The first time the S&M guys and P.O.W. House were in a video

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.

I've got four new blogs now:

The Big Freakin' Transition- about the future and economics

Crazy California 43- Cool and weird locations in California

Full Circle- about writing and the writer's life

And a fiction blog- 

Stench: Homeless Superhero

 

Jeff Cotter Flatland run in 1988

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.

I've got four new blogs now:

The Big Freakin' Transition- about the future and economics

Crazy California 43- weird and cool locations in California

Full Circle- about writing and the writer's life

 And a fiction blog...

Stench: Homeless Superhero

Chris Day stories

Here's flatland dynamo Chris Day, at the peek of the AFA Masters era, ripping it up on flatland in 1988.

At the beginning of August in 1986, I flew from San Jose to Southern California to start my new life working a Wizard Publications.  I was so nervous about it all that I got a horrible case of the hives, and had to wear long sleeve, button up shirts to work for two weeks.  And Jenkins and Lew gave me a hard time about that, thinking they had accidentally just hired a button up dork.  I was a dork, alright, just not a button up one.  Once the hives were gone I went back to rockin' my T-shirt collection.

I moved into Gork and Lew's two bedroom apartment, and slept on the couch for a couple of months.  They showed me around the office, around Redondo Beach, and took me to their flatland area, The Spot.  The Spot locals at the time were Lew, Gork, Craig Grasso, and this young kid named Chris Day.  Chris was about 14 or 15 then, and did these amazing flail boomerangs, whipping his legs around and snapping the trick like no one else at the time.  Chris was amazing to watch.  When R.L. Osborn was in town, he'd usually come ride at The Spot once or twice a week, and it was obvious he was keeping tabs on Chris.  Chris was one of the young generation of riders, and R.L., an old school veteran then, didn't want to miss any progression happening in the sport.

As a young kid, though, Chris could be kind of annoying.  I soon learned that he would ride over to our apartment, barge in the the door without much of a knock, and head straight for the cookie jar Gork kept well stocked.  We didn't really mind him eating cookies, but it would have been cool if he at least asked first.

When the magazine deadlines were close, Andy, Lew, Gork, and me all wound up working late at Wizard, which was a small warehouse with an office area up front.  All of our offices were in the back, along the walls of the warehouse.  Sometimes Chris would ride over there at night to hang out.  But we were busy doing the work we should have been doing in the previous three weeks, and we didn't need any more distractions.  Gork would always have his ghetto blaster blasting metal, usually Metallica, on those nights.  In between songs we'd often hear Chris knocking on the warehouse door and yelling, "Hey guys!  It's me!  Chris!  Hey guys!  Let me in!"  We'd laugh, and the next song would start, then we couldn't hear him anymore.  When that song stopped, we'd hear Chris yelling and knocking again.  One might he did that for about two hours.

It wasn't that we didn't like Chris.  Generally speaking he was a pretty cool kid as well as a great up and coming rider.  But he would wear on our nerves, and we just needed some time without him around now and then.

As the fall progressed, Gork, Lew, and I decided to move into a three bedroom apartment, so I could get off the couch.  We looked around for a while, an found one about a half mile away in Hermosa Beach, right down the alley from where Andy and his wife Kelly lived.  We moved in one weekend, and decided to not tell Chris that we moved.  We still went down to The Spot every night and rode with him, but we just "forgot" to tell him we moved.  Every once in a while he'd say, "I was knocking on your door yesterday, and nobody answered."  One of us would tell him we must have been at the store or something.  It took Chris three weeks to figure out we moved to a new apartment and then find it.  After that, he went back to raiding the cookie jar until Gork stopped stocking it.

Somewhere along that time, Gork's grandma sent him some homemade persimmon brownies.  No offense to Gork's grandma, but they didn't taste good.  We had a new cookie jar then, some ceramic animal or something.  And we stopped leaving cookies out for Chris to eat, so he left the jar alone.  So grandma's persimmon brownies sat in that jar as kind of a science experiment.  After five or six weeks, they all had about a quarter inch of hairy mold on them.  We had a party one weekend, and Chris showed up, along with a bunch of other people.  When the chips and other munchies ran out, Chris asked if we had anything else to eat.  We'd all had a few beers at that point, and one of us said, "there's some homemade persimmon brownies in the cookie jar."  I think Chris had snagged a couple beers, despite being under age, so he was a bit buzzed.  He opened the cookie jar and started chowing down on the mold covered persimmon brownies.  I think he ate all of them.  We just sat there laughing our asses off.

I soon got laid off and moved south to Huntington Beach to work for the AFA, and I only ran into Chris Day at contests then.  He kept improving and rocked on flatland for quite a while.

Years later, when I was working on my video, The Ultimate Weekend, Jess Dyrenforth called up and said he'd been riding this cool ramp near San Diego, and that he wanted me to come shoot some video.  So I headed there with Randy Lawrence.  Much to my surprise, along with Jess were Pete Augustin, underground legend Mike Tokemoto, and Chris Day.  Chris was doing these amazing sweeper footplants on the spine.  None of us had seen anything like them before.  Chris also did these sprocket slides to revert.  I wasn't sure what to call them, kind of a 540 sprocket bash.  But they were fucking amazing.

You can find that section of video here.  Go to 38:03 in the video.  Here are a couple angles of Chris Day's sweepers in 1990.

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

Steve Emig: The White Bear's Substack

Over under wall ride in 1990

Ever go through old photos or magazines and find something you totally forgot about?  This is one of those.  Since I started working on the DIY book based on this blog, I finally got around to capturing some stills from the BMX footage of mine that has survived thanks to the internet.  This is a still of Randy Lawrence doing a wall ride over me doing a wall bounce at the Blues Brothers Wall in Huntington Beach, CA.

This is one of many walls north of the HB pier, and this one happened to have both a lip to hit it on the far left side, and the least sand in front of it, which made it possible to hit it.  The wall is also a bit under-vert.  I never measured it, but it's about 80 or 85 degrees, which is just enough to make it easy to go much higher than a true vert wall.  But only Randy, and later Dave Clymer, could get near the top of it.  I honestly forgot just how high Randy Lawrence was going until I stilled this on the video.  Even better, I'm pretty sure this is the first over/under wall ride ever documented.  When I googled that last night, looking for other double wall rides, I couldn't find any.  There was one photo of two guys on a banked wall, maybe 60 degrees steep, but that was it.

When I made that video in 1990, the rider-made video movement wasn't even a movement yet.  Eddie Roman had made a student film, Aggro Riding and Kung Fu Fighting and Aggroman.  I had produced six AFA contest videos in 1987 and edited the 1988 2-Hip season video, now on You Tube as 2-Hip BHIP.  I think Mark Eaton made the first Dorkin' in York, edited on VHS working with 2 VCR's wired together.  Videos made by riders were still a brand new thing, and we were making it up as we went.  All of these videos had a lot of things never seen by riders before in videos.  Not only were we documenting progression in riding itself, but we were documenting the growth and progression of street riding, the changes in ramps, and progressing in video producing itself.  We were literally just making this shit up as we went along, just like we'd done with zines a few years before.

 There were several firsts in The Ultimate Weekend, but the double wall ride is one I totally forgot about.  I'm pretty stoked on that.  If anyone else has pics of a double wall ride back in the day, show me on Facebook.  There must be some other ones out there somewhere.

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The White Bear's Making a Scene

Martin Aparijo's Quaterpipe Session

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Different Kind of Pool Party

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Primo and Diane's Backyard Ramps

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

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

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

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

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

Pierre Andre

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Blues Brothers Wall

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oreo Pancakes and Cottage Cheese Disease

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ultimate Weekend Flatland

Hey guys, I'm sorry I haven't posted for a while.  My computer broke, and accessing other computers has been sketchy at best.  Anyhow, I'm continuing on with look back on the 25th anniversary of the release of my self-produced 1990 video, The Ultimate Weekend. 

Today's section starts at 4:37 in this clip, with a Huntington beach flatlander named Red.  As I recall, his real name was Joe Goodfellow.  He's no relation to "Crazy Red" Mike Carlson, found later in this video.  By 1990, I had given up on ever being a pro flatlander, although I would still go out and practice flatland nearly every night.  During 1987 and 1988, the scuffing/rolling tricks took hold, led by the Golden Gate Park crew debuting the Backyard to the world.  Technically, scuffing started with the insanely original NorCal  Skyway pro Oleg Konings in about 1985.  But his scuffing tricks didn't catch on.  In 1987, the Backyard caught on, and then Kevin Jones blew minds with the Locomotive, his no hand version of the Backyard.  Suddenly, the many individual styles in flatland began to merge into the forward rolling tricks movement.  Let me correct myself, actually, Denny Howell doing the whiplash in 1986 got the forward rolling trick idea going.  Then the others I mentioned followed.

On one hand, these tricks were super hard for the time period, and really innovative.  But on the negative side, everyone's riding style started to look like everyone elses.  That bummed me out.  Since my motivation was to always be trying something new, I took my flatland in a different direction.  While nearly everyone else was stoked on rolling tricks, I started trying to invent new hopping tricks.  Not the stationary hops of the mid-80's, but a new kind.  I did a backwards wheelie one day, and tapped my back brake and hopped in the middle of it, then landed and continued the wheelie.  I kept playing around with weird tricks like that.  By the time I shot this video, I could do half-cabs six or eight feet, looback half-cabs, rolling backwards bunnyhops, nollies, full cabs (rollback 360 bunnyhop) and I was trying "King Cabs (rolling backwards into a 540 bunnyhop).  I also had this absolutely crazy trick I tried for about three years, the bunnyhop tailwhip, which I never landed cleanly.

Now, I know these days most of those are standard street tricks.  But in 1990, these tricks were considered stupid.  So I didn't put any of them in this video.  I went with the Huntington beach locals like Red, Andy Mucahy, newcomer Sean Johnson (the black dude) and a few others.  I met these most of kids when they were just getting into BMX freestyle, and I was one of the guys who taught them some basic tricks.  Over the years they became damn good flatlanders.  They weren't the top riders in the country by any means, but they were good, they were local, and I gave them five minutes in the video.

One other thing to note was that I used a skateboard to film some of the tricks, like the Hang 5 at 4:53, Andy's hitch hiker at 5:19, and one or two other tricks.  To BMXers and skaters, that was simple, low budget camera work, and it looked pretty cool.  But a year later, working on an actual TV production, I showed these shots to pro cameramen, and they were blown away.  They had no idea how I got those shots rolling around a moving rider.  When I told them I did it on a skateboard, they flipped.  Not only were us BMXers and skateboarders progressing in our own weird little sports, we were also progressing in art, photography, and in video camera work.  Our weird little videos not only stoked riders, but they helped change the way Hollywood did its work years later.  Pretty cool.

The H Ramp

Yeah, I know I'm lagging.  My laptop died, so I'm blogging without my own computer right now, which sucks.  Anyhow, October 2015 was the 25th anniversary of the release of my first self-produced BMX video, The Ultimate Weekend, in 1990.  So I'm going to jump ahead to 1990 in this blog, and tell the story of this video, section by section. 

At 2:08 in this clip, after the intro, we get to a mini-ramp.  Seems like a pretty lame section of mostly Keith Treanor, with a bit of John Povah and Alan Valek riding.  What's cool about this section is that I think this is the first time a mini-ramp appeared in any BMX video.  To the best of my knowledge, the first mini-ramp was the Towne Street ramp in Costa Mesa, California, built by a bunch of the Schmitt Stix skaters.  They originally built a 9 foot high vert halfpipe, but the neighbors complained (typical) and the city inspectors came to check out the ramp.  Backyard ramps were really rare in those days, even in California, and the city guys weren't sure what to do about it.  After some research, they realized it wasn't illegal to have a ramp, but it had to be no higher than six feet.  So the skaters chopped the the top three feet of their vert ramp off, and BOOM, the first under vert mini-ramp was born.  They soon realized that an under vert ramp allowed a whole bunch of new tricks to be performed, and the idea caught on.

A year or two later, some skaters in Santa Ana, CA built two mini-ramps side by side, and they had a little spine in between the two so skaters could transfer from one to the other.  The ramps formed a big letter "H", and became known as the H-Ramp.  Skaters from all over came to session it.  Later on it was rebuilt into an "L" shape with a hip, five feet tall as I recall.  Then at one end of the "L" was a larger, six foot mini.  That's the set-up you see in this video.  The reason Keith Treanor does a million tail taps, and not much else, is because this footage was shot on his second of third trip to the H-Ramp.  Keith went on to become a master of mini-ramps, but this was when he was just learning to ride them. 

Other stories about the H-Ramp... My boss, Don Hoffman, at Unreel Productions was shooting footage of Vision skaters there one day when he accidentally stepped off the back edge of the deck.  He fell five feet awkwardly, and the camera slammed him in the face.  That doesn't sound like too big of a deal, but we used 35 pound Betacam cameras then, and Don got worked by that beast.  He looked kinda like the Elephant Man for about a week, and the fall cost about $3,000 damage to the camera and $4,000 to Don's face.  We never let him live that one down. 

Another story there is one time I was riding the ramp with Keith Treanor, John Povah, and Jess Dyrenforth.  At that time, Jess was changing from a BMX rider to an inline skater.  He brought his girlfriend, Angie Walton, to the ramp.  She was also a skater, and was trying to learn some kind of handstand drop-in thing on her blades.  Somehow, I got the job of holding her ankles while she was in the handstand to stabilize her before she tried to drop-in.  I was trying to be a gentleman and not look down her shorts to see her underwear as I did this.  But I wasn't a great gentleman and she had pretty standard issue white underwear on.  If her name sounds familiar, it's because she became a major force in the inline world, publishing a magazine (called Daily Bread, I think) and then she was the main force behind starting the Warped Tour, which was a damn cool idea.