BitterCyclist.com

BC: Are there any dream bikes that you’ve got in the works? What would be your ultimate dream machine?

PF: I have been creating a new Soul Cycle for well over a year. I am still very much hooked on this form of expression and I am driven to take it to the next level. Not only that, but our crew is really shaping up and I owe it to them to keep innovating. Four of us now have Soul Cycles, and Nate from Bikeblender.com usually comes along on rides to make Margaritas and mango smoothies. We’ve got Jay Broemmel and his Golden Gate bridge bike, some classic cruisers, and a bunch of Xtracycles to carry the food. It’s amazing how we can rock a party when the moment is right. Anyone who wants to experience it should get on our ride list for the San Francisco cruiser ride (http://www.fossilfool.com/SF-cruiser-ride/index.htm) on our web site. Check out the video highlights from last year, too. (http://www.fossilfool.com/SF-cruiser-ride/cruiser-vid.html)

The original Soul Cycle has served me very, very well but is starting to hold me back in a couple of key ways. First, despite the beautiful cosmic tribal paint job that Thao did, and all the party lighting, it still looks too boxy to my eyes, too much like a regular bike. So, I’m creating a custom chopper frame for the new Soul Cycle. I’ve been inspired by the creations of Kyle Watson (http://www.kylewatsondesign.com) and Bryan Fuller, who are both masters in the world of chopper bicycles. More than any other bike, a nice chopper has the ability to stop traffic. I also want to be able to climb San Francisco’s hills without an electric assist kit. So, to create my new bike, I’ve chosen to work with Curtis Inglis (http://www.ingliscycles.com/retrotec/ ). He’s not only one of the Bay Area’s best framebuilders, but he has a lot of experience working with curved tubing, because he does mostly race-ready recreations of classic Schwinn cruiser designs.

The second thing is that it was not designed originally as a performance tool, but simply as a music bike. Now that I’ve been street performing with the bike for almost two years, I know what features I want. I need a bike that can respond and support my musical performance. Simply rapping over a backing track on a minidisc player is no longer inspiring to me. Plus, it’s hit or miss with my audiences. I’ve been needing a way to gradually build the performance energy, to have it grow and respond to the crowd. I’ve been teaching myself the basics of hip hop music production and I’m going to integrate a drum machine, a sampler, and various effects processors directly into my new Soul Cycle. I want the buttons of the drum machine to emerge through the wooden veneer of the curved Soul Cycle cabinet, so that the whole bike becomes my instrument. I’m never going to be a top tier hiphop producer, but I won’t have to be. I’ll work with producers who know what they’re doing. Darius Minnae, who is the drummer for Lyrics Born, has already started working with me to create beats for my live performance.

The new bike is definitely a dream bike and will be at the core of the street party system we’ve been creating for the past three years. The bike itself is not the dream, but is a step towards the dream. The dream is to lead a bike-based urban talent search through New York, Chicago, LA, Miami, Paris, Amsterdam, Havana, to share my music and find the best underground rappers in each city. We’ll support the tour by producing dvd’s of the breakdance / freestyle sessions that will happen live in the street. Another dream is to have a network of Cruiser Rides in every city, not just Boulder and SF, so when I go home to Boston, I can hook up with cool people from the Boston Cruiser Ride. Yet another dream is to host a Bicycle Music Festival, a summer concert series taking place in city parks on warm summer nights. And another dream is to have a group of 10 friends come over without warning on a Friday night, demanding to go on a cruise, and to have, for each of them, a different knockout bike ready to ride – a bright red double-decker London bus tandem with a spiral staircase leading to the upper seat, a jungle bike with live orchids and tree frogs, a bamboo chopper, a shaft-drive roadster – then for us all to roll to the pier, dance with the fisherwomen and tourists, rap in the street, buy cocktails with the tip money, get discovered by a record producer and get invited to take Dr. Dre for a Soul Cycle cruise next time he visits San Francisco. And apart from the warm summer nights, it’s all possible.

BC: You also rap and do street parties with the bikes that are really inspiring. Have you noticed any cultural phenomena like the one you’ve created in San Francisco in other parts of the country?

PF: I have noticed a few things that are similar to the San Francisco cruiser ride. The roller skaters in Golden Gate Park on Sundays have a great community that revolves around music and public performance. The idea of cruising on bikes with lights and music is obviously not new. The Boulder Cruiser Ride (http://www.cruiserbikeride.org) is much larger and older than our SF ride series, and one of the coolest things about their rides, I’m told, is that the members regularly start romances and friendships. I’m really inspired by Cyclecide http://www.cyclecide.com ) in terms of the way they’ve taken their art beyond just chopping bikes and have reached out to the community with their carnival show. I would probably collaborate more with them but our musical taste and visual aesthetic are totally different. My friend Kipchoge from Xtracycle hosts a fabulous bike-in music festival called Shrimpfest, by the side of the Yuba River.

I think the aspect of our scene that really is new is the idea of the mobile party. Anyone who joined us on our annual Halloween ride this past year saw one of the best examples of this. We started in the Mission at Toby’s café with about 30 people with great bikes and awesome costumes – about 10 people had the DLG. We rolled to Fair Oaks street, where I’d heard they have an annual Halloween Street Party. When we got there the street looked really festive. Lots of kids and costumes and glow sticks and spooky decorations. There was a security person at the barricade on 22^nd street. He was hesitant to let us in. He said “my main goal is to protect the children!” I said “Our main goal is to amaze the children!” He was a neighborhood guy, and he wanted to make sure we wouldn’t cause any problems. I turned around, cut the music, and told our group “This is a family event! Be cool and watch out for the kids!” Then he let us in. We rolled in to the party and it was amazing. People were full-on cheering for us. We set up a triangle dance floor in the middle of the street with the three Soul Cycles. Immediately this kid in a Spiderman costume did a one-handed Capoeira handspring into the dancefloor, and from then on it was just awesome dancing and street performing for about 30 minutes. They were begging us to stay, but we felt the calling to head to the Castro, where, ironically, the cops didn’t let us in with our bikes. I can’t wait to do it again next year on Fair Oaks. I need to get in touch with their neighborhood organization so we can make it even better next year.

BC: You’ve created a great product with the Down Low Glow and you also do custom modifications like the Soul Cycle. Do you have any exciting products planned for the future?

PF: Well, The Down Low Glow has been my main product focus the last two years. I’m psyched about the version we’re selling these days, just the quality of it. We’ve got new battery chargers, higher capacity batteries, and new molded power connectors. New power connectors may not sound like a big deal, but it can be the difference between a product feeling cheap, and feeling like it’s made to last. I spent 3 weeks last winter testing different adhesives to seal our DLG tubes. We had been using various glues from the Home Depot, and they were all too weak, not waterproof, or would contaminate and crack the polycarbonate. In frustration I called 3M and spoke to one of their salesman, who put me in touch with a local rep named Karl Steigerwold, who stopped by our workshop and looked at the problem first hand. The next day I had a sample of a 3M waterproof epoxy FEDEX’ed to me and a $50 epoxy gun. Well, it fixed the problem, and now we’re selling DLG tubes that are ready to ride in the rain, and they’re sealed so tight you can’t even open them with a hammer and screwdriver.

We’re also learning more about the safety benefits of the DLG. Did you know that 70% of nighttime bicycle-car collisions are due to inadequate side visibility? Anyone who’s ever seen the DLG at night knows it provides side visibility at a whole new level when compared with using blinkies alone. My main goal with the product is to simplify the design and make it something that really fits into a bicycle commuter’s lifestyle.

Beyond the Down Low Glow, we’ve got a new, non-custom, user-friendly Soul Cycle coming out very soon. It’s lightweight, goes on and off in about 2 minutes, and offers great sound for 1-5 people. It also fits on any bicycle. I’ll let you know when it’s out.

And we’ve got a couple new lighting products in the works that I can’t tell you about just yet. My goal is keep making “Cool Safety” products that help bike people spread the love in their communities. When you have Fossil Fool products on your two-wheeled thing, you’ll be getting props from other bikers, love from the sidewalk, even car people will be giving the thumbs up. It feels good to know that people see you and respect you on the road. And when you fly by cars in traffic on a cloud of blue neon, they’ll be thinking, “Maybe I should get on a bike…”

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