This post is for all the freaks, geeks, dorks, and weirdos. Not the ones who check Tik Tok to find the latest way to dress "edgy." This is for the truly weird. Many weirdos look pretty normal from the outside, but have a lot of weird, often oddly wonderful, shit going on in their heads. If this meme made you smile, you're probably one of them. The memes are better, funnier, more sarcastic, and more fucked up on Pinterest. They just are. Welcome to another blog post about why I love Pinterest and hate that other app... what's it called? Oh yeah, Instagram. This meme above is one of the 711 memes on my NSFW Pinterest board.
Simply put, Pinterest is a platform where people collect photos and videos, then organize and curate those photos into different themes on "boards." Pinterest is the "bucket" for your Bucket List. It's the digital "board" for your dream board. It's where you can collect 748 sexy and sultry photos of famous women, put it on a board called Hot, and not look like a complete perv. A partial perv, maybe, but not a complete perv. Pinterest is where you can go for Art Inspiration, or to browse through 2,066 Street Art photos, looking for ideas. Or just because.
Pinterest is a search engine all its own, designed to find and share great images of all kinds, pulled from all over the web, even things like Hovercraft and Flying Cars. Don't worry, you don't get dragged digitally into Emo fashion and vegan cupcake recipes when you sign into Pinterest. Sure, you can pop open a White Claw (Careful! Don't chip a nail), and look up those things if you want to. But if you're reading this post, I'm pretty sure you don't want to. You can look up whatever you want on Pinterest. OK, not hardcore porn, but just about anything else you can take a photo of. Like I said, Pinterest is its own visual search engine.
This classic photo of Dino Deluca blasting a gigantic one hander one footer is just one of the 1,298 pins I have on my Freestyle BMX Tales board That's just the Old School BMX photos. I have another board for Mid School and New School BMX photos. Action Sports? I have some other boards, too.
JFA/Social Distortion flyer from my Punk Rock Flyers board.
What about the punk rock? That's what I said this post was about. Here ya go. Here's my board with 930 Punk Rock Flyers, including that one above. Here's my Punk Rock that I Like board. Just for some music roots, I have a Johnny Cash board, as well. Keeping with the sarcastic, punk rock vibe, here are some more boards.
Josh White with a stretched one footed turndown at Edison Trails, 1990. From the In Front of My Lens board.
You get the idea. Each of these links goes to a Pinterest board with dozens, or hundreds, of photos, and a few videos, to check out. Pinterest is great to find inspiration, to find new ideas, and mostly to waste a shitload of time if you have a real job. It's also a good way to collect something (digital photos and videos) that doesn't clutter up the house.
I'm an middle aged Generation X loser at this point. We grew up watching 1960's and 1970's re-runs on TV, and hearing our parents complain about the conformity in factory and office jobs. We had no cell phones, no video games, and no internet porn. We had to dig through boxes in our friend's basement to find porn, actual Playboy and Penthouse magazines his dad had stashed away. We played OUTSIDE as kids, and drank from somebody's garden hose when thirsty.
In the 1970's, "live streaming" meant actually wandering along a creek, looking for frogs and crawdads. Into our parents' world of white collar and blue collar jobs came two men. Evel Kneivel (157 pins), and Bruce Lee (715 pins). If we were lucky, our parents took us to see 20th Century Stunt Shows when we were kids. The prospect of either a boring working future, or a post-apocalyptic future, inspired many of us to want to be stuntmen or stuntwomen. That's where BMX and skateboarding came in, and other action sports later on. We could learn tricks on bikes and boards, and become neighborhood stunt kids.
Bruce Lee teaching and sparring. From my Bruce Lee board.
While most people have been scrolling through posers on Instagram, I've been collecting photos from all over the interwebs on subjects that interest me. I have over 100 Pinterest boards. I have a Because Pizza board, a board of some of my Grey Trash Alien drawings, a Legos are still cool board, a Scooby-Doo board, a board of Dave Vanderspek and The Curb Dogs, a 43 board, and a Josh Bender board. Of course, I have a White Bears (that aren't me) board. So when you need to waste some time at work, or are looking for things to make out of your old skateboard parts or old bike parts, my Pinterest page is the place to go. Now you know. Waste time. Find inspiration. Laugh at memes. Get cool ideas for shit to my your life more interesting. Enjoy.
This blog is rolling up on the 1,000 blog post milestone- this is post #995
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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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Here's the Agent Orange music video for "World Gone Bad," shot in the legendary Combi Pool at Pipeline Skatepark, in Upland California. This video was directed by Don Hoffman, the founder of Unreel Productions, Vision Skateboard's video company. This music video was a segment at the end of Vision's first skate video,Skatevisions, which came out in 1985, I think. The entire soundtrack of the video was by Agent Orange. Powell-Peralta's Bones Brigade videos may have been more popular at the time, Vision's videos had way better music.
Many of you reading this have heard my basic story of stumbling into the BMX industry. But here's the short version for any of you who haven't. I got into BMX riding, and then racing, while living in a trailer park outside Boise, Idaho, in 1982. I was heading into my junior year of high school. By the end of that year, us trailer park kids found the Fort Boise BMX track, and began to race. I raced until mid 1984, but got more into the emerging sport of BMX freestyle in 1983, and joined the only Boise area trick team, with Jay Bickel and Wayne Moore in the spring of 1984. By late 1984, about the time FREESTYLIN'magazine put out its first issue, BMX freestyle had become my life.
In the summer of 1985, my family moved to San Jose, California, where my dad got a new job. I worked my summer job in Boise, then drove to San Jose to live with my family. I found a job at a local Pizza Hut, and rode every afternoon, since I wasn't going to college. I knew there was a group of hardcore freestylers in the Bay Area, but I didn't know how to find them. I didn't get the first two issues of FREESTYLIN' in Idaho, and the first one showed the Golden Gate Park scene.
So I started a freestyle zine, and put it out in some local bike shops, to find other freestylers. That worked, and by October 1985, I made it to the monthly Beach Park Ramp Jam, put on by Skyway rider Robert Peterson. I met the Skyway team and the main Curb Dogs, and a bunch of really good amateurs. I rode alone all week, then went up to ride with those guys every weekend that I could make it up to The City. I published 11 issues of my zine, San Jose Stylin', which somehow landed me a job at Wizard Publications, home to BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines, in the summer of 1986. In a year, I went from a freestyler in Idaho who only knew two other BMX freestylers, to part of the BMX industry. So I became a fanboy and industry insider at the same time.
Me on my Raleigh freestyle bike, my second "factory" sponsor, with a Shingle shuffle under the Huntington Beach Pier, in 1987. Raleigh was basically a flow sponsorship, but I got free bikes for a year, and a week in a motel at the Long Beach trade show, where everybody's riders did group demos. The H.B. Pier was a well known session spot, particularly on the weekends, with a few local BMX freestylers, and several top freestyle skateboarders, and dozens of other BMXers and skaters that came by once in a while.
But I was still really uptight and dorky, and had lots of issues, coming from a family that was a bit more screwed up than most. My moodiness and dorkiness got me laid off from the magazines, after a few months. We all got along fairly well, but I just wasn't the right fit for that crew. I got hired by Bob Morales, owner of the American Freestyle Association (AFA), to edit their newsletter, and do a million other odd jobs at the AFA. I moved from Hermosa Beach down to Huntington Beach, and worked there all through 1987. In early summer, I got the chance to produce a series of six videos for the AFA. Vision Street Wear was a major sponsor of the AFA, and they sent a cameraman from their video company, Unreel Productions, to every AFA contest, to shoot footage. The deal was that both Vision/Unreel, and the AFA, could use the footage for any projects they wanted to do.
They shot footage on a broadcast quality Sony Betacam video camera that cost $50,000. They also had a full blown, broadcast quality edit bay at Unreel. In those days, when shooting on video tape, that edit bay cost $500,000 to build. Today, a high end Mac or PC laptop now could do everything that room did, and a lot more, for about $3,500. But back then, shooting and editing quality video was really expensive. To edit the AFA videos, I went to Unreel, and they gave me VHS copies of the footage for each contest. I would log, or watch all the raw footage at home, making notes of the clips I liked. Then I'd go back to Unreel with my notes, and Dave the editor and I would work in that crazy cool edit bay. I'd tell him which shots to use, and he did the actual editing and effects, and walked me through the whole process. They didn't charge the AFA to edit, so we could sell a few dozen of each videos, and actually make a bit of money.
That year, I made a whole bunch of trips to Unreel, over in Costa Mesa, about ten miles from where I lived in Huntington Beach. I got to know everyone at Unreel, and when they needed a new guy for an entry level job, they gave me a call. That's how I wound up working at Unreel Productions. At the time, Vision Skateboards was one of the Big 5 companies in the skateboard industry, the other four included board manufacturers Powell-Peralta and Santa Cruz, and the two main magazines, Transworld and Thrasher. Skateboarding was still rising in the 1980's boom, the third, and largest wave of skateboarding up to that time.
Vision also owned Sims and Schmitt Stix skateboards, Sims Snowboards, and Vision Street Wear clothes. This whole Vision empire was spread out in several buildings in Costa Mesa, California. Unreel was the coolest, a two story office unit on the end of the building, the edge of the mesa, with an ocean view from the second floor. When Brad Dorfman, the owner of Vision, had someone he wanted to impress, he brought them over and showed them Unreel.
My nickname at Unreel Productions was "The Dub Guy," because I was the guy in the little room upstairs, where everyone went when they needed a copy of some Vision video for one reason or another. My little room, about 6 foot by 8 foot, had one video machine for every format we used, except the big one, the 1 inch tape reel to reel machine. I had a cable tied to that machine, through the ceiling, to my room. I also had three pro caliber VHS duplication machines, so I could make copies of whatever format someone needed. I made videos for the Unreel producers, I dubbed VHS copies of all the raw footage that anyone shot. That was cool, because I learned where all the pools and skate spots were, so I could go hit them on my bike later. I also made copies of videos for the promotions department, the art department, and anything else people in Vision needed.
Tape librarian. That was a big part of my job. Not the coolest sounding job. Across the hallway from my room was the tape library, which was a small storeroom with shelves on every wall. When I started there were well over 1,000 individual tapes, most of them the 20 minute Betacam tapes used in the camera. Those came in boxes of ten tapes. In most cases, the outer boxes would have something like "Tampa" written on them. Our producers were really lazy at labeling their tapes. So I had to go through every single tape, and figure out, "OK, this is Tampa Am contest," then I'd find out who was the cameraman for that contest, and ask them, "OK, is this 1985? 1986? 1987? What month was the contest?" Then I hand wrote the little card, and a label sticker, for every single tape. I spent months doing that, watching part of almost every tape, and fast forwarding through to note any key shots, like an interview or where the pros runs were. That's what I did when not doing other work. I usually didn't leave my tiny room for hours, just copying 3 copies of this, 20 copies of that, for different people in the Vision companies. By the time Unreel closed down, we had about 2,400 tapes in the tape library, every single tape and case hand labeled by me.
In a group of companies that grossed somewhere around $50 million that year, the 1987-88 Vision empire, there were all kinds of video projects going on, plus the occasional outside project. With Vision making so much money, Unreel didn't really have to make money as a separate business. We were always being called on to do some project for Vision or one of the other companies, from skate videos to fashion videos, or videos to show at trade shows for Vision Street Wear. But the main thing we did was a series of home videos, like Psycho Skate, Freestylin' Fanatics, Sims Snowshredders, and Barge at Will. Unreel also produced the first nationally syndicated action sports TV series, called Sports on the Edge, in 1989. Six years before the X-Games, we had a series of six TV shows that played on TV stations across the U.S., including Vision's Skate Escape event. That series featured skateboarding, snowboarding, BMX racing, BMX freestyle, body boarding. I had zero creative input on any of those TV shows or videos, I was basically a glorified production assistant. But now, 24 years later, it's pretty cool that my name is in the credits for Red Hot Skate Rock, the video we did with the Red Hot Chili Peppers, when they played at the big Skate Escape event. Who knew they'd still be kicking ass in 2023.
One really cool side aspect of working at Unreel was that I got introduced to a whole bunch of pretty cool, and some lame, music. When you make action sports videos, you always need background music, and the Vision companies were a collection of dozens of really creative people, many into the local punk and rock scenes. Unreel also had a woman who came in occasionally, who was a 20-something knockout brunette, when I first started going to Unreel. I think she was a hardcore groupie in Hollywood's Sunset Strip music scene, something like that. She would sit on the floor, in the downstairs waiting room, before they had furniture. She just had a phone, and she called all the musicians she knew, and had them send demo tapes and other copies of their music to Unreel. In addition, the producers were always looking for new bands. Dave and I dubbed all the good music that came in over to digital PCM music, recording the digital info on video tapes. Plus I made copies of the finished videos a lot, so I was introduced to a lot of cool music in the 2 1/2 years I worked at Unreel.
When I came from Idaho to California, I listened to top 40 and MTV music (MTV used to actually play music, kids), groups like Bruce Springsteen, Night Ranger, Queen, ZZ Top, and music like that. My cassette collection brought me a lot of grief when I started working at the magazines. Gork was a hardcore metalhead, and Andy and Lew were into punk and industrial music. I had just never been properly introduced to punk rock, except for a guy in high school who told me about the Dead Kennedys. While working at Unreel, the hardcore H.B. local freestyler, Mike Sarrail, started introducing me to alternative and punk music, then taking me to shows to see bands like Jane's Addiction, Social Distortion, Human Drama, The Dickies, and a whole bunch more. Mike really got me into punk, but I also found quite a few bands from working at Unreel, and some on KROQ radio, as well. So here are several of the bands I learned about while working at Unreel Productions, from 1987 to 1990.
JFA (Jodie Foster's Army)- We Know You Suck (full album) Some skater had shot home video of a JFA show, and it was in the Unreel tape library. We never used it in a video, but I checked it out when I found the tape.
Stacey Q-"Insecurity"- Someone at Unreel knew Stacey Q's producer, John St. James. Unreel was working on the original music video for her song "Insecurity," when I started there. I heard that song, over and over and over, for the first couple of weeks, coming out of the edit bay, as they edited it. At the time, 7-Up had just put out this Cherry 7-Up commercial. They spent something like a million dollars to shoot a video that looked like black and white film, but have just the pink show up.
Unreel had a component betacam edit bay, not composite, which meant behind the machines there were three cables for everything, instead of one, which separated the three main colors of video. Dave Alvarez, our editor, figured a way to do the same effect as the 7-Up commercial, just by patching cables a certain way. So the fairly low budget Stacey Q "Insecurity" video, the original version, had the same look as the million dollar plus 7-Up commercial. But for some reason, the record company had another video produced for the song later on. Stacey Q was completely unknown, a wannabe pop star at the time. She came by Unreel a few times. She later had success with the song "Two of Hearts."The song made it to #3 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Definitely not my taste in music, but this was the first new music I heard when I started at Unreel.
The Descendents- "Coolidge"- For context, snowboarding was really new in 1987-88, and still largely unknown to a lot of the public, when I started at Unreel. At the time, 95% of ski resorts banned snowboarding on their mountains. But Tom Sims, who started Sims skateboards and Sims snowboards, is the west coast inventor of snowboarding. Unreel was working on the second Sims Snowboards video, Snowshredders, when I started. There was a version mostly edited, with pink lawn flamingos being tossed around in the intro, for some reason. Brad Dorfman, or someone, didn't like the intro, and so the video underwent a major re-edit, over the winter of 1987-88. I had a 3/4" copy to make VHS promos copies from, and first heard The Descendents song, "Coolidge," there. I just really liked the song, not knowing who the band was. I used to play that in my room, over and over, on the big 3/4", cassette, just because I liked the song. I later found out what the band was, and The Descendents and All became favorites of mine.
On a side note,I also got the job of making a snowboard tuning video with Tom Sims himself, my first cameraman and lighting job at Unreel. On the second day of shooting, Tom brought in the first snowboard he made, in 7th grade shop class, in 1966 or so. That board is now famous as, arguably, the first modern snowboard. When I saw it, I asked "What is that?" and Tom told me the story behind it. Snowboards have come a long way since.
Tom Sims with his first homemade snowboard, from about 1966, made in shop class in school.
Agent Orange- "Bloodstains"- I think "Bloodstains," was the first video I ever saw show skateboarding on MTV, back in the mid 1980's. After The Descendents, I discovered Agent Orange at Unreel. SinceSkatevisionswas already a couple of years old when I started at Unreel, I didn't get asked to make a copy of it for quite a while. I had never seen the video before working there. When I did dub it, I recognized a couple of songs that I'd heard on KROQ, but never knew what band it was. This is another video I'd put in and just listen to every once in a while. Just great music, from my point of view. But my favorite thing about Agent Orange and Skatevisions come from an whereYouTube video Moby interviews street artist Shephard Fairey. At 7:12 in this interview, Shephard says that watching Skatevisions, with the Agent Orange soundtrack, had a big effect on him, and that was his introduction to punk rock. Without Skatevisions, Andre' may have never had a posse, and Obama may not have had much hope for change. So I'm stoked my old boss, Don Hoffman, made the video that helped get 14-year-old Shephard started down the alternative path to all the cool stuff he's done since.
All- "Don Quixote"- Brian Gillogly, one of the Unreel producers, worked at Skateboarder magazine, years before, and he directed Freestylin' Fanatics, and other videos. He used the All song "Don Quixote" in one video, and again, like "Coolidge," I just liked the song, and started listening to it at work sometimes. All is basically The Descendents with a different singer, something like that.
Big Drill Car- "In Green Fields"- One of the people in Big Drill Car worked at Vision, in the art department, I think. They have a great sound, which I first heard dubbing videos at Unreel. I picked up their album "Casette Type Thing," at Vinyl Solution in Huntington Beach, and listened to that tape a hundred times or more. I still listen to them when writing or drawing, on a regular basis, and I saw them play live 3 or 4 times in the early 90's.
Drive, She Said- Drive, She Said (full album)- I think we used a song or two from this album in some video. Mostly I just remember seeing the album laying around. The name, "Drive, She Said," stuck in my head. Sounds like an 80's hair band.
Blind Dog Lost- "Pete's Theme"- This is one song that I just liked, having heard it play while dubbing it many times.
Slammin' Watusis- "Skt Skt Skt"- This is another song I just heard a bunch while dubbing tapes, and liked the song.
The Splatcats-"Even Steven"- This is the intro music for the Freestylin' Fanatics video, after the Vision Street Wear commercial at the very beginning. It's another just really cool song I liked back in 1988. Brian dug deep and found some really cool music for the videos he worked on, I'll give him that. I thought this was The Descendents when I first heard it. Listen to the lyrics of this song, it's pretty crazy, but they get lost in the groove of the music.
Joe Satriani- "Satch Boogie"- So... someone at Unreel talked to Joe Satriani's people, and got a verbal "OK" to use his music, from the Surfing With the Alien album, before it came out. The deal was we could use any of the music for $300 per song. Our producers loved "Satch Boogie," and several other songs, and we edited the music into several places in the Sports on the Edge TV shows. Then... Surfing With the Alien took off. When they went to pay Satriani's record label, the label said, "Uh... no... we want $3,000 per song." So Unreel found a good local musician, and had him do similar music, hitting the same beats of the edited video, for much less money. They had to edit out every Satriani song we used, it was just way too much money to spend for background music. Lesson of the day, get written contracts to use music, if you're producing videos, folks. On the bright side, the groupie woman I mentioned above, she got Dave and I tickets to see Joe Satriani and his band play live at a closed event at the NAMM trade show in early 1988. It was a great show, in a room full of hardcore musicians. Satriani's bass player was even more amazing than him. I think Paul Stanley from KISS was standing next to me, one of maybe 200 people in the room, for that show. I'm not 100% sure, with no make-up, but I think it was him. Thanks groupie chick!
Yello- "Oh Yeah"- This is another song that everybody in that era heard. Someone at Unreel did get the rights to use this song in writing, and we used it in several videos, I think. It was in the intro of Snow Shredders. But you all probably know this song from this commercial, which came out later, or maybe this one, much later on, or maybe from 80's dance club mixes of the song.
Skatemaster Tate-"Year O' Tate"- Gerry Hurtado, aka Skatemaster Tate, was a skater and musician in the 80's skate scene in SoCal. He was one of the live hosts of Skate Escape, along with radio DJ The Poorman, from KROQ, and pro vert skater Ken Park. The producers at Unreel decided to not only make a music video of Tater, but to make a 3D music video. This was shown on the big screen, above the ramp, at Vision's big Skate Escape event in 1988. It's also the reason you see a bunch of kids in a crowd wearing 3D glasses (at 1:00) in some of the videos. But since it was shot in 3D, this clip was never used in an actual video. I just found this clip online recently, and hadn't seen it since 1989 or 1990. Skatemaster Tate went on to host Sk8-TV on Nickelodeon in 1990. That's him on the left with Lance Mountain and the co-host guy, in that clip.
The Stain-"I Know the Scam" "Flashing Reds"- One day, street skating pioneer, Mark Gonzales, walked into Unreel with a record album, put out by a punk band in Toledo, that none of us had ever heard of. Mark bought the album just because he liked the cover art. The band was The Stain, and the producers at Unreel contacted the leader of the band, Jon Stainbrook. It turns out Jon had some really good friends who were musicians, and one had a home recording studio, so Jon and The Stain, became one of our main sources of cheap, good, video music from then on. I called him up, and used a bunch of The Stain's music when I made my own BMX video, The Ultimate Weekend, shortly after leaving Vision, in 1990.
Uniform Choice- "A Choice" - This is a punk band I had heard of, but never actually listened to. Then I got to shoot all the video footage for amateur vert skater, Mark Cernicky, for Barge at Will(19:03), and they used Uniform Choice for his segment. I love that segment now. Cernicky of DEATH!
Red Hot Chili Peppers- "Fight Like a Brave"- OK, I saw the movie Thrashin', featuring the Chili Peppers, in a drive-in, in Gork's van, with then magazine co-workers and roommates, Gork and Lew, in 1986. So I knew who they were. But I never really heard their music until the Skate Escape event. I ran from Don Hoffman's side, in the event director's booth, at the back of the arena, and into the pit for the Chili Pepper's live show there. Great set. Then the Unreel later put out the Red Hot Skate Rock home video, so I heard their music a bunch of times back then. I like their 1990's and beyond music better, to be honest. We had no idea they would still be playing more than 30 years later, back then. They still really fuckin' rock. More power to the Peppers.
Bad Brains-"Big Takeover"- Someone at Unreel, possibly one of the skaters, introduced me to Bad Brains. Then, in 1990, when I worked with Christian Hosoi and his guys for three days, shooting for the Tuff Skts promo, he said he was a fan of Bad Brains. So when I made the original 7 minute promo video for Tuff Skts, I used Bad Brains and Muddy Waters music (for the slo-mo part). I lost my copy of that promo in 2008, in a move, and there's no version except that super short clip from Sk8-TV, above, with lame music. But the real version of that promo had Bad Brains in it.
Muddy Waters- "King Bee"- When I shot footage at Christian Hosoi's ramp for the Tuff Skts promo linked above), he had kind of a one man media day. There were 3 or 4 magazine photographers there, his team skaters, Block, Little Man, and Joey Tran, as well as surf filmmaker Herbie Fletcher, shooting film. Christian Fletcher was also there, skating. Hosoi had a full sized halfpipe on the top of this hill in Echo Park, where he lived in a house once owned by W.C. Fields. Herbie had some movie footage of Christian from an earlier shoot, and we all went into the little side house, and watched it on a movie screen. The footage was all in slo-mo, shot in high speed film. Christian put some Muddy Waters blues music on the record player while we watched the film, and it worked really well with the slo-mo. So I bought a Muddy Waters cassette and used the song "King Bee" in the Tuff Skts promo video. I later realized I like blues music in general, so thanks Christian for turning me on to Muddy Waters.
The Offspring-"Jennifer Lost the War"- In January of 1990, as Vision was in a downward spiral thanks to the slowdown of the 80's skateboarding boom, we had a meeting at Unreel. The decision had been made to dissolve Unreel. All the producers and our manager got the boot. The two lowest (and cheapest) people on the payroll, a woman named Laura, and me, were kept on. But we had to move to the Vision main office in Santa Ana. Don Hoffman would work freelance when needed. Laura found a "real" TV production job in about a month, which left me, in a big office, with a bunch of the basic video equipment. Every call that came in for Unreel was then directed to me. Remember, I was a lowly production assistant, and eventually a cameraman, for 2 1/2 years. I had nothing to do with any official business at Unreel.
Suddenly I had distributors from Portugal on the phone, or shops who needed a new copy of a video because one was a bad tape, and other weird, random phone calls from around the world. One day I picked up a call, and a really mad guy said, "You used my band's music in a skate video without paying, and I'm going to fucking kill you!" Naturally, I was kind of curious who the hell this guy was, because I had no idea. So I asked, "Who the hell are you?" It turned out he was Frank from Zed Records, a huge indie music shop in Long Beach that had a small record label. I told him I had no idea what he was talking about, and explained my side of the story at Unreel. Eventually he calmed down.
The best I could figure out, some skater brought in a ghetto blaster recorded tape with the band he wanted to use for his segment on one side, and a young punk band called The Offspring, on the other side. The tape wasn't labeled. In the course of making Barge at Will, somebody turned the tape over, and used one of The Offspring's songs in the video, thinking it was cool. Keep in mind, this was four years before their breakout album, Smash, came out. Nobody knew who the fuck The Offspring was in 1990, except maybe a few local friends and punkers. Ultimately I drove down to Zed Records after work one day, talked to Frank, and we worked it out. I was able to get $1,000 (retail value) of Vision Street Wear clothes sent to The Offspring, and everyone was reasonably happy. A year or so later, I saw them play (opening for Citizen Fish), with Mike Sarrail. Mike started talking to them and I ended up having a beer or two with them before the show, at Al's Bar in downtown L.A. That's how I first heard The Offspring's music. These Huntington Beach locals became one of my favorite bands over the years, and I 've seen them live 3 or 4 times.
No Doubt-"Oi to the World" (The Vandals cover)- When Unreel shut down in January of 1990, we had two really nice office units to clear out, Unreel's suite, and the Vision promotions department, which was next door. Tom, Vision's facilities manager, gave me the job of making a list of every single piece of video equipment in the Unreel office, and writing down the serial number. Much to my surprise, I found over $10,000 worth of equipment that wasn't on any previous list. Being the ridiculously honest goofball that I am, I didn't steal any of the equipment and sell it.
While doing that job, I dug into every nook and cranny of the office. In the closet by Don Hoffman's old office, I found a big box of albums, CD's and maybe 40 or 50 cassette tapes. Remember the hot groupie chick I mentioned? I think a lot of that music was stuff she had musicians send to Unreel in 1987 or early 1988, along with other music people had sent later on.
At lunch at Vision, I mentioned this to a guy named Dave, who worked in the mailroom. He said I had to let him have some of it, being into punk himself. He came by my apartment the next weekend, and we split the music between us. There were multiple Anthrax picture disk albums, still shrink wrapped. Those were already collector's items then. There were a couple of The Offspring's first album, unopened, and a few other records. Dave and I went though it all. He picked one thing, then I picked one, then he picked one. At the end we both had some really cool music, and I had about 20 hand recorded cassettes. He wasn't interested in those. So Dave took off with his haul.
I went up to my bedroom, and put each cassette in my little ghetto blaster, and played parts of a couple songs. If I really liked the music at first listen, I kept it, if not, I tossed it in the trash. One of those cassette had "No Doubt" written in a girl's handwriting on it on the cassette card, and on the tape. Again, this was 1990, a full two years before the "Trapped in a Box" music video came out, and five years before their breakout Tragic Kingdom album. I played the first song, there was a guy singing. It didn't really move me. I fast forwarded a ways, and listened to a bit of another song, also a guy singing. The music didn't grab me, so I tossed the garage recorded, ghetto blaster taped cassette, probably hand labeled by Gwen Stefani, recorded in 1987, into the trash, with about 20 other cassettes. Yeah, I kind of wish I would have kept all those. Or at least that one. Lesson learned.
For those of you not aware, the band No Doubt was formed as a ska band, by Eric Stefani (Gwen's older brother) and John Spence, in 1986, and the original lead singer was John. John tragically died by suicide in late 1987, and a very reluctant and shy Gwen took over lead vocals. Obviously, she rose to the task, and eventually kicked major ass on vocals. But the tape I had still had John singing lead, so the self-taped songs I had on cassette were from some time in 1987, three years before I heard of the band, and eight years before they broke out big time with the Tragic Kingdom album in 1995. Eric Stefani left the band in 1994, and became an animator on The Simpson's show.
So there's a bunch of the music I got introduced to while working at a pretty cool job, at Unreel Productions, back in the late 1980's. This post is done and I'm hungry. It's time for a little something refreshing.
Country, BlueGrass, Blues... That's what CBGB's acronym name stood for. When you create something new, like opening a small club for music acts, things take on a life of their own. This great little video just popped up on my YouTube feed, and begged for a blog post. And let's face it, if CBGB's is legendary in your mind, you still wonder what OMFUG means. This video will tell you. 12 epic shows at the legendary tiny NYC club, CBGB's, that changed music forever, analyzed in this great little video. And what's a Gormandizer?
Everyone who found their way into punk rock and alternative music came by a different path. Those bands who played epic shows at CBGB's and other tiny clubs in the mid 1970's, in New York City, started something that is still rippling through society nearly 50 years later. Most of you probably had one or two friends that initially turned you on to the punk scene, and probably quite a few bands of that era. For me, it was a long journey to get into punk rock, and I bounced around a lot, and had a wide range of people, and even some jobs, where I was turned on to different aspects of punk rock music and culture. BMX freestyler and walking punk rock encyclopedia, Mike Sarrail, is the guy who dragged me slowly into punk, and got me hooked, in 1987-1988. A huge thanks to Mike for that. But that was a decade after I first heard of this weird thing called punk rock.
I remember seeing a TV show, 60 minutes, I think, or one like it, with a segment on the punk rock scene in New York City, in about 1977 or 1978. The old reporter was talking to punk kids outside some club, and they showed a little footage of a show. At the time, I was a super dorky Ohio kid, around 11 or 12, and listened mostly to Canadian soft rock station CKLW, from Windsor. I remember that interview with the punk kids, because while they were shooting it, some kid suddenly yelped, and everyon turned. While he was standing there, someone had cut his forearm with a knife. Not a bad cut, but you could see it bleeding on camera. I just thought, "Those kids are CRAZY!" That was my first taste of this thing called punk rock.
A guy named Phil in high school would read me Dead Kennedys lyrics in American government class in 1983-84. Phil was a really cool guy, super smart, and the "head punker," of the 7 or 8 punkers, in Boise High School. He let me listen to the DK's on his Walkman a couple of times, and it just sounded so thrashy, I couldn't understand it. But then he read me some lyrics, and let me read a lyric sheet of Jello Biafra's writing, and that floored me. "This guy's really smart," I said, totally surprised. Phil, most likely wearing his Holiday Inn Cambodia T-shirt, agreed. So we talked about punk a little now and then. And we'd draw weird doodles in class, and show them to each other.
One day I drew a sort of desert landscape, kind of like monument valley, with rock spires, with a black sun in the sky, and all the shadows were on the wrong side, falling towards the sun. The idea was sparked by something Phil had said, or some DK lyrics, I can't remember. He thought that one was really cool. Phil also had the single coolest piercing, long before the piercing trend began. He came to school one day with about a three inch long, rusty, bent nail through his ear. And he wore it for a month or so. It never got infected. He was the first person who helped me understand that there was intelligence, and really something being said in punk rock, or at least some of it. But I still didn't like the music at all. And the punkers didn't stand for anything, it was just "do your own thing." I was way to uptight and conflicted for that message in high school.
My senior year of high school, 1983-1984, was when I was getting really serious about BMX. I was racing regularly that summer, and then indoor winter races over in Caldwell. But I also ran cross country, and actually got a varsity letter. So technically I was a jock, though a cross country letter makes it an iffy case. I was a back of the pack runner. But at the same time, I was getting serious about BMX trick riding, it wasn't really called "freestyle" yet. So I was just beginning to swerve off of the mainstream track, and into the alternative subculture world, but not in music. When my trick teammate Jay Bickel and I practiced, in late spring and on in 1984, we usually had The Cars self-titled album blasting.
But it was BMX freestyle that took over my life in 1984 in Boise, and I spent my high school graduation money, about $400, on my first serious bike, a Skyway T/A. My parents weren't happy about that. But I didn't have near enough money to go to college anyway, so it wasn't that big of a deal. I joined the only BMX trick team in Idaho, and we did a few shows, and rode in parades, which Jay's mom promoted for us. We also had the first two freestyle contests in Idaho. So I was careening away from mainstream, though my main group of friends were typical Idaho outdoorsy guys. I'd hang out with them most nights, and then I'd go practice tricks at Jay's house a couple days a week, and on my own in the afternoons.
Life took my family to San Jose, California in 1985, where I started my first BMX freestyle zine, and got to know the Golden Gate Park freestyle guys, particularly the already legendary Curb Dogs, led by the character Dave Vanderspek. I heard a bit more punk, but other than riding two or three times a month with those guys, I didn't hang out enough to hear much of the music they were into. But Vander was the pioneer, leading the punk rock and skater influence into the small, fledgling, BMX freestyle world. He was totally ahead of his time in many ways, including music and wild clothes, as well as riding progression. That was another way the punk rock world seeped a bit more into my consciousness, but that was still before I got into the music itself.
My zine, as I've written about many times in my blogs, landed me a job at BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines in August of 1986. Suddenly one of my bosses, Andy Jenkins, and my co-worker/roommate, Mark "Lew" Lewman, were totally into punk music. My other boss/roommate, Craig, "Gork" Barrette was a hardcore metalhead, turning me onto to other bands I'd never heard of, like Metallica, Saxon, and then new band, Guns n' Roses. My first night sleeping on their couch, they scanned my two little crates of cassette tapes, shook their heads, and said something like, "We need to get you listening to some good music."
Andy and Lew tried to baptise me into punk rock and industrial music in 1986, and, along with Gork, took me to my first punk gig, Tex and the Horseheads, opening for Andy's indsutrial band, Factory, in the fall of 1986. This gig was on the roof of an art colony in the L.A. arts district, back when artists actually lived there. The police and police helicopter shut down the show before Factory played, which added to the underground hype of the band. I did see Factory actually play a few weeks later. While I got exposed to Siouxsie and the Banshees, Black Flag, Skinny Puppy,Joy Division, Bauhaus, D.R.I., and Marginal Man, from them, and The Cureand Gene Loves Jezebelfrom Redondo Beach freestyler, Craig Grasso, who we sessioned with at The Spot, every night.I heard a lot more music from the punk world, butit still didn't seem to be for me. The joke at FREESTYLIN' magazine was that they laid me off because I didn't like Skinny Puppy, Andy's favorite industrial band. I just didn't get industrial music, and it was a running joke, every time I screwed up. "You didn't do this right... and you don't like Skinny Puppy," and we'd all laugh. My musical horizons were widening, but I still listened to my Bruce Springsteen and Night Ranger cassettes all the time, much to their dismay. Meanwhile, the Beastie Boys' Licensed to Ill came out, and Lew played that about 17 times a day, every day from then on. My musical tastes probably doomed my job at Wizard Publications as much as my exceptional dorkiness. It's a tough call. But it's cool, they hired this guy a couple of months later, after I got laid off, and he worked out well there.
Then I moved to Huntington Beach to work Bob Morales at the American Freestyle Association (AFA), editing their newsletter, in late January of 1987. I went from hearing Gork's KNAC (hard rock/metal station) and Lew's nono-stop Beastie Boys, at work, to having KROQ, SoCal's widely known new wave/alternative rock station, on at work all day. They played the Dead Kennedys once in a while, Oingo Boingo, the Violent Femmes, a bunch of other New Wave, and lots of non-top 40 music, with songs like this and this, andthis. I think it was Bob Morales who turned me on to 7 Seconds, as well. Or maybe it was one of the skinheads we used as ramp roadies occasionally. Hey, just put on some good music, and take the skinheads bowling. I can't remember. Sometime around then is when I remember hearing of a guy named Mike who just wanted a Pepsi, but his mom wouldn't give him one. Jeeez... it was just one Pepsi.
Within a couple of weeks, I became a local BMX freestyler at the Huntington Beach Pier, where I met Mike Sarrail. He was a tall skinny guy who was great at doing Miami hop-hops and undertakers, and other solid freestyle tricks of the day. We started riding every weekend, and hanging out. When driving around to go get a burger or get a new tube at a bike shop, Mike started playing all kinds of music I'd never heard of.
Analyzing my musical taste, or lack thereof, Mike asked one day, "You like acoustic guitar stuff, right?" I replied, "Yeah." Mike put on Jane's Addiction's "Jane Says." I liked it. Then he played "Mountain Song," and that was pretty cool, too. I didn't have a car then, so whenever we went somewhere to ride, Mike introduced me to some new music, slowly leading me into the underground world of punk and indie music in general. Mike also had a great leather jacket, and on the back he had hand painted a bunch fo the lyrics from Crass' "Big A Little A." Not only was it a cool jacket, it was a conversation starter at every club. People would walk up behind Mike, and start reading the back of his jacket, often grabbing his arm when he started to walk away, so they could finish reading it.
He didn't shove music at me, saying "How can you NOT like this!" He'd say, "Check this out." He also made me a great bootleg mix tape of Guns n' Roses, in 1987, from other bootlegs. He called it "Boot by Boot." I told him he should have called it "Second hand boots." Either way, it had, "Mama Kin," "Patience," "Used to Love Her," songs that later came out on the Lies EP. There was also an interview with the band talking about when they all lived in a one room apartment together.
Mike's favorite band was The Ramones, which he introduced me to after breaking me in on mellower bands. Ramones Mania soon became a go to cassette for me when out riding my freestyle bike, night after night. When I think of 1989, I think of sessioning the Huntington Pier Bank almost every night, with whatever skaters showed up, and Ramones Mania in my Walkman. Night after night after night, that whole spring and summer, after someone cut down the chain blocking the bank, that was my thing. Learning new bank tricks to The Ramones. Mike also introduced me to a bunch of punk classics like The Misfits, The Damned, The Buzzcocks, Sham 69, FEAR, The Zeros, and this uplifting little ditty.
Mike also started taking me to his favorite punk venue, Scream, in L.A. The funny thing is that it's the building that's in this Journey video. I totally recognized the big staircase from this video, the first time I went there. This happened in late 1987 or early 1988. Jane's Addiciton was basically the house band, playing regularly, and the deal on Saturday nights was "10 bands for $10." Hard to beat that. My first time there, I remember a band called Pygmy Love Circusplayed, the singer was wearing a kilt, and holding a stuffed boar's head on stage, with a big knife, I think. I just went, "What the fuck is going on here?" I won't lie, I went home with a headache. The second trip was a little better, but I still left with a headache.
The third trip up to Scream, one of the bands played the Johnny Cash song "Ring of Fire" at the end of their set. I grew up with my mom's country music radio stations playing in the background my whole childhood, and while I didn't like much country music, I was a big fan of Johnny Cash. That punk band, of course, was Social Distortion, and they played several of the songs that later came out on the Social Distortion album in those shows at Scream. I think Mike made me a tape of some of their songs, and I bought Social Distortion, the album, on cassette when it came out. I was hooked, and went to a bunch more shows with Mike over the next 3-4 years, a few at Scream , and several other places. At Scream I discovered bands like The Dickies, Human Drama, and Junkyard, as well as seeing Jane's Addiction and Social Distortion a few times each.
In late 1987, I went to work for Unreel Productions, Vision Skateboard's video company. Part of my job was tape librarian, and I soon found a video of JFA (Jodie Foster's Army) that some skater had taped, and they dubbed to betacam. That was one of the first skate punk bands. The main part of my job was making dubs of videos for everyone in the Vision empire, which consisted of several companies. When I made copies of the 1987 Vision video Skatevisions, I discovered Agent Orange, whose music is the entire soundtrack. In this interview with Moby, street artist Shephard Fairey says Skatevisions is what first turned him on to punk rock. I liked the Agent Orange music immediately. So I would put on that tape in the background, and just listen to it at work, in my little dub room.
Another favorite song I found at Unreel was this one song in Sims snowboard video, Snow Shredders, which turned out to be "Coolidge" by The Descendents. That's probably the first punk song I really connected to. I still play it all the time in the mornings, all these years later, to get me going. "I looked up one day and saw, it was up to me, you can only be a victim if you admit defeat." That line has helped keep me going through a lot of tough times (as has Social Distortion's "Don't Drag Me Down"). I would just play Skatevisions or Snow Shredders videos over and over, just for the music. I eventually made VHS dubs of those tapes, realizing I shouldn't be playing the master tapes just to listen to the music in my little dub room.
Between the Vision skaters bringing in music, and a knockout of a woman who was our "freelance music finder chick" at Unreel, I heard of a lot of up-and coming bands working at Unreel. I first heard The Offspring, Yello, Uniform Choice, JFA, TSOL, Big Drill Car, All, guitarist Joe Satriani, and The Vandals, and several other bands, because of working at Unreel Productions. That's when my music taste really began to change, between Mike Sarrail introducing me to new music on the weekends, and finding bands at work, at Unreel, during the week, I slipped into the punk rock world between 1987 and 1990.
One day street skating pioneer Mark Gonzales, yes, "The Gonz" himself, walked into Unreel with a weird vinyl album that he gave to Unreel head producer Don Hoffman. Mark was a Vision skater in the mid-late 1980's, before defecting and starting Blind under Steve Rocco's World Industries fledgling empire. Mark found the album at Vinyl Solution record shop in Huntington Beach, I think, and bought it just because he liked the cover. There was a song Mark wanted to use for his next video part, I think. That album was The Stain, a punk band from Toledo, Ohio. Don contacted the main guy, Jon Stainbrook, and Jon turned out to be a great source of music for Vision and Unreel, for the next couple of years. We used a several of The Stain's songs, and other music from the talented trio, who all did their own individual music as well.
For any of you that watched or bought my 1990 BMX video, The Ultimate Weekend, on the front of the box it said, "Killer soundtrack by The Stain." When making my video, I called up Jon, and bought a bunch of music for the video. I still owe him for 4 songs, I think. I did pay him for the other 8. The check's in the mail Jon... I was particularly proud of the little music video I made using his skate song "Pool Party," for the Nude Bowl section in the video (26:54 in the link above). While I still listened to several other types of music, mostly classic rock then (can't knock some Boston now and then), punk became my main day to day music by that time. Also in 1990, I worked for a surf and skate video distributor in Gardena. At a trade show that winter, we went to the premiere of Snowboarders in Exile. I scored a free copy of Snowboarder's in Exile, which has one of the greatest soundtracks ever, and watched it dozens of times over the next couple of years. This video turned me on to Husker Du, and Firehose, among other bands.
In the early 1990's, I started hanging out more with the Huntington Beach BMX racer/jumper scene. Editing this video in 1991 led to sleeping on the floor of Chris Moeller's tiny "Winnebago" apartment, when S&M Bikes was being run out of a single car garage. A big part of that Huntington Beach area BMX crew was the P.O.W.'s, (Pros Of Westminster). I later lived in that house, and was also roommates with Chris Moeller, and Jason "Timmy" Ball in another apartment later on. Timmy was always finding new music, and introduced us to bands like Propaghandi and Nashville Pussy. By then I was a fan of The Descendents and All, as was Chris. Chris turned me on to a bunch of new music, late 80's and early 90's power punk or pop punk, and some 80's hardcore, as well. I first heard of Green Day, Pegboy, and NoFX from Chris, and first heard Nirvana on a mix tape that Will Smyth, from the U.K., made for Chris. He also had a great compilation cassette from Flipside Records, called The Big One, that he played all the time. It had Green Day, The Offspring, Big Drill Car, and several other bands on it, which were all pretty unknown at the time. Chris also introduced me to Operation Ivy, the epic ska band that was only around a couple of years, but had enormous influence in the punk world. Green Day covered their song, "Knowledge" in live shows for years.
In 1992, and again in 1993, I lived for several months in the P.O.W. House in Westminster, with BMXers like Dave Clymer, Alan Foster, Todd Lyons, John Paul Rogers, Lawan Cunningham, Chris Sales, Jason Lonergan, and later Brian Foster, among others. Every night the House members, and former house guys, and a few others, congregated in the living room, and looked for cheap punk shows to go see, if possible. I saw a lot of good shows in those days. Bands like Pegboy and photographer O's band Olivelawn are two that stand out in my mind. That was also the era where several female punk bands came onto my radar. L7 was a favorite for us at the house, we went to several of their shows. But there was also Hole, The Muffs, Babes in Toyland, Japanese band Shonen Knife, and local Orange County female punkers The Red Aunts. In addition to seeing some of those, I remember multiple shows of All, Big Drill Car, and Chemical People, together, and going to see Jawbreaker, along with a bunch of other bands I saw and forgot.
As the early 90's progressed, Nirvana broke big, much to their dismay. The Grunge explosion helped launch several other underground bands into the mainstream, ready or not. Orange County ska band, No Doubt, blasted to the stratosphere, with Gewn Stefani lamenting the troubles of girlhood. That coincided with another SoCal ska band, Save Ferris, breaking, and then South Bay's bad boys, Pennywise. Rage Against the Machine played their first gig in a Huntington Beach living room, the city where slam dancing was born (really). And straight out of action sports hub, Huntington Beach, came The Offspring, blowing up huge and surprising everyone, themselves included. Somewhere in that time period I first heard Face to Face, probably "Disconnected" on KROQ. I think "Disconnected" is the single greatest song of the 1990's. For real. Also in the early 90's, New Jersey BMX street riding powerhouse, and star of my 1990 video, Keith Treanor, was the guy who said, "You're smart Sluggy, you'd totally like Bad Religion, they talk about smart shit." Keith was right, and showed me that truth is stranger than fiction. A bit later on came the Props BMX videos which turned the BMX world onto an up coming band named Blink-182, and others.
In the P.O.W. House, with 8 to 12 BMX guys living in the four bedroom house in Westminster, California, rent was only $90 to $120 month. That was a good thing during the early 1990's long recession. Often we would get to the middle of the month with no job, and then look through the want ads in the newspaper, to find a job to work for two weeks, to come up with rent money by the first of the next month. Seriously, a few of us did that at times, getting a shitty telemarketing job, or something, just to pay rent, by some ramen and beer, and then we'd quit, ride our bikes hard for two weeks, then find another one.
In this period, I ran into two jobs that I wound up working over and over for several years. One of those jobs was in the box office for the first Cirque du Soleil show to come to Orange County, Saltimbanco. Working there was so cool, I worked in the box office the next four times they came to Orange County, until 2003. Cirque was the coolest and best run company I ever worked for. The other job I applied to on a dare from one of the guys in the House. There was always a want ad for an "adult book store" in the newspaper. We'd joke about it with each other. One day, one of the guys dared me to go apply. There was another construction job close to it, so I headed out to apply for both. I went and applied at the porn store first, and I got hired on the spot. I never even made it to the other job site. Suddenly I was a real life smut peddler, selling magazines, vibrators, lubes, and leather goods to the bondage folks. It was actually much more boring than people imagine, but the pay was pretty good since I got an hourly wage, plus a commission on everything but magazines.
The guys I worked with at the porn store were cool, and after about six months of working there, I went in one day and a co-worker, Bryan, asked if I had done anything interesting lately. I said I went to a punk show the night before, Social Distortion, I think. Bryan was this really small, skinny guy, and he got a weird smirk on his face. "I used to be in a punk band, you know," he told me. "Really?" I had no idea, we had never really talked about music at work. "Which band?" I asked, expecting him to say some obscure Orange County punk band I'd never heard of. And here's where I bring this crazy long post about punk rock full circle, to the crazy 1970's music and art scenes that sparked punk rock in New York City, in clubs like CBGB's and others.
Bryan's smile grew, "I was the original rhythmn guitarist in The Cramps." I didn't believe him at first. Alan, the manager said, "Yep, he was." The Cramps, one of those handful bands that nearly every punker had a patch or pin of on their jacket or backpack then, and even now. How legendary are The Cramps? Here's Henry Rollins talking about The Cramps. A couple of days later, my porn store co-worker, Bryan Gregory, brought in an album with him on the cover. "I invented the 'halfhead' look," Bryan said proudly. The Bryan I worked with in the 90's had jet black hair, usually pulled straight back in a ponytail. On the Gravest Hits album cover his hair in front was died blonde, and it hung over one side of his face. He said he started that look, in 1975or 1976, something like that. Then people started copying it. He'd tell them, "Don't copy me, come up with your own style." But some of them kept copying him. Bryan's half head look morphed into the New Wave flop (guitarist) made famous a decade later, by guys like vert skater Tony Hawk, and many others in the 1980's.
Bryan, in general, hated new guys at work. Before that day talking about punk, we got along, but didn't talk all that much. After that day, we started talking about punk, music in general, creativity, art, and a lot more. Not long after, he turned me on to a great, but little known movie, called Mindwalk. He was in a band called Pollen then (1994-95?) which changed their name to The Dials, because of another, more established band, called Pollen in Europe. I wound up being a roadie for Bryan and The Dials at a couple of club gigs. Bryan and I were talking about some music video ideas, after I told him I made low budget BMX videos, but never ended up making any of them happen.
Bryan, the store manager Alan, and I, talked about what it would be like to open a cool porn store, since we worked in a sketchy old school one, with no style, that was pretty hospitable to women. We knew it wasn't going to happen, but we all had cool ideas for it. Not long after Condom Revolution opened up in Orange County, which was pretty much what we all had imagined, a fun, cool adult store that was welcoming to women and couples, not like the traditional, creepy, old porn shops. Good idea, because that was a new trend a few years later, before the internet took over most of the adult business.
Starting in 1992, I worked on TV show crews, like American Gladiators, in the summer, and then came back to Orange County in late summer. Some times I worked as a furniture mover the rest of the year, but if couldn't find another job, they'd hire me back at the ol' porn shop, since I was a good worker and an honest guy. I worked at the porn store (Hip Pocket Books in Garden Grove) about 4 times over the next several years.
By the late 1990's, Bryan had become the area supervisor of a few porn stores in the area. Something about porn stores attracted musicians, we had four serious musicians work at that one store while I was there. You could work in those shops with tattoos, which was unusual at the time, and we could easily switch shifts, like in restaurants, so they could get nights off to play gigs. The money was decent, the work was easy, and you could get your girlfriends 15% off on toys, as well as condoms, and lubes, and videos. Maybe that was it.
In about 1998, I think, I interviewed Bryan for a zine I was doing called Huevos. The zine was a combination of action sports (still called Extreme Sports by most people, thanks to ESPN, which we hated), and art and some music. Bryan and I sat in the back office of the porn store, I turned on my old school cassette recorder, and I asked him about the earliest days of punk rock, the time leading up to the rise of CBGB's as a legendary club for the New York punk scene. Bryan was totally open, and it was immediately apparent he had done a lot of interviews before. As a zine, newsletter, and magazine guy at times, I had interviewed maybe two or three dozen people, and written long, solid interviews. Interviewing Bryan was like interviewing a major rock star on one hand, but we were co-workers and friends, and both sarastic as could be, so it was a fun chat. The interview filled up both sides of a 90 minute cassette, talking about his life, from a "sissy boy in Detroit" (his term), as a bisexual kid in that rough city in the 1960's, to the present time (the late 1990's). He was totally open, and the converation wandered through a whole bunch of topics, and stories from his life as a musician and artist, and anything else that came up.
On Detroit he said, "Even the girls would kick your ass there when I was a kid.". He told me about the early days in New York City, sleeping in hollows under the sidewalks in the winter with Cramps members Lux Interior and Poison Ivy. He talked about moving to New York, about meeting Lux and Ivy and forming The Cramps. He went through his time with them, leaving The Cramps, working other jobs, and playing in other bands.
We talked all the way into the late 1990's, where he wanted to play accordion in his current band, The Dials, and bring some Zydeco influence into it some day. Yep, Bryan Gregory, the guy that scared the crap out of young Henry Rollins (in the funny story linked above) played accordion as a kid, and had a really wide range of musical influences. His life stories surprised me several times. And the accordion bit threw me, I totally didn't expect that. The Dials had homemade cassette tape out, which he gave me a copy of. I don't know if they ever made an album /CD. But I was clueless to Zydeco music, and he explained where he first heard it, and why he wanted to blend it into the band's music.
Was there a common theme to this crazy character, Bryan Gregory, who was one of those early msucians and characters that helped spawn what we now call punk rock? Yes. Bryan said he always wanted to try something new. He loved to break new ground, try things no one had ever done before, and liked shocking people with the unexpected. He was still doing that with his music and art, in his late 40's, at the time of the interview. Once something had been done, and the newness had faded, he liked to move on to other ideas. Like so many creative people, he had more ideas than he knew what to do with, and he liked to keep trying them, see where they went, and then try something else.
As a guy who didn't know much about punk history, despite Mike Sarrail's expert tutelage years earlier, I got to ask the one question I'd always had about the early days of punk in New York City. I asked Bryan Gregory, original member of The Cramps, sitting in the back office of the porn store, "OK, who would you say really started punk rock?" I expected him to say The Ramones, or one of those known early bands, maybe a short-lived band I had never heard of. His answer surprised me, "I'd have to say that street urchin, Patti Smith, with her poetry." He thought she had the attitude in her poetry readings and music that really lit the fire of what became eventually became punk rock. So for every punker out there who has ever wondered where punk really started, that's the answer from one of the people that was there when it all got going.
One more thing about that interview, which was probably the last in-depth interview anyone ever did with Bryan. He was largely forgotten by the media at that point. He died in early 2001, about a month short of his 51st birthday. Bryan brought a custom guitar to the interview to show me. By custom, I mean he had hand carved the body of what I believe was a Fender Telecaster. He carved a penis each in the top and bottom horns, by the neck, and two penises, touching heads, in the rounded part of the body, so there was a hole in the body inside of them. Bryan called it the Fender Phallicaster. He said his bandmates in The Dials wouldn't let him play it on stage, but he wanted to at some point, again, just to fuck with people.
I don't think I had a camera that day, I used photos of him from albums, and from a recent art show of his I went to, when I made the zine. So I don't think I actually took a photo of the one and only Bryan Gregory, hand-carved Fender Phallicaster. I honestly don't remember. Bummer. I've looked it up online, now, 25 years after the interview, with all the good years of the internet since, and I can find no mention of that guitar. I have no idea what happened to it. It's probably in a closet or storage unit in Orange County, packed away and forgotten, that'd be my guess. But who knows?
The funny thing about Bryan was that he was this crazy character and musician on stage, particularly in The Cramps. But I knew him as a funny, sarcastic co-worker, who was pretty low key. I asked him one day at work what he did the night before, I think we were talking about some new TV show or something. Bryan said, "I watched a couple of TV shows and darned socks." I just started laughing, "Nobody has darned socks in like fifty years! Are you kidding me?" Bryan snapped back, "Hey, I have good socks, those fuckers are expensive." Then I went to an art show of these 3D collage things he made, which he called "dream boxes." They were something I'd never seen before, and really freaking cool. If I wasn't so broke then, I would have bought one. Or two. His day to day life then was pretty normal, but he was still playing music and breaking new ground with his artwork. In fact, my title in my zine interview with him was, "If it hasn't been done yet, Bryan Gregory might just be the guy to do it first."
So that's my story of transition from a teenage dork who listened to Night Ranger and Billy Squier, to a middle aged, Has Been, Old School BMX freestyle dork, turned Sharpie artist and blogger, who likes punk rock. I have never been to CBGB's, and I have never even owned an album by The Cramps. But with my odd life path, I brought this epic blog post full circle in my own weird way. I hope this was interesting to a few of you out there, and reminded you of some music you've forgotten about.
In the course of writing blog posts, I often run into things I don't expect. Bryan Gregory seems to have gained a small cult following after he died. That's really cool. I last talked to him about a year before he died, in 2000, I think, when KROQ had him as the answer to a trivia question one night. I called him up and told him, and he found that amusing. I went on with my life, lost track of Bryan, and didn't hear about his death until a couple of years later.
That story about The Cramps, told by Henry Rollins (link above) is epic. I also really dig this song I just found. "The Day Bryan Gregory Died."There's even a book about about Bryan and The Cramps, as well. His legacy as a pioneering musician lives on, 50 years after punk rock began, and 22 years after Bryan's death. That's cool. For anyone wondering, the 90 minute audio cassette with my interview of Bryan was in the storage unit I lost in my move to North Carolina in 2008. It, and all my stuff, got sold in a storage unit auction. Yeah, that's a bummer. Any last words Bryan?Heh, heh, heh... Sarcastic 'til the end...
Oh yeah, I googled it. Turns out I'm a Gormandizer. You learn something every day. And yes, this post makes me seem cooler than I really am. Most of these bands were being played somewhere in my periphery. and a small number are the ones I listened to a lot, and the ones I saw live at some point. The harcdcore punk fans have been to far more gigs than I have. I'm still a dork, I'm just a dork who listens to better music than I did 37-38 years ago, that's all. If you want to hate on me for all the bands I didn't mention, write your own damn post.
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