https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWpcb9T-o9g
Crusty Demons Talk Show
Vault of Chaos
Watch Live Tuesdays at 3pm Pacific Time.
This little almost there. 1 second. Okay, it’s popped away. Excellent. And here we go guys.
So watch the countdown and then I’ll pop off with Seth.
Wow, that’s pretty good. What’s up? Hey, Bob. Hey, what’s up, free dog? How are you doing?
What happened, Dano? We lost your partner. Yeah, he fell off the chair. I think he fell off the chair. Told you I was coming out.
Do I got time to grab my coffee? I hope so.
You got to come prepared. Hey, are we live, Bob? Are we coming at you live right now? Live? We’re live.
Okay. Welcome to the first podcast to the Crusty demons. Yeah. Welcome everybody from around the world. Yes.
How do everyone? Yeah, and I guess we’re going to probably just kick this one off. How the hell did we come up with crusty one, Jayna?
Probably starts back with snowboarding all the way back. Let’s just wind it back then. Okay. For all you, welcome to our new podcast here we got Barbara in the house, myself, Dana Nicholson, John Freeman. And let’s get into storytime.
And we’re going to kick this whole thing off. We’ll kick it off with the old days. So winding back, the whole movie thing started with snowboarding all boils down to back in the day. Once upon a time, there was a guy called Freedog Creatures a Habit. Yeah, I think we met each other on one of the Southern California local mountains up here, like Big Bear or Snow Summit, something like that.
And I was out filming with a guy named Burt Lamar back then, and you were in the half pipe and I was just coming off of filming with Kelly Slater and that project was called Kelly Slater in Black and White. And you had heard about it. And I think you pulled me aside and you said, hey, why don’t you make a movie on what we do snowboarding? Well, if you remember back then, the first snowboard movies just come out. And I’ve lived in Tahoe as a professional snowboarder.
I came down into California and no one in California, in Southern California was doing that. So when I met you and Creatures of Habit became the first snowboard adventure into one you and I movie career together. Me as an athlete, you as a filmmaker. And I believe the snowboard movies are the first time we actually put Bob on film. In one of the snowboard movies, creatures have it on a snow chopper that I made them.
Right? Yeah, we shot a rocket into your head, Bob. Shot. I’ve been making stuff for you, Bob, for a long time, haven’t I? Sending it real quick.
Fill it in Bob, for a second. Well, back then these guys were snowboarders pro snowboarders. They made snowboard movies, surfing movies, whatever it is. I worked in the dirt bike industry. That’s what got me out to California and moved into this place.
And a guy named Brian manley was helping me out and I’d go to the races with him. And he lived in the same complex as Dana, like a Melrose Place complex. And, you know, he was one of the apartments in it. So we got we felt Huntington Beach. Huntington Beach, California, which at that time, which is mid ninety s, I guess, was 93, 94, we all met, you know, roughly 92, 93, 94, we all met.
But Huntington Beach, man, a guy from Virginia, come back there, that was the best place in the world to be, was Huntington Beach. I was like, you’re kidding me. We got to live here. You know what I mean? But that’s why I met all you guys and met all the action sports stars in those industries, your industries.
And I worked in the dirt bike industry or motorcycle industry, which was so conservative run and stuff like that. Let me plug in here real quick, just to chime in.
I was thinking about this whole podcast. I was thinking about what we talked about, thinking about this whole kind of where motorcycles motocross is today, freestyle motocross, right where we came from. Snowboarding, basically, where in surfing, skate, snow, surf industry. Yeah, pretty much time action sports. Right?
So I kind of recapped a little bit into my snowboard industry career, my snowboard career. And I was thinking like, man, when we started doing these films, we were pretty good at instigating a lot of stuff and having fun and kind of one up, you do it, I do it type of thing. And going into the first The Crusty Demons movies with John and I think it was already too late. It was already in our blood of that’s kind of the way we rolled it with what you’re saying right now. We go to the beach, Huntington Beach, john would be visiting and you would make us, Dean, go to the swap meet and buy a $20 bicycle, three speed up on the swap meet.
And then we would pack it around Huntington Beach, like 2030 of us. And then you run the stairs to the beach on the three speed and you made them do it. And whoever did it stepped up for the day, just for the day. And it was like the Sunday beach or Saturday went out in honey. Everyone was watching us.
But that was just us rolling around the beach on three speeds. We’re not even filming yet. I mean, that’s kind of my point. There was film wait, hang on. Video cameras, a lot of white belts.
Most of them got done without film, though. In the early days of Huntington, when we were snowboarders, that’s kind of how we rolled. And then when we bring the snowboard movie element into it. But I must say to that story with the three speeds, brian Manley was the one guy that was the major link between us and snowboarding and the major stars in the industry. Of motocross.
All. Hats off to Brian. And he’ll be coming up on one of our shortcoming podcast. Brian’s ass did a double on Staircase, which was the movie Stair escalator. No, they were the metal sharp edges.
And he ripped it on the three star escalator coming down from the second story of the movie theater. Yeah. No, he peddled into that thing I’ve never seen by pedal into it that hard. He hit it with some speed dog. Ryan stepped it up.
Yeah, he actually moved into Huntington. We turned his dirt bike into a chopper. Well, that’s what started it all. He left his dirt bike in my garage, full factory dirt bike. When we turned it into a chopper.
And unbeknownst to him, he probably opened the garage and found what you built for him. Yeah, it’s in the movie. Okay. So trustee one going back to that whole train of thought. I’m kind of like, man, I know we instigate a lot of stuff and we broke a lot of shit, but we definitely paid for what we broke.
And we made a lot of people stars. And a lot of times we stepped up and did I didn’t instigate too much shit. We did it with them. Right.
You guys stepped up, but if you got called out, you either bitched out or you did it. Right. I guess what I’m saying is, I stuck a stick in a lot of spokes by stuck in my own spokes also. Right. You did a couple of car wheels, but like, McCarron did it with flip flops on.
Yeah, I planned my crash like Freedog. I knew I was going to crash anyway. So I looked forward back in the creatures days when Freedog was going around filming us on snowboards. And that’s where the kind of the skits came in. We would do these funny skits.
I’d build little vehicles, and Johnny would come up with these crazy house ideas.
The trike snowboard with jet engine on them is what I was bubba was I enjoyed doing this with dana was a pro snowboarder. I wanted some comedy and I wanted skits. I didn’t want to just have big jumps, adventure. That was all part of it. We ended up going all over the world with snowboards, but I wanted comedy.
Like when I did Kelly Slater in black and white. We came up with comedy for this young kid that turned 18 and turned pro. And it was funny and it was the real guy that came out. And so we adapted a bit of that into creature’s habit. And we had funny guys like Sean Palmer, Andy Hetzel, the bastard guys.
We had Brett Johnson. Dana and I was like, man, these are perfect guys. Dana introduced me at that time to Kemper Snowboards. So we had a little bit of a budget, I think maybe $10,000. To me, that was like a million dollars.
I could take $10,000 and take people all over the place. We could make skits we could, you know, go to, because we’d get free tickets because I would go to the marketing people. If you remember, Dana and I remember you guys were standing outside like, hurry up, free dog, before anybody gets up on like, snowbird mammoth. So we were pretty lucky to get all that. And then we figured out people in these places that we could do skit, like that country mammoth.
And I thought of a double Ozabo. So we had Don Zabo, which I made into like a spoof of James Bond. And that’s where Dana came up with the vehicles. Him. And Damien coming up.
It’s kind of like your bubble skits.
Bubba kind of introduces us to sat asked a kid from Pennsylvania, and his old deal was he saw snowboard movies. He knew from the snowboard movies, and that’s why he had the idea to come out and meet up with us. But getting back to the nitty gritty of crusty demons one, after what I think it was, six years of six titles of movies with Creatures of Habit, I came to John with the idea of doing the on any Sunday type of I think it was a combination of you and Brian Manley. Now, Brian Manley is the one I came brian Manley, before you even knew him. It had nothing to do with Brian.
The whole idea the whole idea of making a dirt bike movie like our movie was coming in that style yeah. Was coming to you and Brian Manley was our introduction to be able to ride with other riders. I didn’t introduce you to a lot of these people until I was already handing over footage. That’s why we invested in the first camera for me, and we started filming hey. We started actually putting the footage that I would film with Brian and McGrath and them in the Creatures of habit.
Creatures of habit. And people are really starting to go, wow. But that’s kind of when Brian stepped in, wow was Sean Palmer came to me and he said, dude, we need to do more of that in the movie. Put more of those guys McGrath manly Emma back then. Emma, he’s like, dan.
Coming from my roots as a professional snowboarder, I’ve been going to the sandings since I was in 8th grade. And when I was in junior high, 6th grade, junior high, we had the dirt field behind our house. We had the mini bikes, and we had the XR seventy five S. And then we started going to as we got older, we started doing the dirt bike tracks. But Dumont Dunes was the place that really struck me when I was growing up younger.
And we started riding kind of the ATCs and the dirt bikes and free riding. That’s where it really tipped off kind of full circle to you how our snowboard career, our film career, it was the same kind of majesty, writing beautiful places and that type of adventure. And I think at that time there was nothing there, but on any Sunday back in the day was an outline, I would say. I don’t even know if they went to Dumont. Maybe not necessarily on any Sunday was kind of more of, well, that’s what got me into dirt bikes.
It was motocross racing and then free riding certain areas. And then coming out, you had to move to California to work in the industry, and it was all motocross, dirt bike racing, woods, desert, whatever it was. There was no free riding yet. There was no freestyle motocross yet. I worked at the Yamaha shop up the street and a couple of other companies as well.
But I come home to Huntington Beach. You know what I mean? And that’s what you guys were. And then John would come down and stuff like that. But the weekend trips with you guys to Dumont, Jones, Acateia Wells, and some of those places, I’m from the East Coast.
I’ve never seen mountains of sand or open desert like that. And then you’d have McGrath with you or Emmig with you, and then whoever, all the names came out, because that’s what they do on the weekends off season, would go out and ride the desert and have fun and shovel up hits and this, that, and the other. I’ve never seen it before, so I was blown away when I did. Well, that’s what kind of got us back in the day, Bob, was we would go out with Brian in Manley’s Ass since we was a good free rider, man, and a good racer as well, and he was a bastard. He used to send me off every trail and every town trail in sight.
He’d tell everybody else, go around, and Dana’s going to follow me. That’s because you ran your mouth. He makes me the hardship, right? Being a pro snowboarder, I stuck his ass on top of Mammoth and just sent it off a 40 foot cliff and left him there like a cat on I left him up there like a cat on a raft dog. Just no way down.
I think that’s funny, but that’s the way it was. Everyone, well, not so much me, but one up in each other to do this, and Damien Sanders, all those guys would come out riding as well. You guys had a crew zabo, like we said. And then the Motocross crew, which were racers back then, they were Motocross racers.
I’ll tell you what, if you really want to get to the thing that struck the cord in me, that really the moment in time where I said, you know what? These fucking guys need a movement like we do. No, this is the moment in time is because I became friends with Manly, and I enjoyed fucking sending him off a cliff. And we go ride with him and we trade gear, and they give us their gade fucking neon shit. Okay, so we went to go see Brian Manley race at Supercross in La Coliseum, right?
Yes. And Brian kicked Ass is an amazing rider. But I remember he got like 7th place or something like that. Yeah. And the whole thing was if he didn’t get which is good.
Well, no, the whole thing was if you didn’t get in that sport, if you didn’t get number one, two or three, nobody knew who the fuck you were at all. And that was the point I went to. We go ride with these guys on the weekend. They’re amazing, nobody sees it. And that’s when I went to with John.
Look, we need to do the same movie as a snowboard movie because nobody knows who these guys are unless you’re on that podium. And then that’s kind of fucked up. And that time remember John, the industry, they all had collar shirts in the pits you couldn’t have attached to you. I remember Jimmy Button, one of these guys were hanging out with buttons and McGrath and them. And if you can’t have piercings, you can’t call your hair.
You’re not freaking fine because they got a piercing. They got fine because they got a chat to you caller shirt. It was horrifying. That’s why when our first movie came out, the industry was horrified. They loved it, but they were biting their tongue.
They couldn’t say nothing. The Mitch paint from Pro Circuit was at our premiere. The Fox guys were chimed in and for a few days kind of like of these guys like McGrath Emek, you couldn’t get behind the ropes with these guys, but Manly pushed us in. Not only pushed us in behind the ropes with those guys, but we’re like poking funny stupid things in front of them. That’s like a microphone made out of a stick.
And there’s ESPN trying to film these guys and we’re over there just poking a stick and they’re just like, what are you doing? And then they started loving us and inviting us to their homes. One concept Hammer got to go behind these racers lives like the 50s with Emmett. Well, you started that one. The concept that we’ve always done with our movies, Johnny, was inside out.
We always went from the inside of the industry out. We’ve come as professional athletes and we became friends with surfers, skaters, snowboarders from around the world before Crusty Demons as professional athletes and myself as a filmmaker, as a filmmaker filming my sports that I love to do. And that’s how going into ride a motorcycle or go to a guy surfing or whatever, that’s another athlete is a common respect. And when we come into the industry like that, the people in the industry really couldn’t do much. About a couple of years for Crusty One to sell copies to get into the system for about a month.
Yeah, we sent a copy to a couple of motocross motorcycle industry. And they didn’t know what for sale. They were like, what is it? They had no idea. So I sent them out to my distributors.
That is surf skate. Yeah, they were cool. And that went out and then heard about it and they were like, you know what’s this? Crusty demons with dirt. How do we get it at our local motocross shop?
So people start calling because they were in snowboard shops, surf shops, skate shops, and that’s how Crusky One got distributed. The motocross shops, they didn’t want it. They were like, what is it? Do you know the movie? Well, actually, motorcycle shops would start a video section and that would bring people into their store.
And then I know when crusty I worked at a motorcycle shop, I think it was crusty two and three. When it starts getting more and more preorders, remember that when they started pre ordering it. And we preordered a lot. And then all of a sudden, all these shops, you’d have all these pre orders before they even duplicated. And that was a good start of it.
But that’s the way it was back then, too. And that’s how you filled your we didn’t know how to duplicate that many movies. Yeah, I had no idea. Learn all that stuff. You got to remember back then, it was VHS, so they needed to know how long the tape was, which we didn’t know how long the tape was till we were finished, so they couldn’t reorder the tape.
So there’s always a little bit of a dilemma.
The funny thing is, we kind of lost back in that day, we had Rockdog, remember? And I was a guy that was actually a duplicator, and he let me have a little piece of his office that I was editing, creatures of Habit. Then it moved on to Krusky and he didn’t know how to fulfill that many tapes. It was like, yeah, he didn’t know what to do. Like Dana said, he had to run his tapes at real time.
I remember working at a motorcycle shop and have a level A list, literally a month, six weeks before the date that was supposed to be released. And people on that list got their movie first, you know what I mean? When they got duplicated by the case and they got distributed to the stores. And that was a big deal because we’d have two or three boxes sold, 100 a box, you know what I mean? Before.
I remember our driver. We called him Rod Dogs. And his biggest thing that he had then was times 1000 no, religion was his biggest thing because he promised the religious people that you’re going to make Jesus the Christ and this and that. And then I came in with extreme sport. But the one thing that the religion people said, you can’t make pornographic copies because what if one gets slipped into the box wrong?
So that’s why he was getting good orders and then he hit me and he’s like, I don’t even know how to keep up with these kind of orders.
Let’s change the subject back to the snowboard industry. The funny thing, you were saying how in the beginning, the motorcycle industry didn’t really know how to react the freestyle motocross competition, which we kind of pretty much invented, modeled after a snowboard competition as a contest or as a spectacle, is what you’re saying. No, my point is freestyle motocross. Well, Lofty and I pretty much invented the whole concept that must have been like crusty four was only crusty three. So it was Crusty four that we were doing.
That right. But listen, the first competition I held with Lofty and Jimbo in Las Vegas, because it was an obord trade show, NSA and the snowboard industry understood that. The motor motorcycle industry didn’t understand it. The freestyle motocross industry that we thought of a competition to do, like a big, giant bowl. Yeah, john Pastrana won that, I think mainly came up with that idea.
You’re an idiot. I came up with it with Lofty in my own fucking garage. I’m sitting in. There you go. Are you busy?
Yeah, I remember because I remember you guys put it on a cardboard box and you put clay jumps and benefit. I remember seeing it at Ses house. That’s what I remember. Yeah, we made it. And you guys got a clay model.
Yeah, it was cool. Sitting, having breakfast. Yeah. I brought Fox in flesh gear ourselves. Crusty Demons.
But anyways, the first competition, we picked a different venue, which we pulled the plug. And our first venue was at a snowboard trade show in Las Vegas because the snowboard industry understood it and it worked. It stuck. But, yeah, it was in the parking lot at the Las Vegas Speedway where they have NASCAR. It wasn’t necessarily parking lot.
They have two areas where they have dirty we did go to NASCAR, so NASCAR had a bunch of people there, too. But then we were drawing from the snowboard industry because the whole trade show was going on then. And we’re wondering, is anybody going to show up to this thing? And we could see lights as far as you could see of cars coming from Las Vegas. Well, that’s what I’m just remembered.
It was huge. That’s my whole point of the Conversation job. That’s why the date was chosen. That’s why I chose the date, was because of the snowboard industry. That’s the whole point.
The whole concept of it. And it works because of the snowboard industry. Just like Crusty won the movie was because of the snowboard industry, is what brought it to life. That’s basically the point. But, yeah, the crusty one getting that off the ground.
Maybe next week we’ll have to bring in Manly for a plug or something. For a plug. He’s pretty excited about this. So Brian’s got quite a history with us from Crusty One till now. Even back in Snowboarding, we used to take them up to Manlist and all kinds of places.
Yeah, well, the Crusty One, I would say between Brian Minley and Joel Albrick being our major outlet to some of the top riding in Southern California in the early days, and a couple of the best train riders of all time up in Southern California. And then Access, because we used to take like, McGrath and Emmett and all them into the hills. You know, the COVID shot on Crusty One was the first day that Emmett ever rode in the sand dunes. He never rode sand dunes before we took him out there. He didn’t even know what it was.
He just followed Brian, manley. Brian’s like, okay, hit it in third. Brian grew up riding with his dad, following his dad all over the hills. And that’s why Brian has so many skills. And it’s like you’re saying, most of these places, even with the top guys, like Emmy, brian would be the leader of the fucking he leads the train.
And then we’d come across like, McGrath. And I was like, holy crap, that guy is a freak. Yeah, he’s going up cliffs, falling off cliffs, all those guys.
Oh, my god. Yeah. Phil Lawrence. Remember him? Yeah, Phil.
Remember Ryan Rhino was a good one. Race guys that did the free riding. You know what it was? Racer guys that like to do shit like we did that just have fun and wreck shit and blow shit up, you know what I mean? And then we had reckless guys that were like Metzger that tried to do like tricks on a motorcycle.
We’re like, what’s the guy doing? Like some Superman thing? And he land, hit his nuts at he’s like, oh, dude, did you get the shot? Yeah, we got the shot. Well, the metro wrist and my balls.
Remember the metzger degan show? In the beginning, they just wanted to actually, they were the rebel racers, racers that wanted to do their own thing. So they already kind of had a little bit of a wire wheel going with some of the racers we were working with, which is kind of funny. They were a little younger than, like, Emmett and McGrath. Yeah, the little young punks coming in.
And we saw their character, and I was like, that’s perfect. Remember this other guy came in on Crusty One in a big way? Well, that’s where you came in, budh. And you guys came in yeah, from another racer guy that came out to California from back east. Just hooked up.
Seth just hooked up with them. They went bumper to bumper all the way across the country to come ride California and stuff. And I met Seth when I worked at RaceTech or something like that. And Seth in the back hit his dirt bike, and then he had a snowboard. And I was like, that’s when I started talking about, hey, I know the snowboarder.
And I talked about you and creatures of habit and all that stuff. And he knew about it. He was like, fuck, okay, that’s sweet. You got to introduce me those guys. And then we shoot the shit.
Drinking a beer, smoking a bowl. Then he’s from Pennsylvania or upstate New York, something like that. And he breaks out a deer antler, a deer antler and smokes a bowl out of a deer antler. And I’m going, oh, you are from Pennsylvania, son. But that was funny.
But that was a long time ago. But that was 25 plus years ago, guys. Yeah. What do you guys think? You guys want to wrap this first show up as our first tester kick off just to finish on Seth.
He earned it from there. Seth will come in through this conversation every time we get on. But God bless. It’s a good topic next week to kick the show off with Bob. Start off with the cessaga.
Yeah, I did give him a job doing drywall with me and then spent his last $100 on a street gun. And then I split to Japan for a couple of weeks ago. Snowboarding. Well, at least you gave my job. And he got to stay.
I mean, there’s so much shit that came along, you know what I mean? Boom, boom, boom when anybody placed on 17th street. And the rest is history, guys. But we’ll tell you about that here in the next. Everything that we talk about on these shows, these podcasts from here on out, just bringing in a lot of memories like we just went through times 100, times a billion.
I think the plan, guys, times a million for all you guys, the fans out there. And you write in, we’re going to be doing this every Tuesday, 03:00 in the afternoon, California time. And it’s going to be me and Dana and Bob. And we’re going to have guests coming in and we’re going to take questions from you guys. But I think this is a good introduction for the three of us.
And we talked a little bit about the origin of how Crusty got going, how Snowboarding with me and Dana got going. And I spent seven years with Dana on those films before Crusty came along. So Crusty Gosh, that was in 1994, guys. The stories we can tell.
Come up with questions because this is a good time to get us. We’re excited about this podcast. Dana. Yeah, we’re going to be coming at you. And we’re actually working on new project.
Legends of Film will be a film. We’re coming out with a documentary. So while we’re doing this podcast, we’re going to be doing interviews with different filmmakers also and different athletes that we’ve worked with over the years. And we’re going to be taking away on this Legends film project. And we’ll tell you guys more about that as it goes along.
So we’ll see you guys next week. Tune in same time, same bath at channel 03:00 at the Bike racks. 03:00 at the bike rack. I love it. Yeah, leave the deer antler at home.
All right. Peace out, doggy. All right, I don’t know how to chime out, but I’m going to chime tip.