This is the Golden Gate Park BMX freestyle scene in San Francisco, summer of 1986. BMX freestyle, as we called it then, had only been an actual sport for two years. We were inventing something new, and not realizing how far reaching our weird little sport would be. I started my first zine in September of 1985 just to meet these guys. It still amazes me how much that first zine changed the course of my life. I'm the guy chasing his bike at 5:07. Dumb trick I used to do in parades in Idaho, but hey, it got me on TV.
Edit- 4:15 pm, 10/13/2018- I just finished making my way through Richmond Zine Fest 2018, here at the Main Library. Thanks to all zine publishers I talked to for your hospitality.
I know I'm a sketchy looking old white guy with really bad teeth, but everyone here at Zine Fest was super friendly. That's one of the great things about zines, bringing such a wide array of people together with a common interest. In 1985, when I started doing zines, there were no zine fests, just some trading at BMX freestyle contests and through the snail mail. As a really old dude who's been into zines for decades, it's really cool to see younger people not only publishing zines, but progressing, doing amazing art, design, and writing, and keeping this weird little world alive. Props to all of you at Zine Fest today, it really stoked me out to see so many zinesters in one place. I will be adding a ton of links to this post later today, so it might be worth coming back to tomorrow for another look.
By the way, this is the only song I've ever heard mention zines. Harvey Danger's "Flagpole Sitta" from 1997. To me, it's the zine anthem. Have you all heard it?
I was a dorky kid from the Midwest, born in Ohio in the mid 1960's, moved town to town as a kid in the 1970's, then to New Mexico for a year, then to Boise, Idaho in 1981, where I went to high school. My parents moved us to a trailer park outside Boise for a year, so they could save money to buy a house. During that year in the trailer park, in the desert, I got into BMX. Then came BMX racing at Fort Boise in late 1982 and through 1983. Then I got into the new sport of BMX freestyle, or trick riding, in 1984.
In 1985, a year after I graduated, my family moved to San Jose, California, where my dad just got a new job. That was a year after this little guy came out from some tiny company called Apple Computers in nearby Cuppertino. I worked my summer job in Boise, managing a tiny amusement park called The Fun Spot, and then I packed up my shit brown, 1971 Pontiac Bonneville, and drove solo to San Jose. I quickly found a job at a local Pizza Hut, just down the road from the Winschester Mystery House. I worked evenings, and spent my afternoons riding my BMX freestyle bike by myself.
I started my first zine, San Jose Stylin', as a way to meet the riders of the Bay Area, some of the best anywhere in our little sport at the time. It worked. I was soon riding at the Beach Park Ramp Jams, put on by Skyway pro and mad scientist, Robert Peterson. Within a few more weeks, I was traveling up to Golden Gate Park in San Francisco every weekend I could, to ride with the guys in the video above, and pros Dave Vanderspek, Robert Peterson, Rick Allison, and Hugo Gonzales, as well. I interviewed Maurice Meyer (featured in the video at the top of this post) and the others, I covered our scene, and shot photos of us sessioning. I also called riders around the country, and was soon putting out much of the national BMX freestyle news two months before it came out in the magazines.
The smartest thing I did with my zine was to send individual copies to each of the editorial guys at BMX Action, BMX Plus, and FREESTYLIN' magazines. Much to my surprise, after six months of putting zines out, I got a call from Andy Jenkins, the editor at FREESTYLIN'. He wanted me to write a contest article, to cover the next big freestyle contest for the magazine. That was March of 1986. In the August issue of FREESTYLIN' (here- scan page 11/mag page 20), which hit news stands in late June, my article came out, as well as a new freestyle zine review article, where my zine was listed #1 in the country. By August of 1986, I was offered a job at Wizard Publications, which put out BMX Action and FREESTYLIN'. That job, which came directly because of my zine, changed the entire course of my life.
I only lasted five months working at the magazines, I just didn't click with those guys, and was permanently replaced by a 17-year-old biker/skater kid from Back East... this guy. Really. I got a job where I edited and shot photos for the American Freestyle Association newsletter for a year, then got a job at Vision Skateboards' video company, Unreel Productions. I was the peon of the staff that put out videos like this and this and this. By 1989, I was not only a freestyler riding every night for fun, I was staff cameraman at Unreel:
During the same time, pro BMX racer, jumping crazyman, and teenage entrepreneur, Chris "Mad Dog" Moeller, asked me to make the first video for his company, S&M Bikes. The video cost $250 total, including beer money. I lost my job while making it (long story), and wound up sleeping on the floor of the tiny, one bedroom apartment where Chris ran S&M out of the garage.
One morning, Chris came out and showed me a copy of a Henry Rollins book, Black Coffee Blues, full of poetry. I'd been writing poems, and not telling anybody about them, since I had a girlfriend who was a singer five years earlier. I thought I would write her a hit. Then she dumped me. Anyhow, I sat down at my typewriter, and put out a zine of my own poetry, called We're on the Same Mental Plane... and it's Crashing. The zine had about 100 poems, and was so thick, I had to bind it with duct tape. The first poem was called "Journey of the White Bear," an autobiographical poem about my life, in metaphor. That was the poem I wrote when my singer girlfriend dumped me. Chris started making fun of me, calling me The White Bear. That was 1992. The nickname stuck, and that's still my name in the BMX world (and it's on my blog title).
I put out two more zines of poetry in 1996 and 1997, while working as a furniture mover. In 1998, I did two or three issues of an action sports zine, called Session Sports, where I interviewed my neighbors, free skier Jason Moore, and skysurfer Troy Hartman. I wrote a great interview with Sasquatch. I also interviewed musician Bryan Gregory, founding member of The Cramps, who I worked with at a porn store. That may have been the last in depth interview anyone ever did with him. He died a couple of years later.
All in all, I've published about 40 zines, starting with the 11 issues of San Jose Stylin' in 1985-86. I did a zine about taxi driving in 2005 or 2006. I did a zine about Huntington Beach, where I worked as a taxi driver around the same time. That was my most popular zine ever, called The White Bear's Very, VERY Unofficial Guide to Huntington Beach. I put out about 150 or 200 copies of that one. Initially, I gave them to the Irish kids, college age people who came to HB every summer from Ireland to work and party. Eventually, people all over town heard about the zine, and would just walk up to my taxi and ask if they could get one. That was the only zine that totally paid for itself. I didn't charge for it, but I got a ton of taxi rides because of it, which more than paid for all the zines I made. There's a lesson there. Both of those zines were 48 pages, by the way.
I did a zine for my dad's 70th birthday, in 2007, writing down a bunch of his old jokes, and putting pictures of classic cars (he owned three classic T-Birds as a young man). It sounds lame, but he loved it.
I've done some one-off zine-books, writing on a single subject. One on a social theory of mine, I called The Warrior Sports, is my favorite, and I handed out about 50 copies at the 1998 X-Games in San Diego. I even did a zine of short stories, that an old skateboard friend just sent me a copy of, also from 1998.
Zines, quite literally, changed the course of my life, towards a much more creative, if often crazy and sometimes broke, path. Instead of being a BMX freestyler for 2 or 3 years, and then going back to college, the job at BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines changed the entire trajectory of my life. And that was entirely due to my first zine. All told, I wound up writing and/or getting photos published in 7 BMX magazines and a newsletter. I produced and/or edited 15 BMX, skateboard, and snowboard videos, and worked on another ten or so at Unreel Productions. That led to working on TV crews. I've worked on over 300 episodes of a dozen different TV shows. I also worked in the box office of the first five Cirque du Soleil tours that came to Orange County, California. The first, Saltimbanco, in 1993, was when Cirque consisted of one touring show. Now they have about 20 worldwide. Besides that first, I worked on Allegria, Quidam, Dralion, and Varekai. Cirque du Soleil is th ebest run company I ever worked for, the most creative, and nobody works as hard as circus people. It's become huge and a lot more corporate over the years, and isn't near as much fun to work at the entry level. But if I was forced to pick one company to work for the rest of my life, it would be Cirque du Soleil. But that time has passed. Now is the time to create my own "Cirque."
My latest zine is called Club White Bear, and is only available to members who pay $25 a year for a membership. The idea is loosely based on Club Homeboy, a thing my FREESTYLIN' magazine co-worker and roommate, Mark "Lew" Lewman started in 1986. It's geared toward old school BMXers, but is not limited to them. Club White Bear only has two members at the moment, so it doesn't matter much. I will do other zines on single subjects available to everyone as time roll on.
Other than the two zines my old friend just sent me, and the master of Club White Bear #1, I have no copies of any of my zines. I lost my whole collection of zines, and everything else I owned, including vintage BMX and skateboard video footage, my magazine collection, master tapes of videos I produced, and copies of about 250 of the 500+ poems Ive written, in 2008, when I moved to North Carolina in 2008. That was probably the darkest time of my adult life. I simply stopped writing poetry. North Carolina turned out to be ten years of living hell. I finally was able to escape it in August. I've been living homeless in Richmond ever since. I landed here totally randomly, but there's a LOT of cool stuff happening here. I've decided to stay for a while. Priority one is getting my life stabilized, start making a steady income, and get my act together. Then... then it's time to make some cool shit. Stay tuned.
Here's a few things I've learned that zines are good for:
Losing money
Getting minority ideas out to a small number of people
Meeting other zine publishers
Getting your name known in a sport, genre', scene, or subculture of some sort
Making friends with similar outlooks on things
Here's what zines are bad for:
Making money
Yes, I'm homeless, I look like hell, and I'm broke at the moment. What I lack in cash, I more than make up for in stories and insights into the crazy world we live in. My crazy path through all kinds of work with amazingly creative people started with my first zine. I wouldn't trade that for a Mercedes and a McMansion. You never know where taking the time to publish a zine will lead you. Enjoy the journey as much as you can.
Zines, by their very nature, are collector's items. Save them, cherish them, and don't wind up giving your own last copies away like I always manage to do.
The Richmond Zine Fest is starting right now, as I type this. And all the links to make this post worth checking out are not linked yet. So come back in a day or so and check it out again.
You can reach me by email at: stevenemig13@gmail.com . Or you can friend me on Facebook, the only Steve Emig in Richmond, or steveemig43 on Instagram. I don't have a working phone. Gotta go, gotta get to the Zine Fest.
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...
No comments:
Post a Comment