The durability of aftermarket bike products rarely lives up to advertising hype. Bombproof? Bulletproof? Nukeproof? Hardly. Simple fact is, we as consumers are the guinea pigs.

That next-generation space-age material used on an F-16 fighter jet must be strong enough for a bike, right? Maybe, until that high-dollar carbon crank arm that used to be a missile fuselage splinters in half and finds part of itself impaled in your calf muscle. Along with the quest for Herculean strength, we mountain bikers also continually look to drop an extra hundred grams of weight off our bikes, never mind the night before when we guzzled a sixer of Coors Light and ate a Big Mac—supersized of course. But then there is the genre of mountain biker concerned with neither strength nor the weight of money-sucking aftermarket components. Their concern is, primarily, how rad does this thing look on my ride?

Rad seemed to be the only thing on the mind of a man—I’ll call him the Bunnyhopping Rockstar—I met in the summer of 1995 at a barbecue cookout near Pittsburgh hosted by Dirty Harry’s Bicycles and the now-defunct Dirt Rag magazine. Sure, minimal weight and strength were added benefits, but when it got down to business, Bunnyhopping Rockstar only cared about the rad factor. Long wiry blonde hair down past his shoulders, tattoos on his thin, pale, sinewy arms, a scent of sweaty armpits and cigarette butts and a nonstop air-drumming routine that must have contained more invisible toms than Neil Peart’s 1984 Rush world tour kit were just a few of this character’s distinctive traits.

He was impossible to miss. The dude jumped around with more vigor than a 6-year-old on a pogo stick. His ratty hair bounced up and down and flowed more elegantly than a horse’s mane. He had a Walkman on and every so often, when a really good drum solo was coming, he’d stop hopping and put on an in- visible drumming spectacle that kept me in awe. Boom! Dugga-dugga-crash-ch-ch-ch-Chang-ka-kakakaka-Kow! Boom! Snare! Crash! Gong!