Brian Yeagle street/dirt segment from Anthem II

I stumbled across this segment on YouTube a couple days ago.  I'd never seen it before.  It's now one of my favorite BMX street/dirt sections ever.  That's mostly because it doesn't look like every other street video section.  Brian Yeagle from Anthem II, 12 years ago?  Something like that.  

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X-Games 2023 BMX highlights

Wow.  Just fucking wow.  

A backwards bunnyhop won real street at Rincon, over the rail, down the big drop.  Fucking wow.

I learned backwards bunnyhops in 1988, because I was a dork, and knew I couldn't hang in flatland anymore, once the locomotive and whiplash were invented.  And by "hang" I mean place in the middle of the pack, in a class of  fifty 17& over intermediates, in flatland at an AFA Masters comp.  

So I started trying a bunch of weird bunnyhop tricks, just seeing what was possible.  Since I rode with skateboarders every weekend at the Huntington Beach Pier, I learned a few skate tricks on my bike, like half-Cabs (roolback to 180 bunnyhop) and no complys (footplant to 180 on flat), backside bonelesses (can-can footplant on a bank), and nollies (nosewheelie into a speed bump to hop).  

In the freestyle world at the time, those weren't even tricks.  Pretty much no one else did them.  Eddie Roman did footplants to 360's, along with dozens of other weird, hard, and innovative tricks.  So goofing around on my own, I got to where I could do 6-7 foot backwards bunnyhops on flat, 6-7 foot half-Cabs (on a freewheel, not freecoaster, so I could launch farther) and full Cabs (rollback to 360 bunnyhop, only landed a few).  I tried a bunch of other bunnyhop tricks, and famously spent years trying to pull a bunnyhop tailwhop, but never landed a single one.  None of those things were even considered tricks at the time.  

Then, 15-20 years later, with stronger bikes, and when street riding had progressed a lot, riders discovered those old skate-inspired tricks, and took them to gaps, drops, ledges, and banks.  They kept pushing them to new levels.  So as a complete dork of a rider from the 80's and 90's, I'm stoked to see an completely fucking insane, HUGE backwards bunnyhop win Real Street at the X-Games.  I never even dreamed something like that would be possible.  Mad props to Colin Varanyak, and all these riders.  

My favorite part of all the X-Games footage I've seen was the cutaway shot during the dirt jumping comp.  The camera panned over to Cory Nastazio, standing near a pole, watching the action, and just goes, "Wow."  Yeah... Wow.  

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Santee 1988: A day that changed bike riding forever...

This day in the spring of 1988 completely changed BMX riding forever.  The first 2-Hip Meet the Street contest.  Ron Wilkerson and posse put on this comp in a spot behind a shopping center in Santee, California, a spot where Dave Voelker had built some giant wall rides.

At 4:00 in this clip of Mondo Vision, you get the official Vision Street Wear edit of the Santee Meet the Street contest.  The edit above is my edit for the 1988 2-Hip contest video, it's edited from the same footage, but is my rider-made edit, and much lower budget.  The Mondo Vision edit was directed by one of the Unreel Producers, I can't remember which one.

None of us knew what to expect.  Wall rides on BMX bikes were just invented the year before, and the biggest wallride ot appear in a magazine photo before the contest was about two feet high.  BMX freestyle then was closely following skateboarding, and street skating was just beginning to become its own thing, led by skaters Mark Gonzales, Tommy Guerrero, and Nata Kaupas.  What exactly did "street" riding mean, anyway?  None of us who showed up at Santee really knew.  We all had been doing it as long as we'd been riding, just like all the BMX racers a decade before us.  We'd been hitting driveway curb jumps, doing kick turms on banks, doing footplants on benches, carving and doing bunnyhop "airs" in ditches, jumping down steps, and launching off loading docks on occasion.  But there had never been a contest of street riding before, as far as we knew.  Actually, later I heard Dave Vanderspek had held a small DIY comp in NorCal a year or so earlier.  But I didn't know that on this sunny day in Santee.  

A group of maybe 200 people total, mostly riders, showed up in a weird little area, behind a pretty average shopping center, in the Spring of 1988.  Ron Wilkerson, Haro pro rider, vert and lip trick legend, and the guy who started putting on a halfpipe contest series the year before, put the event together.  I rode down to the contest with the Unreel Productions cameraman, Pat Wallace.  He was a lifelong California surfer guy, VW van and all, and Unreel's official camerman then.  Vision Street Wear sponsored all AFA and 2-Hip contests that year, and Unreel, where I worked, was Vision's video company.  So Pat got sent to every event to shoot footage, and both Vision and 2-Hip could use that footage however they wanted later on.  And just for the record, as the Unreel tap libraian, MOST of the AFA and 2-Hip video shot from 1987-1990 has NEVER BEEN SEEN by anybody, except me.  Really.  There are dozens of hours of high quality, early, BMX freestyle footage form the 1980's that never got used in ANY video.  It's all sitting in a warehouse now... somewhere. 

All that aside, I was there as a rider, not a video guy.  As we neared the contest sight, I joked, "It's going to be crazy, I wouldn't be surprised if somebody does a can-can wall ride or something today."  That seemed like an completely crazy trick at that point.  We rolled back behind the shopping center, and the first thing I saw, out the window of the VW van, was SoCal local rider George Smoot doing a can-can wall ride, on this HUGE dirt bank to wall.  We hadn't even parked, and my mind was alreayd  blown.  

Soon after, I was on my bike, as Pat got the camera, and started shooting.  Another guy, I think a friend of Pat's came along as well.  The riding area was completely unseen from the road in front of the shopping center, and while one police car rolled up to see what was happening (and somehow got a 12 inch square Vision Street Wear sticker added to the trunk), the world had no idea out little contest was happening.  It was just a bunch of BMXers, and a few obstacles.  But there was a car.  Most of us dreamed of riding on a car at some point, in our day to day riding, but never got the opportunity.  and Ron Wilkerson had a huge, old, land yacht towed in to thrash.  Right after we got there, cans of spray paint were pulled out, orange and green.  A whole bunch of guys laid down bikes and started spray painting the car, and duct taping the windshield.  

The guys best known for street riding at the time were the NorCal pioneer of everything, Dave Vanderspek, and San Diego thrashers Eddie Roman and Pete Agustin.  So those were the guys most expected to blow minds going in.  But we'd never all got together before to thrash urban obstacles, so everyone else was an unknown commodity.  

Vander, Eddie, and Pete were there, of course.  Santee area local, Dave Voelker was the guy who rode that spot on his own, and built the dirt jumps to giant wall rides.  He was an immediate standout.  Straight outta Torrance, The Spot locals, R.L. Osborn and Craig Grasso stood out immediately as well.  R.L., one of the pioneers of BMX freestyle, going back nearly a decade then, was thought to be pretty much "retired" from riding at the time.  Yet, he was there blasting huge wall rides in both directions and back peg fakie wall rides, among other moves.  Grasso, the artsy looking omnivorous rider who could ride anything well, was doing big fakie wall rides, wall ride variations, and throwing his unique style at obstacles.  

But the contest also drew hardcore BMX racers, most notably pros Rich Barlett and Chris Moeller.  The launch ramp up to the five foot box, then to a four foot high box, was up their alley.  Moeller, well known magazine test jumper, as well as pro racer, made fun of freestylers by putting a trick list on the back of his number plate, with tricks like "bunnyhop" and "long skid" listed on it.  Vert legend Todd Anderson, running his coaster brake General, was there as well, and tossed out amazing fakie wall footplants into the growing trick lexicon of the day.  Scott Towne, magazine photographer, was throwing out tons of style as well on his bike.  NorCal young buck vert rider, Mike Golden, jumped the car sideways, to flat, off a tiny launch ramp.  Dave Vanderspek launched off the tiny ramp to footplant on the roof over the car.  Vander still had it.

The whole day was a "Fuck yeah!  This is cool!" vibe among all of us.  You can't put it into a context for modern riders, who have grown up with ramps, skateparks, and decades of videos to watch.  It was like you took 100 hardcore BMX riders, and dropped them at the first skatepark ever built.  It was all new.  Yeah, we'd jumped off skater's launch ramps, and homemade plywood ramps before.  But the obstacles were largely new.  Many of the tricks were pretty knew, wall rides and fakie wall rides had been invented less than a year before.  And then we had the boxes, and a car to figure out what we could do on it.  Something like Steve Crandall's DIY comps, or Trey Jones Swampfest would be the closest comparison to the Santee vibe, in today's world.  It was just a fun, crazy, experimental day of riding new stuff, real, hardcore, BMXin'.

The only crowd really was a few dozen friends, girlfriends, and some family members.  It was mostly just a bunch of riders.  And we all just went nuts.  There were only two classes, Good (amateur), and Great (pro).  There were no pro street riders then, this was the contest that turned street riding into a "sport," so riders just decided if they felt "pro" or not.  In addition to the big car, launch ramps, and big boxes, and ramp/dirt wall rides, the obstacles included two parking blocks and a shopping cart.  The one complaint some of us had was there wasn't much in the way of actual "street" obstacles.  No one had done peg grinds on rails or ledges yet, that hadn't been invented.  But there were no bench sized ledges, concrete or asphalt banks, or other types of often ridden obstacles.  It didn't really matter.  It turned into a jumping and wall ride contest mostly.  But that's the stuff that looks the best in person and on camera.  

Like I said, coming into the contest, Dave Vanderspek, Eddie Roman, and Pete Augustin had the biggest reputations as street riders.  That day in Santee moved Dave Voelker, Craig Grasso, R.L. Osborn up into the mix.  One more rider, the one from farthest away, dropped jaws with the trick of the day.  English rider Craig Campbell, best known for vert, threw out solid tricks all day, and then blew what few brain cells we had left at the end with a huge wall ride to 360.  I don't think anyone else had even imagined that, let alone thought of trying it.  

I'll give the hardcore street riding roots medal to NorCal, early originators of street style riding since 1982-1983, like Dave Vanderspek, Maurice Meyer, Robert Peterson, and the whole Golden Gate Park crew.  Being from the San Francisco area, with so much crazy terrain everywhere, street riding was in their DNA.  That's the place Ron Wilkerson came from originally.  But the street riding torch got passed to the San Diego crew that day in Santee.  Yeah, Eddie Roman and Pete Augustin could bust some cool tricks on street, we knew that before.  Look at the results, Vic Murphy won the Good class, and Dave Voelker won Great, with Eddie Roman, Pete Augustin, and contest promoter, Ron Wilkerson, who lived in Encinitas then, also among the top 8 in the Great class.  

The first 2-Hip Meet the Street contest not only put the San Diego riders front and center in the new street riding genere', it opened everyone's mind to the potential riding available in the urban jungle around all of us.  We all rode away looking at the city streets around us completely differently after a few hours at that contest.  A few months after, the contest photos came out in the September issue of BMX Plus!, and probably the September issue of FREESTYLIN'.  I don't have my magazine collection anymore, and oldschoolmags.com is missing that issue, so I couldn't check.  The BMX Plus issue is on their site. 

Much like the first King of Dirt jam at Rich Bartlett's dad's haouse, a year earlier, the Santee 2-Hip Meet the Street changed the way everyone there looked at the world around us, and what was possible on a BMX bike.  The magazine photos, and later the videos above, spread that vibe to thousands more riders.  And BMX street riding spawned into a sport, as well as just something fun to do between racing and freestyle sessions.  Bike riding was never the same after that day in Santee, and street riding continues to evolve now, 35 years later.  Even crazier, many of the riders there that day are still riding.  None of us expected that.  

Nearly a year later, I got a call from Ron Wilkerson, asking me if I wanted to edit the 2-Hip contest season video.  I jumped at the chance.  I was able to borrow Unreel's S-VHS "offline" edit system, and chopped it all together in the spring of 1989, 5 vert comps and this street comp.  Why did Ron ask me?  The year before I produced six videos for the AFA, and I was the guy who seemed to have the basic skills to edit a low budget video at the time.  Eddie Roman's "BMX movie," Aggroman, came out later in 1989, which really sparked the rider-made video movement in BMX freestyle.  For the next year or two it was Eddie, Mark Eaton of the Plywood Hoods, me, and Jeremy Alder Back east, producinga few rider-made, low budget videos.  By about 1991, a whole lot more people start putting out low budget BMX videos, which sparked a video revolution during the recession of the early 1990's, after BMX "died," and only the hardcore people were left.  This video embedded above, became part of the 2-Hip BHIP video, check it out.  

So that's my story of the first media covered BMX street contest, one sunny spring day, in Santee, California in 1988.

Sebastian Keep- More Walls PRO GRESS SHUN!

This one just came out, and if you're ever been into BMX, you've probably seen it.  It's worth watching again.  This is true BMX stunt work on street.  Taking one basic trick, wallrides, and just pushing it in multiple directions past the current limits.  Insane progression by Sebastian Keep.  Another epic Red Bull backed video.  Nobody does content creation like Red Bull.

Huntington Beach Street Scene... the first made-for-TV BMX street contest

Produced by the Old Man of BMX himself, Scot Breithaupt, the Huntington Beach Street scene in early 1989 was the first made-for-TV BMX street contest ever.  The intro starts with Scot and announcer Dave Stanfield, and then you see myself (blue shirt), and Randy Lawrence (white shirt), and the H.B. flatland crew.

Bike riders have been jumping curbs, riding embankments, and having fun on urban obstacles for 100 years or more.  BMX street started with Bob Haro doing kickturns on the 6th & Commonwealth banks, and Bob and R.L. Osborn riding the Larry's Donuts bank in Redondo Beach around 1979-1980. 

Bob Haro himself, riding the 6th & Commonwealth banks in downtown L.A., around 1981-82.  I think these banks are still there, and there's a skate spot right around the corner, probably to  keep skaters off these banks. 

But BMX street riding really got going with the Curb Dogs and the other Bay Area freestylers in the early 1980's.  The San Diego riders were right on their tail, exploring the potential of urban obstacles.  When Mark Gonzales, Tommy Guererro, Natas Kaupas, and a few other skaters  started pushing the idea of treating every city as a big skatepark in the mid 1980's, BMXers soon followed, and street riding started to get a little magazine coverage in about 1985.  Curb Dogs founder held the first BMX street contest, but it was a mostly NorCal event, and didn't get any media coverage.  Ron Wilkerson, a year after holding the first BMX halfpipe contests, decided to hold a street comp.  He held the first 2-Hip Meet the Street contest in Santee, California, at one of Dave Voelker's favorite riding spots, in the spring of 1988.  This contest did get media coverage, and I happened to be the guy who edited the first 2-Hip video, which included this section, from the Santee contest.   

The next spring, in 1989, I was still working at Vision Skateboard's video company, Unreel Productions.  The Old Man of BMX himself, Scot Breithaupt, re-emerged on the scene, that time as a TV producer.  At a time when the young network ESPN wanted nothing to do with action sports, Scot managed to sell them a series of bicycle shows, the Action Sports Cycle Series.  Scot was a seat-of-the-pants type entrepreneur.  He would sell the idea, and then try to figure out how to make it happen.  

Scot was also the single best hard sell salesman I've ever met.  He could have talked a polar bear into buying a refrigerator, and a chest freezer to boot. So Scot sold the series to ESPN, found a video editor, and then came to Unreel to rent our edit bay at night to edit his TV shows.  Back in 1989, editing broadcast quality video took a $500,000 edit bay full of VTR's and effects boxes, and more monitors than the bridge of the Enterprise on Star Trek.  I got the job of hanging out at night with Scot and his editor, mostly to make sure Scot didn't "borrow" any of our video footage or equipment.  Scot was a bit shady at times.  

It was easy work for me, and I spent most of the time in our lobby watching the collection of surf videos the Unreel producers had donated.  After a few weeks of this, Scot asked me if I had any ideas for a show.  He was finishing up editing one show, it was a Sunday night.  He needed to find or hold a bike event the next Saturday, edit the show the week after, and the show would air two days after that.  

My answer was quick, "You have to do a street riding show."  But Scot, a diehard BMX racer since the sport was invented in 1970, shot back, "Like jumping curbs and stuff?"  It took me 20 minutes, and showing him the raw footage from the 2-hip contest in Santee, to talk him into the idea.  He finally agreed it sounded cool, and he needed some kind of  bike contest to make a show out of.  The next day we went to work.  Scot rented the old Surf Theater parking lot in downtown Huntington Beach, and borrowed the Stonehenge jump box ramp from GT Bikes and got a junked car.  I got on the phone (no internet in those days) and told every freestyler I could think of that we were having a street contest that coming Saturday.  It all came together in a week.

He called the event the Huntington Beach Street Scene.  I just wanted to get street riding on TV, BMX almost never got on TV back then.  Other than Chris Moeller taking a pretty good digger, and Randy Lawrence getting a really lame nickname from Scot in the show, things went off well.  This show got the best ratings, by far, of any show in the series.  That's how the first made-for-TV BMX street contest happened.  Yeah, it looks pretty goofy now, but you have to start somewhere.  BMX street has evolved ever since.   

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The Spot Finder

Sessioning Gilligan's Lagoon on my bike

Gilligan's Island intro from season 2 on, I think.  The initial intro was in black & white and was shot in different locations.   If you're part of Generation X, you spent many hours laying on your stomach in the thick, earth tone shag carpet, on the living room floor, elbows out, your head propped up on your hands, watching Gilligan's Island episodes.  At :38 in the intro, and then under the head shots of the cast, we see the familiar sight of the lagoon, as they called it on the show.  The S.S. Minnow is washed up on the sandy beach, big rocks by the holes in the hull.  In many episodes, the castaways went to that little beach, surrounded by trees, for one reason or another.

But that area in the shot isn't really a beach.  It's TV set, which was set up on the back part of the CBS-MTM Studio lot.  Officially, it was, and still is, called CBS Studio Center.  That's what we called it when I got a job as a spotter on American Gladiators in the summer of 1992.  What's a spotter?  On American Gladiators, we were a crew of 8 guys, and most of the time we helped the grips (TV industry construction guys) move set pieces around.  If you watched American Gladiators in the late 1980's and early 1990's, you know there were several different games, where the contenders competed against the gladiators.  Each game had a whole bunch of pieces that had to be moved in from outside, and set up, with a live audience watching.  If you freeze this clip at :24, that's me in the black, in the background on Wesley "2 Scoops" Berry's tower.  Wesley is the single best athlete I've ever met, and a really cool guy as well.

One of the older crew guys told me the Gladiators stage crew did the biggest set changes in the history of TV, and we did them 7 times each day.  I don't know if that was true, but we worked hard on that show.  How many other people you know who've actually moved an entire pyramid, on a daily basis, and that puppy weighed like 22,000 pounds or something.  So a big part of our job was moving heavy things on and off the stage, or Gladiators Arena, as it was called.

We taped the whole season of American Gladiators in about 7 weeks total, in the summer.  Most TV shows shoot for a nine month season, roughly September through May, like a school year. In the summers, nearly everyone was gone, "on hiatus," and we had the whole big lot pretty much to ourselves.  Gladiators was housed in Stage 3, said to be the second biggest sound stage in the whole Hollywood/L.A. area.  The CBS-MTM lot is actually in Studio City, over the hill from the famous Hollywood sign, and a couple miles to the west.  It's off Radford street, near the intersection of Ventura and Laurel Canyon, for you SoCal people.  When I was up in the area recently, people refer to the lot as the Radford Studios these days.

For the first 7 or 8 days of working on set, we would set up the games, usually a couple at once, and both the contenders and gladiators would practice.  Since it was a TV show, and a progressive, competition show, the producers didn't want either the gladiators or the contenders to get hurt.  So us spotters got to play most of the games with them.  As part of our job, we learned to take stunt falls into the crash pads from veteran stuntman Bob Yerkes, who was in his 70's then.  We learned how to fight with pugil sticks from Marine Corps drill sergeants from the San Diego bootcamp You can see me under th eleft tower at 1:01 in that clip).  Then we would be contenders for the gladiators to practice, and gladiators for the contenders to practice.  So I got my ass kicked by both groups, which was pretty fun, most of the time.

Like any big budget TV show, we had an hour for a catered lunch each day, which meant eating cafeteria style, on a smaller stage, and then we had time to chill or wander around a bit.  One day at lunch, someone mentioned the old mill.  I said, "what old mill?  The crew guy said, follow me, check this out.  There was a line of trees behind Stages 1/2, 3 (our stage), and the next couple.  I knew there was a hill below the trees, but never wandered back there.  So I follow this guy into a little cut in the trees, and there's a wooden walkway that went into the back of  wood framed building.  We walked into a bare, empty wooden room, with two windows on the other side.  The guy said, "look out the window." He walked to one, I walked to the other.  Suddenly I was looking out the window of an old fashioned mill, from a second story window.  There was a big mill wheel on the side of the mill, and a pond below.  The pond was surrounded by big asphalt banks, so you could walk around the edge of the pond.  The banks were 6 or 7 feet high, and dropped down to the flat ground of a parking area below.  It looked something like this, from below, when there was no water in the pond.

The main thing the old mill was used for during gladiators was for people to sneak out into it, since it was pretty secluded, and make-out or get a blowjob.  While I never managed to get lucky there, I did wander out there once in a while.  It was a cool set, and right behind our stage.

At the time, I was either living in the P.O.W. House in Westminster, which you old school BMXers know of, or roommates with Chris Moeller and others in one apartment or another, down in Huntington Beach.  Those places were 50 miles away.  I worked 7 days a week on the show, with only 2 or 3 days off in 6 or 7 weeks.  I didn't have a car then.  So I would rent a cheap motel room by the week, which was about a mile and a half away.  I rode my BMX bike, an S&M Dirt Bike, to work each day.  I parked it back stage, and sometimes rode it over to lunch.  One time I gave Ice the Gladiator a ride to lunch on my handlebars.  I was riding by to lunch and she said, "Hey, give me a ride."

Our spotter crew worked pretty hard most of the day, so I didn't have much energy to go session after work.  But  I would occasionally do a few tricks at lunch.  Anyhow, one day I wandered over into the old mill at lunch, looked out the window, and the pond was empty.  Even better, it was a big, banked pool, with 6-7 foot high banks.  There was even a mellow hip.  So after work, I asked someone if anyone would freak out if I rode it a bit.  The people on my crew said, "Probably not."  So I rode down the driveway into the parking area, and rode the big banked pool for half an hour or so.  I loved riding banks back then.  I could do little hip jumps, maybe a foot, foot and a half off the ground, but they were fun.  I did some kickturns, and a bunch of backside bonelesses, a favorite bank trick of mine.  I could to 180 and 360 flyouts onto the top of the bank.  Nothing was insane, but it was a blast to ride.  Best of all, security rolled by in their golf carts, and didn't care.

Over four seasons, I had maybe 8 or 10 solo sessions, in the mill pond after days on the Gladiators crew.  One day one of the guys who worked for the studio itself came by.  "You know that's Gilligan's Lagoon, right?" he asked.  No, I didn't know.  He assured me it was.  The little inlet, to the left of the mill, was where they put the sand, and the S.S. Minnow, to shoot the intro, and other scenes, for Gilligan's lagoon.  So, as far as I know, I was the first, and only, BMXer to ride Gilligan's lagoon banks, while it was dry.  I mentioned that fact in a Facebook comment last weekend.  Much to my surprise, Eddie Fiola responded, saying I shouldn't say I was the only BMXer to session the lagoon banks.  "Don't forget, I work in Hollywood, too," Eddie said.  So it sounds like Eddie found it too, at some point.

According to the CBS Studio Center wikipedia page linked above, Gilligan's Lagoon was demolished, and paved over to make a parking structure, in the mid-1990's.  I last rode it in 1995, I think, my last time working there on American Gladiators, and I know the lower area, by the lagoon, got really built up later on.  I snuck my sister and her friend on the lot a couple years later, while I gave them a tour of Hollywood, and we parked in that area.  I think the lagoon was still there then, maybe 1996 or 1997.  In any case, I think I'm the first BMXer to session Gilligan's lagoon banks, and one of only a couple who ever did.

Jon Peterson, the Haro assistant team manager, who introduced me to the freestyle industry in Tulsa in 1986, also commented on the Facebook post where I mentioned the lagoon.  He said he digs my weird stories, so I wold him I'd write this one up.

I didn't know much about the history of the CBS-MTM lot when I worked there, except that Rosanne taped on Stage 1, next door to our stage.  That was where the Mary Tyler Moore show, the "MTM" in CBS-MTM, taped many years earlier.  But here's a cool little look around the lot with Bob Vila from This Ol' House, a few years later.



I have a couple of new blogs I'm getting going on.  Check them out:

Crazy California 43

 The Big Freakin' Transition

 

Full Circle

 

Hogshit Rides 2018 Year End Edit

This showed up yesterday, courtesy of Jody Donnelly.  I watched it, and now I'm jonesin' to go ride (and to lose a ton more weight to make that happen).  Watch it, then get that New Year's session underway.

Left out of my zines: Pete Augustin

If you were a BMX freestyler in the 80's, and someone mentioned the name Pete Augustin, riding like what's in this clip is probably what comes to mind.  In the Webster's Dictionary of Freestyle in the 1980's, if you looked up "aggro," there was a picture of Pete riding street.  Remember that pic of him doing a lookback off a curb with the back tire tagging a the top of  trash can?  Yeah.  Hard.  Tough.  Brash.  San Diego street riding.  That was Pete Augustin.

So it may surprise some people that, for some reason I can't really remember, Pete Augustin came up to The Spot in Redondo Beach once in a while and had some flatland sessions with us in 1986.  Pete was Chris Day's favorite rider, and the guy Chris wanted to emulate back then, and I think Pete hooked Chris up with Bad Boy Club clothes, so maybe that's why he came up to The Spot.  In any case, Pete was one of the first SoCal pros I rode with.  I think R.L. was out on a tour when I first started at Wizard, and Pete was at The Spot a few times before R.L. got back.  He wasn't a huge flatland rider, but you pretty much had to ride flatland then, street wasn't its own genre yet, and Pete had some cool stuff.  The rolling backwards handstands were crazy.  Here's Pete on flat.



Sliders and backwards wheelies were big in late 1986, and two of my favorite tricks.  Pete (and Lew) ripped both at those.  I could do a halfway decent backwards wheelie (on the peg), but Pete was doing one handed ones.  I thought, "Damn, I need to step my shit up," and started learning those.  Lew already did solid one handed backwards wheelies.  But Pete also did one handed backwards wheelies, then would grab the front tire, and then let go and just hold the tire for a few seconds.  It took me months to get that variation dialed, it was just a weird balance point to keep. That's the big thing I remember from riding with Pete Augustin at The Spot in late 1986.

Even then, Pete had the reputation of being a guy people were afraid to talk to.  Everyone who didn't know him seemed to think that if you looked at him wrong, he'd punch you in the face.  Maybe he went off on some annoying kid at some point, and it got blown up, out of proportion.  But when I was riding with him at The Spot in those days, he was totally cool.  OK, he's not like Mr. Congeniality, the smooth-talking salesman type.  He would ride, we would ride, and we'd all be doing our own thing for a while.  Focused more than anything.  But when we started talking, he was cool.

So for the next three or four years, when riders from different parts of the country brought up this idea that Pete Augustin was totally unapproachable, I'd tell them he had always been cool to me, and while he was aggro as hell in his riding, he was cool to talk to.

A couple years later, at one of the local AFA comps in Anaheim, which were held at the R.G. Canning car shows, we had this brick patio area at the Anaheim convention center to practice in.  Wall rides were the new thing then, and a few of us were trying them on the brick wall of the patio.  Really, we were doing wall slides.  We'd bunnyhop next to the wall, and get both tires to touch the wall, sort of sliding against it.  Nobody was getting any real traction on the wall.  It was just flat horizontal ground to flat vertical wall, no bank to help us out.  We were all running 90 or more psi for flatland, which didn't help.

As we were doing that, Pete Augustin rolled out onto the patio.  We all did a couple of more lame wall slides.  Then Pete went to do one.  He did this gargantuan bunnyhop, hitting the wall nearly vertical, slamming the bottoms of his tires into the wall.  From flat ground, he bunnhopped into the wall, actually rode up it a bit, and pretty much did a kickturn on the wall, pulled out, and landed.  It was fucking amazing.  I'd never seen anyone stick to a wall like that coming off of flat ground.  Neither had the rest of the guys there.  Pete kind of smiled and rode away.  I don't think he even said anything.  The riding said it all.  "Like this, guys.  San Diego motherfuckers!"

 When writing the stories for my two 48 page zines about The Spot in Redondo, I wrote a few pages about the guys who weren't really locals when I was there, but rode with us now and then.  As I cut the sections down to actually fit in the zines, that part got cut.  The part about Pete Augustin isn't in the zines, so I decided to write a blog post about riding with him.

Four years later, shooting video for my first, completely self-produced video, Jess Dyrenforth invited me to a session at Mouse's ramp near San Diego, and Pete and Chris Day were there tearing it up, along with underground SoCal legend Mike Tokemoto.  You can see that section here at 38:05.  Pete's in the white T-shirt.  This section is the first serious spine ramp session EVER in a BMX freestyle video, so they were breaking new ground then.  So that's what I remember of Pete Augustin from the 1980's.

My zine about the The Spot in Redondo turned into two, solid, 48 page zines of stories and thoughts and photos.  The two big, fat zines, come with some original, homemade stickers and mini flyers.  We all know that zines immediately turn into collector's items, by their very nature.  They're so collectible, nobody ever sells their zines.  So I'm charging $15 for these 2-zine packs.  Each one is signed and numbered, you know, so you can sell it on Ebay if I ever hit the big time as a writer, like J.K. Rowling or something.  Or even Ed Templeton, his "Teens Smoking" books have sold for $500 on Ebay, believe that or not.

Anyhow, if you'd like to add these to your own collection, paypal me $15 to stevenemig13@gmail.com .   ("steven" not "steve")  Shipping is included in the continental U.S..   If you're in Canada, Alaska, or Hawaii, it's $20.  In Australia, New Zealand or the U.K., $25 U.S. You've read the blog, now get my stories into your hot little hands.  Or big hands.  The first packs are shipping out today.

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

Jimmy Levan film coming next year

I just saw this trailer on Facebook.  I haven't seen Jimmy in person in about 20 years, but I've watched videos of him.  It's weird to hear someone I actually know talking about a near death experience.  I can't wait to see this Go Fast Pull Up.

Below is the Jimmy Levan I met in '91.  He was a young up and comer then, and he still cleared the Santa Ana Civic Center pyramid, which is a good 30-35 foot jump off a mellow bank.  That was a taste of the riding he would do in the years after.

Congratulations Dave Voelker on making the BMX Hall of Fame

Last night, at Dave Voelker's house in the San Diego area, he held a big party to celebrate making it into the BMX Hall of Fame.  It's 9:30 am East Coast time now, 6:30 West Coast time, so I figure Dave has just recently passed out in the desert somewhere near his house, as a coyote looks on and wonders what the fuck this human is doing laying out in the brush.  I imagine it was one hell of a party, and had I been anywhere near the West Coast, I would have joined in the festivities. 

Congratulations Dave!  Voelker making the HOF is a no-brainer.  Few riders have blown minds on a 20 inch bike for as many years as Dave has.  I had the good fortune to meet Dave when he was an unknown ramp rider that Brian Scura had just hired to ride in his shows.  During my short stint at FREESTYLIN' magazine, I was told to go out front one afternoon and help some guy set up Scura's quarterpipe for a photo shoot.  I went outside, and offered to help this kid with white-blond, stringy hair.  After all, it took two or three people to set up the typical wooden quarterpipe in those days. 

"I got it," Dave said.  "Scura designed this ramp so one person can set it up.  Brian Scura was not only a weird, yet talented, rider, he was a mad scientist (he invented the Gyro), and owned one of the few pro trick teams at the time.  So I chatted with this Dave kid as I watched him set up the ramp solo, which was amazing in itself. 

Then he grabbed his bike, no helmet, to do a few warm-up airs, and see how the ramp felt.  His first air was five or six feet out, pretty respectable at the time.  "This kid's pretty good," I thought.  After a handful of airs in the six to seven foot range, Dave rode at the ramp a little slower.  The bike was suddenly upside down as his foot stopped at the very top of the transition.  I screamed, thinking this guy was going to eat shit and land on his head with no helmet.  But Dave was snapping one of his now-famous upside down footplants.  I'd never seen anything like it at the time.  It blew my mind. 

About then, Windy Osborn walked out with her camera.  I watched her check out Dave's huge airs (with a helmet).  But there really wasn't anything for me to do, so I reluctantly headed back in side and left Windy and Dave to do the photo shoot.  That was the fall of 1986. 

Dave stormed on the scene, soon became a GT factory rider, and toured the world like crazy.  We all watched him blow minds on both flatland and ramps year after year.  I can honestly say Dave has been one of my favorite riders to watch... ever.  There are a ton of memories, like sitting on a curb in New Jersey outside an AFA contest.  Riders were goofing around in the parking lot.  I was talking to some rider, and we were both leaning back on our hands, with our legs stretched out over the curb and our feet in the parking lot.  Dave Voelker comes racing towards us and yells, "Watch out!"  He bunnyhopped, at speed, into a manual on top of the curb, hopped over our legs, and landed in a manual, hauling ass.  He rode it for another 20 feet, and then hopped off the curb and headed towards some other obstacle. 

At the huge (for the time) 1989 2-Hip King of Vert contest that Unreel Productions (where I worked) helped put on, one of the cameramen asked Dave what he thought of the halfpipe.  I love his answer, "You have to be able to land on these things (halfpipes), I never really had to do that before." 

When it comes to my memories of Dave Voelker riding, the top is the first 2-Hip Meet the Street contest in Santee, California in the spring of 1988.  That's my edit of the contest above, from the 2-Hip BHIP video, and as you can see, Dave's all over it.  None of us really knew what to expect that day.  Dave Vanderspek and his NorCal Curb Dogs were legends on street then, as was San Diego rider Eddie Roman.  But the location of that first big street contest was Voelker's personal spot.  Before that contest, the only wall rides we'd seen photos of were two or three feet high. 

Unreel cameraman Pat Wallace shot the video in this clip, at a time when Spike Jonze was a photographer, R.L. Osborn came back from contest retirement, and there were far more riders than there were video cameras.  It was the changing of the guards that day in that parking lot behind a shopping center in Santee.  Dave Vanderspek, one of the earliest pioneers of street riding showed off the bar endo on a ledge and fun-filled style that made him a legend.  But a whole new crop of riders, several unexpected, rose to the occasion and established themselves at the new school of BMX street riding.  South Bay rider Craig Grasso, ramp legend Todd Anderson, NorCal ramp kid Mike Golden (the only one to jump the roof of the car), Orange County local George Smoot, rider/industry guy Scott Towne, and several others made their mark on the exploding street riding scene.  Englishman Craig Campbell hucked the trick of the day, the 540 wall ride (or wall ride to 360 out).  Eddie Roman, long time innovator, already a street legend, cemented his place in street riding.

But it was Dave Voelker who blew every fucking mind that day with wall rides bigger than any of us had ever dreamed of, and his crazy jump over the sixteen foot box where he clipped and cleared the final 8 feet without his bike.  Not one person at that Santee contest had any idea what a street contest would look like, what obstacles would be there, or just how big street riding could be.  Except maybe Vander, he'd already held the first street contest in NorCal.  But it was Dave Voelker that went so fast and so big that we all realized we were just scratching the surface of what could be done with a BMX bike on the urban terrain all around us. 

Dave showed us a taste of the future that day, and pretty much every day since.  Thanks for blowing our freakin' minds Dave.  Congratulations on a well deserved spot in the BMX Hall of Fame.  And I hope today's hangover isn't too bad.

Now.  There's only one way to end this post.  Everybody get out your air guitars.  Duh... nuh, nuh, nuh...nuh, nuh, nuh....

San Francisco street riding 1986 and 2017

I consider San Francisco the city where BMX street riding was born.  Dave Vanderspek and his Curb Dogs really pushed the skateboard idea that the whole urban world was a skatepark waiting to be sessioned.  Street skating pioneer Tommy Guerrero was one of the Curb Dogs, after all.  I know riders back to Bob Haro and the early BMX racers jumped curbs and did kick turns on banks.  But the Curb Dogs and the Golden Gate Park riders really pushed street riding to becoming its own genre.  The San Diego riders quickly joined the cause, pushing street knowledge even further.

In this clip above, about halfway through, you see Curb Dog Maurice Meyer doing what he did every day, riding the San Diego hills and jumping those curb cuts to big air down the hills.  Drob rode a coaster brake, too.  It amazed me seeing him, Vander and a few others blasting five foot high tabletops off curbs.

In this clip below, we see new school trials and street rider Danny MacCaskill doing the exact same thing on the crazy terrain of the city by the bay.  The progression continues.

BMX freestyle legends

 I come from the world of BMX freestyle in the 1980's and 1990's.  I stumbled into the industry thanks to a zine I published, so I got to know all these guys over the years.  Ron Wilkerson (above) was a top pro freestyler for Haro Bikes for years.  He invented a lot of lip tricks on vert, and can ride anything.  He also put on the 2-Hip King of Vert Series and the 2-Hip Meet the Street series of contests, as well as starting two bike companies, Wilkerson Airlines in the 90's, and 2-Hip Bikes which is still going today.  He's one of the most influential freestylers ever.

The middle drawing is an unfinished one of Eddie Roman.  Eddie rode for Skyway bikes, could ride flatland, ramps, and street, and made several of the most influential BMX videos ever.  He was one of the lead guys as street riding turned into its own genre in the late 80's.

The bottom drawing is another San Diego street legend, Vic Murphy.  This one-footed tabletop jump was off of a curb cut.  You know those little bumps at the edge of a driveway?  Vic hit one of those and blasted this super stylish jump, which is one of the great street riding photos of the early days.  I think it's a Spike Jonze photo, from his days at FREESTYLIN' magazine.  Normally I always draw the backgrounds in my drawings.  But this one of Vic just seemed better against the white paper.  I really dig this drawing, it's one of the favorites I've done.