To be fair, this little group is an outlier, one of the most influential creative scenes in human history. They were much more influential than most Creative Scenes. But that wasn't apparent in the beginning, which is the point. The Homebrew Club, including it's best known members Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, created personal computers. Wozniak and Jobs founded Apple Computers, now Apple, which brought us the Macintosh, iPods, and iPhones, among many other innovations. A small group of creative people, a "creative scene," can have all kinds of effects, and even change the course of human history.
They were geeks when that was something everyone did not want to be. But they found themselves fascinated by eletronics, and the emerging technology of computers. Here's an interview from about 2004, with six early members of the 1975 Homebrew Club, in Menlo Park, California, including Steve Wozniak. These six geeks from the 1970's, and the others from their scene, changed the lives of nearly every single on earth. For real. That's how major of an effect a small creative scene can potentially have.
What is a "Creative Scene?" My definition of a Creative Scene is a group of two or more people, focused on advancing in some creative endeavor. Two kids in the back of a 3rd grade class trying to draw better airplanes than each other is a Creative Scene. A group of artists at a small indie gallery is a Creative Scene. The kids and staff working on a high school yearbook is a creative scene. A band, no matter how good or bad, is a creative scene. The kids riding skateboards, BMX bikes, and yes, even scooters,* at a skatepark, is a creative scene. Two women making Aunt Agnes' gooseberry jelly and selling it online, is a creative scene. Travis Patrana and the Nitro Circus lunatics is a Creative Scene. Todd McFarlane and the original posse that started Image Comics were a creative scene. Three 9-year-old girls in the front yard making up dance moves, is a Creative Scene. Amanda Palmer and whomever she's hanging out with at this moment, is a Creative Scene. One time Old School BMX freestyler Chris Lashua and his Cirque Mechnic is a Creative Scene. A blog or YouTube channel's creator(s) and their followers, are a creative scene. CBGB's in the 1970's, and later, was a creative scene. The group of Montreal street performers that created Cirque du Soleil, was a Creative Scene. The people riding BMX and mountain bikes at Sheep Hills today, is a creative scene. Gary Vaynerchuk and the people at VaynerMedia is a creative scene. Tyler Perry's movie studio in Atlanta is a Creative Scene. Yuga Labs, a hanfdul of artistic, former punk and hip hop influenced skateboarders and BMXers from Miami, that created the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT's, and the Otherside metaverse, is a Creative Scene. And yes, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, in their garage, Woz's cubicle, and Steve's bedroom, in 1975, were a Creative Scene... on that birthed Apple. You get the idea.
We all have some idea what an art scene or a music scene is. They are not only the artists or the bands, but the local gallery owners, the patrons who buy pieces of work or go see shows, the local arts organizations that plan the First Friday Art Walk, the local bars and clubs where bands play, and all the people playing roles who support these people and the scenes. Those are the best known kind of Creative Scenes.
There are scenes within scenes. There are better and worse scenes. Most Creative Scenes don't have any major influence, except to help people become more creative, and learn skills, either creative, ogranizational, or business-wise. A healthy creative environment, let's say a thriving city's creative community, has dozens, maybe hundreds, of loosely interconnected scenes, with many types of people playing roles in multiple scenes, moving between scenes, and bouncing off of, and inspiring each other. This type or creative environment separates a city like Austin, Texas from say Detroit, Michigan. Both have creative scenes, Detroit has been huge force in music from Motown to rock n' roll to early electronic music. But it's been devastated economically, and continues ot struggle as a city. Austin is peaking as a Creative Scene city, and currently thriving financially as a major tech hub city, where economic and creative Detroit's heydays were decades ago. But the cheap cost of living and post apocalyptic scenes of Detroit may set the seeds for more great Creative Scenes in the future. Time will tell.
This theme, Creative Scenes, is something I've been learning about since the 1980's, as a BMX freestyler, and ever since, through many creative projects, jobs, and experiences. I even lived in an indie art gallery once, back in 2005-6. That's where my Sharpie Scribble Style art technique was born.
Right now, in late 2022, I believe we are on the cusp of some of the biggest changes in society in modern times, which will take place over several years. Creative Scenes is where I'm going to focus my energy for the forseeable future. I've got a lot to say on the subject, so it's time to get to work. Buckle up, it's gonna be a crazy ride.
*As an Old School BMX guy, I love to make fun of scooter riders. And then R Willy came along... Damn him.
Bones Brigade: An Autobiography, the epic 2012 documentary by skate legend and original Zephyr Team skateboarder, Stacy Peralta. I finally found it free on YouTube, and watched it. It got to me. These guys were big influences on me, like all skater/punk/action sports kids in the 1980's.
The Powell-Peralta Bones Brigade team was legendary in the skateboard, punk rock, and action sports subcultures in the 1980's. This is the guys behind that crew, telling the parts they didn't tell along the way.
While mostly known as a Has Been BMX industry guy, I actually started skateboarding in 1976, three or four years before I even knew BMX bikes existed. I lived in the small, rural town of Willard, Ohio. My friend showed me a pressed aluminum skateboard his dad made at the shop at work, with steel roller skate wheels and no grip tape. I thought he was lying when he said his dad made it, it looked factory made, like a lawnmower. But I've never seen another board like it.
His name was Jeff. Jeff put it down on the flat rocks of the walkway, in front of his house. We didn't walk out to the actual sidewalk, for some reason. We were on the walkway through their front yard, made of big flat stones, most were a foot and a half, or two feet across, and there was grass growing between the rocks. Jeff put the skateboard down, put one foot on it, and pushed off with the other. He rolled across one stone, then onto the next stone, rolling about three feet. I said, "Whoa." So he let me try. I put my left foot on top, pushed off with my right foot, pulled my right foot up on the deck. I rolled about a foot, and the front wheel hit a crack in the stone. The board stopped, I got thrown forward, and fell to the ground, slamming a knee and scraping it. I was a complete wuss as a kid, I hated pain. I stood up and said, "Skateboarding is dumb." That was my introduction to skateboarding, the first time I ever saw a skateboard. I walked away with a scraped knee and turned off on skateboards. It was the corner of Laurel and Clark streets, I just looked it up on Google Maps, bottom right corner there, It looks like those big flat rocks are still in front of that house.
That was during fourth grade for me, I lived a block and a half away, down Laurel Street, from Jeff. A couple months later, another friend got a plastic skateboard, with urethane wheels. I tried that board, on a smooth piece of sidewalk, and found that riding skateboards was actually fun. Another friend got a skateboard, it was the mid 1970's, when the skateboarding fad swept across the United States. That was the second big wave of skateboards, after the 1965-66 rise, a decade earlier. Skateboarding turned into one of those things we did as 9-year-old kids. We played backyard baseball, football, swam in the city pool a couple blocks away, and we rode skateboards.
We didn't have magazines to look at then. There was one book, a hardcover book, about skateboarding, in the Willard Library. We took turns checking that book out, which had a bunch of the late 60's and early 70's skaters. We looked over each other's shoulders as one kid flipped through the pages. Those were the only tricks we knew existed. 360's. Wheelies. Daffys. The Coffin. Sitting on our board sideways, with our feet on our friend's board, and his feet on our board, going down a big hill.
I decided I needed a skateboard. I got 50 cents a week allowance from my parents... sometimes. After buying some penny candy downtown, that cost 2 cents each, I saved up my extra change. For nine fucking months, I saved quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies. I saved up to buy a green plastic Scamp skateboard, at the Western Auto store on Myrtle Street, the main street in "downtown" Willard. That was the first thing I ever saved up money for in my life.
Finally I had a board, and my friend Steve and I wound up at the parking lot of my Lutheran church, which had a decent sized hill, by 10-year-old standards. Steve's board was blue plastic, and had a double kicktail. We figured out that we could put my board backwards, on top of Steve's board, and then took turns trying to make it all the way down the hill, riding the stacked boards. We both made it to the bottom of the hill within an hour. That was skateboarding for us, then 10 year olds, in Willard, Ohio, in 1977. Like old guys always say, skateboarding if it was ever mentioned on TV, it was nearly always compared to hula hoops, and called a "fad," like the hula hoops our sisters had.
There were no skateboard videos, we only had three main channels of TV then. Us kids only got to see skateboard magazines twice, I think. One of Jeff's older brothers skated, and had a few skateboard magazines. But us"little kids" never got to look at them. A couple of times, that brother gave us little kids five or ten minutes to look through his skateboard magazines. There were four or five of us, we each grabbed a magazine, and flipped through them like maniacs, as fast as possible, so we could find the coolest photos during those few minutes. That was the first time any of us saw photos of kids in California riding skateboards in pools. But it was just this quick glimpse of some kids, way out west in California, skateboarding in pools. We didn't know that there were skateparks. We weren't sure where those pools were, or why there was no water in them. But those were those far away kids... way out in California. We didn't know any of their names. They might as well have been on the moon.
The next year, in 1978, my family went to a flea market, in a parking garage, in Mansfield, the city my mom was from. We had a booth, selling random stuff, like a garage sale. I had a lot of time to wander around and check out the other booths. I found some high school kid in his parents' booth who was selling a skateboard he made, for $2.00. It was made out of a 3/4" thick oak board, about 5 1/2" wide. No kicktail, it was flat. It had a pointed nose, curved sides, and a narrow tail. It had GT trucks which were really narrow, but, the maroon wheels were each 2 1/2" wide. The wheels stuck out over the edges of the board. That became my skateboard, and I skated that thing for a decade. I took it down to the Huntington Beach Pier, in 1987 or early 1988, when I was a BMX freestyler, hanging out with Pierre Andre, Don Brown, Hans Lingren, and the HB local skaters. We all took turns trying to ollie my old $2 board, and finally broke the trucks.
As my family moved form town to town, I would go out on the street, and do rock walks, toe drag 360's, and backside G-turns, which I didn't realize were called G-turns. Every new house we lived in, I met the kids in the new neighborhood on that $2 skateboard. I would go skate in the driveway, and down the street, and that's how I started meeting the neighbor kids.
When we first moved to Boise in 1981, I would put Joan Jett's "I Love Rock n' Roll" cassette on my cheesy ghetto blaster in our garage, and do rockwalks and G-turns for hours. I'd still never bought a skateboard magazine. Our house was a incredibly psychologically tense place, and miserable, by and large. Skateboarding wasn't a sport to me, because I sucked at sports. It wasn't anything that I ever imagined to do after high school. It wasn't a thing that anyone made money at, as far as I knew. For me, skateboarding was another escape, a physical way to cope with my constant depression and the drama of everyday life. As a screwed up teenager, in a family that was more fucked up than most, I would read, run off and wander the woods (later he desert), ride my bike around, or skateboard. Those were my escapes.
Skateboarding had died, it wasn't cool anymore. I didn't care. Skateboarding was a way to cope. That's who rode skateboards in those days, fucked up kids from families that were more dysfunctional that most. It was never something that was going to lead to anything else. Skateboarding was a way to cope with daily life. That's it.
This video took me back to those early days. As my life wandered in weird directions, I wound up working in the BMX and skateboard industries, and the Bones Brigade riders were a huge influence on me in my 20's, and since. I was in that world, met a couple of them, and this story they tell touches my story, like tens of thousands of other kids and young people in the 1980's, and millions of kids in the 1990's.
None of this was supposed to happen. We weren't supposed to follow that weird intuition that drew us to bikes and skateboards, and the other action sports. We rebelled, we bucked the system. We just needed to follow this other, weird thing, and see where it led. It led us to places that none of us could have imagined back then.
But then that's the thing about creativity, it leads to brand new places, brand new things, and new "sports," new businesses, and new industries. Those weird little things have now spread to so many people around the world, that the fucking Olympics has added, is adding more BMX and skateboarding. None of this was supposed to happen. But, then again, it was supposed to happen. The Universe likes to fuck with the status quo every now and then, using weird, fucked up, driven, creative goofballs like the Bones Brigade, and all of us who followed.
In 1998, the fifth year of the X-Games, the suits at ESPN thought the future of BMX freestyle was side by side dog piss airs. As a longtime rider and zine publisher, I had come to a different conclusion.
I was working full time as a furniture mover in 1998. I was also riding nearly every day, just for myself. I wrote up a zine that same summer called The Rise of the Warrior Sports, and took a bunch of copies to the '98 X-Games in San Diego, and passed them out. By that time, I was thinking that BMX freestyle, and all the action sports, were part of a much bigger shift happening in society. By riding, and shooting photos, making videos, zines, magazines, and starting companies, riders were actually helping to build the distant future of the United States. How does doing curb endos, airs, and jumping doubles affect a whole society, and the world at large? Here's the story.
My Warrior Sports zine started with a book I picked up on a trip to visit my parents in North Carolina, Christmas time of 1989. The book was called The Great Depression of 1990, by economist Ravi Batra. He based his prediction for a huge economic downturn on a social theory by a man from India named P.R. Sarkar. That theory, The Law of Social Cycle, said that there are four basic mentalities in any society. Those are the Warriors, the Intellectuals, the Acquisitors, and the Laborers. These mentalities aren't based on your race, gender, social class or anything like that. They're based on the way you earn your living in the world.
The Warriors earn their living with physical skills and courage. In Sarkar's theory, Warriors are NOT just soldiers or people who fight wars. Anyone who makes their living using some type of courage or physical prowess is part of this Warrior group. Examples include soldiers, police, firefighters, construction workers who do really dangerous work, and professional athletes, among others.
The Intellectuals are the people who use their brain power to earn their way in the world. These include professors, teachers, scientists, writers, artists, politicians, the clergy, and other serious thinkers.
The Acquisitors are also smart, but they use their smarts in business. Acquisitors include people in finance, landlords, business owners, entrepreneurs, stock traders, professional investors and others focused on making money.
The Laborers are the largest group of people, by far. They are the average, everyday working people with low to mid-level skills that work for other people's businesses. They don't excel at any of the above categories, but they are the largest part of any country, and are the masses in any society. These are the people who make up the body of a city, state, or country.
The cool part of this theory is that at any given time, one of these groups leads a society, and that society is shaped by their outlook on life. This affects every level and aspect of that society. One mentality can dominate a society for hundreds of years, there's no set time limit. But the interesting thing (to Ravi Batra, and to me, anyhow) is that these groups lead a society in a particular order. That order is: Intellectuals, Acquisitors, Laborers, Warriors, and back to the Intellectuals.
Batra, the economist born to Indian parents, took The Law of Social Cycle, which was virtually unknown in the U.S., and applied it to the United States, in the 1980's. He came to the conclusion that the U.S. had been in an Acquisitor Age since its colonial days. But in the late 80's, we were heading into the "Acquisitor cum Laborer" stage. That meant that the big business people leading society were getting more and more corrupt. They were siphoning off the wealth of the middle class, the wealth of the nation, and totally screwing over the everyday working people. Not every business person did this, but a fair amount did. Batra blended this concept with a whole bunch of data on economic cycles, and predicted we would have a Great Depression starting in 1990. He was wrong. Sort of. Those of us old enough to remember the early 1990's recall that we went into a recession in 1990, and we were in tough financial times through 1996. But it was officially called a "double dip recession" at the time. So what Ravi Batra predicted actually happened, it just didn't get as bad as he predicted.
I was always interested in the future, and became interested in economics in high school. I found his book fascinating, and I started paying attention to the financial markets and the "big picture" of the world after I read the book.
I produced my own bike video that year, in 1990, The Ultimate Weekend, the 8th BMX freestyle video I produced or edited, and went on to work on several TV show crews in the early 90's. I worked as a furniture mover or video store clerk in between shows. I was also out riding my bike every day, just for fun at that point. I also got into rock climbing, and became a boulderer, climbing small but technical cliffs with no ropes.
By the mid-1990's, after seeing much of what Batra predicted actually come true, I started thinking more about Sarkar's Law of Social Cycle. If Batra's assessment of the U.S. was correct, then the theory hinted at other things happening in the future. First, the corporate world, the major Acquisitors, would keep getting more and more corrupt, and keep gaining in wealth. The American Middle Class would start to die out as a greater percentage of wealth shifted to the super rich. This would eventually cause a popular uprising among the everyday, working people, the Laborers. That's the Acquisitor cum Laborer era. The working people get sick of being screwed over, and a populist uprising, or a series of uprisings, start to happen.
The Laborers stand up, but they don't have the skills to actually lead society for any length of time. So things get really chaotic and crazy as average people rise up against the corporate overlords. At that point, one of two things happen. Either the society completely collapses, or gets overthrown by a stronger neighbor, or the Warriors mentality rises to power, and The Warrior Age begins.With the Warrior age comes a different set of values, like more respect for courage and physical abilities. There's also a big push toward individualism and doing your own thing, rather than fitting in with mass culture.
With this theory in the back of my head, rattling around, I lived at the infamous P.O.W. BMX House, was a long time roommate and sidekick to Chris Moeller, I saw the rise of Sheep Hills and dirt jumping, and I edited the first two S&M Bikes videos for Chris. As I burned out of the TV production world and faded away from the BMX industry in 1995, I started to realize something else was going on. BMX freestyle, and the action sports world as a whole, were part of the Warrior mentality rising up in society. As our weird activity turned into a sport, a lifestyle, and then a trend, so did skateboarding, snowboarding, mountain biking, and... OK, even inline skating.
I realized that I was an Intellectual with Warrior tendencies. While I would never be a great BMX pro, but my deep thinker side saw the bigger picture that we were all a part of. We were one aspect of the Warrior mentality, people who wanted to push ourselves physically, who often did daring stuff, who looked up to physical skills and courage more than a big bank account. We wanted to actually get out there, do our own thing, and really EXPERIENCE life. We just weren't interested in working for someone else just to buy a bigger house, a newer car, and have a hotter wife than our neighbor.
Most interesting to me, the action sports world was a totally new type of Warrior mentality. We blended art and creativity with physical skill and courage, and created "sports" where winning a game wasn't the point. Progressing as a rider, and as a human being, that was the point.
I typed up these ideas in a zine of about 20 pages, added a few Xeroxed photos, and I passed out a bunch of copies to people while walking around the 1998 X-games in San Diego. Like most zines, I eventually handed out every copy I made, most people flipped through it for a minute or two, then put it in their backpack. I handed one to photographer Mark Losey, and he put it in an outside pocket of his camera bag. I hung out, watched the competitions, and headed home to Huntington Beach. I didn't think much more about the idea, and went on with my life.
In the summer of 1999, I decided I wanted to get back into the BMX world, and I scammed a press pass to the X-Games in San Francisco. I stayed at some relatives' house in San Jose, and drove up and shot behind the scenes video all weekend. At one point, I got to the deck of the vert ramp during BMX practice. A whole new generation of riders that I didn't know had taken over, for the most part. Dave Mirra and Ryan Nyquist were going through their trick bags. I was shooting video, and getting some really cool, up close footage.
Then Dennis McCoy flew out near me after e run. We came up at the same time, in the AFA days of the mid-80's, and I knew him pretty well. Out of nowhere, Dennis turned to me and said, "I read that warrior thing you wrote, that was really cool." I didn't know what he was talking about at first. I'd forgotten about the zine a year earlier. "I got one of your zines last year from Losey," Dennis said. Then I remembered. And I was blown away.
A zine that didn't seem to have much impact, or even get read much, a year earlier, had left a lasting impression on Dennis McCoy. The old school rider who was still hanging with the kids on the vert ramp in 1999. Let's face it, getting compliments about something you write feels good. But getting a compliment out of nowhere, from Dennis McCoy, DM fucking C himself, A YEAR after I wrote the zine. That's insane. I'll remember that one til I die. Or 'til Alzheimer's sets in from rotting my brain by drinking Diet Coke every day.
More than just the compliment, though, I realized I was right. The BMX freestylers, the whole action sports world, really was a part of the P.R. Sarkar's Warrior mentality coming up in society, and growing into a worldwide influence. That's why the concept really resonated with Dennis, he was one of the best examples of the rising Warrior Sports mentality in the world.
But... I realized... if that was right, then the other aspects of the theory would eventually happen. In time, somewhere down the line, average people would start rising up in a series of populist uprisings. And these uprisings would start small, but spread quickly. And they would eventually get bigger, and bigger, causing major shifts in the way society thinks and acts. And that would completely freak out the big money Acquisitor establishment that runs the world from the the corporate boardrooms, the traditional advertising agencies, and behind closed doors in our capitals. So I kept an eye out for something that looked like a legit populist uprising.
When the Occupy Wall Street movement sprang up, around 2014, I knew that was the start. Then it faded and went underground. But many of those people kept working in their local areas. When the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign first started, we all knew what would happen. We'd wind up with long time political insider Hillary Clinton running against longtime political insider Jeb Bush. Got ya, didn't I? If you can think back to the very beginning of the 2016 campaign cycle, that's what it looked like. That's what most everyone believed.
But then something crazy happened. On the Left, Social Democratic senator Bernie Sanders tapped into a huge populist uprising that was fed up with the mainstream Democratic Party. On the Right, egomaniac billionaire and reality TV star Donald Trump tapped into a huge populist movement that was sick of the traditional Republican Party. Things got crazy, Vladimir Putin added his evil genius to the mix, and Trump is now president, though probably not for much longer.
The people, the average, everyday people, the Laborers in Sarkar's theory, are rising up. While the Republicans have the political edge right now, all those Bernie supporters are still out there. In addition, we've seen other movements, like women standing up in the #metoo movement, and the #neveragain movement. As I write this (3/24/2018) there's a huge march in Washington D.C. happening today, sparked by a handful of Florida high school students who survived the recent mass school shooting. Over 800 satellite marches are happening around the world. Kids are tired of getting shot at school. They're tired of friends using guns to commit suicide or kill other kids in the hood. This is another populist uprising.
Attitudes are changing. Everyday working people are tired of getting screwed over. They're tired of working two jobs and still struggling to survive. The shit is hitting the fan. And the fan is on high. Hell, the fan's on HYPER. There will be more uprisings of different groups that will seem to spring out of nowhere and spread like wildfire. These groups will keep coming up, and we will see some really crazy, chaotic, and turbulent times ahead. It will be tough. But there are a lot of Warriors in the world now. Not just people who fight actual wars. But people who stand up and fight for what they believe is right. We look up to courage now much more than we did in 1998, or in 1990, or in 1984, when Bob Morales held the first BMX freestyle contest.
My belief is that if you ride now, you are part of the Warrior Mentality rising in society. If you rode years ago, or skated, or snowboarded, you are part of the Warrior Mentality rising in society. But us in the action sports world have created a whole new kind of "warrior." We have created lifestyles, and sports, where people can be individuals, and they can express themselves and conquer their fears with bikes and boards and other vehicles. But we've created ways to build your courage WITHOUT going into an actual war and killing other humans beings. That's HUGE.
That's the basic idea I shared with the world in my 1998 zine, The Rise of the Warrior Sports. Was I right? Was Ravi Batra right? Was P.R. Sarkar right? If this blog post helps you make sense of the craziness in the world today, then maybe all three of us were right. I'll let you decide.
What I do know is that I had some people ride in my taxi in 1999 and ask me specifically about this Warrior Age idea. I don't know who they were, or where they read my zine. But after that, my life got nuts. I became homeless, and have been struggling ever since. I've been turned downed for dozens of jobs I was completely qualified for since. It's been a tough ride. All kinds of weird shit has happened in my life. And I've wondered if my "Warrior Sports" idea really freaked out somebody powerful somewhere. I'll never know. But if it did. They lost. The Warriors of the world, the people willing to stand up and fight for what they believe in... they're winning. And if I'm right, all of us BMXers played a part in that. You don't just ride to progress. You're part of something much, MUCH bigger. You're a part of a fundamental shift in society itself. The Warrior Age is coming. You're helping to build it.
Now go ride.
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When I first moved to Southern California, I soon learned an annual tradition there. Even though hardly anyone I knew skied, everyone seemed to look forward to the new Warren Miller ski movie that came out every fall. I never managed to see one actually projected on a screen, but I was shown the video by somebody every year for my first several years there. Ski and snowboard film making legend Warren Miller died yesterday, at the age of 93.
Decades before "action sports" were called action sports, before S-VHS and Hi-8 video cameras were affordable to average people, even before surf movies were really a thing, Warren Miller was making one, totally kick ass, ski film each year. He started way back in 1949. He shot real film on real movie cameras. He produced and edited the movies. But there were few, if any, theaters who wanted to show a skiing movie back then. So he started "four walling" his films. He'd rent a room, set up the projector and a screen and a bunch of chairs, and charge admission to watch them. Long, LONG before the Do It Yourself idea became popular, he was doing it himself, with the help of some friends.
As a video producer, and one of the first BMXers to make our own videos, I often forget that Warren Miller was one of my big influences when I started producing videos in 1987. In tribute to his legacy, I'll be binge watching some of his films this weekend. Maybe you want to as well. Hats off to you Warren Miller.
There a few things that go back a long ways for me. I got into BMX in a trailer park outside Boise, Idaho, in 1982. That changed the course of my life. Just over a decade later, I was living in the infamous P.O.W. House in Westminster, CA, and I saw job ad for a circus coming to town. I wound up working in the box office of Saltimbanco, the first Cirque du Soleil show that appeared in Orange County, California. Working at Cirque changed what I thought was possible in life. There is nobody I've seen that work harder AND smarter than circus people. At that time, Cirque was just a single traveling show, a nine-year-old project that started with a group of street performers in Montreal. I could relate to that. As a BMX freestyler at the Huntington Beach Pier, I was a street performer who did tricks for around 140,000 people over a few years time.
Cirque du Soleil now has around 20 different shows, including several of the top permanent shows in Las Vegas. In the early tours, it was the best run company I've ever seen. I went on to work on four more tours that came to Orange County, mostly because it was just a fun place to go to work. Well, and I got to see the show for free several times.
The Cirque du Soleil box offices are built in a semi trailer. I spent many, many hours on the phone or at the window there day dreaming of someday performing in a BMX or rock climbing act in Cirque. That never happened for me. But now the insanely amazing organization of Cirque has put together a show around the energy and lifestyle of the action sports world. I DEFINITELY want to see this in 2018. If you get the chance, you should to.
Trying to get an idea of where the bike and skate industries are right now, I ran into this Sean Mortimer article on small companies in the skateboard business. If you're in the business of any action sports, this is worth a read.
In the late 80's, skater Christian Hosoi was known for his high airs and style, and always battling Tony Hawk, the technical vert trick master, for the win in vert contests. Christian teamed up with Vision Skateboards in 1990 and did a company called Tuff Skts. It didn't last that long, but it gave me a chance to shoot video of him and his crew for three days, and then edit a promo video. The original promo was 7 minutes long, and had music from Bad Brains and Muddy Waters, two of Christian's favorites. But the women in the Vision promotions department told me that it made them look like hoodlums. So I edited it down to four minutes they approved of. This little clip of that from Sk8-TV is the only part that survived. Bummer.
I got a great education about video production at Unreel Productions. But I didn't really like most of the videos they produced while I was there. The weird thing about Unreel, was that it didn't have to make money. We were basically going out and shooting all kinds of events, and every video would sell 3,000 copies or so because of all the shops that carried Vision. But we didn't have a TV series contract like big production companies. So we'd just shoot all this footage, and then months later, someone would say, "let's make this kind of video," and we'd go through the archives.
The reason that bugged me is because skateboarding and BMX freestyle were progressing like crazy, but our videos weren't on top of that progression. Plus everything had to have a million Vision Street Wear clothes and logos in it. So in early 1990, I got an S-VHS camera of my own, and I started shooting footage of my friends and riders that I knew. I wanted to produce my own video of what riding was actually like. Nearly every weekend, I went one place or another and shot whatever riders I could find that were up to something cool.
As fate would have it, the Vision empire was collapsing. It just got too big too quick, it was micro-managed, and key people were bailing like rats on a sinking ship. At one point, we were having two or three going away parties for good people every week. So it wasn't completely surprising when there was a meeting in early 1990, and we were told that Unreel was being dissolved. Don Hoffman, the head of Unreel, kept working as a freelancer. I was still the lowest guy on the totem pole, which meant I was cheap and knew how to work most of the equipment. So the woman just above me and I were moved to the Vision main office in Santa Ana. She found a new job on a real TV show soon after. From then on, I sat in an office with nothing to do, and read through all the computer files of my former co-workers, and watched videos all day. That sounds great, but I was bored out of my mind. So I quit around the first of July.
On my last day, one of the women in the promotions department (where my office was) asked me if I had any plans for the next few weeks. I didn't. "Do you want to drive the mini-ramp rig cross country on a little skate tour?" she asked. Here's the funny part, one of my goals as a BMX freestyler was to go on a summer tour doing shows. I never did it with a BMX team, but I jumped at the chance to drive/manage the skateboard tour. The next Monday I hopped in the dually pick-up with a skater named Mark Oblow, hitched up the ramp trailer, and headed east towards Atlanta.
In a great bit of luck, it turned out to be over 100 degrees every single day, wherever we were. On top of that, the blue Ford Vision dually was geared to pull trailers. It chugged up hills, not even whining, while pulling the 24 foot ramp trailer. But on the flats, it did 55 miles per hour. Period. Maybe 60 on a long downhill stretch. In case you didn't know, the American West is huge. It's ridiculous at 55 mph.
Mark and I left the hotel a couple hundred miles west of San Antonio on the morning of day 3. We had to be in Atlanta the next evening. We weren't going to make it. On top of that, we had to stop in Houston and pick up a couple of 15-year-old skaters named Mike Crum and Chris Gentry. As soon as we pulled away from the house, they asked if I could buy them cigarettes. As the responsible "tour manager," I said, "No." So I pulled over at the next 7-11 and made Oblow buy them cigarettes.
We headed east through Texas, and I wound up driving 24 hours straight to make it to Atlanta by Friday evening. I finally let Oblow drive for three hours, so I could get some sleep. But I couldn't sleep with him driving the rig. So I took over for the last three hours. 27 hours of driving in 30 hours and I ended up by doing head nods while stuck in Atlanta's Friday night rush hour. Don't ever do that. It was stupid. But we made it on time.
We met old school vert skater Buck Smith in Atlanta, and did a week of demos at Stone Mountain, and then headed back west, doing demos all the way to El Paso. It wasn't the craziest tour ever, but it definitely had its moments.
After the tour, I started doing some work for a little surf video distributor called NSI video. That fall, I finished my $5,000 self-produced video, The Ultimate Weekend. The video had a lot of firsts in it. The first handrail slide down steps by Keith Treanor. The first ice pick handrail slide by John Povah. The first mini ramps in a BMX video. The first spine ramp in a BMX video. The first 360 over a spine in a BMX video. The first footage from the Nude Bowl (an empty pool out in the desert) in a BMX video. I only made about $2,500 back, so it was a financial failure. But every rider around saw the video, and it made it around the world to some extent. So in that context, it was a success. Here it is:
What I didn't realize at the time was that I was one of the pioneers of the "rider-made" video movement, which spread through BMX, skateboarding, and snowboarding in the 90's. A handful of us riders, Eddie Roman, Mark Eaton, and myself in BMX freestyle, made our own videos the way WE wanted them to be. Soon every little start-up company in action sports was doing the same thing.
This is one of the craziest bits of footage I shot, from the 2-Hip King of Dirt at Mission Trails in the spring 1991. This clip is from the first S&M Bikes video, the ultra low-budget, Feel My Leg Muscles, I'm a Racer. There was no jump in BMX like the huge Death Jump at Mission Trails at the time, and in my opinion, was really the first mega ramp. It was an epic day for BMX jumping.
In the last post, I gave an overview of my life as a kid, up to the time I was 19 and moved with my family to San Jose, California. Here's stuff that I did and worked on after that
1985
-Moved to San Jose, California from Boise, Idaho in late August. Started a BMX freestyle zine called San Jose Stylin' as a way to meet Bay Area riders. It worked. I did 11 self-published issues of the zine, paid for with my Pizza Hut job earnings. I worked up to a free mailing list of about 120 people across the U.S.. If you don't know what a zine is (pronounced "zeen."), watch this.
1986
-I became the team manager of the Off The Wall BMX freestyle team, and hooked five or six NorCal amateurs up with the team. The bikes were neon, Taiwanese made pieces of crap, and we all bailed on the team pretty quickly. The company turned into Air-Uni and eventually Ozone, which had good bikes.
-In April, I got a surprise call from Andy Jenkins, the editor of FREESTYLIN' magazine, asking if I could write an article about the AFA Masters contest in Tulsa, Oklahoma that month. I met then unknown riders Josh White, Joe Johnson, and Mat Hofman at that contest, and hung out with the Haro factory team all weekend. Epic weekend for a BMX freestyle kid from Idaho.
-My article appeared in the July issue of FREESTYLIN', along with my blog being named the #1 freestyle blog in the country in another article.
-I appeared in this Bay Area TV segment (at 5:07, chasing my bike) focusing on the Golden Gate Park freestyle scene and Skyway factory pro Maurice Meyer.
-I got hired at Wizard Publications, publishers of BMX Action and FREESTYLIN'. Andy Jenkins had been the editor of FREESTYLIN' for two years, and made the push to hire me. I worked there from August 1 to the end of December, when I was surprisingly laid off. I became roommates with co-workers Craig "Gork" Barrette and Mark "Lew" Lewman. I was really an uptight dork then, but the main reason I got fired is because I didn't like the band Skinny Puppy, Andy and Lew's favorite band. On the plus side, I leanred the basics of Xerox art from those guys. A couple months later they hired a kid named Spike Jonze to fill my old job. Really. He fit in much better than me with that crew. He's done pretty well for himself since, as well.
1987
- I spent the month of January unemployed and riding all day, every day with Craig Grasso, (in this clip at :24, 1:54, 2:36, 4:11, 4:34, 4:45, and 5:35) a damn good rider and a hilarious dude.
-I got hired at the American Freestyle Association (AFA) in late January to write, shoot photos, and edit their newsletter. Went to work for Bob Morales, the guy in the red T-shirt in this clip. Bob was the iconic young entrepreneur, he always had a million ideas and not enough money to pull them off. I did a little bit of everything that year for $5 an hour. Bob's the guy that turned BMX trick riding into the sport of BMX freestyle by holding first skatepark, and then flatland and ramp contests.
-Bob walked in one day in the late spring and asked if I wanted to make a TV commercial for the next contest. With the help of Unreel Productions (the Vision Skateboards video company), I made a really bad commercial, and then produced six contest videos for the AFA. That was the start of my video career. A couple shots from those early (and pretty lame) videos wound up in this trailer (at 2:18 and 2:19) for the documentary, Joe Kid on a Stingray. Vision Street Wear sponsored all the AFA contests, and they sent a video cameraman to shoot footage of each one. So Bob sent me to Unreel Productions, Vision's video company, and they told me what to do, step by step. I spent so much time at Unreel, that they hired me in December of 1987. I didn't have a title, but I was what they call a production assistant in the TV/video world. I spent most of my time making copies of tapes for people at Vision. Like the two previous jobs, I just learned by doing. Dave Alvarez, the amazing (and highly underpaid) video editor at Unreel taught me tons, as did the producers there.I continued to ride my freestyle bike two or three hours every day in hopes of becoming a pro freestyler.
In 1987 I was still ridiculously shy and naive, and started dating a woman five years older than me who was a singer in a band. I decided I would write her a hit song, so I started writing lyrics. I soon realized a couple of things: 1) If you can't sing, writing songs is really writing poetry, and 2) poetry is a really cheap form of therapy. I wrote dozens of really bad poems and threw most of them away. When she dumped me in the spring of 1988, I was crushed, and I spent most of the night listening to Don McClean's "American Pie," and writing a poem called "Journey of The White Bear." It was the first pretty good poem I ever wrote. I kept writing poetry and not telling anyone.
1989
In early 1989, I got a call from pro rider/contest promoter Ron Wilkerson to edit 2-Hip contest season video. I borrowed an S-VHS edit system from Unreel, and edited 2-Hip: The '88 Adventure as a side project. It was later renamed 2-Hip BHIP.
I also became the staff cameraman for Unreel that year, which included getting sent to all the 2-Hip contests that year to shoot video. At the first King of Vert contest, in Ontario, Canada, I was shooting video when this happened. It was a really big deal in BMX freestyle. You can see my footage of it at 14:43 in this clip. At the Colorado Springs contest, you can see me in this clip. I'm the left deck of the ramp, second guy from the far end, in a black and white shirt. At 1:02 Mat Hoffman does a barspin disaster right in front of me.
By 1989, Vision's nemesis, Powell-Peralta, was ruling the skate video world with the Bones Brigade videos. Don Hoffman and us at Unreel stepped up our game and put out Vision's Barge at Will video. For once, I had some footage I shot in a video that the public saw. I shot all the footage for the Mark Cernicky section, some of Kele Rosecrans' section, and a bit in the Joe Johnson and Ken Park sections. We shot both of those sections at Tony Hawk's Fallbrook ramp. I didn't get to meet Tony, but I had lunch with his dad, Frank Hawk, which was cool.
I showed up for work one morning, and one of the women in the promotions said, "Oh, today's the Tom Petty shoot." "The what?" I asked. I wound up going up to the valley side of the Hollywood Hills for the skateboard shoot for Tom Petty's "Freefallin'" video. It was the first major music video to feature skateboarding, with Vision skaters Eric Nash, Joe Johnson, and Kele Rosecrans featured in it, and Miki Keller, the only woman there who could actually skate a ramp, is in the background. She went on to be a pioneer in women's motocross. As for me, I got to hang out, eat free food from the craft service table, and shoot behind the scenes footage. That's about as easy as a day can get. Good times.
Unreel tried to sell a series of action sports TV shows to ESPN that year (six years before the X-Games). The reply from the suits at ESPN was, "Nobody wants to watch skateboarding on TV... and what the hell is snowboarding?" Classic. So Unreel syndicated the shows as the Sports on the Edge series, which was the first syndicated action sports series on TV.
While Unreel Productions was trying to sell high quality action sports shows to ESPN, BMX pioneer and force of nature Scot Breithaupt reappeared on the scene as a TV show promoter. His salesmanship powered through the ESPN brass, and he sold them a bicycle based TV series. His production company, the aptly named L.M. (Last Minute) Productions, didn't have a crew, equipment or a place to edit. So he came up with ideas, pulled crews together at the last minute, shot vide of different events, and quickly edited shows. He rented the Unreel edit bay at night to do his editing. I got the job of staying there at nights as they edited, and making sure Scot didn't "borrow" any Unreel footage (or equipment) for his shows. As they finished editing a show one Sunday night, Scot was wondering what he was going to do for the next show, which needed to be at EPSN two weeks later. I talked him into the idea of doing a street riding show. It took me about 20 minutes to convince him that "street" was the new thing in freestyle, and somebody needed to put it on TV first.
Scot and I worked together to put on a street contest the next Saturday. I got about 50 good riders to show up, and Scot got ramps, and old car, and a parking lot to hold it. The "Huntington Beach Street Scene" turned out to be the first made-for TV bike street contest ever. Eight days after the event the show was completely edited, and shipped off to ESPN. For anyone who's ever worked in TV production, the idea to think up a show and have it at the network two weeks later is ridiculous. We did it anyhow. The show aired a few days later, and got the highest ratings of any of Scot's series. Unfortunately, the show never made it on You Tube, and the master tape is probably in a garage somewhere. Scot, now known as the Godfather of BMX, passed away a couple of years ago.
