AFA Oregon Pro Ramps- My 2nd BMX video I produced- now 36 years old

This video came out in late summer 1987, I think.  After getting laid off from my life changing job at FREESTYLIN' magazine at the end of 1986, I got hired by Bob Morales to be the editor/photographer of the AFA newsletter.  But I did all kinds of things there.  One day Bob walked in and asked, "Do you want to direct a TV commercial for the Austin contest?  I can get really cheap commercial spots on MTV there."  That question started my video career.

The year was 1987, it was the era when the younger quarterpipe schooled BMX vert riders were begining to rival the older skatepark schooled riders in skill level.  Mike Dominguez was the king of quarterpipe riding, with Eddie Fiola and Brian Blyther right up there (neither was at this contest), the old skatepark rivals.  But guys like Dave Voelker, Josh White, and Todd Anderson were closing in on them.  Dino Deluca, Mat Hoffman, and Joe Johnson were still amateurs then.  But all of these guys were clocking in airs above 8 feet out, sometimes in the 10 to 12 foot range.  This same year, Ron Wilkerson, already a major touring pro for Haro, started the 2-Hip King of Vert Halfpipe series, which led vert BMX away from quarterpipes over the next few years, and into halfpipe riding. This AFA Freestyle Masters contest took place in Portland, Oregon, in the Spring of 1987.  

Back then, the new little offshoot sport of BMX freestyle was about four years old, and BMX racing was 17, barely old enough to drive.  BMX freestyle started as trick riding shows in the late 1970's.  Then it started as a sport in 1983, with Bob Morales promoting the first BMX skatepark contests.  The first American Freestyle Association flatland and quarterpipe contest was in Venice Beach, in June of 1984.  Things were growing fast, and by 1987, all three BMX magazines had spawned a freestyle magazine as well.  

There were three of us in the little AFA office when I started, and a couple more, a few months later.  I did a little bit of everything there.  I answered phone calls, put heat transfers on T-shirts, drove the van and big trailer (Gary Turner's old 30 foot dragster trailer), and was a roadie and fill-in judge at local and national contests.  I wrote, shot the photos, did the layout, and helped fold and staple all 3,000 newsletters each month.  Bob always had about 17 things going at once, and he'd just say, go do this, and show me the basics, and then let me finish it, figuring anything new out as I went.   

Then came the video work.  Bob found out he could buy local commercial spots, on MTV in Austin, Texas, to promote that contest, for $25 each, I think.  But we needed a broadcast quality, 30 second TV commercial, in about a week.  He asked me to do it, and I said, "Uh... sure.  How do I do that?"  Typical punk rock/BMX/action sports D.I.Y.  attitude of the times.  He said, "Call up Unreel, they'll tell you what to do."  

Unreel Productions was the video company part of Vision Skateboards and Vision Street Wear, and VSW sponsored the AFA Masters contest series.  So they sent a cameraman to shoot video of each contest.  The deal was that both Vision and the AFA could use that footage.  So I called Unreel, and they told me to come over the next day.  They handed me ten VHS tapes, explained what a window dub was (numbers for the time code in the picture), and told me to go home, and write down the numbers of all the shots I wanted to use, then call them back. 

The next couple of nights, I did that, picking all the best shots, and marking where the pro contest runs started.  The next day I was in Unreel's $500,000 Betacam edit bay with their editor, Dave Alvarez, who was a couple of years older than me.  Dave had long, straight hair, a tie dye T-shirt, and Vision shorts.  He didn't fit the picutre in my head of what a video editor should look like.  But he was an incredible editing wizard, and great to work with, since I had no clue what I was doing.  He walked me through editing, step by step.  Sometimes, while doing the intro, he'd play a few seconds of music, and say, I need a shot that matches this sound.  So I'd think of a shot, look it up in my handwritten log notes, and he'd edit it in.  Within a couple of days of editing, we had a half hour show.  These videos were in color, but this copy above looks like a copy of a copy, and color gets lost as they went down tape generations back then.  They don't have to worry about stuff like that now, in the digital era.  

I "produced and directed" six AFA videos that year, with Dave doing all the editing.  Basically, that means I picked the shots used, after logging the footage, and just made sure the videos got finished, that's what a producer does.  All that time I spent at Unreel led to them calling me when they needed a new guy to do basic work, later that year.  I left the AFA, and started working at Unreel, in December of 1987.  

One question by Bob Morales one day, asking me to do that first commercial, turned my life in a different direction, which later led to things like this, in 1990, and working as a crew guy here. starting in 1992.  It's weird how tiny opportunities can change your whole life.  

While the quality is sketchy from this old VHS tape, the riding is amazing for the time period, and would be solid riding in today's world.  This was BMX vert at the beginning of the quarterpipe era over 35 years ago.  

I've got a new blog now, check it out:

Small Business Futurist

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

AFA Oregon Pro Ramps Video from 1987

I'd like to give a HUGE thanks to Rosey Junior, who linked this in the comments of my blog post about rider-made videos, in the Club Homeboy FB group.  This is actually the second video I ever produced, for Bob Morales at the American Freestyle Association, way back in 1987.  I haven't seen this since probably 1987, maybe '88.  The cameraman was Pat Wallace, the Unreel Productions staff cameraman then.  It was edited on pro quality betacam (NOT betamax), by Unreel editor Dave Alvarez, who's a fucking wizard with video stuff.  He's also the guy who taught me most of what I know about video while later working at Unreel.

Should you bother watching this?  I'll just list the amateur riders, and you decide.  Mathew Hoffman.  Joe Johnson.  Dino Deluca.  Dave Voelker. 

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...

An idea for Todd Lyons and SE Bikes

Old school racer/jumper/street rider and shameless self-promoter Todd Lyons and I go back to the P.O.W. House days of the early 90's.  I don't think we actually lived in the house at the same time, but everyone would congregate there either to go riding or to go out at night.  So we shared some fun times in those days of stealing $7 beers in clubs and taking over unused beer taps.

These days Todd's a family man, and brand manager for SE Bikes, which happened to be the company that sponsored my Idaho freestyle teammate Jay Bickel back in 1984.  Todd's been spearheading the design of a bunch of big BMX bikes aimed at us old guys, as well as the traditional SE classics like the Quadangle and the PK Ripper.

I stumbled across this classic photo yesterday, looking for something else.  This amazing photo is the cover of FREESTYLIN' magazine issue #3, the first issue I got as a kid in Idaho.  I thought, with all the old school flavored stuff Todd's been doing at SE, like getting Mike Buff and Stu Thomsen bikes out, it would be cool if he did a new version of this classic photo.  It's Todd Anderson jumping over the convertible bug,  with Perry Kramer, Dino Deluca, Toby Henderson, McGoo (?) Fred Blood, and a couple others in the car.

If any of you out there think Todd should make this happen, leave a comment on the facebook page where you see this.  Oh, and to make it difficult for you Todd, you absolutely need to get a Ford Pinto in the background.  OK, who thinks this is a cool idea?

Update:  354 page views on this post in about three hours, AND Todd Anderson said on Facebook that he's up for it.  Freakin' Cool.  No word from Todd Lyons yet, but he might still be in China, in a far different time zone.