$100 and a T-shirt is the best zine documentary I've seen. It's pretty much the only zine documentary. This is early 90's zine culture, and a lot like the 80's zine culture in BMX and skateboarding, except we never had zine shows/get-togethers. We'd just meet up at competitions, and mail each other zines in between.
At the end of August in 1985, I finished my summer job at the Boise Fun Spot, packed up my gigantic, 1971, shit brown, Pontiac Bonneville, and drove solo down to San Jose, California. My family had moved there in June. I unpacked, got situated in my new room, and lined up a job at a Pizza Hut within a couple of weeks. My focus then was on how to find and meet the riders of the San Francisco Bay Area BMX freestyle scene. It was the home of the Curb Dogs and the Skyway Factory team. Pro freestylers Dave Vanderspek, Maurice Meyer, Robert Peterson, Hugo Gonzalez, and Rick Allison lived somewhere in the Bay Area, along with a bunch of great amateurs. BMX freestyle was my life then, at age 19, and I wanted to meet the other riders around.
Goofy AF photo of me balancing on my Skyway T/A, at the Boise Fun Spot, summer of 1985. Photo by Vaughn Kidwell.
I'd read about zines, little self-published booklets, in an issue of FREESTYLIN' magazine. For some reason, the idea appealed to me. I didn't think of myself as a writer then, I kind of wanted to be a photographer, but I only had a Kodak 110 Instamatic camera. I went to the huge San Jose swap meet, and bought an ancient, manual, Royal typewriter, that came in a carrying case, for $15. I launched my first zine, San Jose Stylin', with the Kodak and the Royal, and money from my Pizza Hut job.
I used a bunch of photos I shot in Boise, and on a trip to an AFA contest in Venice Beach that summer. I laid out where I wanted the photos to be on a sheet of typing paper, traced around them in pencil, and then put that piece of paper into the typewriter, and typed around the photo spots. Then I put the actual photos on the paper with Scotch tape. I didn't even know zines were supposed to be folded in half at first, like little books. I'd never actually seen a real zine, only read about them. My first 2 or 3 zines were just three sheets of paper, with Xeroxed photos and words on both sides, stapled in the top left corner, like a school report.
I worked the second shift at Pizza Hut, and most of my zine work was done late at night, after I got home, from about 1:30 to 4:00 am. The process of producing a zine did a lot for me that I didn't realize then. First of all, it gave me a creative outlet to focus on. Secondly, a zine is only a zine if you finish it, and have something to hand out. I had been a big daydreamer my whole life. But I rarely followed through on anything.
I grew up in small town Ohio, then New Mexico and Idaho. Doing creative work for a living wasn't a thing. I only met one professional artist as a kid. People I knew, and then my friends and I, would hang out, drink beer, and dream up all kinds of crazy ideas. "Hey, we should make a soap opera about stoners and call it, 'As the bong bubbles...'" "We should start a fishing TV show." "We should invent a new kind of fishing reel that doesn't get the line all tangled." Being an artist or filmmaker or something like that simply wasn't an option where and when I grew up. You maybe went to college, then you got a job that you didn't like at one of the big companies in town. After 40 years of misery, and good pay, you got a retirement party, a gold watch, and a pension. That was the life I was told I would have growing up.
But my zine was fun. It was work. It was creative. It broke me out of my repressive shyness a little. I could write whatever I wanted. I could publish my own photos. I could interview pro BMX freestylers. I had to follow through and finish each issue, because people kept asking me about the next one. That's the biggest lesson from my first zine, I learned to buckle down and actually finish a creative project. After a while, it became a habit. That's a big lesson of BMX freestyle, and action sports in general. No one pushes you to do them (or at least then they didn't). Riding was self-directed, we pushed ourselves. When we fell and got hurt, we had to get ourselves back up, and keep trying. You don't get good by sitting around and thinking about it, it was something we had to physically get out and do. And with my zine, I learned to follow through, and finish it, issue after issue.
As an up-and coming rider, I decided that I wouldn't ask pro riders for autographs, like most riders did. I would ask for a handshake, "Hey, I'm Steve Emig, I make a zine, nice to meet you." That makes a huge difference. I also had the sense to send a copy to EACH member of the editorial staff of the three main BMX publishing companies. Wizard Publications put out BMX Action and FREESTYLIN', Hi-Torque put out BMX Plus, and later American Freestyler. Super BMX had their mag, and later a freestyle magazine. I wanted the editors to go out on their coffee break and say, "Hey, did you guys get the new San Jose Stylin' zine? It's pretty cool."
Much to my surprise, that simple idea worked, and I got a chance to write a freelance article for FREESTYLIN' after about six zines. By the time it got on the news stands (about three months lag time back then), I got hired at Wizard, working for both BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines. My zine, started with a manual typewriter and a Kodak instamatic camera, changed the entire course of my life. Suddenly, a month after my 20th birthday, I moved to Southern California, and was part of the BMX industry. That was a big jump from a kid riding in a few parades, in a city with three freestylers, in Boise.
My 11th and final issue of San Jose Stylin' was maybe 20 or 24 zine pages, and I had a (snail) mailing list of 120 people across the U.S.. I still didn't think of myself as a writer, but I had moved up to a Pentax 35mm camera, and was getting better at taking photos. More than anything, finishing creative projects had become a habit. Instead of dreaming new ideas up every couple of days, I actually got to work on some of them. It's easy to start a great creative idea. But working artists of any kind have to actually FINISH projects, often on a deadline. My first zine really helped me figure that out.
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