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Grinding and Rolling: the Town's Success Formula
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Kwan Booth
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Last Updated on May, 22 2008 at 03:44 PM
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Oakland is a mobile kind of town. Way beyond the "whatever gets me from
point A to point B" mentality, folks here seem to take a special kind
of pride in their rides while eschewing conventional transportation
ideas with an almost religious zeal. We've got Scrapers and Choppers
and Hybrids. We've got Fixed Gears and Art Cars and Rat Bikes. We run
on pedal power and vegetable oil just as much as good old petrol, and
are just as likely to be spearheading the next big transport trend in
an abandoned warehouse as we are to be tricking out an old Impala in
our front yard. When it comes to our wheels, Oakland definitely goes. |
Oakland is a mobile kind of town. Way beyond the "whatever gets me from point A to point B" mentality, folks here seem to take a special kind of pride in their rides while eschewing conventional transportation ideas with an almost religious zeal. We've got Scrapers and Choppers and Hybrids. We've got Fixed Gears and Art Cars and Rat Bikes. We run on pedal power and vegetable oil just as much as good old petrol, and are just as likely to be spearheading the next big transport trend in an abandoned warehouse as we are to be tricking out an old Impala in our front yard. When it comes to our wheels, Oakland definitely goes.
So it's not surprising that the latest mobility craze to gain worldwide fame had its genesis in the Town. World, take note: Oakland is the home of the Scraper Bike Movement. And Tyrone Stevenson Jr., aka "Baby Champ," is the Scraper Bike King.
Scraper bikes, the multicolored, multi wheeled versions of the famed Oakland Scraper (cars from the mid '80's customarily upgraded with expensive wheels, paint jobs and sound systems) have been popping up in neighborhoods around the city, in music videos and all over the Internet for the last few years. While inspired by traditional scrapers with booming systems and candy colored paint jobs, the bikes also often resemble Nascar-sponsored vehicles, covered with logos promoting everything from Oreos to the latest Oakland Hip Hop group.
Stevenson says that the inspiration behind the first bike, made when he was just 13 years old, was simple: I don't have wheels, I need wheels. I need to make the flyest wheel possible.
Tyrone "Baby Champ" Stevenson-The Scraper Bike King
"It's all I had and that was my way of transportation to my house or my cousin's house," he says of the first bike, born in his East Oakland back yard six years ago. He says that he experimented with different types of paints and designs before hitting on the right combination of audaciousness and style.
When Champ first debuted the bikes in 2002, making a slow cruising circuit around the town's hoods, reactions on the streets were lots of smiles and more than a few shaking heads as he rolled by on Oakland's soon to be next big thing. "Their first reaction was like - 'O my god! Are you serious?' Their jaws would drop because they never seen nothing like that before."
Before he knew it, the backyard hobby had turned into a money maker as the shaking heads gave way to requests for custom orders, which led to an entire fleet of scraper bikes weaving through the city's side streets. And with the added hood fame and pocket change (the bikes regularly sell for between $50-$200), came offers for special appearances, eventually leading to scraper bike cameos in videos for Bay Area hip hop stars including the Federation and Kafani. Then, the bikes got popular.
Last year, inspired by the local response, Stevenson posted a video on YouTube. The video of himself and his rap group, The Trunk Boiz, riding, ghost riding and generally going dumb around town caught on like wildfire and the Scraper Bike movement was born.
"I posted the video and then I just sat and watched the hits rise from 200 to 2000 to 200,000," Stevenson says of the video's surprise popularity. Eventually the clip, which was meant to be a promo for the Scraper Bike album, garnered over 2 million hits and was nominated for the Youtube Video of the Year award.
Since then, requests have come pouring in for bikes from as far away as Jamaica and Germany. A quick Internet search also reveals that imitators from Portland to Tokyo have begun picking up spray cans and parts attempting to recreate the original. So in true entrepreneurial fashion, Stevenson says that the slew of imitators has inspired him to go corporate. Now instead of rims and paint jobs, the 19 year old is talking branding and patents. He says the decision to turn his hobby into a legitimate business "was mandatory, because people were seeing me and realizing that I'm the only person on the market making (these bikes), and once they seen that I was actually doing it and progressing, a lot of people tried to come in."
Scraperbikes.net went live about a month ago and while he still works on a select few custom orders, Stevenson and his crew of five close friends devote most of their energy to opening up a Scraper Bike bike shop later this summer, releasing a series of DVDs, patenting his production methods and growing Innovative Teens Inc. the nonprofit he's created around the movement. And like any mogul in the making, he says the bikes are just the beginning, before rattling off a list of goals that includes starting a clothing line, a video game company "winning a Grammy, winning the Nobel Peace Prize and then I want to be on Oprah" sometime in the next 5 years. And after that? "I'll want to slow down and go to college around 25, 30, cuz you know, I still got to be on the grind."
See an exhibition of Oakland's Scraper Bikes as part of the Cool: Remixed exhibit at the Oakland Museum. Cool: Remixed accompanies the Birth of the Cool exhibit from the Orange County Museum of Art: California Art, Design, and Culture in Mid-Century.
For more info go to www.museumca.org |
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