First of all, it was 1988. Keep that in mind. The band Metal MC was supposed to be part Anthrax and part Beastie Boys. It was neither. On one hand, blending hard rock and rap in one band did get huge about a decade later, with Limp Bizkit, Kid Rock, and others. So you can't blame the guys for trying. Maybe they were just the wrong guys, maybe they were too early on that idea. But Metal MC didn't take off. But they did give us SoCal BMX freestylers an excuse for a really fun jam, one summer afternoon in 1988.
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The area on the bike path, underneath the Huntington Beach Pier, looked like this when I first rode up in the early spring of 1987. That's French freestyle skater Pierre Andre' in the video, one of the H.B. Pier locals in those days. That is the best video showing the area we rode and skated every Saturday and Sunday, in the late 1980's and into the 1990's. There's an open restaurant area in this spot now, where there used to be an arcade, a bike rental place, and the Green Burrito Mexican restaurant on the south end of the building. The bike path is still there, but the whole are looks much different now. Here's a quick history of the H.B. Pier, from 1902 to 1985. The end of the pier got trashed in another storm in early 1988, and was rebuilt and reopened in 1991, I believe.
Most of what people now know as "Main Street" in Huntington Beach today, didn't exist in the 1980's and 1990's. The Main Street I was introduced to was a bunch of two story brick buildings, and there were a few empty shops. There was a liquor store one block inland, on the corner, and very few people, like a handful, walking around at night. The legendary Golden Bear nightclub, where Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and hundreds of other great musicians played, from the 1930's to the early 1980's, had closed down in 1983.
There were about 5 bars in Downtown H.B. then. Cagney's was behind Jack's Surf Shop on PCH. Heading inland there was Perq's, Ma(fuckin')zotti's, The Long Board, and Skeefer's. Maybe one or two more. Main Street was dingy, and most people in the city didn't come down there often at night, they went to the Newport Pier area bars, or other spots to party. The Electric Chair record shop was just inland of where the fountain now is, a small storefront, with milk crates of punk albums and 7 inches on folding tables. The P.O. Curb, now replaced by the low wall protruding from Rockin' Fig Surf Shop (still in the same location) was getting skated every night.
Huntington Beach was a weird, occasionally wild, little surf town then. There were oil pumps all over downtown then, even right on PCH (Pacific Coast Highway). As a Midwest kid who spent high school in Boise, Idaho, I'd never seen a town like Huntington Beach, except maybe Venice Beach, but that had a whole different vibe. The H.B. scene of the 1980's was something much different than it is today. There were surfers, skaters, BMXers, wandering punkers and a few skinheads, and a bunch of weird characters. Then there was the crowds that came to the beach on the weekends. That was the Huntington Beach I moved into in early 1987, to work for the American Freestyle Association as the newsletter editor/photographer, and all around assistant to Bob Morales.
There were always a few BMXers and a few freestyle skaters, that hung out at the Huntington Beach Pier on the weekends, in the late 1980's and into the 1990's. There were a bunch of reasons for this, besides the hot women in bikinis. The long wide area of pavement next to the building, on the south side of the pier, was a good place to both ride skateboards and BMX freestyle bikes. During the week, there really weren't many people riding or walking up and down the bike path. Under the pier itself it was concrete, which was sandy and slippery, so the pavement worked better for us.
The main skaters were English freestyle skating champ Don Brown and French freestyle skating champ Pierre Andre' (Senizergues), and often Swedish freestyle skating champ Hans Lingren, along with local freestyle skater Jeremy Ramey. Why were three of the top European freestyle skaters in Huntington Beach? They rode for either Vision or Sims Skateboards (then owned by Vision), located in nearby Costa Mesa. Although he rode for Powell-Peralta, Per Welinder rolled by fairly often as well. At the time, all these freestyle skaters were the low paid demo skaters for the Big Three skate companies, while the vert skaters, like Tony Hawk, Christian Hosoi, and Steve Caballero, were making the big money. In the 1990's, the freestyle skaters took over the skate industry, and were sometimes jokingly referred to as the "Skate Illuminati." In about 1989, another top freestyle skater came up, Darryl Grogan, and he came down the pier now and then, as well.
On the BMX freestyle side, the most local rider was Mike Sarrail, a tall guy from the San Gabriel Valley, who was really good at Miami hop hops. He drove over an hour every weekend to session. There was a crew of good amateur riders in the Lakewood area who came by often to bust out their flatland skills. In no particular order they were Nathan Shimizu, Ron Camero, Jeff Cotter, Ron McCoy, Dan Hubbard, and Derek Oriee. Sometimes they brought Tim Cotter, Jeff's little brother, who also rode. Most of those guys were featured in Vision's Freestylin' Fanatics video. The spandex brothers, Chuck and Joe Johnson, showed up once in a while. It wasn't unusual to see Martin Aparijo or Woody Itson show up, the original flatland guys. From the desert, Randy Lawrence moved to H.B. for a while and found work as a bike mechanic, and he joined the locals around 1988-89. Those were the guys there most often in that era. Because the pier was a well known scene, pretty much anybody could just randomly show up and ride or skate. Ed Templeton and Mark Gonzales showed up on a regular basis, along with a whole crew of H. B.'s amateur skaters.
On any given Saturday or Sunday, we'd start showing up around 11:00 am or so, and just start riding or skating. The skaters would get a crowd, and skate for 15-20 minutes, until the police showed up and said the crowd was blocking the bike path. Then they'd stop skating, the crowd of beach going spectators would wander off, and then us BMXers would take over. A crowd would form, usually 100 or so people, maybe 200. At times we'd get 500 or more people watching. We'd take turns busting out our latest and best flatland, for 15-20 minutes. Then the police would roll up, say the crowd was blocking the bike path (which we actually told them not to do), and we'd stop. The crowd would wander off, and then the skaters would get going again. That was our weekend. Week after week, year after year. We'd head off to grab some food or take a leak when needed. We'd talk to girls, or try to. Mostly we just rode and skated in front of crowds from 11:00am or noon until about 7 or 8 pm. That's our weekends played out, unless there was a contest somewhere. I once figured out that I rode in front of at least 140,000 people, 100 or 200 at a time, from 1987 to about 1992, on all those weekends at the pier, from about 1987 to 1992. The same was true of all the other riders and skaters.
Because so many, literally thousands, of random people watched us ride and skate every weekend, we'd often meet people who who said they wanted to put us in a video, a movie, at TV show, or something like that. BMX freestyle was a new thing in the late 1980's, even most Californians hadn't seen it live and in person. Most of the people who wanted to put us in a video or TV show were completely full of shit. But not all of them. The guy behind the Metal MC video wandered up and started talking to Mike one afternoon. Mike explained freestyle, and that there were a lot more riders, jumpers and vert riders, too.
The talk turned into a real project, and the guy rented the empty lot on PCH and Main (where Huntington Surf & Sport stands now), where we often had local AFA contests. Mike told him to contact GT, to rent the Stonehenge, their four sided jump ramp, and we called around to tell riders to show up for the jam. Boom, a fun BMX jam happened, and the guy's crew shot a bunch of footage to make the Metal MC video. It was an all afternoon jam.
In the video above, you see mostly Brian Blyther (in black) jumping, East Coast rider Dennis Langlois (grey jersey), and San Diego thrasher Brand Blanchard landing a 540 on the deck. Also at the jam were NorCal legends Dave Vanderspek and Maurice Meyer, San Diego street rider Eddie Roman, several of the Lakewood crew, pro racer/jumper Rich Bartlett, Craig Grasso, Randy Lawrence, George Smoot, Scott Robinson, and about 30 more riders, myself included. We had this kind of jam a couple of times. This one, and another for a guy who made mass marketed video that sold in places like Kmart. At the time, all day BMX jam sessions with some top riders and no contest were a rare thing, so this and the other Stonehenge ram jam were two really fun events Huntington Beach during the late 80's.
This blog post was inspired by a great photo of Brian Blyther doing an X-up, that Steve Giberson, aka Guy B, shared on Facebook recently.
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