If you’ve ever stood in the bathroom at Soundpony Lounge, then you know pretty much everything you need to know about Cry Baby Hill. We say this with love. Nowhere else in Tulsa can you find the same alchemy of grime, enthusiasm, glorious disaster, uninhibited love, community hotness, joy, and absolute mess than at this now-legendary event. Born from the beloved chaotic-good haunt where cycling and drinking first intermingled here, Team Soundpony’s watch party on Cry Baby Hill marks the incredible final day of Tulsa Tough, where cyclists race up and down the killer hills south of downtown, being cheered on, hollered at, and entertained by . . . well, by you. In themed costume. In flagrante. In the most public display of expressive, exhilarated fervor most of you let fly with all year.
Andy Wheeler is a multivalent bike advocate: co-director of Cry Baby Hill, public interest writer for Bike Club, and Minister of Information/Board of Directors member for Team Soundpony, a cycling team whose riders seem to have more fun than most. ("Bicycles are a rolling celebration," says the CBH Facebook page, "and we are just an extension of that.") His favorite place to ride is in the “insanely gorgeous” hills of Osage County. He talked with Root about the genesis of CBH, the cultural anthropology of what the hell happens up there and the instant theme kismet that was Tiger King.
AC: Is there something about the culture of cycling that brings this kind of spirit out? Because this kind of thing doesn't happen at the end of, like, a baseball game.
AW: Before Tulsa Tough got here in 2006, we [Team Soundpony and CBH originators Wheeler, Mike Wozniak and Josh Gifford] were amateur bike racers in our 20s and 30s who had a lot more energy for this kind of thing, but we didn't have anything local. We grew up watching the Tour de France on these random networks, or in old antiquated movies. The most dramatic parts of the races were always these mountain climbs where the race would be decided. We always knew hills decided races, but we also appreciated the fans along the side of the road. I think the Italians call them the tifosi—the really rabid cycling fans. Those were the stages we would get up at five o'clock in the morning to watch. So we literally learned on television how to lose our minds. Like, hey, we've got it: we’ve gotta be drinking since Tuesday, and then go up on a mountainside and scream at everybody that goes by. Yeah!
AC: So when Tulsa Tough arrived, you were ready.
AW: What happened was, the Saturday race went on from maybe 10:00am till 8:00 or 9:00pm, maybe 9:30. And then all the pro racers went up to Soundpony [which two founders of Team Soundpony had just opened the month before, and which sat right in front of the course] and hung out. And everybody met up there and partied a little bit, and the people who weren’t racing on Sunday just … kept going. That was the genesis of Cry Baby Hill. Everybody went up there the next morning to watch the Sunday races, super tired, groggy, maybe a little drunk still. I think the costumes also grew out of the fact that all our clothes were so dirty and so disheveled and we thought, we gotta do something to hide, like, the train wreck that is the darkness behind my eyes. And costumes certainly helped with that. I don’t want to make it sound like a complete catastrophe, but that's exactly what it is. It's a complete catastrophe.
AC: What makes it so cathartic?
AW: There's very defined borders on CBH: the condos and houses on one side and the bike race on the other. There's very defined rules: no dogs, no kids, no whining, no glass, and this year, no coolers. Within those borders and rules, between that gap, people feel a sense of comfort with their friends to lose their minds. It's a container for the madness. It's almost an accomplishment in and of itself to make it up there. But the real accomplishment is to be able to endure that all day. I mean, the racers are going by like 70 times in a row, doing 20 miles an hour. It's crazy. And then the people that have been up there since like 8:00am, partying really hard, they're part of the spectacle too. Everybody's just been screaming for the entire day. I always took pride in the fact of how shot my voice was the next day. Like, is there anything left? No, there is not? Then I had a really good time.
At the same time, after this past year, there's been a lot of people looking to Cry Baby Hill like, “if we can just make it to CBH we're going to be okay—and then we're going to explode, we're going to party so hard.” And I'm like, you guys, we don't have to do it all in one shot. We can stretch it out throughout the summer. We really can.
AC: Now that CBH has grown from being just a handful of cycling fans staggering up the hill from Soundpony the night before, to a crowd of thousands, do you feel like it’s reached some sort of tipping point?
AW: Yeah. We created this super inclusive bike club where, if you wanna come ride bikes, you're welcome to join us. That was the ethos behind Cry Baby Hill: if you want to be a part of something fun with bikes and racing, come on up and let's go party. And for some reason I can't explain, from day one nobody's really given a shit what we've done up there. The powers that be with the race organization, the City of Tulsa, Tulsa Police Department (God bless them), Tulsa Fire, EMS, Chamber of Commerce—they've all given us carte blanche. Now folks are promoting Cry Baby Hill like, Hey, it's Oklahoma's biggest party! Tulsa Tough and CBH are in complete agreement that we don't need to beat that drum any harder. Our patience is kind of worn out with the drunkenness, especially when we have to keep pulling minors out of the crowd. There have been a number of instances where somebody got super drunk and wanted to fight. But TPD has been fantastic up there. Just their immediate presence chills everybody out. The bottom line is, we're all about positivity until it gets negative. Then you got to go. We're walking a very fine line. We understand that people have put a lot of trust in us to know what we're doing. And honestly, we don't, but it's organically grown to the point where a lot of people in the crowd help us out because they understand how it works.
AC: So how does it work?
AW: How late in the day you get there is about how close to the fire you want to walk. If you get there first thing in the morning, it's just the hill in its quiet little bird-chirping glory. By three and four and five in the afternoon, it gets super loose and super dodgy. It's always hot and it's muggy and it's just a really hot sweaty mess. But if you walk around the course and see all the house parties and everybody having a good time, you’ll get a taste of what the potential of Tulsa is. Everybody gets along, everybody's welcoming, everybody's just super happy to be there and proud to be a part of that event. And then the more comfortable you get, the further into the breach you go, you know, I think it's a matter of comfort level. It's not for everybody, especially later in the day. If you get too hot easily, or you don't like crowds, this is not the place for you.
This year, adjacent to the bridge that crosses West 21st Street, we've got the whole parking lot. There's a stage that's cordoned off. There's water, beer, food trucks. We've got multiple bands, DJs. It's an effort to thin it out up top and try to bring people down all the way around the race course. That'd be ideal, instead of trying to cram them all on that tiny, tiny hillside, which is going to be even tighter because of the fencing and barriers up there. [Barriers between the crowd and the course made their first CBH appearance in 2019.] Most of our effort in the past was trying to push people back in time, doing this dance between them partying their asses off and then every single lap we'd have to get them off the course again. It was a lot of effort. Now we can just try to encourage people to party safely.
AC: Tiger King was one of the first things that brought people together at the beginning of pandemic times. And it had this incredibly delicious/terrible Oklahoma connection. Was it just obvious to you all that it had to be this year’s theme?
AW: When that came out a couple of us were texting each other like, “Can you believe what a great theme this is going to be for Cry Baby Hill?” And then as the spring wore on and we realized we weren't going to have Tulsa Tough that switched to, “Are you kidding me?” Because it's the perfect costume idea. Mullets and EMS jackets. Somebody getting their arm ripped off. Carole Baskin murdering her husband. It's all perfect. The whole deal. We felt like it was taken from us. And we just took it back. [Ed. note: this theme already appears to be morphing along an associative glam/redneck axis that includes "King of the Hill," science fiction, and Melvis only knows what else. Long story short: be safe, be nice, stay hydrated, go wild.]
