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Mountain Bike
November 2005
METAL HEAD
Onstage and on the Trail, Audioslave’s Tim Commerford Goes Big
By Andrew Vontz
In five hours, Tim Commerford, 37, bass player in the rock supergroup Audioslave, will take to the stage with his band at the Wiltern Theater in Los Angeles to jam out in front of a sold-out crowd. Between Audioslave and his old project, Rage Against the Machine, Commerford has sold more than 10 million discs had three number-one albums, and become a rock icon. But when he rolls up to the Wiltern 45 minutes before soundcheck, he isn’t thinking about music at all. Ask him why he’s wheeling his Santa Cruz Bullit into the building and he’ll say he’s got one thought in his head: hucking off of the stage into the seats before it’s time to play. “We just got back from Cuba where we played for 70,000 kids who’d never been to a rock show. There was a nice stage that I sized up and jumped off of right before the show,” he reports, rather matter of factly, as if all rockers take stage dives aboard freeride rigs. Then again, Commerford doesn’t have the wiry, strung out bearing of the typical purveyor of goat-slaying riffs. In fact, he’s 6’2” and 180 pounds of solid, rippling muscle, and with a Maori warrior tattoo covering most of his upper body he looks like a comic-book jib samurai incarnate.
Everywhere he’s gone for the past eight years for business or pleasure—for instance, Stuttgart, Amsterdam, and Mexico—he’s brought one of his 30 (yes, THREE ZERO) mountain bikes with him. When he’s home in Los Angeles he digs hitting super technical trails with Hans Rey. “It doesn’t matter if it’s a waterway or Pike’s Peak or rolling singletrack. I like riding, wherever it is. I’ve had my GPS for three years and I have 8,000 miles on it—and that’s mainly riding I’ve done on tour,” he says. Just then, as Commerford ratchets the buckles on his Shimano shoes and prepares to shred, Audioslave’s tour manager, Rick Fagan, comes and pops Commerford’s stage-huck balloon. “The venue won’t allow it. It’s too risky,” Fagan says. “And if you fall there’s not going to be a show tonight. Sorry man.”
Commerford runs a hand through his shoulder-length brown locks, shrugs his shoulders and wheels his bike outside where he proceeds to bomb a two-story metal staircase in back of the Wiltern with a one-pedal-stroke run-in. Then he rolls across the street from the theater and does a huck off of a five-foot-tall wall before he cruises to the line in front of the venue to give his fans a treat. He asks for two volunteers to lie on the ground and then proceeds to bunny hop them and then skid to a halt inches from rush-hour traffic.
Is Commerford an unusual creature in the rock menagerie? Yes indeed. Whereas most pop icons spend their nights chasing the next girl, the next high, and the next party, Commerford has spent the past ten years using the unique opportunities afforded a rock star to pursue the ultimate ride. “I go to bed every night thinking about my bike or some ride I might be doing the next day or a ride I was on the day before. It’s more than just something I do to stay in shape or pass time or check out for a while. It’s a lifestyle and I dream about it,” he says as he relaxes backstage and stares at his newest rig, a Maverick ML-8. After the show Commerford confesses that even when he’s on stage rocking his skull to the music—and Commerford is literally metal-headed; more on that later—he’s visualizing his next ride.
How did mountain biking find you?
I met my wife back in ’93. Her stepfather, Jimbo Insko, was big into mountain biking. I’m thinking, okay, a guy named Jimbo. How good is this going to go? The first thing he did was take me out in the garage to show me his mountain bike, a Performance titanium hardtail. I’ve always been into nuts and bolts and different kinds of metal and there was a lot for me to like. He’s this unbelievable dude. He’s 49 years old now and he was Mr. USA in bodybuilding in 1983. I call him my dad even though he’s my father in law. I love hanging out with him and riding with him. He’s learning things, he’s trying things, and that’s why I ride. I’m so happy that I chose a sport I’ll be able to do for a long time. He has a coffee shop in Orange County, Cyrano’s, that’s a mountain bike hub. He’s got a little shop in the back where he works on his bike and everyone else’s bike.
What was your lifestyle like before you found mountain biking?
My view of the world was very narrow. I maybe looked from one end of the block to the next. I played varsity football in high school, I skateboarded a lot, I played basketball, I played baseball, I was on the swim team for six years. I wasn’t looking at the mountains and the horizon and seeing what was out there. But now when I’m driving I’m looking so much further down the road and it’s all because of mountain biking. The first times I went riding by myself I used to be scared. I remember getting up in the morning and I’d have knots in my stomach before I went riding. It was a big deal when I wasn’t scared anymore. It was part of my life. That’s what I used to say: riding my bike is my job and I want to go on a big ride every day and be ready to go on a long ride any time the chance comes up.
Do you listen to music when you ride?
No. I feel like there’s rhythm in the ride and it really inspires me. I love to hear the animals and see the animals and see how the trail changes from day to day with rain and landslides. Your wheels are hitting the ground at various times and certain rhythms come out of that and some of those rhythms are cool. I love that. I keep a tape recorder in my car and if a beat or a riff or a part sticks with me for a whole ride then I know it’s good. I’ll mouth it into the tape recorder when I get back to the car. Those ideas always hold water. When we come back from this next European tour we’re supposed to go write more songs. Riding my bike and rehearsing go hand in hand. I love to ride hard before rehearsal. I can sit there and write music and be tired and be okay.
How long have you been taking your bike on the road?
In ‘97 I went to Australia with Rage and that’s when I finally brought it along. I’d been obsessed with it and I’d overcome massive injuries from mountain biking and I decided I needed to have it with me on the road and be able to enjoy it and see the world that way. Those are my memories. My memories are not these little shit ass venues we might be in or these cum couches (points to couch he’s sitting on). It’s the audiences and the set lists and the rides I go on.
Are your bandmates into riding?
I’m enthusiastic about mountain biking and I try to turn on anyone I can to the sport. I bought (Audioslave guitarist) Tom Morello a Cannondale Jekyll. He rides it all the time. I bought (Audioslave singer) Chris Cornell an Intense Uzzi SL. He’s never ridden it. I would start building up bikes from parts in my garage and give them to my guys. I’ve probably given away $25,000 worth of bikes. Maybe one out of every sixteen people I’ve worked with will get into it.
What’s your riding routine when you’re on tour?
I do it whenever I can. The one thing I’m bad at is gauging how tired I might be later in the day or the next day after a ride. There have been a lot of shows that I’ve had bad, bad shows from my standpoint because I’m too tired to stand up for an hour and a half much less bob around. It’s a fine art to know when to turn around and come back. But I always ride on my days off. If I don’t I feel like a derelict, like I’m blowing it. If I were to miss riding on more than one day when we weren’t playing it’d be a major bummer.
What do you think about Bon Jovi sponsoring a cycling team?
Better than not doing it. I heard he rides mountain bikes—I want a celebrity race with me and Bon Jovi. I’m calling you out, Bon Jovi, and I will crush you. I think it’s cool that he’s paying for a cycling team. I’m going to open up my own Red Bull and pay for people to win. I can see myself paying big dollars for someone to jump off of a cliff. There are only a few guys in the world like Dave Watson and Kyle Strait who can do that kind of unbelievable riding. That picture of Dave Watson jumping over the Tour De France peloton—that’s what I want to do. It went outside of the world of mountain biking and it got people who don’t mountain bike psyched on our sport. The guy’s not afraid. Not afraid of pain, not afraid of dropping sixty feet through the air.
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A few days later Audioslave releases its second album, Out of Exile. Later in the week it will debut on the Billboard charts at number one. In the meantime, Commerford has a few precious days to pause at his Malibu home with his wife, Aleece, and their two boys, Xavier and Quentin, before he hits the road again. Still, he makes time to go for a four-hour ride on the trails in the Santa Monica Mountains where he learned how to ride. Rolling on his new Maverick ML-8, Commerford has the skills and suspension to go big—he can huck 15-foot drops and easily nails an 8-footer off the trail—but he’s also a man who loves the pain and finesse of climbing. He wasn’t always a tech master, though. On the other side of the canyon is Westridge, a trail that almost ended his affair with mountain biking. After nailing a low-speed, super steep technical crawl up loose hardpack, Tim looks out on Westridge while he catches his breath.
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What was your first brush with freeriding like?
I’d been riding mountain bikes for three years really seriously. I had a Trek 900 chromoly hard tail with the Specialized Future Shock. I had ridden my bike from Santa Monica over the mountain range to rehearsal into the San Fernando Valley. I was coming back flying down a fire road on West Ridge where there was a jump off to the left that I decided to hit. There’s no way I would come flying down a road with all the speed I could get to hit a jump now. But I was just a novice. I remember hitting the jump and feeling really front heavy and that was it. I woke up in an emergency room. I have a metal plate right here (points next to left eye) and I’ve got four nuts that you can feel. My skull is screwed together from that.
So you’re a real life metal head?
I am a metal head but I don’t set off metal detectors. It’s titanium—total mountain bike metal. It’s pretty sick. I actually have an x-ray somewhere of my teeth and you can see it. I have since crashed on it again. Once I broke it open and the metal was just out! There are some Phillips head screws in there and the nice thing about it is they didn’t recess them perfectly. Coming back from it was a psychological thing where I had to go, ‘I’m going to learn how to ride a bike now and I’m not going to be an idiot novice and go flying down a hill at speed and hit a jump.’
What do you like about mountain biking?
The more pain you can endure, the bigger your window of opportunity will be. Cycling is my window of opportunity. If it weren’t for cycling I wouldn’t be 180 pounds. I’d be 215 pounds. I’d be drinking beer. I wouldn’t be in the shape I’m in.
Do you enjoy the pain?
I grew up with a very psychologically painful life and I used the bass guitar to zone out and forget about the pain. The bass guitar became my job and my mountain bike became my new bass guitar. I put myself in pain and I feel like I’m a rock climber. If there’s anything negative happening in my life then the pain on my bike far outweighs it and I forget and I get to erase the chalkboard for a day and start again. I don’t rock climb, but when those guys are on the side of the mountain they don’t worry about their wives nagging at them. They’re worried about surviving. I think mountain biking is the same thing. When you’re on a hard trail you’re not thinking about anything but getting down that trail. I like that.
What does mountain biking mean to you?
It feels so good to take my bike out in places I don’t know. But to be able to go anywhere in the world and get on my bike and ride is the most amazing feeling in the world. We’ve been to London a bunch of times and finally I decided to bring my mountain bike. I asked around about where I could go riding and they said this place called Dorking. Sure enough, I got on a train for a little while and went to this little city called Dorking and I rode my mountain bike. There was a bike shop there and I met people there and I rode my bike to the top of a hill and there was an old castle at the top and you can see the ocean. That freedom of being able to go a lot further than you can go when you just walk around has translated to the way that I look at the world when I’m walking around or when I’m in a car. I’m not just looking a block away. I’m looking to the mountains in the distance. I’m saying, hey, I can see those mountains so I can ride to those mountains! That’s sick.
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