Cruising from Precita Park to Dolores Park at Saturday’s BMF

photo: Adam Aufdencamp

Cruising from Precita Park to Dolores Park at the first annual BMF in 2007

The largest crowds at Dolores Park showed similar growth.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

San Francisco’s hottest salsa/reggae/hip-hop/rock band, MANICATO, has been added to the Dolores Park stop at the Bicycle Music Festival!

Some interesting scenes from the workshop this week. The musical part starts at 3:05. It was awesome to see the expressions on our neighbors’ faces as we cruised around West Berkeley with Janaysa singing and playing.

Folk / Soul singer Janaysa came by the workshop on Tuesday to test-ride the piano mount on the Mundo. She was initially ‘concerned’ but left on a high after a good try out.

Come see Janaysa perform on Saturday as part of the cruiser ride! Don’t miss out on the night time festivities. Bring a bike to Dolores Park! Catch BLO, Stitchcraft, Ginger Ninjas, Manicato, La Malamana, and BMX flatlander Pete Brandt. And then join the BMF cruiser ride.

BMF does not pay bands to perform. Instead, we pass the bucket amongst the crowd after each band plays. Some bands go to great lengths to be part of the BMF, and all of our bands have spent years developing their musical act. So show your support for the bands you like by throwing some cash in the bucket. It’s not cool to support bands early in the day, then run out of money for the later performers. Please bring plenty of ones and fives, or tens and twenties, high roller! As co-organizer Gabe says, “please take a few bucks out of your pocket, then put the rest in the bucket.”

Big thanks to this year’s Golden Goose, Kathy Rose, who’ll be leading the charge on our busking efforts.

Soul singer Janaysa will be going mobile, performing at the nighttime cruiser ride (beginning at Dolores Park). She’ll be playing piano and singing. The piano will be rigidly mounted to the back of a Mundo Utility Bicycle, using a custom bamboo piano mount. The red tractor seat is another recent mod designed to turn this bike into a serious mobile performance venue.

Other mobile performers in the nighttime cruise will include Mafiosa Felice and Joel Elrod. Joel (shown below street performing at KFOG Kaboom) will be backing me up on the Roland 808, and Mafi will be playing cuatro and singing.

Just checked the lunar schedule for BMF. We’ll see moonrise at 11PM, hopefully while cruising to the afterparty!

The moon will be 4 days past full, or 87% full.

My favorite part of performing at last year’s BMF was leading the call and response section of the Boda Boda rap as we cruised down Valencia. At the time, I thought I was just doing the ride to lead people to the biker beer bar, but once we arrived at the bar, the energy fell. I now realize that my art form is rocking the mic as I rock the bike. There aren’t too many other bike rappers out there who would even really try it. So this year, I’m just going to celebrate it. I hope you’ll be part of my performance, which will begin after Pete Brandt’s BMX performance.

Fortunately I won’t be alone. We just finished this new aTractor seat for the Mundo, so I can have Joel and Mafi play percussion for me.