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Mike Daily. A lot of you won't recognize the name. Many of you will... if you are a core BMXer, and you stuck with BMX through the 80's and beyond, at the very least you will have heard of his crew, The Plywood Hoods. THE Plywood Fucking Hoods! Friends, please believe me when I say... this is deep. This is the real seminal, core BMX shit... the underground that was so creative and so venerable that it seeped through to the more main stream BMX press and left it's influential mark. From those DIY beginnings in 'zine publishing, Mike went on to eventually work at Go The Rider's Manual and BMX Plus.
To me, Mike is in essence an artist. He is an author, a poet, an improvisational artist, a spoken word performer, a music maker... a 'zine craftsman. And significantly... a BMXer to the core. Talking to him and reading his words, you can feel the integrity, the earnest approach is palpable.
Read this interview... tell me this guy doesn't love BMX. He's one of us.
When the impetus for this interview hatched... it was just going to be a simple few questions to be used as an introduction to the resurgence of his Aggro Rag 'zine. I'm sure you guys noticed... I was pretty hyped on it. I love everything about the OG Aggro Rag... and I was so stoked that it was about to rise again -- a BMX Phoenix. I knew it would be good. When I got the actual 'zine in the mail and started digging in... I was blown away, or rather carried away... right back to the late 80's when skate and punk 'zines were a new phenomena, and in the pre-internet days... 'zines were our "network", they were how we knew that there were others "out there", who were into the same stuff, who shared our interests and best of all - it was not only reassuring and inspiring... but also accessible and open for contribution! We could participate... by submitting to existing 'zines or even doing our own.
Getting Aggro Rag #13 (a favorite number of mine so I considered it auspicious) took me back. I got the feeling of excitement and kinship - just like back in the day. I envisioned Mike, like a mad scientist, pouring over the raw text, cramming the interviews and features into pages and doing the layout in a total old school way. Cutting and pasting with scissors, doing page and photo cuts and glue and tape and a photocopier. I think he actually used photoshop, but humor my fantasy. However he did it... it was like he was back in the proverbial saddle. Mike was back. Aggro Rag was back... a lot of the same old characters were back and featured in the pages of the new issue. And it was absolutely chock full of content. Every inch of page space is filled with "the goods".
Anyway... the few introductory questions to help him re-introduce the 'zine turned into this. I'm very proud of it. Mostly because of the way Matt executed our vision of the interview. Matt always exceeds my high expectations. That said, Mike is an amazing interview subject. He answered the follow up questions before we even asked them. It was like he really understood how this site likes to approach an interview. How we like to go a little deeper and really get to know people. When I got the answers back, I forwarded them to Matt and we discussed it. It was clear... this guy; this interview... deserved our full BMX Society treatment. A 'zine pioneer like Mike Daily should not be relegated to a paragraph or two of text. We wanted to give back a little of what he's given us over the years with Aggro Rag. We wanted to blow him away. Honor him. Pay tribute to a pioneer of the BMX 'zine genre.
I present... the BMX Society's Mike Daily Interview.
Give your eyes a break and click on one of the pdf files. It is easier to read. The jpg's lose some resolution. If you want to print it... and we feel it is worthy, there is a high res version of the pdf. Enjoy.
Mike Daily Interview - Standard Resolution
Mike Daily Interview - High Resolution
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