Me (Steve Emig), doing a Robert Peterson inspired balance trick, on my Skyway BMX bike, in the summer of 1985, at the Boise Fun Spot. Photo by co-worker Vaughn Kidwell.
In the photo above, I was 19-years-old, wearing way-to-short Op cord shorts, which I thought were what guys in California wore then. I was wrong. At that job I managed 12 employees, while making $3.10 an hour during the day, and practiced tricks on my bike for 2-3 hours every night. Everyone thought I was an idiot for wasting all my time on a "little kid's bike."
I got into BMX in 1982, while in high school, and everyone wondered why I spent so much time riding a "little kid's bike." I told them BMX freestyle was this cool, new,emerging sport. They didn't believe me. I graduated high school from Boise High in 1984, and I didn't have money for college, so I got a job at a big Mexican restaurant, and kept riding my bike as much as possible. I was one of the first 3 or 4 BMX freestylers in Idaho, and rode with Jay Bickel on the reformed version of the first Idaho trick team, the Critical Condition Stunt Team.
My family moved to San Jose, California in June of 1985, because my dad got a new job there. I rented a room at my best friend's house for the summer, and worked at the Boise Fun Spot as the manager. It had six carnival rides, a food stand, and a miniature golf course (I tied the course record, 31 for 18 holes), and was in Julia Davis Park, near the zoo, by the Boise River. It's gone now, there's a playground where The Fun Spot used to be. When The Fun Spot closed in August, I packed up my ugly, brown, 1971 Pontiac Bonneville, and drove solo to San Jose, and moved back in with my family.
I quickly got a job at a local Pizza Hut, and wondered how to find the BMX freestylers in the Bay Area. In those pre-internet days, things like that were hard. So I started publishing a zine about freestyle, and passed it out at local bike shops, hoping to meet some other riders. It worked, I soon met some San Jose local riders, and they told me about the monthly ramp jams, and that led me to Sunday sessions at Golden Gate Park, the tightest scene in freestyle at the time. I kept publishing a zine monthly, and sending copies to several BMX industry people. Pretty much everyone thought publishing a zine was pretty stupid, and it eventually ate up half my monthly pay from Pizza Hut.
Then in July of 1986, I got offered a job at BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines. At age 20, I moved to Southern California with a bike, a suitcase, and $80. I didn't really click with the guys at the magazines, and got laid off after 5 months. They hired a biker/skater kid from Maryland named Spike Jonze to replace me, and I went on to edit a freestyle newsletter. That led to me producing low budget BMX videos in 1987.
In 1988, I had the idea to do an "audio zine" about BMX, basically a cassette tape with contest highlights, interviews, some music I liked, and stuff like that. That didn't take off, and people thought it was a dumb idea. But it was basically an early version of a podcast, just 30 years too early. Sometimes an idea is just way ahead of technology.
I had another idea in 1988. The Godfather of BMX himself, Scot Breithaupt, sold a TV series to ESPN to produce bike shows. He and his editor rented our edit bay and cut the shows at night. I got the job of hanging out while they were editing. One night Scot asked if I had any ideas for the next show. I told him street riding was the hot new thing in BMX, and it took me about 20 minutes to sell him on that idea. I ended up helping him put on the first made-for-TV bike street contest, six years before the X-Games. It was called The Huntington Beach Street Scene. Short on time and money, Scot used me and riding buddy Randy Lawrence in the intro, as well. Even Scot wasn't sure about street riding, it was something BMXers had always done, he couldn't understand it as its own genre'. But the show wound up getting the best ratings of any show in his series.
In 1990, after working at the Vision Skateboard video company for 2 1/2 years, I decided to self-produce a BMX video. Only a couple riders, Eddie Roman, and Mark Eaton, had tried that at the time. Even riders couldn't figure out why I was making my own video. BMXer/mountain biker Dave Cullinan asked me, why are you making a video, you don't have a company? I told him I wanted to make a video that showed our real riding, not doing flatland, in a uniform, at a miniature golf course, something that one business did in their video. In 1990, I shot and produced a video called The Ultimate Weekend. I lost a bunch of money, but helped show other people that us BMX freestylers could actually produce our own videos. I wound up making the first BMX videos for the AFA, 2-Hip, and S&M Bikes. I produced or edited 12 early BMX videos in all, becoming one of the pioneers in the rider-made video movement, which happened in BMX, skating, snowboarding, and inline in the early 1990's. Obviously making videos has become a huge part of action sports, as the sports, and technology, continue to progress.
I published my first zine of poetry in 1992, with nearly 100 poems. That didn't seem like a good idea, even to me, but my nickname, The White Bear, came from the first poem in that zine. I did a handful of other zines during the 90's, 2 more of poetry, and 3 or 4 of action sports and random stuff. I've published over 40 zines, several 48 pages or more, in my life. People always think zines are kind of dumb, until you give them one, then they think they're cool. Zines blew up in the 90's, with thousands being published worldwide. Even one popular song mentioned them.
Many years later, I wound up homeless, while working as a taxi driver, living in my cab. When the business really took a dive (before Uber and Lyft), in 2007, I wound up totally living on the streets. No booze, no drugs, just the wrong job at the wrong time. After a year, I went to stay with my family for a while. My parents, and my sister's family, all wound up in North Carolina, though we were originally from Ohio. I went there in November of 2008, as the Great Recession economic collapse was happening. With nothing to do, and unable to find any job at all in NC, I used my parents' computer, and started blogging about my days in the BMX industry in the 1980's. In North Carolina, they though BMX was stupid, and most people didn't really know what a blog was.
I had never spent much time online before that, I was a Luddite, and didn't think much of the internet in general. But with nothing but time in NC, I started "surfing the web," as we called it back then, and blogging about BMX. No one thought anything would come of my blogging, especially me. But I've written over 2,400 blog posts across more than 25 blog ideas, and have raked in over 240,000 total page views, on personal blogs, in 12 1/2 years. I got real depressed in late 2012, a couple of months after my dad's death, and deleted all my blogs. But there are still well over 1,000 posts that I've written since then, online.
Later in 2015, still unable to find any job in NC, I decided to take my weird form of Sharpie art drawings, that I call Sharpie Scribble Style, and start selling them. I was living with my mom then, and literally didn't have a dime to my name when I started. I had my Sharpies, a sketch pad, and a $65 refurbished laptop. No one thought my Sharpie art would sell, even me. But I had few options at the time. I'd applied for over 140 local jobs, over a couple of years, and got 1 call back, but not hired.
So I started drawing every day, stepping up my art game. Who did I hit up to sell drawings? The BMXers around the U.S. and the world that read my blog. I had a solid following of several hundred readers at the time. Google #sharpiescribblestyle, on an image search, and you can see a bunch of my drawings. I've sold about 90 originals, and they take 40-45 hours each to draw. I didn't get rich, I didn't even make a living, but I survived as a "working artist," for five years, and am now known mostly as a blogger and Sharpie artist. Thanks to old freestyle friend Ron Camero, you can see prints of my drawings in several Wahoo's Fish Tacos locations. That's about the coolest "gallery" there is for action sports artists and photographers, in Southern California.
Do you see a trend here? OK, I excel at not making much money, that's one trend. But throughout my life, over the last 35 years, I kept getting ideas to try something new, something kind of weird or crazy. Every freakin' time, a whole bunch of people told me those ideas were stupid, and that I was wasting my time. This happens to everyone who has new ideas, and tries to make them happen. Over those years, I got much more in touch with my own creativity, and learned to work with my own creative process. Sometimes the ideas, like zines and BMX videos, turned into whole scenes, even creative movements. Some ideas, like the audio zine, fizzled out.
I've learned that whenever you get into something new, nearly everyone thinks it's a bad idea, BECAUSE... it's something new. It's outside their frame of reference. Once an idea takes off, most of those same people who talked shit tell their friends, "I always told him that would work." Most of the haters come around, at least those close to you. That's the arc of creation. You just have to endure and work through it.
"The person with a new idea is a crank, until the idea succeeds"
-Mark Twain
Recently I've been diving in and learning about art and NFT's, Non Fungible Tokens. In a couple weeks of research, I've learned one thing. There's something to these. From the creators, and the traders, buying and selling them, there's a crazy, frantic energy of this quickly moving thing. I recognize that energy from the early days of freestyle. Then there are the Haters. Much of the established art world, old school bankers who say crypto is going to crash (uh... like fiat already is?). And the Haters are really vocal. That's a sign something pretty cool is happening. Oh, and unlike the other movements I've been a part of, this one has ridiculous amounts of money involved. That's good and bad. But being a homeless artist sucks a lot more than being a pretty well set artist, I can tell you that.
I don't know where this whole thing is headed, but I'm already seeing that crazy energy in the NFT world, art, gaming, metaverse/VR, all across the board. I'll be making a few NFT's of some of my creative work in the not too distant future, and testing out the waters. I'm still in the deep dive and intense learning phase in all of this, but I already see there's something to all this new tech, and all the creativity surrounding it.
So that's my main focus at the moment, learning something new, a new direction to take my creative work. We'll see where it leads. But the more I dig in, not to the crazy money, but the actual creativity and work being done behind the scenes, the more interesting it gets. I've had this feeling before. I think it's going be a fun ride. I'll end with a meme I made about a couple of bike riders who had a really crazy idea a while back.
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