Clint Eastwood and John Compton ride into town on bobbed Big Twins. Both were filmed riding, and both handled the tank-shift motors easily. It was obviously not their first time on bikes!
In an episode of the 1950s television show Highway Patrol, aired 2 April 1956, two motorcycle club members (Clint Eastwood as ‘Joe Keeley’ and John Compton as ‘Nick West’) ride their stripped-down Harleys into a small town and stop at a café for breakfast. They are shocked when the café owner (Jack Edwards as ‘Bernie Sills’) confronts them with a shotgun, forces them outside and orders them to leave.
We just want somethin’ to eat, mister.
It turns out the café owner’s wife (Paula Houston as ‘Mrs. Sills’) was injured during a ‘motorcycle raid’ by a renegade club eight months earlier. Sills just assumes that because Joe and Nick are on bikes and wearing leather jackets, they must be part of that renegade club.
‘Mrs. Sills’ (Paula Houston) limps into the café, and is greeted by her doting husband, ‘Bernie Sills’ (Jack Edwards).
As his wife calls the Highway Patrol, her husband menaces and provokes the bikers until Nick snatches the shotgun from Sills and punches him on the jaw. Joe drags Nick away, they jump on their bikes (accurately customized in the fashion of the day, BTW) and roar out of town.
Nick and Joe make their getaway.
When Sills learns that his wife has called the Highway Patrol, the first thing he does is hide the gun. Then he lies to the responding officer, who is also on a motorcycle, telling him the cyclists started the trouble, that they’re dangerous and so on. Relying on the café owner’s words, the motorcycle cop sets off in hot pursuit of the bikers, only to be struck and fatally injured by a distracted trucker who runs a red light.
Sills is there when Broderick Crawford (‘Chief Dan Mathews’) shows up, and does his best to convince the head cop that those ‘cycle bums’ are responsible for the patrolman’s crash. He swears out a complaint against the bikers for ‘disturbing the peace’, infuriated that a more serious charge can’t be laid against them immediately.
‘Captain Dan Mathews’ rolls his eyes at Bernie Sills, who is vehemently insisting that ‘those cycle bums’ are responsible for the patrolman’s crash.
Back in his squad car, however, Mathews questions the café owner’s story — he doubts two bikers would take on an entire town — and tracks them down solely to question them as possible witnesses. When he hears their version of the morning’s events, he is incensed that Sills lied to him, so Mathews sets a trap for Sills. He outfits one of his motor patrolmen with a customized Harley and a borrowed motorcycle club jacket, and sends him into town to stop at the café.
A Highway Patrol officer in mufti, wearing a jacket borrowed from Nick and Joe’s club, shows up for breakfast at the Sills’ café.
Sure enough, Sills goes off on the ersatz ‘biker’, knocking over his Harley, beating on it with the stock of his shotgun, and threatening to shoot the ‘biker’. Sills even admits he’s using the same shotgun he used on Joe and Nick.
Sills vents his rage on the patrolman’s motorcycle, not realizing that Dan Mathews is watching from across the street.
At that point, Mathews and his driver appear, having witnessed the entire incident, and arrest Sills on two charges of assault with a deadly weapon. As he tries to weasel his way out of the trouble he’s in, the café owner’s wife calls him a bitter old fool, and vows to tell Mathews the truth about the incident with Joe and Nick.
‘You’re not gonna arrest me, are ya?’‘We sure as hell are, asshole!’
I tracked this episode down because, as a longtime biker, I’m interested in anything and everything to do with our history, and this episode is part of that history.
HISTORY
The ‘outlaw biker’ of today first became an identifiable character in the summer of 1947, when the town of Hollister, California, hosted a Gypsy Tour (a large motorcycle rally) which included races, hill-climbs, tire-kicking and socializing. This event was sanctioned by the AMA – the American Motorcycle Association, as it was then known – and drew a large number of ‘straight’ clubs: mom-and-pop touring clubs and sport-minded racing clubs.
‘Little Bobby’ Kelton of the Wing Nutz MC does donuts on the main drag of Hollister in July, 1947.
However, a small number of clubs, with names like Galloping Goose and Boozefighters, and comprised primarily of recently returned World War Two combat veterans, were more interested in partying than anything else, and began drinking, brawling, racing and performing motorcycle stunts on the town’s main drag.
Boozefighters MC members play games in the street, as townspeople and other riders watch.
Some windows were broken, some people were arrested, and the overwhelmed local police called the Highway Patrol in to assist in restoring order. This was finally accomplished by commandeering a dance band and a flatbed truck to serve as a stage. The damages were paid for on the spot, and the roughhousing came to a halt as the rebels took to the streets to dance!
Crowds boogie-woogie around a makeshift bandstand.
It would have been a non-story but for the efforts of an enterprising (and desperate) photographer named Barney Peterson. The San Francisco Chronicle sent Peterson to photograph the reported carnage, but he reportedly arrived too late to capture anything but the peaceful aftermath. According to witnesses, the photographer, eager to secure his commission, artfully arranged broken beer bottles beneath a bike parked at the curb, to make it look as if the town were awash in drunken revelers, and then grabbed a local fellow named Eddie Davenport and posed the visibly intoxicated Davenport on the bike with a bottle in each hand.
The resulting photograph appeared in LIFE magazine two weeks later, and seared the image of bikers as drunken louts and ruffians into the consciousness of Americans from coast to coast. Similar shenanigans at a rally the following summer, in Riverside, California, cemented that image.
August ‘Gus’ Deserpa, the young bearded man seen in the background of this photo, was a projectionist at the local theater. He had just gotten off work and wanted to check out the scene. Later, he told researchers that photographer Barney Peterson had staged the shot, gathering and arranging beer bottles around the parked motorcycle to make it seem the debauchery was worse than it really was. The myth of the ‘outlaw biker’ is based on a lie that traveled around the world in the pages of a popular magazine.
The AMA reportedly insisted that ‘99% of all motorcyclists are upright, law-abiding citizens,’ and announced that the clubs misbehaving at Hollister and Riverside would be ‘outlawed’ by the AMA. This merely meant that its members would be barred from taking part in AMA-sanctioned competition – a harsh punishment for a club that cared about winning trophies and national titles.
However, for a band of hooligans that described itself as ‘a drinking club with a motorcycle problem,’ the way the Boozefighters MC did, being ‘outlawed’ was a badge of honor. It wasn’t long before certain outlawed clubs (and those that aspired to be) devised a diamond-shaped 1% patch, which marked them as proud members of the 1% of all motorcyclists who did not fit in the AMA’s neat white-picket-fence world. They would be the elite, the baddest of the bad.
Rooney’s ‘Cyclist’s Raid’ and the real-life events at Hollister and Riverside helped inspire Stanley Kramer’s 1953 film The Wild One, which featured a smarmy motorcycle club leader (Marlon Brando as ‘Johnny Strabler’) opposite a far more realistic biker named ‘Chino’ (Lee Marvin) and his outlaw club, The Beetles. That, in turn, led to the April 1956 airing of the Highway Patrol episode titled ‘Motorcycle A’.
So why is this relatively unremembered half-hour television program worth all this verbiage? Well, kids, it stands out because, unlike The Wild One or Rooney’s fiction, or a lot of newspaper reports of the day, the bikers in this Highway Patrol episode are not the bad guys!
See? History, made fresh right here! 😁
And just to show that Highway Patrol wasn’t a one-off for Clint Eastwood’s riding abilities, here are two more pics of the man on wheels.
Clint Eastwood with his son.Clint Eastwood and Sondra Locke in ‘The Gauntlet’ (1977) aboard a panhead stolen from a ‘biker gang’ member they’d been brawling with.
If you’re a biker, you know that Hollister is not just an über-hip clothing line for spoiled mall rats. No, Hollister — a small farming community in Southern California southeast of San Jose — is the birthplace of the American Biker, that enduring trope perpetuated by media and entertainment ever since that hot July 4th weekend of 1947, when a ‘riot’ broke out during a motorcycle rally.
For much of postwar America, this guy served as introduction to the two-wheeled menace known as ‘the biker’. Even today, decades after the Yuppie invasion has convinced much of America that most Harley riders are Empty Nesters in full Midlife Crisis mode or well-to-do RUBs (rich urban professionals) with more dollars than sense, the menacing trope of ‘the biker’ endures. We serve as villains in movies and television shows, as objects of perverse sexual attraction in an alarming number of bodice-ripping romance novels, and as bogeymen for law enforcement agencies looking to gin up support for larger budgets and more deadly weaponry. In LIFE magazine, the photograph was credited to Barney Petersen. However, numerous sources have his last name spelled ‘Peterson’, and that’s the spelling I use here.
The scene at Hollister was a familiar one: a small town, eager to bring in tourists who might spend money at local businesses, built a racetrack at Veteran’s Memorial Park, and began hosting motorcycle races and ‘Gypsy Tours’: popular family-friendly gatherings sponsored by the American Motorcycle Association, as it was then known. The events were well-attended and profitable, and in most cases the worst local authorities had to deal with was a few Drunk and Disorderly arrests and some hospitalizations due to injuries suffered in motorcycle crashes on and off the track.
This photo of a ‘straight’ club appeared in the magazine LIFE just three weeks after the infamous Peterson/Davenport photo.
However, the 1947 event, one of the first held since the guns of World War Two fell silent, drew a new breed of rider. These were not the nice Mom-and-Pop ‘straight’ clubs pictured above, that frequently appeared at these events in matching uniforms, riding pristine motorcycles kitted out with numerous factory-approved accessories.
One of the field games played at many a motorcycle rally. The idea was to ride at the lowest possible speed while the passenger tended to the task at hand. If the rider’s foot touched the ground, he and his passenger were disqualified. Note the American Motorcycle Association patch on the rider’s shoulder. Membership in the American Motorcycle Association (now the American Motorcyclist Association) precludes membership in an ‘outlaw’ club.
No, these were rough, hard-bitten young men — most of them combat veterans who had seen the worst the world had to offer in the killing fields of Europe and the South Pacific — and they roared into town en masse aboard stripped-down, hopped-up motorcycles unlike anything those at Hollister had ever seen before.
The lot at Veteran’s Memorial Park, packed with motorcycles — many Harley-Davidson or Indian motorcycles stripped for action — on the July 4th weekend in 1947.
These were rattletrap bombers with front brakes and fenders removed, and rear fenders ‘bobbed’ as short as possible. Chain guards, windshields, engine guards, saddlebags — anything that might increase weight and wind-drag, and slow the machines down — were all shitcanned in favor of better performance, until all that remained was the bare essence of a motorcycle: a massive engine, rigid frame and springer forks, two wheels, a petrol tank and a saddle.
A typical ‘bob job’ Harley-Davidson at Hollister: no windshield, no front fender, back fender cut short and the original taillight – not that large or bright to begin with – replaced by a front fender light even smaller and less visible to following motorists. The hand belongs to the bike’s sleeping owner, rolled up in blankets on the ground beside his Harley, as any good biker would.A Galloping Goose and a Boozefighter race heads-up on January 18, 1948. The Boozefighter’s sweater has their trademark Triple-X bottle on its front, a logo the club still uses to this day.
These men also came sporting motorcycle club sweaters or jackets with new, more menacing names — Boozefighters, Thirteen Rebels, Galloping Goose (in military argot the ‘goose’ was the upraised middle finger we call ‘the bird’) and more — and they came not to sit docilely in the stands watching as racers on the track went round-y-round, but to ride and race and party themselves, and that is exactly what they did.
13 Rebels MC in an undated photograph, all wearing their club sweaters with the Bad Luck Cat emblem on the front. The back of each sweater bore the legend ’13 Rebels’ in large stitched-on letters.13 Rebels MC members and friends loading a racing bike kitted with specially-lugged mudder tires. As you can see by their boots and trouser legs, those tires were sorely needed!Boozefighters MC members in a photograph purportedly taken at Riverside, California, in July, 1948, where a second ‘riot’ allegedly took place. Some researchers have suggested the photo was actually made at Hollister in 1947.
Many motorcycle clubs of the day wore sweaters with the club name emblazoned on them, rather than the paramilitary uniforms of the Mom-and-Pops or the cutoff denim vests of later groups like the Hells Angels.
The Boozefighters MC, led by ‘Wino Willie’ Forkner, described itself as a drinking club with a motorcycle problem, and did their level best to live up to that claim. Other clubs, in turn, tried their best to keep pace.
‘Wino Willie’ Forkner was a combat veteran who had been thrown out of his previous motorcycle club. He founded and led the Boozefighters MC, and passed away at the ripe old age of 78.♪ ♫ Wine, wine, fruit o’ the vine, when you gonna let me get sober…. ♫ ♪ Club members play two-wheeled games in the middle of Hollister’s Main Street.‘Little Bobby’ Kelton, a member of the Wing Nutz MC, at play on the streets of Hollister…. ….but it wasn’t just the boys. These women are identified as members of the Tracy Gear Jammers, an all-female club that got down with the boys in the streets of Hollister that weekend.A trio of Tracy Gear Jammers giving Eddie Davenport a run for his money!The Tracy Gear Jammers may have harbored a penchant for sailors’ blues, although the tall brunette second from far right is very noticeably NOT hugging a sailor! 😏
THE RIOT
The much-ballyhooed ‘riot’ was really nothing more than a lot of rowdy behavior along Hollister’s main drag, including impromptu drag races and riders doing doughnuts in the street, and raucous drinking in the bars. At one point, it’s reported that a rider did pilot his motorcycle into a bar. In the tumult, some furniture and glassware were damaged, and promptly paid for by the offender.
A heavy police presence brought an end to the most outré behavior.
Still, local law enforcement felt overwhelmed, and called for reinforcements from neighboring counties and the California Highway Patrol. The cops geared up, corralled the partying bikers on the main drag, and commandeered a flatbed truck for use as a bandstand. They pressed a dance band into service, and the rest of the night proved playwright William Congreve’s contention* that ‘Music has charms to soothe a savage breast.’
Alleged ‘rioters’ boogie to the sound of a band pressed into service by the cops.A few of the boys were invited to stay a little longer, but the most serious offenses were traffic violations and ‘indecent exposure’: reportedly the result of a drunk trying to urinate into the radiator of an overheating car. I did some très stupid things while drinking, but whipping it out on the main drag to water down someone’s steaming flivver is beyond even me!😆
NEWS COVERAGE, MONDAY, JULY 7, 1947
Unlike the San Francisco daily, Hollister’s local newspaper, the Hollister Free Lance, didn’t feel the need to exaggerate the weekend’s events.
The coverage in the San Francisco Chronicle included two photographs by Barney Peterson. For your viewing comfort, I replaced the grainy newsprint photos with clear images of the original pics.
CYCLIST’S HOLIDAY, LIFE, JULY 21, 1947
This innocuous cover photo belied the bombshell waiting within.
However, at around the time the band began to play, photographer Barney Peterson arrived in town. Peterson was a freelancer dispatched by The San Francisco Chronicle. His brief was to bring back pictures of the reported mayhem, but all he found was a street filled with happy dancing bikers and civilians, a parking lot full of motorcycles, and a few riders sacked out for the night on the courthouse lawn. In other words, b-o-o-o-o-ring!
Instead of ‘rioting gangs’, photographer Barney Peterson found riders sacked out beside the front steps of the local courthouse.
Desperate to preserve his commission, Peterson improvised. As eyewitnesses confirm, he found a motorcycle parked at the curb — a stripped-down Harley-Davidson knucklehead with no front fender, and a seaman’s bag tied across the rear fender behind the saddle. Perfect! He carefully arranged a bunch of empty beer bottles on the street around the motorcycle, even cadging some from a nearby café, to symbolize the debauchery he assumed had taken place prior to his arrival. Yeah, that will do! Finally, he recruited a local fellow, a drunk named Eddie Davenport, to climb aboard the artfully staged motorcycle and pose for some photographs. Bingo! The editor’s gonna love it!
The shot heard around the biker world.
A series of images were made, including the most infamous: the ‘Cyclist’s Holiday’ photograph (above) which the magazine LIFE published in their July 21st issue, along with an overheated blurb about the ‘4000 cyclists’ who allegedly ran amok in the peaceful city of Hollister. Barney Peterson’s posed and staged photo of farm boy Eddie Davenport — he of the slack-jawed, glassy-eyed gaze and two-fisted drinking style pictured above — struck terror into the hearts of pearl-clutching newspaper and magazine editors, chiefs of police and other dignitaries across the nation. Other Peterson creations showed Davenport holding a club jacket belonging to a member of the Tulare Raiders Motorcycle Club named Dave. No word on whether that was Dave’s Harley, or whether Dave approved of his jacket being sported by a non-member.
Per the custom of the day, Peterson noted his subject’s name on the film negative.
However, as he’d hoped, Peterson’s editor did love his photo, but they weren’t alone. The photograph hit the wire services, and was immediately picked up by LIFE.
THE REACTION, LIFE, AUGUST 11, 1947
The response to LIFE‘s publication of Peterson’s staged (and libelous) photograph was immediate. Three weeks later, the magazine’s August 11th issue included Letters to the Editors from motorcyclist Charles A. Addams, film star and cyclist Keenan Wynn, and Paul Brokaw, who edited the magazine Motorcyclist at the time.
Letters to the Editors from Charles A. Addams, Keenan Wynn and Paul Brokaw.
All three correspondents complained of the negative coverage.
Mr. Addams wrote that the 4000 riders reportedly in attendance were notmembers of a single club, as the magazine alleged; that 50% were members of the American Motorcycle Association and the other 50% ‘mere motorcyclists out for a three-day holiday’; and that roughly ‘500 made the event the debacle that it was.’ I checked, and it appears certain Mr. Addams was not the infamous New Yorker cartoonist who created The Addams Family. How cool would that have been? 😏
Actor Keenan Wynn (No. 39) rides like a nutter in the 1957 Catalina Grand Prix.
Keenan Wynn, who later took film star and fledgling desert racer Lee Marvin under his wing, and showed Steve McQueen what dirt bikes were for, wrote ‘I have taken it upon myself to… straighten out what will obviously be an extremely bad impression of motorcyclists.’ He went on to decry the reckless behavior of the wild ones at Hollister, and noted that riding under the influence ‘as our friend in the picture seems to be doing, is one of the fundamental “don’ts” of riding…’ Wynn also felt obliged to cite some examples of ‘safe and sane Hollywood riders,’ like Clark Gable, Randolph Scott, Ward Bond and Andy Devine.
Keenan Wynn (left) with fellow actor and motorcycle aficionado Lee Marvin (right) and Marvin’s Triumph Scrambler, at an unnamed desert race. I do not recognize the other two people.
Motorcyclist Editor Paul Brokaw expressed his shock at the photograph, and was perhaps the first in print to call Barney Peterson out for his chicanery, noting that the picture ‘was very obviously arranged and posed by an enterprising and unscrupulous photographer.’ Brokaw also called out the ‘mercenary-minded barkeepers’ who continued to serve obviously intoxicated customers, and the ‘small percentage’ of riotous motorcyclists, ‘aided by a much larger group of nonmotorcycling hellraisers,’ who actually caused all the fuss.
Brokaw went on to damn LIFE for ‘sear(ing) a pitiful brand on the character of tens of thousands of innocent, clean-cut, respectable, law-abiding young men and women who are the true representatives of an admirable sport.’
LIFE responded to the criticism by including, in the same issue, a lengthy ‘presentation of law-abiding, respectable motorcyclists,’ which included photos of Mom-and-Pop clubs and motorcycling fashion trends.
The first page of LIFE‘s ‘you meet the nicest people on motorcycles’ article.Field games and uniformed riders. Note the writer’s insistence that ‘womenfolk’ are limited to riding pillion, despite the fact that at least three photos in the article feature women riding their own machines, including the full-page photo opposite the damned headline! Sheesh! Fashion for the ‘womenfolk’ and the motorcycle!Instead of ‘Mom-and-Pop’ we have ‘Mom-and-Daughter’ at top, and a sore service station attendant at bottom, with a little daredevilry in the middle.
‘HOLLISTER’, MOTORCYCLIST, AUGUST, 1947
Paul Brokaw’s magazine’s August 1947 number. In the Table of Contents is an article titled ‘Hollister’. I’ve never seen any reference to this article, and have no idea what it might say, but I just purchased a copy on eBay (11-11-2024) and will report back with a scan if anything worthwhile comes to light. Can’t believe I didn’t seek this out sooner!
CYCLISTS’ RAID, Harper’s, January, 1951
The ‘riot’ at Hollister probably would have faded into the mists of time and memory, had it not been for Barney Peterson’s photograph, but the next stage in the evolution of the biker image was even more nefarious. A hack named Frank Rooney took the bare bones of what happened at Hollister and fashioned them into a lengthy, perverse short story titled ‘Cyclists’ Raid‘.
I am convinced the title’s echoing of LIFE‘s ‘Cyclist’s Holiday’ is not a coincidence.
Artwork by David Berger, which accompanied Cyclists’ Raid in the pages of Harper‘s.Here, the bikers arrive, organized and orderly for a while.
In his lurid saga, Rooney portrays the bikers as a paramilitary pack of marauders who chose the small nameless town from a list of possible destinations, and even did reconnaissance in advance of their arrival, going so far as to learn the names of hotel keepers and filling station managers. They ride into town in formation aboard matching motorcycles, and their leader, ‘Gar Simpson’, declares them to be ‘Troop B of the Angeleno Motorcycle Club.’ In casual conversation, Simpson reveals the club’s plan to expand across California (‘We’re forming Troop G now.’) and other states: ‘Nevada — Arizona — Colorado — Wyoming.’
Angeleno Motorcycle Club leader Gar Simpson, or is it? Who can tell?🤷🏻♀️They’re all dressed alike!
The riders quickly take over the accommodations in town, including the hotel operated by the story’s main character, Joel Bleeker, a widowed former Army officer and combat veteran with a comely seventeen-year-old daughter. The club members proceed to drink, to sing raucous songs, to ride their motorcycles up and down the street (and eventually the sidewalks), but never ever remove the green-lensed riding goggles they all wear, even at night, even inside the dining hall of Bleeker’s inn.
By dint of their uniforms and mask-like goggles, Gar Simpson’s riders were ‘standardized figurines, seeking in each other a willful loss of identity…,’ or some such psychobabble.
This is crucial to Rooney’s telling, because the goggles allow individual riders to remain:
‘standardized figurines, seeking in each other a willful loss of identity, dividing themselves equally among one another until there was only a single mythical figure, unspeakably sterile….‘
….so much so that when the ‘raid’ comes to its inevitably violent climax — a freak motorcycle crash which kill’s Bleeker’s beautiful daughter — Bleeker and his outraged townsfolk have no one to blame but themselves. The nameless, faceless riders are able to mount up and ride out of town, exempt from consequence by reason of their numbers and unremarkable sameness.
The ‘raid’s’ evening concludes its horrific third act as riders terrorize citizens, racing and stunting in the streets, riding on sidewalks and in and out of business establishments. It is this last which brings about the final tragedy: the death of Bleeker’s lovely daughter.
Rooney’s story appeared in Harper’s, a popular magazine that arrived by post in many American homes, issue after issue. It could not help but reinforce the ‘lesson’ of LIFE‘s ‘Cyclist’s Holiday’ pic: ‘Martha, those goddamned bikers are bad news!‘
A complete scan of the story ‘Cyclists’ Raid’, as published, can be read here.
THE WILD ONE, Stanley Kramer, et alia, December 30, 1953
The Wild One starred Mary Murphy and Marlon Brando, and featured Gil Stratton, Jr. and Alvy Moore, as members of Brando’s motorcycle ‘gang’, the Black Rebels Motorcycle Club.
Rooney’s story, dripping with pathos and armchair psychology, caught the eye of filmmaker Stanley Kramer, who used the Hollister stories as inspiration for his 1953 Marlon Brando vehicle, The Wild One, co-starring Lee Marvin, Mary Murphy and, in an uncredited role, character actor Alvy Moore, best known for his portrayal of county agricultural agent Hank Kimball on the 1960s television show Green Acres.
That “Streetcar” Man Has A New Desire!
Kramer interviewed people who actually attended the July 4th gathering at Hollister, and came away with a clear idea of the story he wished to tell.
Stanley Kramer is introduced to Marlon Brando’s sister, actress Jocelyn Brando, on the set of the 1953 film The Wild One.
A script was commissioned. However, it placed at least some of the blame for the events on the townspeople themselves, who invited the bikers in, tolerated the more benign hijinks they engaged in, and profited from sales of alcohol, food and other commodities. Censors rejected the script as ‘pro-Communist’, in that it made money-grubbing merchants the bad guys. We all know that anyone making money is, by definition, a hero, right? 🙄
Even the French got into it.
Kramer caved, and as a result, we ended up with a bowdlerized version of the story Kramer wanted to tell. The true anti-heroes of Hollister — those brave young men just back from a grueling war, eager to recapture the camaraderie of military life, celebrate their survival and blow off years’ worth of steam — were replaced by Marlon Brando, as stiff as his brand-new Levi’s and monogrammed Perfecto leather jacket, portraying ‘Johnny Strabler’ as a mewling teenager riven with Daddy issues, riding a shiny new British bike, mumbling already-dated ‘hep cat’ slang and mooning over Mary Murphy’s more mature waitress.
Marlon Brando’s ‘Johnny Strabler’ whinging on about his mean old man.
Meanwhile, Lee Marvin, an actual combat veteran with a Purple Heart to his credit, and a real-life rider himself, acted the ‘villain’ of the piece. In ‘Chino’, Marvin channeled the essence of ‘Wino Willie’ Forkner. He rode into town astride a road-weary Harley-Davidson Big Twin, clad in military surplus and thrift store garments the way many of the men at Hollister had been, waving a cigar and loudly greeting old friends.
Lee Marvin as ‘Chino’, riding into town with his club, The Beetles, and yes, the British band said they did name themselves after Chino’s club!Lee Marvin’s ‘Chino’ with that devilish grin, the leader of his pack.
Johnny Strabler was a dilettante, a poseur. Chino was a fuckin’ honest-to-god biker. Johnny’s leather jacket may rightly be considered iconic — it is a fashion staple to this day, even amongst people who wouldn’t go within ten feet of a motorcycle — but so is Lee Marvin’s portrayal of Chino. Talk to bikers you know. How many of ’em wanted to be Johnny Strabler when they grew up? and how many wanted to be Chino? I can tell you my answer!
Chino taunting Johnny for quitting Chino’s club….….and defending Johnny even after Johnny beats him in a lively street brawl, because that’s the biker way, baby!
HIGHWAY PATROL
There’s another chapter to this story, discovered after I completed my post about Hollister. If you’re interested, there’s a link at the bottom about an episode of the television series Highway Patrol that aired in April of 1956. Check it out!
AND SO….
I geek out about this stuff because I love our history as motorcyclists — all the influences that went into creating our lifestyle and all the ways that lifestyle is portrayed, interpreted and further influenced by attention from media and popular culture. The chain of events that lead from World War Two to Hollister, from Hollister to Harper’s, and from Harper’s to Hollywood, are just part of the fascinating origin story we all share.
As I write this, we are less than two weeks from the premiere of yet another biker movie; an A-list Hollywood production starring well-known actors like Austin Butler, Tom Hardy, Jody Comer, Norman Reedus and Michael Shannon.+ The Bikeriders, loosely based on photo-journalist Danny Lyon’s seminal 1968 book of the same title, promises to be yet another milestone in our unfolding story. I already have my tickets, and can’t wait to see what comes up on the big screen!
* Congreve, William The Mourning Bride, 1697. The original lines read ‘Music has charms to soothe a savage breast, to soften Rocks, or bend a knotted Oak.’
+ Just this afternoon, I received my copy of The Vandals: The Photography of the Motion Picture ‘The Bikeriders’. Woo-hoo!
❤️ A brief pictorial history of a love affair for the ages. ❤️
Forty-five years ago I was a kid with a dream of owning a Harley-Davidson. I put away the alcohol and drugs that I’d abused all through my teens, got not one but two jobs, saved some money for a down-payment and worked with my credit union to establish credit. Now it was time to find the bike of my dreams….
….and find her I did.
I began my search at the stealership on Burnet Road in Austin, just south of Koenig Lane, where the sales manager treated me like the Julia Roberts character in Pretty Woman. For whatever reason — my age, my long hair, my jeans-and-t-shirt wardrobe choices — he apparently assumed I wasn’t well-heeled enough to afford a Harley. When I announced that I was there to buy a bike he said ‘The used bikes are outside,’ waved a lazy hand in the direction of the door, turned on his heel and walked away. In previous visits to that shop I had watched that man do everything short of performing fellatio on the showroom floor to make a sale, so, yeah, I took being treated that way personally.
But it worked out well for me, because as I was leaving the stealership I spotted a Harley in a used car lot two doors up the street….
….and that Harley — the 1974 FX-1200 Superglide I named The Bitch — has been under my ass or in my garage ever since.
Forty-five years! 😮 Outside my blood relations, there is not a single relationship in my life older than the one between me and The Bitch.
So, Happy Anniversary, baby! Let’s do forty-five more! 😎
In his 1979 article* about the Bandidos Motorcycle Club, Texas Monthlywriter Dick Reavis created a humorous sidebar about the First Church of Harley-Davidson, located in Denton, Texas. The sect’s theology is a little off-center — the church’s founder, Malvern Daugherty, AKA ‘Reverend Box’, describes it as a ‘beer-and-reefer church’ — but some members claim to believe in Ralph, the little tin god of all things Harley-Davidson.
True believers feel that Ralph lives within each Harley-Davidson engine and, as Reavis writes, ‘that he is a jealous and exacting god. In order to worship him, Harley owners must kneel and carry out monkish acts of ritual devotion, like changing oil, tuning up, and keeping Ralph’s motor-temple clean. “The more religiously you carry out maintenance, the more Ralph smiles on you,” oracle Box proclaims. Inspired study of the Harley repair manual is considered necessary to gain Ralph’s grace.
‘First Churchers fear Ralph’s wrath, which a few of them have suffered firsthand. “You’ll be puttin’ down the road one day when all of a sudden your motor will thunder out ‘Rraaaallphh!’ That’s his punishment for infidels. You’ll find that your motor won’t run anymore, if it’s in one piece, and as for Ralph, he’ll be gone from it, back to his celestial home.” This vengeful visitation, Box says, is called “Ralphing it on the road.” ‘
While I’m not a member of the First Church of Harley-Davidson (if it still exists; that was written in 1979) I will allow that somespirit lives within Harley-Davidson engines — that’s what gives Harley-Davidson its legendary ‘soul’ — and that it is possible to piss them off….
….as I have apparently done.
You see, I sinned by taking The Bitch — my beloved 1974 shovelhead — for granted. When I parked her years ago, I didn’t do the things one must do to keep Ralph happy while his motorcycle home sits idle. I didn’t add fuel stabilizer to the petrol tanks or, better yet, drain the damned things. I didn’t put the battery on a trickle charger to keep it fresh, or fire the bike up and run it for fifteen minutes or so, which is apparently what is required to burn off any condensation that may have accumulated in the oiling system. I didn’t do nothin’ except hoist The Bitch up on a stand and slap a chain and padlock on her.
To be fair, I didn’t realize I was parking the bike for years. I’d had a get-off that destroyed the inner primary, and assumed I would make the repairs and get back in the saddle in short order. However, life had other plans.
In December, on my way to a Toy Run, FFS, I had a get-off in a highway underpass. The hows and whys are a story unto themselves, but the end result was a very expensive jigsaw puzzle!
For one thing, I got an opportunity to return to college, to complete the bachelor’s degree I had begun working toward the same year I bought The Bitch. There were forms to fill out, an application essay to write, interviews and appointments and registration…. and then there were classes, and homework, and, y’know, life stuff, like family gatherings and dates with my wife and dinners with friends, and I simply lost track of time. One day I looked up and realized it had been years.
That is when my quest to trike the shovelhead began in earnest, but still, The Bitch sat in the garage, more hat-rack than Harley, as I did all I did to try to procure a trike frame for her. After those efforts failed, and I bought the Freewheeler I am currently riding, any urgency to get The Bitch running quickly waned again. I had something new to distract me, and the learning curve of getting used to life on three wheels. The shovel would wait. 🤷🏻♀️ Yet another sin against Ralph.
As noted in my previous post, I got a wild hair to enter my shovelhead in the Handbuilt Motorcycle Show, so I began working on replacing fluids, battery, et cetera. I foolishly believed The Bitch, my faithful steed of forty-five years, would magically not suffer the degradations of time in idle limbo; that the gas would probably be just fine, the carburetor still fully functional, the inner tubes still airtight.
Yeah. That didn’t happen.
Believing the fuel tanks to be close to empty, I poured most of a gallon of fresh petrol in them before learning that the carburetor was not still fully functional, and that the damned petcock leaked whenever I turned it on.
This leaking petcock would need to be replaced. I had to loosen the fatbob mounting bolts fore and aft to get the petcock, with its 90° outlet, past the backside of the shovelhead’s rocker boxes.
I ordered a carburetor rebuild kit and replacement petcock from Amazon, available for next-day delivery, and called it a night. The next day, when the new parts arrived, I got stuck back into my penance…. umm, my mechanical efforts…. and began draining the fuel tanks as I rebuilt the carburetor.
Yeah, that didn’t happen, either.
The rebuild kit was nothing but made-in-China crap — the gaskets didn’t fit and the float valve needle was a full 1/8th of an inch longer than OEM! 😮 It’s as if, in creating this kit, the manufacturers looked at the pictures in a service manual and used their best approximation of the necessary sizes. Utterly useless, and on its way back to the Commie bastards who created it.
She’s missing something, but I can’t quite put my finger on just what….
So I turned my attention to the tanks, and realized there was far more petrol in there than I’d realized. The first can I used to catch fuel overflowed, so I deployed a second, and thought I’d pretty well gotten everything out. Time to replace the petcock then, right?
Except that, when I removed the petcock, another gallon of petrol splashed out!
I was panicked, getting doused with the stuff and unable to get the petcock back in place, but I did finally managed to get a gas can under the tank outlet and catch the last one-third of a gallon. However, the rest splashed all over the floor and began spreading rapidly, as petrol is wont to do.
In a mad scramble, accompanied by much cursing, wailing and gnashing of teeth, I used crumpled newspaper to sop up as much of the stuff as I could, but the smell remained. Dunno if you’ve ever had the pleasure, but years-old petrol reeks even worse than the fresh stuff you spill on the side of your car at the local convenience store. It reeks, and the stench lingers for a really long time!
Bless her heart, Jackie braved the hail of cusswords and self-recrimination I unleashed in the moment to come to my aid. She also did a quick Google search, and learned that kitty litter will supposedly absorb the odor. I will tell you that at this moment, over thirteen hours after I spread the kitty litter, it is no silver bullet. If any of the odor has been absorbed, or dissipated out the vent fan that’s been running for the past forty-eight hours, I can’t tell. That crap still reeks!
UPDATE: It took over seventy-two hours, the aforementioned application of kitty litter and a good scrubbing of the garage floor with a mixture of vinegar and baking soda to finally clear that stench from the garage! 🤢
I did manage to learn why the tank retained so much petrol after I thought it drained. Turned out that the petcock’s filter was clogged almost three inches up its length — the rust a fuel stabilizer might have prevented, don’tcha know — so that, even with the petcock on its ‘reserve’ setting, none of that last gallon of gas could escape….
….until I removed the petcock, of course! 🙄
Neil Young tried to warn me: RUST NEVER SLEEPS!Who knows what kind of rust and other crud is up there, inside that hole?
So here I am. The shovel can’t be put back together because I don’t have the carburetor rebuild kit required, and I’m probably going to have to remove and cleanse the tanks — just the job I was hoping I would not have to do!
The Bitch, my beloved 1974 shovelhead, has been sitting and gathering dust and cobwebs for several years more than I care to admit. Long story, but anyhoo….
Jackie and I are packing up the house in Austin — it’s already listed for sale — and prepping for our anticipated move to San Antonio, so I’ve felt fortunate to have the 2016 Freewheeler to ride, and assumed The Bitch would be trailered to SA in its existing condition.
But then I saw the announcements for this coming weekend’s Handbuilt Motorcycle Show, including a call for entries. I scanned the photo galleries of past events, and didn’t see anything that looked like The Bitch, so I thought, ‘Hmmm…. Wouldn’t that be a kick in the head, getting my weary old road warrior in a show with all these slick, sleek professionally built custom bikes?’ What can I say? 🤷🏻♀️ I’m evil that way. 😈
Only trick is that when you submit an entry, you promise that the motorcycle you show will be running when you deliver it to the showgrounds. Hence, with Jackie’s encouragement, I started scrambling to get The Bitch fired up.
That’s just the color you want to see on a set of plugs!
First step: drain as much sumped oil as possible from the crankcase. I pulled the sparkplugs, still a lovely shade of tan because I know how to tune the shovel properly, and dropped the feed from the oil-bag, and started kicking, and kicking, and kicking….
Oil being returned to the oil-bag as I kick drains into the oil pan on the floor.The flow from the crankcase, as I kick, is forced out the chain oiler through the crankcase breather.Imagine: we used to let that waste oil drain into the ground and think nothing of it. Now we have to collect it in containers, and make an appointment to take it to the Hazardous Waste Recycling Center, which is all the way down IH35, south of Ben White Boulevard! It’s a wonder more people aren’t just dumping the stuff on the ground, still. Not me, of course — I’m a good steward of the earth these days — but I’ll bet there are a lot of gearheads who can’t be arsed to drain and retain the way I do. UPDATE: a couple weeks after publishing the post you’re currently reading, I rediscovered this clipping I had in my files, fromPopular Science back in 1963, and thought I’d share it with y’all.
I finally got enough oil out that I thought I might be good to go, so I reattached the feed line and poured two quarts of Valvoline Grade 50 into the oil-bag. It will officially hold three, but in my experience, that includes any oil stored in the external filter and connecting lines. The tank itself might hold two and a half. However, since the 50 is just to flush the system, two will do what needs doing.
The last battery I bought The Bitch measured 5.25×3.5×7″ and weighed 11 pounds! 😮
Next up was the battery. I’d been buying lovely gel batteries from the BMW shop on North Lamar, but the bastards had the nerve to go out of business. However, Cycle Gear over on US Highway 183 at Burnet Road came to the rescue. It took a couple of tries, but they came up with a Lithium Ion battery from Duraboost. First one I’ve ever purchased. It’s smaller and lighter, with no acid to fuss about, and has the added advantage of being mountable in any position, even upside down, without leaking or malfunctioning. Not a cheap date, but worth every penny, IMO. I imagine chopper builders the world over are ecstatic about these things!
This little jewel measures 5.3 x 2.6 x 3.6″, and weighs a measly 1.3 pounds! 😮😮😮 It also fits neatly into the battery box with inches to spare!
Added bennie: Cycle Gear gave me a discount for being a veteran! 👍🏻
Thinking I might be ready to give The Bitch a try, I took her off the hydraulic stand she’d been resting on for years — an adventure in itself — and leaned her over on her kickstand, where she immediately began puking oil all over the floor. I started to panic, thinking all my nice new 50-weight was going to end up soaking into old issues of The Austin Chronicle. Apparently I hadn’t cleared as much of the sumped oil as I’d thought, but it stopped in short order.
So now I have oil, lights and power. What next? Oh, yeah…. petrol! 👍🏻
Behind that very ‘old school’ panhead air cleaner cover is a fifty-year-old Zenith Bendix 38mm carburetor that has served me very well for forty-five years!
The Bitch still runs the OEM Zenith Bendix carburetor she came with from the factory — a juicy, easy-to-kickstart mixer that has served me well over the years. The Bendix has powered The Bitch and I well over half a million miles, from sea-level Galveston and Corpus Christi to the top of Rocky Mountain Nat’l Park — 11,798′ above sea level — and from the Texas border with Mexico to the Badlands of South Dakota. We’ve been up and down the Rockies on numerous trips, and all over the desert Southwest, with nary an adjustment or stutter. I spent years working the parts counter at Bud’s Motorcycle Shop on East First Street, and I was just agog at the pains some riders went through to rejet their carburetors in advance of road trips. Some even installed adjustable main-jets! Me, I was always, like, ‘Why?‘ 🤷🏻♀️ The Bitch just never needed it.
But as good a carb as the Bendix is, no carburetor will tolerate being ignored for years. They develop…. issues, you might say, and mine was not the exception I was hoping it would be. Nope. I poured some petrol in the tank, flipped the petcock lever, and….
Nothing. Nada. Zip. Not a drop of petrol was getting from tank to jet. Curses! 🤬
The carburetor prior to disassembly….
I dropped the bowl, catching the requisite handful of petrol as I did. One of my least favorite things, the smell of gasoline on my hands, because it lingers. C’est la vie, right? I wiped the bowl clean and blew compressed air through the passage from fuel pump to jet, clearing the passage of whatever obstruction it had, and thought I’d scored big-time! I reassembled the carb, turned the petcock back on, and watched heartbroken as petrol Niagara’d all over my engine from the vent at the back of the bowl. Curses again! 🤬
That petcock has less than fifty miles on it, and leaks like a sieve. Apparently, that’s a common problem with aftermarket petcocks. If the one I get tomorrow fails, I guess I’ll be shopping at the stealership again.
I took it all apart again, inspected and cleaned the float needle, and gave it another go. Same mess. Dammit! And, as if that weren’t enough, the petcock, which is virtually brand new, has sprung a leak as well. Imma have to get used to eating food that tastes like gasoline for the next several days. 🤢
I have a coffee can filled with petcocks, fuel filters and carburetor parts — even a spare Bendix carb — but in the rush to prep the house for sale, I naturally packed it and stowed it in the storage unit we rented. 🙄 I ran up to the storage unit and retrieved that tin and another filled with fuel line and clamps, but did not find the Bendix rebuild kit I thought I had in stock. Need I say ‘Curses!’ again? 🤬
The carburetor in amongst spare parts from my stash, but I decided against trying to piece it together with odd parts. I’ll have the rebuild kit tomorrow, and handle it then.
Since Bud’s is no longer in business, following Bud Reveile’s untimely death in 2015, the odds of finding a rebuild kit in town are slim to none, so I jumped on Amazon and, sure enough, they have ’em available for next-day delivery! They also have a petcock that will allegedly fit my 1997 Softail tanks. Fingers crossed they’re right. 🤞🏻
So, I’m at an stopping point for the moment. More anon….
….but during all the mad dashing to get the bike running, I received a message from the Handbuilt Motorcycle Show staff telling me my entry has been rejected! 😭 REJECTED!?!? How could they do that to my baby? 😢
Seriously, I knew my last-minute, unconventional entry was a longshot in a show packed full of sleek, pristine machines, but it was worth a shot, no? 🤷🏻♀️ And it gave me the kick in the ass I needed to get The Bitch fired up. No reason to quit now!
And I’m still going to the show, despite the slight! 😎 Maybe see some of y’all there!
UPDATE:
I did in fact attend the show, with my old friend Bil (one ‘L’ only) from ‘way back in my glory days. It was fun enough, wandering around checking out the flash machines. A lot of shiny chit to gawk at, most of it Euro or Pacific Rim in origin.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that. 😏
I’ll take ‘Things I Wouldn’t Be Caught Dead On’ for $400, Alex.I’ll take ‘Things I’d Be Embarrassed to Park Beside’ for $1000, Alex.Some nice details on these knuckleheads, but there really is such a thing as ‘too much’, y’know?I mean, I like Steampunk effects well enough, but….….there’s cool accents and then….….there’s overload.Newton R-n-D Yamaha Triple. Odd AF, but at least they broke the mold.The flip-side of Newton’s Yammer-Hammer.There were some old school chops, like this very classic panhead and the Honda Four beside it….….and then there was this Sporty trike set up for a wheelchair rider. If you’ve read my posts titled chal•lenge, and chal•lenge, part two you know that I’ve long been fascinated by handicap adaptations for motorcyclists, so this really caught my eye.This part in particular intrigued me – a fold-out transfer board for shifting from saddle to wheelchair. The other wheelchair users I’ve known – motorcyclists and cagers alike – just muscled their way back and forth. That’s what I did when I was in a chair after my accident, but it requires upper-body strength not all wheelchair users possess. This would definitely make life easier for those folks.Trick, no?Then there was this oddity – another Yamaha creation – which happened to be parked right beside….….the Coroner’s Office? 🤷🏻♀️ The show was held in the old printing plant of the Austin American-Statesman on South Congress, right where the billboard company I worked for once had their headquarters. I have no idea why the Statesman might have had an office for the Coroner, or if that was some wag’s idea of humor. Maybe this was actually the newspaper’s morgue, where old back-issues are kept on file for reference?🤷🏻♀️ In any event, using the Statesman’s property for a motorcycle show was an interesting choice, given the daily’s editorial bias against motorcyclists. Or maybe it was just bikers they disliked so intensely? All I can tell you is that I have my own ‘morgue’ of newspaper clippings from the Statesman, documenting their long history of anti-biker bigotry.In any event, Bil and I had a good enough time, walking our mutually gimped legs off checking out the displays….
….but I soon realized that, of the two choices I had for that weekend’s entertainment, the Texas Fandangoout in Gillespie County would have been much more my speed. Hosted by the Cherokee Chapter of the Antique Motorcycle Club of America(of which I am an erstwhile member), the Texas Fandango features vintage machines – many of them American – along with a vintage swap meet, bike show, chopper show, Xtreem Flattrack Racing, drag racing, Custom Van show and free camping. It also has the advantage of being held in the scenic Texas Hill Country, with great riding roads all around, as opposed to the Handbuilt Show, which is held in very un-scenic and hard-to-get-to downtown Austin.
The Texas Fandango is coming up soon, April 4th through 6th, 2025, and I’m really, really wanting to make the scene if I can. My friend, artist Norman Bean, is slated to be there, with his incredible artwork on display, and it is to be hoped that other old faces might pop up, as well.
It would be nice to spend time with my tribe again. 😎
As noted in my previous post, the very talented artist Lyndell Dean Wolff painted a portrait of your humble narrator, based on a photograph of me taken at Mount Rushmore back in the early ’80s. I’d ridden up from Texas with my partner — the late T.R. Evans (R.I.P.) — and just had to do all the famous stuff like Mount Rushmore, Spearfish Canyon, et cetera.
Well, Lyndell completed the painting just in time to unveil it at the 20th Annual David Mann Memorial Chopperfest at Ventura, California. Again, per my previous post, my wife and I are in the middle of packing up MMMoMMA’s exhibits (and all our shyte) for a move to San Antonio. After twenty-four and a half years in this house, and me a confirmed packrat/hoarder, there is a lot of shyte to pack!
However, how many times am I going to witness the first public display of a portrait of myself? 🤷🏻♀️
Hence, about halfway through the week of the Chopperfest, I got the wild idea of actually attending Chopperfest for the first time! 😮
We discussed it — I mean, the timing could scarcely have been worse — but my wife, bless her heart, agreed that if I rendered one room paintable I could light out for the shaky coast, and she’d still have something to do to move us along. I busted a hump and got ‘er done that Friday evening. Insert big sigh of relief here.
Still, I dithered about going — ‘It’s a lot of miles, we’re jammed up with moving….,‘ and so on — but sometime around nine o’clock that evening I threw a few things in a baby duffel, loaded a cooler full of snacks and drinks, filled my venerable ’70s-era stainless steel Thermos™ with coffee and set out on the road.
Late night balling through West Texas.In a lot of stretches, I had the road to myself. That never happens on IH35 anymore!I do love The Land of Enchantment!I took some time — here on a small stretch of old Route 66 — to indulge my passion for architecture.That gorgeous brickwork just amazes me. I hope someone will come along and restore that building, rather than just tearing it down and erecting some soulless pre-fab thing in its place!This view of snow-covered mountains just presaged what was to come.Between the bitter cold, fog and snow and that ice-slicked roadway, this was a bit of a hairy ride!But we survived, and lived to drive another day!Sunset over I-10 on the Saturday night….….and the colors just get prettier and prettier! Looks like colors from a Maxfield Parrish painting!At this point I was running on ‘blues power’ (as I used to call it back in my drinking and drugging days) and was virtually braindead. I could not even tell you what city this was, but this was my last photo of the night.
Jackie and I have a lovely system in place when I’m on the road: we will talk on the telephone at intervals (which helps me stay awake) and when it’s time for me to crash, she’ll go online and book me a room. This particular night, I called it quits somewhere around Palm Springs. After roughly twenty-six hours with nothing but catnaps, Audible books and coffee, I was ready to sleep…. and I did! 😴😴😴
I woke up to this on the Sunday morning. Hell of a day for a motorcycle show, yes?I managed to blast through the Los Angeles area at 80 and 90 MPH without getting clipped. Saw a couple of CHP cruisers and one motorcycle working, but the Sunday morning traffic was sparse, and aside from some left-lane loogies it was a relatively stress-free drive.
It wasn’t hard to find the Ventura County Fairgrounds, where the Chopperfest was being held; just follow the stream of motorcycles. I inched my black road warrior van to the front gate surrounded by the sights and sounds of a vast motorcycling community, found a parking spot and limped my way into the event.
This was a proper chopper show, with plenty of handbuilt scooters of all sorts and sizes, from this well-worn 1946 knuckle bobber….….and gorgeous, race-ready ’47 Indian Chief….….to this Bizarro World 1975 Honda 550, with all sorts of whimsical details….….like the shot-through petrol tank and Brothel badge…….the ‘Fuck Ya‘ hand shifter and copper tank covers…….and expressive rear fender! 🙄There was a replica of the ‘Billy Bike’ from the 1969 cult classic Easy Rider, starring Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper and Jack Nicholson. I’ve seen a lot of star-spangled ‘Captain America’ replicas — at least three so far that their owners swore were the sole surviving movie panhead!!! 🙄 — but never seen a Billy Bike outside of Franklin Mint’s 1:10 scale models. For the record, Franklin Mint’s Easy Rider 1:10 scale replica motorcycles are part of MMMoMMA’s original exhibit. Note that the chopped and flame-painted Billy Bike is parked right beside what appears to be a beautifully restored 1957 Sportster (below). I just love that there was a wide variety of machines here!This was an interesting item: a one-of-a-kind 1942 Crosley, designed and built by Russell Martin.Check out all the beautiful details, and see if you can guess just what it is you’re seeing ….before perusing the menu of ingredients (below) that went into this incredible build.Isn’t that amazing? 😮A brace of gorgeous Indians.Near as I can tell, that’s a 2024 WTF, but the builder insists it is a 1974 Maico. 🤷🏻♀️ Me, I have to take his word for it!A sleek shovelhead….….a more extravagant panhead….….and an even wilder creation known only as ‘bagger’!
I wanted to enjoy some of the bikes on display before making my appearance at Lyndell’s stand, so I wandered about for a while, snapping photos of interesting details like these:
I believe that speaks for itself, don’t you?In its way, so does this one! 😁This carburetor cover went with the Native American-themed paint on this rider’s panhead.Instructions or warning? 🤷🏻♀️Beautifully designed and crafted midships footrest and brake pedal. I would need to have far shorter legs and smaller feet than I do to even use these, and that slick chrome doesn’t offer much purchase if trying desperately to avoid ramming the cager who just pulled out in front of you. On a wet day? No way! Pretty, though! 😁Apparently saddlebags and a sky-high sissy bar weren’t enough for this rider….….but then again, he does put on some miles!However, long bikes like these — the laid-back California-born chopper of the sort immortalized in David Mann’s brilliant artwork — remain the raison d’être for Chopperfest, and this slabside shovel is a prime example of the style.Some fools say that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, but a tasty shovel hooks me every time. This heavily chromed and polished 1978 is fun to look at, but for my own bikes I avoid parts that are too shiny. It’s a whole thing with me…. 😏I may be a shovel man, but this panhead sure caught my eye: simple, understated, with those stepped-up shotguns and a relatively unmolested wishbone frame. Be still, my heart! 🥰And speaking of unmolested, here we are right where we started, looking at a well-loved knucklehead with an OEM frame in what appears to be OEM condition!Days like these are why Southern California is considered a bikers’ paradise!
But what of the artist I drove all this way to see? There was a crowded food court serviced by an array of food trailers, and a long outdoor market of sorts that stretched from end to end of the fairgrounds, with all manner of goods on offer. I saw leathers, patches, jewelry, custom and vintage motorcycle parts, even rain gutters for your house!
There were also two huge exhibition halls. The first was filled with booths offering much of the same as those in the bazaar outside: parts, t-shirts, accessories, Jesus…. 😮 oh, yeah, the Lord was there and eager to make your acquaintance, if the motorcycle ministry boys surrounding the booth were to be believed.
Finally, in the last exhibition hall, I found the artists. I began with a quick walkabout, to see who-all was there. I spotted some future MMMoMMA acquisitions, and some real dreck.
First were the helmets. As noted in my previous post, Biltwell invites artists to paint and display painted helmets, which are then offered for sale.
I failed to make note of artists’ names. My apologies to them.This being the David Mann Memorial Chopperfest, it just makes sense to honor the man.Imma take a wild-assed guess that these were by Wayne Wreck! 😏Some gorgeous work!But then….….what to my wondering eyes should appear….….but Lyndell Dean Wolff’s contribution to the helmet show! I knew it was his even at a glance because I’d seen the prelim work on his Facebook page.
There were a great many artists’ work on display, and some great pieces.
David ‘Huggy Beahr’ Hanson, who passed away last year, was being honored at the 2024 Chopperfest. This is oil pastel on walnut by artist Cynthia Polk. Cynthia Polk’s tribute to David Mann.Anthony Hicks, who is also mentioned in a recent MMMoMMA Facebook post. I want to pay more attention to what this fellow’s doing!I failed to get this artist’s name, as well. The print is signed Bloody.TPN….? 🤷🏻♀️Finally, it was time to introduce myself to Lyndell Dean Wolff.
When I approached Lyndell Dean Wolff’s booth in the exhibition hall, I saw that my portrait was hanging on the portable chain link fence that backstopped the artists’ displays. We’d never met IRL, so with Lyndell looking on, I gestured at the portrait with my cane and said ‘That’s an ugly sumbitch right there.’
‘Sturgis Run, ’87’ by Lyndell Dean Wolff (2024) acrylic on foamboard
Lyndell said ‘That’s Bill James from Austin’ as he was getting to his feet. It seemed like he was prepared to defend his subject’s honor or his art, or both, and it took him a moment to comprehend that I was saying ‘I’m Bill James from Austin,’ but then all joy broke loose.
He and his sweetie, Sharon, were just amazed that I would travel that far just to meet him, but I told them, as I told you at the top of the post, ‘How many portraits of me are artists gonna paint in my lifetime? I couldn’t miss this!’
From left to right: artist Lyndell Dean Wolff, Early Rider Bruce Shroeder and your humble narrator, leaning on a cane his nephew Devon custom-crafted for him and looking utterly exhausted. You’d think I’d been bustin’ my ass all week, and then taken a hell-for-leather drive across half the continent! 😏 BTW, check out Lyndell’s artwork hanging behind us, and then check out his websites. Damn, he’s good, and I’d like to see him get the recognition he deserves!
This is Lyndell’s own page, with galleries, biography, et cetera.
We sat there and visited for a couple of hours — the great open-ended visiting I love best — talking about our lives, our motorcycle exploits, our work…. After a while we were joined by a fellow named Bruce, who rode with the Early Riders. Bruce could talk for England, as they say. He kept up a running monolog about people I’ve never met in places I’ve never been, and rarely paused for breath. I like a good yarn, but Bruce beat all I ever heard!
As we sat and visited, this fellow motored by. He claimed he was test-riding the prototype 2035 Harley-Davidson bagger, for when all us Boomers are too pooped to crawl up on our motorcycles anymore!
As the afternoon waned so did the crowds, and Lyndell and Sharon started to pack up. I gave them some Shovel Shop ‘Watch for Biker’ t-shirts I’d carried out there for them, we said our goodbyes, and I hit the highway east, retracing my steps back to Texas. It was a real pleasure to get to meet them both, and share that wonderful afternoon with them.
From left to right: your humble narrator with a portrait of a much younger him, artist Lyndell Dean Wolff and Sharon. Do I look sleepy? I think I look sleepy. 😵💫
Took it a little easier going home — a night in the same hotel in Palm Springs, and another in El Paso — but I did my best to make up that time on the road.
Leaving LA.It’s not just me, is it? Actually, just last week I saw a post about this ‘mountain’ on a Facebook page, so I know it’s not just me! 😎Gotta make up time somehow, right? I’d actually hit 110, but by the time I raised my camera I was already losing speed. However, in West Texas most of the traffic was running 95, so I wasn’t that far outta line!Welcome back to Austin. Just part of the reason we’re leaving after all these years, but this shyte definitely plays a part! 🤬
When I was maybe seven or eight the boy next door came home from college on a toaster-tank BMW, and was giving the neighbor kids rides around the block. I begged and pleaded with my Mom – ‘PleaseI’llbecarefulI’llhangontightPleasecanIgoCanIgoPleaseI’llbecarefulPlease….’ – until she finally gave in. Yay! 😁👍
Gene and I were halfway around the block when I got this thought, like a crystal-clear voice in my head, that said ‘I’m going to HAVE one of these someday!’ The moment was so profound that, forty years later, I was able to take my wife to that exact spot and say ‘There! That’s where it all began!’ 🤷♀️
Right about there is where that lightning bolt inspiration struck me!
We were not allowed to have motorcycles when we were kids; not even minibikes, which were all the rage at the time. The closest I got to the chopper of my dreams was some plastic modelling kits and a Sting-Ray bicycle.
Not my Sting-Ray – this one is listed on eBay for $1200 😳 – but this is the color and year I had.
Of course, on the sly I rode anything with a motor – minibike, moped, dirtbike, whatever – whenever anyone was dumb enough to let me, but that wasn’t often. We lived in a ‘nice’ suburban town, and actual bikers were hard to find. The boy next door and Steve down the street, who had a BSA, were the only people I knew with real motorcycles, and they were never dumb enough to let me near the controls! 😆
As noted in previous posts, I spent my teen years drinking and drugging – a lot and very badly – and it wasn’t until I put all that aside, at the age of 21, that I could get serious about putting together the money for my first motorcycle. It took a year of sobriety to clean up my rather messy financial history, and working two jobs while going to school full-time on the GI Bill, but I finally got together the down-payment. With that in hand I got the nod from the credit union to begin shopping. Yay again! 😁👍
I toddled off to the Harley-Davidson dealership – I already knew I wanted a Harley – but the guy there was such a jackass that I turned around and walked out. Smart move, because half a block up the street I saw a Harley for sale in a used car lot. It was black, low, lean and mean, one of the prettiest things I’d ever seen, and looked like it might be everything I ever wanted.
I could not have been more right.
I called this biker I’d met in sobriety – a lawyer, of all things, who built choppers! – and asked him to come look at the bike with me. He came down and we went over the bike together. It was a 1974 Harley-Davidson Superglide FX with a 74 cubic inch shovelhead motor, a kickstarter (no electric start then or now) and disc brakes fore and aft. After he took it for a test ride (I did not yet have my motorcycle license) Wayne gave it the thumbs-up, and the deal was done. I completed the paperwork at the credit union, conveniently located just around the corner from the used-car lot, and spent a near-sleepless night as keyed up as a kid at Christmas.
The next day – April 11th, 1979 – I threw my leg over my very first Harley for the very first time. That’s right: Forty-four years ago today I answered the call I heard that long-ago afternoon, on the back of Gene Graf’s BMW. After years of wishing and wanting and dreaming about it, I finally had me one of those things! 😎
April 11, 1979, at Northwest Hills Texaco, where I worked at the time.
And forty-four years later, I still have that same motorcycle. I’ve had a few others along the way, but that one is my ride-or-die keeper. She (for she is a girl, make no mistake) is no longer black, and not as low or quite as lean as she was (neither am I, for that matter 😏 ) but she is still the prettiest thing I have ever seen. She’s still gorgeous, and righteous, and I still love her dearly.
Sad to say, a series of unfortunate events (primarily a disabling on-the-job accident) have kept me off my one true love (machine division) for several years, but I still harbor a hope that we may still find a way to be together again.
However, in the meanwhile, and with the support of my one true love (human division) I have secured a different bike, better suited to my disabilities. She’s big and fat and shiny and loud, and so new-fangled and complicated I dare not touch most of her more intimate components, but I’ve already had my hands on her, a little bit, doing little fix-its and adjustments, and once that happens love is sure to follow. She’ll never displace my shovelhead – seriously, what could? – but I have a good feeling about her. 🥰
My new-to-me 2016 Harley-Davidson Freewheeler. Now all I have to do is unlearn forty-four years of training, practice and instinct I’ve accumulated riding a two-wheeler, and learn the proper handling of a three-wheeler. For those who don’t know: it’s a very different style of riding!
So, Happy Anniversary to my 1974 Harley-Davidson FX – my beloved shovelhead – and thank you, thank you, thank you for all the years of joy and adventure you brought me. Let’s go for forty-four more, eh? 😁
Yes, sir, that’s my baby. No, sir, I don’t mean ‘maybe.’ Yes, sir, that’s my baby now!
And don’t you go getting jealous of the new kid. She’s just here to help. 😏
‘Art is eternal, for it reveals the inner landscape, which is the soul of man’ – – Martha Graham, Dancer and Choreographer – –
The very first article I ever published appeared in Easyriders, the groundbreaking magazine which was at once the LIFE, Saturday Evening Post and Reader’s Digest of the outlaw biker set. I wrote about tattoo removal – a topic I thought some readers might find interesting – after an encounter with a dermatologist at a Veteran’s Administration hospital in Hastings, Nebraska, who told me about a then-new technique for obliterating unwanted tattoos via laser. I won’t bore you with the details – the information is all woefully outdated anyway – but I ended my piece with the words
‘These days, even art is not eternal.’
However, barring catastrophic circumstances like the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, where – in addition to thousands of lives, including my cousin Eddie – an estimated $110 million worth of art was destroyed, or the Taliban’s deliberate destruction of The Buddhas of Bamiyan, art really is eternal….
….and even those pieces lost or destroyed live on in memory.
….and all this to say ‘Hey! I got some cool stuff to show ya!’
An advert for prints of Dave Mann’s earliest posters. Chopperspublisher Ed ‘Big Daddy’ Roth was a wily self-promoter with a sharp eye for moneymaking opportunities. He had no problem exploiting the talents of young artists like Mann, and continued to make bank off Mann’s work long after Mann left his stable.
IN THE BEGINNING….
I don’t know who first attempted to paint or draw images of the biker life, but Dave Mann was certainly a pioneer. After selling some early paintings of biker life to Choppers magazine founder Ed ‘Big Daddy’ Roth (creator of the iconic ‘Rat Fink’ and a number of radically customized cars and motorcycles), Mann joined the El Forastero Motorcycle Club (forastero is ‘stranger’ or ‘foreigner’ in Spanish) as a charter member of the club’s Kansas City MO chapter.
Hollywood Run was the painting Dave Mann’s friend and club brother Tiny showed to Choppers publisher Ed ‘Big Daddy’ Roth. Roth recognized Mann’s potential, quickly bought up as many of the artist’s paintings as he could, and turned them into a profitable line of posters.Another of Dave Mann’s early paintings for Ed ‘Big Daddy’ Roth features a wild desert party populated by outlaw bikers from numerous extant motorcycle clubs of the day.Dave Mann in 1970, aboard the panhead chopper he purchased from Hells Angels member Buzzard. BTW, Buzzard appears in Bill Ray’s book of photographs – Hells Angels of Berdoo ’65: Inside the Mother Charter (NYC, 2010, Bill Ray/Blurb) – and is mentioned in Hunter S. Thompson’s seminal work of ‘gonzo journalism’: Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs(NYC, 1967, Random House)
In 1971 Mann answered an advert for a ‘motorcycle artist’, discovered in the back pages of a new biker magazine called Easyriders, and spent the remainder of his working life as in-house artist for the publication. His first centerfold painting for Easyriders appeared in October, 1971, and Mann reportedly produced artwork – centerfold paintings, story illustrations and adverts – for every issue from that first to his retirement in 2003, shortly before he passed away. His final piece, Sunset, appeared in the May 2004 issue.
One last toke for the road. Titled ‘Frisco Nights‘ or ‘One More for the Road‘, this was Dave Mann’s first-ever centerfold for Easyriders. It appeared in the magazine’s third issue, in October, 1971. Mann reportedly created art for every issue between this and his final piece (below) published in May, 2004, along with additional illustrations for other magazines, book publishers, friends and collectors. That’s a hard-working artist!.
Aptly, Sunset, May 2004 was Mann’s last original piece for Easyriders.
REPRESENT!
His earliest works were primitive – a cross between illustration and caricature – but as he gained experience Mann’s work took on a style reminiscent of the American painter Edward Hopper, who is best known for his iconic Nighthawks(1942). Look at the figures in Hopper’s work, and compare them to Mann’s. I certainly see the influence.
Edward Hopper The Nighthawks(1942)On a road trip that took me to the National Motorcycle Museum at Anamosa, Iowa, on the day they closed forever, and the Harley-Davidson Museum in Milwaukee, I also got to visit the Art Institute of Chicago, where the original Nighthawks lives. My wife managed to catch me and the painting alone in the one split-second when it wasn’t surrounded by admirers!David Mann Midnight Run(June, 1972)Edward Hopper Summer Evening (1947)David Mann Pick-Up (Want Some Candy?)January 1974 Edward Hopper Gas (1940)David Mann Gas Stop (1967)
More than technique or style, however, Hopper and Mann shared the desire to illustrate and elevate the prosaic, the quotidian, the mundane everyday doings of regular people historically overlooked by representational artists. For Hopper it might be patrons seated in a late-night diner – an apparent oasis of light and warmth in an otherwise dreary cityscape – sharing space and yet isolated from one another, silent, bored. For Mann it could be the streetwalker ignoring her john to watch the more attractive, more enticing biker cruise by on his radical panhead chopper. Hopper might present a sweet moment between a young couple on a dark summer evening – you can almost hear the crickets singing – while Mann’s swain straddles a raked and stretched shovelhead as he chats up the object of his affections on a crisp autumn afternoon….
You get the point.
The Dilemma (September 1976) is one of my favorite Mann paintings of all time; I even have a small print of it framed above my office door. Dave’s attention to the minute details of this road-weary ‘rat’ panhead and rider is mind-boggling. Note the cracked and taped-together taillight lens, chipped paint on the fuel tank, mismatched tool bags strapped to the front forks and oil drips on the pavement below. Look at the rider’s military tattoos, too; his ragged cut-off vest, heavy engineer boots and greasy Levi’s, doubled up for added protection. Then there’s the quiet humor of the scene – a hot hippie hitchhiker headed to that Haven of Hedonism, San Francisco, and the biker with no place to put her! Sadly, this actually happened to my partner and I on our way to Sturgis. Our bikes were laden with camping gear, and we had no room to pick up two hitchhiking honeys we encountered just south of Oklahoma City! 😒 My rigid 1974 shovelhead and T.R.’s rigid jockey-shift ‘73 shovelhead chopper on the first Friday of August, 1982, packed and ready for the run to Sturgis.The Dilemma and the design for my Shovel Shop t-shirts. In the hall, vintage adverts for the Famous James motorcycles. See my post below about the marque, its history and my history with it.
And by ‘centerfold’ I merely refer to the fact that Mann’s work appeared in the center pages of each issue, where it could be removed (as so many of us did) and turned into a poster. Although many of his paintings included idealized images of women, his purpose was to document our lives as bikers, not provide masturbation motivation for horny teenagers!
STRAIGHT ON FOR YOU!
One perspective Mann relied on was full frontal….
….from his earliest efforts. This is Pacific Coast Highway Run, 1964Easyriders Video #43 cover artEasyriders Video #40 cover artEasyriders Video #29 cover artEasyriders Bikes & Babes Video cover artWinter Ride, date unknownA Cold Winter Ride, story illustration from Easyriders January 1990Excelsior-Henderson, October 1998First Ride of the Year, January 1993Helmet Protest, January 1996, highlighted a political position dear to most bikers’ hearts: the freedom to choose whether or not to wear a helmet when we ride. Even many of us who wear helmets by choice still believe the decision should be ours alone, and not left some government bureaucrat who has never ridden a motorcycle in his life. Mann revisited this theme over and over again through the years. This piece also shows his ability to capture complex objects like motorcycles at different angles in the same painting.Inside Pass appeared in BIKER, July 2000. Dave was as skilled in painting automobiles as he was motorcycles, and capturing the action of two moving vehicles pitted in a wheel-to-wheel race.Run to the Wall , date unknown. Many bikers are military veterans, and believe no service member should be left behind, so the cause of POWs and MIAs affects us deeply.In Memory of Lt. Col. ‘Smilin’ Jack Potter, U.S.A.F. is a loving tribute to Jacquie’s father.Even in self-portraiture: Dave Mann with Jacquie
Here is another of my favorites, a classic piece by Dave Mann:
Another favorite Mann painting. I’m unsure of the title – it may be First Ride of Spring – but I love the way it captures one of the happier moments in a biker’s life: hauling ass up a scenic road with his woman tucked in behind. I used this as inspiration for my own piece, seen below: a t-shirt design I created for the Motorcycle Rights Organization ABATE of Texas back in 1989.
My design as it appeared on t-shirts. This artwork predates the introduction of computers into my artistic toolkit, so please be kind. The central image was all done by hand, and the lettering created letter by letter, line by line with Letraset ® rub-on letters. Much to my surprise Letraset fonts are still available! 😱
I was able to reuse that image on some recent creations: my Watch for Bikerscoffee mugs and…. ….and the matching Watch for Bikerst-shirts, both reasonably priced at my Shovel Shopstore at Etsy..
Mann returned to that theme many times in his career.
Coming at You, April 1975It even inspired this homage by artist Shawn Dickinson, titled Wild and Wolfy….….and another titled Werewolves on Wheels, Shawn’s tribute to Dave Mann’s In the Wind on a Friday Night….….and the original: In the Wind on a Friday Night, August 1972
Another favorite was the reverse: the motorcycle moving in a straight line away from the viewer. He used both angles to great effect.
Mann’s follow-up to Coming at You appeared in a Jammers Handbook. Mann’s attention to detail extended even to the smallest things, like the oil spatter up this passenger’s left shoulder, excess lubricant slung off the rear drive chain at speed. You could always spot a biker chick by those chain tracks, and you could tell if she was packin’ on a Big Twin or Sporty by which shoulder was marked. I pissed off more than one woman passenger when their nicest tops ended up ruined that way! 🤷♀️
Carnival, September 1987. Note the graffiti at right.Snow What appeared in BIKER, February 2003FREEDOM was a fundraising poster for some friends in Cleveland.Storm Jammin’ appeared in EasyridersMarch 1989 and again in BIKER in October 2005. This one gets me because I took a soggy ride like this, from Austin to East Texas, to lay to rest a friend who died too soon…. as if there were any other kind. 😒
THE DAYS OF OUR LIVES
Mann’s technical abilities as an artist are undeniable but, as clearly demonstrated here, for those of us who ride it was Mann’s ability to illustrate the everyday aspects of our lives as bikers which so endeared him to us. He captured the emotional element – the ‘inner landscape’ Ms. Graham referenced in her quote – in painting after painting.. It might be two bikers blasting down an L.A. freeway, beards and club colors flapping in the wind, as one passes a joint to the other.
Hollyweed, November 1976. Note the altered ‘Hollywood’ sign high above the highway.
It might be a biker on his low, lean, radically stretched chopper, glaring balefully at the cop writing out a traffic ticket.
Busted, December 1974. Damn cops ruin everything, don’t they?
It might be a woman frustrated and angry because her old man, the insensitive prick, just passed a beer joint when she desperately needed a potty break….
Hey, What About….! December 1982.
….or another one of my favorites. showing a woman curled up against her man’s back, safe and secure and sleepy after a weekend of riding and camping out under the stars, while he steers his radical chopper back to the brightly-lit city in the distance.
Homeward Bound, January 1975
One of Dave Mann’s most iconic images has been stolen and reproduced on everything from t-shirts and coffee mugs to wall tapestries, area rugs and more. In ‘Ghost Rider’ Mann equates the hard-riding biker at the foreground to the hard-riding ghostly cowboy keeping pace with him. Some of the later reproductions went the politically correct route of erasing the SS lightning bolts Mann’s biker has on his fuel tank….
….and that’s a topic for a whole ‘nother post! 😎
Ghost Rider, November 1983. Unofficial (read: stolen, ripped off, plagiarized) iterations of the image, on tapestries, t-shirts, et cetera, excised the SS lightning bolts from the fuel tank in a lame attempt at political correctness. If you see the Ghost Rider without lightning bolts you’re most likely looking at a fake.
Mann covered breakdowns and break-ups, club life and solo riders, sleek choppers and road-warrior rat bikes, and brought to each painting the same skill and dedication to detail. He was our Frederic Remington, and we loved him for it.
Another favorite. Anyone who rides very long at all has been in a similar situation….
Middle of Nowhere, June 1981
….but try to make the best of it! 😆
Beer Run, July, 1978. It’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it!😁
BREAKING DOWN AND CRACKING UP!
Paul Simon once sang ‘Everything put together sooner or later falls apart,’ and that’s as true of motorcycles as anything else. In numerous paintings, Dave Mann captured the frustration and helplessness of that instant when your machine fails, and you realize there’s nothing you can do about it except sit and wait, or go for help.
Broken Primary Belt, October 1981.I’ve been here! 😡 Primary Belt, January 2002.
In the early ’80s, on a ride through the Central Texas Hill Country southwest of Austin, I stripped the teeth off my primary drive belt while pulling up a steep hill. Thankfully, I wasn’t alone. It grieved me to interrupt my friends’ ride that way, but I was stuck.
BTW, that was one of the very few times my shovelhead rode home in the back of a truck.
One of the reasons I have always been psychotic about building my bikes to be bulletproof, and making sure I can fix all but the worst breakdowns with tools and spare parts in my road kit is because I cannot stand to be that helpless, hapless rider stranded beside the road. I’d rather have people depend on me than have to impose on friends or, worse still, depend on the kindness of strangers.
In this instance, when I got the bike home and went to replace the wasted primary belt, I learned that I couldn’t have replaced the belt by the side of the road even if I’d had a spare belt with me; that the inner primary cover (which can’t be removed without an impact wrench and clutch-hub puller) wouldn’t let me take the belt off the engine pulley! Since I had the inner primary cover off anyway, I took the opportunity to grind down the bosses on the inner primary so that I couldtake the belt off without removing the inner primary, the next time the need arose. That’s just how I roll! 😁
As an aside: I will never understand why some riders get angrywhen I mention tool kits and roadside repairs in that context. Seems to me everyone is better off if I can fix the problem by the side of the road and get on with the ride, rather than be forced to wait for a wrecker or a buddy with a trailer to come fetch me. Still, I’ve had riders – every one of them the sort I call ‘Born Again Bikers’ – get absolutely incensed at the notion that I am capable in that regard, as if my competence was – dare I say it? – a challenge to their manhood…. 🙄
And that’sa whole ‘nother post, too! 😏
Oh, look! There I am making a minor repair to my shovelhead while on a run to the annual ‘Blow-In’ at Jim’s Motorcycle Shop in Axtell. Because I had the know-how and tools to accomplish that task, our group ride was not interrupted. Fifteen minutes of wrench twiddling, a quick test-ride, and then me and my date and my gaggle of buddies were back out on the road again! 😎Lucky… or not. Broken Belt Bummer, March 1988.That kind of breakage happens often enough that it showed up in at least three of Dave Mann paintings, and in addition to my own adventure, I’ve seen it happen right in front of my eyes. Dog Breath, a good ol’ boy from Tennessee who worked with me at Bud’s, broke a belt on the street in front of the shop, trying to hotrod his shovelhead. Don’t see good ol’ steel chain doing something like that, do ya? 😆 Or do ya? Check out the next painting.
Of course, it could be worse. You could be well and truly fucked, like this poor couple….
Fuckin’ Rain! Thunderstruck! September, 1982. I have seen smaller images of this painting for years, and noticed the rain and the woman retrieving the broken drive chain. It wasn’t until I discovered a larger image on the Dave Mann Facebook page (link at bottom of column) that I spotted the broken spokes on the rear wheel. If that doesn’t make you want to flip off the sky gods nothing will! However, if you should break down anywhere near me, I promise you I’ll lend a hand.When We Do Wrong, February 1975, originally had a quote attributed to the Hells Angels of the 1960s:
When We Do Right, No One Remembers When We Do Wrong, No One Forgets
but I decided to repurpose the art for a quote of my own; something I say whenever the topic of helping brokedown riders is discussed. I’ve had enough strangers go out of their way to help me when I needed it. The only way I can repay their kindness is by passing it on to others.
BIKER’S CODE
However, if you’re lucky enough to break down while riding with others, the Biker’s Code says ‘No biker left behind.’ By hook or crook or boot or rope, you’re both getting home.
This is titled Dark Roadside Repairs (April 1982) but it’s obvious to anyone who wrenches on bikes (or has ridden long enough to run out of gas) that the guy on the green bike (with a small Sportster tank) has run out of gas, and the guy on the black bike (with the larger-capacity fat bob tanks) has dropped his fuel line and is draining petrol into a beer can salvaged out of the ditch, to get the guy on the green bike to the next service station. I have done that, and had it done for me, so I made the task a lot simpler by running a single tank held in place with a big rubber band. I could just remove the rubber band, take the fuel line loose, lift the tank off my bike and give the other guy all the fuel he’d need. No muss, no fuss, no scrounging for ‘clean enough’ beer cans or bottles in roadside ditches! Unfortunately, that trick doesn’t work with fat bobs!Sunrise Sunday Morning, Texas Panhandle, June 30, 1991
And if all else fails….
Push Home, November, 1978
Another scene most riders will recognize (or cringe from): the bike that just…. Will. Not. Start! I’ve never owned a Sportster, but I started my share during my years of working at Bud’s. I’ve also been that pissed at my shovel, when it’s been particularly coldblooded and cantankerous. Fortunately for me, those instances have been few and far between….
….and the next sound you hear will be me knockin’ on wood! 😱
Damn Sporty!February, 1979Won’t Start, May 1979Kickin’ the Bitch, Bee Caves, Texas, circa 1982. Photo by Bob Wilson, a rider from Pennsylvania who owned the forest green boattail FX seen at left. The young woman rummaging in my saddlebag was my live-in girlfriend, Lea.
Sadly, our machines aren’t the only things that betray us.
You can feel the rider’s frustration at the cager who recklessly or maliciously ran him off the road, then drove off and left him. This appeared in January 1986, as a story illustration.
Bikers are all too familiar with the cager who seems to have it in for us. Popular wisdom advises riders Don’t ride as if they can’t see you; ride as if they’re aiming for you! Unfortunately, I know from bitter experience that sometimes they actually are aiming for us!
This is the 1987 FXRS I spent two years rebuilding and adapting to my disabilities. I added the finishing touches to her on a Friday afternoon. Two days later, on a beautiful sunlit Sunday in late October, Jackie and I were riding on a narrow two-lane road east of Taylor, Texas, when a kid in a pickup going the opposite direction decided to pass a slower-moving automobile. He crossed the double-yellow line, looked me right in the eye and kept on coming. Then he drove away, leaving us for dead. 🤬
Fortunately, neither of us were badly injured, but the bike was totaled. FMTT! I got to enjoy my new-to-me FXRS for less than forty-eight hours before it was snatched away from me! Forty-eight fucking hours! Damn, I was pissed! Still am, in fact!
But if one of the bastards does nail you, what can you do but heal as best you can, and dream of getting back in the wind where you belong?
Medicating a Broken Leg, October 1976
If you’ve ever built a motorcycle, you’ll recognize the anguished look on this fellow’s face, as he watches his freshly painted fuel tank head for a collision with the garage floor.
Oh, Shit! 1974
Mayhaps he needs a helper. Maybe a curvaceous blonde? Someone half-naked, perhaps? Yeah, that’ll do the trick! 😆
In Mann’s art, women are primarily placed in secondary roles as backrests, bike washers, beer fetchers and sexual conquests. In Mann’s world, women rarely ride their own. In fact, of the hundreds of paintings Mann produced, I’ve only found a baker’s dozen thus far depicting women riders. However, to his credit, man or woman, when he painted them he brought the same skills, artistic integrity and vision to bear.
Big Bertha, December 1976, A woman on her own bike was still something of a novelty to a lot of bikers in the ’70s, even though women have been active in motorcycling from the very beginning. Look up the Van Buren sisters, or Effie and Avis Hotchkiss, for starters. Bertha, Dragon Ladies MCRide Hard, Die Fast, 1968Devil Dolls MC in BIKER(March, 2001) is a real-life ‘outlaw’ club for women.I Just Don’t Give Up, July 1999, was a story illustration. She’s riding a Servicar with a homemade taco box on the back. 45″ Servicars and solo rides were a popular choice for women riders back in the ’60s and ’70s – I dated a woman who rode a 45″ solo in the early ’80s – but nowadays women ride anything the boys can ride, from high-tech high-speed sportbikes by the Japanese and European marques to full-dress Harleys and Indians.Jesus Chrysler, April 1998His and Hers, July 1987. Sportsters for the girls and Big Twins for the boys, with matching paint jobs. The boys are quite amused that they’ve got the women packing all the gear So much for chivalry!Solo Flight, a story illustration from Easyriders, November 1999. Coincidentally, November 1999 is when my solo flight ended! 😁Jackie and I got hitched at the end of that month, and (with apologies to Prince) partied like it was 1999. 😆Merry Christmas, Babe! This appeared in BIKER, December, 1999. Technically, the woman is not riding the bike, but she is receiving one as a Christmas gift. I think we can safely assume she’ll be riding as soon as the snow melts, and she gets some leather on over that lacy lingerie! 😏L’alibi, March 1997. Mann’s wife, Jacquie, made frequent appearances in her husband’s work for Easyriders. She’s shown here at the controls of a hot pink Evo constructed in Pro-Street Style.Easyriders Video #13 cover artWild Women Don’t Worry, Wild Women Don’t Sing the Blues! I have no idea what the actual title is, but every time I see this painting that old tune by the late folk-blues singer Judy Roderick comes to mind.…….and Wild Women will look good on the cover of an Easyriders tattoo video!
Finally, what could be finer than doing something you love, like riding, and looking over to see the person you most love in this world enjoying the same thing?
Sunday Morning, July 1979.
I FOUGHT THE LAW AND THE LAW WON!
One of the downsides of biker life is the occasional brush with the law.
Noise Infraction, September 1977.
I’ve gotten a couple of these over the years. One was right after I’d installed brand new mufflers on my bike! Turns out I was riding my motorcycle in that trooper’s personal ‘No Biker Zone’. I’ve learned there are a lot of those in this state. 🙄 I’ve come to see ‘too loud’ tickets as a sort of ‘road-use tax’; nothing to do but pay the piper, no pun intended. 😏
My best road dog learned that the hard way. We were jamming through West Texas enroute to the Four Corners region when we were tagged by a state trooper near Sweetwater, Texas. On a busy Interstate Highway packed full of noisy highballing tractor-trailers and speeding cagers, he spotted us coming the opposite direction, doubled back and pulled us over. The fuckwad actually claimed he could hear our exhausts over the noise of the semis and pickup trucks, despite the fact that my exhaust system was in excellent condition and my partner’s was almost new. The trooper ignored the modified pickup that blasted past us as we stood there (leaving us all with tinnitus) and wrote us both tickets for ‘exhaust too loud.’
The first time I received a ‘too loud’ ticket, over a decade earlier, I was incensed because, as it happened, my mufflers were brand-new at the time. How could this asshole write me a ticket? I went so far as to call the State Attorney General’s office, to see if this was even legal, and was told the law leaves ‘too loud’ to the discretion of the officer making the traffic stop.
At the time I was incensed. The state is going to leave something like that up to officer discretion? Geez! The potential for abuse is staggering. How can you defend against an officer’s opinion, when it’s given the weight of evidence in a court of law? Well, you can’t, so I paid up….
….and that’s how I gained the ‘road-use tax’ perspective. If you can’t fight it, just find a way to accept it.
However, I later realized that ‘officer discretion’ is actually a good thing for us. It beats the hell out of decibel meters!
Think about it: the occasional cop may decide your pipes are too loud and ding you for ’em, but with a decibel meter? With a goddam decibel meter, every cop will be writing tickets for pipes too loud. When it comes to cops, better the few than the majority.
In fact, I’m so opposed to decibel meters, and the threat they pose to those of us who ride large-displacement American motors, that I resigned my membership in the American Motorcyclist Association when they made the incomprehensible decision to donate decibel meters to police departments. Seriously!?! What the ever-lovin’ fuck were they thinking? I doubt they miss my $50 annual dues, but I sleep better at night knowing I’m not arming our enemies and making life worse for my fellow riders.
Anyhoo, in the Sweetwater incident, I paid my fine before we left the jurisdiction. I am scrupulous about such things, because I never want to give a cop an excuse, like an unpaid traffic ticket, to pull me off my bike. If they want me they’re gonna have to make something up!
However, my partner, who had never been through this, was overcome with righteous indignation, and swore he’d fight this outrage. Sure enough, when we got back from our week on the road, he had his motorcycle inspected, gathered all pertinent documentation, closed his clinic for two days and hied himself out to Sweetwater to wage war against injustice.
The upshot? He lost two days out of his practice, the cost of travel to Sweetwater and overnight accommodations, and had to pay a fine and ‘court costs’ amounting to more than three times what I’d paid the day I got the ticket. I refrained from saying ‘I told you so,‘ but I did tell him so! 😆 As I said: nothing to do but pay the piper and get on down the road.
A final note: I mentioned the Sweetwater stop to my attorney at the time, who specialized in motorcycle-related law, and he said ‘Oh, that was Trooper _______.’ Apparently, the fellow who stopped us was renowned statewide for his hatred of bikers. 🤷♀️ Whatcha gonna do?
Welcome to Daytona Ticket in IRON HORSE, June, 1981
We’ve all had close calls like this one, too.
Nobody Talks, Everybody Walks, September 1981Run Heat, July 1975.In the early ’80s I was part of a pack of about thirty or forty motorcycles enroute to a party at Lake Buchanan when we got jacked up by a battalion of LEOs of every stripe. Every cop in the county must have been there! We had local yokels, county mounties, smokies, probably a dogcatcher or two, all drawing down on us with shotguns and automatic rifles! It was a nice day for a ride with friends until the po-po came ’round. They ran us through the mill – license, tags, VINs, warrantless searches – and came up with exactly one warrant, for an unpaid traffic ticket. Out of forty of us, they got to arrest one! I guess we weren’t the roving band of criminal kingpins they thought we’d be! 😂
But sometimes the heat is more than just an inconvenient wants-and-warrants stop or speeding ticket. Prosecutors and LEOs seem to be convinced that bikers – particularly patchholders or independents on Harleys – are career criminals simply because they identify as bikers. As a result, too many bikers, many of them innocent, have wasted years inside prison walls. Mann showed their lives, as well.
Bum Beef illustrated a short story in Easyriders. FWIW, I never saw a prisoner’s toilet looking that nasty. In my experience, most cons keep their houses spotless, and especially their toilets.Prison Memoriesillustrated another short story, about a convict who watches a young dirt-biker tearing up the fields outside the barred windows of his cell, and how the boy inspires him. One way that Easyriders stood out from all the other motorcycle magazines was with its publication of short fiction by a number of talented authors. Larry ‘Rabbit’ Cole was a particular favorite, as was Jody Via. (More on Jody Via in the footnotes to my history of Easyriders magazine.)
Although Easyriders went downhill in the late ’80s and ’90s, I take great pride in the fact that Easyriders published the first short story I ever sold! 😁 Sadly, Dave Mann did not create the illustration for it. What a feather in my cap that would have been!
If anyone cares, I will post a couple of short stories I have written in a future entry.
On a brighter note, here Mann captures the joy on a rider’s face as he clears those gates. The first things he sees are his girl, a bottle of Jack, and his prized shovelhead chop. As an added bonus: Dave Mann and Jacquie stand at far right, ready to welcome him back to the world.
Prison Release, August 1982
HISTORY LESSON
Mann knew the history of our tribe, too, from the streets of Hollister, California, where it all began….
Wild One, March 1993, celebrates the ‘Hollister Riot’ of 1947, a raucous motorcycle rally and party that allegedly got out of hand, and gave rise to the whole outlaw biker phenomenon. In response to negative press about the incident, a spokesman for the American Motorcycle Association (as it was then known) reportedly claimed the rowdies at Hollister were ‘outlawed’ by the AMA, which meant they would not be permitted to take part in AMA-sanctioned events. The AMA later went on to assure America that ‘99% of motorcyclists are upstanding, law-abiding citizens.’
Much to the AMA’s chagrin, it turned out the remaining 1% were just fine with the notion of being ‘outlaws’ – part of the elite rejected by the ‘straight’ association – and were soon sporting patches declaring themselves ‘one-percenters’. The honor is jealously guarded by those who claim it, and anyone wearing the ‘1%’ patch or tattoo had best be prepared to defend it! The infamous ‘Hollister riots’ photograph by Barney Peterson, which appeared in LIFE two weeks later, cemented in the minds of most Americans the image of motorcyclists as lawless, drunken ruffians. Unfortunately, the photo was staged. Peterson, assigned to cover the story, arrived too late to witness any of the ‘riot’ itself. Not wanting to miss out on his commission, he grabbed this fellow, later identified as Eddie Davenport of nearby Tulare. Peterson sat him on a motorcycle parked at the curb and artfully arranged bottles around the motorcycle, to make it seem the entire town was overrun by drunks on two wheels! His ploy worked: the photo hit the wire services and was picked up by LIFE
I’ve penned a lengthy article about the history and aftermath of the incident at Hollister here.
….through the early days of the custom bike scene.
Ape Hanger Days (December, 1973) is one of Mann’s most widely recognized and reproduced images, topped only by Ghost Rider (November, 1983). From the bared brick behind the stucco wall to the ragged cut-off Levi’s jacket and the grease spattered on the rim and sidewall of the rear tire, the detail is astounding, and Angelo’s sweet little panhead is period correct and perfect in every way! The swastika is also period correct, although to Angelo the broken cross likely did not mean what it signifies today.Only the gods know how many motorcycles (and paintings, and drawings, and tattoos…. see below) Dave Mann’s works have inspired. This is a note-for-note replica of Angelo’s panhead from ‘Ape Hanger Days‘ by a fellow from Florida named Hollywood Tig.
A RABBIT HOLE:
If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go down another rabbit hole for just a moment, to show you another painstaking replica: the late tattoo artist Richiepan’s reproduction of Dave Mann’s own red rigid-framed shovelhead, as pictured below.
Crazy Dave’s Broad-Slide, AKA Slip-Slidin’ Away or Brodie! above.Dave often appeared in his own artwork. This image is particularly prized by fans because it features his shovelhead in action, showin’ class in front of a joint named ‘The Shores’, not far from where Dave and Jacquie lived. Below is Richiepan’s tribute bike.Richiepan’s tribute bike in its prime.Richiepan with his tribute to Dave Mann, prior to the disaster.The Dave Mann tribute bike, and several others, after the trailer broke loose from the truck.Oh, the humanity!
Here’s a write-up on Richiepan’s build from the December 2009 issue of The Horse/Backstreet Choppers:
My Old Gang (May 1979) depicts a number of Mann’s brothers in the El Forastero Motorcycle Club. Per David’s Facebook page (link at bottom of column) they are, from left: Tom Fugle, Greycat, Tiny, Skip Taylor and Dan Jungroth. They are often featured in Mann’s other paintings, as well.
….the custom bike movement of the Seventies….
Florida Freeway, October 1973
….the Eighties….
Family, August 1986
….the Nineties….
Cruisin’ Colorado, August 1998
….and into the new century.
Mondo, June 2001, is Mondo Parra of Denver’s Choppers, a respected custom builder from a long-lived, well known and historic chopper shop.
He gave us the prophetically named Last Call….
Last Call, painted shortly before he retired, appeared in BIKERJune 2003
….and a glimpse into the future, come what may.
Future Riders appeared in BIKEROctober, 1999
Unlike Vincent van Gogh, David Mann didn’t have to die to become well-known. He had the satisfaction of knowing his talents were appreciated. There were frequent letters to the editors, lauding his works. Poster prints of his most popular paintings sold like hotcakes. Then there was the large-format book of his work released in 1987, which quickly sold out and is now highly collectible. Even the cheapie reprints Paisano Publications released in 2016 and 2017 are going for stupid money on eBay.
There’s the 1987 original, a gift from my best road dog, and the 2016 reprint. Same artwork and pretty good printing, but thinner, cheaper paper. The publisher released four of these, gathering artwork from all the publications David Mann painted for – Easyriders, Iron Horse, Biker, American Rodder,et cetera – and packaged them to make a quick buck off the now deceased artist. My understanding is that David’s widow, Jacquie, never saw a dime of that money. Not cool! 😡
Then there are the tattoos: so, so many tattoos! I mean, bikers like tattoos anyway, but they really like tattoos of Dave Mann’s art! Just Google ‘David Mann tattoos‘ and see what comes up. 😮
Finally, there was this tribute to David Mann from the pages of Easyriders; just a biographical sketch and a heartfelt appreciation of the still-living artist. I can’t recall what issue it was in and the interwebs are keeping stum about it. I’ll add the date of publication ASAP, if I ever find it.
‘ART IS ETERNAL, FOR IT REVEALS THE INNER LANDSCAPE, WHICH IS THE SOUL OF MAN’
As noted at the top of this page, artists have the power to move us with their words, their images, their sculpture and dance and film – to limn the ‘inner landscape’ of absolute strangers – and David Mann had that ability, in spades!
HEARTBREAKING….
So many incredible paintings, but one of the images that most touches me is this one, depicting a rider on his rigid shovelhead; the biker and bike from Ghost Rider, sans SS lightning bolts and ethereal cowboy. This time, the biker is alone in the desert hills, but the shadows on the rock behind him tell us he’s missing his woman, wishing she were still packing behind him for the long ride, tucked in behind him where she belongs. The tattoo on his arm and the title – In Memory Of… – suggest that she is not just out of his life, but altogether gone from this world. So much emotion and history packed into one small frame!
Thankfully, I’ve never lost a lover to death, but I have lost brothers, friends and kinfolk, and I do know the ache of yearning for something you once had, and will never have again.
In Memory Of…, appeared in the August 1999 issue of BIKER. As noted below, it was painted with magazine staffer Clean Dean in mind. Dean had recently lost his wife to cancer, and Dave thoughtfully used Dean and Karen as models for the shadow figure on the rock wall.
Finally, another look at the artist himself, seated on his beloved shovelhead.
Here’s the Mann himself in happier days, with the shovelhead that inspired Richiepan’s replica. He is pictured with his brother ‘Wild Bill’ and friend Squirrel.
DAVID WILLIAM MANN, September 10th, 1940 to September 11th, 2004. R.I.P.
Recognition of a Great MannThis tribute appeared in Easyriders January 2005, part IThis tribute appeared in Easyriders January 2005, part II
Sonny Barger joined the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club the same year I was born, and was still a member in good standing when he passed away on June 29th, 2022. That’s one long career!
Myself, I never met the man – to the best of my knowledge I never met any member of his club – but Barger was still a big influence in my life. He features prominently in Hunter S. Thompson’s Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs (Random House, 1967) and parts of Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (Farrar Straus Giroux, 1968), and my nascent view of what it meant to be a motorcyclist – the life path I’d already chosen for myself – was informed by Barger’s and his brothers’ exploits. Not for me the ‘nicest people on a Honda’ as the infamous mid-’60s advert suggested. I would be a biker….
….and that’s what I did.
HELLS ANGELS ATTACH ANTIWAR PROTESTERS, AND SONNY LEARNS HOW TO USE THE PRESS
Aside from Evel Knievel, who was much more masochist than motorcyclist, Sonny Barger is assuredly the most famous biker in the world, and was in the news numerous times throughout his tenure. For example, after members of the Oakland chapter of the Hells Angels, which Sonny served as President, broke up an antiwar demonstration in October, 1965, Sonny held a press conference in which he foreswore violence against future protests because ‘Any physical encounter would only produce sympathy for this mob of traitors.’ He also read a telegram he’d sent then-President Lyndon Johnson, volunteering his club brothers for ‘behind the line duty in Vietnam’ as ‘a crack group of trained gorillas [sic]’ who would ‘demoralize the Vietcong and advance the cause of freedom.’
Hells Angel MC member Michael Walter is led away after attacking antiwar protesters in 1965.Sonny Barger holds press conference in November, 1965, to renounce violence against antiwar protesters and read a telegram sent to President Lyndon B. Johnson. He suggested Hells Angels members serving as ‘a crack team of trained gorillas [sic] would demoralize the Vietcong and advance the cause of freedom.’
ALTAMONT FREE CONCERT, DECEMBER 6th, 1969
Hells Angels members on stage at the Altamont Free Concert, December 6th, 1969.
Sonny was also the voice of the Hells Angels after the disastrous Altamont Speedway concert in December, 1969, which resulted in the stabbing death of an eighteen-year-old African American named Meredith Hunter. Although accounts differ as to why they were present, the Angels had been sitting on the front edge of the low-slung stage, acting as a human barrier between the crowd and the performers. Hunter, who had been tossed off the stage by Hells Angels during a previous altercation, returned with a handgun and began waving it around, firing at least one shot into the crowd. Hells Angel member Alan Passaro stabbed and disarmed Hunter, who later died of his wounds.
Rolling Stones singer Mick Jagger prances on stage surrounded by Hells Angels MC members. So many mistakes in such a tiny space — stage built too low to the ground, inadequate professional security to protect performers and equipment, the band’s lengthy delay in starting their set (reportedly because Jagger wanted cover of darkness to go with his ‘Satanic’ imagery) — but the biggest mistake of all was the band’s assumption that American Hells Angels would be the same relatively mild-mannered rough boys as their British counterparts. The Stones had used UK Angels as security at concerts over there, and took for granted that these California blokes would be just as obliging and well-behaved. 🙄
The next morning, as the talking heads on local radio station KSAN attempted to unravel the chaotic stream of events, Sonny Barger called in and gave his club’s side of the story – the only official statement the club ever offered about the concert or the killing. Barger defended his patch holders, telling radio host Stefan Ponek ‘You can say anything you want and you can call them people flower children and this and that, and there was three hundred thousand people there approximately or whatever they say, and I guarantee you that the largest majority of them were there to have a good time, but there was a couple thousand of them that was there looking for trouble.’
Jagger tried to coax the crowd — which had been drinking, drugging and brawling in the hot sun all afternoon — into mellowing out and behaving like good little flower children…. to no avail.
Brushing aside the host’s attempt to cut in, Barger went on to say ‘Some of them people out there ain’t a bit better than what some of the people think of the worst of us, man, and it’s about time they realized it….’
In this screenshot from the documentary Gimme Shelter, ill-fated Meredith Hunter, in the pistachio green suit can be seen brandishing a pistol as his girlfriend Patty Bredehoft, in the white crochet vest, attempts to calm him. Witnesses claim Hunter fired into the crowd, and Barger alleges that an Angel was struck by a bullet from Hunter’s firearm.
The incident at Altamont and Barger’s telephone call to the radio station were captured on film by documentarians Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin, and the resulting movie, Gimme Shelter, was released in 1970. One week after its premiere Hells Angel Alan Passaro went on trial, charged with murdering Meredith Hunter. However, when the film was played in court, it clearly showed Passaro acting in defense of self and third parties, and he was acquitted of all charges.
In this screenshot from the documentary Gimme Shelter, Meredith Hunter is taken down by Hells Angel Alan Passaro. It annoys the fuck out of me when I hear people claim ‘those mean ol’ Hells Angels murdered poor li’l Meredith Hunter.’ 🤬 So far as I’m concerned, Alan Passaro deserved a medal for valor for going up against a wild-eyed gunman, armed with nothing but a knife and brass cojones. His bravery protected his brothers, the performers and stagehands, and every innocent concertgoer in that crowd who could have been wounded or killed by Hunter’s reckless gunplay. Instead, because he was one of ‘those mean ol’ Hells Angels,’ Passaro was indicted on a charge of murder. However, when the jury say these scenes from the documentary, they voted (quite properly, IMO, to acquit Alan Passaro. In 1985 Passaro died in a drowning police considered ‘suspicious’ (although no foul play was ever confirmed) but rumors that a second, unidentified assailant may have been involved in Hunter’s death kept the Altamont case open until 2005. In May of that year, the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office dismissed the theory that a second Hells Angel member took part in the fatal scuffle.
HOLLYWOOD CALLS….
American International, filmmaker Roger Corman’s outfit, was responsible for classic biker exploitation films like The Wild Angels, the Peter Fonda/Nancy Sinatra vehicle which helped kickstart the careers of actress Diane Ladd, director Peter Bogdanovich, stuntman Gary Littlejohn, character actor Michael J. Pollard, et alia. Corman was also involce in the production of movies like Devil’s Angels (1967, an underrated classic), Naked Angels (1969), Angels Die Hard (1970), Angels Hard as They Come (1971), The Dirt Gang (1972), The Darktown Strutters (1975, featuring African American women on wildly customized VW-powered trikes! 😮 ), Deathsport (1978), Fast Charlie… The Moonbeam Rider (1979), The Dirt Bike Kid (1985), The Lawless Land (1988), Nam Angels (1989) and Back to Back (1989).
Given the Hells Angels’ hard-won reputation as thuggish brutes prone to violence and lawlessness, Barger was preternaturally media savvy – an excellent spokesman for his club and a wily self-promoter. He finagled parts for himself and other Angels in a couple of biker films – Hells Angels on Wheels with Adam Roarke and future Easy Rider star Jack Nicholson, and Hells Angels ’69, starring ’60s heartthrob Jeremy Slate, who later played the biker gang leader in The Born Losers.
In his memoir, Sonny reports that ‘Sweet Cocaine’ (pictured above, on the set of the Hell’s Angels ’69 movie) was stolen while he was running errands one day. A few brutal hours later, he had his bike back, and the thieves were paying a dear price for their poor decision-making.
….BUT SO DO THE COPS
Barger was also in the headlines for numerous arrests on charges ranging from drugs and weapons charges to conspiracy and murder, and, while acquitted of the more serious charges, still spent several years in prison. During this time he gave several interviews to motorcycle magazines, including two for Supercycle, published in February and December, 1979.
Sonny speaks, and the ‘Voice of the American Biker’ listens.
SONNY BECOMES AN AUTHOR
During these years, and despite his numerous legal woes, Sonny discovered that he was a marketable commodity. The ‘Free Sonny’ t-shirts his wife sold during his incarceration were wildly popular, and other merchandise soon followed, but he really hit the jackpot when he teamed up with writers Keith and Kent Zimmerman and penned his memoir, Hell’s Angel: The Life and Times of Sonny Barger and the Hell’s Angels Motorcycle Club (William Morrow, 2000).
The book quickly became a best-seller, so he followed up with two biker-themed crime novels also co-authored by the Zimmerman Brothers – Dead in 5 Heartbeats and 6 Chambers, 1 Bullet (William Morrow, 2004 and 2006). He released a collection of road tales titled Ridin’ High, Livin’ Free: Hell-Raising Motorcycle Stories (William Morrow, 2003) and Freedom: Credos from the Road (William Morrow, 2005). Finally, with Darwin Holstrom, he co-authored Let’s Ride: Sonny Barger’s Guide to Motorcycling (William Morrow, 2010) in which he dissed American motorcycle manufacturer Harley-Davidson, for decades the only motorcycle Hells Angels were permitted to ride. In what can only be seen as heresy by those loyal to the brand, Barger wrote:
In terms of pure workmanship, personally, I don’t like Harleys. I ride them because I’m in the club, and that’s the image, but if I could I would seriously consider riding a Honda ST1100 or a BMW. We really missed the boat by not switching over to the Japanese models when they began building bigger bikes. I’ll usually say “Fuck Harley-Davidson.”
Sonny Barger
Sonny’s final contribution to the literature of motorcycling seems to be his massive scrapbook-styled tome, Sonny: 60 Years Hells Angels, published by the French imprint Serious Publishing in 2017. Copies are currently listed on Amazon at $357 USD! 😳 I swear, I did not pay even a fifth of that for my copy! 😎
Anyway, here is the first of the two 1979 interviews:
Supercycle, February 1979Supercycle, February 1979Supercycle, February 1979Supercycle, February 1979Supercycle, February 1979Supercycle, February 1979
If enough folks are interested, I’ll post the second interview soon, along with some other articles about this and other clubs.
AS NOTED ABOVE: I am not associated with the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club (or any other club) and am only posting these images and this information in the interest of preserving and sharing the collective culture and history of the motorcycling world for historians and bikers like me, who are fascinated by it all. Sláinte!
Why I Ride a Slow, Uncomfortable, Unreliable, Noisy Motorcycle
Why I ride a Harley-Davidson with 17-inch ape hanger handlebars, a massive sissy bar that has the technical sophistication of a very large lawn mower?
Photo by Anne Watson, annewatson photography
May 28, 2013 at 1:29pm ET by: Tim Watson
If you ever saw my motorcycle you’d think I was a complete idiot. You would ask yourself why on earth would someone ride something with 17-inch ape hanger handlebars, a massive sissy bar that looks like a throwback from an early 1970s biker film bolted to a motorcycle that has the technical sophistication of a very large lawn mower?
It’s also noisy. Very noisy. Under hard acceleration it sounds like a moose bellowing as if someone had just slammed its testicles in a car door.
I honestly didn’t want it to be like that. But when my bike left the Harley-Davidson factory its stock engine set-up meant it ran so lean that the heat from the air-cooled motor made it almost impossible to ride here in California when temperatures climb into the 80s.
So I changed out the stock pipes. But then I was told I needed a new air filter and a re-map of the engine. All of that didn’t make my motorcycle much faster but it did suddenly come alive. And it sort of cooled down.
Its exhaust can be truly obnoxious which is why I ride with a light hand on the throttle in built-up areas. When there’s nobody about and just me and an open road I revert to the moose bellowing. But after a while it can make even my head hurt and then I wonder about my sanity and why I ride this damned bike.
I have read and re-read the countless things I could do to make its V-twin 96-ci engine faster and perform better. But I’m not convinced. I look at my bike and I am not sure that it is either.
At idle it shakes like a carnival ride and if I look down for too long the vibrations make my vision go blurry and then my hands go numb.
I hate the fact every single bolt and fastening has to be glued in place to stop them falling out. Before each ride I always have to check it over so it doesn’t leave me standing at an intersection with nothing more than the handlebars, a seat and a pile of parts.
The ape hanger bars were an after thought. I’d seen some of the Mexican low rider motorcycles in my neighborhood with mean looking dudes using them on their bikes.
I’ll admit they look preposterous (not the Mexican dudes) and I have lost count of the number of people who ask me precisely why I have them. I can’t give them a satisfactory answer. I just like ape hangers.
I did have an idea once of how I wanted my bike to look. I thought a sort of 1950s bobber style with some classic retro parts. But it’s become a bit of a mish-mash and not quite how I envisaged it would turn out.
Photo by Tim Watson
I paid good money for a special order 32-inch sissy bar for the back of my bike. Some people have said looks like I am riding a remote control motorcycle or others have asked if I ever receive radio wave interference through it. It serves absolutely no purpose, rattles like hell all the time and makes getting on or off the bike a contortionist’s act. But I like the way it looks.
In a moment of madness I once took the front fender off. But this resulted in the bike and my face being sand blasted from road grit. Even an artfully tied bandana between the forks when it rained meant all that happened was a jet of water was thrown off the tire and straight up my nose. In a matter of hours the fender went back on.
I also kept the stock solo seat too. But if I were honest it would be more comfortable sitting on a piece of cardboard. There’s no back support and I feel I can ride over cigarette butts and tell you if they’re filtered or unfiltered. But I like the feedback from the road that it gives me even if on long rides it kills my back.
There’s an ugly gash on my bike’s left peg where I thought I could easily squeeze between a parked car and a wall to ride down a back alley. And there’s a dent the size of a dime on the front of the gas tank, caused by a rock flung out of a truck tire on the freeway. I’ve left it as a reminder of what that would have done to my face if the rock had hit me.
The factory fit rear brake light, which some say looks like a limp chrome dick, works intermittently. The rudimentary fuel gauge that may well have come off a 1960’s child’s pedal car some times pops out of the tank when I least expect it.
And I constantly have to check the primary plug for leaks as I over torqued it once during an oil change and stripped the thread. The chopper-style headlight I bought for it and which replaced the perfectly serviceable original light, is about as useful as a candle in the wind. But in daylight and probably only to my eyes it looks good.
Of course there are far better bikes out there I could have bought. There are many that are faster and nicer looking that probably have more engineering sophistication in their front brake lever than my entire motorcycle.
But herein lies the problem. For everything that irritates me about my bike it always without fail makes me smile every single time I get on it.
I have ridden it through empty deserts, up mountains and across, around and through nine states covering more than 8,000 miles in the process. I have nearly been taken out by an 18-wheeler on a downhill mountain pass and I once ran over a rattlesnake with it in the Mojave Desert.
My bike has taken me though some astonishing U.S. backwater towns in 100 plus degree heat and then a few hours later up into the mountains and over snow covered roads.
And, just like legendary Western lawman Wyatt Earp, I too once rode into Tombstone, Arizona, on it.
It’s my motorcycle. It drives me nuts at times but it’s been through a lot with me and has now become a part of my life. And for that reason alone I will never, ever sell it.
And my response? Well, it’s like this….
Why I Ride a Slow, Uncomfortable, Unreliable, Noisy Motorcycle
I too ride a motorcycle that is slower than the latest whiz-bang showroom models, but then, its powerplant is a forty-eight-year-old shovelhead which was tractor-engineered at birth and is still virtually box stock. It is smaller than the smallest late-model engine, still fitted with its factory carburetor and cam, rudimentary exhaust and (gasp!) a points-and condenser ignition system! That’s downright barbaric, isn’t it? and especially when you realize that my motorcycle has never had an electric starter. That’s right; kick-start only, kids, just the way Grandpa did!
My shovelhead does have solid lifters – more for reliability and convenience than performance – and a belt-drive primary. However, the belt is for convenience, as well, and whatever low-end performance boost it might have provided has been offset by the 25-tooth countershaft sprocket I installed to regain my highway top-end. My bike is built to go places, but I don’t have to break any land speed records making the trip.
And when I say ‘built to go places’ I mean that in every sense.
My motorcycle is not uncomfortable. It began its life as a 1974 FX 1200 Superglide, with the heavy OEM swingarm frame and lightweight narrow-glide forks. I played with different saddles and handlebars, added highway pegs and a set of wide-glide forks off a 1966 Police Special, but my motorcycle never became truly comfortable on long rides until I switched from the stock swingarm frame to an OEM 1954 rigid wishbone.
Me and The Bitch (and Rob Darnstaedt’s Low Rider) at the Terrace Apartments off South Congress Avenue in South Austin, circa 1979 or early 1980.
I can hear the Greek chorus now, shouting ‘Impossible! Absurd!’ but it’s true, nonetheless. With the rigid frame and a frame-mounted LaPera butt-bucket saddle, I have ridden all over the Central Plains and Rocky Mountain States, from Texas to South Dakota, from Louisiana to Arizona – numerous 500- and 600-mile days, at least one 1000-mile day, a lot of back roads and goat paths and well over a half-million miles all told – and never once regretted converting to a rigid frame.
Me and The Bitch at Sturgis, 1982.
And if you’re interested, my comfort depended on the way I set the bike up at the start, the way I pack for road trips and the way I learned to ride a rigid-framed motorcycle. It’s different than a swingarm
My motorcycle is not unreliable, either. Despite its origin as a ‘bowling ball bike’ manufactured during the worst of the AMF years at the Motor Company, when factory workers were allegedly sabotaging bikes in order to get back at miscreant management, my shovelhead was never an unreliable machine. In addition, I’ve had my fingers in every subassembly on my motorcycle, from handlebar wiring to wheel hubs, and did my damnedest to rebuild them right. That means plenty of Nylock, Loctite, lock-washers and safety wire, and the systematic removal of anything the bike does not need to function the way I need it to. No chrome covers or extra gewgaws; no colored lights or (shudder) a stereo; not even turn signals.
As a result of stripping my bike down and securing every part on it the best I possibly can, parts rarely vibrate loose. As a result of simplifying every system on the motorcycle the best I possibly can – seven wires for the entire wiring harness, for instance, rather than the seemingly endless coils of brightly-colored 16-gauge snaking hither and yon – I can usually troubleshoot problems with little fuss. As a result of knowing my motorcycle’s innermost workings, I am able to repair all but the most serious breakdowns parked under the nearest shade tree.
Finally, as a result of my efforts, I can count on one hand the number of times in the past 43 years my shovelhead has been forced to ride home in the back of a truck, with fingers left over.
And my motorcycle is not particularly loud, either. Louder than a Prius, yes, but so is a hummingbird fart, and my shovelhead is far quieter than a good many late-model Harleys. It is also a damned sight less irritating to adult ears than the wind-tunnel shriek of many metric sportbikes, whose riders are, ironically, so quick to whine about Harley riders giving them a bad name. Let’s not forget that’s a two-way street, kids.
And you will never find me parked outside some chic café with a lovely open-air patio, rapping on my open exhaust pipes as hapless diners cover their ears, or racing into my neighborhood in the wee hours, setting off car alarms and rattling window glass as I screech to a halt in my driveway. I have this funny thing about treating people as I’d want to be treated, see, and I wouldn’t want some overgrown man-child on his midlife-crisis-mobile destroying my peace and quiet.
See how easy that is?
But what is so compelling about a motorcycle with few creature comforts and only the bare minimum of safety equipment? Why would I choose it over a newer, faster, sleeker model with all the latest whistles and bells, and stick with it for almost four and a half decades?
Well, for me it’s like this:
Recent years have proven that anyone with a large enough credit limit can own a Harley-Davidson, a Victory or ersatz Indian, a Triumph, Moto Guzzi or Ducati, or any of the Pacific Rim brands. A swipe of the gold card, a push of a button, the snick of a gearshift and voila! Instant motorcyclist!
Bill kickin’ The Bitch circa 2002.
But how many of those men and women can climb aboard a motorcycle with a forty-eight-year-old engine cradled in a sixty-eight-year-old frame and pushing fifty-six-year-old front forks, and do the things I’ve done with it? How many can ride that motorcycle from Denver to Austin in a day after a week of 500-mile days, kickstart that engine on an icy-cold morning in the South Dakota Badlands or a hurricane-drenched night in Houston, or navigate the Black Canyon of the Gunnison with nothing but mechanical brakes and a four-speed transmission between them and the canyon rim? How many can tear down the better part of their bike at the roadside and put it back together again, and actually make it run? How many would even be willing to try?
I know I’m not the only greybeard out here on a rigid-framed dinosaur of a motorcycle. There are plenty of panheads and knuckleheads in daily use here and around the world, ridden by bikers who do every one of the things I’ve mentioned here. However, a lot more peoplecan’t do those things than can, and I really enjoy being part of that smaller circle.
Bill and The Bitch, still together all these years!
The Shovel Shop 
