GO: The Rider's Manual — The Magazine BMX Action and Freestylin' Became

GO: The Rider's Manual — The Magazine BMX Action and Freestylin' Became

A Legend Bike Co. history · written first-hand by Bill Ryan, who wrote the Workshop column for GO in the late 1980s

By 1989 the boom was over and everybody in the room knew it. Two of the best bike magazines ever printed were getting thinner every month, both of them coming out of the same building. So somebody made the hard call. Put them together. One magazine, racing and freestyle under one roof, and a name that fit on a starting gate. They called it GO.

Two magazines, one building

To understand GO you have to back up to where it came from, and that's Bob Osborn and Wizard Publications in Torrance, California. Bob came out of motocross promoting, saw BMX racing catching, and figured the sport needed a magazine the same way it needed a starting gate. The first title started life as Bicycle Motocross Action and by 1983 it had tightened up to plain BMX Action. That was the bible for the racing side.

Then trick riding showed up. Kids in parking lots, under-vert quarterpipes, no gate and no clock. Racing magazines didn't quite know what to do with it. So in 1985 Wizard launched Freestylin', a magazine just for that, and handed it to a young editor named Andy Jenkins. Freestylin' didn't read like a trade journal. It read like the kids who made it — punk records, inside jokes, photos shot at two in the morning behind the warehouse. That tone is the thing that mattered most, and it's the thing GO inherited.

For a few years Wizard ran both. BMX Action for the racers. Freestylin' for the freestyle crowd. Same staff bouncing between the two, same building, same energy. It worked right up until the money stopped.

The hard call

Here's the part nobody likes to talk about. By the back half of the '80s, BMX was coming down off the biggest boom the sport had ever seen. Tracks were quieter. Shops were nervous. And the ad pages — the thing that actually pays for a magazine — were getting harder to fill. Two magazines splitting one shrinking pile of advertising is a losing math problem. Anybody who's run a business knows it.

So Wizard merged them. BMX Action and Freestylin' became one magazine. The first combined issue was dated November 1989. Tim "Fuzzy" Hall on the cover, a can-can seat grab, shot by a kid named Spike Jonze. One hundred pages. Racing in the front half, freestyle in the back, all of it under one cover for the first time.

They were smart about the changeover. For the first three issues the front of the magazine still carried both the FREESTYLIN' and BMX ACTION logos, so a kid standing at the newsstand would recognize what he was holding. If you subscribed to either one, you just started getting GO instead. The clean GO logo — "GO: The Rider's Manual" — took over with the February 1990 issue. That February cover is the one collectors call the real first GO, even though three issues had already shipped.

What GO actually was

The subtitle told you the whole idea. The Rider's Manual. Not a fan magazine you read and threw out. A manual. Something you kept on the floor next to your bike with grease thumbprints on the corner.

That's where my end of it lived. I wrote the Workshop column for GO in the late '80s — the hands-on section, the part that showed you how to actually set the thing up and keep it running. How to true a wheel. How to set a headset so it didn't knock. How to bleed... how to bleed and adjust and tighten and not strip the threads doing it. Wrenching stuff. The unglamorous half of riding that nobody puts on a poster but every rider has to learn or quit. Workshop was the magazine living up to its own name. A rider's manual ought to teach you to work on your own bike, and that's what that page was for.

The masthead in those early issues reads like a who's who of people who went on to do bigger things than anybody expected. Mark Lewman and Mike Daily editing. Spike Jonze on photography — the same Spike Jonze who later directed movies and Beastie Boys videos, back when he was just the squeaky-voiced kid from a Maryland bike shop who never put his camera down. Jeff Tremaine running the art before he went off and built Jackass. Andy Jenkins, gOrk — Craig Barrette — and a whole crew of riders writing their own scene reports. Bob Osborn over the top of all of it as publisher, out of Wizard Publications on Del Amo Boulevard in Torrance.

That was the magic of the place, and it carried straight into GO. The people making it were the people living it. Bob figured that out early. He'd rather hand the thing to riders who loved it than to trained journalists who didn't, and you can feel that on every page.

The covers tell the story

Flip through the GO run and you're flipping through the whole turn of the sport at the end of the '80s into the early '90s. Matt Hoffman before he was the Condor, snapping shots eight feet out of a quarterpipe. Dennis McCoy pulling air at the Dominguez ramp. Rick Moliterno. Brian Blyther can-canning in Hermosa Beach. The racing side too — Greg Hill, Gary Ellis, the ABA and NBL nationals covered week to week. How-to sequences in the back: lookbacks, fufanus, nose wheelies, the tricks that were brand new and had no settled names yet.

That's the value of these old magazines, and it's why I bother writing any of this down. A lot of what happened in BMX in that window only exists because somebody at Wizard shot it and printed it. No printout, no proof. GO is a few years of the sport's memory, bound and dated.

How it ended

It didn't last. GO ran from that November 1989 issue to March 1992 — Brian Lopes on the last cover. A little over two years.

The reason is the same reason it got created in the first place, just turned the other way. The merger was supposed to save money by running one magazine instead of two. But freestyle had splintered into a dozen competing titles by the early '90s, the bike industry was still hurting, and the advertising never came back the way it needed to. As one British editor put it at the time, GO kept the fire going, but the industry didn't get it and pulled its money. When the ad money goes, the magazine goes. That's not a mystery. That's just the business, and I've watched it play out in more than one corner of this world.

The people landed fine. Better than fine. The Wizard crew scattered into Homeboy, then Dirt, then Grand Royal, Girl Skateboards, Big Brother, Hollywood. A startling number of the names on those GO mastheads went on to shape skateboarding, magazines, and movies for the next twenty years. The magazine died. The talent that built it absolutely did not.

What we don't know

A few things I want to be straight about, because I'd rather flag a gap than paper over it.

  • Exact circulation numbers for GO aren't something I've seen published. I'm not going to make one up. It was a real national magazine on real newsstands; the precise figures, I can't source.
  • The staff list shifted over the run. The names above are mostly from the early issues. Editors and shooters came and went — Brad McDonald is shooting by 1991, for instance — so don't read any one masthead as the whole story.
  • My own Workshop column: I wrote it, and I stand behind that. The full month-by-month record of exactly which issues carried it isn't something I have in front of me, so I'm not going to pretend to a precise run of dates.

Related Legend Bike Co. chapters

Sources

23mag.com — "GO BMX Magazine 1989–1990" and "GO BMX Magazine 1991–1992" issue-by-issue archives, including the editor's note from issue 1 on the dual logos, the staff list (Mark Lewman, Mike Daily, Spike Jonze, Jeff Tremaine, Bob Osborn / Wizard Publications), and the November 1989 first issue through March 1992 final issue. Oldschoolmags.com — Wizard Publications history and the 1989 merger of BMX Action and Freestylin' into GO; magazine PDF archive (GO masthead: Wizard Publications, Inc., Torrance, California). Slam City Skates blog — Anthony Pappalardo interview with Mark Lewman on Wizard Publications, the founding of Freestylin', the merger into GO, and the staff who came out of it. Workshop column firsthand: Bill Ryan, who wrote the Workshop tech column for GO in the late 1980s.