1983. What the fuck were you doing in 1983? This is one of my favorite photos from the entire history of BMX freestyle. Dave Vanderspek, tabletop bunnyhop, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco. Look to the left of the photo, you'll see those high crossbar handle bars. Those are 9 inch rise bars, the bottom of Dave's bottom bracket is 2 or 3 inches above that. Dave, Maurice Meyer, and Robert Peterson could all do high tabletop bunnyhops. They didn't bunnyhop straight and lay the bike sideways, they bunnyhopped and kicked the back end up to the side... the hard way.
At one AFA Masters contest at the Velodrome in the fall of 1986, I was down on the infield and area riding around, and I ran into Dave. There was a set of five or six stairs coming down from a higher level, and a narrow hubba wall thing, with a metal rail on top, next to the stairs. Dave saw me and said, "Hey Steve, what do you think of this?" He rode across the small paved area, and did this huge bunnyhop up into a pedal stall, on the angled hubba wall thing, missing the rail on top of it. I'd never seen anyone bunnyhop into a pedal stall. I said, "That's cool, but you can't do it in the contest." I was lame, thinking only about my contest run, where I was probably going to get like 33rd out of 54 guys in 17 & Over intermediate, or something like that.
Meanwhile, Dave Vanderspek, who was riding pro, saw the wall thought, "I wonder of I can pedal stall that?" While we were all thinking about contest placings and many guys about sponsors and all that, Dave was just riding shit. It was 1986, street riding was something we all did, but it wasn't its own genre' yet. It would be another year and a half or so before Dave held the first small street contest in NorCal, and then Ron Wilkerson (also originally from San Francisco) held the first one that got magazine coverage, at Santee. Wall rides would be officially invented a year later. Street peg grinds had not been invented yet. But I watched Dave Vanderspek do two or three huge bunnyhops to pedal stalls on a slanted wall. He was landing on the back pedal, and he rode a coaster brake. His pedals were pretty much level. After he rode off, I went over and stood next to the wall where he was landing. The place he was landing his pedal on was over 4 1/2 feet off the ground.
Another favorite Vander photo of mine above. Before wall rides, or looking for gaps, before peg grinds had even been invented, street riding often consisted of doing your flatland tricks in a really sketchy location. Bar endo on a high corner of a ledge with no margin for error, about 1985. These were a favorite of Dave's. This photo is from an interview that was in Bill Batchelor's big newsprint zine, Shreddin'.
You know you're not a great photographer when you can easily name the best photo you've ever taken. I'm not a great photographer, and this is the best photo I've ever taken. Dave Vanderspek at the Palm Springs Tramway GPV race, outside Palm Springs, California, in 1987. Without a fairing, Dave was at a disadvantage, he was probably only hitting 70 or 75mph at the bottom of the hill. Tommy Brackens, riding with a fairing at this race, passed the camera motorcycle in a turn one run. The motorcycle was doing 85mph. Because the course was long and lacked lots of tight turns, people were hitting BIG speeds.
The night before the contest, I remember seeing Dave and another guy walking their bikes out of the motel courtyard about 2am, with a 12 pack under one arm. "Who wants to go hit the course right now?" he asked. Only the guy heading with him went. They hit that crazy fast course, on their GPV's, in the dark (desert road, no street lights)... drunk.
Vander airing over the six foot wide canyon, over Christian Hosoi. AFA Masters contest, Venice Beach, California, 1985. This happens to be the first California contest I ever made it to, thanks to Justin Bickel and his parents, from Idaho. I'm in the background there somewhere, I shot this from the opposite angle, on my trusty Kodak 110 camera, and put the photo in my zine. This is another of my favorite BMX freestyle photos of all time.
Dave Vanderspek was one of a kind. That's why I just drew this tribute drawing of him. Copies are available. Find me on Facebook, or email me at: stevenemig13@gmail.com, for info.
Check out my new mash-up book/blog about the future:
Blog post: What Dave Vanderspek brought to the freestyle party
This is photo of Dave Vanderspek was taken by 13-year-old Bill Batchelor, for his really amazing Shreddin' zine, from July of 1985. This was a couple years before wall rides, three years before the first street peg grind photo in a magazine, and five years before the first handrail grinds on street. Doing a bar endo in a really gnarly urban place was one of Vander's early street moves, setting the stage for the future of street riding to come.
I started hearing about Dave Vanderspek in BMX Plus in 1983, when I was getting serious about BMX racing in Idaho, and only BMX Plus was available in 7-11's and grocery stores in Boise. I didn't run into BMX Action until I started buying parts at Bob's Bikes (and Lawnmower Repair), my local bike shop in Boise. The first photo I can remember of Dave was at a skatepark contest at Pipeline Skatepark, when he was blasting huge 7 and 8 foot high jumps out of the back corner of the square side of the Combi Pool. The pool was 13 feet deep with five feet of vert and huge coping, and Dave was BLASTING out of that pool. It seemed insane. Later, when I got to ride that pool a little, I couldn't even get my front tire up to the tile in that corner, though I could carve right up to the coping in the round bowl. Dave's massive flyouts 3 or 4 years earlier seemed even more amazing. And completely impossible.
While obviously an amazingly talented rider, Dave didn't spend his riding career on one factory team. He rode a Schwinn in the first issue of FREESTYLIN' magazine. He later rode for the Skyway factory team, and later for Kuwahara, and Boss. But he spent most of his time promoting the Curb Dogs, the local, San Francisco bike/skate team he helped found. With guys like Maurice Meyer, skater Tommy Guerrero, and several others, The Curb Dogs was the best known independent team in the world, and always landed in the top 5 teams when polls were taken, always beating some of the factory teams of the day. Since I just did the drawing below as a tribute to Vander, I'm going to be writing some posts about my memories of riding, hanging out, and talking with him. But in this post, I want to list five big things Dave Vanderspek brought to BMX freestyle in the 1980's.
Street riding- Dave was one of the earliest pioneers of BMX street riding. Yes, I know, every early rider rode on "the streets." Bob Haro and R.L. Osborn used to practice kickturns at the Larry's Donuts bank in Redondo Beach, and there's a classic photo of Bob Haro doing an edged kickturn on the 6th and Commonwealth banks, in downtown L.A.. Yes, everyone rode on the streets on their bikes, and hit little curb jumps. But not everyone had an urban terrain like San Francisco. Dave Vanderspek was one of the first riders to see the paved world as a big skatepark/bike park, ready to be explored and sessioned, just for the fun and thrill of riding it. Dave and the Curb Dogs were one of the big early forces in pushing the use of urban terrain in all news ways and figuring out how it could be used to have fun on a bike.
Punk Rock- As a BMXer, skater, and a punker, Dave brought the "fuck it" punk rock attitude into BMX in a way no one else did in the early 1980's. With the Curb Dogs bike/skate demo team, he also took the "Do It Yourself/DIY" attitude of punk, and brought it into BMX freestyle, where we were listening to all kinds of music, and wearing motorcycle-style leathers and helmets to compete in flatland. Vander's punk rock vibe, and attitude, led the way in BMX freestylers learning to be ourselves, wear more functional clothing, and working hard to build and promote our own teams, invent new tricks, and figuring out a way to make things we wanted to see happen in the world.
The Curb Dogs- In the early days of BMX freestyle spreading across the U.S. and the world, there was no team like the Curb Dogs. In the annual NORA cup awards, the Curb Dogs were always in the top 5 most popular freestyle teams, ranking among all the factory teams of the day. They always beat 3 or 4 factory teams in the magazine reader polls. That happened because Dave, while coming across as a Jeff Spiccoli-like goofball sometimes, worked his ass off to be weird, have fun, and promote the hell out of the Curb Dogs, and BMX freestyle itself.
The first BMX halfpipe contest- While Ron Wilkerson took vert to a new level by putting on the 2-Hip King of Vert contests from 1987 on, the very first BMX halfpipe contest was promoted by Dave Vanderspek at skater Joe Lopes' ramp, in San Francisco.
The first BMX street contest- If you ask an old school rider when the first BMX street contest was, they'll most likely say it was the 2-Hip Meet the Street contest in Santee, California, in the spring of 1988. Heck for years, I thought that was the first street contest, because that was the first I heard of and went to. But once again, Dave Vanderspek led the way, holding a small, NorCal street contest months before Santee happened. It was a regional thing, none of the magazines showed up to cover it. From what I heard, that wasn't the point, Dave just decided someone needed to throw a BMX street contest, so he put one on, before anyone else.
Dave Vanderspek, airing out of the Pipe Bowl at Pipeline Skatepark, 1983 or 1984. Dave didn't have a skatepark to practice at in NorCal, and he rode a coaster brake in the pools. That pool is 12 feet deep with four feet of vert. Few, if any, skateparks today are as hard to air out of as the Pipe Bowl was.
How good of a rider was Dave Vanderspek? While Dave Vanderspek was known for doing easy tricks like track stands and and harder tricks like bar endos, he had a full bag of flatland tricks, many of them, like the bar endo, and the Vander Roll, were tricks he invented. Some were not super hard, and more for show, like the Vander Roll, but some tricks were really hard. I also saw Dave doing blunts on parking blocks on top of banks, a predecessor to the street abubaca, a year before the abubaca was invented.
One day at a contest at the velodrome, I was talking to Dave, and he looked over at a hubba, an angled concrete wall on the side of a small set of stairs. He asked, "You think I can pedal stall that?" Since I'd never seen a pedal stall, I said, "Huh?" Dave pedaled slowly towards it, did a huge bunnyhop, and landed on his pedal, on the angled wall, 4 1/2 feet off the ground. First try. He literally did a 3 1/2 foot high bunnyhop, turned 90 degrees, and landed on his pedal, at a time when street peg stalls didn't exist, and peg grinds on ledges were a year or two away from being invented. Then he hopped down and kinda of laughed. I'd never seen anything like that, and Vander blew my fucking mind. Again.
On one or more occasions, Dave put a freewheel on his freestyle bike, and raced B Pro, and was in the mix with the other pro racers of the day. He didn't have a skatepark to practice in, but competed in skatepark contests. He was so far ahead of the game in early street riding, that we usually didn't understand how hard and gnarly his tricks really were. Then there's that insanely high bunnyhop tabletop photo from 1983 (in a previous section). That photo is now 37 years old, and I've never seen anyone equal it in height and style, to this day. Dave Vanderspek wasn't just a funny and charismatic goofball, and a good promoter, he was seriously one of the best all around riders in BMX freestyle in the early and mid 1980's, and a pioneer in many different ways.
While he died tragically in 1988, Dave Vanderspek was a huge influence on the world of BMX freestyle, and many of the top riders of the era. That's why I chose to draw a picture of him with my Sharpies, the 4th drawing in my series of Old School BMX freestyle pros. Here's the picture I drew. It's 11" X 14", drawn in my signature Sharpie scribble style, and some signed (by me) and numbered copies are still available. Contact me at: stevenemig13@gmail.com for info.
Here's a local TV news segment on the Beach Park Bike shop ramp jams, at the same time period I lived in San Jose. In the clip we see Robert Peterson, Maurice Meyer, Karl Rothe, Chris Rothe, and Darcy Langlois.
As I've mentioned many times in blogs before, I got into BMX while in high school in Boise, Idaho, in June of 1982. I raced locally throughout 1983 and into 1984, then got more into freestyle, and focused on that. I graduated from Boise High in 1984, and used my $300 in graduation gift money to buy a Skyway T/A frame and fork set, much to everyone's dismay. That was my first good quality BMX/freestyle bike. In the spring of 1985, my dad got laid off, and soon found a new job in San Jose, California. My family moved there in May, I think. I rented a room at my best friend's house for the summer and worked my summer job as manager of a tiny amusement park called the Boise Fun Spot. Here's the sole surviving riding photo of me from that summer, along with one of me running the Ferris Wheel. The three women on the Ferris wheel, Kim, Michelle, and Pam, all worked there. The photos were taken by co-worker Vaughn Kidwell.
Long before I met Robert Peterson, I spent the Idaho winter learning Peterson inspired balance tricks in my bedroom and the living room. Oh yeah, real Vuarnet cat eye glasses, baby. Found those in a field, you can't beat free. Insert joke about my Op cord shorts here ________________.
After we closed the Fun Spot, tore down the rides, and packed it up for the winter, I got ready to move to San Jose. I packed up my shit brown 1971 Pontiac Bonneville, which had 455 engine, and was slightly smaller than the U.S.S. Nimitz, and got about the same gas mileage. I drove solo from Boise to San Jose, which is a story for another day. I got situated in my parents' three bedroom apartment, and soon found a job at Pizza Hut, right down the street from the Winchester Mystery House. I began riding solo around our area in the afternoons, and working in the evenings. The Apple Macintosh had just debuted the year before, Apple was still a pretty small company, and I didn't hear the term "Silicon Valley," for months after moving there. Things have changed a bit in San Jose since 1985.
I knew there was a really cool scene of riders in NorCal, but in those pre-internet days, I had no idea where to find them, and the San Francisco Bay Area is HUGE. At that point, I'd never seen the first issue of FREESTYLIN' magazine, that told about Golden Gate Park, and where the riders sessioned at on the weekends. I had been thinking about starting a Xerox zine about freestyle in Boise, inspired by an article in FREESTYLIN'. So I decided that doing a zine would be a way to find and meet other riders. I also called my Idaho teammate, Jay Bickel. He introduced me to Skyway riders Oleg Konings and Robert Peterson at the 1985 Venice Beach AFA contest, but didn't know how to contact either of them. His mom said she'd try to find their numbers.
I took my photos from Boise, including the one above, and made my first zine, called "San Jose Stylin'." It sucked, it wasn't even folded like a book, I'd never actually seen a zine in real life before, just read about them. My first couple of issues were three pages, copied on both sides, and stapled in the upper left corner, like a test in school. I bought a manual (non-electric) Royal typewriter, 1930's era, at the San Jose Swap Meet for $15, and had my trusty 110 Kodak to take photos with. I used my Pizza Hut money to publish my zine. I then drove around San Jose and dropped off copies at every bike shop that carried BMX bikes.
After a week, I got a phone call from a guy named John Vasquez, an amazing rider, and he told me to come see his ramp and meet his riding buddies, which included Vince Torres. They were in San Jose, and I went down to session with them, and shoot some photos. They became the main story in my second zine issue. They also told me about riders meeting up at Golden Gate Park on the weekends, and the monthly ramp jams at Beach Park Bikes, where Robert Peterson worked. About the same time, Jay from Idaho got back to me, also telling me about Bert and Beach Park Bikes.
I called up Bert at the shop, and he was really cool. He told me the next ramp jam was a week later, and that I should come ride with them. By then, I'd sold my car. So I borrowed my dad's car, and braved the Bay Area traffic, which scared the crap out of me at first, since we didn't have traffic much in Boise. But I put my Skyway in the trunk, and made the trip up to Foster City, home of Beach Park Bikes. About halfway to downtown San Francisco from my home in San Jose, Beach Park sat practically in the shadow of the enormous San Mateo Bridge.
I got up there, a Saturday afternoon, I think. The Skyway factory ramp was there, not even set up yet, along with the wedge ramp. I went into the shop, asked for Robert Peterson, and introduced myself, and gave him a few of my zines. Bert was really cool, and immediately introduced me to Dave Vanderspek and Maurice Meyer, leaders of the legendary Curb Dogs, and pro riders who were standing there. That's the first time I met Vander and Drob. I later met Oleg Konings again, who, by the way, is the guy who invented scuffing... in 1984. True.
As they set up the ramps, I got talking to another rider there, a guy named John Ficarra, who lived a couple blocks away. We hit it off, and he wound up introducing me to other riders who showed up, which included Chris and Karl Rothe, Darcy Langlois, Tim Treacy, and I think Rick Anderson and Mike Golden, hot ramp riders, were there that day. As I recall, John, Vince, and a couple other guys from San Jose showed up that day as well.
Honestly, I was overwhelmed. I was some kid from Idaho, where there were two serious freestylers, in the whole state, and I thought I was hot shit. I got fucking schooled at Beach Park, everyone there was really good. Suddenly I wasn't reading about Bert, Maurice, Dave, and Oleg in the magazines, I was hanging out and riding with them. I honestly never really thought that would happen while living in Idaho. I mean, we all played basketball as kids, too, but never expected to hang on a court with Magic Johnson Larry Bird some day. But in freestyle, even now, riding with the top pros is a pretty normal thing if you travel to contests or jams.
I introduced myself as "the zine guy," because I honestly didn't feel cool enough to hang with those guys. It wasn't them, they were all cool as hell. That was my own issues. I don't remember much about that day, except just having a blast riding and trying to land my best tricks, and seeing all these other tricks I'd never seen before. I hit the ramps a bit, and got more psyched on riding than ever. I had to leave right when the jam was over, my parents needed the car to go somewhere, I think.
The last thing I remember was John Ficarra saying, "Hey we're going to get a pizza and watch Faces of Death, you wanna come over? As tough as it was to say "no" to an offer like that, I did, and headed back to San Jose. A whole news phase of my freestyle life had begun, and would take me places I couldn't even imagine at the time.
I'm going to dive into a bunch of stories about my time in San Jose, and Dave Vanderspek, in particular, because I've just finished my latest Old School Pro rider drawing, one of Dave Vanderspek, below.
High quality color copies of this drawing, 11" X 14," each signed and numbered, on thick card stock, are available for $20. Message me on Facebook, or email me at stevenemig13@gmail.com, if you're interested. The first 22 are gone, but there are plenty left... for now.
Here's a regular at the AFA local California contests in 1987, Jeff Cotter, with a smokin' hot flatland routine in 1988. Jeff and his younger brother Tim were at pretty much every American Freestyle Association contest in Southern California, local or Masters Series. He was part of what we called the Lakewood crew, which included Ron McCoy, Nathan Shimizu, Ron Camero, and a few others. By 1988, he was sponsored by Ozone and Vision Street Wear.
Since I'm (more or less) living up in the San Fernando Valley again, one local AFA contest from 1987 popped into my had recently. During my stint as the newsletter editor/photographer for the American Freestyle Association newsletter in 1987, I did a whole bunch of other stuff as well, because that's what happens in a small business with only 3 or 4 employees. Two or three months into my work at the AFA, owner Bob Morales bought a 30 foot long box trailer from Gary Turner, the "G. T." behind GT Bikes. Gary owned a dragster at that point, and Bob bought his old dragster trailer when Gary upgraded to a better one. It was about twice as big of a trailer as we needed to haul the basic AFA gear to a contest, but the price was right.
I had never pulled a trailer behind a car or truck before, and I was the main driver of the AFA Ford van, and I had to quickly learn how to drive with a huge ass trailer following me. That was one time being uptight and completely anal retentive was a good trait. I was super careful, and managed to never scratch that monster trailer, and got pretty dang good at driving with a trailer over the next several months.
Another aspect of having a trailer, is how to load it. To go to an AFA local contest, we had our 8 foot high, wooden Socko quarterpipe, a couple of four foot high, really heavy speakers, two or three boxes of T-shirts, little posts and rope rope off the contest area, and some folding tables and chairs. The quarterpipe, with kickers off, we could roll into the trailer, and it fit right over the wheel wells inside. It locked right in place, which was really cool. Then we would just put all the other stuff in the back of the trailer, behind the quaterpipe, that made it all easy to unload.
The AFA Ford van with the big, 30 foot box trailer, became a 49 foot long rig. That's not as long as a standard tractor trailer rig, but it's bigger than most things on the freeway. My first, trip of any length, was a night drive up the 405 freeway to Northridge. For those of you not in or from Southern California, Northridge is best known as the site of the big, 6.7 magnitude earthquake, in 1994. That's the most destructive earthquake that has happened in the 34 years since I first moved to SoCal. But this story happened in 1987, seven years before the big earthquake.
We had an AFA local contest scheduled for the next morning, in a corner of a big parking lot, at a fairgrounds-type place, where the Devonshire downs BMX track was located. We decided to drive up the night before, rather than battle 50 miles of traffic, potentially 4 hours in traffic, on Saturday morning. Bob drove his BMW, following me and our two "roadies," a couple of Huntington Beach local skinheads. Yeah, skinheads. While we didn't agree with their ideology, they worked cheap, and were pretty cool for the most part. In those days, a lot of young guys had friends who became skinheads, so they became skinheads, but weren't walking being racist assholes all the time. That's kind of how these two were. They looked the part, but were more just punkers than crazy racists. The cool thing about young skinheads was that they would gladly do $5 worth of work for $2 worth of beer. Saving money was a priority at the AFA, and Bob was a master a getting things done cheap.
We took off, and not long after I got going on the freeway, I realized that our new trailer was kind of squirrelly over about 45 miles an hour. As I got going at about 55 mph, the big trailer started swaying side to side a little bit, maybe a foot each way. I did my best to keep the rig riding well, but it was nervewracking, and I just cruised along at about 50, as other cars swerved around us, and honked on a regular basis.
Somewhere around LAX airport, the thing I was hoping to avoid happened, I saw flashing lights in the rear view mirror. I pulled over, and Bob and his then girlfriend Suzy Q, pulled over behind the CHP car. The highway patrol officer walked up, and asked the basic questions to see if I was drunk or something. I told him the trailer was just kind of squirrelly, and I was doing my best to keep it in my lane. That, of course, wasn't good enough. A second CHP car pulled up, and Bob talked to the two officers, told him he owned the van and trailer, and tried to work things out. Just to make things even more fun, I really had to take a leak, and was hoping they'd decide to just give me a warning... quickly. Then I could pull over and take a leak at a restaurant or something.
Nope, that wasn't in the cards. As I joked with the skinheads about just taking a leak on the side of the road, and taking the second ticket, we waited. The officers took a full 45 minutes or so to actually flip through a copy of the California Vehicle Code (pre-internet days), and find a code they could ticket me for. As my dad would say, I had to whiz so bad that my back teeth were floating and my eye teeth were singing "Anchors Away," by the time they handed me a ticket to sign. I accepted the citation for the obscure offense of "trailer not tracking properly," and we got back underway. We stopped to hit the restroom shortly afterwards, and then made it up to the Devonshire Downs site without incident.
The parking lot reserved for our flatland a ramp contest was rough asphalt, and really old asphalt. And there were potholes. I'm not talking little six inch diameter potholes an inch or two deep, there were six or eight inch deep holes in the parking lot, big enough to ride a BMX bike into and then jump out the other side. It was ridiculous. Bob found our contact, and tried to negotiate a better chunk of parking lot, but it was a no go. So, in the dark, we set up the quarterpipe, with as straight as possible run up to it. We set up our stanchions, roped off the contest area, and set up the speakers and sound system. There was a fair, or carnival type thing, going on, and their security was supposed to keep an eye on our stuff until the fair shut down for the night.
I think Bob and Suzy had a hotel room for the night, and the skinheads and I were going to crash in the van, on site, to keep an eye on our ramp and equipment after the fair closed for the night. With everything set up, Bob and Suzy headed off to the hotel, and the skinheads and me were hungry. There was no cheap fast food in sight. One of the guys flagged down a car, and a couple of upscale guys said there were a couple fast food places a mile or so away. Somehow, one of the skinheads talked these yuppie guys into giving our grungy asses a ride. The guys talked non-stop, and we realized they were pretty much coked out. They dropped us off as Carl's Jr. or Del Taco, or whatever it was, and claimed they were going to run a couple errands, and then come back by, and give us a ride back to the event site.
The three of us had a cheap dinner, and the skinheads took their money Bob paid them, and bought a couple of 40's of beer. Surprisingly, the two yuppie guys came back, but they got really paranoid about us, and didn't want to give us a ride back. The skinheads said they must have chalked up another line and drifted off into coke paranoia. Since it was dark when they gave a ride to the restaurant, we hadn't paid attention, and didn't even know how to get back to the event site. The paranoid yuppies pointed us in the right direction, and took off. So the skinheads and I walked a mile and a half or so, back to our contest site. Luckily no police rolled by, since the skinheads started working on their beers as we walked.
Back at the AFA van, they chilled out to drink the rest of their 40's, and I was able to get a wristband from our contact, and I wandered around the fair for a while. I wound up watching a really good cover band, playing a stage near the back gate, close to our contest area. I remember the banded ended their set with a kick ass cover of Steppenwolf's "Magic Carpet Ride," and I headed out the back gate as fair closed down.
Back in our van, the skinheads were happily buzzed, and telling stories and were pretty mellow. I grabbed my bike, and rode a little, jumping out of the crazy potholes and joking with the skinheads. It was a pretty warm night, and as we started thinking about crashing out for the night, I joked, "I should sleep on top of the quarterpipe tonight." It quickly went from a joke, to what seemed like a cool idea. So I grabbed my sleeping bag, climbed up on the 4' by 8' deck of the quarterpipe, laid out my sleeping bag, and went to sleep. The skinheads crashed out in the van, not far away.
The next thing I remember was feeling the wood below me rock, hear the buzz of tires on the ramp, and heard someone yell, "Whoa!" I opened my eyes, half asleep, trying to figure out where the hell I was. I looked out of my sleeping bag, and all I saw was sky all around me. From somewhere below, I heard a voice say, "There's someone sleeping on top of the ramp." The voices below wondered if some bum had climbed up on the ramp overnight, and I woke up enough to remember I was sleeping on top of the AFA quarterpipe. I sat up, and the guys below said, "Hey, it's Steve!" and started laughing. I forget which riders it was, but it was one of the small groups of riders that was at every local AFA contest. It may have been the Lakewood guys, because I remember when I sat up, I saw Jeff Cotter roll into one of the potholes, and jump out, doing a small no footer. Jeff was a hardcore flatlander, and I knew he had a quaterpipe at home, but I'd never seen him jump anything. Still waking up, I remember thinking, "Whoa, Cotter can jump?"
By that time, several of the riders rolled over and started asking me if I actually slept on the quarterpipe all night, which they thought was pretty funny. I started talking to those guys standing there, as other riders started hitting the quarterpipe, while I was sitting on top. Someone asked why I slept on the ramp, and I told them the skinheads were crashed out in the van. So immediately, a couple guys started knocking on the sides of the van to wake up the skinheads, who were not very happy with the wake-up call, since they were kind of hung over.
I climbed down from the deck of the ramp, and everyone started practicing on the ramp, and joking about the horrible potholes in the parking lot. That turned quickly into little trains hitting the bigger potholes and jumping out, trying can-cans, no footers, X-ups, and lookbacks. After that it turned into a normal, local AFA contest. But it's the only AFA contest that year where riders were actually jumping out of potholes and doing variations during their flatland runs. That was the joke of the day.
We held the contest, and as usual, I worked during it, then jumped on my bike and competed in flatland, and then helped tear everything down, along with our skinhead roadies and Bob, Suzy, and probably Riki, Bob's sister, who worked at the AFA. We made the long trip back to Huntington Beach that night. The big trailer and van were squirrelly, again, but we made it back without incident. Then we took the skinheads bowling.
Sometimes you just have to put on the headphones, crank it up, forget the world, and rock out. Here are a few of my favorite rock performances for that purpose. Taking me back to the days of riding the school bus home from high school in Boise to Blue Valley trailer park... Rush- "Tom Sawyer." Dick Dale- "Miserlou" (This song inspired the movie Pulp Fiction)
Quick rule of international finance and central banking. If you have to put $211 BILLION dollars, into ANYTHING, in TWO DAYS... that thing is pretty much FUCKED. The Fed (the Federal Reserve, those people that aren't a U.S. government agency, but print our money) pumped $211 billion into the Repo Market a couple of weeks ago, in two days. It didn't go into our everyday economy, but straight into the financial markets.
Uh...OK... you're thinking, so what the hell is the Repo Market? The Repo Market plays a role kind of like a pawn shop for the financial markets. If you had $67 in your checking account, and you needed $100 minimum the next morning to avoid a fee, you'd need to come up with some money to put in your account. One solution would be to take your X-Box to a pawn shop, get a $100 loan for it, then put the $100 into your bank account to avoid the fee. When you could got your next paycheck, you would go back to the pawn shop, pay the $100, plus some interest, and get your Xbox back. Everything's cool.
In the world of huge investment banks, and major banking, banks need to make certain numbers every night. Your money doesn't just sit in a bank's vault. We know most money moves as computer blips these days anyhow. Banks have a very tiny fraction of the money people deposit in banks, and to keep them from going bankrupt, they have certain numbers to hit every day, to keep regulators happy, and to make a huge collapse like 2008, less likely. So the Repo Market is kind of like a pawn shop for banks. They go into a site, and the banks that need money to make their numbers, borrow money overnight, or for a few days, from banks that have extra money.
It's called the "Repo" market not because something gets repossessed, but because the banks sell something (like government bonds) to another bank, and they have a contact to buy it back in a day or two. "Repo" is short for "repurchase," because those contracts are called "repurchase agreements." So every night, banks borrow billions from each other, and then pay it back in a day, or a few days.
The Fed tries to keep the interest rate for these Repo loans at a certain level. But on September 23rd, 2019, the market went crazy, banks didn't want to loan to each other for some reason, and that interest rate shot from around 2% up to near 10%. This meant banks with money didn't trust some of the other banks to pay the money back. The video at the top of this page explains how The Fed created money, then shoved it into this market. It's kind of like your car engine seizing because it needs a lot of oil, and the mechanic pours 4 quarts of oil into it, to keep it running. But the engine is leaking so bad, it STILL doesn't want to keep running, so the mechanic (The Fed), just keeps pouring oil into it, instead of manning up and saying, "We need to rebuild this engine, it's toast." The Fed doesn't want to admit they fucked up. BIG TIME. That's the basic, underlying problem.
When I wrote this blog post on October 1st, I didn't know what the Repo Market was either. In that post, I predicted that the biggest economic collapse, of our lifetimes, would begin in October 2019. I have seen major trends converging, and the economic system deteriorating, for a long time. October looked like it would be the flashpoint. I predicted we would see a "Lehman Brothers" type moment. In September 2008, after the earlier collapse of investment bank Bear Stearns, another investment bank, Lehman Brothers, went bust. Nobody expected that, and the financial world FREAKED. While we had actually been in a recession for a year at that point, it wasn't obvious to most people. Things were happening behind the scenes, but looked pretty good on the surface. The U.S. stock markets had still been going up, and that's the indicator of "the economy" in most people's thinking.
But when Lehman Brothers collapsed, the already very shaky economy, collapsed in a way that everyone could see. The stock market dropped dramatically, everything went into turmoil, and President George W. Bush oversaw a shot of $600 billion into the economy from The Fed. Coming into office in the middle of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930's, President Obama oversaw two more big injections of money into our financial system, to try and keep things afloat. Those influxes of money into the economy were called "Quantitative Easing." Why? Because that's confusing term, and doesn't sound scary. Basically, The Fed creates money out of thin air, and buys government bonds, or other things. It also owns most of the massive $1.6 trillion in student debt, too. But that's another mess.
The stock markets began to turn upward in early 2008, and have trended up until January 2018, a month after President Trump signed the huge tax cuts bill into law. Since that time, the stock markets have risen, but they've gone to about, or just above the January 26, 2018 peak, and then dropped quite a bit. Then they go back up, due to super cheap money available to the financial markets. But they barely move above that January 2018 high mark.
Right now after hundreds of billions of dollars have been pumped into the financial markets in the last 6 weeks, the stock market is at a new high. But it's only up about 4% in 21 months. That's pathetic. The stock market, at its peak right now, is up 2% a year for nearly the last two years. It keeps beginning to drop, and The Fed and major banks do something, ANYTHING, to prop it back up for a while longer. But the the things they do are getting less and less effective. So the Repo Market, which never made news before, seized up on September 23rd, 2019.
What I didn't realize when I wrote that blog post on October 1st, was that the "Lehman Brothers Moment," had already happened. The Spetember 23rd seizing of the Repi Markets was our "Lehman Brothers moment." It just happened in a place so obscure, it made news for two days, was swept under the rug, and life went on. But to keep life going on, The Fed pumped an average of $190 BILLION A DAY into the economy in October, and is still pumping tens and hundreds of billions of dollars in, nearly every day.
If we imagine that old car with the engine seizing because of an oil leak, The Fed didn't say, "It's fucked, let's take the time to pull the engine, and completely rebuild it." Instead they put a 5 gallon oil tank on the hood, pouring oil straight into the engine, to keep it driving. But THAT wasn't enough. So basically, in this metaphor, our old car with the oil leak, now has a super tanker ship full of oil, sitting on top of the car, pouring oil into the engine, that they don't want to admit needs fixed. That won't last forever. This is by no means a perfect metaphor, but it captures the absurdity of the solution to the problem that the economy worldwide is facing.
This is why we get billionaire investors like Ray Dalio writing essays like this one, "The World Has Gone Mad,"and a lot of people actually read it.
The reality is, WE ARE IN the "next" economic downturn.It has already begun.
In 2008, we had a major bank collapse, Bear Stearns, and then a second, Lehman Brothers, and that freaked everyone out, and policy makers and The Fed went into war room mode to try and keep the economy going. Now, The Fed and other economic leaders are taking massive actions, already comparable to 2008 in size, to keep one or more (likely several) MAJOR banks and businesses from collapsing like Lehman Brothers, AND they're pretending it's not happening. We're getting the massive bailout, BEFORE the collapse.
That's not good. As I have said for a couple of years, the serious recession we should have had in 2017 (and should now be working our way out of), has been held off by massive manipulation at levels unheard of in world history. So now shit's just gonna get stupid at some point, more major businesses will fail, and A LOT of average people will really take a big hit, and it will get much uglier. This is the kind of scenario that can implode an empire.
Hopefully, instead, we take the hard hit financially, and rebuild a system in a way that's viable in today's hyper connected, high tech enabled world. What we are seeing right now is THE BEGINNING of the disruption of our world economic system, which was built in and upon, the Industrial Age. Remember when Napster went live, and completely changed the music industry... ONVERNIGHT? That's happening to our economic system worldwide now. Hang on.
This is one of the few BMX freestyle videos of the late 1980's, made by a guy completely out of the the BMX and freestyle industry.
We have my Huntington beach Pier riding buddy Mike Sarrail to thank for this one. Every weekend in the late 1980's and early 1990's, we were at the H.B. Pier riding for crowds. While the pros and top ams were touring the country and the world, A handful of us H.B. locals, and lots of random visiting freestylers, performed for crowds of 100 or more people, several times a day, on weekends. One time I tried to figure out just how many people I rode in front of there, and the number was over 140,000 people, 100 to sometimes 500 per crowd, over a five year period.
Though he lived an hour inland, Mike was a local at the pier on weekends, and was known for doing the undertaker, as well as barspinning and no handed Miami hop hops, among other tricks. Riding for lots of crowds back then, we inevitably met a lot of people, many of whom think thought freestyle was really cool. Every now and then, some guy would say he was going to use us in a movie or something, and make us famous. That never happened.
But one day Mike spent half an hour or 45 minutes talking to a guy who said he made videos, and had some distribution channel to sell thousands of them in mainstream discount stores, like Kmart. He asked Mike about freestyle, what kinds of riding there were, who the top riders were, and what music we listened to. Mike gave him all kinds of ideas. I rode up and talked to the guy to, a little bit.
He left, and we didn't think much of it. But then the guy called Mike back, and he ended up helping to set up the Metal MC music video shoot/ramp jam. The guy rented the then-empty lot on the corner of PCH and Main, across from the pier, the same lot we used for local AFA contests then. It's where Huntington Surf & Sport, and the Duke Kahanamoku statue now stand. Mike helped the guy get in touch with GT, and he rented the infamous Stonehenge, 4 sided box ramp, for the jam. There was no contest, Mike and I just called everyone we knew and told them there would be a jam that weekend.
If was one big, long, causal, totally fun session. As you can see in the video, Brian Blyther and Dave Voelker were launching. Rich Bartlett came down from the high desert. Dave Vanderspek, Maurice Meyer and the NorCal posse came down. The San Diego guys came up. Eddie Roman was riding, and if you look close, you can see Brad Blanchard land a 540 jump on the Stonehenge deck, which was pretty epic in 1988.
It was one of the most fun and drama-free days of riding at any event in those days. The guy shot at the Camarillo halfpipe, Mission Beach, and several other places. The guy was completely outside the BMX/freestyle industry. The camera work is mostly lame. The editing is hokey. There was no attempt to get the freshest, most progressive riding.
But the guy made the video quick, got it on the market, and probably sold more copies than any other BMX freestyle video of the late 1980's. That was the home video world then. There's a lot of good riding, and a bunch of amateurs got some coverage. As weird as it sounds, thousands more kids saw this video than the GT and BMX Plus videos together, which were the main industry video producers then.
I just started a new blog for Marvin Davits, to promote Marvin's business of installing dinghy davits on boats and yachts. Check it out.
The Man in Black, the coolest country singer I heard growing up, singing the Nine Inch Nails song "Hurt." With this bittersweet cover, nearing the end of his life, Johnny Cash touched a generation who was largely unaware of him. This song sent thousands back into his life of songwriting about the struggles of life we all face and try to cope with.
From 1982, riding my BMX bike nearly every day was the main thing that helped me cope with the stress and pain and craziness of life. As I got more into riding, first racing, and then freestyle, I did what most BMXers did in the 1980's. I told my family and friends it was all about winning a race, or winning a trophy at the next freestyle contest. I told them I was "practicing" to win a "competition." Average people understood that. That's what mainstream sports were for. You practiced to become a "winner" by beating another team on a certain day.
But BMX riding wasn't about that, tough I managed to convince myself that it was, for a few years. Really, like most BMXers and skaters and surfers and snowboarders, I was escaping. My bike was the vessel that took me away from the craziness of the world for a couple of hours. I could do whatever I wanted. I could go fast and just pedal to blow off steam and vent frustration. I could practice a flatland move over and over and over, a moving meditation of sorts. Some days I would just ride around the Jeep trails of the desert outside Boise for hours.
BMX was never really about "winning" for me. It was about survival. I think that's why so many riders are still doing it now, in their 40's and 50's. That's why it's a lifestyle sport, using the term "sport" very loosely. It's not a hobby. It's something we need, something simply necessary, no matter our age, to deal with this wonderful, terrible, incredible, painful opera called life on Earth.
Loser and Bitch... a love story
In the late 1990's working at Cirque du Soleil, I met a woman several years younger than me. She was a petite little thing, really cute, but with a huge attitude. One of our first days working in the box office, she came in and started bitching about something at her other job. After venting about someone getting pissed at her there, I said, half jokingly, "Doesn't he know you're bitch?" She jumped off her stool stomped over to mine, and punched me in the arm. Hard. It actually hurt. "Loser," she snapped, as she walked back to her spot. But she smiled a little. We ate lunch together in the Cirque cuisine that day, hit it off, and became friends. From that day on, she called me Loser and I called her Bitch.
On one hand, she was like a second chance at the little hotties I'd never hooked up with in high school. She was smart and funny and cute and feisty as could be. We became really close friends, but never did hook up. Yet we could talk about anything. We both came from families that were more dysfunctional than most. Between us, we had more issues than a magazine rack at Barnes & Noble. We both had sick senses of humor, and made each other laugh a lot.
But she was also a cutter. One three occasions, I called her when she was in her room at home, dragging the a razor blade lightly across her wrist. One night, the first, was worse than the other two. She didn't seem to fit in anywhere, much like me, freaks even in the crazy world of Southern California. She was in the depths of depression and saw no future. She was completely suicidal, something the majority of people don't understand, though half think about at some point.
The popular belief is that suicidal people want to kill themselves. In most cases, that isn't true. In my experience, most of the time, it isn't that a suicidal person wants to die, what they really want is to escape the incredible pain of living that they just can't take anymore. They want away from it, out of the pain, and killing themselves seems the best way to do that at times. In those times, depression envelopes them, like a dark, humid, tangible cloud of pain, depression, and self-loathing. That's where Bitch was on those nights, the razor blade nights.
On the first of those, the worst one, I knew by talking to her on the phone that I may never see her again. The cloud of darkness was worse than ever, and that really bummed me out. I loved that crazy little chick. So I did the best thing I could think of, knowing her pretty well at that point. I fucked with her, I helped her plan the perfect suicide.
"So how you gonna do it?" I asked. "Please tell me you're not going to do the whole razor blade in the bathtub thing, that is so fucking cliche'." "Fuck you," she snapped. Then she told me she was sitting next to the tub on her bathroom floor. "Are you naked?" I asked. "What? No," she replied, "Fuck you." I continued, "You're hot, I mean you have to kill yourself naked. You aren't going to care, but at least the ambulance drivers get to see your hot body as they clean up the mess." "Fuck you," she replied, a tiny bit softer than the previous ones.
"You don't have to do it tonight," I prodded, "you could do it tomorrow. You could go BASE jumping somewhere, and just forget the parachute. Are there any tall buildings near you?" "You're an asshole," she snapped back. "An asshole you've never fucked, by the way. That's another reason you can't do it right now. I mean, I'm a Loser, but if you're going to off yourself, you might as well let me fuck you first. I never get laid, I'm terrible in bed, you'll be more motivated to die afterwards, I promise." "Fuck you," she said, a little slower. And a little softer. I thought I heard a whisper of a smile on that "fuck you."
I kept pressing. Several tense minutes and about 20 more fuck you's later, she started laughing. The spell broke. The thick dark cloud of pain and self-loathing and despair dissolved quite a bit. "God dammit, I'm trying to commit suicide here," she said. "I know," I responded, "I'm your friend, I'm trying to help." She broke into more laughter. We talked a few more minutes. She was still incredibly depressed, and although she told me she had set the razor blade down, I knew it was still only a 50/50 chance I'd see her alive again. She might fall right back into the deep spell of despair later that night. And she wouldn't call me. We hung up our phones. I didn't have a car, and she lived 15 miles away or so. Going there wasn't really an option. I hoped things would be alright. They were.
We helped each other through tough times for 3 or 4 years, and then went our separate ways. We needed each other to work through certain issues we each had, for a while. That's what all relationships are ultimately about. I realize that now. We are drawn to the people we're drawn to for a reason.
On that particular night, and a few more like it, I helped my friend Bitch break the spell of suicidal depression. I was able to do that because I'd been there myself, thinking about suicide, and I knew it was a spell. When someone is suicidal, people think that they need to give that person a reason to live for the rest of their lives. What people need is help breaking the spell of the dark cloud of depression that has been woven by all the horrible words and actions they've experienced, and then repeated in their own thoughts until it seems impossible to escape from. You don't have to help a suicidal person find a reason to live to 40 or 50 or 60 more years. You just need to help them find a reason to live for ten more minutes. And then ten more. Then an hour more.
That is exactly what BMX freestyle did for me for the 20 years I rode nearly eve;ry day, from 1982 to 2002. That's why I want to get a bike again, as soon as I can, to get that ability to blow off steam back. There are some financial hurdles to make it over first, though. But that ability to vent and escape and ride, that's why surfers surf, and skaters skate, and snowboarders board, and all the rest. This is a part of why artists make art and writers write and musicians play. Those are other forms of creative outlets. And it's works of art, often created in dark times by their creators, that help everyone else get through their tough times. That's one of the biggest reasons society NEEDS art and artists of all kinds.
I came to McDonald's tonight more depressed than I'd been in a while. My life is somewhat challenging right now, and I was tired and frustrated and a bit of depression set in. I set a goal today for the little business I'm trying to build up around my Sharpie art and writing. And I did amazing today, several drawings sold. But I didn't reach the goal I really was aiming for. Being tired and frustrated, I started thinking about all the things that could go wrong. I started weaving my own little spell of depression. So I came here, got something to eat, clicked onto the wifi, and did what I often do when kind of depressed, I listened to "Hey Nonny Nonny" by The Poxy Boggards. Yeah, try staying depressed while listening to that. Afterwards I listened to this song, and then this song. My little spell of minor depression was broken, and I got back to creative work, which happened to be writing this blog post.
There are times when we wonder what life's about. Then there are times we're doing things we love, like riding a BMX bike for me and many of my friends, or a skateboard, or creating art. We don't question life while doing those things, because while doing them, life is worthwhile. It feels worthwhile. There's no need to question it.
The challenge of being human is to create a life where you spend as much of your time as possible doing the things you don't have to question, the things that are inherently worthwhile to you. Ride, skate, play with your kids, paint, write a song, take a walk in the woods, whatever. So start building that life. It's not supposed to be easy. That's the whole point, to learn to handle whatever life can throw at us.
