Produced by the Old Man of BMX himself, Scot Breithaupt, the Huntington Beach Street scene in early 1989 was the first made-for-TV BMX street contest ever. The intro starts with Scot and announcer Dave Stanfield, and then you see myself (blue shirt), and Randy Lawrence (white shirt), and the H.B. flatland crew.
Bike riders have been jumping curbs, riding embankments, and having fun on urban obstacles for 100 years or more. BMX street started with Bob Haro doing kickturns on the 6th & Commonwealth banks, and Bob and R.L. Osborn riding the Larry's Donuts bank in Redondo Beach around 1979-1980.
Bob Haro himself, riding the 6th & Commonwealth banks in downtown L.A., around 1981-82. I think these banks are still there, and there's a skate spot right around the corner, probably to keep skaters off these banks.
But BMX street riding really got going with the Curb Dogs and the other Bay Area freestylers in the early 1980's. The San Diego riders were right on their tail, exploring the potential of urban obstacles. When Mark Gonzales, Tommy Guererro, Natas Kaupas, and a few other skaters started pushing the idea of treating every city as a big skatepark in the mid 1980's, BMXers soon followed, and street riding started to get a little magazine coverage in about 1985. Curb Dogs founder held the first BMX street contest, but it was a mostly NorCal event, and didn't get any media coverage. Ron Wilkerson, a year after holding the first BMX halfpipe contests, decided to hold a street comp. He held the first 2-Hip Meet the Street contest in Santee, California, at one of Dave Voelker's favorite riding spots, in the spring of 1988. This contest did get media coverage, and I happened to be the guy who edited the first 2-Hip video, which included this section, from the Santee contest.
The next spring, in 1989, I was still working at Vision Skateboard's video company, Unreel Productions. The Old Man of BMX himself, Scot Breithaupt, re-emerged on the scene, that time as a TV producer. At a time when the young network ESPN wanted nothing to do with action sports, Scot managed to sell them a series of bicycle shows, the Action Sports Cycle Series. Scot was a seat-of-the-pants type entrepreneur. He would sell the idea, and then try to figure out how to make it happen.
Scot was also the single best hard sell salesman I've ever met. He could have talked a polar bear into buying a refrigerator, and a chest freezer to boot. So Scot sold the series to ESPN, found a video editor, and then came to Unreel to rent our edit bay at night to edit his TV shows. Back in 1989, editing broadcast quality video took a $500,000 edit bay full of VTR's and effects boxes, and more monitors than the bridge of the Enterprise on Star Trek. I got the job of hanging out at night with Scot and his editor, mostly to make sure Scot didn't "borrow" any of our video footage or equipment. Scot was a bit shady at times.
It was easy work for me, and I spent most of the time in our lobby watching the collection of surf videos the Unreel producers had donated. After a few weeks of this, Scot asked me if I had any ideas for a show. He was finishing up editing one show, it was a Sunday night. He needed to find or hold a bike event the next Saturday, edit the show the week after, and the show would air two days after that.
My answer was quick, "You have to do a street riding show." But Scot, a diehard BMX racer since the sport was invented in 1970, shot back, "Like jumping curbs and stuff?" It took me 20 minutes, and showing him the raw footage from the 2-hip contest in Santee, to talk him into the idea. He finally agreed it sounded cool, and he needed some kind of bike contest to make a show out of. The next day we went to work. Scot rented the old Surf Theater parking lot in downtown Huntington Beach, and borrowed the Stonehenge jump box ramp from GT Bikes and got a junked car. I got on the phone (no internet in those days) and told every freestyler I could think of that we were having a street contest that coming Saturday. It all came together in a week.
He called the event the Huntington Beach Street Scene. I just wanted to get street riding on TV, BMX almost never got on TV back then. Other than Chris Moeller taking a pretty good digger, and Randy Lawrence getting a really lame nickname from Scot in the show, things went off well. This show got the best ratings, by far, of any show in the series. That's how the first made-for-TV BMX street contest happened. Yeah, it looks pretty goofy now, but you have to start somewhere. BMX street has evolved ever since.
I've got a new blog about BMX, skateboard, and action sports spots, check it out:
This post is about the section of The Ultimate Weekend from 10:41 to 12:17, the beginning of "Saturday Morning" in the video, me riding to the H.B. Pier, to me flipping off the walk your bike lights. I self-produced this video in 1990.
I spent my first six months in Southern California, in 1986, in the Redondo and Hermosa Beach area, known as the South Bay, in two apartments I shared with my magazine co-workers Gork and Lew. After five months working at Wizard Publications, and a month riding with Craig Grasso everyday after I got laid off, I got a job at the American Freestyle Association working for Bob Morales. Bob picked me up in the AFA van one day, and I moved south, past the "Orange Curtain," (from Democrat L.A. region into Republican stronghold (until two weeks ago) Orange County). My new home city, which I'd only been to 3 or 4 times, was the surfer filled city of Huntington Beach.
Huntington Beach began it's official life as Pacific City, in the early 1900's. Some developers with big ideas imagined the empty stretch of beach as the "Atlantic City of the West Coast." That idea fizzled out quick, and it was largely a little village of lima bean farmers. The original pier was built around 1902, around the time of the Pacific City idea. The name was later changed to Huntington Beach, to suck up to railroad magnate Henry Huntington, to bribe him into building a railroad extension from Long Beach, about ten miles north, to H.B., so more people could get to the rural beach town. It worked, and Huntington Beach was incorporated in 1909. Finally there was a way to get people easily from distant Los Angeles and Long Beach to H.B. But still, hardly anyone wanted to move to H.B.
In 1914, the 4th of July celebration at the pier included a "surf riding" demonstration by a Hawaiian, an Olympic swimming champion, a diver, and surfer named Duke Kahanamoku. When his slightly older surf buddy and leader of the Wakiki surf posse, George Freeth died in 1918, Duke went on to promote surfing around the world, bringing back the ancient sport of the Hawaiian kings. He became known as "The Father of Modern Surfing," But still, not too many people wanted to actually live in the little town by the sea. At one point, if you bought a set of encyclopedias, you got a free lot in downtown Huntington Beach.
Then, in 1920, wildcatters struck oil in H.B., and suddenly A LOT of people wanted to live there. And a few encyclopedia buyers became millionaires, as the legend goes. H.B. became something like an old west town, with hard working oil men, rowdy bars, ladies of the evening (the former Youth Hostel was then known as Hotel Evangeline), and a lot of money changing hands. If you walk out behind the Longboard bar on Main Street, across the alley is a little tiny brick structure, and there was a slightly larger one with three doors nearby. Those are the old "drunk tank" jail cells from the 1920's. The cops would just drag the drunks from the bars and lock them in for the night to sleep it off.
The oil boom in Huntington Beach had several long term effects on the city. First, it attracted a lot of people, and a lot of riff raff. Second, for decades, the north part of town was filled with oil wells and pumps, many right along the beach. You can see them in this 1949 home movie clip at 2:56. So, while people flocked to Southern California in the 1940's through the 1980's, many people avoided H.B. and built beachfront homes on nearly every other stretch of beach, from Malibu to Newport. But Huntington, the "dirty oil town beach" didn't get nearly as developed, except for one condo complex just north of the pier. Because the wealthy people favored Newport Beach, Sunset Beach, Long Beach and on up to Malibu, H.B. was a lot less expensive to live in. Even when I moved there in 1987, there were still a bunch of oil pumps downtown, and right along Pacific Coast Highway.
Because Huntington Beach was cheaper to live in, it became the working class beach city, and a home to lots of surfers. There's no great point break in H.B. to surf, but there's 8 miles of southwest facing beach breaks. The waves aren't great, but they're consistently pretty good, and it was the cheapest beach city from the late 1950's to the mid 1990's. So it became known as Surf City, the city Jan and Dean wrote their song "Surf City" about.
In typical small city fashion, the city leaders of the late 1950's and early 1960's wanted to get the "lazy surfers" out of their town. It didn't work. As the surf culture grew and expanded, H.B. went on to become a hot spot for skateboarding, BMX and freestyle, snowboarding (there's snow 1 1/2 hours away), motocross (Seth Eslow lived there) and the early UFC fighting and MMA. It's still a major action sports hub area. Surfer and BMX freestyle pioneer, Bob Morales, who grew up a bit inland, chose H.B. to set up the AFA, and that's how I landed there. My job, officially, was to be the editor of the AFA newsletter. I wound up doing everything, from putting AFA logos on T-shirts to driving the 30 foot trailer to contests. It was actually pretty cool, though I struggled on my $5 an hour pay rate.
On one of my first photo shoots at FREESTYLIN' magazine, I drove photographer Windy Osborn to, shortly after starting at Wizard Publications, I met English freestyle skater Don Brown, and I knew that he and a few skaters, as well as a few BMX freestylers, hung out and rode beneath the H.B. Pier every weekend. So after I rented a room and got settled in H.B., (after a couple week's crashing on Bob's couch), my weekend ritual was to get up, make a huge plate of pancakes, pig out, and ride down to the Huntington Beach pier and freestyle all day. Unless there was an AFA contest somewhere, I was at the pier. In those days, the fancy restaurant on the pier, looking out over the beach, was Maxwell's, and the area below it, by the video arcade, looked like this. The walk and bike path widened, and us BMXers took turns with the freestyle skaters, getting crowds and riding for them. Every 20 to 30 minutes, the beach police on their ATV's would roll up, tell us to stop riding or skating, and that the crowd was blocking the bike path. This, supposedly, caused a danger because all the Fred and Frita poser cyclists, in their brand new spandex and over-priced/under ridden road bikes, would ride down the crowded bike path at speed and run into people. Somehow that was our fault.
There were literally thousands of beach goers every weekend, and we continually drew crowds of 100 to 150 people, and sometimes up to 500. Then the police would stop us, the crowd would wander off, then the skaters would come out, draw another crowd, and do their thing, until they got shut down. This happened every Saturday and Sunday from early 1987 to about 1991 for me. Being the geek that I am, I once figured out that I did flatland in front of over 140,000 people, 100 or so at a time, during those H.B. Pier weekends. While I didn't do near as many shows as some freestylers, I performed before far more people, as a street performer, than most. As a skating and riding spot, the H.B. Pier goes back to the mid 1970's, when skaters came down to session the bank that used to be there.
So when I got around to shooting the Huntington Beach Pier/Saturday morning section for this video, I just shot my normal life. I wake up in my room on Sims street, near Warner and Bolsa Chica, on the north end of town. I can't remember what the huge scab on my knee was from, but it was a bail of some sort. My room is a mess, and I head down, and make breakfast. The furry bowling ball of a cat, Silus, was my roommates cat, and the most unfriendly feline I ever met. The fucker bit my palm once when I was trying to get it away from the sliding glass door as it hissed at another Tom cat outside. It wasn't unusual to see Silus on the counter eating out of a pot of something after my roommate Kevin cooked.
Making Oreo Double Stuff pancakes was not my normal weekend breakfast, although the slice of cold pepperoni and pineapple pizza with the pancakes was pretty normal. When I made this video, I wanted to show "the real BMX freestyle lifestyle I knew," and not the hoopty shit that you saw in a BMX Plus or Vision Street Wear video. No uniforms, no flatland on miniature golf courses, or that kind of stuff. But in addition to showing some new and progressive riding, I also wanted to show off some video making skills I learned working at Unreel. I'm actually pretty proud of this little montage. I chopped a bunch of my weekend life into short bits, it moves pretty well, and it gives a really good glimpse of my life as a freestyler for those early H.B. years. I did actually ride about 5 miles to the Huntington Beach Pier every weekend when there wasn't a contest. I skipped the ride down Warner to Bolsa Chica Beach, and the 3 miles of pedaling the bike path down Bolsa Chica beach and along the cliffs.
The part you see in this video is when I get to Goldenwest and the bike path, the north end of the downtown area. That quick shot with tons of people on the beach is pretty funny, it's a compression shot from Goldenwest and PCH. I was shooting far up the beach, and making it look way more crowded than it ever really was in 1990. That was a super crowded day, and I made it look even more crowded. Now, 30 years later, that's pretty much what it does look like on the weekends. But back then, it was usually fairly empty until up near the pier.
The bike path continues next to Pacific Coast Highway (PCH), but the part I show in this video, with the sandy dirt path, and the big, 11 foot high, mural covered, retaining walls, that's the old railroad bed that Henry Huntington built 100 years ago. The murals were old ones in 1990, and many later got covered with new, officially sanctioned murals in the 1990's, and later officially sanctioned graffiti art. Then they all got painted over again with beige paint, because the graffiti art attracted unofficial graffiti writers from all over. Typical. So while it wasn't my plan, I ended up documenting several of the old murals, which were probably done in the 1970's.
Our favorite wall, The Blues Brothers Wall, is just south of the 14th street steps. It was pretty flat, and usually had less sand in front of it than most other walls, and had a big lip to wall ride on the left end, and a small lip farther to the right. So my typical weekend ride turns into a quick wall session with Keith Treanor, then unknown and super hungry ripper from New Jersey, and Randy Lawrence, a kid form the desert who moved to the beach and worked as a bike shop mechanic at the time. I met both at the H.B pier on the weekends. Keith, of course, went on to be a pro mini ramp and street rider for S&M Bikes for many years after this video gave him a chance to show his stuff. They'll be a lot more about him as these blog posts go on.
Randy Lawrence is the most natural BMX rider I've ever seen IN MY LIFE. He would just naturally learn stuff in minutes. Back when we first met, '88 or so, he could learn ANY flatland trick we could think of in ten minutes with Mike Sarrail and I coaching him. Seriously. He made me sick, in a good way. When I say the most natural rider, I mean that he just learned anything like he was born to do it. No one, not Eddie Fiola, Mat Hoffman, Mike Dominguez, Dennis McCoy, ANYONE, seemed so born to ride a BMX bike as Randy. Randy's brother was pro motocrosser Phil Lawrence, who along with Jeff Emig (a second cousin to me, I think) was one of the pioneering motocross freeriders in the early 90's, who set the stage for the early Crusty Demons of Dirt videos, and the sport of Freestyle Motocross. Much to my surprise back then, Randy became a motorcycle mechanic, tuning bikes for Doug Dubach, and later Jeremy McGrath through most of Jeremy's championships. Now Randy trains young motocross riders, he's legendary in the motocross world, and his son Ryder Lawrence is one of the best up-and coming kids in the BMX world. When you do this at age seven, there are some big things in store in coming years. The way Ryder flows through that hilatious nose bonk, and rides it out, that's the same natural riding flow I saw in Randy back in the late 80's and 90's. If it ever gets to the point of trying to genetically engineer the perfect BMX or FSMX rider, start with the Lawrence family. There's just something in their blood that's perfect for two wheels. Unless you tell Randy to do a simple X-up, that is.
In this section of The Ultimate Weekend, Alan Valek (who uploaded my video to YouTube, thanks again for that Alan!) watches from the top of the wall as we do wall rides and fakies. This was the only place I could do fakie wall rides, because of the smooth lip. Keith and Randy step things up with no handers. If you pause the quick flash edit, it looks like this:
That's Randy and me doing the first over/under wall ride ever in BMX history. The idea just popped into my head right then, and we tried a couple. Randy's got the white tank top on, Keith has the black T-shirt, and I have the red T-shirt on. In this pic, and the video, Randy's up really high, going opposite. Dave Clymer, a year or so later, is the only other rider I've seen get that high on the 11 foot high Blues Brothers Wall, and Dave was going his natural direction. I didn't realize Randy was going opposite until I shared this still a few months ago, and Randy told me that's opposite for him. I just did a little wall bounce, not sure how high he was going to go. I just wanted to see if we could time it and both be on the wall at the same time. To be fair, the Blues Brothers Wall is slightly under vert, maybe 80 to 85 degrees, but it's definitely a wall, and not a steep bank.
The next highest I ever saw anyone get on that wall, after Randy and Clymer, is Keith's wall ride in this section, going his natural direction. That one scared the crap out of me, Keith's back tire broke loose, and it slid across the whole wall, but he rode it out. A hair under Keith's front wheel was how high Josh White went. Josh told me about the wall at the pier, and we found it together one Saturday. For over a year, I rode on the bike path up top to the pier, never going down the other path to find these walls. Josh, one of the more amazing vert riders ever, got about 8 feet up the wall, 2 feet lower than Randy Lawrence going opposite. Josh was also doing fakie wall rides to turndowns out that first day we rode it.
Years later, I lived about three blocks from this wall, and I sessioned it all the time, and went rock climbing on the wall down to the beach right there. I got into bouldering as something to do away from the BMX world, and I had a 300+ foot traverse on the lower wall just down from here. This is one of my favorite places to ride ever. I tried to learn framestand wall rides there, I could stand up in a low, long wall ride, but never get my hands off the grips. Too chicken.
We actually didn't ride this wall as a group really, but would hit it individually when in the area. Keith stepped it up that day, getting stretched no handed fakie wall rides. Then he decided to go for the rail grind into the sand on the spur of the moment. At the time, no one had done a handrail slide down steps, but people were talking about them. Skaters had been doing board slides on rails for 3 or 4 years, and I think 50/50's were starting to happen. Meanwhile, BMXers were trying to figure out a way to slide handrails on bikes. We talked about sprocket slides, like today's crank arm slides, but it just seemed too dangerous, with little chance of ever riding it out. As double peg grinds started becoming standard on vert ramps, and a few riders toyed with feeble grinds on street ledges, the idea of a double peg grind on a handrail down stairs was forming. But it hadn't been done yet. So Keith decided to try this rail into the sand with no notice, and luckily I had the camera rolling when he headed that way. I'm not sure what any of us expected, but Keith's front wheel washed out on the sand in front of the rail, and it turned into a funny bail.
Then Randy held Keith on the rail, trying to get the mechanics of sliding and pulling up and off it at the bottom. The sand made for a crash pad to soften the landing. Remember kids, there were no skatepark rails then. This was 1990. Hell, there were no skateparks in Southern California then. The whole technical problem of how to bunnyhop, angle the bike, and land on both pegs hadn't been figured out yet. So putting his bike on the rail to slide and land in the sand was a way to get part of the idea worked out.
Randy's 360 off the wall and into the sand, next to the woman laying out, was another spur of the moment decision. She was laying there when we shot Keith on the rail. As we were walking back up towards the wall, Randy said, "I could 360 over the wall and land by her." I didn't think he was serious at first, because there was a 2 or 3 inch lip on top of that wall, and doing a bunnyhop over it into doing a 360 drop five feet, seemed pretty crazy then. But it was Randy, so I walked a ways away, so the woman wouldn't wonder what I was doing, and Randy did a great 360 drop first try, and the poor, unsuspecting woman was totally startled. We, of course, thought that was hilarious back then.
After that, we see close-ups of another painted wall, and then the "walk your bike lights" that had recently been put up by the pier. Every bike rider hated those lights, which were on during the weekends. Those damn lights, again, were put up because of road bike posers riding fast down the bike path, on the weekends, when it was crowded, and then running into pedestrians. Those weekend riders never showed up to actually put miles in during the week, when the bike path was not crowded, and you could ride the whole eight miles of Huntington Beach's bike path at speed. They just showed up on the weekends to pose. Debbie Hendrickson, a serious cyclist and Sim snowboard team manager, told me the hardcore cyclists called the posers Fred or Frita.
So that's the story of this little section, and one of my all time favorite places to ride, The Blues Brothers Wall. There's only one thing left to do in this post, tell you how to make Oreo Double Stuff pancakes.
Oreo Double Stuff pancakes:
Ingredients:
"Just add water" pancake mix
water
Double Stuff Oreo Cookies
Take a bunch of Oreos, a couple for each big pancake you plan to make, and crumble them up into big chunks, say 1/4" to 3/8" round. It's best to leave the cookies and cream attached to each other.
Put the pancake griddle on the stove, and turn the heat to about 6 1/2 or 7, slightly above medium if it's gas, and let it warm up. The key to good pancakes is to have the griddle at the perfect temperature, and the batter at the right consistency.
Pour the dry pancake batter mix into a big measuring cup or small bowl. I don't measure the water, I make batter by feel and sight. I add a little bit of water, and stir it by hand with a fork. Then I add a bit more water, and stir it more. At first, the pancake mix turns into a dough-like consistency. Then it slowly works towards batter. I like to work to the point where the batter pours slowly, but steadily. It's a thick liquid.
Once the batter is near a good consistency, add the Oreo chunks and mix them in with a fork until they are pretty evenly spaced in the batter. I tried Oreo pancakes with regular thickness Oreos, and you couldn't really taste the Oreos at all, so go with the Double Stuffs.
By then, the griddle should be hot. In fact, it should be a bit too hot. I always pull the griddle off the stove, and wave it around to cool it a bit, then put in back on the stove, before pouring my first pancakes. If you do this, don't hit anyone. Once you start making pancakes, it stays a bit cooler from the batter. For most people, I'd advise putting a little cooking oil on the griddle, or melting some butter. Me, though, I cook my pancakes without oil on a Teflon griddle. They brown lightly on the bottom, and I wait until the batter is about ready to bubble, and I start edging the plastic spatula under them, until I can get under the whole pancake and flip it.
I normally use a square griddle, and make 4 pancakes, 4" to 5" in diameter, at once. I flip all four, and the watch them. A square griddle cooks hotter in the center, and I'll get the spatula under the flipped pancakes, and spin them so the outside edge is towards the middle of the pan, to cook them evenly, and let them finish cooking. Then I set them on a plate off to the side. I don't care if they cool off a bitas I make the rest. If you have company, put an oven safe plate in the oven, turn it up to about 225 to 250 degrees, and just set all the pancakes on it to keep them warm until you're ready to eat. Remember to use a pot holder or two to get that plate out of the oven, and set it on another pot holder on the table.
With the Oreo cookies and frosting in the pancakes, in big chunks, you don't really need maple syrup on these pancakes. But don't let that stop you, 'cause maple syrup is awesome. To really live large, make a big ol' plate of Oreo pancakes, scoop some vanilla ice cream on top, or maybe Oreo Cookies and Cream, and then hit it with some maple syrup. You can go back to the gym, or go ride, tomorrow. If you wind up trying these, show me some photos on Facebook.
I'm currently writing a series of big, fat zines called, Freestyle BMX Tales, after my former blog that had over 500 posts about BMX freestyle BITD. Each zine will be at least 48 pages, full of my old school BMX stories, and written around a theme. I'll be hand making all of them, in typical zine fashion, and signing and numbering each one. Zines, by their very nature, are collector's items.
The first Zine in the series is about The Spot in Redondo Beach, the place I rode with Lew, Gork, Andy Jenkins, R.L. Osborn, Chris Day, and Craig Grasso, among others. That was when I first moved to SoCal and started working at FREESTYLIN' magazine in 1986. It will be done and ready to ship about December4th, 2018. You can pre-order the first copy by sending $6 paypal to me at: stevenemig13@gmail.com . ( steven, not steve in the email address) Mark it "The Spot zine" or something. So far, the first 5 are spoken for.
I'll be sharing most of my BMX stories on the new Block Bikes Blog from now on, check it out...
Today's behind the scenes look at my 1990 video, The Ultimate Weekend, is about the short section from 9:53 to 10:37. Then we'll look at The Stain, the Toledo punk rock band and studio musicians that provided the entire soundtrack for this video. You can see them in the video's credits, beginning at 46:07.
On the north end of Huntington Beach, California, there's a Jack-in-the-Box restaurant right on the beach. To the north are the three story high houses, shaped much like the old Mississippi River steamboats of Mark Twain's day, built right onto the sand of Sunset Beach. To the south is 8 miles of beach, the first four of which don't have a single house or condo on the sand. There are parking lots for beach goers and a big, wide bike and walking path. On the inland side of the first big stretch of beach south of Jack-in-the-Box is Bolsa Chica wetlands, which contains an amazing diversity of wildlife for an area surrounded by civilization. This section of my video was shot on the inland side of Bolsa Chica wetlands.
If you drive inland on Warner from that Jack-in-the-Box, through the S curve, past Bolsa Chica road, and take a right on Graham Street, you'll cross over a canal right before Slater. If you park your car or truck there, where only the cinder block walls and canal are in sight, you'll see a blocked, but paved service road heading back towards the ocean along the canal. If you ride your bike about 300 yards along that service road, you'll see a pump house on your right, across the canal, and a place next to it where a truck can drive down into the canal when it's dry. That little drive-in spot was known as the Slater Ditch to the guys who showed it to me in 1988 or so, and as Cancer Ditch by some of the younger guys. They called it Cancer Ditch because the water next to the pump house was so nasty that the joke was you'd get cancer immediately if you fell in it.
The weird way the truck roll-in was built formed concrete banks on both sides, which were loved by skateboarders for years. So the city built some concrete speed bumps to disrupt the skating. For the most part, it worked. Skaters found other spots. But it was still ridable on BMX bikes, and us locals had many late night sessions there. Occasionally, we'd hit it up on a Sunday, fairly certain no city workers would show up, because we had to jump a small fence to get there. I could never manage much more than footplants on the wall off the bank. But it was still a fun place to goof around.
In this short clip, local flatlander Sean Johnson asks to see a move, and Andy Mulcahy and another guy, whose name I never knew, watch as Randy Lawrence (white sleeveless shirt) and Keith Treanor, thrash the spot. Finally, after all the guitar music during the mini ramp and flatland segments, we get into a little punk rock and street riding to rev up the video a little. The song is, you guessed it, "My Grandma's Got a Mohawk," by The Stain.
When Randy crashes on the fakie at the end, you hear someone say, "That's the Boner." Guess I should explain that. In late 1988, I think it was, the Godfather of BMX himself, Scot Breithaupt, had become a TV producer, and sold a bike show series to ESPN. Scot's production company was called L.M. Productions, which stood for "Last Minute." His logo was a clock set at two minutes til midnight. Typical Scot. He was renting our edit bay at Unreel at night to edit his shows, and I got the job of staying there all night as representative from Unreel. Babysitter, basically. My main job was to make sure he didn't steal anything, either equipment or, more likely, video footage to use in one of his shows. Scot was an amazing guy in many ways, but could be shady as a maple tree as well.
As Scot and his editor were finishing a show one Sunday night, he said he didn't know what to do for the next week. He had to have the next finished show done and shipped to ESPN in two weeks. In the TV world, that's simply impossible. But Scot wasn't phased by that. I said, "How about street riding?" He didn't know what I was talking about. BMX racers had always ridden the streets and jumped curbs, but he didn't realize that BMX street riding was becoming its own thing. Ron Wilkerson's 2-Hip Meet the Street contest in Santee earlier that year exploded the interest in street riding. It took me 20 minutes, but I talked Scot into having a street contest and shooting it for his next show.
We held the contest one week later in the Huntington Beach Surf Theater parking lot downtown, right behind Wimpi's, and he had the show edited (with much input from me) and it aired a week after that. That happened to be the best ranking show, by far, in his bike series. It also happened to be the first made-for-TV bike street contest EVER. That was about 6 1/2 years before the X-Games. Unfortunately, the Huntington Beach Street Scene, as he called it, it not on YouTube.
While I was on a late night run to In-N-Out, Scot and his editor completed a section of the show featuring then bike shop mechanic, and H.B. local freestyler, Randy Lawrence. For some fucking reason, Scot gave Randy the nickname, "The Boner." He even typed it up on the screen. Randy wasn't happy, but he shrugged it off, and the name mostly faded in a year or so. But on our night session to the Cancer Ditch in 1990, that guy brought it up.
So who is The Stain?
On The Ultimate Weekend video box, with the amazing (just kidding) black and white graphics I did myself, it says, "Killer soundtrack by The Stain." But virtually none of the punkers in Orange County had heard of The Stain. The story starts with this guy, skateboard legend Mark Gonzales, on a trip to Vinyl Solution record shop in about 1987. He found a punk album from a band he never heard of, and bought it because he liked the cover. That band was a Toledo, Ohio based punk band called The Stain. Mark skated for Vision then. Since we were always looking for music at Unreel Productions, Mark brought the album in one day and showed it to Don Hoffman, head of Unreel, to see if they could use a song in some video.
Music is a nightmare for video producers, because you're supposed to have the rights to use the music in your videos, on contract from the musician or group. Unreel got really stung by this by getting a verbal agreement to use music from guitarist Joe Satriani, from his "Surfing With the Alien" album, for $300 a song. They had a legit verbal agreement, and edited a show TV show with his music. While that was happening, the album was released, and became a huge hit. When Unreel went to pay, Satriani's people said, "$300 a song? Uh, no, now we want $3,000 a song." So we had to rush to find new audio for a whole, one hour show.
We had this bombshell of a woman, who seemed to pretty much be a professional groupie, who found us music to use from Hollywood, local Orange County, and up-and-coming bands. She had left by the time I started working full time there. But they had several bands they used. Don knew Agent Orange, and used them in Skatevisions in 1986. But local bands were sketchy by nature, and it was hard to find good music that could be used cheap on a regular basis. It was a continual battle.
So one day, Don Hoffman called up the guy from The Stain in Toledo, using info on the album that Gonz brought in. He finally tracked down Jon Stainbrook, the drummer, and main force behind The Stain. As it turned out, Jon was a legit dude, and had friends who were good studio musicians, including one, Mark Mickel, whose well-off dad had built him a good studio. Jon was cool, easy to work with, actually came through with good music when asked, and charged a reasonable $100 a song, because they had to actually rent Mark's studio to record. Jon Stainbrook and friends became Unreel's main go to guys for music.
So when I decided to make a video in 1990, bootlegging your favorite punk bands wasn't the thing to do yet. Having worked at Unreel, and being anal about getting sued, I bought my music from Jon. Most of it anyhow. I think I used 14 tracks, so I owed him $1400, which came out of my pocket. I paid him $1,000, as I recall, and shaded on the rest. I still owe Jon Stainbrook $400. The check's in the mail, Jon.
Anyhow, in late July, 1990, I flew myself to Indianapolis for a 2-Hip contest to shoot video, and then drove to Chicago to shoot the vert session with Bob Kohl, an injured Brian Dahl, and new kid John Peacy. Kevin Martin and Ron Wilkerson crashed at Bob's house that night, too. So Kevin's in the video in that segment, as well. Ron was off doing business somewhere.
After shooting that session, I made a made dash across the Midwest, hitting 107 mph, in the rain, on the Ohio turnpike in my rented Mazda 323, and spent a day at my Grandma's apartment in Wadsworth, just outside of Akron, Ohio. Then I headed back west, and met up with Jon Stainbrook, in Toledo. I'd never met Jon in person, and, being a motel for traveling punk bands for years, he said I could crash at his house for a couple of nights. As luck would have it, The Stain, among other things, was the stage band for comedian Howie Mandel when he was in that area, who was a top comic and still had hair then. They had a show to do in Ann Arbor that next day at the University of Michigan, and I tagged along as a roadie.
So in the credits at 46:01, you see Jon out in front of the theater, and I pan up to the marquis with Howie Mandel's name. I forget what was wrong with the audio there, a camera problem, I think. Then you see Mark, backstage, warming up on his bass. After that, is guitarist Jeff Kollman, smoking a hot series of riffs to warm up. All three of these guys had totally different taste in music, which is why there's a weird mix in my video. Mark was a huge fan of The Beatles, a consummate musician who played several instruments well, and made cool, pop-type songs. Jeff was (and still is) a serious guitarist, and all the long guitar solo tracks are his. And Jon had the punk band, and was the business guy who got them together to make music for Unreel and others.
So, I wound up watching Howie Mandel live from backstage that day, which was a cool bonus. About 20 minutes into the show, Jon, who was sitting at his drum set, center stage, behind Howie as he performed, started signaling to me. I finally figured out that John wanted me to take photos with a disposable camera he brought. But he wanted me to take flash photos of Howie, from behind, while Howie was doing his show. I was way too much of a chicken for that. So then Jon wanted me to slide him the camera across the stage, to the drum set, so he could take photos. So I did that. And Jon took photos from the drum kit. And Howie saw the flash and was like, "What the fuck?" He worked it into his routine, and was pretty cool with it.
After the show, I got to meet Howie backstage, and went to shake hands with him, but he wouldn't shake my hand. I didn't know what was up. Being a "germaphobe" was a pretty unknown thing back then. Jon explained it to me later. No Howie's famous for his fist bumps.
Jon Stainbrook is now one of the most prominent people in Toledo's Republican politics. I have no idea what Mark is up to these days, that day in Arbor was the only time I met him. And as for guitarist Jeff Kollman, here is he a couple of years ago in a pedal demo video. He's still shredding.
