Here's the crazy thing, when you look up FREESTYLIN' magazine on YouTube, almost nothing comes up. How is there no documentary about FREESTYLIN'? Mark Eaton, what are you up to these days? This video above is former EXPN website editor Brian Tunney shooting a video at 3162 Kashiwa Street in Torrance, California, in 2019, I believe. That building was the longtime home of Wizard Publications, which put out BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines, as well as two or three issues of Homeboy magazine. The words, and especially the photos, that came out of this building in the 1980's, changed the lives of thousands of us BMXers and early freestylers in that era. This is the best video I could find paying homage to FREESTYLIN'.
Bob "Oz" Osborn, founder and owner of Wizard Publications, begins the introduction for the FREESTYLIN' magazine staff introduction at 30:30 in that link above.
Last weekend, September 21st, 2024, the legendary staff of FREESTYLIN' magazine was inducted into the USA BMX Hall of Fame, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, for the BMX freestyle "Industry" category. The staff of FREESTYLIN' inducted includes the editor Andy Jenkins, assistant editor Mark "Lew" Lewman, managing editor/proofreader Don Tosach, art director Janice Jenkins, associate editor/photographer Spike Jonze, advertising salesperson Valerie Adlam, and receptionist/mild-mannered superhuman Dian Harlan. They are all completely deserving of this honor, and it's great to see them all included in the official BMX Hall of Fame. This group of people inspired thousands of us kids doing tricks on bikes around the U.S. and around the world, including me. Wizard Publications owner Bob Osborn, and his daughter and photographer, Windy Osborn are already members of the BMX Hall of Fame.
FREESTYLIN' magazine was the bible of 1980's BMX freestyle. It was, by far, the hippest, coolest, most stylish BMX magazine ever. I was a dorky BMX freestyler in Boise Idaho, way up at 43 degrees of latitude, when the first issue of FREESTYLIN' magazine came out in the summer of 1984. I didn't even see the first two issues of it until long after they came out. The first issue of the mag that I got my hands on was issue #3. It had SE Racing freestyler Todd Anderson one the cover, blasting a one footed tabletop over a convertible Volkswagen bug full of SE's BMX racing legends, including Scot Breithaupt, Perry Kramer, Toby Henderson, and several others. From that issue on, I spent hours reading every single issue of FREESTYLIN' for the next several years.
Like so many other riders out there at the time, when it was definitely not cool to do tricks on a "little kid's bike," FREESTYLIN' was the main thread showing us kids around the world what was happening in Southern California in BMX freestyle, and later all over the U.S. and the world. In 1984-1985-1986 and beyond, we didn't have the internet, YouTube, or even very many BMX freestyle videos in those early years. FREESTYLIN' was where we got the news, new tricks, style, attitude, and DIY ethic that was the rapidly changing and progressing sport of BMX freestyle. As my blog readers know, BMX freestyle changed the entire course of my life, and FREESTYLIN' magazine was a huge inspiration in those years. I had a complete collection of FREESTYLIN' issues, until I lost them in a move back east in 2008.
Here are a few clips of some of the FREESTYLIN' magazine staff members since the 1980's.
This was the first video that BMX Plus! magazine produced, in 1985. In those days, professional quality video equipment was really expensive, and to make a video to sell copies of, you had to hire a professional video production company to shoot, produce, and edit the video. That meant spending tens of thousands of dollars for the project. Because of this high financial barrier to entry, not many BMX freestyle videos got made in the mid and late 1980's.
"You can't get good by sitting around thinking about it. It's something you have to physically get out and do."
-Brian Scura, Freestyle's Raddest Tricks
What we called BMX freestyle in the 1980's began in the late 1970's, when Bob Haro and a friend started doing tricks on their BMX racing bikes. This video came out in 1985. In the intro, Bob says he had been freestyling for 8 years, putting the birth of BMX freestyle around 1977.
Yes, people have been doing tricks on bicycles since bikes were invented, which around 1875. The first time a cute girl walked by a guy on an early bike is probably when the first bike trick was invented. That's my thinking, anyhow. But the thing we call freestyle, the hobby, sport, and lifestyle of doing tricks on 20 inch BMX bikes, began with Bob Haro and his friend John.
Within a year or so, he began doing demos at BMX races, and then doing shows at other events. He rode with R.L. Osborn not long after, living with the Osborn family, while drawing cartoons and working at BMX Action. He started making custom number plates for racers. Bob Haro did his first freestyle tour with Bob Morales about 1980. R.L., the son of BMX Action magazine founder, Bob "Oz" Osborn, started the BMX Action Trick Team in 1980 or 1981. Bob Morales started MF, Morales/Fiola, with top skatepark rider, Eddie Fiola, making stickers and leathers, I think, and went on to start Dyno, an accessories company. Soon after he was putting on the first BMX freestyle contest series, in the skateparks in 1983, turning freestyle into a competitive sport.
My point here is that from about 1977 to 1982, BMX freestyle was a handful of really entrepreneurial guys doing shows, and a larger group of guys who rode BMX bikes in skateparks. Mike Buff, Jeff Watson, Fred Becker, Tinker Juarez, Steve "Bio Air Bennett, Martin Aparijo, and Woody Itson were some of the main riders in those early years, all in Southern California.
Then freestyle started getting photos in magazines, which got a good response, and it began to grow larger. Bob Haro's number plate business took off. Dyno, Bob Morales' accessory company, got bought by GT Bikes. R.L. Osborn and Mike Buff toured the U.S. and parts of Europe. Everywhere these guys did shows, a few kids got hooked on this new thing called BMX freestyle, growing the sport organically. Bob Haro redesigned a Torker, and put out the first bike specifically designed for freestyle, in 1983, the Haro Freestyler, later called the Haro Master.
By the time BMX Plus! magazine put out this video in 1985, Haro, GT, Redline, Hutch, CW, and other companies had freestyle bikes on the market. BMX Action started FREESTYLIN' magazine in the fall of 1984. They also put out a video, made documentary style, of the BMX Action Trick Team, in 1985. That was the first wave of popularity of BMX freestyle, and that's when this video came out.
In the 1980's, the BMX media was all about the magazines, beginning with BMX Action, BMX Plus!, and Super BMX. FREESTYLIN'magazine, the "Thrasher" of BMX, came out in the fall of 1984. BMX Plus! put out some one shot freestyle magazines, Freestyle Spectacular, in 1986, and then came out with American Freestyler. Super BMX put out Freestyle magazine soon after. If you wanted to get sponsored, you had to get coverage in magazines, and there were six magazines, in 1987-1988. It was all about magazine photos. Many pros, and some amateurs, got a "photo contingency," a cash bonus, if they got photo in a magazine, bigger money for bigger photos. Some riders got coverage for their skill, and a few became coverage whores, always hanging out at the magazines or calling up photographers to see if they needed riders that week.
Videos in the 1980's cost a lot of money to produce, easily $20,000 to $40,000, to hire a video production company and make a half hour video, like Freestyle's Raddest Tricks, above. Consumer video cameras existed, VHS, and 8mm, (before Hi8), but the quality degraded really fast when you edited and made copies of them. Because of this, there weren't many BMX freestyle videos in that first wave of freestyle's popularity. BMX Plus! and GT Bikes ruled the 1980's BMX freestyle video market. Because there were so few videos put out, no standard form existed then. That's why many early videos didn't have sections for each rider. That concept was one of many at the time. Most videos had a bunch of riders, riding together at a shoot, to save money. Then they were edited in a montage.
Another thing, riders had their tricks dialed back then, because doing shows, riding in contests, and photo shoots for sponsored riders, were the main forms of showing your tricks to other riders and everyday people. It wasn't about doing something super gnarly and getting it on video one time. You had to be able to land that trick 9 times out of 10, or better, 10 out of 10. Because of this, when it came to the few video shoots, riders were doing the tricks they practiced every day. Each separate shoot in this video probably took place over one to three hours. So riders weren't trying something to get it once. They did the tricks they could do almost every time, and then the shoot was over. There was no going back to get the shot a week over. Either you pulled your best tricks at the shoot, or you didn't.
Since BMX freestyle was spawned from BMX racing only a few years earlier, riders wore racing leathers to promote their sponsors, and even helmets, goggles, and sometimes jofas (mouth guards).on flatland. They did this because the BMX companies, the magazines, and the video producers didn't want to get sued if some kid got injured trying this stuff at home. Yes, it looks goofy and hokey, but that was the nature of this brand new sport back then.
BMX freestyle was this weird hybrid of BMX racing and jumping, and skateboarding in pools, which is where the airs came from. Its influences ranged from motocross, to BMX racing, to surfing (skaters first rode pools to imitate surfing waves), and skateboarding. All of these influences were coming together, and nobody really knew what the fuck they were doing then, in the sense that everything was new. Riders, the magazines, and video producers were all trying different ideas with this new and emerging little sport, trying to find out what worked in riding, for photos and video, and on the business side. Much like skateboarding in the 1970's, BMX freestyle was considered a fad then, by most people. It was some weird little fad that would go away in a couple of years, but it was new and fun to watch. Obviously, over the 39 years since Freestyle's Raddest Tricks came out, BMX freestyle, or whatever you may call it now in its various forms, has evolved in many different directions. None of us expected it to get as big and widespread as it has back in 1985.
I bought this video for $29.95, by mail order, in the fall of 1985. I had just moved to San Jose, California, and was 19 years old. I wasn't going to college, I was working nights at a Pizza Hut, and I had no friends yet in San Jose. Freestyle was it, that was my whole focus, at that point in time. I was riding 2 to 4 hours everyday, often wandering around San Jose, exploring my new region. I was just starting my first zine, as a way to meet some other freestylers in the Bay Area.
I watched this video seven times the day I got it in the mail. Two of those times I sat on my handlebars of my bike, balancing on it, feet on the front wheel, through the whole video, without putting my foot down. That just seemed like the hardcore thing to do that day. I watched this video dozens of times over the next year. I watched it so many times, that I remembered the goofy, electronic "canned music," which video producers used in many different types of videos in those days, to avoid getting sued for copyright infringement. I heard some of this exact same music in at least two porno videos in the years after I bought this video. Yeah, they used the same canned music other video producers did then, which is pretty funny.
Freestyle's Raddest Tricks, the two sequels, and the GT Bikes videos GT-V and Demo Tape, were the most widely watched, and most influential BMX freestyle videos of the late 1980's. As my blog works towards its 1,000th blog post, and I look back on major influences in those early days of 1980's BMX freestyle, this video was a huge influence on me, and almost all of us.
Here's Dave Vanderspek on a local news segment about him and the Curb Dogs from 1985.
It's really cool to see Dave Vanderspek, leader of the Curb Dogs, inventor of the Vander Roll, and amazing BMX freestyle rider, inducted into the BMX Hall of Fame. As I've written about several times before, I lived in San Jose in 1985-86, and published my first zine there. That zine, San Jose Stylin', is what landed me the job at BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines in August of 1986. Most of what I covered in 11 issues of that zine was the Bay Area scene, was made up of Dave Vanderspek, Maurice Meyer, and the Curb Dogs, and Robert Peterson, and the Skyway riders.
So I knew Vander, and the other guys in that scene, and rode with them on the weekends, whenever I could get up to the monthly Beach Park Ramp Jams, or San Francisco. The Golden Gate Park/Bay Area freestyle scene was the most cohesive scene of that era. Most of the guys were at Golden Gate Park, on Sunday afternoons, every week. All of the pros, Dave, Maurice, Robert Peterson, Rick Allison, Oleg Konings, and Hugo Gonzales, were always cool with helping newer and younger riders learn and improve. That happened, to some degree, in most scenes then. But it was a much bigger thing in the Bay Area.
Dave, Maurice, Bert, and all those pros would help all of us learn new tricks. Just the little things, "Hey, if you put your foot here, it would help you come out of it," or "I think if you lean this way, it'll help." That kind of thing. Some pros back then were just more into their own riding. They wanted to learn new tricks and push the boundaries. Teaching new riders wasn't a priority for many pros of the day. The NorCal guys wanted everybody in the scene to improve, and have fun riding, not just themselves.
The Golden Gate Park scene had a different vibe than every other freestyle scene I saw at the time. Even if some brand new kid rolled up, who could only do one or two tricks, they'd help the kid learn something new that session. That "make the whole scene better" vibe seemed to emanate from Dave, and through everyone else. The more time went on, the more that had an effect on me, and still does, decades later.
The reality is, I talked some smack about Vander back then, and was definitely jealous of how much magazine coverage he got, early on. I'd seen photos of him in the magazines, before moving to San Jose. Then I met him, and he seemed like a total goofball, he totally reminded my of Jeff Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. I didn't take him seriously at first.
The best BMX photo I ever shot, this photo was complete luck. I was just holding the camera. Dave Vanderspek, at speed, at the Palm Springs Tramway Road GPV event, 1987.
Then I got the job at the magazines, and learned that Andy and Lew at FREESTYLIN' were some of Vander's biggest fans. It was actually in the handful of times I saw Dave after moving to Southern California, that I gained a lot more respect for him. After meeting and riding with several other top pros, and seeing Dave ride some more times, I realized just how good of a rider he was.
At one of the Velodrome contests, I rolled up to this little patch of pavement in the infield, near the contest area. Dave was sitting there on his bike. He started pedaling slow, and said, "Check this out." Then he did a huge bunnyhop, and landed in a pedal stall, on the hubba part of this small set of stairs. This was 1987, a year before the Santee Meet-the-Street contest. Street riding was barely even a thing then. Dave's pedal stall was like four feet off the ground. Street grinds hadn't been invented yet. Wall rides hadn't been invented yet. And Vander was doing this trick that would be impressive now, 36 years later. Then he hopped down, and said, "Hey your frame is cracked." Sure enough, there was a hairline crack in the Raleigh I was riding, right at this weird gusset it had. I hadn't even noticed. He explained why the weird design of the gusset would always be prone to cracks at that spot, just the way it was designed. I later told Raleigh, and they changed the design, making the gusset much better.
A couple of other times, Dave would roll up at an event, and talk about all the new tricks I'd learned since moving to SoCal. For a few minutes we'd just talk about tricks or new stuff we were working on. I had only ridden with Dave, at the Beach Park Jams, or Golden Gate Park, maybe a dozen times, while living in San Jose. But he remembered what tricks I had been doing then, and commented on new stuff I was doing, a year or two later. It wasn't just me, he did that for all the riders he knew, at any level. So he'd blow my mind with some crazy trick or move, then just sit there and talk a bit, like we'd been hanging out, riding together for years. He truly wanted to see everyone he knew keep improving, and get as good at freestyle, or skating, as possible. For a guy who was a solid, pro caliber rider, and who was always busy self-promoting shows, and all kinds of other stuff all the time, that was amazing.
So it's great to see him honored in the BMX Hall of Fame now. Here are a few other videos of Dave and the Curb Dogs, Skyway, and other NorCal riders and skaters of that era.
And just for good measure, here's a local news segment about Maurice Meyer, which also shows the Golden Gate Park scene, and several of the amateur riders, as well.
Dave Vanderspek tribute drawing I did a couple years ago. #sharpiescribblestyle
I've been doing most of my new writing on Substack now, check it out:
Held in an arena in Portland, Oregon, in 1987, this video of AFA Freestyle Masters was the first video I ever directed. Getting the job of producing this video is another thing that pretty much changed the course of my life in the BMX world, though I didn't realize it until months later. Unreel Productions editor Dave Alvarez and founder Don Hoffman shepherded me through the video production process, because I didn't have a clue what I was doing. I haven't seen this video since about 1988, I just stumbled on it on YouTube.
The riders in the intro are: Ron Wilkerson, unknown, Darren Pelio (?), Mike Loveridge, Mike Perkins, Kenneth Evans, Jason Parkes, Rick Allison, Dave Vanderspek (with skateboard), Dave Nourie, Martin Aparijo, and R.L. Osborn (not counting the mugshots of riders watching).
This video has all of the pro flatland runs, start to finish, with no cuts. Basically, it was cheaper to do it that way, to not edit the runs. Plus , we didn't pay for the edit time at Unreel, ($150 to $200 an hour or so then), we couldn't take forever editing this. I think we edited this video in two eight hour edit sessions. The pro riders, in order, are: Robert Peterson, Josh White, Dave Nourie, Rick Allison, Ron Wilkerson, Martin Aparijo, Fred Blood, Dave Vanderspek, Chris Lashua, Pete Agustin, and R.L. Osborn.
I was at the Oregon contest, mostly as an AFA roadie, but also as a rider. What I remember most from this contest was that Oregon 1987 was the contest when scuffing took off, thanks to the backyard, the backwards on the back wheel scuffing trick, which came from out of the San Francisco Golden Gate Park scene. I think Tim Treacy invented the trick, but I can't remember for sure.
But that was the trick of the contest, everyone was trying to learn it in the jam circles around the contest site, and at the hotel at night. The first scuffing trick I know of was one Oleg Konings did, as far back as 1984, standing on one peg, on the side of the bike. Of the pros at this contest, only Robert Peterson did a single scuffing trick. But that one trick, the backyard, caught fire at this contest, and began to change freestyle forever. It started with a whole range of one wheel, forward rolling tricks, while scuffing. Soon after, came the popularity of the hang 5, the whiplash, Kevin Jones and the locomotive, and the trend towards one wheel scuffing, and later gliding tricks. So while there's not a single backyard in this video, that was the big bit of progression that happened at this contest.
Another phase of riding changes was the trend toward linking tricks together that was gaining popularity in early 1987. R.L. Osborn was one of the first pros to begin linking tricks. He also did the backwards grip ride at the end, a mind blowing trick for that time period. As far as the linking went, several other pros were still in the: do a trick, ride a bit, do a trick, ride a bit, format. That had been the standard until then. In the intro, you can see an amateur rider, who I think is Darren Pelio (SE uniform) linking several tricks, and also Kenneth Evans (white uniform) also linking several tricks. That was another rising trend at the time. Soon they merged, with the scuffing and gliding, one wheel rolling tricks being linked together. As far as riding goes, those were two big trends at this contest.
Another thing at this contest was the ever revolutionary Dave Vanderspek, always ahead of his time, using a skateboard in his run. You can hear the crowd cheering, we all loved it. The judges, unfortunately for Dave, didn't like it, and Dave placed at the back of the pro pack, getting 7th or 8th I think. After we got back to California, Dave called the AFA, trying to figure out why he didn't place higher. Since I had ridden up in the Bay area for a bit, I wound up on the phone with Dave for maybe 20 minutes, trying to explain that I didn't know why the judges didn't like the skateboard addition to his routine. He got more people cheering than anyone, but judging was based mostly on doing the most popular tricks well, not touching down a foot, and a little bit of originality. For what it's worth, Dave's crazy bike/skate run later got featured in the Vision Street Wear video Mondo Vision, which sold about 40,000 copies, and no other BMX flatlander got featured. In the long run, Dave Vanderspek got far more coverage from this contest than anyone else.
The one other thing I remember from this contest was that the parking lot had a couple of levels. There was a big, wide ramp up to the higher level, kind of like a flyout jump, but for cars. As the main AFA roadie guy, I got sent out in the rental minivan to run errands, several times, on the day or two before the contest. The parking plot was completely empty then. Every time I hit that ramp a bit faster, and finally hit it at 50 or 55 mph. I'm pretty sure I got the minivan completely off the ground. So that was memorable for me. I may have just topped out the shocks, but I think I got a couple inches of air. If so, that's the only time I ever jumped a motorized vehicle.
It would be hard for today's riders to even imagine the BMX freestyle world of the 1980's. No cell phones, no Instagram, no social media at all, no internet, and only a handful of people owned their own video cameras, mostly big VHS ones, personal computers were just becoming a thing, the revolutionary Apple Macinstosh had only been out for 3 years. One of them might have 6 KILObytes of memory, if you had an external hard drive. A kilobyte is 1/1,000th of a megabyte. None of those desktops could edit video, they were for word processing and simple games, the "desktop publishing" revolution was just getting going. Back in those days, when we went riding, we just went riding. Nobody was shooting video or photos, unless you were doing a magazine photo shoot. We didn't document our sessions, we just rode.
In 1987, when I produced this video for the American Freestyle Association (AFA), only BMX companies made videos, riders didn't make their own videos. The only rider-made freestyle videos I'd seen before this were some 5 minute clips edited by New York rider Carl Marquardt, Eddie Roman's school project, the 15 or so minute version of Aggro Riding and Kung Fu Fighting, and the Gork Video, which BMX Action editor Gork made, all from 1986.
In the mid 1980's, professional video cameras cost $20,000 to $50,000, and the equipment. To make a video of anything back then, from an industrial training or promotion video, to a local TV commercial, to a BMX freestyle video, you had to hire a professional video production company. One early BMX video cost $40,000 to shoot, edit, and produce. Then you had to get the VHS tapes made, about $3 each, and design and get boxes printed, and then ship out the orders. The BMX Action Trick Team/magazine video, Rippin', came out in 1985, and was produced in a full documentary style. That's what the video crew knew how to do, make short documentaries. The BMX Plus! video, Freestyle's Raddest Tricks, also came out in 1985, in more of a live TV show style. That was the first video I bought, and I watched it 7 times the day it came in the mail, twice while balancing on my bike in the living room through the whole video. Seriously. GT Bikes made GT-V in 1986, and only a handful more videos came out before 1990.
At that point, the first skateboard videos, , and Powell-Peralta's The Bones Brigade Video Show (1984), and Vision's SkateVisions (1985), had only come out a couple years earlier. The whole concept of making skateboard and BMX videos was just being invented. The natural idea was to make a "little movie on video," with some bad acting, and often some goofy comedy bits. There was no standard way to make a BMX or skateboard video yet. So different people were trying different ideas for several years.
The cheaper way to make videos was Wayne's World style, by producing TV shows for a local PBS channel, where you got to borrow cameras and editing equipment. You had to produce a TV show to air, but you could also work on your own ideas while you had the borrowed equipment, or make a home video out of your public access show. That's what Don Hoffman, who later formed Unreel Productions with Vision Skateboards did. If you're an Old School BMX freestyler and don't known who Don Hoffman is, you should. Don made videos like this, which also aired as local TV shows on PBS, before making videos for Vision Skateboards, Sims Snowboards, and Vision Street Wear. He started BMX and skateboard videos in about 1984, before the other companies got into the game. In this short clip, you can see Don Hoffman on the left, Bob Morales, who started the AFA, in the middle, and, of course, Eddie Fiola on the right. Don was actually the biggest pioneer of BMX videos, having made 7 or 8 PBS shows/videos by 1987, of most of the ASPA/AFA skatepark contests.
Bob Morales hired me to be the editor of the AFA newsletter, American Freestyle, in late January of 1987, about a month after I got laid off from FREESTYLIN' magazine because I didn't like the band Skinny Puppy. For the ballin' amount of $5 an hour (CA minimum wages was $3.35/hour then), I became the editor/photographer of the monthly newsletter that went out to about 3,000 AFA members. But the AFA was a tiny business, consisting of just Bob, his sister Riki, and me, when I started. So I also answered phones, put heat transfers on T-shirts, helped fold and address all 3,000 newsletters, was a roadie at AFA contests, and did anything else that came up. I went from a few months of sitting in an office without much to do most of the time, to doing all kinds of different stuff every day.
About three months into working there, Bob walked into the back office where I worked and asked if I wanted to make a TV commercial for the Austin, Texas contest. He learned he could buy local spots on MTV for $25 each. Since I had absolutely no idea how to make a TV commercial, and since I worked for Bob and new he expected me to do it anyway, I said, "Sure." There was a huge, "We'll figure it out as we go" attitude at the AFA, DIY all the way when it came to anything new. "How do I make a TV commercial," I asked. "Call Don Hoffman at Unreel, he'll tell you," Bob replied. I had no idea that 30 second conversation in 1987 would lead to me producing 15 BMX, skateboard, and snowboard videos, working on about 10 Vision videos, and working on over 300 TV episodes of about a dozen different shows. But that's how life works, sometimes little conversations or incidents lead to a whole new direction in life.
For the 1987 AFA Freestyle Masters national series, Vision Street Wear clothes were a sponsor. Part of the deal was that they would send a cameraman to each of the six contests around the country. For the Oregon contest, that was an Unreel producer/cameraman named Gary Langenheim. He had worked mostly on surf TV shows before Unreel. The deal with the video footage was that both AFA and Vision/Unreel could use any of the footage for commercials, home videos, or whatever. So I called up Don Hoffman at Unreel, and he said to come over the next day, and they'd give me VHS copies of all the raw footage, window dubs, as they were called. There was a box in the picture when the videos played, a "window" with rolling numbers. That told me the time code. I would watch the videos at home, and write down the time code of each shot I wanted, then make a list of all those shots. When I did that, they told me to come back, and they'd set up a session to come in an edit the video.
Luckily I rented a room from a guy who was an ex-video editor himself, so we had a cool TV and VCR set-up, which made it easier. So I spent a few nights and part of a weekend watching all the footage, maybe three hours of total footage. But when you pause the video to write down the numbers, it takes much longer to "log" the footage. I went through all the video, and wrote down everything interesting, the best riding, and also face shots and crowd shots (cutaway shots), and the start and end times of each pro rider's run. After about a week, I had that done, and called up Unreel again.
They scheduled an edit session with their video editor, a techno wizard in the form of a 25-year-old guy named Dave Alvarez, with long, straight brown hair, Vision board shorts, and a different tie dyed shirt every day. They led me back up to Unreel's $500,000 Betacam edit bay (similar to this), which was capable of editing broadcast TV shows. The room was in the back, on the second floor, of the Unreel offices. It had about a dozen monitors (TV screens), and two banks of VTR's (pro caliber VCR's), which cost $5,000 to $20,000 each. There were two really nice office chairs on a linoleum floor, then a bar type thing behind them. You could step up, and there was a big, black leather chair and couch, so other people could watch an editing session. That room blew my mind, and intimidated me. I felt like I was on the bridge in Star Trek in there, except the lighting was always low.
For the intro, Dave picked some music, which I think he and another guy named Dave had created and recorded themselves. It was either that or canned music, which in the 1980's was usually kind of bland, electronic music, that video producers could buy, and use in videos as much as they wanted. You could get seriously sued for using popular, copyrighted music in those pre-internet, pre sharing economy days. Canned music was used in a wide variety of home videos in those days. I remember hearing some of the same music used in a BMX Plus! video also used in multiple porno videos.
Anyhow, Dave introduced me to what he called "fancy news editing." By laying down the music track first, he could then play me a short piece of the music, and say, "I need a shot that looks like this sounds." I'd go through my log sheets, to a shot that was about the right length, that I thought would fit the music, and tell him the time code. Dave would pull up that shot, and fit it over the music, so that the beginning of the shot, any movements, and the end of the shot, would all fall right on beats of the music. This takes much longer to do well, than just chopping shots together, but it flows and watches much better. That was one of the first video editing tricks Dave Alvarez taught me.
It was really fun sitting there and directing a video, shot by shot, in that crazy edit bay room. Dave and I got along well, and only argued about the length of the shots. As a video editor, he wanted to "keep the video tight," and get out of a shot as quick as possible. That makes the video flow better, and not seem to lag. But as a BMX freestyler myself, I wanted to extend shots, to show that the rider actually landed the trick and rode away. We argued quite a bit at first about this, and wound up splitting the difference much of the time. He'd make shots a tad longer than he normally would have, but they would show the landing of the tricks, not just a really quick shot mid trick. Actions sports videos actually did change how videos and TV shows got made later on, bringing our views as riders and skaters into account. Things like shooting with a fisheye lens close-up, to get the full body in a shot, and riding skateboards or rollerblades with a camera, next to someone to get shot, and many other things became more popular from all their use in 1990's BMX, skateboard, snowboard, and other action sports videos.
In the edit bay, Dave and I spent most of the first day just editing the intro of the video, and the second day we edited the rest of the video, because they were much simpler, cuts edits, and because the pros flatland runs were 4 minutes long, with no editing during the runs. This made this a pretty simple video to edit, from Dave's standpoint. There were minimal effects, and long segments, so the editing went quick. "Effects are an excuse for bad editing most of the time" Dave taught me.
When we got to the credits, I was actually surprised when Dave told me I was the "director." In my head, a director was someone like Steven Spielberg or George Lucas, spending months or years making big, complicated movies. But Dave explained how it worked in home videos. The executive producer was one or more people who paid for the thing, or ran the company that paid for it. They often had nothing to do with actually making the video. The producer was the person in charge of actually making sure the whole project got done. The director was the person who actually picked what shots went in the video, and in what order. The editor was the person actually at the controls, editing the video clips together. So, for the whopping sum of $250 that I got paid to be the producer and director of this AFA video, I was both producer and director. It sounded way more prestigious than it was, but I was cool with that.
After we finished editing the show, Unreel made a duplication master, that's a high quality copy of the original master tape, so they didn't wear out the master tape every time they made copies from it. Everything was edited on actual videotape then, digital video editing was still a few years away for the high end TV shows, and about a decade away for prosumer video. Since the AFA only sold a few dozen of this video, and the ones that followed, Unreel made us a few copies when we needed them. I went over Costa Mesa and picked them up, then we'd ship them out at the AFA ourselves.
Home videos generally cost about $30 each then, so even after paying me and paying Unreel for the video copies, there was a good profit in it for the AFA. Selling 40 to 60 of each of these contest videos, made the AFA maybe $500 to $1,000 bucks on each video. That's not huge by video standards. But money was always tight at the AFA. Bob Morales didn't take much of a salary from the AFA, if any at all. He actually made his living then mostly from creating ads for several BMX companies, and his other business ventures, like Mor Distributing, and Auburn Bikes.
So that's how I wound up being one of the first actual riders to produce and direct a few of the early, if not that popular, BMX freestyle videos. I ended up doing six videos for the AFA in 1987, one each for flatland and ramps, from the Oregon, Texas, and Ohio contests. A couple of the clips from those videos made it into Mark Eaton's Joe Kid on a Stingray BMX documentary, many years later, in 2005. The shot at 2:18 of Matt Hoffman in that trailer, and the following shot of Kevin Jones doing a locomotive, were from the AFA videos I did. I had nothing to do with Joe Kid on a Stingray, but it was cool to see a couple of those AFA videos survived for over15 years, and that Mark used a couple shots from them.
I mentioned at the top of this post that Dave Alvarez was a techno wizard of an editor. I'm not just saying that because he made this video, and the next 5 I did for the AFA, look really professional. Local TV new personality, Chuck Henry, ended up stealing Dave from Unreel Productions in late 1989, I think. Dave went to work at KABC, editing Chuck's news magazine show, Eye on L.A.*. In his first year of editing in Hollywood, Dave Alvarez won an emmy for his work, so he really was, and is, a top notch video editor.
So that's the story of the first video I produced and directed. The Oregon Pro Flatland video led to those five other videos for the AFA, and then to getting hired to work at Unreel Productions in December of 1987. Beginning as a guy dubbing videos for different people at Vision and Unreel, I wound up becoming an decent cameraman, and working on a whole lot more home videos and TV shows, over the next 8 years. That 30 second conversation with Bob Morales, agreeing to make a low budget TV commercial, changed the direction of my working life.
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First of all, it was 1988. Keep that in mind. The band Metal MC was supposed to be part Anthrax and part Beastie Boys. It was neither. On one hand, blending hard rock and rap in one band did get huge about a decade later, with Limp Bizkit, Kid Rock, and others. So you can't blame the guys for trying. Maybe they were just the wrong guys, maybe they were too early on that idea. But Metal MC didn't take off. But they did give us SoCal BMX freestylers an excuse for a really fun jam, one summer afternoon in 1988.
The area on the bike path, underneath the Huntington Beach Pier, looked like this when I first rode up in the early spring of 1987. That's French freestyle skater Pierre Andre' in the video, one of the H.B. Pier locals in those days. That is the best video showing the area we rode and skated every Saturday and Sunday, in the late 1980's and into the 1990's. There's an open restaurant area in this spot now, where there used to be an arcade, a bike rental place, and the Green Burrito Mexican restaurant on the south end of the building. The bike path is still there, but the whole are looks much different now. Here's a quick history of the H.B. Pier, from 1902 to 1985. The end of the pier got trashed in another storm in early 1988, and was rebuilt and reopened in 1991, I believe.
Most of what people now know as "Main Street" in Huntington Beach today, didn't exist in the 1980's and 1990's. The Main Street I was introduced to was a bunch of two story brick buildings, and there were a few empty shops. There was a liquor store one block inland, on the corner, and very few people, like a handful, walking around at night. The legendary Golden Bear nightclub, where Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and hundreds of other great musicians played, from the 1930's to the early 1980's, had closed down in 1983.
There were about 5 bars in Downtown H.B. then. Cagney's was behind Jack's Surf Shop on PCH. Heading inland there was Perq's, Ma(fuckin')zotti's, The Long Board, and Skeefer's. Maybe one or two more. Main Street was dingy, and most people in the city didn't come down there often at night, they went to the Newport Pier area bars, or other spots to party. The Electric Chair record shop was just inland of where the fountain now is, a small storefront, with milk crates of punk albums and 7 inches on folding tables. The P.O. Curb, now replaced by the low wall protruding from Rockin' Fig Surf Shop (still in the same location) was getting skated every night.
Huntington Beach was a weird, occasionally wild, little surf town then. There were oil pumps all over downtown then, even right on PCH (Pacific Coast Highway). As a Midwest kid who spent high school in Boise, Idaho, I'd never seen a town like Huntington Beach, except maybe Venice Beach, but that had a whole different vibe. The H.B. scene of the 1980's was something much different than it is today. There were surfers, skaters, BMXers, wandering punkers and a few skinheads, and a bunch of weird characters. Then there was the crowds that came to the beach on the weekends. That was the Huntington Beach I moved into in early 1987, to work for the American Freestyle Association as the newsletter editor/photographer, and all around assistant to Bob Morales.
There were always a few BMXers and a few freestyle skaters, that hung out at the Huntington Beach Pier on the weekends, in the late 1980's and into the 1990's. There were a bunch of reasons for this, besides the hot women in bikinis. The long wide area of pavement next to the building, on the south side of the pier, was a good place to both ride skateboards and BMX freestyle bikes. During the week, there really weren't many people riding or walking up and down the bike path. Under the pier itself it was concrete, which was sandy and slippery, so the pavement worked better for us.
The main skaters were English freestyle skating champ Don Brown and French freestyle skating champ Pierre Andre' (Senizergues), and often Swedish freestyle skating champ Hans Lingren, along with local freestyle skater Jeremy Ramey. Why were three of the top European freestyle skaters in Huntington Beach? They rode for either Vision or Sims Skateboards (then owned by Vision), located in nearby Costa Mesa. Although he rode for Powell-Peralta, Per Welinder rolled by fairly often as well. At the time, all these freestyle skaters were the low paid demo skaters for the Big Three skate companies, while the vert skaters, like Tony Hawk, Christian Hosoi, and Steve Caballero, were making the big money. In the 1990's, the freestyle skaters took over the skate industry, and were sometimes jokingly referred to as the "Skate Illuminati." In about 1989, another top freestyle skater came up, Darryl Grogan, and he came down the pier now and then, as well.
On the BMX freestyle side, the most local rider was Mike Sarrail, a tall guy from the San Gabriel Valley, who was really good at Miami hop hops. He drove over an hour every weekend to session. There was a crew of good amateur riders in the Lakewood area who came by often to bust out their flatland skills. In no particular order they were Nathan Shimizu, Ron Camero, Jeff Cotter, Ron McCoy, Dan Hubbard, and Derek Oriee. Sometimes they brought Tim Cotter, Jeff's little brother, who also rode. Most of those guys were featured in Vision's Freestylin' Fanatics video. The spandex brothers, Chuck and Joe Johnson, showed up once in a while. It wasn't unusual to see Martin Aparijo or Woody Itson show up, the original flatland guys. From the desert, Randy Lawrence moved to H.B. for a while and found work as a bike mechanic, and he joined the locals around 1988-89. Those were the guys there most often in that era. Because the pier was a well known scene, pretty much anybody could just randomly show up and ride or skate. Ed Templeton and Mark Gonzales showed up on a regular basis, along with a whole crew of H. B.'s amateur skaters.
On any given Saturday or Sunday, we'd start showing up around 11:00 am or so, and just start riding or skating. The skaters would get a crowd, and skate for 15-20 minutes, until the police showed up and said the crowd was blocking the bike path. Then they'd stop skating, the crowd of beach going spectators would wander off, and then us BMXers would take over. A crowd would form, usually 100 or so people, maybe 200. At times we'd get 500 or more people watching. We'd take turns busting out our latest and best flatland, for 15-20 minutes. Then the police would roll up, say the crowd was blocking the bike path (which we actually told them not to do), and we'd stop. The crowd would wander off, and then the skaters would get going again. That was our weekend. Week after week, year after year. We'd head off to grab some food or take a leak when needed. We'd talk to girls, or try to. Mostly we just rode and skated in front of crowds from 11:00am or noon until about 7 or 8 pm. That's our weekends played out, unless there was a contest somewhere. I once figured out that I rode in front of at least 140,000 people, 100 or 200 at a time, from 1987 to about 1992, on all those weekends at the pier, from about 1987 to 1992. The same was true of all the other riders and skaters.
Because so many, literally thousands, of random people watched us ride and skate every weekend, we'd often meet people who who said they wanted to put us in a video, a movie, at TV show, or something like that. BMX freestyle was a new thing in the late 1980's, even most Californians hadn't seen it live and in person. Most of the people who wanted to put us in a video or TV show were completely full of shit. But not all of them. The guy behind the Metal MC video wandered up and started talking to Mike one afternoon. Mike explained freestyle, and that there were a lot more riders, jumpers and vert riders, too.
The talk turned into a real project, and the guy rented the empty lot on PCH and Main (where Huntington Surf & Sport stands now), where we often had local AFA contests. Mike told him to contact GT, to rent the Stonehenge, their four sided jump ramp, and we called around to tell riders to show up for the jam. Boom, a fun BMX jam happened, and the guy's crew shot a bunch of footage to make the Metal MC video. It was an all afternoon jam.
In the video above, you see mostly Brian Blyther (in black) jumping, East Coast rider Dennis Langlois (grey jersey), and San Diego thrasher Brand Blanchard landing a 540 on the deck. Also at the jam were NorCal legends Dave Vanderspek and Maurice Meyer, San Diego street rider Eddie Roman, several of the Lakewood crew, pro racer/jumper Rich Bartlett, Craig Grasso, Randy Lawrence, George Smoot, Scott Robinson, and about 30 more riders, myself included. We had this kind of jam a couple of times. This one, and another for a guy who made mass marketed video that sold in places like Kmart. At the time, all day BMX jam sessions with some top riders and no contest were a rare thing, so this and the other Stonehenge ram jam were two really fun events Huntington Beach during the late 80's.
This blog post was inspired by a great photo of Brian Blyther doing an X-up, that Steve Giberson, aka Guy B, shared on Facebook recently.
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This video came out in late summer 1987, I think. After getting laid off from my life changing job at FREESTYLIN' magazine at the end of 1986, I got hired by Bob Morales to be the editor/photographer of the AFA newsletter. But I did all kinds of things there. One day Bob walked in and asked, "Do you want to direct a TV commercial for the Austin contest? I can get really cheap commercial spots on MTV there." That question started my video career.
The year was 1987, it was the era when the younger quarterpipe schooled BMX vert riders were begining to rival the older skatepark schooled riders in skill level. Mike Dominguez was the king of quarterpipe riding, with Eddie Fiola and Brian Blyther right up there (neither was at this contest), the old skatepark rivals. But guys like Dave Voelker, Josh White, and Todd Anderson were closing in on them. Dino Deluca, Mat Hoffman, and Joe Johnson were still amateurs then. But all of these guys were clocking in airs above 8 feet out, sometimes in the 10 to 12 foot range. This same year, Ron Wilkerson, already a major touring pro for Haro, started the 2-Hip King of Vert Halfpipe series, which led vert BMX away from quarterpipes over the next few years, and into halfpipe riding. This AFA Freestyle Masters contest took place in Portland, Oregon, in the Spring of 1987.
Back then, the new little offshoot sport of BMX freestyle was about four years old, and BMX racing was 17, barely old enough to drive. BMX freestyle started as trick riding shows in the late 1970's. Then it started as a sport in 1983, with Bob Morales promoting the first BMX skatepark contests. The first American Freestyle Association flatland and quarterpipe contest was in Venice Beach, in June of 1984. Things were growing fast, and by 1987, all three BMX magazines had spawned a freestyle magazine as well.
There were three of us in the little AFA office when I started, and a couple more, a few months later. I did a little bit of everything there. I answered phone calls, put heat transfers on T-shirts, drove the van and big trailer (Gary Turner's old 30 foot dragster trailer), and was a roadie and fill-in judge at local and national contests. I wrote, shot the photos, did the layout, and helped fold and staple all 3,000 newsletters each month. Bob always had about 17 things going at once, and he'd just say, go do this, and show me the basics, and then let me finish it, figuring anything new out as I went.
Then came the video work. Bob found out he could buy local commercial spots, on MTV in Austin, Texas, to promote that contest, for $25 each, I think. But we needed a broadcast quality, 30 second TV commercial, in about a week. He asked me to do it, and I said, "Uh... sure. How do I do that?" Typical punk rock/BMX/action sports D.I.Y. attitude of the times. He said, "Call up Unreel, they'll tell you what to do."
Unreel Productions was the video company part of Vision Skateboards and Vision Street Wear, and VSW sponsored the AFA Masters contest series. So they sent a cameraman to shoot video of each contest. The deal was that both Vision and the AFA could use that footage. So I called Unreel, and they told me to come over the next day. They handed me ten VHS tapes, explained what a window dub was (numbers for the time code in the picture), and told me to go home, and write down the numbers of all the shots I wanted to use, then call them back.
The next couple of nights, I did that, picking all the best shots, and marking where the pro contest runs started. The next day I was in Unreel's $500,000 Betacam edit bay with their editor, Dave Alvarez, who was a couple of years older than me. Dave had long, straight hair, a tie dye T-shirt, and Vision shorts. He didn't fit the picutre in my head of what a video editor should look like. But he was an incredible editing wizard, and great to work with, since I had no clue what I was doing. He walked me through editing, step by step. Sometimes, while doing the intro, he'd play a few seconds of music, and say, I need a shot that matches this sound. So I'd think of a shot, look it up in my handwritten log notes, and he'd edit it in. Within a couple of days of editing, we had a half hour show. These videos were in color, but this copy above looks like a copy of a copy, and color gets lost as they went down tape generations back then. They don't have to worry about stuff like that now, in the digital era.
I "produced and directed" six AFA videos that year, with Dave doing all the editing. Basically, that means I picked the shots used, after logging the footage, and just made sure the videos got finished, that's what a producer does. All that time I spent at Unreel led to them calling me when they needed a new guy to do basic work, later that year. I left the AFA, and started working at Unreel, in December of 1987.
One question by Bob Morales one day, asking me to do that first commercial, turned my life in a different direction, which later led to things like this, in 1990, and working as a crew guy here. starting in 1992. It's weird how tiny opportunities can change your whole life.
While the quality is sketchy from this old VHS tape, the riding is amazing for the time period, and would be solid riding in today's world. This was BMX vert at the beginning of the quarterpipe era over 35 years ago.
Here's a regular at the AFA local California contests in 1987, Jeff Cotter, with a smokin' hot flatland routine in 1988. Jeff and his younger brother Tim were at pretty much every American Freestyle Association contest in Southern California, local or Masters Series. He was part of what we called the Lakewood crew, which included Ron McCoy, Nathan Shimizu, Ron Camero, and a few others. By 1988, he was sponsored by Ozone and Vision Street Wear.
Since I'm (more or less) living up in the San Fernando Valley again, one local AFA contest from 1987 popped into my had recently. During my stint as the newsletter editor/photographer for the American Freestyle Association newsletter in 1987, I did a whole bunch of other stuff as well, because that's what happens in a small business with only 3 or 4 employees. Two or three months into my work at the AFA, owner Bob Morales bought a 30 foot long box trailer from Gary Turner, the "G. T." behind GT Bikes. Gary owned a dragster at that point, and Bob bought his old dragster trailer when Gary upgraded to a better one. It was about twice as big of a trailer as we needed to haul the basic AFA gear to a contest, but the price was right.
I had never pulled a trailer behind a car or truck before, and I was the main driver of the AFA Ford van, and I had to quickly learn how to drive with a huge ass trailer following me. That was one time being uptight and completely anal retentive was a good trait. I was super careful, and managed to never scratch that monster trailer, and got pretty dang good at driving with a trailer over the next several months.
Another aspect of having a trailer, is how to load it. To go to an AFA local contest, we had our 8 foot high, wooden Socko quarterpipe, a couple of four foot high, really heavy speakers, two or three boxes of T-shirts, little posts and rope rope off the contest area, and some folding tables and chairs. The quarterpipe, with kickers off, we could roll into the trailer, and it fit right over the wheel wells inside. It locked right in place, which was really cool. Then we would just put all the other stuff in the back of the trailer, behind the quaterpipe, that made it all easy to unload.
The AFA Ford van with the big, 30 foot box trailer, became a 49 foot long rig. That's not as long as a standard tractor trailer rig, but it's bigger than most things on the freeway. My first, trip of any length, was a night drive up the 405 freeway to Northridge. For those of you not in or from Southern California, Northridge is best known as the site of the big, 6.7 magnitude earthquake, in 1994. That's the most destructive earthquake that has happened in the 34 years since I first moved to SoCal. But this story happened in 1987, seven years before the big earthquake.
We had an AFA local contest scheduled for the next morning, in a corner of a big parking lot, at a fairgrounds-type place, where the Devonshire downs BMX track was located. We decided to drive up the night before, rather than battle 50 miles of traffic, potentially 4 hours in traffic, on Saturday morning. Bob drove his BMW, following me and our two "roadies," a couple of Huntington Beach local skinheads. Yeah, skinheads. While we didn't agree with their ideology, they worked cheap, and were pretty cool for the most part. In those days, a lot of young guys had friends who became skinheads, so they became skinheads, but weren't walking being racist assholes all the time. That's kind of how these two were. They looked the part, but were more just punkers than crazy racists. The cool thing about young skinheads was that they would gladly do $5 worth of work for $2 worth of beer. Saving money was a priority at the AFA, and Bob was a master a getting things done cheap.
We took off, and not long after I got going on the freeway, I realized that our new trailer was kind of squirrelly over about 45 miles an hour. As I got going at about 55 mph, the big trailer started swaying side to side a little bit, maybe a foot each way. I did my best to keep the rig riding well, but it was nervewracking, and I just cruised along at about 50, as other cars swerved around us, and honked on a regular basis.
Somewhere around LAX airport, the thing I was hoping to avoid happened, I saw flashing lights in the rear view mirror. I pulled over, and Bob and his then girlfriend Suzy Q, pulled over behind the CHP car. The highway patrol officer walked up, and asked the basic questions to see if I was drunk or something. I told him the trailer was just kind of squirrelly, and I was doing my best to keep it in my lane. That, of course, wasn't good enough. A second CHP car pulled up, and Bob talked to the two officers, told him he owned the van and trailer, and tried to work things out. Just to make things even more fun, I really had to take a leak, and was hoping they'd decide to just give me a warning... quickly. Then I could pull over and take a leak at a restaurant or something.
Nope, that wasn't in the cards. As I joked with the skinheads about just taking a leak on the side of the road, and taking the second ticket, we waited. The officers took a full 45 minutes or so to actually flip through a copy of the California Vehicle Code (pre-internet days), and find a code they could ticket me for. As my dad would say, I had to whiz so bad that my back teeth were floating and my eye teeth were singing "Anchors Away," by the time they handed me a ticket to sign. I accepted the citation for the obscure offense of "trailer not tracking properly," and we got back underway. We stopped to hit the restroom shortly afterwards, and then made it up to the Devonshire Downs site without incident.
The parking lot reserved for our flatland a ramp contest was rough asphalt, and really old asphalt. And there were potholes. I'm not talking little six inch diameter potholes an inch or two deep, there were six or eight inch deep holes in the parking lot, big enough to ride a BMX bike into and then jump out the other side. It was ridiculous. Bob found our contact, and tried to negotiate a better chunk of parking lot, but it was a no go. So, in the dark, we set up the quarterpipe, with as straight as possible run up to it. We set up our stanchions, roped off the contest area, and set up the speakers and sound system. There was a fair, or carnival type thing, going on, and their security was supposed to keep an eye on our stuff until the fair shut down for the night.
I think Bob and Suzy had a hotel room for the night, and the skinheads and I were going to crash in the van, on site, to keep an eye on our ramp and equipment after the fair closed for the night. With everything set up, Bob and Suzy headed off to the hotel, and the skinheads and me were hungry. There was no cheap fast food in sight. One of the guys flagged down a car, and a couple of upscale guys said there were a couple fast food places a mile or so away. Somehow, one of the skinheads talked these yuppie guys into giving our grungy asses a ride. The guys talked non-stop, and we realized they were pretty much coked out. They dropped us off as Carl's Jr. or Del Taco, or whatever it was, and claimed they were going to run a couple errands, and then come back by, and give us a ride back to the event site.
The three of us had a cheap dinner, and the skinheads took their money Bob paid them, and bought a couple of 40's of beer. Surprisingly, the two yuppie guys came back, but they got really paranoid about us, and didn't want to give us a ride back. The skinheads said they must have chalked up another line and drifted off into coke paranoia. Since it was dark when they gave a ride to the restaurant, we hadn't paid attention, and didn't even know how to get back to the event site. The paranoid yuppies pointed us in the right direction, and took off. So the skinheads and I walked a mile and a half or so, back to our contest site. Luckily no police rolled by, since the skinheads started working on their beers as we walked.
Back at the AFA van, they chilled out to drink the rest of their 40's, and I was able to get a wristband from our contact, and I wandered around the fair for a while. I wound up watching a really good cover band, playing a stage near the back gate, close to our contest area. I remember the banded ended their set with a kick ass cover of Steppenwolf's "Magic Carpet Ride," and I headed out the back gate as fair closed down.
Back in our van, the skinheads were happily buzzed, and telling stories and were pretty mellow. I grabbed my bike, and rode a little, jumping out of the crazy potholes and joking with the skinheads. It was a pretty warm night, and as we started thinking about crashing out for the night, I joked, "I should sleep on top of the quarterpipe tonight." It quickly went from a joke, to what seemed like a cool idea. So I grabbed my sleeping bag, climbed up on the 4' by 8' deck of the quarterpipe, laid out my sleeping bag, and went to sleep. The skinheads crashed out in the van, not far away.
The next thing I remember was feeling the wood below me rock, hear the buzz of tires on the ramp, and heard someone yell, "Whoa!" I opened my eyes, half asleep, trying to figure out where the hell I was. I looked out of my sleeping bag, and all I saw was sky all around me. From somewhere below, I heard a voice say, "There's someone sleeping on top of the ramp." The voices below wondered if some bum had climbed up on the ramp overnight, and I woke up enough to remember I was sleeping on top of the AFA quarterpipe. I sat up, and the guys below said, "Hey, it's Steve!" and started laughing. I forget which riders it was, but it was one of the small groups of riders that was at every local AFA contest. It may have been the Lakewood guys, because I remember when I sat up, I saw Jeff Cotter roll into one of the potholes, and jump out, doing a small no footer. Jeff was a hardcore flatlander, and I knew he had a quaterpipe at home, but I'd never seen him jump anything. Still waking up, I remember thinking, "Whoa, Cotter can jump?"
By that time, several of the riders rolled over and started asking me if I actually slept on the quarterpipe all night, which they thought was pretty funny. I started talking to those guys standing there, as other riders started hitting the quarterpipe, while I was sitting on top. Someone asked why I slept on the ramp, and I told them the skinheads were crashed out in the van. So immediately, a couple guys started knocking on the sides of the van to wake up the skinheads, who were not very happy with the wake-up call, since they were kind of hung over.
I climbed down from the deck of the ramp, and everyone started practicing on the ramp, and joking about the horrible potholes in the parking lot. That turned quickly into little trains hitting the bigger potholes and jumping out, trying can-cans, no footers, X-ups, and lookbacks. After that it turned into a normal, local AFA contest. But it's the only AFA contest that year where riders were actually jumping out of potholes and doing variations during their flatland runs. That was the joke of the day.
We held the contest, and as usual, I worked during it, then jumped on my bike and competed in flatland, and then helped tear everything down, along with our skinhead roadies and Bob, Suzy, and probably Riki, Bob's sister, who worked at the AFA. We made the long trip back to Huntington Beach that night. The big trailer and van were squirrelly, again, but we made it back without incident. Then we took the skinheads bowling.
This is one of the few BMX freestyle videos of the late 1980's, made by a guy completely out of the the BMX and freestyle industry.
We have my Huntington beach Pier riding buddy Mike Sarrail to thank for this one. Every weekend in the late 1980's and early 1990's, we were at the H.B. Pier riding for crowds. While the pros and top ams were touring the country and the world, A handful of us H.B. locals, and lots of random visiting freestylers, performed for crowds of 100 or more people, several times a day, on weekends. One time I tried to figure out just how many people I rode in front of there, and the number was over 140,000 people, 100 to sometimes 500 per crowd, over a five year period.
Though he lived an hour inland, Mike was a local at the pier on weekends, and was known for doing the undertaker, as well as barspinning and no handed Miami hop hops, among other tricks. Riding for lots of crowds back then, we inevitably met a lot of people, many of whom think thought freestyle was really cool. Every now and then, some guy would say he was going to use us in a movie or something, and make us famous. That never happened.
But one day Mike spent half an hour or 45 minutes talking to a guy who said he made videos, and had some distribution channel to sell thousands of them in mainstream discount stores, like Kmart. He asked Mike about freestyle, what kinds of riding there were, who the top riders were, and what music we listened to. Mike gave him all kinds of ideas. I rode up and talked to the guy to, a little bit.
He left, and we didn't think much of it. But then the guy called Mike back, and he ended up helping to set up the Metal MC music video shoot/ramp jam. The guy rented the then-empty lot on the corner of PCH and Main, across from the pier, the same lot we used for local AFA contests then. It's where Huntington Surf & Sport, and the Duke Kahanamoku statue now stand. Mike helped the guy get in touch with GT, and he rented the infamous Stonehenge, 4 sided box ramp, for the jam. There was no contest, Mike and I just called everyone we knew and told them there would be a jam that weekend.
If was one big, long, causal, totally fun session. As you can see in the video, Brian Blyther and Dave Voelker were launching. Rich Bartlett came down from the high desert. Dave Vanderspek, Maurice Meyer and the NorCal posse came down. The San Diego guys came up. Eddie Roman was riding, and if you look close, you can see Brad Blanchard land a 540 jump on the Stonehenge deck, which was pretty epic in 1988.
It was one of the most fun and drama-free days of riding at any event in those days. The guy shot at the Camarillo halfpipe, Mission Beach, and several other places. The guy was completely outside the BMX/freestyle industry. The camera work is mostly lame. The editing is hokey. There was no attempt to get the freshest, most progressive riding.
But the guy made the video quick, got it on the market, and probably sold more copies than any other BMX freestyle video of the late 1980's. That was the home video world then. There's a lot of good riding, and a bunch of amateurs got some coverage. As weird as it sounds, thousands more kids saw this video than the GT and BMX Plus videos together, which were the main industry video producers then.
I just started a new blog for Marvin Davits, to promote Marvin's business of installing dinghy davits on boats and yachts. Check it out.
The first photos I ever saw of Martin Aparijo, back in 1983.
Martin Aparijo, who most of us Old School BMX freestylers remember as a pioneering flatlander, here as a BMX Plus test rider. This is a Champion 24inch cruiser test, from the February 1983 issue of BMX Plus. That was the second or third BMX magazine I ever bought, the first being the December 1982 issue of BMX Plus with Stompin' Stu Thomsen on the cover. This issue has Bob Haro doing a wheelie on the cover, and a Bob Haro how-to inside for the Haro bar-hop, the first trick I ever learned out of a magazine.
Somebody shared this two photo combo on Facebook a couple of days ago, and it instantly took me back to my earliest days as a BMX rider in 1982 and 1983. I knew without reading the caption, that the rider was Martin Aparijo. Yes, Martin is best remembered as the pioneering flatland rider, one of the two riders of the early and mid-1980's that focused on flatland, the other being Woody Itson. Like Woody, Martin could jump well, too. In fact, Martin was the first jumper to do a front flip off a jump, also in the early 80's. You can ask him that story if you meet him sometime.
The trick above is called the Hannah, after motocross legend Bob Hannah. In this case, obviously, Martin pushed it and popped his visor off with the front tire. I knew the name Bob Hannah, because it got thrown around at the trailer park. Motocross showed up on TV maybe a couple of times a year back then, and if people knew one rider, it was Bob "Hurricane" Hannah.
This magazine came out during the cold Idaho winter, while I was living in Blue Valley trailer park. But we didn't have snow all the time, and we rode when the dirt was frozen, we rode on the ice on the pond, and even made jumps out of snow that winter.
There were Jeep trails heading out in several directions from Blue Valley, and often we'd just go out riding, by ourselves, or with a couple other guys, and just ride the Jeep trails for a mile or two in one direction or another, and then ride back. It was all BMX to us, jumping, racing each other, trying to do early tricks like bunnyhops or endos, or riding the Jeep trails like a mountain biker would now.
The locals at Blue Valley were the Damon Brothers, Mike, Steve, Brian, Andy, and their step brother Greg. Mike and Steve were the best riders, but were in high school (like me), and were more into girls and parties, than BMX. I was more of a dork, so I hung with the younger guys and rode my bike, a Sentinal Exploder GX. Any collector got one of those? I doubt it, it was a "Kmart special" bike. The Damon brothers (except Greg) had all ridden BMX while living in California years before, I think. So they all had BMX bikes and a bit more skill than the rest of us, who had none.
Andy, the youngest, had a classic Mongoose with Motomags, a 1980 or 81 model, I think. I jumped it once, off our "big" jump, which was about 2 1/2 feet high... to flat. I landed back wheel first, and the next thing I knew, both of my heels hit the ground, the handlebars were still in my hands, but the bike was rolling away, 8 feet in front of me. Like a cartoon, with a look on my face that made everyone laugh, I slid on my heels, and fell right to my butt, handlebars still in my hands.
Like all ghetto BMXers, we had a "you break, you pay" rule, when riding other kid's bikes. All I could think was that I suddenly owed Andy a bunch of money for whatever broke. It turned out he just hadn't tightened the gooseneck, and the bars and stem slid right out of the head tube when the back wheel hit the ground. Nothing broke, my ass hurt from the hard landing, and everybody laughed about it for a while.
Brian and Andy were the main Damons riding every day. The there were Scott and Rocky, from the other side of the pond (in the trailer park, not England), and Buzzard, Me, and occasionally Shane from our side. Yes, we had a friend named Buzzard. He had a real name, but I have no idea what it was. He got made fun of for a buzz haircut a couple of years before, and got nicknamed "Buzz." then someone mentioned that, with his hair short, he looked a lot like a buzzard (turkey vulture), and he did. From then on, he was Buzzard.
Our trails were about 40 yards long, a dirt area with one foot high berms on each end. A motorcycle rider, a couple of years earlier, had roosted the berms, and rode them for a while, and we kept them shaped. On one side there was an 18 inch high jump to flat, which I jumped 18' 2" off of once, when it had just rained and the dirt was hard and fast. A little past that were our doubles, six inches high and three feet apart. When we all improved a bit, we added a third jump, making them a six foot long set of triples. Then we'd hit the left hand berm at the bottom (it sloped a tiny bit), and head back up to a one foot high jump to flat. That was our "style" jump. It was over that little jump that I spent a couple of days learning to pull the bike vertical and do a Hannah, inspired by that photos of Martin Aparijo above. The was the first jump variation I ever learned, and it's all thanks to Martin on that Champion 24" cruiser bike test, in the photos above.
In the middle of our jumping area was our "big jump." It ranged from 2 feet to 3 feet high, depending on how thrashed it was. We rebuilt it time after time. Like the others, it was a jump to flat. that's the jump I hit on Andy's bike, where the bars came out.
So thanks whoever shared those pics of Martin on Facebook, those took me back to the time I was just getting really stoked on BMX. There wasn't much else to do in the trailer park. There were three cute girls and one ugly one. One cute girl was 16, my age, and had an older boyfriend. No play there. Of the other two cute ones, one had the same boyfriend the whole time, and one was prude/shy, and didn't make out with anybody. So all of us horny, frustrated, young guys rode our BMX bikes all the time, and took turns making out with the ugly girl. Hey, it was a trailer park.
When I started getting more into freestyle in 1983, and into 1984, most freestylers rode coaster brakes. I always hated coaster brakes, since my first crappy BMX bike had one that never worked right. So I decided to freestyle on a freewheel, which was unusual at the time. Martin Aparijo rode a freewheel, and so I figured I could learn tricks on a freewheel bike, too. If other riders asked why I didn't ride a coaster brake, I's say, "Martin rides a freewheel, and look at all the tricks he's invented."
When I originally wrote this blog post, in the fall of 2019, I was working on one of my drawings of Martin Aparijo to sell. Homeless and struggling to get my act back together at the time, Martin helped me out by letting my draw a picture of him, and sell them. I first met Martin on a FREESTYLIN' magazine photo shoot in 1986. He's a first class guy, and helps a lot of people out behind the scenes, but he'd never tell you that. We've talked a lot over the years, and he's given me advice many times.
Here's the 11" X 14" drawing I did of Martin, my take on a classic photo from his GT days in the 1980's, done in my Sharpie Scribble Style.
To insure the drawings actually sold, Martin offered to sign each one, and it this was the best selling drawing of the six Old School BMX Freestyle drawings I've done. This is Martin with one of the drawings, right after he signed it. Most of them went to diehard fans of Martin, around the world, including Europe, Australia, South America, and even one to Taiwan. Martin Aparijo is global, these days. Thanks again Martin, that was a huge help, at the time.
Blog Post: Watching the GT-V video for the first time
East coast legend, and GT/Mountain Dew sponsored pro, Chris Lashua, hanging the back wheel out with a wedge ramp flipper in Whistler, British Columbia, Canada. Summer 1986. I stayed with the Bickels in that hotel in the background that week. My photo.
After the first night in Whistler, we got to kind of know the other riders, and then next morning we were back out on our bikes wandering around, exploring the area, when much to everyone's surprise, the GT Brittania tour motorhome pulled up. Somebody saw it coming up the road, and we all rode over to see it. It came to a stop, and out popped GT pro riders, Eddie Fiola and Chris Lashua.
It turned out Eddie and Chris were doing demos at Expo 86, a sort of World's Fair, being held in Vancouver at at the time. They had a few days off, heard about the freestyle contest in Whistler, and drove up to hang out for a few days. So we had 30 or so freestylers from Canada, Jay and I from Idaho (OK, I lived in San Jose at the time), a handful more from Washington and Oregon, and vert legend Eddie Fiola and east coast pro rider/promoter Chris Lashua hanging out, and riding for about 4 days. It was an epic time for freestyle that week in Whistler.
On their second day there, Eddie and Chris got a small package from GT Bikes headquarters in Huntington Beach, California. It was late morning, and a few of us were hanging out in the town square area. Eddie and Chris came up, said they just got the first copy of the first GT Bikes freestyle video, GT-V, and asked if anyone had a VCR in their room. It was on VHS, but their huge RV didn't have a VCR in it. Hey, it was the 80's, no YouTube or smart phones back then. A lot of people didn't even have VCR's yet in 1986.
Obviously, all of us unknown riders were psyched to see a new video, before its official release date, and riders took off (no cell phones then) to find anyone who might have a VCR. No one did. We went into the mountain bike shop, one of the few things open in Whistler during the summer months, and they didn't have a VCR. I think it was the guy in the bike shop who suggested the bar next door. We were all kind of frustrated, freestyle videos were few and far between then, and we were all amped to watch it. Eddie and Chris were both excited to see it, to since they were GT riders, and Eddie was a star of the video.
Finally, Eddie went into the bar, and which was pretty dark and dingy, and had about five morning drinkers in it. This wasn't some hip, ski area sports bar. It was a dive bar in a tiny mountain ski town, in the off season. Eddie got the OK from the bartender to play the video... if those of us watching it bought something to drink, at like 11:00 am. There was one other rule, only guys of legal age, which I think was 19 years old in B.C. then, could come in the bar and watch it. About 10 or 15 riders were sitting on their bikes, outside the bike shop next door, still thinking someone might have a VCR we could borrow, so we could all watch it in the bike shop. Then Eddie Fiola and Chris Lashua came over, and told us the bar would show it. But only three or four of us were legal age and able to go in and see it.
So we went into the bar, I was legal , but Jay, my old teammate, had to stay outside. We wound up with Eddie, Chris, and 3 or 4 of us riders sitting at the corner of the bar, buying Cokes, so we could watch GT-V for the first time. Even the Canadians didn't want a beer that early in the morning. We got the bartender to turn the TV, so the ten or so riders who were under age, could peer through the glass window, and sort of, kind of, see the video, 15 feet away, but not hear the sound. And that's how I watched the first GT Bikes video, GT-V, for the first time. You can watch the final version of GT-V (with lame audio) on YouTube by searching " (1986) GT-V Absolutely Unreel," as of the time I'm writing this. Premiere parties didn't become a thing for at least 10 or 12 more years. When a video came out, you plugged into whatever VCR was around, with a few friends, and that was your "premiere."
I was sitting at a bar, drinking a Coke, with Eddie Fiola, Chris Lashua, and about three Canadian riders I'd just met over the previous couple of days. The GT/Brittania RV that's in the opening shots of the video, was parked half a block away. Seriously, for a dorky kid from Idaho (and San Jose), it was just surreal. Every few minutes, we'd kind of look over our shoulders, and see this group of faces pressed up against the window behind us, trying to catch every bit of action in the video they could. They would pull their faces back every little while to keep from fogging up the glass with their breath. In those days, we got all of our news and visuals about BMX freestyle from BMX and freestyle magazines, and the two or three videos that had come out over the previous couple of years. The main ones were two videos by BMX Plus, and Rippin' by the BMX Action Trick Team. There was also a Curb Dogs video, but not many people had seen it at the time. We were all so desperate to see video footage of freestyle back then, we'd do about anything to see new footage of the pros riding.
The GT-V video started with Eddie, Fiola, Martin Aparijo, and Brian Scura teaching some dorky kid (played by Josh White) to be a good freestyler. The video shows those four, plus Dino Deluca and Brett Hernandez, doing flatland in Huntington Beach, Hollywood, and at a school show. There's also ramp riding at the BMX Action T.O.L. halfpipe, and on the GT Brittania quarterpipe. Eddie does his best airs, and shows off the "over and out," his can-can to one footer, which I'm pretty sure is the first multiple variation air, something Mat Hoffman got known for a year or two later. Martin showed off a ton of flatland, including the quickspin and bar rides, new tricks at the time. Josh White showed off all his crazy variations and his insane flexibility. And... Chris Lashua wasn't even in the video, because The Man was still keepin' the East Coast riders down then.
That version of GT-V, and the copy I ended up with a year later, had the original music, which started with Motley Crue's "Home Sweet Home," as they turned the ignition key in the motorhome at the beginning. It was actually a pretty cool sound track for the day. Then, after the video was completely finished being edited, some lawyer told the producers that the music could get GT sued. So they put in this crap canned music. Back in those days, producers could pay $100 or something for a whole cassette tape of mediocre electronic music that came with the rights to use it in any video. "Canned music," as it was called, was also used in porn videos in those days. So it wasn't unusual to watch an 80's BMX video, and then hear the exact same electronic instrumental song in a porno video later on. I know at least two songs from the first BMX Plus video (1985) were in popular porno videos at the same time.
After we watched GT-V in the bar, which Eddie and Chris themselves were seeing for the first time, we all went out, and talked about it to the younger riders, and described all the new tricks we could remember from it. Later that day, someone paid like $50 to rent a VCR from somewhere, and I think they showed it in the mountain bike shop, and in someone's hotel room once or twice. The video wasn't released for another month or so, so it was this awesome sneak preview for those of us in Whistler. I wasn't really a part of the industry yet, though I had hung out with most of the pros in Tulsa, a couple months earlier. I was doing my zine, covering the NorCal freestyle scene then, and I took some photos of Eddie and Chris Lashua while we were all riding together for those few days. The photo of Chris Lashua, above, is one of those photos.
For the next two or three days, I hung out and rode with Jay Bickel, Eddie Fiola, Chris Lashua, and the Canadian and Northwest U.S. guys. The two Canadians I remember the names of are Rob Dodds, a really good vert and all around rider from B.C., and Rob Thring, a top rider and freestyle organizer in eastern Canada. Monte Hill, a good, but unknown, vert rider from Washington, was also in the mix that week. Basically, that week was this crew of totally unknown, but hardcore and solid riders from Canada, Washington, Oregon, and Idaho, plus pros Eddie and Chris.
We sessioned flatland in the town square, and the quarterpipe and wedge ramp when they got set up that Friday, as I recall. We also pushed our bikes up the mountain, and did a little riding on the hiking and mountain bike trails. They weren't crazy MTB trails with big jumps and drops, like today's MTB trails, they were hiking trails, basically, used by cross country MTBers. But there were some fun downhill sections to haul ass down.
We also rode the BMX track before the racers showed up. Two pro racers, I think it was Greg Hill and Stu Thomsen, showed up that weekend, but I never talked to them. They were up at the BMX track most of the time. There was a story that Greg was chasing Stu through the little town one night, just screwing around. They carved around the corner of a building, and a local woman pushing a baby stroller was right there. Stu bunnyhopped the kid in stroller, and Greg carved around it, freaking out the woman pushing the stroller. A couple of the Canadian guys said they saw the incident happen.
The BMX track had this huge, insane gap between the second and third berms. It made like a ten foot high, 25 foot plus gap, that dropped downhill. Today it would be a big jump on a BMX bike, and a solid MTB jump. In 1986, that gap was Evel Knievel level shit. Two or three of the Canadians challenged each other to jump it one night, and after a couple of huge, bails, one guy made the gap. At that time, that was the craziest thing I'd ever anybody seen do on a BMX bike. I don't even remember the guy's name who jumped it, and I didn't have my camera when he did it. It was a hint of things to come a decade later, when dirt jumping really took off and jumping got insane.
Eddie Fiola also had a brand new trick he just invented that week, called the "Expo." He learned it right before coming up to Whistler, while he and Chris were doing demos at the Expo '86. It was a quarterpipe trick where he would ride up the ramp, and do a 90 degree flyout, landing sideways on the deck. Then he'd hop once or twice, then hop back in spinning 90 degrees, going in fakie, and rolling backwards off the ramp. At the time, Ron Wilkerson had not yet invented the abubaca, and hopping in backwards was a really gnarly trick. Eddie showed us that one, and it blew our minds. We usually don't think of Eddie as someone who did lip tricks, but if you ever see him riding a skatepark, yell, "Hey, Eddie, get a foot out," and see what he does.
Then, on Saturday morning, we had the flatland contest, as the "World Championships" BMX race (with only two top pro racers), was going on up the hill. Like most BMX freestyle contests I've competed in, I remember nothing of the contest itself. Yeah, Jay and I competed against all the other guys. I think Jay placed well, and I was in the middle of the pack, as usual. Let's face it, the contest itself has really always been a way to justify going to ride with friends from other regions for a couple of days, and we usually forget the contest itself, and remember the riding from the rest of the weekend.
Since I,rode up to Whistler with the Bickels, and we had a long drive back to Boise, we left right after the flatland comp, and missed the ramp riding. We didn't see a sasquatch or a bear on the drive back either, which is probably a good thing. The Bickels gave me a ride to the Boise airport, and I flew back to San Jose, and my "normal life" of making pizzas and riding around San Jose every afternoon. At Pizza Hut in San Jose, we did have Canadian bacon to put on pizzas.
