S&M Bikes "Behind the Shield" Book Launch Party- S&M Bikes shop- #2

 The sequence of Chris Moeller, jumping the Cadillac at the Palm Springs Meet the Street, is BMX legend stuff.  In a riding career full of big, gnarly, sketchy ass jumps, this one stood out.  He jumped the car once, lengthwise, off a 2 1/2 foot high launch ramp, with plenty of room to spare.  Then some guys put a 4 foot high, 8 foot long 4 foot wide box jump box, sideways, in front of the car, and a bike, I think, then people just put random stuff, in front of that, like helmets, T-shirts, a Big Gulp cup.  Chris came charging down the road from half a block away, a second time, and jumped the whole freakin' mess.  Definitely a good choice for the cover of the book. 

 It would be hard to try to sum up the crazy, dysfunctional, innovative, gnarly as fuck philosophy of S&M Bikes' 32 1/2 year history in single photo.  But Matt Berringer walking his bike into Sheep Hills with a 12 pack of PBR in hand comes pretty fucking close. 

 The scene in the S&M Bikes shop parking lot last night (July 20th, 2019) at the Behind the Shield book launch party.  Old BMXer/punkers don't age all that well, but we look badass as hell.  Lots of black T-shirts and scars old scars, I think that's the key.  Glory is temporary, pain is forever, and chicks don't really dig scars.  Something like that.

 Straight outta Westminster (at least in the early 90's), Iroquois street legend turned car salesman and happily married man with a kickass grill, Ned and wife Kristy.  If they invite you over for a BBQ, don't miss it, that's the biggest thing I've learned from his Facebook posts. 

 I know black don't crack, but the indomitable Super G looks younger than he did 25 years ago.  People were tripping out about that as he walked in last night.  WTF G?  Good to see the man who took a bullet (literally, he did) and survived intensive care JUST so he could pay Moeller back the $1100 he owed for T-shirts he had made.

People I don't know listening to Chris tell stories on the mike as 44 Something plays in the background.  That's Keith Treanor doing a turndown at Moreno Valley on the screen. 

She never had a name that I know of, but the S&M T-shirt dominatrix chick (Sadistic Sadie is my nickname for her) made it to the book launch, on two classic green S&M "chick shirt" T-shirts, I saw guys wearing.  Whip it, whip it good.

Chris Moeller in "Leg Muscles": The Chain Wallet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I've got  a new blog going, it's about building an art or creative business, or any small business.  You can check it out here:
WPOS Kreative Ideas

Meeting Chris Moeller 32 years ago

For some reason, there aren't many videos of Chris Moeller riding on YouTube.  Home video cameras were still expensive in those days, which is part of the reason.  But this crazy jump from 1990 is classic Chris Moeller.  According to a recent podcast, Moeller and S&M Bikes are finishing up a book commemorating 30 years in business.  Actually, that was last year, but books take time to make happen.  Since I was around S&M Bikes for a few years, I figured now would be a good time tell some of those BMX tales.

For the old school BMXers who read my blog, you know that I published a zine that somehow landed me a job at Wizard Publications in 1986, home of BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines.  That's what launched me into the BMX freestyle industry.  Many of you also know that I didn't last there very long, five months is all it was.  But a lot of amazing stuff happened during that five months.  I first heard of, and first met, racer and insane jumper Chris Moeller during that time, among other things. 

Gork was the editor of BMX Action magazine, while I worked there, and he was also my roommate during that time, as was Lew, Assistant editor of FREESTYLIN'.  So we were talking about BMX and riders at work, out riding at night, at lunch, hanging out at home, but not on the ride to work in the morning.  The reason we didn't talk on the way to work is because Gork was (and still is, I'm sure) a total metalhead, and he always had Metallica, Saxon, or some other metal blasting in his van during our commute.  Lew and I didn't have cars, so we rode with Gork or rode our bikes to work.  Like any group of BMXers, when one of us saw or heard of something cool, we were talking about it at all times.

That's how it was when Gork came in after a photo shoot in Huntington Beach one day, and said he met this local kid who was a crazy good jumper, better than the pro Gork and Windy took to the photo shoot.  That kid was Chris Moeller, about 15 or 16 at the time.  It wasn't that Gork said "Hey, we ran into some local down in Huntington Beach who's a good jumper."  Gork was freaking out about how insane of a jumper this Moeller kid was.  He mentioned it in the morning, told us more about the kid at lunch, and kept bringing it up.  According to Gork, Chris would just try anything off a jump. So that was the first time I ever heard of Chris Moeller.

Not long after that, Gork set up a photo shoot specifically with Chris, I think it was another bike testshoot.  On that shoot, they wound up at a place called Hidden Valley, which is a weird little valley, hidden behind a shopping center at Beach and Adams in Huntington Beach.  There have been jumps in that general area since the early 80's, and maybe longer.

In the little valley part itself, there's this sketchy old tree swing on the side of a big hill with a set of cruiser handlebars on the end of the rope.  In fact, it's the tree swing you see Ed Templeton on at 1:34 in this video.  In the mid-80's there was a little dirt lip at the top of this hill, and you could jump off it and down the the hill, haul ass, and try to ride into a little trail through the brush at the bottom.  Hardly anyone ever jumped this, it was just too sketchy.

But on that first official photo shoot, young Chris Moeller jumped it.  And he didn't just jump 12 feet and bomb down the hill after he landed.  Chris did a head-high no footer down it, on a test bike, I think.  No one, NO ONE, got more than two or three off the ground on that sketchy bonzai jump.  and NO ONE did a trick down it.  ANY trick.  To be honest, the jump down the hill next to the tire swing was pretty much just a dare jump.  If you had a really stupid friend with a BMX bike, you'd dare them to jump it... and then watch him eat shit.

But Moeller jumped down it, soaring head high at a time when that was insane.  He did a no-footer at a time when only a handful of people could actually do a no-footer off a jump.  He blew Gork's mind.  So much so that Gork took Windy's photo sequence, and pieced them together on the Xerox machine to make a multi-image sequence out of actual paper.  No Photo Shop in 1986, Gork spent the time to do it by hand.  AND he talked about this kid Chris Moeller for about two weeks straight.  That turned Chris into a prime BMX Action test rider, which is some great coverage for a young rider.

Later that fall, I rode with Gork down to a national race in Lake Elsinore, an hour or so South, and inland, from the Wizard warehouse in Torrance.  On the way, Gork told me he was going to give a young rider a ride, the kid didn't have a ride to get to the race.  At an upscale condo complex in Huntington Beach, we picked up Chris Moeller.  He said "hi" to Gork, put his bike in the back of the Wizard Astro van, and didn't say a single word all the way to the race.  He just sat in the back, silent as could be, while Gork and I sat up front and talked.  I figured that Chris Moeller kid must be really shy or something.  It turns out I was wrong there.

That's how I met Chris Moeller, Orange County racer, soon to be a huge pioneer in dirt jumping, and also soon to start his own bike company (with Greg Scott).   Now 30 years later, S&M Bikes has book coming out soon.  So I figured it would be as good a time as any to share some of my own tales from the S&M Bikes posse that I knew in those days. 

I'm going to be sharing most of my old school BMX stories on the new Block Bikes Blog from now on, check it out...

Bernie Sanders rides Slam Bars

Remember yesterday when I told you there were some really cool murals here in Richmond, Virginia?  I saw this one on the bus today while headed for a library to work on my latest drawing.  Freakin' cool.  If you're an old school BMXer Has Been like me, this is cool mostly because it looks  so much like the slam pit punker on the S&M Bikes Slam Bars logo from way back.

In one of my former lives, as Chris Moeller's roommate and sporadic S&M Bikes worker, I put a lot of these stickers on bars back when the image was new.  So when I saw the Bernie mural during our last presidential/Russian hacked/non-election, I thought it was a great mural.  I had no idea it was here in Richmond until I rode by it half an hour ago.  Pretty cool that I randomly saw it today.  I was trying to think of a subject for an old school BMX post for today, I guess it's time for an S&M Bikes tale later today.
Here's the original Circle Jerks logo that inspired both the Slam Bar logo and the Bernie mural here in Richmond.