I edited this video in 1990, shortly after quitting my job as a video guy at Vision Skateboards. NSI video was a small surf/skate/snowboard video distributor, back in the days when there were several small distributors. Small operators like NSI would buy the various surf and skate videos coming out, then they would sell the VHS videos to surf shops, skateboard shops, snowboard shops, and mom and pop video stores around the U.S., and some other parts of the world. The Skater's Quarterly videos were mostly compilations of other company's videos, with a little bit of original footage, and some short interviews. This was years before 411 Video Magazine for skaters, or Props video magazine, for BMXers, came out. 411 debuted in 1993, and Props debuted in 1994.
I think this video came out in early November of 1990, in time to sell a ton of them during the holiday season. This is the first action sports video magazine video series the I know of, coming out about three years before 411 Video Magazine in skateboarding, and four years before Props Video Magazine in BMX. Gerard at NSI had already produced Skater's Quarterly #1, several months before I started to work for him. This video doesn't have the production quality, and it doesn't have the in depth interviews of 411 or Props. But it was also aimed more at just average skater kids around the country, not the hardcore skaters.
What it does have is a lot of good, solid, 1990 era skateboarding. We used chunks of other people's videos, mostly from NSA contests, as I'll describe below. Plus we used a bit of my own footage, of the wedding of pro skater John Lucero, and his wife Heathyr. Yes, I asked their permission to use it in this video. Heathyr was the women's clothing designer for Vision Street Wear, she created things like what you see the models in this video wearing, during the skateboard part. They're mostly decked out in VSW women's clothes, the black and white pieces are VSW stuff. So I worked with Heathyr on several fashion shoots at Vision, shooting video, and she asked me to shoot video of the wedding, when she married John Lucero. John was was just getting ready to start Black Label Skateboards then. It was the coolest wedding I have ever been to, and the Cadillac Tramps and the Vandals played at the reception. How many weddings have a slam pit on the dance floor. Not enough. So that's were that footage came from.
Now let's get into the skating. In 1990, vert still ruled, and street was still a little offshoot, just coming up, and not taken too seriously by the major skateboard companies yet, those being Powell-Peralta, Vision, and Santa Cruz. They all had street skaters on the team, but vert was the thing that sold big numbers of boards in 1990. But not for much longer. Skating went into a lull in the early 1990's, but not to the extent that BMX did. The 1980's was skateboarding's third wave of popularity, and the second for BMX racing, and the first wave for BMX freestyle. Each wave, the sports grew, and there was more of a base when the waved crashed, and they rebuilt from a higher level each time.
In the Mount Trashmore segment of this Skater's Quarterly #2, that little kid skating the vert ramp is Danny Way. For real. Danny was about 16 then, several years younger than the seasoned pros on the deck. Some of the older guys were really fucking with him, there's a shot where a guy drops in right behind Danny, and then throws him off when Danny goes for a McTwist, making Danny bail hard. Gotta pay your dues, and Danny Way did. I'd say Danny Way got the last laugh. He's the guy who invented the launch part of the mega ramp, and later jumped the Great Wall of China with one. The guy with the red T-shirt talking a lot in the Trashmore segment is Jason Jesse, who's funny, as ever.
In the Shut Up and Skate contest in Dallas, there's a run or two by Mike Crum, who has a yellow helmet and black and white spotted shorts. Mike was about 15 at the time. He and Chris Gentry were the two young guys on the Vision skateboard tour I managed that summer, shortly before making this video. I had to give him some props. I'm not sure is Chris is in the Dallas or Houston segments. At the end of the segment you see Jeff Phillips pulling a Phillips 66, a weird backwards invert trick he invented. Then, at the Shut Up and Skate at Skatepark of Houston, we see a whole bunch of pros going for it, including the insane wall ride from Hell attempts off the side of the vert ramp. Things are bigger in Texas, including the bails. You'll also see a naked Ho Ho plant, by Steve Schneer, I believe. It's kept marginally PG with the use of a sock.
In the Arizona NSA street contest, you see the era when the top vert skaters were also placing high in street contests, because the street course was basically a bunch of pieces of ramps. Christian Hosoi, Tony Hawk, and Steve Caballero all tear it up in this section, but Eric Dressen holds it up for the New School of emerging street skaters at that time. In the NSA Ohio vert contest we have Hawk, Hosoi, and Cab, but the standout in that segment is Tony Magnusson, doing ridiculously high airs. He has the red T-shirt with the "X" logo in white. Damn that guy could go high back then. In the Rhode Island contest, there's a pretty good fight in the background of one shot. See if you catch it first pass.
In the NSA Visalia (central California) contest, the announcer says, "This is our Masters Division, all these guys are over 27" (years old). That's funny to hear now, when Steve Alba is still schralping in pools at 60, and Chris Miller is still amazing at vert in his late 50's, along with many others. Chris Miller has the yellow helmet at that event, and the black and white striped shirt. Also mixed in this video is footage of the Dog Bowl from about 1980, a night session at the Nude Bowl in 1990, and some footage at Baldy Pipe. I think that's Dave Duncan leading that pack at Baldy, but I'm not sure. Then we see a bit of the San Francisco street contest in the drained pools at the city hall.
Then, at the end, there's a session on the halfpipe with the big faces painted on it. That's a Tracker trucks demo at the Action Sports Retailer trade show. That character on the ramp is an Andy Jenkins character, from his Wrench Pilot comics in Transworld Skateboarding. So I assume Andy J. and crew painted that ramp. This was three years before Andy became art director at Girl Skateboards. Cool. I shot this footage of the demo, which features Tony Hawk, with his hair about as long as it ever got, and Joe Johnson who has the super long pony tail, and several other skaters. I edited in a bunch of really technical stuff that Tony was doing, since that's what you didn't see in most other videos at the time. The very last trick in that segment is Bucky Lasek, an new pro on the scene at the time. That was the first time I ever heard of Bucky. He busts out with a backside 360 ollie, a trick Tony couldn't even do then, Tony freaked, when he saw Bucky do that, and that's why I turned the camera to Tony, who was sitting on the ramp pretty much next to me freaking out over Bucky's trick. When Tony Hawk freaks out while seeing you land a new trick, it's a pretty damn hard trick.
I've said several times, I've never actually met Tony Hawk. I've never actually been introduced, or talked to him. I have shot photos and video of him skating, worked at 3 or 4 contests he was at, shot video at his Fallbrook house of Ken Park and Joe Johnson, with Don Hoffman (when Tony was off doing demos) in 1989. I saw Tony's first 900 live, from the side of the ramp in 1999. I was standing about 20 feet form the halfpipe, by some weird quirk of fate. So I've been around places he was skating, but never actually talked to him. That's kind of a bummer, since I first saw him skate live in 1988, and we've all seen him grow into this household name since, doing all kinds of cool things along the way.
In any case, all that, plus quite a bit more, is packed into Skater's Quarterly #2. Watching it over, I was stoked, it's a shitload of great skating from that era, when vert was the thing, and as street was just beginning to really take off big time. My favorite shot of this whole video though is John and Heathyr, after the wedding, on the merry-go-round, and especially on the bumper cars. I love it when John just drives into the wall. Too funny. Heathyr and John went their separate ways many years ago, but that was, by far, the coolest wedding I've ever been to, an one of my coolest video jobs I ever had. John still owns Black Label Skateboards and does a lot of design work, and Heathyr runs Mantrap 1989.
Now, a look back to that era in action sports, as the 1980's ended and the 1990's began, led by a big recession. In 1990, BMX had been declared "dead" for a year, and skateboarding was heading that way. The new sport of snowboarding was just hitting mainstream people's radar, and mountain biking was where the bike industry had decided to focus its attention and its money. I don't know what waves exist in the surfing industry (no pun intended), but it was flowing along. It was an era where VHS videos were the thing, and Friday night trips to the local video store to get videos for the weekend were a popular thing. While major video store chains like Blockbuster existed, there were plenty of small, mom and pop run video stores. Working as a video store clerk was one of my many odd jobs, later in the 1990's. In addition, there were small bike, skateboard, and ski/snowboard shops in many places.
This is the RCA model of the S-VHS video camera I bought in 1989, forking out $1,100, on my credit cards, and making payments well into the 1990's. The higher quality, and relatively low cost of S-VHS, SVHS-C, and Hi8 video cameras made low budget video production available to everyday people. I was one of the first BMX freestylers to start producing my own videos, and the same thing was happening in skateboarding, snowboarding, and surfing.
At the same time, the prosumer video camera and equipment industry was in its early days. "Prosumer" equipment was somewhat better quality than the standard consumer VHS or 8mm video equipment, but was much cheaper than the broadcast quality equipment used by TV shows and local TV news stations. The late 1980's into the 1990's was the period that began to democratize video media, giving anyone willing to learn the basics, the chance to make videos and share them (on VHS tapes).
This democratization of the media began with the Apple Macintosh in 1984, and the rise of desktop publishing. That technology allowed anyone to create newsletters, zines, magazines, and even books. Prosumer video equipment did the same for video media. Then came the internet, and eventually enough bandwidth to share text, audio, and video worldwide, on the internet. Social media platforms later built on this. The overall positive effect of all this technology in giving voices to the voiceless cannot be understated. These technologies completely changed society. This is why so many people in certain (highly ignorant) groups are now trying to censor everyone left and right these days. The older power brokers of the world loved the days when they controlled ALL of the media. Those days are gone.
Into that world of low budget, niche videos, many opportunities came along. Gerard, a SoCal business guy from Hermosa Beach, with a knack for sales, started a video distribution company. He mainly sold surf videos in the early 1980's. He expanded to skateboarding, and then into snowboarding, later on. Yes, he's the guy who distributed by self-produced, 1990 BMX freestyle video, The Ultimate Weekend. NSI sold about 500 of my videos in the U.S., which was pretty damn good since I didn't have a name, a business brand, or history of making previous videos.
I can't remember how I met Gerard, I think I got to know him in early 1990, when Unreel Productions, the Vision Skateboards video company, was dissolved. By early March 1990, it was just me and some video equipment in an office at the Vision headquarters in Santa Ana. I took a lot of phone calls from people who had been doing business with Unreel in the years before. Unreel founder Don Hoffman worked freelance after that, project by project, as Vision went into a downward spiral in to the recession.
For nearly six months, I sat in a big office, day after day, and had nothing to do. Many people would love that, but it drove me nuts. I've always been motivated to do something. I quit at the end of June, then got hired to drive the dually and halfpipe trailer on a three week skateboard tour across the U.S.. As soon as the tour ended, I hopped a plane, on my own dime, and flew to Indianapolis, to shoot video of the 2-Hip King of Vert contest there. I also drove to Chicago for a couple days, and shot footage of Bob Kohl, Brian Dahl (injured at the contest), and a new vert rider coming up, named Jon Peacy. Then I drove my little rental Mazda from Chicago to Ohio, topping it out at 108 mph on the Ohio turnpike, in the rain. I met and hung out for a couple of days with Jon Stainbrook and his band The Stain, whose music I used for my video. Most of the music from Skater's Quarterly is by The Stain, as well. I also went to see my grandma near Akron, who was 85 at the time.
When I made it back to Huntington Beach, I had no job, no income, some savings, and about 12 credit cards, one of which I had put $1,000 on during the skate tour. Vision paid me that money back, but, being a 24-year-old idiot, I didn't pay off my credit card. I paid it down a little, then made monthly payments and lived off of the money for a while. Sometime around August or September of 1990, I think I met Gerard at NSI, and started doing some freelance work for him. I worked part time shooting the bits, and then editing Skater's Quarterly #2. In October, I spent a lot of time, and money, editing The Ultimate Weekend. It cost me $1,000 just to rent the edit system I used to edit the video for 40 hours. If I had any business sense back then, I would have just kept working at Vision, and used their equipment for free. But I just had to quit Vision out of boredom.
At the time, Gerard had a little office for NSI in Gardena, inland of the South Bay area of Los Angeles county. For you Old School freestylers, Gardena is a few miles from the Velodrome at Cal State Dominguez, where we had so many AFA contests in the 1980's. NSI was a small, operation, three people at most, but Gerard sold a lot of videos. He sold them in groups of two or three, or maybe 10 or 20 videos, on a big order. He sold the popular videos, like the top surf videos of the day, and all the Powell-Peralta Bones Brigade videos. He sold them to thousands of small surf shops, skate shops, and mom and pop video shops.
At the time, it cost about $3 to make a VHS copy of a 60 minute video, plus maybe a quarter each for boxes and labels, if you got enough printed up. He would buy them for $5 or $6 from the companies, I think, and wholesale them to the shops for $9 or $10. Something like that. Small distributors like NSI made around $2 to $3 a video, and he often shipped out 100 to 150 orders, usually 2 to 5 videos each, every day during the holiday season. It was a lot of work packing and shipping, but he worked the phones hard, and did pretty well, with minimal overhead. I helped with a lot of that packing and shipping during the 1990 Christmas season. He also had some other streams of income, I think he had a rental house or two. The guy worked hard, sold a ton of videos, a few at a time, and small surf, skate, and snowboard companies loved him, because he sold a huge percentage of their videos to his vast network of little shops.
Now we finally get to the idea behind Skater's Quarterly. This was a brilliant idea for that time. If you watch this video, most of it is footage from NSA skate contests. You'll see the big names, Tony Hawk, Christian Hosoi, Steve Caballero, Chris Miller, Eric Dressen, mostly in NSA contest footage. Since he sold so many videos, he'd call up the people he knew at the NSA (he sold their videos), and other companies, and say, "Hey, it's Gerard here. I'm gonna make a skateboard video magazine, do you mind if I use some of the footage from your latest video? I'll be promoting your video, and it'll help me sell some more of your videos." Something like that. Every time, they'd say, "Uh... sure... go ahead."
That's where I came in. He had me edit video parts from other people's videos, a whole bunch of them, into the Skater's Quarterly. Then we'd shoot the intros, most right in the office (he'd moved back into his garage by this point). For SQ #2, we spent the weekend at the Action Sports Retailer trade show shooting video (the skate session at the end, with the Andy Jenkins character painted on the ramp), plus we went up to the Bones Brigade 7: Propaganda video premiere, in Santa Barbara. Total costs were my hourly rate to shoot and edit, a hotel room for two nights at the trade show, and some video tape. He had an S-VHS edit system, and the line on cheap labels and boxes. For maybe $600 total production costs, and $3 per VHS copy, NSI had Skater's Quarterly Video Magazine #2.
Here's the smart part. When he called up all those shops, he'd say, "Hey, it's NSI video, we have three new surf videos out this month, and two skateboard videos. They'd order 3 or 4 of the videos, and he made About $3 each. Then he'd say, "I also have this skateboard video magazine, Skater's Quarterly, it's an hour of great skateboarding, with all the top names." then they'd order two or three of the Skater's Quarterly videos. But since he produced the video, he made about $6 per copy, not $3. So a $12 profit jumped up to $12 plus $18 (3 SQ videos X $6), or $30 profit per sale. That extra $6 to $18 per order adds up when you ship out 50 to 80 orders on a good day, and 150 orders per day over the holidays. I made $9 or $10 an hour for my very limited editing skills. That was my freelance job for the second half of 1990 and into 1991.
I pretty much forgot about these videos. I haven't seen any of them since I edited them, in late 1990 and early 1991. I was just telling a friend about these videos a couple of days ago. Then I looked up some skate video, and Skater's Quarterly popped up on the side on YouTube. SQ #2 is the only one of the three NSI videos I edited on YouTube, but it was cool to watch it over again, 33 years later. The footage is a lot better skating than I remember. I also edited Skater's Quarterly #3, and Snowboarder's Quarterly #1, where we covered the premiere of Snowboarder's in Exile, my favorite snowboard video of the 90's.
So that's the story behind one of the other little video projects I did in the early 90's, and three of the 16 bike, skate, and snowboard videos I produced or edited, between 1987 and 2001.
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