After nearly a decade of saying he’d make it out to Bike Kill every fall, Spencer finally made the pilgrimage to Brooklyn. For the past 20 years, the Black Label Bike Club has been serving up freak bike carnage every year around Halloween. Don’t miss the amazing gallery from the quintessential Bike Kill photographer, Tod Seelie, and enjoy Spencer’s musings on this wild event below…

“Oh, I’ll make it next year,” I had repeated as I watched October fly by again and again and AGAIN. I got fed up with saying someday. This past October I knocked two things off my bucket list: a trip to some amazing slot canyons in Utah, and finally making it to Bike Kill. Back in ye olde Flickr days, I came across Tod Seelie’s incredible images of Bike Kill and I was ensorcelled. Since then, Tod and I have become good friends, working professionally and very unprofessionally together, so going to Bike Kill with him completes a poetic circle of sorts.

I arrived at a sprawl of bikes locked anywhere and everywhere on a remote backstreet in Red Hook. Everyone left their “normal bikes” behind in search of the silly parking lot toys that awaited us. As I arrive, Tod reminded me, “Ride early, ride often, it’s called Bike Kill for a reason!” The party works smoothly in spite of the chaos – see a bike not being ridden, snag it, trade for another bike, rinse and repeat. Share your candy.

After twenty years, Black Label has amassed a staggering number of freak bikes in all shapes and sizes: super tall, super small, surf bikes, trikes, disco ball bikes, wooden penny farthings, bikes that go boing, bikes that smash, bikes that roll, and some that can barely be moved or ridden. Bike Kill is a cacophony of chaos and ingenuity, years of work poured into piles of forgotten and discarded bike frames, reborn into mangled phoenixes of fun.

My friend Richie even showed up, at the last minute, from Detroit with one of his personal bikes, Stoopid Tall. This was a prelude to his record-setting Stoopid Taller. I got to escort both of these bikes on their inaugural rides back in LA and it was fun to clear the way for him again at Bike Kill.

I spent all afternoon riding as many bikes as I possibly could. That same curiosity that captured me so many years ago was alive again. I wanted to play on all the silly-ass bikes. I even noticed a touring tall bike that I’d coveted many moons ago, floating around the sea of freaks. I had to ride it, and so I did. Through it all, I don’t know what hurt more: my ass cheeks from all the terrible saddles (or lack thereof), or my face cheeks from smiling so much. After endless laps back and forth on the narrow strip of road between two vacant lots, night began its descent.

It was time for the final event: tall bike jousting. Modern knights atop their poorly-assembled steeds with lances of PVC and foam from the scrap heap. Dangerous, absolutely, but glory doesn’t come cheap. I hemmed and hawed about getting in line to joust, feeling like I’d left those days behind me, but in the end my ego got the best of me and I got in line. Propped up by a few Black Label members and buoyed by the throngs of onlookers, I stared down one of the bike polo players I had ridden across the Williamsburg bridge with the night before. As I was thrust toward my adversary, things went black and my muscle memory kicked in. I’ve been here so many times before. I dropped my lance into their chest, handily knocking them off their double-tall frame. The crowd on the other side caught me and I looked back to see the fallen rider already up and cheering. No deaths, no arrests. I’d call it a success.

Shortly after that, the DJ blasted the quintessential rave classic “Sandstorm” as the crowd erupted into one final burst of energy as the evening hit its crescendo. All the pent-up excitement of watching people hurl themselves at each other atop mangled corpses of bikes after an afternoon of pure debaucherous joy needed to be funneled somewhere. As the music died out, the real work began: packing up the bikes and picking up all the trash.

Finally making it to Bike Kill was a true pilgrimage for me and I will cherish the memory. It rekindled my love for freak bikes, a love that had become dormant under the weight of endless bike industry jargon and new technology. Bikes should be fun, stupid, and make you laugh until you fall over. That’s what Bike Kill is about. Sometime that day, I looked over at my friend Dinah; teeth painted black, massive wig askew, with a joint hanging out her mouth as she screamed, “I just wanna be dumb with my friends forever.” ‘Nuff said…