Friday, April 26, 2019
Go Fast, Pull Up: The Jimmy Levan Story...
I still haven't seen this yet. I don't have a DVD player at my house, mostly because I don't have a house. But you probably do. Jimmy Levan is one crazy cat. He's funny, he's cool to hang out with, he goes fast, and he goes BIG. This video/book set about his life is available, right now, on DVD or Blu-Ray at the Block Bikes Online Store, right here. Or you can read this post, and then buy it .
I met Jimmy way back in the dark ages of the early 1990's. It was 1991, and Chris Moeller, the pro racer, crazy jumper, S&M Bikes owner, tapped me to make the first S&M Bikes video. Young Jimmy rode for them back then. On one trip down to Chris' tiny apartment, for a weekend of shooting video, I met these two kids, Jimmy Levan and his friend Barstow. Barstow probably had a real name, but I never heard it all weekend. So we crashed on the floor of the long, narrow, "Winnebago" apartment, drank a few beers at night, and went riding and shooting video during the day. S&M Bikes was run out of a single car garage then, and money was damn near non-existent. The sessions were fun, cheap, and gritty. But who cares?
We hit a ditch in Westminster, near the infamous P.O.W. House, we rode in the back of Chris' pick-up truck, and we hit the Santa Ana Civic Center, one of our favorite street spots in those days. Then we hit Magnolia in Huntington Beach, a sometimes soggy trails area in the wetlands by the H.B. power plant. That whole video, S&M Bikes Feel My Leg Muscles, I'm a Racer, had a total budget of about $250, including beer money. And it looks like it:
It was a fun weekend, and I'm the guy who shot all the footage in this section, which I'm pretty sure is Jimmy Levan's first ever video segment. That's another reason I need to see this video. Anyhow, in a taste of things to come, Jimmy jumps the Civic Center pyramid at 2:00 in the clip above, which is about 30 to 35 feet across, off of a really mellow bank. It takes some serious racer speed to jump that, and Chris Moeller, himself, was the only other person I saw do it back then. Even as a young buck, Jimmy let us know that he would rack up a bunch of frequent flyer miles on his bike in the years ahead. So enjoy this clip, and click the link below to grab your copy of Go Fast Pull Up.
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