Cycling team prepares for 2,000 mile journey with a concert every night, and they’re towing the backline
Mark Braun has made his life’s work the piano. He’s performed throughout the world as a soloist, with big bands and, occasionally, with some of the giants of the blues and jazz world. Mr. B’s specialty is boogie woogie – a style that originated from ragtime and stride piano players in the saloons of port cities like New Orleans, St. Louis and New York in the early 20th century. He’s also a long distance swimmer, cyclist and baseball fan.
I recently had lunch with Mr. B and his current drummer, Sam Genson, to talk about how a lifelong love for athletics and music has developed into the upcoming Joybox Express tour: a piano-bike odyssey from Lake Itasca, Minnesota down the river to New Orleans. Their project is a catalyst for fundraisers and community giving, directed towards organizations that provide the youth access to arts and athletics. Recently partnering with ArtTrain, Mr. B and the Joybox Express organization is undergoing an effort to raise funds and organize logistics necessary to support a 95 day bicycle journey while towing 350 pounds of band equipment, including a Baldwin upright piano, a double bass and a drum set.
As we were chewing our Greek salads, Mr. B outlined how they’re raising funds to support this tour. Mr B. and the Joybox Express will be giving a concert and a presentation on Sunday, May 19 at the Ark, where you can hear the band, including appearances by George Bedard, Peter “Madcat” Ruth, Ellen Rowe, Pete Siers, Sam Slomovits and more. Attendees will get to see the piano-bike up close, meet the whip-smart team behind the Joybox Express and have an opportunity to financially support this charitable organization.
The longer we talked, the more I saw that it really is a box of joy. Mr. B has struck on the bliss that’s possible in the middle of the venn diagram where what you do well and what you love overlap with what the world needs and what the world will pay for.
How does the fundraising aspect work?
In the case of our trips across Michigan, we’ve bene?tted about 40 groups so far. Not all of them ?t strictly that parameter of kids’ art and athletics. We’ll work with anybody that’s up to good works in the community. They can partner up with us, come to our event, be part of it and raise funds for themselves. For instance, if your daughter is on the local lacrosse team, they always need to raise funds so they can continue to have a lacrosse team. You take our pledge form, you get a team of friends together, distribute our pledge forms amongst all those folks and get commitments from their friends, per mile, for a group ride with the Joybox Express. All the funds go 100% to those groups. They never go through our books. What we try to do in fundraising is locating groups that are in need, convincing them to partner with us in an event and then allowing them to raise funds. We’re just the catalyst.
With a concert at the end of the bike ride?
The reason it works is because of the kind of heroic effort involved in the piano bike. That’s what appeals to people, when they see the effort that’s involved. That’s the hook that gets ‘em to cough up some dough.
If you don’t mind my asking, how do you guys stay alive out there – if all the money moves to the local fundraising organization?
We do all our own independent fundraising. There have been a couple of occasions where the groups we’ve worked with, on their own volition, have said to us, “We’re so grateful for what you do. Can we help you do it?” and they’ll give a percentage back to us, but we never ask for that. Sometimes it’ll be with the help of a venue that will pay us something to perform. A perfect example is our most local group ride that we’ve done three times now goes from Chelsea to Ann Arbor. We’ll play on the lawn of the Chelsea Library. They’ll pay us a modest fee to perform.
We’ll do the group ride and everybody’ll do their pledge form things and raise money. When we get to the end of the line, which the last two years has been at the Wolverine State Brewing Co., they’ll pay us something to perform there. So that supports us. We’re always looking for commercial opportunities to support ourselves and what we do. We do the traditional musician thing. We carry around all our swag with us, so we sell CDs, T-shirts. We do pretty well with that as we travel. A lot of people want to support you. They might not be itching to buy a CD, but they want to help you out. Then, we do fundraisers for ourselves. We’ve done six or seven of those fundraisers over the last three years. Whoever is the host will invite their friends and colleagues. We’ll perform and make a pitch for what we’re doing, and people will make a donation to us. We’re now officially a 501c3 government recognized nonprofit.
Your bio mentioned you’ve studied with some American blues piano masters, but how did you get into cycling?
I’ve always been into all kind of sports. I like to do just about any kind of sport – even if I’m not any good at it, I like to do it. I always had a bike like any little kid had a bike, and in Flint, I used to have to ride my bike long distances just to go to my baseball practices. I’d have to ride about three or four miles one way across the city, and I just always loved it. So when I got about 16, I got a little more interested in it. I got a fairly nice 10 speed bicycle, and I joined up kind of unofficially with the Flint velo club. They had a couple prominent racers that were part of their team. It was very well organized. I was only peripherally involved with them, but I would ride with them every once in a while – we’d go out on training rides, so I got to challenge myself a little bit more on a bike at that time, and I liked it. Then I kind of fell away from it, and as I got older I had some more friends that got me back into it. And in the background of my mind for 30 years I’ve been thinking about the piano bike. Piano bike…
So this has been something that fermented for a long time before it became a reality. Are you training right now?
I make an effort to keep general health. I swim three days a week and walk three days a week, about five miles at a crack. I cycle a little through the winter, but I’ll start to really intensify in the summer.
The thing is, about this kind of bike riding. The two young guys – there’s another young guy, our fiddle player Lance Wagner – they have a kind of base fitness level. The biggest thing they have to do is achieve a little bit more strength. I don’t know how to say this just right. They just have to get their ass in shape. What hurts is the sit-bones way up inside your ass, almost towards your rectum, you’ll feel those bones. If you went out for a four-hour ride today, since you’re not used to riding, after about an hour you’d start to complain that your ass hurt a little bit, but you could keep doing it all day. But then tomorrow, you wouldn’t want to get back on a bike. So what Sam and Lance have got to do, aside from getting general strength – they don’t have to have any real bike handling skills – because on the back, they can’t steer. It’s like an exercise bike. They just have to pedal eight hours a day. They got to get their ass in shape, and you can do that in about three or four weeks. So if they don’t get on a bike very regularly for about a month before we go, they’ll be dead in the water.
How many miles are you looking to do, on average, each day?
On riding days, about 30 a day.
Do you have any tales of triumph or woe from previous bike tours?
Plenty of triumphs, a little bit of woe. There was the day that we went on one of our longest
Days – we had gone 52 miles and it was plus 90 degree weather with very high humidity. We were going to make our goal, and it was going to be altogether almost a 60 mile day. We were on track, only a couple hours out, but our rear wheels started to get real funky on us – not the tires, but the wheels. We noticed it a little too late, and we popped some spokes. Then we had to have the wheels re-built – the actual wheels. We have rare and unusual wheels, so it’s hard to make sure you have the right spokes on hand and the right tools and the know how to rebuild the wheels. By unbelievable coincidence that day we had riding with us the guy that built the piano bike, Mark Nobilette. He was visiting us from Colorado and riding with us on tour. The bike shop had some extra spokes that were just right for our wheels that they had on hand, He accessed them, they re-built the wheels, and we got going the next day. But we had to shut the thing down and park the piano bike out on North Territorial road and take the wheels off. We couldn’t even ask the people where we parked it. We just left it somewhere and locked it up. That was a little funky. We learned something there that day – that we need to anticipate. In that spirit, one of our riders and musicians, young Lance, has been going out to the bike shop pretty regularly to learn the mechanics of our particular bike and how to rebuild a wheel if necessary – certainly how to change tubes and tires effectively on the side of the road – and how to bleed the brakes, how to repair the chains and just go through the whole bike to do roadside repair so we can be more independent if we have mechanical dif?culties. In addition, we’ll have a long, long list of all the bike shops that’ll be anywhere near us. Our team will be contacting them when we’re immediately in their area, so they can be kind of on alert if we need them.
It sounds like something the bike shops would be equally interested in, as well as organizations bringing instruments to band kids or what have you.
We found that to be true. One day, we were in Holland, Mich. We had a bad chain break. The piano bike has an unusual chain, a super long chain. I couldn’t begin to explain it to you – I barely understand it myself, but it is unique. There was a mechanic there that for about four hours straight just activated his brain and came up with a unique solution and fixed our piano bike and never billed us a penny. It’s really true – the bike people, they buy into this. They see the appeal and want to help. That might not be true everywhere we go, but there is that feeling.
You mentioned how much you enjoyed riding your bike to baseball practice. Are there other experiences that solidi?ed the importance of the arts and/or athletics to this degree so that now you want to make available those kinds of experiences to the community?
There were some moments of my life that I can recall fairly vividly. I had a English teacher in my senior year at Southwestern High School in Flint. He was a kind of unusual guy, older guy, he might have sadly been kind of an abuser – always had a real red nose, I think he might’ve been kind of a drinker or something. He was kind of a beat type dude. He loved literature and he pointed out to me – he kind of treated me a little differently. I never had to go to his class, he’d let me go to the library all the time and just work on something. Cause in Flint, it was just a zoo. If you were at the school, they had all they could do to just make sure the animals didn’t go crazy and kill each other. So he’d let me go down to the library and work on writing stuff and reading stuff, and he gave me something – I think it was Plato – and I’m paraphrasing now, but it said that music and gymnastics are the two perfect disciplines to be combined in a wholly healthy person. That’s a paraphrase. That just made a huge impression on me right then because I already knew that I liked doing both those things, but I didn’t really connect the two in my mind. What we’d like to do is we don’t want to be too high brow or pontifcating about this – the best thing we can do is just to demonstrate and not to talk about it. The fact is there are a lot of musicians, or artists, kids, that will think that every guy on the football team is just a real dummy, and the kids on the football team think that the guys who play violin are effete, and it’s nice to break down those barriers, because some of the most interesting people I’ve met in my life do both. A great example is a local guy that played on the football team here at Michigan – D’ahani Jones. He plays saxophone, he’s a great athlete, he’s an actor – a very interesting and vital guy. It’s cool to help break down some of those barriers – just to put it plainly. I just want to support the things that have served me well throughout my whole life, and those are my two things I’ve enjoyed my whole life, just the way a kid would. I’d just like other people to be able to continue to enjoy them and it’s becoming harder. Budgets are diminished, opportunities are lessened. We’re just trying to, the extent that we can, beat a drum about this and be advocates.
We have no special voice or special expertise. We’re just people that know we like those things, and because we’re so visible, we have the opportunity to be advocates. We’re not broadly listened to, but in small groups, with the people we interact with. There we are, demonstrating those two things, and it’s immediately evident, when you see us. So I think it’s worthwhile.
