The Ultimate Weekend, my first self-produced BMX video. In 1990, after working for 2 1/2 years at Unreel Productions, the Vision Skateboards video company, I wanted to make a BMX freestyle video that showed "real riding." Only a handful of BMX freestyle videos had come out, up until that point. But the wave of early prosumer video equipment made producing my own BMX video possible. For the first time, average people could produce their own videos. Armed with my $1,100 S-VHS video camera, I spent about 8 months shooting footage on weekends, and $5,000 of my own money to produce The Ultimate Weekend. At the time, it was a pretty good rider-made video, the best edited of the bunch at the time. In the process, I hada punk band called The Stain, from Ohio, produce and record two "punk songs" of lyrics I had written. Thanks to Jon Stainbrook, Mark Mickel, and Jeff Kollman, John from Government Issue, and friends, for humoring me, and making these highly questionable songs happen.
"Cottage Cheese Disease" - 10:39 (in video above)- In 1988, 1989 and beyond, I wrote lyrics to a bunch of "punk songs." My friend Mike, a Huntington Beach Pier local, Mike, started taking me to punk rock shows, and properly introducing me to punk music. I was already writing poems at the time, after dating a woman who was the lead singer in a local band. I didn't tell anyone about the poetry slowly filling notebooks in my closet.
The punk songs were just other ideas that I'd get, and write down, funny, sarcastic little ideas. I never really wanted to start a band, I just liked making up fucked up, funny songs. At one point, I started writing a series of short stories that included a fictional punk band called U.I., Unpardonably Ignorant, a line from the book Think and Grow Rich. In those stories, the characters would reference the band, and my songs were the band's songs. But those stories never got finished.
"Cottage Cheese Disease" was what a former roommate of mine called women's cellulite. We were riding at the the H.B. Pier one weekend, and some large woman walked by in a smaller than necessary swimsuit, and I made a joke "Whoa, she got the cottage cheese disease." Over the next hour or so it turned into a song. I thought of it as a song, not a rap. But when The Stain took it, they turned it into a rap. Now, 35 years later, I'm fat from my years working as a taxi driver, and have my own cottage cheese disease. Karma got the last laugh.
"Mom's Imagination" - 44:07 (in the video above)- For this song, I was thinking back to high school in Boise, when I was just getting into freestyle. My mom had a pretty good imagination when it came to what I was up to. I was a shy dork getting shot down by pretty much every girl I talked to at parties, yet my mom always seemed to think that when I came home on the weekends, I'd been to a full blown drunken orgy or something. My best friend in high school, Darrin, and I used to joke about this. One day I laughed, "Man, I wish my life was half as great as my mom's imagination." He laughed, "Yeah, no shit." The line stuck in my head, and I turned it into these song lyrics. The Stain, again, turned it into an actual song. What I like about this song is that "Mom's Imagination" actually sounds like a song you might here in a show by a young punk band.
"California Bitch" lyrics
Refrain
She's a... California bitch
in her bleach blond hair
California bitch
but I don't care
California bitch
in her Cabriolet
California bitch... No way!
Daddy pays the rent
She has a good time
Party with her friends
Maybe do a few lines
Find a new guy
'cause she's got an itch
She's a California...
She's a California... BITCH!
Refrain
There was another verse or two, I can't remember them now. "California Bitch" was written about the hot, stuck-up, blond girls that we'd try to talk to at the beach, and who would either ignore us, or make fun of us. A lot of them drove convertible Volkswagen Cabriolets then, that was the trendy, stuck-up, blond, rich girl car then. Being a BMX freestyler was definitely not cool in the 1980's, and most of the hot girls walking by would totally blow us off. So "California Bitch" was my "Fuck you bitch" song to all of the hot girls who waned nothing to do with me.
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