The first time the S&M guys and P.O.W. House were in a video

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.

I've got four new blogs now:

The Big Freakin' Transition- about the future and economics

Crazy California 43- Cool and weird locations in California

Full Circle- about writing and the writer's life

And a fiction blog- 

Stench: Homeless Superhero

 

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. 

Dan Hubbard and Team Pro Motion

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. 

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.

Ultimate Weekend Flatland

Hey guys, I'm sorry I haven't posted for a while.  My computer broke, and accessing other computers has been sketchy at best.  Anyhow, I'm continuing on with look back on the 25th anniversary of the release of my self-produced 1990 video, The Ultimate Weekend. 

Today's section starts at 4:37 in this clip, with a Huntington beach flatlander named Red.  As I recall, his real name was Joe Goodfellow.  He's no relation to "Crazy Red" Mike Carlson, found later in this video.  By 1990, I had given up on ever being a pro flatlander, although I would still go out and practice flatland nearly every night.  During 1987 and 1988, the scuffing/rolling tricks took hold, led by the Golden Gate Park crew debuting the Backyard to the world.  Technically, scuffing started with the insanely original NorCal  Skyway pro Oleg Konings in about 1985.  But his scuffing tricks didn't catch on.  In 1987, the Backyard caught on, and then Kevin Jones blew minds with the Locomotive, his no hand version of the Backyard.  Suddenly, the many individual styles in flatland began to merge into the forward rolling tricks movement.  Let me correct myself, actually, Denny Howell doing the whiplash in 1986 got the forward rolling trick idea going.  Then the others I mentioned followed.

On one hand, these tricks were super hard for the time period, and really innovative.  But on the negative side, everyone's riding style started to look like everyone elses.  That bummed me out.  Since my motivation was to always be trying something new, I took my flatland in a different direction.  While nearly everyone else was stoked on rolling tricks, I started trying to invent new hopping tricks.  Not the stationary hops of the mid-80's, but a new kind.  I did a backwards wheelie one day, and tapped my back brake and hopped in the middle of it, then landed and continued the wheelie.  I kept playing around with weird tricks like that.  By the time I shot this video, I could do half-cabs six or eight feet, looback half-cabs, rolling backwards bunnyhops, nollies, full cabs (rollback 360 bunnyhop) and I was trying "King Cabs (rolling backwards into a 540 bunnyhop).  I also had this absolutely crazy trick I tried for about three years, the bunnyhop tailwhip, which I never landed cleanly.

Now, I know these days most of those are standard street tricks.  But in 1990, these tricks were considered stupid.  So I didn't put any of them in this video.  I went with the Huntington beach locals like Red, Andy Mucahy, newcomer Sean Johnson (the black dude) and a few others.  I met these most of kids when they were just getting into BMX freestyle, and I was one of the guys who taught them some basic tricks.  Over the years they became damn good flatlanders.  They weren't the top riders in the country by any means, but they were good, they were local, and I gave them five minutes in the video.

One other thing to note was that I used a skateboard to film some of the tricks, like the Hang 5 at 4:53, Andy's hitch hiker at 5:19, and one or two other tricks.  To BMXers and skaters, that was simple, low budget camera work, and it looked pretty cool.  But a year later, working on an actual TV production, I showed these shots to pro cameramen, and they were blown away.  They had no idea how I got those shots rolling around a moving rider.  When I told them I did it on a skateboard, they flipped.  Not only were us BMXers and skateboarders progressing in our own weird little sports, we were also progressing in art, photography, and in video camera work.  Our weird little videos not only stoked riders, but they helped change the way Hollywood did its work years later.  Pretty cool.

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.