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.
