The rise of the fixie culture in San Francisco
A French version of this article can be found on As De Pique, Rubsy's excellent blog dedicated to the fixie bike culture.
Rubsy, creator of As-de-pique.com and leader of the Hejorama riders team meets with tattoo Artist Sunny Buick and asks her to share her memories of the rise of the fixie bike culture in San Francisco back in the 80's.
Then he amused himself by building custom bikes. At first he was passionate by the Cholo style of customization. Then it became crazier when he started doing theme bikes. He had a dead Elvis bike, a bike called « Raw Hide » that was a cowboy bike. It had large skirts or fenders with his drawings of cowboys in hand tooled leather, and cowhide fur trim. And since he was in the antique business he had found an old bronze rodeo trophy and he put that on the front of his bike. His bike weighed maybe 60 kilos and when he rode it dressed as a cowboy, he because a recognizable downtown San Francisco character. Because he was friend with lots of messengers he became their mascot.
- Soundtrack of the report
- Bike Song
- Mark Ronson & The Business Intl
Hello Sunny, can you introduce yourself for those who don't know who you are?
My name is Sunny Buick. I’m a painter and tattoo artist. I’m from San Francisco and I’ve been living in Paris for 8 years.You’re from SF. I heard that you were in the punk scene back in the day?
I wasn’t punk but I started to tattoo across the street from the most famous punk club where it all happened. Punk rock is too violent for me, the concerts were more for boys, plus I was too young to see punk really happen. I started to go out at 15 in 1985, punk was more or less over by then… The people who were into bikes in SF were activists. It’s were Critical Mass was starting to be recreated. You have to know that SF is a city with a large hippy community, the automobile that’s the system, so to ride a bike is to be outside the system, it’s the next step in the hippie thinking… In any case I was there when the first guys took track bikes on the street and worked with them as messengers.What made you meet these people?
With my ex-husband we were what is considered « post modernists » children of the nuclear bomb era. We were afraid of the future so we had a romance with the past. We dressed in vintage, we were passionate about old stuff. A life we thought was simpler because we were afraid of the future. My ex husband loved bikes because he was a bit backwards. He couldn’t drive a car, but it became political for him. He hated cars and because they were anti-bicycle.
Then he amused himself by building custom bikes. At first he was passionate by the Cholo style of customization. Then it became crazier when he started doing theme bikes. He had a dead Elvis bike, a bike called « Raw Hide » that was a cowboy bike. It had large skirts or fenders with his drawings of cowboys in hand tooled leather, and cowhide fur trim. And since he was in the antique business he had found an old bronze rodeo trophy and he put that on the front of his bike. His bike weighed maybe 60 kilos and when he rode it dressed as a cowboy, he because a recognizable downtown San Francisco character. Because he was friend with lots of messengers he became their mascot.
So you were close to the bicycle messenger scene in SF, can you tell us a little more about the emergence of fixed gears in the scene?
First of all the BMs adored my ex husband because he was crazy like them. Because they were crazy they chose to be BM because they wanted to be free, for them it was a way to work when they wanted, as much or as little. There were a lot of BM because downtown SF is very hard to get around by car. They also chose this career because they weren’t adapted to the work world. They couldn’t have a real job, they liked to party too much, with drugs or alcohol… With this kind of job they could live the lifestyle they liked. Of course there was a lot of drugs around in this scene, speed or meth… To claim their punk lifestyle, their madness and to live outside the system, they started to use fixed gears at work. For me it was just to show how crazy they were. So they all started to do it and were respected for it… They were rebels. At this time period especially in SF the tension was very high between bicyclists and automobilists, because at the last Friday of every month there was Critical Mass. We held our protest the same hours that everyone was trying to get out of the city for the weekend. And it created some real conflicts... But it was against the people in their cars! I saw a lot of people, friends and friends of the messengers die in accidents on their bikes, hit by cars or trucks. A girl messenger was dragged several hundred meters by a delivery truck before he noticed that he had killed her. Back then everyone was deeply effected because it was a small community and everyone knew each other.
