Here's vert legend Mike Dominguez in the Pipe Bowl at Pipeline skatepark in 1985. This was the contest he uncorked the no-footed can-can.
I've been pushing the old school BMX world to support Don Hoffman's Kickstarter campaign to make the "Badlands" documentary, which would tell the story of Baldy Pipe, Pipeline skatepark, and the influence it had. It's primarily a skate story, but BMX vert is part of the story. The campaign ended a couple days ago, and it found 115 backers pledging $16, 843 (43!) towards the $150,000 goal. Don isn't giving up. He's going to regroup and keep working on getting this done.
For me personally, Pipeline was a place I first read about in BMX Plus in 1982 or 1983, as a high school kid in Idaho. The skatepark, and its riders, instantly became legendary to our little Idaho riding crew. It seemed like a magical place a million miles away then.
As the years passed, I ended up riding Pipeline a few times right before it closed. In fact, I had my front tire crab in the pipe while oververt the last night it was open. That sent me into a Superman dive straight down 11 feet onto it's hard, hard concrete. I ended up going to the emergency room, thinking my wrist was broken. I was actually stoked that I might have the last broken bone from Pipeline. It turned out to be a really bad palm bruise, and I couldn't hang onto my grip for a month afterward.
Since I worked under Don Hoffman at Unreel Productions then, I got to go up and shoot video, and ride, several times after the park closed. The fences were getting torn down, which opened up a whole bunch of lines not possible before. I was jumping out of the four foot bowl and doing a little nose wheelie into the ditch, among other things. During those sessions, Fiola, Blyther, Steve Alba, Micke Alba, and several Vision skaters had some epic sessions. It was great being able to ride without little kids yelling "Next after after next" before rolling in. I chipped about eight blue tiles out of the shallow part of the Combi right after Malba and Salba got themselves some. I didn't bother going up the weekend in got demolished for the last session, I think there was a freestyle event that weekend.
I really hope Don manages to get this movie made, because it's a big part of the history of everyone who's ridden vert in ANY sport.
As the Kickstarter crowdfunding clock ticks away for the Badlands (Pipeline Skatepark) documentary, I realized that a lot of the old and mid school riders out there don't realize just how big of a part Pipeline played in vert riding. Like Dogtown and Z-Boys and Joe Kid on a Stingray, this movie will tell a great story about how vert skating and BMX got off the ground. Pun intended. Some park had to be the first to actually build bowl with vertical walls, and that park was Pipeline.
In this clip we see Don Hoffman, the man behind the Badlands movie, ask early skatepark rider/contest promoter Bob Morales to explain the set-up for early vert riders, and Eddie Fiola, the original King of the Skateparks is the rider. These three guys played huge roles in making BMX/bike stunts what it is today, and what it was when we all did it. Help the Badlands Movie Kickstarter campaign to get this documentary made. 18 days to go, $7,403 and counting...
Chris Miller flat out shredding Pipeline after it closed.
When I got the job at Unreel Productions, Vision's video company, in late 1987, I spent most of my time in a little room with a bunch of machines making copies of different videos. I also got the job of organizing the tape library, which was boxes of hundreds of tapes which were not labeled well. Most of those tapes were betacam camera originals. In those days, big, 35 pound, betacam cameras were the "broadcast quality" standard. The cameras cost about $50,000, and the video quality was high enough to be shown on broadcast TV. So when a cameraman went out to shoot something, they came back with a bunch of these tapes. Each tape was in a plastic case, and ten of those fit into a cardboard tape box.
So while I was making copies of one thing or another, I would pull out a box of these betacam tapes, figure out what contest or video shoot it was, and label all the tapes and boxes by hand, so we could find that footage easily later. In the course of doing this, I saw all the footage that was being shot, and I looked at all the old camera tapes and master tapes of videos already made. So I became real familiar with each skater, biker, or snowboarder's style and abilities.
At the same time, I would get off work and go ride my BMX freestyle bike for two or three hours every night. Often I would ride to work, and then hit a whole bunch of street spots around Huntington Beach on my way home. So watching all the footage definitely stoked me to ride, and gave me ideas for tricks sometimes.
It didn't take long for me to be blown away by the skating of Chris Miller. He had this effortless looking flow around the pools that was absolutely oozing with style. I decided that I wanted to learn to ride my bike the way Chris Miller skated. That never happened. But it was definitely a good goal to work towards.
In this clip, we see Chris first in the 15 bowl, the biggest vert bowl at Pipeline, and then he's skating the back bowls, which rarely get seen in videos. Those were the beginner bowls, and were 4 feet, 6 feet, 8 feet, and 10 feet deep. When the park was open, there were fences between the bowls, which prevented transfers. But after the park closed, and the fences were torn down, all kinds of new lines were possible, which is what Chris is taking advantage of.
Then he moves to the Combi Pool, the gnarliest skatepark pool in its day, and Chris tears it up. That was the pool the skaters spent the most time in over the years. Then he moves on to the Pipe Bowl, the pool best known to BMXers, because that's the one the riders blasted huge airs out of. Those tuck kneed carves Chris does in the pipe are some of the coolest things in skateboarding.
The video is old, down a couple of generations, and kind of sketchy. But Chris Miller's skating is epic. In a bike comparison, I'd have to pick Brian Foster as the guy who best blends speed, style, and big airs like Miller does on his skate. Both of those guys are just beautiful to watch ride. It's no surprise that Chris Miller has ruled the Master's Class at the new combi pool in the Pro-Tec Pool Party contests for nearly a decade.
The story of Pipeline and Baldy Pipe will be told in the Badlands Movie. You can help it get made by support the Kickstarter campaign in that link. $6,578 and counting...
I think this clip is from the 1987 GT Bikes video Demo Tape. In any case, industry legend McGoo does a quick interview with Eddie Fiola as they look at his 1985 run from the King of the Skateparks series. Eddie ran skinny, 1 3/8" rims for that contest, and people thought he had a 22" bike or something.
At the time, quaterpipes ranged from the Bob Haro designed, 6' high plan in the magazines, to 9' high. Most ramps went just up to vert. The face wall of the Pipe Bowl at Pipeline skatepark, however, was an 8' transition with four feet of vert. The pipe itself was 20 feet diameter. You had to be badass just to air out of that wall in the deep end. The fence is five feet high, and Eddie routinely got two or three feet over that.
This was the first skatepark where BMXers could really blast airs more than 3 or 4 feet out. Eddie Fiola established himself as the first King of the Skateparks, and was the most widely known pro freestyler to all us kids out in the rest of the country then. His riding, along with the other skatepark riders, inspired kids all over the U.S. and U.K. to build sketchy ramps and learn to blast airs.
In today's world of mega airs, it's hard to understand just how earth shattering these huge airs were at the time. The 540 was a brand new trick as well. Having the full pipe to pump speed out of, as well as a deep pool with no coping, helped Eddie and the others take riding to a whole different level. Without Pipeline skatepark, that jump in the progression of skatepark riding may have taken years to happen.
The Badlands movie, tellling the story of Pipeline Skatepark, is now raising money on Kickstarter. It's a huge skateboard story, but it's also a big part of BMX freestyle history. Click the link and help support this movie getting made.
Blogger's note- June 14, 2021- Don's still trying to find funding to make the Pipeline documentary, which really needs to happen.
Blogger's note- 8/12/2023- The Kickstarter campaign to make the Pipeline documentary didn't raise enough, as far as I know, and I don't know if Don is still looking for money to fund the doc.
I have a new blog now about side hustles, gig jobs, small businesses, and making a living in the recession. Check it out:
Go to 26:26 in this video. The Badlands Movie... because Agent Orange never played in a bowl at your skatepark. Badlands/Pipeline Skatepark movie Kickstarter campaign. Ante up. Home of the first vert pools in a skatepark. $6,293 and counting...
Blogger's note: 8/12/2023: The Kickstarter campaign for this documentary wasn't able to raise enough for the documentary to get made, which really sucks. This post is from 2017, and I don't know if Don is still trying to find funding for the movie.
I have a new blog now about side hustles, gig jobs, small businesses, economics, and making a living in the recession, check it out:
After the success of the Dogtown and Z-Boys documentary years ago, we've seen some old school documentaries and videos come in the BMX and skateboard world. But the one I personally want to see made the most is now raising money on Kickstarter. In the clip above, we see the original BMX King of the Skateparks, Eddie Fiola. He's at the legendary Pipeline Skatepark that was in Upland, California. What many of you don't know is that the guy in this clip interviewing Eddie (in 1983? 84?) is Don Hoffman. Who's Don Hoffman? He's a surfer and skater from way back, and happens to be the son of Stan and Jean Hoffman, the people who built Pipeline Skatepark. Don's the guy behind the Badlands movie.
Don got into video in the early 1980's, making videos Wayne's World style with borrowed equipment. By the late 80's, Don had made more BMX freestyle videos, the King of the Skatepark series, than anyone. Don went on to start Unreel Productions, the video company for the Vision Skateboards/Vision Street Wear companies. I worked for Don for about 2 1/2 years there, and among other things, I was the tape librarian at Unreel. That sounds boring, and it would be to most people. When I started at Unreel, there were hundreds of betacam raw footage tapes in boxes. Most boxes had a label like "Savannah." Usually the tapes were numbered, but that was about it. So I got the job of going through and actually watching parts of every single tape, and going to Don or one of the other guys and asking, "OK, this is the Savannah skate contest. What year?" Then I would label the case of ever single tape. By the time Unreel closed, there were about 3,000 tapes, and I had hand written the labels on nearly every single one.
Why am I telling you this nearly 30 years later? Because I know what's on those tapes. I know all the footage that was never used, which is a lot, both in skating and BMX. I also got the "job" of going up to Pipeline Skatepark after it closed, and shooting video with Don of the pool skaters who were let in for those awesome private sessions. I called up Eddie Fiola and Brian Blyther, and invited them to come ride after the park was closed. Don was the main cameraman, but I was the second camera guy for many of those epic sessions. I also got to set down the camera every once in a while and ride myself. I got down in the Pipe Bowl with Eddie and Brian dropping in and zooming past me, so I could get different angles of their classic lines in the Pipe Bowl.
Pipeline wasn't just another Southern California skatepark. Pipeline completely changed the game in skateboarding in 1977, and about five years later changed the game for BMX freestyle as well. This movie REALLY needs to get made. I'm going to throw the weight of this blog behind this project for the rest of the Kickstarter campaign. The story of Pipeline and the Badlands is primarily a skate story, but it's a skate story that changed BMX forever. It would be well worth you throwing a few bucks into this project and help this get made. Check out the Badlands Kickstarter campaign for more details. As of this post, the campaign has raised $6,038 of the $149,995 goal. I'll keep tabs on it as I continue to tell my stories about Pipeline and the locals there.
Would you be more likely to contribute to the fundraising if I drew a picture of on of the classic photos from Pipeline and offered it to Don as a prize for donating? Let me know.
Blogger's note- August 12, 2023: I wrote this post back in 2017, and the Kickstarter campaign didn't raise enough money to fully fund the documentary, to the best of my knowledge. I don't know if Don is still trying to fund the idea or not at this point.
I have a new blog now about side hustles, gig jobs, small businesses, and making a living in the recession, check it out:
I heard about this comp from a post by Mat Hoffman on Facebook. I was really stoked to hear that there was an X-Game qualifier in the city of Boise, where my life in BMX started. In a trailer park outside Boise, known as Blue Valley by us residents, a bunch of us white trash kids started riding our bikes every evening and trying to out-do each other. After a few months, someone heard there was a BMX track near downtown Boise. We packed four guys and three bikes into Scott's mom's Ford Pinto, and went to our first race.
The Fort Boise BMX track was built in an abandoned sewer pond at the edge of the foothills. I can't tell you how stoked we were to see a place actually built for BMX riding. In October of 1982, that seemed amazing. Looking back, it wasn't much, but it was something. Scott, Jason, and Brian raced as I watched and coached. All three guys went home with trophies. The next weekend, we packed all the BMXers into my dad's van, and headed to the track. It was the last race of the season, and we all raced and had a blast. I was hooked on BMX. Here's what our track looked like back in 1983.
I know that the sketchy old BMX tracks of the 1970's and 1980's spawned better tracks and later skateparks all over the country. When I got serious about BMX freestyle in late 1983 and 1984, I was the third freestyler in Boise, and the whole state of Idaho, following Justin Bickel and Wayne Moore. Wayne retired at the ripe old age of 17, and Justin and I reformed their trick trick team into the Critical Condition Stunt Team. We did shows everywhere we could in the Boise area, and also rode in parades, stoked to share our weird little sport with the people of that area.
It was only a couple years ago that I learned that Boise sits just above 43 degrees latitude, which stoked me out. Not many freestylers out there started riding at 43 degrees above the equator. As one of the pioneers of freestyle in the Boise area, I'm stoked to see that they've actually built a great skatepark there, and that it was picked to host an X-Games qualifier. It's cool to see some amazing new school riding going down in the little city in the middle of nowhere that gave me my start.
I have a new blog about side hustles, gig jobs, small businesses, economics, and making a living in the recession, check it out:
Man, I'm really bummed I missed this bash. But that's life. Here's one of the official web edits from S&M Bikes of their 30th anniversary party and premiere of the new video, Hot Dogs who Can't Read. At the end of this is a link to another clip, O.G. Dawgs and Hot Dogs, which is worth the watch, too.
To all the old schoolers from the S&M Bikes world, back in the day it wasn't a party until you saw Moeller's dick. But hey, he's a family man now, and just can't be doing that all the time. So it appears the hot dog suit and the hot dog street ramp thing filled in for Moeller's hot dog.
Only three years until The Ultimate Weekend 30th anniversary... I better start saving up for that bash.
I have two new blogs I'm doing now:
Crazy California 43- This blog's about weird, cool, odd, funny, and historic places in California.
WPOS Kreative Ideas- This blog is about creativity, writing, art, blogging, promoting creative work, and whatever else I fell like blogging about.
I'm still stuck in North Carolina, so I didn't make it to the party. I was surprised to see a shout out to me from old friends Mike Sarrail and Randy Lawrence in this clip. Thanks guys.
It's cool to say we're Old School in the BMX world. But at this point, we're just old. I can live with that. Thirty years ago this year, a 16-year-old kid and a 19-year-old kid were sick of breaking bikes and bending rear dropouts when they jumped. So they went to a welding shop called B&E that actually built bikes for several BMX companies. The kids asked the machinists if they could weld two rear dropouts together on a bike to make it stronger. The shop said they could, and S&M Bicycles was born. The "S" stood for Greg Scott, and the "M" was for Chris Moeller. They pooled their money, got a few frames made, sold them quickly, and then made some more. Once they got a little momentum, Greg wanted to rent a business office, get some furniture, and start looking like a "real" business. Chris, the younger of the two, was more interested in plowing all the money back into making more bikes and other stuff. Chris was also highly influenced by his grandpa, who had built a very successful construction equipment business. Chris' grandpa had a quote, "Partners are good... for dancing." He liked to be a lone wolf when it came to running his business. Chris took those words to heart, bought out Greg's interest in the company, and went to town.
A natural salesman, Chris renamed the company S&M Bikes, and sold stuff like crazy. His business method was simple, but not easy. Make bikes and stuff that wouldn't break, sell them all at a profit, get more stuff made, sell that for a bigger profit, and repeat. I think he was running it out of his bedroom in the P.O.W. House (Pro's Of Westminster) when I shot some video there for my video, The Ultimate Weekend, in 1990. That's the clip in this video above with the punk rock "Jesus Loves Me" song in the background. That was the first time the S&M Bikes crew and the P.O.W.'s showed up in a BMX video.
A year later, Chris called me out of the blue and said he wanted to make a video for the fledgling company. The super low budget result was Feel My Leg Muscles, I'm a Racer. I lost my job in the course of making that video, which is one of the funniest BMX stories out there, and I wound up sleeping on the floor of Moeller's apartment for close to a year. At first a guy named Shaggy, who looked just like Sccoby-Doo's friend, slept on the couch, and later Bill Grad (R.I.P.) I sat on a chair by the kitchen phone and sold bikes, bars, forks, and stuff. I helped sticker frames and pack orders. I helped Chris stack the bike boxes onto a skateboard and push them a block to the shipping place, before UPS made the garage an official stop.
There are a million things that could have wiped out S&M Bikes along the way. But the little, punk rock-inspired bike company with the crazy jumping owner kept plugging along, and celebrated its 30th anniversary last weekend in Riverside, California. Looks like a good time was had by all at the Bro Fest. And Matt Berringer put an exclamation point on the trails session with a over 40-year-old front flip. A lot has come and gone in the BMX bike world since 1987, but riders having fun and pushing their limits kept S&M Bikes a solid force for three decades now. Props to Chris Moeller and everyone who's been a part of S&M Bikes over all those years.
English S&M rider Alex Leech came over on holiday with skater friend Rob Lawrence, which always made for entertaining sessions while we were making Feel My Leg Muscles, I'm a Racer.
When I produced the first six AFA videos in 1987, I sat in a half-million-dollar edit bay that looked like the bridge of the Starship Enterprise. I called out time code numbers from a really comfy rolling chair while video wizard Dave Alvarez edited the videos. When I edited the '88 2-Hip video, I sat at a big table in my bedroom with two pro level S-VHS decks and an RM-440 edit controller. When I edited The Ultimate Weekend in 1990, I rented an edit system in the back of a video store for $25 an hour. Then, in 1991, when I edited the S&M video, Feel My Leg Muscles, I'm a Racer, I sat on the living room floor of Chris Moeller's tiny,eight foot wide apartment. I hooked my S-VHS camera to an S-VHS VCR that Chris bought, and looked at it on his tiny TV. Next to me sat a 40 of beer, probably Mickey's.
Normally editing is a really mentally intense job, where you go into a room, shut out all distractions, and focus on how to best put the pictures and sounds together. When editing "Leg Muscles," bouncing around the room were Chris Moeller, Jason Pro, a girl we called Sexecutioner Lisa and Lisa's kitten named Satan. There was also a set of BDSM nipple clamps which we all took turns wearing for some reason. Needless to say, concentrating was hard, especially while wearing the nipple clamps. I edited the sketchy way, hitting play-record-pause on the VCR, then play on my camera, then pause on the VCR, and hoping the video edited somewhere near where I wanted it to. Meanwhile, I'd look up and see drunken foolishness, Satan the kitten was drinking Kahlua, and people asking me how it was going every five minutes. So that's pretty much why the editing sucked. I remember that after John Paul Rogers' "section," I fell backward, drunk off my ass, and gave up for the night. Looking at it the next, it's a good thing I did.
So... how did we come up with the lame-ass (and now classic somehow) title, Feel My Leg Muscles, I'm a Racer. The day before I edited it, Chris was wondering what he should call the video. I had no idea. So I said, "As we get drunk tonight, let's just write down every idea anyone has, and in the morning, when we're all hungover, we'll see which sounds the best." Chris was down for the idea. Every so often someone would have an idea, and they'd yell it out and write it down on a paper on the counter. We probably had 20 or 30 prospective titles to ponder the next morning. If you've seen the actual video, you know there are a whole bunch of titles on cards before "Leg Muscles." "I dig girls in low top Converse was one." "40 ounces to freedom" was another, I think. But the winner was the line Dave Clymer used to pick up his then-girlfriend, "Feel My Leg Muscles, I'm a Racer." Yeah, that actually worked on her.
We looked over all the titles, and picked Leg Muscles. But Chris wanted to mess with everyone and have a whole bunch of titles. So he found some index cards and wrote down all the titles, as well as the name titles. Then he sat on a lawn chair outside the front door, and I shot the video of all the titles as he flipped the cards in his lap. I think that happened the weekend before the editing happened. Maybe. I was pretty drunk both times, so I'm not sure.
I've never edited another video in such weird conditions. It seems hilarious now that riders and skaters spend six months or a year to get their tricks, and then companies spend thousands and thousands of dollars on editing. It was a whole different world back when we were making this whole bike video thing up.
Chris Moeller's section in the S&M Bikes', 1991, highly professional, high budget BMX movie, Feel My Leg Muscles... I'm a Racer.
With the price drop in S-VHS video cameras in the late 1980's, and the appearance of smaller Video8 and Hi-8 camcorders, people started shooting video of stuff they couldn't afford to before. A handful of BMX freestylers started videotaping their riding every once in a while. When I worked at Wizard in 1986, BMX Action editor Gork made the Gork Vid-i-eo. He misspelled video, don't ask. It was pretty funny, some riding and a lot of goofing around. We didn't think of it as a "video," it was something to show friends. A professional video editor in New York named Carl Marquardt made some short, very well produced videos. Eddie Roman started making videos with Kung Fu and bikes. Mark Eaton taped the Plywood Hoods and made videos. I produced a bunch at the AFA, then one for 2-Hip, then The Ultimate Weekend in 1990. Eddie and Mark kept at it and the quality kept getting better and better. I ran out of money making my first one. Since I put Chris Moeller and the P.O.W.'s in my video, he called me out of the blue in 1991, and said he wanted to make a video for S&M Bikes.
I was working at a video duplicator at the time, making copies of thrilling videos, like 4 hour videos for farmers about the different types of corn to plant, and sales tapes for automatic bowling lane sweepers. Really. I spent $5,000 making The Ultimate Weekend the year before, and made about $2,500 back. Then I lived off my credit cards for 3 or 4 months, like an idiot, and wound up waaaaay in debt. So when Chris called, I was stoked. I thought, "Cool, I can make a video with great jumping and earn an extra $2,000 or so on the side." I asked Chris what he was looking to spend. He said, "About $250 or so." Hmmmm... so much for making a bunch of money on a side project.
I was working nights in North Hollywood, a sketchy area of the San Fernando Valley then. I was renting a bed in a crazy flophouse that made the P.O.W. House seem high class. Yeah, I didn't rent a room, I rented a one level of a bunk bed, $40 a week. The apartment was rented in the name of an old guy named George, a paranoid schizophrenic who practiced black magic. It got pretty weird there at times.
Anyhow, Chris was like 19 then, and said, "I have this great idea for a video, we'll take a John Holmes porn video and have all the bad acting, and then cut to bike riding when the video cuts to sex." I thought he was nuts. But it sounded fun. I later found out he is nuts, but in a mostly creative way. So I went down to Huntington Beach on the weekends, and we started shooting video on my full size S-VHS camera.
It was a whole new experience for me. I got into BMX freestyle when Bob Haro and R.L. Osborn were setting an example as professional entrepreneurs on bikes. Then I worked at Unreel Productions, which spent tons of money to make videos that could have shown on TV, quality-wise, but ended up as home videos. So my background was shooting videos and not worrying about money. Chris was coming at the video from the opposite perspective. He had started a bike company at age 16 with almost no money and watched every penny super close. S&M Bikes, at the time, was housed in the single car garage of his tiny, one bedroom apartment. I was used to paying for music rights. He suggested bootlegging punk songs, since the skate videos were doing it, and most punk bands were way to broke to sue.
He also wanted to make it funny as fuck and mess with viewers, which scared me a bit. But it was fun to shoot. I don't remember a lot of the shoots. In a video with Chris Moeller, everyone expected crazy jumping right off the bat. So he wanted to do the skateboard chain wallet bit at the start. At first I wasn't sure, but as he kept skating around, I was laughing and trying not to shake the camera.
So one of the craziest jumpers in the world at the time starts his first official video section with a couple of minutes of making fun of skaters and then a couple minutes making fun BMX street riders (which bummed me out, as a lame street rider).
Then, out of nowhere, he does this huge jump nearly everyone misses. Pause this clip at 5:07. In that shot, Chris is jumping the huge, flat topped, pyramid at the Santa Ana Civic center. That's a very mellow bank to a 30 or 35 foot flat top, onto another mellow bank. Seriously, TODAY, that would be a serious jump. In 1991, it blew my mind.
Then Chris actually does some dirt jumping and some real big handrails for the time. I don't know what riders around the country were expecting the first time they popped in that tape, but it wasn't that. And that was the whole point.
The whole process of making this video was like nothing I'd done before. With the collapse of the BMX industry, the rider's weird ideas were starting to show up. I was beginning to realize how much fun we could have with a BMX video. Moeller... was just being Moeller. That's what made it like nothing else coming out at the time.
Next weekend in Riverside, California is the annual Boozer Jam, combined with the 30th anniversary party for S&M Bikes. I won't be there, and I doubt anyone really cares. I've told many BMX stories over the years, but few about my interactions with Chris Moeller, S&M Bikes, and the P.O.W. House. This seems like the perfect time to throw some of those stories out into the blogosphere.
I first heard of Chris Moeller from Gork, the editor of BMX Action. He and Windy went to shoot photos of some pro racer at some jumps on Brookhurst by a grocery store in Huntington Beach. Gork came back freaking out about this 16-year-old kid doing all these insane jumps while they were there. That kid, of course, was Chris Moeller.
I've learned over the years that just when you think you have Chris figured out, he surprises you. So here's a story that will surprise many of you. I first met Moeller when I rode with Gork to a national in Lake Elsinore. On the way, we picked up Chris who'd ask Gork to hitch a ride to the race. Gork and I were in the front seats of the Wizard Publications Astro van, and Chris sat on the floor in the back with his bike. I don't think Chris said two words for the whole trip, which was about an hour. My first impression of Chris Moeller was that he might be a great jumper, but he was really shy.
Sometime after that, Gork showed us at Wizard this amazing series of photos of Chris doing a no-footer, head high, for about 25 feet, on a downhill jump at Hidden Valley in Huntington Beach. Without a doubt, it was the craziest jump I'd ever seen photos of at that point. Gork took the photos, Xeroxed them (ask you dad what a Xerox is, kids), and made this amazing, multi-image sequence... totally by hand. It was awesome. I met a slew of amazing riders in 1986, Mat Hoffman, Joe Johnson, Josh White, and Chris Moeller, among others.
After getting booted from Wizard, I landed as newsletter editor at the American Freestyle Association in Huntington Beach. I was in the area, but as a freestyler hanging out at the pier, I rarely ran into Moeller then. I went on to work at Unreel Productions, the Vision video company. In early 1990, Unreel was dissolved, and I moved to the Vision main office. it was there one day that Vision BMX team manager, Mike Miranda, told me about four riders that rented an apartment in H.B.. They called themselves the HBP's, or Huntington Beach Pros. Some months later, I learned that several more riders had joined the pack and rented a house in Westminster, the much more affordable city inland of Huntington Beach. They renamed themselves the Pros of Westminster, or P.O.W.'s. It was the first serious rider house in BMX.
That same year, I decided to shoot and produce my own video. I'd produced six videos for the AFA, one for 2-Hip, and worked at Unreel when they made a bunch of really hokey videos, like Freestylin' Fanatics. I decided to make a video that showed real riding, and CURRENT riding, which only Eddie Roman and Mark Eaton were doing then. And to be honest, those were really sketchy at the time, though the riding was insane. So I shot video most every weekend through 1990, and edited the video in October of that year.
I wanted good jumping in the video, not just freestylers doing flyout jumps. The best doubles jumpers in the sport then were the S&M and P.O.W.'s. So I called them up, and I went to shoot at the P.O.W. House, and then later at Edison, some jumps squeezed in a little area behind the high school. The clip above is what I came up with for the video. It's short, but it was insane jumping for that time. Here's a list of most of the guys in this segment:
John Paul Rogers- :17, :26 (S&M rider, P.O.W.)
Alan Foster- :29, :46 (P.O.W., I didn't know he had a little brother who rode then)
Chris Moeller- :31, 1:06, 2:00 (The "M" in S&M Bikes, and the guy who built the company into what it is today)
McGoo- :33 (Official comedian of the BMX industry)
Dave Clymer- :40, :56, 1:09, 1:24 (S&M rider and P.O.W.)
Eric Milman- :50, 1:11 (P.O.W.)
Mike "Crazy Red" Carlson- 1:02, 1:22, 1:28, 1:32, 1:36, 1:45, 1:45, 1:50, 2:04 (S&M Rider)
Greg Scott- 1:30 (The "S" in S&M Bikes originally)
Also in the clip are Dave Cullinan, Kim Boyle, Josh White, and Mike, a local kid. The toe -dragger tailwhip that Crazy Red does at the end is the first tailwhip over doubles in a BMX video ever. The 360 that Moeller does at the end was the biggest 360 I'd ever seen at that point. The music is two live tracks by The Stain, a Toledo punk band. Someone has to be pioneers in everything, and the S&M/P.O.W. guys were the main pioneers when dirt jumping was starting to turn into its own sport.
This clip is well worth watching for the old school trickery by Drob and and Golden Gate Park crew in 1986. But at 5:07 in the clip, you can see me chasing my bike. That was a stupid trick I did in parades in Idaho, but it got me in this TV clip. In the time between when this clip was shot, and when it aired, my goofy little freestyle zine landed me a job at BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines. My life changed forever.
After five months as a magazine gofer/proofreader, I got laid off, mostly because I didn't like the band Skinny Puppy. They hired some kid named Spike a couple of months later. Cool kid, wonder what happened to him. Anyhow, I rode every day with Craig Grasso for a month (which I highly advise, he's hilarious), called around the industry, then landed a job as the newsletter editor for the American Freestyle Association. That job moved me from Hermosa Beach a bit south to Huntington Beach, a working class surf town at the time.
In my stint at FREESTYLIN', I did drove Windy Osborn to a photo shoot at the Huntington Beach Pier once, where she shot pics of freestyle skaters Henry Candioti and Don Brown. So I knew both skaters and some bike freestylers hung out there on the weekends. When I moved there, I headed down to the pier every weekend to session. I met a tall, lanky rider named Mike Sarrail. He was a master of Miami Hop hops, and invented the Undertaker, among other things. We hit it off, and rode together every weekend with skaters Pierre Andre, Don Brown, and whoever else wandered by on bikes and boards.
That summer, I had this cool idea. Like most "cool ideas," it seemed awesome at the time. I wanted to blow off the dinky AFA newsletter and do a newsletter/newspaper thing covering bikes, skates, surf, and whatever else seemed cool. I threw the idea at Mike, and we started planning it out. In those days before the internet, it could have been cool. Probably not. But maybe.
After dreaming about it for a while that summer of 1987, Mike and I decided to make some T-shirts to sell to raise a little money. I took a photo of a rider doing a lookdown, and we made iron-on transfer T-shirts that said, "S&M Productions... We're coming" with the pic of the lookdown in the middle. "S&M" stood for Steve & Mike. We sold the T-shirts around Huntington Beach, and didn't make much money. I think if you look real hard at my Facebook pics, you'll find a pic of me doing a Shingle Shuffle under the HB Pier wearing one of those shirts with the sleeves cut off.
Anyhow... like most of my "cool" ideas back then, it was mostly dream and little action. We never made the multi-sport newsletter (or videos) and S&M Productions fizzled out. So that's the story of how S&M started 30 years ago in the BMX freestyle world.
Oh yeah, one guy who bought one of our shirts said, "Hey, there's some BMX racing guys doing a company called S&M, too." Turns out he was right.
I've got two new blogs I'm doing now:
Crazy California 43- This blog's about weird, cool, odd, and historic locations in California.
WPOS Kreative Ideas- This blog's about creativity, writing, art, blogging, promoting creative work, and whatever else I feel like blogging about.
This past Monday, Memorial Day, was also the 40th anniversary of the opening of Pipeline Skatepark in Upland, California. It opened with the namesake full pipe attached to a bowl that was amazing for BMX bikes. Pipeline wasn't far from the already legendary Baldy Pipe, which had already been skated for a while. Baldy was a 16 foot diameter pipe, Pipeline's was 20 feet.
Here's Eddie Fiola, the original King of the Skateparks, being interviewed by Don Hoffman. Don's parents, Stan and Jean, owned Pipeline, which took both skating and BMX vert to a whole different level. Eddie is rocking the MF jersey, which stood for Morales (as in Bob) and Fiola.
A Kickstarter campaign for a Pipeline/Badlands documentary is getting going. More on all that later. I'm moving this week, so I'll be adding more posts in 2 or 3 days.
At fifty years old, I'm way overweight after years of taxi driving and bad eating habits. I'm starting to lost the weight. As an old BMXer, I went looking online for a good bike to get me riding again. I kept seeing Todd Lyon's posts on Facebook, he's the SE Bikes brand manager now. I checked out his video for the SE Fat Ripper, and that's when I found this clip by Seth's Bike Hacks YouTube channel. This video is the reason I decided to start saving up for a Fat Ripper. I've become a fan of Seth's YouTube channel.
As most of you reading this know, I've been telling old school BMX stories in my blogs since I moved to North Carolina in November 2008. Moving here, I lost all my bike videos and DVD's, I lost all the master tapes to videos I produced, and I lost dozens of hours of raw footage ranging from 1989 to 2007. I had been planning to make my own documentary of BMX freestyle at some point. Because I couldn't borrow money to get my stuffed shipped from California, I lost one of the best raw footage collections in the freestyle world. All I had left were memories. So I started blogging.
In the last nine years, I've written about 800 posts about the early days of BMX freestyle, and I have lots more to tell. I'd like to thank all of you who've read and enjoyed my bike tales over the years.
When I came to NC, I couldn't find a decent job. It was late 2008 and the bottom was dropping out of the economy, so I wasn't alone. I eventually drove a taxi here for a while, and spent a year struggling to survive while living in my taxi. I've also been selling my Sharpie artwork here and there to make a little money. I'm too old to get hired at entry level jobs here, and my "eclectic"work history seems to keep me from getting a good paying job in some other area. But I spent most of my life in highly entrepreneurial Southern California. When I couldn't find a decent job, I thought, "OK, I'll create my own job."
But the truth is, I wrote most of 800 or so posts on the different versions of Freestyle BMX Tales while I was homeless and looking for work. At the same time, I've been educating myself on how writing and art works in today's world. It's a completely different industry than when my zine landed me a job at Wizard Publications in 1986. In today's world, many magazines have died, websites have taken over, and most make money from ads and links. But something else has happened thanks to the web and today's crazy technology. Millions of people have started websites, blogs, YouTube channels about things they are actually passionate about. This blog is one of those things, and so is Seth's You Tube channel above. Today's tech let's creative people in little niches create all kinds of stuff to share with the world. But there's been one huge problem. Money.
Either creative people need to finance their creative work from their job, and do it as a hobby. Or they need to dumb it down for a mass audience and try to be one of the small number of people who makes a ton of money on YouTube from ads or through affiliate links on blogs and websites.
But there's another option. With a service called Patreon, you can support creative people doing cool stuff in a way that doesn't require us to dumb stuff down or sell our souls just for advertising dollars. You can now support people just because you're stoked on what we do.
I've done a lot of things over the years. Telling stories about the early days of BMX freestyle is not my main focus now. My main focus is writing zines, blogs, and doing artwork to encourage people to build creative scenes. After reading lots of books that would bore most of you, I've learned that "creative scenes," like local bike scenes, skate scenes, art scenes, music scenes, actually play a huge role in creating jobs in today's world. We got into BMX freestyle in the 80's because we liked this weird, new, creative sport-type thing. Along the way, we formed little local scenes. We also discovered the DIY ethic and started shooting photos, putting on shows, making zines, videos, magazines, and bike companies. Because we liked riding, we created an entire industry that created a ton of jobs. The same thing happened in skateboarding, snowboarding, high tech, and dozens of other creative areas.
But now we're in a world where tech is taking over human jobs by the millions. One industry after another has lost jobs to new forms of technology. The high paying factory jobs of our childhood are gone, and no one is replacing them. People looking into the future are really worried about jobs for humans in the next few decades. I see one viable solution. Millions of people will have to create their own jobs, in new businesses in dozens of new industries.
I'm taking what I've learned from being a part of many creative scenes, and taking those ideas to a new generation of creative people. Some will be middle-aged geezers like myself, but most will be younger people who create stuff, but haven't experienced how a creative activity, like BMX freestyle, can turn into a whole new industry. This is my work. Writing and drawing IS MY JOB NOW. If you want to support my work, you can do it on my Patreon page. You get goodies, by the way, for different levels of support.
You can also support Seth's YouTube channel on the link at the end of the video above. Welcome to the world where you can directly support and communicate with the creative people who do stuff you're stoked on. You now have the power to support the people doing the things you think are good in the world. Go for it.
The late Dave Vanderspek schools the cops and the news media on the difference between a skate contest, a sticker toss, and a riot. Normal people just didn't get it back then. And we liked it that way.
On Facebook recently there was a promo for an upcoming book about BMX freestyle, and it listed the names of riders that would be featured in the book. There were a lot of great names on the list. But I noticed one glaring omission, there was no one from NorCal. You just can't tell the story of BMX freestyle without the San Francisco Bay Area riders. They didn't invent freestyle, but they left an lasting imprint on the whole freestyle scene. I'm not just saying that because I was part of the scene for a while. I'm saying that because BMX freestyle wouldn't be BMX freestyle without Golden Gate Park, the Curb Dogs, the Skyway team, the Ground Control crew, and the attitude that rose from the crazy streets of San Francisco. Here's a look at the NorCal influence through the videos of NorCal riders.
Blogger's note: I just saw the link to Dom Phipps' book, and on the website and it DOES mention the Curb Dogs and Maurice Meyer. It was the Facebook post that didn't have any NorCal reference that was my spark to create this post, which I've been working on for a few days now.
Many of you have been reading my blogs for nearly a decade. For as little as $1 a month, you can help support my work here.
The Pro Riders Dave Vanderspek was unquestionably the charismatic leader of both the Curb Dogs and the Golden Gate Park Freestyle scene. He was also a good skater, and was the first person to really bring the skateboard and punk rock influence into freestyle. Maurice Meyer, aka "Drob" was a solid, always underrated rider BITD, but not the outgoing promoter that Dave was. I always thought of Drob as the "assistant manager of NorCal freestyle." He was kind of the second in command guy in the Curb Dogs, the Skyway factory team, and Golden Gate Park scene during my time there. His brother was freestyle skater Ray Meyer. Ron Wilkerson was one of the most influential riders of the 80's, and ever since. He started as part of the Golden Gate Park scene and with his 2-Hip Trick Team, and got the very first cover photo on FREESTYLIN' magazine riding there. He soon landed on the Haro Bikes team as a pro rider, and moved to Southern California. He brought lip tricks into the vert world, started the first series of halfpipe and street contests, and went on to own Wilkerson Airlines and now 2-Hip Bikes. Robert Peterson became known as the Mater of Balance for his array of stationary balance tricks. He was also team manager of the Skyway Factory team for quite a while and a mad scientist inventing freestyle tech. Rick Allison added a showman style to early freestyle riding. The thing that sticks out in my mind about Rick is that he could do the fastest surfers I've ever seen anyone do. Oleg Konings (1:01 in this clip) was a freak among the freaks. At a time when nearly every rider had a original tricks, Oleg came up with tricks that were totally unique and weird. He invented the first scuffing trick, too. Really. That's it in the clip. "Oleg, put your helmet on!" Hugo Gonzalez is last, but definitely not least. Hugo was the craziest ramp and skatepark rider in the early days, bar none. Before anyone even used the term "Huck it," that's what Hugo was doing. If there was a crazy jump to be attempted, Hugo was the guy to try it. He constantly was pushing the limits of what was possible with a BMX freestyle bike in the air. And landing was always optional to Hugo.
NorCal rider contributions to BMX freestyle
-Golden Gate Park Scene was the most cohesive scene I ever saw in freestyle. There was no other scene like it. It had a totally different vibe than any other.
-The Curb Dogs bike/skate team was the most popular non-factory trick team of the 80's. They routinely placed above most factory teams in magazine polls.
-The terrain of San Francisco, combined with punk rock and skateboard influences promoted by Vander and the Curb Dogs was the main, initial thrust of BMX street riding. The San Diego riders soon followed suit.
-Vander showed us that motocross style uniforms were stupid.
-First scuff trick ever was invented by Oleg Konings (see Oleg clip above).
BMX freestyle balance tricks were made popular by Robert Peterson, who invented most of the early balance tricks.
-First wall ride-type trick was Hugo Gonzalez' fence ride at Pipeline Skatepark.
-First BMX halfpipe contest was put on by Dave Vanderspek
-First BMX street contest was put on by Dave Vanderspek
-First BMX halfpipe series, 2-Hip King of Vert, was put on by Ron Wilkerson.
-Second BMX street contest, and first BMX street contest series, 2-Hip Meet the Street, was put on by Ron Wilkerson.
-The first made-for-TV BMX street contest, the Huntington Beach Street Scene, was put on by Scot Breithaupt and myself (Steve Emig) in 1989, and aired on ESPN, six years before the X-Games.
NorCal freestylers in FREESTYLIN' magazine in the early days...
The Premiere- Issue # 1 of FREESTYLIN', Cover: Ron Wilkerson at Golden Gate Park (in San Francisco)- Summer 1984 FREESTYLIN' #2- Hugo Gonzalez pull out poster- fall '84 FREESTYLIN' #3- Robert Peterson interview- winter '84-'85 FREESTYLIN'#5- The Great NorCal ramp series- May '85 FREESTYLIN' #6- Cover: Hugo Gonzalez (and fellow Skyway rider Scott Freeman)- July 1985 BMX Action- Cover: Dave Vanderspek- November 1985 FREESTYLIN' # 12- Cover: Dave Vanderspek, Maurice & Ray Meyer interview- May 1986 FREESTYLIN' #13- Interview with Dave Vanderspek, Robert Peterson's bar extender- June '86 FREESTYLIN' #15- San Jose Stylin' (my zine) named top freestyle zine in the country- August '86 FREESTYLIN' #16- Photos of Maurice Meyer, Dave Vanderspek, & Oleg Konings- September '86 FREESTYLIN' #19- My mini interview with some skater named Rodney Mullen- December '86 FREESTYLIN' #21- Robert Peterson interview (which had a 43 page transcription)- February '87 FREESTYLIN' #24- Golden Gate Park Flatland- May '87 FREESTYLIN' #26- Marc McKee undergrounder, tricks by Robert Peterson and Karl Rothe FREESTYLIN' #31- Ron Wilkerson interview (lived in SoCal then) FREESTYLIN' #46- Cover: Ron Wilkerson (SoCal guy then), R.I.P. Vander piece- March 1989 FREESTYLIN' #47- Vander Memorial Jam- April '89 Go: The Rider's Manual- Vol.2 #4- Ron Wilkerson- February 1991
Vander would ride it. "Slam, bang, crash 'em up, do it again."
43.
I'm working on a big zine telling my crazy taxi driver stories, which is why this blog is on hold this month. You can read the post about the well known BMXers and other reasonably famous people I gave taxi rides to here:
I'm at a transition point right now, I'm moving out of the apartment I've been living in at the end of May. Not sure where I'm moving to yet, I'll likely be "floating" for a while. I'm also spending the month of May 2017 to tell a bunch of my stories of unusual adventures I've had. This is a lead up to publishing my first big zine of crazy taxi stories and opening an online store to sell my writing and artwork. So I won't be posting in this blog for the rest of May. I'll have a new story nearly every day, some from the BMX world, in this blog:
Around 5,000 retail stores, all from major chains, have closed in the last year, are closing now, or scheduled to close this year. What Napster did to music, Amazon and outlet malls are doing to department stores and mall stores. Here's an update on my Get Weird Make Money blog.
I gave up on that blog, here's my new ones (October 2021):
I met Jeff Cotter in 1987, while working for the AFA. He was part of the Lakewood posse that included Ron McCoy, Nathan Shimizu, Ron Camero, his little brother Tim Cotter, and Derek Oriee. All of those guys were good riders, and always at the SoCal local AFA contests. Jeff was sponsored by Ozone at one point, and by Vision Street Wear. None of that crew became top pros, but they were always good, polished, flatland riders. They often came down to the Huntington Beach Pier on the weekends where Mike Sarrail, myself, and a few of the Vision freestyle skaters would ride for the crowds.
So why am I showing a clip of one of the hundreds of good flatlanders from the heyday of 1988? Because Jeff went on to take a job riding in Ringling Bros. Circus not long after this. He flew to Japan and was doing shows with Jose Yanez, the inventor of BMX backflips. When Jeff came back to SoCal in 1990, I was shooting footage for my first self-produced bike video, The Ultimate Weekend. Jeff told me he could do backflips into water, and I went to Long Beach to shoot footage of him. While he was flipping into the lake, I asked him if he'd ever tried backflip variations. He said he never really thought of it, so he gave it a shot. He did a stretched one handed flip into the lake, and a real quick no hander, which made him the first actual freestyler to do any kind of backflip variations. Mat Hoffman was doing backflip fakies and flairs on vert then. But no one in the BMX freestyle world had done flip variations on video. Jeff Cotter, Lakewood area flatlander, wound up being that guy.
I shot the footage of Jeff flipping into the lake right as I was getting ready to edit my video. Back in those days, I had to pay $25 an hour to rent the edit equipment, and I set a solid deadline to stop shooting footage. Jeff called me a week after that deadline, and said he had learned flips ramp to ramp, making him the first freestyler to do so. But I was just getting ready to edit, and I didn't go shoot footage of him for the video. That was my mistake.
Jose Yanez was a rider from Arizona who learned flips and then double backflips into water, back when everyone thought that was impossible. But Jose wasn't a serious racer or freestyler. Jeff, the flatlander from Lakewood, became the first freestyler to do flips ramp to ramp, and to try one handers and no handers. In the weird world of BMX riding progression, you never know who will break new ground with the tricks that change everything. Jose did it first. Mat Hoffman took flips to halfpipes first. And Jeff Cotter brought flips into the mainstream freestyle world.
At 44:11 in this clip, you can see Jeff flipping into a lake in 1990.
just ran across this, and the first minute or two of this clip is pretty amazing. Until I got to the part where Guy Martin heard the "World Record" for a gravity racer... 84 mph. You think we should tell him that when he was in kindergarten, BMXers built pieces of crap out of spare parts called GPV's, gravity powered vehicles. At the Palm Springs tramway race in 1987, Tommy Brackens passed the camera motorcycle on his GPV, which was doing 85 mph... in a turn. I've personally watched GPV's hit around 90 mph and skate luges hit 110 mph+. Here's the next video, where Guy "breaks the record" at 85.612 mph. Just fast forward til the end. Then he crashes trying to go faster. It's a good crash, worth the watch.
Hey Guy, it was a cute little go kart you guys built... but this is how you go fast using gravity:
I went to this event with NorCal friend John Ficarra, who didn't fair so well. On that day engineer Dan Hannebrink's fairing won the day. There were a few other events, and Hannebrink crashed hard in one. He had the technology, but not the balls of pro BMX racers like Tommy Brackens. Here's the lead up to the video above, starting 5:10 in the clip. You were 5 years old when this happened Guy Martin.
Go to 1:03 in this video and you'll see the enigmatic Skyway pro Oleg Konings doing a scuff trick. I can't remember what he called it. Why is this a big deal? Because, to the best of my knowledge, this was the first scuffing trick EVER. I personally saw Oleg doing this trick in 1985, when I first moved to the Bay Area. He had been doing it a while at that point. For those of you who found freestyle in the very late 1980's or later, "scuffing" is the act of pushing a foot on a tire, then dragging that foot to control the speed, which helped you keep your balance.
Right before I left NorCal for my job at FREESTYLIN', Golden Gate Park local Tim Tracy had invented another scuffing trick, it was a forwards side glide with his leg over the handlebars, scuffing on the front wheel. It was amazing at the time, but like Oleg's earlier scuff trick, it didn't catch on.
At an AFA Masters contest in Oregon in the spring of 1987, the NorCal crew unleashed the Backyard, and that was the trick that blew up and got the whole freestyle world learning scuff tricks.
Here's Dennis MCoy in 1987 bustin' some scuff tricks. At 1:01 in this clip he does a funky chicken, into a spinning front peg scuff thing. Then at 1:45, he goes into a locomotive, which is what the backyard soon morphed into, thanks to Kevin Jones. At 1:56 Dennis does the backyard, the trick that started a whole flurry of scuffing moves. Within a year, scuffing moves started turning into gliding moves, and that was the foundation for all of today's flatland. And it all started with a weird kid from NorCal called Oleg Konings.
One night in the mid-2000's, when I was a fat taxi driver, I got a call from the BMX guys at Barspinner Ryan's house in Huntington Beach. Somebody needed a ride from a party at their house. I was the old, washed up Has Been BMX industry guy, so all the BMX guys called me when they needed a cab... especially if they didn't have money.
In any case, I picked up one of the Sheep Hills Locals, can't remember which one, hopped in the cab with a couple younger guys I didn't know. As I was driving them, the Sheep Hills guy told them, "Hey man, this is The White Bear, he's the guy that made the 44 Something video." Much to my surprise, one of those guys was a rider just breaking into the big time, Ryan "Biz" Jordan. He said, something like, "I used to watch that video EVERY DAY before I went out riding." To say I was stoked is an understatement. When I shot video and sat down to edit that video in a corner of the S&M Bikes office, my main goal was to make a video that made people want to go ride. It's as simple as that. When I made my first self-produced video in 1990, riders didn't really make videos then. Eddie Roman had made Aggroman, and Mark Eaton had mad a couple of VHS mastered Dorkin' In York videos. But videos were made by companies to promote their bikes. So I spent a long time that year trying to figure out what the real goal of my video was. When it all came down to it, my criteria for a good bike video was that I wanted a rider to be walking their bikes out the front door to go ride before the video ended. I've actually seen that happen with my videos fromtime to time.
But when Ryan Jordan was in my cab that night, it was the first time that a serious pro rider told me that my video got him stoked to go riding before he was a pro. That's a good feeling. So all you riders out there, if you run across some old HAS BEEN BMX guy whose photos or video parts or videos they produced stoked you out when you were younger, let them know. It's a really great feeling to know that the video I got paid $450 to edit in 1993 actually made people want to ride.
As you can see from this clip, old school Midwest BMXer Scotty Zabielski has a beard. I'd rate that beard as slightly bigger than a 19th century lumberjack beard, but still a ways from wizard status. Scotty Z is raising money for ST. Baldrick's to help fight childhood cancer. That big ol' beard is coming off April 23rd. If he gets enough money, the eyebrows are getting shaved, too.
Scotty's a straight up guy, and the leading patron of my artwork as I've worked to turn that into my business. So help him out with $$$ or a share, or both!
This just popped up on my You Tube feed. My first question was, "Where was this chick when we lived at the P.O.W. and S&M Houses back in the day? Then I remembered, "Oh, I'm old, she wasn't born yet." My next thought was, "This woman can seriously handle power tools and welders, so she'd probably kick my ass for calling her a "chick."
So here are two great things old schoolers. #1 is this awesome invention, BMX bike and beer hauler. I have a feeling S&M Bikes will be producing these by next weekend. #2 is Laura herself. One of you lucky BMXers watching this just found the perfect woman. This thing is awesome on so many levels... right up there with the Shipper Ripper in the SE Bikes warehouse in 1985. It was a shopping cart with handlebars welded on and custom stickers.
Here's Rich Bartlett in 2015 on a mountain bike. He's still riding trails.
In the summer of 1987, I got a call from Dave Alvarez, the genius video editor at Unreel Productions. He's the guy who actually edited the six American Freestyle Association videos I produced in 1987, so that's how I knew him. He told me he was being sent to shoot video in Lancaster that weekend at Rich Bartlett's house, and since it was a BMX thing, he said he'd give me a ride. We rode up in the Unreel Toyota van, north of L.A., to an event that changed the course of BMX jumping forever.
BMX Action editor Craig Gork Barrette and pro racer/jumper/vert rider Rich Bartlett had this idea to throw a BMX dirt jumping jam. It was the first King of Dirt jam, held at Rich's trails built at his dad's house. Everyone who rode a BMX bike back then jumped on dirt. But there were no jumping contests and there were two schools of jumping then. The traditional BMX racer school of jumping focused on jumping at speed, smoothly, over big sets of doubles. Their tricks were mostly the classics: tabletops, the Leary (lookback), X-ups, and maybe a one hand one footer. The other school of jumping then was the freestyle jumpers. Freestylers couldn't pedal worth a damn, and mostly loved flyout jumps with no gap to clear. Freestylers did 360's, Leary's, and more technical variations with much smaller air usually. Both groups didn't think much of the others.
That first King of Dirt brought riders from both schools of jumping, and from all over the U.S. (and even the U.K.) together for the first time in a big way. There was a smaller track near the house which both groups liked. Then there were the bigger jumps spread over the huge lot. Rich had built those jumps in a way none of us had seen before. It started by pedaling fast to a big tabletop jump. All day long he kept telling us all, "If you clear the tabletop, you don't have to pedal through the rest of the jumps." That was totally new then. To the best of my knowledge, Rich Bartlett built the first rhythm section in BMX. The racers got the rhythm idea down first, although most still wanted to pedal between jumps. Us freestylers, who rarely jumped that far, had trouble. But most of us were coasting through some of the jumps by the end of the day, even if we couldn't clear that first table top.
To put that 1987 day in perspective, when we went to the local McDonald's for breakfast that morning (about eight of us crashed on Rich's floor the night before), jumping phenom Chris Moeller was panhandling money for breakfast. He and friend Greg Scott had just started making "Mad Dog" frames under the name S&M Bicycles, which stood for "Scott" and Moeller." About a year later, Chris bought out Greg and went to town with the little company.
There were a handful of guys from England there, and that was the first time I met Will Smyth, who went on to publish DIG BMX magazine (and now an awesome website) a few years later. Another kid made his debut that day, a kid from Utah named Tim "Fuzzy" Hall. There were probably 40 or 50 riders there, maybe more. It wasn't a contest, and the main sponsor was the local Domino's Pizza place, which gave Gork and Rich a discount on pizzas for us all.
It was an epic day in BMX, and everyone there rode, and Dave was about the only guy shooting video because Vision Street Wear was a co-sponsor. Most of the craziest jumps went to the young S&M team with Moeller, Dave Clymer, John Paul Rogers, and a couple others flowing 360's and stretching Nac-nacs. Freestylers tried to pedal with more speed and die hard racer/jumpers tried 360's, which dinged a few rims as I remember. Everyone had a great time. One goofy kid who couldn't jump very well started trying tailwhip jumps, a brand new idea at the time. I remember that part, because I was that goofy kid. All kinds of riders tried new variations, and went home with serious stoke on dirt jumping and what was possible.
The day ended with Fuzzy Hall trying this ridiculous canyon gap of about 35 feet or so. He made it a couple of times, as I remember. Everyone thought Chris Moeller would be the guy to do it first, but he'd just had his bike stolen, and didn't attempt it on a borrowed bike.
But the big takeaway that day was Rich Bartlett's idea of rhythm sections. That became the standard way to build jumps over the next couple of years, and the trails have only gotten bigger since. Here's a few of the epic rhythm sections inspired by Rich's idea:
When most of us older guys think back to the King of the Skateparks era in the early 1980's, Eddie Fiola, Brian Blyther, Mike Dominguez come to mind first, along with Hugo Gonzales, Rich Sigur, Tony Murray and maybe a couple others. All those guys were pushing the progression of riding vert and pools. The airs were getting higher, the tricks were getting gnarlier, and Hugo was hucking ridiculous things.
But one of the fundamental tricks of BMX vert, dirt jumping, and park riding came from a lesser known, but still rad rider, Jeff Carroll. Like Jeremy Alder and Jose Yanez in the last two posts, Jeff showed the riding world that a trick thought impossible was actually possible. Jeff gave us the no-hander. It wasn't an eight foot air, his arms weren't stretched like later riders would do, but in the photo above at what I think is the last skatepark comp of that era, in 1985, Jeff showed the BMX world that you could take both hands off the bars in the air, put them back on, and survive. With that one trick, he changed BMX riding.
Here are some of the other guys who later built on that idea:
In 1984, Eddie Fiola, Mike Dominguez, Brian Blyther battled it out for the King of the Skateparks on a BMX bike. Doing a seven or eight foot air and letting go of one hand and one foot was the peak of aerial radness. That summer, the first BMX freestyle flatland and ramp contest was put on by BMX freestyler turned entrepreneur Bob Morales. The term "BMX freestyle," was new. Wizard Publications put out the first issue of FREESTYLIN' magazine. BMX "trick riding" was just morphing into an actual sport. Dozens of riders showed up at each contest with brand new tricks. Nobody was sure what we were really capable of on BMX bikes. Racers had been jumping bikes for 14 years. NOBODY in the freestyle world even thought seriously of attempting a backflip on a bike. It just seemed far too dangerous.
Then out of nowhere, Arizona came this kid named Jose Yanez who did the impossible. He wasn't a top pro racer. He wasn't a known freestyler. He was just a kid who liked riding and decided to try the scariest thing any rider could think of at the time. He learned, landed, and got a cover photo doing the trick no one thought was really possible on a bicycle. Jose Yanez did the impossible, became instantly famous in the BMX world, then wound up in Ringling Bros., Barnum & Bailey Circus touring the world doing that trick. Most of us freestylers back then never saw him do it live. Even after he proved it possible, no freestylers learned the trick ramp to ramp until 1990, when flatlander Jeff Cotter learned it from Jose himself while working in the circus. Mat Hoffman, in his traditional role of taking a new idea beyond possibility, learned backflip fakies and flairs, the backflip air, that same year. Even then, it was a couple more years, around '92 or '93 when a group of BMX riders started learning to do backflips. By that time, Jose Yanez had already done double backflips on a BMX bike into water, AND flipped a motorcycle ramp to ramp, the first to do either of those feats.
To put this into perspective, let's compare Jose's feats to the life of freestyle motocross pioneer Travis Pastrana. Jose did the first BMX ramp to ramp backflip when Travis was less than a year old and in diapers. Jose did a double BMX backflip into water when Travis was about four years old. Jose first flipped a motorcycle ramp to ramp when Travis was about eight-years-old. Travis tried a motorcycle backflip on dirt for the first time in 2000, but missed and broke his foot. He was about 17 at the time. That was nine years after Jose had already done it. I'm not trying to diss Travis, we all know how much he's added to the action sports world of progression. I'm just pointing out how far Jose was in front of the curve. But Jose Yanez, like many pioneers, didn't have massive TV coverage or tons of press around when he flipped that dirtbike. In fact, he didn't have ANY press around, just a friend with a video camera.
The BMX and MX riders of today, as well as those in other action sports, grew up with backflips and flip variations as part of the lexicon of tricks. These kids don't remember a time when a flip on two wheels was "impossible." But us old guys remember that time. In every progressive endeavor, someone has to put it on the line a be first. In the world of flips on two-wheeled vehicles, Jose Yanez was that guy.
