Feel My Finger Muscles, I'm Editing Drunk

English S&M rider Alex Leech came over on holiday with skater friend Rob Lawrence, which always made for entertaining sessions while we were making Feel My Leg Muscles, I'm a Racer.

When I produced the first six AFA videos in 1987, I sat in a half-million-dollar edit bay that looked like the bridge of the Starship Enterprise.  I called out time code numbers from a really comfy rolling chair while video wizard Dave Alvarez edited the videos.  When I edited the '88 2-Hip video, I sat at a big table in my bedroom with two pro level S-VHS decks and an RM-440 edit controller.  When I edited The Ultimate Weekend in 1990, I rented an edit system in the back of a video store for $25 an hour.  Then, in 1991, when I edited the S&M video, Feel My Leg Muscles, I'm a Racer, I sat on the living room floor of Chris Moeller's tiny,eight foot wide apartment.  I hooked my S-VHS camera to an S-VHS VCR that Chris bought, and looked at it on his tiny TV.  Next to me sat a 40 of beer, probably Mickey's.

Normally editing is a really mentally intense job, where you go into a room, shut out all distractions, and focus on how to best put the pictures and sounds together.  When editing "Leg Muscles," bouncing around the room were Chris Moeller, Jason Pro, a girl we called Sexecutioner Lisa and Lisa's kitten named Satan.  There was also a set of BDSM nipple clamps which we all took turns wearing for some reason.  Needless to say, concentrating was hard, especially while wearing the nipple clamps.  I edited the sketchy way, hitting play-record-pause on the VCR, then play on my camera, then pause on the VCR, and hoping the video edited somewhere near where I wanted it to.  Meanwhile, I'd look up and see drunken foolishness, Satan the kitten was drinking Kahlua, and people asking me how it was going every five minutes.  So that's pretty much why the editing sucked.  I remember that after John Paul Rogers' "section," I fell backward, drunk off my ass, and gave up for the night.  Looking at it the next, it's a good thing I did.

So... how did we come up with the lame-ass (and now classic somehow) title, Feel My Leg Muscles, I'm a Racer.  The day before I edited it, Chris was wondering what he should call the video.  I had no idea.  So I said, "As we get drunk tonight, let's just write down every idea anyone has, and in the morning, when we're all hungover, we'll see which sounds the best."  Chris was down for the idea.  Every so often someone would have an idea, and they'd yell it out and write it down on a paper on the counter.  We probably had 20 or 30 prospective titles to ponder the next morning.  If you've seen the actual video, you know there are a whole bunch of titles on cards before "Leg Muscles."  "I dig girls in low top Converse was one."  "40 ounces to freedom" was another, I think.  But the winner was the line Dave Clymer used to pick up his then-girlfriend, "Feel My Leg Muscles, I'm a Racer."  Yeah, that actually worked on her.

We looked over all the titles, and picked Leg Muscles.  But Chris wanted to mess with everyone and have a whole bunch of titles.  So he found some index cards and wrote down all the titles, as well as the name titles.  Then he sat on a lawn chair outside the front door, and I shot the video of all the titles as he flipped the cards in his lap.  I think that happened the weekend before the editing happened.  Maybe.  I was pretty drunk both times, so I'm not sure.

I've never edited another video in such weird conditions.  It seems hilarious now that riders and skaters spend six months or a year to get their tricks, and then companies spend thousands and thousands of dollars on editing.  It was a whole different world back when we were making this whole bike video thing up.

Dave Clymer's section from Leg Muscles

Mission Trails K.O.D. section from Leg Muscles

Jimmy Levan's section from Leg Muscles

Can somebody tell me why Perry Mervar's section isn't on YouTube?  C'mon, make it happen.

 

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.

How the S&M Bikes video "Feel my leg muscles" came to be

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.

I've got four new blogs I'm doing now:

The Big Freakin' Transition- about the future and the economy

Crazy California 43- This blog's about weird, cool, odd, and historic locations in California.

Full Circle- about writing and the writer's life

And a fiction blog:

Stench: Homeless Superhero