In rock’s nascent days, lurking not too far in the shadows behind the leather jacket, the DA, the hot rod, and the hot chick, was the motorcycle. Like the leather jacket, the cycle’s iconic power can be traced back to Marlon Brando’s role in The Wild Bunch.
Hot rods remained the vehicle of choice through the years when Chuck Berry was motovatin’, while soul and British Invasion artists of the first half of the ’60s did most of their commuting by foot and train. In the second half of the ’60s, however, thanks to Roger Corman‘s exploitation flicks and hippie-era interest in exploring the wide-open spaces of the United States, the motorcycle came to light as the vehicle of choice for rock ‘n rollers.
The opening images of one of the two most influential movies of my lifetime was accompanied by rock’s finest motorcycle song ever!
For reasons still unclear to me to this day, my parents and the parents of friends of mine from down the block took us all to see a drive-in double feature of Hell’s Angels on Wheels with Easy Rider. I must have been 5 or 6 years old. This was in the days when your could shove 8 people into a station wagon, with kids fighting for the highly valued seats that flipped up and faced looking out the back window. I still recall a bad biker dude in a WWI German helmet and a guy getting shot right between the eyes – shattering his rectangular Granny glasses – to end Hell’s Angels on Wheels. Yes! Then came Easy Rider, with choppers, kick-ass sideburns and facial hair, the leather football helmet, and “Born to Be Wild”. Yes! From that night forward I developed a crystal clear lifetime goal that, to be honest, exists in some form to this day: I wanted to be a hippie.*
*As part of this plan, I wanted to ride a chopper. Over the next couple of years I saved money to buy a mini-bike. My Mom was totally against it, but I kept saving. I was a week away from trying to get my Dad to make the case that I should be allowed to get one when a motocycle-riding neighbor from around the corner flipped his bike and died instantly. Just as fast I decided to cap my hippie accoutrements at big sideburns, a Fu Manchu, and a fringed suede jacket.
Peter Fonda has said numerous times, whenever anyone remembers he’s around, that Easy Rider was conceived as a hippie Western on choppers. As hippie westerns go, you’d think the last stand would have been at Altamont, but despite the biker-led tragedy at Altamont, the influence of Easy Rider wouldn’t die! Check out this 1971 promo film by Iron Butterfly.
What started to dash the hopes of biker rock wasn’t much different than what dashed my own: the hogs started killing folks.
Richard Farina died on a cycle in 1966, but he was a folkie. Bob Dylan had his legendary motocycle crash a few years later, but we know that was an excuse for something else. The deaths of Duane Allman and Berry Oakly, almost a year to the day and only a few blocks apart, scared off countless rockers from straddling a hog and led to Lynyrd Skynyrd writing rock’s most painful epic, “Freebird”.
But not every rocker gave up on the biker rock dream. Heavy metal guys, of course, were always tougher and more manly than the competition, even hairy Southern Rockers. Judas Priest’s Rob Halford was about a tough and manly as they came. The guy was dressed in leather from head to toe, and he was known to straddle a hog at any given opportunity. Not even my boys Steppenwolf posed for band shots with singer John Kay’s thighs wrapped around all that chrome, steel, and leather. Here’s the key shot from the band’s homepage.
I should note that aside from Priest and some other early metal acts, Brits tend not to rely on the iconic motorcycle power of the motocycle, favoring scooters, bikes, buses, and “lorries” instead.
Aside from the work of Halford, perhaps rock’s last great claim to the dream of the hog in rock was made by my friends The Dead Milkmen, in their video for “Smokin’ Banana Peels”. I’m hopeful that we’ll get at least one of them to chime in with their memories of re-creating that legendary scene from Easy Rider. What staged, open-road sense of freedom and power they must have felt!
Today, the hopes of the motorcyle in rock are sadly unfulfilled. There is a newer band called Black Motorcycle Rebel Club, which has more of a gelded Fonzie ring to it than Brando in The Wild Bunch. Then there’s this guy:
Bob Seger
Thanks for this one. You’re bringing back a lot of memories.
Here’s the thing. You’re dead on about Fonzie, at least after the first half-season or so, when he used to show up in a khaki jacket and not say, “Eeeyyyyh!” upon every entrance. He actually got *less* cool with the addition of leather. But Brando in The Wild Bunch? Have you ever actually watched the whole movie? He’s about as menacing as an eight year old:
A: You drank my glass of soda!
B: No I didn’t! (giggle)
A: Well, who did?!
B: I don’t know. *You* did!
A: I just filled it –
B: That’s what *you* are. (tee hee)
That’s the level of bad ass bikery in this movie. Even the “menacing freaks” in A Touch of Evil are scarier. Where’s Mr. Buskirk? Anyhow, he seemed forced, and at least 30% gay. (I know it’s like being a little pregnant, but some moments were worse than others.) Though I should lay some of that on the hat, I realize.
I never wanted to own a motorcycle, because that pretty much had to be your thing. All time, money, effort, went to guys’ bikes. You had to have those funky muffler burns, and if you *did manage to be a guy with a motorcycle who also sat in front of the TV with a guitar, noodling, or jamming with friends for whole days at a time, then your motorcycle wasn’t one I *wanted* to own. I’m down with your sideburn and suede fringe ambitions, but I never wanted to join the Great Unwashed.
When we were kids we had a house in Avalon, NJ – a 19th century log cabin around which were 60s mod vacation homes. Across the street was the huge victorian pile belonging to Mrs. Cake and her dog, Cinder. It was four stories, with a widow’s walk and all, and had been moved from a part of the island now under the bay, years before. My little sister and I always hung out over there, playing with her dog, and my brother and I used to cut her grass. [See: seared on brain since 1969 – box turtle in electric mower, with sound!] So one fine 3d of July in the summer of 1971 or 1972, along come about a dozen or fifteen loud-ass hogs down the street. Her son and his pals, come to watch the fireworks from all the surrounding towns, from the vantage point of her widow’s walk. We went over, and though my parents were out, it was tacitly understood we shouldn’tbe venturing across. But we felt the tenor of the house had long been more accurately established by Mrs. Cake’s styling purple Gremlin, and we also knew from countless television demonstrations that the bad-ass-looking people are actually the salt of the earth, and the clean-cut guys were the minions of the scrooge-like and uncool Man. We weren’t there long, and I think people went out of their way not to freak out the kids or offer us pot (very forward thinking, that.) Not as memorable as it might have been all-around, the experience left me with no motorcycle ambitions…
I know what you mean about the actual movie, The Wild Ones and Brando’s performance. But that still is a stone classic. Highly influential Look, even if the hat never caught on.
I’m sure other Townspeople out there know what I mean about the promise of Biker Rock. Not what it became but what it promised. Damn, I’ve felt a deep-seated sense of satisfaction, if slight disappointment, just revisiting these childhood aspirations.
TRUE STORY
Many of you already know that I went to high school in Africa, in a small mountain kingdom called Swaziland. Swaziland was a wonderful place to be a teenager for all kinds of reasons — wide open spaces, little in the way of “rules” (though the everybody-knows-your-parents-personally Mayberry vibe of the place kept things healthily in check), no real way to fuck yourself up other than booze and some godalmightyblowyourheadoff pot, and… motorcycles. *Everybody* in the 16-18 age group had a bike of some size and shape, though almost all were off-road or dual-purpose jobbies.
The off-road capabilities of these bikes were very important, as Swaziland didn’t have too many roads back then. Plus, the preferred method of driving out into the countryside to get loaded was to organize a caravan of dirt bikes, with one of us borrowing a pickup truck (a “bakkie,” borrowing from nearby South African slang) to actually transport the crates of Castle Lager required to achieve the desired effect.
But I digress. (Ah, sweet memories! Strange that I’ve forgotten the skull-crushing hangovers, and ommitted the stories about Adam Elliott pissing all over my bike in a fit of drunken pique about something, or Goff Haw waking up with his head on a vomit-encrusted pillow, moaning woefully, “I’m swimming in puuuuuuke!”)
The point here is that I may be the only RTHer who ever actually pulled a Rob Halford move on the rock stage.
See, as a pimply-faced 16 year-old, I managed to bring together four or five of my closest music-loving friends to form a band. The cast of characters was an odd one, by virtue of the fact that there just weren’t very many people to choose from. Nobody could afford to be a member of a “subculture,” since we had trouble enough finding a roomful of people to agree on a culture to begin with. There was Peter “Pubes” Horn (drums) — five feet tall and so upset about his height that he grew a five-inch pile of hair on the top of his head; Alan Kang (bass), budding computer genius who mooned hopelessly after school hottie Dawn Sherper; Richard “Ski” Zwierczowski (piano), who smoked so much dope that his hair *and* his teeth turned orange; David “Bertie” Bertram (vocals), who once famously totalled his mom’s Citroen in a drunken stupor, then polled the dudes in the back seat as to whether they preferred to go home or haul the unbroken bottles of beer back to his house for a party; and, of course, me (guitar). I suppose my claim to fame in this bunch was that I was the jive talker, the guy who usually got us into trouble and was the first to talk his way out of it. Thus, I was occasionally known as “Con.”
Together, this band of losers was known as, uh… well, when we played school assembly, we were called, um, the Flunk Punks. Hey, we were 16, and living in Africa, for fuck’s sake! We didn’t know from cool!
Anyhow, the school assembly gig was fast approaching, and we were in conceptual disarray, as always. Bertie, who eventually went on to join the Merchant Marines and now works for a shipping concern in Durban, was concerned about his Look, and dubious about the jumpsuit we urged him to wear as frontman. Kang, who eventually *did* become a computer genius, and now teaches the subject in university somewhere, was apparently genetically incapable of being funky. Kang’s job was to lull the audience into thinking we were going to play one of the school favorites of the day, “Another One Bites the Dust,” after 30 seconds of which the rest of the band would roar into our stirring, proto-rockist anthem, “Disco Is Dead!” (c) Bertie/Con Music, Inc. Unfortunately, whenever Kang played *anything* on the bass without a band behind him, it came out in 3/4 time. Imagine the opening bass notes to “Another One Bites the Dust” played as a waltz, and you’ll get the idea. Ski, who, I think, eventually went crazy, had just discovered the wonders of “jimson weed,” some kind of naturally ocurring hallucinogen, and refused to play anything other than AC/DC songs. He could not be budged on this point, so we had to add “Rock and Roll Damnation” to our set list to appease him. He agreed to sit at the piano and appear bandly during the other numbers, though he would not play. Peter, who eventually grew up to be a six-foot accountant, was impatient. And I, who eventually grew up to be an underemployed composer for film and TV, needed to come up with some kind of galvanizing focus for this impending disaster.
Enter the motorcycle.
It was decided that the grand gesture we needed to wake up the sleeping assembly masses was a triumphant ride down the assembly hall steps — down, down to the stage, exhaust roaring — hell, flames shooting out of our tailpipes if at all possible — and fists pumping. I had a bike, Pubes had a bike… we could do it!
Sadly, Peter (who was always the practical sort), refused to take any part in this madness. His Yamaha 200 already had weak front forks, and his parents wouldn’t allow him to ride it to school anyway. This left me, and I was determined.
The day before the fateful assembly, I drove my bike to school and walked to the top of the steps in the assembly hall. I looked down them, and was suddenly struck by the unacceptably low payoff-to-danger ratio of my concept. But I would ride my bike into the performance — I must! Scouting around the stage area, I noticed a door to the left of the curtain. Sure enough, it led outside, and was just big enough for a gangly 16 year-old on a dirt bike.
The big day arrived. Bertie was nervous, Kang was confused, Ski was high, and Peter was focused on the task at hand. Headmaster Dick “Mass” Eyeington (who was later brutally murdered in Somalia by Al-Qaeda, believe it or not) made a few announcements, and the curtain opened. As it opened, I kickstarted my Yamaha DT 175 into sputtering action, gave the engine a couple of hesitant revs (*man* was it loud! Am I gonna get in trouble for this?) and engaged first gear.
What I hadn’t anticipated in my 16 year-old rock and roll fantasy was that it’s awfully hard to get to bugs-in-your-teeth, wind-blowing-back-your-hair speeds when the distance from the stage door to the other side of the stage is about 24 feet. And anybody who’s ever ridden a bike will tell you that the first 20 feet — especially if you’re nervous — are the slowest and the wobbliest. So the net effect of my Big Rock Gesture was: Vroom, cough, sputter, click-wobble, roll, idle, waitaminnitIgottaputthekickstanddown and then a degrading walk back over to my side of the stage to don my guitar and switch the amp on. While the rest of the Flunk Punks waited with beads of sweat forming on their noses.
What happened next is lost in the dim recesses of my panicky memory. Kang screwed up his bass part, nobody in the audience got the joke, “Rock and Roll Damnation” kicked ass, and then Peter’s bass drum pedal broke during a laughably un-rockin’ version of “Ice Cream Man.” We occupied ourselves in the post-mortem with conspiracy theories about who might have sabotaged our drum set to ruin our performance. Strangely, I was never singled out for my lunk-headed motorcycling contribution to the fiasco.
My, I seem to have rambled, haven’t I? Do I win a booby prize for longest RTH post ever?
Thanks for metting me relive some treasured memories. One of these days I’ll transcribe the yearbook story I wrote during this era about our band — or, rather, a later incarnation called, uh, “Warhead.”
Hey, I was only 17, man!
Awesome, Townsman HBV!!! This is just the sort of Biker Rock aspirations I’d hoped we’d unlock.
A scant few RTH posts have made me laugh out loud. This one made me laugh out loud, with tears rolling down my cheeks, until people at work actually asked if I was OK. I vaguely remember you telling me some version of this story, but this is still the Post of the – um, however long RTH lasts, this is the Post of It.
Wiping tears from my eyes, I have to ask: Nobody got the bright idea of the rest of the band playing while you rode on stage?
Rick/Mr. Mod:
I am quietly proud of your votes of approval, though somewhat ashamed that I have the free time to write something that long.
In answer to Rick’s question: the band stood there with incredibly uncool awkwardness because I suppose we all suffered from the “the bike will go ‘vroom’ and *then* the band will kick out the jams” delusion. I *sounded* cool, anyway. Since we never actually practiced it… I dunno, we were young and eagerly stupid about the whole thing.
Thanks again for your kind words — I had fun reliving those halcyon days of yore, pink shades notwithstanding.
Sory, that should read: “It sounded cool, anyway…” meaning the concept. I did not sound cool in the least.
The most amazing part of the story is that you didn’t get a week of detention for this. Maybe the headmaster thought that you had already suffered enough.
It’s also amazing that your band played Ice Cream Man.
Great story! I attended a financial services conference a couple of years ago, and G. Gordon Liddy (former asshole White House plumber, and current asshole radio talk show host) performed the same entrance prior to his presentation with a similar outcome. It took forever for him to traverse the couple of feet from door to parking spot while wafting exhaust through the room, and it was an interminable amount of time for him to get it up on the kickstand. After the first 5 seconds of laughter the stunt created, we in the audience were left there to wait in uncomfortable silence for 10 minutes while he handled those logistics. Pure momentum killer. And this was a grown man thinking this was going to be a cool entrance. We didn’t even get Ice Cream Man by the time he made it to the mic.
G. Gordon Liddy on a motorcycle. Well, if that’s not the indelible image of simultaneously the unfulfilled promise of the motorcycle in rock and the greatest disappointment in rock, I’m not sure what is.
Man, did this story ever bring me back to another time and place. I have a similar story that I won’t tell at length here, involving a bicycle rather than a motorcycle. In 6th grade, some friends wanted to make an Evil Kneivel style film, featuring a bike, a ramp, and some explosives attached to the bike. The film looked stupid, but I can report with pride that the rider really cut himself up good.
Thanks for bringing me back to those times!