Conscious Choice: Rock The Bike

May 2008 | Green Scene

Rock The Bike

A new generation of carbon-free musicians brings pedal to the people

by Alastair Bland

Pop stars and big cars have long retained a powerful hold on the hearts of impressionable music fans. Each glitzy, each sexy, each high maintenance and each photogenic, they’ve shared the spotlight for decades, on tour and on MTV. But a fresh undercurrent of musical culture is reinventing what’s cool — and taking gasoline out of the equation. Around the country, musicians are embracing pedal-power, biking from show to show, city to city, even nation to nation. The movement arrives as a reaction to the trends of global hip-hop and mass-produced rock, worlds in which stars may preach socio-political and environmental righteousness yet indulge in glamorous, grossly extravagant limo lifestyles.

Shake Your Peace!, a six-piece folk-soul group in Berkeley, stands at the helm of the bike music revolution. The band has helped fuel the trend both at home and throughout the West, regularly loading their gear — including a cello — onto rear-rack bike extensions called Xtracycles and convoying to their next show. Shake Your Peace!, which began in 2005 as the solo act of 26-year-old lead singer, guitarist and fiddler Gabe Dominguez, now has three bike-powered concert tours on their resume and one currently in progress — a month-long ride around Utah. The band has performed nearly every one of its shows off-the-grid via electric converters rigged to the rear hubs of their bikes, which fans pedal onstage to power the P.A. system and fill the air with carbon-free music.

The bike band revolution can be accredited in large part to bicycle, a lower-case B hard-rock band from Seattle that helped innovate the concept in the late 1990s. The group has inspired and advised other cycling bands in the years since, though bicycle themselves have often toured in the company of a support vehicle.

But not the Ginger Ninjas. In April, this folk-ska band from North San Juan, California (fronted by Xtracycle co-founder Kipchoge Spencer) completed a fully pedal-powered tour of 5000 miles from Lake Tahoe to Chiapas, Mexico. The Ninjas’ tour — called Pleasant Revolution — included 80 dates. So did the Rolling Stones’ 2006 Bigger Bang Tour, but the tired supergroup’s tour also included 80 semi trucks, a jet plane and 37,000 barrels of oil — each incinerated, of course. The Ginger Ninjas, who employed a pedal-powered sound system at most shows, estimate they expended a third of a barrel of oil on their journey.

In Los Angeles dwells the ragtime-gypsy jazz duet The Ditty Bops, two young women who have advocated low-impact, sustainable living for years and who, since their inception in 2003, have managed to balance their ideals with national acclaim and success. They released their second Warner Brothers album, Moon Over the Freeway, in 2006.

“We knew we needed to go on tour to support the record,” says Amanda Barrett, vocalist and mandolinist. “We just didn’t want to get in the back of that van again.”

So she and the group’s other half, Abby DeWald, rode their bikes across the continent on a 4,700-mile, 40-show tour, finishing in New York City after more than 100 days. A supporting musician followed in a biodiesel van, but, hell, the guy plays piano.

In San Francisco, Fossil Fool, “The Bike Rapper,” has achieved an unlikely alchemy. Known more casually as Paul Freedman, the innovative vocalist and tech wizard has blended the shadowy realm of streetside rap with the gentle notion of the bicycle. He rides a massive, self-designed pedal-powered chopper from gig to gig. It’s a bike mean as hell and cool as night. It glows when pedaled and serves as a human-powered P.A. system at Fossil Fool’s mobile street parties, and it gets great gas mileage between venues — which is to say none.

“My character when I perform is a rapper born in an alternate universe where bikes are cool and cars are lame,” says Freedman. “There’s no doubt we live in a car culture, but I also have no doubt that bikes are way cooler. People are sick of the hip-hop culture where the rapper has the newest Mercedes.”

In San Francisco, Fossil Fool and shake your peace! join the Sonya Cotton Band in organizing the second annual Bicycle Music Festival, scheduled for June 21st. Last summer the fledgling event drew 300 spectators as 20 strong-legged bands jammed at venues throughout the city, packing up and shifting camp multiple times between 10 a.m. and 1 a.m. This year, organizers expect a crowd of 800 or more. Meanwhile, media around the nation have covered the accelerating trend, and though mtv still flaunts rappers and rockers in limos and jets, the pedal-powered music revolution may be nearing critical mass. What happens then is still anyone’s guess, but let’s hope it’s downhill.

To hear these bike bands do their thing, check out our free Soundtrack for Change.

Alastair Bland is a freelance writer in San Francisco who spends weekends cycling uphill, marinating halibut and aging beer.

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