Session at Martin Aparijo's ramp in 1990

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:

Welcome to Dystopia: The Future is Now

I have a couple of new blogs I'm getting off the ground.  Check them out:

Crazy California

The Phoenix Great Depression

The Ultimate Weekend Story 4: Huntington Beach Flatlanders

Back to the story behind my 1990, self-produced BMX freestyle video, The Ultimate Weekend.  The part of the video I'm writing about today is the flatland segment from 4:37 to 9:53 in the video above.

Within a week or two of starting my job at Wizard Publications in August 1986, I drove Windy Osborn, (Windy Osborn Photography) our photographer, to a photo shoot at the Huntington Beach Pier.  It was my first trip south from Torrance to Orange County, and we were there to shoot photos of freestyle skateboarder Henry Candioti, who I thought was from Italy.  He was actually from Argentina, at the time, and his family had recently moved to the States.  Windy and I went down below the pier, to the wide bike path area, where Henry and another freestyle skater were skating.  Windy got to work, first watching what Henry could do, and then shooting a bunch of photos of him.  I just kind of stood back, watched Henry and the other skater, and checked out the scene on a sunny, fairly empty, weekday at the beach.  I'd never been to the H.B. Pier before.

While Windy was changing film, and talking to Henry, the other skater rolled over, Henry said, "This is Don Brown he's a lot better than me, he's the guy you should really be shooting."  So Windy finished shooting Henry, then asked Don if he wanted to shoot some photos.  She was shooting for FREESTYLIN' magazine that day, a BMX freestyle magazine.  But Oz the publisher (and Windy's dad), had decided that including skateboarding in the magazine would help it grow, bring in more income, and hopefully spread the word of BMX freestyle, which had only been an actual sport for two years at the time.

Don was really cool and funny, and Windy shot a few photos below the pier on the wide part of the bike path, by the arcade.  Looking for a different background, she asked Don to head up the stairs, onto the pier itself, next to Maxwell's restaurant.  As she was shooting, some local kids were hanging out, and having them in the background, watching Don skate, made for a cool backdrop.  Out of that shoot, came the great photo of Don's 540 (720/?) shove-it, above, which ran as a full page photo in the December 1986 issue of FREESTYLIN', which you can check out here.  Don's on page 56, Henry on 51 and 52.  On the page after Don you can see the mini-interview I did with a skater who practiced at The Spot in Redondo, where we rode our bikes every night.  That kid is named Rodney Mullen.

When this photo came back from the developer (remember developing photos people?), Windy freaked because that girl walking by on the far left, which Windy didn't notice while she was laying on the ground shooting, focusing on framing the shot well, that girl turned and looked at Don, and that just added that magical touch to this photo.  Windy loved that, and ran down to show her dad, Oz, right away.  She got so stoked when really great photos turned up.

So what does any of this have to do with my 1990 BMX freestyle video?  As it turned out, those kids in the background of this photo, who were maybe 12 or 13 at the time, they kept riding.  I remember seeing them at a GT show a year or so later at Bolsa Chica Bikes.  After the show, SoCal flatland icon Mike Sarrail and I taught them some tricks, like old school tailwhips, squeakers, and stuff.  Those kids practiced in that parking lot for an hour or more.  And they kept riding.

Another year or so later, early high school age for them, I moved to an apartment near that area.  I ran into them right away, because they practiced every night in the Taco Bell parking lot, at Bolsa Chica and Heil in Huntington Beach, a couple blocks from my place.  By that time, they could do most of what I could do, and they were moving on past my flatland level with the Kevin Jones/Plywood Hoods inspired forward rolling tricks.  And they kept riding.  None of them ever went pro, as far as I know, but they became really solid amateurs on the SoCal contest scene.

The kid in the blue shirt, sitting on his bike, in the Don Brown photo above, is Andy Mulcahy, who you first see at 5:38 in the video.  Ahhhh... the mullet era.  Anyhow, by 1990, this crew usually practiced in a parking lot of a big shopping center on Beach Boulevard, near Stark and across from the Burger King, not too far from the 405.  The opening part of this section was shot behind that shopping center.  The first flatlander is Joe Goodfellow, known as Red then.  He's not to be confused with "Crazy Red" Mike Carlson, who's in the video later.  Red might be the guy blocked by Don's knee in the the photo above, I'm not sure.

A lot of The Ultimate Weekend was pretty new stuff happening in BMX at the time, like th estreet and mini ramp riding.  While Andy, Red, and the guys were really good, they weren't quite the cutting edge of flatland, dominated by the Plywood Hoods, Chase Guoin, and a couple others at the time.  But their long, smooth lines let me progress in a different way in my video.  Those opening shots of Red, where I'm rolling along beside and moving around him, were shot with by skateboarding along side him with the camera.  These days, you all probably know that.  But in 1990, that was something that wasn't done much.  Ski filmmaker Bruce Benedict, the first to shoot serious footage of Action Jackson and the early Rollerblade team, started using blades to shoot cool tracking shots with a camera.  I know this because he also shot most of our Sims snowboard footage, and we talked about it a couple of times when I worked at Vision and he showed us he Rollerblade footage.

But when I took this section of the video up to my first real "Hollywood" TV job in early 1991, and showed them this flatland footage, they freaked.  The experienced cameramen and editors I worked with on Supercross and Monster Truck TV shows, they could not figure out how I shot that footage.  It seriously baffled them.  The only way Hollywood people knew how to get a tracking shot (rolling beside or behind something) was with a big camera dollie, like this:



It was hilarious.  Huge devices like those above are all they thought of when trying to get the camera rolling, and there's no way a big camera dollie could do those shots I took.  I was a lowly P.A. (production assistant) around guys who'd worked in the real TV industry for 10-15 years.  And those first camera shots rolling along and around Red and Andy had them completely confused.  They just kept re-watching them, and couldn't figure out how I shot them.  I finally said, "I did it with a skateboard."  It blew their fucking minds.  They first thought I sat on a skateboard, held the camera, and had someone push me.  I said, "No, I just skated along side of them, and around them, holding the camera  (a full size S-VHS) in one hand.

One thing about the early, rider-made, BMX, skateboard, and snowboard videos that never gets discussed is that we changed the way the entire video world shot video.  Using a skateboard to get tracking shots is just one example.  But, accidentally, we changed the video world by making the videos we, as riders, skaters, and boarders, wanted to see.  We came up with new ways of shooting and editing that changed Hollywood.  We also pretty much invented the "reality TV" idea, too, by shooting candid footage of ourselves and random people, but that's a whole different issue.

The contest at the Rose Bowl was one I gave those guys a ride to, and shot some footage while I was there.  The minute+ long hitchhiker was just a shot I caught randomly.  I'd never seen anyone do a hitchhiker more than maybe 100 feet or so, and that was amazing to me.  But that guy, and I don't even know who he was, just kept going, and going, and going.It was insane to see at that time.

The nighttime footage was another session I shot later in 1990, late summer or early fall maybe, to get the most up to date stuff they were doing before I edited the video.  The black guy riding is Sean Johnson, who just moved to Huntington Beach and started riding with those guys a month or so before that.  The trick where he's doing what looks like a "lawnmower" rolling in a circle is something I'd never seen before I shot it.

So while Andy, Red, and the H.B. flatlanders weren't quite up with the Plywood Hoods at the time, they were solid riders, and a part of our H.B. scene that needed to be in The Ultimate Weekend.  In addition, I met Don Brown.  A few months after that photo shoot, I got the boot from Wizard Publications, landed a job as the AFA newsletter editor in H.B., and became a local at the pier.  Don Brown, Pierre Andre', and Mike Sarrail became lifelong friends.

I'm going to be sharing most of my old school BMX stories on the new Block Bikes Blog from now on, check it out...

The Ultimate Weekend video story 3: The H Ramp

The part of the video I'm talking about today is the H-Ramp, the mini ramp segment from 2:06 to 4:28.  The main rider is Keith Treanor, in the white T-shirt, and also Alan Valek in the black shorts.   Local Huntington Beach flatlanders Sean Johnson (the black dude) and Andy Mucahy are in there, and I can't remember the name of the guy with the long hair.

Sit down my little childrens, it's time for a lesson in bikin' from way back in the dark ages.  If you just watched the clip of the H-Ramp at the times above, you're probably thinkin,' "That's some really boring mini-ramp riding set to some guitar guy playing elevator music."  OK, fair assessment by today's standards.  But this was waaaaaay back in 1990.  Money was tight, sponsors were largely gone, we burned all our uniforms in a huge bonfire at the last AFA flatland contest.  OK, that last part didn't happen, but it should have.

In 1990, the widepread popularity of flatland was fading, street riding was still growing in leaps and bounds, there were no skateparks in Southern Caliornia (really... NONE), and halfpipes had taken over in place of the quarterpipes of the years before.  Two and a half years earlier, on a back street in in Costa Mesa, CA, a legal battle took place that ultimately changed both skateboarding and BMX forever.  But almost no BMXer knew about it.  But me.

Led by skateboarder Paul Schmitt, a handful of skateboarders rented a house on Towne Street, lodged between Placentia and Monrovia, and 18th and 19th, in the Costa Mesa industrial area.  Schmitt's skate company, Schmitt Stix, was part of the Vision world, and Vision's main building was a couple blocks one way, and the wood shop that built the boards was a couple blocks the other way.  And Unreel Productions, the Vision video company where I worked, was housed in a new, upscale office complex a block from Vision.  The skaters, Paul, John Lucero, and a few others, were close to work, close to their sponsor, and on a chill little street hoping they'd have fairly tolerant neighbors.  So, being skaters, they built a 9 foot tall backyard halfpipe.  Some of the neighbors complained, since there's always some douchebag who hates any noise in every neighborhood.  The city was called, and code enforcement came to check out the ramp.

Now at the time, backyard skateboard ramps were completely unknown to normal people.  Most people had never seen one, and didn't know they existed.  But Paul Schmitt and crew, being smart and pretty industrious, had built a halfpipe that was solid, not dangerous by construction standards, and didn't even qualify as a fire hazard.  Being the only halfpipe anywhere around, attracted skaters from quite a ways for evening sessions.  But, code enforcement, being the nebulous world of obscure city ordinances that it is, found a law that the ramp broke.  You couldn't build anything over six feet high in a Costa Mesa backyard without getting the plans approved by the city.  Paul and the skaters argued their case, and all of us at Vision heard about legal fight day to day.  The Man was keeping good skaters down.

After a lot of back and forth, the skaters simply chopped the top three feet off of their nine foot tall vert ramp.  The six foot ramp was no longer an issue, and the guy who complained the about the noise was told he just had to deal with it.  The skaters began stopping sessions at dusk, and a relative peaceful state was achieved on Towne Street.

But something else happened by accident.  The ramp was suddenly quite a bit under vert, since it was chopped off, which made airs pretty much impossible, but it made a lot of lip and coping tricks more possible.  Paul Schmitt and the skaters of the house, in their battle with the city of Costa Mesa, created the world's first skateboard mini ramp, as seen at 1:12 in this 1987 Schmitt Stix video.  At the time, skaters like Schmitt, Lucero, Mark Gonzales, Gator, John Grigley, and a whole bunch more started skating the Towne Street ramp.  They realized that there was quite a bit to be tried on an undervert ramp, and word got around the skate world.  I heard about this, and saw some video from time to time, because I was the guy who made copies of any video that anyone in the Vision Skateboards world needed.  Mostly a boring job, but I heard about the Towne Street ramp, new pools, new ditches, and other spots sessioned by Vision skaters.  As a hardcore BMX guy, that was a great perk of my job.

But the rest of the BMX world heard none of this.  BMXers built launch ramps, and the early 2-Hip Meet the Street contests, starting in 1988, had small ramps, often like bits of a cut up mini ramp.  But the 4 to 6 foot tall, under vert halfpipe, was a skate only thing for a couple of years.

A few other people started building mini ramps, since they could fly under the radar of local authorities, and since they opened up transition riding to a lot of street skaters.  One of these early mini ramps was the H-Ramp, several miles inland, in Santa Ana.  A dad who was good at building things had a big backyard and a son who liked to skate.  He built two mini ramp halfpipes, 4 or 5 feet tall, side by side.  Then he added a middle section that connected them, with a 3 or 4 foot spine, an idea born in the Powell-Peralta, Bones #3, Animal Chin video.  When asked later about the secret Animal Chin ramp, the Powell skaters said the back to back vert ramps with a spine was actually too gnarly to try most of the ideas they had.  So when Unreel Productions got the job of putting on the biggest skate vert contest ever in 1989, we melded the two ideas, and made a ramp with a vert spine to a mini ramp at the Vision Skate Escape.  It was the first time a lot of skaters ever rode a spine ramp, and set the stage (literally) for some new tricks that weekend.  The Vert/mini spine combo was way more shredable than the huge spine of the Chin ramp, and got the idea of both mini ramps and spine ramps into the skate world.

Meanwhile, in the big backyard in Santa Ana, the two mini ramps with the middle mini-spine connector section made it look like a big letter "H," and it became known as the H-Ramp.  Skaters from far and wide showed up to session there.  The "H" shape lasted for a year or so, and then the ramp got re-configured and rebuilt in a few different ways as time passed.  You can see the H-Ramp a year earlier, with skater Marty "Jinx" Jiminez sessioning it at 50:14 in Vision's Barge at Will (1989).  If you watch Barge at Will, you'll see the mini ramp idea was all over the skate world by 1989, just two years after the Towne Street Ramp, with 10 or more different mini ramps showing up in the video.

Sometime in early 1990, BMXers John Povah and Keith Treanor got wind of the H-Ramp, and got the OK, to start sessioning it on a regular basis.  So why am I going to so much detail about this mini ramp, in a video segment that's alright, but definitely doesn't blow your socks off?  Because the H-Ramp segment in The Ultimate Weekend was the very first time a mini ramp showed up in a BMX video.  Serioiusly, the first one.  Much of the footage in this section was shot on the second time Keith rode there, which is the second time he ever rode an actual mini ramp.  Keith went on to become a mini ramp ruler later on, but this is him just getting used to one.  That's why he seems ot be doing a lot of tailtaps.  This was one of the earliest segments I shot for the video, and I didn't go back to get better footage of Keith there because I knew there were a couple more mini-ramp segments later on.

Making The Ultimate Weekend, I didn't set out to have the first "this" and the first "that."  I just wanted to make a good quality, "professional" video, that showed the actual riding all of us were doing in my Huntington Beach area scene and around Southern California in 1990.  I wanted fresh riding, a lot of different riders and styles, and one rider that was going to session with all these people that the video would seem to follow around.  That rider, who I actually had agree to the idea, was former GT rider Jess Dyrenforth.  He was a good all around rider.  I knew him fairly well, we was pretty well known, and my video was going look like I followed him around to all these sessions in one amazing weekend.  But Jess was getting into Rollerblading really seriously then, and he just kept flaking out on me.  He wasn't being a dick, he was just super busy.  Then I met Keith Treanor and John Povah at the Oceanview jump, and Keith was this hot, new rider, who was hungry as hell, and always had time to ride.  So he became the main guy in the video, and John was there a lot as well.

I have a couple of more memories from the H-Ramp, besides me sucking at riding it, that is.  My boss at Unreel, Don Hoffman, went to shoot some video there for one of our Vision videos.  Don is the guy on the left in this clip, interviewing AFA head, Bob Morales.  It might be the Marty Jiminez footage I linked above when this happened, I'm not sure.  But at the time, the deck on the H-Ramp was eight feet wide on one part, and four feet wide on another.  So Don was shooting with one of Unreel's huge, $50,000, 35 pound Betacam cameras.  He stepped back, thinking the deck was 8 feet wide, but was on the narrow section, and fell off the back of the ramp, which was 5 feet high.  That sounds pretty funny, but he fell backwards, with his eye up to the viewfinder, and the massive 35 pound camera landed on his face.  He did something like $5,000 damage to the camera, and $7,000 damage to his face.  Plus he looked like the elephant man for about a week.  Poor Don.  But he eventually healed, and we all gave him shit about it for a year or so. 

My other memory is one day, probably after I made the video, I was riding the H-Ramp with Keith, John, Jess, and Jess's girlfriend, a chick named Angie Walton.  Angie was riding there on rollerblades, and was about the first woman riding ramps on blades.  Jess was switching, riding his bike a bit, and then the blades.  At one point, we were all tired, and sitting there on the parts of the ramp talking.  Angie was trying to learn some kind of handstand drop-in thing.  She needed someone to hold her legs up in the handstand, as she tried to figure out how to balance so she could actually drop-in from there. I was the closest person, so she asked me. 

So Angie is upside down, in a handstand on the coping, wearing T-shirt and pretty short shorts, I'm holding her legs as she's doing a handstand, and her boyfriend Jess is 20 feet away.  The weird part was that I could see right down her shorts, and she kept directing me to lean her legs a little one way of the other, I'd look down, and be looking down her shorts by accident.  Sure, I'm a guy, and she's was really good looking, but I really was actually trying to be a gentleman about the whole thing, and not stand there staring at her down her shorts.  And Jess was watching, trying to help her figure out these drop-in things while I'm trying to not to look down her shorts.  I'm a dork to start with, and it was just this weird situation that stuck in my mind.  Her underwear was pretty standard issue white women's panties, I couldn't avoid getting a glimpse.  I guess it never occurred to Angie, she just wanted to learn that trick, oblivious to the weird view she had on display from my angle.  So if you stumble across this post Angie, I really was trying not to be a perv that day. 

Angie, by the way, went on to start Daily Bread, the top inline magazine for years, and to start this other little idea with roadie/promoter Kevin Lyman... called the Warped Tour.  Really.  I actually called her up looking for a job on it when I first heard about it.  She didn't know who the fuck I was.  Kevin, was the guy whose crew built the stage for the Vision Skate Escape contest, linked above.  Looking for a clip of Angie skating, I found this interview, which I listened to the first 20 minutes of, it's pretty damn funny. 

The Ultimate Weekend Story 2: the Intro

The Intro starts at :55 in this video, and ends at 2:00, that's the segment this post is about.

I started shooting footage for this video in about late February or March of 1990, as my employer, Unreel Productions was being shut down by parent company Vision Skateboards.  Vision blew up to huge size in 1988 as vert skateboarding, BMX, and the emerging sport of snowboarding hit peaks.

Then Vision Street Wear clothes, the logo that pretty much identifies the 1980's in action sports, caught the attention of the real, New York City fashion world.  After the preppie, big name brand, snobby 1980's lagged on and got even more boring, shit was happening in the urban environment.  Hip hop music was breaking through to the mainstream world with the Aerosmith/RUN DMC collaboration, LL Cool J,  Salt-N-Pepa, Kid N' Play, D.J. Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince,  Tone Loc, The Fat Boys, Public Enemy, N.W.A. and, of course, The Beastie Boys.  New wave had faded, metal had spawned the glam hairbands, and the weird people were looking for something fresh.  And the urban world was just that.  Rap and Hip Hop had grown out of the tough streets of New York City, and it couldn't be held to the black community anymore.  The hyper trendy fashion world looked to these scenes for inspiration, and along with hip hop, skateboarding was starting to take to the streets in a big way thanks to guys like Mark Gonzales, Tommy Guerrero, and Natas Kaupas.  Then Vision made clothes, and just put that feel in words in a simple, yet powerful logo: Vision Street Wear.

As over-hyped as it seems to us old schoolers looking back.  When it broke, the Vision Street Wear logo was fresh.  The fashion world loved it, it got some mainstream TV hype, helped by then Vision skater, The Gonz himself.  Vision grew to $50 million in sales in 1988, I think.  They bought the huge, 100,000 square foot, former Ocean Pacific (Op) building in Santa Ana (a block from where S&M Bikes is now), and planned to do $100 million in sales in 1989.  Vision Street Wear didn't realize how trendy the fashion world is, and didn't have a whole new line of "street wear" coming out in 1989.  So the big time fashion world moved on.  Vision geared up and spent big, banking on that $100 million in sales year.  But they only made $60 million or so.  Good, but not enough to keep the gravy train rolling.  The skateboard industry started to tank in its 10 year cycle.  The mainstream bike world gave up on BMX and freestyle, and put their money into mountain bikes.  And the long contract with Snowboard pioneer Tom Sims ended, so Tom and Vision fought over who owned the name Sims Snowboards.

Unreel Productions, the video arm of  Vision that never had to actually make money, became a big expense to cut.  So the building was closed down, a woman named Laura and I were kept, and all the producers were let go.  Don Hoffman, the who started Unreel with Vision owner Brad Dorfman, went to freelance status.  I got the job of taking inventory of the entire building, and getting it ready to move out.  In that process I found about $10,000 worth of video equipment that wasn't listed on the previous inventory.  I didn't sell any to pocket the money.  Being the dork that I am, I dutifully listed every piece.

Laura and I moved into a single office in the Vision main building, and in a month or so, she found a job in the real TV world, just over the hill from Hollywood.  Then it was just me.  Sitting in a big office with the leftover equipment, and almost nothing to do.  That's when I started really planning my own video.  I started shooting video on the weekends, not every one, but when I found a cool session somewhere.  Mike Sarrail went along most of the time, shooting photos and riding.

I shot sporadically until September, never really sure if I could actually make a video all by myself, start to finish.  I'd never done a big project like that all by myself.  Most riders thought the video footage  I was shooting would never show up anywhere at first.

I edited it in late September or early October of 1990.  I picked the best shots to make a fast paced and intense, grab you by the shirt collar and wake you up, intro.

When I finished the video, Keith Treanor came over to my apartment, and I showed the video to him alone.  That was the "premiere," I guess you could say.  After the intro, he turned around and said something like, "Holy shit, I didn't think your video was actually going to be good."  I just started laughing.

So as the flatland, quarterpipe, leathers-and-helmet-wearing era of the 1980's was fading, and the halfpipe, dirt jump and street-inspired, shorts and T-shirts, no-sponsors-left, 1990's were just starting, I got a wide range of riders in front of my camera.

Here's the guys in the intro:

Close-up backflip- Jeff Cotter- SoCal local flatlander to most people at the time
Close-up backyard to switch-up- Unknown flatlander at a Rose Bowl AFA contest
Rock-n-roll sprocket fakie on over-vert tombstone- Chris Day- young flatland wonder kid
Wall ride over my sister's head- Me (Steve Emig)- industry guy, cameraman, and mediocre rider at best, to most people.  My sister Cheri, then in college, is now a very experienced 4th grade teacher who's earned her Masters and National Boards.  Thanks for sitting there, sis!
Leary in the P.O.W. House backyard- John Paul Rogers- P.O.W. resident, S&M racer and jumper
Barspin tailtap on a quarterpipe- Todd Anderson- Camarillo ramp legend and 80's vert pro
1 hand 1 foot flyout jump- Keith Treanor- then unknown rager who just moved from New Jersey to Huntington Beach.
Rope-a roni (?)- Joe "Red" Goodfellow- H.B. local flatlander
Can-can on dirt at Mission Trails- Gary Laurent- Vert pro and Vegas show rider
High tailwhip to feet flyout on quarterpipe (a show trick)- Dan Hubbard- SoCal local rider and trick team owner
Front wheel 540 (with Stacy Peralta-esque hair flying)- Jeff Cotter
1 hand no footer at Mission Trails- Randy Lawrence- Desert rat turned H. B. local and bike shop mechanic
1 footed turndown over doubles- Josh White- legendary 80's vert rider who considered himself a ground rider
Nosepick to rockwalk drop-in over mini-spine- Unknown rider, 2-Hip show, I think.
1 hand no footed seat grab over long set of doubles- Mike "Crazy Red" Carlson- jumping nutcase
Tailwhip footplant on mini-ramp- Gary Laurent
Poorly timed double wall ride- Randy Lawrence (going opposite!) over me
Huge fakie wall ride- Keith Treanor
Lookback table thing off the tombstone- Jess Dyrenforth- GT rider turned inline stud
360 flyout- Keith Treanor
Chicken butt air at the Nude Bowl- 1980's skatepark and vert pioneer and legend Brian Blyther
Rockwalk drop into the Nude Bowl- Keith Treanor
Rock n' roll wall fakie- Keith Treanor
360 over mini-spine- unknown rider at 2-Hip show
High 1 hand no footer on halfpipe- John Peacy- Newcomer on the vert scene
No hander flyout- John Povah- former U.K. vert rider turned Orange County local
No footed X-up over doubles- Josh White
Street abubaca- Alan Valek- H.B. area local ripper
Nac-Nac over doubles- Alan Foster- AA pro racer, P.O.W. House resident (now known mostly as Brian Foster's older brother)
1 foot tabletop over doubles- Josh White
Bank hip 270- Alan Valek
Booster footplant on bench- Keith Treanor
Big 360 over doubles- Mike "Crazy Red" Carlson
Long sprocket grind on ledge- Eddie Roman- Skyway pro, street legend, and guy who made "Aggroman"
Jump over John Povah's head to flat- Keith Treanor.  That became the logo of the video in high contrast white on black, from Mike Sarrail's photo.  I've seen Keith get a full two feet higher on that jump than he did in this shot.

Oh, and the guy who's screaming "Are you ready?!" at the beginning- John Stainbrook- Toledo, Ohio punk rocker, lead guy of The Stain, and motel to traveling punk bands in the 1980's and 1990's.  Now he's a top Republican Toledo politics.

I'm going to be sharing most of my old school BMX stories on the new Block Bikes Blog from now on, check it out...

The story behind The Ultimate Weekend 1: It's time to make my own video

Then unknown Keith Treanor, with a crazy high fakie wall ride for 1990.

In 1990, the BMX freestyle world was in turmoil.  Let me set the scene.  BMX trick riding started the 1980's with Bob Haro and a handful of other young guys doing tricks on bikes.  Haro formed a team with friend Bob Morales, and they toured around and did some shows, letting BMX racers know there was more to be done on  BMX bike than just race and jump.  Racing itself was only a decade old then.  R.L. Osborn and Mike Buff formed the BMX Action Trick Team, and toured more extensively around the U.S., and BMX freestyle found a handful of followers across the U.S. and in Europe as magazines printed photos of tricks.  The weird little activity grew slowly.

 Bob Morales put on skatepark contests in 1983, Bob Haro created the Haro Freestyler, the first bike designed for trick riding, about the same time.  In 1984 Morales started the American Freestyle Association, and the first flatland and ramps competitions took place.  BMX freestyle became a sport.  Bob Osborn, publisher of BMX Action magazine, saw this new thing growing, and started FREESTYLIN' magazine to cover it.  Bob Haro, Bob Morales, Bob Osborn.  If it wasn't for guys named Bob, freestyle wouldn't exist, I guess.  I never thought about that until now.

Around the U.S. and U.K., little scenes sprang up, local trick teams were formed everywhere, and competitions and magazine coverage spread the weird little sport.  BMX freestyle grew exponentially in the mid-1980's.  A few videos were made, the most popular being the BMX Plus! videos: riders in leathers and helmets flatlanding in miniature gold courses and at the beach while McGoo added colorful commentary.  But the sport really got out to the world in print magazines.  By 1988, there were 400 or more riders entered at AFA Masters contests, which was a lot, considering almost all of them rode flatland, and many ramps as well.  Haro, GT, CW, Kuwahara, and other factory teams crisscrossed the country spreading the word about this new sport, and showing it to kids in person.

And then, in January of 1989, something happened at the main bicycle industry trade show in Long Beach, California.  I was there walking around, and I heard major bike business guys, in booth after booth, saying the same thing, "BMX is dead, mountain bikes are the new thing."  Just like that, corporate money fled from the BMX racing and especially the freestyle world.  As far as the big time bike industry was concerned, BMX freestyle was dead.

But nobody told us riders.  We kept riding.  It was our life.  The lack of money in the sport got so bad that I showed up at the 2-Hip Meet the Street in New York City, at the already famous Brooklyn Banks.  I had a room in midtown Manhattan with Rich Bartlett, paid for by Vision Street Wear.  I was the Vision cameraman, Rich was the Vision street rider and vert rider.  We rode to the contest site, and sessioned with everyone.  As we were heading back, Rich told me, "Hey Dennis, Mat and some guys need a place to stay, I said they could crash in our room."  I said, "Cool."  Next thing I knew, Dennis McCoy, Mat Hoffman, Steve Swope, Rick Thorne, and a couple other Kansas City guys were sleeping on our floor for the weekend.  Why?  They didn't have sponsors.  Dennis McCoy was the top overall rider in the world for two years straight.  Mat was the top ramp rider pushing the sport, and a new pro.  THEY didn't have sponsors.  That's how much things had changed in a year.  So things went ghetto.  Ron Wilkerson put on the contest, low budget style, and it was the best weekend of my freestyle life.

A few months later, Vision Skateboards/Vision Street Wear, decided to shut down Unreel Productions, Vision's video company, which was where I worked.  They kept me, laid off all the higher paid producers, and I sat in a office with almost nothing to do for six months.  I realized it was time to try and make my own freestyle video.  I didn't know if I could actually do it by myself.  But I knew I needed to try.

I rode after work around Huntington Beach, and I rode at the H.B. pier on the weekends, doing flatland for beach crowds with Mike Sarrail, freestyle skateboarders Pierre Andre, Don Brown, and a few others.   Sometimes I'd go ride with other people.  I wanted to make a video that showed the world of riding I knew.  No uniforms, no helmets when riding flatland.  All kinds of riding: flatland, ramps, street, dirt jumping, and pools if we could find them. The big money may have left the sport, but bike riding, and skateboarding, which the bike world followed in ways, were changing dramatically.  Things were going more to the streets, and the whole idea that we ride mostly to progress, not to compete, was just starting to really settle into our consciousness.  Contests were cool, but we rode because we loved to ride, and we wanted to learn and invent new stuff.  Things were changing really fast in 1990, and I wanted to show it in a video, since I just spent 2 1/2 years at Unreel learning about how to make videos.

As crazy as it sounds now, the idea that every rider gets their own section in a video wasn't the standard yet.  Nobody went out to "shoot a part."  We just went out riding, and a few of us had video cameras.  Pretty much all riders had "real jobs" then.  So my basic idea for the video was the same idea I pitched to Andy Jenkins, Gork and Lew in 1986, in the Wizard Publications parking lot.  Andy was toying with the idea of a FREESTYLIN' magazine video then.  My video idea was simple:  Get off work on Friday afternoon,  ride all weekend with as many different people, in as many different places, as possible.  End it as an exhausted rider on Sunday night.  For a rider, it would be The Ultimate Weekend.  That was the idea.

So I just started taking my $1100, full size S-VHS, RCA camera out every weekend and riding with everyone, and everywhere I could.  We packed up the little blue Datsun pick-up I bought off Mike Sarrail, and went out to session.  Flatland.  Street.  Flyout dirt jumps.  Racer-made double jump trails.  Freestyle shows.  Ramps.  Pools.  Even a skatepark in Tijuana , Mexico.  I shot video, (and rode) with legendary freestylers from the 1980's, up-and-coming riders, H.B. locals, racers, and met a few new friends who went on to legendary status in the 1990's.  Because things in riding were changing so fast, my video wound up having a lot of firsts in it.  It was a struggle to finish it, it took about 8 months, but I managed to shoot, log, edit, and put out a full length video, which cost me $5,000 out of my pocket.  Mike Sarrail came through with a last minute loan to help me get it done.  I dropped The Ultimate Weekend with little fanfare in October of 1990.  Since rider-made videos, and videos in general, were few and far between then, so there was no premiere party.  During the process, I quit at Vision, and started working freelance for a surf video distributor called NSI.  It was a sketchy, but fun place to work, and he sold about 500 copies of my video in the U.S., and bought the foreign rights.  I have a feeling he sold a bunch more videos that I got paid for.  I was super shy, and a horrible salesman then, so I let NSI handle it.  For an independently made video, it sold fairly well.  But I only maid about $2,500 back, so I lost about $2,500 producing the video.  I had bad and expensive habits from working at Unreel, where money never mattered.  I didn't know how to make a good video cheap then. 

Eighteen years later, in 2008, after over five years struggling as a taxi driver, and a year living on the streets of Southern California, I moved to North Carolina to live with my family and regroup.  In a 5 foot by 5 foot storage unit in Huntington Beach was all my raw footage, my master tapes for The Ultimate Weekend and other videos I'd made, my magazine collection (including a complete FREESTYLIN' magazine collection), and my other stuff.  I arranged for some friends in Cali to pay the late fee on my storage unit and ship all the good stuff to me.  But I needed to borrow $150 from my parents.  My mom said she could loan it to me before I flew to NC.  Two weeks after I got to NC, things changed, as they often do with her.  She said, "Oh, I can't afford to help you with that."  And that's how I lost all my BMX stuff, including one of the best BMX freestyle video footage collections, ranging from 1989 to 2007.  Poof.  It was all gone.  It probably got sold to one of the people now on Storage Wars, most likely, since it was sold in a storage unit auction.

I went into a deep depression, and then I started blogging about my memories of my days in the BMX freestyle world.  Memories were all I had left.  Ten years later, I'm still telling some of those stories.  This is my main tie to the BMX freestyle world, now.  In the next few weeks, I'll tell the stories behind The Ultimate Weekend, section by section. It was a crazy time, and I recently realized that I never told any of those tales.  Hopefully it will be (mostly) worth reading.