Here's the Agent Orange music video for "World Gone Bad," shot in the legendary Combi Pool at Pipeline Skatepark, in Upland California. This video was directed by Don Hoffman, the founder of Unreel Productions, Vision Skateboard's video company. This music video was a segment at the end of Vision's first skate video, Skatevisions, which came out in 1985, I think. The entire soundtrack of the video was by Agent Orange. Powell-Peralta's Bones Brigade videos may have been more popular at the time, Vision's videos had way better music.
Many of you reading this have heard my basic story of stumbling into the BMX industry. But here's the short version for any of you who haven't. I got into BMX riding, and then racing, while living in a trailer park outside Boise, Idaho, in 1982. I was heading into my junior year of high school. By the end of that year, us trailer park kids found the Fort Boise BMX track, and began to race. I raced until mid 1984, but got more into the emerging sport of BMX freestyle in 1983, and joined the only Boise area trick team, with Jay Bickel and Wayne Moore in the spring of 1984. By late 1984, about the time FREESTYLIN' magazine put out its first issue, BMX freestyle had become my life.
In the summer of 1985, my family moved to San Jose, California, where my dad got a new job. I worked my summer job in Boise, then drove to San Jose to live with my family. I found a job at a local Pizza Hut, and rode every afternoon, since I wasn't going to college. I knew there was a group of hardcore freestylers in the Bay Area, but I didn't know how to find them. I didn't get the first two issues of FREESTYLIN' in Idaho, and the first one showed the Golden Gate Park scene.
So I started a freestyle zine, and put it out in some local bike shops, to find other freestylers. That worked, and by October 1985, I made it to the monthly Beach Park Ramp Jam, put on by Skyway rider Robert Peterson. I met the Skyway team and the main Curb Dogs, and a bunch of really good amateurs. I rode alone all week, then went up to ride with those guys every weekend that I could make it up to The City. I published 11 issues of my zine, San Jose Stylin', which somehow landed me a job at Wizard Publications, home to BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines, in the summer of 1986. In a year, I went from a freestyler in Idaho who only knew two other BMX freestylers, to part of the BMX industry. So I became a fanboy and industry insider at the same time..jpg)
.jpg)
Me on my Raleigh freestyle bike, my second "factory" sponsor, with a Shingle shuffle under the Huntington Beach Pier, in 1987. Raleigh was basically a flow sponsorship, but I got free bikes for a year, and a week in a motel at the Long Beach trade show, where everybody's riders did group demos. The H.B. Pier was a well known session spot, particularly on the weekends, with a few local BMX freestylers, and several top freestyle skateboarders, and dozens of other BMXers and skaters that came by once in a while.
But I was still really uptight and dorky, and had lots of issues, coming from a family that was a bit more screwed up than most. My moodiness and dorkiness got me laid off from the magazines, after a few months. We all got along fairly well, but I just wasn't the right fit for that crew. I got hired by Bob Morales, owner of the American Freestyle Association (AFA), to edit their newsletter, and do a million other odd jobs at the AFA. I moved from Hermosa Beach down to Huntington Beach, and worked there all through 1987. In early summer, I got the chance to produce a series of six videos for the AFA. Vision Street Wear was a major sponsor of the AFA, and they sent a cameraman from their video company, Unreel Productions, to every AFA contest, to shoot footage. The deal was that both Vision/Unreel, and the AFA, could use the footage for any projects they wanted to do.
They shot footage on a broadcast quality Sony Betacam video camera that cost $50,000. They also had a full blown, broadcast quality edit bay at Unreel. In those days, when shooting on video tape, that edit bay cost $500,000 to build. Today, a high end Mac or PC laptop now could do everything that room did, and a lot more, for about $3,500. But back then, shooting and editing quality video was really expensive. To edit the AFA videos, I went to Unreel, and they gave me VHS copies of the footage for each contest. I would log, or watch all the raw footage at home, making notes of the clips I liked. Then I'd go back to Unreel with my notes, and Dave the editor and I would work in that crazy cool edit bay. I'd tell him which shots to use, and he did the actual editing and effects, and walked me through the whole process. They didn't charge the AFA to edit, so we could sell a few dozen of each videos, and actually make a bit of money.
That year, I made a whole bunch of trips to Unreel, over in Costa Mesa, about ten miles from where I lived in Huntington Beach. I got to know everyone at Unreel, and when they needed a new guy for an entry level job, they gave me a call. That's how I wound up working at Unreel Productions. At the time, Vision Skateboards was one of the Big 5 companies in the skateboard industry, the other four included board manufacturers Powell-Peralta and Santa Cruz, and the two main magazines, Transworld and Thrasher. Skateboarding was still rising in the 1980's boom, the third, and largest wave of skateboarding up to that time.
Vision also owned Sims and Schmitt Stix skateboards, Sims Snowboards, and Vision Street Wear clothes. This whole Vision empire was spread out in several buildings in Costa Mesa, California. Unreel was the coolest, a two story office unit on the end of the building, the edge of the mesa, with an ocean view from the second floor. When Brad Dorfman, the owner of Vision, had someone he wanted to impress, he brought them over and showed them Unreel.
My nickname at Unreel Productions was "The Dub Guy," because I was the guy in the little room upstairs, where everyone went when they needed a copy of some Vision video for one reason or another. My little room, about 6 foot by 8 foot, had one video machine for every format we used, except the big one, the 1 inch tape reel to reel machine. I had a cable tied to that machine, through the ceiling, to my room. I also had three pro caliber VHS duplication machines, so I could make copies of whatever format someone needed. I made videos for the Unreel producers, I dubbed VHS copies of all the raw footage that anyone shot. That was cool, because I learned where all the pools and skate spots were, so I could go hit them on my bike later. I also made copies of videos for the promotions department, the art department, and anything else people in Vision needed.
Tape librarian. That was a big part of my job. Not the coolest sounding job. Across the hallway from my room was the tape library, which was a small storeroom with shelves on every wall. When I started there were well over 1,000 individual tapes, most of them the 20 minute Betacam tapes used in the camera. Those came in boxes of ten tapes. In most cases, the outer boxes would have something like "Tampa" written on them. Our producers were really lazy at labeling their tapes. So I had to go through every single tape, and figure out, "OK, this is Tampa Am contest," then I'd find out who was the cameraman for that contest, and ask them, "OK, is this 1985? 1986? 1987? What month was the contest?" Then I hand wrote the little card, and a label sticker, for every single tape. I spent months doing that, watching part of almost every tape, and fast forwarding through to note any key shots, like an interview or where the pros runs were. That's what I did when not doing other work. I usually didn't leave my tiny room for hours, just copying 3 copies of this, 20 copies of that, for different people in the Vision companies. By the time Unreel closed down, we had about 2,400 tapes in the tape library, every single tape and case hand labeled by me.
In a group of companies that grossed somewhere around $50 million that year, the 1987-88 Vision empire, there were all kinds of video projects going on, plus the occasional outside project. With Vision making so much money, Unreel didn't really have to make money as a separate business. We were always being called on to do some project for Vision or one of the other companies, from skate videos to fashion videos, or videos to show at trade shows for Vision Street Wear. But the main thing we did was a series of home videos, like Psycho Skate, Freestylin' Fanatics, Sims Snowshredders, and Barge at Will. Unreel also produced the first nationally syndicated action sports TV series, called Sports on the Edge, in 1989. Six years before the X-Games, we had a series of six TV shows that played on TV stations across the U.S., including Vision's Skate Escape event. That series featured skateboarding, snowboarding, BMX racing, BMX freestyle, body boarding. I had zero creative input on any of those TV shows or videos, I was basically a glorified production assistant. But now, 24 years later, it's pretty cool that my name is in the credits for Red Hot Skate Rock, the video we did with the Red Hot Chili Peppers, when they played at the big Skate Escape event. Who knew they'd still be kicking ass in 2023.
One really cool side aspect of working at Unreel was that I got introduced to a whole bunch of pretty cool, and some lame, music. When you make action sports videos, you always need background music, and the Vision companies were a collection of dozens of really creative people, many into the local punk and rock scenes. Unreel also had a woman who came in occasionally, who was a 20-something knockout brunette, when I first started going to Unreel. I think she was a hardcore groupie in Hollywood's Sunset Strip music scene, something like that. She would sit on the floor, in the downstairs waiting room, before they had furniture. She just had a phone, and she called all the musicians she knew, and had them send demo tapes and other copies of their music to Unreel. In addition, the producers were always looking for new bands. Dave and I dubbed all the good music that came in over to digital PCM music, recording the digital info on video tapes. Plus I made copies of the finished videos a lot, so I was introduced to a lot of cool music in the 2 1/2 years I worked at Unreel.
When I came from Idaho to California, I listened to top 40 and MTV music (MTV used to actually play music, kids), groups like Bruce Springsteen, Night Ranger, Queen, ZZ Top, and music like that. My cassette collection brought me a lot of grief when I started working at the magazines. Gork was a hardcore metalhead, and Andy and Lew were into punk and industrial music. I had just never been properly introduced to punk rock, except for a guy in high school who told me about the Dead Kennedys. While working at Unreel, the hardcore H.B. local freestyler, Mike Sarrail, started introducing me to alternative and punk music, then taking me to shows to see bands like Jane's Addiction, Social Distortion, Human Drama, The Dickies, and a whole bunch more. Mike really got me into punk, but I also found quite a few bands from working at Unreel, and some on KROQ radio, as well. So here are several of the bands I learned about while working at Unreel Productions, from 1987 to 1990.
JFA (Jodie Foster's Army)- We Know You Suck (full album) Some skater had shot home video of a JFA show, and it was in the Unreel tape library. We never used it in a video, but I checked it out when I found the tape.
Stacey Q- "Insecurity"- Someone at Unreel knew Stacey Q's producer, John St. James. Unreel was working on the original music video for her song "Insecurity," when I started there. I heard that song, over and over and over, for the first couple of weeks, coming out of the edit bay, as they edited it. At the time, 7-Up had just put out this Cherry 7-Up commercial. They spent something like a million dollars to shoot a video that looked like black and white film, but have just the pink show up.
Unreel had a component betacam edit bay, not composite, which meant behind the machines there were three cables for everything, instead of one, which separated the three main colors of video. Dave Alvarez, our editor, figured a way to do the same effect as the 7-Up commercial, just by patching cables a certain way. So the fairly low budget Stacey Q "Insecurity" video, the original version, had the same look as the million dollar plus 7-Up commercial. But for some reason, the record company had another video produced for the song later on. Stacey Q was completely unknown, a wannabe pop star at the time. She came by Unreel a few times. She later had success with the song "Two of Hearts." The song made it to #3 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Definitely not my taste in music, but this was the first new music I heard when I started at Unreel.
The Descendents- "Coolidge"- For context, snowboarding was really new in 1987-88, and still largely unknown to a lot of the public, when I started at Unreel. At the time, 95% of ski resorts banned snowboarding on their mountains. But Tom Sims, who started Sims skateboards and Sims snowboards, is the west coast inventor of snowboarding. Unreel was working on the second Sims Snowboards video, Snowshredders, when I started. There was a version mostly edited, with pink lawn flamingos being tossed around in the intro, for some reason. Brad Dorfman, or someone, didn't like the intro, and so the video underwent a major re-edit, over the winter of 1987-88. I had a 3/4" copy to make VHS promos copies from, and first heard The Descendents song, "Coolidge," there. I just really liked the song, not knowing who the band was. I used to play that in my room, over and over, on the big 3/4", cassette, just because I liked the song. I later found out what the band was, and The Descendents and All became favorites of mine.
On a side note, I also got the job of making a snowboard tuning video with Tom Sims himself, my first cameraman and lighting job at Unreel. On the second day of shooting, Tom brought in the first snowboard he made, in 7th grade shop class, in 1966 or so. That board is now famous as, arguably, the first modern snowboard. When I saw it, I asked "What is that?" and Tom told me the story behind it. Snowboards have come a long way since. 
Tom Sims with his first homemade snowboard, from about 1966, made in shop class in school.
Agent Orange- "Bloodstains"- I think "Bloodstains," was the first video I ever saw show skateboarding on MTV, back in the mid 1980's. After The Descendents, I discovered Agent Orange at Unreel. Since Skatevisions was already a couple of years old when I started at Unreel, I didn't get asked to make a copy of it for quite a while. I had never seen the video before working there. When I did dub it, I recognized a couple of songs that I'd heard on KROQ, but never knew what band it was. This is another video I'd put in and just listen to every once in a while. Just great music, from my point of view. But my favorite thing about Agent Orange and Skatevisions come from an whereYouTube video Moby interviews street artist Shephard Fairey. At 7:12 in this interview, Shephard says that watching Skatevisions, with the Agent Orange soundtrack, had a big effect on him, and that was his introduction to punk rock. Without Skatevisions, Andre' may have never had a posse, and Obama may not have had much hope for change. So I'm stoked my old boss, Don Hoffman, made the video that helped get 14-year-old Shephard started down the alternative path to all the cool stuff he's done since.
All- "Don Quixote"- Brian Gillogly, one of the Unreel producers, worked at Skateboarder magazine, years before, and he directed Freestylin' Fanatics, and other videos. He used the All song "Don Quixote" in one video, and again, like "Coolidge," I just liked the song, and started listening to it at work sometimes. All is basically The Descendents with a different singer, something like that.
Big Drill Car- "In Green Fields"- One of the people in Big Drill Car worked at Vision, in the art department, I think. They have a great sound, which I first heard dubbing videos at Unreel. I picked up their album "Casette Type Thing," at Vinyl Solution in Huntington Beach, and listened to that tape a hundred times or more. I still listen to them when writing or drawing, on a regular basis, and I saw them play live 3 or 4 times in the early 90's.
Drive, She Said- Drive, She Said (full album)- I think we used a song or two from this album in some video. Mostly I just remember seeing the album laying around. The name, "Drive, She Said," stuck in my head. Sounds like an 80's hair band.
Blind Dog Lost- "Pete's Theme"- This is one song that I just liked, having heard it play while dubbing it many times.
Slammin' Watusis- "Skt Skt Skt"- This is another song I just heard a bunch while dubbing tapes, and liked the song.
The Splatcats- "Even Steven"- This is the intro music for the Freestylin' Fanatics video, after the Vision Street Wear commercial at the very beginning. It's another just really cool song I liked back in 1988. Brian dug deep and found some really cool music for the videos he worked on, I'll give him that. I thought this was The Descendents when I first heard it. Listen to the lyrics of this song, it's pretty crazy, but they get lost in the groove of the music.
Joe Satriani- "Satch Boogie"- So... someone at Unreel talked to Joe Satriani's people, and got a verbal "OK" to use his music, from the Surfing With the Alien album, before it came out. The deal was we could use any of the music for $300 per song. Our producers loved "Satch Boogie," and several other songs, and we edited the music into several places in the Sports on the Edge TV shows. Then... Surfing With the Alien took off. When they went to pay Satriani's record label, the label said, "Uh... no... we want $3,000 per song." So Unreel found a good local musician, and had him do similar music, hitting the same beats of the edited video, for much less money. They had to edit out every Satriani song we used, it was just way too much money to spend for background music. Lesson of the day, get written contracts to use music, if you're producing videos, folks. On the bright side, the groupie woman I mentioned above, she got Dave and I tickets to see Joe Satriani and his band play live at a closed event at the NAMM trade show in early 1988. It was a great show, in a room full of hardcore musicians. Satriani's bass player was even more amazing than him. I think Paul Stanley from KISS was standing next to me, one of maybe 200 people in the room, for that show. I'm not 100% sure, with no make-up, but I think it was him. Thanks groupie chick!
Yello- "Oh Yeah"- This is another song that everybody in that era heard. Someone at Unreel did get the rights to use this song in writing, and we used it in several videos, I think. It was in the intro of Snow Shredders. But you all probably know this song from this commercial, which came out later, or maybe this one, much later on, or maybe from 80's dance club mixes of the song.
Skatemaster Tate- "Year O' Tate"- Gerry Hurtado, aka Skatemaster Tate, was a skater and musician in the 80's skate scene in SoCal. He was one of the live hosts of Skate Escape, along with radio DJ The Poorman, from KROQ, and pro vert skater Ken Park. The producers at Unreel decided to not only make a music video of Tater, but to make a 3D music video. This was shown on the big screen, above the ramp, at Vision's big Skate Escape event in 1988. It's also the reason you see a bunch of kids in a crowd wearing 3D glasses (at 1:00) in some of the videos. But since it was shot in 3D, this clip was never used in an actual video. I just found this clip online recently, and hadn't seen it since 1989 or 1990. Skatemaster Tate went on to host Sk8-TV on Nickelodeon in 1990. That's him on the left with Lance Mountain and the co-host guy, in that clip.
The Stain- "I Know the Scam" "Flashing Reds"- One day, street skating pioneer, Mark Gonzales, walked into Unreel with a record album, put out by a punk band in Toledo, that none of us had ever heard of. Mark bought the album just because he liked the cover art. The band was The Stain, and the producers at Unreel contacted the leader of the band, Jon Stainbrook. It turns out Jon had some really good friends who were musicians, and one had a home recording studio, so Jon and The Stain, became one of our main sources of cheap, good, video music from then on. I called him up, and used a bunch of The Stain's music when I made my own BMX video, The Ultimate Weekend, shortly after leaving Vision, in 1990.
Uniform Choice- "A Choice" - This is a punk band I had heard of, but never actually listened to. Then I got to shoot all the video footage for amateur vert skater, Mark Cernicky, for Barge at Will (19:03), and they used Uniform Choice for his segment. I love that segment now. Cernicky of DEATH!
Red Hot Chili Peppers- "Fight Like a Brave"- OK, I saw the movie Thrashin', featuring the Chili Peppers, in a drive-in, in Gork's van, with then magazine co-workers and roommates, Gork and Lew, in 1986. So I knew who they were. But I never really heard their music until the Skate Escape event. I ran from Don Hoffman's side, in the event director's booth, at the back of the arena, and into the pit for the Chili Pepper's live show there. Great set. Then the Unreel later put out the Red Hot Skate Rock home video, so I heard their music a bunch of times back then. I like their 1990's and beyond music better, to be honest. We had no idea they would still be playing more than 30 years later, back then. They still really fuckin' rock. More power to the Peppers.
Bad Brains- "Big Takeover"- Someone at Unreel, possibly one of the skaters, introduced me to Bad Brains. Then, in 1990, when I worked with Christian Hosoi and his guys for three days, shooting for the Tuff Skts promo, he said he was a fan of Bad Brains. So when I made the original 7 minute promo video for Tuff Skts, I used Bad Brains and Muddy Waters music (for the slo-mo part). I lost my copy of that promo in 2008, in a move, and there's no version except that super short clip from Sk8-TV, above, with lame music. But the real version of that promo had Bad Brains in it.
Muddy Waters- "King Bee"- When I shot footage at Christian Hosoi's ramp for the Tuff Skts promo linked above), he had kind of a one man media day. There were 3 or 4 magazine photographers there, his team skaters, Block, Little Man, and Joey Tran, as well as surf filmmaker Herbie Fletcher, shooting film. Christian Fletcher was also there, skating. Hosoi had a full sized halfpipe on the top of this hill in Echo Park, where he lived in a house once owned by W.C. Fields. Herbie had some movie footage of Christian from an earlier shoot, and we all went into the little side house, and watched it on a movie screen. The footage was all in slo-mo, shot in high speed film. Christian put some Muddy Waters blues music on the record player while we watched the film, and it worked really well with the slo-mo. So I bought a Muddy Waters cassette and used the song "King Bee" in the Tuff Skts promo video. I later realized I like blues music in general, so thanks Christian for turning me on to Muddy Waters.
The Offspring- "Jennifer Lost the War"- In January of 1990, as Vision was in a downward spiral thanks to the slowdown of the 80's skateboarding boom, we had a meeting at Unreel. The decision had been made to dissolve Unreel. All the producers and our manager got the boot. The two lowest (and cheapest) people on the payroll, a woman named Laura, and me, were kept on. But we had to move to the Vision main office in Santa Ana. Don Hoffman would work freelance when needed. Laura found a "real" TV production job in about a month, which left me, in a big office, with a bunch of the basic video equipment. Every call that came in for Unreel was then directed to me. Remember, I was a lowly production assistant, and eventually a cameraman, for 2 1/2 years. I had nothing to do with any official business at Unreel.
Suddenly I had distributors from Portugal on the phone, or shops who needed a new copy of a video because one was a bad tape, and other weird, random phone calls from around the world. One day I picked up a call, and a really mad guy said, "You used my band's music in a skate video without paying, and I'm going to fucking kill you!" Naturally, I was kind of curious who the hell this guy was, because I had no idea. So I asked, "Who the hell are you?" It turned out he was Frank from Zed Records, a huge indie music shop in Long Beach that had a small record label. I told him I had no idea what he was talking about, and explained my side of the story at Unreel. Eventually he calmed down.
The best I could figure out, some skater brought in a ghetto blaster recorded tape with the band he wanted to use for his segment on one side, and a young punk band called The Offspring, on the other side. The tape wasn't labeled. In the course of making Barge at Will, somebody turned the tape over, and used one of The Offspring's songs in the video, thinking it was cool. Keep in mind, this was four years before their breakout album, Smash, came out. Nobody knew who the fuck The Offspring was in 1990, except maybe a few local friends and punkers. Ultimately I drove down to Zed Records after work one day, talked to Frank, and we worked it out. I was able to get $1,000 (retail value) of Vision Street Wear clothes sent to The Offspring, and everyone was reasonably happy. A year or so later, I saw them play (opening for Citizen Fish), with Mike Sarrail. Mike started talking to them and I ended up having a beer or two with them before the show, at Al's Bar in downtown L.A. That's how I first heard The Offspring's music. These Huntington Beach locals became one of my favorite bands over the years, and I 've seen them live 3 or 4 times.
No Doubt- "Oi to the World" (The Vandals cover)- When Unreel shut down in January of 1990, we had two really nice office units to clear out, Unreel's suite, and the Vision promotions department, which was next door. Tom, Vision's facilities manager, gave me the job of making a list of every single piece of video equipment in the Unreel office, and writing down the serial number. Much to my surprise, I found over $10,000 worth of equipment that wasn't on any previous list. Being the ridiculously honest goofball that I am, I didn't steal any of the equipment and sell it.
While doing that job, I dug into every nook and cranny of the office. In the closet by Don Hoffman's old office, I found a big box of albums, CD's and maybe 40 or 50 cassette tapes. Remember the hot groupie chick I mentioned? I think a lot of that music was stuff she had musicians send to Unreel in 1987 or early 1988, along with other music people had sent later on.
At lunch at Vision, I mentioned this to a guy named Dave, who worked in the mailroom. He said I had to let him have some of it, being into punk himself. He came by my apartment the next weekend, and we split the music between us. There were multiple Anthrax picture disk albums, still shrink wrapped. Those were already collector's items then. There were a couple of The Offspring's first album, unopened, and a few other records. Dave and I went though it all. He picked one thing, then I picked one, then he picked one. At the end we both had some really cool music, and I had about 20 hand recorded cassettes. He wasn't interested in those. So Dave took off with his haul.
I went up to my bedroom, and put each cassette in my little ghetto blaster, and played parts of a couple songs. If I really liked the music at first listen, I kept it, if not, I tossed it in the trash. One of those cassette had "No Doubt" written in a girl's handwriting on it on the cassette card, and on the tape. Again, this was 1990, a full two years before the "Trapped in a Box" music video came out, and five years before their breakout Tragic Kingdom album. I played the first song, there was a guy singing. It didn't really move me. I fast forwarded a ways, and listened to a bit of another song, also a guy singing. The music didn't grab me, so I tossed the garage recorded, ghetto blaster taped cassette, probably hand labeled by Gwen Stefani, recorded in 1987, into the trash, with about 20 other cassettes. Yeah, I kind of wish I would have kept all those. Or at least that one. Lesson learned.
For those of you not aware, the band No Doubt was formed as a ska band, by Eric Stefani (Gwen's older brother) and John Spence, in 1986, and the original lead singer was John. John tragically died by suicide in late 1987, and a very reluctant and shy Gwen took over lead vocals. Obviously, she rose to the task, and eventually kicked major ass on vocals. But the tape I had still had John singing lead, so the self-taped songs I had on cassette were from some time in 1987, three years before I heard of the band, and eight years before they broke out big time with the Tragic Kingdom album in 1995. Eric Stefani left the band in 1994, and became an animator on The Simpson's show.
So there's a bunch of the music I got introduced to while working at a pretty cool job, at Unreel Productions, back in the late 1980's. This post is done and I'm hungry. It's time for a little something refreshing.
