AFA Oregon Pro Ramps- My 2nd BMX video I produced- now 36 years old

This video came out in late summer 1987, I think.  After getting laid off from my life changing job at FREESTYLIN' magazine at the end of 1986, I got hired by Bob Morales to be the editor/photographer of the AFA newsletter.  But I did all kinds of things there.  One day Bob walked in and asked, "Do you want to direct a TV commercial for the Austin contest?  I can get really cheap commercial spots on MTV there."  That question started my video career.

The year was 1987, it was the era when the younger quarterpipe schooled BMX vert riders were begining to rival the older skatepark schooled riders in skill level.  Mike Dominguez was the king of quarterpipe riding, with Eddie Fiola and Brian Blyther right up there (neither was at this contest), the old skatepark rivals.  But guys like Dave Voelker, Josh White, and Todd Anderson were closing in on them.  Dino Deluca, Mat Hoffman, and Joe Johnson were still amateurs then.  But all of these guys were clocking in airs above 8 feet out, sometimes in the 10 to 12 foot range.  This same year, Ron Wilkerson, already a major touring pro for Haro, started the 2-Hip King of Vert Halfpipe series, which led vert BMX away from quarterpipes over the next few years, and into halfpipe riding. This AFA Freestyle Masters contest took place in Portland, Oregon, in the Spring of 1987.  

Back then, the new little offshoot sport of BMX freestyle was about four years old, and BMX racing was 17, barely old enough to drive.  BMX freestyle started as trick riding shows in the late 1970's.  Then it started as a sport in 1983, with Bob Morales promoting the first BMX skatepark contests.  The first American Freestyle Association flatland and quarterpipe contest was in Venice Beach, in June of 1984.  Things were growing fast, and by 1987, all three BMX magazines had spawned a freestyle magazine as well.  

There were three of us in the little AFA office when I started, and a couple more, a few months later.  I did a little bit of everything there.  I answered phone calls, put heat transfers on T-shirts, drove the van and big trailer (Gary Turner's old 30 foot dragster trailer), and was a roadie and fill-in judge at local and national contests.  I wrote, shot the photos, did the layout, and helped fold and staple all 3,000 newsletters each month.  Bob always had about 17 things going at once, and he'd just say, go do this, and show me the basics, and then let me finish it, figuring anything new out as I went.   

Then came the video work.  Bob found out he could buy local commercial spots, on MTV in Austin, Texas, to promote that contest, for $25 each, I think.  But we needed a broadcast quality, 30 second TV commercial, in about a week.  He asked me to do it, and I said, "Uh... sure.  How do I do that?"  Typical punk rock/BMX/action sports D.I.Y.  attitude of the times.  He said, "Call up Unreel, they'll tell you what to do."  

Unreel Productions was the video company part of Vision Skateboards and Vision Street Wear, and VSW sponsored the AFA Masters contest series.  So they sent a cameraman to shoot video of each contest.  The deal was that both Vision and the AFA could use that footage.  So I called Unreel, and they told me to come over the next day.  They handed me ten VHS tapes, explained what a window dub was (numbers for the time code in the picture), and told me to go home, and write down the numbers of all the shots I wanted to use, then call them back. 

The next couple of nights, I did that, picking all the best shots, and marking where the pro contest runs started.  The next day I was in Unreel's $500,000 Betacam edit bay with their editor, Dave Alvarez, who was a couple of years older than me.  Dave had long, straight hair, a tie dye T-shirt, and Vision shorts.  He didn't fit the picutre in my head of what a video editor should look like.  But he was an incredible editing wizard, and great to work with, since I had no clue what I was doing.  He walked me through editing, step by step.  Sometimes, while doing the intro, he'd play a few seconds of music, and say, I need a shot that matches this sound.  So I'd think of a shot, look it up in my handwritten log notes, and he'd edit it in.  Within a couple of days of editing, we had a half hour show.  These videos were in color, but this copy above looks like a copy of a copy, and color gets lost as they went down tape generations back then.  They don't have to worry about stuff like that now, in the digital era.  

I "produced and directed" six AFA videos that year, with Dave doing all the editing.  Basically, that means I picked the shots used, after logging the footage, and just made sure the videos got finished, that's what a producer does.  All that time I spent at Unreel led to them calling me when they needed a new guy to do basic work, later that year.  I left the AFA, and started working at Unreel, in December of 1987.  

One question by Bob Morales one day, asking me to do that first commercial, turned my life in a different direction, which later led to things like this, in 1990, and working as a crew guy here. starting in 1992.  It's weird how tiny opportunities can change your whole life.  

While the quality is sketchy from this old VHS tape, the riding is amazing for the time period, and would be solid riding in today's world.  This was BMX vert at the beginning of the quarterpipe era over 35 years ago.  

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Small Business Futurist

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. 

Meeting Dave Voelker for the first time

Eddie's Roman's 2000 video of fellow San Diego ripper, Dave Voelker, one of my favorite riders of all time.

I was a couple of months into the job that changed the entire course of my life, working at Wizard Publications, home of BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines.  As epic as that sounds, I spent much of the first two months sitting in my office, going through boxes of Windy's old 8 X 10 black and white photos, looking for ones to decorate my office, and reading back issues of BMX Action.  I was waiting for the printouts of the articles to get handed to me to proofread, and Andy, Lew, and Gork were masters of the last minute.  I usually got all the copy for both magazines over about two days, the day before deadline.  I also drove Windy to photo shoots, where I helped out a little, but mostly just hung out.  I built up the bikes for that months bike tests.  I wrote little pieces of the magazine, when asked.  But it took a couple of months for my job to really evolve and keep me busy most of the time.

About the time that happened, sometime in the Fall of 1986, it was nearing the end of or normal workday.  FREESTYLIN' editor Andy Jenkins came over my intercom, and said the weird, goofy, but brilliant rider, trick team owner, and inventor, Brian Scura, had a new ramp rider.  He had just driven up to Wizard from San Diego to do a photo shoot with Windy Osborn, the photographer for both magazines then.  Andy told me to go out side and help this new kid set up the quarterpipe for the shoot.

So I walked out of my office, through the small warehouse, out the human door next to the big roll up door, and out to the edge of the parking lot.  There was a van with a flat trailer, with a sturdily built wooden quarterpipe on it.  Walking around the trailer was a young guy, maybe 18 or 19, with stringy white blond hair.  I told him Andy said to come out and help him set up the ramp.  He said something along the lines of, "I don't really need help, Brian Scura designed this thing, he laughed, "it's pretty much a one-man job."  I laughed, Brian Scura was the guy who designed the Gyro brake cable detangler, and I got the job of listening to Brian for an hour on how to properly dial in a Gyro.  Then I had to put that knowledge out to the BMX freestyle world in like 2 or 3 small paragraphs.  Brian was a inventive genius, so I was intrigued on how one guy could set up a big, heavy, 1980's quarterpipe.  I told the blond guy I didn't have much to do, and I might as well hang out.  He just laughed, and went to work unloading the ramp with off the trailer, basically by himself.  There was a car jack, and the trailer tilted as I remember.  It was brilliant the way it had all been designed.  Typical Scura.

He was right, I stood there and pretended to help here and there, but wasn't needed.  Kashiwa Street, where Wizard was located, was on the backside of a closed loop, so there was very little traffic.  When riders brought their own quarterpipes, they'd set up on the side of the street, next to the Wizard parking lot.  In typical freestyler fashion, the blond guy and me just started talking, riders rarely introduced themselves upon meeting back then.  We all rode, so they were part of the group, no matter how they dressed or what music they listened to or what background they came from.  I think at some point, Dave and I introduced ourselves, both being new to the industry side of freestyle, neither of us knowing who the other guys was.

Once the ramp was set up, Dave moved the van, and parked nearby.  Then he grabbed his bike, but not his helmet, and did a few warm-up airs.  Although I rode ramps, I rode them badly, and aired about coping high, or a little under.  Dave's first air, just to check out how the ramp was sitting, was maybe 5 or 6 feet.  That was a solid air for any rider then.  The top pro riders of the era topped out at about 8 foot straight airs in contests, did variations 2 or 3 feet lower, and a few could push ten foot airs on their personal ramps.  Every rider's quarterpipe was different then, with transitions from 5 1/2 feet to 9 feet.  Some had a couple inches of vert, some were still the slightly undervert, six foot tall, Bob Haro-style ramps that had started quarterpipe riding.  The Brian Scura Trick Team ramp was 8 feet high, as I recall, big for the day, and I sat there watching this unknown kid from San Diego, Dave Voelker, blast several six or seven foot airs without his helmet on.  That was insane at the time.

Then he headed to the ramp a tiny bit slower, and I gasped as his bike went completely upside down, for a couple seconds, I thought he'd looped out, and this new kid was going to kill himself before Windy got a chance to shoot a single photo.  As I caught my breath, I realized he was actually doing a downside footplant at the very top of the ramp.  There were 2 or 3 riders that did downside footplants.  But this Voelker guy did one so freakin' upside down, and so stretched out, that it blew my mind.  As he rode back from it, I told him I thought he was going to bail right then.  He just laughed and said something along the lines of, "Yeah, people trip out on those."

A couple of airs later, Windy walked out with her camera.  I asked if she needed any help, because I just wanted to see what this blond nutcase was going to do with his helmet on.  But Windy said she had it handled, and it was still during work hours, so I had to head back inside, and miss the actual photo shoot. 

As the years passed, Dave Voelker did one crazy thing after another that blew my mind, and everyone else's.  His flatland riding influenced mine, and I learned to do quicker flat ground 360's, because the ones he did looked so cool.  On top of amazing riding, Dave was always just a cool dude to hang out with, he always just seemed kinda stoked to just be riding.  And that's a good thing.

When I came across this photo from a few years back, the best footplant photo of Dave I've ever seen, I knew I had to do my own Sharpie art version of it.  That's the drawing below.  I got Dave's OK to draw it, and sell some copies, and he's getting the original.  I'm doing 20 high quality color copies, signed and numbered by me.  Like the John "Dizz" Hicks drawing I did recently, I put a kind of apocalyptic, dystopian, urban background in this one.  I wanted to do something different than the lyrics and song titles I've done in the backgrounds of my musician drawings.  Also, we're in really crazy times in the world these days, and I kind of want to remind everyone that no matter how dark things may seem, BMX freestyle riding shines bright.

Eveyone who gets a drawing copy can get Dave's autograph, if you meet up with him at some point, I left room for that.  Half of the drawings are on their way to Europe, and there are 4 of the 20 still available as I write this.  If you're interested in one of those, hit me up on Facebook, or email me at: stevenemig13@gmail.com .  

Now grab a cool drink, and watch that video above.  It's one of the classics that never gets old.  Thanks Dave for letting me draw this, and thanks to Shad Holland, whose photo of the drawing copy I'm using below.  You can also order some of Windy's classic BMX photos, and her new stuff, on her website at windyosborn.com . You can find my Sharpie artwork all over using #sharpiescribblestyle.

Voelker is still a favorite

How popular is Dave Voelker in the old school BMX world?  My blog post congratulating him for making it into the Hallf of Fame got 930 views in two days.  That's more than any post I ever wrote in FREESTYLIN' Mag Tales or Freestyle BMX Tales blogs.  Wow.

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....