Pentabike

“I’ve lied, bullshitted, exaggerated and fabricated some incredibly ridiculous stories about the creation of the Pentabike design in order to lend some sort of dark credibility to the question,” says Dave Strunk, a Denver, Colorado resident and the focus of my interview, “but the reality is that it started in about 1989 or so when I was working in a book warehouse here in Denver.” According to Strunk, the book warehouse afforded him the luxury to begin seditiously, if not somewhat subliminally, planting subversive images, such as the good, old-fashioned pentagram, in many popular book titles being shipped to what he refers to as “religious propaganda stores across this great land.”

“Having cut my teeth in the first and second wave punk rock movements of England and the U.S., I naturally had a tendency to sway to the left and to appreciate cynicism and anything that caused people to pause and question what is worth believing in and what is not,” Strunk says. As previously described, Strunk had become accustomed to inserting pentagrams into religious literature, and as a result of this, the first Pentabike design was scribed into Strunk’s messenger bag when he left the book warehouse and began working as a bicycle courier in Denver. It was in effect forgotten about until years later, when Strunk began spotting the logo in various places around Denver, at which time he reclaimed the design and noticed it garnering a somewhat cult following, both in Denver and throughout the rest of the country, showing up everywhere from bike shops to trash dumpsters and even as tattoos without any help or persuasion from Strunk himself. “In reality,” he says, “the logo was a modification of something that was started to simply raise eyebrows and rile up the middle-of-the-road establishment, but it was never meant to become an official logo or brand, as such.”

Strunk did not, however, create the design as an indication of his support, interest, affiliation or interaction with any specific groups, agendas, beliefs or mantras. “I’ve always been sort of a devil’s advocate on most anything you’d ever care to discuss,” he explains, “and the logo, while stemming from some apparent icon that most people identify as being affiliated with a ‘satanic’ agenda, was simply a stupid little tag that was utilized by me during my years as a courier here in Denver and happened to be noticed by a somewhat small and subversive group of people.”

Having first gotten into cycling in the late 70s and early 80s, Strunk’s first experiences were with BMX. “The late 80s brought the purchase of my first real ‘adult’ bike,” Strunk says. “It came in the form of a totally shitty, secondhand mountain bike with a six-speed Shimano groupo and an early Tru Temper frame. I called it the ‘Cheetah Chrome Mother Fucker’ (anyone who understands this reference, you‘re a true punk), and I rode it for miles and miles around Denver and the surrounding areas.” Strunk got his first real road bike around this same time and logged plentiful miles, leading, inevitably, to his courier gig in Denver.

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Comments on this article

Posted on March 9, 2010 by Doug

Strunk can explain away his coincidental crossover into pentagrams, but not the quart of Goat's blood in his messenger bag.

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