In this guest blog, author Keerthi Jayasimha writes about his experiences from the Crusty Demons, motocross stunt show held in Palace Grounds Bangalore. Event date: 2005, December 10

Palace Grounds Concert Area was chosen as the demonic site for all the evil stunts to be done by the Aussie team: Crusty Demons. Coupla streets away on the way to the venue I could already feel the high spirits of the approaching teenage motorcyclists savagely trying to overtake every possible vehicle in front. I smiled as rode in. Reached the place and found my friends and hung out at the parking lot admiring the huge turnout and the enthusiasm of the public. We were quite surprised to see a couple of old women as well. Not bad.

After running around and looking for backstage to collect passes (aha!) for myself and 2 friends thankfully arranged for by Shubabrata(Shumi) of BSMotoring, I waited for the other two as my other friends with 500/- tickets (and cursing looks) joined the endless beeline of masses into the squatting area through the 2 entrances. After a while, before getting in, security frisks them (ladies are spared grrr!) for weapons, Intoxicants and cameras etc. They find nothing. That is because they always search in the same places. Bangaloreans are too smart for such basic stuff anyway. They get in. My friends arrive, we get in through the VIP (ha!) entrance and surprise: Rain!

Drizzle actually! As usual, the short folks get a raw deal. I try to be nice by letting people shorter than I come and stand in front of me. That put me in the end again. Now I know who gets the raw deal. So much for courtesy. Drizzle gets stronger. The crowd waits very patiently past 7:30.

The circuit was pretty simple. 200ftx100ft area with two sets of a 3Nos parallel Incline ramps and a 20ft high dune landing for the bikes to climb up, fly and land on the dunes or after. We wondered if this was going to be a tailor-made ‘wham bam thank you ma’am’ shows to fool the Indian public? The Crusty-fatso-compere announces that the delay is because of rain and they will start after a few rounds of testing. Ten more minutes. The crowd is still patient. I guess It was because of some good music playing; Greenday, Nickelback and all. I had a new name for them tonight: Slushy Demons.

Vrooom! Vrooom! Ah! the real sound of music is heard. Crowd cheers and a crusty dude…MAD MIKE with half the riding gear comes in a Honda Motocross to test the tracks. Goes around waving the public (buying time, from my critical angle). Takes a few rounds ad suddenly goes on one of the ramps and WHOOP!! is in the air, somebody pours his mountain dew on my shoes and lands on the dune instantly giving a mass rush and carbonated drink on my right shoe. We had seen this earlier only on T.V. The real thing was WOW! After the tests, they announce that it is going to be a little tough, but they are still going to do it. The crowd cheers and gets noisy. The show finally starts. There are two comperes, one normal looking guy and another like some kind of overweight ragamuffin demon.

After a while, they reveal an interesting part of their team: Crusty-Babes!!! Yeah! why not?! Two lucky @#$* are chosen from the crowd and made to sit on a King Size sofa with 2 rusty babes all thru the show. Crusty-Comperes were promising lots of free stuff. But this was amazing. Others were just T-Shirts.

the show starts, they do lots of stunts: Jumps with bodies parallel to bike, feet on handles, Midair swaying, ‘Look ma, No Hands’ jumps. Crusty-Babes are brought on to the dunes to dance to some tunes. They dance to ‘1-2-3 by the Jets’ rather silly, but a great filler that eliminated the redundancy of the stunts. Another round of free stuff and the next level starts with another young crusty-cadaverous-demon ‘Steve Mini’ doing a 360D flip.. whoa! breathtaking!! Never seen anything like that before. Rest of the guys follow him start doing 360D flips one after the other and then parallels two at a time and make the stunt seem as easy as winking at your crony after doing something silly. I guess 10 years of practice does the trick. Finally, during the penultimate parallel 360D flip one of the guys crashes on the dune luckily unhurt. Surprisingly the crowd instead of boo..ing actually backed up the compere by cheering at the guy who crashed totally ignoring the guy who did it. No wonder the compere declared the Bangalore as the best so far for its collective gesture of encouragement. Hmmm. touching <choke> 🙂

After the crowd had enough of the MotoCross bikes, they bring in the Yamaha ATV(you know what it is!). what did we expect? Something fancy we have not seen this thing so far in this city except for the globe trotters who have somewhere sometime. This thing moves by George. After a humble entry and circumnavigating the performance area, he suddenly takes off on one of the ramps and lands on the dune. Crowd thrilled again just like the first time and rather surprised considering the weight of the buggy. Amazing. More rounds more tricks and amazingly no crash. He did it and did it right. Crusty-Busty-Babes get on top (of the dunes) again and start dancing to another song which titillated some of the dudes standing in the front row and did make them howl and groan at the futility of their sonic pleading. They were really hot this time though. phew!

Starts drizzling again.. but that wouldn’t bother the crusty-demons, as the plump host entices the audience to demand more, ‘Are you having fun, Bangalore?’, ‘You guys Rock!’ ‘you want more don’t you’ while that was going on. the second host disappears and some ‘nautanki’ starts: Host1 finds Host2 (Sorry couldn’t get the names) all geared up and begging other crusty demons for their bikes to show his talent, sure enough, nobody cares and then he announces to do some with a .. (you won’t believe it!) a Snowmobile!!! Yes and hmmm.. you guess is as good as mine was: How do you get that beast of a machine to do anything close to what the bikes or the ATV did. considering they had taken the ATV too far. I am sure that would have been the first snowmobile on the south Indian landmass. He starts it up and rides it around waves, gathers curiosity and cheers and takes the first jump off the ramp and lands on the dune. We were zapped!! SnowMobile on Bangalore soil doing a 40ft jump. Crusty Demons were something and they were taking motocross to a different level altogether. the guy drives it back up to the dune there are fireworks and the guy is interviewed by Host1 etc.. After raving about the crowd and the city he announces the grand finale.

One more round of free stuff, with Teeshirts autographed by all the Demons they start riding some dilapidated local RX100s and HeroHondas and start the destruction session by pushing the bikes off the dunes and setting them on fire. Then comes MadMike in our Infamous AutoRickshaw goes around banging steve’s AutoR and basically behave a little rougher than our regular AutoDrivers. Finally tries to climb up a dune and the auto gives up midway and rolls back and MadMike unable to control the notorious 3-wheeler topples the thing and proudly comes out of it like an F1 driver. Little does he know the subtle complexities of manoeuvring something as special as an Auto; He may be the Top crusty Demon but he just couldn’t tame our national carrier. Too bad.

Finally, when we all think it is over, crusties announce the real finale: Music starts again, crusty-babes go pillion with the crusty-demons around the circuit in reverse-Aerosmith-video fashion and make many a heart misses a beat and then the snowmobile starts Vroom!! all music stops, everybody wonders what he is up to and Vroooooooom! speeds up to take and ramp and holy shit! he does a 360D flip in that freaking beast. Well-timed fireworks go off and the crowd cheers and leaves my ears ringing… We had never seen anything like that before. Crusty-Demons rock…!!! After an Ovation (standing obviously as no one was sitting) the entire teams turns up followed by a Vote of thanks. It is a pity they are not performing elsewhere.

After the show, needless to say, lots of souped-up 2strokes driven by Crusty-Demon wannabes were trying to impress whoever was watching, by their half baked wheelies and stoppie turned skiddies. Of course, they have a long way to go. Dunno how many crashed up that night on their way back…

KJ