They may never give up their black leather pants, but rock musicians are starting to shed their image as indulgers in all things—including luxury tours that produce millions of pounds of CO2.
The Rolling Stones now buy carbon offsets; Dave Matthews and Korn tour in biodiesel-fueled buses; and the Ginger Ninjas, an emerging Northern California band, claim to be the first rockers to have toured entirely by bicycle—even though their recent “Pleasant Revolution” tour covered 5,000 miles through California and Mexico.
The Ninjas avoided support vehicles by hauling everything on bikes fitted with Xtracycle rack extenders. (Oakland, Calif.- based Xtracycle was cofounded by Kipchoge Spencer, one of the band’s guitar players and vocalists.) They shrank their carbon footprint further by using a bicycle-powered generator to provide the electricity to run their hyperefficient 1,000-watt sound system. All crewmembers had to do was put four of their bikes on stands and pedal, and just like that, the people congregating nightly in a Mexican town’s plaza found themselves at an impromptu free rock concert.
Many townspeople seemed stunned by the Ninjas’ shunning of electricity. But others liked the dreamy, ska-toned music so much that they happily answered the Ninjas’ call to pedal-power the concert themselves on subsequent nights.
Not only did the Ninjas help the environment, says Spencer, they demonstrated that it’s not just possible, but downright easy, to live without gasoline. Through their lyrics and the many conversations with locals that their bike caravan engendered, they also tried to raise awareness about other reasons to choose a bike over a car. “One of our goals in doing the tour was to promote the bicycle lifestyle in Mexico,” says Spencer. “We wanted to show that even people who can afford cars might choose bikes.”
The Ninjas are currently on a new global bike tour, which will move from the East Coast of the United States to Mexico, South America, Asia, and Europe. And Spencer reports that the East Coasters are pedal-powering at concerts as much as the Mexicans did. “Everyone warms up to it similarly, though kids are always the first.”
Read more stories by Jennifer Roberts.