Once upon a time, there was this guy named Gerard who lived in Hermosa Beach and ran a small surf video distribution company. Gerard was a kind of shady salesman guy, but he sold A TON of videos for all the independent video surf film producers, so they loved him. He also sold a lot for the bigger companies, like Vision Skateboards and Sims Snowboards. Because he sold so many videos for other people, he would call them up and say, "Hey, I'm making a compilation video, can I use a clip from your new video in it?" They'd always say, "Sure, go for it." He would say as many of his compilation videos as he did their videos, and he made twice as much money per video on the compilation videos. Shady... but it worked out for everyone involved, including me. Gerard hired me to edit and work for him for a while, and he sold 500 copies of my BMX video,The Ultimate Weekend, in the fall of 1990, in the U.S., and a bunch overseas as well.
As skateboarding and snowboarding took off in the late 1980's and early 1990's, Gerard's little distribution company also sold a ton of skateboard and snowboard videos, as well as surf flicks. After I left Unreel Productions, the Vision Skateboards video company, in 1990, I met Gerard, and wound up editing three videos for him. We did two issues of Skateboarder's Quarterly Video Magazine, and that was nearly three years before411 (skateboard) video magazine came out. I also edited this first issue of Snowboarder's Quarterly.
Most of these video clips are from other people's videos, edited with the mini-interviews Gerard and I did at the Action Sports Retailer trade show in San Diego, in the fall of 1990, as I recall. The Snowboarder's in Exile premier was great. There were maybe 100 to 150 people in the room watching the premier, and nearly every top snowboarder in the world was there. I watched that video probably 100 times over the next few years. In Snowboarder's Quarterly #1, above, you can see our quick interviews with the future 1992 Penthouse Pet of the Year (and Damian Sanders' then girlfriend) Brandy Ledford at 18: 12, and Sims Snowboards team rider Chris Roach at 35:12, among others.
At the beginning, you see ski/snowboard fimmaker Bruce Benedict, and producer Laura Mickelson, my former co-worker at Unreel, talking about their snowboard video, 20 Tricks. Laura Mickelson is now a working artist here in SoCal (which I just found out), as well as a long time video/TV/documentary filmmaker. Damian Sanders, one of the main guys in Snowboarders in Exile, did a ton of snowboarding, some motocross freeriding. He went on to start the Pimp N Ho Ball and the bi-weekly Club Rubber, with business partner Jon Huntington, in Costa Mesa, California, which turned incredibly profitable. Both the night club and the ball got so popular that they moved to Las Vegas. Check out this interview for a deeper look at Damian.
Damian and Brandy lived in Huntington Beach in the early 1990's, and even next door to the P.O.W. BMX House, in Westminster, for a little while. One night in 1992 or so, I was riding my BMX bike down Beach Boulevard in H.B., and got pulled over by the cops, since I didn't have a light on my bike. For some fucking reason, they called for back-up. The second pair of cops walked up, as the first pair was checking my ID. One of them said, "Last night we pulled over some crazy kid right here, driving a hearse, and he had "666" shaved in the back of his head." I said, "You guys pulled over Damian? I saw him and Brandy around downtown H.B. sometimes, and I knew Damian was driving a hearse then. The cops said, "You know that guy?" I said, "Everyone in H.B. knows who he is, that's Damian Sanders, he's one of the best snowboarders in the world." The cop just shook his head. I never actually met Damian, but I'd see him around town over the years, through the 1990's and into the 2000's, when I was a taxi driver and picked up lots of fares from Club Rubber. I think I got another ticket for riding my bike without a light, but I can't remember for sure. I got a few of them back in those days, but usually got off with just a warning.
This morning, I went digging into YouTube looking for Skateboarder's Quarterly #2, which is pretty hard to find. I haven't found it yet, but I ran into this Snowboarder's Quarterly video instead ( Finally found it later, fuckin' algos these days!) I haven't seen this video since probably 1991. I was the cameraman for all the little, in between interview and trade show footage, and I edited this video together, using big blocks from Snowboarders in Exile,20 Tricks, New Kids on the Twock, and a couple other videos that came out at the beginning of the 1990-1991 snowboard season.
I edited this video in 1990, shortly after quitting my job as a video guy at Vision Skateboards. NSI video was a small surf/skate/snowboard video distributor, back in the days when there were several small distributors. Small operators like NSI would buy the various surf and skate videos coming out, then they would sell the VHS videos to surf shops, skateboard shops, snowboard shops, and mom and pop video stores around the U.S., and some other parts of the world. The Skater's Quarterly videos were mostly compilations of other company's videos, with a little bit of original footage, and some short interviews. This was years before 411 Video Magazine for skaters, or Props video magazine, for BMXers, came out.411 debuted in 1993, and Props debuted in 1994.
I think this video came out in early November of 1990, in time to sell a ton of them during the holiday season. This is the first action sports video magazine video series the I know of, coming out about three years before 411 Video Magazine in skateboarding, and four years before Props Video Magazine in BMX. Gerard at NSI had already produced Skater's Quarterly #1, several months before I started to work for him. This video doesn't have the production quality, and it doesn't have the in depth interviews of 411 or Props. But it was also aimed more at just average skater kids around the country, not the hardcore skaters.
What it does have is a lot of good, solid, 1990 era skateboarding. We used chunks of other people's videos, mostly from NSA contests, as I'll describe below. Plus we used a bit of my own footage, of the wedding of pro skater John Lucero, and his wife Heathyr. Yes, I asked their permission to use it in this video. Heathyr was the women's clothing designer for Vision Street Wear, she created things like what you see the models in this video wearing, during the skateboard part. They're mostly decked out in VSW women's clothes, the black and white pieces are VSW stuff. So I worked with Heathyr on several fashion shoots at Vision, shooting video, and she asked me to shoot video of the wedding, when she married John Lucero. John was was just getting ready to start Black Label Skateboards then. It was the coolest wedding I have ever been to, and the Cadillac Tramps and the Vandals played at the reception. How many weddings have a slam pit on the dance floor. Not enough. So that's were that footage came from.
Now let's get into the skating. In 1990, vert still ruled, and street was still a little offshoot, just coming up, and not taken too seriously by the major skateboard companies yet, those being Powell-Peralta, Vision, and Santa Cruz. They all had street skaters on the team, but vert was the thing that sold big numbers of boards in 1990. But not for much longer. Skating went into a lull in the early 1990's, but not to the extent that BMX did. The 1980's was skateboarding's third wave of popularity, and the second for BMX racing, and the first wave for BMX freestyle. Each wave, the sports grew, and there was more of a base when the waved crashed, and they rebuilt from a higher level each time.
In the Mount Trashmore segment of this Skater's Quarterly #2, that little kid skating the vert ramp is Danny Way. For real. Danny was about 16 then, several years younger than the seasoned pros on the deck. Some of the older guys were really fucking with him, there's a shot where a guy drops in right behind Danny, and then throws him off when Danny goes for a McTwist, making Danny bail hard. Gotta pay your dues, and Danny Way did. I'd say Danny Way got the last laugh. He's the guy who invented the launch part of the mega ramp, and later jumped the Great Wall of China with one. The guy with the red T-shirt talking a lot in the Trashmore segment is Jason Jesse, who's funny, as ever.
In the Shut Up and Skate contest in Dallas, there's a run or two by Mike Crum, who has a yellow helmet and black and white spotted shorts. Mike was about 15 at the time. He and Chris Gentry were the two young guys on the Vision skateboard tour I managed that summer, shortly before making this video. I had to give him some props. I'm not sure is Chris is in the Dallas or Houston segments. At the end of the segment you see Jeff Phillips pulling a Phillips 66, a weird backwards invert trick he invented. Then, at the Shut Up and Skate at Skatepark of Houston, we see a whole bunch of pros going for it, including the insane wall ride from Hell attempts off the side of the vert ramp. Things are bigger in Texas, including the bails. You'll also see a naked Ho Ho plant, by Steve Schneer, I believe. It's kept marginally PG with the use of a sock.
In the Arizona NSA street contest, you see the era when the top vert skaters were also placing high in street contests, because the street course was basically a bunch of pieces of ramps. Christian Hosoi, Tony Hawk, and Steve Caballero all tear it up in this section, but Eric Dressen holds it up for the New School of emerging street skaters at that time. In the NSA Ohio vert contest we have Hawk, Hosoi, and Cab, but the standout in that segment is Tony Magnusson, doing ridiculously high airs. He has the red T-shirt with the "X" logo in white. Damn that guy could go high back then. In the Rhode Island contest, there's a pretty good fight in the background of one shot. See if you catch it first pass.
In the NSA Visalia (central California) contest, the announcer says, "This is our Masters Division, all these guys are over 27" (years old). That's funny to hear now, when Steve Alba is still schralping in pools at 60, and Chris Miller is still amazing at vert in his late 50's, along with many others. Chris Miller has the yellow helmet at that event, and the black and white striped shirt. Also mixed in this video is footage of the Dog Bowl from about 1980, a night session at the Nude Bowl in 1990, and some footage at Baldy Pipe. I think that's Dave Duncan leading that pack at Baldy, but I'm not sure. Then we see a bit of the San Francisco street contest in the drained pools at the city hall.
Then, at the end, there's a session on the halfpipe with the big faces painted on it. That's a Tracker trucks demo at the Action Sports Retailer trade show. That character on the ramp is an Andy Jenkins character, from his Wrench Pilot comics in Transworld Skateboarding. So I assume Andy J. and crew painted that ramp. This was three years before Andy became art director at Girl Skateboards. Cool. I shot this footage of the demo, which features Tony Hawk, with his hair about as long as it ever got, and Joe Johnson who has the super long pony tail, and several other skaters. I edited in a bunch of really technical stuff that Tony was doing, since that's what you didn't see in most other videos at the time. The very last trick in that segment is Bucky Lasek, an new pro on the scene at the time. That was the first time I ever heard of Bucky. He busts out with a backside 360 ollie, a trick Tony couldn't even do then, Tony freaked, when he saw Bucky do that, and that's why I turned the camera to Tony, who was sitting on the ramp pretty much next to me freaking out over Bucky's trick. When Tony Hawk freaks out while seeing you land a new trick, it's a pretty damn hard trick.
I've said several times, I've never actually met Tony Hawk. I've never actually been introduced, or talked to him. I have shot photos and video of him skating, worked at 3 or 4 contests he was at, shot video at his Fallbrook house of Ken Park and Joe Johnson, with Don Hoffman (when Tony was off doing demos) in 1989. I saw Tony's first 900 live, from the side of the ramp in 1999. I was standing about 20 feet form the halfpipe, by some weird quirk of fate. So I've been around places he was skating, but never actually talked to him. That's kind of a bummer, since I first saw him skate live in 1988, and we've all seen him grow into this household name since, doing all kinds of cool things along the way.
In any case, all that, plus quite a bit more, is packed into Skater's Quarterly #2. Watching it over, I was stoked, it's a shitload of great skating from that era, when vert was the thing, and as street was just beginning to really take off big time. My favorite shot of this whole video though is John and Heathyr, after the wedding, on the merry-go-round, and especially on the bumper cars. I love it when John just drives into the wall. Too funny. Heathyr and John went their separate ways many years ago, but that was, by far, the coolest wedding I've ever been to, an one of my coolest video jobs I ever had. John still owns Black Label Skateboards and does a lot of design work, and Heathyr runs Mantrap 1989.
Now, a look back to that era in action sports, as the 1980's ended and the 1990's began, led by a big recession. In 1990, BMX had been declared "dead" for a year, and skateboarding was heading that way. The new sport of snowboarding was just hitting mainstream people's radar, and mountain biking was where the bike industry had decided to focus its attention and its money. I don't know what waves exist in the surfing industry (no pun intended), but it was flowing along. It was an era where VHS videos were the thing, and Friday night trips to the local video store to get videos for the weekend were a popular thing. While major video store chains like Blockbuster existed, there were plenty of small, mom and pop run video stores. Working as a video store clerk was one of my many odd jobs, later in the 1990's. In addition, there were small bike, skateboard, and ski/snowboard shops in many places.
This is the RCA model of the S-VHS video camera I bought in 1989, forking out $1,100, on my credit cards, and making payments well into the 1990's. The higher quality, and relatively low cost of S-VHS, SVHS-C, and Hi8 video cameras made low budget video production available to everyday people. I was one of the first BMX freestylers to start producing my own videos, and the same thing was happening in skateboarding, snowboarding, and surfing.
At the same time, the prosumer video camera and equipment industry was in its early days. "Prosumer" equipment was somewhat better quality than the standard consumer VHS or 8mm video equipment, but was much cheaper than the broadcast quality equipment used by TV shows and local TV news stations. The late 1980's into the 1990's was the period that began to democratize video media, giving anyone willing to learn the basics, the chance to make videos and share them (on VHS tapes).
This democratization of the media began with the Apple Macintosh in 1984, and the rise of desktop publishing. That technology allowed anyone to create newsletters, zines, magazines, and even books. Prosumer video equipment did the same for video media. Then came the internet, and eventually enough bandwidth to share text, audio, and video worldwide, on the internet. Social media platforms later built on this. The overall positive effect of all this technology in giving voices to the voiceless cannot be understated. These technologies completely changed society. This is why so many people in certain (highly ignorant) groups are now trying to censor everyone left and right these days. The older power brokers of the world loved the days when they controlled ALL of the media. Those days are gone.
Into that world of low budget, niche videos, many opportunities came along. Gerard, a SoCal business guy from Hermosa Beach, with a knack for sales, started a video distribution company. He mainly sold surf videos in the early 1980's. He expanded to skateboarding, and then into snowboarding, later on. Yes, he's the guy who distributed by self-produced, 1990 BMX freestyle video, The Ultimate Weekend. NSI sold about 500 of my videos in the U.S., which was pretty damn good since I didn't have a name, a business brand, or history of making previous videos.
I can't remember how I met Gerard, I think I got to know him in early 1990, when Unreel Productions, the Vision Skateboards video company, was dissolved. By early March 1990, it was just me and some video equipment in an office at the Vision headquarters in Santa Ana. I took a lot of phone calls from people who had been doing business with Unreel in the years before. Unreel founder Don Hoffman worked freelance after that, project by project, as Vision went into a downward spiral in to the recession.
For nearly six months, I sat in a big office, day after day, and had nothing to do. Many people would love that, but it drove me nuts. I've always been motivated to do something. I quit at the end of June, then got hired to drive the dually and halfpipe trailer on a three week skateboard tour across the U.S.. As soon as the tour ended, I hopped a plane, on my own dime, and flew to Indianapolis, to shoot video of the 2-Hip King of Vert contest there. I also drove to Chicago for a couple days, and shot footage of Bob Kohl, Brian Dahl (injured at the contest), and a new vert rider coming up, named Jon Peacy. Then I drove my little rental Mazda from Chicago to Ohio, topping it out at 108 mph on the Ohio turnpike, in the rain. I met and hung out for a couple of days with Jon Stainbrook and his band The Stain, whose music I used for my video. Most of the music from Skater's Quarterly is by The Stain, as well. I also went to see my grandma near Akron, who was 85 at the time.
When I made it back to Huntington Beach, I had no job, no income, some savings, and about 12 credit cards, one of which I had put $1,000 on during the skate tour. Vision paid me that money back, but, being a 24-year-old idiot, I didn't pay off my credit card. I paid it down a little, then made monthly payments and lived off of the money for a while. Sometime around August or September of 1990, I think I met Gerard at NSI, and started doing some freelance work for him. I worked part time shooting the bits, and then editing Skater's Quarterly #2. In October, I spent a lot of time, and money, editing The Ultimate Weekend. It cost me $1,000 just to rent the edit system I used to edit the video for 40 hours. If I had any business sense back then, I would have just kept working at Vision, and used their equipment for free. But I just had to quit Vision out of boredom.
At the time, Gerard had a little office for NSI in Gardena, inland of the South Bay area of Los Angeles county. For you Old School freestylers, Gardena is a few miles from the Velodrome at Cal State Dominguez, where we had so many AFA contests in the 1980's. NSI was a small, operation, three people at most, but Gerard sold a lot of videos. He sold them in groups of two or three, or maybe 10 or 20 videos, on a big order. He sold the popular videos, like the top surf videos of the day, and all the Powell-Peralta Bones Brigade videos. He sold them to thousands of small surf shops, skate shops, and mom and pop video shops.
At the time, it cost about $3 to make a VHS copy of a 60 minute video, plus maybe a quarter each for boxes and labels, if you got enough printed up. He would buy them for $5 or $6 from the companies, I think, and wholesale them to the shops for $9 or $10. Something like that. Small distributors like NSI made around $2 to $3 a video, and he often shipped out 100 to 150 orders, usually 2 to 5 videos each, every day during the holiday season. It was a lot of work packing and shipping, but he worked the phones hard, and did pretty well, with minimal overhead. I helped with a lot of that packing and shipping during the 1990 Christmas season. He also had some other streams of income, I think he had a rental house or two. The guy worked hard, sold a ton of videos, a few at a time, and small surf, skate, and snowboard companies loved him, because he sold a huge percentage of their videos to his vast network of little shops.
Now we finally get to the idea behind Skater's Quarterly. This was a brilliant idea for that time. If you watch this video, most of it is footage from NSA skate contests. You'll see the big names, Tony Hawk, Christian Hosoi, Steve Caballero, Chris Miller, Eric Dressen, mostly in NSA contest footage. Since he sold so many videos, he'd call up the people he knew at the NSA (he sold their videos), and other companies, and say, "Hey, it's Gerard here. I'm gonna make a skateboard video magazine, do you mind if I use some of the footage from your latest video? I'll be promoting your video, and it'll help me sell some more of your videos." Something like that. Every time, they'd say, "Uh... sure... go ahead."
That's where I came in. He had me edit video parts from other people's videos, a whole bunch of them, into the Skater's Quarterly. Then we'd shoot the intros, most right in the office (he'd moved back into his garage by this point). For SQ #2, we spent the weekend at the Action Sports Retailer trade show shooting video (the skate session at the end, with the Andy Jenkins character painted on the ramp), plus we went up to the Bones Brigade 7: Propaganda video premiere, in Santa Barbara. Total costs were my hourly rate to shoot and edit, a hotel room for two nights at the trade show, and some video tape. He had an S-VHS edit system, and the line on cheap labels and boxes. For maybe $600 total production costs, and $3 per VHS copy, NSI had Skater's Quarterly Video Magazine #2.
Here's the smart part. When he called up all those shops, he'd say, "Hey, it's NSI video, we have three new surf videos out this month, and two skateboard videos. They'd order 3 or 4 of the videos, and he made About $3 each. Then he'd say, "I also have this skateboard video magazine, Skater's Quarterly, it's an hour of great skateboarding, with all the top names." then they'd order two or three of the Skater's Quarterly videos. But since he produced the video, he made about $6 per copy, not $3. So a $12 profit jumped up to $12 plus $18 (3 SQ videos X $6), or $30 profit per sale. That extra $6 to $18 per order adds up when you ship out 50 to 80 orders on a good day, and 150 orders per day over the holidays. I made $9 or $10 an hour for my very limited editing skills. That was my freelance job for the second half of 1990 and into 1991.
I pretty much forgot about these videos. I haven't seen any of them since I edited them, in late 1990 and early 1991. I was just telling a friend about these videos a couple of days ago. Then I looked up some skate video, and Skater's Quarterly popped up on the side on YouTube. SQ #2 is the only one of the three NSI videos I edited on YouTube, but it was cool to watch it over again, 33 years later. The footage is a lot better skating than I remember. I also edited Skater's Quarterly #3, and Snowboarder's Quarterly #1, where we covered the premiere of Snowboarder's in Exile, my favorite snowboard video of the 90's.
So that's the story behind one of the other little video projects I did in the early 90's, and three of the 16 bike, skate, and snowboard videos I produced or edited, between 1987 and 2001.
Keith Treanor. New Jersey born and bred. Moved to Huntington Beach with his Mom, brother & sister in 1990. Got known for a hot temper BITD, but also a fun, occasionally even goofy, rider who was always down to push the limits. I'm stoked that Keith with this huge fakie wall ride shows up when you pull this video up.
"The first time I saw you was in the video that fat guy made."
-Pete Augustin to Keith Treanor, in 1993 or so. Keith shared the line with me, some time later, and I thought it was hilarious, since I'm the fat guy (I wasn't fat then, but wasn't ripped abs thin, either), and the video is The Ultimate Weekend.
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OK, it wasn't exactly 30 years ago today, but pretty close. It was just about this time, late April or early May, of 1990, when I rode up to the Oceanview flyout jump in Huntington Beach. It was early evening, maybe an hour before sunset. You can see the Oceanview segment in the The Ultimate Weekend, above at 23:22. There were a couple of guys there that I didn't know. Those guys turned out to be recent New Jersey transplant Keith Treanor, and English vert rider who moved to SoCal, John Povah.
I'd lived in Huntington Beach, California for three years then. Bob Morales brought me to H.B. to edit the AFA newsletter in January 1987, and got me into video work, kind of by accident. That led to a job at Unreel Productions, the Vision Skateboards/Vision Street Wear's video company. Being socially retarded, and not having a girlfriend most of the time, I spent my evenings hitting street riding spots, or doing a little flatland by the Taco Bell at Bolsa Chica and Heil. I spent weekends doing flatland for the crowds at the H.B. Pier, hanging with Mike Sarrail, and freestyle skaters Pierre Andre', Don Brown, Hans Lingren, Jeremy Ramey, and whomever showed up.
The Oceanview jump, located at Oceanview High School, on the corner of Warner and Gothard, was the perfect freestyler's jump. A long, concrete sidewalk led up to a 6 1/2 high flyout jump, under a huge tree. At that time, jumping contests were just becoming a thing, mostly held at BMX races. Chris Moeller was about the craziest jumper of that time period, and he had just taken over his little garage bike company, S&M Bicycles, from co-founding partner, Greg Scott. Greg was the "S" and Chris was the "M," their last initials. They had different ideas on how to run the company, and Chris went solo with it in 1989, I think. Chris changed the name to S&M Bikes, and worked like a mad dog to sell BMX bikes actually made for dirt jumpers.
The S&M guys, like Chris, Dave Clymer, and John Paul Rogers, summed up racer jumping at that time. Tricks like X-ups, nac-nacs, no footers, no handers, and 360's over big (for the time period) doubles were what the serious racers that jumped were doing. But the freestylers, like myself, were still partial to flyout jumps. Ride up to the jump slower than the racers did when hitting doubles, get some hang time, and try to weirder tricks, like a one-hand 360, or maybe a tailwhip (which hadn't been pulled on dirt then) or even a decade attempt. There was still a big chasm between pro BMX racer jumping, and freestyler jumping. Over the next few years, the styles blended, as dirt and street comps progressed during the ramen days long recession of the early 1990's. Racer jumpers started trying crazier tricks, and freestylers learned how to pedal. Then the next generation, like th eSheep Hills Locals in the H.B. area, rose up as dirt jumpers. Most didn't race much, and rarely, if ever, did flatland freestyle, just street and dirt.
I think my first reaction to Keith jumping at Oceanview was something like "Holy FUCK!" Nobody, no-fucking-body, even came close to getting as high off of this jump as Keith Treanor did. It's not an accident that a high contrast shot of Keith jumping over John's uplifted hand was on the box of The Ultimate Weekend video. Keith is 9 or 10 feet off flat ground in the Mike Sarrail photo I used for the video cover. I personally saw Keith get a full two feet higher than that once or twice, but not when I had video running.
John Povah was no slouch either. He was a solid vert rider from England, who moved over here a year or so earlier, I think. He was riding street and some dirt then, and hitting backyard ramps, when possible.
We had a good session that day I first saw Keith and John, and in typical BMXer fashion then, I had no idea what their names were when I rolled away. I'd been shooting a little bit of footage on my RCA S-VHS- camera on the weekends, and I was thinking about trying to produce my own freestyle video. Unreel Productions had been dissolved a few months earlier, in January 1990. All of the main people were let go, and I was moved to the Vision Skateboards/Vision Street Wear main offices in Santa Ana. I worked cheap, compared to the rest, and knew how to work most of the equipment. That's why they kept me.
At Vision, I sat in a room all day, alone, and got called to shoot some video every week or so. I got a good check for doing nothing, which is a dream job for many people. But it was driving me crazy. I wanted to produce my own video, to show BMX freestyle as I saw it. The Vision videos, like Freestylin' Fanatics, were goofy, the footage was old, and I pretty much hated it. Fanatics was cool because it gave some props to a bunch of younger riders, but it didn't show what riding was really about in my opinion, and missed the rapid progression happening in riding then.
Eddie Roman made Aggroman a year earlier, which I saw as a funny, goofy, movie-made-on-video of freestyle. Us riders didn't make freestyle videos then, just companies like GT or BMX Plus! made freestyle videos then. I wanted to create my own take on riding. I wasn't actually sure I could even produce a video from start to finish. The idea scared the hell out of me. But around the time I met Keith and John, I was getting pretty serious about the idea.
I saw them again at Oceanview a few days later, we had another session, and I think that's when I got their names and numbers, and started calling them to go session and shoot footage for this video I wanted to make. And that turned into a few months of taking my big video camera, using full size S-VHS tapes, around to our sessions, and hitting a bunch of places we may not have normally.
In October of 1990, I rented a video editing system for $25 an our, located in the back of a video shop. I spent 40 hours, $1,000 out of my pocket, to edit The Ultimate Weekend. The whole video producing process cost me $5,000 of my own money. OK, a grand was borrowed from Mike Sarrail, and then paid back. That's what making a self-produced video cost in 1990. I made about $2,500 back, selling VHS tapes through a surf video distributor. I lost my ass, then lived off my credit cards for a while, when I was working freelance. Why did I did I live off my credit cards? Because I was only working part of the time, and because I was 24 years old, and I was an idiot. I lost money on The Ultimate Weekend, but I'm stoked I made it. I had a crazy idea, I gave it a shot, and I finished a big project, something I really struggled with then.
This year is the 30th anniversary of The Ultimate Weekend, my first totally self-produced video. Over the next few months, I'm going to do a series of posts about making that video. I really wanted to make a sequel ten years ago, for the 20th anniversary. But I was broke in North Carolina, and it just was not going to happen. I wanted to make a 30th anniversary sequel this year, and... well, we'll see. Maybe it'll happen. Either way, I'll tell some of the stories of the making of this video, as I wind down this blog, and start up my next main blog... Stay tuned.
I have a new blog about BMX, skateboard, and action sports spots, check it out:
At 29:08 in this video, you see a couple of guys in front of a garage playing "Dueling Banjos" on a banjo and a guitar. The guy on the banjo is early skatepark rider, Steve "Bio Air" Bennett, who I'd never met before. This was around the corner from Martin Aparijo's quarterpipe, which Keith Treanor, John Povah, and I went to for a session, in the late summer of 1990. This blog post is about that session on Martin's quarterpipe, starting with the "Dueling banjos."
This section, our session at Martin Aparijo's quaterpipe, happened in the late summer or early fall of 1990. Keith Treanor, John Povah, and me headed to Martin's house, to join an afternoon session on his quarterpipe. The riders there that day were Jess Dyrenforth (turquoise shorts, black knee pads), John Povah (no shirt, white cap), Keith Treanor (white T-shirt, black shin guards), Steve "Bio Air" Bennett (yellow tank top- old ASPA shirt- and neon green bike), Martin Aparijo (white helmet), and Todd Anderson (light blue tank top, black cap). So there was some serious talent there that afternoon. This whole session happened because I think a ran into Martin somewhere, told him I'd been shooting footage to make my own video, which was a really weird thing to do then. Eddie Roman had put out Aggroman a year earlier, and Mark Eaton was making the first Dorkin' in York videos with two VHS machines. No one took those very serious then. Just riders goofing around with vieo cameras. Only big companies like GT, Haro, or BMX Plus, and Vision Street Wear put out "real" BMX videos back then. That was the mindset.
The context for this video was that it was shot and put out in 1990, during a big transition time for BMX freestyle. At the big bike industry trade show in early 1989, industry people were walking around, all weekend, saying "BMX is dead, mountain bikes are the new thing." So every major company was getting rid of their BMX and freestyle programs, and putting their effort into the rising trend of mountain bikes, which was really just getting going in the mainstream then. GT and Haro kept their factory teams, though they paired them down and let some riders go. So over the course of 1989, most of the sponsorship money in BMX freestyle just disappeared. So did a huge number of BMX freestyle riders. From a logical way of thinking, it was time to quit.
It was like, OK we got into this weird little sport in 1984-86, most of us, we saw it grow through the AFA flatland and ramp days. We had a good time, it was cool, and by 1990 we were in our 20's. It made sense to give up "that BMX thing," go to college, go get a real job, and move on to the life all the people around us wanted us to live. But for a few hundred of us, BMX freestyle had become our life. It was a huge part of who we were. It was how we coped with all the stupidity in the rest of the world, and the rest of life. Giving up the thing that made life worth living for us wasn't even a question. We kept riding, without the money, the sponsorships, the industry jobs. We kept riding, because that what we did. That's who we were.
At the same time, Vision Skateboards and Vision Street Wear, which had done something like $60 million in sales in 1988, was collapsing. That story is a big can of worms, and I was in the middle of it, since I worked at Unreel Productions, Vision's video company. In January 1990, we had a meeting, and we were told "Vision is shutting down Unreel." Don Hoffman, who started it, would keep working on a freelance basis, and me and the other lower level employee, were kept, and moved into an office in the main Vision building. The other 5 or 6 people, they were looking for jobs.
After a month or so, that woman that was kept, got a job in Hollywood, and I was sitting in a big office, with a bunch of video equipment, alone. I was getting a decent check, but was bored out of my skull every day. While I was there, other people in Vision were getting laid off nearly every Friday. Morale was horrible, and the biggest group of really talented people I'd ever seen was falling apart. Vision just got too big too quick, and the reckoning time was at hand. At the same time, the whole country was sliding into a recession, which wound up lagging on for about six years. So pretty much everything was looking pretty bad, on many levels. All the more reason to go ride a couple of hours every night, just to blow off some steam.
As all that was happening, and I decided I was sick of the goofy Vision videos (in my opinion), with old footage, very little riding progression, guys riding in leathers and helmets on flatland, and all of that. I wanted to make a video that showed "real riding." So I took my S-VHS camera every weekend, and usually went somewhere with Mike Sarrail, my flatland riding buddy from the Huntington Beach Pier. Along the way, I met New Jersey transplant Keith Treanor, a young, hungry, and really good, yet still mostly unknown, rider. Keith was riding with John Povah most of the time, and they became the core of my video, weekend after weekend.
The whole idea for The Ultimate Weekend was that a group of riders got off work on Friday afternoon, and spent the whole weekend riding all kinds of cool places with all kinds of great riders. That idea got lost a little, but it's how the video is organized, rather than in sections for each rider, which was just one way to make a video back then. Like all revolutions, I was just making this shit up as I went. I was trying to make the video I wanted to watch to get stoked to go ride. A couple hours away, Eddie Roman was doing the same thing. Across the country, Mark Eaton and Jeremy Alder were also doing the same thing. It was time for a change. A handful of us started making that change.
In that weird, crazy, broke-ass context, riding wasn't about making sponsors happy anymore. It wasn't about placing well in the next contest. We just went out day after day to have fun, and to push our limits. Sure, these days, everyone knows that. But all during the 1980's, most of us had to tell people around us that we were trying to get sponsored, or working to go pro, or practicing for a contest, to justify why we spent all of our time and money on "little kids' bikes." By the time 1990 crashed down on us, we were down to the truth, "Fuck it, let's go ride and have fun." We were getting over the need justify riding to other people. "Fuck'em, we have more fun than they do, anyhow, let them think what they want." I doubt the top pros had to deal with people like that, but a lot of the rest of us did.
In that context I ran into Martin Aparijo, or maybe I got a phone call, because he heard I was working on a video. He said something like, "Hey, I have a quarterpipe, bring the guys over for a session." So we went to Martin's house one afternoon, and we ran late, I remember that. But the guys had a great little session right before dusk. It wasn't that long. There was no hype. It was just a bunch of good riders on one of the few ramps that existed then, trying their newest moves.
Here's the crazy part. I'd never seen anyone do a solid nosepick to fakie on a ramp. Both Jess and Todd pulled it that day. I'd never seen anyone do a Smith disaster (front peg, back wheel), Jess did it. I'd never seen a one footed tailtap, Todd did that. I'd never seen a barspin abubaca, Todd did that. I'd never seen an abubaca to nosepick to fakie. Keith did that. I'd never seen Keith (or anyone) pull an icepick, and Keith did that. While freestyle was "dead," it was progressing at light speed. This little session, a half an hour or so at Martin Aparijo's quarterpipe, turned into one of the most innovative segments in a video full of new tricks and progression.
Then there's Martin Aparijo himself, the flatlander. By the time of this session, I'd pretty much forgot that I first saw Martin in BMX Plus as a test rider, jumping. So when he rode up to his ramp and just stomped that front wheel 540 on the bottom of the ramp, I wasn't too surprised. Then he whipped the back wheel 900 (or so) megaspin, and it got away from him. That's to be expected, this is Martin the flatland legend. Todd Anderson, quarterpipe legend, rolls up and does a back wheel 540, to show his ground chops. But then, out of nowhere, Martin hit the ramp at speed and flew out onto the roof. I did not expect that. Then it kicked in, "Oh yeah, Martin was a really good jumper back in the day." I actually missed the shot the first time he did it, he flew right out of frame, I was expecting him to do a small air. The second time he did it, he flew out of sight, but I got the shot.
At the time this video came out, a whole bunch of riders were pausing and rewinding this little section of the video, because it broke a lot of new ground. So thanks Martin, for giving me that phone call back then, I'm really glad this short but awesome session made it into that video.
My drawing of Martin Aparijo, in classic BITD GT pro rider form, still has copies available. About 20 copies of the run of 50 are still up for grabs. They're all signed and numbered by me, and Martin has agreed to sign them all as well. Huge thanks for that Martin. I'm taking the next batch to HB Tuesday tomorrow to get him to sign them. If you're interested in one, hit me up on Facebook, or email me at: stevenemig13@gmail.com, and we'll work it out. They're 11" X 14", all drawn in my #sharpiescribblestyle.
Check out my new mash-up book/blog thing about the future:
If you started riding in the first wide wave of BMX freestyle in the mid 1980's, you remember Woody Itson as a pioneer of flatland. If you were in the Southern California scene in the early 80's, you might remember Woody riding skateparks or getting an occasional magazine photo jumping.
But here's one even Woody might not remember. In 1990 Woody's Diamond Back deal was over, and he was riding just for himself, according to a interview bit I just found on 23mag.com . During that year, I was riding the amazing flyout jump at Oceanview High School in Huntingtin Beach often. I was also shooting video for my first self-produced bike video, The Ultimate Weekend.
I just came across this still I made from the video a while back. Woody Itson, unsponsored, throwing a switch handed jump. In 1986, a 14-year-old Mat Hoffman debuted that trick to the freestyle world. Four years later, Woody was pulling it off. Heck, I made the video and I forgot this shot was in there. You can find it at 23:52 in the video.
