That time the Red Hot Chili Peppers played at a skate contest I worked at...

Firsts.  The Vision Skate Escape was the 1988 NSA halfpipe finals, held at U.C. Irvine Bren Center in Irvine, California.  It was the first time a spine ramp was used in a major skateboard competition.  Powell Peralta had just invented the first spine ramp a year or so earlier in Bones Brigade: The Search for Animal Chin video.  When the Powell skaters were asked about the Chin ramp spine, they said, it was intimidating because it was so big.  So the Unreel team went with a full halfpipe/spine to mini ramp. It was the first mini ramp in a major skateboard contest.  Mini ramps had also just been invented about a year or two earlier. It was the first time a punk band called the Red Hot Chili Peppers was hired to play at the NSA finals.  The Chili Peppers had been a band for about six years at this point.  

In 1988, I was working at Unreel Productions, the Vision Skateboards video production company, and skateboarding was in it's third big wave of popularity, and hitting its 1980's peak.  The vert skaters were the top guys at that point.  Freestyle skaters did technical tricks on flat, and street skating was just turning into a thing then.  This was the biggest skateboard contest ever put on, at that time.  

Skateboarding had hardly ever shown up on TV, other than tiny news bits or commercials, at that point.  ESPN was a little upstart cable network, mostly showing hours of kickboxing or fishing videos.  It would be another seven years before ESPN got around to starting the Extreme Games (they changed the name to X-Games in 1996).  In 1988, Unreel, Vision,  were pushing the envelope to try and get another full hour of skateboarding on ESPN, following the minor success of Holiday Havoc, about a year earlier.  

Skate Escape final battle: Tony Hawk vs. Christian Hosoi

I ran all kinds of errands for about three weeks leading up to this event, picking up supplies, taking things to the ramp building warehouse, and things like that.  The contest was a two day thing, with prelims on Saturday, and finals on Sunday.  It was set up in an unusual, head to head format.  Two skaters would each take a run, and one would advance.  Then another two would go head to head, and it kept going.  By the finals, Tony Hawk and Christian Hosoi had skated several all out runs over two days, and both were pretty exhausted.  But when the Chili Peppers played at the end on Sunday, they got a jam session going, Tony, Christian, and Chris Miller are the guys you see most in this video.  Getting to play while the Chili Peppers played live up on the deck was a once in a lifetime chance, at least at that time.  

The live hosts of the show were KROQ radio deejay The Poorman, who is also the guy who created the Loveline radio show that later made Dr. Drew famous.  With Poorman was skater/rapper/musician Skatemaster Tate, and Vision pro vert skater Ken Park.

Like any fairly large live event, there was a lot of people, and a lot of work involved to make it happen.  For both days of the competition, I was in a booth at the back left of the arena floor, wearing two big headsets, calling cues and communicating with different crew guys.  Don Hoffman, head of Unreel was directing the action next to me, his headset on the main channel.  We had another group out in a big TV truck out back, the same way they tape major sports events, like football and basketball.  That was really big time for skateboarding in 1988.  

Three of us from Unreel, Dave, Amanda, and myself, all pitched in on a room in a hotel in Irvine that night, along with Elaine, Amanda's sister.  That allowed us to be a lot closer to get there in the morning. It was a long day of work on Saturday, and when we were done, Amanda decided we needed to go have milkshakes, or something, as a late night snack.  Somehow we ended up at The Arches, a really upscale Newport Beach steakhouse, best known as John Wayne's favorite restaurant (before he died, obviously) by locals.  It was one of the only places still open.  The even crazier part is that Poorman and one or two of his friends came along as well.  The Arches didn't have milkshakes, so we ended up eating full meals, which turned into a $140 bill.  We told the waiter we worked for Vision Skateboards, and he said Brad Dorfman, owner of Vision, was a regular there.  When he brought the bill, he asked if we wanted to put it on Brad's tab.  For real.  We all looked at each other, really tempted to do it.  But common sense, and the desire to still have jobs on Monday, prevailed, and we split the tab.  Poorman turned out to be a pretty cool guy to have dinner with, he had some good stories, and was a funny guy, just like on air.  

By the time the contest was over Sunday afternoon, so was my job.  I took my headphones of and told Don, "I'll be in the pit," and ran up to right below the mini ramp, where the inevitable slam pit formed, as the Chili Peppers started playing.  I blew off a lot of steam, and it was a great show.  The chairs everyone had been sitting on were all zip-tied together.  So chairs were pushed out of the way to make room for a pit, and a few chairs, sometimes 2 or 3 tied together, went flying through the air at times.  Like all good punk gigs, I was sweaty and happy and tired by the end of their set.  The tech guys, the  lighting guys, cameramen, and the ramp crew, had to tear down, but we were done.  So I headed home for a much needed shower and good night's sleep.

Vision put out several videos, and a few TV shows, while I worked there.  I was called The Dub Guy in the Unreel office.  My main, day to day job was to make copies of different videos for people all across the Vision empire, which included Sim skateboards and snowboards, Schmitt Stix skateboards, and Vision Street Wear clothes.  So running dubs was what most people knew I did.  But I ran errands to Hollywood, or wherever, to pick up tapes, equipment, and whatever else was needed.  

Basically I was the one permanent production assistant at Unreel.  In 1989, I also became the official cameraman, so I got sent on video shoots now and then, as well.  When Red Hot Skate Rock was released, I learned I actually got named in the credits.  At the time, I thought it was pretty cool, but not that big of a deal.  But none of us expected the Red Hot Chili Peppers to be a major band 35 years later.  Now, as a broke, Has Been geezer of 56, it's cool as fuck my name's in the credits of a Chili Peppers video from the 1980's.  The Peppers have just gotten better over time.  And me... well I didn't.  That's life.  

60 Minutes Red Hot Chili Peppers segment- 2023

Chili Peppers Carpool karaoke with James Cordon  You HAVE to watch this.

Chili Peppers at Slane Castle 2003 - My favorite concert of theirs on YouTube

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"Born to Party" The Metal MC BMX jam in Huntington Beach- Summer 1988

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.  

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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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Freestylin' USA 1988

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. 

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