A snapshot from a festival on wheels

San Francisco is a notoriously bike-friendly town. The famous critical mass ride began right here in 1992. Now, on any given day or night you can find biking events with a collective spirit: The SF Bike Party, the casual Wednesday evening Butterlap ride, group tours led by the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition. So, it makes perfect sense that the city by the bay would be home to the first all-pedal-powered outdoor music festival. It took place on June 18th this year. KALW’s Ali Budner brings us this postcard.

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ALI BUDNER: It’s a sunny morning at Stowe Lake Meadow in Golden Gate Park and the grass is already strewn with bikes. Amid the tinkering and whirring sounds of pedals and wheels, there’s an excited chatter of voices. The 5th annual Bicycle Music Festival is getting into gear.

And for this festival, musicians aren’t the only ones warming up.

BARON HIRSCHBERGER: My name is Baron Hirschberger, and I think I’m generating power for some sound checks and testing.

Hirschberger is just one of scores of volunteers who will power the stage with their own legs.

HIRSCHBERGER: Really I’m just trying to make these lights in front of me turn blue, which are flashing red right now.

BUDNER: Is it hard?

HIRSCHBERGER: Well, I wouldn’t say it’s hard, but it’s definitely demanding, as you can hear by my breathing. But it’s fun to see how much power it takes.

GABE DOMINGUEZ: We’re kind of harvesting from the human garden of sweat.

Gabe Dominguez co-founded this festival with Paul Freedman of Rock the Bike, a Berkeley-based business that provides pedal-powered stages for various events. Dominguez breaks down how it works.

DOMINGUEZ: So, Lance Armstrong can put out 500 watts when he’s bicycling down the street.

Lance Armstrong needs that power to keep moving.

DOMINGUEZ: But if you elevated Lance Armstrong’s rear wheel and he was pedaling in place, and if you hooked it up to a generator, instead of using electricity, you’d be producing electricity.  And so if you hook that motor up to Lance Armstrong’s wheel, you have 500 watts of power that you can use to run anything you want.

Like… a concert. Generating power with bicycles isn’t a new idea.  Even powering a stage with bikes has been done before.

DOMINGUEZ: In the 80s up in Humboldt this guy named Bart Orlando was doing pedal-powered concerts and he had a giant sound system that he would bring in on a truck bed and it would be hauled in with fossil fuels.

But for this event, everything needed for the festival is packed in and packed out on the backs of bicycles. 

DOMINGUEZ: ...hauling giant speakers and just huge bags of audio equipment, bicycle powered ice cream makers, and just so much stuff.

The festival needs between 2 and 5 kilowatt hours of power to run the mics, lights, amps, and speakers for the 14 bands performing throughout the day. The power comes from volunteers in the audience who take turns pedaling. And you can actually see when the bikers get tired because the sound will literally falter or the lights will flicker. This can also happen if the bikers get too excited and overburden the system.

Many of the people who attend the Bicycle Music Festival are already steeped in bike culture. Like Jonathan Yoot:

JONATHAN YOOT: Last year, we brought our bicycle puppet show and promoted bike advocacy to younger generations. “Stop every time at the edge of the street. Use your head before your feet. Make sure you hear every sound. Look left right left and all around!” You know, that’s the stop signs rhyme.

But you don’t have to be a bike buff to show up and have a good time.

MARA: My name is Mara.

JESSE: I’m Jesse.

MARA: I actually get the Twitter feed for 94121, which is our zip code, and this was listed on it!  So that’s how we learned about it.

And the music here is as varied as the audience.

DOMINGUEZ [on stage]: Thanks for coming out this morning. I'd like to introduce without much further ado, the kick-off band for our festival, please give it up for StitchCraft!

DOMINGUEZ: We have bands performing throughout the day, ranging from opera to Bhangra to rock and roll to bluegrass. We had a barn dance this year – a big square dance, with a dance caller.

Dominguez’s personal favorite moment of the day happened during the “live on bike” procession. See, the bicycle music festival wouldn’t be quite complete without an actual bike ride. So...

DOMINGUEZ: Half-way through the day, after a great time at Golden Gate Park, we pack up the entire festival again onto our bikes and our bike trailers, and that’s the bands, the audience, the volunteers – everybody’s on bicycles. We don’t use any cars. And we have a mobile stage that we built this year that’s as wide as a semi truck. So it takes up an entire lane of traffic.

Two opera singers from the San Francisco Conservatory jumped up on there and were singing Puccini in the streets of San Francisco, while people are running to the windows of their apartments and looking down. People are coming out of the stores with half-eaten burritos and just cheering and traffic is pulling over and people are rolling down their windows ’cause they want to hear this opera, this baritone and this soprano, just singing!

After a glorious operatic serenade through the streets, the whole bike parade ends up at the bottom of Potrero Hill in Showplace Triangle for Act II of the Festival.

DOMINGUEZ: We set up all the bikes, we set up all the stage, microphones, info station, bike-blended smoothie station, everything. And then 5 more bands perform into the night.

It’s a party atmosphere, yeah. But for Dominguez, for the volunteers, and for many festival-goers, this event has a deeper significance.

DOMINGUEZ: It’s a life-changing moment when they see what we’re capable of. Not only in terms of creating electricity or something like that, but what we can do in terms of our ingenuity and just creativity and wacky inventiveness. But also in terms of what human beings are capable of in terms of grassroots organizing for the sake of fun and art, and reshaping our city.

And other cities are catching on. From San Francisco to Chico, Seattle, Vancouver, and as far away as Vienna, London, Australia.

DOMINGUEZ: This guy wrote us from Taiwan. There’s people all the time, a guy in Amazonia, Brazil, people letting us know that they are starting their own.

But it all started right here. In San Francisco, I’m Ali Budner for Crosscurrents.