Keith Treanor, born and raised in New Jersey, came out to Huntington Beach and rode and rode and rode and wound up riding for S&M Bikes for years. In this podcast, #43 for The Union Tapes podcast out of the U.K., Keith goes through his life in BMX, from early days on the East Coast, the days coming up as an unknown amateur in the Huntington Beach/Orange County, California scene, and all through his years as a pro riding for S&M Bikes.
I remember meeting Keith at the Oceanview Jump, a freestyler fly out jump at Oceanview High School in Huntington Beach. That jump was an amazing set-up, a long, concrete sidewalk runway to a 6 1/2 foot high jump up to flat. Keith flat out RULED on that jump, no one even came close to getting as high out of the Oceanview Jump as Keith did. In my 1990 video, The Ultimate Weekend, Oceanview made for a cool jumping segment (for that time) at 23:22* in the video. In one shot, Keith is a good 10 feet out, in a full tuck, landing to flat. That was insane for that era, where you could easily snap a frame or forks coming down from that high up. I've personally seen Keith go a good 1 1/2 to 2 feet higher than that, 12 feet up to flat, but didn't get it on video.
Keith Treanor with a one handed 360 at the Oceanview fly out jump, which they mention in the interview. He's about 4 feet up, going from right to left, in this still shot.
I was already shooting video footage on the weekends, to make my own video, which became The Ultimate Weekend, when I remember meeting Keith and John Povah at Oceanview. I used to ride there, as well. When I started making that video, GT rider Jess Dyrenforth was supposed to be the star of the video. But every time I wanted to go shoot video, Jess was busy. He was riding for GT Bikes, and was deep into the inline skating world, as well. After I met Keith and John, I'd call them up, and Keith was always down to ride, and John was too, when not busy with his auto painting job. Keith was young, hungry, and would just go off anywhere we went, so he ended up being the star of the video.
Here's another still shot from The Ultimate Weekend, with Keith doing the first 360 over a spine ever to appear in a BMX video. Gary Laurent did a 360 over the spine a few minutes later. In 1990, peg grinds, mini-ramps, handrails, and a lot of things were just starting to happen at the time, so every video of that era had lots of "world firsts" or "firsts on video" in it.
This mini-ramp set up above was amazing for its day, this was the backyard of freestyle skaters Primo and Diane Desiderio, who were working in the City Streets show at Sea World at the time. Gary Laurent also rode in the show, I believe, and he got the OK to take us to this ramp, even though Primo and Diane weren't home. Gary had those ramps wired, but he had never tried a 360 over the spine. Keith, still really new to mini-ramps, because only a couple of them existed then, stepped it up to 3 over the spine. Then Gary had to do it. Because riding was evolving so fast then, every video that came out in that era had a bunch of world firsts, or firsts on video. So this was only the second or third mini-ramp ever in a BMX video, and Keith did the first 360 over a spine on video. These are just a few of my memories of those early days (1990-1994ish) hanging out and riding with Keith and John Povah.
There's a whole lot more in the podcast above, Keith talks us through his whole BMX career. If you're a rider from the 1990's era, check it out.
The Ultimate Weekend- 1990 - Beginning with 7 shots in the intro, Keith Treanor appears throughout the video.
* Right before the Oceanview segment, there's a shot of me doing a double peg grind on a little ledge in Huntington Beach in early August of 1990. That year, 1990, the year I was working on shooting and producing the video, The Ultimate Weekend, was the year that BMX freestylers took double peg grinds, the BMX version of a 50/50 grind on a skateboard, onto the streets. In this ridiculously self-serving Substack post, I dug into the various people who did the first double peg street grinds on video, and approximately when they did them. If you are interested in the very beginning of the double peg grinds that led to all of handrail, hubba, and ledge grinds in the last 35 years, check this post out.
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.
Bob Haro invented BMX freestyle. If you ride flatland, ramps, pools, park, street or anything similar, you do that, because Bob Haro started doing tricks on his bike in the 1970's, and then started doing trick shows. Bob Haro invented BMX freestyle, that's what us old riders all learned, when getting into "trick riding," the emerging sport of BMX freestyle, in the early 1980's. Yes, other people rode BMX bikes in pools, and most BMX racers jumped and did some tricks. But Bob started doing trick shows at BMX races, and those early demos led to the growth of "trick riding," which became BMX freestyle, all the non-racing aspects of BMX, except dirt jumping. This short video above gives a quick overview of Bob Haro talking about riding skateparks in the mid 1970's, then starting the business that became Haro Designs, and eventually Haro Bikes. This video is from 1985 or 1986, I believe.
Bob Haro (left) and Bob Morales- around 1979 or 1980. This is the first touring BMX freestyle team, and two incredibly entrepreneurial young guys. Bob Haro invented the first BMX freestyle bike in 1983, redesigning the twin top tube Torker to work better for trick riding. He sold Haro, and has been doing other design work in the decades since. Bob Morales designed the first Dyno bike, and helped design the GT performer freestyle bike, and later put out Auburn race bikes, and Morales flatland bikes. He started the ASPA, put on BMX skatepark contests, and then the AFA, the flatland and ramps comps of the 1980's. He went on to create mountain bike and motorcycle components. Early BMX freestyle was about shows, and was completely intertwined with entrepreneurship. If this photo is from 1980, then Haro is about 22 and Morales is about 17.
Bob Haro- one man freestyle show in the U.K. in 1983- This 5 1/2 minute video shows Bob doing a demo, and then has a short interview. While these tricks look pretty simple now, Bob was inventing the foundational tricks that everything since has been built on. Do you ride now? Go out and try to do a back wheel 540 on a wedge ramp or bank, like Bob does in this video. Forty one years later and that's still a solid trick, and not as simple as it looks, is it?
23Mag page on Bob Haro- This page includes a BMX drawing from 1976, rock walk how-to from 1979, and several more really early photos and some written description of Bob's work in BMX freestyle.
Bob Haro and the original BMX freestyle bike, the Haro Freestyler, 1983. Photo nabbed from internet.
The BMX chase scene from the movie E.T. (1982)- Bob Haro was one of the riders in this scene- In the recent Unclicked podcast with Bob Haro (linked below), Ryan Fudger and Dennis Enarson talk with Haro about the two early movies featuring BMX, E.T.- The Extraterrestrial from 1982, and RAD from 1986. To people coming up after the 1980's in BMX, those two movies seem comparable. But there was a huge difference between them. E.T. was a mainstream hit movie, directed by Steven Spielberg, and it grossed over $359 million in North America, $619 million worldwide, and sold over 120 million movie tickets, in theaters. Riding a BMX bike in E.T. in 1982 would be like riding in a BMX chase scene in a movie like one of the Harry Potter movies, or a Star Wars or Avengers movie in recent years. E.T. was that big in its day, at a time when most people had never really seen BMX racing before.
RAD, on the other hand, cost $3 million to make, and completely bombed in theaters, grossing only $2 million. Theaters were the game in the 1980's movies, the whole home video market was just getting going in the 1980's. As I wrote in one of my most popular blog posts, I hated RAD when it came out. I actually liked the Kevin Bacon bicycle messenger movie, Quicksilver, which came out about the same time, much better. That bombed in theaters, too, grossing $7 million, after costing $10 million to make.
RAD, however, turned into a cult classic, in the early 1990's when the home video market grew. In the home video era, RAD was watched over and over by kids coming up then, and drew a lot of people into BMX. RAD, as you older riders know, featured Eddie Fiola and Martin Aparijo stunts for the main characters, plus several other top BMXers of that era. Quicksilver featured Martin Aparijo and Woody Itson, along with bike stuntman Pat Romano, in the jam session scene, which was more like an actual BMX freestyle session in those days.
So E.T. showed a really cool scene of BMX jumping and riding to well over 100 million people in 1982, just as BMX freestyle was beginning to emerge as a separate thing to BMX racing. RAD was a whole movie about BMX, that despite a pretty goofy story line, it showed BMX riding to hundreds of thousands of kids in the early 1990's, and drew a lot of new riders into the sport, earning is a cult status to riders coming up in that era.
Bob Haro BMX Masters- This is a short video talking about his art and cartoons. Bob's artwork is what first got him drawn into working at BMX Action magazine in the mid 1970's.
Talk Tales- This is a 7 minute video, from 2023, of Bob talking about life as a kid, freestyle, his music, and other stuff.
Born from BMX/Bell Helmets- This is a short clip of Bob looking back at drawing, and how he developed his cartoon style of BMX drawings.
Bob Haro- Master Class in France in 2012 (put on by Frank Beliot & crew)- 59 minutes-This is a one hour video, with Bob talking about his whole life in BMX freestyle, and work since. He shares a lot of his own photos in this presentation. This predates all of the more recent podcasts, and is Bob himself giving a talk about his life and work.
Unclicked podcast with Bob Haro- 2:32:00- Ryan Fudger of Our BMX and current Haro pro rider Dennis Enarson, sit down with Bob Haro and talk about his whole life, in and out of BMX, for 2 1/2 hours, in early 2024.
Bob Haro with an edged, coaster brake kickturn, on an early quarterpipe, about 1982 or 1983. Photo nabbed from internet.
This new blog post idea, looking at pioneers in BMX freestyle, was inspired by the recent Unclicked podcast with Bob Haro. While I really liked the podcast, I realized while listening to it that today's BMX media people weren't around in the 1980's. So there are certain questions they may not even think to ask, or aspects of that first decade of BMX freestyle that they just aren't aware of. I'm a rider and industry guy from that era, who is now a blogger operating outside today's real world of BMX. I decided I could do a series of blog posts where, instead of my personal stories of some event, I gather the best videos and material about a pioneering rider, and bring the best info about that rider into one place. This isn't everything there is about Bob Haro on the web. But if you want to learn about Bob's influence on BMX freestyle, going through the videos and info in this post will give you a solid understanding of who he was, what he's done, and his input in the early years of BMX freestyle. In future "Freestyle Pioneers" posts, I'll do the same with other riders and industry people.
Lifers... A short documentary on the Old School BMXers from Belfast that are still riding
today.
I first saw Will Smyth at the very first King of Dirt Jam, in Palmdale, California, in 1987. I can't remember if I actually talked to him that day or not. A few years later, in the early 1990's, after BMX "died," he stayed at our apartment while on holiday, on trips to the States. I got to know him then. When he started Dig BMX magazine, I was one of many who wrote some articles for those early issues. Design-wise, Dig was the coolest BMX magazine since FREESTYLIN'. Content wise, those early issues had the feel of a zine, but in a really cool, full color magazine, with killer layout and design.
I got contacted a couple months ago to contribute a little bit to one of the articles in a new magazine, aimed at the Old School BMX crowd... the lifers. I was told the name, Greystoke. It sounded like a cool idea. I was more than happy to send in a bit of text on the subject. Later on, I found it was Will Smyth, the crew from Dig BMX, along with lifelong rider and industry guy, Scott Towne, doing this project. I knew this was going to be something special, and have been waiting for it to come out.
Dennis McCoy, blowing minds at age 20 (he should have beat Woody), and more than three decades later at age 52, and at age 56. He's got to be part alien, or part Yoda, or something. Legend. Lifer.
When I sat down to write this blog post, I looked for some old video of Will, or some of the other U.K. riders, from the early 90's. Much to my surprise, I found the short documentary above. Even better. Far from sunny Southern California, across a continent and an ocean, in Belfast, lived a crew of BMX riders as hardcore as any guys, anywhere. From the crew that brought us Dig BMX in the 1990's, now comes Greystoke, as the original Generation X BMXers ride through middle age, now in their 40's 50's, and even early 60's. Once BMX gets ahold of you, it doesn't let go. As we all learned decades ago, action sports are lifestyle sports. Into today's 21st century world comes Greystoke BMX magazine. Check it out, and pre-order here: Greystoke BMX.* They have some merch, too.
Blogger's note- 8/2/2023: I live a weirder life than most these days. I had a few rough days before when I first sat down and wrote this blog post. I wrote this post while in a really frustrated mood. Last night, I kept thinking about it. What I wrote just didn't sit well with me. So I re-wrote the post this morning. I wasn't trying to piss anyone off yesterday, I just wrote when I was in a bad place, when I was far more sarcastic than normal. I haven't checked any comments yet, I just rewrote the post for my own reasons.
* Not a paid link.
I'm doing a lot of my writing on Substack these days, 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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A couple of guys goofing around in a garage led to a revolution in consumer technology that changed the course of human history. That is not an understatement. Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs were fascinated by the emerging technology of computers in the early 1970's. Woz built the Apple 1, and Steve decided they needed to sell them to other hobbyists. Apple Computers, now Apple, was born in 1975. What kind of phone do you have? These two guys were ,arguably, the most influential Creative Scene in history.
"Buck lived at a big house in the sun-kissed Santa Clara valley... There were great stables... rows of vine-clad servants' cottages, an endless and orderly array of outhouses, long grape arbors, green pastures, orchards, and berry patches."
-Jack London
From the second paragraph of The Call of the Wild, 1903, describing the Santa Clara valley, the San Jose area of California, in the 1890's, when the Klondike gold rush began
My interest in what I now call Creative Scenes began with my first BMX race, October of 1982, in Boise, Idaho. About ten of us from the Blue Valley mobile home park piled into my dad's big, silver, Ford van, to go race the last BMX race of the season. Three guys raced the week before, after we heard a track actually existed in Boise, and I tagged along to watch and coach. They all got first or second place in their novice class. We went back to the trailer park, and got everyone else stoked on the idea. So I talked my dad into borrowing the van the next week. We got there way too early, and rode around a very rudimentary BMX track, which seemed like the coolest thing ever to us.
We wore faded Levi's and T-shirts, and rode bargain store BMX frames, cobbled together with mismatched, halfway decent components, some stolen. We got pie plates with a number in marker on it, taped to our handlebars, for numberplates. The Boise BMX scene was already solid, but not fast growing. So even in our first or second races, in the novice class, we all raced some intermediates, and novices who had raced for months. The track gave trophies for 1st through 3rd place. We all went home with trophies, mostly 1sts and 2nds. Most of the kids we raced against were on $400 to $600, top-of-the-line BMX bikes, many had full racing leathers and fancy helmets. We shared a few old, heavy, motorcycle helmets we borrowed from dads in the trailer park.
All day long we kept hearing kids and parents asking the same question, "Who are all these kids on crappy bikes, and why are they all fast?" That whole summer, we had been coming out as it cooled down each evening, and riding our BMX bikes, pushing each other to get better. I later realized we had formed a little BMX scene, completely by accident. Isolated in the trailer park outside of town, from most of the people we went to school with, and the whole city of Boise, BMX became our thing. We were high school and junior high kids, and we just kept trying to outdo each other, to race faster, jump higher or farther, and learn new tricks the other guys couldn't do. By forming a little scene where BMX became our life, we improved faster than many other guys in town, who liked BMX, but also did a bunch of other activities. We were fairly focused, day after day, and hungry to be good at something. There's not a whole lot of positive reiforcment for kids in most trailer parks. So we showed up at the last race, and beat a bunch of much more experienced racers.
At first I wondered how that happened. In time, I figured out we had created a hardcore little BMX scene. I became fascinated with the scenes in BMX freestyle, and later was a part of several different scenes as I moved around over the years. In time I realized these scenes existed in skateboarding, snowboarding, surfing, and other action sports. I also realized they were similar to the art and music scenes that we've all heard of. Later still, I was a part of a few art scenes, and learned that high tech start-ups, and entrepreneurial scenes also exist. These are all different forms of Creative Scenes.
So what's a Creative Scene? My working definition is that it's a group of two or more people who get together on a regular basis, to pursue some creative endeavor.
The video above, which appears to be a segment of a larger program, starts with Mark Zuckerberg, who founded Facebook in 2004. He leaves the Boston area, home to Harvard, where he went to school, and to MIT. He moved his fledgling social media busniess to Palo Alto, part of "Silicon Valley," officially the Santa Clara Valley on the south end of the San Francisco Bay. The area is anchored by San Jose, and a bunch of suburb cities on the west side, heading up into the peninsula leading to San Francisco.
From the birth of Hewlett-Packard decades before, the area had grown into THE place for cutting edge computer technology work, by 2004, when Mark Zuckerberg took his social media platform there. From the grape arbors and fruit orchards that Jack London wrote of more than 100 years earlier, the San Jose/Santa Clara Valley area had become a massive scene of many interwoven tech scenes, some influenced by the strong counter culture wirters, hippies, and music scenes, just to the north in San Francisco. London himself, in his day, was a part of the Carmel writing scene in the early 20th century, not far to the southwest.
It was in this large, originally defense-oriented, high technology region, an area with thousands of engineers and computer scientists, that Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs were raised. They grew up in a huge a scene of interwoven high tech, and other Creative Scenes, including the R&D departments of major corporations, computer hobbyists, along with the counter culture, music, and other scenes in nearby San Francisco.
They not only had an interest in computers and new technology as young kids, but they were surrounded by a culture of many different Creative Scenes, and a big part of the high tech industry. As Steve Wozniak says, if he hadn't been surrounded by both the engineers and tech people, and his dad's other connections in the industry, his first score of 400 transitiors, and his first homemade computer, would never have happened. He would have still had the interest in computers, but lacked many of the other factors that led to his and Jobs' success later on. His story would have been much different. Being in that area was a big part of what made the Homebrew Club, one of the most legendary high tech Creative Scenes ever, to form. That was a key part of the story of Apple Computers, and many other early innovators in tech.
Creative Scenes can be as simple and small as two 5-year-olds drawing "cool cars" in the back of a kindergarten class, or two tween girls learning dance moves in the living room off of TikTok or YouTube. Or Creative Scenes can be as massive as Apple, now a $2.6 trillion company, which is a scene of probably hundreds of smaller Creative Scenes interwoven inside the business. I'm going to be writing quite a bit on the whole concept of Creative Scenes in the future, and looking at all kinds of them throughout recent history, and maybe farther back, at some point.
We are now, in late April 2023, at the edge of what I believe will be the worst recessionary period of our lifetimes. We are now in the "powers-at-be says there won't be a serious recession" part of the timeline, which happens for a few months right before every recession, then things really head down. Yes, recessions and depressions suck on many levels. But they are also times of incredible change and innovation. Recessions are a great time to try out new ideas, because a lot of old, lame ideas come crumbling down, in many parts of society. Economic down times are when lots of new ideas, movements, businesses, and industries are really needed.
This is a little look at the general idea of Creative Scenes, which most of us have some knowledge of, but I think will become much more important in the next several years. There will be much more on this concept coming in this blog, on my Patreon page, and in other my other writing. Stay tuned...
My footage and editing of Chris Moeller, in 1991, when S&M bikes was being run out of the garage of a one bedroom apartment, on Alabama Street, in Huntington Beach, California. Clip from the first S&M Bikes video, Feel My Leg Muscles, I'm a Racer, that title was the pick-up line Dave Clymer used to pick up his girlfriend.
I was sitting outside the front door of the tiny "Winnebago" apartment, on a lawn chair. It was 1991. The apartment, officially on Alabama Street in Huntington Beach, actually opened up to the backyard of three other units. It was like we had to go into someone else's backyard to get to our front door. The whole apartment was 8 feet wide, tiny living room, tiny kitchen, hall and tiny bathroom, small bedroom, then the single car garage that housed S&M Bikes. There were two tiny windows. It felt like you were in a motorhome, so it got dubbed the "Winnebago," before I moved in.
The fledgling S&M Bikes company, then doing about $100,000 gross revenue a year, lived in the garage. Chris lived in the bedroom, and most nights, his girlfriend stayed over. I slept on the living room floor. Shaggy, who looked just like Shaggy from Scooby-Doo, slept on the two cushion couch. I wound up getting fired from my video duplicating job in North Hollywood, while making the "Leg Muscles" video, a story which became a BMX industry urban legend. That's a tale for another day. After losing that job, while making "Leg Muscles," I wound up living in the Winnebago.
Mornings usually started with Chris' then girlfriend Shelly, waking up early, stepping over me and my sleeping bag, and heading out to work. The three of us roommates were up late, usually drinking a bit, and slept in. Often there was an early call from some East Coast bike shop a little later, wanting a Dirtbike frame or a pair of Slam Bars. I groaned in my mild hangover, crawled halfway out of my sleeping bag on the floor, and reached up for the landline phone, sitting on a little wooden stand we found in an alley. I'd bring the phone down to my head, and croak "S&M Bikes." We had a sheet or two of scratch paper, and usually a pen pr pencil on the stand. I'd take down the order, hang up, and go back to sleep.
Somewhere around 8:30 or 9:00, I'd wake up, roll up my sleeping bag, and tuck it in a corner of the living room, then pour a bowl of cereal. I'd usually open the front door, and sit outside it and eat breakfast. Chris would often wake up soon after. I distinctly remember him coming out with a cup of microwaved hot water day after day, and sitting outside the door in the other sketchy old lawn chair, in cheap shorts and some random, well worn T-shirt. He would drink a cup of hot tea. Some days he'd go get a free cup of coffee at his bank, about three blocks away. Money was tight, even for him. Shaggy and I had $200 rent and a little food and beer to buy. Chris had bicycle frames, forks, and handlebars to get built, and orders to ship out, many bills to pay, rent to pay, and a small company to keep running. A pack of ramen really was a standard meal once or twice a week, and sometimes more than that.
One day, Chris came out with his cup of hot water, sat down, and opened up a tea bag, and made his hot tea. We'd usually talk about what orders needed to go out that day, or getting 25 more sets of Slam Bars made, or maybe a place to go ride later, after the day's orders were packed, and picked up by the UPS guy. After drinking his tea, on that particular day, Chris sat his tea bag on the plastic arm of the lawn chair.
The next morning, Chris came out with his mug of hot water, grabbed the tea bag from the day before, still sitting on the arm of the lawn chair, and made another cup of tea with it. I joked about him re-using it, and he said it was still good, and tea bags cost money. Then he finished his tea, and set the used tea bag on the arm of the lawn chair, again.
When he came out the third morning, mug of hot water in hand, and made tea a third time, with the same tea bag, I laughed again. Chris Moeller was a cheap ass motherfucker back then. Maybe he still is. But that is part of what it took to start and run a tiny bike company, in the recession, in 1991. He started S&M, with a $1,200 loan from his Grandpa, (his business idol), as fas as I know. Chris had to live cheap, and re-invest as much money as possible back into buying frames, forks, bars, t-shirts, and the other things S&M Bikes sold. H bought a batch of something, sold that stuff, and took that slightly larger amount of money, bought more stuff to sell, and repeated the process. In this way he multiplied the business' money, and built a small company, without any debt. That's pretty freakin' amazing, considering how much money most traditional businesses start with, how much debt they take on, and how many of those businesses go out of business.
Up in the Hermosa Beach area, skateboarder Steve Rocco was doing the same thing, with a little skateboard company called World Industries. The word was that Rocco named his company "World Industries" as a joke, because it looked big time when the name was printed on a credit card. Rocco's story is documented in the film The Man Who Souled the World, which you need to watch, if you never have.
By 1989, the third wave of skateboarding popularity (60's, 70's, 80's), the second wave of BMX racing popularity (70's,80's), and the first wave of BMX freestylepopularity, (80's), had run their course, and they were business aspect of the two sports were fading. Then the recession of 1990 hit the real business world. The Big 5 companies in skateboarding, and the handful in BMX companies, were hit hard. The industries, run by diehard, old school business guys, went into a nosedive.
Into that mess a few well known skaters and BMXers started their own little companies, which everyone with any business experience, expected to fail. These companies all seemed to have a top name rider/skater running the business, and a smart guy, and less known, less skilled rider/skater, as a sidekick. the sidekicks helped out to a greater or lesser extent, behind the scenes, depenidng on the company.
Steve Rocco started World Industries, and freestyle skating world champion, Rodney Mullen was the smart sidekick. Tony Hawk started Birdhouse, with freestyle skater Per Welinder as the sidekick. Freestyle skater Pierre Andre Senizergues got a shoe company in France, Etnies, to make skate shoes. Then he took it over, working with good friend, and another freestyle skater, Don Brown as assistant everything in the early days. In BMX, Haro pro Ron Wilkerson started 2-Hip, putting on halfpipe and then street contests. His sidekick was former East Coast freestyler Kevin Martin. Meanwhile, Chris Moeller started S&M Bikes in 1987 with fellow racer Greg Scott. They parted ways about 1989, and Chris took over, and I became his brainiac sidekick for about 4 years, after he hired me to make the first S&M Bikes video. John Lucero, another pro skater, and curb skating officianado, started Black Label Skateboards. Ed Templeton started Toy Machine Skateboards. Mat Hoffman and sidekick Steve Swope took their Sprocket Jockeys trick team, and morphed it into several businesses, including contest promotion and Hoffman Bikes. All of these businesses, and several others, really took root in the long "double dip" recession of the early 1990's.
These businesses were not ideas pitched to rich angel investors, who gave these budding entrepreneurs $5 million to burn, while waiting to see if the businesses turned into something that could be taken public, or sold to Google or Yahoo. Hell, Google and Yahoo were still years away from being invented. These little bike and skate businesses were started with a thousand, two thousand, or maybe five thousand dollars, and no clue of how to actually run a business. They were started by guys who were thinking, "We need bikes that don't crack," or "We need to make skateboards where skaters can help design their board and graphics." Basically, the ideas going in were, "We don't know what the fuck we're doing, but this NEEDS to happen."
S&M Bikes is still going strong, 33 years old now, and Chris Moeller is a millionaire. He's probably still a tightwad, at least until one of his twin daughters asks for money. He still rides, with two replaced hips, and it still a brilliant business man. Me, I'm homeless in the San Fernando Valley, but wherever I go, local police are told by someone (apparently from a federal level) that I have a 216 IQ, and they can't fuck with me, since a whole bunch of three-letter agencies have spent the last 18 years fucking with me, went kind of overboard. Apparently that ridiculously high IQ test score (I took that test when I was going to join the Marines in 1985) is overly important to certain groups of people. I've never been told in person what the score was, but have overheard police, who were told, talking about it. I really don't believe it, but that's the only explanation I have for a couple of decades of really weird shit happening in my life. Seriously, that's my story, as best as I can figure it out. OK, my story is far from typical of the others in this bunch, most have fared much better.
Steve Rocco sold World Industries for $20 million in 1998 or so. Rodney Mullen is a skate legend, still skates, and gives TED Talks to super smart people on the subject of creativity. World Industries also spawned Spike Jonze' film career, and Johnny Knoxville, and the whole Jackass phenomena. The three Jackass movies, made for $35 million total, are three of the most profitable movies in the history of film. Really.
Black Label Skateboards is small, but vibrant. Mat Hoffman owns like 9 companies, and has been re-engineered with alien DNA. OK, I can't prove that, but that's the only explanation I can think of for why his body still functions after so many horrific crashes. Toy Mahcine skateboards is still going strong, and Ed Templeton still skates, even after seriously breaking his neck. Ed's also a world reknowned aritst.
Birdhouse Skateboards is still around, I don't know if Tony is affiliated with it these days, or not. But the Tony Hawk Pro Skater video game made over $ 1 billion in its ten year run. Tony's doing well, and still skating hard.
Etnies shoes morphed into Sole Technology, which puts out Emerica, E's shoes, 32 snowboard boots, and Altamont clothes. At its peak, Sole Tech did somewhere around $200 million in sales a year, dwarfing these other companies. Now they're battling Nike and Van's, the big boys in sports shoes. More power to them. Pierre and Don are my old bros from years riding and skating at the Huntington Beach Pier, they're good guys.
So now we're in the beginning of another, more serious, recession. I personally think it will be a long, drawn out, depression or great depression, kind of like the Great Recession of 2008, and the long recession of the 1990's, put together. I've dubbed this The Phoenix Great Depression, follow the link to find out why. The dirtbag riders and skaters of 30 years ago are industry moguls now. Will young guys and gals in BMX, skateboarding, and other action sports, start a new series of small businesses to take them out? I don't know. They're all in it for the long haul, and I expect them all to be around for a while.
A whole slew of other companies were also spawned from bike/skate world in the recession of the 1990's. My focus in this current economic collapse isn't on the BMX, skateboard, and the now huge action sports industries. In this economic downturn, I think millions of Americans, many recently laid off, others already working gig jobs or running small businesses, will do what the BMXers and skaters of 1990 did to that world. I think we will see a huge wave of small businesses emerge, many out of sheer necessity, in this decade, the 2020's. Some of those will grow into giants, and into completely new industries, going forward.
Still in the grips of the Covid-19 business shutdown, small business itself has taken a beating. Millions of small businesses are on the ropes now, to use the boxing metaphor. Many will fail. But there just aren't enough major businesses to put 20 or 30 or 50 million Americans back to work, as we exit this recession. Millions, literally millions of new small businesses will be necessary to do this. I think we will start seeing micro and small businesses rise up from the ashes of this massive economic collapse, and create some amazing things. I saw it happen in our little BMX and skateboard world 30 years ago. I think this time around will be even more exciting.
Here's the garage on Alabama Street in Huntington Beach, that housed S&M Bikes in 1991. The back end of the Winnebago apartment
I have a new blog now, about side hustles, gig jobs, small businesses, and making a living in recession of 2023-2025. Check it out:
Watch the segment at 16:27, that's what this post is about.
Looking through photos on my laptop yesterday, I saw one I snapped of Dave Voelker and Brian Blyther at the One Love Jam (photo below), about a month ago. Like the rest you riders out there, these vert riders blew my mind in magazines and contests back in the day, and were both inspirations in my own riding. Since I got lucky and stumbled into the BMX freestyle industry, I got to know both of them back in the 1980's.
In a moment of dorky thoughts about all the crazy shit I've seen them do back in the day, the segment at 16:27 in the Vision/Unreel Productions Freestylin' Fanatics video popped into my head. While I was working at Unreel, a lot of riders thought I was busy producing and directing these Vision videos in my 2 1/2 years there.
In reality, I was The Dub Guy, that was my nickname. Most of my time was spent in a little, 6 by 8 foot room, filled with all kinds of pro VTR's (video tape recorders, because "VCR" wasn't a cool enough acronym for $7,000 machines) making copies of different videos, for all the the assorted people in the Vision Skateboards/Vision Street Wear empire. When I wasn't doing that, I was cleaning heads on the machines, running important errands, like picking up frozen yogurt and Chinese chicken salads for my co-workers, or hand labeling the 3,000 tapes in our tape library. I was everybody's assistant and gofer, and I didn't direct or produce anything until late 1988, and that was a short video segment.
But since I was the sole BMX kid, in a office full of old surfer/skateboarders, they told me one day to "write some copy" for the Freestylin' Fanatics video. "Copy" is TV talk for a script, basically, words for a voice-over guy to say over the video. I had no idea what the fuck they wanted, I'd never written any copy before, so I said, "Sure, I'll give it a try." I figured they'd hate what I wrote, and write something else. So I made up this weird story about Ivan Drabinski's School of Parking Attendants for the clip of Brian and Dave riding over the junk cars. Those cars, I believe, were somewhere on the Ohio State Fairgrounds, where an AFA Masters contest was held. Don Hoffman ( I think) was the cameraman at that contest, and saw the cars, and told Brian and Dave to screw around on them, outside the contest, for a little funny footage.
As was typical for all raw video footage at Unreel, I made a VHS window dub of the footage after the contest. A window dub is a copy of the raw video footage from camera, usually on a VHS tape, that had a box with running numbers in it, showing the time code from the original tape. The directors would watch the VHS window dub, write down the numbers of the shots they liked, and then take that list of shots in, when they went into the edit bay (the $250,000 room of editing equipment in those days), and edit the final video. In typical Unreel Productions fashion, the footage sat, unwatched, for over a year.
Then, management decided to make a BMX freestyle video, and Brian Gillogly, an old school surfer who once worked at Skateboarder Magazine, got picked to direct the video. Even though I was the only BMX guy in the office, I wasn't a producer, so I had nothing to do with decision making for Freestylin' Fanatics. At least until Brian asked me to write the voice-overs. So I took a tape of the footage home, and wrote V.O.'s for this scene, the Dave Vanderspek scene, and the Martin and Woody flatland scene, that night. Brian and I irked each other sometimes, so I figured he'd hate what I wrote. But he actually liked it, and Dave Alvarez, our video editor, did the voice-overs, then edited them into the video.
Where did I come up with Ivan Drabinski and his school for parking attendants? Three years earlier, in Boise, Idaho, I managed a tiny little amusement park, called The Fun Spot, for the summer. One of the kids working there was John Drabinski. He was a cool guy, and Drabinski was a cool sounding name, so I started there. Ivan just seemed to fit with Drabinski, they sounded good together, and I just made up this dumb ass little story. And what do you know? It wound up in the video. To be honest, I told Brian that talking over the riding was a stupid idea, and he should just cut the scene together with some cool music. But he was the director. So that's the story of Ivan Drabinski's School of Parking attendants, which I think went bankrupt a few months later, after one of the valets rammed a $100,000 Lamborghini Countach into the side of a parked Rolls Royce at 85 mph. There I go, making up stories again. Something about the name Ivan Drabinski makes me want to keep making things up about him. Maybe it'll be a novel someday.
I think I actually apologized to Dave Voelker after the video came out, for the lame voice-over, but he said he actually thought it was funny. Maybe. It was a long time ago. Dave can comment if he remembers that.
This was one of those little things I did at Unreel that I didn't think twice about, just some extra work to goof around with, and that would be thrown in the trash the next day, as far as I was concerned. And here I am, writing a blog post about it, 32 years later. Weird world.
Brian Blyther and Dave Voelker, hanging out at the One Love flatland Jam, in early 2020. No cars were damaged in the making of this photo. Which is good, because Brian's a cop now, and one of us would have got arrested.
How did 2020 go for you? This is how a lot of people think of this year, drawing to a close as I compile this ebook. I have no idea what was supposed to happen in this photo, but obviously it didn't go as planned. BMXers weren't the first people to do stupid stuff on bikes. But BMX freestyle took trick riding to all new levels, and to millions of people around the world, something that didn't happen in the 100 or so years of bike riding before freestyle got going.
In the original version of this blog post, I embedded a video clip of a young man and woman, riding bikes on a domed roof of an old building. In that clip, we saw a man and a woman, probably in their early 20's, around college age, riding bikes on the edge of this dome, on a windy day, at some point in the 1920's, the Roaring 20's, as they've come to be known. Not insane by today's standards, but they had a 20 to 30 mph wind they were dealing with, it was definitely dodgy.
I'm 54 now, as the crazy year 2020 draws to an end, and my grandparents were born between 1900 and 1909, I think, which would put these riders right around the same age. So if you're middle aged like me, imagine your grandparents riding 1920's bikes on a domed roof in the wind, as young people. Pretty radical for those days.
Then we see a guy on a 1920's mega ramp, below, basically, clearing a gap of 25 to 30 feet. Sure, there are a lot of riders who could make that jump today, on their BMX or mountain bikes. But that guy did it when the grandparents of us Old Schoolers were young, on a mild steel frame. What we call 4130 chromoly (or chrome-moly) steel today, was aircraft technology from the 1920's, to the best of my knowledge. It wasn't a material used to make bikes then, it was way too expensive. All these old bike trick videos and photos were people riding what we call mild steel frames. You know, the kind of frames you could snap in ten minutes at your local trails. These are the bikes Mike and Frank from American Pickers find in a barn of they're having a really good day. There were actually people riding bikes with wooden rims in that era.
I don't care how good of a rider you are, would you try that gap below on a skinny tire, $200, mild steel, beach cruiser-style bike from Walmart? Hell no, you wouldn't. My point is, people were getting crazy on bicycles from about the time modern bicycles were invented, which was around 1875. The Fred Flintstone-style, "hobby horse," foot push bikes, adult sized versions of today's toddler balance bikes, popped up around 1830. But pedal bikes came along around 1875.
As I've thought about those early bike riders while blogging, and as I've dug into these old clips and vintage photos, it's become apparent that there were some crazy ass motherfuckers on bicycles from the earliest days. And I mean crazy... by Morgan Wade Dakota Roche standards. They were doing Evel Knievel caliber shit 120 years ago. This photo below dates to 1905. My oldest grandma was kindergarten age when this photo was taken. Most people rode horses into town in those days.
Speaking of grandmas, it wasn't just guys getting crazy back then, somebody's grandma did trackstands.
Not crazy enough for you? I said above that some of these ancient bike tricksters were crazy by Morgan Wade standards, I wasn't exaggerating, like this guy below.
Yes, there were even sponsored riders back then, as well. It was a lot different from today's sponsorship deals. Young riders making $30,000 at one contest today, for five minutes worth of contest runs, makes them seem pretty badass. But you know who was really badass, Annie Oakley. She had a bike sponsor AND a gun sponsor... around 1900-1905. Sure, Larry Edgar can do a 37 foot high tabletop off a curb jump, but can he shoot six glass balls out of the air with a lever action 30/30 before they hit the ground? I don't think so. Annie Oakley could.
And yes, even back then, girlfriends and wives got pissed off when you bought too many bikes in those days. Some things never change.
There were even street riders 120 years ago.
Not only were people doing crazy and amazing stuff on bikes 80-100-120 years ago, on mild steel frame bikes, they were shredding without Red Bull, without helmets, without Emergency Rooms, and without Red Bull video production budgets. I don't know who this crazy fool is but I'm betting Morgan Wade is one of his descendants. Morgan's my go to favorite rider these days (and Dakota Roche), when I want to watch amazing new school riding, which is why I keep mentioning him.
You get the idea. There were people doing tricks on bikes from the get go. My personal belief is that bicycle trick riding was invented about ten minutes after the first guy learned to ride the first bike, when a cute girl walked by. That's just an educated guess.
We didn't know about this history when freestyle began spreading in the early 1980's, as Bob Haro, Bob Morales, Eddie Fiola, R.L. Osborn, Mike Buff, and other freestyle pioneers started doing demos and shows and letting other riders see what they had learned. After 1980, trick riding on BMX bikes began to spread slowly around Southern California, and the BMX racing world. Then a few hundred weird kids, myself included, caught the fever, and it blew up in small scenes dotted around the U.S., the U.K., and Europe, into the first wave of popularity in the late 1980's. Martin Aparijo and Woody Itson, who could both jump and ride pools, focused on flatland, and opened all our eyes to the what was possible with a BMX bike and a parking lot. We didn't all have skateparks, but we all had local parking lots for flatland.
So why did BMX freestyle, which started with Bob Haro and his friend John riding pools, just about on the 100 year anniversary of bikes being invented, take off and blow up world wide? Why did all the other action sports seem to pop up, grow, and explode, just as us Generation X kids were coming of age? This is one of the themes I went into in my online book/blog Welcome to Dystopia: The Future is Now, Book 1 (You can google it).
I think I've found the answer to this question, based on a little known social theory from India. The concept comes from a thinker, and pretty weird guy, P.R. Sarkar, and it's called The Law of Social Cycle. Basically, Sarkar came to the conclusion that there were four main mentalities of people in any society, The Intellectuals (smart people), The Acquisitors (smart people who focus on building wealth), The Laborers (average people who work normal jobs), and The Warriors (people focused on physical skills and courage). At any given time, in every society, one of these mentalities dominates society. That mentality is most looked up to, and shapes every aspect of their world. These mentalities can dominate society for decades or hundreds of years. But the mentalities dominate society in a particular order. The Warriors, The Intellectuals, The Acquisitors, The Laborers, and back to the The Warriors again.
An American economist, of Indian background (India Indians, not Native American Indians), named Ravi Batra, applied this concept to the U.S. in the 1980's, and came to the conclusion that we've been in the Acquisitor Age since our colonial days. The U.S. has been about business people, businessMEN primarily, as any woman who knows history can tell you. In the 1980's, when Batra figured this out, he wrote that we're nearing the end of the Acquisitor Age, a time when things turn to massive business and government corruption, the common working people get the shaft, and their standard of living goes down and stays down. Eventually, the working people become fed up, and they rise up in a huge populist movement.
Guess where we are now? Yep, the Occupy Wall Street movement, in 2011, was the beginning of the American populist movement rising to national awareness. It had been brewing under the surface for decades. Then the unexpected rise of both Donald Trump (on the political Right) and Bernie Sanders (on the political Left) were more examples of the rising populist movement. While they are on opposite ends of the political spectrum, they both tapped into millions of average working people who were pissed off at how much of a struggle everyday life, and making ends meet financially, had become. The new crop of both Progressive Left, and some of the Right Wing political extremes, tapped into millions of The Laborers rising up in protest.
In Sarkar's theory, The Laborers rise up, shit gets completely crazy and chaotic for a while, then one of two things happen. Either the society collapses and/or gets taken over by a rival (the bad option), or The Warriors rise up and take control and lead a new version of society. While the vast majority of people are Laborers, they aren't leaders, by nature. So The Laborers' populist movement rises up, shakes up and collapses the business people's corrupt system, then it kind of dies out. That vacuum is filled by Warriors, physically strong and truly courageous people. The average working people are sick of smooth talking con men at that point, they want actual, courageous, leaders.
So what does this have to do with BMX freestyle and actions sports? Simply, we as BMXers and Action Sports people, are one part of The Warrior mentality. Watching Sarkar's theory play out over 30 years now, since I read the book about it, I realized that the Warrior mentality people don't just pop up when The Laborers revolt, they slowly build, and the Warrior mentality spreads across the society little by little.
The entire action sports world, we are all part of the Warrior mentality that's been rising up in society, from the few weirdos on the fringe, decades ago. When all those crazy and fun-filled riders in the photos above got crazy on their bikes, they were freaks. Society wasn't ready for them, they didn't get thousands of other people to go out and do crazy things on bicycles. Bicycle trick riding was a novelty, but it didn't take off as a mass movement. But bicycling itself, then newer than BMX is today, did grow in a practical way. These shredders in the photos above, they were the handful of people pushing the limits in a highly conformist, Industrial Age, businessman's world.
But when Bob Haro and friends started doing tricks in the 1970's, they appeared on the heels of us Generation X kids seeing a couple of amazing and crazy people. Those two people, who influenced so many of us as little kids, were Evel Knievel and Bruce Lee. Their skills, daring, and general badassness really appealed to us kids, whose dad's (and a few moms then) worked either blue collar factory jobs, or suit-and-tie, 9 to 5 office jobs.
We were born into a world of massive, "company man" conformity, and Evel and Bruce showed us it was possible to be a bad ass. Those two came along right after surfing got popular in the 1960's, and as martial arts was gaining steam in the U.S.. Motocross, the other root action sport, besides surfing, had been slowly growing in the U.S., as well. These were all modern people with a Warrior mentality, but unlike the soldiers, police, and firefighters, professional athletes in mainstream team sports, the Warrior mentality people of earlier eras, these action sports pioneers turned that mentality towards a new group, a whole new kind, of "sports."
Another aspect of The Warriors that P.R. Sarkar described, was that people with the Warrior mentality are big on individualism. They like to do their own thing. So as the Warrior mentality was slowly spreading throughout American society in the soldiers, police, firefighters, and professional athletes in traditional sports, a whole new world of very individual-oriented sports, Action Sports, from BMX to rock climbing to surfing, and all the rest, evolved.
I published a zine in 1998 called "The Warrior Sports" explaining this idea. I passed about 50 of those zines out at the X-Games in San Diego that year. Much to my surprise, a year later, I was on the deck of the X-Games vert ramp, shooting video with a scammed press pass. Dennis McCoy rolled out next to me. Out of nowhere, he said, "Hey, that warrior zine you wrote last year was pretty cool." I didn't even see Dennis the year before, he nabbed a zine I gave to Mark Losey. But when Dennis McCoy remembers a zine a year after you publish it, you know you hit on a pretty cool idea.
So, in the Big Picture of things. BMX and BMX freestyle happened when they did, and took off and grew worldwide in the way they did, because society was finally ready for some radness. The Warrior Mentality was creeping through society, slowly becoming more acceptable to more and more people. By the time Bob Haro got his bike into a skatepark about 1975, a whole bunch of kids in Generation X was ready and looking for something wilder and crazier than the things our parents did as hobbies. You know, exciting things like bowling and miniature golf. Us Generation X kids were looking for a new type of excitement, and BMX freestyle was it for us, skateboarding for others, surfing for others, and the same with all the other Action Sports. Without realizing it, we all played a small part in creating a new version of the Warrior mentality. We found ways to do scary stuff, push our physical and mental limits, and get crazy, without actually going to war and killing other people. The early human tribal people, and later warriors and soldiers, were the root of warriorship, and the warrior mentality in ancient times.
As we move forward in the world today, we'll see more and more people who are actually physically good at something, from many different Warrior-type backgrounds, rise up to positions of importance in society. People are sick of silver-tongued, douchebag politicians. OK, a lot of people are, not everyone, there are still plenty of those politicians in office. As we navigate these chaotic times, we will see more courageous people emerge, actual leaders, and maybe some will be people we sessioned with in days past. Hopefully we'll take this into a type of society that's better for the vast majority of people and less of a 1% versus the 99% world.
One last thing, if you spend a chunk of your time in a bike shop, take heart, you never know what a small group of people from a bike shop will accomplish. Check the meme below.
The Wright Brothers' bike shop in Dayton, Ohio in the early 1900's.
