As I said before, I never was a total Prince fan. His music provided the soundtrack for many high school memories, Purple Rain etched itself into those years. But over the years, and he kept re-inventing himself, continually producing new music, fighting his record label, and keeping it all fresh, I gained more and more respect for him. I was thinking about doing a Prince drawing, but I had a slew of other drawings lined up to do, so I was hesitating. Then I woke up at 4am a couple days ago, started working on that drawing, and had this deep sense that I needed to pound it out in a single day. So I did. I went back to it today, and touched it up here and there, adding several more song titles (thanks for the help on those Sonja A., Maurice M., and Mike S.) and put some purple raindrops in it. That's the finished drawing above.
When I wrote the big post about Prince the other day, I left out one story. Several years ago, working as a taxi driver in Orange County (CA), I wandered by Fashion Island Mall in Newport Beach about bar close time. An attractive woman in her 40's flagged me down. She was the stereotypical Newport Beach cougar; great legs, saline enhanced bustline, Botox infused lips, and a college age guy in tow. They got in, and she told me where they were headed, a little known part of Bayside, close to the entrance of Balboa Island. She started kissing the guy, and at that exact moment, the sounds of The Foo Fighters covering Prince's hyper-erotic song "Darling Nikki" oozed out of the speakers. It was literally like I was in a music video for the song, watching the story happen live. Darling Nikki was luring her prey into her lair for the night. As we pulled up in her driveway a few minutes later, the song was just ending. She handed the guy some money to pay me, and strutted up towards her front door, keys already in hand. She'd obviously done this before. The young guy got out, leaned in the passenger window to pay me, and said, "Oh God, what am I in for?" I replied, "You heard the song that was playing, right?" He nodded. "Have fun," I said as he ran to catch up with her. OOooooooooooooh Nikki!
Like many other people, I've been watching and listening to a lot of Prince music since he died a few days ago. This clip from a tribute to George Harrison at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame stands out for several reasons. I knew Prince was a good guitar player and all around great musician and songwriter. But I didn't realize how absolutely phenomenal he was on guitar. To start with, this happened in a room full of great musicians. Tough crowd. Then we don't even see Prince until halfway through the song. When we do see him, he's wailing away, making his guitar sing, scream, and weep. He's dressed pretty low key by his standards. He doesn't say or sing a word. There's no fancy dancing. He just plays like few others are capable of doing. As if that's not enough, he falls backwards-mid-solo-into the hands of a crew guy, and doesn't miss a single beat. Then he concludes this amazing solo, throws his guitar up to God knows who, and struts off stage with the signature Prince smirk. Amazing.
I was finishing up high school when Prince first broke big time, and I remember making fun of all the girls I knew who were going to his concert in Boise, Idaho. The tickets actually said, "Where something purple," on them. Most of us high school guys made fun of him initially. But at the same time, we really liked "Little Red Corvette." When we first heard the "pocket full of Trojans" line, we couldn't believe they could actually play that song on the radio. Prince had an edge to his music that no one else did in 1984. We were the first high school kids to have MTV, which actually played music videos then, as a soundtrack and visual influence to those years. Prince's Purple Rain music was part of the soundtrack of my life then, and every song takes me back to those confusing and exciting days of youth.
My favorite Prince song is "Raspberry Beret." In the summer of 1985, I was the manager of a tiny amusement park near downtown Boise, called the Boise Fun Spot. With six rides, a food stand, and a miniature golf course, it attracted lots of moms with small kids, and bored and wandering junior high and high school kids. "Raspberry Beret" had just gone into heavy rotation on the radio and MTV when a young woman walked into the park wearing a navy blue beret. She was pretty good looking, and was wearing some very loose fitting shorts. When I locked her into a Ferris wheel seat, she made it obvious she wasn't wearing any underwear. We started talking as she got off the ride. She took her little sister around to the various rides, and all of us guys working were intrigued. I took a break from the Ferris wheel, and walked into the food stand singing "Blueberry Beret." I was immediately hit by the reply of the high school girls working there, one of which was my ex-girlfriend, "That girl's a SKANK!" they yelled. I just smiled and kept singing "Blueberry Beret." I never hooked up with Miss Blue Beret, but I did take have lunch with her for a couple of days, which totally irked the girls I worked with. "Raspberry Beret" always takes me back to that summer a year out of high school.
I paid less attention to Prince's music after that. I never saw him perform live, and now I wish I would have. He kept producing new music, always creating new sounds and looks, something very few musicians are able to do. He stayed in Minneapolis, his home area, instead of moving to Hollywood, New York City, Nashville, or some other music industry hot spot. Then, in 2001, I wound up out of work. I started talking to a panhandler near my house one day, and learned he usually made $10 or $20 in less than an hour before the cops showed up to run him off. Times were tight, and I started panhandling on the weekends to scrape up cash to buy food while I looked for work. One day, after standing on the off ramp with my sign for over an hour, I only had a couple dollars, not even enough to buy lunch. In one group of cars, a red Corvette pulled up right beside me. The driver handed me a $20 bill and said something like, "Good luck, man." He drove off, and I started singing Prince's "Little Red Corvette" as a headed off to McDonald's to get a McChicken. From that point on, whenever I was having bad luck panhandling, I would start singing "Little Red Corvette." Every single time I did that someone drove up and handed me a $5 or $10 or $20 bill. That money kept me alive through some really tough times. "Little Red Corvette" became my good luck song on the streets.
I saw Prince from time to time on TV and heard his songs on the radio. He got a $100 million+ contract, and then fought for his creative freedom and to own his master tapes, breaking new ground for musicians everywhere. He performed with "Slave" written on his cheek. He changed his name to that now famous symbol, and became known as "symbol" and then "the Artist formerly known as Prince," and finally just "The Artist." Think about that one for a minute. Many musicians have been known by one name, but how many could be labeled "The Artist," as if they were the only artist out there, and have the name stick. Then he changed his name back to Prince, making things a bit easier for fans and media talking about him.
One thing that hasn't been said much since his death is how many great female musicians Prince helped out over the years. He pointed the spotlight at Appalonia, Sheila E., and many other women in music, and showed the world women could not only look pretty and sing, but they could PLAY. He produced and starred in his own movie, Purple Rain, made on a tiny budget ($9 million), which is a huge undertaking. He had Paisley Park built, a combo music and video studio, sound stage (where they could practice for live shows), and living space. Again he broke new ground with that concept.
Of all the things I've heard about Prince in the last week, though, this is by far the funniest and weirdest: Kevin Smith talking about working with Prince. It's obvious that Prince, as gifted as he was, was getting pretty damn weird in recent years. Kevin's story brings thoughts of Howard Hughes to mind. (Watch The Aviator if you don't know). Is this just how a super-creative genius musician acts? Was Prince struggling to cope with his huge library of very erotic music conflicting with his spirituality in later years? We don't know. What we do know from Kevin Smith's story is that there are 50 or more finished music videos for songs we've never heard. Some reports are now saying there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of unreleased Prince songs hidden in his vault.
That brings me to the next thing. In the last couple days it's been said that Prince, known control freak, didn't have a will. So no one knows how his fortune, and more importantly, all his music and publishing rights, are going to be divided, and whether it will all get released. The only thing I can say for sure is that the lawyers and accountants involved are going to make a fortune.
Prince was a never-ending mystery in life, and now the mystery continues... with a bigger audience than ever watching. RIP Prince.
"Failure is the key to success; each mistake teaches us something." -Morihei Ueshiba, founder of the martial art of aikido
I held my first pop-up art show today. Most people would probably call it a failure. But I have a different concept of failure than most people. To me, the whole thing was an experiment. I'm a basically unknown artist in my area, in a small town of 30,000 people, in North Carolina. Contrary to what many people nationally may think, there actually is a vibrant art scene in the larger cities in this region. Winston-Salem has Trade Street, Greensboro has a scene. Highpoint? Who knows? But I wanted to see if a virtually unknown artist could draw a few other creative people to an obscure location for an impromptu art show here in Kernersville. I wanted to see if I could do it with minimal promotion in a short period of time.
I've never been to a pop-up anything, but I've heard of them. I picked a location where I used to walk every day. It was a little used street a block off the busy route 66, right behind two fast food places. It was wide open, non-threatening, and the weather was great. I made $3 worth of fliers and passed them out yesterday to various people and shops around town. Everyone I gave a flier to said it sounded like a pretty cool idea. So that was the experiment.
In the photo above, you can see the car parked on that street, with a sign that said "Art Show" on one window, and one of my drawings of Bruce Lee on the other window. My mom is chillin' in the background. Long story short, no one came specifically for my short notice art show/meet-up. Several people did check out my blog last night, after seeing the fliers. Several people did drive by slowly, but I don't know if any of them came for the art show. The two restaurants there, Wendy's and Dairy-O, had a lot of traffic.
As it turned out, the only people I talked to were a couple with their grandson who pulled up in a HUGE 5th wheel camper behind a new dually pick-up. They were all Carolina Panther fans, and liked the Cam Newton drawing I did back during the football season. Then they drove off pulling a trailer (39') that was bigger than some of the apartments I've lived in.
So was it a failure? Not to me. I spent $3 on promotion and sat out on a beautiful day soaking up the sun and some Vitamin D. It's hard to go very wrong there. And I learned that it would be tough to put together a decent pop-up event in this little town without a local following. I also had a great idea pop in my head about how to promote my work. Then I took my mom out for ice cream. All in all, a good day.
Back in my junior year of high school, my best friend Darrin got really into pottery, and used to go into the pottery class at lunch to throw pots. I started tagging along, and soon he taught me the basics. I took pottery the next year, and with Darrin's tutoring, I was about a semester ahead of the others in my class. Even the teacher used to forget I was a first year potter. Every day, Darrin and I would center a piece of clay on the wheel, usually with a beautiful bottleneck vase in mind. But things don't always turn out the way you want them to. So we categorized our pot throwing attempts. On a really good day, we'd wind up with a good looking vase, often with a small bottleneck (which was hard to do well). If that didn't pan out, we could turn it into a spittoon shape. Not awesome, but it was still something. If that didn't work, like when we played with the clay too long and it got soft, we could still pull off an ashtray. People smoked a lot back then, and we could always find someone to give a hand made ashtray to. If it all went south, it never seemed like a failure, because the very act of trying to throw a pot was just plain fun. So we classified those days as a learning experience.
Today's Pop-Up Art Show was a learning experience. It didn't go off the way I was hoping, but it was still a fun day. I think the big lessons are 1) build a local following, and 2) work with an established shop or group to do my next pop-up event. Now it's back to the series of drawings I've been working on this week.
This clip is from a pop-up art show in the NoHo district of the San Fernando Valley in Southern California. NoHo is the hipster/marketing term for a part of North Hollywood, California. I picked this clip because I actually lived and worked in North Hollywood in 1990-91, when that area was totally ghetto. Contrary to the name, North Hollywood is not the north part of Hollywood. It's actually a seperate city over the big hill from Hollywood. Sometime after I moved away, they started calling part of it NoHo to build an art scene, and obviously, it worked.
My name is Steve Emig, as you've figured out by now, and I'm spearheading a pop-up art show this Saturday, April 16, 2016, here in Kernersville, North Carolina. The location is a little road named Abbotts Trace Drive. The road is one block long, and right behind the Wendy's and Dairy-O on route 66, just north of regular I-40. Or "New 40" as many call it. Why there? Because I used to walk around that area every morning, it's open, and there are plenty of places to park and to buy snacks nearby. Just park there on Abbotts Trace, and look for anyone with artwork in, on, around or near their car. The hours are 1pm to 3pm. It's open to everyone of any age who does arts and crafts or has an interest in arts and crafts.
Why am I doing this? Mostly because I'm tired of sitting in my "studio" (aka bedroom/laundry room) drawing pictures and not talking to other artists. This is an experiment, I have no idea who will show up, except me. I've never been to a pop-up art show before. I don't know how they're supposed to go. It just sounded like a fun way to meet some other creative people here in ol' K-Vegas.
Here's all I'm asking... if you show up, bring some work of your own, if you have any. If not, that's cool, check out the work of those who do show up. The weather it supposed to be partly sunny and in the 60's, so it should be pretty nice out. If you want to take photos of anyone's work, ask first, some people aren't cool with that. Bring your creative spirit and have some fun. Come and go as you please. If you head to the nearby restaurants, be cool. They have nothing to do with this. I have no idea who will show or what will happen. Like most creative endeavors, the spontaneity is part of the fun. Obey the traffic laws and any others that may apply. This not organized, sanctioned, or official in any way. It's just a bunch of people hanging out and talking about creative stuff or whatever topic comes up. See you there.
This drawing request came from Paula, a friend I met in the late '80's or early '90's. She wanted this as a gift for a friend, and that friend turned out to be 70's skateboard legend, Robin Logan. Robin was from the Logan family that started Logan Earth Ski skateboards, and in the original photo, she's doing a kickflip variation. I'm not sure what they called that trick then, because the word "kickflip" comes from Rodney Mullen in the late 70's, I think. The owl has a personal meaning for her, which I won't go into. Since Robin had her arms spread, I thought it made sense for the owl to have its wings spread as well. I was given free reign on this one, and I ended up giving the owl some jewelry or decoration. That's just where the feeling led me. I'm always worried when I send these drawings out, because I never know how they'll be received. But both Paula and Robin said they liked it, so I'm stoked.
I first met Randy Lawrence in about '88 or '89, when he left his desert home and migrated to Huntington Beach, California. We rode together at the HB Pier on the weekends, and were roommates at one point. I was working at Unreel Productions at the time, and Randy was a bike shop mechanic. My bike rattled and shook so much, that Randy used to tune it at night when I was asleep, just because the noise it made bugged the heck out of him and the other roommates. We headed off in different directions in the 90's, and I split time between furniture moving and the TV business. Randy wound up wrenching for pro motocross racers, including Jeremy McGrath during his Supercross champion years.
These days Randy trains young motocross riders, and has a son, Ryder, is a wunderkind on two wheels. The photo I used in the drawing above is from a couple years ago. Ryder is doing a wall ride while Randy is launching a big fakie wall ride in the background. There's a lot of fathers and sons (and daughters) riding BMX together these days, but few at the level these two do. At the Old School BMX Jam at Woodward West a few weeks ago, Randy and Ryder did side by side backflips into the foam pit. Not only can Ryder do that, but check out this video clip of him on a Mega Ramp, at age 7. That's a 50 foot jump, folks. Keep an eye on this kid. Rydas Gotta Ride!
This is footage I shot of a 2-Hip King of Dirt comp at Mission Trails near San Diego, in the spring of 1991, that wound up in the first S&M Bikes video, Feel My Leg Muscles, I'm a Racer.
At the moment (spring 2016), I'm a middle aged guy who somehow wound up in Kernersville, North Carolina. My "eclectic" work history makes me a bad match for the job market here, so I'm creating my own job (aka small business) doing artwork, writing projects, and whatever else that leads to. I'm putting a lot of links in this post. If you see parentheses with a number inside, like this (13:43), that's a point in the video either I'm in, or I'm the cameraman, producer, or editor. I've lived a weird life, and been involved in a lot of creative endeavors over the last few decades. Here's a look at how I got here. I was born in a small town in Ohio, and we moved around Ohio during my childhood. My dad was a draftsman/design engineer. I grew up looking at his huge sheets of drafting paper and designs for things my dad drew. He taught me how to draw Army Jeeps, the old Willys kind, when I was eight. That turned me into one of the best artists in my class that year. I've been drawing ever since, though not always on a regular basis.
In 1976, as a nine-year-old in Willard, Ohio, a friend showed me a skateboard. It was just over a foot long, made out of pressed aluminum, had steel wheels, and no grip tape. I rolled about a foot on it, hit a pebble, fell, scraped my knee, and said, "Skateboards are dumb!" In the following months, another friend got a plastic skateboard with urethane wheels, and I started learning to ride it. I saved up my allowance (minus candy money) for nine months to buy my own board, a lime green plastic Scamp. I've goofed around on skateboards ever since.
My family moved to Carlsbad, New Mexico for my ninth grade year, and that year sucked, though I did fall in love with the desert. I bought an old BMX bike off my friend Mike for $5, a few days before we moved again, that time to Boise, Idaho. I lived there through high school. In a trailer park outside of Boise, I got into BMX bike riding in 1982. There wasn't much else to do out there. I built my $5 Sentinal Exploder GX into a better bike, part by part, and started racing BMX in October of that year. I raced locally at the Fort Boise track, all through 1983, and won a contest to help re-design the track, and help design and build a new track in Boise. Then, I started getting into trick riding, which was just turning into a sport in 1984. Much to everyone's dismay, I spent my high school graduation money on a brand new Skyway T/A bike. I joined the only trick team in Idaho, with rider Jay Bickel. We did shows and rode in parades all that year. I also traveled with Jay's family to my first big BMX freestyle contests, one in Whistler, British Columbia, and one in Venice Beach, California in 1985.
I didn't have enough money to go to college, so I followed my family to a new city, San Jose, California, in August of 1985. Like all freestylers then, I lived for the moment that FREESTYLIN' magazine would show up in the mail every month. I literally read every word of that mag, even the ads, trying to soak up every drop of knowledge about the obscure world of BMX freestyle. As luck would have it, one of the best freestyle scenes in the world then was in the San Francisco Bay Area. I'd met Robert Peterson, Eddie Fiola, and a few others at my first AFA contest in SoCal. But I didn't know them well.
I'd read about zines, (pronounced zeens) in FREESTYLIN'. Those were small, self-published booklets about some topic. In those pre-internet days, that's what self-publishers did. I bought an old manual (as in NON-ELECTRIC) typewriter at the swap meet for $15, and used my Kodak 110 camera (remember those?) to take photos, and I started my zine. I had never seen an actual zine in my life, just a magazine article about them. So I had no idea what I was doing. My goal was just to meet the riders of the Bay Area. Much to my surprise, it worked. Before long, I was going to the monthly Beach Park Ramp Jams, put on by Skyway pro Robert Peterson. Soon after I went to Golden Gate Park (5:07) on the weekends for the sessions there. I met all the local pros and interviewed them, Bert, Dave Vanderspek, Maurice Meyer, Hugo Gonzales, Oleg Konings, and Rick Allsion. I also met a big crew of amazing amateurs. Future BMX Plus! editor Karl Rothe was in that crew, as was future skateboard deck design legend Mark McKee. The Golden Gate Park scene was the most cohesive freestyle scene anywhere, and I became a part of it, though my riding lagged behind the other ams.
The something amazing happened. I got a call out of the blue from Andy Jenkins, editor of FREESTYLIN'. He said the guys liked my zines I sent them, and asked if I wanted to write a story about the next AFA contest. I flew myself to Tulsa, Oklahoma, hung out with the Haro team all weekend, and had the time of my life. I met some up-and-coming ramp riders like Joe Johnson, Josh White, and a local Oklahoma kid named Mat Hoffman, who was 14 then. My first article, and a review of my zine, which they thought was the best in the country then, appeared in the July 1986 issue of FREESTYLIN'. I was beyond stoked. Then I got another call from Andy J., one of the writers was leaving the magazine, and they wanted me to fly down and interview for the job. That weekend was amazing. Even better, I got the job as editorial assistant at two national magazines,BMX Action and FREESTYLIN', at age 20. I had no college degree. I'd never even taken a single college course. I had no background in creative writing, other than high school work and my zine. They just liked my zine and knew I was a hardcore (if not overly talented) BMX freestyler. I left San Jose with a bike, a suitcase, and $80, and moved to Southern California.
Suddenly, I was a part of the BMX and freestyle industry. I met all the riders, company heads, and behind the scenes industry guys. I was living the BMX freestyle life. But, I didn't totally click with Andy, Lew, and Gork at the magazines. I just wasn't punk rock enough for them. I didn't like the band Skinny Puppy. And I was really uptight back then. I got laid off after only five months there. One cool thing was that Lew introduced me to a freestyle skater who practiced right by The Spot in Redondo Beach, where we rode flatland every night. That skater was a 19-year-old Rodney Mullen. He was the first pro skater I really got to know, and the first person who was super serious about practicing with an intensity few others had. I learned a lot from Rodney, and did a mini-interview with him that wound up in the December 1986 issue of FREESTYLIN'. My time at Wizard Pubs was over on New Year's Eve 1986. They permanently replaced me with some BMXer/skater kid from the East Coast. A kid named Spike Jonze.
I quickly found a job at the American Freestyle Association, editing their newsletter. There I worked for early freestyler and serial entrepreneur Bob Morales. He's the guy that turned BMX freestyle into a sport. He promoted the first skatepark contests, then later the flatland and ramp contests. I did a little bit of everything there, from writing, shooting photos, and laying out the newsletter, to running errands, putting logos on T-shirts, and driving the AFA van and 30 foot long trailer. There was something new nearly every day at the AFA. The pay sucked, but it was interesting. One day, before a big contest in Austin, Texas, Bob walked in and asked me if I wanted to make a TV commercial. He found out that he could get ads on MTV in the Austin area for $25 each. So I headed off to Unreel Productions, the Vision Skateboards/Vision Street Wear video company that shot footage of all our contests. They guided me through the process of producing a TV commercial. It wasn't great, but it did bring some spectators to the contest. After that contest, Bob talked to me. "You know," he said, "I advertised some contest videos in the newsletter a while back and never actually got around to making those videos. Do you want to produce them?" Again, I said, "Sure." I went back to Unreel, and my video career started by producing six AFA videos (2:18) in 1987. Very few people saw those early videos, but two or three clips from those videos wound up in Mark Eaton's BMX documentary,Joe Kid on a Stingray. I spent so much time at Unreel that year, that they offered me a job in December of 1987.
Outside of work hours, I rode my bike every night, and spent my weekends at the Huntington Beach Pier, freestyling in front of crowds with Mike Sarrail and other BMX guys, along with freestyle skaters Pierre Andre, Don Brown, and Hans Lingren. The H.B. Pier was a known spot, and anyone could show up on a weekend. Mark Gonzales rolled by often, Ed Templeton was a young local, Bob Schmelzer was there a lot. On the bike front, Woody Itson and Martin Aparijo showed up on a regular basis, along with many others. I figured out once that I probably rode in front of over 140,000 people at the Pier. But they were in crowds of 50 to 500 people at a time, over several years.
When I started at the video company, Unreel Productions was then housed in a really nice office in Costa Mesa, CA, and we could see the Pacific from the upstairs windows. That's not a good thing when we had an office full of surfers. They would disappear when the waves were good. But it was another job I was completely unqualified for, but ended up excelling at. My main job was making dubs, copies of tapes needed by someone in the Vision family of companies. At that time, Vision owned Vision, Schmitt Stix, and Sims skateboards. It also owned Sims Snowboards, and Vision Street Wear clothing. So I suddenly left the BMX world, and became a part of the skateboard industry. On one hand, it was a really cool job. I made VHS copies of all the raw footage our cameramen shot. So I saw all the footage of the BMXers, skaters, snowboarders, and fashion photo shoots. On the other hand, one of my jobs was to label and organize all the video tapes in the tape library. The boxes were labeled with tags like, "savannah skate." No date. No year. No idea who was on which tape. I literally went through every single tape, found out when and where it was shot, and labeled each one of the 3,000 or so tapes and organized them. When I was bored, I'd put on a tape I liked and just watch it, until more work came my way.
During the course of my 2 1/2+ years at Unreel, I worked on Psycho Skate, Vision Skate Escape, Red Hot Skate Rock, Mondo Vision, Freestylin' Fanatics, Snow Shredders, Snow Daze, Barge at Will (14:53, 19:02, 45:18) many fashion videos, and other random stuff. I was basically a production assistant, so I didn't have much say in the videos. The one exception was for the BMX videos, they'd always ask for my input on those. In addition to those home videos, Unreel produced the first ever action sports syndicated TV series, called Sports on the Edge. That was six years before the X-Games came along. When Unreel tried to sell the series to ESPN, the suits there replied, "No one wants to watch skateboarding on TV... and what the hell is snowboarding?" It took a few years, but ESPN finally saw the light when it came to action sports. During that time, I also edited the 1988 contest season video (3:07) for Ron Wilkerson at 2-Hip.
By 1989, I became the staff cameraman at Unreel, so I shot a bunch of footage which was nearly always fun. I was on the deck of the halfpipe shooting video when this happened. I went to the '89 2-Hip Meet the Street at the Brooklyn Banks in New York City. Racer/street rider Rich Bartlett and I shared a hotel room, and Dennis McCoy, Mat Hoffman, Steve Swope, Rick Thorne, and a couple other guys slept on the floor of our room to save money. That was the best weekend of my BMX life. I also met a ton of talented people working at Unreel/Vision. Don Hoffman, Dave Alvarez, Paul Schmitt, Marty Jiminez, Mike Miranda, John B. (the B is for Badass) Hogan, Miki Keller, Scott Clum, and many, many more. In 1989, though, the wave of skateboard and clothing business began to fade, and Vision was to big for its own good. Unreel was dissolved, and I was moved to an office in the main Vision building. The last project I worked on there was a promo for Tuff Skates, a short lived skate company that combined Christian Hosoi and Vision. I got to hang with Christian and his guys for three days shooting video, which was a crazy experience. There's nothing like hauling a $50,000 video camera to a sketchy area of Van Nuys, to shoot footage of Christian Hosoi skating a pool behind a crack house.
I finally bailed from Vision in the summer of 1990. On my last day there, one of the women in the promotions department asked me what I had planned after I quit. I told her I didn't have any plans. So they asked me if I wanted to go on a short tour with some skaters. I spent the next three weeks on the road with Mark Oblow, Buck Smith, and two 15-year-old vert skaters named MikeCrum and Chris Gentry. As tours go, it wasn't that crazy. But I did see the most disgusting thing ever on that tour. Ask me about it some time.
I had already started shooting footage on the weekends for my own, self-produced video. I got a part time job at NSI Video, a small distributor of surf and skate videos. In October of 1990, I released The Ultimate Weekend, (27:33, 28:30) my first completely self-produced bike video. I tried to show what riding was really like, and to not be as hokey as the Vision BMX videos I'd worked on. Jess Dyrenforth was supposed to be the star of the video, but he kept flaking out on me. A recent New Jersey transplant to H.B., Keith Treanor, was always raring to go ride. The video had about 35 great riders in it, but Keith became the star. Unfortunately, that year the BMX freestyle industry was collapsing as the bike world switched their focus to the growing new genre of mountain bikes.
A woman I had worked with at Unreel called me one day and asked if I'd like to work a day or two on "real" TV shows. I showed up at the office, just over the hill from Hollywood, and logged footage all day for monster truck shows. The asked me back the next day... and the next. I wound up working a few months on those shows, that year's monster truck and supercross series. One of the highlights of working there was meeting Johnny Airtime, the super technical motorcycle jumper whose career spanned the years between Evel Knievel and Seth Enslow. One day, I sent him a copy of the footage in the clip at the top of this post. He called me up and said he was blown away by how crazy BMXers were. We brainstormed some ideas for the Stuntmaster's TV series, which was produced by the same company. That led to this stunt. I was gone by the time they taped the show, but that Stuntmasters episode had far reaching effects. It was Johnny Airtime who told Mat Hoffman that to do bigger airs, he needed a bigger ramp. So without the BMX world knowing, it led to Mat and Steve Swope doing this. It's funny how things happen sometimes. I went back to doing odd jobs in Orange County, but the next year I finagled a job on the stage crew of the hit TV show American Gladiators. That's where I met the best athlete I've ever seen, Wesley "2 Scoops" Barry. I worked four seasons on that crew, along with working on similar shows Knights and Warriors and Blade Warriors. If Lady Battleaxe on Knights and Warriors looks familiar, that's because Dot Jones went on to play Coach Bieste in Glee a few years ago. When I met Dot on the show, she was taking time off her job as a prison guard, and was the nine time women's world arm wrestling champ. It may seem hard to believe, but she is the funniest woman I've ever met.
During that same period of time, the early 90's, I got a call from Chris Moeller, owner of the fledgling BMX company, S&M Bikes. He asked me to produce a video for them. I was stoked, hoping to pocket $2,000 or $3,000 for making the video. As it turned out, Chris was a serious tightwad in those days, and we made the entire video for less than $750, including beer money. That video, Feel My Leg Muscles, I'm a Racer, became a cult classic in the BMX world. It a crazy turn of events, I also wound up sleeping on the floor of Chris' tiny apartment, and helping sell bikes and ship orders for S&M in those early days. Chris and I were roommates nearly constantly until 1995, and we spent many hilarious nights drinking cheap beer and brainstorming ideas for the company. In the skateboard world, maverick entrepreneur Steve Rocco had the super intelligent Rodney Mullen as a sidekick. Chris Moeller, the maverick entrepreneur of the BMX world, had me. It was a crazy time. In 1993, with a slightly bigger budget, I produced and edited the second S&M Bikes video,44 Something. That low budget video sold somewhere around 8,000 copies and was later called one of the ten best videos of the 90's by BMX Plus! magazine.
In 1992, I became the first freestyler to become an official resident of the P.O.W. BMX House. Roommates in that era included Moeller, Dave Clymer, John Paul Rogers, Todd Lyons, Alan Foster, Chris Sales, Jai Lonegran, Lawan Cunningham, Mike Griffin, Brian Foster, Brooks and Suzy, a couple of dogs, and many others. If you've ever jumped your bike, raise a Mickey's Big Mouth (or an O'Douls if you're on the wagon now) to the P.O.W.'s and to Hippy Jay and Hippy Sean, who built Sheep Hills during that era. Remember kids, never drink St.Ides (it's EVIL!), ramen is your friend in times of need, and "You are rotten." Subliminal old school message, if you're too big for an S&M these days, get an SE Fat Ripper.
Another thing that happened in the early 90's was that I got a part time job in 1993 for the first Cirque du Soleil tour to come to Orange County, CA. The show was Saltimbanco, and I was blown away by that weird new Circus. At the time, no one knew what Cirque was, so I had to explain it to people on the phone as I sold tickets. "Andrew Lloyd Webber meets The Fall Guy," was the line I used. In later years, I also worked in the Orange County box office at the Cirque tours of Alegria, Quidam, Dralion, and Varekai. Cirque du Soleil is the best run company I've ever seen, which surprises people. There's a reason it started as a group of French Canadian street performers and now has about a dozen shows worldwide. If you've never seen Cirque du Soleil, go see it when it comes to your area, or when you're in Las Vegas. I learned a ton of stuff working with circus people, one of the hardest working groups there is.
Yet another thing that happened in the early 90's was that I decided to work through my personal issues, like being super shy and not making a lot of money. I started reading books about real estate and business. That led to reading self-help books, and later books on religion and philosphy. In 1993, I bought a speed reading course and started plowing through books of all kinds. I read several hundred books, mostly non-fiction, in the 90's, and listened to hundreds more on tape.
By 1995, I was burning out. I was tired of working on dumb TV shows, and the BMX world was still pretty dead. I became a full time furniture mover. That sucked. In two years, I moved about 900 households. I still rode my bike nearly every day, but just did it for fun. After a couple years of pushing cat-piss-stained couches up stairs, I decided that the TV industry really wasn't so bad. I started calling my contacts, and got a job at a lighting company. In Hollywood terms, that means I was in a warehouse, testing, prepping, and packing up studio lights that then went to TV shows, movie premieres, and corporate parties. It was a long commute, but the work was pretty fun and it paid well. I even got to got out and worked on location once in a while. I worked at the 50th Emmy Awards after party, at a premiere for the second Harry Potter movie, and spent one day on the set ofViva Rock Vegas, the second Fred Flintstone movie. I was finally making good money, and was generally pretty stoked on life.
Then I injured myself. It seemed to be a hernia. When you lift things that weigh 100 pounds or more several times a day, that's a real bummer. I saved up money, took the summer of '99 off, and planned on getting the necessary surgery so I could get back in action. But there was a problem with my insurance. I got the run-around for three months, never did get to see a doctor, and burned through my saved up money. I needed a job that didn't require heavy lifting. Somehow, I decided to try taxi driving. Within two months, I could no longer afford my apartment (three blocks from the beach), andI put my stuff in storage and lived in my cab for six months.Taxi driving is a crazy job, and back then it was a really hard way to make a living. But I figured it out, and was able to have three exceptional weeks that got me a place to stay, and allowed me to only work weekends. That was in the spring of 2000.
That was my good year in taxi driving. I worked three long days a week, made $300 to $350 a week usually, and had four days off. Having four days off is a really cool thing since I lived in a beach city. Then, right before Christmas, there was a mix up at the DMV, and my driver's license got revoked for failure to pay a fine that I had actually paid. Things went downhill fast. I worked a telemarketing job for a while, but eventually wound up homeless. I worked at a restaurant and lived in the bushes for nine months.
That turned into a decade of struggling in and out of homelessness. I eventually got my license restored and got a taxi permit. But the taxi industry was changing due to computer dispatching, and I wound up living in my taxi again, working 7 long days a week. Every day was a struggle to earn enough money to pay for the cab, pay for gas, and buy food. From 2003 to 2005, I struggled in the cab, often working 90 to 100 hours a week, and just scraped by.
The thing about taxi driving, is that you never know who is going to get in the
back of your cab. I gave rides to homeless people. I gave a ride to billionaire Larry Ellison once. Other people in my taxi included BMXers Barspinner Ryan Brennan, Cory Nastazio, Shaun Butler, Ryan "Biz" Jordan, and Chase Hawk. One night in HB, I picked up skaters Arto Saari and Stefan Janoski, and drove them to Geoff Rowley's house. I gave rides to surfers Christian Fletcher, Samba Mann, and Karina Petroni. I picked up early UFC fighters Tank Abbot and Ken Shamrock. I used to work Dennis Rodman and Carmen Electra's beach house late at night after the clubs closed. I got a lot of great rides out of their place. Taxi driving was really fun at times. I even gave a ride to the Black Eyed Peas' tour bus driver one night, that guy was hilarious. I gained a lot of weight working those crazy hours in the taxi, going from 200 pounds to 374. I started having serious health problems. It got harder and harder to make money, because all the taxi companies were putting more and more cabs on the road.
Then, in 2005, I got an unusual offer. A taxi driver named Richard that I knew also ran an indy art gallery called AAA Electra 99. He offered to let me live in the art gallery, and drive his cab on the weekends. It was awesome to have some time off, though at first I just slept all the time. I'd completely given up on doing anything creative while driving a taxi. Living in a small industrial unit full of art by young, unknown artists, I got the bug again. I drew a little picture the second night. My creativity started bubbling up again. A couple years before, I tried to do a mural with markers. One day at the gallery, I layered a bunch of marker scribbles over each other while drawing a tree. It looked pretty cool. My scribble style was born. I did that for seven months, working the weekends with hardly any sleep, then drawing in the gallery where I had a mama cat and six kittens for roommates. But I didn't make enough to save any money.
So I went back to full time driving and living in a cab in mid-2006. Again, I struggled to make enough to pay for my taxi lease, gas, and food. In November of 2007, I could no longer make enough money to pay for the cab. With $15 in my pocket, I walked out onto the streets of Orange County, California. I weighed about 365 pounds, and my feet were cracked and bleeding from severe athlete's foot. I could just barely walk, I hobbled really slow like an old man. I expected to die within a few weeks. My mantra was "Moment to moment, day by day." I lost all hope for any kind of future.
But I didn't die. I lived on the streets, panhandling to survive, for nearly a full year. The streets are no joke. A lot of bad stuff happens out there that normal people never see or hear about. Surviving that year was the biggest accomplishment of my life, but I'm the only one who knows that. Everyone else just thinks I'm a complete loser for getting into that situation. Just for the record, I don't drink or do drugs. I just couldn't make enough money to get my life back on track. I finally called my family, who had moved to the Triad area of North Carolina. They gathered money and flew me to NC. I arrived in my parents' small apartment in Kernersville in November of 2008. Remember that time? The start of the Great Recession? It was a bad time to try and find a job. As I began to decompress from my year on the streets, I just wanted to get a job, lose weight, and forget all about homelessness. But I couldn't even get a restaurant job. All my old friends and contacts in California meant nothing. I started blogging about my early days in BMX. I had no idea that anyone would actually read it. After about a month, my blog went viral in the old school BMX freestyle community online. I didn't even know there was an old school BMX community online. I've been blogging ever since.
I drove a taxi in nearby Winston-Salem for a while. Again, I had to live in the cab and gained by most of the 130 pounds I'd lost. In 2012, my dad had a massive stroke, and eventually wound up in a nursing home. It was obvious he wasn't going to be around very long. I quit taxi driving, and literally built a hut in the woods to live in for a couple months. I would panhandle money for a couple of days, then take the regional bus to Highpoint, where my dad was, and stay for a couple of days. My mom and I weren't getting along well at the time. On the day my dad died in August 2012, my mom asked me to stay at her apartment. I've been living with her ever since, working odd jobs when I could find them, and selling artwork now and then.
After dealing with some serious health issues over the last four years, and finally starting to get that worked out last year, I realized that I was never going to find a high paying job here in the Piedmont Triad area of North Carolina. But I think like a Californian from the action sports and TV world. I decided to step up my game with my "scribble style" artwork I do with Sharpie markers. I decided to create my own job. That's where we're at now. My Sharpie art looks nothing like that of Jessie Armand, his stuff is amazing. But, I'm hitting up my social web as well as local people to draw whatever I can. My forte' is sports pictures with lots of shadows. I have drawn quite a bit of other stuff as well. As I write this, I'm all caught up on the drawings I'm doing for other people, and I'm drawing my first surfing picture in my new style.
So that's my story in a nutshell. Most people around here see me as a complete loser. Maybe they're right. Or maybe I'm just regrouping for another go at it. I know this is a really long blog post, but I only scratched the surface. If you meet me in person and want to be moderately entertained for a while, ask me about some of my taxi or homeless stories. I have lots of them. Or you can get me to draw a picture for you. That sounds good, too.
If you're only going to watch one clip linked in this post, make it the Brian Foster clip. Stay Strong like Stephen Murray and chill like Boozer Mike. Ridaz Gotta Ride. Now go do something cool.
