A Triton — Triumph Bonneville engine in Norton Featherbed frame — was my idea of a perfect bike when I sketched bikes during physics lessons at school

Nowadays motorheads go for bikes like this Suzuki Hyabusa crotch rocket — one of my colleagues at SAP rides one to work each day

Bikers

By Thomas M. Rickers
The American Interest, November/December 2008

Edited by Andy Ross

The notion that the motorcycle provides an experience fundamentally different from other forms of transportation is by no means exclusive to Americans. T.E. Lawrence, who claimed to have put 100,000 miles on motorcycles and eventually died on one, described his love of the ride thus: "The greatest pleasure of my recent life has been speed on the road. ... I could write for hours on the lustfulness of moving swiftly."

Add the constant danger, the lack of any barrier between the rider and the surrounding environment, and the skill and knowledge required to ride, and it's easy to see why the motorcycle has an image all its own. But these traits are merely the foundation of America's unique motorcycle culture.

The current image of the American motorcycle begins with motorcycle clubs after the Second World War. GIs returning home formed motorcycle clubs as a way of coping with the challenges of returning to civilian life. Whatever the reasons, motorcycle clubs rose in popularity.

In 1947, during a large rally in Hollister, California, several motorcycle clubs started trouble. Local police detained fifty or sixty riders, mostly for relatively minor offenses. But they soon felt so overwhelmed by the large number of cyclists in town that they called in the state highway patrol for help.

The Hollister riot had given birth to the trope of the "problem biker" in the American imagination. The accounts of the riot inspired the classic 1953 film The Wild One, starring Marlon Brando.
 

Hot nights and chopped hogs on Highway 40
 

In 1964, the bikers were members of the Hells Angels, a motorcycle club with a mean streak founded in San Bernardino but with chapters across California. The event was a Hells Angels beach party outside Monterey, and the crime an alleged rape of two girls. Media outlets nationwide seized on the salacious tale of heathen outlaws defiling teenage maidens, and the Hells Angels were catapulted into the national psyche. The Angels had become, in the words of Hunter S. Thompson, "the hundred-carat headline."

The Hells Angels surfaced in the tumultuous cultural sea of the Sixties, as the Beat Generation morphed into the counterculture. To many, the Angels were harbingers of cultural entropy, but Sixties radicals, political types and academics saw them as quintessential anti-heroes. Peace and love they were not, but their lawlessness and hostility to social mores made them icons of the counterculture state of nature.
 

With the popularity of the Hells Angels came a resurgence of the biker film. The genre reached it apogee with the counterculture classic Easy Rider (1969), complete with a soundtrack supplied by Steppenwolf and the Byrds. The bikers in these films are modern-day cowboys, living at the edge of civilization. Like the "post-Westerns" of the same period, the biker movie is ambivalent about the conflict between the civilized and the uncivilized. The outlaw motorcyclist had been firmly planted in the public consciousness.

Just as the foundational myth of "how the West was won" has become crucial to how we see ourselves as Americans, so the outlaw image has shaped motorcycle culture. The most obvious impact has been on motorcycle design itself.

Go shopping for a motorcycle and you'll be presented with a range of different styles. But above them all rides the classic American cruiser: huge engine, loud pipes and ample chrome. The Harley-Davidson is the archetype of the American cruiser, and just about the only thing a self-respecting outlaw would ride. This fixation has encouraged a focus on maintaining traditional styling and engineering, despite a raft of technological improvements over the years.

There's a sartorial style for riders, too, that seems designed to exude toughness. Black leather has long been a staple for bikers, in part because it offers excellent protection in the event of a crash. There are other, less expensive materials, but leather looks cooler.

A similar attitude surrounds the subject of helmets, which is governed by the principle that the coolness of a helmet is inversely proportional to its likelihood of protecting the brain. This requires bikers to seek out the tiniest helmets allowed by law. And wherever helmets aren't mandated, many riders go without. Part of the rebel image is having nothing to lose, and nothing says "nothing to lose" like not wearing a helmet.

The biker ethos is about being free from social constraints, yet that ethos imposes a fairly rigid mode of dress and behavior. There are rules, it seems, to living without rules. Moreover, the notion of freedom as expressed in the biker film means living outside society. Yet buying a motorcycle as an act of off-the-shelf rebellion is just another form of consumerism.

We know from history that America is a land of contradictions. Americans make a fetish of freedom while preferring social conformity. The biker myth allows us to celebrate as patriotic the rejection of our own way of life.

But what is most important about motorcycling is the sense of community and shared experience that transcends nationality. This is the reason bikers wave to one another on the road.


Reference: Hunter S. Thompson, Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga (Random House, 1967)
 

AR  Apotheosis of adolescent delinquency! Quintessence of lustfulness! My bike frenzy reached its peak some forty years ago, when I drew endless doodles of Tritons and similar steeds during physics lessons and rode a personally customized Triumph with ape-hangers while crowned in a helmet decorated with a Hans Huckebein bomber emblem. This rocker rebellion was topped in 1970 as I consumed both the Thompson book Hell's Angels and the Peter Fonda – Dennis Hopper movie Easy Rider. Lost then in mental space, I never recovered that pure terrific joy again. Now my bliss is but a glow in realms of mystic glory.