My Best Halloween taxi driver story

It was Halloween, I can't remember what year, maybe 2004.  I rolled down Main Street in Huntington Beach, California, in my taxi about 10:00 pm.  A guy dressed as a pimp, who looked a lot like the guy in the clip above, flagged me down.  He'd had enough partying, and was heading home to Costa Mesa to chill out.  I zig-zagged out of downtown HB, and headed up Adams Street.  The pimp and I were talking, and I was almost to Brookhurst when a small, jacked up, pick-up truck shot out of the parking lot across the intersection.  The truck hit the median awkwardly, bounced over it, and swerved into the lanes about 100 yards in front of us.  It hit the opposite curb, tilted, then rolled over onto its roof on the sidewalk.  It wobbled, then rolled back onto its right side.  I hit the brakes as we approached.  I glanced back at the pimp, both of us freaked out by what we just saw.  "I gotta stop man," I said, "this is serious."  The pimp just nodded.  I pulled over to the curb right by the wrecked truck, hit my flashers, and got out and walked towards the truck.  The pimp got out and walked slowly behind me. 

The accident was so brutal, I seriously thought there might be body parts hanging out of the truck.  Nobody was visible.  I stopped a few feet from it, and heard something rattle inside.  Suddenly a skinny young guy slipped out the partially squashed passenger's side window, right by the ground.  My jaw dropped in amazement.  The guy jumped to his feet, and said, "Help me roll my truck back over, I gotta get out of here.  I'm under age and there's a 12 pack in the cab."  I looked over to the pimp, who'd walked up beside me.  Befuddled is the word that comes to mind.  We looked at each other, wondering if all that had really just happened.  I was sober, and I couldn't believe it.  I can't imagine what the drunk pimp was thinking.

I looked at the kid who'd slipped out of the truck.  "Uh...dude... you're not driving away from this one."  A lady walking across the street was already on her phone.  The pimp just stood there bewildered.  I talked to the driver of the truck for the few minutes, but I don't remember what was said. 

The police showed up in  a few minutes, and the pimp and I walked silently to the cab, got in, I turned the meter back on, and I took the pimp home.  Neither of us could really believe that crazy scenario just happened right in front of us.  It happened on Halloween night, which is already a crazy and fun night to be a taxi driver. 

Halloween is a fun holiday to dress up, party, and let loose.  Have fun tonight, whether you're taking the kids out trick or treating, or partying with friends.  If you're drinking, take a taxi or hit up Uber for a safe ride home.  Be the smart pimp, not the stupid young drunk in the pick-up truck. 




We've had a terrible tragedy in New York City today, where bike riders, like me and most of you reading this, were targeted.  My deepest thoughts, prayers, and best wishes to the families of those killed, and to the injured and everyone involved. 

Why I love drawing musicians

Music is one of the greatest forms of magic in the universe.  What else can bring people together from all kinds of backgrounds, all kinds of belief systems, and get them to tune into a single moment?  OK, the recent total eclipse, did that.  But not much else can.  Just like during that surreal moment when day turned to night and even the animals were quiet, music has the incredible power to overcome the things that push us apart.  A great live concert photo captures a faction of a second of that energy when a musician loses themselves in the bliss of creating magic in the moment through their music.

 I love the challenge of taking one of those photos and adding my own flair to it.  I don't want to just make a cool picture of the artist, I want you to remember that feeling of how great music can make you feel.  Then I add lists of songs or lyrics in the background.  I do that so that once someone gets past that initial thought of that musician playing live, they can be reminded of the songs or words that have really touched them at some point in their lives.  Even more, I want people to find songs or lyrics in the back of my drawings that they're not familiar with.  I want them to go look up those songs, and explore the work of that musician, that purveyor of magic moments, even more.

That's why I love doing drawings of musicians.  My Sharpie drawing of Prince above will be at my show at Earshot Music in Winston-Salem, (NC) which opens this coming Saturday, November 4th, from 7:00 to 9:00 pm.  Come by and check it out if you're local.  Check out my work on this blog or Facebook if you're not.  I'd be stoked to do a drawing of your favorite musician... as long as they don't suck.  Ultimately, I want to take my own photos to draw my Sharpie pictures of.

In the course of doing this Prince tribute drawing, I dove into his music, and discovered tons of stuff I'd never heard before.  This clip below is one of my favorites now.  Just let the guitar do the talking for you...

Time to think... in jail

Two weeks ago tomorrow, I managed to get myself arrested for the first time ever in my 51 years on Earth.  I landed in a holding cell once, because of a traffic warrant back in about 1989.  But that's it.  I was homeless when I was arrested, and got into the kind of trouble homeless people tend to get into.  I won't go into any details about that, since the court date is coming up.

I was basically deaf in my left ear due to the half a bug stuck in it that I wrote about in the last post.  So I had a hard time understanding some of the questions I was asked.  When I was offered a phone call, I blanked out, and didn't call anyone.  I wound up spending three days in county jail.

That gave me a lot of time to think about my artwork and writing.  I'm making progress with my artwork, and I'm really stoked on that.  I really want to get a camera so I can start shooting my own photos to make drawings of. 

But my writing and blogging have been bouncing around all over the place.  I'm an amateur futurist at heart, I read big books most people don't read, and listen to a lot of online lectures most people don't listen to.  That gives me a better idea of some of the big problems lurking in our future. 

I'm also a guy who likes to brainstorm ideas and possible solutions for problems we'll have to deal with in the future.  So I've written a bunch of blog posts about things that people in this area could do that I think would help build the art, music, and other creative scenes, and create more jobs.  I use this area as an example of the smaller cities and towns around the country that don't have huge tech companies drawing money and talent into their region. 

But I realized that the people actually running things around here don't want to hear my ideas.  I don't have a PhD in economic development.  I've never taken a single college course.  And, I was homeless all summer, and for several of the last 15 years, even though I was working most of that time.  Nobody in a position of power really wants a homeless guy publishing ideas about the city or town they're running. 

So I've decided to stop writing about this specific area as an example of both good and bad things happening in our world today.  I'm going to focus more on the ideas themselves, and getting my ideas out to the people who are more likely to be open to those ideas. 

As Americans, we have a lot of big challenges to deal with in the coming years.  In addition to issues like climate change, a slow growing economy, and social issues like crime and the growing opioid epidemic, we have the "retail apocalypse" wiping out hundreds of thousands of jobs.  We have 400 malls expected to close in the next few years, along with the 5,000 + stores closed this year alone.  Our country has a recession about once a decade, and it's been 9 years since the Great Recession.  We have major fractures in BOTH major political parties, and yet another "get nothing done" Congress.  We also have a serious study projecting that 47% of all jobs could be taken over by technology in the next 20 years.  The top tech people are really freaked out about that issue, but few others think about it. 

There are a ton of big issues looming, and happening right now.  These are some of the ones I'm thinking about and looking for solutions to.  So I'm going to keep writing about these topics, along with old school BMX, skateboarding, and other stuff I'm interested in.  But I'm not going to talk about the area I now live in, and how it stacks up against this region or that region.  I'll look at these issues as things that are happening many places, and write about ideas any of these areas could think about to deal with future issues as they arise. 

Bug in the ear saga: Day 36

This isn't my ear, but the beetle in this video is very similar in size and type of what crawled into my ear 36 days ago.  This beetle wasn't too hard to get out, mine was.

Over five weeks ago, I went to the hospital emergency department and told them a bug had crawled into my ear in the night before.  It was a five hour visit, the doctor got called away to more urgent calls, which is understandable.  He used a big plastic tube with a beveled edge to try and get the bug out.  It was dead.  When the thing crawled into my ear, and I realized it didn't plan on coming out, I poured some peroxide in my ear.  The thing went berserk, and it felt like I had a tiny Tasmanian devil like the cartoon one) in there.  The little guy (or gal) got its little legs going, bounced around, then tried to dig into my ear drum.  I grabbed a bottle of water, and filled my ear up two or three times, and the little bugger finally stopped moving.

So the doctor, five weeks ago, tried to flush and core it out, and managed to scrape or gouge the inside of my ear canal in the process.  I left thinking the bug was gone, and the prescription for antibiotics would take care of the infection.  After a few days, my ear canal felt totally inflamed and sore, so I went back.  While the antibiotics were working on the main infection, the scrape inside my ear canal got a second, bacterial infection.  It's called Swimmer's Ear, which is a horrible name, since it feels nothing like just having a bit of water in your ear, as the name implies.  They gave me some ear drops, and that started working on the ear canal infection.

This whole time, I was about 90% deaf in my left ear, which is a drag, as you would imagine.  I took the full course of antibiotics, and that took care if the infection in my head.  I kept using the ear drops for several more days, and that killed off the swimmer's ear infection, which basically filled my ear with goop, which then dried into a yellowish crust.  Then I started cleaning my ear out, bit by bit, day by day, getting the scab and dried goop out.

I figured  that once I got my ear canal all cleaned out, my hearing would come back.  Instead, I found that the bug, or at least a good chunk of it, was still lodged up against my ear drum.  So I cleaned it out with peroxide and a straightened out paper clip, very carefully.  A couple small pieces of the bug's shell came out, but the big chunk was still stuck.  I couldn't get it to budge.

In the meantime, I got a bill for over $500 for the ED trip that didn't even get the whole bug out.  Yesterday, I went to another emergency department, and some very dedicated nurses and a doctor spent a couple hours trying everything they could think of to get the last half of the beetle out.  They were about to give up, when it finally flushed out.  It was a freaky experience all around, and I don't recommend trying it.  To be on the safe side, the doctor prescribed more ear drops.  I thanked the team, and was stoked that my hearing finally started to return.

I went to my mom's pharmacy to get the ear drops, only to find they cost over $200 since I don't have insurance.  The pharmacist was able to find an alternative, got it OK'd by the ED doctor, and I'm finally healing from the trouble one little beetle managed to cause me.  I wanted to keep the bug, but didn't get the chance since it came out in tiny pieces.

So... that was interesting... 

A non-BMXer's great thoughts on how bike riding changes you

I've never heard of Tony Desnick until today, this TED talk popped up while looking at other videos.  Like many of my blog readers, bike riding changed my life.  In our cases it was BMX bikes that took us new places.  Here's an incredible look at how bike riding can change a person, a neighborhood, a community, or even a country.  And it's by someone who came at bikes from a completely different direction from us old BMX guys and gals.  His childhood was similar to many of ours, but his later love for bikes came out of a health crisis.

I know you don't have a spare 20 minutes.  But this TED Talk is really worth a watch.  I learned a lot from it, and I think you may, too.

Richard Florida and the New Urban Crisis

I just finished reading Richard Florida's newest book, The New Urban Crisis.  It gives a great (if often gloomy) look at how technology and the "back to the city" movement have changed the world in the last fifteen years.

In 2002, Professor Richard Florida exploded onto the economic development scene with his book, The Rise of the Creative Class.  A big part of his findings were that a new class of workers, which he called the "Creative Class," comprised about 35% of the U.S. workforce.  This class was made up of tech workers, scientists, educators, researchers, artists, designers, engineers, media, healthcare, and people in the legal professions.  These people have to think, use creativity, and make complex decisions on a daily basis. 

Back then, in 2002,  in the U.S., about 1% of people worked in agriculture, less than 20% were part of the Working Class (manufacturing/construction/transportation), and around 30% were part of the Creative Class.  The other 50% or so were in the low wage Service Class.  The Creative Class people mostly made good money and lived well.  The former American Middle Class, the Working Class, were (and still are) disappearing as jobs were lost to new technology and outsourcing.  In its place, tens of millions of people were struggling to survive by working one or more low wage Service Class jobs. 

Teaching then at Carnegie Mellow University in Pittsburgh, a city devastated by the loss of high paying factory jobs, Professor Florida saw lots of bright tech students graduating from the college, but none of them were staying to work in Pittsburgh.  He started researching the issue, and found that most of the tech workers, this new Creative Class, were clustering in a small number of areas.  They were going to Silicon Valley (San Jose/San Francisco area), Boston, Seattle, Washington D.C., New York, Austin, and to a lesser degree, the Raleigh Research Triangle. 

The tech companies, he found, were moving to where all the talented tech workers lived.  That's the opposite of what happened with Industrial Age manufacturing companies.  So in "Rise" Florida made the case for cities to work to build their creative climates like art, music, and high tech scenes.  Research universities also played a key role in attracting the top Creative Class people. 

After reading his book and hearing him speak, civic leaders across the U.S. and the world worked on making their cities more inviting to this Creative Class.  It worked in many ways.  Cities across the nation have attracted upscale people back into their revived downtown areas.  They've attracted businesses and venture capital dollars as well.  There are now around 100 "innovation parks" in the U.S., like the Wake Forest Innovation Quarter here in Winston-Salem, NC. 

Unfortunately, the clustering effect of these creative people worked better than Richard Florida had expected.  That leads to his findings in The New Urban Crisis.

Here are his main points:
1.  In describing what he calls "winner-take-all urbanism," only a handful of larger cities have really benefited greatly from this Creative Class clustering.  The best people, the main tech companies, the most promising start-ups, and the vast majority of venture capital money are going to a handful of places.

2.  This has created a crisis in the "winner" cities.  While the tech workers live well, the prices of housing and other things have risen, and the majority of non-Creative Class people have a harder time affording to live in these cities.

3.  As upscale techies and other well off Creative Class people move back to the rebuilt downtown areas, many of the lower income people have been pushed to the suburbs.  Poverty, crime, drug problems, and over all distress of just surviving has spread to suburbs throughout the country.

4.  The core issue of the New Urban Crisis continues to be the loss of the American Middle Class that made this such a prosperous nation for several decades. 

5.  Finally, while the New Urban Crisis is serious in the U.S., the U.K., and even Canada, it's much worse in the developing countries around the world. 

And then, to top all this off, we had the huge populist uprising that led to Donald Trump taking over in the White House.  While he promises many things, his policies are pretty much the opposite of what is needed to help out the tens of millions of struggling Service Class workers and the hundreds of smaller cities and towns that don't benefit as much from the Creative Class concentrating in a few regions. 

Richard Florida spends the later part of the book outlining the policies he thinks will help us spread the benefits of the Knowledge Based economy that has replaced the old Industrial Economy of the 1800's and 1900's. 

You can get a good feel for his ideas by listening to the talk above.  But, of course, the book is much better and goes into all the details explaining his findings.  If you look toward the future, want to build your city up, or are a civic or cultural leader, The New Urban Crisis is worth the read.

(The links to buy the book are unpaid links.)

What are "Creative Scenes?"

Here's a cool, and fairly new, part of the art and music scene here in Winston-Salem, NC.  The Art Park.  Officially it's called Artivity on the Green.  What was an abandoned lot a couple years back is now a cool looking little park, with murals by local artists on the back wall.  There was a high school aged band playing in the green loops in the back last Friday.  The red towers are meant to harken back to Winston's industrial days, and they spout steam at night, like the smokestacks back in the day. 

In the last post I wrote about how "Creative Scenes" are not only cool things for a city to have, but actually a key part of any town, city, or region's economy in today's world.  Some of you are probably asking:

What's a Creative Scene?

A Creative Scene is two or more people who are into some type of creative work, and who talk, bounce ideas around, compete, collaborate, and ultimately push each other to improve.  People in Creative Scenes usually progress faster than creative people working alone.

A Creative Scene can be two kids in 3rd grade who try to draw comic book characters.  It can be a garage band.  It can be the kids in a skatepark skateboarding and riding bikes.  It can be the artists in a local indie gallery.  It can be a couple of entrepreneurs working on a new idea in the garage or spare bedroom.  It can be a big city's orchestra.  It can be the local theater company.  It can be a world touring band like Metallica playing sold out shows in different countries. 

What every town or city needs to encourage these days is a "scene of Creative Scenes" that interact and mingle with each other.  This is where new ideas, from a local park clean-up campaign, to a new song, to a multi-billion dollar tech company, often start.  Some of these ideas turn into businesses, and even entire new industries.  Other scenes provide a "Creative Ecosystem" that attract talented people from the region, state, or even around the world. 

Creative Scenes in today's economy

I first saw this band play live a year or so after this local TV show performance. Most of the hundreds of millions of people who've heard their music since would be hard pressed to identify them from from this video if their name wasn't there.

People of all ages and all walks of life have an urge to create something.  They start creating.  Our school system, designed 130 years ago to turn kids into compliant factory workers, stamps the creative urge out of most people.  But not all.  Some continue to create, despite the pain and oppression thrown at them from the larger world.  These people usually move out of their oppressive towns and cities and into creative scenes formed earlier by similar people, usually in large cities. 

These little groups of people try new things, bounce ideas off each other, and progress in their crafts.  Ideas are their commodities, and these people create our new pictures, paintings, music, sculptures, buildings, technology, software, games, businesses, sports, pastimes, and a lot of new products.  In today's constantly changing world, these people create the new industries and the new jobs.

Everyone has seen this happen time after time, especially in the high tech world.  Yet, most civic leaders still spend much of their time oppressing their creative people, and propping up the last vestiges of the Industrial Age that haven't collapsed yet.  In doing so, the people running towns, cities, states, and much of the federal government are sewing the seeds of their own financial ruin. 

A handful of large cities comprise most of the economy of the United States, and are literally carrying the rest of the country financially.  Most of our country is struggling.  Even worse, they don't want to admit they're struggling. 

The economic future of EVERY small village, town, city, region or state is in the IDEAS in the heads of the people in that region.  Civic leaders can't FORCE creative scenes into existence.  But they CAN enable, support, and nurture the CREATIVE SCENES they have, and help those people rebuild the cultural and economic future of their region.  If they don't, the MOST CREATIVE PEOPLE in their areas will move to the biggest cities where they can live and work with like-minded people. 

No creative scenes, no economic future for your town, city region, or state.  It's as simple as that these days.  Do you want your region to have future or not?

My work in this world these days is to help people, find, create, build, and nurture their Creative Scenes.  Why are you here?

The band above has sold over 39 million albums since that video was shot.  I know for a fact that has helped the city where they lived most of that time.  I used to live there, too.

Who the heck is Steve Emig... My Creative Work

When I shot this footage in the spring of 1991, BMX was all but dead, because the bike industry turned their attention to the new sport of mountain bikes.  We were also in the long recession of the early 90's, and pretty much everyone in this clip could make about ten different meals with a packet of ramen.  But that didn't keep the best riders in the world from hucking themselves like crazy over the huge Death Jump at Mission Trails.  Ron Wilkerson's 2-Hip King of Dirt contest, Mission Trails, outside San Diego, California.

I'm meeting a lot of new people in the creative scene around here who don't know anything about my background.  So this post is part creative resume' and part ego trip.

1983- I raced BMX all year and entered a contest to re-design the Fort Boise BMX track.  I tied with a couple of younger kids, using my drafting skills to make a kick ass design.  I won half a year worth of free races for 1984.  But I got more into BMX freestyle (trick riding), and only used about 9 free races.
1984- I graduated from Boise High, and used my grad money to buy my first good BMX bike, a Skyway T/A.  Everyone thought I was an idiot for spending all my time riding a "little kid's bike."  I saved up $1,000 over the summer, working at $2.10 an hour, but couldn't afford to go to college.  I joined Idaho's only BMX trick team with Jay Bickel and Wayne Moore.  Wayne retired (at age 17), and Jay and I reformed it into the Critical Condition Stunt Team, and performed in shows and parades around Boise.  I also competed in Idaho's first two BMX freestyle contests ever.
August 1985- My family moved to San Jose, California.  I started a Xerox zine called San Jose Stylin' as a way to meet the San Francisco Bay Area riders.  It worked.  Soon I was riding with the best scene in freestyle at Golden Gate Park on the weekends.
Spring 1986- You can see me chasing my bike at 5:07 in this TV clip about the GG Park bike scene.  I was asked to write a contest article for FREESTYLIN' magazine, thanks to my zine.  My zine was ranked as #1 in the country in the same magazine issue, August 1986.
August 1986- I landed the job that changed the course of my life, working for Wizard Publications.  2-hipThat opportunity came thanks to FREESTYLIN' editor Andy Jenkins. They published BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines.  I was an editorial assistant, but also proofread both magazines.
December 1986- I was told (the night before Christmas vacation) I was getting laid off at Wizard on December 31st.  I just didn't click well with the guys there.  And I didn't like the band Skinny Puppy.  I was permanently replaced by an unknown, 17-year-old kid from the East Coast named Spike Jonze.
January 1987- I was hired  by BMX freestyle pioneer and serial entrepreneur Bob Morales to be the editor/photographer of the American Freestyle Association newsletter.  The AFA was the organization that put on all the BMX freestyle competitions then.  With the job, I moved From Hermosa Beach, about 15 miles south to the working class beach town of Huntington Beach.  I started hanging out at the HB pier on the weekends, where I rode (and sometimes skated) with walking punk rock encyclopedia and BMX freestyler Mike Sarrail, freestyle skateboarders Pierre Andre, Don Brown, Hans Lingren, and Bob Schmelzer.  In addition, street skaters Mark Gonzales, Ed Templeton and others came by often, as did a bunch of really good BMX freestylers.
Spring 1987- Bob walked in one day and asked if I wanted to make a TV commercial for our next contest in Austin, Texas.  I learned how to produce a (really bad) TV commercial, and then produced six home videos for the AFA.  The two shots at 2:18 and 2:19 in this trailer came from those videos. 
Around the same time, I had a girlfriend who was in a band.  I decided I'd write her a hit song, so I started writing (really bad) lyrics.  She dumped me, and I wrote a poem that night called "Journey of The White Bear."  I kept writing poetry, mostly as cheap therapy.  I didn't show my poems to anyone for fear of criticism.
December 1987 to late 1988- Got hired at Unreel Productions, the video arm of the Vision Skateboards/Vision Street Wear empire.  I was a basically a production assistant when they made all these: Sims Snow Shredders,  Vision Psycho Skate, Vision Street Wear World Cup of BMX, AFA Masters Finals,  Gonz Goes to New York, Vision Skate Escape, Red Hot Skate Rock (with the Red Hot Chili Peppers) Vision Street Wear Freestylin' Fanatics, Mondo Vision, and Sims Snow Daze.
 Early 1989- Pat, the staff cameraman at Unreel moved on to another job.  I became the staff cameraman.  That meant traveling with a 35 pound, $50,000 Sony betacam camera.  That made me pretty nervous.  I was called on to shoot behind-the-scenes footage of Vision/Vision Street Wear photo shoots, and other random things.  I got sent to all of Ron Wilkerson's 2-Hip contests that year, because VSW sponsored his events.  Here's footage I shot at the King of Vert contest in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada.  At 14:43 in this clip, amateur Mat Hoffman makes history by landing the first 900 air (2 1/2 spins) on a bike.  In this clip from the Colorado contest, which someone else shot, you can see me shooting video on the deck of the ramp.  I'm on the left ramp deck, near the far end, with a black and white shirt on.  At 9:25 in this clip, Mat Hoffman surprises the heck out of me by doing a front flip off his bike right in front of me.  I almost stepped backwards off the ramp on that one.
Spring 1989- 2-Hip Promoter Ron Wilkerson hired me to edit 2-Hip's 1988 contest video, now called 2-Hip BHIP.  That included the very first Meet the Street contest, a day that changed BMX bike riding FOREVER.  I didn't shoot this footage, but you can see me ghost riding my bike into the wall at 5:49.
Fall 1989- I shot some footage and actually did a little editing on Vision's best skate video ever, Barge at Will. 
I also got sent to shoot behind-the-scenes footage of the Vision skaters at a shoot for Tom Petty's "Freefallin'" video.
January 1990- Vision was having big financial issues, and they dissolved Unreel Productions.  Since I was the cheapest guy who knew how to work the most equipment, I didn't get fired, along with Laura, the woman who was our production coordinator.  Don Hoffman, founder of Unreel, continued to work freelance for Vision.  We closed down our cool office in Costa Mesa and got moved to the Vision headquarters in Santa Ana.  Laura soon found a job at a "real" TV production company in Hollywood.
Spring 1990-  I shot and edited a 7 minute promo video for Tuff Skts, a company where skate legend Christian Hosoi and Vision worked together.  The company didn't last long, but this was a blast to make.  Only this short version with different music has survived.  This appeared on Sk8-TV in 1990.
I also decided to produce my own BMX freestyle video, largely because the Vision videos were pretty goofy, and I wanted to show the world "real BMX riding."  I started shooting video of different riders on the weekends, usually with my friend, rider/photographer Mike Sarrail.  Following the lead of rider/video producers Eddie Roman and Mark Eaton, I became a pioneer in the "rider-made" video movement that exploded through the action sports world in the early 1990's.  None of us realized that at the time, though.  We were just trying to make videos we'd want to watch.
July 1990- Quit at Vision Sports video, went on a three week, cross country skateboard tour with these guys: Buck Smith, Chris Gentry, Mike Crum, Mark Oblow.   Drove 24 hours straight (27 out of 30 hours total) to make it to Atlanta on time because the rig only did 55 mph.  Dumb.  Don't try that.
Summer/Fall 1990- I worked freelance for surf/skate video distributor, NSI video.  I edited two issues of his Skater's Quarterly video, one issue of Snowboard Quarterly and got to go to the premier of this, my favorite snowboard video ever.  Got to interview Brandi Sanders at the premier.
October 1990- Released The Ultimate Weekend.  I shot, edited, produced, and mostly financed the 45 minute video, following in the steps of Eddie Roman and Mark Eaton making "rider-made" bike videos. My friend Mike Sarrail helped with the last chunk of money to finish it.  We didn't realize it then, but we were pioneers leading the rider-made video revolution that swept through action sports in the early 1990's.  I used music from a Toledo punk rock band called The Stain, a band discovered out west by skateboard legend Mark Gonzales.  In those days, every video had a lot of firsts in it.  The Ultimate Weekend had the first hand rail slide on a bike (Keith Treanor), the first mini-ramp footage, the first spine ramp footage, the first footage of the Nude Bowl with bikes, the first ice pick handrail grind (John Povah), the first footage of the S&M Bikes riders and the P.O.W. BMX House in a video, the first double wall ride in a video (Randy Lawrence/myself), the biggest 360 over doubles to date (Chris Moeller) and the first tailwhip jump over doubles (Mike "Crazy Red" Carlson) in a video, among other firsts.  My video was the best quality rider-made video at the time.  Then Eddie Roman put out Headfirst with Mat Hoffman about six months later, and blew my video out of the water.  The Ultimate Weekend put Keith Treanor on the map as an up and coming rider, and featured about 40 other great riders as well.
   I also did some riding in The Ultimate Weekend as well, at:  1:04, 1:25, 10:47, 11:23, 11:25, 11:35, 15:40, 20:07, 23:17, 27:33, 28:28, 36:22, 37:15.  I also wrote the lyrics for the song "Mom's Imagination," and had The Stain record it for the video.
Early 1991- Got a job at GRB Motorsports, working on the production crew of the 1991 Monster Truck, Mud Racer, and Supercross TV shows.
Spring 1991- Working at GRB Motorsports, motorcycle stuntman, Johnny Airtime, worked in the other office nearby.  He was a stunt coordinator on GRB's flagship shows World's Greatest Stunts and Stuntmaster's.  I shot the BMX footage that's at the very top of this blog post.  I made a copy and sent it by interoffice memo to Johnny. At that point I hadn't met him, but I figured he'd get a kick out of it. I was a lowly production assistant, so it surprised everyone in the office when Johnny called our office and asked for me.  He said, "You BMXers are crazy!" We talked for about 20 minutes, and he asked what kind of stunt a BMXer could do for the Stuntmaster's show.  I suggested a big 360 jump, thinking of friends Chris Moeller and Dave Clymer.  Johnny and I went back and forth with ideas, and decided a 360 over three flaming cars would be a cool stunt.  I told him about Chris and Dave.  He came back, "What about Mat Hoffman, I've seen videos of him, he's amazing."  I replied, "Yeah, Mat could do it."  I hung up, and didn't think much more of it.  I moved on to another job a couple months later, and never worked for GRB again.  A couple years later somebody told me about Mat Hoffman on Stuntmasters.  I got an even bigger surprise several years later when I read Mat's book.  In it he wrote that talking to Johnny Airtime on the Stuntmasters set, he learned that a bigger ramp was the key to doing higher airs on a quarterpipe.  That led to Mat blowing everybody's mind by doing this in 1992.  It's amazing the legacy one little phone call can have. It was inevitable that Mat would meet Johnny Airtime at some point, I just happened to help that happen.  Mat's secret mega quarterpipe project changed action sports forever, and he later became personal friends with Evel Knievel, which also was inevitable.
Summer 1991- I shot part of and edited Feel My Leg Muscles, I'm a Racer*, the first video for S&M Bikes.  At the time, pro BMX racer, legendary smartass, and crazy jumper turned entrepreneur Chris Moeller was running the company out of the garage of his one bedroom apartment.  The video featured Dave Clymer, Jimmy Levan, and English bloke Alex Leech.  The original version also featured a fight scene by porn legend John Holmes.  The total budget of the video was $250, including beer.  I edited the video sitting on the floor of Chris' tiny living room, using my camera and a VCR and a 40 of Mickey's.  I ended up living on that living room floor afterward (long story).  * The title was an actual pickup line Clymer used to pick up his girlfriend at the time.
Sometime in 1992 ( I think)- Chris, Bill Grad, and me got really drunk and designed the ultimate BMX bike, the BS20-Neon.   Just for the record, the first Big Brother magazine video, Shit, didn't come out until 1996.  That later morphed into the Jackass TV show in 2000, and the later Jackass movies.  We were ahead of the curve on stupid action sports comedy at the time, although skate entrepreneur Steve Rocco was the King.
Summers of 1992-1995- I worked as a spotter on the crew of the American Gladiators hit TV show.  I worked on that crew for four seasons, and led the crew of eight in 1994 and 1995.  I got to see this happen live from 15 feet away, and played the games against the gladiators and contenders during in the several days of practice.  I also met the best athlete I've ever seen, Wesley "2 Scoops" Berry.  I'm on Wesley's tower in this clip, and if you freeze it at :24, I'm the guy in black.  Hey, crew guys aren't supposed to show up much.  Weird show, but it was a blast to work, and I met a wide range of people, famous and not famous, working there.
Fall 1992- Self-published a huge zine with about 80 poems, called We're on the Same Mental Plane... and it's Crashing.  The first poem was "Journey of the White Bear," written in '88.  That became my nickname in the BMX world, and I later took it as my pen name.
1993- Worked in the box office of then little known Cirque du Soleil on their first tour to Orange County, CA with Saltimbanco.  Most amazing job I've ever worked.
 Fall 1993- Worked as a spotter on the crew of Knights and Warriors TV show.
1995- Worked in the box office of Cirque du Soleil's Allegria for a while they were in Orange County.
Summer 1995- Worked as a spotter on the crew of the inline skating show Blade Warriors.
I burned out on TV work, and worked more "normal" jobs, like as a furniture mover and a video store clerk.  I got back into the entertainment industry as a lighting tech (basically a roadie), in 1998.
1996- I self-published my second zine of poetry called Mush.  It had about 30 of my best poems written from 1991 to 1996.
1997-1998- I published two issues of a zine called Huevos, mostly about action sports.  I interviewed free skier (and my neighbor) Jason Moore, and musician, artist, and founding member of The Cramps, Bryan Gregory, among others.  I also had a pretty funny interview with Sasquatch.
1997- Worked in the box office of Cirque du Soleil's Quidam in Orange County, CA.  I also self-published my third zine of poetry and thoughts.
1998- Stumbled into the job of staff writer for the short-lived BMX magazine BMX Rider.  It was published by Peterson Publications, best known for car magazines.  It only lasted two issues.  I did feature interviews with BMX entrepreneur Chris Moeller, and all around amazing rider Brian Foster.
1999- I had to quit my lighting tech job due to an injury.  I became a taxi driver in Huntington Beach area of California.  Things started going down hill,  I became homeless and lived in my taxi in October 1999.  After six months, I had a great month driving the cab, and got myself a room in the spring of 2000.  I've struggled with homelessness ever since.
2000- I worked freelance for a few weeks, and wrote most of the website copy for an "action sports web portal," a dotcom start-up called LNXS.  They pronounced it "lynx."  I never got paid and it bombed.
I worked in the box office on Cirque du Soleil show Dralion while they were in Orange County, CA.
 2002- I was working a lame job and rented a tiny room built on the side of a Mexican American family's house.  The room had one tiny window and felt like a cave.  So, inspired by an idea I saw in "House of Style" on MTV, I got big rolls of paper, and taped them to one wall.  I wanted to draw a scene looking out a cave to a sunset.  I've never been much of a painter, to I tried to do the mural with markers.  It sucked.  I couldn't find a way to shade with markers.  So I started playing around with different doodles looking for a way.  I made a bunch of big collages of action sports magazine photos and marker doodles.  That's where working with markers started for me.
Spring 2003- I worked on Cirque du Soleil's Varekai in Orange County, CA.  Nobody knew I was living homeless in the bushes at the time.
Late summer 2003- I went back to taxi driving, after losing my license in a DMV mix-up in 2000.  I gave up all creative work and focused entirely on making money and getting my life back on track.  From Labor Day 2003 to Labor day 2005, I only had five days off.  The taxi company put dispatch computers in the taxis, replacing the old radios, and that completely changed the entire business.  Literally overnight, it became much, much harder to make money as a cab driver.  I worked seven days a week, often 14 to 18 hours a day, while living in the taxi.  It sucked.  Giving up on creative pursuits and focusing just on making money didn't get me back on track financially, I wound up in much worse shape. There's a lesson there.
Late summer 2005- A taxi driver who owned an indie art gallery offered me the chance to work only weekends driving his taxi, and live in AAA Electra 99 gallery in Anaheim during the week.  Taxi driver/fame ass arteest Richard Johnson is a crazy character, and it was great to get away from working 80 to 100 hours a week and to start being creative again.  Suddenly I was surrounded by all kinds of art by up and coming artists, as well as 7 cats.   Although it's only 2 or 3 miles from Disneyland, Electra is so far underground that you need spelunking gear to find it.  Oh... and Mamie Van Doren's a whore! (Inside Electra joke)
I started drawing a bit my second day staying in the gallery.  Soon I was drawing big pictures with markers, and bought my first set of 24 Sharpies.  I played with different doodles and ways to shade with markers, and one day I drew a tree.  I started scribbling different colors of markers over each other to color the tree roots.  That's where my "scribble style" of shading with Sharpie ultra fine markers was born.  I spent the about seven months living there, and my scribble style started to evolve.  When I went back to driving a taxi full time in June 2006, I would often draw while waiting for rides in my taxi.  My creativity was reborn at AAA Electra 99.  That's what weird, quirky little creative scenes are good for.
2005- BMX freestyler and rider-made video pioneer Mark Eaton produced Joe Kid on a Stingray, the documentary history of BMX and freestyle.  Two shots from my 1987 AFA videos, Mat Hoffman at 2:17 and Kevin Jones at 2:18 in the trailer, made it into the movie.  
November 25, 2007-  I dropped off my cab at the taxi company in Santa Ana, California, and walked out to live on the streets with about $15 in my wallet.  My possessions were in a small storage unit.  I weighed about 365 pounds, could barely walk due to horribly cracked and bleeding feet, and I survived three cases of cellulitis/MRSA infection that year.  The first infection nearly killed me.  The ED doctor that I saw the third time told me,"if you don't quit driving a taxi, you will die.  We're talking weeks, maybe a few months."  I walked out to live on the streets believing I would die within a few weeks.  I couldn't make any progress in getting my finances back on track, I'd drifted away from my friends in the BMX and other industries, and I rarely talked to my family.  It seemed like "game over," to me.
December 2007-  After a couple of weeks living fully on the streets of Orange County, California, I realized I needed a project to focus on.  In six weeks I wrote, practiced, and planned out a one hour long comedy video.  I panhandled enough money to get my video camera out of the pawn shop.  I traveled around on the bus, went to locations I picked before, and shot the whole video, section by section, each in one take, straight to tape.  I watched it once or twice in the camera, and put the master tape in my storage unit.  By the time I finished that video, I realized that I probably wasn't going to die.  So I started looking for ways to make money and get my life back on track.  I spent hours in fast food joints drawing picture in my Sharpie "scribble style" while homeless.
Spring 2008- I sold a Sharpie drawing of an alien for $5 in Hollywood, near the corner of Hollywood and Highland.  That's today's "Hollywood and Vine" tourist area.  That was the first scribble style drawing I ever sold.  Back then, there were still a lot of people in that area of Hollyweird dressing up as famous people and taking photos with tourists to make tips.  That day I saw a guy dressed as Elmo get in a fight with a biker in a Harley Davidson vest.  Gotta love Hollywood.
Early November 2008- After nearly a year on the streets wandering Southern California, I realized there was no way I was going to be able to get back on my feet financially in SoCal.  I called up my parents in Kernersville, NC, and they offered to fly me to North Carolina.  My parents, my sister, and an uncle pitched in to get me cross country.  If you happen to remember late 2008, you know that it was a REALLY bad time to try to find a new job.  The American economy was in freefall, and serious investors and economists were worried about a world economic collapse.  The financial crisis became the Great Recession.  As for me, surviving that year on the streets in California was the biggest accomplishment of my life.  But there are few people who can understand that.  The TV show "Survivor" is a GAME, everyone knows they're going to survive.  They can quit and go take a hot shower and eat great food any time.  Homelessness is a REAL survival situation.  The streets are no joke.
 Early December 2008- I came to North Carolina with a bookbag sized backpack.  That's it.  My Mac laptop was in a pawn shop in Huntington Beach with 10 years worth of poems typed into it.  My digital 8 video camera was in another pawn shop.  The rest of my worldly possessions were in a 5' X 5' storage unit in H.B..  In that little room was all my journals and hand written copies of hundreds of poems, going back to about 1988.  It also contained one of the best collections of raw video footage of BMX freestyle from 1989 to 2007.  I dreamed of making a freestyle documentary with all that footage.  That dream was got me through years of tough times and homelessness. I also had the master tapes of my videos, and all my action sports magazines ,including a complete collection of FREESTYLIN' magazine, with a few extras.   (Check scan page 29, magazine page 56 for an interview I did with a guy who now gives TED Talks).  To get my stuff, including all my creative work, to NC, I needed to borrow about $200.  Before I flew to NC, my family said they could loan it too me.  A couple weeks after getting to NC, I asked my mom to borrow the money to get my stuff out of pawn, storage, and shipped to NC.  She said, "No, we don't have money for that."  I lost EVERYTHING creative that I still had moving to North Carolina.  From an action sports point of view, and an intellectual point of view, and a creative point of view, I didn't have anyone to talk to in Kernersville.  I went into a deep, deep depression.
Mid-December 2008- I was pretty much a Luddite through the 2000's.  I never had a computer that I could use as much as I wanted until I moved to my parents' place here in NC.  So I started surfing the net every night, as we used to say.  During that time I learned that my former co-workers Andy Jenkins and Mark "Lew" Lewman, along with Spike Jonze, had put together a limited edition book about FREESTYLIN' magazine, published by Nike.  The whole thing was part of the hype leading to BMX racing (a really lame version of it), being included in the 2008 Olympics.  Just for the record, I'm totally against action sports in the Olympics.  But that's another matter.  A scan of the book showed up online, and I read it, figuring there would be a line about me and my collection of bad nicknames from my time there.  But I wasn't even mentioned.  Neither were people like Steve "Guy-B" Giberson, Mark Snavely, or others who worked on and contributed to the magazine at some point.  I was already totally bummed out because I was so isolated from anything creative at the time.  So I decided to start a blog and write 20 or 30 posts about my memories of working at Wizard Publications, home to BMX Action and FREESTYLIN'.  It wasn't an act of revenge so much as just saying, "Hey, I worked on it for a bit, too."  I called the blog FREESTYLIN' Mag Tales.  I didn't think many people would ever read it.  I just wanted my memories of that time out there in cyberland.  Since I had just lost all my creative work, all I had left were my memories.  So I started blogging.
Late December 2008- After about 25 or so posts on FREESTYLIN' Mag Tales, a post about an awkward personal moment went viral in the old school BMX community online.  I didn't even know there was an old school BMX community online.  Seriously, that's how clueless I was about the internet then.  I started getting emails and comments from old friends form BMX in the 80's and 90's, and a bunch of people I didn't know but who were into BMX back then.  My blog became the #1 old school BMX blog in the world.  Yeah, it's a small niche, but I'll take it.
Fall 2009- FREESTYLIN' Mag Tales had gone over 200 posts, and seen something like 25,000 page views in a year.  That seemed like a lot to me.  And that was only five months of my BMX life.  Also, I managed to piss off everyone I worked with there, which wasn't my intention.  But I wasn't too worried about that either.  I had a couple hundred avid readers, and decided to delve into all my other stories from those early days in BMX freestyle.  So I ended the FREESTYLIN' blog and started Freestyle BMX Tales blog.  I also started learning about ways to try and make money with blogs, since I still couldn't find ANY job.  I started writing about my first days, riding in a trailer park outside Boise, Idaho in 1982.  Most of my readers followed along, and I gained more as time went by.
Sometime in 2010- Still unemployed, I wanted to start a blog to make money.  I put Google Adsense ads on my BMX blog, but only racked up about $35 in a few months in ad revenue.  Then I got kicked off Adsense because I didn't see the email to send them my tax info.  Dumb mistake.  I'd also been learning about how to get a blog to rank #1 in a Google search.  So I tried to think up the stupidest blog name I could that had "make money" in the title.  It was just an experiment to see if I could get a blog with a "make money" and a crazy title to rank #1.  Since I'd been homeless and a panhandler, I decided Make Money Panhandling was the stupidest title I could think of.  I started the blog, and used what I learned to get it higher in the search rankings.  Then something unexpected happened, I realized that I had a lot to say about the subject of homelessness and panhandling.  So I started posting away, while doing my BMX blog as well.  In a couple months, Make Money Panhandling was solidly locked in the #1 spot when someone searched for "panhandling."  At that point, I had the top two old school BMX blogs in the world, AND the top panhandling blog in the world.  Again, I didn't set out to do that, it just kinda happened.  At one point, I was contacted by TV journalist John Stossel's producer.  They were doing a show on freeloaders, and he wanted info on panhandling.  We traded 2 or 3 long email, and I answered all his questions to the best of my ability.  Most media reports about panhandling super negative, and often just P.R. for non-profits.  But Stossel's Freeloaders show handled the subject well.  That's Stossel himself panhandling at the beginning.  So who turned out to be the biggest freeloaders in the U.S.?  GE.  As in General Electric.  Panhandlers may be annoying, but in the amount of money sucked out of American taxpayers, they barely make it on the list.  A panhandler may walk with $30 in a day, maybe even $50.  Huge corporations walk away with tens of millions or more.
June 2011- I got some money that helped me start working as a taxi driver in Winston-Salem, NC.  I lived in the cab, and often just ate a loaf of French bread from Walmart and a bottle of water as I learned the city the first month.  I transferred to a better taxi company.  I worked seven days a week, living in the taxi, until June 2012.  I never made enough money to rent an apartment.  I got a cheap motel room one night a week to watch a little TV, eat a cheap pizza, and catch up on sleep.
March 2012- My dad had a serious stroke.  With surgery, he survived the stroke, but was partially paralyzed and lost some of his cognitive ability.  Still had his sense of humor.  I visited him when I could in the hospital and nursing home, while working 7 days a week in the taxi.
June- 2012- I quit driving a taxi, and built a hut in the woods in Winston-Salem.  I lived in it, and  got a panhandling permit. I used funny panhandling signs like, "Why lie? I need a Lexus." and "You didn't send me a card on Father's day," among many others.  I would panhandle a 2 or 3 days, and then take the regional bus and go visit my dad, who was getting worse.
August 2012- My dad died.  I moved into my mom's apartment.  You never realize how good of neighbors raccoons are until you move in with family.  Heh, heh, heh.  Just wanted to see if anyone actually read all this.
Fall 2012- In a real dark time after my dad's death, and unable to find any work, I deleted all my blogs.  At that point, my three main blogs had over 180,000 total page views, and I'd written over 2,000 posts over about 30 different blogs.  The next three years were really tough in several ways.
June 2015- Started a new version of Freestyle BMX Tales on Blogger.  I tried Wordpress for a while, but went back to Blogger because it had a good mobile version that I didn't have to worry about.  It has a total of about 25,000 page views.  I stopped doing it in August of 2017.
Fall 2015- I started doing larger drawings in my scribble style with Sharpies, starting off with some big, Georgia O'Keefe style flowers, and then some animal drawings.
October 2015- I started an art blog called Steve Emig Art to give my drawings a home online.  I started doing all kinds of drawings and this blog shows the recent evolution of my Sharpie art.  With little promotion, it has 9,250 page views in two years.
November 2015- Still unable to find a job of any kind, I decided to focus on my artwork, the only thing that made me a little money from time to time.  I spent two hours looking at art online one night, trying to answer a simple question.  "What could I draw that I'd want to put on my own wall?"  I love graffiti and street art.  My 30+ zines over the years taught me Xerox (copy machine) art.  Stencils by Banksy and others caught my eye that night.  I found a simple stencil of Bruce Lee's face and drew that in my style.  I liked it, taped it to my wall (I'm too broke for frames), and knew I was on the right track.  I started promoting my Sharpie art on Facebook and my art blog, and started getting a few orders, mostly for drawing classic, old school BMX photos, or photos of friends, their kids, and stuff like that.  I started doing 18" by 24" drawings, which took 20 to 25 hours to draw, and I sold them for $50 to $75.  Money was always tight, living with my mom.  So I never was really able to re-invest what I made to really get a business going.  But my skills and technique improved steadily.
Summer 2016- By doing drawings of people's photos, I realized that high contrast drawings with hard shadows work best with my style.  I started doing drawings of athletes and musicians, and have been focusing on those since.
October 2016- I got a big write up in the local Kernersville (NC) newspaper about my artwork and my thoughts on writing a book about building creative scenes.
June 2017- My mom and I parted ways.  She got a one bedroom apartment, and I stored my stuff with friends and moved into the woods, living homeless in Winston-Salem.  I've been focusing fully on my art ever since.  I also decided to consolidate all my blogs into one, this one.
November 4th, 2017- My first solo art opening is happening at Earshot Music, 3254 Silas Creek Parkway, Winston-Salem, on Saturday, November 4th, from 7 to 9 pm.  

After getting into the kind of trouble homeless people tend to get in, I'm back staying at my mom's place temporarily.


 

Who the heck is Steve Emig? The early years...

We managed to live in a small cottage on the end of Holiday Lakes, outside that small town of Willard, Ohio, for 2 1/2 years.  That was 6th through 8th grades for me.  We didn't have a boat, but I swam at the little beach all summer long with a bunch of friends.  This video was made by one of my little sister's good friends who still lives there.

Last Friday night, I FINALLY made it to the First Friday Art fest on Trade Street here in Winston-Salem, NC.  For a bunch of reasons, I'd never actually hung out on a First Friday, when the art scene here opens doors to everyone.  I had a few of my Sharpie drawings with me, and they got a surprisingly good response from everyone I showed them to.  I was really stoked on that.  So, since I've now introduced myself to some of the Winston-Salem creative scene, and told a few people about this blog, I figured I'd better give you an idea who I am.  This post will tell you a bit about my school years up through high school.  The next post I'll link a bunch of stuff I've done and worked on since then.

Early years- I was born in Ohio in 1966, making me one of the old farts in what's now known as Generation X.  My dad was a draftsman and worked into a design engineer as I grew up.  So I was raised looking at mechanical drawings my dad had done.  He also taught me to draw Army Jeeps when I was 8, which made me fairly cool among the artistic kids in third grade.  My mom was a housewife, who worked several part time jobs, and liked doing crafts.  Ceramics in the early 70's was the one she excelled at most.

But I was chubby, sucked at sports, had buck teeth, and couldn't say my "R's" and S's" well until about 7th grade.  I was also the shortest kid in class in every grade school, and super shy.  So I grew up as a dork, geek, dweeb... take your pick.  My family was more dysfunctional than most, less dysfunctional than some, and we moved to a new house or apartment nearly every year.  As I grew up, we bounced around Ohio and Indiana until 8th grade, then a year in New Mexico (culture shock!), then to Boise, Idaho, where I managed to go to the same high school for three years, though we lived in three houses during that time.

As a kid, I spent most of my time imagining, wandering the woods (later the desert), and drawing, and into things like being a Boy Scout.

In the summer of 1982, we moved to a trailer park outside Boise known as Blue Valley.  There were only three girls our age there, and the cute one had a boyfriend.  So all the junior high and high school boys didn't have much to do, so we started trying to out-do each other on our BMX bikes.  We started racing at the local track, and by the next year, BMX was my thing.  That little bike changed the course of my life. 

Voelker is still a favorite

How popular is Dave Voelker in the old school BMX world?  My blog post congratulating him for making it into the Hallf of Fame got 930 views in two days.  That's more than any post I ever wrote in FREESTYLIN' Mag Tales or Freestyle BMX Tales blogs.  Wow.

Freefallin'... Goodbye to Tom Petty

Iconic rocker.  Gifted song writer.  The leader of one of those few bands who have put out hit songs over several decades...  Even if you don't consider yourself a Tom Petty fan, I bet you can sing along with at least ten of his songs, word for word.  He had a way of writing songs that were eternal.  They didn't seem to age and get old.

In 1989, after a couple years at Unreel Productions, I had become the staff cameraman.  For those who don't know, Unreel was the video production company owned by Vision Skatebpards.  In those days, that meant traveling, often solo, to 2-Hip contests around the country, lugging a 35 pound, $50,000 betacam video camera with me.  Yeah, professional video cameras cost more than a damn nice car in those days.  I also did a lot of shooting behind-the-scenes footage of Vision skateboard and BMX photo shoots.  I also got to shoot footage of Vision Street Wear fashion photo shoots.

Even so, it was a total surprise to me when I walked in one day and a couple of the women in the promotions department said, "Lucky you, you get to hang with Tom Petty today."  "Huh?" I replied.  No one had bothered to tell me.  So I was given an address, and I packed both the big, pro betacam, and a smaller SVHS camcorder into the trusty Unreel Toyota van.  I headed out of Costa Mesa, all the way up through Hollywood, to Mulholland Drive, a road that snakes through the Hollywood Hills.  It's a super rich area, comparable to Malibu or Beverly Hills, with big fancy houses hidden mostly in the trees, each with a view of either Hollywood and L.A., or the San Fernando Valley on the other side of the hills.  The address turned out to be a narrow driveway that snaked between two properties to a lot about a third the size of a football field.  The grassy chunk of land had a magnificent view of Universal City and the East side of the San Fernando Valley.

Mike Miranda, the Vision BMX team manager, was there already, with the Vision Skateboards trailer mini-ramp.  And we were it.  So he carefully turned the truck around, and I helped him set up the ramp in the lot.  Just as we were finishing the 20 minute process of getting the ramp set up and solid, people from the music video crew showed up.  The director looked at the ramp from a couple different angles, walking beside it.  In typical Hollywood fashion he said, "I need you to move the ramp... about a foot that way," and he pointed.  Mike and I started laughing.  Then we realized he was serious.  So we folded the ramp back up, and wiggled the pick-up pulling it back and forth, and set up the ramp for a second time, taking well over half an hour.  By then, we both decided the director was a fucking idiot.

By the time we had it set up again, the herd of white production trucks and "real" Hollywood crew people were there, setting up all their stuff.  One of the best things about a big budget "Hollywood" TV or movie shoot is something called the Craft Service table.  Basically, it's a table of free food for everyone working, continually replenished, all day long.  Fruit, bagels, muffins, cookies, chips, sodas, coffee, the works.  Oh, and we got a catered lunch, as well.  I pulled the small, inconspicuous SVHS camera out, and started shooting behind-the scenes footage with my right hand, while chowing down free muffins with my left.  I didn't have a boss all day.  I didn't work for the music video crew.  That's about as good as a camera job gets.  It was a vacation day to me.

Now to all of us at the time, Tom Petty was an older rock guy who had several good songs.  I wasn't particularly a fan.  The crazy thing was, "Freefallin'" was the first major music video on MTV that showed skateboarding.  Really, skating in a music video was unheard of then, except for a couple indie band videos that played on MTV's "120 Minutes" show once in a great while.  Not only did the "Freefallin'" feature pro skaters, it featured a girl skating.  There were only a handful of women skaters then, Care Beth Burnside being the best known.  So somehow, thanks to the Vision promotions department and a video director we hated, skating was getting huge, mainstream viewing.  This was five to six years before the X-Games.  None of us from Vision could really believe it, but we just rolled with the concept.

The three featured Vision skaters were vert skater (and Tony Hawk's roommate) Joe Johnson (white shirt), vert skater Eric Nash (blue/gray striped shirt), and street skater Kele Rosecrans (turquoise shirt).  The three of them were more than happy to spend the day hanging out with the three actress/models starring in the video.  The lead actress, the one you see doing fakies, had never skated before.  But she was a longtime surfer.  So the skaters were happy to grab her by the hips and push her back and forth until she learned to fakie fairly well.  In half and hour she was pumping back and forth across the ramp.  It was pretty impressive.

In typical Vision Street Wear style, the three lead girls were adorned in what we (at Vision) called "Vision Slut Wear."  After the Vision Street Wear logo shirt made waves in the "real" fashion world the year before, Vision designers made Vision Street Wear clothes for women, which never sold well at all.  Our inside joke was that the stuff only looked good on Gator's girlfriend.

But few realize there was a fourth Vision skateboarder there in the video as well.  At 2:47 in the video, you see Kele air on the opposite side of the ramp, and there's another attractive woman there in black shorts and a white top.  That's Miki Keller, one of the few women on earth at the time who actually could skate a mini-ramp well.  Miki was a serious snowboarder then, and was the Sims Snowboard team manager.  Unfortunately, Miki's skating got left on the proverbial "cutting room floor."  That's a bummer.  But her skating made the lead actress look lame, which is probably why.
Miki was not only a pioneer in snowboarding, but she later got into women's motocross and built that into a legit sport.  I was always to shy to ask Miki out when I worked with her.  My loss.

Anyhow, at one point while the crew was setting up the next shot.  Tom Petty was pushing his daughter on the camera dolly.  That's a contraption on a little set of railroad tracks, where a film camera is mounted and a crew person pushes the dolly along as they shoot.  So from maybe ten or fifteen feet away, I pointed my camera at Tom and his daughter.  He saw me shooting, and he had no idea who the hell I was, or where the footage would end up.  But he didn't get mad or flip out.  He said, kind of sarcastically, "We want royalties on that video," and then cracked a smile.  I got the message, and turned the camera off and nodded.  He nodded back, and went back to talking to his daughter.

I later worked on a bunch of TV shows, and I've seen stars throw fits and be complete assholes at times.  But Tom Petty was cool as could be.  When I invaded his personal time with his daughter, he politely got me to chill out and give them their moment to just hang out without being taped.

I ended up giving Eric and Kele rides home after the shoot, and then drove the van home, since it was after work hours.  It was a great day of getting paid to hang out, seeing what a "real" film shoot was like, and eating way too much free food.

The video came out soon after, and went into major rotation on MTV.  I still think the director was a dork.  But I can't really picture any other video for that song now.  Skateboarding snuck into TV screens around the world in a weird way, and I started listening to a lot more Tom Petty music after that.  The thing I like best about his music is that his songs are timeless.  They don't just sound like a particular era or genre.  Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers put out great songs over about 40 years or so.  Everyone has to die sometime, and it's a shame to see Tom Petty leave this world at only 66 years old.  But he left us all a great treasure of music that will live on.  And in my case, it's nice to have met someone who was not only an incredibly prolific and talented musician, but a damn cool guy as well.

Join the jam circle in the afterlife, Tom, there's a lot of great talent there that we all miss.

Congratulations Dave Voelker on making the BMX Hall of Fame

Last night, at Dave Voelker's house in the San Diego area, he held a big party to celebrate making it into the BMX Hall of Fame.  It's 9:30 am East Coast time now, 6:30 West Coast time, so I figure Dave has just recently passed out in the desert somewhere near his house, as a coyote looks on and wonders what the fuck this human is doing laying out in the brush.  I imagine it was one hell of a party, and had I been anywhere near the West Coast, I would have joined in the festivities. 

Congratulations Dave!  Voelker making the HOF is a no-brainer.  Few riders have blown minds on a 20 inch bike for as many years as Dave has.  I had the good fortune to meet Dave when he was an unknown ramp rider that Brian Scura had just hired to ride in his shows.  During my short stint at FREESTYLIN' magazine, I was told to go out front one afternoon and help some guy set up Scura's quarterpipe for a photo shoot.  I went outside, and offered to help this kid with white-blond, stringy hair.  After all, it took two or three people to set up the typical wooden quarterpipe in those days. 

"I got it," Dave said.  "Scura designed this ramp so one person can set it up.  Brian Scura was not only a weird, yet talented, rider, he was a mad scientist (he invented the Gyro), and owned one of the few pro trick teams at the time.  So I chatted with this Dave kid as I watched him set up the ramp solo, which was amazing in itself. 

Then he grabbed his bike, no helmet, to do a few warm-up airs, and see how the ramp felt.  His first air was five or six feet out, pretty respectable at the time.  "This kid's pretty good," I thought.  After a handful of airs in the six to seven foot range, Dave rode at the ramp a little slower.  The bike was suddenly upside down as his foot stopped at the very top of the transition.  I screamed, thinking this guy was going to eat shit and land on his head with no helmet.  But Dave was snapping one of his now-famous upside down footplants.  I'd never seen anything like it at the time.  It blew my mind. 

About then, Windy Osborn walked out with her camera.  I watched her check out Dave's huge airs (with a helmet).  But there really wasn't anything for me to do, so I reluctantly headed back in side and left Windy and Dave to do the photo shoot.  That was the fall of 1986. 

Dave stormed on the scene, soon became a GT factory rider, and toured the world like crazy.  We all watched him blow minds on both flatland and ramps year after year.  I can honestly say Dave has been one of my favorite riders to watch... ever.  There are a ton of memories, like sitting on a curb in New Jersey outside an AFA contest.  Riders were goofing around in the parking lot.  I was talking to some rider, and we were both leaning back on our hands, with our legs stretched out over the curb and our feet in the parking lot.  Dave Voelker comes racing towards us and yells, "Watch out!"  He bunnyhopped, at speed, into a manual on top of the curb, hopped over our legs, and landed in a manual, hauling ass.  He rode it for another 20 feet, and then hopped off the curb and headed towards some other obstacle. 

At the huge (for the time) 1989 2-Hip King of Vert contest that Unreel Productions (where I worked) helped put on, one of the cameramen asked Dave what he thought of the halfpipe.  I love his answer, "You have to be able to land on these things (halfpipes), I never really had to do that before." 

When it comes to my memories of Dave Voelker riding, the top is the first 2-Hip Meet the Street contest in Santee, California in the spring of 1988.  That's my edit of the contest above, from the 2-Hip BHIP video, and as you can see, Dave's all over it.  None of us really knew what to expect that day.  Dave Vanderspek and his NorCal Curb Dogs were legends on street then, as was San Diego rider Eddie Roman.  But the location of that first big street contest was Voelker's personal spot.  Before that contest, the only wall rides we'd seen photos of were two or three feet high. 

Unreel cameraman Pat Wallace shot the video in this clip, at a time when Spike Jonze was a photographer, R.L. Osborn came back from contest retirement, and there were far more riders than there were video cameras.  It was the changing of the guards that day in that parking lot behind a shopping center in Santee.  Dave Vanderspek, one of the earliest pioneers of street riding showed off the bar endo on a ledge and fun-filled style that made him a legend.  But a whole new crop of riders, several unexpected, rose to the occasion and established themselves at the new school of BMX street riding.  South Bay rider Craig Grasso, ramp legend Todd Anderson, NorCal ramp kid Mike Golden (the only one to jump the roof of the car), Orange County local George Smoot, rider/industry guy Scott Towne, and several others made their mark on the exploding street riding scene.  Englishman Craig Campbell hucked the trick of the day, the 540 wall ride (or wall ride to 360 out).  Eddie Roman, long time innovator, already a street legend, cemented his place in street riding.

But it was Dave Voelker who blew every fucking mind that day with wall rides bigger than any of us had ever dreamed of, and his crazy jump over the sixteen foot box where he clipped and cleared the final 8 feet without his bike.  Not one person at that Santee contest had any idea what a street contest would look like, what obstacles would be there, or just how big street riding could be.  Except maybe Vander, he'd already held the first street contest in NorCal.  But it was Dave Voelker that went so fast and so big that we all realized we were just scratching the surface of what could be done with a BMX bike on the urban terrain all around us. 

Dave showed us a taste of the future that day, and pretty much every day since.  Thanks for blowing our freakin' minds Dave.  Congratulations on a well deserved spot in the BMX Hall of Fame.  And I hope today's hangover isn't too bad.

Now.  There's only one way to end this post.  Everybody get out your air guitars.  Duh... nuh, nuh, nuh...nuh, nuh, nuh....