Yesterday ( 3/25/2022) Mat Hoffman put a post on Facebook saying that his first 900 happened 33 years ago today. On that day in 1989, I happened to be a cameraman for Unreel Productions, shooting video of the 2-Hip King of Vert in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada. That's where Mat landed that first 900, so I got it on video (14:43). Joe Johnson, riding for GT at that time (after riding for Haro), also pulled his first double tailwhip air that day (11:31). Some days being a cameraman was epic. That was one of those days. Here's part of my footage from that day, with narrated by Eddie Roman and some friends for the 2-Hip video, Ride Like a Man.
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Mike "Hucker" Clark with some crazy corked out 360 at Sheep Hills. Boozer Jam 2021.
I got a little more time to work online now, I found a library that's open. So I'm starting on a new batch of BMX memes. The photos of Hucker, Jesse, and Tucker are my pics from Boozer Jam 2021. The other two are vintage public domain photos I found, digging through thousands of public domain photos from way back. Enjoy. Feel free to share if you like these people. #steveemigphotos
Jesse Gergory, S&M Bikes/Rock Star Energy Drink/Etnies rider, and one of the best female jumpers out there these days. She can manual crazy good, too. @lilbmxwolf on Instagram.
Tucker fuckin' rips. Why is he not in a bunch more videos? Seriously... why not? Somebody shoot more quality footage of Tucker. @tuckersmithbmx on Instagram.
I honestly hope Mat doesn't get any stupid ideas when he gets this, like trying something like this.
Todd Lyons, one of my old roommates from the POW House days in the early 90's, is brand manager as SE Bikes now. He's always sharing comments from haters, mad that the bikes sell as soon as they get to shops or online sellers. So kids are always bitching about having to wait for the next shipment to come in to get a bike. When I saw this photo, that came to mind.
I do most of my writing on Substack these days, a platform designed specifically for writers. Check it out:
Here's vert legend Mike Dominguez in the Pipe Bowl at Pipeline skatepark in 1985. This was the contest he uncorked the no-footed can-can.
I've been pushing the old school BMX world to support Don Hoffman's Kickstarter campaign to make the "Badlands" documentary, which would tell the story of Baldy Pipe, Pipeline skatepark, and the influence it had. It's primarily a skate story, but BMX vert is part of the story. The campaign ended a couple days ago, and it found 115 backers pledging $16, 843 (43!) towards the $150,000 goal. Don isn't giving up. He's going to regroup and keep working on getting this done.
For me personally, Pipeline was a place I first read about in BMX Plus in 1982 or 1983, as a high school kid in Idaho. The skatepark, and its riders, instantly became legendary to our little Idaho riding crew. It seemed like a magical place a million miles away then.
As the years passed, I ended up riding Pipeline a few times right before it closed. In fact, I had my front tire crab in the pipe while oververt the last night it was open. That sent me into a Superman dive straight down 11 feet onto it's hard, hard concrete. I ended up going to the emergency room, thinking my wrist was broken. I was actually stoked that I might have the last broken bone from Pipeline. It turned out to be a really bad palm bruise, and I couldn't hang onto my grip for a month afterward.
Since I worked under Don Hoffman at Unreel Productions then, I got to go up and shoot video, and ride, several times after the park closed. The fences were getting torn down, which opened up a whole bunch of lines not possible before. I was jumping out of the four foot bowl and doing a little nose wheelie into the ditch, among other things. During those sessions, Fiola, Blyther, Steve Alba, Micke Alba, and several Vision skaters had some epic sessions. It was great being able to ride without little kids yelling "Next after after next" before rolling in. I chipped about eight blue tiles out of the shallow part of the Combi right after Malba and Salba got themselves some. I didn't bother going up the weekend in got demolished for the last session, I think there was a freestyle event that weekend.
I really hope Don manages to get this movie made, because it's a big part of the history of everyone who's ridden vert in ANY sport.
I do most of my writing on Substack these days, a platform designed specifically for writers. Check it out:
I heard about this comp from a post by Mat Hoffman on Facebook. I was really stoked to hear that there was an X-Game qualifier in the city of Boise, where my life in BMX started. In a trailer park outside Boise, known as Blue Valley by us residents, a bunch of us white trash kids started riding our bikes every evening and trying to out-do each other. After a few months, someone heard there was a BMX track near downtown Boise. We packed four guys and three bikes into Scott's mom's Ford Pinto, and went to our first race.
The Fort Boise BMX track was built in an abandoned sewer pond at the edge of the foothills. I can't tell you how stoked we were to see a place actually built for BMX riding. In October of 1982, that seemed amazing. Looking back, it wasn't much, but it was something. Scott, Jason, and Brian raced as I watched and coached. All three guys went home with trophies. The next weekend, we packed all the BMXers into my dad's van, and headed to the track. It was the last race of the season, and we all raced and had a blast. I was hooked on BMX. Here's what our track looked like back in 1983.
I know that the sketchy old BMX tracks of the 1970's and 1980's spawned better tracks and later skateparks all over the country. When I got serious about BMX freestyle in late 1983 and 1984, I was the third freestyler in Boise, and the whole state of Idaho, following Justin Bickel and Wayne Moore. Wayne retired at the ripe old age of 17, and Justin and I reformed their trick trick team into the Critical Condition Stunt Team. We did shows everywhere we could in the Boise area, and also rode in parades, stoked to share our weird little sport with the people of that area.
It was only a couple years ago that I learned that Boise sits just above 43 degrees latitude, which stoked me out. Not many freestylers out there started riding at 43 degrees above the equator. As one of the pioneers of freestyle in the Boise area, I'm stoked to see that they've actually built a great skatepark there, and that it was picked to host an X-Games qualifier. It's cool to see some amazing new school riding going down in the little city in the middle of nowhere that gave me my start.
I have a new blog about side hustles, gig jobs, small businesses, economics, and making a living in the recession, check it out:
Chris Moeller's section in the S&M Bikes', 1991, highly professional, high budget BMX movie, Feel My Leg Muscles... I'm a Racer.
With the price drop in S-VHS video cameras in the late 1980's, and the appearance of smaller Video8 and Hi-8 camcorders, people started shooting video of stuff they couldn't afford to before. A handful of BMX freestylers started videotaping their riding every once in a while. When I worked at Wizard in 1986, BMX Action editor Gork made the Gork Vid-i-eo. He misspelled video, don't ask. It was pretty funny, some riding and a lot of goofing around. We didn't think of it as a "video," it was something to show friends. A professional video editor in New York named Carl Marquardt made some short, very well produced videos. Eddie Roman started making videos with Kung Fu and bikes. Mark Eaton taped the Plywood Hoods and made videos. I produced a bunch at the AFA, then one for 2-Hip, then The Ultimate Weekend in 1990. Eddie and Mark kept at it and the quality kept getting better and better. I ran out of money making my first one. Since I put Chris Moeller and the P.O.W.'s in my video, he called me out of the blue in 1991, and said he wanted to make a video for S&M Bikes.
I was working at a video duplicator at the time, making copies of thrilling videos, like 4 hour videos for farmers about the different types of corn to plant, and sales tapes for automatic bowling lane sweepers. Really. I spent $5,000 making The Ultimate Weekend the year before, and made about $2,500 back. Then I lived off my credit cards for 3 or 4 months, like an idiot, and wound up waaaaay in debt. So when Chris called, I was stoked. I thought, "Cool, I can make a video with great jumping and earn an extra $2,000 or so on the side." I asked Chris what he was looking to spend. He said, "About $250 or so." Hmmmm... so much for making a bunch of money on a side project.
I was working nights in North Hollywood, a sketchy area of the San Fernando Valley then. I was renting a bed in a crazy flophouse that made the P.O.W. House seem high class. Yeah, I didn't rent a room, I rented a one level of a bunk bed, $40 a week. The apartment was rented in the name of an old guy named George, a paranoid schizophrenic who practiced black magic. It got pretty weird there at times.
Anyhow, Chris was like 19 then, and said, "I have this great idea for a video, we'll take a John Holmes porn video and have all the bad acting, and then cut to bike riding when the video cuts to sex." I thought he was nuts. But it sounded fun. I later found out he is nuts, but in a mostly creative way. So I went down to Huntington Beach on the weekends, and we started shooting video on my full size S-VHS camera.
It was a whole new experience for me. I got into BMX freestyle when Bob Haro and R.L. Osborn were setting an example as professional entrepreneurs on bikes. Then I worked at Unreel Productions, which spent tons of money to make videos that could have shown on TV, quality-wise, but ended up as home videos. So my background was shooting videos and not worrying about money. Chris was coming at the video from the opposite perspective. He had started a bike company at age 16 with almost no money and watched every penny super close. S&M Bikes, at the time, was housed in the single car garage of his tiny, one bedroom apartment. I was used to paying for music rights. He suggested bootlegging punk songs, since the skate videos were doing it, and most punk bands were way to broke to sue.
He also wanted to make it funny as fuck and mess with viewers, which scared me a bit. But it was fun to shoot. I don't remember a lot of the shoots. In a video with Chris Moeller, everyone expected crazy jumping right off the bat. So he wanted to do the skateboard chain wallet bit at the start. At first I wasn't sure, but as he kept skating around, I was laughing and trying not to shake the camera.
So one of the craziest jumpers in the world at the time starts his first official video section with a couple of minutes of making fun of skaters and then a couple minutes making fun BMX street riders (which bummed me out, as a lame street rider).
Then, out of nowhere, he does this huge jump nearly everyone misses. Pause this clip at 5:07. In that shot, Chris is jumping the huge, flat topped, pyramid at the Santa Ana Civic center. That's a very mellow bank to a 30 or 35 foot flat top, onto another mellow bank. Seriously, TODAY, that would be a serious jump. In 1991, it blew my mind.
Then Chris actually does some dirt jumping and some real big handrails for the time. I don't know what riders around the country were expecting the first time they popped in that tape, but it wasn't that. And that was the whole point.
The whole process of making this video was like nothing I'd done before. With the collapse of the BMX industry, the rider's weird ideas were starting to show up. I was beginning to realize how much fun we could have with a BMX video. Moeller... was just being Moeller. That's what made it like nothing else coming out at the time.
Next weekend in Riverside, California is the annual Boozer Jam, combined with the 30th anniversary party for S&M Bikes. I won't be there, and I doubt anyone really cares. I've told many BMX stories over the years, but few about my interactions with Chris Moeller, S&M Bikes, and the P.O.W. House. This seems like the perfect time to throw some of those stories out into the blogosphere.
I first heard of Chris Moeller from Gork, the editor of BMX Action. He and Windy went to shoot photos of some pro racer at some jumps on Brookhurst by a grocery store in Huntington Beach. Gork came back freaking out about this 16-year-old kid doing all these insane jumps while they were there. That kid, of course, was Chris Moeller.
I've learned over the years that just when you think you have Chris figured out, he surprises you. So here's a story that will surprise many of you. I first met Moeller when I rode with Gork to a national in Lake Elsinore. On the way, we picked up Chris who'd ask Gork to hitch a ride to the race. Gork and I were in the front seats of the Wizard Publications Astro van, and Chris sat on the floor in the back with his bike. I don't think Chris said two words for the whole trip, which was about an hour. My first impression of Chris Moeller was that he might be a great jumper, but he was really shy.
Sometime after that, Gork showed us at Wizard this amazing series of photos of Chris doing a no-footer, head high, for about 25 feet, on a downhill jump at Hidden Valley in Huntington Beach. Without a doubt, it was the craziest jump I'd ever seen photos of at that point. Gork took the photos, Xeroxed them (ask you dad what a Xerox is, kids), and made this amazing, multi-image sequence... totally by hand. It was awesome. I met a slew of amazing riders in 1986, Mat Hoffman, Joe Johnson, Josh White, and Chris Moeller, among others.
After getting booted from Wizard, I landed as newsletter editor at the American Freestyle Association in Huntington Beach. I was in the area, but as a freestyler hanging out at the pier, I rarely ran into Moeller then. I went on to work at Unreel Productions, the Vision video company. In early 1990, Unreel was dissolved, and I moved to the Vision main office. it was there one day that Vision BMX team manager, Mike Miranda, told me about four riders that rented an apartment in H.B.. They called themselves the HBP's, or Huntington Beach Pros. Some months later, I learned that several more riders had joined the pack and rented a house in Westminster, the much more affordable city inland of Huntington Beach. They renamed themselves the Pros of Westminster, or P.O.W.'s. It was the first serious rider house in BMX.
That same year, I decided to shoot and produce my own video. I'd produced six videos for the AFA, one for 2-Hip, and worked at Unreel when they made a bunch of really hokey videos, like Freestylin' Fanatics. I decided to make a video that showed real riding, and CURRENT riding, which only Eddie Roman and Mark Eaton were doing then. And to be honest, those were really sketchy at the time, though the riding was insane. So I shot video most every weekend through 1990, and edited the video in October of that year.
I wanted good jumping in the video, not just freestylers doing flyout jumps. The best doubles jumpers in the sport then were the S&M and P.O.W.'s. So I called them up, and I went to shoot at the P.O.W. House, and then later at Edison, some jumps squeezed in a little area behind the high school. The clip above is what I came up with for the video. It's short, but it was insane jumping for that time. Here's a list of most of the guys in this segment:
John Paul Rogers- :17, :26 (S&M rider, P.O.W.)
Alan Foster- :29, :46 (P.O.W., I didn't know he had a little brother who rode then)
Chris Moeller- :31, 1:06, 2:00 (The "M" in S&M Bikes, and the guy who built the company into what it is today)
McGoo- :33 (Official comedian of the BMX industry)
Dave Clymer- :40, :56, 1:09, 1:24 (S&M rider and P.O.W.)
Eric Milman- :50, 1:11 (P.O.W.)
Mike "Crazy Red" Carlson- 1:02, 1:22, 1:28, 1:32, 1:36, 1:45, 1:45, 1:50, 2:04 (S&M Rider)
Greg Scott- 1:30 (The "S" in S&M Bikes originally)
Also in the clip are Dave Cullinan, Kim Boyle, Josh White, and Mike, a local kid. The toe -dragger tailwhip that Crazy Red does at the end is the first tailwhip over doubles in a BMX video ever. The 360 that Moeller does at the end was the biggest 360 I'd ever seen at that point. The music is two live tracks by The Stain, a Toledo punk band. Someone has to be pioneers in everything, and the S&M/P.O.W. guys were the main pioneers when dirt jumping was starting to turn into its own sport.
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.
This past Monday, Memorial Day, was also the 40th anniversary of the opening of Pipeline Skatepark in Upland, California. It opened with the namesake full pipe attached to a bowl that was amazing for BMX bikes. Pipeline wasn't far from the already legendary Baldy Pipe, which had already been skated for a while. Baldy was a 16 foot diameter pipe, Pipeline's was 20 feet.
Here's Eddie Fiola, the original King of the Skateparks, being interviewed by Don Hoffman. Don's parents, Stan and Jean, owned Pipeline, which took both skating and BMX vert to a whole different level. Eddie is rocking the MF jersey, which stood for Morales (as in Bob) and Fiola.
A Kickstarter campaign for a Pipeline/Badlands documentary is getting going. More on all that later. I'm moving this week, so I'll be adding more posts in 2 or 3 days.
At fifty years old, I'm way overweight after years of taxi driving and bad eating habits. I'm starting to lost the weight. As an old BMXer, I went looking online for a good bike to get me riding again. I kept seeing Todd Lyon's posts on Facebook, he's the SE Bikes brand manager now. I checked out his video for the SE Fat Ripper, and that's when I found this clip by Seth's Bike Hacks YouTube channel. This video is the reason I decided to start saving up for a Fat Ripper. I've become a fan of Seth's YouTube channel.
As most of you reading this know, I've been telling old school BMX stories in my blogs since I moved to North Carolina in November 2008. Moving here, I lost all my bike videos and DVD's, I lost all the master tapes to videos I produced, and I lost dozens of hours of raw footage ranging from 1989 to 2007. I had been planning to make my own documentary of BMX freestyle at some point. Because I couldn't borrow money to get my stuffed shipped from California, I lost one of the best raw footage collections in the freestyle world. All I had left were memories. So I started blogging.
In the last nine years, I've written about 800 posts about the early days of BMX freestyle, and I have lots more to tell. I'd like to thank all of you who've read and enjoyed my bike tales over the years.
When I came to NC, I couldn't find a decent job. It was late 2008 and the bottom was dropping out of the economy, so I wasn't alone. I eventually drove a taxi here for a while, and spent a year struggling to survive while living in my taxi. I've also been selling my Sharpie artwork here and there to make a little money. I'm too old to get hired at entry level jobs here, and my "eclectic"work history seems to keep me from getting a good paying job in some other area. But I spent most of my life in highly entrepreneurial Southern California. When I couldn't find a decent job, I thought, "OK, I'll create my own job."
But the truth is, I wrote most of 800 or so posts on the different versions of Freestyle BMX Tales while I was homeless and looking for work. At the same time, I've been educating myself on how writing and art works in today's world. It's a completely different industry than when my zine landed me a job at Wizard Publications in 1986. In today's world, many magazines have died, websites have taken over, and most make money from ads and links. But something else has happened thanks to the web and today's crazy technology. Millions of people have started websites, blogs, YouTube channels about things they are actually passionate about. This blog is one of those things, and so is Seth's You Tube channel above. Today's tech let's creative people in little niches create all kinds of stuff to share with the world. But there's been one huge problem. Money.
Either creative people need to finance their creative work from their job, and do it as a hobby. Or they need to dumb it down for a mass audience and try to be one of the small number of people who makes a ton of money on YouTube from ads or through affiliate links on blogs and websites.
But there's another option. With a service called Patreon, you can support creative people doing cool stuff in a way that doesn't require us to dumb stuff down or sell our souls just for advertising dollars. You can now support people just because you're stoked on what we do.
I've done a lot of things over the years. Telling stories about the early days of BMX freestyle is not my main focus now. My main focus is writing zines, blogs, and doing artwork to encourage people to build creative scenes. After reading lots of books that would bore most of you, I've learned that "creative scenes," like local bike scenes, skate scenes, art scenes, music scenes, actually play a huge role in creating jobs in today's world. We got into BMX freestyle in the 80's because we liked this weird, new, creative sport-type thing. Along the way, we formed little local scenes. We also discovered the DIY ethic and started shooting photos, putting on shows, making zines, videos, magazines, and bike companies. Because we liked riding, we created an entire industry that created a ton of jobs. The same thing happened in skateboarding, snowboarding, high tech, and dozens of other creative areas.
But now we're in a world where tech is taking over human jobs by the millions. One industry after another has lost jobs to new forms of technology. The high paying factory jobs of our childhood are gone, and no one is replacing them. People looking into the future are really worried about jobs for humans in the next few decades. I see one viable solution. Millions of people will have to create their own jobs, in new businesses in dozens of new industries.
I'm taking what I've learned from being a part of many creative scenes, and taking those ideas to a new generation of creative people. Some will be middle-aged geezers like myself, but most will be younger people who create stuff, but haven't experienced how a creative activity, like BMX freestyle, can turn into a whole new industry. This is my work. Writing and drawing IS MY JOB NOW. If you want to support my work, you can do it on my Patreon page. You get goodies, by the way, for different levels of support.
You can also support Seth's YouTube channel on the link at the end of the video above. Welcome to the world where you can directly support and communicate with the creative people who do stuff you're stoked on. You now have the power to support the people doing the things you think are good in the world. Go for it.
I'm working on a big zine telling my crazy taxi driver stories, which is why this blog is on hold this month. You can read the post about the well known BMXers and other reasonably famous people I gave taxi rides to here:
I'm at a transition point right now, I'm moving out of the apartment I've been living in at the end of May. Not sure where I'm moving to yet, I'll likely be "floating" for a while. I'm also spending the month of May 2017 to tell a bunch of my stories of unusual adventures I've had. This is a lead up to publishing my first big zine of crazy taxi stories and opening an online store to sell my writing and artwork. So I won't be posting in this blog for the rest of May. I'll have a new story nearly every day, some from the BMX world, in this blog:
Around 5,000 retail stores, all from major chains, have closed in the last year, are closing now, or scheduled to close this year. What Napster did to music, Amazon and outlet malls are doing to department stores and mall stores. Here's an update on my Get Weird Make Money blog.
I gave up on that blog, here's my new ones (October 2021):
Here's flatland dynamo Chris Day, at the peek of the AFA Masters era, ripping it up on flatland in 1988.
At the beginning of August in 1986, I flew from San Jose to Southern California to start my new life working a Wizard Publications. I was so nervous about it all that I got a horrible case of the hives, and had to wear long sleeve, button up shirts to work for two weeks. And Jenkins and Lew gave me a hard time about that, thinking they had accidentally just hired a button up dork. I was a dork, alright, just not a button up one. Once the hives were gone I went back to rockin' my T-shirt collection.
I moved into Gork and Lew's two bedroom apartment, and slept on the couch for a couple of months. They showed me around the office, around Redondo Beach, and took me to their flatland area, The Spot. The Spot locals at the time were Lew, Gork, Craig Grasso, and this young kid named Chris Day. Chris was about 14 or 15 then, and did these amazing flail boomerangs, whipping his legs around and snapping the trick like no one else at the time. Chris was amazing to watch. When R.L. Osborn was in town, he'd usually come ride at The Spot once or twice a week, and it was obvious he was keeping tabs on Chris. Chris was one of the young generation of riders, and R.L., an old school veteran then, didn't want to miss any progression happening in the sport.
As a young kid, though, Chris could be kind of annoying. I soon learned that he would ride over to our apartment, barge in the the door without much of a knock, and head straight for the cookie jar Gork kept well stocked. We didn't really mind him eating cookies, but it would have been cool if he at least asked first.
When the magazine deadlines were close, Andy, Lew, Gork, and me all wound up working late at Wizard, which was a small warehouse with an office area up front. All of our offices were in the back, along the walls of the warehouse. Sometimes Chris would ride over there at night to hang out. But we were busy doing the work we should have been doing in the previous three weeks, and we didn't need any more distractions. Gork would always have his ghetto blaster blasting metal, usually Metallica, on those nights. In between songs we'd often hear Chris knocking on the warehouse door and yelling, "Hey guys! It's me! Chris! Hey guys! Let me in!" We'd laugh, and the next song would start, then we couldn't hear him anymore. When that song stopped, we'd hear Chris yelling and knocking again. One might he did that for about two hours.
It wasn't that we didn't like Chris. Generally speaking he was a pretty cool kid as well as a great up and coming rider. But he would wear on our nerves, and we just needed some time without him around now and then.
As the fall progressed, Gork, Lew, and I decided to move into a three bedroom apartment, so I could get off the couch. We looked around for a while, an found one about a half mile away in Hermosa Beach, right down the alley from where Andy and his wife Kelly lived. We moved in one weekend, and decided to not tell Chris that we moved. We still went down to The Spot every night and rode with him, but we just "forgot" to tell him we moved. Every once in a while he'd say, "I was knocking on your door yesterday, and nobody answered." One of us would tell him we must have been at the store or something. It took Chris three weeks to figure out we moved to a new apartment and then find it. After that, he went back to raiding the cookie jar until Gork stopped stocking it.
Somewhere along that time, Gork's grandma sent him some homemade persimmon brownies. No offense to Gork's grandma, but they didn't taste good. We had a new cookie jar then, some ceramic animal or something. And we stopped leaving cookies out for Chris to eat, so he left the jar alone. So grandma's persimmon brownies sat in that jar as kind of a science experiment. After five or six weeks, they all had about a quarter inch of hairy mold on them. We had a party one weekend, and Chris showed up, along with a bunch of other people. When the chips and other munchies ran out, Chris asked if we had anything else to eat. We'd all had a few beers at that point, and one of us said, "there's some homemade persimmon brownies in the cookie jar." I think Chris had snagged a couple beers, despite being under age, so he was a bit buzzed. He opened the cookie jar and started chowing down on the mold covered persimmon brownies. I think he ate all of them. We just sat there laughing our asses off.
I soon got laid off and moved south to Huntington Beach to work for the AFA, and I only ran into Chris Day at contests then. He kept improving and rocked on flatland for quite a while.
Years later, when I was working on my video, The Ultimate Weekend, Jess Dyrenforth called up and said he'd been riding this cool ramp near San Diego, and that he wanted me to come shoot some video. So I headed there with Randy Lawrence. Much to my surprise, along with Jess were Pete Augustin, underground legend Mike Tokemoto, and Chris Day. Chris was doing these amazing sweeper footplants on the spine. None of us had seen anything like them before. Chris also did these sprocket slides to revert. I wasn't sure what to call them, kind of a 540 sprocket bash. But they were fucking amazing.
You can find that section of video here. Go to 38:03 in the video. Here are a couple angles of Chris Day's sweepers in 1990.
As of the late summer of 2023, I'm going in a new direction with my writing. Check out my new stuff on my Substack:
Ever go through old photos or magazines and find something you totally forgot about? This is one of those. Since I started working on the DIY book based on this blog, I finally got around to capturing some stills from the BMX footage of mine that has survived thanks to the internet. This is a still of Randy Lawrence doing a wall ride over me doing a wall bounce at the Blues Brothers Wall in Huntington Beach, CA.
This is one of many walls north of the HB pier, and this one happened to have both a lip to hit it on the far left side, and the least sand in front of it, which made it possible to hit it. The wall is also a bit under-vert. I never measured it, but it's about 80 or 85 degrees, which is just enough to make it easy to go much higher than a true vert wall. But only Randy, and later Dave Clymer, could get near the top of it. I honestly forgot just how high Randy Lawrence was going until I stilled this on the video. Even better, I'm pretty sure this is the first over/under wall ride ever documented. When I googled that last night, looking for other double wall rides, I couldn't find any. There was one photo of two guys on a banked wall, maybe 60 degrees steep, but that was it.
When I made that video in 1990, the rider-made video movement wasn't even a movement yet. Eddie Roman had made a student film, Aggro Riding and Kung Fu Fighting and Aggroman. I had produced six AFA contest videos in 1987 and edited the 1988 2-Hip season video, now on You Tube as 2-Hip BHIP. I think Mark Eaton made the first Dorkin' in York, edited on VHS working with 2 VCR's wired together. Videos made by riders were still a brand new thing, and we were making it up as we went. All of these videos had a lot of things never seen by riders before in videos. Not only were we documenting progression in riding itself, but we were documenting the growth and progression of street riding, the changes in ramps, and progressing in video producing itself. We were literally just making this shit up as we went along, just like we'd done with zines a few years before.
There were several firsts in The Ultimate Weekend, but the double wall ride is one I totally forgot about. I'm pretty stoked on that. If anyone else has pics of a double wall ride back in the day, show me on Facebook. There must be some other ones out there somewhere.
Here's the three I've done over the last few months. On the left is my take on a classic early photo of then Haro pro Ron Wilkerson. Top right is my color take on one of my favorite street photos ever, the epic black and white shot of Vic Murphy launching a one foot tabletop off a curb jump. Bottom right is my color drawing of the best photo I've ever taken, a B & W panning shot of Dave Vanderspek on his GPV (gravity powered vehicle) at the Palm Springs Tramway race and ramp jam in 1987. I do sell these drawings, and I'll also be giving some away now and then to people who buy my BMX magnus opus: Freestyle BMX Tales: The Book.
Here's a closer look at the Wilkerson drawing. I usually add words and phrases to my drawings. In this case, a bunch of things Ron contributed to BMX freestyle. All three of these drawings are 18" X 24", and all done in my unique "scribble style" with Sharpies on paper.
Vic top, Vander bottom, slightly closer up pic. You can see more of my work on my art blog: Steve Emig Art.
This is Freestyle BMX Tales: The Book, part 1. That big square up top is all the pages of part 1, (20 full size pages) laid out. I'm calling this "the coffee table book of BMX zines." It's either one of my greatest ideas... or one of my worst. I'm never sure. Here's a few excerpts:
"On another street, I followed Rick Thorne between two big rig trucks, both of which were moving slowly. Unfortunately for us, they were moving closer to each other. We both hit the gas, cranking hard to get past them. Rick pulled up his front wheel and turned the bars to squeak through the narrowing gap. I did the same thing right behind him, yelling in excitement as I cleared the trucks."
"The sound wound up, and with a yell, Scot came screaming around the corner of the warehouse racks on an 80cc dirtbike. Jay and I looked at each other, wondering if that was a normal thing in the SE warehouse." "A few weeks later, completely out of nowhere, Andy (Jenkins, editor of FREESTYLIN') called me up at home, in San Jose, one afternoon. He asked me if I was planning to go to the next AFA Masters comp in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I told him I was. 'Would you like to cover it for us?' I grabbed a putty knife to scrape my bottom jaw off the floor. 'Uh...yeah.' I muttered somehow."
"This punk kid sailed 25 or 30 feet down the hill, head high, blasting a huge no footer. Nobody jumped like that back then. Those were the first photos I saw of Chris Moeller..."
"'Uh-boo-buh-kuh,' Andy told me, I don't know what the trick is or how you spell it. He's coming here in an hour and you'll be driving Windy and Ron to the photo shoot.'"
I got into BMX in a trailer park outside Boise, Idaho in the summer of 1982. I saw my first local freestyle show in the spring of 1984. BMX freestyle became my thing, and I dreamed of being a pro rider someday, getting free bikes, and touring the country. I never did become a pro, but I did get some free bikes and managed one skateboard tour. I didn't have the guts or charisma to start my own company in the 80's or 90's, so I became a kind of wandering sidekick, the right hand man to some of the top people building freestyle. I became part of the Golden Gate Park scene in 1985, getting to know Dave Vanderspek, Maurice Meyer, Robert Peterson and the rest up there. My zine landed me a job at Wizard Publications, where I worked with Andy J., Lew, Gork, and Windy. I went on to work for AFA owner Bob Morales, the guy who turned trick riding into the sport of BMX freestyle. That led to video work, and I worked for Don Hoffman at Unreel Productions, the Vision Skateboards/Vision Street Wear video company. A lot of BMXers don't know Don, but he made several of the first freestyle videos, and his parents owned the legendary Pipeline Skatepark. I went on to self-produce a video called The Ultimate Weekend, in 1990. The next year, young Chris Moeller, who ran S&M Bikes out of the garage of a one bedroom apartment at the time, called me up to make their first video. I became his sidekick/roommate for quite a while, and also lived in the P.O.W. House during the early 90's, rooming with guys like Dave Clymer, Todd Lyons, John Paul Rogers, Alan and Brian Foster, and a bunch more.
I have a lot of stories. I'm putting the best ones into a weird book of sorts. It's a handmade thing, a D-Ring binder, filled with 20 pages to start, all hand laid out by me, zine style. It comes with a few custom stickers and a couple of 11" X 17" copies of my drawings. Each book is signed and numbered, and I'm hand numbering the pages of every copy. Part 1 of Freestyle BMX Tales:The Book is out now, and costs $20. Every 4 to 6 weeks, I'll have another 20 pages (and some goodies) for $10. I've got a lot of stories of those old school days of BMX freestyle. I'll keep putting some on the blog for everyone to read. But the best collection of my stories, thoughts, and lessons from those days will be in the book. You can order yours today at my Go Fund Me page. The books are numbered as the orders come in. #3 is up for grabs as I write this (11/262016). Order yours today.
For most of us kids in the 1970's, it started like the kids in the clip above. I never jumped anywhere near that far on my banana seat bike. But I did jump it on a regular basis. Inspired by daredevil Evel Knievel, we jumped tree root sidewalk lips on our mild steel banana seat bikes as little kids. Then we moved up to scrounging bricks, concrete blocks, and random pieces of wood lying around our garages, and building rickety wooden jumps. For most of us kids across the country, we went through the 70's not knowing that a handful of crazy Californians had started modifying their Schwinn Stingrays and started racing bicycles motocross style. Bicycle Motocross was below our radar until the late 70's.
For me, seeing the Schwinn Phantom Scrambler in red and black in the window of a bike shop in Plymouth, Ohio in 1979 started the idea. I never did get that bike. In fact I moved to Carlsbad, New Mexico the next year, 9th grade for me. I had a cheap ten speed then. I used to ride it to an area called The Flume, where there were a bunch of off road Jeep and motocross trails. I wished I had that Schwinn Scrambler then. I still didn't know BMX actually existed. One kid in 8th grade told us about it, but he was a hillbilly kid who lied all the time, so none of us believed him.
As luck would have it, I bought my first BMX bike, a Sentinal Exploder GX, for $5 off my friend Mike, a few days before we moved away from New Mexico. It was red, mild steel, of course, and had curved, blade forks, and six spoke aluminum mags that I later realized were heavier than Motomags. It was a piece of shit. Even worse, it had a coaster brake that was all messed up. Sometimes the pedals would go all the way around twice before it would catch and turn the back wheel.
We moved to Boise, Idaho, and my Exploder sat in the garage for a year. Then my parents decided to buy a double wide mobile home and move to a trailer park outside of town. The idea was for them to save money for a year so they could buy a house. Little did I know that my Sentinal Exploder GX would change the course of my life while in that trailer park.
Yes, folks, Freestyle BMX Tales is back... for a limited run, until February 1st, 2017. More on the reason in the next post.
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.
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.
I'm continuing with my 25th anniversary look back at my 1990 video, The Ultimate Weekend. Today's clip begins at 12:20 in the video above: Team Pro Motion.
I met SoCal local rider Dan Hubbard, or Danny as we called him back then, in 1986 when I worked at Wizard Productions. Dan was a high school kid then, and had a 8 foot high halfpipe at his parents' house in Palos Verdes. P.V. is a sort of hilly peninsula of upscale houses that juts out into the Pacific between Redondo Beach and Long Beach. Gork and Lew took me to Dan's house, I think we just went up to ride. Dan's halfpipe was my favorite ever for one reason. It's the only ramp I ever got air on. That's a long story, which goes back to this sketchy quarterpipe I bought from some skaters in Idaho. My QP was six feet high, had a foot of vert, and had this gap in the plywood between the transition and the vert. On my driveway, the vert was actually over-vert. So I couldn't do actual airs, I would do airs a foot below the top of the ramp. Somehow, that turned into a weird mental block for me, and from then on, I couldn't get out on any ramp. Except for Dan Hubbard's halfpipe for some reason.
In any case, I met Dan in '86 at his house, and he was a super clean cut kid and a hardcore rider. He was at all the AFA SoCal local contests and was known for having a totally dialed, super clean routine. He could ride flatland and vert, but flat was where he dominated. He did well in contest after contest, hardly ever touching his foot down. In fact, I remember one contest where a bunch of us were so sick of Dan's flawless routines, that we joked around about putting Vaseline on his rims so his brakes wouldn't work, just so we could see him screw up for once. But we never did that, we liked Dan, after all.
Like so many other riders in the mid-80's, Dan formed a trick team and did shows. But he was one of the few that turned his trick team into a legit business, and by 1990, when this video was shot, Dan was a professional rider promoting his own shows. The other two riders in this segment are his teammates, Jeff Cotter, with the long hair, and legendary Camarillo Ramp rider Todd Anderson.
For this section, Dan set up his ramp in a parking lot on the North side of Redondo Beach, with Palos Verdes in the background. I shot the three riders from a whole bunch of different angles, so I could show off my editing skills when put this segment together. Dan and Jeff were local SoCal riders at the time, not very well known on the national scene. Todd Anderson, on the other hand, was already a legend, and I was really stoked to get them all in my video.
Years later, Dan told me that this was the only bike video he'd ever been featured in. And I have him riding to my lame-ass song, "Cottage Cheese Disease." I'm really sorry about that Dan. In any case, the three of them busted out that afternoon. Dan did his signature flawless flatland combos and a cool fakie on the ramp. Jeff showed off his flatland chops, including the Pop Tart, a jump up to a bar ride, which was a pretty new trick at the time, and still seems insane to me. Todd Anderson, of course, showed off his classic ramp style.
In the time after this video was shot, Dan continued to run his trick team, and still does today, as far as I know. He has one or two teams doing shows for kids and promoting freestyle around the U.S. Jeff Cotter went off and joined the Ringling Brothers Circus after this was shot, and hung out with Jose Yanez, the guy who did the first backflips on a BMX bike. Jeff was the first freestyler to learn flips, and did them into water at the end of this video. Todd Anderson rode for a while longer, then went on to shoe horses for a living, which I believe he still does today.
I addition, Dan Hubbard went on to become a successful Hollywood stuntman, and got past his squeaky clean reputation as a rider, and has done some really crazy stuff over the years for TV shows and movies. One of the best things about looking back at this video for me is seeing where all these riders have gone since this was made.
