I’ll try to shut up about the flies

May 9, 007
post-Stagecoach Music Festival
HOME, finally

For two days, I’ve been trying to think of good things to say. So far I’m having trouble recapping the post-Coachella country-music adventures at Stagecoach in a concise and entertaining fashion. Even though WILLIE NELSON IS THE CLOSEST THING TO GOD WALKING THIS EARTH. And this one guy in the Riders in the Sky can do the hambone on his face. That was awesome.

To sum up: Cyclecide wowed hundreds of kids and their parents at Stagecoach, this 20,000+ country music festival in the Mojave Desert. We tried our best to be the scary, dirty, heavy-metal ride-running, funnel-cake-eating, county-fair carnival workers that we ourselves feared and awed in our collective youth. And I think we succeeded. And sold lots of T-shirts.

not as ‘ardcore as dem

I realize if I’m to start this blog thing, not only do I need to learn the daunting technology involved in putting up links and photos too — I’m also supposed to post frequently as hell to prevent losing my audience. But:

1) I’m still overstimulated from 2 months of constant adrenaline rushes… and I’ve got kind of a poor attitude at the moment. I still can’t get over the flies. So many flies everywhere at that god-forsaken hellhole called Artists’ Camping. Flies covering the bus ceiling, flies dotting the tent ceiling, flies in the kitchen, flies in the bathroom. Flies flies flies. I still itch when I think about it. Two epsom salt baths and a shower have yet not been enough.

2) This line of thinking/ranting leads to me not being able to get over how “artists” are treated in general in America. At Coachella, even the opening-opening bands who play right when the gates open get styled way more than we do. Consistently. We’re talking shade, and their own bar, and air-conditioned trailers and ornate communal areas and crafts-service meals and handmade gifts from the promoters … and they’re not even there for one whole day most of the time. They’ve got hotels and whatnot. Us, we could probably be consultants when the U.S. government decides to privatize refugee camps in Darfur.

if only I wasn’t made of piss and vinegar, they’d land this frequently, instead of slightly less

Maybe the promoters assume we’re used to squalor because, well, we ARE used to it … but for an event that rumoredly makes a $23 million dollar profit, you’d think that we artists, providers of ALL the eye-candy on that giant field out there in Indio, could get our own shower trailer, or maybe a sink and a bar of soap. Whether because of cost-cutting or oversight, the promoters saved on portajohn-cleaning fees, and then spent more on the hospital bills for those who got treated for staph infections as a result of blah blah bitch bitch bitch. See? Not funny.

HOWEVER! I’m exceedingly proud that many of my good friends, and good friends once removed, were pretty much solely responsible for the visual entertainment at America’s biggest rock’n’roll festival. GO TEAM ART FAG!

Now. I’m going out to dinner in the misty California night and have someone else make me food and take care of the dishes.

And if there’s a fly in my soup, I’ll just eat it. Whatever.

Braaaaaaaains

May 5, 007
Stagecoach Music Festival
Cyclecide DJ / merch booth

None of us saw much music at Coachella. We had no time — and if we did, when we got our nightly second winds, we traveled in a pack, mostly. Saturday night we went as zombies.

I can’t remember if Spider or Doyle was the one to originally call Zombie Night, but then Doyle found this white 3-piece suit in the trash, and it actually fit him, so then we had to. After Cyclecide’s shows got more and more surreal throughout the day, with our collective heatstroke advancing at a steady clip, we re-appropriated the contents of our clown makeup case at dusk, piled on the fake blood, and went out strolling.

Helping run the Heavy Pedal Cyclecide Bike Rodeo, after days and days of hard labor and hiking uphill both ways in the snow with no shoes on etc., it’s immensely relaxing to walk around Coachella like a zombie. Fuck trying to look attractive, fuck rushing to see this or that band, fuck posture — this is how we feel. UhhhUUUHHH.

Everyone invented different “character” zombies and got into it. Doyle was a player zombie, lifting his sunglasses and winking one drippy-bloody eye. Spider leaned more toward office-worker zombie with tie and everything. I played a curly-mustachioed, missing-toothed, undead carny who kept trying to sneak and eat people’s brains when they weren’t looking. Lurching around with drink in hand, stopping in crowded pathways to stare into space with hips jutted out at unruly angles, jump-starting again as people gathered closer to see just what was wrong … Spider even drooled. A lot.

Crowds cut us a wide swath, and gawked and took photos — even as they walked like us, but not on purpose. We all swarmed Buffalo’s Fire Pod piece while it shot off big flames out of its eight-foot petals. We raided the Cut Chemist show in the Do-Lab dome and stunned the hip-hop heads in front. We took a special group ride on the Kinetic Steam Works’ black-and-white carousel. We zombie-ballroom-danced around Johnny Amerika’s Movement piece, too, while it belched fire clouds around us. Talk about a photo ops.

We ignored the Rage Against the Machine reunion and pooh-poohed the RHCPs. (“Remember when the Red Hot Chili Peppers used to be the Red Hot Chili Peppers?,” I kept saying, balefully.) But when Manu Chao took the main stage, all semblance of zombie-ness ceased and we ran toward the front and danced and moshed like 15-year-old punk kids. Then the Cauac Twins’ Tesla coils went off and Jesse Wack and company took over our sound system for an extended drunken jam that actually didn’t sound very bad, and we laid around on the Cyclecide stage on the pink carpet and told stories.

Then when they kicked us out of the field after the crowds had gone, some went back to camp and had another party in front of L.T.’s gorgeous Cyclecide fire barrel she made us. Others drifted off into the night, on their way to do who knows what with who knows whom. I fell asleep at a reasonable hour, but I hear Bjork eventually came back to our camp and partied with us, and someone in Cyclecide actually got to do coke off her tits.

Success. Also: exhaustion.

Next, a report from Stagecoach. Which is going on right now and I’m pretending to DJ in the shade. Hey, three carloads of fresh blood arrived last night and kept us up drinking. Let them do some of the work. Most of us still feel like zombies — just without the makeup now.

Plague?

May 4, 007
(now it’s the) Stagecoach Music Festival
Artists’ Parking Lot

For whatever reason, the Johnny on the Spot guys did NOT clean the Portajohns in Artists’ Camping after Coachella was over, though they serviced everything else. On Tuesday, as we broke down the rides for our Wednesday gig in Riverside, Laird said he went to try to go pee and couldn’t even see the toilet seat for all the flies swarming on it.

Ever smelled a bank of Portajohns that’s been baking for five days in 104-degree heat?

And would you think it smelled better or worse than post-Coachella DOG PUKE my Bruno tried to eat again after he threw it up and then we left and came back from the Riverside gig? … Apparently he learned the fine art of post-event groundscoring from his mother. He likes to dig through trash and conserve resources, just like me. YOU, OK? I LEARNED IT BY WATCHING YOU.

This whole Portajohn / flies / no-showers-for-artists fiasco has caused some health issues. I lost my voice long about Tuesday — whether from carnival-talk or total dehydration or something more ominous I’m still not sure — and so did a lot of other people. Folks who laid on the grass find themselves covered in red and white bumps. Chem trails form Xes above us in the sky on some mornings; on others, not a cloud up in the blue. Water trucks rumble by and planes fly over to spray the grass on the polo fields with Lord knows what chemicals and pesticides. Flies have multiplied exponentially since our arrival.

Now that the powers that be have finally decided to stop making the artists forage for interesting and unlikely places to go #2, as well as to bathe and locate enough electricity to charge our phones, the flies have all dispersed. And swarmed our camps. In the kitchen, in the bus, in my car, all over the dogs and food and people. They’re everywhere. Fly paper doesn’t work because of the new high winds and dust blowing around. The weather might be this way all weekend.

What’s worse, one artist just took a trip to the hospital this morning to treat a staph infection in his eye… which has now got us all washing our hands like Howard Hughes and trying not to panic. That shit’s contagious as hell. We’ve got 4 or 5 days left of this.

Roughing it is fun — but not for this long, in this heat, with this little shade, when someone else is in charge of hygeine. Cyclecide needs to invest in a generator.

no, not that kind of generator. Although it would be nice and I can’t figure out why nobody’s invented one yet

In other news, Monday’s woo-party-party at the Desert Springs hotel pretty much drained anything left in everyone’s batteries. Artists’ groups, friends of, and hangers-on converged on the place, an hour from the site, to celebrate a job well done. Some of the fancy magical Palm Springs spa-waters are located there at the hotel, and we all like to sit around in the many pools after Coachella and swap stories and drink beer and make “clown soup.” (Michelle Burke had to actually request that Cyclecide shower before entering the water — she said she’s seen the combination of greasepaint and dirt in a jacuzzi before, and it wasn’t pretty.)

Turns out that soaking in hot tubs for hours on end isn’t the best thing for sunburned skin on a sensitive Southern girl who’s used to humidity instead of oven-style weather. In addition to no voice, I’ve got a white five-o’clock shadow on my already-red face that makes me look like a burn-victim rodeo clown in reverse. I didn’t mean to jaunt to the Palm Desert in my fancy car for a chemical peel and hot tub soak at a hotel spa, but that’s what happened.

Our Wednesday gig 2 hours away at the barbecue for the UC-Riverside’s end-of-year festivities went off swimmingly. Setup and breakdown in “chilly” 70-80-degree weather. Rides only, no show, 3-hour start to finish with The Well-Behaved Kids (no alcohol or firearms on campus). After that, Conrad’s mom brought us all food (hero!) and we rented three rooms in a hotel and took showers.

SHOWERS, people. Life is good.

Gotta go. Someone’s sound-checking and I’m jumpy to see Willie Nelson … next post I’ll tell a bit about Coachella cuz I think I’m finally decompressed enough.

P.S. I heard George Strait is here camping all weekend — not hotel-ing it like all the other divas. He asked for a horse to ride around, and they gave him one. Champ.

uhhhhhUUUUUHHHHHH

we are delirious.

sitting by a pool at a hotel with air conditioning. For a minute. Going back into the hotness to break down the rides and take them to Riverside to set them up for a show at UCR tomorrow. Then re-breaking them down and re-taking them back to the polo fields in Indio to re-set them up for Stagecoach. Which judging by all the purple wristbands on the 60-year-old vendors and whatnot outside at the hotel pool right now …. it’s going to be Bizarro Coachella.

Two kinds of music next weekend: country and western. I need to go into town to buy a new set of Billy Bob teeth to plump up my accent and bark at the Cyclofuge or whatever ride I’m running this weekend — just to scare the kids. Hopefully I won’t get my ass kicked. I’m from Mississippi though so I’m allowed to talk like that.

But right now all I want to do is take a nap in the shade. Someday I’ll get a whole night’s sleep again.

Overheard in the bar by the pool just now:

“did you find my shorts in your room last night by the way?”

“No but I heard somebody lost their panties.”

“That might be the pair we sold.”

(All this said by a guy who’s got a nametag on his chinese coolie hat that reads “HELLO MY NAME IS GET OUT OF MY FACE”)

OK bye. Swimming

Clown town

April 28, 007
Coachella Valley Music Festival

ITEM! Ratgirl’s grandpa used to eat meat gravy on his chocolate cake. “It all goes to the same place anyway,” she said he’d say.

The gates have opened and the rubes have flooded in. Seventy thousand people rocked out here yesterday. Seventy thousand surprisingly well-behaved and not-totally-fucked-up-on-drugs people.

Did I mention it’s hot? Up to 104, I heard. The dogs stay chained up in the shade in camp all day while we perform and run the rides, panting panting napping napping. They’re luckier than us.

when dogs hate crowds they bite people. Us, not so much. Well, kind of, sometimes

Some days it feels like a pleasant bizarro version of a death march. Mostly, though, being in the Bike Rodeo rules.

“The flies are gonna miss us,” Bill the Junkman said at camp this morning. Yep, and there’s plenty of flies. Next week they’ll be hanging out like, “Remember Coachella? Man, that was awesome. Those people brought food, and dog shit, and tons of dirty hippies showering in a pond-runoff faucet from the polo field all day…”

The Coachella horizon looks like capitalist Burning Man. Steam engine here, Gorey-esque carousel there, geodesic dome blaring drum’n’bass there, twin Tesla coils shooting off lightning over yonder. Johnny Amerika’s piece fires off in the evening, looking like a mad scientist’s laboratory about to explode any second now for 20 minutes at a time.

In the open field amid the stages and food-court tent oases designed with Asian or Mexican themes, Cyclecide runs the midway all day under the hell-sun. Seventy thousand fresh-faced hipster kids adore our pedal-powered carnival rides. Philip Blaine, the art guy at Goldenvoice, said everyone’s raving about us. I’m sure they’re raving about everyone else’s art too. We party-throwers are becoming a viable industry.

and we look good too. right? Right??

The sideshow was short and sweet yesterday — parade of the bikes, bullfight, tallbike joust, moshpit of recklessness. Doyle jousted Otto and won, and then took a pratfall and lost to Linda on purpose. It was so hot that by the end of that 15 minutes of running around I laid on top of a pile of bikes in the finale and pretended to take a nap, just so I could get horizontal for a minute. Of course a couple people laid on top of me so it wasn’t all that comfortable.

Chicken brought up a half dozen people we hadn’t yet met, who ended up “interning” on our rides yesterday and learning the Way of the Bike Rodeo Clown. They get to be carnies, and I think they’re enjoying it. One dude Esben, a Danish bike fiend who used to be in a circus as a child, can ride the stupid Rudy bike nobody else can ride — two different ways. Rudy built it for the sole purpose of watching people try to ride it and fall down. But Esben can flip it up and sit on the handlebars and work it like it’s a tall unicycle. Should’ve known Chicken would bring a top-notch labor force.

In addition to running things, Jarico’s been toiling on his new sculpture, the Melody Maker — an interactive tower that spins a bunch of contraptions with instruments on them that play when the rider climbs up on a bicycle in the tower and pedals. The Melody Maker is nice to perch in at night — to observe the hoi polloi, the sea of heads rocking out to Peaches or Bjork or DJ Shadow.

It’s hard to want to leave our area and Johnny’s next door, though. It’s kind of like Frogger in the thorougfares — too many people going every which way. Even though we’re hams, most of us are antisocial as well, and slightly too old to run around amid the kids. Plus we just enjoy each other’s company.

And now the gates are open again, and we’re half an hour late, and Katy Bell’s dyeing Big Daddy’s and Laird’s hair clown-blue to match Moses’s. They all shaved parts of their heads clown-style, which is basically pretending to be balding, so they’ve all got fake old-man clown hair. Now they’ve got Esben on his knees with the clippers too — what a good sport — and then they’re all going to rinse in the hose all the hippies are lining up for.

They’re gonna give the hippies blue feet. Neener neener.

Again with the buses

April 26, 007
Coachella Valley Music Festival
Artists’ Parking Lot

It’s 4pm. It’s hot. My mechanic, Scruffy, showed up today. He drove Jamie Viada’s carousel down in a truck whose tire wrapped around the axle in a blowout last night. The carousel is part of Kinetic Steam Works, or KSW, the group that built the steam engine.

The steam engine runs the carousel. It also runs the Dingus. The Dingus is an old widowmaker — an electric machine that would punch holes in metal, shear metal, bend metal. According to Scruffy, now it shreds fish, stuffed animals, and bottles of ketchup (catsup?) and mustard. That’s all I know about KSW for now. I’m sure I’ll meet them later tonight.

rock and roll coochie coo

Scruffy and Laird have got the back of Jarico’s bus open, looking at its innards, conferring about its current state. The three of us are drinking water in the shade at camp right now while the rest of Cyclecide puts up the rides on the midway and shops in town. We’re still — still — waiting on Chicken’s bus to arrive with the majority of our crew on board. They broke down last night sometime when the oil filter housing got scraped off and oil spilled everywhere. Or something.

Laird just suggested we climb up on the roof of Jarico’s bus to look for Chicken and company on the road outside. But Scruffy knows all about Chicken’s bus because he drove it for years as a Green Tortoise employee. He says he’ll be able to hear it coming down the road.

Coincidentally, Jarico and company lived at the old Green Tortoise headquarters in the Bayview for a decade before they / we were gentrified out by an overeager landlord who now still pays rent on his own house as it sits empty. The Bayview isn’t gentrified yet. White folks are still afraid of the place.

Anyhoo, it’s final-setup day here at Coachella. All 500 artists are scrambling with their creations, assembling rides and engines, checking audio and video equipment, building impossible geodesic domes, test-flying tiny remote-controlled helicopters, and rehearsing dance routines in the noonday sun on a stage with no wind or shade.

All the rides I know how to set up are at home, and none of the girl-clowns are here yet, so I’ve got no skills to offer but holding it down for the Ladies’ Auxiliary. See, despite Cyclecide’s female half’s reputations — as strong women with few conventional “feminine” tendencies — the fact is, when we’re doing Cyclecide things, at least I for one always end up cooking, cleaning, sewing, and watching the dogs instead of building things and playing with metal.

Whilst preparing sandwiches for the crew back at camp today — which takes quite a longer time to do than it seems it would — I was faced with the conundrum of how to deliver lunch and beers to 10 people on a Swing Bike with no basket or bicycle trailer. And we didn’t have any cold beers or coolers that weren’t full of food. So I came up with a great junkyard Martha Stewart ™ beer cooler:

Take an empty, square 2.5-gallon plastic water jug and cut a 6-inch rectangular hole into the top front of the container. Layer the bottom with ice; place warm beer atop ice. Repeat until full.

So yeah. Waiting on Chicken’s bus. They’re still — still — at Foodsco for just another minute longer, and should be here any second now for the past 2 hours. It’s been a motherscratcher of a time trying to hold this much space in a 500-strong artists’ campground for 23 more people when everybody’s pouring in to be ready for the 11am gates tomorrow. In fact, the neighbor across the way from us is getting downright irate, and even threatened to run over one of our tents with his truck. But I just made friends with the ice guy today on the other side of us. He’s got ice aplenty and he’s willing to share. Things are good.

And so far all crews seem to be acclimating to the extreme heat in a mature fashion by not getting wasted and rendering themselves unable to work the next day.

We’re learning.

It’s been 45 minutes since I started writing this post, and Laird and Scruffy are STILL talking about Jarico’s bus.

Chicken’s bus is here. Scruffy heard its familiar rumble and perked up his ears, like a dog whose master has just pulled into the driveway. Time to rumble with the neighbors over how much space we’re going to take up.

Rousting about

April 25, 007
Coachella Valley Music Festival
Artists’ Parking Lot

Everyone’s in town at the big pre-festival shop. After a good few sunny hours spent unloading the rides and bikes onto Coachella’s midway, we at Cyclecide — half of whom hadn’t slept or eaten — went into Indio for some Denny’s and ice cream and air conditioning. Now the crew’s out at Home Depot and the grocery store, avoiding the heat and stocking up on supplies for the coming weekend.

Lest anybody be mistaken, Big Daddy would like you all to know that there is only one catsup and that is Heinz. All other brands are ketchup and they are an abomination of nature.

I got the easy job: guarding camp to make sure nobody encroached on our space while the town-errands were done. So after some chicken fried steak I dipped into the coffeeshop in Indio, where I caught a ride with a Goldenvoice worker back to the site. (Goldenvoice = the promoter = insanely organized and professional, and they sure do take care of their artists.)

This woman I rode “home” with just finished filming a “fantasy-reality show” called *Pirate Master,* which premieres on May 31 on CBS, in which she and a dozen or so others got to dress up in period-correct pirate gear and sail a real ship around the Dominica Islands in the West Indies for three weeks and search for buried treasure.

I know, huh. Lucky duck.

dis Jupiter. She’s haaaaarrrrrrrd-core

I already lost my parasol, but I found the Internet. The sun is going down and the houseflies won’t let me nap. More rich-guy RVs just pulled into the fenced-in Paul Frank lot (he’s doing all the merch — talk about bucks — but they too are super-nice people). The sound engineers are blasting Gwen Stefani and bland testosterock out of Coachella’s mammoth speaker systems at errant intervals to check the system. And some hippie standing outside his old van across the way from me right now is doing the weirdest version of yoga I’ve ever seen. It looks more like he’s stirring a couple invisible pots, or rocking the earnest lead-singer power-clench while he plays a hair-metal ballad in his mind’s eye.

Half of the SF freak-arts scene is slowly trickling in to set up camp — expertly, efficiently. Everything in its place. We’re all old pros now. Carnies.

(Jarico hates it when people call him a “carny.” He insists he’s a “showman,” and that we’re “showpeople.” I say we’re both — one when we’re performing and the other when we’re loading and unloading. But I digress.)

I’m not even sure who’s playing at this festival. I just hope somebody in the Bike Rodeo remembered to bring the clown makeup.

Chicken’s bus will leave San Francisco shortly. In theory. By sometime tomorrow morning, this area of artists’ camping will be overtaken by clowns.

Time to work all night.

G forces, flung pianos, flaming fiberglass

April 25, 007
Coachella Valley Music Festival
Artists’ Parking Lot

Johnny Amerika and Tirzah are working artists living in Los Angeles. That happens a lot down there, apparently — unlike San Francisco, where a way higher percentage of clowns like us do it for the love alone. Something about SF being the world capital of creative leisure, and Hollywood liking special effects and people that can build weird things and work long hours on inconceivable projects.

Johnny inherited the six-joystick control box for his latest contraption after creating it on the job for an … well, an animatronic animal for Mel Gibson’s *Apocalypto.* Amerika and crew will hand off this joystick box to audience members here at Coachella to let them play with the fire and make it sing. (Most of his sculptures, like Doyle’s and Rosanna’s and Micheal Christian’s and all of ours, are interactive.)

One of Tirzah and Johnny’s most impressive projects has been the Trebuchet, built originally in 2006 for a car commercial. For those who don’t know, the difference between a trebuchet and a catapult is that with a catapult, the object is flung with undertension action, the way you think it would be, while a trebuchet flings objects by counterweight. With a trebuchet, weights on the opposite side of the truss (the long straight part) sit on the high side, suspended in the air, and when it’s released, the weights fly downward and under the pivot point and to the back side, flipping the truss and tossing the object (attached by cables or whatever) in an “overhand” style.

There. Now you know.

In the commercial, the trebuchet flung a car. And then on the playa it flung a flaming piano. Now it sits at the Burning Man ranch sculpture garden until the next dirt-rave there Labor Day weekend, where it will be placed at the farthest point behind the Man out in the open playa. Where it will throw an array of crazy shit and hopefully a couple pantsless hippies. BLOWJOB! (cough)

Doyle of Black Label Bike Club is on Johnny’s crew here. The two of them often conceive of big fire-and-engine projects and then call on each other for help. Most recently, Doyle (along with Heather, Big Daddy, and Black Label Ben) created the REGURGITATOR, a simple yet complicated G-force machine that Big Daddy says looks like a big tube with a tire in one end and a pulse jet in the other. The rider leans on a lightly-padded pole and spins around super fast in a circle until their face-skin threatens to pull away from their teeth and off their head completely.

Doylie and the blowuppy thing he and Dirtyfinger helped Mr. Amerika make

In Zagreb last year, where Doyle and crew participated in a show called “Device Art” (run by a Croatian group called Kontejner), Big Daddy rode the ride for a just few seconds too long. His ears began to bleed, and the whites of his eyes turned red with blood too — I mean really red — and he stayed scary-looking like that for over two weeks. Small-town folks in Croatia cut him a wide berth on the street. Many thought he was the Devil. Linda chewed Doyle’s ear off about it, saying if Doyle accidentally almost killed Big Daddy again there’d be hell to pay.

For last year’s festival, Doyle and Heather and Johnny Amerika and Cyclecide’s Paul the Plumber built the SPIDER RIDE, an insane “carnival ride” named after Spider, the Cyclecider who got mowed down on his bicycle by a hit-and-run SUV full of shit-talking meatheads last year. (He still needs a new tooth, by the way, so please kick down on Paypal if you’re a kind soul with deep pockets.)

The Spider Ride is built from a 1965 1600cc Volkswagen air-cooled engine that spins a 52-inch, 28-pitch, wooden handcrafted propeller. This propeller creates enough air to move the one rider on the other side of a 16-foot oil-derrick-looking tower, who’s strapped mid-air into an elementary school chair equipped with a small Chinese valve-less style pulse jet. (The pulse jet, incidentally, also has been re-engineered to double as a bong.) A three-minute ride can accelerate to a force of over 6gs, causing temporary unconsciousness.

Unfortunately, the Spider Ride broke early on last year — the first time they let a ticketholder ride it instead of one of the crew — when the propeller hub casued the propeller itself to detach from the engine and hurl itself into the ground. Redneck engineering, as always. Know this: Despite all the fun-times-having mayhem, danger and bodily harm are ever-present realities within our extended circle of friends. RIDER ASSUMES ALL RISK. Don’t say you didn’t know, and don’t sue us later.

This year, all I can gather about Johnny Amerika’s fire-plumbing thing so far — called “Movement” — is that Doyle and Tirzah and Matt Williams and Conrad (also from BLBC) helped him build it in a month and a half. But that it was conceived of a year ago. And that it will burn 75 gallons of propane each night.

No wonder the rest of the world hates us.

incidentally, on the same real estate, the Cauac Twins be makin’ twin Tesla Coils to lightning up Coachella at night

BUT! Most parts Johnny and Doyle and Tirzah use are crafted almost exclusively from recycled industrial salvage diverted from the waste stream. So put that in your pulse jet and smoke it.

In Cyclecide news, I was the first one here on the grounds last night. Big Daddy and Paul Dingledine arrived at 2:30am and made me drink a beer with them even though I was asleep. Have to do what Dad says. They showed me a picture on Dad’s camera phone of the NASCAR brand tomatoes they saw in Wal-Mart.

Tomatoes. NASCAR brand tomatoes. That’s totally what’s going to happen to Burning Man if John Law lets the name go into the public domain. I think the jury is still out for most everyone as to whether that will be heartbreaking or hilarious.

It’s 9:30am, and the advance-crew Cyclecide bus just (finally) got here — they left SF at at 4:20pm yesterday, making it a 15-hour trip — and we’ve got to unload everything onto the midway before the heat of the day really starts. Apparently there was a small “fire issue” — the exhaust manifold burned a little bit of the fiberglass insulation in the back of the bus. No big deal really.

(P.S. I don’t know how to link to other pages or do anything complicated yet. Sorry. I’ve got a friend coming up to the festival who will hopefully allay my computer retardation in a day or two and then I’ll go back & post photos and link things.)

This is weird

April 24, 007
The Brewery, Downtown Los Angeles

Nobody’s running around freaking out here at the Umlaut Haus. People have been awake since 9:30, not one soul got drunk last night, and the crew worked smoothly all evening and went to bed around midnight or 1. Aside from all the electrical wiring, Johnny Amerika’s project is finished.

What I’m used to in the days before Coachella is: Swarms of clowns invading the drunkyard, acting hectic and drinking beers and cracking wise and scrambling around like geeked chickens and losing their shit occasionally and packing and re-packing and re-re-packing the bus and the trailer.

or not “packing” at all

Nobody here in Johnny Amerika’s crew in Los Angeles has raised their voice once. Not that we in the Heavy Pedal Cyclecide Bike Rodeo verbally abuse each other and have shitty times on the road. Nope. We’re a red-nosed family of fools who like to get together to create and float in a heightened atmosphere of surreal, frenetic chaos. We’re 2 DUM 2 DIE.

Hanging out with Cyclecide can be a little much to take. Ask anyone who’s gone on tour with us. Sometimes it drives more squirrelly people to cognitive dissonance. Sometimes violence.

It’s quiet in here. Too quiet. Especially considering how many people live here, and that they all have a really big art show this weekend.

Mr. Amerika, calmly filing down something that’s gonna blow up real good

T-minus 3.5 hours to departure for the Coachella Valley Music Festival in Indio, CA. It’s a three-day camping-trip rock’n’roll blowout of epically organized and awesome proportions. Sure, I’d never go as a ticketholder — like most everyone else I roll with to this thing each year, I’m way too used to working while everyone else plays. To being one of the assholes who’s uncomfortable unless we’re making a spectacle of ourselves.

The show is sold out. Tickets are rumored to be going for $300 — for one day’s attendance — on Ebay. When I add up how much it would cost to get out there to the desert, to camp, to buy waters for $4 all day long inside the gates … well, I wonder why people don’t just go to Thailand instead. Of course, many people probably wonder the same thing about folks who attend the dirt rave in the other desert every year.

Most of the artists in Coachella’s midway are dirt-rave vacationers, after all. We know each other from that Burning Ham thing, and from the larger scene surrounding it. We’re bringing some of that to this. Some PLAYANETICS ™.

The truck will get here to Los Angeles soon. Everything’s already lined up in Tirzah and Johnny Amerika’s shop/garage, right by the roll door, ready to go. People are snacking and chatting quietly, and getting the last of their things together.

No shouting, no wrestling, no drinking at 10am, no last-minute rehearsals, no blaring heavy metal or circus music, no millions of dogs barking and getting in the way.

No herding cats.

This is weird.

this is what they’re makin. dont ask me what it does tho

stage/coachella 2007

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – March 29, 2007

CYCLECIDE BIKE RODEO plays Coachella AND Stagecoach!

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE — THE CYCLECIDE CLOWNS ARE COMING… AGAIN.

The only artist to be invited to perform at the Coachella Valley Music Festival for six years running, San Francisco’s HEAVY PEDAL CYCLECIDE BIKE RODEO returns to the grand music festival in the desert — and its new country-music twin the following weekend — with some BIKE-COPHONY of its own!

Once again, the most interesting shade on the festival grounds comes in the form of CYCLECIDE’s awesome (and world’s only) traveling PEDAL-POWERED CARNIVAL MIDWAY … participants can and will enjoy the breeze provided by the 12-rider BIKE CAROUSEL, the two-person FLIGHT OF THE BUMBLEBEE, or the mighty, four-swing, pedal-powered CYCLOFUGE. For FREE, ladies and gents. All the rides are free.

Yes, folks, the PSYCHOTIC BIKE RODEO CLOWNS OF CYCLECIDE will show their dirty tutus again this year to pie unsuspecting riders in the face during the brief, thrice-daily sideshow performances featuring our punk rock mariachi band LOS BANOS … to war with coolers full of WATER BALLOONS as gawkers watch their friends fly 20 feet in the air on the world-famous pedal-powered FERRIS WHEEL … to encourage participants to hurt themselv– er, try their luck on our bendy SWING BIKES, the messed-up WRONG-WAY BIKE, the lawn-mowing SUBURBAN INTRUDER … or to JOUST on our infamous TALLBIKES …

and the ROCKET BIKE will BURN DOWN THE DESERT!

Also and furthermore, Cyclecide’s “fearless bleeder” Jarico Reesce conceived of a theme for this year’s art and performance — BIKE-COPHONY — after listening to a bunch of hippies at Coachella banging on a metal sculpture with sticks at all hours of the day for the past two years. “How can we drown that out?,” he asked himself.

The answer: The MELODY MAKER, a brand-new interactive kinetic sculpture that creates music! This MELODY MAKER is made entirely out of pre-cycled urban detritus — and as its six riders pedal at the base of the structure, every revolution will cause windmill-like blades on top of the tower to turn … which causes guitars to strum, percussion instruments to bang, and other instruments such as xylophones and washboards to create a musical BIKE-COPHONY entirely controlled by the contraption’s participants!

And finally, this year, no more Hollywood douchebags will be tolerated on set: CYCLECIDE HEREBY CHALLENGES ANDY DICK TO A TALLBIKE JOUST. The gauntlet has been thrown. We’re just saying. We hate that guy.

SAN FRANCISCO’S HEAVY PEDAL CYCLECIDE BIKE RODEO: More drunk clowns. More carnival rides. More franken-bikes. More idiotic skits. More interactive sculpture. More BIKE-COPHONY.

No brakes, no problem. 2 dum 2 die.