Over under wall ride in 1990

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.

My main blog these days is about building creative scenes, check it out:
The White Bear's Making a Scene

Mark Eatons Tribute to Dave Mirra

I was an industry guy who still rode a lot when Dave Mirra started popping up on the scene.  So my memories of him are a lot different than today's young riders who grew up watching Dave winning gold after gold in the X-games.  This is the best tribute to Dave I've seen from the guys in my generation.  It's no surprise that it comes from the video files of Mark Eaton. 

Another thing that most of you know now is that riders all over are painting their pedals gold as a tribute to Dave Mirra's legacy.  I'm not sure who started this idea, but it's going viral now.  Ride in Peace Dave.

The State of BMX Videos in 1990

Eddie Roman's Aggroman (Mat Hoffman clip above), was like a movie and it was awesome when it came out.  But after a couple views, we treated it like a porno, fast forward through all the sketchy acting to get to the good stuff.  This was the best known rider-made video when I released The Ultimate Weekend in 1990.  Mark Eaton's original Dorkin' In York came out around then, too.

At an AFA Velodrome contest in 1986, I was hanging in my hotel room with the rest of the Off The Wall factory team.  Off The Wall was a really crappy bike made by some Taiwanese company.  It's a long story, but it eventually turned into the Air/Uni and then the Ozone, which were good bikes.  Anyhow, Eddie Roman walked into our room with a VHS tape in his hand, and said he had something to show us.  It was a video, I think he made it for a class in school, and it was called "Aggro Riding and Kung Fu Fighting."  It was funny and had some good riding in it, but the technical quality wasn't very good.  But we didn't care.  It was a video made by an actual BMX freestyler, and not just any freestyler, Eddie Roman, Skway factory guy and street riding legend.  THAT was the beginning of the rider-made video movement.  But we didn't know that at the time.  After Eddie showed us the video, he ran out to some other room full of riders to show it off again.

The next year, 1987, I produced six videos for the American Freestyle Association.  They were real simple, and all contest footage.  In 1988, Ron Wilkerson called on me to edit the 2-Hip season video, which you can now find online as 2-Hip BHIP.  I was working at Unreel Productions by that time, the video company owned by Vision Skateboards/Vision Street Wear.  Eddie Roman got a job at a local video production company around the same time.  Meanwhile, across the U.S. in Pennsylvania, Plywood Hood Mark Eaton (we called him Lungmustard then) started making VHS videos of himself, Kevin Jones, and the rest of the Hoods.  All of these videos were pretty sketchy technically, but they had great riding.  That's what riders around the country, and around the world wanted to see.  There was no internet then, we only had magazines to learn about freestyle, and the occasional, completely over-produced BMX Plus!  or Vision video, where everyone was wearing leathers and helmets, even riding flatland. 

That was the environment when I decided to completely self-produce my own video in 1990, which, of course, was The Ultimate Weekend.  None of us considered rider-made videos a movement yet, we just wanted something that showed "real riding."  Nobody was making videos like that.  Our punk rock, D.I.Y. influence led Eddie, Mark, and I to make our own videos.  Little did we know, it was the start of a revolution, not only in BMX, but in all action sports.