Beginning in 1968 I was a roadie for the Sons of Champlin, a San Francisco band. I worked on shows with the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Santana, The Byrds, Steve Miller Band, Credence, Sly and the Family Stone, Merle Haggard, Canned Heat, Doobie Brothers, Three Dog Night, Fleetwood Mac, The Tubes, Linda Ronstadt, Ten Years After, Donovan, Average White Band, Albert King, Hot Tuna, Chaka Khan, Flatt and Scruggs, Chambers Brothers, Chuck Berry, Eagles, Huey Lewis and the News, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Bo Diddly, Taj Mahal, Paul Butterfield, Jethro Tull, Van Morrison, Buddy Guy, Dave Mason, Joe Cocker, Ike and Tina Turner, Everly Brothers, Boz Scaggs, The Band, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Marshall Tucker Band, Kingfish, John Mayall, Tower of Power, Leon Russell, Journey, just to name a few you have heard of.
I've smoked a joint with Jerry Garcia, met Janis Joplin when she was only wearing panties, been mountain biking with Bobby Weir. I never had a drug habit, I was never drunk, I never went to jail, and in decades of service I never missed a show. Okay, except for that night Bill Graham threw me out of the Fillmore...
But I digress. Five years ago I sat down to write a book about the things I saw and did. It has been a long process, but it will hit the shelves on September 17.
The people I met, the places I went and the shows I saw make mine one of the best rock and roll adventures anyone ever had.
But that's not what the book is about.
I also had the best bicycle adventure of the 20th Century. Hardly anyone gets to take part in something that changes the world. I did twice, and the second was even better.
During the seventies in California I shared a house with a fellow hippie bicycle fanatic whom I had met at the Grateful Dead office. His name was Gary Fisher and we had an eclectic hobby of converting old balloon tire bike frames into hybrid bikes for riding off road.
In 1976 I started putting on downhill races for our strange and funky bikes. We called our race course "
Repack," because one trip down the two mile, 1300-feet of elevation dirt road heated a coaster brake so badly that the owner would have to tear it down and "repack" it with grease. The initial participants were the dozen or so people who cared for this insane activity and had the equipment to do it.
Within a couple of years a few of us began assembling the bikes for our crazy sport on frames hand built specifically for that purpose, made with the same quality as a Tour de France race bike. In 1979 Gary and I rounded up a couple of hundred bucks and rented a garage, where we assembled our version of this new type of bicycle on frames built in another garage by a 22 year old kid named
Tom Ritchey. Gary and I called our two person company "MountainBikes," which we thought was a clever name We only made one product, a very expensive hand built bike that would go anywhere, called, well, a MountainBike.
Here is our first business card:
Our first print ad, February 1980.
No one could have predicted what followed.
Five years after we rented our garage, every bicycle manufacturer in the world was making a bike copied from our design, and our company name had gone generic along with our design. Two years after that, "mountain bikes" were outselling every other type of bicycle. Our silly hobby turned out to be the most important development in bicycling of the 20th Century.
Well, gosh.
By 1983 the term "mountain bike" was generic, so to distinguish the company we called ourselves Kelly-Fisher MountainBikes. After I sold my interest to Gary in 1983, it became Fisher Mountain Bikes. The company is now a subsidiary of Trek.
Mountain bike racing now has the most participants of any cycling sport. Mountain biking is an Olympic medal sport, and our homegrown sport of downhill racing is a World Championship event.
I can go anywhere and see my influence on popular culture, plus I got to tour with legendary rock bands. My many bicycle adventures took me all over the world, from the Giro d'Italia to the Iditarod. They were unlikely and outrageous and too numerous to chronicle in a DKos diary. That's why I wrote the book
Starting in 1980 I was editor of the first publication for mountain bikers, the Fat Tire Flyer. And that is the name of the book: Fat Tire Flyer. You can order it online now at a discount, although it won't be shipped for a few more weeks. If you are in the bicycle business, I will be signing the first available copies at Interbike, the big bicycle trade show held in Las Vegas September 10-12.
Here's a little mnemonic device to help you remember the title.
My UID is #207, a Kossack from Day One. Here's a photo that draws from both of my lifetime adventures, mountain biking in 1992 with Grateful Dead guitarist Bobby Weir.