Forget the Bus: This Musician Tours by Bike
Somewhere in the Mississippi Delta, at a dilapidated filling station along the same Highway 49 that inspired Howlin' Wolf to wail, we pause for some water and a biscuit. It's midday, the autumn sun hangs high over acres of cotton stubble, in the far-off level distance a harvester crawls the tufted horizon. The day's planned mileage isn't arduous—60, and every one of them flat—but the riding has been jittery, tense. With no shoulders on Highway 49, and edge line rumble strips forcing us into the traffic lane, we spent the morning being buzzed by tractor-trailers and a species of ancient sedans that seems to exist only in the Delta.
The effects of this tension are perhaps evident on our faces when an elderly man asks where we're headed. His tone is helpful, even pitying, as though hoping we'll answer somewhere nearabouts so he can console us that we're almost there. Our response—the town of Greenwood, still some 40 miles to the south—instead provokes a surprised snort, then some chiding for us having acted, in our answer, "like that's nothing." We try to retract some of our nonchalance, but having ridden all the way from Minnesota, we tell him, it feels a little like nothing.
"Minnesota?" he says, with popped eyes. He looks us up and down as he backs away. "Sorry, boys," he tells us. "My mama told me never talk to crazy people."
A 1,500-mile ride from St. Paul, Minnesota, to New Orleans, Louisiana, did sound crazy when the idea surfaced, but in that not-actually-crazy, feel-good way, like calling in sick from work to go to the beach. Yet certain elements of the ride might truly be a little crazy—and by this I mean my partner, a 35-year-old Minnesota singer-songwriter named Ben Weaver. Ben is touring in support of a new album, entitled I Would Rather Be a Buffalo. The Salsa Vaya bicycle he's straddling? It's his tour bus.
Ben Weaver's songs are not about cycling, or even traveling. They're about the things most songs are about: love, or the lack thereof; the highs and lows of existence, and all their attendant mysteries. They're gravelly, poetic, musically spare, often a little haunted. Their gritty moodiness stands in contrast to what cycling tends to evoke: sunshine, major chords, quick cadences. But then Weaver—whose thick build and scraggly beard give him the look of a 19th-century lumberjack—hews to few stereotypes of the modern cyclist. He has little interest in data points such as speed or mileage, he's fond of the occasional cigarette, and his primary source of refueling is Little Debbie snack bars. Yet cycling has become as integral to his life as music is—especially since he joined the two pursuits three years ago.
Perhaps the greatest pleasure is the most subtle: the rhythm that develops after days and days of riding. Ride, eat, play music, sleep, repeat. With this routine comes an animal clarity we rarely encounter in workaday life.
This tour—24 days of riding and 12 nights of shows—is the apotheosis of that merger. Weaver spent a decade and a half touring the standard way: driving a van from town to town, plugging in at clubs and barrooms, flopping in motel beds, and repeating this routine for weeks or sometimes months. But for this father of three, the routine curdled into a grind, with a day on the road feeling like two hours of joy bracketed by 22 hours of homesickness and boredom.
So thorough was his burnout that he even abandoned music for a while and took a job butchering pigs. When that trial separation didn't work—"the songs chased after me like rattling bones," he says—he tried a different tack: He strapped his guitar and banjo to his bike and started riding to shows. Local gigs, at first, but soon he was covering the Upper Midwest on his bike, and, he discovered, packing far more hours of joy into the touring grind.
After a while, the bike started to feel like a third instrument. He's ridden since he was a kid, back then pedaling a BMX bike off into the unknown for a taste of freedom—a mindset he hasn't really outgrown. Many of us, in our teens, switch to cars for conveying ourselves into that freedom zone, but that didn't happen to Weaver. For him, a bike represents freedom the way a '69 Chevy does for Bruce Springsteen. "It's more than a mode of transportation to me," he says. "It's part of who I am, at this point, which means it's part of what my music is."
Weaver isn't the first musician to experiment with pedal-powered touring. The Ginger Ninjas, a California folk-funk band, has done several bike tours, and Blind Pilot, a folk-pop band based in Portland, Oregon, has done a couple as well. For them, bike touring was a link back to their more freewheeling busking days. For Weaver, though, it's more elemental than that. "A bicycle isn't exactly a Stone Age implement, but it's a link to something primitive," he says. "There's a primitive aspect to throwing yourself out into the weather and the landscape." Bicycle touring fits into a lo-fi, slow-food aesthetic—a way of encountering the world at its own natural speed. "I feel way more alive outside in 100-degree heat than I do in an air-conditioned room," he says. "It's not about environmentalism, or proving some point—all that stuff feels wushy to me. It's about having some kind of connection to the land, about getting some dirt under your nails."
There's a lot of distance between using a bike for inspiration and using one as a tour bus on a monthlong tour—1,500 miles of difference, in fact. This comes into brutally sharp focus on the fourth day of the journey, during the 75 miles from Winona, Minnesota, to Viroqua, Wisconsin, where Weaver has an evening show scheduled. An earthly conspiracy thwarts us throughout the day: It begins with an unremitting headwind; it follows with rain; then an undulating landscape of hills. We're still many miles from Viroqua, riding through a dense fog, when nightfall settles on us, adding another layer of weight. It feels dicey riding on slick, black, lonesome back roads past lightless Amish farms. It's late-October cold, and the hills have turned my legs into useless Twizzlers. It's obvious we're not going to make it on time for the show and still unclear is how we're going to make it to Viroqua at all.
Weaver doesn't like making the call to the concert promoters, I can tell. The pickup-truck rescue they supply feels to him like a surrender to the elements, and he loves the elements. As Weaver recounts this ride and others onstage, I understand something about him: Bad trips make for good stories, as the old saw goes, yes, but in Weaver's mind bad trips also make for good trips—when you're on a bike and when it's nature impeding you.
This is plainly evident at a show in St. Charles, Missouri, which comes at the immediate end of a 102-mile ride—the second day of consecutive centuries in subfreezing weather. I'm flat-out depleted, a lurching Gumby of exhaustion, but Weaver seems almost refreshed by the ride of eight-plus hours, the last two of which involved more than 2,000 feet of climbing. The night's venue, the Bike Stop Cafe, is a combination cafe and cycling shop, and, onstage, Weaver seems torn between singing and telling stories from the road; the songs meld into the journey, the journey into the songs. "Sorry," he finally says to the crowd, after describing riding down a country back road and scaring up what must've been 200 blackbirds, a particularly glorious brush with nature. "I guess I'm preaching to the choir here. But I like choirs. Choirs can be beautiful."
This is the way Ben Weaver speaks: It's big talk, as opposed to small talk, with every conversational topic ransacked for its philosophical underpinnings, its submerged metaphors. Our conversations on the ride tend to follow this pattern: The sight of behemoth farm machinery provokes thoughts about extractive agriculture, a roadkill bobcat inspires thoughts about mortality (and, I suspect, a future song lyric), and every time Google Maps deposits us on some seven-mile stretch of rural gravel, Weaver unwinds on the limits of technology. Never once do I hear him curse a daylong 20-mph headwind, a frigid rain, the eight-mile climb leading out of Boscobel, Wisconsin, et cetera. But the seventh or eighth time Google Maps dumps us onto gravel, adding hours to our ride, I hear new curse words only a songwriter could invent.
This brings up one of the differences between a civilian's bike tour and a musician's bike tour. The itinerary isn't flexible—show time is show time, regardless of whatever setbacks arise, such as a foul Google Maps routing, on the small end of things; or, more problematically, the fierce pain that begins to wrack my right thigh halfway through the journey. For three days the pain grows worse, so that even the slightest incline is excruciating. We built a few off days into the schedule, but they're not movable; to lose, say, 80 miles to a forced rest day means making it up the next day, on top of whatever distance is scheduled. That the pain swiftly eases once I'm off the bike offers us a clue, however, and when we fractionally adjust my seat height, it fades away for good.
If some of the charms of a civilian bike tour are therefore restricted for us—spontaneous detours, sightseeing, roadside naps—it's almost never a slog. Perhaps the greatest pleasure is the most subtle (and musical) one: the rhythm that develops after days and days of riding. Ride, eat, play music, sleep, repeat. With this routine comes a kind of animal clarity, a singular purposefulness that we rarely encounter in the mayhem of workaday life. It's a gift proffered by the trip's long distance—neither Weaver nor I notice it until maybe 700 miles in, when, as Weaver puts it, "all the residue has blown off." The high points (the generosity of strangers feeding and housing us along the way, the magical way a cold beer tastes after a 90-plus-mile ride, the companionship of the steadily fattening Mississippi River) get entangled with the low (the left crank arm falling apart on my bike, forcing me to pedal with one leg for a while, the aforementioned headwind that tried blowing us backward through much of Illinois, the steady dog chases we encounter once we pass the Mason-Dixon line), as mere drum flourishes in that steady downbeat rhythm.
Riding into the South, often on the mythical Highway 61, adds a new layer of texture to the trip—particularly when we enter the Mississippi Delta, the seedbed of blues and rock 'n' roll. This stretch turns any musician into a kind of pilgrim, and Weaver revels in a landscape that seems framed by an invisible treble clef. In Clarksdale, Mississippi, as Weaver is performing at the Quapaw Canoe Company, a 60-something African American man in a phosphorescent three-piece suit slaps his knees and shouts out, "Yeah, I hear some blues in there," and Weaver smiles—home in a spiritual sense.
It's between Clarksdale and Greenwood that the elderly man labels us crazy, and we grin about that one for a while. We look a little crazy, we suppose—Weaver especially, with the necks of his guitar and banjo jutting upward from the rear panniers and resembling, in their black waterproof cases, twin smokestacks. And maybe we are a little crazy. How else to explain the magnificently vacant space that opens up in your head after 20 days of nonstop riding? Or the way seven or eight hours can pass without those clinches of anxiety that gum up a regular day in the life? Or the way a hot link of boudin sausage and a cold Coca-Cola, scarfed outside a filling station at a little Louisiana crossroads, feels like a sacred experience—a bona fide brush with the divine? Perhaps it's owing to the season, or maybe it's our route, but it's not until we're just outside New Orleans that we finally encounter other touring cyclists—a couple heading east as we're heading west, fellow inmates of our grand asylum, acknowledged with a wave.
New Orleans proffers euphoria to anyone who desires it, but, strangely, we're disinclined to receive it. We'd expected to want to pollute ourselves with Sazeracs and crawfish cream sauce, but instead of wallowing, we find ourselves antsy, and touched by something like melancholy. Despite 1,500 miles and 24 days, the end feels abrupt—it's too soon. Weaver plays a final show outside, beside the Mississippi River. Then he squanders the two days of rest he afforded himself in the itinerary by trying to figure out—on the phone with family, airlines, venues—a way he can ride back home rather than fly.
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