An American Life, Larry C. Ballard, No Waste Publishing, 2009, , . .

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Indian Larry (born Lawrence DeSmedt; April 28, 1949 – August 30, 2004) was a noted builder and artist, stunt rider, and biker. He first became known as in the 1980s when he was riding the streets of New York City on a chopped Indian motorcycle. Respected as an old school builder, Larry sought greater acceptance of choppers being looked upon as an art form. He became interested in the scene of hot rods and at an early age and was a fan of Von Dutch and Ed "Big Daddy" Roth, whom he would later meet in California.

Wide acknowledgment of Indian Larry's talent only came to fruition in the last few years of his life. He died in 2004 from injuries sustained in a motorcycle accident while performing at a bike show. Larry's bike, Grease Monkey, was featured in Easyriders magazine in September 1998. Then in 2001, a wider audience became aware of Indian Larry through a Discovery Channel program entitled, Motorcycle Mania II, followed by his participation in three different Biker Build-Off programs. Likewise, it was only during the last few years that Larry had the funding to bring his lifetime of ideas to fruition and show all of his mechanical artistry in a handful of notable chopper builds such as Daddy-O (known to most people as the bike), Wild Child, and Chain of Mystery. In addition to television, popular exposure to Indian Larry's down-to-earth personality and philosophy occurred through his many appearances at bike shows and rallies across the United States.

Indian Larry was born Lawrence DeSmedt in Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York on April 28, 1949. He grew up in the Newburgh, New York area including the town of New Windsor.[1][2] The oldest of three children, with two younger sisters, Diane and Tina, Larry was described by his mother, Dorothy, as "a good boy, but mischievous."[3] Larry's strict father, Augustine, was a carpenter at West Point Military Academy and had built the family's home. He wanted his son to follow in his footsteps in the carpentry trade.[3] Young Larry liked Lincoln logs and Ed “Big Daddy― Roth Revell plastic model kits.[4] Roth, a legendary California artist and hot rod builder, was a big influence, and what Larry absorbed would later bubble up to influence his own work in one form or another.[5]

Larry attended a Catholic elementary school where he suffered abuse. The nuns would hit his knuckles until they bled and lock him in dark closets.[6][7] He kept what was occurring to himself, and didn't tell his family what was going on. When his mother asked about his knuckles, Larry would always just say that he had gotten into a fight.[3] It wasn't until years later that his family learned what had actually happened.[7] As a child Larry was described as being sensitive and artistic, and "feeling more than most."[8]

A well-known anecdote about Indian Larry is that as a kid he attempted to build a bomb in his parent's basement in order to blow up the Catholic school;[3][6] Instead, an explosion occurred at the DeSmedt home, and Larry lost the small finger on his left hand. Another version of the story states that the injury occurred while he was trying to build a skyrocket for the 4th of July.[9][10] When asked about the injury during a 2003 Biker Build-Off program, Larry seemed to have come to peace with it:

As a youth Larry participated in the Boy Scouts. His scoutmaster, Gerald Doering, is known for having raced Indian motorcycles, "and his love for the sport had a profound effect upon Larry."[1] Doering and his son Ted (who was the same age as Larry; they were friends in the scout troop together)[12] would later found the Motorcyclepedia in 2011 — a large motorcycle museum 65 miles north of Manhattan. (Ted had opened a chopper shop in 1969 out of a shed on the family's property, and the Doerings started selling wholesale parts in the early 70s focusing mainly on older Harley-Davidson models and had collected Indian motorcycles over the decades).[13][14] Larry's first build was when he took his little sister Tina's tricycle and equipped it with Schwinn bicycle handlebars and a lawn mower engine.[3][6][15] According to a Rolling Stone interview that was mentioned in a New York Times article, Larry's first motorcycle was a 1939 Harley Knucklehead that he bought when he was a teenager for a couple hundred dollars. "Within hours, he had taken it apart, and it took him nine months to put it back together."[16]

As a young man Larry learned how to weld from Conrad Stenglein in the Newburgh, New York area. The shop was simple. As Stenglein described it: "All we had in the shop was a welding machine, torches, grinder, body putty, stuff like that."[12] Quality of work was important to Larry early on. Stenglein said that "Whatever part we made for a bike, it had to be strong and had to be good, that was our thing. It had to be perfect. If Larry put something on a bike that he didn't like, he'd cut it off. That's how he was."[12]

A month before he was to graduate from high school, Larry told his mother that he was heading to California to join his younger sister Diane who was deeply immersed in the 1960s counterculture (Diane had run away from home when she was 16).[17] In California Larry also took part in the scene and delved into drugs. Larry saw his sister Diane as a kindred spirit who understood what it was like to feel like an outsider in society.[18] Then tragedy struck. On June 21, 1971, Diane was murdered. Larry accompanied her body back to their hometown for her funeral. The experience was emotionally devastating to him.[3][19]

Coupled with his grief, Larry was spiraling in drug addiction. To pay for the drugs he was robbing stores. The cops had an idea that it was Larry but had not been able to catch him so they set up a sting operation. In 1972 as Larry was exiting a bank he had just robbed, he was fired upon by two police officers. He narrowly escaped being killed when one of the bullets grazed his eyebrow.[3][20] At the age of 23, Larry was sent to Sing Sing prison for three years. During his incarceration Larry earned his GED, and started taking courses in welding and mechanics. Prison was "the place where he honed all his best mechanic skills."[21] He also asked his mother to send him a dictionary and books on philosophy and other topics. He was released in September 1976.[22]

After completing parole, Larry relocated to New York City where he became involved with the underground scene. The first magazine article about Indian Larry was in Iron Horse Magazine (Issue # 70 November 1987).[9] It featured his 1950 Indian Chief chopper with red-orange flames.[23] It was during this period that people began to call him Indian Larry.[24] In the 1980s he hung out with Robert Maplethorpe and , who had heard about Indian Larry, and "searched him out", because they found him "so fascinating".[24] Maplethorpe was "attracted to Indian Larry's 'crash and burn'" lifestyle.[16] One of the photographs that he took of Indian Larry ended up on the cover of Artforum magazine.[6]

Indian Larry began working in different motorcycle shops in New York City and New Jersey during the 1980s and early 1990s. Often he would be rebuilding motors out of his apartment.[25] For many years Larry struggled with alcohol abuse and heroin.[26] In November 1991, during a period when he was living around the Bowery, Larry was going through severe withdrawals one night, wandering the streets cutting himself with a broken beer bottle. Larry would later say, "I was homeless, shirtless, penniless, showerless. I had nothing. I had nothing left".[3][27] According to Larry's youngest sister Tina, (who went on to become a registered nurse)[6] when a cop arrived on the scene that night in 1991 and shined a spotlight in Larry's face, Larry told him, "Just shoot me." They committed him to Bellevue Hospital.[6][28] It was through Bellevue that Larry got connected up with a drug and alcohol program.[29]

Larry had "1991" and "1994" tattooed on his arm, as he explained that he had to go back after his initial treatment.[3] Larry struggled with a familiar cycle for years. As friend and bike building partner Paul Cox explained: "...he would go through periods of time when he didn't think he deserved fame or whatever, and would sabotage himself by doing drugs. Larry would attack himself internally and head down a self-destructive spiral."[30] It was not until the late 1990s that Larry was finally able to free himself and stop using.[31] Mentioning the long journey that it took, Larry expressed that he didn't think that he could do it all over again. "It was too hard," he said.[3] Larry's friend, celebrity photographer Timothy White, said in the Discovery Channel biography of Indian Larry that "drugs didn’t belong with Larry and I think Larry knew that and it wasn’t until he got to a point that he really realized that — only at that point could he let it all go. And once he did, his life changed completely. It changed completely, like nobody I've ever seen."[3]

Indian Larry, along with Paul Cox, Fritz "Spritz by Fritz" Schenck, Steg, and Frank, started Psycho Cycles on New York's in the early 1990s. The shop moved to Rivington street,[9] and later across the river to , where head mechanic Larry founded Gasoline Alley on North 14th Street in 2001. In January 2004, Larry took over the business and renamed it Indian Larry Enterprises.[32]

Larry is credited with re-popularizing the stripped down, tall handlebar, foot clutched, jockey shifted, no front brake or fender, small gas tank, open piped, kick start only, stock rake choppers that prevailed in the 1960s, before long front ends became popular (Larry explained during his first Biker Build-Off, that he preferred nimbleness in a bike so he could ride at high speeds along the mountain switchbacks).[33]

When building a chopper, Larry could draw upon what he had mastered over the years in the fields of mechanics, welding, and metal fabrication. Among custom bike builders, Indian Larry was known and respected for having mastered the old-school style of building and remaining loyal to it.[34] Larry considered himself to be a "gearhead" originally, and was rooted in the hot rod culture of the 1950s and 1960s. During the Biker Build-Off period in 2003-2004, Larry's appreciation for modern horsepower and twin carburetors for increased fuel/air intake was expressed in his builds.[33]

In the art of building a bike, Larry preferred old school methods and didn't use CNC machines.[35] He favored Paughco rigid frames and Harley Davidson Panhead motors.[24] Larry liked being able to see all of the nuts and bolts and mechanics of a bike, rather than concealing those elements in a bike's construction.[3][24] The way that Larry approached building a bike was evident early on. The man who taught Larry the craft of using a welding torch said that he remembered Larry not wanting to grind down welds if they were good because Larry "felt it showed your craftmanship."[12]

Larry's childhood friend, Ted Doering, who knew Larry when he was first learning to build and would chrome parts for him, said that Larry had even envisioned the idea for a "'clear,' see-through transmission case" in order to "view the gears working". Doering added that Larry "would fabricate or customize every piece because on a motorcycle, you can see everything."[12]

Larry's shop partner, Paul Cox, (who he first met in 1990, but started working with at Psycho Cycles in 1994)[36] described how Larry conceived the idea for a new chopper build: "Working alongside him you realized how much he ran on instinct. Built-in instinct. He would rarely make a sketch or jot down notes...he just envisioned what he wanted in one wide-eyed flash and would turn to you with a look like he saw God. At that point it was 'all over but the cryin,' he would say."[37]

Although Larry had been profiled before, such as the aforementioned Iron Horse article nearly a decade earlier, his first big exposure occurred when he was profiled, among others of Psycho Cycles, in Easyriders magazine (February 1998, No. 296, p. 87-91) in an article entitled, "Hardcore NYC Troubadors".[38] Then in September 1998, Easyriders profiled the chopper that Larry had built and rode on a daily basis called Grease Monkey (September 1998, No. 303). Later that year it won the Editor's Choice Award at the Easyriders Invitational Bike Show in Columbus, Ohio, which was an important recognition by the biker world of Larry's talent.[39]

The beginning of Indian Larry becoming known to the general public was his appearance in the Discovery Channel program, Motorcycle Mania II in 2001. The program's primary focus was on customizer Jesse James, but it also had different scenes profiling Indian Larry as he and the group (which included Jesse James, Chopper Dave, and Giuseppe Ronsin) set out to ride 1400 miles from Long Beach, California to the Sturgis 2001 Black Hills Classic in Sturgis, South Dakota. When one of the choppers breaks down in Southern , Larry is shown performing his mechanical skills on the bike in a supermarket parking lot (when his own bike has magneto problems, Larry explains to the camera, "If the bike is not running; if it's leaking oil; and if it's dirty. That's about the only three things that will really get to me.")[40] The program also shows Larry displaying his famous neck tattoo, sharing snippets of his personal philosophy, and doing riding stunts — this included him reclining back on his bike, Grease Monkey,[41] with his legs outstretched over the handlebars, and standing up on the saddle with his arms outstretched to the side as he speeds down the highway. The group also visits Denver's Choppers in , Nevada (now in Reno) where Larry is shown meeting chopper builder, Mondo Porras for the first time.

Larry wanted to "elevate the art of the motorcycle" in the general perception and the art world.[3] He stated, “As far as I’m concerned, it is one of the highest art forms, because it combines all media: sculpture, painting, as well as the mechanics, and it’s just a lot more than any one single medium"[33][42] (In addition to metalwork and painting, Larry included engraving and leather work to the list in another interview).[43] He explained that being a chopper builder requires being able to create from the abstract, and having a sense for aesthetics, while also possessing mechanical skills to deal with "extremely critical tolerances...like 2/10,000 of an inch in the motors".[43][44]

The premise of each 45 minutes program was to profile two different custom motorcycle builders, each from a different part of the United States, and film them and their crews at work in their respective shops building a unique bike from start to finish within a set number of days. (They were given 30 days to build for Larry's first two Biker Build-Offs, and 10 days for his third and final build for the program).[43] The format seemed perfectly suited to Larry, as television viewers witnessed segments showing the culmination of years of bike building experience interspersed with Larry's philosophical insights. Also shown helping Larry in the construction of each bike were Paul Cox and Keino Sasaki (pronounced "cane-o") from his shop.[45]