How the S&M Bikes video "Feel my leg muscles" came to be

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.

I've got four new blogs I'm doing now:

The Big Freakin' Transition- about the future and the economy

Crazy California 43- This blog's about weird, cool, odd, and historic locations in California.

Full Circle- about writing and the writer's life

And a fiction blog:

Stench: Homeless Superhero