To say that the Bay Rising Tour is “environmentally conscious” would be a laughable understatement. It is in fact completely human-powered, with San Francisco bands Rupa & the April Fishes and Shake Your Peace biking 200 miles to play 11 shows around the Bay Area over 10 days. They will be carrying with them their own stage, as well as a unique sound system that will be powered at each show by volunteers who pedal to create electricity. The tour starts tomorrow and comes to the San Jose Bike Party Friday.
Singer-songwriter Rupa Marya of Rupa & the April Fishes said they were inspired to put the tour together after years of international touring left her wanting to make a local connection.
“We’ve been going around the world so much in the last four years, I was feeling like ‘how much do I know my own Bay Area?’” says Marya, a Mountain View native. “How can I put that energy and curiosity and joy into my own neighborhood?”
Toward that end, she had been doing things like traveling Bay Area backroads and visiting missions around Northern California, starting to ask a lot of questions about local landmarks, ecosystems and communities. At an Occupy SF show, she met Paul Freedman, co-founder of Rock the Bike, who came up with the bicycle-powered concert system. She told him she wanted to so something local, and soon she was working on the Bay Rising Tour.
“It’s exciting because you can know an area from driving, but you don’t really know it unless you walk it or bike it,” she says.
She’s under no illusions about how hard it will be to pull off—“we’re going to be exhausted,” she admits—but the tour fits well into her view that activism begins in one’s own backyard, reaching out to individuals and communities around her in a time of economic and social collapse on a mass scale.
“We’re living in a time of emergency. Our role as artists is to do something that reminds us of our creative capacity,” she says.
After the band finishes the tour, they’ll be releasing the title track of their upcoming album Build on May 1, in honor of strikers around the world. The album will be released in September.
“It’s in the can,” says Marya. “I’m really excited about how it sounds.”
The Bay Rising Tour comes to the San Jose Bike Party on Friday, April 20 at 8pm. For location and route details, go to sjbikeparty.org.
.Bike-Powered Bay Rising Tour Comes to San Jose Bike Party April 20
