a SHAKE YOUR PEACE! tour-van circa 2005

Gabe Dominguez at Bicycle Music Festival.
@ "Bernal Heights Hilltop Concert & Capture the Flag Game" in San Francisco '07

St. George, UT- May 2007 tour
Deer Creek Reservoir - Fall '05 tour

at Bicycle Music Festival

Dominguez Boys listen to red flute concert en route to Zion National Park. Utah Tour 2007

about SHAKE YOUR PEACE!

SHAKE YOUR PEACE! cellist Joey Chang, bucket drum at the ready, rolls down Hwy 1

In a Nutshell:
SHAKE YOUR PEACE! is a folk band based out of camping tent on the roof of a pink house in San Francisco's Mission District. The band aims to be more and more sustainable: touring on bicycles (without a support van) and using public transportation, powering its P.A. system with human/audience power via bicycle, planting a tree for each CD it makes, and more.

The band performs regularly in the SF Bay Area and on its own bicycle music tours throughout the West.

Beyond the Nutshell:
With an original literary and theatrical style drawing from the worlds of gospel, folk, drag queens, pirates, pop, and country, SHAKE YOUR PEACE! is what would happen if Aretha Franklin, Hank Williams, and Johnny Appleseed threw off their clothes and climbed in bed together, strapped bicycle wheels to the side of their mattress, and started rolling across America inviting everyone they met to come jump up-and-down on the bed.

In its essence, it's an acoustic American folk band - an amalgam of gospel shouts, squeals, and singing; the cowboy balladry and backcountry touring habits of Ramblin' Jack Elliott; the sometimes whimsical, sometimes serious, and ever-romantic socialist lyrics of Woody Guthrie; and pop music from the 60's to the present day - performed on guitar, fiddle, cello, harmonica, foot, and 4-part harmony. In spirit, SHAKE YOUR PEACE! seems to be in the lineage of what could be called the "punk-rock" tradition in American folk music, epitomized by artists like Joe Hill, Pete Seeger, and Utah Phillips - who blurred the lines between where their concerts ended and their lives of social justice activism began.

In practice SHAKE YOUR PEACE! is a "sustainable band," meaning that in addition to presenting its music via the standard anarcho-punk/DIY hallmarks of music-business (self-recording and self-releasing records, booking its own shows, anti-copyrighting creative work, and presenting merchandise with no set prices) it's upped the political ante by adding a comprehensive "sustainable/environmental dogma" that turns each music-business step: from touring on bicycles, to planting one tree for each CD made, to powering the website with wind power - into ecological performance-art pieces unto themselves. [To read more about what SHAKE YOUR PEACE!'s sustainability looks like practically speaking, check out FAQ&D 1) "What is Sustainable Rock & Roll?"]

Sustainable music isn't a new genre of music stylistically speaking (a hip hop artist could be a sustainable musician as easily as a classical musician), but an entirely new paradigm practically speaking. It's based on the idea that "music" isn't just the harmony a musician creates onstage, but the harmony they create offstage as well. As master percussionist David Pleasant once pointed out: "Remember, there's the music...and then there's Thee Music. There's a difference." As a sustainable music project, SHAKE YOUR PEACE! aims to include Thee Music in its aesthetic; trying to create harmony with the bugs, fish, and trees through the musical instrument of practical action, as much as it aims to create harmony with its chords, lyrics, and melodies through traditional instruments..

Taking its cues from Gandhi's infamous "Salt March," and "Swaraj" or "Self-Rule" campaigns of revolutionary self-reliance, SHAKE YOUR PEACE!'s grander aim is to use it's self reliant and sustainable practices as a means for social revolution. Slightly different from Gandhi's expressions: where he used spinning wheels to make a local and sustainable cotton fabric in defiance of the British, SHAKE YOUR PEACE! uses bicycle wheels to spin a local and sustainable social fabric in defiance of the culture of consumerism; and whereas Gandhi and his friends walked down to the beach to crystallize salt out of the vast anonymous ocean, SHAKE YOUR PEACE! bikes to small towns like Ephraim, Utah to crystallize a sustainable vision out of the vast anonymous swaths of Middle America. SHAKE YOUR PEACE! believes that its personal action is a political force, and hopes that if enough people can make the "powers that be" irrelevant by exercising their own power, that "one day," as the quote goes, "they're gonna throw a war, and nobody's gonna show up."

Currently based in a 7' x 9' camping tent on the roof of "The Pink Palace," a 3-story musicians collective covered in gang graffiti in the heart of San Francisco's Mission District, SHAKE YOUR PEACE! is preparing to take its bicycle tour tornado once more through the pastoral heartland of Utah.

An October 2005 tour of N. Utah was the first “sustainable rock & roll bicycle tour” for the band. The band followed up with a 600-mile April 2007 tour from the top of the state to the bottom in support of their new album: "Sing It As You Please." In late 2007 SYP! joined The Ginger Ninjas during the California section of their "Pleasant Revolution Tour," again pedaling 600 miles, this time from  the Sierra Mountains near Tahoe all the way down to San Diego. May 2008 marks the 3rd Annual SHAKE YOUR PEACE! Rock & Roll Bicycle Tour of Utah, sharing the bill with Sonya Cotton, and pedaling over 300 miles, making appearances everywhere from high school lunch rooms, to clubs, to backcountry alpine meadows where the audience and band will have to hike-in.

The album "Sing It As You Please," is an almost entirely handmade album, sewn together individually with fun interactive elements like the little fuzzy pocket on the back that contains a miniature 20-page book (purported to be "made by real actual bugs") whose pages are all laboriously cut out with scissors and then sewn into an inch-and-a-half book binding.

The album ranges in musical expression from incense smoke wafting through a cathedral, to joyfully flicked boogers at a campfire; and lyrically from timeless folk-styled lines: "river storms and river tides still held between two river sides, going to love you all my life babe," (On the Hudson) to jubilantly playful eruptions: "you're so hot you melt the boxers right off of my boodie!" (In the Arms of The Gypsy). The humanity of the band with all of its "sacred" and all of its "profane," is fully on display throughout the entirety of the warm, lo-fi performances, inviting the listener to grab a seat on the couch in the living room where it was recorded. [Click here to listen to "Sing It As You Please"]

Whether on the chorus of Juss A Little Bit Mo where we're asked to sing along at their live performances, the rock & roll bicycle tour where we're encouraged to ride and camp-out along the band, or with their album where we're invited to "Sing it As You Please," SHAKE YOUR PEACE! is inviting everyone to not only rally to the vision of sustainable musicianship, but to add their voice and interpretation.

 In the foothills of Salt Lake City

 The Caravan rolls through Salt Lake

>> In May SHAKE YOUR PEACE! tours Utah for a second time, pedaling 600 miles from the top to the bottom of the state, playing 25 shows everywhere from mountain meadows, to sustainability festivals, to opening for Ralph Nader at a graduation ceremony. With the pedal-powered PA in tow, it is the first significant, entirely self-supported (no sag wagon) music bike tour ever (as far as we know).

>> In the Spring, The whiz team at Rock The Bike converts Dominguez' 12V PA system into a human-powered wonder. It is the first significant pedal-powered PA system able to be hauled for hundreds of miles on a bike, ever (as far as we know).

No photoshop used here, San Francisco hills are just really like cliffs. (photo: Mark J)

 The Mini-Martin, on a Fall morning in Utah, is cooler than being cool.

"The Gypsy" - Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn