Pierre Andre

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.