For those of you who have read my other BMX blogs over the years, you know I did a short stint BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines, that happened in 1986, and got me started in the BMX industry. I got laid off at the end of 1986, mostly because I didn't like the band Skinny Puppy. They hired East Coast BMX/skater Spike Jonze to replace me, and he was the perfect fit for the Wizard Publications posse.
I moved down to Huntington Beach to become editor/photographer for the American Freestyle Association newsletter, working with serial BMX entrepreneur Bob Morales. I found a room to rent near Springdale and Warner, and by mid February 1987, I was spending my weekends sessioning below the Huntington Beach Pier. Mike Sarrail was the main BMX freestyler there as a local, though he lived far inland. Freestyle skateboarders Pierre Andre' (Senizergues), Don Brown, Hans Lingren, and Jeremy Ramey were the local skaters at the pier every weekend. The Lakewood BMX freestylers, Jeff Cotter, Ron Camero, Nathan Shimizu, Ron McCoy, and Derek Oriee came down often. Martin Aparijo and Woody Itson came by now and then, as did many other SoCal freestylers.
The H.B. Pier was a known spot for more than a decade to both skaters and BMXers, plus it was the beach, so anyone could show up on any given Saturday or Sunday. Street skating was just evolving into its own genre when I moved there in 1987, and Ed Templton and Mark Gonzales came by often, as did Bob Schemlzer, Per Welinder, and Darryl Grogan later on. Natas came by once when I was there, Ray Barbee as well, and many more. Jason Lee was one of the up-and-coming local skaters then, I didn't even know who he was, he was part of the local kids group.
Us BMX freestylers, and the freestyle skaters, got crowds of 75 to 100 people hour after hour, sometimes 500 people watching us at once. The crowds would always wind up blocking the bike path, even though we tried to tell them to keep it open. The the police would roll up on their quads, shut down the crowd, and we'd take a breather. Then five minutes later we'd start riding or skating again, and the next crowd would form. We did that every weekend there wasn't a competition somewhere. I once figured out that from 1987 to about 1992, I rode in front of at least 140,000 people at the H.B. Pier, 100 or 200 at a time. We all worked out and polished our tricks there, and got to gauge the crowd response on them from the people watching.
One day in the summer of 1988, I think, GT pro freestyler Josh White rode up. I was the only BMX guy there, and I knew Josh by then, so we sat there talking for a few minutes. He said some other rider told him there were some cool walls to do wall rides on, somewhere north of the pier. I told him, quite confidently, that there weren't any walls by the beach in that area. I rode down Goldenwest from my apartment to the beach bike path every weekend, for over a year at that point, and then rode down the bike path to the pier, over a mile. I'd never seen any rideable walls.
At that time, the wall ride was still a really new trick in BMX. The BMX world changing photo of Eddie Roman in FREESTYLIN', doing a wall ride on the Jinx Bank wall in Redondo Beach the year before, changed riding forever . As soon as that photo hit, we were all trying wall rides. Anyhow, intrigued by Josh's info, we rode north on the bike path, looking for the mysterious walls he'd heard of. Just past the one condo complex that's on the ocean side of PCH (Pacific Coast Highway), the bike path headed up hill. A lower path that was really sandy headed off just above the sand, but I always rode the upper, paved, bike path. We decided to follow the sandy path. Like in the poem, "the road not taken" taking the less traveled path paid off. To our left, as we headed north, a retaining wall dropped down to the wide sandy beach H.B, is famous for. But to our right, totally unknown to me, there was a series of slightly undervert banked walls, 10 to 12 feet high. Most of the walls had old murals on them, that looked like they dated from the early 1980's, maybe late 1970's. The walls looked completely fun to ride, but the first two or three had five or six inches of sand in front of them.
Then we rolled up on a wall that had murals of The Three Stooges and the Blues Brothers. There was hardly any sand in front of the left side of that wall. And by the bottom left corner of the wall, there was a mound of dirt, a lip someone had built to do wall rides. Josh hit it, and went maybe five feet up the wall. That was INSANE to watch, because at that time, we'd only seen a couple photos of wall rides in the magazines (no internet or YouTube back then), and guys were doing wall rides about two feet up the wall. Josh kept hitting the lip, going higher and higher. I wall ride to the left, so the lip didn't work for me. But I started hitting the wall a bit to the left, coming off flat ground, and was getting two feet or so up the wall.
Josh tried a fakie on the wall, and the little lip made a perfect roll-up. In about four tries, Josh was getting his front tire about 2 1/2 feet from the top of the wall, pulling off, and doing a full turndowns coming out of the fakie. I did my first wall ride fakies that day as well. After a good half hour session, Josh was doing wall rides with his tires up at the Blues Brothers necktie knots, about seven feet up. I was getting about 2-3 feet up the banked wall, which is probably about 75 to 80 degrees steep. The Blues Brothers Wall instantly became a favorite place ride. Us H.B. Pier locals started hitting the wall on a regular basis, maybe once or twice a month, after that.
When I was shooting video for my first self-produced video in 1990, the local posse of Randy Lawrence, Keith Treanor, Alan Valek, and me went there one day with my video camera. You can see that section in The Ultimate Weekend video starting at 10:41, and that's where these still shots come from.
The Blues Brothers Wall was pretty well known already in the SoCal BMX scene by that time, but my video showed the wall to the nation and worldwide BMX community. Foreigners who trekked to Huntington Beach on holiday to ride, usually got a session in at the wall in the years after. I rode it once in a while in the early 90's, and quite a bit in 95-99. I lived a few blocks away, on 15th Street, from '97-'99, and had a bunch of solo sessions there. At my best, I could get my wheels about 6 feet up the wall, a little over halfway up the 11 feet high wall. Randy Lawrence, going opposite in the top photo, by the way, got about 9 feet up. There was a Club Homeboy ad featuring Dave Clymer had a tiny photo of him wall riding less than a foot from the top of the wall, and that was in 1991 or 1992. Even today, that would be pretty impressive. Dave even rolled in from the top once or twice, Hell Track style, and that's the gmarliest thing ever done on the Blues Brothers Wall that I know of.
Why did we ride the Blues Brothers Wall, off all the walls along that path? Generally it was the wall that had the least sand in front of it, that's the main reason. I usually had to make a little path to hit it to the left, there was a little lip about 50 feet to the right of the bigger lip. Also, Skater Ed Templeton did a mural on the wall in the late 90's. There was a time when a painter could apply to the city and paint a mural on one of the walls. Several of the older murals got painted over, and new ones put up. But then graffiti writers started showing up, and adding some unofficial art to the walls. Eventually the walls were repainted the ugly tan color they are today. Ed Templton's mural was a long, digestive track looking painting that said, "Consume waste."
If you want to go check out the wall for the first time, park your car or ride to 14th Street and PCH in Huntington Beach, which is about a half mile north of the pier. There's actually parking on PCH if your come from the north, and can find a spot. Go down the big set of steps across from 14th Street, and the Blues Brothers wall, now with no murals, is the wall to your left, as you walk down towards the beach. I went and checked it out yesterday, here's what it looks like now.
The Blues Brothers Wall,, minus the Blues Brothers and the Three Stooges, May 2021, #steveemigphoto
Thirty two years after I first heard of it, it's still much the same. There's a paved bike path running in front of it now, and actual restrooms nearby, and a telephone type pole about where we used to rollback from fakies. And there are A LOT more people riding and walking by. Huntington Beach is a much more popular place these days. So that's my take on the story of the Blues Brothers Wall, one of my favorite places ever to ride a bike. Also, the lip at the bottom left corner is gone, that area now seems to belong to this guy.
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