Was lifetime L.A. Laker player Kobe Bryant the best who ever played the game of basketball? That can always be argued. Was he one of the best to ever play the game? No question. One year ago today nine people died in a helicopter crash north of Los Angeles. We remember that crash today because Kobe Bryant and his daughter Gigi were among them.
Kobe Bryant was my favorite basketball player of all time. After hearing reports of his death one year ago, before we knew for sure, I started looking up videos of him. I found this one above and watched it. Top athletes remind us of the potential we all have within us, and inspire us to push our own limits in one way or another.
Not long after his death, I made a drawing of Kobe as a tribute. These take me 40 or more hours to draw, and I dive into the interviews, documentaries, and other work of whomever I'm drawing. In that process, I gained a lot more respect for Kobe, both on and off the court. This interview below is my favorite of everything I watched about Kobe. RIP Kobe Bryant, Gianna Bryant, and the other killed in that tragic crash.
Phred at Earshot Music in Winston-Salem, NC shot this photo, and made this eflyer, for my first solo art show at his shop.
My friend Ann in North Carolina just sent me this article yesterday letting me know that Phred Rainey died. Or passed, as they say back there. Nobody dies in North Carolina, they all "pass." However you phrase it, one of the coolest people I met in my decade in NC is no longer among us.
I met Phred after a couple of hippies saw me doing my Sharpie art drawings in McDonald's by Hanes Mall, in Winston. I was homeless at the time, and trying to break into Winston's art scene, and sell my work, hoping to get my life back on track. The guys said, "Hey, that drawing is cool, you should show it to the guys at the music shop across the street. They have art on the walls, but this drawing is better than what they have up." I figured it was worth a shot, and walked over there later that day. I showed my drawing to the manager, and he liked it. He told me to come back the next day, when the owner of the shop would be there.
I went back the next day, and met a bearded, really friendly guy name Phred Rainey. I showed him a couple of drawings, I think I had a Jerry Garcia drawing, and one other one. He really liked it, we talked for a few minutes, and he put me in contact with Jane Buck, who handled the local art for Earshot Music.
Earshot music was a great indie "record shop" as we used to call them. They had all kinds of classic music on vinyl. They had every genre' you could think of. They had box sets, they had CD's, and some videos. They always had something I couldn't identify, but found cool, playing in the shop. It was just the old school type music shop you wanted to go hang out in, look through the bins, find that one thing you could buy at the moment, and find 25 more albums or CD's that you wanted to buy but couldn't afford at the time. It was a great music shop that reminded me of a smaller version of Amoeba Music in Hollywood, or Vinyl Solution in Huntington Beach, CA, but with a much wider selection, not just punk. But Earshot was a great shop... in Winston-Salem. With the move to digital music over the last 25 years, the cool record shop to hang out in and find new music has largely been lost. Earshot was one of those shops. I say "was" because I'm out west now, and I don't know what the future of the shop is.
Over the next few weeks, Jane and Phred put a couple of my Sharpie drawings up on the shop wall, and people like them, and one sold. While Jane handled the art, every time I went into the shop, Phred was usually who I talked to. They helped me get cheap frames I couldn't afford. He shot photos of my art, because I didn't have a phone or camera. He made the flyer above. We talked about ideas, and he was always just a really cool, really helpful guy. He didn't ask for anything, except a very small cut when a drawing sold.
I wound up doing a solo art show at Earshot, in November of 2017, and Jane lined up an interview with Lisa O'Donnell, who did an artist profile with me, for the Winston-Salem Journal. She, too, became a friend, and I later did a drawing for her daughter's birthday. I did eight drawings for the show at Earshot, and Phred put them up the night before. The Kurt Cobain drawing above, sold an hour after it went up on the wall, the day before the show. A handful of people showed up for the show. Because of that little show, and all the help from Phred and Jane, my Sharpie scribble style drawings started selling. And selling.
I had sold several drawings earlier, but the real sales came in late 2017 and the first months of 2018, almost all through Earshot Music. Phred knew I was homeless at the time, and often didn't take the shop's normal cut to sell my drawings. My point here is that Phred Rainey was one of those really great people, who continually went out of his way to help people find great music, discover new music, and help local musicians and artists to get some exposure, and get going in the Winston-Salem music and art scenes. I actually sold far more drawings through Earshot music, thanks to Phred and Jane, than when my art was up in a gallery (or or two) in Winston's Trade Street art scene downtown.
So I'm really surprised and sad to hear Phred has left this world. He was just a cool, solid human being, who went to great lengths to help those around him. I wrote this post about my interaction with Phred, but I'm just one of the hundreds, probably thousands of people who wandered into Earshot Music over the years Phred owned it. I had no idea he had leukemia, and it's really sad to hear he's gone.
The Earshot Music shop in 2018.
My Gene Simmons/KISS Sharpie drawing on the wall in Earshot for the art show in late 2017. I've sold over 90 original drawings in the last five years, and Phred and Earshot really helped me get my work off the ground, and into other people's hands.
I just found this photo in December, I think. I have no idea where he was supposed to land, but obviously, he didn't make it. And how 'bout the kink in the ramp, pretty gnarly. Early 1900's crazy man.
I'm pretty sure this is either a circus performer, or a daredevil who went around doing this loop. The circus idea comes from the rigging and rope nets to crash into, circus people knew how to do those things. There are 3 or 4 different photos of this loop and set up, and I think it's from 1910-1920 era.
Old School street riding, really old school. This is a safety bike, a penny farthing design, but with the little wheel in front to make it safer to ride. The inventor rode it down the U.S. Capitol steps, in the 1890's, I believe, to prove how much easier this bike was to ride, than the standard penny farthing.
I think this is from the 1930's to 1950's era, and I found it deep in some public domain files. Cool idea. Don't be surprised if someone brings this idea back to life, just on a beefier sprocket.
Ow. Just OW. Not only does this take strength and balance, but it had to hurt his head like crazy. Don't try this at home, especially if you're drunk. (Unless your friends are shooting video, anyhow).
Mega ramp, 1904 or 1905. This one actually had a date. This looks to be a 20 to 25 foot gap, and a pretty well built ramp. Keep in mind, though, that these bikes were all made with what we call "mild steel" not chromoly. He's hucking this gap on a bike that you could snap riding off a loading dock one time, and he's doing it without a helmet, without an emergency room to go to afterward, and without a Red Bull video budget. Gnarly.
This is from around 1910, I think. Look close at the back rim, there seems to be a flat spot. Let's put this nutcase in perspective: It took about 105 years, MUCH stronger bikes, and Morgan Wade, for this trick to be repeated. This guys balls must have clanged when he walked. In-freakin'-sane.
Hope you enjoyed this look back at the crazy bike riders of your grandparents and great-grandparents day.
I just finished my 363 page ebook about freestyle in the early 1980's. It's called Freestyle BMX Tales: Idaho Dork to Industry Guy. The ebook (aka digital file, not a dead tree book), has several of my most popular blog posts about the era from 1982 to 1986, when I got into BMX and freestyle, and freestyle itself was just turning into a sport. It's costs $3.43 (+ applicable taxes), and is available in my brand new online store. Check it out at the link below:
This is the version of the 2-Hip Meet the Street comp that I edited for the 2-Hip season video. That video is now on YouTube as 2-Hip BHIP. This was the first street contest most of us remember, though Dave Vanderspek put on one or to regional street comps in NorCal earlier.
Everybody was looking forward to this contest at the time, because we had no idea what was going to happen. Dave Vanderspek and Eddie Roman were known as street riding guys before this, though it was something all of us did daily. Wall rides had been a thing for a year or so, fakie wall rides were really new. Abubacas had been a trick on vert for a year and a half. None of us had seen a magazine photo of a wall ride more than 2 1/2 feet high in a magazine, before this contest. It's hard to explain now how new all of this was then.
Street riding wasn't really a thing yet, no one had any ideas where the limits were. Peg grinds were done on vert ramps, but no one really did them on street. It was two year after this contest that the first handrail peg grind was caught on video. We honestly had no idea what the obstacles would be, who would be the standout riders, or what new tricks we would see. This was one of the most fun contests I ever went to.
I'm the guy ghost riding his bike into the wall in the blue shirt. I did other stuff like sketchy footplant tailwhips, but decided to only put myself in the video doing something goofy. There were so many riders no one expected were doing cool stuff that day.
San Francisco innovator, Dave Vanderspek, was one of the first guys to do hard tricks on street, going back to 1982-1983. He does the bar endo on the box at 3:55. Freeze that shot, look how edged he is. That's some of the earliest roots of street riding, doing flatland tricks on a sketchy or high spot. Dave and the Curb Dogs showed us all footplants and blunts on parking blocks early on, too. Vander represents the deepest roots of serious street riding.
The other guy we all expected to rip it up that day was Eddie Roman, he got the first wall ride photo in FREESTYLIN' (on the Jinx Bank in Redondo). Eddie put walls in play, and that changed riding forever. I love Eddie's 180 to backwards bunnyhop off the box at 3:55, that's the kind of classic "Eddie Roman stuff" many of us expected. But guys like magazine guy Scott Towne(2:57), ramp rider Todd Anderson(2:10), Orange County local George Smoot (1:25), 2-Hip guy Kevin Martin(2:46), San Diego basher Pete Agustin (4:02), and "Conan the Bikebarian," pro racer/bodybuilder Rich Bartlett (3:12) ripped it up that day. Vic Murphy also ripped, but somehow we didn't get much footage of him. Mike Golden, the young vert rider from NorCal, was the only guy who jumped the roof of the car to flat. All kinds of BMXers threw down that day.
Craig Grasso (4:11)was known for being weird, artsy, and riding everything pretty well, and he was a standout rider all day. I spent a lot of time riding with Grasso in 1986, and I knew he was a great street rider. But he was way better than we all expected him to be in Santee. Another rider no one really expected to flat out rip at the Meet the Street was R.L. Osborn (3: 37). We all grew up looking at R.L.'s photos in the magazines, but he was believed to be more or less retired by 1988. R.L. came out and showed off 15 years worth of BMX skills applied to new obstacles.
The trick of the day went to Englishman Craig Campbell, with the wall ride to 360 (4:53), or 540 wall ride, we didn't know what to call it. That trick blew everyone's fucking mind. Craig got the trick of the day, no doubt. But the man of the day, which oddly surprised a lot of us, was Dave Voelker (1:07). We all knew Dave was a great ramp rider, and flat out crazy on his bike, but he wasn't one of the first guys that came to mind when someone mentioned street riding, before this contest. But Dave's insanely high wall rides, big jumps, and all around aggroness, made him the man of the day in Santee.
Yeah, this was his stomping grounds, but no one stomped like Dave that day. From Santee on, Dave was the first name that came to mind when street riding was mentioned. It sort of seemed like a changing of the guards in that way. The earliest pioneers of really pushing street, like Dave Vanderspek and his Curb Dogs, and Eddie Roman, handed the torch to guys like Dave Voelker, Vic Murphy, and Craig Grasso to really push the level of street riding as it morphed into its own genre.
Pretty much everyone got really psyched on street riding that day, and that's the work of Ron Wilkerson and the 2-Hip crew, for putting on this Meet the Street, and the ones that followed. This contest changed BMX freestyle forever. A year later the bike industry decided BMX and freestyle were dead, and turned their attention, and their money, to mountain bikes. Freestyle went underground, and street riding was a big part of the down years.
There's another video clip form this contest, edited by Dave Alvarez, our video editor at Unreel Productions, on pro caliber equipment. Here's that clip, go to 4:02.
Here's somebody's home video from that day, that shows several of the pro rider's runs. Check out what happens when Dave Voelker shoots his bike jumping the box. I forgot about that part.
If you've read a few of my Old School freestyle blog posts, you should check out my new ebook. It's big, 263 pages, but you can read each little chapter separately. You can download it anywhere, and it costs about the same as a cup of coffee. It covers me getting into freestyle in 1982-'86 in Boise Idaho. I write about meeting pros for the first time, riding in Golden Gate Park, [ublishing a zine, and stumbling into the BMX industry. I also get into the bigger picture of why BMX freestyle happened during our time, and how a few guys doing tricks in SoCal turned into a worldwide thing. I tell a little bit of every freestyler's story in telling my own story. Check it out and get you copy now at the link below:
This video came out in early spring of 1989, and was the 7th BMX freestyle video I directed or edited.
When it came time to put the first official 2-Hip contest season video together for the 1988 season, Ron Wilkerson called me up and asked me if I wanted to edit the video. Yeah, that surprised me, too. But to put it in context, this happened in early 1989. Eddie Roman, who I credit with really starting the rider-made video movement in BMX freestyle, was still working on Aggroman at the time, so he wasn't really known as a video producer yet. I had been working at Unreel Productions, Vision's video company, for over a year. I just got tapped as the Unreel cameraman that spring, after our old cameraman, Pat Wallace, moved on to a better job. Pat's the guy who shot all the contest footage in this video.
I had produced six videos for the AFA in 1987, and then got hired at Unreel. So from Ron's point of view, I was a rider and a video guy who could do the job, and work cheap. Cheap was $500 for logging hours and hours of footage, picking the best shots, and then editing it all together on Unreel's S-VHS system and getting a duplication master tape made. My bosses at Unreel were cool with loaning me the S-VHS edit system to do a side project, which was way cool of them. I think it took 3 or 4weeks of working nights, after working at Unreel during the day, to get this done. Ron got music from Bob Haro and the The Bohemians to use in the video. When I ran out of that music, I recorded myself drumming beats on a phone book and a little metal can full of thumb tacks. Hey, it was a low budget video, I was on a deadline, and it worked.
The intro part with Kevin Martin calling Ron, and then carrying the ramp pieces, was their idea, and the 2-Hip crew shot all those parts, and gave me the footage. I didn't really like the idea, but they did, and it was their video. The biggest thing to explain about making a low budget BMX freestyle video in 1989 was that nobody had really done it yet. Mark Eaton had made Dorkin' in York, which was really sketchy VHS footage of incredible riding by Kevin Jones, Mark, and the York crew. The riding was insane but the video quality sucked. Like all of us, Mark was working with no budget, and in his case, two VCR's to edit it. I hadn't see that video at the time I made this one. Eddie Roman was working on Aggroman, which was like a super low budget BMX and Kung Fu movie, shot on video. That came out soon after this video. The "real" freestyle videos of that era were the BMX company sponsored videos, which cost tens of thousands of dollars to make. The main ones were the BMX Plus videos, and GT Bikes video GT-V. Those were all shot and edited on pro level equipment, but by people who were industrial video producers, not freestylers. They had great technical quality, and good riding, but they also had guys wearing leathers and helmets to ride flatland.
There was no playbook for us low budget guys at the time. There was no standard way to make a low budget freestyle video then. This was one of the first rider-made videos ever. So it it kinda sucked in a lot of ways, but the riding was great for the time period. AND, this video had the first 2-Hip Meet the Street contest in Santee, California in it. Street riding competitions were brand new when that footage was shot, and a lot of freestylers watched that section over and over, and then headed out to street ride in their towns.
Unlike the AFA videos I directed, which sold about 25 or 30 copies each, this video sold a few hundred that first year, I think. Also, it was watched by most of the freestylers around at the time. Originally we called it 2-Hip: The '88 Adventure, but it got tagged 2-Hip BHIP sometime later, and 2-Hip just kept selling copies of this video for years, when people ordered T-shirts or other things. Then, for the 1989 contest series video, Ron Wilkerson asked Eddie Roman to make the video. Eddie was his normal weird, creative self, and made an awesome video called Ride like a Man, in early 1990. That's when the low-budget, rider-made freestyle movement really got going.
When I finished this video, I got Ron Wilkerson the master tape, and a duplication master (so he wouldn't wear out the original when he got copies made, and he gave me a check for $500. My little sister was heading off to college soon after that. So, being the good (and stupid) brother that I was, I got a money order for $500, and sent it all to her. She's been a teacher in North Carolina for many years now. Here are the remaining segments of the video, except the street part, I'm going to do another blog post about that.
This is the second of the six AFA videos I produced directed in 1987. Dave Voelker and Dino Deluca were still amateurs then, and Mike Dominguez, Josh White, Todd Anderson, and Ron Wilkerson battle it out in the pro class.
Unlike the previous post, of the AFA Oregon Pro Flatland video, this original VHS video has been watched... a lot. Yes, it really is a color video, but the tape was so worn out, it looks black and white on YouTube. That kind of thing happened in the world of actual video tape and generation loss, in the pre-digital era.
In any case, this is the second video I produced and directed for the American Freestyle Association in 1987. The flatland and quarterpipe/wedge ramp contest format had been going for two and a half years at this point. Ron Wilkerson took things to the halfpipe realm with the 2-Hip King of Vert contest series, following Dave Vanderspek's lead. Dave put on the first few halfpipe contests in San Francisco. But the AFA with the flatland and quarterpipe contests were the big dog in the 1980's freestyle contest world. Some of the AFA Masters national contests drew 400 riders or more in that era, and each got a 1 1/2 minute run. Let me tell you, there was nothing like having to judge 48, very comparable, 14-15 intermediate flatlanders, and try to get them in the proper order. Everyone hated the judging, but the winners. Since I had to judge contests sometimes, and I also competed, and was always in the middle (or back) of the pack in the national contests, I didn't bitch too much. Judging was impossible.
But the jam circles were a blast, and a week later, we forget who won anyhow, and just remembered the big tricks and the new tricks.
Check out me new online store for ebooks, stickers, T-shirts, art, and what ever else I can thing up...
In this video, we see top BMX freestylers, Martin Aparijo, R.L. Osborn, Ron Wilkerson, Chris Lashua, Josh White, Dave Vanderspek, and others, showing us the cutting edge of flatland in the spring of 1987.
One day, while I was working as the American Freestyle Association's newsletter editor, Bob Morales came into the little room. Bob started putting on skatepark contests in 1982, and flatland and ramp contests with the AFA, in 1984. By 1987, with three or four employees, we had about 3,000 members nationwide, we put on 6 national contests, and regional BMX freestyle contests were held under the AFA name in several areas. Bob said, "Steve, you wanna make a TV commercial? I just found out I can get local cable TV spots for $25 each in Austin." I had absolutely no background in producing videos, and no idea how to make one So I said, "Uh... sure." That's how things worked at the AFA, and BMX freestyle, in those days. Come up with a cool idea, then figure out how to do it, and then make it happen somehow. Bob, at the ripe old age of 23 then, was already a veteran serial entrepreneur, and "seat of the pants" didn't even begin to describe his style of business in those days. Bob always had about 17 different projects going, and it was hard to keep up. But it was interesting, if frustrating at times.
Our AFA Masters national contests were sponsored by a handful of BMX industry companies, and Vision Street Wear was a major sponsor. That was the new clothing line put out by Vision Skateboards owner Brad Dorfman. The rise of street skateboarding synched up with the rise of hip hop, break dancing, and urban culture going mainstream, so "street" was the cool thing in fashion at the moment. Vision also had a video production company, called Unreel Productions. Unreel sent a cameraman to every AFA contest, who shot footage on a broadcast quality Sony Betacam camera. The deal was that both Vision and Unreel could use that footage any way they wanted. So Bob gave me the phone number to Unreel, and I called them up, told them I worked at the AFA, and said, "We want to make a TV commercial, what do I do?" They told me to come by the next day, and we'd get started.
The Unreel crew, mainly Dave Alvarez, a wizard of a video editor, shepherded me through the process, and Dave did the editing with the shots I picked out. Soon we had a pretty lame 30 second commercial with cool BMX action in it. The commercial played on MTV in the Austin area before that contest. People did actually see it, and Austin, as usual, was a great contest. Even in 1987, it was Austin. The weird Texas city with the great music scene was also an early hot spot of BMX freestyle.
After that, Bob talked to me again. "You know... I kind of advertised some freestyle videos in the newsletter about six months ago, and we got some orders. But I never got around to making the videos. You want to make some AFA contest videos?" Again, I answered, "Uh... sure." And that's how I become a video producer. Unreel gave me VHS window dubs of the raw footage, I logged it at home on my roommate's VCR. Then I went in, picked the shots, and Dave Alvarez edited it all together in Unreel's half million dollar, component betacam edit bay.
So at a time when a pro quality video camera cost $50,000, and a good edit bay cost $500,000, the no-budget AFA had broadcast quality videos that sold 35 copies each. That's entrepreneurship, folks. That's also how I became a video guy. This was the first of six contest videos I produced for the AFA in 1987, before the rider-made video movement got going.
After letting this blog sit for a long time, I've decided to get it going again. Welcome back!
Check out my online store with ebooks, stickers, art, and whatever else I can come up with, at:
