Shooting the Breeze: A Chat With Mountain Biking Pioneer Joe Breeze

By Steve Thomas

Marin County has given its heart and soul to its favored prodigal child over the years, that child being mountain biking, of course. Born and raised on the trails around Mount Tamalpais, and brought to adulthood on the sketchy and twisted downhill slopes of the unholy Repack. Largely through the wild and early off-road antics of the original Klunker Crew, led by the likes of Charlie Kelly, Gary Fisher, Tom Ritchey and Joe Breeze, mountain biking lived up to its youthful promise and developed into a whole new revolutionary sport in its own right—our sport.

Somewhere between this motley cycling-obsessed crew, the modern-day mountain bike emerged to accommodate the new sport, with Joe Breeze’s first Breezer 1 balloon-tire bike being widely considered as the first truly recognizable ancestor of what would soon become a fully fledged mountain bike.

Joe still lives and works within the shadow of Mount Tam.  He fittingly stands as curator of the Marin Museum of Bicycling. We caught up with this humble godfather of mountain biking to learn more.

MBA: Can you tell us how you first got into cycling and what kind of riding you did pre-mountain bike?
Joe Breeze: My father raced sports cars, and rode his bike to work and all over to stay in shape for car racing. Cycling rubbed off on many of us in the family, and I’d be riding across California by the time I was 14, and up to Washington state and back by 16. I took up road racing in 1970 and raced for 10 years, eventually at the highest level in the U.S.

MBA: I’ve heard from Tom Ritchey about you going to him for a tandem frame. Can you tell us about that encounter?
JB: My buddy Otis Guy and I wanted to set the world record across America by bike. We chose to do it on a tandem in 1976. We probably still hold the record to Lincoln, Nebraska (like anybody cares). That’s where my knees blew up, as we were going way too fast, being about two days ahead of the record. We got another chance in 1979 from Anchor Brewing owner Fritz Maytag. He had bought one of my first 10 Breezers. We needed a new tandem, as I had been hitting my knees on the handlebars on our Eisentraut while climbing hills. It was a great tandem, and we had won the Davis Double Century (a local 200-mile race) five times in a row on that bike, but I needed more room.

We contracted with Tom Ritchey to build the new frame, and there was a certain detail I wanted Tom to do: I had made an elliptical tube to connect my twin laterals to the seat tube. Tom built his tandems with two sets of twin lats but with X-bracing connectors. So, in January 1979, I brought Breezer #1 down to Palo Alto to show Tom what I wanted. Peter Johnson, another stellar builder, happened to be there. We all knew each other from road racing, and Peter, with a devilish smile, wrested the bike from me and rode off doing a wheelie across the street and was jumping curbs like it was a BMX bike.

Ritchey’s eyes were like saucers! Like, “What the heck is this thing?” He said he was planning to ride down the Sierra’s John Muir Trail that summer with cyclocross ace Joe Ryan using 650B bikes he would build, but when he saw the volume of the Breezer’s balloon tires, that’s what he wanted to use. I gave him my drawings and told him Gary Fisher hadn’t bought one of my Breezers, figuring he could make another for Gary. Later that year Tom would call Gary to see if he could sell off nine more framesets in Marin, as he wasn’t having any luck in the South Bay. And so began Gary Fisher’s and Charlie Kelly’s first-ever MTB business, eponymously named “MountainBikes,” with Tom Ritchey supplying frames and forks. Via the Anchor Steamer, Tom got introduced to the mountain bike.

MBA: How and when exactly did you get involved with the klunker scene?
JB: It was a bit of unintended consequences involving my best buds from our road-racing club, Velo Club Tamalpais. In 1973, Otis Guy, Marc Vendetti (now president at the Marin Museum), and I were hoping to find and restore the fine bicycles from the 19th century and display them so people could better appreciate cycling through its vast heritage. Well, we got derailed from that pretty early on. A hot lead of the sought-after machines fizzled out at a Santa Cruz bike shop one day, and Marc, not wanting to go away empty-handed, suggested I buy a pre-war newsboy bike from a derelict line-up behind the shop.

He said, “Hey, Joe, offer them $5 for this old Schwinn here.”

I said, incredulously, “What would I do with that sled (being the antithesis of our sophisticated road-racing machines)?!”
Marc explained how a year or two before he had ridden such a bike down trails on Mount Tamalpais and that he might enjoy it. I bit, and after trimming the sled from its fully equipped 70 pounds to a svelte 50, I was bombing down Tam’s old scenic railway grade. By the bottom, I was hooked! I rode the balloon-tire bike to our next club meeting, and by the next meeting a month later, Gary Fisher and Charlie Kelly were sporting similar bikes. It wasn’t long before this fat-tire adjunct morphed into our off-season wintertime fun out in the woods with our friends.

By 1976 it became apparent among us competitors that we would need to know who was fastest down the hill. That moment came on October 21st when a dozen riders raced down the brake-burning Repack downhill. There would be 22 Repack races by 1979, all promoted by Charlie Kelly. Along the way our old sleds would be termed “klunkers.”

MBA: How different was it compared to the other riding you were doing at the time, and what did it mean to you at the time?
JB: I recall telling someone back then, “Riding these bikes versus our road bikes is like the difference between ballet and football. Both very different, but beautiful in their own way.” Road bikes were about finesse and grace, while the fatties brought out my inner caveman.

MBA: Back then, did you ever think about XC-style riding on a bike made for the job?
JB: Repack was just one variety of off-road riding we were into. Cross-country riding made up the bulk of our riding, as we were riding all over Tamalpais, right out our back doors. In fact, the self-sufficiency aspect of bicycling was a point of pride. Being schlepped to the top of a hill was more a rarity.

MBA: Were you surprised how quickly it took off after building those frames?
JB: Before, when I was riding my old klunkers, my road-racer friends who didn’t klunk would look at me kind of askance, like, “Breeze, when are you going to take that thing to the dump?” Once aboard my shiny new Breezer, the reaction was quite different. You could see their mind twirling with, like, “Hey, this bike might actually go somewhere.” I knew all they needed to do was throw a leg over one.

MBA: Looking back, did being in there at ground level change your life?
JB: What really surprised me most was how Europeans took to the mountain bike. I figured Euros had nothing to learn from Americans about the bicycle, as our country having a fractured cycling past. But no, embraced it was, and they were soon beating us at our own game.

MBA: Did getting more involved with Breezer Bikes impact your passion for riding bikes?
JB: I tell you, I didn’t need any more help with passion for riding. Even when I was building Joe Breeze road-racing frames one at a time (from 1974), I figured I’d be a starving-artist frame builder and cyclist for the rest of my life!

MBA: What are you most satisfied about in terms of both the bikes you made, the impact you had on the sport or personal achievements?
JB: I’m proudest of my role in getting more Americans onto bicycles than at any time since the 1890s Gilded Age. The mountain bike’s welcoming nature got way more people into riding. It’s wonderful to see so many realizing they can extend their cycling beyond trails to get where they need to go and be healthful in everyday life. By the late 1990s I was a full-time transportation cycling advocate, and since the U.S. still needed purpose-built everyday bikes, I introduced a line of fully equipped transportation bikes (akin to cars) in the early 2000s.

MBA: What riding do you still do, and what bikes do you ride now?
JB: I still ride all the same disciplines I always have: road, MTB, town. On Breezers, of course, a Venturi, a Supercell, a Finesse. My Finesse is my car, a fully equipped bike. I have an e-town bike I use at times when I need to arrive fresh. I put in most of my miles on the road.

MBA: Do you see parallels with gravel riding, the ethos and the early MTB years?
JB: Are they any different? Gravel bikes now have about the same-size tires and can do just about all the fun stuff mountain bikes can do. Hey, speaking of this parallel, you should be interviewing Charlie Cunningham! Check out his CC Proto. His drop-bar arrangement is perhaps the last shoe to drop of the many heresies he deployed in 1979. His “spaceship” was seen as ugly and unproven then, and today it’s all beautiful.

MBA: Can you tell us about your role at the Marin Museum?
JB: I’ve devoted the past 10 years to the Marin Museum of Bicycling, a non-profit showcasing cycling’s evolution from the 1860s onward: “Illuminating and celebrating cycling’s past, present and future.” Fellow volunteers and I work to inspire people about the bicycle—the freedom machine, the noblest invention.

MBA: What did you personally get the most out of, and are there things you would do differently with the benefit of hindsight?
JB: I would’ve had buyers of the first nine production Breezers sign an agreement giving me first right of refusal to buy back their Breezer for the sale price ($750)! I figure they would’ve appreciated no risk of devaluation. In case that appears nonsensical, one Series 1 Breezer recently sold for $30,000.