THE BIKERIDERS (1968)

I first discovered Danny Lyon’s 1968 book The Bikeriders in 1980, when I came across a hardback first edition in a used book store, and what a discovery it was!

Danny Lyon is an award-winning lensman who spent the early days of the 1960s with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), documenting the Civil Rights Movement in the Deep South (above).  In his first week in the South, Lyon was arrested, and spent a week in a cell beside a beleaguered Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Junior.

Upon release he was threatened with lynching by racist cops (like those pictured above) but persevered to become SNCC’s official photographer, documenting many of the key moments in the Civil Rights Movement’s quest for justice and racial equality.

He also became lifelong friends with SNCC organizer and future Congressman John Lewis (above) and was at the Congressman’s side in the final days of Mr. Lewis’ life.

After his efforts in the Deep South, Lyon — already a dedicated rider — returned to Chicago, enrolled in university there, and became a member of the Chicago Outlaws Motorcycle Club.

As a full-patch member of the Outlaws, Lyon (aboard his beloved 1956 Triumph Thunderbird, above) rode and partied with the club, but also photographed Outlaws and patchholders from other clubs, their wives and girlfriends, motorcycle racers and mechanics and others involved in the motorcycle scene. 

He also conducted low-key, casual interviews with Outlaws and other clubbers, their old ladies, and some of the racers he’d met at tracks from Illinois to New Hampshire.

The resulting book was groundbreaking in many ways.  For starters, it combined Lyon’s technically brilliant and compassionately soulful images of the motorcycling world with transcripts of his interviews, in a format never before seen in American publishing.  It also made him one of the first observers (after Hunter S. Thompson of Hell’s Angels fame and Tom Wolfe, who wrote The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test) to document the rising phenomenon of ‘outlaw motorcycle clubs’, and his book the first photo book about bikers ever published.  Finally, it made his the very first book about clubs written by an actual member of a club, and giving voice to rank-and-file members of those clubs.

Sadly, The Bikeriders  received little notice when it was first published, and quickly went out of print.  As psychotic as I have always been about reading and collecting books on motorcycling and other topics of interest, I’d never heard of Lyon or his book when I found that first edition hardback at Half-Price Books on Lavaca Street in Austin in 1980, but gladly paid the $4.95 for my copy….

….and by-the-by, as of this morning, those same first edition / first printing hardbacks were selling for anywhere from $1000 to $1850!  😮 Not that my copy is for sale anytime soon — as a biker and historian, the book is a precious resource — but it’s nice to know I scored one hell of a deal! 😆

For a long time, at least amongst the bikers I rode with, no one had ever heard of Danny Lyon or his precious little book.  I stashed the slender volume on a shelf in my ‘permanent library’, and only showed it to people I really thought could appreciate this rare gem I’d uncovered.

However, with the advent of social media I saw more and more people raving about his groundbreaking photojournalism: The Bikeriders, his monograph on the Texas prison system, his work with SNCC during the Civil Rights Movement of the early ’60s, his report on the destruction of Lower Manhattan and much, much more.

A BRIEF RETROSPECTIVE OF DANNY LYON’S WORK

THE BIKERIDERS RIDES AGAIN, 1997 to 2014

Beginning in 1997, reissues of The Bikeriders began to appear. Some were über-expensive slip-cased collectors’ items, priced in the hundreds, but in 2003 Chronicle Books released a more reasonably priced revised edition, which gave Lyon’s work a second chance at the immortality it deserves.

The new release included a number of ‘lost’ photographs — many in color like the one above — that the photographer unearthed from a forgotten file cabinet in the offices of Magnum Photos, where Lyon was an associate from 1967 to 1975.

The 2003 edition also included new remarks by the author about his personal history with the Outlaws Motorcycle Club, and why he hung up his colors. For those of us interested in the history of bikers, this was dynamite stuff!

THE BIKERIDERS RIDES ONTO THE SILVER SCREEN, 2024

Apparently, filmmaker Jeff Nichols (Take Shelter, Midnight Special and Mud) agreed with that ‘dynamite’ assessment, because he took Lyon’s book — the photographs, interviews, and Lyon’s personal remarks — as inspiration for a new full-length feature film, also titled The Bikeriders and starring current A-list actors like Austin Butler (Elvis and Masters of the Air), Jodie Comer (Star Wars Episode IX and Killing Eve), and Tom Hardy (Band of Brothers and Inception).

Reading reports about the upcoming film and synopses of the plot, and viewing the trailer for the film, I feel certain the storyline depicted in the film will be heavily weighted by Lyon’s later remarks about his tenure with the club. The film’s ‘rise and fall’ arc seems to reflect the photographer’s disillusionment with the club’s turn from a band of rowdy hard-riding roughnecks to a grimmer, more dangerous organization.

I’m still excited to see the film.  If nothing else, a ‘biker flick’ from A-listers like Butler, Comer, Hardy and Nichols will become part of biker history, along the lines of The Wild One and Easy Rider.

The Bikeriders may well have the power, as those films did, to impact the future of biker life in America and around the world. However, I am NOT expecting a happily-ever-after ending for Kathy, Benny, Johnny and the boys.

Guess we’ll find out this weekend, eh? 😆

NOW, LET THE MARKETING BEGIN! ☣️

It should come as no surprise that swag for The Bikeriders film is already flying off the shelves. The other day I posted on Facebook about a $1250 ‘Vandals’ jacket on offer from Schott Brothers, the same purveyors of leather goods who crafted Marlon Brando’s famous ‘Perfecto’ jacket for the 1953 film The Wild One. They are now offering a ‘D-Pocket Jacket’ like the one Tom Hardy’s character wears in the film.

Then there’s the photo book VANDALS: The Photography of the Motion Picture ‘The Bikeriders’ (2024), which is available through Amazon, Schott’s website, and goddess knows where else….

….and, of course, official merch from the filmmakers themselves, including denim jackets with Vandals MC ‘colors’ printed or embroidered on the back, matching ball caps, t-shirts, hoodies and sweatpants (sweatpants? 😮 Really? 😱).

I am not pimping for these mercenary fecks, BTW; I’m just alerting you, gentle reader, to exactly WTF is going on in the motorcycling world, for better or worse. 😱

Those of us who have been riding for a while are having flashbacks to Sons of Anarchy and all the relentless marketing surrounding that production. To this day, people are showing up at motorcycle events wearing official ‘support’ t-shirts and pirated copies of SoA colors, and YouTube teems with videos of people warning riders of issues with faux club colors, like the ones the couple below are sporting.

Just for the record: DON’T!

I’d love to hear back from anyone who’s seen The Bikeriders movie. I’ll do my best to respond to comments ASAP.

Shalom!