S&M Bikes 30th Anniversary Party

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.

Here's more footage from the jam:
Nate Richter's footage.
MTB and S&M 30th party (party starts at about 11:40)

S&M Bikes also premiered their new video, Hot Dogs Who Can't Read...

I have two new blogs I'm doing now:

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

WPOS Kreative Ideas- This blog's about creativity, writing, art, blogging, promoting creative work, and whatever else I fell like blogging about.

The Birth of S&M in the BMX world 30 years ago

This clip is well worth watching for the old school trickery by Drob and and Golden Gate Park crew in 1986.  But at 5:07 in the clip, you can see me chasing my bike.  That was a stupid trick I did in parades in Idaho, but it got me in this TV clip.  In the time between when this clip was shot, and when it aired, my goofy little freestyle zine landed me a job at BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines.  My life changed forever. 

After five months as a magazine gofer/proofreader, I got laid off, mostly because I didn't like the band Skinny Puppy.  They hired some kid named Spike a couple of months later.  Cool kid, wonder what happened to him.  Anyhow,  I rode every day with Craig Grasso for a month (which I highly advise, he's hilarious), called around the industry, then landed a job as the newsletter editor for the American Freestyle Association.  That job moved me from Hermosa Beach a bit south to Huntington Beach, a working class surf town at the time. 

In my stint at FREESTYLIN', I did drove Windy Osborn to a photo shoot at the Huntington Beach Pier once, where she shot pics of freestyle skaters Henry Candioti and Don Brown.  So I knew both skaters and some bike freestylers hung out there on the weekends.  When I moved there, I headed down to the pier every weekend to session.  I met a tall, lanky rider named Mike Sarrail.  He was a master of Miami Hop hops, and invented the Undertaker, among other things.  We hit it off, and rode together every weekend with skaters Pierre Andre, Don Brown, and whoever else wandered by on bikes and boards. 

That summer, I had this cool idea.  Like most "cool ideas," it seemed awesome at the time.  I wanted to blow off the dinky AFA newsletter and do a newsletter/newspaper thing covering bikes, skates, surf, and whatever else seemed cool.  I threw the idea at Mike, and we started planning it out.  In those days before the internet, it could have been cool.  Probably not.  But maybe.

After dreaming about it for a while that summer of 1987, Mike and I decided to make some T-shirts to sell to raise a little money.  I took a photo of a rider doing a lookdown, and we made iron-on transfer T-shirts that said,  "S&M Productions... We're coming" with the pic of the lookdown in the middle.  "S&M" stood for Steve & Mike.  We sold the T-shirts around Huntington Beach, and didn't make much money.  I think if you look real hard at my Facebook pics, you'll find a pic of me doing a Shingle Shuffle under the HB Pier wearing one of those shirts with the sleeves cut off. 

Anyhow... like most of my "cool" ideas back then, it was mostly dream and little action.  We never made the multi-sport newsletter (or videos) and S&M Productions fizzled out.  So that's the story of how S&M started 30 years ago in the BMX freestyle world. 

Oh yeah, one guy who bought one of our shirts said, "Hey, there's some BMX racing guys doing a company called S&M, too."  Turns out he was right.

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

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

WPOS Kreative Ideas- This blog's about creativity, writing, art, blogging, promoting creative work, and whatever else I feel like blogging about.

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. 

2-Hip BMX Freestyle Show

I'm continuing on with my 25th anniversary look back at my 1990 BMX video, The Ultimate Weekend.  Today's clip is a 2-Hip freestyle show at 16:54 in the video above.

In the early and mid 1980's, each of the action sports like BMX racing, BMX freestyle, skateboarding, snowboarding, etc, was it's own entity.  There was crossover between them, of course.  But we didn't see them as one big movement then, we just saw weird, new emerging activities that were kind of turning into sports.  One thing that set BMX freestyle apart from the very beginning was the emphasis on going out and putting on shows.  From Bob Haro and R.L. Osborn in the earliest days, to the wave of mid-80's BMX freestylers across the country (and world), shows were an important part of what we did.  Some guys, like Ron Wilkerson and Dave Vanderspek in the San Francisco area, really promoted shows and turned them into a business.  Ron Wilkerson hooked up with Haro as a sponsor, moved to the San Diego area, and blended his trick team shows into the rest of his business endeavors. 

Myself, as a lowly editorial assistant at Wizard Publications in 1986, I did an informal survey of nearly all the riders I met, asking them how they got into freestyle.  Almost all of them told me it started with seeing a live show of one of the traveling teams, often a factory team.  Now, 30 years later, there are only a few professional and factory trick teams out there, and this may be one of the reasons there are fewer young kids getting into the sport.  Something for all you bike company owners to think about...

Somehow, through the freestyle grapevine, I got wind of this 2-Hip show somewhere in San Diego.  I think Gary Laurent let me know.  Mike Sarrail, his then girlfriend Paula, Keath Treanor, and I headed south to San Diego for a couple days of shooting video.  Mike's the tall, skinny guy who's always flipping me off in the video.  He didn't really want to be on camera, so every time I pointed the camera at him, he flipped me the bird, thinking I wouldn't use that footage.  Much to his dismay, I did.  All that aside, we caught this show featuring Ron Wilkerson himself (white helmet), Gary Laurent (yellow helmet), and a couple of flatlanders who I didn't know.  I didn't bother getting their names for some reason.  Sorry guys.  Mike went off to shoot photos, I was shooting video, and Keith and Paula parked themselves on the tailgate of my truck, affectionately known as Blue Hell.  I bought the truck off of Mike, and still owe him quite a bit of money for it.  I plan to make that money with The Ultimate Weekend II one of these days.  Anyhow, Keith and Paula were soon joined by a wandering, drunk homeless guy.  I learned a big lesson on action sports video making that day:  interview bums whenever you can.  This may be the first homeless guy featured in a BMX video, but many more found their way into action sports videos after that. 

I don't know who the show was actually for, it wasn't a bike shop or any kind of festival.  What I do know, and what I captured on video, was a lot of little kids being thoroughly stoked by seeing Ron, Gary and the guys bust out on their bikes.  That's how it grows.  I'm glad I got this show on tape to add to the video.  The riders weren't doing the biggest or craziest airs of their lives.  The flatlanders weren't the best in the world.  But they took BMX freestyle to some new people that day, and that is a huge part of what freestyle is all about. 

Magnolia Jumps

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.

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.