If you were a BMX freestyler in the 80's, and someone mentioned the name Pete Augustin, riding like what's in this clip is probably what comes to mind. In the Webster's Dictionary of Freestyle in the 1980's, if you looked up "aggro," there was a picture of Pete riding street. Remember that pic of him doing a lookback off a curb with the back tire tagging a the top of trash can? Yeah. Hard. Tough. Brash. San Diego street riding. That was Pete Augustin.
So it may surprise some people that, for some reason I can't really remember, Pete Augustin came up to The Spot in Redondo Beach once in a while and had some flatland sessions with us in 1986. Pete was Chris Day's favorite rider, and the guy Chris wanted to emulate back then, and I think Pete hooked Chris up with Bad Boy Club clothes, so maybe that's why he came up to The Spot. In any case, Pete was one of the first SoCal pros I rode with. I think R.L. was out on a tour when I first started at Wizard, and Pete was at The Spot a few times before R.L. got back. He wasn't a huge flatland rider, but you pretty much had to ride flatland then, street wasn't its own genre yet, and Pete had some cool stuff. The rolling backwards handstands were crazy. Here's Pete on flat.
Sliders and backwards wheelies were big in late 1986, and two of my favorite tricks. Pete (and Lew) ripped both at those. I could do a halfway decent backwards wheelie (on the peg), but Pete was doing one handed ones. I thought, "Damn, I need to step my shit up," and started learning those. Lew already did solid one handed backwards wheelies. But Pete also did one handed backwards wheelies, then would grab the front tire, and then let go and just hold the tire for a few seconds. It took me months to get that variation dialed, it was just a weird balance point to keep. That's the big thing I remember from riding with Pete Augustin at The Spot in late 1986.
Even then, Pete had the reputation of being a guy people were afraid to talk to. Everyone who didn't know him seemed to think that if you looked at him wrong, he'd punch you in the face. Maybe he went off on some annoying kid at some point, and it got blown up, out of proportion. But when I was riding with him at The Spot in those days, he was totally cool. OK, he's not like Mr. Congeniality, the smooth-talking salesman type. He would ride, we would ride, and we'd all be doing our own thing for a while. Focused more than anything. But when we started talking, he was cool.
So for the next three or four years, when riders from different parts of the country brought up this idea that Pete Augustin was totally unapproachable, I'd tell them he had always been cool to me, and while he was aggro as hell in his riding, he was cool to talk to.
A couple years later, at one of the local AFA comps in Anaheim, which were held at the R.G. Canning car shows, we had this brick patio area at the Anaheim convention center to practice in. Wall rides were the new thing then, and a few of us were trying them on the brick wall of the patio. Really, we were doing wall slides. We'd bunnyhop next to the wall, and get both tires to touch the wall, sort of sliding against it. Nobody was getting any real traction on the wall. It was just flat horizontal ground to flat vertical wall, no bank to help us out. We were all running 90 or more psi for flatland, which didn't help.
As we were doing that, Pete Augustin rolled out onto the patio. We all did a couple of more lame wall slides. Then Pete went to do one. He did this gargantuan bunnyhop, hitting the wall nearly vertical, slamming the bottoms of his tires into the wall. From flat ground, he bunnhopped into the wall, actually rode up it a bit, and pretty much did a kickturn on the wall, pulled out, and landed. It was fucking amazing. I'd never seen anyone stick to a wall like that coming off of flat ground. Neither had the rest of the guys there. Pete kind of smiled and rode away. I don't think he even said anything. The riding said it all. "Like this, guys. San Diego motherfuckers!"
When writing the stories for my two 48 page zines about The Spot in Redondo, I wrote a few pages about the guys who weren't really locals when I was there, but rode with us now and then. As I cut the sections down to actually fit in the zines, that part got cut. The part about Pete Augustin isn't in the zines, so I decided to write a blog post about riding with him.
Four years later, shooting video for my first, completely self-produced video, Jess Dyrenforth invited me to a session at Mouse's ramp near San Diego, and Pete and Chris Day were there tearing it up, along with underground SoCal legend Mike Tokemoto. You can see that section here at 38:05. Pete's in the white T-shirt. This section is the first serious spine ramp session EVER in a BMX freestyle video, so they were breaking new ground then. So that's what I remember of Pete Augustin from the 1980's.
My zine about the The Spot in Redondo turned into two, solid, 48 page zines of stories and thoughts and photos. The two big, fat zines, come with some original, homemade stickers and mini flyers. We all know that zines immediately turn into collector's items, by their very nature. They're so collectible, nobody ever sells their zines. So I'm charging $15 for these 2-zine packs. Each one is signed and numbered, you know, so you can sell it on Ebay if I ever hit the big time as a writer, like J.K. Rowling or something. Or even Ed Templeton, his "Teens Smoking" books have sold for $500 on Ebay, believe that or not.
Anyhow, if you'd like to add these to your own collection, paypal me $15 to stevenemig13@gmail.com . ("steven" not "steve") Shipping is included in the continental U.S.. If you're in Canada, Alaska, or Hawaii, it's $20. In Australia, New Zealand or the U.K., $25 U.S. You've read the blog, now get my stories into your hot little hands. Or big hands. The first packs are shipping out today.
I've got a new blog going, it's about building an art or creative business, or any small business. You can check it out here:
WPOS Kreative Ideas
No comments:
Post a Comment