Chris Miller flat out shredding Pipeline after it closed.
When I got the job at Unreel Productions, Vision's video company, in late 1987, I spent most of my time in a little room with a bunch of machines making copies of different videos. I also got the job of organizing the tape library, which was boxes of hundreds of tapes which were not labeled well. Most of those tapes were betacam camera originals. In those days, big, 35 pound, betacam cameras were the "broadcast quality" standard. The cameras cost about $50,000, and the video quality was high enough to be shown on broadcast TV. So when a cameraman went out to shoot something, they came back with a bunch of these tapes. Each tape was in a plastic case, and ten of those fit into a cardboard tape box.
So while I was making copies of one thing or another, I would pull out a box of these betacam tapes, figure out what contest or video shoot it was, and label all the tapes and boxes by hand, so we could find that footage easily later. In the course of doing this, I saw all the footage that was being shot, and I looked at all the old camera tapes and master tapes of videos already made. So I became real familiar with each skater, biker, or snowboarder's style and abilities.
At the same time, I would get off work and go ride my BMX freestyle bike for two or three hours every night. Often I would ride to work, and then hit a whole bunch of street spots around Huntington Beach on my way home. So watching all the footage definitely stoked me to ride, and gave me ideas for tricks sometimes.
It didn't take long for me to be blown away by the skating of Chris Miller. He had this effortless looking flow around the pools that was absolutely oozing with style. I decided that I wanted to learn to ride my bike the way Chris Miller skated. That never happened. But it was definitely a good goal to work towards.
In this clip, we see Chris first in the 15 bowl, the biggest vert bowl at Pipeline, and then he's skating the back bowls, which rarely get seen in videos. Those were the beginner bowls, and were 4 feet, 6 feet, 8 feet, and 10 feet deep. When the park was open, there were fences between the bowls, which prevented transfers. But after the park closed, and the fences were torn down, all kinds of new lines were possible, which is what Chris is taking advantage of.
Then he moves to the Combi Pool, the gnarliest skatepark pool in its day, and Chris tears it up. That was the pool the skaters spent the most time in over the years. Then he moves on to the Pipe Bowl, the pool best known to BMXers, because that's the one the riders blasted huge airs out of. Those tuck kneed carves Chris does in the pipe are some of the coolest things in skateboarding.
The video is old, down a couple of generations, and kind of sketchy. But Chris Miller's skating is epic. In a bike comparison, I'd have to pick Brian Foster as the guy who best blends speed, style, and big airs like Miller does on his skate. Both of those guys are just beautiful to watch ride. It's no surprise that Chris Miller has ruled the Master's Class at the new combi pool in the Pro-Tec Pool Party contests for nearly a decade.
The story of Pipeline and Baldy Pipe will be told in the Badlands Movie. You can help it get made by support the Kickstarter campaign in that link. $6,578 and counting...
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When most of us older guys think back to the King of the Skateparks era in the early 1980's, Eddie Fiola, Brian Blyther, Mike Dominguez come to mind first, along with Hugo Gonzales, Rich Sigur, Tony Murray and maybe a couple others. All those guys were pushing the progression of riding vert and pools. The airs were getting higher, the tricks were getting gnarlier, and Hugo was hucking ridiculous things.
But one of the fundamental tricks of BMX vert, dirt jumping, and park riding came from a lesser known, but still rad rider, Jeff Carroll. Like Jeremy Alder and Jose Yanez in the last two posts, Jeff showed the riding world that a trick thought impossible was actually possible. Jeff gave us the no-hander. It wasn't an eight foot air, his arms weren't stretched like later riders would do, but in the photo above at what I think is the last skatepark comp of that era, in 1985, Jeff showed the BMX world that you could take both hands off the bars in the air, put them back on, and survive. With that one trick, he changed BMX riding.
Here are some of the other guys who later built on that idea:
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.
