Journey of The White Bear #12: My start as a zine publisher

This is my favorite little video clip about zines, it captures the basic idea being weird, being into something outside the mainstream, and self-publishing a little booklet, which is was zines are.

Life Lesson:  There's a great power in self-publishing something

In late August of 1985, I packed up my monstrous, shit brown, 1971 Pontiac Bonneville, and drove solo from Boise, Idaho to San Jose, California.  My car broke down an hour after I started, so the trip ended up taking two days.  I pulled up to my family's new apartment in San Jose, California the second afternoon.  It was a big move, but I'd been moving my whole life, so I was used to that part. 

I soon found a job working at a local Pizza Hut, and I went to the huge San Jose swap meet and bought an ancient, manual, Royal typewriter for $15.  My plan was to publish a zine about BMX freestyle as a way to meet the riders of the San Francisco Bay Area.  In those early years of BMX freestyle, NorCal was had a great scene.  But I had no idea where the riders actually were, and it was a huge area.  I got the idea for doing a zine from Andy Jenkins, the editor of FREESTYLIN' magazine, who wrote an article about zines.  He was a fan of skateboard zines, and he tossed the idea out to us kids in the BMX world. 

I took the bait, but I was entirely selfish at first.  I just wanted a reason to meet the pro riders, and good amateurs, in the Bay Area.  I pulled out my freestyle photos from Idaho, and from a contest in Venice Beach I went to that summer.  I had absolutely no idea what a zine was supposed to look like, and no idea how to make one.  I filled up three pages, front and back, with photos and stories typed on the typewriter.  I made copies at a local copy shop, stapled each one in the upper left-hand corner, and drove around to local bikes shops that sold BMX bikes in the San Jose area, and gave them a few. 

A few days later, I got a call from a guy named John Vasquez, a San Jose freestyler who worked at one of the bikes shops I gave zines to.  He invited me over to ride the quarterpipe his friends had.  After meeting him, I started learning about the Bay Area freestyle scene.  I tracked down Skyway pro Robert Peterson, who I'd met at the Venice Beach contest.  He held a ramp jam once a month at the bike shop he worked at, and invited me to show up and session with them.  Within a couple of months, thanks initially to my zine, I met all the main riders in the Bay Area, and wound up riding with them and interviewing many of them for my zine. 

I sent copies of each zine to the individual editors and assistant editors of the BMX magazines.  It just seemed like the right thing to do.  Much to my surprise, my zine was reviewed as the best BMX zine in the country in the July 1986 issue of FREESTYLIN,' and I wound up working there a while, which launched me into the BMX/freestyle industry.  The biggest, life-changing event of my life happened because I self-published a rather lame, but really enthusiastic, zine.  I've published zines ever since, more than 40 of them, over the last 32 years.

Today everyone is a self-publisher with social media, online photo sharing, and blogs.  But there's still something entirely different about handing someone a little book that you hand made yourself.  It's not online for the world, your mom, and the police to read.  It's just for the person you give it to and whomever they share it with.  Zines nearly always get read by multiple people.  Zines, by their very nature, are collector's items.  So even in this world of instant publishing to the world, zines are still being published, read, collected, and cherished.  Now you know.

Journey of The White Bear #11: Handshakes not autographs

This clip is a San Francisco Bay Area local program that aired in September, 1986.  I actually moved to Southern California after this was shot and before it aired.  You can see me chasing my bike at 5:07, that's a trick I used to do in parades in Idaho.  It's a lame trick, but it got me in the clip.  At 1:39, on the left, you can see me going into a trick called the quickspin, which was a pretty good trick at the time. 

Life Lesson: Handshakes not autographs

When I started riding with Idaho's only trick team in 1984, I was a completely shy guy who was suddenly doing shows in front of crowds, getting the occasional mention in the newspapers, and even showing up on local TV.  That was all intimidating, but it helped me to start breaking out of my shell.  It also was a time when people started giving me advice on how to succeed, which is pretty funny, because no one saw a future in BMX freestyle.  But random people at shows, adults much older than me, would walk up and say I should do this or that to promote myself and the team.  Luckily for me, my teammate Justin's mom was very extroverted, and booked all of our shows. 

One thing I decided on my own was that when I started meeting sponsored and pro riders, I would shake their hand and introduce myself, rather than asking for an autograph.  Most riders from places away from California would ask pro riders to sign their jersey or number plate or a magazine cover.  But from my first trip to a big event in Venice Beach, California in 1985, I just started introducing myself to the riders and industry people I met. 

To be clear, they were all pretty approachable, it wasn't like walking up to Lebron James at a game today.  But I never asked for an autograph.  I don't know just how much that helped me, but as luck would have it, my dad got a job in San Jose, California in 1985.  The family moved in early summer, and I worked my summer job at a little amusement park in Boise, and then drove to San Jose in late August.  I met Skyway pro freestyler Robert Peterson, who lived in the Bay Area, at a contest the year before.  It took me about a month to track him down in that huge area in those pre-internet days, but I eventually started hanging out with him, Maurice Meyer, the main guy in the clip above, and many other great riders.  I'll go more into how I met these guys in the next post.

Though I wasn't near as good of a rider as most of the Golden Gate Park locals, they welcomed me and I became part of the crew.  I learned several things from hanging out with those riders, but one was that there's a whole different mentality to asking a "famous" person for an autograph (or selfie these days) and introducing yourself.  Even if they meet lots of people and forget you, if you see them again sometime, you can say "I met you at ________ last year and introduced myself."  It's much easier to get a conversation with them than, "You signed my neck at a show last year."  It's a lot less creepy for them, too. 

In every field of endeavor, there are a relatively small number of people who really make things happen.  Taking 20 seconds to introduce yourself may lead to an opportunity down the line.  You never know.

I'm starting up an online store soon to put out my writing and art.  If you like anything you've read here and would like to contribute to my start-up, you can do it here.

Alex Leech and Rob Lawrence on holiday in 1991

 This is Alex Leech, English BMX freestyler, when I first met him in 1991.  Like many riders from the U.K., he and skater friend Rob Lawrence saved money for months to com to the U.S. on holiday and ride for a month.  I ended up shooting video of him for the first S&M Bikes video, Feel My Leg Muscles, I'm a Racer.  these are stills from that footage.  Above, Alex rocking braids held tight with Super Glue 4.

 Alex, in a epic T-shirt, and Rob, chilling at the H-Ramp in Santa Ana, CA.

 On a trip to a San Pedro high school known for its banks, Alex knocks off a bench abubaca.

 In 1991, a barpsin drop-in on a five foot ramp was a big deal.  Keith Treanor, watching nearby, freaked when Alex did this.

 Downside footplant on coping gone wrong.  These looked great, until his toe slipped on this one.

Alex hitting the ejection button at the H-Ramp.  I lost the footage.  But Alex and Rob borrowed this sketchy ass old van with about 220,000 miles, and used it to tool around Southern California during their trip.  We took it out to the Nude Bowl in the middle of the desert on day for an epic session.  Good times.