Chris Miller at Pipeline

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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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.