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.
Here's Rich Bartlett in 2015 on a mountain bike. He's still riding trails.
In the summer of 1987, I got a call from Dave Alvarez, the genius video editor at Unreel Productions. He's the guy who actually edited the six American Freestyle Association videos I produced in 1987, so that's how I knew him. He told me he was being sent to shoot video in Lancaster that weekend at Rich Bartlett's house, and since it was a BMX thing, he said he'd give me a ride. We rode up in the Unreel Toyota van, north of L.A., to an event that changed the course of BMX jumping forever.
BMX Action editor Craig Gork Barrette and pro racer/jumper/vert rider Rich Bartlett had this idea to throw a BMX dirt jumping jam. It was the first King of Dirt jam, held at Rich's trails built at his dad's house. Everyone who rode a BMX bike back then jumped on dirt. But there were no jumping contests and there were two schools of jumping then. The traditional BMX racer school of jumping focused on jumping at speed, smoothly, over big sets of doubles. Their tricks were mostly the classics: tabletops, the Leary (lookback), X-ups, and maybe a one hand one footer. The other school of jumping then was the freestyle jumpers. Freestylers couldn't pedal worth a damn, and mostly loved flyout jumps with no gap to clear. Freestylers did 360's, Leary's, and more technical variations with much smaller air usually. Both groups didn't think much of the others.
That first King of Dirt brought riders from both schools of jumping, and from all over the U.S. (and even the U.K.) together for the first time in a big way. There was a smaller track near the house which both groups liked. Then there were the bigger jumps spread over the huge lot. Rich had built those jumps in a way none of us had seen before. It started by pedaling fast to a big tabletop jump. All day long he kept telling us all, "If you clear the tabletop, you don't have to pedal through the rest of the jumps." That was totally new then. To the best of my knowledge, Rich Bartlett built the first rhythm section in BMX. The racers got the rhythm idea down first, although most still wanted to pedal between jumps. Us freestylers, who rarely jumped that far, had trouble. But most of us were coasting through some of the jumps by the end of the day, even if we couldn't clear that first table top.
To put that 1987 day in perspective, when we went to the local McDonald's for breakfast that morning (about eight of us crashed on Rich's floor the night before), jumping phenom Chris Moeller was panhandling money for breakfast. He and friend Greg Scott had just started making "Mad Dog" frames under the name S&M Bicycles, which stood for "Scott" and Moeller." About a year later, Chris bought out Greg and went to town with the little company.
There were a handful of guys from England there, and that was the first time I met Will Smyth, who went on to publish DIG BMX magazine (and now an awesome website) a few years later. Another kid made his debut that day, a kid from Utah named Tim "Fuzzy" Hall. There were probably 40 or 50 riders there, maybe more. It wasn't a contest, and the main sponsor was the local Domino's Pizza place, which gave Gork and Rich a discount on pizzas for us all.
It was an epic day in BMX, and everyone there rode, and Dave was about the only guy shooting video because Vision Street Wear was a co-sponsor. Most of the craziest jumps went to the young S&M team with Moeller, Dave Clymer, John Paul Rogers, and a couple others flowing 360's and stretching Nac-nacs. Freestylers tried to pedal with more speed and die hard racer/jumpers tried 360's, which dinged a few rims as I remember. Everyone had a great time. One goofy kid who couldn't jump very well started trying tailwhip jumps, a brand new idea at the time. I remember that part, because I was that goofy kid. All kinds of riders tried new variations, and went home with serious stoke on dirt jumping and what was possible.
The day ended with Fuzzy Hall trying this ridiculous canyon gap of about 35 feet or so. He made it a couple of times, as I remember. Everyone thought Chris Moeller would be the guy to do it first, but he'd just had his bike stolen, and didn't attempt it on a borrowed bike.
But the big takeaway that day was Rich Bartlett's idea of rhythm sections. That became the standard way to build jumps over the next couple of years, and the trails have only gotten bigger since. Here's a few of the epic rhythm sections inspired by Rich's idea:
Back in about 1989, four pro BMXers rented an apartment on Alabama Street in Huntington Beach. I believe the original four were Chris Moeller, Dave Clymer, John Paul Rogers, and Alan Foster (?). Realizing that you could have really cheap rent in Southern California by sharing bedrooms, the crew added some members and rented a four bedroom, two bathroom house on Iroquois Street in Westminster, CA. Over the course of about five years, 22 people were official residents, and well over 150 top riders from around the world crashed out on the couches or floors at one point or another. The riders dubbed themselves the Pros Of Westminster. The P.O.W. House, as it soon came to be known, was the first hardcore BMX rider house in the country, and a immensely influential BMX scene all by itself.
Check out my epic blog post about why the action sports exploded when they did
I was the sole freestyler who was a resident, and the only video producer when I lived there. But I'd lost my equipment to edit, I was totally broke, and we never put out a P.O.W. House video. But the riders of that house have been in all kinds of videos. So here's my compilation, which is a big start and a work in progress. Enjoy.
Only 28 years in the making (give or take), here is it the official (more or less) video of the Pros of Westminster, the infamous P.O.W. House. Iroquois Street REPRESENT.
The P.O.W. House section from The Ultimate Weekend, the clip above, (1990-Steve Emig), :10-P.O.W. House backyard 1990, first time in a video, :26- John Paul Rogers, :31- Chris Moeller, :41- Dave Clymer, :47- Alan Foster, :51- Eric Millman, :56- Dave Clymer, 1:09- Dave Clymer, 1:12- Eric Millman, 2:00- Chris Moeller 2-Hip Ride Like a Man (1990-2-Hip/Eddie Roman), "2-Hip Street"- 1:50- Steve Emig, "Woodward"- 1:49- Dave Clymer, 2:12- Dave Clymer The Ultimate Weekend (1990- Steve Emig)- 27:33- Steve Emig (before living in the House), 28:28- Steve Emig, 33:50- P.O.W. House section (embedded above), 36:22- Steve Emig, 37:14- Steve Emig ABA Grands AA Pro Semis 1990- Dave Clymer
2-Hip Meet the Street '90 & '91- The Kings of Chromoly, 2014 web edit of old footage by Emil Chervatin, :19- Todd Lyons, :28- Dave Clymer, 1:17 Dave Clymer, 1:22- Todd Lyons, 2:22- Dave Clymer, 2:44- Dave Clymer, 3:03- Todd Lyons, 5:03 Todd Lyons, this is why you never use chipboard on the deck of a ramp. This might be footage I shot of these comps, I'm not sure. Chris Moeller in Feel My Leg Muscles, I'm a Racer (1991-Chris Moeller/Emig) Dave Clymer in Feel My Leg Muscles, I'm a Racer (1991-Moeller/Emig) Mission Trails 2-Hip King of Dirt in Leg Muscles (1991-Moeller/Emig), :07- Moeller, :38- Keith Treanor (friend of House), 1:15- Moeller, 1:20- Clymer, 1:27- Treanor, 1:37- Clymer, 1:57- Moeller 1991 ABA Grands AA Pro Mains- Dave Clymer 1991 UGP Flying Circus jump contest in Columbus, Ohio (contest starts at 17:39) Chris Moeller crash at Backyard Jam (93) 1993 NBL Grands Pro Open Main- Alan Foster, Brian Foster Chris Moeller- 1993 ABA Eugene, Oregon A Pro Mains S&M Bikes 44 Something (1993-Moeller/Emig) Intro-Chris Moeller, 1:26- Keith Treanor (friend of the House), 6:59-Lawan Cunningham, 8:36- John Paul Rogers, 11:50-Chris Moeller, 13:33- Mike Griffin, 14:15-Dave Clymer, 20:13-Todd Lyons, 20:39- Lawan Cunningham, 21:07- Alan Foster, 21:59- Brian Foster, 22:07- Todd Lyons, 22:14- Chris Moeller, 23:00- Chris Moeller S&M Bikes BMX Inferno (1994-Moeller/Dave Parrick) 5:20-Shaun Butler (Friend of House) in P.O.W. House backyard, 13:30- John Paul Rogers, 19:34- Mike Griffin, 22:20- Chris Moeller, 27:40- Brian Foster, 28:14- Todd Lyons, 30:02 John Paul Rogers American Gladiators (1994- Goldwyn Productions) freeze it at :24 and you can see me (Steve Emig) in the background on Wesley Barry's tower. Brian Foster Dirty Deeds (1995-Dave Parrick) Mike Griffin Dirty Deeds (1995- Dave Parrick) 1995 ABA Grands AA Pro Mains- Brian Foster Soil BMX (1996- Barspinner Ryan Brennan) 32:47- Brian Foster This crew, who came to be known as the Sheep Hills Locals (SHL!) were the direct descendants of the P.O.W. House and inheritors of Sheep Hills in the post-3 berms era. Props 21- (1997- Props)Bethlehem (PA) Scene report- 1:14- Jay Lonegran, 3:23- Jay Lonegran American Muscle BMX (1997- Schwinn/Chris Rye/Massei; John Paul Rogers was team manager), 1:48- Brian Foster, 11:25- Alan Foster, 21:32 montage Brian & Alan, 27:59- Alan & Brian, 29:31- Brian Foster Mike Griffin East Coast Destruction 4 (1999- ECD) Todd Lyons JNCO commercial (2000? JNCO) Todd Lyons JNCO raw footage/outtakes (2000-JNCO)- street, Sheep Hills (Check out Death Ride Dave at 6:54) Jay Lonegran in East Coast Destruction (2000-ECD) Brian Foster 2002 X-Games dirt (2002- ESPN) S&M Bikes 20th Anniversary Party (2007?- S&M Bikes) 1:00- Todd Lyons, 1:32- Chris Moeller skating, 2:43- John Paul Rogers, 2:59- Jason Thompson Chris Moeller showing new products at Interbike (2009- Vital BMX) Todd Lyons interview at Interbike (2009- 3V) S&M Bikes Hallowiener Jam (2011- S&M Bikes) Moeller at 2:15, 2:33, 4:31, 4:40 car jump, and at 6:38 they show the photo sequence of Chris Moeller jumping a Cadillac to flat at the 2-Hip Meet the Street in Palm Springs in '89 or '90. I saw that one happen live, it was freakin' nuts back then. Chris Moeller jumps car to flat (2011 S&M) Brian Foster Stay Fit (2012? Fit Bikes) Brian Foster signature stem promo (2012- Fit Bikes) Nike 6.0 The Pool (2012-Nike) 5:22- Brian Foster, Best Trick winner Brian Foster Bike Check (2013-Fit Bikes) Brian Foster- Anthem II Declassified (2013? Fit Bikes) Brian Foster- Tom Dugan does Malaga (2014- Fit Bikes) Brian Foster at 2:35, 4:17, 5:10, 5:34, 6:04, 6:55, 7:20 Todd Lyons BSX Ride session (2014- BMX Ultra.com) Brian Foster Holy Fit- (2015- Fit Bikes) Jay Lonegran Posh Halloween Jam (2015- DIG/Rob Dolecki) Jay at :29, 3:49 Chris Moeller on Brian Foster (2015?) BF-iT trailer- Brian Foster documentary (2015) BF-it Cutting room floor (2015- DIG) Alan Foster- :12, 5:49; John Paul Rogers- :22, 3:59, 9:27; Chris Moeller- :30, 1:34, 5:43, 6:20, 7:59; Todd Lyons- :52, 2:56, 4:56, 5:29. This is the closest thing to a P.O.W. House "where are they now" with the best known guys. Everybody's talking about Brian Foster, but then, we've been doing that for 20-some years. Style never goes out of style. Todd Lyons- Introducing the Fat Ripper (2016- SE Bikes) Summer Cruisin' with SE Bikes (2016-SE Bikes) Todd Lyons at :21 SE Bikes Philly Rideout: narrated by Todd Lyons (2016-Third Eye Productions) Brian Foster at Merritt warehouse (2017- Merritt) Todd Lyons- The OM-Duro: The Worlds first 27.5 inch BMX Mountain Bike (2017-SE Bikes)
The Pro's Of Westminster included:
Dave Clymer, Chris Moeller, Todd Lyons, John Paul Rogers, Bill Grad (RIP), Eric Millman, John Salamne, Alan Foster, Lawan Cunningham, Mike Griffin, Jay Lonergan, Chris Sales, Bill Naggy, Scotty _______?, Brooks Manbeck, Brian Foster, Jason Thompson, Steve Emig, and ???? Who'd I forget?
Two brave women lived there: Suzi, Brooks' girlfriend and now wife, and Kris, Alan's girlfriend and now wife. I'd like to apologize to the ladies for all the grief we gave them.
Honorable mention and Card Sharks contestant: Ned.
Also: Bob the dog, and Thor the Pit Bull (I'm not sure if Thor was there long enough to be official.
I'm Steve Emig, aka Heevin' Steve, Heave, E.Mig, M.Ig, The White Bear, Sluggo, etc. Here's what I've been doing lately. All drawings are 18" X 24", and drawn in my unique Scribble Style with Sharpies. Vic Murphy's classic one foot table off a curb, Dave Vanderspek on his GPV, early pic of Ron Wilkerson, and The Ramones.
I'm going in a new direction with my writing, as of late summer 2023. Check out my new stuff on my Substack:
I've been getting some stills off video I shot for the DIY book I'm working on. Here's a few that didn't work out as planned. Not sure who the top one is.
Dave Clymer, Dover, Newport Beach, CA, 1993
Chris Moeller, Twin Palms, I think. 1993
Moeller again, Dover, Newport Beach, 1993
Uploaded this one by accident, Keith Treanor, with the most clicked turndown I've seen him do. 2-Hip Mission Trails KOD. '91.
I had another story from the 90's in mind for today. But Rich Bartlett had a post on Facebook with a pic of him testing the single blade Kastan forks back in about '89. That photo instantly took me back to one of those epic nights in the tiny, one bedroom apartment we called the Winnebago. In about 1991, Chris Moeller, founder of the fledgling bike company S&M Bikes, lived in a tiny apartment on Alabama Street in Huntington Beach, California. An enterprising apartment owner had taken 8 feet off the back of a few garages and made it into a long, narrow, completely unpermitted apartment. The whole thing would have fit into a semi trailer. First you had to walk through a gate into a private backyard, and then to a door that shouldn't have been there. The door led to the tiny living room, which led to the tiny kitchen, a hallway passed a tiny bathroom on one side, then the small single bedroom. A door out the other end of the bedroom led to a single car garage. That garage was the home of S&M Bikes in 1990-91.
Chris Moeller, pro racer, amazing jumper, BMX Action/Go test rider, entrepreneur, and certifiable weirdo, lived in the bedroom. After getting fired from my job at a video duplication company while working on the first S&M Bikes video (Feel My Leg Muscles, I'm a Racer), I wound up sleeping on the floor of the living room. Shaggy, an East Coast transplant who looked like a real life Shaggy from the Scooby-Doo cartoons, slept on the two cushion couch, with his legs hanging off the end. The weird apartment had the dimensions of the inside of a motorhome, hence the name, The Winnebago. We could literally lay on the living room floor and touch our hands to one wall and feet to the opposite wall.
For those of you who remember 1991, it was a time of national recession, and a full on depression for the BMX world. At the bike trade show in early 1989, a mantra was repeated by the whole bike industry, "BMX is dead, mountain bikes are the future." Unfortunately, no one asked us BMX racers and freestylers if we minded if they killed our sport. The corporate money pulled out of BMX, many pros lost sponsors, and only us hardcore riders were left. We struggled along, making our own videos, starting our own little companies, and promoting our own contests, and getting really good at making multiple types of meals out of ramen.
In those years of the late 1980's and early 90's, a few new ideas hit the BMX world. Linn Kastan, the guy who gave us tubular forks, Redline V Bars, and Redline Bikes, became enamored with the single sided landing gear on small airplanes. He decided that by making single sided BMX forks, riders could get rid extra weight on their bikes. Hey, it worked for airplanes weighing a couple thousand pounds, why not a BMX bike? Well, BMXers quickly answered, "small airplanes don't do tabletops, Leary's, and 360's." Kastan got a few racers to try the crazy forks, but it didn't last that long.
Around the same time, my old bosses Todd Huffman and Bob Morales came up with the Auburn BMX bike, which had a bolt-on, replaceable back end. The idea was that you could quickly change to a longer or shorter back end of your bike depending on riding conditions. Unfortunately, they never made any alternative back ends. Hey, I rode an Auburn for a couple years, as a freestyler, and I liked the bike. But the whole bolt-on back end idea didn't go anywhere.
So one night, Moeller, Shaggy and me were sitting in the tiny living room, probably eating spaghetti or ramen, and drinking 40's of Mickey's. Chris started going off about all these crazy bike ideas people had come up with. Then the magic happened. "We should make the most ridiculous bike possible and see if kids would actually order it." I think this was around the time that Steve Rocco and crew at Big Brother magazine came out with the Big Brother Brick. They put an ad in the magazine for a normal brick with a Big Brother sticker on it, and charged $400 (+ shipping & handling, of course). The word was that they'd actually sold three or four of them.
Anyhow, Chris grabbed an old pair of forks, a hacksaw, and cut one leg off. We were off to the races, literally rolling on the floor laughing half the time. A couple hours later we had the prototype for the S&M Bikes BS 20 Neon. The single bladed fork came with front wheel drive, a bolt-on front end (your choice of the Weak Link or Missing Link versions), a single bladed rear end (I think) and the high weight/low strength S&M Herbal Tea handlebars. Once we had the pile of junk bolted together, we opened more beers and the next step was obvious, we needed to make an ad for it. The ad above actually ran in some magazine. Maybe more than one, I really don't remember.
My stomach hurt from laughing so hard. I think Chris and Shaggy's did, too. But that wasn't the last laugh. We actually got three or four orders from really stupid kids when the ad came out. What can I say? I (kinda) love the 90's. We did send really sarcastic letters to the kids to tell them it was a joke. At least one kid was totally heart-broken. Sigh.
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.
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.
This clip is from a TV show called Stuntmasters, and features Mat Hoffman, the first BMXer to ever appear on the show.
In the last post I wrote about my experiences shooting video at the 2-Hip King of Dirt contest at Mission Trails, near San Diego, California in 1991. As radio icon Paul Harvey used to say, "Here is... the rest of the story." At the time I went to that contest, I was working as a production assistant at a TV production company called G.R.B. Motorsports in Studio City, California. I was the low guy on the totem pole, doing stuff like ordering supplies, labeling and logging tapes, and keeping the tape library organized. It was my first job at a "real" Hollywood production company, and we were producing the supercross and monster truck TV shows that year. The main office of G.R.B. was about a mile away, situated in a nice suburban house. That part of the company produced the World's Greatest Stunts and Stuntmasters shows. One of their stuntmen, who went by the moniker Johnny Airtime, also worked on staff in that office. So I did something I wasn't supposed to do. I made a 3/4" (professional quality) copy of the highlights from the Mission trails contest, and I sent it by interoffice memo to Johnny Airtime, who I hadn't met at the time. I sent a note that said something like, "I'm a BMXer working at the other office, and I thought you'd like to check out some footage of a contest that happened last weekend." I put it in the interoffice mail, and went on with my job. The next day, our receptionist buzzed my phone, "Uh... Steve... Johnny Airtime's on the line... and he wants to talk to you." I was blown away.
Let me tell you a little bit about Johnny Airtime. There was a long stretch, more than fifteen years, between the stunt career of Evil Kneivel and Seth Enslow, who sparked another generation of motorcycle jumpers. In that period between the two, Johnny Airtime was the guy who kept motorcycle jumping alive. But he took a different tack than Evil. Rather than just hitting a ramp and hucking himself over a bunch of cars, Johnny Airtime did super technical, and super dangerous motorcycle jumps. In one jump he jumped over a moving train, lengthwise. That's crazy enough. But Johnny set it up so the train smashed his takeoff ramp seconds after he took off. In another jump, he jumped two semi trucks lengthwise, while the trucks were doing 30 miles an hour down the road. In another jump, he jumped off a takeoff ramp and into the back of a moving truck. He actually smashed through the roof of the truck on purpose. Johnny Airtime took motorcycle jumping into a whole new realm of super technical jumping, and inspired a new generation that started with Seth Enslow and other crazy freeriders, and turned into today's freestyle motocross guys.
So, needless to say, I was blown away that Johnny Airtime wanted to talk to me on the phone, and my boss, who was an asshole, was kind of pissed off about it. So I picked up the phone. "You BMX guys are crazy!" Johnny exclaimed. "I'm not crazy," I replied, "but my friends are." We hit it off immediately, and Johnny talked about how crazy that footage was for about fifteen minutes. Then he took it to a place I never expected. "We need one of these guys for Stuntmasters," he said. At the time, I was spending my weekends shooting footage of Chris Moeller, Dave Clymer, and the rest of the guys on the S&M team, which was the leading team of jumpers at that time. Johnny asked me what these guys could do... and actually land. Moeller was known for doing huge 360's, so I told Johnny about that. I said the top guys could 360 about 20, maybe 25 feet. "But it has to look spectacular," he replied. "Uh... they could jump over a pit of rattlesnakes or something." Yeah... rattlesnakes, that was my first idea. Johnny told we that wouldn't be visual enough. So as my boss peaked into my office, wondering what the hell I was doing, Johnny and I threw ideas back and forth. "They could do a 360 over about three cars," I offered." "It has to look more spectacular," he replied. "Uh..." I stammered, "you could set the cars on fire." Johnny Airtime said that might work. I was stoked, because I thought I just scored a TV appearance for one of the S&M guys, either Moeller or Clymer. We threw around a few other ideas, but kept coming back to the 360 over three flaming cars . Then the conversation took another tack, "What about that kid Mat Hoffman?" Johnny asked. He said he had seen some video of Mat and they'd been thinking about contacting him, but no one knew exactly what kind of stunt he could do. "Yeah," I replied, "Mat could do it." We talked another minute or two, then Johnny thanked me again for sending him the footage, and we hung up. My boss asked why I'd been on the phone for 20 minutes when I was supposed to be working. "I just came up with a stunt for Stuntmasters," I replied with a smile. My boss looked perplexed and walked back to his office.
I ended up meeting Johnny a couple of times, and he said that they planned to do the BMX stunt for the next season, and I could work on the crew. Soon after that, thought, most of the staff in my office quit to go work on American Gladiators. My workload tripled, and most of the people left in the office I didn't like. I quit and found another job. I never heard another word about Mat's stunt until about a year after it happened. Somebody told me they saw it on TV, and I was stoked it actually happened. At the same time, I was bummed I didn't get to work on the crew of that show. But that's life in Hollywood. I rarely saw Mat during that time, and I never mentioned my conversation with Johnny Airtime to him.
But wait... there's more. I titled these two blog posts, "The First Mega Ramp" because in my mind, Death Jump at Mission Trails was the first Mega Ramp. It had a downhill run to a kicker, a long gap, and a big, downhill landing. That jump vaulted a handful of BMX riders into the realm of stunt men.
Years later, I read Mat Hoffman's book. In it, Mat mentioned the Stuntmasters stunt, and said that was where he met Johnny Airtime. Mat told Johnny he was looking for a way to do higher airs. Mat was flirting with the fourteen or fifteen foot range on a normal ramp, but couldn't take it any higher. Johnny, being an expert at the physics of jumps, told Mat that to to bigger airs, he needed a bigger ramp. Mat took that idea and ran with it. The next year he built the first mega quaterpipe, 21 feet high as I recall. Following that he made a mega halfpipe and put a weedeater engine on his bike in an attempt to push high airs even farther. On the quarterpipe, Mat set an official world record of a 26 1/2 foot air. Mike "Big Island" Castillo, who worked for Mat during that time, told me he's seen Mat do airs about 29 feet out unofficially.
The lesson for me in all of this is that when you show other people your sport to spread the news, it can have bigger consequences. I sent Johnny Airtime some footage to show him BMX. That led to a stunt and Johnny meeting Mat. That friendship led to the birth of Mega Ramps, and ultimately to today's big air bike and skate contests, which is some of the craziest riding ever. That led to the Nitro Circus "gigantaramp" where they jump the big gap on all kinds of contraptions. And now you know the rest of the story.
This is footage I shot at the 2-Hip King of Dirt in spring of 1991. The footage was edited and used in the first official S&M Bikes video, Feel My Leg Muscles... I'm A Racer. That video title was a line Dave Clymer used to pick up his girlfriend at the time.
OK, for this second post on the new version of Freestyle BMX Tales, I'm jumping forward a bit to 1991. To set the mood, BMX and freestyle had nearly died in 1989. At the bike trade show in early 1989 I heard one thing over and over, "BMX is dead, mountain bikes are the new thing." After that trade show, nearly every company either dropped completely or seriously cut back their BMX and freestyle programs. At the same time, street riding was becoming its own genre, and the AFA's flatland and quarterpipe contests were fading in popularity. Veteran Haro pro Ron Wilkerson became the main promoter of contests, putting on halfpipe, street, and dirt contests. At this time, the fledgling indy company S&M Bikes, headed by racer/jumper Chris Moeller, was being run out of a tiny one bedroom apartment. There were a whole bunch of hardcore riders still, but the industry just plain gave up on us. Those were some of the best days of BMX, when pros traded ramen recipes and slept on whatever motel floor was available at contests. Pro purses were small but the tricks kept getting bigger. Into this world came the word that Ron Wilkerson was going to hold a dirt contest at the legendary Mission Trails jumps near San Diego. Mission Trails was home to Death Jump, a steep roll in to a three foot kicker that launched riders over 25 feet of flat and then to a steep down hill landing that was hardpack covered by sandy dirt. Wiping out was like landing on sandpaper. We were seriously worried someone might die at that contest.
There was a crowd of 150 or so people that day, nearly all hitting the jumps one after another. In those days there were many more people riding than taking photos or shooting video. I went there with the S&M Bikes/P.O.W. House crew including Chris Moeller, Dave Clymer, Keith Treanor, and others. Tim "Fuzzy" Hall was there, and boosted a killer archibald over the table top jump. Mike "Crazy Red" Carlson did a decade over the same jump, which was a pretty new variation at the time. Mike Kranaich (I never could spell his last name) was coming close to landing double tailwhips on that same jump, the first time any of us had seen that trick tried. Then the contest moved up to the double jump. Vic Murphy was doing textbook caliber tabletops. Chris Moeller is seen in the clip above trying 360's over that jump. But the real mind blowing came when Mat Hoffman tried a backflip over the jump, the first time anyone had seen that tried on dirt. He under-rotated and crashed. But hell, he's Mat Hoffman, so he tried it again, and didn't make it that time either. But Mat let the genie out of the bottle, he came close enough to show everyone that backflips on double jumps were possible, and several people learned them in the next couple of years. Mat was a vert rider in all our minds, nobody really expected him to try something unheard of on dirt.
Then came the part of the contest that excited and scared everyone: Death Jump. Secretly we were all hoping it wouldn't live up to its name that day. Now keep in mind, this was just a big group of hardcore riders out in the desert. There were no TV cameras or crew people. There were no paramedics. It was as core as could be. Just a bunch of the world's best riders trying the biggest jump anyone had ever seen up to that point. In the clip above you see Bill Nitschke endo on death jump. It was a gnarly crash, but amazing because Bill was best known as a flatlander. Keith Treanor ejected off his bike and did a painful one hand, two feet slide down the landing. One of the locals jumped it shirtless, kicking into a half tabletop. Dave Clymer is the guy in the clip who does the eject to back slide, saved by his mailman short shorts. Chris Moeller was definitely one of the favorites of the day, he'd earned a big reputation as one of the world's craziest jumpers. He easily cleared the big jump a few times, then managed a big no hander. You can hear Ron Wilkerson on the mike going,"Yeeeaaah!" after that one. Mat was still riding, despite his hard backflip crashes, and hucked a no footer to no footed can-can to no footer over Death Jump. Dang! Also in the mix was all-around riding legend Dennis McCoy. He hucked a backflip attempt, and then a 720 attempt, crashing hard both times.
But the crashes of the day belonged to the relatively unknown Mike "Crazy Red" Carlson. He had several huge bails that day, but the climax was his 360 attempt into the crowd where he hits another bike which flips up and hits him in the head. Somehow, everyone walked away from that contest... well a few were limping. There was plenty of road rash from the hard, sandpaper-like landings. Eddie Roman and I got video footage, and we both used it in videos later that year.
The biggest thing about the 2-Hip King of Dirt contest at Mission Trails was that it completely changed everyone's perspective about what was possible on dirt jumps. This was four years before the first X-Games. BMX was "dead." But a handful of guys changed the way we all looked at our bikes forever. Suddenly backflips were on the table. Twenty five foot jumps were on the table. Double tailwhips were on the table. In one crazy, thristy afternoon, BMX riding changed forever. In my typical way, I was wondering about the future. Death Jump reminded me of the freestyle skiing jumps where people did triple backflips. Watching Death Jump that day, I predicted someone would eventually do a double backflip on a bike, as crazy as it seemed at the time. It took several years, but it eventually did happen. Now as I write this 24 years later, both a BMXer and a MX rider have done triple backflips. How far will it progress? That's up to today's young huckers.
