I got into bmx pretty heavily when My family moved to Ithaca Ny, from Long Island in 1986, after my pops retired from the service… We lived a few miles out of town, and on the drive home, we usually passed a bike shop called Pedal Away.
The shop carried bmx parts, and ran Pedal Sport, the local BMX track where I first met Toast…I first saw Guav, and a few other freestylers outside that shop, they were a part of the freestyle team at Pedal Away, and they were some of the first freestylers I had ever seen. (guav denies it to this day but i swear he had a Stryper t shirt on). I remember seeing those dudes around, on Skyway street beats and such, being totally stoked.
Anyrate, Tag, Bones, Gilly, and I raced, and jumped dirt mounds, while these dudes did cherry pickers and nourie stands on the other side of town… We sometimes would cross paths at ACS, where Gilly and Bones went to school. ACS had a basketball court with Ramps, and we would launch off them, onto a grassy hill. Sometimes Kelly and his brother Kim would roll up, and park their truck behind the ramp, and launch over it, while one of them sat in the Bed, drinking rolling rocks. They usually wore motocross pants while doing this, that were cut into shorts.
Around the same time period, we started going to see Toast’s band “milktoast” at the local punk shows, called ‘Ithacore’. Toast was into speedmetal, punk rock and BMX, and his casette tapes had these Awesome graphics on the cover, drawn by some dude named Banx.
Guav, Banx, Gilly, Bones, all went to the same school,the rest of us went to different high schools, we all got to know each other through the music scene and bmx. Being it was the late eighties, in a small town in upstate NY, there was an unwritten connection between bmxers, punk rockers, skateboarders and such, as we probably totaled 25 in a town filled with jocks, ivy leaguers, and rednecks.
Some 20 years later, most of us still stay in touch, and are still doing our small town rebellion good timing, through bmx, music and art. Guav Did the Graphics you can see on the FBM completes, and Banks Violette just had some wacky art show in NYC, Gilly is still dialing in the dirt jumps, Toast is in the running for best 40 and over 1 footed table tops…and I am sitting here typing up some irrelevant mess, connecting all of our pasts..
On June 20th, you can see the influence, and the commentary, of these guys, and more at the Bicycle Film Festival, when Joe Stakun premieres the documentary about FBM Bike Company.
Originally Posted by steve Crandall