Bash Brothers

Time to re-visit the Subrosa Bash bike. I wanted to get into more detail today, only Sher never wrote me back. Ron Bonner did—to say that Sher had gotten my e-mail and to never hesitate to e-mail either of them with questions—but that's it. At least Subrosa ran a better photo of the bike (and some of the thoughts behind it) on their site. I'll post another update if/when I hear back from Ryan. I'm curious to know some things that aren't revealed on the site—like the price, availability and any sort of specs.

But for now, let's get into a little history, shall we?

Like I mentioned before, the Subrosa's bashguard is just a scaled-down version of the old Bully design, as seen below:


So let's talk about Bully. It's kind of an odd frame—and an odd company—to pay homage to. R.L. Osborn, who started Bully, was one of the most well-known freestylers in the '80s, thanks to his dad—BMX media mogul Bob Osborn, the founder of BMX Action and the owner of Wizard Publications (later responsible for Freestylin' and Go). R.L. was not only a member of the BMX Action Trick Team, he also got quite a few covers over the years. It's possible that his last name may have had something to do with this. Later on he entered contests, but it was obvious the future belonged to up-and-comers like Rick Moliterno, Kevin Jones and Dennis McCoy.

Then in the late '80s, everything changed. Street riding happened. All of a sudden uniforms weren't cool, contest runs were secondary to the riding that went on outside the venues, and meticulously color-matched neon bikes were out. Born showmen like Martin Aparijo and Woody Itson went the way of the bolt-on standing platform. Others survived: Pete Augustin, once a flatlander for CW and Schwinn, was reborn as "The Disgustman," a ripped, tattooed, neighborhood-terrorizing skinhead. Dave Voelker showed he could shred just as hard on the streets as he could on a halfpipe. A crew of grimy San Diego misfits started calling themselves the Dirt Brothers. And then there was R.L.

R.L. was one of those guys on the fast road to irrelevancy. He'd spent his career wearing uniforms and riding in demos and contests. Not very street. Also, he was already over 25—ancient for a freestyler in the '80s. Only he was making piles of money and, oh yeah, his dad ran the BMX media. So he had no problem staying in the magazines. R.L. went from clean-cut Cali boy to slightly more "street" to patently ridiculous in no time flat. (Admittedly, he made fun of himself in a Hammer ad.) He was 26 when he added the ridiculous fake dreads (think Dan Aykroyd in Trading Places), and was allegedly pulling down $350,000 a year. So with his first company, the aforementioned Hammer Bodywear, doing well, and no main bike sponsor, he decided to start a bike company, too. That was Bully.

Osborn used his considerable influence (and even considerabler bankroll) to put together a killer team. There was vert vet Mike Dominguez (below), who—if you believe the stories—only rode in contests, never took his bike out of the box otherwise, and rode with everything hand-tight, yet still killed it. There was British skatepark rider Craig Campbell, who'd moved to the States and become a miniramp and street destroyer. There was Indiana flatlander Perry Mervar, famous for "Perry's Doom," a rolling leap of faith from the rear pegs straight to the grips. And later there were Cali street riders Vic Murphy and Mike Krnaich, who enjoyed mismatched wheels and must have broken a frame a week. Others who eventually rode for Bully included Jon Byers, who went on to start Eastern, and some crazy Canadian kid named Jay Miron.

The bikes? Well. The first Bullys were sewer-pipe disasterpieces with sloppy welds and absurdly relaxed angles. Best thing about them were the Marc McKee designed graphics and the two-tone paint. They looked street enough, but I knew flatlanders who broke them.

Funny thing is, Bully later went on to produce a frame with no bashguard (from an allegedly higher grade of chromoly) that was ridden by Mervar as well as Murphy, who ran a Sprocket Pocket for his sprocket-protection needs. I'm convinced Dominguez only rode a bashguard bike because he didn't care what he rode—he could have done 540s six feet out on a beach cruiser. And R.L. himself, who was about as street as Richard Marx, rode a bashguard bike because he was in the business of selling bashguard bikes. In the most self-serving (and embarassing) bike check in BMX history, R.L. ran down the parts on his personal ride—a box-stock Bully, of course—for the February 1990 issue of Go. (Sample text: "WHEELS: 'Aluminum wheels, rubber tires, ahhh...'") This from a guy whose impressively anal bike checks in BMX Action used to feature blow-by-blow descriptions of how he modified his rear coaster hub. I'm not saying that people can't change, but R.L. was a real street rider like Milli Vanilli were real singers. And everyone knew it.

Anyway, bashguard bikes lasted for less than a decade before being killed off by solidly built, bare-bones frames from companies like S&M and Hoffman. It was a lot like the early mammals peacing out the last of the dinosaurs, just without the asteroid impacts. (There's a pretty good history of bashguard frames here, if you're interested in the rise and fall.) Bashguard bikes were good for the big companies, because they were able to a) sell new frames to kids who already had perfectly good bikes, and b) promote street riding in their ads despite explicitly prohibiting it in their "lifetime" warranties. According to the fine print, those bikes just weren't built for that sort of thing. And it was hard to claim "just riding along" when your frame was dented to hell, or your tissue-paper dropouts were destroyed. It wasn't planned obsolescence as much as it was mutually assured destruction. Fine if you were a factory rider, not so much if you were buying your own bikes.

Which at long last brings us to the Subrosa bike:


It's more or less a Bully minus the standing platform, but with modern upgrades like an integrated headset, small dropouts and gyro tabs. Not only did they knock off Bully's bashguard design (which admittedly was the best of a bad bunch back in the day, and looks much better when designed around a smaller sprocket), they paid homage to McKee with the skeleton and rose graphics. (McKee's ad for Bully was even awesomer.) The original Bullys came with a cooler parts package, though. Four-piece bars should have been a must, fellas.


I don't see a bashguard resurgence ever happening. And I don't think Subrosa expects there to be one—if they make more than 100 of these things, I'll be surprised. They should be able to sell that many to nostalgia-crazed 30-somethings and curious 20-somethings. Your average weight-weenie teenager wouldn't touch this thing with a an uncut Macneil 330.

What's weird to me is that Sher states that the Bash bike "embodies a time that was about progression and change in control of the riders," when to me it embodies the exact opposite. The companies that pushed bashguard bikes the hardest were the big corporations—GT/Dyno, Haro and Mongoose. S&M was making frames before the bashguard era, but they never made a bashguard bike. Neither did Hoffman. Wilkerson Airlines did, but Ron always was a little different from the rest of us.

Progression? The bashguard didn't represent progression. It was a mere mutation in the gene pool, like standing platforms or Z-Rims. A BMX appendix. Bashguard bikes were heavy and unwieldly, yet they were still weak enough that your average 13-year-old could destroy one in a summer. When they passed on in the mid-'90s, I don't recall a single rider shedding a tear. Around 1993 I replaced my broken 1991 GT Aggressor with a 1985 Haro Sport and considered it an upgrade.

If anything, bashguard bikes represented the Hot Topicification of BMX—big companies finding a way to profit from a legitimate movement. Only riders were slowly waking to the fact that they didn't NEED these companies to tell them what was cool. The time period that followed has been dubbed the "dark days" of BMX, as bike sales dropped precipitously, pro riders were forced to get real jobs, and magazines went out of business. But BMX never died, it just re-focused. Those may have been dark days financially, yes, but they also birthed rider-owned companies like S&M, Hoffman and Standard, not to mention Ride magazine and Props. Dark days? No way. That was the period of enlightenment, as riders realized how much power they really had. What followed was the Renaissance. Bashguard bikes were an end, not a beginning.

Then again, if Mötley Crüe can still sell out gigs, and people are willing to pay $400 for grips that sucked in the '80s, and Knight can produce stuff like this, well, maybe it's fine.

After all, if I've learned anything over the years, it's that there's no accounting for taste.


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I'm sorry, but YouTube embedding being disabled is just plain stupid. That said, I was gonna post this video today no matter what.

But just to have something embedded...