Chris Moeller in "Leg Muscles": The Chain Wallet

The S&M Bikes 30 year book, Behind the Shield, is coming out soon.  So I figured it's a good time to tell a few of my stories from the days of being part of the S&M posses and longtime roommate to Chris Moeller.

In 1990, as Vision Skateboards was collapsing, and Unreel Productions, their video company, where I worked, was shut down.  Since I was the cheapest guy on staff and knew how to work most of the equipment, they kept me around and moved me to the Vision main headquarters building in Santa Ana, California.  Oddly, that's a block from where the S&M (and Fit) Bikes headquarters is now.

Anyhow, tired of being a peon on all the kinda goofy Vision videos, with no say in how they were made, I decided to self-produce my own BMX freestyle video.  I wanted to show the actual riding we did day after day, no uniforms, lots of street, and no riding on minature golf courses.  I shot footage all year long, put all my money into it, borrowed a grand late from Mike Sarrail to finish it (which I did pay back, just for the record), and The Ultimate Weekend came out in October of 1987.  As one of the first rider made videos, it was good for its day.  I spent $5,000 making it, of my own money, and made maybe $2,500 back over the next six or eight months.  I went into the project thinking I'd make like $20,000 or more back.  Yeah...sure...  I was still super shy, and a horrible salesman, and I let a surf video distributor do most of the selling.

I didn't pay off all my credit cards, and soon was working at a video duplicator in North Hollywood for $8 an hour and had $7,000 in or so in debt.  In the days before crippling student debt was a normal thing for people, that seemed like a lot to me.  I worked all the time, rode solo in the San Fenrnado Valley, and was depressed by the "insurmountable" amount of debt I had.

In 1991, while working that duplicating job, Chris Moeller found me somehow, and called up saying he wanted to make a video for S&M Bikes.  The entire company then was housed in the single car garage, of a one bedroom apartment, on Alabama street in Huntington Beach, California.  The BMX industry had "died" a year and a half earlier, and times were tight in the 20 inch world.  I was initially hoping Chris wanted to spend $2,000 or so to make the video.  I could have some fun, and pocket a good check.  When I asked him what budget he had in mind, he said, "like maybe $200."  After working at Unreel, where the budget wasn't ever a factor, $200 seemed like nothing.  But it sounded like fun, and I started going down on the weekends to H.B., and shooting video of Chris and the crew.

It's hard to imagine now, but dirt jumping wasn't even a sport then, it was something we all did to some extent, and Chris and a handful of lunatics, did to an insane level for the time period.  They'd have a jump contest at BMX nationals every once in a while, with one, single double jump, and that was it.  But Chris, Dave Clymer, John Paul Rogers, the P.O.W. House guys, and a few others were pro racers who spent a ton of time jumping for fun, and were pushing the progression at the time.  Most of the top jumpers were then S&M riders.  Chris couldn't pay them, but the bikes were stronger, and no other companies had a budget, or even the idea, to steal riders from S&M then.  Basically, S&M Bikes WAS dirt jumping in the minds of most BMX racers and freestylers in 1991.

Chris Moeller, being the guy he was, wanted to fuck with everyone when we made the video.  First was the whole thing of using the bad acting from porn videos in it.  Then, he started the video with flatlander Perry Mervar's section.  He wanted hardcore jumpers everywhere to get the video, pop it into the VCR all excited, and go, "Flatland?  What the fuck is this shit?"  In addition, dorking around and practical jokes have always been a part of BMX, and the whole hardcore punk mentality we had back then.  Basically, we we being jackasses a few years before the Big Brother videos came out, which turned into the Jackass TV show, and ultimately, the Jackass movies.  That first S&M Bikes video, Feel My Leg Muscles, I'm a Racer,  is basically a prequel to the Jackass stuff years later.

I crashed out on the floor of Moeller's apartment one weekend night, and the next morning he said, that to start his section, he wanted to start with skating.  Again, he wanted to do that just to fuck with people.  He said he had this funny idea to make fun of old school skaters, who'd taken to wearing biker-type chain wallets then.

So he grabbed his board, I grabbed the camera, and we rode our bikes down to a little park, Manning Park, on the corner of Delaware and Detroit.  There Chris got the big car tow chain he came up with somewhere, stuffed one end into his front pocket, and the other end into his back pocket, and started skating round the basketball court with it dragging behind.  At first, I thought it was just dumb.  We did the little intro part, where he talks about wearing the beanie ("stocking cap" in my world), another skater trend then, and the old car thing, then leads into the chain wallet.  I didn't even know Chris could skate at all then.  I knew him from a few years back, and had seen him around from time to time, but didn't really know much about him, other than he was a pro racer, about the craziest jumper of the day, and had somehow started a bike company at 16-years-old.

This was one of the first video pieces we shot for the video.  I had my big, full size, S-VHS camera, and shot footage as Chris started skating around, doing little tricks, with the massive chain dragging behind.  The longer it went on, the funnier I thought it was.  That, goofy, dorkin' around, sarcastic sense of humor that morning set the tone for all the video shoots we did for Leg Muscles.  Things got weirder and crazier from there, the opposite of my video a year earlier, where I was trying to be professional.  Even more funny, the kid playing basketball just kept playing, pretty much ignoring us, which made the final video look funnier.  And that's why Chris Moeller started his first real video segment skateboarding.

More weird tales from the S&M Bikes world of the early 1990's coming soon...

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