Rock The Bike

Many thanks San Francisco Bicycle Music Festival: World’s largest Human Powered Music Fest.

 

The 6th Annual San Francisco Bicycle Music Festival was our biggest ever and a milestone for our grassroots Human Powered Music Fest. Many thanks to the bands, fans, and our huge volunteer crew. Any one of the 3 phases of the day would have been epic enough. But we had a beautiful, idyllic daytime music festival in the park, an outrageous mobile party, and a post-modern urban block party all in one day. Daytime: 500+ people in a meadow, enjoying live music in the beautiful sunshine… Followed by a fire-truck dodging, freeway underpass screaming, Fossil Fooling LiveOnBike session, with captain Ariel using no electric assist to pull 3 performers and audio gear weighing 250 pounds on our Mobile Stage… Followed by a street party with an elevated stage,  a glowing Bike Tree, and a 3-person pedal powered stage lighting system.


Rupa & The April Fishes perform at Golden Gate Park’s Log Cabin Meadow. Photo: Volker Neumann.


We had 19 pedalers at the peak in Golden Gate Park! Plenty of power for our 10000-Watt sound system to run. In the distance you can see our Pedal Powered Line Array hanging from its bamboo tripod.
 
We mobilized the entire festival on an outrageous LiveOnBike ride with yours truly, Fossil Fool, the Bike Rapper, performing with two bandmates on an elevated Mobile Stage towed by a Mundo. Above: the view from the Mobile Stage.
 

Earlier that week… Load testing the Mobile Stage outside our workshop in Berkeley.
 

We had stunning lighting at our night venue, Showplace Triangle. Three of our LED Stage Lighting panels, a renegade LED project hanging from the billboard over the stage, and the Bike Tree, El Arbol, all powered by 3 different pedalers. One pedaler did the greens, another did the blues, and a third did the reds. The tube on the left with red and green lights is the Pedalometer, which shows pedalers how hard to pedal.
 

SHAKE YOUR PEACE! rocked their return to Bicycle Music Festival perfoming. Bandleader Gabe Dominguez is also the co-founder of San Francisco BMF.
The large “880” in the photo is the instantaneous wattage total. A single electric kettle or hair dryer uses up to 1500 watts, yet we were able to entertain hundreds of people with a total wattage of under 1000. Actually early in the day, an electric kettle did bring down our festival. A member of our volunteer squad plugged it in to our Pedal Powered Stage to have water to sterilize his cookware for our lunch. A fuse in our Pedal Power Utility Box blew. Another fuse blew before we started using our eyes to solve the problem. We saw a bright orange extension cord going all the way to our crew area. Aha!
 

This rig required no electricity, and produced delicious Pedal Powered Ice Cream.  Each batch on the Ice Cream Bike takes about 20 minutes to churn.

In keeping with Bicycle Music Festival tradition, our roadies transport all of of the loudspeakers, Pedal Power gear, food, banners, and festival gear to our venues by bike.
 
Even our 18′ tall bamboo tripod, affectionately known as the Tarzan Tower, can be broken down to a 10′ bamboo bundle and hauled behind one bike.