The Legend of the Jinx Bank

Here's Brian Tunney at the Jinx Bank, last year (2019), talking about the impression two photos from the Jinx Bank, 30-some years ago, left on him.  

As usual in my BMX posts, I'm going back 34 years into the foggy memory banks, but here's how I remember it happening.  If you have read very many of my BMX posts in my assorted blogs, you know my 1985-86 zine, San Jose Stylin', landed me a job at Wizard Publications in August of 1986.  Officially, I was the sole editorial assistant, so I was an assistant to Craig "Gork" Barrette, editor of BMX Action, and Andy Jenkins and Mark "Lew" Lewman, the guys writing FREESTYLIN' magazine.  Unofficially, I took over for Don Toshach, who actually had an English degree, and was the proofreader for both magazines.  I was also the official driver of photographer Windy Osborn, driving her to many of the photo shoots, and being her assistant on those,.  I went from a NorCal freesytler, making 57 pizzas in 4 hours at Pizza Hut, to working at THE MAGAZINES (!!!!) in one day.  Huge life change, and I flew to L.A. with my bike (Skyway T/A), a suitcase, and $80.  That move change the entire course of my life.

I wound up roommates with Gork and Lew, in Redondo Beach, 3-4 miles from the Wizard offices.  We worked more-or-less 9 to 5ish, and put in extra hours near the magazine deadlines.  On Saturdays and Sundays, if there wasn't a local contest somewhere, we all did our own thing, mostly.  My weekends started with waking up, making a HUGE plate of about 12-15 small pancakes, and chowing those down while watching Lew's VHS copy of Bones Brigade II: Future Primitive.  In the intro of that video is this great sentence by C.R. Stecyk:

"200 years of American technology has unwittingly created a massive cement playground, and it took the minds of 12-year-olds to realize its potential."

Every Saturday and every Sunday, I'd carbo load on pancakes, watch Bones II, then grab my bike, and head out on an all day "scouting mission," as I called them.  I'd just go exploring my new world on my bike, Redondo Beach, and the South Bay area of Southern California.  Street riding was something we all did then, but it was in its infancy as a "thing" that actually had a name.  Street skating, pioneered by then Vision skater Mark Gonzales, Curb Dog/Bones Brigade skater Tommy Guerrero, and Natas Kaupas, was just a year and a half old.  Those guys were just beginning to explore the urban world as one big skatepark, waiting to be sessioned.  Us BMX freestylers, and particularly Andy J. and Lew at FREESTYLIN', were heavily influenced by those early street skaters.

My favorite part of Bones II was (and still is) Tommy Guerrero's section, right at the beginning.  I'd seen Tommy jump launch ramps in Golden Gate Park, and even shot photos of him for my zine, and he blew my mind with how high he launched off jump ramps, and his style, along with the other NorCal street skaters.   I never really got to know him, but his use of the insane San Francisco terrain for skating made me want to go find cool shit around Redondo, and then session it on my bike.  So that's what I did, weekend after weekend.  I'd head off in one direction, usually to a known street spot to start, and then I'd wander in some area I'd never been to, and ride down alleys, behind shopping centers, and into weird little nooks and crannies, looking for cool stuff to ride.

One day, driving Windy and Ron Wilkerson to a photo shoot, at a quarterpipe behind a bike shop, on PCH in Redondo, we went 2 or 3 blocks too far, and so we rolled back two or three blocks down this alley, up the hill from Pacific Coast Highway.  It was the photo shoot for some weird new Wilkerson trick, called the abubaca.  we didn't know what that was, Ron had invented it on tour.  Windy and Ron were talking as I drove the Wizard Astro van down the alley.  Off to one side, I saw this weird, but awesome, bank next to a wall, in a little parking lot.  My rider mind made a mental note, and I then drove on and found the quarterpipe we were looking for.

Two or three weeks later, as I headed out after my pancakes and Bones II, that bank popped into my head.  So I headed up to PCH, and headed south.  It wound up being a few blocks past where I thought it was.  I was kind of lost, and came from a totally different direction, when I first saw it in the van.  It took an hour or so, but I found the bank.

I'd never seen one like it, and I'd never heard Gork or Lew mention it, and they rode that area all the time.  I went up a hill from PCH, behind this building, to the back parking lot.  From that side street, the parking lot went down fairly steeply.  The asphalt bank started as flat, and gradually got taller as the parking lot dropped down.  At the high end, it was 5 to 6 feet high.  I did a couple carves and kickturns on it, and scoped out the transition.  It wasn't too kinked, and rode pretty well.  This probably happened in September 1986, somewhere around there.

To put things in perspective, wall rides on bikes didn't exist yet... officially.  On a photo shoot with Windy in Huntington Beach, I saw English bloke Dave Curry do a tiny wall ride.  More of a wall bounce/slide.  It blew my mind.  But he was popping off a tiny, one foot high bank, and slapping both tires against the wall about a foot up.  At the time it was amazing, but Windy didn't think it was worth a photo that day, and it was getting late, anyway.  So Dave Curry didn't get the first wall ride photo in a magazine, which ultimately, is probably a good thing.  Nothing against Dave, but I'll get to that in a bit.

At that time, in 1986, I was big on doing footplants when street riding.  I would bunnyhop and footplant on ledges, benches, and wherever.  I got that idea from both Dave Vanderspek and the Curb Dogs, and from Eddie Roman, another Skyway rider.  So I started doing footplants, riding up the big end of this new bank, bunnyhopping, and planting my right foot on the wall.  There was a business in that building, like paint store, or electric supply store, something like that.  But they never came out and yelled at me as I bounced on their wall.  So I kept riding.

Within half an hour, I was hitting the tallest part of the bank, around fivefeet high, and doing a footplant on the wall two or three feet above that.  That bank was made for those.  I was having a blast.  That is, until I landed hard, and snapped my cheap ass, one piece cranks.  I think that was the only time I ever snapped a pair of cranks.

So that ended my session, and I had to "scooter" my bike back to the apartment, more than a mile, dropcrank, pushing with the other foot.  When I got back to the pad, Lew asked what happened.  I told him I found this amazing bank to ride, was doing huge wall footplants, and snapped my crank.  Lew went through all the banks he knew in the area, but this new bank was one he had never seen.  So I told him I'd have to take him there sometime.

The next Monday, I found a pair of used cranks in a box in the rafters at Wizard, and I was back in action.  The next weekend, I was back at the new bank, doing big footplants, kickturns, little bunnyhop bank "airs," and having more fun, another solo session.  I came down hard from a footplant, and I cracked my fork dropout.  It started to clink and wobble, and I didn't want my front wheel to fall off.  I had that happen once, and it's not a good thing.  So I headed back to the homestead.  The next Monday, I found an old pair of Randy Tischman's forks up in the rafters, purple Kuwahara ones, I think, with weird little stands on the top of the curves.  I put them on, and was ready to ride again.

It took a couple of weeks, but I finally got Lew to follow me to this new bank one Saturday.  He did a few kickturns or something, to get the feel of the bank.  I started doing my footplants, and Lew said they looked way gnarlier than what he had imagined when I described them.  Lew started trying footplants, or something, and got sketchy on one landing, crashed, and rolled his ankle.  It was a mild, but painful, sprain.  That ended our session.  As we started heading slowly home, Lew was pedaling gingerly on his sore ankle.  He said something like, "First you snapped your cranks, then your forks, now I sprained my ankle, this bank is jinxed."  And that's how the Jinx Bank got its name.

The next Monday at work, Lew actually told everyone how gnarly my footplants were, and said Windy should shoot photos of me there.  I was stoked, because I was absolutely desperate to get a photo of me riding in the FREESTYLIN'.  But Lew was known for exaggeration, which  Andy called "The Lew Factor."  Andy J. said, "Lew says these footplants are really gnarly, but when we add in The Lew Factor, that makes them kind of gnarly."  One of these days we'll get Windy to check them out, but no photo shoot right now.  We never made it back out there for Windy to see them.  And Lew never went back to ride the Jinx Bank, it did its number on his psyche.  Myself, I went back every couple of weeks, and took Craig Grasso there often.  Grasso and I had many more great sessions at the Jinx Bank, and neither of us broke bike parts or body parts.  No more Jinxes from the Jinx Bank, after it had been named.  We told R.L. Osborn about it once, and he had actually been there years earlier, after hearing about it from some skaters.  But he never went back.

I got laid off from Wizard at the end of December 1986, and never got a photo of me riding the Jinx Bank.  I did make it back up there for 3 or 4 more sessions, over the next few years.  The last time I went, the building owners had made the small asphalt curb at the bottom, making it hard to ride and skate, without some plywood to lay over the curb.  You can see that in Brian's video above.

Later they added the weird wood thing on the wall, which you can also see in Brian's video above.  That made it largely session proof, for either bikes or skates.  But the coolest thing about the Jinx Bank for me was that when I left, Gork and Lew knew it was there.   Because of that, about nine months later, this photo of Eddie Roman, doing the first wall ride ever in a magazine(since Dave Curry missed his shot) was taken, by Windy, at the Jinx Bank.  It's one of those epic Windy Osborn photos.  This photo changed bike riding instantly, and forever.  With that one photo, suddenly wall rides were possible, and walls, especially banks to walls, were in play.

 Eddie Roman, first BMX wall ride photo, at the Jinx Bank, 1987, I believe.

 While I never got a photo there, and was never a great rider, my Tommy Guerrero and pancake fueled solo scouting missions found the Jinx Bank, a spot that later changed BMX freestyle history.  Not much, but I was stoked the first wall ride photo happened there.   A while after that, Craig Campbell also got an epic wall ride photo there, as Brian shows in the video above.

Street riding progressed rapidly over the next several years, and turned into its own genre eventually, as we all know.  Craig Grasso added his flavor to street, many times over the years.  Here he is on another local bank, a favorite photo of mine.

 Craig Grasso, bank backside boneless.

I may not have had a riding photo in FREESTYLIN',  but in BMX DIY fashion, I gave myself a quick, but decent, wall ride clip in my 1990 self-produced video, The Ultimate Weekend.  And a stylized version of this sketchy video still below is on the T-shirt I'm wearing right now, 34 years after rediscovering the Jinx Bank.  Wall ride over my sister Cheri's head, Blues Brothers Wall, Huntington Beach, 1990.  May the "minds of 12-year-olds" in all of us never stop discovering cool shit to ride in our urban environment.

I've started a new blog, as of May 2022, Check it out:

Steve Emig's Street Life- Dealing with change and building a new life in the 2020's.

 

Feelin' Nifty: The Birth of Club Homeboy

The image of a surprised Buckwheat from the Little Rascals, neon green, crack and peel sticker, with the words "Club Homeboy."  The little "loft it" was added on later versions.  This is the classic, iconic image from Club Homeboy.

Loft it, bitch.  If you were a BMX freestyler in the mid-1980's, you remember Club Homeboy.  You remember this image above, and it probably calls up memories of busting cherrypickers and sliders and side glides and boomerangs and tailwhips in a parking lot at night, maybe with the Beastie Boys Licensed to Ill cassette blasting from a ghetto blaster that didn't have near enough battery life.  Am I close?  Something like that.

Recently, Jeff Venekamp, better known back in the day as Lew's good friend Shinglehead, has been sharing pics on Facebook of his old Club Homeboy stickers.  This is cool, because as Lew's good friend back in Michigan, Jeff got copies of the very first stickers and is about the only guy with good copies of them left.  One of the stickers he posted recently was made about 3/4" wide, 5 or 6 inches inches long, and there was a tiny photo of some 70's looking guy, with shaggy brown hair and a big mustache.  Next to that little photo were the blown up, typewritten words, "Feelin' Nifty."  Only a handful of people know, but that was actually the very first Club Homeboy sticker.  I know this, because I was there in the room when Lew came up with Club Homeboy, and I was one of the original members.  I watched Lew make those first "Feelin' Nifty" stickers a couple nights later, on the Wizard Publications copy machine.  I wrote about CHB a few years ago in my old blog, but I figured it was time to tell the tale again.  Here's how I remember the birth of Club Homeboy.

Mark "Lew" Lewman, the man who in invented it all, at about age 20, flatlanding at The Spot, in one of the first full color Club Homeboy ads, when the whole idea blew up and got huge.

It was the Fall of 1986, and every night there was a flatland BMX freestyle session at The Spot in Redondo Beach, California.  Pretty much every night the session included Mark "Lew" Lewman, Chris Day, Craig Grasso, and myself.  Craig "Gork" Barrette came down 3 or 4 nights a week.  R.L. Osborn rode by himself most of the time, but came down to The Spot a couple of times a week.  Andy Jenkins skated by once or twice a week.  Janice Jenkins, Andy's sister and the FREESTYLIN' art director then, was into cycling, and she rode by a couple of times a week to say, "Hi."  Once in a while, BMX comedian and then CW team manager, M,cGoo came down, sometimes with John "Dizz" Hicks and Ceppies Maes.  Later on, East Coast rider Pete Kearney was out West a while and sessioned with us.  If that's not enough, freestyle skateboarder Rodney Mullen would come down and practice on the smooth concrete next to The Spot when he was staying with Steve Rocco, usually 3 or 4 weeks at a stretch.  That was our crew.  

Lew, Gork and me were roommates, we'd just moved to a three bedroom apartment on the edge of Hermosa Beach, and Andy Jenkins and his wife Kelly lived right down the alley from us.  We all worked at Wizard Publications, as you know well, if you read this blog regularly.  Andy was the editor of FREESTYLIN' magazine, which was about 2 years old then, and Lew was assistant editor.  Gork was the editor BMX Action, and I was the editorial assistant for both magazines.

Craig Grasso was this weird, artsy, funny, crazy guy, about our age (19-20), who rode for SE Racing as a freestyler, and was fun as hell to ride with.  Chris Day was this young local kid, 14 or 15 years old, who was coming on strong with his amazing flail boomerangs and other flatland tricks.  R.L. Osborn, was a top pro freestyler, a pioneer of the sport, rode for Redline, and made the change to General Bikes right around that time.  He was son of Bob Osborn, aka OZ, owner/publisher of  Wizard Publications, and our boss.  R.L.'s sister Windy was the photographer for both magazines, and was dating Eddie Fiola at the time.

One one hand, our scene was a handful of guys who were totally hardcore BMX freestylers, like a a couple dozen scenes around the U.S. and in Europe at the time.  On the other hand, we were all part of the industry, and the coolest magazine in freestyle.  So despite being 5 pretty good to really good riders, and one pioneering pro, our scene at The Spot had a ridiculous amount of influence on the BMX freestyle world, and that's how Club Homeboy happened.

One night after our normal session, Lew, Grasso, and me, and maybe Chris Day, rode over to Andy and Kelly's apartment to hang a bit.  Kelly was cleaning up the small place, Andy was working on some artwork or something on the kitchen table, as I recall.  Lew paced around, ideas flowing freely from his head, as usual.  The rest of us dropped our sweaty selves on the couch and a chair (sorry Kelly).  Lew's idea of the night was that us locals were a kind of posse, a word used by all the rappers at the time.  Remember, this was 1986, and it was cool to hate rap, but fact was, a lot of middle class white kids were starting to dig RUN DMC, The Big Boys, and them weird white rappers, the Beastie Boys.  Their album, Licensed to Ill, dropped right about the time this happened, and Lew played that album non-stop, at work and at home.  

None of our crew, sitting in Andy's apartment that night, thought much of what Lew was saying, because he was spouting new and weird ideas constantly.  Most of the time then, the ideas faded, and new Lew Ideas popped up the next day.  So as Lew walked around the tiny apartment, he said we needed a name for The Spot locals.  The term "posse" was over-used at the time, but Lew wanted something with a hip hop/ghetto feel, you know, because we were all middle class white dudes.  He wanted something that sounded cool.  The word "homeboy" was one he was really diggin' from the start, but homeboy what?  Homeboy Posse?  No.  The Spot Homeboys?  No.  We all tossed out our ideas, and actually "Club Homeboy" was one of the first, but it was quickly discarded.

This went on casually for maybe 15 minutes, as Lew wandered around, Andy worked on whatever he was working on, Kelly cleaned the kitchen, and the Craig, Chris, and me hung out.  Finally Lew came back to the name "Club Homeboy," and Andy agreed it sounded cool.  So Lew pronounced that the official name for us local riders at The Spot was Club Homeboy.  And that was that.  So when Club Homeboy was created, it was Lew, Andy Jenkins, Craig Grasso, Chris Day, Me (Steve Emig), Gork, R.L. Osborn, and McGoo, since we hung out with him all the time.  We threw the name around a bit as we rode around the next couple of nights.  But seriously, we all thought it was just one more of the multitude of Lew Ideas, and it would fade away in a few days.

Two days later, we were all working late at Wizard, and I walked out to take a break, probably from proofreading magazine articles.  Lew was in the open area of the warehouse, where there was a sink, counter, microwave,  a picnic table, and the copy machine.  Lew had bought some sticker paper, which I didn't even realize existed then.  I did a year of making zines before that, but my zines had no"Xerox art" to speak of, and I'd never made stickers.  I asked Lew what he was doing, and he smiled big and handed me a couple of the skinny "Feelin' Nifty" stickers, just made and cut by hand, a couple minutes earlier.  "I'm making some stickers for Club Homeboy" Lew said, really stoked on it all.  Never mind that the stickers didn't say Club Homeboy.  Lew was thinking up weird and clever little sayings, and making stickers for our little crew of riders.

At the time, I had the same helmet that I first got, when I started racing BMX in Boise three years earlier.  It was some old, heavy, 1970's motorcycle helmet that I bought at a garage sale.  My dad got into the mix, and painted it white with spray paint.  I bought a red Haro visor, and was ready to race, and later to use for flatland contests.  I took one of those first two "Feelin' Nifty" stickers, and stuck it on the underside of my helmet visor.  That sticker was still there in the late 1990's, when I lost that helmet, by not paying my storage unit rent, I think.   

A couple of days later, working late again, with more sticker paper, Lew found this picture of Buckwheat in, of all places, a Japanese magazine called Popeye.  It was a weird, pop culture magazine that Oz subscribed to, to give us ideas for stuff, since it was a odd mix of images and stuff.  Lew copied Buckwheat, typed the words "Club Homeboy" on an actual typewriter, blew them up big to get the good distortion (the basis of all 80's and 90's Xerox art), then shrunk them down again, and put them at a 90 degree angle around Buckwheat's head, and the iconic Club Homeboy image was born.  Lew made maybe 30 or 40 of those that night, on white sticker paper, and handed them out to all of us Spot locals.  Club Homeboy, as a crew of local riders, was born, because we all put them on our bikes immediately.

That, of course, made other riders ask what Club Homeboy was.  "It's our crew of locals from The Spot," was the answer.  For about three or four weeks.  Lew found out he was getting sent to the first 2-Hip King of Vert contest, being held, in a barn, in Minnesota.  By that time, Lew found another office supply store that had neon green sticker paper.  Lew ponied up his own money, and made around 300 stickers, I think, to take to Minnesota.  After that weekend, every top vert rider had the stickers on their bike, and the barn probably had 50 of them slapped all over.  Then everybody in the industry wanted a Club Homeboy sticker.  So Club Homeboy was a locals only thing, for us 1986 era locals at The Spot... for about a month.

More stickers were made on the down low on the Wizard copy machine, and stickers were shared, slapped, and put on bikes for the next 3 or 4 months or so.  During that time, I got laid off from the magazines, partly for being a dork, and mostly because I didn't like the band Skinny Puppy.  Midwest photographer Mark Snavely took a stab at working there, but he and Windy didn't meld well, and he was gone in a couple of weeks.  A month or so later, Andy and Lew tapped this biker/skater kid from the East Coast to work at Wizard.  That kid was Spike Jonze.  He did mesh well, and worked at FREESTYLIN' til the end.  I went on to work for Bob Morales, at the AFA, down in Huntington Beach.

Spike, of course, immediately became a new local at The Spot, and a member of Club Homeboy.  As time went on, Oz started to ask what this Club Homeboy thing was, since everyone had stickers on their bikes.  Andy, Lew and Spike, from what I heard, didn't want to tell him at first, since they'd been using Oz's copy machine and toner for months.  But they fessed up, and Oz ended up liking the whole thing, and then he backed it.  Now, when you write the coolest magazine in BMX freestyle, and you can advertise for free, it's hard for your ideas not to get popular.  So Club Homeboy was stepped up into the thing all you 1980's freestylers remember.  And that's my memories about the birth of Club Homeboy.

Thirty three years later, I'm over 50 and still Feelin' Nifty, more nifty than ever, as a matter of fact.  The old body hurts more these days, so I don't loft much jive, but then, I never was a really big jive lofter. I am still dual and silk on a good day, though.  To keep things on the right vibe, I've been listening to the Beastie Boys Licensed to Ill the whole time I've been writing this post, and this post is sponsored by Brass Monkey.   

I have 4 blogs going right now, check them out when you're bored at work...

 

The Big Freakin' Transition- about the future and economics

 

Crazy California 43- weird and cool locations in California

 

Full Circle- about writing and the writer's life

 

and a fiction blog

 

Stench: Homeless Superhero

 

Check out my new mash-up book/blog thing about the future:
Welcome to Dystopia: The Future is Now

I just started a new blog for Marvin Davits, to promote Marvin's business, installing dinghy davits on boats and yachts.  Check it out.

Schralpin' with Grasso

This post was sparked by a album of photos of old school rider Craig Grasso in the Facebook group "Freestylin'.  It's a bummer, but there aren't many videos with Grasso riding on You Tube.  So I picked this one, which is my edit of the first 2-Hip Meet the Street contest in Santee, California in 1988, from the 2-Hip BHIP video.  Craig Grasso is wearing the black beret and yellow and black shirt.  You can see him painting at :25, and riding at 1:54, 2:36, 4:11, 4:34, and 4:46.   Craig was known as a weird, artsy, funny guy, and not a top placing contest rider.  But he ripped it up.  If you check the results for this comp, Grasso came in 4th in the "Great" (pro) class, behind Dave Voelker, Craig Campbell, and R.L. Osborn.  That's some seriously heavy company.  Just for the record, I'm the guy who ghost rides his bike into the big wall.  I decided I'd only include myself in this clip with a goofy shot, since there were so many guys ripping it up that day, and I couldn't give everyone fair video time.

I actually met Craig Grasso on my first trip to Southern California, riding along with my Idaho trick team partner Jay Bickel.  His family took me to the AFA contest in Venice Beach in 1985.  Jay had a co-sponsorship deal with SE Racing, and they sponsored Todd Anderson and Grasso then.  So on my first trip to see the "real" BMX freestyle world, Jay and I hung out with, Todd, Craig, Steve Broderson and that crew all weekend.  It was epic for us.

My life took me to San Jose, California later that year, when my dad got a job there.  I rode with the Golden Gate Park/Curb Dogs/Ground Control riders for a year, and published a zine about that scene.  That little zine catapulted me to a job at Wizard Publications.  That job changed the course of my life in a huge way, and landed me in Redondo Beach, CA, as a roommate with my co-workers Gork and Lew.  Their local riding spot was The Spot, a brick area on the north end of the Redondo Beach Pier complex.  I followed Lew down there night after night.  Gork, although editor of racing magazine BMX Action then, came down to freestyle at least 4 nights a week.  Locals Craig Grasso, and high school kid Chris Day were down there every night as well.  R.L. Osborn came down to ride 2 or 3 times a week.  Skater Rodney Mullen also would practice on the concrete next to The Spot when staying with Steve Rocco for a few weeks at a time.  It was a great scene, but a much different vibe than the NorCal guys I'd been riding with.  Not better or worse, just different.  Industry guy and natural comedian McGoo came down regularly, often bringing Ceppie Maes and Dizz Hicks with him.  They were the CW factory team then.

We all sessioned and practiced our flatland for a 2 or 3 hours every night.  Chris didn't do anything but flatland, and he was busting his amazing "flail" boomerangs back then, swinging his legs wide like a flair in gymnastics.  He was kicking his legs higher and higher, blowing all our minds, as the weeks went by.  Grasso also had a trick he called the Flail.  But it was totally different.  Craig would start pedaling fast, heading towards a group of people either walking or riding up the bike path.  He would pretend to slip a pedal, drop down onto his top tube, and purposely get all squirrely like he was out of control and going to run into the people.  It was always hilarious as people bailed out of the way in panic.  That, and random jokes, were ways that Craig kept us all laughing night after night.

Flatland riding then was filled with single tricks, like backwards wheelies (on the back pegs), sliders, boomerangs, decades, lawnmowers, and the like.  R.L. Osborn was starting to link his tricks together, something that I, myself, had also begun doing.  He was as much, much better rider, of course, but we had the desire to link tricks in common then.  We also all played games of FREESTYLE, often, like HORSE in basketball, where one guy would do a trick, and everyone else had to pull it or get a letter.  That helped us all progress and try new stuff.

 Lew at the time had nerves of steel.  I would get nervous riding with R.L. or other top riders that came by.  Lew would pull his tricks solid, and with tons of style, no matter who was watching. So that was the main form or riding for our group, the group that Lew dubbed, "Club Homeboy" that fall, before opening that club up to riders everywhere.

At times, for whatever reason, a couple of us would wander off and do some street riding.  At the time, street skating, led by Mark Gonzales (who came by The Spot a couple times) was just becoming a thing.  And Andy Jenkins and Lew at FREESTYLIN' were starting to cover BMX street riding in the magazine.  Those little roaming street sessions were usually Grasso, Lew, and me wandering around to hit some bank or curb jumps.  Grasso, being the weird, artsy guy, even back then, showed his latent creativity in finding weird things to try and ride.  At the time, wall rides and wall fakies hadn't been invented.  So we'd do kickturns and footplants on banks a lot.  Even then, Craig Grasso shredded the street obstacles.

On one of those street sessions, Craig and I realized we both liked to do a backside boneless on a bank.  A backside boneless is a skateboard trick, basically like a BMX can-can footplant, BUT done as one swinging, pendulum motion.  Brian Blyther had been doing can-can footplant flyouts on vert for a while.  But on those, he would flyout, land on the can-can foot, stall a few seconds, then hop back in  But Craig and I, independent of each other, had learned to do a more fluid version, more like a skater, on banks.  What was really weird, was when we tried to figure out exactly when each of us learned that trick.  We discovered we "invented" that trick, me in NorCal in him in SoCal, in the same week.  Trippy.  This is something I saw fairly often in the early days of freestyle.  I called it, "spontaneous revelation."  It's more like a form of the "100th monkey" concept.  Riders in different areas, with no contact to each other, would come up with the same trick at almost the same time.  It seems the idea was out there, and Grasso and I tapped into it simultaneously.  That happened to other riders with other tricks as well back in the 80's.

Then I got laid off at Wizard in December of 1986.  The inside joke was that I got fired because I didn't like the band Skinny Puppy, a big favorite of Andy J. and Lew.  But I just didn't fit the Wizard scene, I was way to uptight and dorky.  But I had enough money saved to pay my rent for January of 1987.  So I was still roommates with Gork and Lew while searching for a new job.  So everyday that month, I'd meet up with Grasso, who lived at home then, and we'd ride around and session different places all day.  One day we'd bomb down 190th street hill and head inland to session a some skaters' ramp.  The next day we'd head up PCH (Pacific Coast Highway) and session the Jinx Bank and the Fat Burger banks.  The next day, we'd wander around an find other stuff to ride.  Many days we'd start out at the Wall Ramp in Hermosa Beach.  It was two foundations for a building that never got built.  There was a big concrete slab, a five foot high wall, and then another slab above it.

On the top slab, local skaters had built a tiny mini ramp, eight feet wide and 2 or 3 feet high.  On the bottom slab, there was a launch ramp up against the wall, with a parking block on top of it.  I started doing fakies on it.  I'd been trying to do a fakie on a wall, which wasn't invented yet, for months.  Gork had dubbed the trick the "Spud Stall" since I was from Idaho.  I could get close, but never get my back tire on the wall.  Grasso said my fakies on the launch ramp and parking block were super close to a true wall fakie, with my back tire coming within a couple inches of touching the wall.  But the wall wasn't high enough.  If I tried to go higher, my front wheel would go over the top of the upper slab, and I hang up and fall backwards.  So I never got the wall ride fakie until a couple years later on a wall in Huntington Beach.

Some of you may remember that the person who did get the first wall ride fakie photo was... you guessed it, Craig Grasso.  He did it on the Jinx Bank wall, a bank I found and showed to both Lew and Craig.  That was also the location where the first wall ride photo of Eddie Roman was shot by Windy Osborn.  It's funny how things work out.

While Craig Grasso, in those days, was known mostly as a weird, artsy rider who listened to The Cure and Gene Loves Jezebel, he was also a truly amazing rider, and just a fun guy to hang out and session with.  He could bust four foot airs and several variations, launch a curb jump, bust original tricks on a bank, and lay out serious flatland.  And he was funny as hell all the time.  Just a great person to hang out and session with. 

I know Craig has had some serious struggles since, including in recent years.  I hope things are going better Grasso, and you're out there making people laugh somewhere. 

I'm doing most of my writing on Substack now, check it out:

Steve Emig The White Bear's Substack