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.
Last October was the 25th anniversary of my 1990 video, The Ultimate Weekend. I'm continuing on with the look back at it, today at 14:00 in the clip above.
Jumps. When most of us look back to the early days of riding our bikes, even before many of us knew about BMX, there were the jumps. There's just something amazing about taking a bicycle, made for human powered transportation on the ground, and making it fly. That second or two of weightlessness somehow makes us seem like we are getting away with something. We jump our bikes and get a momentary reprieve from the Law of Gravity.
There had been a lot of jumps built in an around the Huntington Beach, California area. I've heard tales that Greg Hill and other legendary racers hit jumps in the Bolsa Chica mesa area of northern H.B. in the late 70's and early 80's. When I moved to H.B. in 1987, there were jumps at Hidden Valley, nestled in an actual little hidden valley (hence the name) behind the shopping center at Beach and Adams. Those jumps are great in the winter, when many other places flood, and they were around in 1990, though not as elaborate as they are today.
The best known jumps in 1990 were at Magnolia, in the wetlands just south of the big power plant on Pacific Coast Highway. So that's where this little session took place. Sheep Hills, the now infamous jumps of that area, weren't built until about a year after this video was made. We start off this session with a local kid named Mike jumping the style jump. Rhythm sections had yet to take over. In 1990, most jumps were trails where you pedaled a lot then hit the jump. The style jump was 14 1/2 feet tip to tip, and happened to be the biggest double jump I , personally, have ever jumped. In this clip we see Mike bust a one hander over it. Keith Treanor does a 360 over it, and that was a pretty big jump to 360 in those days. John Povah jumps it, and then gets pissed when he can't pull some trick over it. We've all thrown and maybe even kicked our bikes in frustration at times. But when John kicked his bike in this clip, he hurt his foot... for a month. Sometimes it's the stupid things that get you hurt.
The guy with no shirt is a guy we met out there that day. He said his name was Luke and he'd just come back from the Marines as I recall. I think this may actually be the guy we know as Carter Holland today, but I'm not totally sure.
After the style jump, we see a dork session of the guys doing a bunch of different variations over a little bump. Nowadays, this kind of thing would never make it into a video. But I specifically put this in to show our lifestyle of riding then. We weren't always doing the biggest, baddest, most technical tricks. Dork sessions were a fun and normal part of riding, and I wanted that in my video.
Then we hit a flyout jump up on the canal bank. At that time, I'd been trying bunnyhop tailwhips for about three years, and never landed a clean one. I did manage a few toe-dragger bunnyhop tailwhips in late 1989, but never got the trick dialed. Bill Nitschke brought that trick to us later that year. But the idea of tailwhip jumps was out there, and we were all trying them... and not landing them. On any given day of riding at the Huntington Beach Pier, we might decide to ride down to Magnolia and session a while. And what's in this video is a pretty typical session.
The funniest thing that ever happened at Magnolia when I was there happened between Mike Sarrail (the tall guy who does the little kickout over the bump) and myself. He was shooting photos one day of another jump at Magnolia, where we'd ride down off the canal bank, hit a little berm, and then hit a jump. Mike and I were giving each other a hard time, and he started throwing dirt clods at me to try and make me mess up. At one point, he threw a small rock at me as I was coming out of the little berm. The rock went right between my arms and hit me square in the nuts. I did a kind of rolling dead sailor and piled into the the ground. It was the most accurate rock Mike ever threw, and he was laughing his ass off as I lay on the ground in pain grabbing my balls. Aaaaahh... the things we remember about our sessions after time passes.
Then next session after Magnolia is us riding some banks somewhere in an industrial area, either in Orange or Garden Grove, I can't remember. That was the only time I ever rode there. In that section we see John Povah trying, and then making the long manual. Keith Treanor is going for the footplants. I think it's Alan Valek who does the tailwhip on the bank, which was a pretty new trick then.
Unlike today's videos where everyone gets a section and they spend months trying to land their absolute best tricks, in The Ultimate Weekend, I just wanted to show real riding. No one had really done that yet. Most of the mainstream videos up until then had guys riding in uniforms and flatlanding with helmets on. I wanted to show what our world of BMX freestyle, jumping, and street riding really looked like. I just happened to be one of the first guys to do that. A tidal wave of other videos followed in the early and mid 90's, taking riding to new places.
I'm way out of the loop of the BMX scene these days. But I saw a Facebook post about a Brian Foster documentary called BF-it the other day. I was a roommate to both Alan and Brian Foster at the P.O.W. BMX House in the early 90's, so I was anxious to check it out. I followed the link to watch it. Unfortunately, I have Fred Flintstone's old laptop, and my computer froze up sixteen minutes and 47 seconds into the video. Crap. Tonight I managed to watch the whole thing, and I dig it.
Oddly, the first memory of Brian that popped into my head wasn't riding. One night we were sitting around the P.O.W. House living room. The guys who had some money all had $5 pizzas from What-a-Lotta-Pizza. Those of us who didn't have much money that night were eating ramen or microwave burritos. Brian finished his pizza, but left the crusts. He held his box up and said, "Pizza bones!" offering the leftovers to us human roaches. I grabbed the box and scarfed down the crusts. It was a treat in those ramen days.
Then the other memories popped into my head. Riding the backyard ramps with Brian. Watching him tear it up at Sheep Hills and other local trails. The craziest memory I have of Brian from those days was shooting video of several riders jumping the insane gap jump at Dover. Years later, doing a magazine interview, I asked Brian what the craziest thing he ever jumped was, and he said it was that jump at Dover. I don't know what nutcase had the idea to build that jump, but it would still be big by today's standards. The riders would sprint across the field, and drop in a near vertical roll-in at first straight speed. It went down about fifteen feet, then curved up in to a seven foot high kicker. I actually stepped off and measured the gap, and it was 25 feet, though it looked much bigger. The insane part was that it was a flat landing... eight feet higher than the takeoff. Mid jump, riders were about 30 feet above a brush filled ravine. As luck would have it, one of my shots of Brian jumping there is in this documentary.
I didn't see Brian much after about '95, so a lot of what's included in the video is new to me. For whatever reason, Brian had that timeless style when I first met him in the early 90's, and he has built upon that style in the many years since. He's one of the great BMX riders of all time. If you haven't seen BF-it, follow this link and check it out.
