone had actually done a handrail slide on a bike.  We had the idea, but no one had actually pulled it off yet.  In fact, the first handrail slide down steps ever in a BMX video, was Keith near the end of The Ultimate Weekend.  Double peg grinds on street were a brand new thing in 1990, and Keith was breaking new ground in this clip by climbing onto a rail and sliding down into the sand. 

Then Randy said, "Hey, how 'bout if I do a 360 into the sand next to that woman down there."  I thought he was nuts.  First, there was a lip about two inches high he had to bunnyhop over.  Second, doing a bunnyhop 360 down five feet was pretty rare in 1990.  Dennis Mccoy was the only person I knew who 360'd down stairs back then.  But I set up for the shot, and Randy did a perfect 360 first try, startling the hell out of that poor woman getting a tan. 

In the years that passed, I kept riding that wall.  I lived about three blocks from there in the late 90's, and rode the wall all the time.  I eventually did 6 to 7 foot high wall rides there.  The record belongs to Dave Clymer, who got a tiny photo doing a wall ride at the top of the 11 foot high wall, which is still crazy today in my book.  Dave said he even rolled in the top of the wall once, which was really hairy. 

Me, I learned a bunch of wall ride variations there.  I learned alley-oop wall rides, even to the point of back-pedaling and doing a rollback on the wall.  One day I started bunnyhopping from farther and farther away, trying to see how far of a bunnyhop I could do and still land in a wall ride.  I managed to do it from about 6 to 7 feet away.  I did a few rollback wall rides.  I'd do a 180 in the dirt, and hit the wall rolling backwards and get a tiny wall ride.  But there was one variation I never could get.  Several times I tried to do a framestand wall ride.  I would hit the wall at speed, and do a low, long wall ride.  Then I would move my feet off the pedals and onto the frame and stand up on the frame.  What I wanted to do was a fully upright framestand, no hands, while on the wall.  I always wussed out, and never could let go of the bars.  I still want to nail that trick if I ever get back in shape.  I've done long frame stands on on the 45 degree banks of the Santa Ana River Ditch, and on a steep bank of about 60 degrees.  But I could never get that trick on the Blue Brothers Wall.  I've never seen anyone else to that yet, but I'd really like to. 

Oh yeah... I just thought of one more thing I tried-and failed at-on the Blues Brothers Wall.  I don't have a name for it.  Basically, it was a fakie wall ride fakie.  I'd ride towards the wall, do a 180 bunnyhop at speed, and ride backwards into the wall, trying to ride straight up it rolling backwards, and then roll back down forwards.  Years later when I saw a photo of Ruben Alcantara doing a "realie," that's what I thought he did.  But he did a 180 into that nose down position.  As far as I know, no one's ever done a fakie wall ride fakie. 

Oreo Pancakes and Cottage Cheese Disease

As some of you may remember, last October, 2015, was the 25th anniversary of the release of my only completely self-produced BMX freestyle video, The Ultimate Weekend.  Last November, I started going through it bit by bit, telling stories of how it happened.  But right after I got started, my old laptop broke.  It didn't crash, the hinge literally broke.  Being unemployed, I couldn't afford to fix it.  I finally started selling some artwork, and made enough to get it refurbished.  But my blogging has been pretty spotty since then.  So now I"m back at it, starting where I left off in the video.

I'll start with a little refresher on why I made this video and what I had in mind.  The basic idea was to go through an awesome weekend of riding, like many of us did every weekend then, just amplified.  I first pitched this basic idea to Andy Jenkins, Lew, and Gork while working at Wizard Publications in 1986.  Wizard was the home of BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines, and Andy was thinking of pitching a video idea to Oz, our publisher.  The guys didn't like my idea, so it rattled around my brain for the next three years.  The Wizard video never got pitched, and I got laid off and permanently replaced by some East Coast kid named Spike Jonze.

I went to work for Bob Morales at the AFA, and left the Wizard crew and the South Bay (Redondo Beach, Torrance, etc.) behind.  I moved a ways south to Huntington Beach.  HB was a suburb beach city firmly rooted in surf culture then.  It was kind of the dirty beach city then.  There were oil pumps throughout town, pumping away since oil was discovered there in 1920.  Because of this, HB wasn't as elite and trendy as nearby Newport Beach, just to the south.  HB locals didn't care.  Unlike most of the Southern California coast, Huntington Beach didn't have houses built right up to the sand.  Somehow, the beach was open to all, except for one condo development just north of the pier that snuck across Pacific Coast Highway when no one was looking.  Most of the 8 mile stretch of Huntington Beach sand had huge parking lots next to it, so it attracted people from all over Southern California on the weekends.

The strong surf culture in HB went back to 1914, when Honolulu local George Freeth did a demo of surfing next to the pier.  Not long after, Duke Kahanamoku, known as the father of modern surfing, spent a lot of time there.  The waves in HB are rarely huge, but they are consistent.  There are three to five footers nearly every day.  Surfers settled there because of the consistent waves and cheap rent.  Surf culture was originally hated by city leaders in the 50's and early 60's, but eventually, it took over the town.  HB became a hub of surf culture, and in my time a hub for skateboarding, BMX/freestyle, snowboarding, freestyle motocross, and later MMA fighting.  It seemed nearly everyone in town did one or more of these sports.  To be honest, Andy Jenkins and the guys at Wizard did me a great favor by laying me off, because moving to HB was one of the best things that ever happened to me.  I was surrounded by this huge action sports, entrepreneurial, punk rock inspired world.  The AFA was in HB.  GT Bikes was in HB.  Vision Skateboards, which included Sims and Schmitt Stix skateboards, Sims snowboards, and Vision Street Wear, was next door in Costa Mesa.  Quicksilver clothes was in Costa Mesa then.  Many smaller but influential companies were clustered in that same area.  It was a much more immersive scene than the South Bay, where Wizard was.  I didn't realize it then, but I was right in the middle of the action sports explosion of the 80's.

I made $5 an hour at the AFA in 1987, which was a little over minimum wage then.  I started at Unreel, Vision's video company for $1100 a month in late 1987.  My pay increased there to $1750 a month there by early 1990.  I wasn't making great money, and I complained about that all the time.  But I was truly living the life.

From my earliest days in HB, I would get up on Saturday mornings, eat a big breakfast, and ride to the Huntington Beach Pier.  Well known SoCal rider Mike Sarrail was a local there, despite living an hour away.  Several freestyle skaters, like Pierre Andre (Senizergues), Don Brown, Hans Lingren, and Jeremy Ramey skated there every weekend.  On any given weekend, Bob Schmelzer, Ed Templeton, and Mark Gonzales might swing by.  The Lakewood area freestylers, Jeff Cotter, Ron McCoy, Nathan Shimizu, Derek Oriee, and Ron Camero came by often.  Martin Aparijo and Woody Itson showed up to ride now and then.  The HB pier had been a known spot for years, and anyone could show up.  It was an amazing scene.

For some reason, I didn't actually put our pier sessions in the video.  I can't remember why.  That really pisses me off now, because that was the core of it all.  But it seemed too normal then, I guess.  So what you see at 10:39 in this video is me waking up in my single bed and trashed bedroom.  Three of my pots I made in high school pottery are on the night stand.  The cat was named Silis, after some guy in a western TV show.  I referred to Silis as a "furry basketball with legs."  It was huge, and VERY unfriendly.  That fucker bit my hand once.  Pancakes or cold pizza were often my breakfast on weekend mornings.  I decided to up the ante a bit for the video, and I made Oreo pancakes.  The key to those is using Oreo Double Stuff cookies and making the pancake batter pretty thick.  I've only actually made those twice, but they are tasty.

Continuing my Saturday morning montage, which I did some tricky video shots and editing to show off my creative skills, I ride down the bike trail to the pier.  There is the official walking/jogging/bike trail along PCH on the north end of downtown HB.  But there's also a lower trail, just above the sand.  All the painted walls are on the lower trail, which I didn't even know existed for a year or so after I moved to HB.   

As for the song... "Cottage Cheese Disease."   That phrase was one that Gork used to describe women's cellulite.  I used to joke that it would make a funny punk song.  So I wrote the lyrics to the song, sang it into a tape recorder, and sent the tape to Jon Stainbrook, leader of the punk band, The Stain, in Toledo, Ohio.  They turned it from a punk song into a rap, which is what you hear in the video.  Yes, it's lame, and I'm a mysogonistic douchebag for writing it.  But it is funny.  I'll get more into this clip in the next post.