Bike Music Festival & Willamette Music Festival

Trafton B.

May 9, 2010 - 4:34 PM

I'm sitting in the EMU at the moment. Just getting a little work done on a stormy Sunday afternoon. And as I look outside at the deserted amphitheater, I can't help but think about how different everything looked not even twenty-four hours ago.

The Bike Music Festival teamed up with the 40th Annual Willamette Valley Music Festival to bring an entire day's worth of good tunes and great fun to the University of Oregon campus on Saturday.
When I say that campus looks different now, I'm talking about a complete 180° shift from what it looked like yesterday. Currently, it's a drowsy gray with students either inside studying or outside sprinting to the nearest covered roof with their umbrellas. Compare that to yesterday's scene of several thousand students and community members walking around in shorts and flip-flops working on their tans.

Local bands played all throughout the day. Bicycle advocacy groups and shops set up tents offering up free information and bicycle repairs. Several leftover artists and food stands kept their booths up after first showing up for the bi-annual ASUO Street Faire earlier in the week. But to understand the enormity of this event, you really need to know some behind the scenes information.

Try to wrap your heads around this: the Bike Music Festival was powered entirely by bicycles!
With the help of nearly $18,000 in grants from Lane County Tourism, UO Student Sustainability Fund and EWEB, the UO Bike Program was able to purchase a Biker Bar Generator and two Mundo Bicycles, which generated all of the electricity to power the stage for the festival.... with active support from the crowd, of course.

The cool thing about this Biker Bar is that it's completely self-sufficient and all it needs is a few bicycles to work. Take a look at the links above for photos, and I've included some below. The Biker Bar doubles as a bicycle trailer for easy transport. At last year's Bike Music Fest, they actually had a live band playing on the Biker Bar while one well-conditioned volunteer tugged them all over Eugene. And it needs to be hooked up to a maximum of three bicycles at a time in order to be fully functional. And any bicycles will work. Anyone could have ridden their bicycle down to the stage, hooked it up and started pedaling for power. It's genius!

I had the chance to ride one of the bikes on the Biker Bar for a few songs, and it was really cool. The back wheel of each attached bikes rests on a metal pole laying flat horizontal about a foot above the ground. As you pedal, the bar rotates and generates on average a 200-watt electrical current to the audio equipment. It's really cool because the amount of electricity needed to power the equipment fluctuates dependant on how loud the music gets or if there are any massive guitar riffs, so as you ride you can almost feel the rhythm of the music in the bikes. During mellow points in a song, you don't need to ride very hard, and then if the song picks up and it feels like riding through quick sand. That part caught me by surprise. That and I happened to step right on the rotating Biker Bar upon dismounting and nearly face-planted in front of the entire crowd. Gimme a break, it was hot day, and I definitely didn't plan on exerting much energy when I got there.

At 4pm, the Bike Music Festival ended with a live music bicycle ride through Eugene. This year, though, the band was actually riding on a double-decker bicycle - lead singer steering on top, guitarist peddling on the bottom and bassist rocking out on the back with the amplifiers. It looked pretty sweet, but I'm positive that I lack the coordination to operate that contraption safely.

After the ride, everyone reconvened at the heart of campus, hopped off their bikes and danced as the music continued to blast. My favorite part wasn't just that everyone partied all day long in the middle of campus, but rather that outrageous events like these are normal.

I love Eugene.