The Legend of Charlie Gnarly: How BMX began...sort of

  OK, this is not exactly how BMX began.  Last winter, I was working on an ebook about my early years in BMX and freestyle.  Looking for a cool way to open the book, I listened to a few Indian "creation stories" from different tribes, and wondered how a creation story for BMX would go.  Scot Breithaupt himself told me a short version of the story of Charlie Gnarly, one weekend when I worked for him as a cameraman in 1989.  So I decided to write a mythical creation story for BMX.  this is it.  

The Legend of Charlie Gnarly

The Godfather of BMX, Scot Breithaupt, haulin' ass and flying fast in the late 1970's or early 1980's.

A long time ago (the late 1960's), in a land far, far away from most of you (Long Beach, California), a young man was racing his Schwinn Stingray on the bumpy Jeep trails in an area of oil fields.  The young guy also rode motorcycles, but it was really expensive to keep a dirt bike running, so he spent a lot of time on his bicycle, racing around on the bumpy trails.  A few homeless guys lived in the bushes in that area, and no one cared much about him tearing down the trails on his bicycle.  

One day at those trails, young Scot saw a scruffy looking guy with a full beard, on a dirt bike, watching him ride from a distance.  One of the homeless guys, sitting up against an old shack said, "Hey kid, I'll give you a brand new bike if you can catch that guy."  Young Scot didn't think the bum could buy him a bike, but maybe he could steal him one.  Scot was competitive as could be, and liked a challenge, so he took off down the Jeep trail, heading straight for the bearded guy on the motorcycle.  The motorcycle rider, not wearing a helmet, just shook his head, laughed, and let the kid get within about 50 feet, then hit the throttle.  

Scot, pedaling for all he was worth on his Stingray, hauled ass after the motorcycle.  He got close in the first turn, as the motocrosser stuck a leg out and carved the turn, sending up a big roost, showering Scot in dirt and rocks.  The mysterious bearded motocrosser played with the bicyclist, slowing down a bit, letting the kid close in, then carving a turn and hauling down one of the other trails, and accelerating.  In a few minutes, the bicyclist was completely winded.  He coasted to a stop, huffing and puffing, next to the homeless guy by the shack who had bet him.  The motorcyclist stopped 50 yards away, looking back at the kid.  The bearded motocrosser shook his head, hit the throttle, and hauled ass the other direction, riding out of sight down the trails.

Young Scot fought to catch his breath.  He was pissed off, he hated losing a bet.  But chasing the guy on the motorcycle, hauling ass on the bumpy oil field trails was the most fun he'd ever had on his bike.  The old homeless guy sitting by the shed laughed.  "Kid, you'll never catch him.  You know who that was?  That cat on the dirt bike was Charlie Gnarly.  He's the best motocross rider there ever was.  He won every race there was to win.  A few years ago, he up and quit, nobody knows why."  

Young Scot was beginning to catch his breath.  "Charlie Gnarly?"  he asked.

"Yep," the old bum said, "Kid, I'll get you the best bike you ever saw if you ever get Gnarly.  He's fast as the wind on a motorbike."  

Scot shook his head in frustration.  "I'll catch that motherfucker.  I'll get Gnarly someday."  

Scot kept going down to the oil field trails to ride his bike, and some of the younger local kids would show up, and race Scot, and jump off the bumps on the Jeep trails.  Every now and then, maybe once or twice a month, they'd all hear a motorcycle, and Charlie Gnarly would ride up, and sit and watch them, from 50 yards away or so.  The old bum, usually sitting by his shack with a bottle of wine, would yell at them, "Go get him!  Catch Charlie Gnarly!  C'mon kids, get Gnarly!"  Scot and the whole little pack would take off, hauling ass towards the old motocross rider. Charlie Gnarly would let them get close, and then take off, winding back and forth, stopping and starting, carving turns, bouncing over bumps, and keeping the the kids pedaling until they were all out of breath.  It was as if Charlie Gnarly had been born on his dirt bike, his skill amazed them, as the tried to catch him.  Then he'd send up a big roost as he turned and headed off the other direction and disappeared.  

No one knew where Charlie Gnarly lived, or when he would show up.  Scot started riding at the trails every day, and the local kids did, too.  They got faster and faster, pretending to be motocross riders, racing each other every day on their banana seat bikes.  As the Spring of 1970 rolled around, Scot decided they needed to start having official races, just like the real motocrossers did.  He organized races at the old oilfield trails, and called it the B.U.M.S. track.  About the same time, up in Malibu, an hour's drive away, some other bike riders parents' started holding races as well.  Weekly races of what they called Bicycle Motocross began to happen, and draw more and more riders on the weekends.  

Still, once and a while, during the week, Charlie Gnarly would show up at the trails, and all the bicycle riders would take off after him.  By that time, there were broken Schwinn Stingray frames and forks, and a few broken pedals and handlebars, littering the trails.  The crazier the kids got trying to get Gnarly, the more they broke their bikes.  The kids kept looking for better parts, and some of the motorcycle companies, Yamaha and Kawasaki, made bicycles that looked like motocross cycles, but they were heavy and slow, with their plastic fenders and fake gas tanks.  The kids begged, borrowed, and stole bike parts wherever they could.  The just wanted to ride, they wanted to get Gnarly.

One day, Charlie Gnarly showed up in the distance.  Like so many times before, Scot and the other bicycle motocross kids took off after him, chasing him through the trails.  Charlie took a quick left, showering most of the the pack with his roost.  But this time, young Scot Breithaupt was ready for him, Scot anticipated the Charlie's turn, stuck his leg out, and turned off the trail, and cut cross country to the trail Charlie headed down next.  As Charlie Gnarly looked over his shoulder at the pack of kids eating dust, Scot popped out of the brush and onto the trail right next to him.  Scot wasted no time, and kicked the side of Charlie's motorcycle.  Charlie fishtailed, his back tire hit a little mound, and he high-sided, and was thrown off the motorcycle.  Scot skidded to a stop, not really believing he had finally caught Charlie Gnarly. 

Charlie rolled and bounced along the ground, and the motorcycle careened off into the bushes.  Charlie Gnarly smiled.  "You finally got me kid... I had a feeling you'd do it someday.  You got fire in you, like I used to."  Scot watched as Charlie Gnarly got up, brushed some of the dust off of himself, and then went into the bushes, and picked up his motorcycle.  He looked it over, and got back on it.  Scot, very unlike himself, was kind of in shock, blown away he'd caught the champion motocrosser on his Stingray.  He had finally got Gnarly.  "Follow me, kid," Charlie said.  Charlie rode slowly down the trails, to the edge of the oil fields.  Charlie stopped, and got off his bike near an old maintenance building.  

"What're you doing?"  Scot asked.  

"Just hang on a minute," Charlie Gnarly told Scot Breithaupt.  Charlie pulled his keys out of his pocket, and unlocked a rusty padlock on the old building.  He disappeared inside, and reappeared a minute later holding two bicycle frames, frames like Scot had never seen before.  One was bright chrome, the other painted black, the tubes were all straight, not curved like Scot's Schwinn.  Charlie held the chrome one up, "This one is made of Chrome-moly steel, it's lighter, and a lot stronger than your bike."  He held the second bike up, it's down tube looked wider and flat.  "This one is 6061 aluminum, it's not quite as strong, but it's lighter, and it's still a lot stronger than your bike.  I call this design the double diamond hard tail.  If you're going to race bicycles in the dirt, this is how they should be made.  I knew you'd catch me some day, so I figured I'd design and build a  couple bike frames actually made for racing.  You'll be able to ride a lot harder, and a lot faster, on one of these."

Charlie Gnarly handed both frames to Scot Breitaupt.  "Which one do you want?"  Scot checked them both out, then replied, "I want the light one, the aluminum."  Charlie Gnarly held his hand out, and Scot handed him back the chrome frame, and kept the black one.  

Charlie went back into the building, and came out with a pair of chrome forks, with straight fat tubes, the legs weren't curved, they were much beefier than the forks Scot kept breaking. "These are tubular chrome-moly steel, they'll last you a lot longer than the ones you have.  Take these home and build yourself a bicycle MX... a BMX bike."  

"Really?" Scot asked.

"Yeah, really," Charlie Gnarly said, as he locked up the building, and got back on his motorcycle.  

"Thanks." Scot said,  one of the last times he was ever at a loss for words.  Charlie Gnarly started up his motorcycle, nodded to Scot, and rode off.  That was the last time Scot ever saw Charlie Gnarly.  

Scot went on to become one of the top BMX racers, and soon started Scot Enterprises to promote BMX racing, and his riders.   That soon turned into SE Racing, which invented the PK Ripper, the Quadangle, the Floval Flyer racing cruiser, and the OM Flyer for Scot himself.  Scot grew a full beard, just like Charlie Gnarly, and came to be known as the Old Man of BMX, which is what the OM stood for.  The fire that Charlie Gnarly saw in young Scot led to a lot of progression in BMX racing.  Scot rode hard, promoted hard, and would get gnarly every time he did.  That fire also led Scot to a lot of self-destruction at times, he liked to party hard as well.  Scot made huge leaps forward, and sometimes reverted to self-destruction.  But few people, if any, made as much of an impact on creating BMX racing and BMX bikes as Scot Breithupt.  That growth of BMX racing in the 1970's set the stage for BMX freestyle to evolve from skatepark carving in the 1970's to a full fledged sport in the mid-1980's.  SE racing sponsored Todd Anderson, Craig Grasso, Fred Blood, and Justin Bickel, and a few other freestylers along the way. 

OK, maybe that's not exactly how it happened.  That's not quite how BMX began.  But it did begin in 1970, and Scot Breithaupt was a big part of it in the early years.  

In January of 1989, Scot Breithaupt hired me to be a cameraman at the Reno Silver Dollar Nationals, for a TV show he was producing.  Scot headed up early in the week, and paid for a rental car for me to head up to Reno that Friday, taking off a little early from my job at Unreel Productions.  I wound up driving through the Sierra Nevada mountains in a blizzard, so the weekend got off to a sketchy start.  I shot video of Scot, and other racers, all weekend.  We made the long drive back down to Orange County Sunday night.  On the trip, Scot told me the legend of Charlie Gnarly, a mythical guy who young BMX riders would chase when out riding.  Every time they tried to "get Gnarly," they got a little better, a little crazier, and pushed themselves as bike riders.  After a while, the guy disappeared, but every time the BMXers got crazy on their bikes, they called it "gettin' gnarly."  I took a few liberties with the story Scot told me on that drive, but that's the nature of legends.  Welcome to my story in the world of BMX...

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Old days versus new days: Brant Moore talks to Bill Nitschke and Dave Voelker at Swampfest

Bill Nitschke was one of the eternally underrated Midwest rippers in the 1980's, and he invented the Whopper (bunnyhop tailwhip) and a bunch of other tricks.  Dave Voelker was a legendary GT vert, street, and dirt rider always asking Can I go bigger?  This is a really cool conversation about the early days versus today in BMX freestyle. 

I do most of my writing on Substack these days, a platform designed specifically for writers.  Check it out:

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A blog I tried out a while back...

The Spot Finder 

Bike memes #4

Never forget...

It's my opinion that bicycle trick riding began about ten minutes after the first guy learned to ride the first bike, when a cute girl walked by.  Just an educated guess.  This is a circus rider from about 1890, or so.  The more things change, the more they stay the same.

This was about 100 to 110 years ago.  Look at the size and shape of this loop.  Then think about the fact that the guy was riding a mild steel bike, possibly a fixed gear (but probably not).  There are a few photos of this loop, some are of the guy practicing (note the crash pads), and a couple photos are of this loop set up for a circus or demo.  Seriously, this is Mat Hoffman level crazy for its day. 

Ow.  Yeah, it's completely impossible, too.  But just... OW.

This photo was in the archives all by itself.  I have no idea what the hell he was trying to land on.  But  a huge crowd showed up to watch him figure out that kink was a killer. 

This photo just makes me laugh.  We all know that feeling.  The stoke is real. 

This chimp doesn't seem particularly happy about being dressed up and posed on a bike.  That's where this caption came from.  

As hard as it may be to believe, I was actually factory sponsored for about a year.  Raleigh was a huge company, BMX was a tiny thing to them, but some marketing person came up with this odd, and totally cool, retro ad, while I rode for them.  The two man team of David Morris and me didn't do much as a team, except one photo shoot for Super BMX, and demos at the annual bike trade show in Long Beach.  David did shows up in the northwest, I believe.  I actually did really like the bike, seriously.  It was a double top tube, Torker/Haro freestyler design, with Hutch Trick Star geometry.  But to hit the mass market price point, the down tube was mild steel.  And so were the first handlebars, which I found out the hard way when a pair snapped mid-air, during a bunnyhop.  If the bike had been 100% chromoly, it would have been one of my favorite bikes of the 80's.  But I think I snapped 7 of them in a year. 
 

I think this photo is actually dated 1905 or 1910.  Think about this, it took 100 years AND Morgan Wade, to do this trick again.  This guy was fucking nuts.  Also notice the flat spot in the rim.  

I forgot this one.  OK, now all of my current BMX memes are on this blog.  There are a 3 or 4 memes from my own photos about 2 or 3 posts before these vintage meme posts.  Enjoy... share as needed. 

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My bike memes #3

When I first learned to ride a bike, which was at age 6, in 1972, this was my dream bike.  My dad built my first rat bike out of a pile of parts in our garage.  I had five different bikes I wanted him to build up back then, but the super long chopper was the ultimate ride I could imagine.  Easy Rider had just come out, and harcore bikers riding choppers were a prety frequent sight back then.  I didn't even hear of BMX for five more years, as a kid in small town Ohio. 

First, be glad you don't have to wear a marching band uniform to jump a 20-25 foot gap.  Second, be REALLY glad you live in the age of Chromoly, this guy was jumping on a mild steel frame.  Now how crazy does this jump look?

The guitarist we all know as Slash today was actually a gifted BMX rider, jumper, and racer in the mid-1970's, when he was about 13-14.  Then he met skateboarder Steven Adler, who showed him a guitar...

I made this one for all the BMX collectors out there.

Yep, ladies were pulling tricks waaaaaaay before Krys Dauchy came along. 

I'm not sure why this monstrosity was built.  But I love the fact that this guy is about to attack something wearing a black derby. 

Self-explanatory.

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BMX memes #2

This kind of bike is something I've seen being used on TV/movie studio lots a lot.  Tech guys will throw a small light, props, tools, or other equipment, in the big, sturdy basket, and deliver it to one of the sound stages.  Obviously, there are other uses for the big baskets, as well.  

I actually did this a few times while working on the set of American Gladiators in the early 1990's.  I had my BMX bike (an S&M Dirtbike at the time), that I rode to work a couple of years, and a beach cruiser one other year.  Once in a while, one of the women on set would ask to hop on my handlebars to ride over to the lunch stage, which always seemed to be all the way across the lot.  I remember giving Ice, the Gladiator a ride once or twice, and a few other women, as well. 

The bike shop in this photos is Orville and Wilbur Wright's shop in Dayton, Ohio, around 1900-1910.  I made this meme because so many people see BMXers (or skaters, snowboarders, etc.), as loser "adrenaline junkies," too lazy to work, or not very smart.  I just wanted to remind people never to underestimate a couple of bike riders.  The Wright's not only tuned bikes, they invented aviation.  For real.

This seems like a whole lot of set up for a not-so-exciting circus act, but it's also probably in the 1900's-1920's, when no one had seen anything like this.  And after watching the highlights of the Florideah Swampfest, which happened last weekend, building crazy ass shit and then trying to ride it isn't all that different today.  It's probably just about as dangerous, too.

The whole "43" thing in BMX started as an inside joke, with the Curb Dogs in San Francisco, in 1986.  Like the "420" story in pot culture, it slowly radiated out, and now 43 is kind of like the "lucky number" for all of BMX.  This is unit 43 at my old storage unit complex.  I just lost my unit, I couldn't keep the payments up, and it was #143.  Really. 

I wasn't sure what kind of caption to put on this freakin' crazy photo.  This is what popped in my head.  What I keep wondering is if this guy killed a leopard while out in the bush on a bike, what the hell is hiding in that tall grass behind him? 

I wrote my "Become" poem in about 1992... during the P.O.W. House days.  This one I drew on picture of northwest rider Monte Hill tweaking a turndown. 

Todd Lyons, a one time roommate of mine, and now the media savy brand manager for SE Bikes, is always getting kids giving him shit because the SE cruisers sell out of bike shops too fast.  I had TL in mind when I made this one recently.  

 I do most of my writing on Substack these days, a platform designed specifically for writers.  Check it out:

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Another blog idea I tried a while back...

The Spot Finder     

 

My BMX memes #1

That top drawing, and the upside down bail below, are ones I drew in my #sharpiescribblestyle, back in 2016, I think.  The one handled tabletop is Jason Davies, and he did actually give my a thumbs up to draw that photo of him, quite a while before he passed away, in May of this year.  Ride In Peace, Jason. It's a bit cut off, the quote reads, "Bike: a four letter word, that when used properly, relieves the stress that leads to the use of other four letter words."

 

 In 2019, shortly after returning to California, I was working to promote a BMX website that didn't work out.  During that time, I started digging through thousands of public domain, vintage photos online, looking for bike related pics.  I found quite a few, including several that no one had seen before, at least in modern, BMX times.  So I started making memes of them.  "You complete me," above, is one of the many.  Most of the vintage photos in these memes date from the 1890's to the 1920's. 

When I lived in the P.O.W. House back in 1992-1993, we had a motto about life that we called "The 3 B's."  That stood for "Beer, Bikes, and Bitches."  Typical 20-something guys' priorities.  It later got extended to "The 5 B's, 'Bikes, Boards, Beer, Bongs, and Bitches.'"  Obviously, from the photo above, the bikes and babes theme goes way back, long before our day.

1980's freestyle legend Craig Grasso was lost to the Dark Side for quite a while, and none of us had heard from him in years at one point.  I made this meme back then.  He has since reappeared on the scene, and is living and doing art in Las Vegas these days. 

The is the first meme I made, trying to figure out how to work PicMonkey, back in 2019, I think.  I nabbed the photo of RonWilkerson blasting on the Woodward West Mega ramp. 

Did you have a grandpa that used to say things like, "Back when I was a kid we ate road kill 'possum for Sunday dinner, and we were THANKFUL.!"  Well, I did.  OK, not the road kill 'possum part, but he did actually tell me he walked 4 miles to school barefoot once or twice.  And that I wasn't thankful for anything.  That grandpa idea was in my head when I drew this one.  The photo is one of Dennis McCoy's worst bail photos, which I borrowed.

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Animals: The video that fat guy made- My "lost video"

Cory Nastazio, big Superman at Sheep Hills, sometime around 98-2001.  Still from the Animals video. 

Do you remember that video I made that had Mat Hoffman, Dave Mirra, Jay Miron, Cory Nastazio, Ryan Nyquist, Jason Davies, Keith Treanor, Eddie Fiola, Brian Blyther Mike Dominguez, Shaun Butler, Brian Foster, Chris Duncan, Bill Nitschke, Chase Gouin, Perry Mervar, and a whole bunch of other top Mid School riders in it?  No.  Neither do they.  Almost nobody actually saw this video when I put it out.  I think I sold 8 VHS copies (most with hand drawn aliens on the box), and gave away 4 or 5 copies.  This is the story of my 11th BMX video, Animals, "the lost video."  It's not on YouTube as I write this, but you can watch it on BMX Movie Database here:

Animals:  The video that fat guy made (2002) 

 I got my start producing videos while working at the AFA in 1987.  Bob Morales, head of the AFA, walked in the office one day and asked me, "Steve, do you want to make a TV commercial for the Austin contest?  I can get local commercial spots on MTV there for $25 each."  Since I had absolutely no freakin' idea how to produce a TV commercial, but I worked for Bob, I said, "Uh... sure."  That was my start in video production work. 

Unreel Productions, the Vision Skateboard/Vision Street Wear video company, sent a cameraman to every contest, since VSW clothes sponsored the AFA Masters series.  Bob said, "Call Don Hoffman at Unreel, he'll tell you what to do."  So I called over there.  About three days later, I had produced a pretty lame, 30 second, BMX freestyle TV commercial, thanks primarily to Dave Alvarez, the Vision video editor.  He walked me through the process, and did the editing. The commercial played a few times on MTV in Austin, for a couple nights before, advertising the contest.  Back then, BMX freestyle almost never got on TV, and the few guys that saw it were stoked at the little commercial.

Sea otter grooming itself, outside the Monterey Bay Aquarium, while I was on a solo road trip up to see the redwoods, the Spring of 2000.  You can't have a  video called "Animals" without some actual animals in it, can you?

 

Soon after, I produced six AFA contest videos, one for flatland, one for ramps, for the Oregon, Ohio, and Texas AFA Masters contests that year.  Here are Oregon Pro Flatland, and Oregon Pro Ramps.  That led to a job offer from Unreel Productions in December 1987, where I soon became "The Dub Guy," making copies of different videos for people throughout the Vision, Sims, Schmitt Stix, and Vision Street Wear empire.  Basically, I was a production assistant, copying tapes most of the time, and running errands now and then.

I must admit, I'm a complete retard when it comes to operating any kind of electrical machinery, from today's cell phones to 1980's video equipment.  The whole idea of working in a little room and getting 10 different video machines to talk to each other at the right times totally intimidated me.  But I learned how those things worked, bit by bit, and learned the basics of video production over the next 2 1/2 years.  

During that time, in the spring of 1989, Ron Wilkerson asked me to edit the first 2-hip contest season video, for the 1988 season, so that turned into the 7th BMX video I produced, and the first one I actually edited together myself, on a S-VHS system.  It's now known as 2-hip BHIP, and includes the first Santee Meet the Street contest, as well as the King of Vert comps from 1988.  That job earned me $500, which is the most I ever made to produce a BMX video.

Midget Cory Walters, stretched no footed can-can at Sheep Hills, around 2000.

During the late 1980's, besides BMX freestyle surging into its first wave of popularity, something else was happening.  Consumer video equipment was rising in video quality, and the price was coming down.  It was the beginning of what we call "prosumer" video equipment these days.  Suddenly making videos was possible for average people.  In the mid 80's, a pro caliber Sony Betacam (not Betamax) video camera cost $50,000, and Unreel's broadcast quality editing bay cost $500,000 to build.  But Super VHS, or S-VHS, and Video 8 became decent alternatives, with cameras around $1,000 or so.  

You could hook up your VHS VCR to your S-VHS camera, and "edit" videos, Play-Pause-Record style.  It was sketchy, and each generation of copies got a bit more blurry.  But it was halfway decent.  That's when guys like Eddie Roman and Mark Eaton started making their videos.  Eddie made Aggroman in 1989, and Mark made the first Dorkin' in York in 1988 or 1989, I believe.  On the East Coast, Jeremy Alder, inventor of the barspin air, along with his brother, made a video around the same time.  None of us really knew what the fuck we were doing, which is what made it great.  We just started making the videos we wanted to watch.  

I was working at Unreel Productions/Vision, and our producers were making videos like Snow Shredders, Psycho Skate, Skate Escape, Mondo Vision, and Freestylin' Fanatics.  Oh... and we did this video with this one band, too.  That was pretty cool.  Unreel also produced the first syndicated Action Sports TV series, called Sports on the Edge, in 1989, six years before ESPN put on the X-Games.  The Unreel videos were high quality, but the riding and skating was always a bit old, never the latest tricks, and they were kind of dorky videos, I thought.  So in 1990, I started working on my own video project, totally self-produced.  That became The Ultimate Weekend, my 8th BMX video.  Not epic, but a pretty decent video for 1990.  The super hungry New Jersey transplant to Huntington Beach, Keith Treanor, became the star of that video.

Keith Treanor, carving the steps at the Nude Bowl, 1991.  The site of an abandoned nudist colony form the 1970's, the Nude Bowl has been a favorite of skaters and BMXers since the 1980's.  It's way the heck out in the desert, near Desert Hot Springs.  Alex Leech, from England, also carved the steps that day, in the opposite direction.

Several months after I made The Ultimate Weekend, Chris Moeller found me, working up in The Valley, and said he had an idea to do a video for his bike company, S&M Bikes.  At the time, S&M was being run out of the garage of his one bedroom apartment on Alabama Street in Huntington Beach.  We went super low budget for Feel My Leg Muscles, I'm a Racer, and had a lot more fun, and he brought the punk rock, DIY vibe into that video.  I ended up getting fired from my video duplication job during the making of that video, and became Chris' roommate, where a guy named Shaggy was already sleeping on the couch.   

A couple of years later, in 1993, we upped the ante with S&M's second video, 44 Something, which became one of the bestselling BMX videos of the 1990's.  S&M was growing like crazy then, during the early 1990's, "ramen days" of the BMX industry. That's when the riders took over the industry, with S&M, FBM, Hoffman, Standard, Eastern, and several other rider-owned companies starting.  

Over a decade later, 44 Something was listed in BMX Plus' Top Ten BMX videos of the 90's list in 2001, I think.  That was my 10th BMX video I produced, and/or edited.  I also edited three low budget skate and snowboard videos in early 1991-92 for a video distributor called NSI.

Forget Burger King, Bill Nitschke popping the first Whopper (bunnyhop tailwhip) ever, at The Spot in Redondo Beach, 1991, a legendary flatland sessioning area for decades. 

 

I was living really low budget in the early 90's, at the P.O.W. House a couple of times, and roommates with Chris Moeller and some other the rest of the time.  I was moving furniture or working at porn store for most of the year, and then working on TV show stage crews, like American Gladiators, in the summers.  If you freeze that clip at :24, that's me in the background, on the left.  I also worked on Knights and Warriors, and Blade Warriors.  Yeah, there's a theme there, many of the crew people were the same on those shows, and those were my TV world contacts then.  

 

The whole time I wanted to make "my next BMX video," a really cool video, taking what I did right on The Ultimate Weekend (TUW), and what I'd learned from making the S&M videos, and putting it all together.  But I was still super shy back then, and didn't have the personality to actually get a business going.  I just couldn't sell stuff, and selling stuff is what businesses do.  But I took my S-VHS camera, that I bought in 1990 to make TUW, to different contests, and shot video when I wasn't riding.  So I started collecting footage, mostly contest footage. 

Chris Duncan with a one handed tailwhip at at Core Tour contest, in Huntington Beach, about 2000. 

 

 One thing that bugged me about 44 Something was that a lot of the footage was shot by the riders, and while really good riders, they sucked at being cameramen back then.  Shots were shaky, didn't have any pre-roll (footage before the trick you need for editing on tape), or were shot from sketchy angles, they were too dark, or turned away during the trick.  

 

At Unreel, I'd become a pretty good cameraman, and I wanted to make a well shot, well edited, fast paced video, with the newest tricks, good street riding and dirt jumping, some flatland, and some pool or vert riding if I could find places to shoot it.  There were no skateparks or vert ramps in SoCal for most of the early 1990's, until Moreno Valley opened up.  Then there was the Nude Bowl, way out in the desert, at an abandoned nudist colony.  There were a few guys, Mike Tokemoto in particular, riding empty backyard pools with skaters, but not many.  

 

In 1995, I burned out on TV production work.  I was tired of working on other people's stupid ideas, I wanted to work on my own stupid ideas.  I didn't figure out how the "Hollywood" TV/film world worked.  The way to do it is to work on the crew of good paying shows, produced by other people, make good money, and save a bunch of it up.  Then you take some of that money, take some time off, and do your own project.  I hadn't figured that out.  

 

Around the same time, in the summer of 1995, Chris Moeller and I, who had been roommates for most of the previous 4 years, had an argument about something stupid.  I moved out, and rented a room from a woman who lived in some apartments near Beach Boulevard.  I worked full time as a furniture mover, and rode my bike nearly every day through the late 1990's.  But I was riding solo, just for myself, and pretty much lost touch with most of the BMX world.  In late 1996 or early 1997, I moved to a cool apartment, three blocks from the beach, in downtown Huntington Beach.  I was about 4 blocks from the Blues Brothers Wall, and the 18th Street jump.  It was a fun scene there at the time, mostly young people in their 20's or early 30's, and all working class types.  Construction workers, bartenders, servers, a few office workers, and  some strippers.  Damian Sanders and his crew of snowboarders and motocross riders lived two blocks away.  I think Seth Enslow lived in one of those houses for a while.  And it was Huntington Beach, surf city, so almost everyone surfed.  The X-Games had begun, action sports were growing fast, and Huntington Beach was a worldwide hub for those sports.

Emmett Crooms sliding the ultra gnarly rail from the vert deck to the Black Bowl area at the Van's Skatepark, The Block at Orange.  To the best of my knowledge, Emmett is the only one to ever slide this rail.  One shot, and he nailed it.  If he missed, it was headfirst into a 10 foot deep bowl.  Huevos.

 

During that time working as a furniture mover, I bought a new video camera, a Digital 8 one.  It was like Hi8, but actually a digital signal, so it had better video quality.  To break in my new camera, and figure out how to use it, I made a trip down to the San Diego Zoo.  I wandered around all day, shooting footage of animals.  Much like BMXers and skaters, animals don't do what you want them to, and you're never exactly sure what they'll do next.  I got a bunch of cool animal footage on that trip, including the shot of the gorilla picking his nose and eating his boogers.  If that isn't proof of evolution, I'm not sure what is.  I also started going back down to Sheep Hills every once in a while, and shooting footage of whoever was riding.  So I started building up more footage of both animals and BMX riding.

 

After moving more than 900 houses and apartments worth of furniture in 2  1/2 years, I decided that TV production wasn't such a bad job after all.  I called around the few contacts I had, and wound up working at a Hollywood lighting company called ELS, like a roadie, but in the warehouse, up in North Hollywood.  I really liked that job, but after about a year, a minor injury that got worse made me quit.  I couldn't manage to get the minor surgery I needed, and started driving a taxi.  I just couldn't do all the heavy lifting anymore.

 

Financially, things went downhill from there.   After living in my taxi for a few months, while I learned the business, I got taxi driving figured out, and I was able to rent a room inland in H.B., from a crazy old guy who did construction work.  That was in the Spring of 2000.  I found a wedding video guy selling his old Hi8 edit deck, two VCR's in one, and bought that for $750.  So suddenly I could start editing videos at home.  I started playing around with the edit deck, and had the urge to start making BMX videos again.  I had been riding daily all through the late 90's, but was still out of touch with the BMX industry, and most riders.  

 

Dave Mirra, one handed toothpick grind over the spine... at speed.  I'm pretty sure this is not physically possible.  Anaheim B3 contest, 2000?  

 

During that same time period, I scammed a press pass to the 1999 X-Games, as a writer for Dig Magazine in the U.K., and shot more footage during practice sessions.  I ran into Maurice Meyer up there, and we got talking by the BMX vert ramp.  While talking, we decided to walk over and check out the skateboard best trick jam.  That's when Tony Hawk pulled his first 900.  I had my camera in my hand... with a dead battery, standing 20 feet from the side of the ramp.  Actually, it was kind of cool to just watch that one happen.  Once Tony started getting close, we all sensed it could be an epic moment in skateboarding, which it was.  

 

So I got a bunch of footage from the X-Games, and from an X-Games qualifier contest in Anaheim.  I also started going to the Core Tour contests, and shooting footage of dirt jumping.  Basically, I was a Brotographer or lurktographer at that point, however you want to look at it.  I also went to ride the Combi Pool at the Van's Skatepark, after it opened, and got a bit of footage there, too, of the original vert legends, Fiola, Blyther, and Dominguez. 

In the Spring of 2000, I went to a book signing by Julia Butterfly Hill, the activist that lived up in a Redwood tree for over 2 years, so they wouldn't cut it down.  Much to my surprise, former BMX industry guy, Frank Scura, was there, he was a friend of Julia's.  So he introduced me to her, and I bought her book.  After reading it, I dropped my taxi off one day, and took a week and drove up the California coast in my Datsun 280ZX, to see the redwoods.  It was one of the coolest weeks of my life.  I saw young elephant seals near San Simeon, and went to the Monterey Bay aquarium on the way up where I shot more footage.  I also saw a herd of elk near the redwoods, so my collection of animal footage kept growing.  

Chase Gouin with a stalled Jerry, or peg decade, at The Spot in Redondo Beach, 1991.

 

By that time, in early 2001, I had maybe 30 hours of video footage, from 1990-1993, and from 1997 to 2001.  I wanted to make a really cool, hardcore, street, dirt, park video, with some good flatland.  But I didn't really know any of the up and coming riders of that era, except the Sheep Hills guys.  So I decided to make a kind of low budget "demo tape," using some of the Sheep Hills and contest footage I had accumulated.  I figured I'd make a fast paced, low budget, pretty cool video, and sell 100 or so copies, to make a little bit of money.  I'd also show it to up-and-coming riders, to give them an idea of the kid of video I wanted to make.  Then I would make a really cool follow-up video, with hardcore street riders, great dirt jumping, and some park and flatland footage, and get back into the BMX world that way.  

I really liked my weird collection of animal footage, too, and wanted to do something with it.  I sold 5 or 6 shots to the Planet's Funniest Animals TV show, and made $100 per shot plus a T-shirt.  But I wanted to add it to my BMX video.  I knew a bunch of people would think it was stupid, but I didn't really care.  In the meantime, I'd lost my driver license, to some mix-up at the DMV, so I had to quit taxi driving.  I was struggling and homeless at times, making hardly any money.  Sometime in 2001, I sat down for about a week, and edited the Animals video.  I used a bit of my old footage, Keith Treanor and Alex Leech form 1991, as well as an epic flatland session I taped of Bill Nitschke, Perry Mervar, and Chase Gouin at The Spot, in Redondo Beach, also in 1991.  Those are the flatland shots in between sections.  

 

This was the "demo tape," which I planned to use to get some good young riders stoked to be in the follow-up video, and that follow-up video never happened, because I was struggling too much, trying to just make a living, as the taxi industry went downhill in the early 2000's.

Mat Hoffman with a no handed, double front peg grab, at serious height.  1999 X-Games practice session. 

I scraped up money, had a few copies of Animals made, and sold 3 or 4 myself, and sold a few to A-1 Bike Shop in Westminster, close to the old P.O.W. House.  I also gave a few copies away to some riders I met at the Van's Skatepark.  I didn't have money to really promote the video, or to get a legit business started, so that was pretty much it.  I wound up a homeless taxi driver again in 2003, and all my footage sat in my storage unit, along with the all my master tapes, including the Animals master.  When I wound up going to stay with my family in North Carolina in 2008, I lost my storage unit to an auction, and lost everything from my BMX and my creative career, except my Haro brake lever key chain.  I lost all my magazines, including a complete set of FREESTYLIN' magazine, all my DVD's, and all my own footage and master tapes.  I started blogging soon after that, since all I had left was memories at that point.  I was planning to make a BMX documentary some day, with all my footage.  But after losing it all, that idea we gone.

Until about a month ago, I thought the Animals video was lost.  Then Alex Leech had a post on Facebook, with some footage from it.  He mentioned that Animals was on BMX Movie Database.  I was like, "Holy shit!  Really?  I thought all this footage was lost for good."  So I was stoked to see they had somehow come across a copy, and added to their website.  Huge thanks for that BMX Movie Database people!  So that's the story of my 11th BMX video, Animals.

Oh yeah, the tag line.  One time in the 1990's, Pete Augustin told Keith Treanor, "The first time I saw you was in the video that fat guy made," meaning The Ultimate Weekend.  I wasn't really fat then, but I wasn't skinny either.  I laughed when Keith told me that, so that was an inside joke, so I added it to the labels.    

We lost three great riders since this video came out.  Ride In Peace Dave Mirra, Colin Winkleman, and Jason Davies. 

Me (Steve Emig), front flip over the handlebars at speed, into high jump crash pads.  I learned to do this while working on the American Gladiators set in 1993.  I used to it at lunch, since we had big dollies with crash pads parked all over outside our stage. This shot was in 2001, I think, at Huntington Beach High School.  I completely cleared the first ten foot crash pad, with my shoulders landing on the beginning of the second pad.  When I was in better shape, and did this on the American Gladiators set in '92-95, I could fly about 16-17 feet off the bike, and would do a full flip, landing on my knees in the pads.

I do most of my writing on Substack these days, a platform designed specifically for writers.  Check it out:

Steve Emig The White Bear's Substack