About

Greetings and thank you for your interest in Heavy Pedal Cyclecide Bike Rodeo!

Since 1996 we have used bicycles not just as a vehicle, but a medium for expressing our interests in art, music, and performance. We see the bicycle as a malleable machine that can be altered and transformed for the sake of fun.

 

 We began as a bike club. We dumpster-dived for bikes that had been thrown away and transformed them into tall bikes, chopper bikes, tandem bikes and all kinds of pedal-powered bike monstrosities like the Lawn Mower Bike “Suburban Intruder”, the Rocket Bike, the Chupacabra, and others too terrifying to name.

 

Inspired by traditional American rodeos, we created comedic skits and stunts featuring our untamed metal steeds and our bike riders as rodeo clowns, stunt riders, and beauty queens. We rope the audience into our show, getting them to try their hand against us in contests of bike-riding skill, such as barrel racing, piñata-bashing and tall bike jousting. Our mariachi-country-punk band “Los Banos” provides the lively backdrop for our performance.

 

Emboldened by the success of our bike rodeo, we decided to build the country’s one and only pedal-powered carnival midway. We began with the exciting Dizzy Toy, and then progressed to the thrilling Pedal-Powered Ferris Wheel, and then kept growing, adding the sweetly nostalgic Bicycle Carousel, the amazing Cyclofuge, the charming Flight of the Bumblebee, the cacophonous Axe Grinder, and more. Little kids, big kids and kids-at-heart can all participate in our shows now, whether by tackling a bike during our rodeo skits or riding one of our pedal-powered carnival rides.

 

The Heavy Pedal Cyclecide Bike Rodeo has been independently operated and touring for over ten years now. We travel in a converted school bus full of clowns and their alter-cycles and pull a trailer loaded with pedal-powered rides. We’ve toured across the United States and down into Mexico and have been featured performers at festivals such as Coachella, Stage Coach, Bumbershoot, Tour De Fat, Burning Man and Maker Faire, to name a few.

 

We remain passionately devoted to the idea of the bicycle as a piece of interactive kinetic sculpture that can make music, breathe fire, even save the world!

Video interview with Jarico Resce and Paul da Plumber: