Things don't always go as planned #1

 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.

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Martin Aparijo's Quaterpipe Session

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Different Kind of Pool Party

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Freestylers Dirt Jumping in 1990

Like Hannibal from The A-Team used to say, "I love it when a plan comes together."  I'm continuing on with my 25th anniversary look back at my 1990 bike video, The Ultimate Weekend.  As luck would have it, the Boozer Jam 360 is happening tomorrow at Sheep Hills in Costa Mesa, California.  Dirt jumping has evolved incredibly over the years, as the old schoolers looking back at this, then watching the riders tomorrow can attest.  Today's clip starts at 23:15 in the video above.

Before the jumping, though, is a quick shot of me.  There's a quick triple shot of me doing 50/50 grinds (aka double peg) on a little painted ledge at a shopping center on Beach Boulevard in H.B.  At the time I shot this, double peg grinds on street were pretty new.  I kept myself out of this video for the most part because I knew the guys I rode with were better riders than me, and the weird tricks I was learning then weren't very popular.  At the time I shot this video, I was doing 7 or 8 foot half Cabs, full cabs (rollback 360 bunnyhops), lookback half Cabs (which I've STILL never seen anyone else do), 8 or 9 foot rollback bunnyhops, and I'd been trying bunnyhop tailwhips for nearly three years, but never landed one clean.  Looking back, I really wish I would have put those tricks in the video.  But I didn't.  What I did put in was these 50/50 grinds.  I learned them at about 3 am somewhere in the middle of Texas on a skateboard tour with Mark Oblow.  We stopped for gas, we were both delirious from long hours on the road, and Mark found a little ledge on the back of the gas station.  He started ollying up to 50/50 grinds, which gave me the idea.  After a few tries I did a double peg stall.  Then I kept going at it faster until the stalls turned into little grinds.  The next day we picked up am vert skaters Mike Crum and Chris Gentry, and later met up with Buck Smith and did three weeks worth of demos across the South.  Just for the record, the grinds in the video I did with knurled, screw on pegs that were tiny by today's standards.

And then comes Oceanview, one of the coolest flyout jumps ever.  I first got to know Keith Treanor and John Povah at that jump one day, and we started riding together a lot.  This video came out the year before Sheep Hills was built, just to put it into perspective.  In the late 80's, there were two distinct kinds of jumpers.  There were freestylers who liked flyout jumps and doing crazy and usually unstylish tricks.  Then there were the racer jumpers, who jumped double jumps mostly, rarely did 360's, and jumped with more style but less crazy variations.  At the first King of Dirt Jam in 1987 that Gork from BMX Action and Rich Bartlett put on, the split in styles was obvious.  But as street riding contests started happening soon after, the styles started to merge.  Racers started doing crazier variations, and freestylers (some of them, anyhow) learned how  to pedal and started jumping farther and with more style.

This segment at Oceanview includes Keith Treanor (black T-shirt), John Povah (blue tank top), flatland legend Woody Itson (turquoise shorts), vert superstar Josh White (white T-shirt/shorts), and the most surprising to me at the time, H.B. local flatlander Andy Mucahy (jeans).  Now this jump, on the corner of Warner and Gothard, is the only flyout jump I've ever seen with a concrete runway up to a seven foot high jump... to flat.  Early in this clip you see Keith blast the jump for height, going an honest nine or ten feet off the deck.  I've seen Keith go a full two feet higher off that jump, but never caught it on video.  He had this crazy habit of showing up somewhere and going way bigger on his first hit then ever again.  It got to the point where I would actually turn the camera on in the car and point it at Keith because he did that everywhere we went.  The cover of the video was a photo Mike Sarrail shot and I made high contrast of Keith jumping over John's outstretched hand, like he does in this segment. 

This segment  backed by The Stain's "Flashing Red" song, one of my favorites in the video.  The riders go through the gambit of freestyle jumps at the time.  360's, one hand 360's, no footers, no handers, tailwhip attempts, and a decade attempt by John Povah.  The air they're getting seems tiny today, but this was serious freestyler jumping at the time. 

Near the end you see Josh White almost land a tailwhip.  There's a story there.  In '88 or '89 (I can't remember exactly), there were some jumps where the condos above Sheep Hills now sit.  I learned about them when Mike Miranda took Rich Bartlett there to shoot photos for a Vision ad, and I shot video of the photo shoot.  There was a good sized (for the time) hip jump, a couple small doubles, and a ditch jump.  Since the spot was literally only a few blocks from where I worked at Unreel Productions, I started riding over and jumping during my lunch break and after work.  I loved me a good ditch jump. 

One day I rode over and ran into Josh White.  As good a rider as Josh was, he hadn't learned tailwhips off jumps, and that's what he was trying that day.  I was also trying to learn them then, so we took turns missing tailwhips until my chain broke as I rode down into the ditch.  Big, painful faceplant slide, and I scootered my bike back to work, half of me covered in dirt and blood.  I didn't run into Josh for a year or so after that.  When I did run into him, he was at Oceanview one evening... trying again to learn tailwhips.  He'd still never landed one.  I had my camera, so I started shooting video as he got closer and closer to nailing that trick.  The one you see in this clip where he almost makes it and then runs off the bike was the second to last one I shot.  The next try, Josh White landed his first tailwhip over a jump... and my camera battery went dead while he was in the air.  I shit you not.  I missed it.  Josh was so bummed.  I was so bummed. So Josh's first tailwhip was one of the things that didn't make it in the video.  Sometimes things work out, and sometimes they don't.  It still really bums me out that the freakin' camera battery picked that exact instant to die.  But that's life.

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.

The Blues Brothers Wall

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oreo Pancakes and Cottage Cheese Disease

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Cancer Ditch

Back to the 25th annivesary posts about my 1990 video, The Ultimate Weekend.  If you go to 9:54 in the video, you see a quick little night time street session at a place in Huntington Beach many of us called the Slater Ditch.  It's some kind of a pump house or something along a canal that feeds into Bolsa Chica wetlands.  The younger guys, like Andy Mulcahy, whose mug is in this section a couple of times, called it The Cancer Ditch.  They called it that because the water at the bottom of the riding area was so nasty that it would probably give you cancer if you fell in. 

At one time, this had been a well known skate spot, but the city workers built some speed bumps across it to deter skating.  After that it was a place for BMXers to session, usually late at night, like in this video.  Personally, the best I could do was footplant the wall, and jump this little step up on the other side.  In this clip you see Keith Treanor and Randy Lawrence sessioning, while Andy and Sean Johnson look on.  Back in 1990, video cameras could not handle low light well, so I wasn't even sure I could use this footage.  I used the editing system to pump up the video level so it was just barely watchable.  The Stain's quick song, "My Grandma's Got a Mohawk," worked perfectly to end the "Friday Night" phase of the video.  I can't even count how many times I rode this spot in the late 80's and  90's.  Usually alone, but sometimes in groups like this.  The Cancer Ditch is one of those obscure little places that got a little famous because of BMX.

The H Ramp

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

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

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

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

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

The Idea for The Ultimate Weekend video

Here's my 1990, self-produced BMX freestyle video, The Ultimate Weekend.  This month (October 2015) is the 25th anniversary of the release of that video.  I really wanted to make a sequel and "where are they now" companion video for this anniversary.  But it just wasn't in the cards.  So I'm going to spend some time blogging about the story behind The Ultimate Weekend, one of the first rider-made videos.  Many thanks to Alan Valek for uploading it to You Tube. 

Every human-made creation, whether it's a movie, a book, a piece of art, a product, or a company, first starts as an idea in a single person's head.  The Ultimate Weekend came out in the fall of 1990, but the initial idea goes back to the fall of 1986.  I started a BMX freestyle zine in 1985 in San Jose, California.  Over the course of several issues, I interviewed Dave Vanderspek, Maurice Meyer, Hugo Gonzales, and several other pros and amateurs from the San Francisco Bay Area.  At that point, freestyle had become the focus in my life, and I reported on the NorCal scene, which was like no other in the freestyle world at that time.  Much to my surprise, my zine led to writing a contest article for FREESTYLIN' magazine.  Even more to my surprise, that led to a full time job at BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines.  Suddenly I was not only part of the freestyle industry, but I was getting paid to help put out the coolest magazines, and I was riding all the time. 

One evening, at the end of our working day, FREESTYLIN' editor Andy Jenkins summoned Lew, Gork, and me out to the parking lot.  He said he'd been thinking about approaching Oz (aka Bob Osborn, our publisher and boss) with the idea to make a video.  The bad part was, Oz had paid a huge sum of money to have a video production firm make a video about the BMX Action Trick Team a few years before.  The video was well produced, but it cost tens of thousands of dollars to make, and it lost a lot of money.  There just wasn't a market for BMX videos in those early days.  Andy wanted us to brainstorm some ideas for a new video, one that could be done for much less money, yet have the backing of the two Wizard Publications magazines.  But the idea had to be amazing before Andy would take it to Oz.  We sat on the curb and threw ideas around for half an hour or so.  My best idea was to recreate our real lives.  We would get off work on Friday night, and just have "The Ultimate Weekend," riding with top pros, going to shows, contests, and even doing some "street riding," which was a new idea then. 

That was basically what we did every weekend.  Gork, Lew, and I were roommates, and Andy lived a few doors down with his wife.  If there was a local contest, we'd pile into Gork's van and go to it, or to a show in the area.  If there was nothing going on that weekend, I'd wake up Saturday morning, make a HUGE stack of pancakes, watch the Bones Brigade II, Future Primitive skate video, and then go ride all day.  Part of the day I would explore Hermosa Beach, Redondo Beach and the surrounding area on my own.  Part of the time I'd ride with the locals, like Craig Grasso, Lew, Gork, Chris Day, and even R.L. Osborn now and then.  To me, that seemed like it would make a great video. 

But it wasn't a strong enough idea for Andy.  In fact, none of our ideas were strong enough, and Andy never did take the video idea to Oz.  We did, however, make a home made video.  Someone loaned Gork a 8mm video camera, and he shot random riding and funny bits, and chopped them all together.  For an intro, he intended to spell out the letters V-I-D-E-O on his computer.  Keep in mind, this was a Kaypro, mid-80's word processor.  There were no fancy graphics back then.  So Gork spent hours making a huge "V" out of little v's on his computer screen.  Then he shot a few seconds of it on video.  Then he erased the "V" and made a big "I" out of i's.  He literally spent hours doing this.  When the whole thing was edited together on a VHS tape, Gork showed us his masterpiece.  One small problem.  Spelling wasn't Gork's strong suit, and he spelled the intro V-I-D-I--E-O.  It was a pretty funny video with some good riding in it.  We called it the "Gork Vid-I-eo."  I don't know how many people actually saw it, but the biggest thing that video did was to make us realize that we could actually make a low-budget video that was worth watching.  At that point, there were only a handful of BMX videos, and they were all made by "professional" video production companies.  Those people knew video, but they didn't have a clue about BMX.  So they would often lose the rider out of the shot.  Or they wouldn't show someone landing a trick.  Or they spun the camera around and made the watcher dizzy.  Those videos were good on one level, but totally sucked from a hardcore rider's perspective. 

At the time of our parking lot meeting at Wizard, I think the only rider-made video was Eddie Roman's "Aggro Riding and Kung Fu Fighting," which I think he did as a school project.  Actually, there was also a professional video editor named Carl Marquardt (I think that's how he spelled it) who was also a rider in New York City.  He made short videos, five minutes or so, and sent them to us at the magazine.  As far as I know, those were the first rider-made videos. 

After that brainstorming session at Wizard, I kept that idea of a video showing a really awesome weekend of riding in my head.  In 1990, as my job at Vision was dying, I started shooting video on my own, different riders or locations each weekend, and made my first self-produced video, and that became The Ultimate Weekend.