The BMX freestyle foreshadowing of Freestyle Motocross

 This is my recent Sharpie Scribble Style drawing of Martin Aparijo doing a no-footed can-can on his CR 125 in late 1986 or early 1987.  The original photo was in the February 1987 issue of BMX Plus! magazine.  Sean Ewing commissioned me to do this drawing, and he always finds really unique photos for me to do in my weird, Sharpie style.  Thanks Sean.  He also posted the photos from the original photo shoot on Facebook that I'm using below.

If you've been around BMX a while, or have watched Mark Eaton's Joe Kid on a Stingray documentary, you know BMX started in 1970, and was inspired by motocross racing.  Back then motocross bikes had a couple inches of travel, and only got really big air when guys like Evel Knievel or the other distance jumpers flew ramp to ramp.  The first big BMX jumping variation, the classic tabletop, came from BMXers imitating motocross riders.  

But then BMX took off, bikes improved, and jumping evolved.  By 1983-1984, BMX freestyle, trick riding, was becoming an actual sport, and BMX air tricks evolved well past what motocross free riders were doing at the time.  So the guys at BMX Plus! decided to do a photo shoot with some BMX guys doing tricks on motocross bikes.  

This February 1987 article in BMX Plus! opens with Martin Aparijo, Brian Blyther, and Eddie Fiola doing no handers on their motorcycles, side by side.  You can also see several other tricks done by them that day.  You can NOT look up this issue's scan on Old School Mags, they don't have the scan of this issue, unfortunatelty.

Here's the next page, and we see Martin Aparijo again, busting a scary looking nothing, and a small black & white photo in the upper right, of the no footed can-can, again.  The drawing I did above was from a color poster of the trick that came in the magazine.  

So in this article, published in the February 1987 issue of BMX Plus!, we have Martin Aparijo documented doing a nothing and a no-footed can-can on his motorcycle.  Then we have Martin, Brian, and Eddie all doing no-handers on motocross bikes.  In addition they're doing a surfer, a framestand, and a "riding body varial," climbing in a complete 360 around the bike while riding.  

Here's the cool part, freestyle motocross wasn't "invented" for about 7 or 8 more years.  Even better, Martin was best known as a flatland freestyler, though he had been an avid jumper, rode pools, and did the first front flip jump (no photos or video) on a BMX bike. I believe Matt Berringer was the first guy to land a BMX front flip on video, around 2000.  You can see him doing a blackflip followed by a front flip, over doubles, at 10:27 in this video.

So we have Martin Aparijo, Brian Blyther, and Eddie Fiola doing freestyle motocross tricks, 6-8 years before freestyle motocross was invented.  Now, there were, in 1987, and have always been, off road motorcycle "free riders."  I don't know what tricks they were doing in 1987, and couldn't find any clips on YouTube of tricks from that era. 

 Motorcycles were invented in the late 1800's, and there were races by the late 1890's.  Motorcycle "scrambles" in Europe go back to the 1940's or 1950's.  Motocross had been happening in the US. since the 1950's.  Then there was Evel Knievel, Gary Wells, and a few other motorcycle jumpers performing in shows in the late 1960's and 1970's.  That was when motorcycle distance jumping first blew up in popularity, thanks to Evel.  Then there was kind of a lull in motorcycle jumping during the 1980's.  By 1989, and into the early 1990's, daredevil Johnny Airtime was doing super technical jumps, like this jump, over two moving semi trucks, in 1991.  Robbie Knievel was also jumping again, beginning in 1989, even doing no handed distance jumps later on, in the 1990's.   

In the free riding world, motocross racers Jeff Emig,  Phil Lawrence, and Ryan Hughes were three of the top free riders, known for jumping big on natural terrain, in the early 1990's.   Then the first Crusty Demons of Dirt video, in 1994, sparked the free riding explosion, and ultimately leading to the birth of freestyle motocross, or FSMX, as a competitive sport.  

Taking it back to the BMX Plus! article above.  When Martin, Brian, and Eddie did that photo shoot with Scott Towne in late 1986, Jeff Emig* was about 17 years old, Phil Lawrence was about 16, Brian Deegan and Seth Enslow were about 11 or 12, and Travis Pastrana was 2 1/2 years old.  So Martin, Eddie, and Brian were way ahead of the curve of motocross tricks at that time.  At this photo shoot, all three guys got photos doing no handers on motorcycles, three of the first documented no handers.  I can't confirm they were the first no handers ever, but they were definitely three of the first no-handed jumps documented on motorcycles.  Then we have Martin busting out both a nothing and a no-footed can-can, which was originally done on a BMX bike by Mike Dominguez, a few years earlier.  It looks like Martin Aparijo may have invented both of those tricks on a motorcycle.  The next documented no-footed can-can I could find was Larry Linkogle, on the cover of Racer X newspaper, in 1994.  So BMX freestylers Martin Aparijo, Brian Blyther, and Eddie Fiola all have a spot in the roots of freestyle motocross, for the tricks they pulled at this BMX Plus! photo shoot above.

When it comes to variations that were invented on BMX bikes, and then went to motocross, we have to look at Mike Dominguez, Eddie Fiola, and Mat Hoffman.  Either Dominguez or Fiola invented the can-can, and Mike invented the no footed can-can.  Fiola invented the opposite one hand one footer, to the best of my knowledge, and the "over and out," the can-can to one footer.  Then, in the late 1980's and early 1990's, we have Mat Hoffman, seen here in Aggroman in 1989.  Mat stands as the single most innovative vert BMX rider ever.  He invented dozens of variations, among them, the Indian air, and Superman seat grab on vert, which later became standard FSMX tricks.  So several basic, early, FSMX tricks were invented by BMX freestylers, and no handers, no footed can-cans, and nothings, were actually done on motorcycles by BMXers, years before freestyle motocross began.  

Like the late night infomercial guy, here's my "But wait!  That's not all!" part.  The crew at BMX Plus! did another odd article featuring an MX cycle in the 1980's.  Here's the cover of the September 1988 issue of BMX Plus!  Notice anything unusual?  

Yep, you're seeing that right.  There's a guy on a motorcycle doing an air, on a huge quarterpipe, in 1988.

In this 1988 issue of BMX Plus!, a guy named Kerry Day is doing airs on a specially designed, 15 foot high quarterpipe, on an 80cc motorcycle.  That issue came out 29 years before Moto X Quarterpipe high air first appeared in the X-Games in 2017 (with an 18 foot ramp to dirt landing).  Kerry Day did actually air out of this ramp on his motorcycle, and landed back on the ramp.  

 

Here are the photos from the actual article, with Kerry doing a bit of a tabletop, and then a turndown table.  You can find this article on Old School Mags, that's where I stole these photos from.  Kerry was a motocrosser, but may have ridden some BMX in skateparks.  He had seen Tinker Juarez doing airs at a skatepark years earlier, and always wanted to try it on a motorcycle.  This fifteen foot high monstrosity, at a time when BMX quarterpipes were 8 feet high, and halfpipes maybe ten feet high, cost him $3,000 and three months to build.  This huge ramp was built about 4 years before Mat Hoffman's 20 foot high mega quarterpipe.  Kerry could do some variations on his MX on the ramp, including a no footer air.  Check the article at the link to read the whole thing.  While this isn't a BMXer doing airs on a motorcycle, it is the BMX idea of a quarterpipe taken into the motocross world for the first time.   

I'm not done, there's still more.   Many of you Old School BMX freestylers know this one already, but most freestyle motocrossers and young BMxers are not aware of this.  Not one, but two BMX guys did backflips on motorcycles long before Cary Hart made his famous, if sketchy, "first" MX backflip in 2000.  What Cary Hart, and pretty much no one else knew, is that both Jose Yanez and BMX vert rider Bob Kohl had both landed backflips on motorcycles several years earlier.  I'm not dissing Cary Hart, no one in the stadium in 2000 knew backflips had already been done on motorcycles, and it took a lot of balls to try that backflip.  Here's the video.

Thanks to Jan from Frez Productions for compiling this all into a 5 1/2 minute video.  This shows the actual story of motocross backflips in a few minutes.  

Gymnast Jose Yanez decided in the 1980's to learn to do a backflip on a BMX bike, after seeing some freestylers ride in San Diego.  In 1984, he became the first guy to do a backflip on a BMX bike, which landed him a magazine cover.  Jose wound up going off and joining Ringling Brothers circus, doing the BMX backflip in their show, for several years.  It would be six years before another BMX freestyler learned to flip a BMX bike.  Southern California freestyler Jeff Cotter learned it next, and several other riders, like Mat Hoffman (2:13 in this clip), Dave Clymer (5:14 in this clip), Todd Lyons, and Bob Kohl, learned the flip in the next couple of  years.  By that time, Jose had already done double backflips into water, in 1987.  Another few years later, Canadian vert rider Jay Miron became the first BMXer to land a double backflip ramp to ramp, in 1997, followed by Dave Mirra landing his first double backflip in 1999, then doing it in the X-Games in 2000.  

As I said at the start, BMX racing was an offshoot of motocross racing, and it began in 1970.  But in the years since, BMXers have created new variations that were later taken to motocross bikes.  In some cases, BMXers actually landed tricks on motorcycles before freestyle motocrossers did.  And then we have Kerry Day, decades before it became a competitive event, taking the BMX quarterpipe into the world of motorcycle riding.  I've tried to compile all these photos and videos in one blog post, so all the BMXers and FSMXers who aren't aware of these events can check them out all in one place.  I can't verify the Aparijo, Fiola, and Blyther did the very first no handers on motorcycles, or that Martin invented the no footed can-can and nothing on motorcycles, but as I've showed, they were the first I know of to have those tricks documented.  If you have any more information or photos and videos to add, check out my Facebook page, where I'm sure the discussion will continue on all these events and tricks after I publish this post.  

I'll end this post with a link to a cool documentary I found about the Crusty Demons of Dirt video series, and the birth of freestyle motocross as a competitive sport.

How a group of misfits PISSED OFF an entire sport (Crusty Demons)

Blogger's note: 9/9/2023- I just retitled this post, after watching the freestyle motocross documentary below.  Early freestyle motocross included several BMX variations, like the Indian air, Superman seat grab, the nothing, and others, but the early riders that built the sport and lifestyle of freestyle motocross didn't know about the things I wrote about above, in this blog post.  Those events were already kind of lost to history, just as guys doing 25 foot jumps and backflips on bicycles in the 1910's and 1920's were unknown when us Gen X BMX freestylers first did tricks on our bikes. 

So I retitled the post, because these things above, tricks done by Martin Aparijo, Eddie Fiola, Brian Blyther, Kerry Day, Jose' Yanez, and Bob Kohl were foreshadowing things that would happen later, when the right group of crazy guys (and some gals) came along to take motocross riding to a new, highly creative, highly progressive level.  I wrote this post to bring these two BMX photo shoots, and the early MX flips of Jose' and Bob, into one place, for anyone interested learning about them.  Below is the real documentary about the birth of freestyle motocross.  Check it out.

Unchained:  the Untold Story of Freestyle Motocross (2016)

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* Yes, my name is Steve Emig, and I might be related to Jeff Emig, but I'm not sure.  Randy Lawrence tried to introduce us at a Supercross race once, in 1991, where Jeff was racing, and I was working as a TV production assistant.  But we kept missing each other.  I never ended up meeting him.  Someone in my family said my dad and Jeff's dad were cousins, but no one ever verified that for sure.  So Jeff and I might be distantly related cousins, or we might not, I honestly don't know.  I have no idea if either of us is related to Matt Emig, either, but he's badass, just like Jeff.  

Brian and Dave's little session in about 1988

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. 

Desert Treasure...The Nude Bowl: then and now

Here's old school BMXer Rick Thorne with even older school skate legend Steve Alba at one of my favorite places in the world, The Nude Bowl.  Way out in the SoCal desert, on a hillside past Palm Springs and overlooking Desert Hot Springs, there lies the remains of a nudist colony.  Sometime in the late 1970's or early 80's, the naked people abandoned it.  Somehow, skaters found it.

I started working on an old school BMX project today, and looked up some riders from BITD on You Tube.  Much to my surprise, I found Rick Thorne's Pool Hunters.  The bald guy in this clip looks vaguely familiar.  Anyhow, I watched four different clips tonight, and this one at the Nude Bowl with pool skating legend Steve Alba reminded me of my sessions there.  A blog post was inevitable.  I even learned a few things about the pool I didn't know in this clip. 

I first heard of the Nude Bowl in 1988, in my little cubby hole of a room at Unreel Productions, the Vision Skateboards video company.  The biggest part of my job then was dubbing copies of videos for people throughout the Vision world.  People of all different jobs needed videos, mostly VHS copies, of different things, and I made those copies.  I was also the tape librarian, so I made window dubs of all the raw footage that got shot, labeled the tapes, and organized them in the tape vault.  One of the best parts of that job was that I got to watch raw footage that the skaters shot, usually a day or two after it happened.  In those tapes, I first saw footage of this crazy pool out in the desert called the Nude Bowl, and several other skate spots.  This was at a time when Del Mar skatepark closed, and the sole surviving skatepark in Southern California was Pipeline in Upland.

While I always sucked at riding ramps, and never could air much above coping, but I loved riding pools.  Figuring out lines and carving pools was a blast, just pumping around at speed seemed one of the best things to do on a bike.  I finally bought Mike Sarrail's old truck in '88, and managed to ride Pipeline five or six times right before it closed.  Since I happened to work for Don Hoffman, whose parents owned Pipeline, I was able to ride Pipeline a bunch more times after it closed.  I loved riding pools from then on, even though I never rose above coping.

Sometime in late '88 or early '89, I got the job of taking a couple of the Vision skaters out to the Nude Bowl for a session and a low key video shoot.  I can't remember which skaters, though Kele Rosecrans comes to mind.  So we made the trip inland, and I bounced the little Unreel Toyota van off road and got about 100 yards from the pool.  The road was too gnarly at the time to get the van to the top.  We hiked the last little bit, and when I first saw the pool, it seemed like the best thing in the world.  In those days, we had to worry about police or security guards nearly every spot we rode.  But at the Nude Bowl, nobody gave a fuck.  That was awesome.

I went out to the Nude Bowl two or three more times in '89, to shoot video of skaters, and I made sure to take my bike and carve some lines when I could.  In those days, when there were no concrete skateparks at all, it was amazing to ride a pool, hour after hour, and not worry about anybody shutting the session down.

When I started working on my self-produced video, The Ultimate Weekend, in 1990, a session at the Nude Bowl was one of the first places I thought of.  It was sometime in the summer when I finally got it to happen.  Somehow, I was able to talk skatepark legend Brian Blyther to make the trip out there, though he wasn't riding vert all the time then.  He brought Xavier Mendez, another skatepark rider from the 80's.  I got the then unknown ripper Keith Treanor, English vert rider John Povah, and flatlander/photographer Mike Sarrail, and we headed out.  Despite it being 105 degrees out, we had a great little session.  I got footage for my video, and it was a good day all around, despite the heat.  You can watch it at 25:54 in this video.

As luck would have it, that session at the Nude Bowl wound up being the first time the pool showed up in a bike video.  To make it even better, I used music from Toledo punk band, The Stain, and they had recorded a song called "Pool Party" for some skater friends.  It was the perfect song, and I had these crazy dreams of making it a music video and getting it played on MTV.  That never happened, but it was a cool video section anyway.  In these two clips, you can see a 27 year span of one of the most legendary skate/bike pools ever.  Props to Rick Thorne for doing a great series on real life pool riding and skating.

Rick's Nude Bowl clip had 2,605 views when I wrote this post.  I'm just curious how many views this post may help it get.

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