This is the coolest skate edit I've seen in quite a while, not including Andy Anderson's videos, he's kind of in his own world. I've been watching his clips a lot lately. But Martino finds all kinds of weird street places to land some great tricks.
I've been off blogging on several blogs, in several different directions, for about a year and a half, pretty much the whole Covid period. Part of that was because this blog hit a nice, big, round number of 100,000 page views, so that was a good time to retire, and I was tired of writing BMX posts. Also partly because all my blogs on this channel got banned on Facebook, and my WPOS channel wasn't banned. Now pretty much every blog I do gets immediately banned on FB, so it doesn't really matter.
So this blog is going to bounce around a lot, and will not have much BMX on it. I still have the 3rd version of Freestyle BMX Tales, and any Old School BMX posts will probably go there. So I'm starting over in a sense, in several ways, and still thinking about where to take this blog. So... we'll see where it goes.
My footage and editing of Chris Moeller, in 1991, when S&M bikes was being run out of the garage of a one bedroom apartment, on Alabama Street, in Huntington Beach, California. Clip from the first S&M Bikes video, Feel My Leg Muscles, I'm a Racer, that title was the pick-up line Dave Clymer used to pick up his girlfriend.
I was sitting outside the front door of the tiny "Winnebago" apartment, on a lawn chair. It was 1991. The apartment, officially on Alabama Street in Huntington Beach, actually opened up to the backyard of three other units. It was like we had to go into someone else's backyard to get to our front door. The whole apartment was 8 feet wide, tiny living room, tiny kitchen, hall and tiny bathroom, small bedroom, then the single car garage that housed S&M Bikes. There were two tiny windows. It felt like you were in a motorhome, so it got dubbed the "Winnebago," before I moved in.
The fledgling S&M Bikes company, then doing about $100,000 gross revenue a year, lived in the garage. Chris lived in the bedroom, and most nights, his girlfriend stayed over. I slept on the living room floor. Shaggy, who looked just like Shaggy from Scooby-Doo, slept on the two cushion couch. I wound up getting fired from my video duplicating job in North Hollywood, while making the "Leg Muscles" video, a story which became a BMX industry urban legend. That's a tale for another day. After losing that job, while making "Leg Muscles," I wound up living in the Winnebago.
Mornings usually started with Chris' then girlfriend Shelly, waking up early, stepping over me and my sleeping bag, and heading out to work. The three of us roommates were up late, usually drinking a bit, and slept in. Often there was an early call from some East Coast bike shop a little later, wanting a Dirtbike frame or a pair of Slam Bars. I groaned in my mild hangover, crawled halfway out of my sleeping bag on the floor, and reached up for the landline phone, sitting on a little wooden stand we found in an alley. I'd bring the phone down to my head, and croak "S&M Bikes." We had a sheet or two of scratch paper, and usually a pen pr pencil on the stand. I'd take down the order, hang up, and go back to sleep.
Somewhere around 8:30 or 9:00, I'd wake up, roll up my sleeping bag, and tuck it in a corner of the living room, then pour a bowl of cereal. I'd usually open the front door, and sit outside it and eat breakfast. Chris would often wake up soon after. I distinctly remember him coming out with a cup of microwaved hot water day after day, and sitting outside the door in the other sketchy old lawn chair, in cheap shorts and some random, well worn T-shirt. He would drink a cup of hot tea. Some days he'd go get a free cup of coffee at his bank, about three blocks away. Money was tight, even for him. Shaggy and I had $200 rent and a little food and beer to buy. Chris had bicycle frames, forks, and handlebars to get built, and orders to ship out, many bills to pay, rent to pay, and a small company to keep running. A pack of ramen really was a standard meal once or twice a week, and sometimes more than that.
One day, Chris came out with his cup of hot water, sat down, and opened up a tea bag, and made his hot tea. We'd usually talk about what orders needed to go out that day, or getting 25 more sets of Slam Bars made, or maybe a place to go ride later, after the day's orders were packed, and picked up by the UPS guy. After drinking his tea, on that particular day, Chris sat his tea bag on the plastic arm of the lawn chair.
The next morning, Chris came out with his mug of hot water, grabbed the tea bag from the day before, still sitting on the arm of the lawn chair, and made another cup of tea with it. I joked about him re-using it, and he said it was still good, and tea bags cost money. Then he finished his tea, and set the used tea bag on the arm of the lawn chair, again.
When he came out the third morning, mug of hot water in hand, and made tea a third time, with the same tea bag, I laughed again. Chris Moeller was a cheap ass motherfucker back then. Maybe he still is. But that is part of what it took to start and run a tiny bike company, in the recession, in 1991. He started S&M, with a $1,200 loan from his Grandpa, (his business idol), as fas as I know. Chris had to live cheap, and re-invest as much money as possible back into buying frames, forks, bars, t-shirts, and the other things S&M Bikes sold. H bought a batch of something, sold that stuff, and took that slightly larger amount of money, bought more stuff to sell, and repeated the process. In this way he multiplied the business' money, and built a small company, without any debt. That's pretty freakin' amazing, considering how much money most traditional businesses start with, how much debt they take on, and how many of those businesses go out of business.
Up in the Hermosa Beach area, skateboarder Steve Rocco was doing the same thing, with a little skateboard company called World Industries. The word was that Rocco named his company "World Industries" as a joke, because it looked big time when the name was printed on a credit card. Rocco's story is documented in the film The Man Who Souled the World, which you need to watch, if you never have.
By 1989, the third wave of skateboarding popularity (60's, 70's, 80's), the second wave of BMX racing popularity (70's,80's), and the first wave of BMX freestylepopularity, (80's), had run their course, and they were business aspect of the two sports were fading. Then the recession of 1990 hit the real business world. The Big 5 companies in skateboarding, and the handful in BMX companies, were hit hard. The industries, run by diehard, old school business guys, went into a nosedive.
Into that mess a few well known skaters and BMXers started their own little companies, which everyone with any business experience, expected to fail. These companies all seemed to have a top name rider/skater running the business, and a smart guy, and less known, less skilled rider/skater, as a sidekick. the sidekicks helped out to a greater or lesser extent, behind the scenes, depenidng on the company.
Steve Rocco started World Industries, and freestyle skating world champion, Rodney Mullen was the smart sidekick. Tony Hawk started Birdhouse, with freestyle skater Per Welinder as the sidekick. Freestyle skater Pierre Andre Senizergues got a shoe company in France, Etnies, to make skate shoes. Then he took it over, working with good friend, and another freestyle skater, Don Brown as assistant everything in the early days. In BMX, Haro pro Ron Wilkerson started 2-Hip, putting on halfpipe and then street contests. His sidekick was former East Coast freestyler Kevin Martin. Meanwhile, Chris Moeller started S&M Bikes in 1987 with fellow racer Greg Scott. They parted ways about 1989, and Chris took over, and I became his brainiac sidekick for about 4 years, after he hired me to make the first S&M Bikes video. John Lucero, another pro skater, and curb skating officianado, started Black Label Skateboards. Ed Templeton started Toy Machine Skateboards. Mat Hoffman and sidekick Steve Swope took their Sprocket Jockeys trick team, and morphed it into several businesses, including contest promotion and Hoffman Bikes. All of these businesses, and several others, really took root in the long "double dip" recession of the early 1990's.
These businesses were not ideas pitched to rich angel investors, who gave these budding entrepreneurs $5 million to burn, while waiting to see if the businesses turned into something that could be taken public, or sold to Google or Yahoo. Hell, Google and Yahoo were still years away from being invented. These little bike and skate businesses were started with a thousand, two thousand, or maybe five thousand dollars, and no clue of how to actually run a business. They were started by guys who were thinking, "We need bikes that don't crack," or "We need to make skateboards where skaters can help design their board and graphics." Basically, the ideas going in were, "We don't know what the fuck we're doing, but this NEEDS to happen."
S&M Bikes is still going strong, 33 years old now, and Chris Moeller is a millionaire. He's probably still a tightwad, at least until one of his twin daughters asks for money. He still rides, with two replaced hips, and it still a brilliant business man. Me, I'm homeless in the San Fernando Valley, but wherever I go, local police are told by someone (apparently from a federal level) that I have a 216 IQ, and they can't fuck with me, since a whole bunch of three-letter agencies have spent the last 18 years fucking with me, went kind of overboard. Apparently that ridiculously high IQ test score (I took that test when I was going to join the Marines in 1985) is overly important to certain groups of people. I've never been told in person what the score was, but have overheard police, who were told, talking about it. I really don't believe it, but that's the only explanation I have for a couple of decades of really weird shit happening in my life. Seriously, that's my story, as best as I can figure it out. OK, my story is far from typical of the others in this bunch, most have fared much better.
Steve Rocco sold World Industries for $20 million in 1998 or so. Rodney Mullen is a skate legend, still skates, and gives TED Talks to super smart people on the subject of creativity. World Industries also spawned Spike Jonze' film career, and Johnny Knoxville, and the whole Jackass phenomena. The three Jackass movies, made for $35 million total, are three of the most profitable movies in the history of film. Really.
Black Label Skateboards is small, but vibrant. Mat Hoffman owns like 9 companies, and has been re-engineered with alien DNA. OK, I can't prove that, but that's the only explanation I can think of for why his body still functions after so many horrific crashes. Toy Mahcine skateboards is still going strong, and Ed Templeton still skates, even after seriously breaking his neck. Ed's also a world reknowned aritst.
Birdhouse Skateboards is still around, I don't know if Tony is affiliated with it these days, or not. But the Tony Hawk Pro Skater video game made over $ 1 billion in its ten year run. Tony's doing well, and still skating hard.
Etnies shoes morphed into Sole Technology, which puts out Emerica, E's shoes, 32 snowboard boots, and Altamont clothes. At its peak, Sole Tech did somewhere around $200 million in sales a year, dwarfing these other companies. Now they're battling Nike and Van's, the big boys in sports shoes. More power to them. Pierre and Don are my old bros from years riding and skating at the Huntington Beach Pier, they're good guys.
So now we're in the beginning of another, more serious, recession. I personally think it will be a long, drawn out, depression or great depression, kind of like the Great Recession of 2008, and the long recession of the 1990's, put together. I've dubbed this The Phoenix Great Depression, follow the link to find out why. The dirtbag riders and skaters of 30 years ago are industry moguls now. Will young guys and gals in BMX, skateboarding, and other action sports, start a new series of small businesses to take them out? I don't know. They're all in it for the long haul, and I expect them all to be around for a while.
A whole slew of other companies were also spawned from bike/skate world in the recession of the 1990's. My focus in this current economic collapse isn't on the BMX, skateboard, and the now huge action sports industries. In this economic downturn, I think millions of Americans, many recently laid off, others already working gig jobs or running small businesses, will do what the BMXers and skaters of 1990 did to that world. I think we will see a huge wave of small businesses emerge, many out of sheer necessity, in this decade, the 2020's. Some of those will grow into giants, and into completely new industries, going forward.
Still in the grips of the Covid-19 business shutdown, small business itself has taken a beating. Millions of small businesses are on the ropes now, to use the boxing metaphor. Many will fail. But there just aren't enough major businesses to put 20 or 30 or 50 million Americans back to work, as we exit this recession. Millions, literally millions of new small businesses will be necessary to do this. I think we will start seeing micro and small businesses rise up from the ashes of this massive economic collapse, and create some amazing things. I saw it happen in our little BMX and skateboard world 30 years ago. I think this time around will be even more exciting.
Here's the garage on Alabama Street in Huntington Beach, that housed S&M Bikes in 1991. The back end of the Winnebago apartment
I have a new blog now, about side hustles, gig jobs, small businesses, and making a living in recession of 2023-2025. Check it out:
I almost scrolled by this clip, shared by Eddie Roman on Facebook, but it reminded me of a session I had in 1989, and I decided to watch it. Then I decided to blog about that session. Props to Felipe Nunes for landing the loop on his board, major huevos needed to make it happen.
One of my favorite times to be a BMX freestyler was 1989. I lived on the north end of Huntington Beach, California, on Sims Street. That was funny because I worked for Vision Skateboards' video company, which owned Sims skateboards and snowboards. Three or four days a week, I'd ride my bike to work. To go to work, I would ride a mile down Warner to the beach, the very end of the 8.3 mile long, wide beach, that sets Huntington Beach apart from every other SoCal beach city. It was the only city that didn't have houses built right up to the sand, except on condo complex. There was a big bike and walking path the whole length, and I'd ride that on my freestyle bike, then into Newport Shores, and up Superior, into Costa Mesa, down 17th, and over to Unreel Productions on Brioso. It was about a 10 or 11 mile ride, each way.
After work, I'd leave at 5:30 or 6 pm or so, I usually worked over a while. Then I'd head a couple blocks inland on Whittier, and head down 19th Street hill, and wind up above the sketchy oil lands where Sheep Hills jumps were built several months later. But it was just some trails through the brush and small trees then, where locals would walk their dogs, or maybe ride a mountain bike over to the Santa Ana River trail. There is a skate ditch there, and sometimes I'd ride that a little, and then ride up to Hamilton, over the river, and across Brookhurst. Most nights, I would wander around, hitting 4 or 5 spots as I wandered home through Huntington, over the course of 3 or 4 hours. It was just a fun, wandering solo ride each night, and I would wind up sessioning with different people at different spots, or sometimes I would just session alone. Ed Templeton was out on his solo skate missions at the same time in those days, and we knew each other by sight, and would run into each other now and then, and I'd see other skaters once in a while.
Although I was hitting a lot of the same spots, night after night, I wound up riding with a lot of skaters, and a few BMXers, and it was a little different every night. Then on the weekends, I'd ride to the H.B. Pier, and ride with Mike Sarrail, maybe Randy Lawrence, and the freestyle skaters, Pierre Andre', Don Brown, Hans Lingren, Jeremy Ramey, and the other locals. On the weekends, we did mostly flatland, which for me meant squeakers, flatland tailwhip variations, and my versions of mega-spins. I didn't do true mega-spins, I would pump my back wheel (I rode Peregrine Super Pro 48's), and only do a 540 or 720 spin on the back wheel. I did a bunch of variations of the mega-spin, though, one handers, barspins, no handers, barspins to one handed catch, and stuff like that. the BMXers and the skaters alternated, getting crowds of 100 or more people, then having the police roll by and tell us to stop, then the other group would gather a crowd. Each day on the weekends, we'd ride for 10 or more crowds, ususally 100 to 200 people each, sometimes up to 500 people would stop to watch us. Freestyle was anew thing then, and lots of people would watch us and the skaters do our thing.
During that year, as the mainstream money pulled out of BMX and freestyle, and as the factory teams, and many sponsored riders were let go, I was just living the BMX freestyle life. I had a decent job, I bought Mike Sarrail's old pick-up, a blue, lowered (but not slammed), Datsun pick-up, with a cap. I had also become the cameraman for Unreel, and I got to fly to all the 2-Hip King of Vert contests. So my life was more stable than the lives of many pro riders.
One of the coolest things that happened in 1989 is that the chain blocking the Huntington Beach Pier bank was taken down. There was a mellow bank, about three feet high, made of asphalt, on the north side of the pier. The big steps (of the old pier, it's all new now) came down, with concrete heading out to the bike path, and spread left, under the pier. The north side parking lot had two levels then, and the bank was next to the edge of the lower parking lot, where the amphitheater its now. There were big, telephone sized poles coming out of the bank, each about three feet high, which held this massive chain, with links about three inches across, hanging, keeping the bank unridable and unskatable.
One night, I wandered down to the pier bank, and the chain was gone. Some skaters had cut it down, and dragged the 300 pound (or so) chain out into the sand, and buried it. That was the story, anyhow. It was down, and the bank could be sessioned, for about three weeks. Then the authorities found the chain and put it back up. It lasted about a month, I think. Then, suddenly, it was gone again. And it was down for about 9 months, most of 1989. Word had it that the chain "will never be found." I think it was dragged quite aways out into the water, and pretty much buried, allowing the tide and drifting sand to keep covering it more. In any case, the bank was open to session every night.
So I started hitting the pier bank and sessioning it, usually with Ramones Mania playing on my Walkman, in my Vision hip sack, night after night. I learned a lot of stuff on that bank. I sessioned alone most of the time, and it was usually pretty quiet under the pier, in the evenings, then, with a handful of people wandering up and down the bike path. When others showed up, they were mostly skaters. Sometimes a bike rider would come by, but there weren't many locals then.
One night, well after dark, I heard a skateboard coming up the bike path. The noise got closer, and a skater came around the corner from the bike path, which was a hump of sandy ground, where grass fought to keep growing. As first I thought it was a little kid, because the skater was kneeling on the board, hands on the front of the board, pushing with one foot, like really little kids do. I quickly realized it was a young guy, larger than a little kid, maybe in his late teens. But he didn't stand up. It wasn't unusual to see complete strangers show up there, the bank had been there for a decade or more already, and word got around that the chain was down. So skaters from older days (like the 70's or early 80's) would make the trip there to session, as would locals like Ed Templton, Mark Gonzales, Bob Schmelzer (who supposedly made the chain disappear), and others.
The kid said something like, "Cool if I skate?" I said, "Sure." Despite all the skater hate against BMXers, almost everywhere I went that skaters skated, we were always cool. I never really had a problem riding with skaters. So this kid pushed toward the bank, still kneeling, and guiding the board with his hands on the front. He did a carve, or maybe a kick turn type thing, then came back towards me. And that's when I got a better look at him. He was kneeling on the board, because he had apparently been born with both feet pointing backwards. He was pushing, but his legs kind of looked like a grasshopper or something. He couldn't physically stand up. So he kneeled and pushed, the way a little kid would. As we started taking turns hitting the bank, He started planting his hands on the bank, and he'd do a hand varial with the board, or lift up the nose, like a kickturn or tailblock. This guy was a fucking skater. He had obviously spent a lot of time skating and learning tricks.
Yes, he was a physical freak, in the most literal sense. He had been born severely disfigured, his feet literally pointed backwards. I'm not calling him a freak to be mean, he was a literal freak of nature, simply born that way, far from the normal body. But skating and BMX freestyle in 1989 were weird "sports," and we were all freaks, according to mainstream society. No respectable young guy would spend hours a day riding a "useless wooden toy," or a "little kid's bike."
This kid, and I never asked his name, had found a skateboard as a way to express himself, like the other skaters I knew, and and like I had on my freestyle bike. And the dude fucking ripped. He had at least two or three dozen tricks he had come up with, adapted to the weird body nature had given him. Me and the kid with the backwards feet just had a great ol' session for and hour or so. He commented on my tricks, and I commented on his. We gave each other props when we made a trick we'd been missing. It was just like riding with any other skater in most every way, except his body was "handicapped." Myself, I was struggling with my massive shyness and personal issues then (and for many years to come), my "freak" was all on the inside. His was in the physical sense. But there, in the cool evening, at the Huntington Beach Pier bank, none of that mattered. We were just a BMxer and a skater sessioning together.
After a while, he said he was tired, and said, "Later," and pushed off back up the bike trail into the dark. I'd never heard of the kid. I never saw or heard of him again. I never heard another BMXer of skater mention a guy like him. But I never forgot him either. Because, like Tony Hawk says in the clip above, "it's just as hard for him as anyone else." I remember it just seemed cool to me that a guy with such a serious physical issue could truly become a skater, and on the bank or at a skatepark, he could be "just another skater." In a world where his physical condition set him apart from everyone else, both obviously and continuously, it was probably pretty cool to be "just a skater," while on his board.
As the years passed, I later saw a few other people with serious physical issues, that became good skaters. And now, with YouTube,I know there's a one legged BMXer out there somewhere who rips, and one armed one, as well. I've met another skater years ago, with no legs, who ripped it up at the Van's park. And you can't have that in football (OK, one exception I think), basketball, soccer, or hockey. Well maybe hockey, they're all fucking mutants to start with. But that's another issue.
But in a creative sport like skating, BMX, surfing, or rock climbing, where "adapting" to terrain and conditions is something everyone has to do, people with "handicaps," can grab a board or bike, and just figure out their own style and tricks. And that's pretty fucking cool. When it comes down to it, we all have our handicaps, big or small. Most people's are just in their head, or heart, when it's hard to see them. a big part of life is working to get beyond whatever handicaps you have, visible or not.
So, mad props to Felipe Nunes above for being one of the very few skateboarders to master the loop. And props to Felipe and everyone out there who doesn't fit the norm, in whatever way, and uses a bike, board, or whatever, to adapt and to create, play, have fun, and progress, in your own weird way. Weirdos make the world go round, and drive most progress. Keep the world weird... and creative, and fun.
In 1987, I started a new job as the newsletter editor for the American Freestyle Association, and moved to Huntington Beach, California. I didn't have a car, my life was all about BMX freestyle, and I soon found the place to be was on the pavement below the Huntington Beach Pier on the weekends. There were a one or two other BMX freestylers there every weekend, and a handful of freestyle skateboarders. I started hanging out, became a local, and that was my spot every weekend there wasn't a contest to go to. It was a tall guy named Mike Sarrail, and me on bikes, and Pierre Andre', Don Brown, and Hans Lingren on skateboards most every weekend. Since it was a well known bike and skate spot, there were lots of riders and skaters stopping by for sessions, as well.
Freestyle skaters were the dorks of skateboarding then, doing tricks on flat ground with no ramps. They didn't go big, it wasn't mind blowing, but they did the hard, technical tricks that took longer to learn than other aspects of skating. The emerging genre of street skating built, almost entirely, upon the standard freestyle skating tricks.
One day Pierre Andre', who was French, said, "Hey, I found a company in France that wants to start making skate shoes." He'd just come back from a trip home to France, and I didn't think much of it at the time. Pierre, Don, and Hans were all sponsored by skateboard companies under the Vision umbrella, and Vision's new clothing company, Vision Street Wear, was making skateboard shoes they got free. The shoes had a couple good ideas, like ollie guards on the side, but were pretty uncomfortable and didn't last all that long. Since Vision sponsored the AFA contests, that I helped put on, I, too, got free Vision shoes. Not great, but free was good in those low income days.
There was definitely a need for much better shoes, shoes specifically designed for skateboarding (and maybe even BMX riding). A lot of BMXers and skaters wore Van's shoes then, which worked well, but they were not designed specifically for skateboarding at that point. Pierre, the top freestyle skater in France, like all freestyle skaters, had a perfectionist side, and he went to town working with the French shoe company, Etnies. The shoes they came up with were a huge leap forward in skate shoes.
The big initial blast for Etnies came with this classic skateboard video section, where pioneering street skater Natas Kapas wore some of the first Etnies. The shoe company was off to the races. Pierre soon bought them out, headquartered the new company in Costa Mesa, California, blocks from the former Vision main office we all frequented for years.
He worked his ass off, and built a HUGE, amazing company. The parent company, Sole Technology has had revenues as high as $200 million a year, before the Great Recession, and they built not only two huge buildings that you see in the video above, but they built one of the best skateparks in Southern Califrnia, for the city of Lake Forest, right down the hill from their HQ.
We could never pronounce Pierre's last name correctly in the 80's, so he went by Pierre Andre'. But now, Pierre Andre' Senizergues, my old buddy from years of weekends hanging at the H.B. pier, is a prominent entrepreneur and visionary in the highly entrepreneurial region of Orange County, California. He's one of dozens of people I hung out with who started small businesses, most of which are still in business, and some of which are huge now, 30-some years later. These are the people I was surrounded by in my 20's and 30's, all because I started doing tricks on a "little kid's bike" while in high school in Idaho.
My path has been a weird one. I wanted to start my own business in the 80's, but I was super shy, and just couldn't do the salesman part. If you don't sell stuff, you don't have a business. It's as simple as that. So I spent the last 33 years or so reading hundreds of books, a huge number of them about business and personal development. I spent a decade as a sidekick to several young entrepreneurs in the actions sports world, working and brainstorming with them day after day. Along the way, I worked on the crew of several TV shows, a different kind of entrepreneurship. The whole time, I was also working on my personal issues, and eventually ended up a taxi driver in the early 2000's. It's not a prestigious job, in fact, taxi driving operates as a small business, not a job at all. It's in the gray area between a job and a business. I learned to hustle my ass off, find business in weird places, pay $3600 in overhead a month, and I overcame my Rainman like shyness, as well.
But I didn't pay attention to emerging technology, and the taxi industry got disrupted by new tech, even before Uver and Lyft. I wound up homeless. The decade after has been a big struggle, where, among other things, I couldn't get hired for any "real" job anymore. I started blogging in 2007, and a couple years later began to self-educate on how "this whole internet thing" works, and how it has completely changed the way business happens in the U.S. (and most everywhere else).
In late 2015, I was living with my mom after my dad's death, in a small North Carolina town, still unable to find a "real job." My mom is continually in fannacial crisis, so any money I made, was immediately needed for some "emergency." Literally without a dime to my name, I started focusing on the Sharpie artwork I did to start earning money. I've struggled for the three years since as a working artist. But I did start selling artwork. I've sold around 100 original drawings in the last three years, starting at about $20 each, and they sell for $150 or more now. But they take me 35 or more hours to draw. There's just not enough profit, or enough work to sell, to really get me going again financially, without a $10K loan to set up and really do it right. So, as I struggled to survive this last winter, homeless and in a city I'd brand new to me, I started looking at my options.
While I haven't made a decent living selling my artwork, I did learn how to promote and use blogging, the internet, and social media well...for free. When I look around at nearly all of the small businesses, here and elsewhere, hardly any of them are using today's new media and platforms at anywhere near full potential. And that's what I'm pretty good at now. Look up my hashtag, #sharpiescribblestyle on Instagram, Google images, or even Facebook. My Sharpie art has a really solid web and social media presence, better than many mid-sized businesses. Any business can do that, but most are too busy, with their day to day running of the business, to take the time to learn how to use all these tools more effectively. So I'm going to start teaching them.
I'm writing a small book right now on how to use the internet and social media effectively for small business, and how to actually get more sales, not just media hype. Hype is good, but it don't pay your rent or buy you food at the grocery store.
I'm also going to pivot this blog to focus much more on ideas for starting, building, promoting and marketing small businesses. I'm still going to write and old school BMX story or two each week, and I'll still have my artwork on here when I do new stuff. But I'm scaling that back. Looking at my own current skills, drive, and ambition, and the Big Picture of the next decade or two, small businesses will be a huge, possible the deciding factor, in getting the American economy working well for average people again. There won't be millions of factory jobs paying $32 an hour coming back. We have to rebuild this economy ourselves, and small business is the best way to do that.
So that's where I'm at. My book, in a self-published form, will be available soon. I'll keep you all updated. I don't know where all this will lead. But then, I didn't know where it would lead when this guy below told me he found a shoe company in France that wanted to make skateboard shoes 32 years ago. And that turned out pretty well.
Let's skate. I started my drive to turn my Sharpie art into a business in late November 2015. Here's what I started with. I had a free place to live, though it was a toxic environment, and I sort of earned my keep by doing the "guy things" around the apartment, like fixing what broke, and driving my mom around to shop, lots of appointments, and all that. I LITERALLY did not have a dime to my name when I started this whole thing. That's how tight money was. I had a refurbished, old, HP laptop, which was still running Windows XP in 2015. I had a bunch of Sharpies and a few other supplies. I had a cheap, 12" X 18" sketch pad. That was it.
After the previous BMX and other drawings to begin to find my new style of drawing with my scribble style, I did the Chris Miller drawing above. In the days long before GoPro cameras, a jerry-rigged system took this amazing photo from above, of an epic, Chris Miller nosebone at Pipeline Skatepark's Combi Pool. That was one of my favorite skate photos of all time. The drawing came out pretty good.
Months later, with a bunch more drawings done, I saw this photo of skater Diego Najera doing a one-footed nollie. This had great, high contrast lighting, which worked well for me. I was really stoked on this one. I sent it to Huntington Beach Pier friend and old skate buddy, Don Brown. Don's also the vice president of marketing for Sole Technologies (aka Etnies, E's shoes, etc.) This is a big, 18" X 24" drawing, and is now floating around California somewhere, as far as I know.
When I started getting orders to do drawings in 2016, a friend from my BMX days, Paula, asked me to do a birthday drawing for her friend. That friend happened to be legendary skateboarding pioneer, Robin Logan, from the family behind Logan Earth Skis skateboards. Robin was known in the 1970's for doing toe flips, a pre-curser form of a kickflip. The owl represented Robin's mom, who loved owls, and looked over the Logan kids in those pioneering days of skateboarding. With this drawing, I became Facebook friends with Robin Logan, a woman who I saw photos of when I first started skateboarding in about 1976. That's cool.
As time passed, Robin Logan asked me to do some drawings for her of other skaters from her era. Here we have Skateboard Hall of Fame women Vicki Vickers, Deanna Calkins, and Robin on the right. Vicki and Deanna got my drawings of themselves for Mother's Day last year.
Another early skateboard drawing I did was this one above. It's based on a classic old photo of Rodney Mullen doing an Ollie Melancholy, which is the most tweaked a skater can get without a ramp involved. I met Rodney when I first moved to Southern California in 1986, he practiced the same place we rode every night, The Spot, in Redondo Beach. I also got to do a mini-interview with Rodney, which was in the December 1986 issue of FREESTYLIN' magazine.
This one is Armando Chulo, a couple years ago, learning to do kickflips as a teen in Austin. His mom, Athene, asked me to do this one. He's older, much taller, and in college now, I believe.
Yeah, it's an MTB video, but this is my favorite bike video from the last few years. I could watch this video over and over and over. But, watching it again, just now, I realized even this video has one of the things I hate about action sports videos today, repeated tricks, different angles of the same trick, after each other. But it's edited so quick and tight, that it works, mostly.
OK, a day or two ago, Ike Berner put a question out to the old school BMXers on Facebook, asking if he was right that Eddie Roman's video, Ride On was the best BMX video ever. In about 50 comments and replies, Eddie ended up tying with himself, with Ride On and Headfirst being the top two, by far, listed as rider's favorites. I voted for Headfirst, myself. But I'll be honest, as a guy who was one of the first four riders to self-produce and edit full length videos, and the rider who produced more videos than any other rider from 1987 to 1993, I was hoping one of mine would get a shout out. I finally shamelessly fished for a compliment, using the S&M Bikes video, 44 Something, as bait. I got a couple of bites.
While I didn't make the most popular videos of the late 1980's/early 1990's era, I produced and/or edited 12 full length BMX videos for the AFA, 2-Hip, and S&M Bikes, and myself. I also produced and edited 44 Something for S&M Bikes, with a total budget of about $750, and it sold at least 7,000 or 8,000 copies thanks to Chris Moeller's sales skills. It may have been the top selling video of the 90's, and even if it wasn't, it HAD to be the most profitable (For S&M Bikes, not me). I also worked on a bunch of BMX, skate, snowboard, and body boarding videos for Vision Skateboards/Street Wear, and skate, and snowboard videos for NSI video, a surf video distributor.
In addition, my first self-produced video, 1990's The Ultimate Weekend, had a bunch of firsts, like the first handrail slide down steps, the first ice pick rail grind, the first BMX mini ramp riding, the first 360 over a spine, and the first footage from the Nude Bowl in a bike video. I learned my video skills, from the older guys at Unreel, primarily editor extraordinaire, Dave Alvarez.
So here's my basic, simple rules I learned to keep in mind, back in those early days, to make a better bike, skate, or snowboard video.
1.Know what you want your video to do. After 2 1/2 years of being a low guy on the crew at Unreel/Vision, who had no input on videos, watching them make videos I thought were kind of goofy, I wanted to produce my own video to sell. Do it my way, make the video I wanted to watch. As I started shooting footage most every weekend that year, I also started asking myself, "Why do us riders watch BMX freestyle videos?" There are lots of answers, but it finally dawned on me that there's one big reason. I wanted to make a BMX video that made riders want to go ride immediately. My thought was, "If I do a good job, then the guy (or gal) watching the video will have their bike ready to roll out the door by the time the credits roll. You're not (hopefully) making a video (or web edit today) for your demo reel, you're not making a video impress a film school teacher, or to make the world think you're Steven Spielberg, or any of the more self-serving reasons. If you're making an actions sports video, make one that makes people want to go ride, skate, surf, or progress at whatever they do.
2.Keep it tight. This one came straight from editor Dave Alvarez on the first AFA video I produced, and he edited, in 1987. Cut into a shot as late as you can, show only as much as you need to, and cut out as quick as you can. Weed out ANY extra frames/seconds of footage that you can. Keep each shot as short as you can, while still getting what you need out of it.
3. Shoot from different angles. I'm so fucking tired of seeing skate videos, now, in 2019, where it's rail grind after rail grind, and the cameraman is standing at the bottom of the rail with a fisheye lense, for every shot. For BMX videos, standing next to the landing of a set of doubles with a fisheye is the same thing. Yes, that's a good angle. But it's not the only good angle. Get back 50 feet, zoom in a bit, and get the whole trick. Get up high and shoot down at the trick. put the camera on a ledge or tripod, open wide, and let the rider move through the static shot. Shoot head on at the trick. Mix it up, try different things. Don't miss a once in a lifetime trick by getting too creative, but move around, and shoot different ways, it really helps your editing and finished video. You, as camera person, should be getting as creative as the rider.
4. Wide-Tight-Wide when editing. This is another basic rule from Unreel editor Dave Alvarez, who won an Emmy for editing, after leaving Unreel and moving to Hollyweird. When you edit a shot that ends up tight, really close in on the subject, then make the next shot a wide shot. It naturally flows and looks better to the viewer's eyes. If you edit a shot that ends wide, use a tight-in shot next. For a basic frame of reference, a tight shot is a person's face, a medium shot is the person from the chest or waist up, and a wide shot is full body. If your shot ends medium, start the next shot at one extreme or the other, either really tight or really wide. This is how they shoot and edit movies when they don't use effects, and get a good flow. Video effects are an excuse for bad editing, learn to edit without any effects, and then use effects only sparingly.
5.Edit to the music. Another rule from Dave, and almost NOBODY does this these days. He called it "fancy news editing." You have two (maybe more these days) tracks of audio, and one track of video. USE the audio to enhance your video. First, pick music that has a feeling or similar vibe to your video. Then, make the video cut from one shot to another on the beat of the music. This has a huge, but largely unnoticed, effect on how watchable a video is. Even better, have the main action of the video also hit on a beat of the music. Like if a rider does a can-can on a jump, when the leg comes across and hits full extension, it should hit right on a beat of the music. You do this with back timing, or today, perhaps by watching the audio track for the beat and matching it to the video action.
6.Use cutaway shots. In today's fast paced, web edit and VLOG world, jump cuts have become an epidemic. A jump cut is like in a VLOG where the host says something, and then the video visually jumps to another shot, at the same angle, but with their position a bit different. Your eyes automatically go, "Hey, what the fuck?" This is typical in VLOGS today, but it sucks.
A cutaway shot is a shot of something else, that you show for a few seconds to smooth out the transition from one shot to another. For example, you're watching a football game, and they zoom in on a guy who got hurt and is lying there, a wide shot of his whole body. Once they figure he's not getting up right away, the live director will cut to the face of someone in the audience. So, wide shot of the hurt player, tight shot of an audience member's face, then back to the wide shot of the player. Wide-tight-wide, it flows. In a bike video, you can show a shot of a rider riding away from landing a trick, then a shot of his friends watching, or a sign, a weird person nearby, then go on to the next riding shot. Always shoot a bunch of cutaway shots when out shooting something. Shoot shots of that 15 step rail from a distance, showing how gnarly it is, shoot the close-up of the "No bikes or skateboards" sign, shoot a tight shot of the security guard's veins bulging in his neck when he gets pissed, shoot close-ups of the rider's tattoos, his girlfriend's boobs, the sign for the city or region you're in, pretty flowers, your sticker on a bus bench, everything. This give you lots of options for cool cutaways when editing.
7.Log ALL of your footage. I know the standard trick these days is to put your hand over the lens after the rider/skater finally lands the trick on the 47th try. Then you just zip through to the hand, back up a bit, and you've found the shot. WRONG. Sit down with pen and paper (going old school on you here), and watch the whole freakin' tape or drive, and write down everything that happens, and the time code where it's at. This does two things. 1) It reminds you of all the weird little stuff you shot, so, mentally, you know it's in there. 2) You have a written record of where everything you shot is on the raw footage. OK, I'm from the tape days, where we had tapes from the camera, and then edited them on to other tapes. In today's digital world, watching all the footage will show you what's there, and you may want to render/file some of the minor shots (like cutaways) and keep them for editing, or for weeks, months, even years later, on whatever you record your footage on.
I can't tell you how many times I was editing back in the day, and I needed something to fill in a little spot, and something I saw while logging would pop into my head. I'd dig through the log sheets, find it, and edit it in.
OK, I haven't shot or edited video in a long time. But all these thoughts are principles, basic concepts that don't change over time, though how you use them or work with them may change due to changing technology or where the video will end up.
In future posts, I'm going to go into more depth on these basic ideas, and also things I see that bug the fuck out of me in today's videos.
In this just out CNBC article, the department store that clothed me in Toughskins as a kid, Sears, is shutting down another 72 stores. That's after 1,000 Sears/Kmart locations that have already closed. According to the article, many industry people think that Sears is close to filing for bankruptcy. Here's a map of those stores closing down. The closest to here seems to be either Charlotte or Spartenburg, SC area (hover isn't working right now).
That could hit home here in this area. The local mall here in Winston-Salem, Hanes Mall, is one of the "average American malls" that's still doing really well. In the struggling shopping mall world, the high end, luxury malls are mostly doing well. The malls in really small cities are often the ones in the "dead mall" world. There's no official designation for what constitutes a dead mall, but one with 70% or less of the shops filled (or 30%+ empty), is the sort of accepted threshold.
The Hanes Mall here is in the middle, which is why I refer to it as an"average American mall." Some of these across the country are really struggling, some are doing just fine. Hanes is one that's doing well. But three of its anchor stores are Sears, J.C. Penney's, and Macy's. J.C. Penney's has been struggling for years, and many people think its days are really numbered. Now Sears has industry people thinking it might be close to bankruptcy. Macy's has closed a lot of stores in its downsizing, but is definitely in better shape than those two. If Sears and Penney's bite the dust, malls that are now doing well, like Hanes Mall here, will find themselves quickly in a tough spot. What would you do with an empty store in a mall? Or a whole Dead Mall? The retail world is looking for really good ideas. Your idea might be one. My best ideas look something like this. Yes, that's a store in a mall, The Block of Orange in Orange, California. But that's just MY idea. Throw your ideas in my comments on Facebook. They may be much better than mine. Here's a little contest that takes place in this same mall "store" every year.
This was my favorite place that we lived in Ohio. It's called Holiday Lakes, outside Willard. We lived there for about 2 1/2 years, 6th through 8th grades for me. I think this video was uploaded by one of my sister's friends from back then.
I was born in 1966 outside Akron, Ohio, and my family moved around small towns and rural areas of Ohio as I grew up. My dad was a band geek as a kid, playing clarinet and saxophone. He became an avid car guy and target shooter in his younger years. Among his cars, he owned three of these babies. My dad was a draftsman, so he actually drew pictures for a living. He taught me how to draw Army Jeeps when I was 8, and later how to draw isometric and oblique pictures.
My mom listened to country music all day long and liked to do crafts. Ceramics was the one she was best at. I have a sister, Cheri, five years younger than me. My family was more dysfunctional than most, and less dysfunctional than some. We moved to a new house or apartment nearly every year.
I was pudgy, smart, bad at sports, I had buck teeth as a kid, couldn't say my "R's" or "S's" well. Yeah, I was a dork who got picked on a lot. When things got bad, I'd usually run off to the woods and wander around on my own for hours. John Denver's "Country Boy" was my theme song as a kid.
At age 10 in Willard, Ohio, a kid showed me a skateboard for the first time. It was handmade by his dad out of pressed aluminum with steel roller skate wheels. He showed me how to ride it. I rolled about a foot on his rock sidewalk, hit a pebble, fell down, scraped my knee, and said, "Skateboards are dumb." I changed my mind a few months later, and saved my allowance money for nine months to buy a green, plastic Scamp skateboard at Western Auto. It cost me $11.92. A couple years later, I bought a homemade board for $2 at a flea market. It was surfboard shaped, made out of a 3/4" piece of oak, and had 2 1/2" wide GT wheels. I rockwalked that board until about 1988.
When I was in 8th grade, in the late 70's, my dad's company was having troubles, and he found a new job... in Carlsbad, New Mexico. That was a huge culture shock for a small town kid from the Midwest. I went from this to this overnight. It was a rough year. But then that company had problems, and we moved to Boise, Idaho. Though we moved to a new house every year, I did manage to go to Boise High School for the full three years and graduate. My plan was to go to college and become a wildlife biologist. But I didn't have money to start college, so I "took a year off" and ended up never going at all.
At the end of my sophomore year of high school, in June of 1982, we moved to a trailer park in the "desert" outside of Boise. The plan was for my parents to save money for a year and then buy a house. Officially, the park didn't have a name, but all the street names started with the word "blue." So everyone called it Blue Valley. There was nothing but miles of sagebrush in three directions. The other direction was bounded by I-84. It was really hot in the summer, so the dozen of so junior high and high school kids in the park would watch TV all afternoon, and then we'd come out in the early evening after supper. Like kids everywhere, we'd play basketball, whiffle ball, football, or just talk smack to each other. But all us guys had cheap BMX bikes, and we'd also go out to this little area of jumps and berms some motocross rider had built a couple of years before. As the summer progressed, we spent more time riding our bikes and less time playing other games. BMX became our thing. In October of that year, someone heard that there was a BMX track near downtown Boise. We found it, and raced the last race of the year. The track was at the edge of the foothills, in a drained sewer pond. It didn't look like much to most people, but it was amazing to us. Despite our cheap bikes and lack of actual racing experience, we all won trophies. Our daily competition with each other paid off, and we surprised and pissed off the local racers by doing so well. "Where'd all these fast kids on lame bikes come from?" they asked all day. BMX became our thing.
I raced BMX for all of 1983, and helped re-design the Boise track, and then designed a new track. But the emerging sport of BMX freestyle, doing tricks on BMX bikes, was way more interesting to me. I joined the only BMX trick team around, and did shows with Justin Bickel and Wayne Moore. For once, I was actually good at a sport. OK, hardly anybody else actually did that sport, but I didn't care. Much to my parents' dismay, I spent hours a day learning tricks on my little BMX bike. Without realizing it, my life turned in a totally different direction. The idea to be a wildlife biologist faded, and I worked at restaurants and rode my bike, and not much else.
The year after I graduated high school, 1985, my dad got a job in San Jose, California. I finished my summer job in Boise, managing a small amusement park called the Boise Fun Spot. In August, I packed up my ugly, brown 1971 Pontiac Bonneville, and drove solo to San Jose to live with my family.
While my year in Carlsbad, New Mexico was a tough one, I came to love the desert and the wide open spaces of the West. I also made several trips to Carlsbad Caverns, a truly amazing and beautiful cave system. When I lived there ('80-81), another cave, called The New Cave then, was just beginning to be explored. Now it's called Lechuguilla Cave, and is one of the largest cave systems in the world now, bigger than the original caverns that made the area famous.
