DISCLAIMER: This Document Does Not Meet the Current Format Guidelines of the Graduate S

DISCLAIMER:

This document does not meet current format guidelines Graduate School at the The University of Texas at Austin. of the It has been published for informational use only. Copyright by David Castner Croke 2015 The Dissertation Committee for David Castner Croke Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation:

Bikers and the Counterculture: Technology, Masculinity, and Resistance in America, 1965-1975

Committee:

Jeffrey Meikle, Supervisor

Janet Davis

Mark Smith

Shirley Thompson

John Hartigan Bikers and the Counterculture: Technology, Masculinity, and Resistance in America, 1965-1975

by

David Castner Croke, B.A.; M.A.

Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

The University of Texas at Austin December, 2015 Dedication

This work is dedicated to my father, Mark Ignatius Croke; his contrarianism and his integrity shaped me and inspired me to pursue this peculiar path, and his passion for history in all its delirious perversity has informed my own approach: to this project and to life. My godfather, Jim O'Brien, called him “kind-of a hippie and kind-of a redneck,” and this project is kind-of a biography of him. Acknowledgements

Thank you to Jeff Meikle for taking me on as an advisee knowing full well that I would be a shameful laggard, for employing me as his T.A. and providing inspiration with his brilliant lectures, for letting me pursue this demented project as I envisioned it and pushing me in the right direction when I needed it, and for his patient efforts as an editor. Thank you to my blunderbuss cohort and all of my peers and friends at UT; our community, with it humor, intellect, and endless convivial arguments, is what I wanted most out of graduate school, and it's why I stayed in spite of various inhospitable realities and why I have no regrets. And thank you, especially, to my L.A. friends, who literally housed and fed me as I struggled to finish this thing: Isaac Laskin and Sophie Cassidy, Dave Richman, Katie Feo Kelly and Kevin Kelly. Most of all, thank you to my mom, Peggy Croke, who somehow continues to believe in me and support me, listening to me whine about my protean inadequacies, cat-sitting, letting me use her house as a writing retreat, helping me work on my own house, and a thousand other forms of support both small and large.

v Bikers and the Counterculture: Technology, Masculinity, and Resistance in America, 1965-1975

David Castner Croke, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2015

Supervisor: Jeffrey Meikle

During the 1960's a subculture of American motorcyclists became the subject of a intense media attention, its members quickly cemented in popular representation as lurid anti-heroes by virtue of their stylized embrace of danger and their efforts to live radically contingent lives of sublime depravity. Working within an anti-modern tradition that dated back to the turn of the century, the student counterculture of the period, in particular, found this figuration of the biker subculture to be seductive, adopting the biker as a model of its own ethos of insurgent presentness and an icon of its carnivalesque aesthetic. The counterculture responded to the biker particularly insofar as he represented the type of marked whiteness that this new generation of youthful insurgents was attempting to cultivate; he was identified as a hybrid, liminal figure and closely associated with the entropy of the frontier, which played a central, if ambivalent, role in the counterculture's critique of technocracy. And it is in this capacity that the biker has remained a fixture of popular discourse. His uniquely customized motorcycle, or chopper, offered a rebuke to Detroit and its priorities, becoming symbolic of an alternative relationship to the mechanized world that was fundamentally nostalgic and hostile to the hegemony of technologized rationalism. The chopper provided an evocatively paradoxical piece of undomesticated technology, elaborating the American tradition of vernacular engineering and serving as another avatar of the frontier, even as it embraced certain elements of the vi postwar years' populuxe aesthetic. It was a bit of bricolage, a strangely ephemeral and intimately personal machine that, like pop art, combined mass-production and handcraft, and its enthusiasts expressed a nostalgic desire to experience the technological sublime and the dislocations of nascent modernity.

vii Table of Contents

Introduction...... 1

Chapter 1: Antimodernism...... 28

Presentness...... 33

Risk...... 42

Counterculture Icon...... 48

Discomfort...... 60

Masculinity...... 71

Authentic Misogyny...... 78

Violence...... 84

Competition...... 91

Conclusion...... 96

Chapter 2: Carnival...... 101

The Grotesque...... 117

Indexical Bodies...... 120

Pained Bodies...... 128

Drugs...... 131

Sexuality...... 132

Gang Rape...... 133

viii Cunnilingus...... 144

Homoeroticism...... 151

Liminality...... 161

Pragmatism...... 168

Conclusion...... 172

Chapter 3: Frontiers...... 176

Deconstructing Whiteness...... 187

Bikers and Race...... 201

The Linkhorns...... 208

Counterculture Cowboys...... 216

Masculinity...... 220

Frontier Apocalypse...... 225

Entropic Technology...... 230

Bush Fixes...... 235

Technological Sublimity...... 242

Conclusion...... 257

Chapter 4: Chopper...... 263

The Automobile...... 272

Vernacular Functionalism...... 284

Tools Without Handles...... 302

Conspicuous Dysfunction...... 319

ix Rat Bikes...... 325

Japan's Big Four...... 329

Conclusion...... 342

Conclusion: Biker Exceptionalism: Risk, Post-modernism, and the Insane Doctors of the Button...... 3

x Introduction

In 1965, an emerging subculture of American motorcyclists was suddenly ubiquitous. In the wake of the Monterrey Rape Case, in which members of the Hell's Angels Motorcycle Club were charged with the gang rape of two underage girls, the California State's Attorney General's Office released its Lynch Report, chronicling the salacious activities of so-called outlaw motorcyclists. Details of the report, which was unveiled at a press conference, were quickly picked-up by mainstream media outlets throughout the state and recycled nationally, while corespondents like Hunter Thompson,

William Murray, and Bill Ray were dispatched to sojourn with these outrageous degenerates and compile long-form profiles and photo-essays for The Nation, The Saturday Evening Post, and Life, respectively. Meanwhile, with customary alacrity and bluntness, Roger Corman began translating these sensationalistic headlines into drive-in fodder, initiating a sub-genre of exploitation cinema that would remain popular into the early 1970's. Academics followed closely behind, with Mark Watson, Randall

Montgomery, Paul Willis, Daniel Wolf and others initiating ethnographic studies of bikers and their habitus. Indeed, attention on the subculture was so pronounced that meta-commentary on the media circus that surrounded bikers immediately became a trope of popular discourse on the subject. In 1965,

Leonard Lipton's account of the Hell's Angels' assault on Berkeley antiwar protesters representing the

Vietnam Day Committee offered a wry assessment of the overwrought press corps's efforts to record

1 bikers' public antics: “A Hell's Angel had somehow cracked through [the police department's] human wall in his attempt to get at the VDC marchers, but his attack was halted by an intervening clot of photographers who surrounded him in their zeal to get the best pictures.”1 Meanwhile, in The

Bikeriders, Danny Lyon's hybrid work of ethnography, photography, and oral history that poignantly documented the environs of the Chicago-based Outlaws Motorcycle Club in the spirit of Let Us Now

Praise Famous Men, Lyon confessed: “I used to be afraid that when Angels became movie stars and

Cal the hero of a book, the bikerider would perish on the coffee tables of America.”2 For Lyon, media attention—particularly the type of fawning bourgeois exoticism implicated in the coffee table genre— posed an existential threat to the biker. Yet, the the bikers of the 1960's not only courted notoriety, their whole subculture was conceived within an ongoing negotiation with the press.

The 1960's was not the first period in which a deviant subculture of motorcyclists had preoccupied the American media and gained a certain perverse cachet. A generation earlier, a similar cycle of media attention began with the so-called Hollister riot and continued through the release of

The Wild One in 1953. Over the July 4th weekend of 1947, the small town of Hollister, California, hosted a slate of races sanctioned by the American Motorcycle Association. The event attracted about

400 members of several embryonic outlaw clubs, like the Boozefighters and the Galloping Gooses, which were comprised largely of disaffected World War II veterans who had yet to re-assimilate into postwar society. In Hollister, they crowded local bars and engaged in various forms of petty debauchery. After some minor public disturbances, the town’s six-man police force contacted the

California Highway Patrol in order to ensure public safety. Yet, while three bikers did die in motorcycle crashes, the weekend saw few arrests and no convictions for serious violent crimes. None the less, over the next days and weeks, a series of newspapers and periodicals would report that Hollister had actually been the site of a bona-fide riot instigated by demented bikers. On July 6th, the Sunday issue of the San 1 Lipton, Leonard. “I Ran for my Life from the Oakland Cops” The Berkeley Barb, 1,11, October 22 (1965): 3. 2 Lyon, Danny. The Bikeriders. (New York: Macmillan, 1967): viii.

2 Francisco Chronicle featured a front-page article titled: “Havoc in Hollister Motorcyclists Take Over

Town; Many Injured”3 The next day, a follow-up article, “The 40 Hours That Shook Hollister Charge of the Motorcycle Brigade”4 claimed that Hollister had been besieged by no fewer than 4,000 barbarous deviants. Finally, Life Magazine reproduced an image from the San Francisco Chronicle that depicted an impudently drunken man, double-fisting beers while reclining on a Harley-Davidson that was heedlessly parked amidst an avalanche of empty bottles. Subsequent investigation revealed that the tableau was staged,5 but it was an indelible image that galvanized reactionary public opinion and created its own truth. In the months following Hollister, the League of California Cities proposed a ban on all American Motorcycle Association (AMA) events, as the outlaw biker became the paranoid fixation du jour of postwar America.

Of course, hyper-vigilant guardians of bourgeois conformity were not the only ones to buy into the myth of Hollister; a generation of nascent outlaws believed in the myth as well. The image of that drunken young man, deliriously sprawled on a bike that was not his, wearing a borrowed Tulare

Raiders Motorcycle Club jacket, and surrounded by beer bottles that had been carefully collected and arranged by a professional photographer, became a new reality. Thus, in the months and years following the Hollister Riot, groups of bikers were involved in a series of violent confrontations across rural California, all of which seemed to use hyperbolic press coverage of the Hollister Riot as inspiration for action. The apparently anarchic aggression of these raids represented the studied enactment of a media trope, as the bikers who perpetrated this exuberant violence were part of a self- conscious proliferation of outlaw clubs whose members were eager to fulfill the role of the incorrigibly deviant folk-devil as conceived by the press: “Anything that drove the officials wild made me feel good. The establishment had never done anything for me, and in my youthful anger and taste for

3 “Havoc in Hollister Motorcyclists Take Over Town; Many Injured” San Francisco Chronicle July 6 (1947): 1. 4 “The 40 Hours That Shook Hollister Charge of the Motorcycle Brigade”San Francisco Chronicle July 7 (1947): 1. 5 Osgerby, Bill. Biker: Truth and Myth: How the Original Cowboy of the Road Became the Easy Rider of the Silver Screen. (Guilford: Globe Pequot Press, 2005.

3 rebellion, I saw them as responsible for the hardship and misery of my parents and others like them…I

[had] the clipping from the San Francisco Chronicle pertaining to the Hollister riot.”6 When the AMA tried to distance itself from the legacy of Hollister with an infamous press-release that claimed “Only 1 per cent of motorcycle riders are hoodlums and troublemakers,” the governing body of American motorcycling presented would-be outlaws with a pointed rallying cry: “We voted to ally under a 1- per- center patch…We were beginning to believe in our own mystique. As we stacked a few rules and rituals on the simple foundation of motorcycle riding, we thought we were building a little army.”7

Thus, the generation of bikers that emerged after Hollister forged a reciprocal dynamic with the media, courting infamy as they inflected their persona in response to the image of the biker that emerged in popular press reports.

Hunter Thompson was well attuned to this dialectic: “If the 'Hell's Angels Saga' proved any one thing, it was the awesome power of the New York press establishment. The Hell's Angels as they exist today were virtually created by Time, Newsweek and The New York Times.”8 Thompson observed that virtually none of the information contained in the Lynch Report—ostensibly the font of newsworthy information on a novel public threat—was new, and he proceeded to spend much of his energy throughout A Strange and Terrible Saga deconstructing the media cycle in which he was an ambivalent but influential participant. In the process, he also directed snide barbs toward his subjects' palpable hunger for publicity, recognizing that bikers and the media were mutually implicated in cultivating the circus atmosphere that surrounded the subculture. Indeed, bikers relished both publicity and the surreal carnival ambiance that came with their outlandish notoriety: “A line of state troopers took pictures of us, so we pulled out our cameras and took pictures of them. Newspaper reporters took pictures of cops

6 Kaye, H.R. A Place in Hell: the Inside Story of the Hell's Angels—the World's Wildest Outlaws. 1968. (Los Angeles: New English Library, 1970): 13. Qtd. Harris, Maz. Bikers: the Birth of a Modern Day Outlaw. (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1985): 16. 7 Weathern, George, and Vincent Colnett. A Wayward Angel: the Full Story of the Hell's Angels (Guilford: Lyons Press, 2004): 37. 8 Thompson, Hunter S. Hell's Angels: a Strange and Terrible Saga. 1966. (New York: Random House, 1999): 34.

4 taking pictures of us taking pictures of them. It was a circus.”9 In many ways, then, the biker subculture was a post-modern phenomenon, and many close observers were befuddled by the way that bikers confuted prevailing academic understanding of the social and psychological origins of youth subcultures, which built on a substantial body of literature that was developed during the interwar years by members of the Chicago School and other social scientists who focused on the milieu of the urban ethnic enclave and one of its characteristic phenomena: the juvenile street gang.

Within the paradigm of the delinquent street gang, it is taken for granted that participation provides a measure of status and belonging to marginalized individuals, especially during the tumult of adolescence.10 And, this compensatory dynamic certainly came into play in the case of bikers; indeed,

George Weathern's succinct account of his motives for joining the Hell's Angels reads like a sociologist's annotation: “The feeling of instant brotherhood, backing, and status electrified me. I no longer was just a dropout and an Air Force reject. I was a Hell's Angel.”11 However, Mark Watson, who undertook a three-year participant-observer study of outlaw clubs during the 1970's, observed that theories originating in the study of street gangs could help to explicate the nature of the biker subculture but ultimately failed to provide a comprehensive explanation for bikers' motives or their public reception.12 Even a simple demographic analysis presented substantial points of contrast between the two subcultures, as the bikers of the 60's were typically older than gang members and from more stable home environments.13 Outlaw motorcycle clubs seem to have been more closely descended from the car clubs of the 1940's and 50's, which extended the focal concerns of the street gang among an older cohort and within the peculiar environment of burgeoning postwar affluence. Many individual

9 Barger, Ralph, and Keith Zimmerman, and Kent Zimmerman. Hell's Angel: the Life and Times of Sonny Barger and the Hell's Angels Motorcycle Club. (New York: Perennial, 2001): 8. 10 Miller, Walter B. "Lower Class Culture as a Generating Milieu of Gang Delinquency." Journal of Social Issues 14,3 (1958): 5-19. 11 Weathern, Wayward Angel, 10. 12 Watson, Mark J. "Outlaw Motorcyclists: An Outgrowth of Lower Class Cultural Concerns." Deviant Behavior 2.1 (1980): 47. 13 Ibid. Thompson makes the same observation. Thompson, Hell's Angels, 145.

5 bikers, like George Weathern, had experience with car clubs prior to embracing the motorcycle subculture, while the East Bay Dragons, a black outlaw club from Oakland, was actually instituted as a car club before its membership switched, wholesale, to bikes in 1959. For young men who enjoyed recreational violence, car clubs seem to have been a convenient way to organize themselves into squads of combatants, creating a framework for rivalry and confrontation. Car clubs were particularly involved in organizing neighborhood dances through which they attempted to consolidate sexual resources, and these events were frequently targeted by rival clubs. Like gangs, car clubs operated locally, competing with and performing for each other within the micro environment of the urban neighborhood.

The biker emerged from this world and retained some of its preoccupations. During the early

1960's, motorcycle clubs frequently fought with car clubs, and they continued to fight with each other over territory and esoteric matters of honor like the display of their various symbols. But a critical shift in perspective is reflected in the innovation of the so-called run as the central ritual of the outlaw motorcycle club. A run is an extended motorcycle trip that includes the full membership of a club traveling in convoy to some remote locale. A run takes bikers outside the city and outside their familiar territory into a world defined by encounters with strangers alien to their subculture rather than familiar rivals within it. Most of the incidents that inspired sensational media headlines took place on runs, which were designed as a form of generalized provocation: “We'd ride crazy-like, roaring into bars or along sidewalks. Pulling wheelstands. Just looking good. Feeling good. Class was riding four or five abreast along the street, taking up both lanes.”14 The aim of a run, then, was instigation and visibility, as we see in Pete's ecstatic account from The Bikeriders: “ It looked beautiful. It stretched a long way down the expressway. And we had a police escort and people in Chevys and Cadillacs, they had to pull over to the side of the road and let by this group of hairy beasts. Right? Running all the lights. Running every light for sixty miles. We stopped for gas, man. What a scene at those gas stations.”15 Here, bikers 14 Weathern, Wayward Angel, 9. 15 Lyon, Bikeriders, 90.

6 were not confronting local rivals but encountering the general public with a provocative display, and

Pete's boasting reference to the police escort that his cohort received serves as a affirmation of the infamy that such exhibitions quickly began to achieve.

When Dick Hebdige and the Birmingham School turned their attention away from theorizing about gangs or juvenile delinquents to focus, instead, on the concept of youth subcultures, their analysis began to account for this dialectical relationship involving the media, and it also complicated the relationship between resistant youth and their parent cultures. Hebdige writes that the latent function of any subculture is to “express and resolve, albeit magically, the contradictions which remain hidden or unresolved in the parent culture.”16 For him, a subculture does not arise out of some fault in the parent culture and does not exist in binary opposition to that parent culture; instead, it reinforces the values of the parent culture in a parodic way. Paul Willis's Profane Culture finds that British bikers embodied this dynamic rather unambiguously, and Hebdige's analysis also provides insight into American bikers, who certainly exaggerated a distinctly working-class articulation of masculinity. Indeed, Daniel Wolf, in his ethnographic study of the Rebels Motorcycle Club, observed that bikers “adopt attitudes and learn behaviors that gravitate around lower-class focal concerns with independence, freedom, self- reliance, toughness, impulsiveness, and masculinity, all of which are embodied in the highly romanticized image of the anti-hero.”17 Like their British counterparts, American bikers exhibited a strong anti-intellectual streak, idealizing manual labor, as we see when one of Danny Lyon's informants recounted lambasting his brother for attending college: “He went to college for a year, half a year, not even half a year. He went about three months and I says, fucker, you don't quit that college I'll beat the shit out of you. You know? 'Cause, I says, I don't want no college pinko in my family. 'Cause I can't stand 'em. 'Cause if you can't work with your fuckin' hands you ain't no fuckin' good.”18 Of course,

16 Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: the Meaning of Style. (New York: Routledge, 1991): 77. 17 Wolf, Daniel R. The Rebels: a Brotherhood of Outlaw Bikers. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991): 33. 18 Lyon, Bikeriders, 56

7 Zipco's rant also reveals a subtle point of contrast between British and American bikers. Zipco creates an opposition between intellectualism and practical ability, going on to claim that his rich experiences have given him more knowledge than students could possibly receive from arid books, but he does not have anything to say about labor per se.

Indeed, if bikers valorized the ability to work with one's hands, they actually eschewed regular employment. Whereas Willis notes that his subjects took great pride in their vocations and disdained casual labor, mocking a bartender with whom they were acquainted for choosing to live minimally and sustain himself with intermittent work,19 Sonny Barger related: “Some Hell's Angels work regular jobs, some don't. We've never needed much money”20 American bikers, then, did not idealize and often did not pursue formal labor. Indeed, Mark Watson suggested that bikers typically apologized for working, often claiming that they were doing so only to finance repairs to their motorcycles,21 while Hunter

Thompson noted: “They are longshoremen, warehousemen, truck drivers, mechanics, clerks, and casual laborers at any work that pays quick wages and requires no allegiance. Perhaps one in ten has a steady job or a decent income.”22 American bikers, of course, had a less rigid conception of class than Willis's

British subjects. Wolf, Watson, and Thompson all concurred that American bikers were, in effect a lower-middle-class phenomenon, which is to say that they were working-class in a country where that identity is decidedly ambiguous and largely spurned. They were also coming of age in a culture of bombastic affluence that was actually experiencing unacknowledged incipient decline in its industrial sector, especially in places like Oakland and San Bernadino, where the outlaw biker subculture of the

1960's really took root. Thus, bikers' stylized exaggeration of their parent culture was particularly

19 Willis, Paul E. Profane Culture. (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978): 46-49. 20 Barger, Hell's Angel, 33. 21 Watson, Mark J. "Righteousness on Two Wheels: Bikers as a Secular Sect." Sociological Spectrum 2,3,4 (1982): 343. 22 Thompson, Hell's Angels, 51. Similarly, Bill Murray, writing in the Saturday Evening Post, suggested “Most tend to move from job to job, taking work only when they absolutely have to.” Murray, William. "The Hell's Angels." Saturday Evening Post 20 (1965): 32-39. Rpt. Veno, Arthur. ed. The Mammoth Book of Bikers. (Philadelphia: Running Press, 2007): 105.

8 ambivalent, and it contained a burlesqued quality that was absent from the British biker ethos. When

Sonny Barger observes that, “we bought black engineer boots (with a silver buckle) at the Red Wing shoe store, the same place Oakland working grunts bought their work boots,”23 it is clear that affecting the black engineer boots of the prole was not entirely ironic; yet, his reference to his working class peers as grunts exhibits considerable disdain. When he concludes “After leaving the army, I just couldn't face getting a boring, fucked-up job,”24 he is not exaggerating or even parodying working-class values but rejecting them.

Thus, Mark Watson ultimately suggested that bikers embodied a peculiar strain of working-class bohemianism, noting that they were downwardly mobile and that their manifest deficiency represented a particular kind of affectation.25 He actually turned to Fallding's elucidation of the religious sect to find an analogy for the motorcycle club that could account for bikers' extremism, preoccupation with righteous behavior, and cultivated estrangement from society.26 If the street gang, with its exaggerated articulation of working-class values, represented a deviant institution from the perspective of hegemonic authority, membership afforded an unambiguous enhancement in status for individuals originating in positions of abjection. The status that bikers claimed, however, was more ambiguous, even perverse. Their stylized presentation of working-class mores incorporated a self-conscious element of parody; thus, rather than escaping from marginalization by embracing an identity that had established status within their environment, they offered an ironic and outlandish performance of their own marginalization. The outlaw biker, as he emerged in the 1960's, then, was a fantastic loser. In his own estimation, he was filthy, depraved, ignorant, even grotesque. He was an unassimilable, malignant other. And, he was also a blustering superman. For all their zealous self-denigration, bikers were also

23 Barger, Hell's Angel, 27 Barger had a number of conventional jobs, including working the assembly line at the GM plant. 24 Ibid, 22. 25 Watson,”Righteousness,” 336. 26 Fallding, Harold. "Secularization and the Sacred and Profane." The Sociological Quarterly 8.3 (1967): 349-363.

9 extremely disdainful of outsiders and prone to wild immodesty. The biker ethos, then, encompassed extremes of self-aggrandizement and self-deprecation; indeed, it was a dialectic in which these extremes are mutually reinforcing and finally indistinguishable. The biker was scorned by society, and he reciprocated society's scorn: “we're bastard to the world and they're bastards to us.”27 He was a transcendent figure of swaggering egoism precisely because he was vile; he was superior in direct proportion to his degradation. We can see this tension in a characteristic piece of short fiction from

Easyriders magazine, titled “Scooter Trash Stick Together,” in which a biker laments having bothered to glance at the newspaper: “Shoulda learned by this time not to pick up the local newsrag. You know, I usually check out the Daily Garble about as often as I shower, shave, and show up at work on time— and for good reason. But my perverted curiosity (among other things, mind ya) wanted to stick its crabby head up outta this dung-hole and see how bad it really was out there in Televisionland, the world of the citizen.”28 Clearly, this narrator is profoundly alienated from the American mainstream, but the precise valence of his disaffection is ambiguous. Are the contemptible denizens of Televisionland beneath him, or is he, a loathsome unwashed pervert living in shit, beneath them? Both. He is superior to them because he is sublimely repugnant. Ultimately, then, the biker and the citizen, as the narrator terms the subjects of Televisionland, are mutually irreconcilable categories. And, significantly, citizen was the entire biker subculture's preferred label for outsiders: a curiously innocuous slur that wonderfully distills the dialectic nature of the biker persona with its combination of audacious contempt for others and ecstatic, marginalizing self-abnegation.

The citizen, of course, seems like an absurdly inclusive category to malign so venomously, and that indiscriminate quality of their disdain captures the essence of the biker: “I DON'T LIKE NOTHIN!

I DON'T LIKE NOBODY! FUCK EVERYTHING!”29 The biker directed his resentment, not against

27 Murray, “Hell's Angels,” Rpt. Mammoth Bikers, 105. 28 “Scooter Trash Stick Together” Easyriders May 1976: 39. 29 Reynolds, Frank, and Michael McClure. Freewheelin Frank: Secretary of the Angels. (New York: Grove, 1967): 30.

10 the rich and powerful and not even against the stilted milquetoast mainstream, but against virtually everyone: against the modern world itself. Literally, bikers themselves were typically citizens; they met that legal qualification. But, colloquially, the concept of citizenship suggests someone who indicates their general assent to our loose social compact by making some minimal gestures toward constructive participation in society. In our society, of course, the fundamental participatory gesture of civic life is voting, and the colloquial use of citizen designates someone who enjoys that basic right. This voting populace remains an encompassing category, but, in addition to women prior to 1919, a number of socially marginal groups have historically been excluded from this broad class: racial minorities, convicted criminals, and those deemed unfit in various ways by prevailing medical opinion. It would seem that bikers might have identified strongly with this second category, and they did, undoubtedly, define themselves in opposition to law enforcement. However, we must remember that bikers' outlaw status existed in relation to the AMA and not the state. While many bikers certainly had criminal records and boasting about these transgressions conveyed status within the subculture, prior to the

1970's, bikers' legal infractions were typically minor; few bikers were formally barred from voting.30

By adopting citizen as a slur, then, bikers did celebrate their criminal status—or, at least, their antagonism toward legal authority—but they also cultivated a more radical marginality, borrowing from other vectors of exclusion and depicting themselves, at different times, as pathological miscreants in the vein of the chronically insane or as an aggrieved minority that suffered unfair discrimination:

“These very special few are called trash, bums, creeps, freaks, and outlaws, but just by the 'good' people of the earth...we love motorcycles and each other when no one else gives a damn whether we live or die. All we want is to live the way we choose. To be free and ride when and where we please. To party when we want without being hassled by the people who are scared shitless of us.”31 This

30 Thompson quotes Terry the Tramp saying “I've never thought of myself as a criminal” and observes that he has no felony convictions, making him “officially guilty of nothing more than what any spirited citizen might commit in some drunk or violent moment of animal weakness.” Thompson, Hell's Angels, 6-7. 31 Garfield, Jay. Letter. Easyriders April 1977: 8.

11 Easyriders correspondent referred to bikers as scooter people: a common practice that reflected bikers' insistence that their identity was something so elemental and consuming that it was essentially, like race, innate.32 Indeed, when Frank Reynolds was asked why he wore swastikas, he replied: “We feel that we are a superior race. The swastika signifies a superior race. We feel we are a superior race.”33

The we in Reynolds's comment, of course, refers to outlaw bikers and not Aryans. Likewise, when

Easyriders received a letter that suggested “You people are a bunch of dirty, unwashed, long-haired show-offs who have never grown up. 'Whee, mommy, watch me ride my Harley!,'” the magazine labeled the correspondent “Square Racist St. Louis, Missouri” and replied: “Whee, mommy—watch me break this square racist's arm.”34 Here, it seems unavoidable to conclude that Easyriders leveled the charge racist in reference to fact that the letter-writer had expressed an unfounded bias against bikers as a people.35

Ultimately, bikers did not submit their subculture to be parsed into a series of choices or behaviors, nor did they offer any ideology or logic to justify their behavior. And this tendency to naturalize the biker identity provides much of the ambiguity that characterizes the Easyriders passage about Televisionland in which it is unclear who is being rejected by whom. The magazine did not offer a critique of bathing or time discipline. It is not apparent from the passage that the values of

Televisionland are wrong: just that the biker fails to live up to those values.36 From their perspective, bikers are simply people who don't bathe, show up to work on time, or read the newspaper, and they are

32 For instance, in response to a letter writer's complaint about the magazine's vulgarity, Easyriders offered: “Hey baby— chopper riders could wear pissy purple leathers, go to church twice a week, and listen only to Pat Boone records, and it wouldn't change anyone's opinion.” Letter. “Insulting and Crude” Easyriders October 1972: 21. 33 Reynolds, Freewheelin Frank, 9. 34 Letter. “Whee Mommy” Easyriders February 1974: 6. 35 In her book, The Perfect Vehicle, Melissa Holbrook Pierson refers to the biker subculture as “nationalism on wheels,” again capturing this idea that bikers are a people rather than a group of hobbyists or even a subculture. Pierson, Melissa Holbrook. The Perfect Vehicle: What is it About Motorcycles. (New York: Norton, 1998): 9-10. 36 In another Easyriders article, the narrator has a litany of complaints about work but concludes: “I'd quit yesterday except not just everybody want to hire a bearded and tattooed freak who only shows up when it suits him.” Winters, Pete. “The Breeze Past the Knees” Easyriders January 1975: 17.

12 treated accordingly by society: a result that bikers sometimes depict as unfair bias but invariably relish.37 Indeed, in spite of their attempts to naturalize their identity, bikers actually went to great lengths to cultivate their marginality, and Hunter Thompson, in particular, identified the essence of their ethos as a specific type of exaggeration or extremity: “They get angry when they read about how filthy they are, but instead of shoplifting some deodorant, they strive to become even filthier...“This kind of exaggeration is the backbone of their style.”38 Indeed, he suggested that bikers were defined by their active embrace of losing: “They assume, on good evidence, that the people who run the social machinery have little use for outlaw motorcyclists, and they have reconciled to being losers. But instead of losing quietly, one by one, they have banded together with a mindless kind of loyalty and moved outside the framework, for good and ill.”39 Bikers embraced and courted marginalization, making a show of their fantastic abberance.

And this performance struck a chord with an emerging cohort of youthful subversives. In his work on biker films, James Ward speculates about the period of dormancy between the The Wild One in

1953 and the films that he examines, which began appearing in the early to mid 1960's. He suggests that censorship played a role in dissuading filmmakers from continuing to ply the biker topic—The

Wild One was banned in England for a full decade following its release—but he argues that the real reason for the biker's silver-screen hiatus was more fundamental: “The film’s exceptionality also owed to its totalizing effect: there did not seem much left to say about 'outlaw motorcyclists,' at least not until some new social outrage by dangerous characters riding powerful machines captured the public imagination.”40 For Ward, bikers' anti-authoritarian self-laceration simply did not demand sustained

37 Pierson is an interesting anomaly who admits the extent to which she relishes this bias, moving toward an acknowledgment that her investment in the motorcycle subculture has been, to some degree, a form of play-act self- marginalization. For instance, she recounts, in a plaintive tone but with obvious satisfaction, being barred from a state park, noting that she had visited many times before in a car and could easily do so again. Of course, she is not a member of an outlaw club but a scholarly writer. More conventional bikers also admitted to relishing society's scorn but were unlikely to admit that the biker persona could be dropped in the same way that Pierson suggests. 38 Thompson, Hell's Angels, 44. 39 Ibid, 255. 40 Ward, James. “Outlaw Motorcyclists They're Not: A Contrarian Reading of Joseph Losey's These Are the Damned

13 inquiry; it was no longer interesting. Unfortunately, Ward does not specify what changed during the

1960's, when the outlaw biker experienced renewed public interest. Certainly, bikers' attitudes and behaviors changed relatively little during that period; the media savvy bikers of the 1960's may have perfected the angst-ridden belligerence of the postwar outlaws, but the basic provocation immanent in the subculture remained the same, posing an aestheticized nihilism expressed through a predictable amalgam of recklessness, macho bellicosity, and sexual depravity. What really changed then between the early 50's and the mid-60's, placing bikers back in the paranoid spotlight of the bourgeois press, was not the nature of the outrage they posed but the social context in which that incitement circulated: the obsolescence of juvenile delinquency as a paradigm for understanding the indiscretions and provocations of restive young people, coupled with the rise of the New Left and the youth counterculture as political forces. While some of the coverage directed at bikers during the 1960's aimed to incite moral panic within a credulous subset of the American public in the same vein as

Rooney's “Cyclists Raid” and other artifacts of the Hollister period, press accounts that emerged in the wake of the Lynch Report also tended to offer the biker as a luridly compelling anti-hero. And, much of the attention that bikers received during the 1960's came from an emerging underground press or from sources, like Thompson writing for the Nation, that adopted a subversive attitude toward hegemonic institutions and expressed a sympathetic curiosity with respect to the era's insurgent youth movement.

Ultimately, the outlaw biker of the 1960's became a chic avatar of the New Left, a phenomenon that Hunter Thompson outlined succinctly when he observed: “By late summer of 1965 the Angels had become a factor to be reckoned with in the social, intellectual and political life of northern California.

They were quoted almost daily in the press, and no half-bohemian party made the grade unless there were strong rumors—circulated by the host—that the Hell's Angels would also attend.”41 Indeed, by

1965, bikers were not merely hip icons; they were actively being courted by their radical new admirers. (1961) and Sidney Furie's The Leather Boys (1964).” The Journal of Popular Culture 43,2 April (2010): 381-407. 41 Thompson, Hell's Angels, 218.

14 The Hell's Angles were frequent guests at Ken Kesey's La Honda ranch and fixtures on the nascent psychedelic music scene, while the playwright Michael McClure followed his Beard, which instigated a landmark obscenity trial in San Francisco, by collaborating with the Hell's Angel Freewheelin Frank

Reynolds on a manic phantasmagoria of an autobiography that posited Frank as the spiritual successor to Billy the Kid and, perhaps, Walt Whitman. Meanwhile, in England, Paul Willis began work on an ethnographic diptych that looked at bikers and hippies, suggesting that both offered imaginative re- interpretations of society in which movements of resistance might take root.42 Indeed, bikers' new admirers consistently posited them as natural allies of the New Left and its emergent youth counterculture. Danny Lyon's early career, in particular, reflected this perspective. Lyon first gained notoriety as a photographer in 1963, when his work documenting SNCC activities appeared in The

Movement, and his next project, begun that same year, was The Bikeriders; clearly, Lyon, like Willis, envisioned the biker subculture and the New Left as parallel and complimentary forces of resistance.

And, the 1969 film Easy Rider imagined them as one and the same vague emanation of freedom.43 The seminal film provided a near-perfect conflation of the biker subculture and the youth counterculture, and it was ultimately this looming convergence that represented the new public outrage invoked by

Ward. Bikers of the 1960's became threatening anew because they were being taken seriously radical youths, who solicited bikers as allies and frequently imagined themselves becoming more like bikers.

Ultimately, that fraught alliance is the central topic of this project, which could be boiled down to a question as simple as: why did Ken Kesey invite the Hell's Angels to La Honda? This dissertation asks why the biker reemerged as a cultural touchstone from 1965-1975 and what the persistence of

42 Willis, Profane Culture, 6-7. 43 Of course, Martin Rubin excludes Easy Rider from the biker exploitation canon. He notes that the political ambiguity of early biker films reflected studios' desire to appeal to the well-publicized emergent youth culture and their confusion over its contours. The genre emerged just as the institution of the drive-in was transitioning from a mainstream, youth- oriented phenomenon to a more marginal, niche entertainment venue for the working-class. As this development became clearer to studios, biker films became more violent and politically reactionary. Rubin, Martin. “' Make Love Make War': Cultural Confusion and the Biker Film Cycle." Film History (1994): 355-381. Easy Rider stood outside this whole process as a pure emanation of the counterculture and its admiration for the biker.

15 biker iconography in underground press, films, and literature, in particular, says about the New Left, the counterculture, and the nebulous boundary between the two. Austin Texas's underground newspaper, the Rag, featured a regular column on motorcycles called “The Bent Spokesman.” How did that column relate to the paper's focus in Civil Rights issues or its critique of the Vietnam War? Was the paper's interest in bikers simply a contradiction, a misguided, jejune indulgence, or was it, for better and worse, consistent with radicals' understanding of the portentous events of the day and their own activism? Historian John Wood certainly seems to believe the former; he scoffs at the counterculture's affiliation with outlaw bikers in his “Hell's Angels and the Illusion of the Counterculture,” castigating the counterculture for their puerile idealization of alienated individualism and bikers for their ultimate allegiance to hierarchy.44 And Wood is not wrong that the counterculture's fascination with the biker exhibited a certain political incoherence or that it was largely superficial. Yet, if it was the biker aesthetic that attracted the counterculture, that does not mean that the relationship was frivolous; indeed, the counterculture is most legible when apprehended as an expansive aesthetic posture: an ethos in which narrow political ideology was subsumed by an anti-modern emphasis on authenticity and a particular affinity for carnivalesque spectacle.

Thus the biker, with his blustering, self-styled primitivism and gleeful degradation, was a crucial source of inspiration for members of the youth counterculture as they attempted to shed their privileged identities and step outside the framework as Thompson put it. Indeed, a review of Easy

Rider in the underground Berkeley Barb lauded “the grit and dinginess of the character's confrontation with life.” Members of the counterculture recognized a kindred sensibility in bikers' purposeful wretchedness and in their caustic assessment of the typical American citizen. Indeed, in its deprecation of the denizens of Televisionland, Easyriders invoked a characteristic trope of the counterculture with its admiration for the Frankfurt School's Marxist exposition of the culture industry. Televisionland is 44 Wood, John. "Hell's Angels and the Illusion of the Counterculture." The Journal of Popular Culture 37.2 (2003): 336- 351.

16 shorthand for mass-produced culture and its hegemonic power. Televisionland is populated by benumbed citizens experiencing a simulacrum, as we see in philosopher of technology Langdon

Winner's critique: “the ordinary citizen must rely on signals transmitted by the mass media. He immerses himself in the metaworld of shows, extravaganzas, commercials, news, and televised sports events and allows them to represent a larger world that he cannot experience firsthand.”45 Ultimately,

Televisionland is modernity itself, which bikers and their new admirers within the youth counterculture decried as an illusion.

Thus, the concept of authenticity formed the marrow of the rapport between bikers and the counterculture. Tom Wolfe explained the Hell's Angels extended presence at La Honda by writing:

“[The Pranksters] had broken through the worst hangup that intellectuals know—the real-life hangup....the Hell's Angels were real life. It didn't get any realer than that.”46 And this idea of realness was also at the core of Danny Lyon's affinity for bikers. By way of assuaging his anxiety about the potentially corrupting influence of the media circus that surrounded them, Lyon, who was himself a participant in that circus, reflected: “But now I think that this attention doesn't have the strength of reality of the people it aspires to know.” Again, for Lyon, bikers existed in sublime defiance of society, embodying an ineffable realness or authenticity. Yet, if George Weathern concurred with Lyon and

Wolfe, observing that both groups were unclouded by phoniness, he also opined: “hipster drugs and women were cool, but hipster politics were not.”47 Indeed, he referred to the notion that bikers were won over by the counterculture as embarrassing. Meanwhile, Frank Reynolds insisted, almost frantically: “When it comes to the peace marchers, Ken Kesey, Allen Ginsberg, and others, there is no connection of any kind of scene where we look up to them. [sic]”48 Ultimately, if both groups strove

45 Winner, Langdon. Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1977): 295. 46 Wolfe, Tom, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1968): 178. 47 Weathern, Wayward Angel, 61. 48 Reynolds, Freewheelin Frank, Preface.

17 toward a certain realness, they were governed by divergent conceptions of reality, with bikers offering a decidedly nihilistic assessment of modern life defined by masculinity, violence, and degradation.

The final alliance between bikers and the counterculture never came to fruition, and this happenstance continues to figure as a grave disappointment for many observers, like Gary Kieffner, who refers to bikers as “possibly the only highly-esteemed minority group that could have made a determining difference in the Counterculture Revolution.”49 Here, Kieffner positions bikers as

America's working-class revolutionaries who almost were, and his lament has become central to the enduring mythology of the biker subculture, which offers continual opportunities to recapitulate and reevaluate the 1960's. If Part I of this project looks at the philosophical underpinnings of the miscreant subculture and its masculine ethos, Part II begins to examine the motorcycle itself, locating the subculture's definitive totem, the customized chopper, within the history of American design and technology in which it has often served as a counter-narrative to the familiar story of the automobile. In many ways, it was the motorcycle itself that sustained the counterculture's fantasies about the biker subculture, continuing to offer the biker as an alluring figure in spite of his reactionary truculence and fierce ignorance. Indeed, Robert Pirsig, whose Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance became a counterculture touchstone, had scant interest in the subculture of outlaw bikers per se, but he located enormous symbolic import in contrasting the immersive experience of motorcycling with the passivity of watching television, which he associated with the automobile. For a century, the automobile has been the definitive idol of our mass consumer society; indeed, David Gartman's Auto Opium suggests that, over the course of the twentieth century, “the rhythm of American life was set by the cycle of artificial obsolescence engineered in Detroit.”50 The automobile industry has not only provided the iconography of our acquisitive dreams, but it has furnished the central exemplar for our popular

49 Kieffner, Gary L. "Myth, Reality, and Revenge in Hunter S. Thompson's Hell’s Angels." International Journal of Motorcycle Studies 1,2 July (2005). Web. 50 Gartman, David. Auto Opium: a Social History of American Automobile Design. (New York: Routledge, 1994): 157.

18 understanding of mass-production and capitalism itself. From the machine age through the 1960’s, autos nourished intrepid visions of a resplendent mechanized paradise as they transfigured our urban landscape; they became synonymous with social advance and America’s Cold-War mission.51 Yet, the motorcycle, the product that most closely resembles the automobile in its function, as well as its manufacture and distribution, has traveled a divergent path. During the postwar years, when populuxe reveries advanced the American auto industry to its summit, motorcycle manufacturers faced turmoil and bankruptcy. Ultimately, the motorcycle came to embody a critique of Detroit hegemony and the technocratic consumer society that venerated a begrimed Oz on Lake Erie.

In 1940, as visitors were streaming into the New York’s World’s Fair to marvel at the fruits of

America’s techno-cornucopia and to indulge in fantasies of dominion and progress, Indian, the original

American motorcycle manufacturer, introduced a radically streamlined version of its large- displacement flagship, the Indian Chief. An example of this 1940 Indian Chief was among the ninety- five bikes that the Guggenheim chose to include in its controversial 1998 exhibition, “The Art of the

Motorcycle,” which celebrated the Indian Chief for its arresting organic fenders: “The most important cosmetic feature distinguishing the late-model Chief from other motorcycles of its era, however, was the long, graceful sweep of its deeply valanced fenders, which were first introduced on this model in

1940.”52 For visitors to the fair’s World of Tomorrow, the 1940 Indian Chief’s streamlined aesthetic must have seemed a harbinger of things to come, but as Indian and Harley-Davidson emerged from

World War II to face financial turmoil and declining sales, progressive styling became a thing of the past in the motorcycle industry. Ultimately, the audacious design of the 1940 Indian Chief would not be

51 Hine, Thomas. Populuxe (New York: Knopf, 1986): 128. 52 Drutt, Matthew. ed. The Art of the Motorcycle. (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 1998): 217.

19 replicated by an American manufacturer for decades to come.

The Art of the Motorcycle catalog does not mention the incongruous bust of a Native-American that adorned the 1940 Indian Chief’s gracefully sweeping front fender, his unmistakable die-cast mien embedded in a curvilinear, deco-inspired chrome abstraction of the traditional Plains-Indian headdress.

The peculiar bust might seem more at home in a curiosity cabinet than mounted to a motorcycle fender, but Christina Cogdell would undoubtedly see an apt pairing. Cogdell’s Popular Eugenics explores the aesthetic and intellectual affinities between streamlining—that ubiquitous machine-age design convention ostensibly aimed at reducing wind-resistance—and the dubious science of eugenics. For her, the practice of streamlining, with its commitment to an evolutionary model of technological progress, partakes freely of eugenicist ideology and the irrepressible rhetoric of Manifest Destiny, with its racist overtones and its puritan-inflected insistence on millennial visions of conquest and utopia.53

The fantastic fender bust, then, embodied this link between technological advance and imperialism, providing a buoyant affirmation of the enlightenment’s central mission of civilization and progress through rationalized control.54

Of course, the official rhetoric of Manifest Destiny was always a tenuous wish that barely concealed popular anxiety about the virtue of conquest and the benefits of industrial society. Thus,

Jeffrey Meikle identifies the juxtaposition of Native-American images with scenes of technological profusion as an ambivalent trope that helped a dubious public assimilate potentially threatening machines into their otherwise tradition-bound daily lives.55 In this formulation, technological progress was hardly an inexorable triumphal march; the public was reluctant to embrace these alien devices and unconvinced that they presaged the arrival of a mechanized Arcadia of electrified splendor. Indian

53 Horseman, Reginald. Race and Manifest Destiny: the Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981) 54 Segal, Howard P. Technological Utopianism in American Culture. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985): 14. 55 Meikle, Jeffrey L. “Domesticating Modernity: Ambivalence and Appropriation, 1920-1940.” Ed. Wendy Kaplan. Designing Modernity: the Arts of Reform and Persuasion , 1885-1945: Selections from the Wolfsonian. (New York” Thames and Hudson, 1995).

20 imagery hopefully invoked Manifest Destiny and the widespread belief that Anglo-American culture could tame and assimilate any threat, from insurgent native peoples to dynamic and domineering machines, but it also expressed a suppressed longing and admiration for the elemental heathen other and betrayed a powerful wish to maintain continuity with a pastoral pre-industrial landscape. Indeed, for Mike Davis, Native-American imagery carries a similarly ambivalent message. In his essay “White

People Are Only a Bad Dream” Davis embraces the story of Wovoka, a Paiute prophet whose ritual

Ghost Dance and incendiary rhetoric traversed a constellation of struggling tribal communities that faced extinction in the shadow of Wounded Knee. For Davis, Wovoka’s Ghost Dance provides a critique of Frederick Jackson Turner, whom Davis castigates as the ultimate symbol of Manifest

Destiny, Western myopia, and delusional notions of linear history: “They reject the telos of the finished product, the conquered landscape, the linear historical narrative, the managed ecosystem. They see a chaos more ontological than the boom-and-bust cycle.”56 He posits the Ghost Dance as a black hole that unleashes this ontological chaos and confounds linear interpretations of historical progress. For Davis,

Wovoka turns Manifest Destiny on its head.

Perhaps, then, it is Wovoka whose visage graces the 1940 Indian Chief, for in the decades following World War II, the American motorcycle industry fell into precisely such a black hole, escaping the seemingly inexorable flow of history and defying conventional notions of progress. When

Indian finally closed its doors in 1953, after years of dramatically curtailed production and anemic sales, Harley-Davidson was the only American motorcycle manufacturer left standing. And, with no domestic competition, Harley’s styling and engineering sank into a deep torpor. While General Motors

(GM) and its maverick design chief Harley Earl eventually forced Henry Ford to abandon his ideological commitment to ascetic utilitarian design,57 Harley somehow endured for almost fifty years without significantly modifying its product. Of course, during these long stagnant years, Harley never 56 Davis, Mike, Dead Cities, and Other Tales (New York: New Press, 2002): 41. 57 Gartman, Auto Opium, 79.

21 actively embraced archaism as a design philosophy; the company’s engineering malaise and circumscribed aesthetic expression were a by-product of managerial turmoil and financial distress.

When competition finally arrived from Japan in the 1960’s, a languishing Harley-Davidson lacked the resources to reinvent itself as Henry Ford had done with his Model A, and the company became indelibly tied to a highly visible subculture of outlaw bikers who distilled and stylized the anachronistic qualities of the Harley itself.

During the early decades of the twentieth century, both automobiles and motorcycles appealed to a similar audience of bourgeois men who appreciated novel opportunities for outdoor recreation and conspicuous consumption. Automobiles, of course, gradually reached a popular audience, redefining the landscape of middle-class America. After World War II, cars became synonymous with the sprawling affluence of America’s consumer republic and the normative values of middle-class culture, while motorcycles became a fun-house mirror in which the middle-class saw its nihilistic alter-ego in the brutish and licentious figure of the biker. Thus, in the 1960’s, when the furor surrounding the

Vietnam War generated a popular stage for radical cultural critics who decried America’s military- industrial complex, an emerging counterculture turned to the outlaw biker as a crucial icon of its subversive agenda. Of course, bikers themselves supported the war, but this did not compromise the efficacy of the biker as a radical sign. For the counterculture, the biker functioned something like

Davis’s Wovoka; he was an outlandish figure whose persona invoked historical contingency, promising to magically dissolve America’s ruling technocratic regime. The biker presented a jarring paradox, misappropriating a mass-produced commodity and making it the centerpiece in a deviant subculture that rejected the values of mechanization, rationalized control, and consumption-based domesticity that sustained the system of mass-production itself. The chopper that he created—a boisterously customized motorcycle that reconfigured and re-conceptualized Harley’s factory output—was a deliberately perverse technological artifact that sowed anarchy by invoking a bygone era of artisanal craft and

22 vernacular engineering and championing an atavistic brand of masculinity. The biker and his chopper inverted dominant assumptions about technology’s beneficent social impact.

In his Machines as the Measure of Men, Michael Adas examines the relationship between technology and colonialism, attempting to trace the West’s persistent conflation of technological development and civilization. He argues that, as Europe’s colonial project increasingly concentrated resources and knowledge in European metropoles, thereby fueling scientific inquiry and technological innovation, the West gradually came to see technological attainment as the organizing principle in its hierarchical taxonomy of human civilization. Technology became synonymous with progress and superiority.58 If postwar Europe began to forswear that belief, along with the colonial project that underwrote the West’s technological advantage, America kept the faith. The space race of the 1960’s probably represents the apotheosis of the peculiar assumption that better machines make better civilizations, while America’s contemporaneous blundering in Vietnam betrayed the same technological chauvinism, with the general public and military strategists alike anticipating a swift victory for the U.S military and its transcendent machines.59 Bikers also believed that machines were the measure of men, but they were hardly concerned with the march of civilization. As the counterculture’s critique of the

Vietnam War, colonialism, and technocratic society evolved, bikers offered an alternative relationship between man and machine.

Bikers engaged with their evocatively primitive machines in a way that proved they were men, but not civilized men; instead, they were ruggedly masculine, rejecting bourgeois ideals of social progress by embracing risk and violence. For bikers, machines were not indexes of social progress or cultural superiority. Again, the Harley-Davidson has been most remarkable for its stasis and relative

58 Adas, Michael. Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989): 14, 151. The element of scientific knowledge becoming concentrated in European metropoles is also a articular emphasis of Latour, Bruno. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society. (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1987): 225-227. 59 Adas, Michael. Dominance by Design: Technological Imperatives and America's Civilizing Mission. (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2006): 412.

23 lack of sophistication,60 and the biker subculture developed a bombastic style that exploited Harley’s manifest backwardness, distilling an emerging critique of colonialism and technocracy that also condemned America’s consumer republic and its peculiar mix of populuxe hedonism and stilted bourgeois conformity. Bikers nostalgically imagined an entropic landscape of bracing encounters with undomesticated machines, and I elaborate this ethos by twisting and expanding David Nye's concept of the technological sublime, which he posits as a peculiarly American strain of technological euphoria that functioned as a spontaneous vernacular for a turbulent, polyglot nation. While Nye locates the roots of the technological sublime in Kantian metaphysics and traces its American articulation through the Hudson River School and popular traditions of viewing the epic New World landscape, he also suggests that the technological sublime was less a self-conscious aesthetic and more a cultural practice.

Thus, I consider the technological sublime broadly as an emotionally stimulating form of interaction with machines. My version is defined by man's tenuous control over technologies that threaten to overwhelm or destroy us; it is a feeling that exists in the tension between technology's promise to expand and enhance human capacity and its threat to expose human fallibility.61

Thus, the motorcycle’s history confutes familiar accounts of the twentieth century that place the automobile’s methodical evolution at the center of a deterministic narrative of technological advance, social progress, and consumer democracy. Early automobiles functioned in much the same manner that motorcycles have continued to function. They were neither signs of sober bourgeois domesticity, nor instruments of technocratic hegemony; they were part of a distinctly masculine subculture that privileged mechanical knowledge, physical daring, and autonomy. For members of this subculture, automobility seems to have been, primarily, an aesthetic endeavor that offered a spiritual or

60 Ross Fuglsang termed its design “intractable and stagnant.” Fuglsang, Ross Motorcycle Menace: Media Genres and the Construction of a Deviant Subculture. Diss. University of Iowa, 1997. Rpt. “800 Pounds of Steel” Mammoth Bikers,16 61 This formulation echoes Tim Armstrong's account of modernity's ambivalent orientation toward the body, which was the subject of fantasized technological augmentation but also anxiety about its limitations. Armstrong, Tim. Modernism, Technology, and the Body: a Cultural Study. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998): 3.

24 psychological return. Whig historians, who maintain a teleological model of technological development, necessarily define these early automobiles as poorly functioning machines, inferior predecessors to contemporary cars. Yet, for Wiebe Bijker and other advocates of the social construction of technology, or SCOT, model, this is an entirely illegitimate formulation. According to our contemporary definition of the automobile, early automobiles simply did not work at all; they performed virtually none of the tasks that are constitutive of our understanding of an automobile, and they accomplished their altogether different range of functions while exposing their operators to what we would consider unconscionable risk. Bijker’s critical point in Of Bicycles Bakelites and Bulbs, in which he offers the unfolding competition, during the 1890's, between two radically divergent designs for the bicycle as a case-study, is that the merit of technologies is dependent on the purposes toward which we embrace those technologies, while determining those purposes is a highly contingent, deliberative social process. Thus, although the the high-wheeler, with its asymmetrical wheels and precarious, lofty riding position, seems outlandishly ill-conceived to contemporary eyes, while the safety-bicycle seems like a prescient outline of the optimal bicycle configuration, these two designs cannot be seen as two sequential way-stops in the evolution of one discrete and coherent artifact called the bicycle; indeed, the divergent cycles coexisted for almost a decade, during which they serviced utterly distinct audiences. Bijker underscores the fact that the safety-bike, when it emerged to challenge the high-wheeler’s preeminence both commercially and semiotically, did not exploit any new technologies; safety-bike designers worked with the same repertoire of materials and techniques that were employed in constructing high-wheelers but created a wildly disparate artifact by rearranging those components to suit a contradictory understanding of what it meant to ride a bicycle. For Bijker, then, the fundamental technological parity between the high-wheeler and the safety-bike, as well as the extended coexistence of high-wheelers and safety-bicycles, belies the notion that the safety-bike was simply a better or more sophisticated bicycle than the high-wheeler. He argues that the definition of an

25 artifact changes, not only through time, but between different constellations of contemporary observers, or relevant social groups; thus, the safety-bike and the high wheeler were not sequential versions of the

‘bicycle’ but two distinct artifacts that embodied competing definitions of cycling.62

High-wheelers, like all previous iterations of the ‘bicycle,’ were ridden predominantly by affluent young men. For these individuals, danger was a constitutive element of cycling, and the high- wheeler certainly provided this element of risk. More importantly, the high-wheeler conveyed the physical peril involved in its operation in a highly conspicuous manner, symbolically evoking danger in its wildly audacious form. During the high-wheeler’s ascendance, when it was in fact generally termed the ordinary bicycle, the diameter of a high-wheeler’s distinctive front-wheel reached an improbable 60 inches. Without gears, which were certainly part of the Victorian technological repertoire but never appeared on bicycles for reasons that remain unclear, the only way to achieve higher speeds on a bicycle was to increase the diameter of the cycle’s wheels. But, with the high center of gravity that resulted from this exaggerated wheel-diameter, high-wheelers were indeed quite dangerous, and they functioned, for the individuals who chose to ride them, not as a form of transportation but as a prop in a spectacular show of athleticism and daring that was deeply embedded in these individuals' ongoing performance of masculinity. Some enthusiasts, then, defended high-wheelers to the end, including

Franz Schroder, who maintained that only high-wheeling was truly cycling, which he defined as inherently dangerous: “Only riding an Ordinary bicycle was really bicycling. The Ordinary was a

'sense-sharpening machine' that constituted the essential feeling of life: moving, with great pleasure, but continuously in danger of falling.”63 For Schroeder, the high-wheeler was an expression of the technological sublime. It offered him a technologically enhanced capacity but also challenged his tenuous human abilities, and he found negotiating this boundary between chaos and control

62 Bijker, Wiebe E. Of Bicycles, Bakelites, ad Bulbs: Toward a Theory of Sociotechnic Change (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995): 48-49. 63 Ibid, 89.

26 intoxicating.

Almost every account of American motorcycles includes a passage expressing the same sentiment as Schroder.64 This idea of immersive travel and sharpened senses, of an experience that is somehow more deeply embedded in reality, is the very marrow of the motorcycle's enduring appeal, distilling its contrasting relationship to the automobile and everything for which that vehicle has come to stand in American culture. Chapter 1 examines the origins of the biker subculture's relationship to the counterculture, expanding on Doug Rossinow's concept of the politics of authenticity to contextualize the counterculture as part of an American anti-modern tradition that was renewed and expanded by the counterculture's emphasis on presentness. Chapter 2 explores biker humor and sexuality, continuing to expound the anti-modern overtones of the subculture and elaborate its relationship to the counterculture by contemplating the carnivalesque as an aesthetic of entropy and a theory of cultural resistance. Chapter 3 sustains this entropic theme, considering the persistence of frontier mythology within the biker subculture and its popular representation and probing the peculiar racial dynamic of bikers' anti-modernism in particular in order to expand and complicate Rossinow's characterization of the counterculture as the New Left's deliberate experiment in fostering white disenfranchisement. Finally, Chapter 4 offers a focused examination of the biker subculture's signature artifact, the chopper, observing how bikers subverted modern assumptions about technology, reviving and distorting the traditions of vernacular engineering and the technological sublime as part of an anti- technocratic nostalgia for nascent modernity that crystallized popular discourse over modern masculinity.

64 The concept of immersive travel was central to Pirsig's Zen, Piesron's Perfect Machine, and many other examples of motorcycle literature. It is basically the foundation of the genre. In a recent blog post that was ostensibly about locating a bargain motorcycle for purchase, Samuel Wadhams offered another quintessential example of this theme: “What a motorcycle can do is much more interesting. Being atop your transportation, as opposed to inside it, forces a certain mental presence. Flying down the road on the back of an incredibly dumb robot encourages you to pay attention to your surroundings, lest you become violently embedded in them. But this connection pays dividends. Your commute becomes an activity, your vehicle an extension of yourself, your world a bit more playful.” Wadhams, Samuel. “The Adequate Man: How to Get a Cheap Motorcycle and Not Crash It.” Deadspin. July 29 (2015). Web.

27 Chapter 1: Anti-modernism

Bikers shared with the counterculture an aesthetic of romantic anti-modernism that fetishized authenticity, a nebulous amalgam of honesty, risk-taking, and material abnegation that aimed at accessing unmediated experience. All of these themes were prominent in anti-modern cultural forms dating back to the end of the nineteenth century, when many Americans began to assay modernity and wonder what they had wrought. During this era, it was the bourgeoisie, in particular, who sought out compensatory expressions of anti-modernism. They were the architects of modernity and its primary benefactors, yet a vocal minority within that class found reason to despair for themselves and for the emerging modern world, recoiling from urban anonymity, from the first expressions of mass affluence, and from what seemed to be an inexorably hastening pace of life in a globalized world.65 Their feelings of ambivalence and gnawing discontent were embodied in the emergence of neurasthenia as a public health threat endemic to the managerial and intellectual class. Neurasthenia was an ambiguous malady characterized by fatigue, weakness, and anxiety that was initially formulated in the context of bio- medical theories relating the operation of the human body to the laws of thermodynamics: notably,

Kelvin's second law regarding the entropic nature of closed systems. In this schema, the body was imagined to contain a finite reserve of energy or force; like the sun itself, the body was moving ineluctably toward total energy dissipation with neurasthenia looming as a kind of premature heat

65 Lears, T.J. Jackson. No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).

28 death.66

What made the disease a scourge of the bourgeoisie, in particular, was its peculiar epidemiology, with contemporary experts attributing its root cause and proliferation to cultural factors that placed novel strain on the nervous system: the glut of information presented in metropolitan daily newspapers, the abstract thought and sublimated competition required to thrive within global markets and corporate hierarchies, and even the sheer physical speed that urban residents encountered when riding new mass transit systems. In essence, neurasthenia was nothing less than a toxic reaction to the modern world, and it affected the bourgeoisie disproportionately because they were at the forefront of modernity, navigating the fraught terrain of the anonymous modern city. When George Beard popularized the neurasthenia diagnosis in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, he jettisoned the notion of the body as a closed system, postulating a range of methods to replenish human energy reserves, and he placed even greater emphasis on this cultural element of the disease, which he understood, principally, as a metaphysical and psychological disorder rather than a nervous one.67 Of course, if it was modern civilization itself that caused neurasthenia, for restoration Beard and his contemporaries sought therapies that enacted a retreat from civilization. Often this retreat was quite literal, as in the so-called wilderness cure, which inspired a generation of the east coast elite to build rustic camps in the Poconos, Adirondacks, and Berkshires, but it could also be more metaphorical; the

Arts and Crafts Movement, organized sports, and even American imperialism all thrived within the climate of wary regard for modern life and its residuum reflected in Beard's ideas. Around these diverse pursuits with their signal ambivalence toward modernity, a loosely coactive anti-modern movement emerged in quest of particular types of experiences that were imagined to be more authentic: more immediate, more elemental, and often more intense. Once the body was re-imagined as an open system,

66 de la Pena, Carolyn Thomas. The Body Electric: How Strange Machines Built the Modern American. (New York: NYU Press, 2005): 4. 67 Ibid, 5. Also, for more explanation of Beard's emphasis on culture: Bederman, Gail. Manliness and Civilization: a Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995): 86.

29 intense experiences could be conceived as invigorating rather than dissipating, and the pursuit of intense experience informed anti-moderns' abiding fascination with pain, martial arts, and medieval thought.68

What defined anti-modernism, then, aside from its frequently maudlin overtones of nostalgia and romanticism, was an antagonism toward safety, security and the sanctity of the autonomous individual. For Lears, it is this final element, in particular, that had the potential to be genuinely corrosive of modernism, although he is skeptical that any genuine attempt to deconstruct what he terms the therapeutic perspective of modernity coalesced among his turn of the century subjects. For instance, Lears posits neurasthenia as, in some cases, a half-conscious affectation that amounted to a passive refusal to pursue self-interest as defined by modern society, but he maintains that this self- denial ultimately became a perverse way of asserting one's individuality and even superiority, cloaking self-assertion in self-sacrifice. Meanwhile, although nineteenth-century anti-moderns gravitated toward

Catholicism, implicitly manifesting their discomfort with the Reformation's emphasis on enlightened individualism, Lear finds that these apostates were largely content to mimic Gothic architectural forms and romanticize monastic asceticism, emulating the process of what they perceived to be an altogether consuming and singularly intense worldview without actually achieving the transcendent loss of self implicit in inhabiting such a perspective.69

The student counterculture of the 1960's, for the most part, occupied a very similar class position to these nineteenth-century anti-moderns who hand-made rustic furniture, admired paintings of medieval flagellates, and often suffered from neurasthenia. Raised amid postwar affluence in a climate of boisterous expectation, members of the counterculture felt ambivalent about the surfeit of opportunity and privilege that limned their existence: “the disaffected middle-class young are at hand, suffering a strange new kind of 'immiseration' that comes of being stranded between a permissive 68 Lears, No Place, 118, 142. 69 Ibid, 160.

30 childhood and an obnoxiously conformist adulthood, experimenting desperately with new ways of growing up self-respectfully into a world they despise, calling for help.”70 For Beard and his cohort, neurasthenia, with its vague litany of afflictions, was a hybrid disorder: at once medical and cultural, clinical and popular. Indeed, there is a certain obliquely political dimension to Beard's position that something like working at a desk or riding a streetcar might actually precipitate disease, and Lears, in fact, detects a hint of willful political agitation in the contrarianism of the neurasthenic patient, whose malady prevents him from working in the market economy.71 By mid-century, however, neurasthenia was no longer a legitimate diagnosis, and these competing and overlapping elements had been largely distilled and separated. Psychiatry and its preferred diagnosis of depression emerged as the appropriate lens for interpreting the medley of apathy, exhaustion, and anxiousness that typified neurasthenia, and the nervous disorder's ambiguously political emphasis on the peculiar stresses of modern life was largely discarded.72 Gary Greenberg points out in his history of depression that American psychiatry flourished during the interwar years, in part, by covertly appropriating the popular impulse of neurasthenia, with its ability to afflict broad swaths of the population and its nebulous origins in cultural conditions. Whereas previous generations of psychiatrists, especially those based in Europe, saw depression as a rare and necessarily acute affliction emanating from a pathological mind,

Americans and transplants like Adolf Meyer identified a spectrum of depression that might hamper otherwise functional individuals, and they made greater allowance for exogamous environmental factors in precipitating the condition. Yet, Greenberg also underscores the fact that American psychiatry worked strenuously to medicalize depression: “Mental suffering may have been democratized, but it was still an illness, its understanding and treatment still firmly in the hands of the medical elite. The

70 Roszak, Theodore. The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and its Youthful Opposition. 1969. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995): 35. 71 Lears, No Place, 221. 72 Greenberg, Gary. Manufacturing Depression: the Secret History of a Modern Disease. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010): 94-100.

31 social workers would have to find some other way to save the world”73 In 1926 the New York

Psychoanalytic Society ruled that only physicians could practice psychoanalysis, and by World War II the discovery of serotonin and the pharmaceutical revolution had reified this medical paradigm.

During the 1960's, with depression established as an insistently medical category, the specter of alienation arose within popular discourse to occupy a parallel territory of ennui and discontent that was implicitly political. Alienation became a buzzword for the counterculture, in particular, as insurgent youth combined elements of Sartre's existentialism with Marcuse's neo-Marxist interpretation of Freud and fermented them into a catchall complaint against America's Great Society that echoed nineteenth century formulations of neurasthenia in its conflation of politics and psychology.74 If Winner depicts modern citizenship as a state of benumbed detachment, Chester Anderson, writing in the pages of the underground Berkeley Barb, referred to the experience of middle-class life as “dying of unnameable frustration.”75 For the counterculture, alienation was a kind of domestication, an acquiescence to the performance principle with its emphasis on fulfilling prescriptive social roles, especially in relation to the market. Thus, Theodore Roszak, whose influential Making of a Counter Culture attempted a contemporaneous ethnography of the 1960's youth movement in which he was an active participant, defined the Great Society as a kind of stultifying affluence: “a steady job, a secure income, easy credit, free access to the local emporiums, and [one's] own home to pile the merchandise in.”76 Much more so than the anti-moderns of the nineteenth century, the counterculture was explicit about the role that the mechanisms of the market played in feelings of existential dismay. Indeed, as Doug Rossinow points out in his Politics of Authenticity, C Wright Mills's influential new theory of the working class, which

73 Ibid, 125. 74 In the opening line of the preface to his Eros and Civilization, Marcuse declared: This essay employs psychological categories because they have become political categories. The traditional borderlines between psychology on the one side and political and social philosophy on the other have been made obsolete by the condition of man in the present era.” Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization: a Philosophical Inquiry into Freud. 1955. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966): xxvii. 75 Anderson, Chester, “TROUBLE IN BOHEMIA” The Berkeley Barb. 4, 9, 81 March 3 (1967): 7. 76 Roszak, Counterculture, 67.

32 effectively reinterpreted corporatized professional work as a form of proletarian labor, resonated with the counterculture because its members recognized that they were being trained to assume the postwar economy's surfeit of picayune white-collar bureaucratic posts and the comfortable middle-class lives that came with them, and they identified such an existence as a specific type of emasculation and psychic death: alienation.

PRESENTNESS

Bikers struck many observers as wonderfully resistant to alienation. They refused to concern themselves with social hierarchies, resisting the institutional apparatus that perpetuated them. They were consummate drop-outs—from school, from the labor force, from the confines of the nuclear family, and from the bounds of law and order—and the common thread in this overarching pattern of defiance, besides a mulish contrarianism, was a profound resistance to planning. During the 1960's, bikers were not generally involved in ongoing illicit enterprises. They would typically get arrested for minor offenses like assault or petty theft; then they would fail to show up for their court dates, and their legal troubles would snowball. They were not deliberate criminals: just sublimely irresponsible and impulsive malefactors. Indeed, although Thompson described “Terry the Tramp's” arrest record as tall and ugly, he also noted that Terry had no felony convictions, while Terry himself insisted: “I've never thought of myself as a criminal. I don't work at it; I'm not greedy enough. Everything I do is natural, because I need to.”77 The whole ethos of the biker subculture cultivated a kind of impetuousness. They lived in the moment, embracing risk and courting experiences that felt immediate and urgent. They were present: a quality that became central to the work of mid-century intellectuals who influenced the student counterculture like Jean-Paul Sartre and Georges Bataille. In his The Accursed Share, Bataille

77 Thompson, Hell's Angels, 7.

33 expounds on the nature of sovereignty and the miraculous, both of which are characterized by an ability to exist in the present. Bataille describes knowledge and anticipation as man’s customary burden and identifies sovereignty as a realm beyond utility and beyond anticipation. For Bataille, then, sovereignty is a state of radically contingent presence. It is the unfolding of knowledge in time that compromises this sovereignty, making us always beholden to the future and what he terms the ceaseless operation of cognition. The bourgeoisie, of course, lack sovereignty. Their world is defined by delayed gratification, prediction, and planning. For Bataille, the bourgeoisie are effectively domesticated; they lack the courage to enjoy sovereignty even when given the opportunity: “Sometimes the bourgeois has resources at his disposal that would allow him to enjoy the possibilities of this world in a sovereign manner, but then it is in his nature to enjoy them in a furtive manner, to which he strives to give the appearance of servile utility.”78 Even when the bourgeois finds the temerity to indulge with abandon, he rationalizes his behavior, appealing to the pathetic pretext of utility. In this context, the miraculous is a profound moment of unknowing that liberates us from ourselves and the predictive matrix of bourgeois culture by confounding our anticipations; it is a paradoxical revelation that Bataille suggests is encapsulated in the colloquial expression: impossible, but yet there it is. Miracles, then, are short- circuits in the rationalized machinery of modernity.

For many observers, the motorcycle, by its very nature, engenders a kind of presentness; it is a sovereign vehicle: a small miracle that constantly sows unknowing by defying expectation. The motorcycle is never completely stable. It cannot support itself. Its natural tendency is to topple over, and it requires a delicate balancing of forces to remain upright, paradoxically becoming more stable the faster it travels. Motorcyclists are least likely to fall over as they travel along the asymptote of pure speed: as they are sublimated into a rushing vector of perfect linear motion. In a car, when instability looms, it is always prudent to slow down. Motorcycles defy this basic intuition. In order to turn, a 78 Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share: Volumes II and III: the History of Eroticism and Sovereignty. (New York: Zone, 1993): 198.

34 motorcycle rider must lean the bike, flirting with its natural inclination to topple over. If the bike leans too far, becoming unstable as the rider's body nears the onrushing asphalt, the only solution is to act against instinct and create more centrifugal force by accelerating. Thus, in their essay “Cycles of

Paradox,” Mark C. Taylor and Jose Marquez meditate on the counter-intuitive physics of motorcycling, in which speed yields stability and cornering demands acceleration, creating their own poetics of falling: “Falling is the inevitable catastrophe that nevertheless must be avoided, the inescapable fate that must be permanently deferred.”79 Each moment of not-falling, then, is a moment of negated expectation, a miracle. And, when the bike in question was an antiquated Harley that had been radically customized, cobbled together from purloined spare parts and audaciously reconfigured by a drug- addled amateur mechanic, this impossible, but yet there it is quality of not-falling was only heightened.

Bikers accentuated the motorcycle's imputation of immediacy or presentness in the haphazard conduct of their daily lives, performing an apparent obliviousness to the exigencies of time in its modern conception.80 Modernity's emphasis on prediction and planning is, of course, part of a distinctive temporal orientation. Defining time as a linear progression, modernity relentlessly pursues and even fetishizes the future while abjuring the present. It also views time as universal, and the imposition of synchronic time is a signature of modern life and a bulwark of capital's hegemonic approach to disciplining labor.81 The modern individual learns to understand time as a commodity and learns to be on time. Bikers, of course, were never on time. Their whole ethos was contrary, defiant, and tumultuous, and cultivating time discipline was anathema to them. Thus, Thompson described, at some length, the difficulty of coordinating with his Hell's Angels sources, recounting, in particular, his failed attempt to connect with and interview a young Angel and former disc-jockey called “Rodger the

79 Taylor, Mark C. and Marquez, Jose. “Cycles of Paradox.” The Art of the Motorcycle. (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1998): 37. 80 Mark Watson noted that “the biker's sense of time and commitment to it is not only lower class, but more typical of preliterate societies.” Watson, “Outlaw Motorcyclists,” 38. 81 Thompson, Edward P. "Time, Work-discipline, and Industrial Capitalism." Past and present (1967): 56-97.

35 Lodger” after his predilection for insinuating himself into impromptu quarters. Thompson never managed to meet with Rodger because “he had no idea where he might be from one day to the next.”82

Rodger wasn't just tardy; he could not conceive of the conditions in which punctuality even had meaning. He could not make an appointment in the first place, a profound lack of foresight that amounts to a flat rebuff of the future-orientation of modernity. For Rodger, the future was always conjectural; he seemed to live, very literally, in the present.

A modern orientation toward time, then, is not defined simply by the disciplined routine of punctuality, and neither is it confined to the mode of future-oriented planning; a whole range of practices, including a habit like reading the newspaper, adapt modern individuals to linear, synchronic time, placing them within a continuous flow that is experienced universally. Rodger could not keep an appointment because he could not, or would not, fully apprehend the priority of the future. Other potential Thompson interviews never even got off the ground due to what he refers to as the Angels'

“powerful disdain for either home telephones or mailing addresses.”83 A number of Angels whom

Thompson heard about or encountered briefly at parties or club events proved impossible to contact because they were not fully enmeshed in modern synchronic time; they did not have phones. The telephone is the quintessential synchronic communications technology, combining global reach and simultaneous exchange to establish a field of universal time. If Benedict Anderson focuses on municipal daily newspapers as the textual medium through which modern individuals came to imagine themselves existing with unseen strangers in a coherent matrix of time and culture,84 the banal text of the phone book also offers a reification of the same imagined modern community; it is not just a list of everyone living in a given locale but a sort-of pledge that they are available to each other instantaneously: that they exist within the same temporal framework, connected by a comprehensive

82 Thompson, Hell's Angels, 143. 83 Ibid. 84 Anderson, Benedict. Imagined communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. (London: Verso Books, 1983).

36 network of synchronized information exchange. In the 1960's, having one's number in the phone book was essentially a correlate of citizenship, a minimum gesture of participation and belonging.

Of course, bikers defined themselves by renouncing citizenship. They did not read the Daily

Garble, and they did not participate in the imagined community bound by the phone book; thus, the very nature of their existence seemed somehow nebulous: “[Ray] exists in some kind of limbo and can only be found by means of a secret phone number, which changes constantly.”85 Of course, as Rodger's nickname suggests, to a great extent this refusal to assimilate modern conceptions of time and community was an affectation. Many bikers had served in the Army, been to prison, or both; time discipline was not, ultimately, a completely foreign concept to them, but flouting its dictates became symbolically important within the subculture. Sonny Barger makes this clear when he casually remarks that “jail teaches you to be on time,” only to offer, on the very next page, “I needed a close-knit club of men who could jump on their bikes, ride cross-country if they wanted to, and not abide by rules or clocks.”86 Barger seems to value time discipline insofar as it enables his Angles to function as a rationalized unit, but he also recognizes that, ultimately, in order to establish that unit in opposition to the American mainstream, they must manage to defy temporal regulation. Thompson refers to the resulting effect of this defiance as a distinctive sort of life orientation that he juxtaposes with some of the Angels' more sensational traditions: “Among the most controversial [traditions] are Rape, Assault, and Body Odor. Another, not so repellent to the public, is the outlaw's powerful disdain for either home telephones or mailing addresses.”87 Of course, if Thompson is being somewhat facetious in contrasting the Angels' aversion to telephones with rape and assault, in a Foucauldian context their disdain for addresses and phone numbers is, perhaps, just as subversive as their more noxious behaviors.

Paul Willis, in his ethnography of British motor-bike boys, is more explicit in drawing this

85 Thompson, Hell's Angels, 143. 86 Barger, Hell's Angel, 26-27. 87 Thompson, Hell's Angels, 143.

37 connection. Observing that his subjects “lived in the unreified world of the present and its immediate relations,” he goes on to claim that they had “no investment in outside hierarchical structure.”88 For him, bikers' intense focus on the present confounds their relationship to the modern state, which operates through systems of surveillance that define individual citizen-subjects through an accumulation of fixed data points over time. Indeed, even Thompson does not completely disregard this political dimension of bikers' peculiar attitudes regarding the future and the bureaucratic record- keeping apparatus on which modern subjects depend to navigate it. For one, he notes that their refusal to submit to fixed mailing addresses or phone numbers was, in large part, a strategic effort to avoid bill collectors, potentially violent rivals, and, especially, police. In modern society, of course, not having a phone number is very much a reasonable step toward avoiding police detection. The insidious nature of the modern surveillance state is that it operates through and co-opts the very same transcription practices that enable modern life in all of its convenience and security: consumer credit records, insurance records, telephone records, driving records, hospital records, and even records for the provision of basic services like electricity and waste disposal.

Bikers themselves also recognized that modern authority operates through surveillance and transcription practices. During the 1960's, new communications technologies and bureaucratic reforms dramatically expanded the surveillance capacity of law enforcement agencies, and bikers' rise to public notoriety during the same period resulted, to a large degree, from their self-conscious resistance to this modernization of law enforcement. As Terry Orendorff's collaborator Randall Ball observed of the

Vagos: “They refused to accept the increasing restrictions that a growing government presence was pushing on them. They still acted like they lived in a world where a brother could outrun the cops and return to laugh about it.”89 As Ball implies, interactions between bikers and local law-enforcement during the early 1960's were often shockingly collegial, and Orendorff's memoir includes several 88 Willis, Profane Culture, 13. 89 Ball, Terry the Tramp, 147.

38 examples, like the night when he was pulled over while drunkenly swerving along the freeway, and the interceding officer opted to send Orendorff to a local all-night diner with his partner, while the officer himself rode Orendorff's chopper to meet them and then instructed the diner's proprietor to make sure that Orendorff stayed put and drank plenty of coffee. Of course, not all of bikers' encounters with police during that period were so congenial; yet, even when bikers' encounters with law enforcement turned violent, there was a certain nonchalant quality to those encounters. Sonny Barger reminds readers of his memoir that it was not actually a felony to assault an officer in California during the mid-1960's and recounts brawling with Oakland cops by mutual consent, a phenomenon that Frank Reynolds described as “fun and games.”90 And, even when police opted for a formal exercise of authority such that bikers did not return to laugh about their criminal antics, the consequences of police action were often fairly risible, at least for young white men in bikers' social position: men whose abject, peripatetic lifestyle was barely disrupted by arrest. Indeed, even a short jail sentence was scant imposition for many bikers, who typically had friends in jail and who had no pressing obligations outside of it. Three hots and a cot could sometimes serve as a welcome respite from the grind of partying and hustling, and, if incarceration proved unpalatable, it could often be avoided simply by moving to another jurisdiction or adopting a different name; police were yet to develop the communications and record-keeping infrastructure necessary to coordinate between jurisdictions and track individual offenders, especially when those individuals eschewed steady employment, fixed addresses, and phone numbers. Indeed,

Thompson quotes a law enforcement source who laments: "They have become a very fluid bunch. We have a list of twenty-five hundred names of members in the various clubs, but we don't even bother to try to keep addresses. They move constantly. They change their addresses, they change their names, they even change the color of their hair."91 This fluidity of identity invoked literary modernism, but it was antithetical to the version of modern subjecthood fostered by the state. 90 Barger, Hell's Angel, 69 and Reynolds, Freewheelin' Frank, 132. 91 Thompson, Hell's Angels, 41.

39 While the idea of the Hollister Riot represents a bit of media sensationalism, the fact that the 7- man Hollister police force was overwhelmed by the activities of the 4th of July weekend, 1947, seems irrefutable; any event that swells a locale's population by 900% jeopardizes law and order, and at that time California law enforcement did not have an efficient mechanism to allocate reinforcements in such a circumstance. By 1965 things had begun to change, and Hunter Thompson's account of the Bass Lake

Run stressed the role of what he terms a “new and elaborate tracking network, a radio communications system designed to pinpoint any gathering of motorcycle outlaws and broadcast their movements to police all over the state.”92 From his perspective, police reaction to the Bass Lake Run was wildly disproportionate and basically hysterical; he painted law enforcement in a feminized light as both unduly threatened by the Angels and overwhelmed by a surfeit of communication that led them to overreact, quoting a radio bulletin:

The Sierra community of Bass Lake is bracing this morning for a reported invasion of the notorious Hell's Angels motorcycle gang. Heavily armed police and sheriff's deputies are stationed on all roads leading to Bass Lake. Madera County Sheriff, Marlin Young, reports helicopters and other emergency forces standing by. Neighboring law enforcement agencies, including the Kern County sheriff's Canine Patrol, have been alerted and are ready to move. Recent reports say the Hell's Angels are massing in Oakland and San Bernadino. Stay tuned for further details.93

But if Thompson enjoyed tweaking the California Highway Patrol, the state's Attorney General, and local authorities by depicting them as bunch of panicky gossips, he also recognized the paradigm- shifting nature of their new communications infrastructure and feared its totalitarian implications. The

Hollister police force was overwhelmed by the unexpected arrival of 4000 motorcyclists in 1947, but in

1965, police set-up road-blocks in advance of the Bass Lake run, photographing each biker who rode through and handing him a five-page legal document titled “ORDER TO SHOW CAUSE WHY

PRELIMINARY INJUNCTION SHOULD NOT ISSUE AND TEMPORARY RESTRAINING

ORDER MADE” that listed “The People of the State of California” as plaintiff against him.94

92 Ibid, 99. 93 Ibid, 106. 94 Ibid, 121.

40 Thompson was disdainful of this and similar measures, like the proliferation of laws preventing motorcyclists from riding in groups of three or more, and his faintly paranoid, libertarian critique of rationalized law-enforcement represents one of the genuine and enduring congruities between the biker subculture and the student counterculture.

Bikers were attuned to the creeping totalitarianism of the surveillance state, and Orendorff's memoir provides an account of the challenges that bikers faced in the early 1970's that doubles as a fine summary of Foucault's influential oeuvre: “growing government entities spent formidable budgets researching enforcement technology and devious ways to pass legislation to control more segments of the population in increasingly formidable ways.”95 Ball's superbly vague but essentially accurate lament about the emergence of a stultifying atmosphere defined by the petty tyranny of bureaucracy is captured in an anecdote about Orendorff having his motorcycle confiscated by police. Riding through his native El Monte, Orendorff observes another young man with broken-down motorcycle and stops to render aid: “A cop spotted the two wild youngsters in downtown El Monte...He immediately started to write Terry another ticket. He clearly didn't like bikers and wrote him up for leaking oil on the sidewalk, parking on the sidewalk, heading the wrong direction, and operating an unsafe vehicle.

Terry's second motorcycle was towed away.”96 Terry's first motorcycle was one that he found abandoned in a field near his home at age twelve, dragged home in pieces, cajoled back to life, and learned to ride on the streets of El Monte without ever obtaining a license or vehicle registration.

Police, who were familiar with the troubled teen, had looked the other way. But that laissez-faire environment was changing rapidly.

95 Ball, Terry the Tramp, 146. 96 Ibid, 49.

41 Risk

The modernization of policing during the 1960's eliminated much of the unpredictability from encounters with law enforcement. In an era before inter-jurisdictional communication and motor vehicle registration databases, running from the police was something that one could likely get away with. Even getting caught might or might not have yielded onerous consequences, as police wielded authority informally and capriciously. And, of course, it was precisely this volatility that disposed bikers to think of antagonizing the police as a kind of game. George Weathern recounts one night during his early years as a Hell's Angel when several local chapters rallied in Vallejo to storm a dance hosted by a car club, instigating a melee before fleeing on their motorcycles across the Carquinez

Straits toll bridge:

A number of members and some broads were handcuffed. But we were pulling the victims out of the squad cars as fast as the cops could put them in...The local gendarmes were converging in greater numbers and getting their act together. In groups of twos and threes, we beat it out of town for a fast ride home...On the other side [of the bridge] the Highway Patrol cars were waiting three patrolmen per car. They'd pull alongside you or behind you, growling over the bullhorn, “Pull over.” Some tried to knock our guys off the road. But we just cooked down the highway, looking for exits and places to hide. Some members were captured, but I got away. It made the papers the next day.97

Weathern depicts the whole incident as an epic game of tag, and most of his companions seem to have gotten away, which was their expectation. In later years, the likelihood of getting away declined precipitously. Indeed, Weathern's account, in which police units converge on the site of the fracas while reserves lay in wait across the Carquinez Straits toll bridge to ambush fleeing suspects, indirectly references some of the police tactics that eventually made the kind of mad-cap antagonism toward law enforcement that he and his compatriots relished impossible. Modernized law enforcement practices skewed this reckless game in the favor of the police and even more definitively in favor of predictability. Under the old regime, a loss could take many forms: a vicious beating like the one Frank

97 Weathern, Wayward Angel, 30

42 Reynolds endured after attempting to evade police simply because he “[had] no time to be signing tickets,” a cup of coffee and a courtesy ride home like the one Orendorff received, or a formal arrest and a future court date with all of its attendant complications and contingencies. Ultimately, it was not necessarily the severity of the consequences for defying law enforcement that changed and forced a shift in bikers' attitudes—Reynolds certainly was not dissuaded from fleeing and otherwise antagonizing police by his harrowing beating—but the reliability of those consequences.

The quest for a rational world is a quest for predictability. In many ways statistical analysis is the definitive tool of modernity; it enables a number of modernity's quintessential techniques and modalities, like the social sciences, insurance, and futures markets, all which aim, fundamentally, to mitigate the random, unknowable elements of life. This Faustian strain of modernity is nothing short of a comprehensive effort toward totalized control of the human environment. And both capitalism and communism share this fundamental aim. Both systems endeavor, ultimately, to harness industrialization in order to create a rationalized society that secures a cornucopia of manufactured goods for its subjects.98 Indeed, it was this recognition that compelled the counterculture to jettison conventional

Marxism: “Marxism is the mirror image of bourgeois industrialism: an image reversed, and yet unmistakably identical.”99 The counterculture was wary of material abundance and other dubious fruits of predictability, notably safety.100 In Brave New World, which Huxley fashioned as a dark satire of modernity, the dissenting voice of John, the savage, insists that he wants real danger: “But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”101

The counterculture, which often endeavored to fashion itself as a tribe of unrepentant savages, concurred with John. Real danger is anathema to modernity. Indeed, modern subjects do not simply choose to avoid danger; they have rejected the very existence of danger as a category. We may continue

98 Berman, Marshall. All That is Solid Melts into Air: the Experience of Modernity. (London: Verso, 1983). 99 Roszak, Counterculture, 100. 100 Roszak actually remarked: “Affluence lies at the core of any discussion of the counter-cultural sixties.” Ibid, xv 101 Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. 1932. (Ernst Klett Sprachen, 2007): 215.

43 to use the word, but John's real danger has effectively been supplanted by risk, a modern way of understanding threats and assigning blame that employs the universalizing abstraction of science, insisting that all legitimate perils can be predicted and quantified. Real danger is characteristic of traditional societies. It is unpredictable and malevolent, and it is socially constructed. As Mary Douglas observes in her Risk and Blame, the socially constructed nature of danger is obvious to us because we discount traditional societies' apprehension of causality, which runs toward curses, divine retribution, and witchcraft. In this context, where the concept of danger is closely aligned with concepts of sin and taboo, it is clear to us that the perception of danger and the assignation of blame are social processes and political weapons. Within our own society, however, we believe that we are capable of discerning real causes. We insist that risk analysis offers an objective appraisal of probabilities and potential losses that is free of politics and that the forensic sciences provide an efficient and unbiased mechanism for distributing accountability. Of course, as Douglas emphasizes, this is a fallacy. The tools of risk analysis and forensics are indeed fallible, and they bend, predictably, to our biases. Ultimately, we have hardly expiated the social stigma that defined danger from our understanding of risk; labeling someone's actions irrational choices or unwarranted risks is a valuation that serves as an effective form of denigration, and such judgments are inevitably subsumed within the political dynamics of class, race, and gender.102

It is perfectly apt, then, that Huxley conflates savagery, danger, and sin. And bikers sought to do the same, embracing risk in a way that courted the taboo political elements associated with the pre- modern concept of danger. Of course, as the automobile became the subject of a push for safety that intensified into the 1960's, Americans increasingly identified the motorcycle itself as an unwarranted risk. Thus, one hostile letter-writer complains, in typical fashion, to Easyriders, that “You ride on death traps that can be blotted out of vision at 100 feet with a pencil in front of an eye and expect decent

102 Douglas, Mary. Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory. (London: Routledge, 1992): 4.

44 motorists to be aware of your presence,”103 while an editorial from the National Observer that

Easyriders chose to reprint in April of 1974 actually suggests, with faux begrudging resignation, that the only logical policy for addressing motorcycle safety is to ban them outright.104 Of course, bikers generally embraced this perception that motorcycles are inherently dangerous, with Danny Lyon describing the spirit of the bikeriders as “the spirit of the hand that twists open the throttle on the crackling engines of big bikes and rides them on racetracks or through traffic or, on occasion, into oblivion.”105 Indeed, the biker subculture was distinguished from the general community of motorcyclists largely by the latter group's aversion to courting oblivion in the manner that Lyon romanticizes. Bikers embraced the possibility of injury or death that came with racing through traffic, but they were not just enamored of these extravagant physical risks with their macho overtones; they expressed an expansive penchant for risk that incorporated existential elements, assuming more subtle risks in the conduct of their daily lives. Bikers risked having nowhere to stay and nothing to eat by avoiding steady employment and leases. They risked sleeping on the hard ground in the cold when they ventured on club runs without tents or sleeping bags, and they risked screaming delirium, as Thompson termed it, by ingesting unfamiliar drugs in prodigious quantities.

Bikers eschewed modern comforts and embraced privation and uncertainty, which they sought to mitigate through solidarity alone, rather than through the rationalized mechanisms of modernity:

“We lived in friends' garages and all we owned was the clothes on our backs and the bikes between our legs. If you had two pairs of pants, you wore them during the wintertime... The point is we risked everything and shared everything.”106 Douglas maintains that the modern concept of risk covertly continues to operate in the same vein as primitive danger, providing socially constructed avenues of

103 Adams, R. Letter. Easyriders December 1974: 6. 104 Edwin A. Roberts, Jr. National Observer. Rpt. “Biker's Digest: Miscellaneous Quotes from Other Biker Rags.” Easyriders April 1974: 11. 105 Lyon, Bikeriders, vii. 106 Barger, Hell's Angel, 32.

45 blame and judgment, but she notes one crucial difference: whereas the idea of danger effectively upholds the judgment of the social collective against the individual, risk does quite the opposite, bolstering the integrity of the individual rational actor paradigm that has been so instrumental to the formation of modernism. Thus, Sonny Barger draws a close relationship between assuming risk and sharing. If the prototypical modern citizen is an individual, risk-averse, rational actor, bikers wanted to be risk-taking irrational actors, and they want to be collective actors: to cultivate what Thompson termed a mindless kind of loyalty, resisting the individuation implicit in risk analysis and flouting the logic of the market and its valuations to embrace archaic danger.

In an Easyriders article from 1974, the author refers to bikers as crazy fuckers, noting their cavalier disregard for their own prized possessions: “For example, look at how many brothers work on building un-real, fancy, pretty scooters all winter long, and then as soon as the gate is opened to let the sunshine in, run the bastards straight into the ground.”107 He goes on to describe rushing to photograph that month's featured bike because it had been wrecked before it could be photographed on two previous occasions. Of course, when he characterizes this behavior as crazy, that epithet is meant as a perverse valorization; the real message that the magazine is conveying to its readers is that crashing a brand-new, uninsured bike into which you have invested much of your time, labor, and capital is a righteous act. Meanwhile, Thompson scorned bikers and their demented logic when he considered this same contradiction between the abundance of resources expended in bikers' efforts to customize their prized motorcycles and the consummate heedlessness with which those vehicles were subsequently treated:

A chopper is often a work of art, costing as much as $3,000 to build, not counting labor. From the polished chrome spokes to the perfectly balanced super-light flywheel and the twelve coats of special paint on the gas tank, it is a beautiful, graceful machine and so nearly perfect mechanically that it is hard to conceive of it screaming along some midnight highway in the hands of a drunken hoodlum only moments away from a high-speed crash into a tree or a steel guardrail.108 107 Easyriders, November 1974: 21-24. 108 Thompson, Hell's Angels, 92.

46 Although their bikes represented their only material possessions of any value, bikers insisted on riding with reckless abandon, seemingly courting destruction and loss: the very things that the rational actor takes every modern measure to avoid. Bikers, then, exhibited a comprehensive anti-modern understanding of risk, identifying something sublime in the forces of entropy and chaos.

And the spectacle of outlandish risk that bikers created held enormous appeal for the counterculture, which had come to define modern life as the foreclosure of contingency. Rossinow observes that risk was integral to the New Left's romantic self-conception, and we see this investment expressed succinctly and bombastically by Jerry Rubin, who remarked: “We are a believing generation who trust our feelings more than logic. We are not cool. We are hot. We take chances; we expose ourselves.”109 Rossinow traces this anti-modern embrace of exposure and risk to some unlikely sources.

Indeed, he notes that one major influence on the ideology of the New Left, especially as it spread beyond elite metropolitan universities and a small cohort of individuals with strong personal ties to the legacy of the Cultural Front, evolving into a broader grassroots student movement, was the fellowship of the FLC (Faith and Life Community), which had its roots in a neo-orthodox Christian theology in which the concept of authenticity was closely associated with taking risks and in which students were encouraged to emulate the early church by creating a loving community that was corporate but not oppressive.110 Like Lears's anti-moderns with their interest in Catholicism, then, the New Left, through this neo-orthodox proclivity, attempted to turn way from the individualistic, therapeutic perspective of mainstream Protestantism. And, in doing so, they also turned away from the modern paradigm of the rational actor and toward the curious model of the outlaw biker who risked everything and shared everything.

109 Rubin, Jerry. “Elvis Kills Ike” The Berkeley Barb. 6,11,134 March 8-14 (1968): 12. 110 Rossinow, Doug. The politics of authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left in America. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999): 55.

47 Counterculture Icon

Bikers' penchant for assuming and even flaunting irrational risks made them appealing symbolic figures for the New Left, and the topic of bikers and motorcycles is a persistent feature of the New Left and of the counterculture in particular. Indeed, the subject of motorcycles provides a crude tool for distinguishing between the overlapping and mutually reinforcing cultural terrain of these parallel movements. For instance, motorcycles figure quite prominently in the early editions of The Rag, an underground newspaper that began publication in Austin, Texas, in 1966 as a self-conscious alter-ego of the University of Texas's official student newspaper, the Daily Texan. The Rag embodied a version of insurgent activism that was particularly beholden to the counterculture and its priorities. From its origin as a sometimes sophomoric mouthpiece for campus outcasts to lampoon fraternity culture and the hegemony of Longhorn football, The Rag matured into a definitive organ of the the New Left in one of its most significant enclaves outside the traditional coastal strongholds of leftist activity. Yet, as

Rossinow observes, The Rag continued to reflect a buoyantly turbulent, drug-saturated, populist, and libertarian vision of leftism that coalesced at public universities within the American interior and eschewed dogmatic politics. It continued, then, to reflect the interests of the counterculture more than those of the New Left.111

Significantly, from its first issue, The Rag included a column dedicated to motorcycles, initially penned by Mike Baudette. The “Bent Spokesman” column actually filled a third of The Rag's first issue, and it remained a bulwark of the fledgling paper, which also found some of its most loyal advertisers in a number of local motorcycle shops, including The Cycle, a cooperative garage of sorts where bikers could avail themselves of professional tools to work on their own bikes in a community setting. Baudette introduced himself in his first column by affecting a tempered version of the outlaw

111 Ibid, 160-166.

48 biker's jaundiced persona: “I had my '37 Hog for sale. I was offered Stephanie Chernokowsky in trade.

I was also offered a lifetime supply of thrill pills in trade. Finally someone offered me money. I took the money. I was broke.”112 Here, Baudette captured the biker's ethos of self-deprecation laced with nihilism and punctuated with misogyny, but he quickly moved away from this tone of bluff cynicism, attempting to address the question of why motorcycles present a suitable topic for a regular column in

The Rag with a few vague felicitations about motorcycling and some rather prosaic considerations that would seem to appeal, exclusively, to an established community of amateur competitive racers:

“because motorcycles can be a gas...because motorcycles can become a way of life...because informal sporting events are fun but require some sort of organization.”113 Thus, Baudette never satisfactorily tackled the question of why his column belonged, specifically, in an underground newspaper, where it was frequently juxtaposed with stories on Civil Rights, as in a typical issue from 1966 in which the

“Bent Spokesman” appears opposite an article titled “The Art of the Possible or Who Controls the

Courthouse,” which discusses voter registration efforts in Lowndes County, Alabama. But, the fact that he did not feel compelled to address this potential incongruity says more than anything he could have offered; it seems that, within the student underground or counterculture, motorcycles were simply an intuitive fit.

Of course, the intuitive fit of the motorcycle within the counterculture aesthetic was, to a great extent, a byproduct of the counterculture's relationship to the automobile, which was considered emblematic of the alienation that defined the Great Society. Thus, Baudette's real answer to the question of why his column belonged in The Rag came several months after his debut column as he continued to celebrate the motorcycle by way of disparaging the automobile, characterizing the car as artificial, safe, and inoculating: “The cat and his chick have been bottled up inside the colored tube; no one has seen them. They have had, perhaps, a sense of speed now and then, danger at an intersection or 112 Baudette, Mike. “The Bent Spokesman.” The Rag 10 October (1966): 6. 113 Ibid.

49 two. Their origin and the destination are only points in focus when all the space between the two is lost.

Lost is a sense of travel.”114 Here we have the quintessential paean to motorcycle travel as immersive experience. The car driver, Baudette suggested, is not present, not sovereign, but is focused on origin and destination, whereas the motorcyclist is consumed by the experience of travel: “You've been out in it. On your cycle you've really felt the between here and there when every loose bit of gravel or an impatient auto can mean instant destruction you pay attention. [sic]”115 This same sentiment appears in virtually every discussion of motorcycling. The car, it is consistently argued, promotes domestication and alienation; the car renders its driver passive, offering the world as a spectacle to be consumed from a privileged position of comfort, slightly removed from reality.

Baudette, of course, interjected sexual overtones into this dynamic. His alienated car driver is on a date, and he and his companion seem to be going through the ritual of postwar, middle-class courtship in a rather perfunctory way that contrasts sharply with Baudette's description of his own spontaneous motorcycle adventure through the Normandie countryside with a brazen French woman.116

As Rossinow observes, the counterculture's emphasis on sexual liberation was not a straightforward rejection of Victorian prudishness but a confused response to mass advertising's habit of presenting consumption as a sublimation of sexual desire. The call for free love operated, within the politics of authenticity, as a demand for unconditioned existence: reality free of artificial institutional constraints.117 Indeed, this type of authenticity is precisely what Art Johnson demanded in his “Theory of Hip” column, published in a 1966 issue of The Barb: “Cathartic sublimation is being replaced by the demand for real Experience...The System is productive of things. Hip is 'creative' of experience.”118

Yet the notion that the reality lurking behind the culture industry's manufactured facade is characterized

114 Baudette, Mike. “The Bent Spokesman.” The Rag 1,6 (1966): 16. 115 Ibid. 116 Baudette's list of reasons for his column's existence also included:“because cycling is a real turn-on when you've got a chick on the back.” Baudette, Mike. “The Bent Spokesman.” The Rag October 10 (1966): 6. 117 Rossinow, Authenticity, 267. 118 Johnson, Art, “A Theory of Hip; Part One 'What Have You Got?'” The Berkeley Barb 3,23,69 December 9 (1966): 1.

50 by unencumbered desire and free sexual access is a distorted fantasy peculiar to late capitalism and the logic of the culture industry itself. For Rossinow and Thomas Frank, whose Conquest of Cool argues for a dialectical relationship in which the advertising industry spawned youthful dissent even as it co- opted conspicuous signifiers of the same, the counterculture actually retained a consumer outlook, forswearing the newest Chevy model to insist on realizing the latent sexual fantasy that GM used to sell it.119 And, as we see in Baudette's “Spokesman” columns, the motorcycle's role in this quixotic quest was unambiguous. While the car embodied the status quo of heavy-petting, domesticity, and alienation, the motorcycle seemed to deliver on the disingenuous promise of automotive advertising, providing exotic sex, real danger, and presentness.

The motorcycle, then, provided a potent symbolic rebuke to the car and the landscape of suburban alienation with which it had become synonymous, and the counterculture was enthralled, embracing the iconography of the biker subculture and adapting it to their own needs, often in spite of bikers' manifest resistance to this type of appropriation. Indeed, Johnson concludes his “Theory of Hip” column with two references to biker movies, first quoting Brando's iconic line from The Wild One— when asked what he's rebelling against, he retorts “what do you got?”—and then turning to a recent biker exploitation film, The Wild Angels: “The Hip is faced with constant unavoidable conflict with the

System he cannot escape. 'We want to be free from The Man!' Blues shouts in total desperation; just before giving in to cool in Wild Angels.”120 Here, Johnson recognized that bikers were ultimately cool rather than hip; yet, he tried to finesse this reality, still invoking Peter Fonda's “Blues” character as an icon of hip defiance. Indeed, the whole production of that film was characterized by a similar dynamic, with Fonda himself attempting to give his character a counterculture inflection and succeeding, insofar as he was able to change the character's name from Jack Black to “Heavenly Blues,” while script

119 Frank, Thomas. The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture,Counterculture, and the Birth of Hip Consumerism. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). 120 Johnson, “A Theory of Hip,” 1.

51 rewrites moved away from the ironic mirroring of thrill-seeking bikers and motorcycle cops that defined early versions of the narrative and towards a lurid account of an anarchically debauched and subversive biker funeral.121 Eventually, of course, Fonda was able to achieve a more fully realized counterculture interpretation of the biker subculture in Easy Rider, which film historian Martin Rubin places entirely outside the biker exploitation genre pioneered by The Wild Angels.

This desire to include bikers within the counterculture and its expressive program became a matter of considerable internal tension, as some self-identified members of the hip community found bikers' violent machismo and inveterate cool to be anathema to their understanding of the counterculture's politics. For instance, in a pair of letters-to-the-editor from 1967, The Barb was called- out for its sympathetic bias toward the Hell's Angels. By 1967, The Barb's hip constituency and its own reporters had clashed with the Hell's Angels on several occasions; yet, even in these circumstances, the paper tended to demur when it came to calling the bikers to account. For instance, The Barb's coverage of the infamous October 16, 1965, VDC anti-war march, which was disrupted by an attack from several members of the Hell's Angels' Oakland chapter, acknowledges the Angels' malevolence but shifts readers' attention to a greater threat that they share in common with bikers: “We had stood out ground before the Hell's Angels, but the Oakland police really frightened us.”122 Indeed, this desire to shift censure onto the police and even to appease the Angels was made explicit in The Barb's next issue, which contained Allen Ginsberg's poem “To The Angels,” in which he openly solicits the bikers as allies, noting that he refuses to believe rumors that they are in league with the Oakland police or that they are merely gleefully belligerent hooligans. And, The Barb's ongoing tendency to minimize the

Angels' transgressions provoked the ire of one regular reader when the paper ran a photo-essay covering a wake that was held by the club in Golden Gate Park. Several of the photos depict obvious

121Osgerby, Bill. "Sleazy Riders: Exploitation,'Otherness,' and Transgression in the 1960s Biker Movie." Journal of Popular Film and Television. 31, 3 (2003): 98-108. 122 Lipton, Leonard “I Ran For My Life from the Oakland Cops” The Berkeley Barb, 1,11 October 22 (1965): 3.

52 violence, which The Barb's captions treat rather dismissively, describing the action as “part of the fun” and denominating a woman who had been assaulted and thrown to the rain-soaked ground as “muddy miss.”123 In the following issue, an angry reader wrote that the tumult depicted in The Barb's photos was hardly innocuous rough-housing, insisting that he had personally been beaten by Hell's Angels and left lying in the mud after he became involved in a conflict over a dog fight. The Angels, he implied, were nothing but retrograde thugs who did not deserve The Barb's support.

The Barb issued a peculiar response to the letter writer's charge that seemingly confirmed his basic allegation, telling him, rather cavalierly, that there had been a number of skirmishes on the afternoon in question and that the photos may well depict one of those and not the one in which he was assaulted. Of course, the letter writer's principal objection was not related to the accuracy of The Barb's details regarding the specific location and circumstances of the fracas depicted in their photos but the paper's decision to characterize what he felt was a violent assault as a harmless lark, and The Barb's obtuse response prompted another letter to the editor, this time from Hap Stewart, the photographer whose work documenting the wake had incited the first correspondent. Stewart sided definitively with the original letter writer and went several steps further. By way of “attempting to take some responsibility for [his] feelings and actions,” Stewart offered an unequivocal condemnation of the

Angels: “They are, collectively, a group of misfits and assorted morons who, at any given time, are one step away from violence and who will kick the shit out of anyone who happens to displease them

(hippies included).”124 What's more, Stewart was not content to malign the Angels; he saw that the larger issue was not the Angels per se but the indulgent, even fawning, attitude toward them exhibited by the hip community: “I find it very difficult to understand the sheep-like hippie acceptance of the

Angel's behavior....I am confused by the hippie-Hells Angels alliance when the fundamental concepts

123 “At the Wake” The Berkeley Barb, 5,10,109 September 15-21 (1967): 4-5. 124 Stewart, Hap. Letter. “The Beautiful Angels.” The Berkeley Barb 5,10,109 September 15-21 (1967): 4.

53 of each group would seem not to coincide [sic].”125 This alliance has remained, of course, the cornerstone of the biker's enduring fascination for cultural critics and scholars, and Stewart advances a version of the position that has since been championed by John Wood, chastising the counterculture for its woefully misguided defense of vile reactionaries.

Challenged by Stewart to defend their affinity for the Angels, The Barb responded resolutely with an explanation that is far from persuasive but deeply revelatory of the aesthetic preoccupations that informed and sometimes trumped the counterculture's political commitments. After apologizing for the brevity and simplicity of their explanation, The Barb offered: “We have observed that the appeal of hippie thought ideally is in its anti-logical simplicity and directness. Cutting through the intricacies of linear logic, the hippie seeks to sense directly the significance and inner essence of all things—that essence which can never be verbalized. (As Camus once observed, the highest form of scientific logic evolves into poetry).”126 Here, The Barb does not renounce their alliance with the Angels, but neither do they defend the Angels' actions, which are not mentioned. Indeed, the Angels themselves barely figure in The Barb's statement; their readers are left to infer that the Angels somehow embody the anti-logical simplicity of hippie thought. And many readers undoubtedly made that inference; the motorcycle, of course, was popularly understood to be inherently dangerous: irrational. In fact, Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is structured around this close identification of the motorcycle with anti-logical thought. As Roszak points out, Zen was a formative influence on the counterculture, and Pirsig's argument in his Zen closely parallels The Barb's position on the dialectical relationship between poetry and science. Pirsig too is enamored of anti-logical thinking, employing insanity as the central motif of his narrative as he deconstructs scientific reasoning. His road trip took him through

Montana, where, as a young professor a decade earlier, he had suffered a psychotic break that landed him in a mental institution. His inquiry into values, then, is also an inquiry into his own dimly 125 Ibid. 126 “Comment: How High on What Beam Can You Get?” The Berkeley Barb 5,10,109 September 15-21 (1967): 4.

54 remembered past, personified in the ghostly figure of Phaedras, which is Pirsig's name for his former self: the keen young Philosophy professor who was extinguished in a series of electroshock treatments, leaving behind only dim impressions and jumbled clues to his identity, which are being assembled by the middle-aged technical writer and father Pirsig has become. Ultimately, we learn that the spectral

Phaedras had a fateful encounter with another type of apparition: rationality. Phaedras began to have psychological problems, it seems, as he contemplated the fact that the world itself is merely a ghost, insofar as it exists only in human imagination. For Pirsig, the upshot of this revelation was the exposure of rationality as a farce: the real insanity.127 Thus, Pirsig's memoir mirrors other counterculture favorites like Ken Kesey's One Flew Over The Cookoo's Nest, Joseph Heller's Catch 22, and Stanley Kubrick's

Dr. Strangelove, all of which similarly posit rationality as insanity and insanity as the only rational response to bourgeois life in the Great Society.128

The biker became, like the fictional Randle McMurphy of One Flew Over the Cookoo's Nest, a symbol of principled insanity as a kind of righteous disaffection. But, Mike Baudette and other members of the student counterculture were not content to fashion the motorcycle into a totem of authenticity; they sought a collaborative relationship with the biker subculture. Throughout his tenure as the Bent Spokesman, Baudette's columns attempted to address a common community of insurgent motorcyclists. Many of the radical students who constituted The Rag's core readership had begun riding the inexpensive and reliable lightweight Hondas that poured into the U.S market after 1962. Outlaw bikers, of course, had nothing but contempt for these machines and their riders; indeed, two of Danny

Lyon's interview subjects laugh hysterically as they recount the story of a college kid—“Some college

127 Pirsig, Robert M. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values. (New York: William Morrow, 1974): 85. 128 Raszak lauded Dr. Strangelove in the bibliographical notes of his Making of a Counter Culture, remarking: “Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove is the strongest comment on the absurdity of it all. Unhappily, such satire of absurd exaggeration is pretty nearly defunct in an age whose so-called reality exceeds the insanities of the satirical imagination. Not even Jonathan Swift could have invented such pernicious lunacy as the balance of terror or thermonuclear civil defense.” Roszak, Counterculture, 295.

55 pinko or something. Short pants boy”—who crashed his Honda and had his leg badly burned by the bike's exhaust.129 It is a third-hand story that has clearly taken on the status of fable, neatly encapsulating bikers' disdain for both pretentious college kids and Japanese motorcycles in one punchline. Baudette, however, while speaking as an insider with intimate knowledge of the biker subculture, has an inclusive attitude toward the consumer-friendly Japanese machines and their buoyant young riders. And, if Baudette's own persona straddles the divide between outlaw clubs and the emergent crop of motorcycle-riding students, he also offers a dubious bit of reportage that postulates the convergence of these two motorcycling factions as an emerging historical reality, recounting the story of an outlaw club called The Gooses and its evolution into a beatnik organization. Baudette observes that the club leader “could not find peace pins compatible with the Gooses' standard regalia of ornaments” and quotes him issuing an ultimatum: “Either you want to ride or you want to march in demonstrations...So all you guys who want to be beatniks can leave.” Baudette's account concludes triumphantly for his counterculture audience: “The smoke cleared and there were two gentlemen left in the Gooses.”130 Baudette's tale is undoubtedly apocryphal; it is another fable, but this one reflects the way that counterculture-oriented motorcycle riders viewed their outlaw counterparts: as intuitive subversives and imminent allies.

Of course, there was a germ of truth in Baudette's tale. In 1961 the Oakland and San Francisco chapters of the Hell's Angels went to war. Ostensibly, they were fighting over the choice of several members of the San Francisco chapter to fight against the Oakland Angels who jumped a member of the Presidents motorcycle club with whom the San Francisco cohort were personal friends, but there was a latent ideological, or at least aesthetic, antagonism between the two chapters, and divergent attitudes toward drug use and other proxies of counterculture identification unequivocally fueled the conflict. Indeed, George Weathern says of the more hip San Francisco chapter that many of them 129 Lyon, Danny. The Bikeriders. (New York: Macmillan, 1967): 94. 130 Baudette, Mike. “The Bent Spokesman” The Rag 1,5 (1966): 15.

56 “genuinely would sympathize with the hippie movement.”131 Yet, nowhere did an outlaw motorcycle club self-consciously embrace a beatnik identity as The Gooses do in Baudette's report, which represents, ultimately, a form of fantasy wish-fulfillment. Baudette hoped for some amalgamation of bikers and hippies, and this same desire is apparent in The Barb's coverage of bikers. We have seen how The Barb's account of the Hell's Angels attack on VDC protesters resisted condemning the bikers, instead courting them as allies, and the same solicitous attitude distinguishes an article from 1966 titled

“New Haight Happens To Sound of Angels,” in which a Barb reporter attends a happening organized by the Diggers, a counterculture group famous for its efforts to subvert the market by creating a network of sharing and recycling that involved establishing free stores and free restaurants. The article is introduced with the evocative image of a speeding motorcycle that seems to announce the event as an experiment in insurgent presentness : “A roaring motorcycle zipped up Masonic and turned into Haight with a white-faced girl standing on the seat behind the driver. Her loose, ankle-length dress streamed and wafted in the breeze and you had to look close to read the sign on her back: “NOW!””132 Yet, when one looks closely at the article itself, it is apparent that the motorcycle was not actually affiliated with the Diggers' happening; it is the author who has chosen the motorcycle as a symbol of the happening and the author who has chosen to imply that it was ridden by a Hell's Angel. The Hell's Angels did attend events hosted by the Diggers, but, here, that connection is being manufactured to promote The

Barb's anti-logical aesthetic.

The New Left was enthralled with bikers because they seemed to embrace irrational risk: because they seemed authentic. In 1968, describing the Merry Pranksters' fledgling friendship with the

Hell's Angels in his Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe is just that blunt: “[The Pranksters] had broken through the worst hang-up that intellectuals know—the real-life hang-up.”133 Realness, of

131 Weathern, Wayward Angel, 77. 132 Silenius. “New Haight Happens to Sound of Angels.” The Berkeley Barb 3,25,71 Dec 23 (1966): 1. 133 Wolfe, Tom. The Electric Kool-aid Acid Test. (New York: Bantam Books, 1968): 45.

57 course, was another emanation of authenticity with an overtone of social class. Marx's labor theory of value strongly favors physical labor; in his schema, the mental labor of managers is, essentially, nothing more than an adroit form of theft, while the cerebral efforts of intellectuals is consigned to the ephemeral super-structure of society: the not quite real play of shadows that is culture in Marx's estimation. Thus, members of the New Left, like the Cultural Front before them, experienced considerable anxiety over the status of intellectual and cultural work, fretting over the relationship of these endeavors to reality and attempting to re-contextualize their efforts as hands-on, active, and visceral: “We are up front. We are actors, not spectators.”134 Within the Frankfurt School's critique of the culture industry, Marx's romanticization of manual labor was transmogrified into a hostility toward the passive orientation of the modern subject as consumer, and the New Left's politics of authenticity combined this aversion to mass-mediated spectacle with an American strain of populist anti- intellectualism, of which the biker was a conspicuous exemplar.135

Indeed, one of Danny Lyon's interview subjects, Cal, observes of his extensive travels: “So therefore I figure I've got more knowledge up here stored up than half the college kids my age, still going to college. Sure they know plenty. I mean, they know all about it, but they actually never experienced or seen it.”136 And radical students tended to agree with Cal; they admired bikers for their bracing, authentic experiences and cultivated their own pronounced anti-intellectualism: “Young people didn't give a hang about the political theories, ideologies, plans, organizations, meetings or negotiations with the cops. The activists came to act out of their own sense of what was real. The only vanguard is the vanguard of action.”137 For the counterculture, more so than the Cultural Front generation, this anti-

134 Rubin, “Elvis Kills Ike,” 11. 135 The very essence of Adorno's formulation of the culture industry is passivity. As J.M. Bernstein observes of his analysis of Astrology in particular, it “[presents] a benign image of society requiring only conformity added by the 'insight' and limited individual effort recommended by the column for personal success. Bernstein, J.M. Introduction. Adorno, Theodore. The Culture Industry. (New York: Routledge, 1991): 14. 136 Lyon, Bikeriders, 51. 137 Rubin, Jerry. “And in America we are Learning to Become Vietcong.” The Berkeley Barb 6,1,125 January 5-11 (1968): 8-9.

58 intellectual bias extended to Marxism itself. Rubin is dismissive of Marx's concept of vanguardism, and he insists that young people do not care about theories, going on to complain, in particular, about

“Trots:” his disparaging diminutive for the deeply ideological, fundamentalist Marxist Trotskyites, whom he compares to petty office workers. Ultimately, if the counterculture continued to fetishize the working-class, they were enthralled less by virtue of the portentous revolutionary role theorized for them by Marx and more by the romance of working-class nihilism. In this sense, the basic contours of the counterculture's admiration for the outlaw biker were established by the Beat generation's affinity for Neal Cassady, whom they employed as a totemic figure of American masculinity: a kind of noble savage who was completely consumed by his appetites and instincts, living without deliberation and without regard for the consequences of his actions, yet somehow bathed in innocence despite this depravity. Cassady is at the heart of the enduring paragon of the beat aesthetic, On the Road, which

Jack Kerouac famously wrote almost continuously, bingeing on amphetamines and typing on a makeshift scroll in an attempt to write as Cassady lived: in Bataille's phrasing, with sovereignty, or presentness.

Interestingly, Kerouac's presentation of Cassady ties him indelibly to the car and its dominant symbolism, which he subverts, enshrining an alternative automotive mythology in the process.

Cassady, who typically served as wheel-man on the various road-trips that comprised the On The Road narrative, was a consummate car lover, but his love was perverse; it was not the opiated love that

Gartman describes: not the love of the modern American consumer who saw in the car an amalgamation of domesticity, status, and Cold War technological imperium. Cassady's principal vocation was that of car thief, and, even when he was not literally stealing cars, he was figuratively misappropriating them, undertaking a reckless, entropic flight from domestic responsibilities, legal entanglements, and all manner of consequences. Not coincidentally, Cassady is one of the few

59 members of the Kesey-Ginsberg circle for whom Sonny Barger has glowing praise.138 Bikers effectively upped the ante on Cassady's brand of noble savagery. If Cassady distorted Americans' love affair with the car, subverting the domesticated, consumer-friendly image promoted by Detroit, bikers rejected the automobile outright in favor of its pathologically dangerous mirror image in the motorcycle. And, if Cassady was, ultimately, a familiar tragic figure, a contrary individual determined to burn himself out in spectacular symbolic defiance of his society, bikers complicated this narrative of poignant self-destruction by banding together. Like Cassady, the biker was an avatar of working-class nihilism, but the communal nature of the motorcycle club sustained certain Marxist overtones that the

Beats' idealization of Cassady eschewed.

Discomfort

The essence of the motorcycle's dangerous anti-modernism was the spectacle of the body in outlandish peril. In his study, Modernism, Technology and the Body, Tim Armstrong notes that capitalism both produces and depends upon the fragmented body and that modernity reacts to this development with ambivalence, designating the body as a fixed, uncorrupted locus of truth and authenticity but also a plastic medium, a site of transformative work in which the fragmented body is re-imagined, reconfigured, and enhanced.139 Bikers, of course, tended to emphasize the former over the latter, celebrating the body for its vulnerability and mortality: two existential truths that technology has yet to completely mitigate. And this obdurate truth of our precarious and fleeting existence is, of course, distilled in the motorcycle crash. The crash is, as Taylor and Marquez term it, the eventuality that must be forever deferred, but, in this ongoing process of deferral, it is always present. Crashes

138 Barger said “I loved Cassady, the only guy I ever met who could hold a conversation with five people simultaneously and not miss a beat. He was wired.” Barger, Hell's Angel, 128. 139 Armstrong, Modernism, Technology, 3.

60 were a taboo subject among more mainstream motorcyclists; yet, among bikers, they were discussed incessantly and even fetishized. We have seen how Lyon's informants find humor in a college student's mangling crash, and bikers hardly constrained their darkly humorous, macabre fascination with crashes to the misadventures of pitiable outsiders like a short-pants wearing college kid; they also shared stories of their own crashes and attached symbolic importance to these anguishes, which invariably served as an affirmation of their biker identity.

Indeed, crashes often played an important role in the confirmation process by which new members were incorporated into a club. George Weathern relates that, during his initiation into the

Hell's Angels, he was presented with a denim cutaway that was “stained with blood from a jaw breaking spill,”140 and Marc Watson insisted that he was not fully accepted by his informants until he survived his first crash.141 Bikers tended to think of crashing as an eventuality: something that would happen to anyone who logged enough miles on a bike and rode with sufficient verve. In this sense, crashes provided a rough index of simple dedication to riding, while continuing to ride after the physical and emotional trauma of a crash represented an additional testament of devotion: one that was particularly lauded within a subculture that prized stoic machismo and defined itself by carrying its enthusiasm for a fairly commonplace recreational hobby to a distorted, consuming extreme in which riding took precedence over family, employment, and virtually all rational considerations.142 Thus, in a typical letter to Easyriders on the subject of crashing, one British biker writes: “After crutchin' myself on my bike, I end up in a wheelchair for the rest of my natural. The bike got a smashed headlight and two bent pegs—how's that for justice? So the only kicks I have these days are getting drunk and falling out of my chair—and readin' your rag.” Here, although “Dirty Dave's” crash, which leaves him

140 Weathern, Wayward Angel, 10. 141Watson, Outlaw 43. 142 In another Easyriders piece, a biker who has just crashed is ridiculed by hospital staff when he inquires about the fate of his bike before his own condition. His snarky reply to the doctors: “'Some gratitude,' I muttered. 'Without guys like me you'd all be out of a job.'” Scherer, John. “Your Left Swingarm Assembly Is Fractured” Easyriders February 1973.

61 paralyzed, physically prevents him from continuing to ride, it only ratifies his identity as a biker. Dave continues to participate in the biker subculture by reading Easyriders and approximating the thrill of riding by drunkenly falling from his wheelchair; meanwhile, the stark understatement and morbid humor with which he addresses his own paralysis perfectly expresses the biker ethos.

The crash distilled bikers' anti-modern existential perspective with its emphasis on presentness and overtones of nihilism. Crashes were cherished as moments of revelation: encounters with a truth so intense that it overwhelmed human consciousness. George Weathern observed of the aftermath of a crash that “No matter how many sweaty nightmares you wrestled with privately, your scars were badges of class, and you embellished the episode over beers with the brothers.”143 Although Weathern concealed his terror beneath an embellished macho front, that stolidity did not necessarily represent a genuine effort at deception. Weathern manifested this stoicism for an audience of the initiated, who had known the horror of crashing intimately and appreciated his unflappable demeanor precisely as a studied performance. That Bikers feigned indifference when confronting the anguish and terror immanent in the crash, then, did not so much belie the devastating truth of crashing as it did perform the correct interpretation of that event. For bikers, the ordeal of the crash revealed the nihilistic truth of human existence: finitude, suffering, vulnerability. There was something perversely banal, then, in its horror, which was, ultimately, of a piece with the essence of the human condition. In this sense, the crash demanded to be treated with indifference. It was both terrifying and nothing special. Thus, in

Dave's stoicism, we see bikers' exaggerated machismo, but we also see this close identification of the crash with authenticity; his unflinching, even jovial, take on the cruelty of his fate marks him an an insider who sees through the rationalized artifice of culture and embraces the underlying absurdity of life. And, of course, his fondness for drunkenly careening from his wheelchair marks him as an inveterate risk taker. Having already suffered a gruesome loss, Dave is still looking for opportunities to

143 Weathern, Wayward Angel, 44.

62 take chances with his broken body and, in so doing, providing an unlikely model for the counterculture.

Crashes offered the type of intense experience that Lears's anti-moderns were seeking, and the student counterculture of the 1960's likewise articulated their understanding of authenticity and presentness by reference to the body in peril: “what's needed is a new generation of nuisances...people who have nothing material to lose but their bodies.”144 Bikers, of course, presented themselves as people with nothing to lose but their motorcycles and their bodies and a willingness to risk both of those.

Bikers placed their bodies in conspicuous peril and embraced the gruesome eventualities. In the meantime, they also went to great lengths to defile their bodies in less catastrophic ways that were, none the less, deeply unsettling to observers. Bikers and their most frantic detractors agreed wholeheartedly on one truism: bikers were filthy. The infamous Lynch report observes: “Probably the most universal common denominator in identification of Hell's Angels is their generally filthy condition. Investigating officers consistently report these people, both club members and their female associates, seem badly in need of a bath.”145 Virtually every journalistic account of outlaw bikers dwelt on their hygiene. Thompson, of course, suggested that accounts of bikers' pestilence were overstated, but he also jested that he spent ten days checking for signs of infestation after a group of Angels visited his apartment and recounted numerous instances in which his subjects boasted about their feculence, like the time when “Frenchy and the other Angels at the DePau wanted to know if I'd located them by following the smell.”146 In a similar vein, William Murray began his 1965 piece for the Saturday

Evening Post with a story that appears in almost identical form in numerous sources on bikers. When

Murray enters a biker bar accompanied by two plainclothes detectives, he approaches his first interview subjects who mistake him for another detective, initiating a dialogue about hygiene for his consumption:

144 Rubin, “And in America,” 8-9. 145 California “The Hell's Angels Motorcycle Clubs.” Qtd. Thompson, Hell's Angels, 8. 146 Thompson, Hell's Angels, 45.

63 ““What do you guys keep coming around here for?” Skip asked me. “We ain't doing nothing. Why don't you leave us alone?” “Yeah,” Rosie said. “They want to make sure you take a bath, that's all.” “I took a bath, honey,” he said. “You didn't take one once for two months.” Rosie said. “It's a good thing I got lousy sinuses.” “That was last year,” Skip said, grinning. “Now we're as clean as all you good citizens, ain't we, Rosie?” Rosie grinned.”147

As this performance indicates, bikers reveled in their foulness and the revulsion it engendered. This was one of the things that attracted them to the subculture: “I saw the motorcycle riders—filthy as pigs, you know, but they had a ball. I rode around by myself, knew nothing, figured maybe I'd get dirty. I like to be dirty. I'll go outta my way to put filth on my clothes, dirt on my pants, dirt on my face, mess up my hair and eat bugs.”148 In their own parlance, the modifier dirty was almost inseparable from the label biker, and many bikers seemed to choose dirty as a personal epithet, as in “Dirty Dave” or “Dirty

Ernie,” another Easyriders letter writer who worried, facetiously, how his fiancee would react when she learned that, in addition to being the progeny of an impoverished, incestuous rabble, he was also a biker.

Indeed, the genre of biker humor was largely preoccupied with poor hygiene, and the image of the pants that are so befouled and encrusted with putrid sediment that they stand on their own was a particularly common trope: “After a while, you could practically stand your pants up in the corner of the room.”149 Hunter Thompson actually claimed that Hell's Angels' initiates were forced to wear the same pair of jeans, which had been defiled with grease, oil, and various forms of human effluvium, for months or years, until these abominable pants essentially disintegrated. His claim has been disputed, but there is no disputing the fact that the concept of originals, or pants worn since joining the club, was

147 Murray, “Hell's Angels,” Rpt. Mammoth Bikers, 98. 148 Goodpaster, Bobby. Qtd. Lyon, Bikeriders, 82. 149 Levingston, Tobie, and Keith Zimmerman. Soul on bikes: the East Bay Dragons MC and the Black Biker Set. (Motorbooks International, 2013): 92. An Easyriders cartoon depicted the same phenomenon; the erect pants appear in a biker's filthy room—the scene also includes an overflowing toilet and evidence of infestation—while the biker lays in bed with a nude woman who opines: “Gee, before I met you I thought sex was dirty!” Cartoon. Easyriders February 1974: 6.

64 widely recognized by Angels and other bikers. Perhaps it was not an official policy that originals were ritually desecrated before being worn, or perhaps members weren't actually required to wear them, but it seems clear enough that bikers, in general, recognized what was meant by originals and privileged them, especially insofar as they were noisome and ragged. Indeed, Frank Reynolds describes a Hell's

Angels whose “original levis [were] ready to fall off if they weren't stitched with thread to hold them together.”150 Whatever the specific rules regarding originals, bikers wanted to be perceived as putrid and repugnant. And, during the early to mid 1960's, their gleeful embrace of grime seems to have been profoundly disorienting. For contemporary observers, bikers' outrageous foulness was an especially prominent element of their stylized effrontery; it seems to have drawn even more commentary and revulsion than the swastikas with which they adorned themselves or even their boasting about sexual assault.151

Hygiene is, of course, virtually synonymous with modernism.152 In the United States, in particular, it has been integral to the rhetoric of progress and even the project of empire. Indeed, as

America expanded into the Pacific at the turn-of-the-century, imperialist propaganda labeled the

Filipinos promiscuous defecators, arguing that they were manifestly backward and unfit to govern themselves because they lacked indoor plumbing.153 Bikers, if they had been more familiar with the history of American imperialism, would undoubtedly have found Promiscuous Defecators to be an ideal name for an outlaw club. They wanted citizens to recoil from them. They wanted to embody horrible primitive foulness and atavism. And, for many observers, the motorcycle itself seemed to perfectly compliment this perverse desire, resisting modernity by ensuring that riders would be defiled:

150 Reynolds, Freewheelin Frank, 29. 151Weathern claimed that bikers' conspicuous sexual perversions offended citizens far more than swastikas, and their hygiene was likely still more offensive. Weathern, Wayward Angel, 69. 152 Lupton, Ellen and J. Abbott Miller. The Bathroom, the Kitchen, and the Aesthetics of Waste: a Process of Elimination. (Cambridge: MIT List Visual Arts Center, 1992). 153 Anderson, Warwick. Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006): 128.

65 “Early mechanical contraptions, with two wheels or four, allowed the elements to brutalize occupants.

Automobiles moved swiftly to enclosed bodies. The sealed coachwork well served an age which believed that sanitation and civilization formed an inseparable union.”154 Here, Phil Schilling ties the automobile's movement toward full enclosure quite explicitly to the project of modernity and its fetishization of hygiene. The motorcycle rider, by contrast, was not protected from the elements, nor from the bike's mechanical components. Cars included a sealed engine compartment, isolating passengers from the grimy chaos of the combustion-driven engine, but motorcyclists traveled with their bodies intimately commingled with their vehicles' mechanical systems, assuring that riders, already exposed to the natural elements and the filthy debris of the road, would be further befouled by grease, oil, and exhaust.155 Harleys, in particular, were notorious for leaking oil, much of which found its way onto riders' bodies and clothes, as well as their surrounding environs. And, this eventuality was symbolically important for many bikers. Indeed, Michael Baudette, the “Bent Spokesman,” introduces his column by arguing that the motorcycle is worthy of study “because motorcycles do break down and leave glorious slicks in all sorts of neighborhoods.”156 Ultimately, he positions the motorcycle as inherently disruptive because of its tendency to spread filth where it does not belong. Thus, Baudette echoes Schilling, suggesting that the motorcycle has a quality of endemic squalor that places it fundamentally at odds with the modern world.

Indeed, if the concept of hygiene contributed to the rhetoric of civilization and progress that informed turn-of-the-century American colonialism, hygiene's influential position within the hegemonic logic of modernity reached full flourish with the rise of mass-consumption and advertising over the first half of the twentieth century. As Roland Marchand demonstrates, during the interwar

154 Schilling, Phil. The Motorcycle World. (New York: Ridge Press, 1974): 12. 155 Thompson, expressing mild skepticism about the notion that bikers necessarily emit a noxious odor, remarked: “The powerful stench they are said to exude is not so much body odor as the smell of old grease in their crusty uniforms.” Thompson, Hell's Angels, 44. 156 Baudette, Mike. “The Bent Spokesman.” The Rag 1.1 (1966):6.

66 years, a maturing advertising industry helped to reify standards of hygiene, dissecting the body into component parts, each subject to novel maladies that demanded up do date methods of specialized treatment.157 For instance, Listerine was marketed as a mouthwash beginning in 1895, but the product did not achieve sales success until advertisers concocted the notion of halitosis in the 1920s, at which point the bourgeoisie gratefully turned to Listerine to combat this new scourge.158 Bikers, by contrast, frequently boasted about their foul breath. Yet, if bikers affected a certain beastly quality, their aesthetic was not one of abject squalor, as they also expressed an affinity for a variety of bodily ornaments and flourishes, from piercings and tattoos to their signature long hair, which was sometimes died garish colors. Of course, these embellishments were, just like their general lack of hygiene, anathema to mainstream Americans of the 1960's, who identified them as lower-class or even primitive. As the body came to be imagined as a finely tuned, rationalized system, hygiene was fetishized while ornamentation was forsworn, especially for men. During the 1950’s and 60’s, bourgeois men were expected to adhere to a hygienic, neutered, aesthetic of restraint.159 Of course, this ascetic standard for personal presentation is typically associated with the oppressive conformity of postwar suburban consumer culture and the paranoid specter of McCarthyism; yet, there is also a definite affinity between the Ward

Cleaver aesthetic and the ideals of progressive high-Modernist design and architecture. Indeed, throughout his seminal manifesto from 1927, Towards a New Architecture, the notoriously fastidious

Le Corbusier repeatedly conflates his desire for austerity and euclidean perfection in architecture with his neurotic concern for bodily cleanliness and decorum.

And, bikers themselves did not defy modern hygiene norms simply by eschewing personal

157 Marchand, Roland. Advertising the American Dream: Making way for Modernity, 1920-1940. (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1985): 17-20. 158Thus, James Twitchell writes that “Listerine did not make mouthwash as much as it made halitosis.” Twitchell, James B. Twenty Ads that Shook the World: the Century's Most Groundbreaking Advertising and how it Changed Us All. (New York: Broadway Books, 2000): 60. 159 McCracken, Grant. Big Hair: A Journey into the Transformation of Self. (The Overlook Press; Woodstock, NY, 1995) 164.

67 grooming; they were actually recognized and reviled specifically for their pervasive disregard for modern residential architecture and its overt attempts to proscribe behavior in a manner consistent with consumption-driven domesticity and its escalating sanitary standards. The corruption of domestic space by the intrusion of motorcycles and their particular grime was another enduring trope of literature by and about bikers, as we see when Terry Orendorff chortles recounting that he once built a motorcycle in his bedroom and simply tore the wall down when the fully assembled vehicle proved difficult to maneuver through the doorway. Indeed, bikers were always observed storing motorcycles in their living spaces and, especially, befouling their sanitary fixtures by employing them to create oil baths in which they could soak engine parts.160 As we've seen, plumbing symbolized the modern faith that improved technology would provision all Americans with domestic luxury, and it did so while extending and elaborating the Victorian fantasy of separate spheres.161 The home, in this logic, was supposed to be a place of retreat and purification, detached from the rigors and moral ambiguities of the commercial world and unblemished by the mire of productive labor: the medley of tools, raw materials, animals, and animal waste that characterized the traditional farmhouse, where entire families performed their labor in the same space in which they lived. Carolyn Marvin registers the implications of separate spheres rhetoric for domestic architecture by describing the typical turn of the century American's ideal home as “a romantic fantasy of a feudal fortress against the world.”162 By the postwar years, suburbanization and its concomitant domestic technologies provided a democratization and concretization of this separate spheres fantasy: every split-level ranch house its own ersatz castle, connected to the larger world and sustained only by the thread of consumption, free of polluting labor and packed with space-age technologies to maintain its preternatural cleanliness.163

160 Watson, “Outlaw Motorcyclists,” 36. 161 Cowan, Ruth Schwartz. More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave. (New York: Basic Books, 1983). 162 Marvin, Carolyn. When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking about Electric Communications in the late Nineteenth Century. (New York: Oxford University Press): 78. 163 Cowan, More Work

68 Of course, these same suburbanites went to great lengths to take their cars inside their tract castles, introducing the architectural anomaly of the attached garage, which was soon joined by the integral garage. With the introduction of these architecturally contiguous garages, the ultimate consumer product of the era was brought into the intimate embrace of the domestic sphere. Yet, this was not a promiscuous intimacy; the garage was part of the suburban home, but it was a discrete part of a fully rationalized whole, unambiguously fixing the status of the car even as it was elevated. The car's ensconcement within the suburban home, then, represented a managed intimacy, and the contradiction of the attached or integral garage was quickly normalized. But, when it came to the car's fractious alter- ego, the motorcycle, storing a vehicle inside a home was manifestly absurd and faintly profane. “They worship their motorcycles. They take them inside their homes at night.”164 Here, in a police officer's nonplussed rumination on bikers' habits, there is an unmistakable suggestion of perversion, as the officer continues: “They sleep on grease-caked beds.”165 Modern culture promoted a unified aesthetic of purity and control that embraced the entire spectrum of design, from architecture to personal appearance, and bikers pioneered a comprehensive understanding of poor hygiene as an anti-modern statement: a posture that became, of course, a defining attribute of the hippie subculture. Indeed, the epithet dirty became as indelibly linked to the hippie, as it already had been to the biker.

If bikers made a virtue of filth, they also embraced discomfort. Enclosed cars protected passengers from wind, rain, and cold, especially as heaters became standard equipment, beginning in the 1930's. Air-conditioning was a popular feature by 1960 when the average American household owned more than one car and used cars could be purchased on the flourishing secondary market for modest sums.166 Bikers, then, struck many car drivers as simply perverse. They got wet in the rain, and they shivered in the cold. And that was the point. Courting discomfort was an extension of their

164 Qtd. Thompson, Hell's Angels, 85. 165 Ibid. 166Marchand observes that as early as 1927, advertisers were working to normalize the two-car family. Marchand, Advertising, 161.

69 articulation of presentness: their insistence on encountering life without anticipation or preparation.

The eventuality of rain was not their concern. Preparedness was anathema to them. The club run, which was the definitive ritual of the subculture, was, essentially, a camping trip, but bikers did not pack camping equipment; they did not have tents, and they eschewed even sleeping bags: “It was considered uncool to travel with a warm jacket or a sleeping bag. We crashed where we fell.”167 To some degree, this posture was consistent with bikers' genius for making a virtue of necessity. Most of them did not, of course, have money for camping equipment, so they exaggerated and stylized that deficiency. The idea of sleeping where they fell became an integral part of their aesthetic. Indeed, Peter Coyote, another bridge figure between the counterculture and the world of the outlaw biker, who became a founding member of the Diggers' anarchist theater collective around the same time that he lived with Pete Knell, then-president of the Hell's Angels San Francisco chapter, adopted that phrase as the title of his 1999 memoir, which also serves as a history of the counterculture.168

Thus, Frank Reynolds described the outrageous figure of “Raunchy Johnny,” who carried a cane and wore a top-hat, reporting, with palpable relish: “he had been sleeping in the gutter on purpose.”169

His emphasis indicated that he anticipated an incredulous response but also that bikers were invested in cultivating the impression that they were impervious to pain and indifferent to their material environment. The same performativity is apparent in Barger's reference to sleeping bags looking uncool, which is elaborated by George Weathern: “It was considered uncool to travel with a warm jacket or a sleeping bag. We crashed where we fell. We used to drop reds after partying all night, then pass out and fall asleep on the ground.”170 Bikers did not actually enjoy sleeping exposed on the ground any more than anyone else, but they were deeply invested in the symbolism of sleeping where they fell:

167 Barger, Hell's Angels, 73. 168 The cover of the 2009 edition features a vintage photo of Coyote on a chopper. Coyote, Peter. Sleeping Where I Fall: a Chronicle. (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1998). 169 Reynolds, Freewheelin Frank, 7. 170 Weathern, Wayward Angel, 73.

70 living without provision. If sleeping on the cold ground seemed uninviting when they arrived in the woods without a sleeping bag, maybe they would binge on amphetamines and not sleep at all, or maybe they would down some barbiturates and sleep serenely regardless of the conditions; the key to the ethos was in refusing to plan ahead. Hungry, hung-over, strung-out, riding a brutalizing, antiquated bike with no suspension, and exposed to the elements: that's how bikers preferred to confront life. When George

Weathern relished “basking in the condescending or mortified stares of prim women locked into marshmallow lives with marshmallow husbands,”171 his derogatory use of marshmallow captured bikers' disdain for comfort; marshmallow men are soft, domesticated men who live soft, comfortable lives. And, like their anti-modern forebears, the counterculture also adopted a suspicious, even hostile attitude toward comfort.

MASCULINITY

Thus, the bikers' brand of risk-taking aimed to cultivate a state of anti-modern presentness, and it also expressed bikers' understanding of masculinity, which is the quality that Marc Watson describes as their dominant value: the one that subsumes all of their anti-modern postures. In Manliness and

Civilization, Gail Bederman identifies a critical shift in the way that modern Americans constructed male identity. For her, during the early decades of the twentieth century, Victorian notions of manliness, which privileged stoic personal restraint and unfaltering commitment to social duty, yielded to a new understanding that assimilated popular interpretations of Darwinism and lauded men who displayed primitive aggressiveness and physical dominance: masculinity. Bederman sees this transition as, in large part, an elite appropriation of working-class and minority gender constructions that underwrote projects as diverse as Teddy Roosevelt’s imperial ventures and G. Stanley Hall’s pedagogical

171 Ibid, 111.

71 innovations, which identified educational value in young boys' expression of their supposedly innate savagery.172 Yet, while Bederman terminates her analysis in 1917, the contest that she outlines between divergent ideals of appropriate male temperament, with its subtext of race and class conflict, has never been resolved; our understanding of masculinity continues to exist within a dialectic that incorporates conflicting extremes of controlled social rectitude and bestial license, and the figure of the biker has been central to this ongoing popular discourse, serving as an embodiment of the latter extreme. As Ted

Owenby points out in his work Subduing Satan, for men like Teddy Roosevelt and G. Stanley Hall, whom Bederman cites as paragons of modern masculinity, there remained distinct limits to the redeeming effects of male aggression and profligacy; these genteel reformers ultimately encouraged men to embrace their brutish natures within strictly controlled settings, like competitive sports.173 Thus, while Roosevelt and Hall made concessions to working-class interpretations of masculinity that constituted a true revolution within elite Victorian culture, bourgeois Americans hardly abandoned their puritanical valorization of self-restraint, and, particularly during the 1950’s, bourgeois ideals of family- centered domesticated masculinity closely resembled Victorian notions of manliness.

Bikers, for their part, rejected any notion of contained or therapeutic aggression. Willis, noting a conspicuous disdain for sports among his subjects, noted: “They would not engage in any safe channeling of aggressive feelings. That would have been dishonest. Masculinity and aggression were mixed with normal life.” 174 American bikers also had no interest in competitive sport, and they preferred to display their unchanneled aggression through ecstatic sexual violence, flouting the bourgeoisie's lingering commitment to the peculiar virtues of manliness with its demure sense of chivalry. According to Bederman, a revised attitude toward sexual aggression was integral to the paradigm shift between manliness and masculinity. If rape had been an unpardonable lapse of manly

172 Bederman, Manliness and Civilization 173 Owenby, Ted. Subduing Satan: Religion, Recreation, and Manhood in the Rural South 1865-1920. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Pres, 1990). 174 Willis, Profane Culture, 29.

72 honor, the latent potential to commit rape actually became a constituent element of modern masculinity: “modern gender ideologies…depicted the capacity for rape and violence as an admirable and definitive part of masculine identity.”175 Of course, bourgeois men were not supposed to exercise this capacity. Thus, if their formulation of masculinity gestured toward unencumbered male wantonness, it actually inscribed an intensified emphasis on self-discipline; after all, the manly

Victorian male was not imagined to have underlying violent sexual urges that required constraint. For their part, bikers embraced the notion that men were innately disposed to sexual domination and brutality, but they utterly rejected any thought of restraint, insisting on the wholly unfettered expression of their masculinity, such that rape ultimately became a defining attribute of the subculture and the very marrow of the biker phenomenon in popular media. It was a sensationalistic rape case that led to the

Lynch Report and launched the cycle of media fascination that brought the Angels and the outlaw biker to national prominence in the late 1960's, and rape scenes became the lifeblood of the biker exploitation film genre of that era.176

In his memoir, Frank Reynolds spent several pages describing in pornographic detail a rape that he committed at a biker party. The tone is not confessional. It is exultant and provoking; he clearly savors the memory and the opportunity to incite his readers, inviting them to be titillated by passages that echo “Penthouse Letters” while also underscoring the violence of his act: “With three steps I had her inside a dark bedroom squealing and clawing and pawing at my face. I told her—Wonderful, claw!

Scratch! Scream! It is not going to do you any good for I am going to rape you.”177 Ultimately,

Reynolds wanted his readers to identify him as a remorseless rapist, and he provided two mutually reinforcing justifications for his actions that reflect the foundational logic of biker philosophy. First, he repeated a monologue that he delivered to the traumatized young woman: “There's going to be lots of

175 Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 226. 176 Osgerby, Biker, 38. 177 Reynolds, Freewheelin Frank, 117.

73 times that you'll get left alone so you better get used to it now, for this earth is Hell and you live on it.”178 This nihilistic flourish is the essence of the biker sensibility, which views civility as a hypocritical sham and brutality and violence as the warrants of authenticity. Second, Reynolds painted a contemptible picture of the party's other male guests. Emerging from the room where he had committed his assault, Reynolds surveyed the stragglers who remained at the party and observed them “still kissing the neck of the little blond girl, trying hard to be men but not getting down to it.”179 Among these pitiable figures is the young man whose date Reynolds has just abused, sitting “with his head bowed down, not knowing whether to snivel or go in the bedroom and pick up what was left.”180 This rationale essentially ignores the victim, who is reduced to an object that Frank has the right to possess because other claimants are timid non-men, and it builds on Reynolds's first justification, resting on the assumption that civility is mere pretense. According to Reynolds, the woman's date declined to violate her only because he lacked the nerve: the authenticity.

Of course, Reynolds's position is a quintessentially modern one that is consistent with the rise of masculinity and the eclipse of manliness. Modernity, with its rigid notion of linear time and its fetishization of the future, necessarily secreted a contrary impulse. It was, from its inception, an ambivalent movement. By self-consciously plunging into the future, modernity offered the imagined past as an artifact, and it was this imagined past that Beard identified as a corrective to the over- civilized, unduly rationalized, and relentlessly future-oriented world that he encountered unfolding around him. And, while Beard's specific theories, pertaining to neurasthenia and recapitulation, did not endure, his overarching line of reasoning remained influential, especially with the postwar rise of evolutionary psychology, which underscored the governing role of natural instincts in the conduct of modern humans while generally extending the enlightenment's understanding of nature as

178 Ibid, 118. 179 Ibid. 180 Ibid.

74 unambiguously violent and predatory.181 Thus, when feminist critics of the 1960's and 70's turned their attention to the subject of rape, the first myth that they attempted to redress was this quintessentially modern one: the notion that rape is the unfortunate consequence of a natural male instinct improperly restrained.182 As we have seen, the modern perspective forbids the act of rape but essentially condones and even valorizes the underlying desire to rape, casting the crime as a failure to harness inherently masculine primitive urges toward both sexual gratification and domination. Feminist scholars, then, worked to to impugn the masculinity of rapists, defining them as insecure and anxious losers who were unduly threatened by women, especially in the context of insurgent feminism.183

Ultimately, these efforts succeeded, at least insofar as there has been a radical shift in our thinking about sexual assault over the past forty years, with the feminist aphorism “rape is about power, not sex ” emerging as a new liberal consensus. This development might lead contemporary observers to identify bikers' sexual attitudes as preposterously atavistic or deviant, but their posture merely exaggerated and sometimes parodied what remained, through the 1960's, the normative ideal of masculine sexuality. Indeed, Thompson, observing that the Angels compelled a lurid fascination among much of the public, called their appeal “psychic masturbation” and suggested that “the streets of every city are thronged with men who would pay all the money they could get their hands on to be transformed—even for a day—into hairy, hard-fisted brutes who walk over cops, extort free drinks from terrified bartenders and thunder out of town on big motorcycles after raping the banker's daughter.”184 Here, Thompson clearly presents bikers' outrageous boasting about their affinity for sexual assault as an extension of conventional male fantasy. His underlying assumption, that domesticated, middle-class men harbor a repressed desire to commit rape, represents the core of modern rape mythology, although his reference to the banker's daughter suggests that this drive is not

181 Harraway, Donna Jeanne. Simians Cyborgs and Women: the Reinvention of Nature. (New York: Routledge, 1991). 182 Groth, A. Nicholas. Men Who Rape: the Psychology of the Offender. (New York: Plenum, 1979): 2. 183 Ellis, Lee. Theories of Rape: Inquiries into the Causes of Sexual Aggression. (New York: Hemisphere, 1989). 184 Thompson, Hell's Angels, 253.

75 necessarily biological in origin, hinting, perhaps, at a political motivation for sexual assault that is consistent with feminist reinterpretations of the crime. Indeed, Joanna Bourke points out the irony that the feminist position echoes Black Panther and celebrated prison memoirist Eldridge Cleaver's inflammatory insistence on rape as a political weapon. With Thompson's psychic masturbators, who fantasize rape as a form of self-aggrandizement and social revenge, the politics of rape fantasy are not racial, as in Cleaver's case, nor are they precisely anti-feminist; once again, the underlying political orientation seems to be anti-modern, with the banker embodying the modern credit economy and its matrix of social control. Thus, if Thompson, perhaps, moves away from biologically deterministic assessments of rape, incorporating elements of an emerging feminist critique that casts rapists as ineffectual non-men, he continues to position rape as an anti-modern impulse, and he continues, like

Bederman's reformers, to ambivalently locate rape at the core of masculinity.

In articulating this masturbatory theory, Thompson was commenting, in particular, on a specific type of domesticated bourgeois male. He did not seem to be thinking about the counterculture, but they were certainly implicated in these same fantasies of male license, as was Thompson himself. The counterculture shared bikers' understanding of modernism as essentially passive and feminine, conceiving alienation as a form of domestication.185 Indeed, the New Left and the counterculture have been harshly criticized for their misogyny. Feminists quickly observed that women within leftist organizations were typically consigned to administrative roles, while the era's ballyhooed free-love doctrine often redounded to increased male sexual access with none of the mutual obligations of chivalry and many of the same censorious attitudes toward female sexual expression.186 These criticisms were indisputable, but they tended to treat leftist misogyny as an anachronism; in the parlance of the time, it was a hang-up that male radicals had failed to correct. Yet, in many ways, the misogyny of the New Left and the counterculture was not a timeless, primeval legacy but something 185 Rossinow, Authenticity, 17. 186 Ibid , 264-269.

76 they were actively cultivating as part of an effort to employ masculinity as an anti-modern political tool. Indeed, in the pages of The Barb, a contributor identified as “David Super-Straight” deployed spectacular misogyny as an unambiguous extension of the counterculture's politics of authenticity with its hostility toward the charade of middle-class affluence: “Women know instinctively that they are inferior to, and dependent upon men and hate weakness in a man above all else. This is one reason that males and females get along so poorly, because the males, products of Suburbia, are immature little boys.”187 Poorly actually seems a gross understatement for the way many American men got along with women during the 1960's. Scholars who study the subject of rape are reluctant to make historical generalizations about its incidence because the very definition of the term has been highly variable over time and because statistics on that crime have been particularly fragmentary, given the the social taboos that inhibit many victims from reporting attacks, as well as the endemic misogyny of the law enforcement community, which has likewise tended to suppress reporting. Yet, Bourke notes that studies consistently find a dramatic spike in the instance of rape during the 1960's.188 The counterculture generation continued to see rape as an extension of natural male sexual desire, and we can see a curious corollary of this assumption in Hap Stewart's letter to The Barb: “During this particular afternoon in the park I talked with a number of girls who, almost uniformly, seemed to believe that the Hell's Angels are beautiful people. Well, I don't know all the hangups these girls have although I can perceive some of the more apparent misplaced fantasies, but I do know the Hell's Angels are not beautiful people.”189 Given the Angels' reputation, Stewart's reference to misplaced fantasies certainly seems to invoke rape. Of course, part and parcel of the modern idea that men were naturally inclined toward sexual domination was the notion that women were particularly attracted to aggressive males and secretly desirous of sexual violation. Within this logic, a woman's refusal to participate in

187 Super-Straight, David. “The Violent Generation: Third in a Series” The Berkeley Barb August 15-21 (1969): 9. 188 Bourke, Joanna. Rape: Sex, Violence History. (Emeryville, CA: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2007). 189 Stewart, “Beautiful Angels,” 4.

77 sex was readily interpreted as sham social conditioning that did not reflect her own true, animalistic desire.

Authentic Misogyny

Bikers' avowed affinity for rape was part of their particular articulation of masculinity, which exaggerated a quintessentially modern formulation of men as inveterately primitive beasts; it was not, fundamentally, an anti-feminist posture. Indeed, while bikers were often profoundly misogynistic, their misogyny did not typically appear in the context of patriarchy; instead, it was aligned with an anti- modern ethos that, first and foremost, disdained family and civil society. Patriarchy certainly dominates and degrades women, but its ability to function as a hegemonic ideology stems in part from its voluble insistence that it protects and honors them; patriarchy and chivalry are two sides of the same coin.

Bikers gleefully refused to be chivalrous. The pioneering biker exploitation film The Wild Angels includes a scene in which Peter Fonda's Heavenly Blues character is completely indifferent to his girlfriend's attempts to make him jealous by flirting with another man, and Marc Watson corroborates the film's depiction of bikers' apathetic attitude toward their female companions, observing that his subjects pointedly refused to fight over women.190 In doing so, they underscored their own abjection, and they also resisted patriarchy's construction of women as valuable objects. When bikers objectified women, they did so in a gruesome, sadistic, and wholly immoderate manner, flouting chivalry and effectively denying that the objectified woman had any value.

For instance, the Hell's Angel “Smackey Jack” boasted to Hunter Thompson that he carried a pair of rusty pliers with him at all times with which he removed women's teeth. Ultimately, symbolically enacting their own wanton brutality and defiance of patriarchal norms seemed to be a

190 Watson, “Outlaw Motorcyclists,” 44.

78 more important vector of meaning for bikers than antagonism toward women per se. Their antagonism was not instrumental; it did not, generally, aim to proscribe women's behavior. “Smackey Jack” does not claim to remove the teeth of women who have committed any particular transgression. He is not trying to teach anyone a lesson, except, perhaps the nihilistic one that Frank Reynolds impressed on a woman he had sexually assaulted: “This earth is hell and you live on it.”191 While patriarchy aims to control women, bikers seemed more inclined to avoid them, acknowledging the mixture of fear and disdain they felt toward the opposite sex while fantasizing about alternative sources of companionship:

“For I deeply fear women and, in turn my love is for a mechanical motorcycle that cannot be compared to any other motorcycle or any other mechanical object.”192 This trope, offering the motorcycle as a substitute for a romantic lover, was utterly common among bikers, who also fantasized, less poetically and more polysemously, about other replacements for the fairer sex: “Hell, if I could find a man with a pussy, I wouldn't fuck with women. I don't like them.”193 This is the kind of stark antipathy and radically dehumanizing objectification—woman as orifice—that distinguished bikers' misogyny from that of patriarchy.

Of course, as we see have seen, this ferociously misogynistic attitude was dramatized and stylized in biker exploitation films, and Martin Rubin's work on the subject actually employs the term authentic misogyny to describe a particular strain of hostility toward women that was not part of a backlash against feminism but an extension of what he calls the anti-romantic pose of these films.194

Indeed, in The Wild Angels, Blues does not just refuse to express jealousy when his girlfriend flirts with another man; later, when his club-mate's funeral devolves into an epic debauch, he coerces her to have sex with another man, while other club members rape the girlfriend of their departed brother. Thus, by anti-romantic, Rubin means almost ecstatically antithetical to chivalry: deliriously debased and

191 Reynolds, Freewheelin Frank, 118. 192 Ibid, 93. 193 Watson, “Outlaw Motorcyclists,” 42. 194 Rubin, M. " Make Love Make War: Cultural Confusion and the Biker Film Cycle." Film History. 6.3 (1994): 355-381.

79 repugnant. Meanwhile, Alison Perlman observes of these films that, in contrast to the Westerns on which they were typically based, women do not figure in biker movies as a civilizing, domesticating influence; they are simply silenced.195 It is patriarchy, especially operating within the paradigm of separate spheres, that defines women as civilizing agents. This logic romanticizes women as nurturers and empowers them as cultural guardians of sorts, responsible for education and for tempering the fierce competitiveness and venality of the modern market economy and its environs with countervailing moral uplift and acculturation. This humanizing renewal, of course, can only be provided within the sanctuary of the home, and women who resisted this domestic role or trespassed in the male sphere of commerce and politics were punished with what Rubin might term synthetic misogyny: instrumental misogyny that aims to confine women to a rhetorically exalted but materially secondary domesticated status.

In sharp contrast, bikers typically seemed to hate women precisely to the extent that they did embrace domesticity and asked bikers to do the same. Terry Orendorff's biographer, Randall Ball, described Orendorff's first wife, Tekla, as “the consummate evil nester” who “wanted everything— control, a comfortable home, and a secure family.”196 Tekla did not want autonomy or a job; she wanted a stable home and a supportive husband in the patriarchal mold, and Orendorff found this demand far more threatening than her outbursts of violent self-assertion, like the time she “came unglued and shot up his car with a 30-30 Winchester carbine.”197 That particular episode of gun-play was a response to

Terry's demurring attitude toward marriage, and Terry found the incident amusing and endearing; he did marry Tekla, although their marriage was contentious and short-lived. Reflecting on his ex-wife years later, Terry had a clear affinity for Tekla's least domestic attributes, affectionately calling her a wild woman as he sentimentally recounted a brawl that she and her mother initiated with another

195 Perlman, Allison. "The Brief Ride of the Biker Movie." International Journal of Motorcycle Studies 3,1 (2007). Web. 196 Ball, Terry the Tramp, 54. 197 Ibid, 47.

80 girlfriend of his and generally relishing her violent temper and her imposing physical stature. While

Terry's account of the incident did invoke female stereotypes by imputing hysterical jealousy to Tekla and her mother, Terry underscored Tekla's prowess as a brawler in a way that typical misogynist imaginings of cat-fights do not. Ultimately, what he continued to despise in her seemed to be the elements of her personality that were most consistent with patriarchally defined femininity.

Thus, bikers' hostility toward women was an extension of their hostility toward modernity.

Modernity can be figured as a male enterprise by emphasizing its Faustian impulse toward a technologized separation from the natural world, which is submitted to rationalized control and systematic exploitation, but it is also frequently gendered female; extending the logic of separate spheres that defines civilization as a beneficent process of feminizing domestication, modernity can be presented as comprehensive matrix of safety, security, and material abundance. Certainly, this is how bikers viewed the modern world: a feminized web of safety-oriented rules and regulations designed to sustain consumption. For bikers, the modern world was mere feminine artifice, an attitude that was reflected, in particular, in their hostility to language. Bikers tended to figure themselves as virtually illiterate, and they characterized their speech as not merely ineloquent but virtually incomprehensible and inherently obscene. The Easyriders article “THE VIDEOT,” for instance, employs this trope of the pathologically vulgar biker to express bikers' gendered concept of authenticity, which defines their anti- modern brand of misogyny. In the story, our protagonist, Dutch, arrives at a biker party and approaches a series of women who seem receptive to his advances but rebuff him because his approach is too literal: because he is unable to play their language games or to dissemble his bestial desires. First, he is dismissed by a “blonde amazon whose daddy bought her occasional 'Vettes and frequent abortions” for his lewd inquiry “How's your cunt.”198 The figure of the rich girl whose father finances her routine abortions is a cliché and an obvious misogynist flourish, but, it is important to note that—in keeping

198 Skull. “The Videot” Easyriders. December 1977: 68.

81 with Easyriders's editorial posture199—the author does not seem offended by abortions per se; rather, it is the woman's pretense and hypocrisy that are galling. For the author, anyone who is comfortable with the grotesquerie of the abortion procedure should be comfortable discussing sex with frank vulgarity.

The amazon, then, is a hypocrite, and we are meant to see Dutch's obscenity as ingenuous and authentic; he is not trying to be malicious or censorious but simply trying to communicate as honestly and directly as possible.

Indeed, we are meant to believe that Dutch is incapable of guile. Dutch's second encounter with a would-be sexual partner underscores the way that, from the biker's perspective, honesty becomes a pathology in a feminized culture in which language masquerades as reality. This woman seems receptive to his invitation to take her home and asks what he has in mind, which, of course, elicits a consummately blunt reply: “Well, I thought we might split a bottle of Paisano and a few bones—then we could fuck like a pair of minks on Spanish fly.” Again, the woman does not interpret his reply to be demeaning or hostile, and she is almost apologetic as she dismisses his advance: “I like you Dutchy, but I don't fuck. I make love.” At this point a befuddled Dutch returns home, where he turns on the television and and imagines himself—he has ingested a panoply of drugs over the course of the evening

—being interrogated by Johnny Carson and his guests. A plaintive Dutch appeals to Carson: “Well, look man, these chicks want to play word games and fuck with my head.”200 The author's repeated references to 'language games' are colloquial, meant simply to describe the use of language to tease and taunt; however, Wittgenstein's use of the term haunts discourse on bikers' speech. Willis, for instance, dissects examples of his bike boys' conversation and concludes: “The concreteness and lack of abstraction of the motor-bike boys was clearly evident in their use of language. Opinions were

199 The magazine consistently endorsed abortion, as in Don Sharp's “Fuck It” piece, in which he complains of politicians: “a hell of a lot more are just dying to put a storm trooper in every digs to prevent people from looking at pictures of tits or getting abortions.” Sharp, Don. “Fuck It!” Easyriders May 1975: 50. 200 Skull, “The Videot,” 78-79.

82 characteristically expressed in concrete images drawn from their experience of everyday life.”201 For him, bikers' speech has all of the qualities of a language game; it is a simplified subset of linguistic expression grounded in immediate experience. Wittgenstein, of course, was not concerned with achieving a greater coherence between language and reality, and his work actually anticipated the theorizing of Derrida and others who ultimately suggested that language constitutes its own ephemeral and contingent reality. Bikers, however, were avid objectivists who felt that their bluntly obscene and austere language approached perfect congruence with reality, which they perceived in starkly nihilistic terms. And Willis seemingly agrees: “The point here is to show not the limitation, but the hardness and substantiality of the motor-bike boys' language.”202 Certainly, Willis affirms bikers' idealized accounts of their own earthy and unpretentious language.

Of course, there is an undeniably gendered subtext to Willis's valorization of bikers' hard language; in celebrating the bike boys' vigorous use of swearing, he observes: “It held the ability to fill their verbal range with a force of meaning and muscularity of style that made for a distinctive and incontrovertible expression of feelings impossible to other, more polite, modes of discourse.”203 Willis, then, engages in a romanticization of bikers' masculine anti-modernism with all of its misogynist overtones. He does not explicitly endorse bikers' hostility toward women, but, for bikers, their rough language was inseparable from their anti-modern expression of authentic misogyny. When Johnny

Carson asks Dutch why he has returned from “Bucketass's” party alone, Carson's guest, Farrah

Fawcett-Majors, won't abide Dutch's pitiful excuse: “You had it made and you fucked up because you let these people play games. Get in touch with your anger, Dutchy. If you see what you want, you know how to go about getting it.”204 The moral of the story, then, is a familiar one: that sexual violence is a form of authenticity and that men and women are nothing but libidinous animals, as we see illustrated

201 Willis, Profane Culture, 40. 202 Ibid, 42. 203 Ibid, 43. 204 Skull, “The Videot,” 79.

83 when Fawcett-Majors begins fondling herself, initiating a threesome with Carson and McMahon.205

Thus, Fawcett-Majors, as portrayed within the story, seems to share bikers' wanton sexual appetites, and, indeed, an important part of bikers' authentic misogyny was their peculiar assault on the sexual double-standard. During the early 1960's, liberal progressives began to question the hypocrisy of patriarchy's insistence on female chastity within mainstream discourse. Again, this tension played out quite clearly on the silver screen with Splendor in the Grass, from 1961, offering the preeminent example of this bourgeois critique. The film follows two high school sweethearts whose mutual sexual desire is denied by her social obligations with disastrous results. Meanwhile, if the bourgeoisie were beginning to suggest that the sexual double standard thwarted the expression of true love, disrupting socially desirable channels of courtship, bikers offered their own nihilistic critique of that spurious standard. Instead of erasing the false dichotomy between good girls and whores by suggesting that good girls also enjoy sexual pleasure, bikers insisted that all women are whores and that all sex is bestial and depraved.

Violence

Bikers directed sexual violence at women while pointedly refusing to fight over them, but they did find plenty of other reasons for fighting, which remained central to their identity. Terry Orendorff said of his initiation period with the Vagos: “For two years, I rode around with broken hands.”206

Without chivalry to structure their aggression, however, bikers' affinity for violence had a peculiarly capricious quality that observers found unsettling; their use of violence seemed essentially undirected,

205 The article, from 1977, is a later example of the bikers' anti-romantic nihilism and does include an element of conventional anti-feminist misogyny when it imagines Helen Reddy, another of Carson's guests, engaging in a sex act with a hyena. 206 Ball, Terry the Tramp, 61.

84 even casual: “This casual acceptance of bloodletting is a key to the terror they inspire in the squares.”207

Ultimately, Thompson was disillusioned by his experience with the Angels, which famously ended in violence, but throughout his strange and terrible saga, he was manifestly tantalized by their nonchalant belligerence. Indeed, after noting the terror that they inspire in the squares, he continued: “Even a small, inept street-fighter has a tremendous advantage over the average middle-class American, who hasn't had a fight since puberty.”208 Here we see Thompson's own well-documented fetish for masculine violence, as he offers the Angels as a bracing counterpoint to the timidity of the domesticated bourgeois male, who is the target of so much of Thompson's animus within The Hell's Angels and throughout his career.209 Once again, Thompson's passages on violence perhaps reveal even more about himself than they do bikers, but his assessment of the bikers' approach to violence is astute; casualness was the essence of their attitude: “I learned that a fight was just a fight, and not to carry a grudge.”210 Here,

Orendorff was reflecting specifically on intra-club fights, which were extremely common. Bikers fought each other almost as often as they fought outsiders. Fighting was officially against the rules at

Hell's Angels' club meetings, but many members were undeterred: “A five-dollar fine hardly discouraged fighting among members. For instance, one veteran slapped down five dollars at the beginning of each meeting for several weeks, then whaled on a new initiate until the battered rookie dropped out.”211 Weathern did not offer a reason for the veteran member's antagonism. He and his club mates seem to have been wholly incurious about any motivation behind the assaults, coolly accepting them as a mad-cap spectacle.

Within the logic of liberalism, violence is a last resort; it is something that is employed only in

207 Thompson, Hell's Angels, 93. 208 Ibid. 209 At a later point in his narrative, Thompson included a digression in which he mocked then-trendy Karate enthusiasts, who had recently been introduced to the discipline by Bruce Lee, suggesting that these bourgeois trendsters were no better able to challenge an authentic street-brawler than the middle-class wimp who hadn't fought since puberty. 210 Ball, Terry the Tramp, 61. 211 Weathern, Wayward Angel, 95.

85 defense of a worthy cause and only when all other options have been exhausted. William Meacham begins his article for The Barb, “On Revolutionary Violence,” with a classic articulation of this position: “First of all, let's be clear on one thing: we don't dig violence. We know that it is an evil, that the world would be far better without it. We know that violence does harm to him who commits it as well as his victim. We have come to see violence as necessary only reluctantly and hesitantly, and with heavy hearts.”212 In the outlaw biker, observers witnessed a rather different relationship to violence. In his poem “To the Angels,” penned in the wake of the infamous VDC march of October 16, 1965 , as protesters prepared to march through Berkeley and Oakland once again, Allen Ginsberg notes that “the

Fearheads around the VDC public meetings believe the Image of Angels as 'They like to bust people up for kicks.'”213 Ginsberg also provides more instrumental theories for the Angels' previous attack, most of them revolving around some tacit alliance with the Oakland cops. But the Fearheads were basically correct; violence for the Hell's Angels was essentially recreational: “Hell's Angels love to fistfight.

There's never a shortage of drunks or foolhardy motherfuckers willing to take us on, and a lot of times we'll take on each other.”214 Indeed, the Angels' initial attack on VDC marchers in the Fall of 1965 was a spontaneous act carried out by a handful of members. The club had reactionary political leanings, and they were well aware that Ginsberg and the VDC cohort were eager to recruit them to their leftist movement,215 which spurred their overweening contrarianism; but, at root, the marchers were creating a public spectacle, and the Angels wanted to make it their own. Violence was how they achieved that end; it was how they expressed themselves. For them, violence didn't have to mean anything.

This offhand facility with violence was another instance in which bikers exaggerated and parodied working-class values. Sonny Barger makes this point concisely, casting the Angels'

212 Meacham, Wm. “On Revolutionary Violence.” The Rag 3,21 July 10 (1969): 10. 213 Ginsberg, Allen. “To the Angels.” The Berkeley Barb 1,15 November 19 (1965): 2. 214 Barger, Hell's Angel, 87. 215 Ginsberg's poem “To The Angels” chastised them for the October attack but clearly existed within the context of an ongoing effort toward rapprochement.

86 enthusiasm for brawling and apparent indifference to motive as a reflection of their working-class community and its mores: “I fought everybody, younger, older, tougher, whatever. When a new kid came to school, we fought to see who was the toughest. This was part of growing up in East Oakland.

We even fought our friends.”216 However, the Angels did distinguish themselves from the combative denizens of working-class saloon society, combining ebullient aggression and communal identity in a highly particular and unnerving way. What really set them apart from any other clique of men who enjoyed recreational violence was their insistence that a fellow Angel was always right and their total disdain for the concept of fair fighting: “Of all their habits and predilections that society finds alarming, the outlaw's disregard for the time-honored concept of an eye for an eye is the one that frightens people most.”217 It is commonplace to say that violence is irrational, but most combatants maintain a strong sense of their specific injury and the righteousness of their complaint. Even within the context of recreational barroom violence, there is a protocol to instigating a fight, and people who do not want to fight are not usually compelled to do so if they are willing to acquiesce verbally. None of this was true when it came to the Hell's Angels: “We cared as little about clear-cut motives as fight preliminaries.”218

Thus, Frank Reynolds described an occasion when he witnessed a fellow Angel chasing a civilian down the street and sought an explanation: “When I asked why, Magoo, from Oakland, stammered and stuttered, 'You know Freddy, it never really fuckin matters...The guy probably asked him if he could buy him a drink.'”219 The Angels fought without legitimate motive, without precursory ritual, and en masse. Their perverse adage, “an Angel is always right,” and its corollary, “one on all, all on one,” were actually official club rules that meant Angels were compelled to back each other whatever the circumstances, ganging up on anyone who was unlucky enough to find himself in conflict with a club member in a malevolent mass that they termed a rat pack. The Angels, then, fought even when they

216 Barger, Hell's Angel, 20. 217 Thompson, Hell's Angels, 67. 218 Weathern, Wayward Angel, 27. 219 Reynolds, Freewheelin' Frank, 29-30.

87 acknowledged themselves to be in the wrong, and they fought unfairly: “Anybody who thought that he was fighting an Angel one-to-one or that Marquis of Queensberry rules were in effect quickly discovered that 'win' was the only rule.”220 A citizen who found himself confronted by Hell's Angels might have done nothing wrong, might apologize for whatever imagined slight he was accused of issuing, and might still get viciously stomped by fifteen bikers.

Indeed, the triviality of their conflicts is one of the enduring themes of Thompson's account of the Hell's Angels, and he proposed to eliminate them as a public nuisance by donating to them a small piece of rural land where they could keep to themselves and avoid petty confrontations. Of course, the flaw in Thompson's plan for a Hell's Angels reservation is that the Angels did not actually want to avoid trouble, in spite of Barger's insistence that “Angels don't go on runs looking for trouble.”221 If they did not go looking for trouble, they had gone to great lengths to ensure that it would find them, and George Weathern was willing to concede as much: “Sometimes trouble found us, sometimes we found trouble. Groups of cowboys, sailors, or blacks occasionally filled themselves with enough liquid courage and bad judgment to challenge us. But normally we invited the combat.”222 Weathern went on to describe how they would invite combat by employing all manner of harassment, but, even when the trouble was started by groups of cowboys, sailors, or blacks, these combatants were responding to an implicit invitation. Indeed, almost all of the innovations that distinguished the Angels and other outlaw clubs of the 1960's from previous generations of motorcycle clubs were designed to provoke and amplify conflict. This is obvious in the case of the Hell's Angels more psychotic rules, like “an Angel is always right” and “one on all, all on one,” which effectively provided a mechanism for escalating any budding altercation by ensuring the participation of as many members as possible: an outcome that, in turn, tended to magnify the severity of their victims' injuries, increasing the likelihood that the victim

220 Weathern, Wayward Angel, 27-28. 221 Barger, Hell's Angel, 1. 222Weathern, Wayward Angel, 27.

88 or his allies would seek reprisals and, thereby, perpetuating a violent cycle that was, essentially, their aim.

But, even bikers' more innocuous requirements and habits operated obliquely toward this same end. Thompson observed, with some consternation: “the Angels play the role seven days a week: they wear their colors at home, on the street and sometimes even to work; they ride their bikes to the neighborhood grocery for a quart of milk.”223 In fact, the Angels rewarded members for exemplifying what they termed streetativeness, which basically meant being visible and disruptive: attracting public attention.224 Certainly, the Angels seem to have coveted any form of publicity or notoriety as an end in and of itself, but this policy of institutionalized public visibility ultimately functioned specifically to incentivize provocation, ensuring that trouble would find them. If nobody responded to their various provocations and trouble failed to find them, the Angels would resort to fighting each other over minutiae: sometimes literally. During the early 1960's, the Angels' northern California chapters were frequently at war with their southern California chapters because, according to the northern faction, the southerners wore club patches that were too small. Barger recounts an incident from the Bass Lake run where he asked a member of one southern chapter whether he had heard that members of different southern chapter had disrespected the northerners' preferred patch design by firing a bullet through one example. The man dissembled for a moment, and then they attacked each other. Later that day, as part of the same dispute, Barger was involved in a knife fight that spilled into the lake where he almost drowned.

Thus, when bikers encountered conflict, fratricidal or otherwise, they invariably opted to escalate. They were always prepared to deploy violence. And it was this attitude, of course, that continually undermined their relationship with the counterculture: in spectacular incidents like the 1965

VDC march or Altamont, but also in quotidian episodes like the fracas in Golden Gate Park that Hap 223 Thompson, Hell's Angels, 71. 224 Weathern, Wayward Angel, 38.

89 Stewart documented for The Barb. For Stewart, John Wood, and many others, bikers' affinity for violence created a rift between the two groups that rendered any notion of an enduring alliance between the two inconceivable. Yet, many within the counterculture seem to have felt as Thompson did; throughout the course of his narrative, the Angels' penchant for brawling seems to provide an enduring source of Thompson's otherwise waning admiration for his subjects, and much of the counterculture, likewise, responded eagerly to bikers' peculiar brand of ardent, tumultuous violence. They identified its erratic quality with authenticity, and they were particularly enthralled by the way that bikers stylized their violent outbursts as a collective endeavor, positioning mutual defense as a moral imperative that trumped logic or self-interest and originated in a kind of demented solidarity. Thus, in an article about the 1969 biker exploitation film The Naked Angels that appeared in The Barb after being picked up by the Underground Press Service, Bruce Johnson predicted the imminent dissolution of American society and explicitly offered the outlaw motorcycle club as a model for how young people could cooperate in the anarchic landscape of capitalism's demise: “Motorcycle flicks define our future...America is becoming a gangland, you know, and to survive and be free, you're going to have to get yourself together with a tight brotherhood who can deal with all the types of shit put down in Naked Angels. See this flick. It was made for you. Power to the people.”225 Johnson was unequivocal on the nature of the bonds that sustained biker gangs and the instructive value of their understanding of allegiance:

“Intellectuals and Middle Class people base their loyalties on ideas (like their friends are cats they met in the Young Democrats, and the Society for This and That). But poorer people base their loyalties on their love for each other. Ideas are irrelevant, which is true anyway. Remember that.”226 Thus, in

Johnson's unabashed admiration for the violent biker gang's irrational unity, we have another example of the counterculture adopting the biker as a totem of anti-modernism and an avenue for deconstructing individualism. 225 Johnson, Bruce. “Naked Angels Laid Bare.” The Berkeley Barb 9,1,203 July 4-10 (1969): 12. 226 Ibid.

90 In this context, the violence perpetrated by outlaw bikers seemed refreshingly honest. Indeed, in its lack of avowed motive or instrumental objective, it provided a buoyant contrast to the baroque rationalizations of violence that proliferated in mainstream society during the Cold War. Stanley

Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, released in 1964, distills the themes that animated the counterculture's critique of state violence, wonderfully parodying the sophistry of the Vietnam-era military-industrial complex, with characters like General Buck Turgidson offering a perverse logic of tactical violence that anticipates the doublespeak of actual Vietnam-era military bureaucrats: “it became necessary to destroy the town to save it.”227 The film concludes with the surreal and now-iconic image of Major T.J “King”

Kong gleefully riding a nuclear warhead like a bucking bronco, falling earthward toward his own demise and the likely extermination of mankind while waving his cowboy hat and hollering yee-haw.

This scene is meant to capture the truth behind American imperialism: not strategic missile strikes and the ineluctable reasoning of the Domino Theory but the raving, destructive ecstasy of the cowboy whose animalistic cry invokes a distinctly working-class species of atavism.228 Within the film, Major

Kong becomes a kind of ironic hero; compared to higher-ranking officials, who are blinkered by their labyrinthine rationalizations and insulated from actual danger in their impenetrable war-room, where they speculate about the male-to-female ratio that will prevail in the aftermath of nuclear holocaust and fantasize about the obsolescence of monogamy under such exigent circumstances, Kong is, at least, fearless, unselfish, and honest in his irrational prejudices.

Competition

Bikers' use of violence, then, was subtly subversive of modernity and its reasoned,

227 Arnett, Peter. "Major Describes Move" New York Times. February 8 (1968). 228 Lott, Eric. Keynote. “Division Street, U.S.A.” American Studies Graduate Student Association Conference, University of Texas (2009).

91 individualistic worldview. The same was true of bikers' attitude toward competition. Conflict and violence were their milieu, but bikers' feelings about actual competition were decidedly ambivalent. At first glance, bikers seemed to relish competition, exhibiting a Darwinian affinity for laissez-faire and violent struggle. Indeed, Sonny Barger insisted that the Hell's Angels, who withdrew from a non- aggression pact that they had entered into with other outlaw clubs, simply couldn't honor that peace accord because the other outlaws manifestly weren't their equals. “When all the other clubs wanted to be treated as equals, the Hell's Angels ended up leaving the One-Percenters. We didn't feel they were equal, and no matter what, we weren't ever going to treat the other clubs the same way we treated ourselves.”229 Of course, Barger offers no particular evidence as to why the Hell's Angels were superior to other bikers; it was simply an article of faith, and his use of the phrase no matter what actually suggests some equivocation on the matter. For his part, Marc Watson is entirely dismissive of bikers' swaggering insistence on their own superiority, expounding on the lurking insecurity exhibited in

Barger's comments. Indeed, Watson identifies profound self-doubt in his subjects, suggesting that they avoid middle-class environs where they are reminded that they are losers and eschew formal competition that might prove as much.230 Certainly, there was a prominent strain of thinking among bikers that imagined their subculture to be an oasis from competition: “It's brotherhood that makes this life style so tight—brotherhood like you never find in other segments of our competitive society.”231

Thus, while they conceived of life as a violent, adversarial struggle, when it came to more specific, more objective, forms of competition, whether fair fights or motorcycle races, outlaw bikers were decidedly cagey.

Certainly, the rationalized competition that typifies bourgeois society was anathema to bikers. It is important to note, again, that the outlaw motorcyclist does not exist outside the laws of society but

229 Barger, Hell's Angels, 41. 230 Watson, “Outlaw Motorcyclists,” 40. 231 Gook. “In Memory.” Easyriders. May 1980: 52.

92 outside the laws of the the AMA, the governing body of competitive motorcycling. In essence, then, the biker was conceived in opposition to a specific form of competition. There are a number of conflicting accounts of the origin of the so-called 1%, but, interestingly, in Barger's version of events, the precipitating incident was a deadly crash that occurred during a street-race that took place at the location of an AMA event but outside its sanctions. Were the Angels racing on the street because they had contempt for safety protocols, and their zeal for competition could not be contained to a fixed event? Or, were they racing on the street because they were hopelessly outmatched by sanctioned riders and sought a new venue in which to compete according to an alternative set of criteria? None of the outlaws' accounts dwell on how they were performing in AMA sponsored competitions at the time of the rift, but Thompson presented his own speculation on the matter:

Whether the Hell's Angels are real motorcycle artists or not is hard to say. With the exception of a few drag meets, the outlaws are barred from all sanctioned competition, so there are no performance charts to go on. Their bikes are entirely different from road racing and scrambles machines, and even from other road bikes. The Angels tell tales of wiping out professionals in impromptu showdowns...but there are also stories about outlaws on souped-up hogs being humiliated by lightweight Ducatis.232

As Thompson notes, the dynamic between the AMA and the outlaws was one of mutual exclusion based on diverging values, but it is impossible not to conclude that the outlaws would have fared very poorly in formal competition. Thompson highlighted the issue of escalating expenses that accompanied the sport's maturation and specialization, and this was the crucial factor; in the long run, all motor- sports sublimate into economic competition, and the outlaws could not hope to compete seriously in such an environment. Indeed, even as George Weathern opined that speed was where it was at and boasted about bikers' aggressive riding, this reality of inferiority was lurking: “There were no speedometers on most of our bikes. We just rode fast—sixty in the twenty-five m.p.h. Zones, no limits on the highways. Once, though, I know I hit 120 racing a Pontiac from Richmond one night.”233 Here

Weathern conceded that bikers eschewed speedometers, preferring not to quantify their subjective 232 Thompson, Hell's Angels, 86. 233 Weathern, Wayward Angel, 42.

93 experience of lush speed, and Sonny Barger actually estimated that his generation of outlaws averaged closer to 60 m.p.h. on the open road: hardly adequate for serious competition.

Bikers' ambivalent attitude toward competition, then, defined their schism with the AMA, and it informs the dramatic conflict in The Wild One, the seminal 1953 film that served as a touchstone for nascent outlaw clubs. In the film, which was based on “The Cyclists' Raid,” Frank Rooney's fictionalized account of the Hollister Riot for Harper's Magazine, Marlon Brando plays Johnny, a biker whose club travels to the site of a formal motorcycle race and creates contention with race administrators, especially when one club member steals the second-place trophy for the day's race and presents it to Johnny. The gift is an ironic misappropriation, intended to underscore the club's adherence to its own idiosyncratic values, which operate in defiance of the AMA, a bureaucratic organization that promotes a bourgeois definition of sport as a safe and salutary forum for competition and aggression. Johnny accepts the trophy, defiantly strapping it to the handlebars of his 1950 Triumph

Thunderbird as his club leaves town. The action of the film then plays out in the small town of

Wrightsville, where Johnny's Black Rebels find themselves waylaid after one member is injured in a crash. As they kill time in a cafe, tensions with the local citizenry mount, exacerbated by the appearance of a rival motorcycle club: Chino's Beetles. Chino and Johnny actually fight over the stolen trophy, which Johnny retains when he absconds with the cafe waitress, Kathie, and confesses to her that his relationship to the trophy is not entirely ironic. Ultimately, there is a part of Johnny that aspires to win a legitimate race.

It is this latent aspiration that makes Johnny an ambiguous archetype for the outlaw bikers of the 60's. If The Wild One is universally acknowledged as an important reference point for the biker subculture, commentators invariably note that it is Lee Marvin's repugnant villain Chino who seems a more prototypical Hell's Angels than Johnny, an observation that Sonny Barger himself affirmed: “I

94 certainly saw more of Chino in me than Johnny. I still do.”234 Johnny's attitude toward the trophy marks him indelibly as a juvenile delinquent in the 1950's mold. Beneath the bravado of his smirking nihilism, as expressed in his iconic line about rebellion, Johnny is a good kid who harbors rather conventional aspirations that have been perverted, largely through the negligence of the adults around him. Indeed, although his own parents are not depicted, the adults of Wrightsville consistently aggravate the fraught situation in town with their own prejudice and belligerence, failing to recognize Johnny's basic virtue.

According to Allison Perlman, it was particularly important to the film's producer, Stanley Kramer, that the adults be presented in such a manner, which is consistent with that era's discourse on juvenile delinquency.235 Johnny, like Jim Stark, from 1955's Rebel Without a Cause, and other iconic juvenile- delinquent characters of the era, is presented as a fundamentally normal kid whose problems can be traced to the aloof, doltish authority figures in his life who have not given him sufficient emotional support or an appropriate forum for his talents. He is capable of good. Chino, however, harbors none of

Johnny's underlying bourgeois morality. His relationship to the trophy is strictly ironic; in fact, he wants to steal the trophy precisely to tease Johnny for his lingering virtue and his suppressed longing for success and affirmation, which are, for Chino, forms of weakness.

If Chino has nothing but disdain for Johnny's trophy and the restrained form of rationalized competition that it symbolizes, bikers could not be similarly contemptuous of all contests; their identity was defined through aggression, masculinity, and superiority in a way that compelled them to manifest some overt competitiveness, especially when it came to their motorcycles. And the way that outlaw bikers negotiated these conflicting imperatives is encapsulated in a fable from Easyriders that tells the story of Grumble Rumble's final race. Grumble Rumble is unequivocally the fastest rider among the outlaw bikers, and he accepts a challenge from Notorious Norton (so named after the British marque responsible for many of the fastest production models of the 1960's). As the two race neck and neck 234 Barger, Hell's Angel, 26. 235 Perlman, “Brief Ride”

95 toward a cliff, Notorious Norton recoils and yields to Grumble Rumble who plows ahead, crashing into the cliff. Easyriders concludes: “Moral: If you're going to blow it, do it with class.”236 While Grumble

Rumble is not beaten outright, this moral hinges on a tacit acknowledgment that the outlaw's chopper is not the faster machine; the fact that Grumble Rumble is able to run neck and neck with his rival is a testament to his sublime skill as a rider precisely because Easyriders' s readership knows that a Norton is, objectively speaking, significantly faster than a chopped Harley. Thus, even in their own legends, outlaws do not have the faster bikes and do not win the race; instead, they dismiss conventional victory in favor of their own idiosyncratic valuation: class. Class is an important concept for bikers that means righteousness; to do something with class is to execute a performance that distills exalted values. In this instance, it means riding with a rare combination of reckless abandon, consummate skill, and total commitment. In their own fantasies, outlaw bikers were over-matched underdogs who risked everything; they didn't quite win, but their willingness to expose themselves created a transcending spectacle. In reality, they knew that their machines were second-rate, and they eschewed competition.

CONCLUSION

If Watson and a host of journalists and scholars saw bikers' aversion to rationalized competition as a faintly pathetic and hypocritical manifestation of insecurity, the counterculture was more willing to see a beguiling form of anti-modernism. Indeed, in Easy Rider, Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda's fully- realized counterculture reading of the outlaw biker, this charge of hypocrisy is returned upon the bourgeoisie in a small but pivotal scene that lampoons the all-American cult of football. The film, of course, follows an enigmatic pair of bikers, Wyatt and Billy, who have just executed a major drug transaction. As their nomadic journey traverses the American West, the film indulges in a certain

236 “The Tale of Grumble Rumble.” Easyriders. November 1974: 58.

96 ethereal counterculture didacticism, exalting the crude existence of the frontier past when Wyatt and

Billy enjoy the simple hospitality of a hardscrabble ranch and a fledgling hippie commune. But, conflict arises as the pair enters the South, and they find themselves jailed in a small town—seemingly in East Texas, although this is not specified—under a sham pretext: parading without a permit. In jail, they meet Jack Nicholson's character, a besotted ACLU lawyer incarcerated while he recovers from another drinking binge, who secures the bikers' release. Nicholson's character, George Hanson, is a bourgeois provincial, but he is also an incorrigible iconoclast, and he agrees to accompany his new clients to Mardi Gras in New Orleans on a lark. When he accepts their invitation, Wyatt and Billy ask whether he has a helmet, and he smirks, then responds, now grinning, that he has the perfect one, at which point the soundtrack shifts to The Holy Modal Rounders goofy “If You Want to Be a Bird,” as the shot jumps to the trio traveling down the highway, with George riding on the back of Wyatt's bike wearing his high-school football helmet. Later, George explains how his mother, who had originally forbade him to play football, salvaged the helmet after he discarded it and returned it to him, instructing him to save it for his own son. And this is the paradox of football, an irremediably violent, unsafe sport that is, none the less, thoroughly domesticated and knit into the fabric of middle-class American life.

Michael Oriard observes that tabloid newspapers aimed at the working-class initially dismissed football as an elite indulgence that interested them only insofar as it exposed the shameless double-standard of the privileged Ivy Leaguers who pursued football as their favorite pastime yet condemned boxing. And

Easy Rider resurrects this critique, which assumed pointedly political overtones during the Vietnam

Era. For the counterculture, the hypocritical violence of football, which was imagined as a primitive spectacle, yet actually embodied the ideals of industrialism, demanding minutely coordinated, practiced routines with specialized roles, all enabled by the techniques of scientific management, was the perfect analogy for the hypocritical violence of the military industrial complex and American colonialism.

And, the perfect counterpoint to the hypocritical violence of college sports and the Vietnam War

97 was the delirious violence of the outlaw biker, who fought in defense of a brazen fallacy: an Angel is always right. This code seemed like a bombastic assertion of individual license, but it actually compelled club-members to operate as an instinctual mass, rejecting the logic of rational self-interest.

Thus, bikers stylized and performed a retreat from the rationalized community of the bureaucratic modern state into tribalism: “We do not follow any other organization because we do not understand any organization other than our own. I don't even know what 'organization' really means, but I know what the Hell's Angels are.”237 Of course, when Reynolds claims not to understand the concept of organization, he is effectively claiming not to understand the modern world, and he is making a point that is virtually identical to Willis's observation that his bikers, living in the unreified world of the present, had no relation to outside hierarchical structures. Bikers concocted an anti-modern spectacle that was deeply threatening to many Americans, with one Easyriders correspondent identifying bikers as simply abhorrent:

“You people come here on them motorcycles, filthy, unwashed, and most repulsive. This department has maintained a policy of checking out each one for drugs, alcohol, etc., even enforcing bike safety standards. I find you are most repulsive people. You ride on death traps that can be blotted out of vision at 100 feet with a pencil in front of an eye and expect decent motorists to be aware of your presence....After repeated conversations with a psychologist friend of mine, we feel motorcyclists are predominantly masochistically inclined.”238

In this complaint to Easyriders, R. Adams began with a visceral response to bikers' noxious physical presence and then moved to a more sweeping existential indictment, employing scientific evidence to speculate about the inherent danger of motorcycles and finally labeling bikers masochists. Of course, whether or not our letter writer actually consulted a psychologist, as he claims, it does not seem that he was using the concept of masochism in its narrowly clinical sense; instead, he was searching for a way to express his contempt for people who would willfully eschew the comforts of modernity. He used the facade of science, invoking risk analysis and psychology, to provide an objective patina to a politicized

237 Reynolds, Freewheelin Frank, 14. 238 Adams, R. Letter. Easyriders December 1974: 6.

98 moral judgment. He found bikers dangerous, with all of the premodern, taboo connotations that

Douglas identified as immanent in that term. And bikers themselves would likely have agreed with

Adams, which is undoubtedly why Easyriders editors chose to publish the letter, if they didn't write it themselves.

Bikers were proud to be repugnant primitives, and that anti-modern posture proved deeply alluring to anyone with counterculture leanings, like the photographer Bill Ray, who spent an extended period with the Hell's Angels on assignment for Life magazine in 1965 and later reflected: “They didn't have jobs. They absolutely despised everything that most Americans value and strive for—stability, security. They rode their bikes, hung out in bars for days at a time, fought with anyone who messed with them. They were self-contained, with their own set of rules, their own code of behavior. It was extraordinary to be around.”239 Ray identified bikers as a parodic inversion of the American middle- class, and he was captivated. Ultimately, bikers' lack of hygiene, their enthusiasm for conflict, and even the illiberal overtones of their belligerence and prejudice had surprising resonance with the counterculture. In his 1968 “Violent Generation” article for the Barb “David Super-Straight” insists that students must stand and shout: “I am already free! I am not 'equal' to anyone. I am just me! Fuck democracy!”240 At first glance, “Super-Straight's” protest seems like the cris de coeur of the

Nietzschean superman: someone extraordinary who cannot be contained by the cloying mediocrity and timid conformity of democracy. And, it is principally in this vein that he seems to intend his remarks, which, as we've seen, stray into a curious defense of patriarchy. Yet, there is also a radically self- effacing undercurrent to “Super-Straight's” critique that seems to identify democracy and egalitarianism

239 Cosgrove, Ben. “Life Rides with the Hell's Angels, 1965.” Time Magazine. November, 8 (2014). Web. 15 August, 2015. 240 Super-Straight, David. “Violent Generation: Third,” 9. It must be noted that the article was published with a disclaimer. Much more so than the Rag, the Barb spoke to an audience that was cultivating a leftist political orthodoxy, and the editors clearly felt that most of their readers would be offended or nonplussed by Super-Straight's opinions, although it would seem that they were primarily concerned with some of his pronouncements on gender. But, if we must say that Super-Straight's ideas deviated from the general consensus among the Barb's readers, the seriousness with which the editors treated his article, choosing to publish it and providing a thoughtful disclaimer, make it clear that his opinions existed within acceptable counterculture discourse, perhaps usefully defining the boundary of such discourse.

99 as improbable forms of hubris: that sees Nietzsche's timorous sheep, who seek solace in conformity, as perversely self-important. When he proclaims “I am just me,” the just subtly implies that these institutions may overstate the importance of the individual. Maybe we aren't all special. Maybe we don't matter. Certainly, Easyriders's exemplary biker in his craggy dung heap suggests a figure who is just himself in this sense: someone who is ultimately repellent, ignorant, lazy and beneath the minimum standards of democratic participation. Thus, Super-Straight offers an intellectualized articulation of the biker dialectic, portraying himself simultaneously with wild self-aggrandizement and an undercurrent of debasement as he rejects democracy and its particular combination of individualism and universalism.

100 Chapter 2: Carnival

In Easy Rider, Wyatt and Billy set out with no apparent destination but eventually determine to reach Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Significantly, it is in that extended sequence that the film attempts to distill its ideology, reflecting the counterculture's particular admiration for the way that bikers embedded their anti-modern critique of American culture within a carnivalesque aesthetic. The carnivalesque, as formulated by Bakhtin, is a literary theory and political aspiration; it is a mode of expression that employs inversion, absurdity, and scabrous irreverence to disrupt social hierarchies by destabilizing the integrity of the individual subject. It is a joyous, excessive overflowing of boundaries, and its essence is laughter. But, carnival laughter is not the laughter of the satirist, in which one individual places himself above the object of his mockery; carnival laughter is ambivalent, and it facilitates a totalizing communal experience with political overtones: "laughing truth... degraded power."241 Of course, the political consequences of carnival have been a matter of considerable debate with far-ranging consequences. Bakhtin himself was not writing about carnival per se; he was writing about the use of carnival in Rabelais's fiction as an oblique way of addressing political conditions in

Stalinist Russia, and the debate over the politics of carnival continues to serve as a proxy for a larger controversy about the political efficacy of cultural forms, in general, and the insurgent potential of subcultural practices, in particular. In many ways, mass-produced popular culture operates through the

241 Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and his World. 1965. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984): 92.

101 mode of carnival, licensing consumption by creating a carnivalesque space of furious semiotic play.242

And subcultures, which are defined through exaggerating, parodying, and inverting dominant values, carry this mode still further toward debatable ends.

If Bakhtin sees revolutionary potential in carnival, many scholars have argued that it is nothing more than a whimsical blowing-off of steam, a pantomime of insubordination that actually functions to re-inscribe existing hierarchies. This position has a rough correlate in the cultural studies work of

Adorno and other members of the Frankfurt School who maintain that popular culture provides an endless cycle of resistance and recuperation in which the final assimilation of restive cultural forms reinforces hegemonic structures of power.243 In this formulation, cultural resistance is wholly illusory.

For his part, Fredric Jameson offers a slightly more encouraging interpretation of popular culture and its function: one that substantively echoes Arthur Lindley's position on medieval carnival, which holds that “the official order would not have tolerated carnival if it were intolerable. Licensed rebellion is a contradiction in terms. The proper relation between the two orders is not oppositional but dialectical.”244 Jameson, then, maintains, first, that the final foreclosure of resistance through its assimilation into hegemonic structures only functions as an effective form of social control when people are able to invest in the initial gesture of resistance, which they cannot do unless that expression contains some genuinely subversive and disruptive elements.245 More importantly, Jameson subtly shifts the debate from a matter of resistance to one of fluidity, offering subcultures as entropic spaces in which cultural mutations occur: in which dominant values can be reinterpreted, deconstructed, and playfully rearranged.246 In essence, he suggests that subcultures maintain some degree of interpretive

242 Lears, T. J. Jackson. Fables of Abundance: a Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1994): 18. 243 J.M. Bernstein characterizes this position as a simplification of Adorno theory of the culture industry. Bernstein, Introduction. Culture Industry, 20. 244 Lindley, Arthur: Hyperion and the Hobbyhorse: Studies in Carnivalesque Subversion. (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996): 20 245This same position is advanced by Kellner, Douglas. “Critical Theory and the Culture Industries: a Reassessment. Telos 62 (1984-85): 203. 246 Jameson, Fredric. "Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture." Social Text (1979): 130-148.

102 flexibility within a society; while not providing substantive resistance themselves, they provide a semiotic emollient that may serve as the ground in which movements of resistance ultimately take root.

This is Willis's position as well. He feels that bikers and hippies both fail to translate their cultural practices into politics, but he maintains that only the kind of imaginative reinterpretation of everyday life that they provide has the potential to transform society.247

Medieval life and its modalities had been a central preoccupation for Lears's turn-of -the century anti-moderns as well, and there was a certain political dimension to this affinity: an oblique opposition to the Protestant work ethic, individualism, and the modern commercial world. However,

Lears feels that the political potential of turn-of-the-century medievalism went unrealized; instead, medieval life was romanticized as a form of intense experience, and the therapeutic perspective of modernism was ultimately reinforced. This progression was particularly clear in the case of the Arts and Crafts Movement, which originally attempted to revive the medieval guild system as part of a socialist effort to reform labor conditions in Victorian England. In America, however, the socialist dimension of William Morris's vision was largely dismissed. Instead, a powerfully nostalgic medievalism endured, while the movement came to define craft work as a leisure activity through which the dissipated bourgeoisie might find regeneration. Rather than an ethical system of labor, Arts and Crafts came to embody a specific rustic design aesthetic, and consumer objects that were rendered in this style were imagined to be somehow beneficent in and of themselves.248 Of course, if Ruskin and

Morris failed to realize their political vision through medieval revival, medievalism remained a compelling touchstone for social critics. Lewis Mumford, for instance, pursued a similar romanticization of medieval life as more intense and more authentic, and his paeans to the simple life of Dutch peasants exerted a tremendous influence on the counterculture, which identified a prescient

247 Willis, Profane Culture, 6-7. 248 Boris, Eileen. Art and Labor: Ruskin, Morris, and the Craftsman Ideal in America. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986).

103 critique of technocracy in his call to eschew technological development as an end in itself, instead balancing improved tools and techniques with social conscience.249

Thus, the counterculture perpetuated a tradition of anti-modern medievalism, but their interest in carnival, specifically, reflected their desire to finally elaborate this tradition into a political program that would have a genuine corrosive effect on modern individualized subjecthood. To understand carnival, Lundley examines the theology of St. Augustine and his doctrine of evil, which Lundley describes as inherently absurdist. Augustine claimed that, in order for a sin to be damnable, it must be a conscious choice. Then, recognizing that it was entirely irrational to choose damnation, he was forced to conclude that man was not normally in his right mind, a condition that he explained by placing renewed emphasis on the doctrine of Original Sin. For Lundley, Augustine cast normal human consciousness as a form of false-consciousness. Sin was absurd and perverse because it was not a matter of ethics but ontology; thus: “The conjunction of Augustine’s ludic theology with the comic forms of carnival is a match made in heaven.”250 The counterculture's critique of bourgeois consumer society was also a perfect match for the comic forms of carnival, as the counterculture echoed

Augustine in casting normal American consciousness as a form of irrational delusion: “People do not come logically to where they are at. They use logic to justify. We have to get underneath that logic, to the feelings and images that play in the unconscious.”251 Here, Jerry Rubin critiqued the charade of the rational actor, providing a version of Bruno Latour's aphorism: “we have never been modern.”252 For

Rubin, logic is some conjunction of sham pretext and collective delusion; it is not what motivates individuals or governs the operation of society.

Carnival, of course, speaks to the “unconscious feelings and images” that Rubin invoked;

249 Roszak cites Mumford several times, mentioning his “many wise contributions” in the Bibliographical Notes section of The Making of a Counter Culture. Roszak, Counter Culture, 301. 250 Lindley, Hyperion, 20. 251 Rubin, “Elvis Kills Ike,” 12. 252 Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012).

104 indeed, in the very next line of his screed “AMERICA THE FAT MAN,” he proposed handing out thousands of costumes. And, in the same spirit, when military officials visited the University of Texas campus in October of 1967: “SDS and the U.T Committee to End the War, anticipating the antics, greeted the General with the only rational response—a carnival.”253 From the perspective of the counterculture, America's technocratic regime represented insanity masquerading as reason, and the only appropriate response was politics masquerading as insanity. Indeed, Margie Stamberg called this particular Texas event a “demonstration of the absurd,” a common tactic of the New Left and its counterculture allies: “Not long ago I spoke at an sds convention, saying that I believed in the overthrow of the UT administration by violent and forceful laughter.”254 Carnival, then, provided an overarching aesthetic for the counterculture's anti-modernism; in many ways, carnival represented the underlying premise of the counterculture and its blithe faith in the power of entropy: “I support everything which puts people into motion, which creates disruption and controversy, which creates chaos and rebirth.”255 The biker subculture served as a model for this pursuit of carnivalesque chaos and disruption. The totalizing loss of self that accompanies carnival and facilitates its ambivalent laughter is stimulated by the masquerade and the grotesque: two elements that came to define the biker aesthetic by the mid-1960's. The destabilizing role of masquerade is fairly straightforward: “The mask is connected with the joy of change and reincarnation, with gay relativity and with the merry negation of uniformity and similarity; it rejects conformity to oneself.”256 Carnival masquerade, then, does not simply create a momentary impersonation or deception; it calls attention to the enduring instability of identity and the performative nature of the self. And bikers' entire subculture was a form of masquerade, with Thompson referring to them as “costumed hoodlums,”257 and one of his law

253 Stamberg, Maggie. “A Demonstration of the Absurd” The Rag 2, 7 (1967): 9. 254 Reavis, Dick. “The Revolution...That Never Was.” The Rag 1,21 (1966): 9. 255 Rubin, “Elvis Kills Ike,” 12. 256 Bakhtin, Rabelais, 39. 257 Thompson, Hell's Angels, 13.

105 enforcement sources, as we have seen, extrapolating from their affinity for habits of disguise, like dyed hair, to posit a comprehensive instability or fluidity of biker identity. Likewise, Bill Murray, who described a biker gathering as a ludicrous costume party for his Life Magazine audience, received an interesting answer when he asked his police escort whether he might have an easier time communicating with the assembled bikers if he clarified his identity as a journalist, rather than a cop: “I don't think they'd be dumb enough to stomp on a journalist, but you can't count on it. And when they're all together, dressed up and partying, anything can happen.”258 The officer's reference to the bikers being dressed-up seems rather off-hand, but the connection that he makes between bikers' potential for anti-social behavior and their penchant for costumes is significant; indeed, masquerade is essential to carnival because it creates a space in which anything can happen: an entropic, discordant space in which fixed identity positions like 'cop' and 'journalist' erode.

And this same understanding of the contingent nature of identity is elaborated in the grotesque, a profane form that emphasizes the permeable boundaries of the body. The grotesque is an aesthetic of obscenity, but Bakhtin identifies a critical distinction between trite vulgarity and what he terms grotesque realism. Grotesque realism, which is encapsulated in the corpulence and ribald ostentatiousness of carnival, points toward fecundity; it is a critical moment of regeneration within a cyclical system of time. From the perspective of the counterculture, bikers, with their boisterous affinity for all manner of sexual depravity, were consummate grotesque realists, as we see in Easy

Rider's presentation of Wyatt and Billy's visit to Mardi Gras. When George decides to join Wyatt and

Billy, he says that he has always wanted to see New Orleans and visit what was described to him as the greatest brothel in the South. Thus, when Wyatt and Billy arrive in the Crescent City without George, who is murdered when demented locals attack the trio as they camp along a southern highway, Wyatt and Billy decide to visit Madame Tinkertoy's in George's honor. But Wyatt becomes morose as soon as

258 Ibid, 98.

106 they arrive. He has no interest in the narrow obscenity of transactional sex, and he persuades Billy and the two female prostitutes whose company they have purchased to leave the brothel, to go outside as

Wyatt intones portentously, and explore Mardi Gras. Ultimately, of course, they do have sex, but they do so in the midst of Mardi Gras revelry, after they drop acid, in a cemetery. The cemetery backdrop underscores the connection between grotesque realism and cyclical time, casting the sexual encounter as an organic expression. For them to have had sex in a brothel, by contrast, would have reified their alienation; it would have been obscene: “obscenity has become narrowly sexual, isolated, individual, and has no place in the new official system of philosophy and imagery.”259 Obscenity, then, is disciplinary. Indeed, while these lines from Rabelais were languishing unpublished even in Bakhtin’s native Russian, Jean Genet was imprisoned for his obscene sexual behavior in France. Far from embodying exuberant fecundity, his sexuality marked him for discipline and isolation. In an age of alienation, his was a carnival of his own reveries. Genet, or Culafroy, as the central character in Genet's fictionalized autobiography Our Lady of the Flowers is called, describes laying in his prison cell compulsively masturbating, while “collecting in my cupped hands my crushed farts, which I carry to my nose.”260 Here, Calufoy's lewdness becomes a sign of his modern isolation and not a communal rite.

Thus, Bakhtin conceived Rabelais as a critique of Stalinist Russia and its peculiar brand of modernism, and his work received a wary reception. In his introduction to Rabelais, Michael Holquist observes:

“Bakhtin’s claim that the folk not only picked their noses and farted, but enjoyed doing do, seemed particularly unregenerate.”261 But Bakhtin saw revolution in so much transcendent fart sniffing.

Bikers were also tremendous fans of fart-sniffing. If we return to The Barb's defense of the

Hell's Angels, the paper identifies the Angels with unreason: with a certain carnivalesque excess and with the turbulent elation of participation over staid, passive observation. And the counterculture was

259 Ibid,109. 260 Genet, Jean. Our lady of the Flowers. Trans. Bernard Frechtman. (New York: Grove, 1991): 166. 261 Holquist, Michael. Introduction. Bakhtin, Rabelais, xix.

107 not simply misreading or misappropriating elements of the outlaw biker subculture; bikers themselves actively cultivated carnivalesque illogic and inversion. Ultimately, the carnivalesque defined their aesthetic, and we can see that sensibility expounded quite deliberately in “The Pasadena Run,” a long piece of fiction by J.J. Solari from a 1975 issue of Easyriders. In the story, a biker is called before a

Pasadena judge to account for the debacle that resulted from his club's attempt to participate in the city's annual Rose Parade. That event itself is one of the many deracinated echoes of carnival in

American culture, a chamber of commerce spectacle in which a harvest of purely decorative agricultural produce is celebrated to promote corporate sponsors and to provide a televisual compliment to the contained aggression of college sports. The faux carnival of the minutely choreographed Rose Parade, then, is ripe for bikers' brand of disruption. In Solari's story, the details of the Rose Parade travesty emerge piecemeal, as the judicial proceeding is marred by incessant interruptions and digressions stemming from the state of mutual incomprehensibility that exists between our biker protagonist and the presiding judge: “But remember, you were the one who said I could tell this fuckin'...blessed, I mean...story in my own words rather than have a lawyer here, so don't for chrissakes blame fuckin' me if I can't always choose the 'proper and dignified mode of communication,' as you put it, to tell my fuckin' story.”262 Thus, the story is, essentially, a vaudeville routine: a fish out of water farce driven by wordplay, misunderstanding, and this extended joke about bikers' pathological inability to speak without cursing. The narrator's endemic vulgarity constantly disrupts the solemnity of the courtroom in a carnivalesque way, and the Rose Parade narrative that gradually emerges is full of similar moments of inversion.

The bikers have been called before the judge, in large part, because they did not have a permit to enter their float in the Rose Parade,263 but they recount that they actually tried to obtain proper

262 Solari, J.J. “The Pasadena Run” Easyriders September 1975: 19. 263 In Easy Rider, Wyatt and Billy are arrested for “parading without a permit.” Easy Rider. Dir. Dennis Hopper. Columbia Pictures, 1969. Film.

108 authorization. According to our protagonist, he and his club mates entered the office of the Rose Parade

Committee only to be shamed by the resident bureaucrat who insulted them and their bikes. In a familiar trope, the bikers are indifferent to the pencil-pusher's calumnies against their personal hygiene, intellectual capacities, and bimbo girlfriends but take great offense at the charge that their bikes are greasy. The narrator insists that “he had no right to hint that we don't take care of our putts,”264 conceding that they retaliated by throwing his desk out the window onto what they believed to be his car. Of course, it turned out not to be his car but his secretary's, and when they learned this, long after they had left the premises, the bikers sent an emissary back to the Rose Parade Committee to make restitution. Unfortunately, the club member who they sent had no fly on his worn-out pants, which prompted the committee's secretary to apprehensively ignore him, at which point he attempted to catch her attention by physically grabbing her, causing her to scream frantically, believing that she was being assaulted.

Having irrevocably fallen out with the Rose Parade Committee, the bikers decided to proceed with their float none the less and to make amends by creating something lofty and inspiring that would be appreciated by the whole community. Accordingly, they initially plan a VD motif for their float but then decide on the environment as their theme, which they attempt to render by killing and stuffing a

California condor. To accompany the condor, they decide to include a down-and-out itinerant proselytizer with whom they are familiar, as well as a club hanger-on called Carbuncle Carla, who

“wanted to go nekkid and have herself be fucked by one of the guys dressed as a maraudin' Indian on the rampage.”265 In deference to the family atmosphere of the Rose Parade, the bikers insist that she keep her clothes on, but a number of club members do dress as Indians and do take their turns with

Carla as the float rolls through Pasadena and the others throw “flowers and shitballs,” in a gesture that

264 Solari, “Pasadena Run,” 68. 265 Ibid.

109 they describe as “one of them 'deeper meaning' things.”266 Ultimately, their devout friend, The Preacher, tries to heal a woman in a wheelchair and, getting no response, pulls his pistol and throws her to the ground, insisting that she walk and manifest his miracle, at which point the entire parade devolves into anarchy, and the bikers are arrested.

Thus, the bikers' attempt to honor America turns into a demented parody. Specifically, they manage to subvert the pillars of manifest destiny: that mutant strain of Calvinist millennialism in which white Americans prophesied their own virtuous conquest over the sublime landscape of the New World and its savage native inhabitants. In the carnivalesque world of the biker, the evangelical preacher proves to be a violently unhinged maniac; the majestic fauna is stuffed and mounted; and the chaste pioneer woman is having kinky sex with the Indians. Of course, while Solari himself obviously has a slyly sophisticated understanding of American history and mythology, as well as a satirical predilection, it is significant that he presents the bikers in his story as naïve. The bikers' desire to participate in the parade and to honor American history is genuine, but the result of their efforts is always ironic and farcical. They are not presented as renegades or free thinkers who revel in subversion. Instead, they are just their unvarnished, authentic selves, and it is this authenticity that is somehow unassimilable to the bourgeois mainstream and its rituals, as their intentions are consistently misinterpreted, and their interactions with straight society invariably devolve into violence.

Obviously, it strains credulity to imagine that Solari's bikers actually thought they would be doing a civic service by displaying their venereal-disease-ridden genitals in order to provide free sex education to the citizens of Pasadena, but positing as much was important to the mythology of the outlaw biker.

According to Solari, bikers do not actively pursue carnivalesque inversion and entropy; it is simply the byproduct of their authentic presence in a world that is alienated. They can't help but turn the ersatz chamber of commerce carnival of the Rose Parade into Bakhtin's medieval carnival with all of its

266 Ibid.

110 ambivalence and entropy.

Of course, bikers weren't actually unassimilable; they put considerable work into maintaining their estrangement from society. Thompson's description of the Angels' aesthetic as a parodic exaggeration of the very traits that marked them as losers and outsiders was finely attuned to the carnivalesque elements of the biker persona, and he also noted that one of the signature features of this performance was its enduring nature: “But instead of submitting quietly to their fate, they have made it the basis of a full-time social vendetta.”267 This idea of a full-time social vendetta represents the crucial distinction between outlaw bikers of the 1960's and their predecessors. It is what marked them as a subculture. There was no such thing as a casual member of an outlaw club, and one dynamic of these clubs that may seem particularly irrational to the outsider is the way that they treated former members, who could never relax around the current corps, as the ties of friendship that they maintained with certain club members would not prevent them from being rat-packed like any pitiful citizen. At the same time, outlaw bikers did not necessarily consider it a failing to leave the club. If a member left on good terms, that individual would be welcomed back.268 Membership required intense, sustained commitment. If one was incapable of making that commitment, for whatever reason, one could leave the club and return when able. The bikers' priority was that no one should remain in the club on a casual basis; thus, marriage and jobs frequently drove members to quit, while divorce and unemployment drove them back to the club. It simply was not an option to be an outlaw biker on the weekend and a husband and father during the week. A member with domestic priorities could not be trusted; when he was arrested, he might be desperate to avoid prison and continue supporting his family: desperate enough to betray his brothers. When members of a rival club recognized him walking his kids home from school, he might be tempted to reason with them, to surrender his club's insignia in order to avoid an ugly scene, or even to call the police for help: any of which would represent a 267 Thomson, Hell's Angels, 52. 268 George Weathern, for instance, left the club and returned on multiple occasions.

111 humiliating capitulation for the club.269

Of course, the all-or-nothing nature of membership in outlaw clubs was not just a pragmatic reaction to the exigencies of the outlaw lifestyle. The enveloping nature of the subculture also reflected a recognition that bikers' carefully constructed aura of feral menace and the perverse cachet that came with it was dependent on cultivating an engrossing commitment to the biker aesthetic: an enduring performance so encompassing that it defined club members' very existence. The Hell's Angels, in particular, pioneered this expansive understanding of biker identity, and they actually exhibited a proprietary attitude about the very concept of a biker lifestyle: “You see people wearing their fucking patches, 'Ride to live, Live to ride.' Yeah, right. As soon as shit comes down, their bike is the first thing they sell. Sonny is the one who pushed the bike-riding lifestyle. There wasn't an outlaw type of lifestyle as there is today until [Sonny Barger] created it.”270 The outlaw clubs of the 1960's, led by the Hell's

Angels, created an idea of the biker that transcended the activity of motorcycling. Sonny Barger was a biker even when he happened to be driving a car. But, in order to achieve this effect, bikers had to commit to an unceasing performance. Bikers simply weren't as compelling if their threatening antics could be dismissed as an act. They were intimidating because they had positioned themselves as the Id incarnate: feral maniacs who could not be reasoned with. And to sustain that illusion meant there could be no break in character: only the berserker. Thus, George Weathern observed matter-of-factly: “My temper prevented Helen from ever really relaxing in public places, but it enhanced my club reputation.”271 To be a righteous Angel was to be on at all times; a member could not have a quiet evening out with his wife. Weathern does not say outright that this unhinged lunatic, who could not dine in public, was simply a persona that he adopted—he seems more inclined to present his temper as an innate characteristic—but his comments strongly imply, at the very least, that he consciously chose

269 Daniel Wolf's ethnography of the Rebels, in particular, underscores this dynamic, noting that many of the club's policies pointedly aimed to undermine familiar allegiance. Wolf, Rebels, 138. 270 Barger, Hell's Angel, 49. 271 Weathern, Wayward Angel, 28.

112 to exaggerate and indulge his temper and that he was acutely conscious of the way his violent eruptions embodied the club's ethos. Meanwhile, in his own memoir, Frank Reynolds related a story about living in a squalid flop-house with a fellow Hell's Angel and that member's girlfriend, with whom Frank had been romantically involved in the past, underscoring the fact that this state of depravity was continuous: “And then I'd lay at night and watch them fuck in our two-room pad. Do you realize I did this as everyday life?”272 Of course, in emphasizing that he lived like this as everyday life, Reynolds's intention is not to normalize his behavior but quite the opposite: to aggrandize himself by emphasizing the degree and duration of his estrangement from bourgeois conventions. Biker life was constructed as a perpetual carnival.

Again, this commitment to a particular lifestyle as a totalizing performance proved captivating to members of the counterculture, in particular, who set out to create their own carnivalesque subculture with the idea that it would become an alternate reality: “The soul of Hip then is dysfunction.

Defined, Hip is alienation – socio - economic as well as mental-coupled with participation in a subculture whose rituals defy the mores of the dominant society. It is a living Protest Vote; an indignant reaction to cynicism.”273 Art Johnson's notion of a living protest vote represents the counterculture's somewhat more buoyant spin on the immersive lifestyle that Thompson referred to as a full-time social vendetta in the case of his subjects. Johnson's references to dysfunction and alienation suggest a profound estrangement from society: not merely a constellation of dissident ideas or eccentric habits but an alternative mode of existence. Again, he is building on the Frankfurt School's attempt to activate the political potential of Freud's work by yoking it to Marx: “Freud's definition of neurosis as 'the expression of the rebellion of the Id against the outer world' becomes true for the Hip, not just at the unconscious mental level—but at the conscious existential level!”274 A neurotic cannot reconcile the

272 Reynolds, Freewheelin Frank, 8. 273 Johnson, Art, “A Theory of Hip; Part One 'What Have You Got?'” The Berkeley Barb 3,23,69 (1966): 1. 274 Ibid , 4.

113 demands placed on him by society with his own desires, and this tension manifests itself in various self-destructive behaviors. The notion of expressing the Id on a conscious, existential level is a proposal to resolve the conflict between Id and Superego by choosing to live in a new society, a wholly immersive subculture where the dictates of the Superego are not hostile to the Id. It is a program for politicizing psychological discontent. Freud examined the conflict between Id and Superego, but he did not particularly consider deviations in the composition of the Superego based on the subject's relationship to structures of power nor the Superego's variability between cultures and over time.275

Marcuse, however, recognized the Superego as a social construct and a political weapon, and Johnson went on to describe hip as freely-chosen total neurosis by which he meant an unreserved renunciation of the Superego, which he saw as a toxic manifestation of technocratic bourgeois culture. Numerous critics have noted how this mentality ultimately compromised the political efficacy of the New Left, leading to a certain strain of indulgent individualism that engendered the fractious identity politics of the 70's.276 In Johnson's formulation, however, total neurosis was not wanton solipsism but the dissolution of the modern individual as structured by the Superego. Again, the desired effect was carnivalesque.

costume

One crucial tool for creating and sustaining the totalizing loss of self that defines carnival is

275 Louis Menand points out that Freud took a cultural turn later in his career, but he basically advanced an inverted version of recapitulation theory that conceived of culture as as an extension of individual psychology. For Freud, culture and the structure of the Superego were defined by fairly static archetypes: by universal conflicts like the Oedipus syndrome rather than dynamic political factors. Menand, Louis. Introduction. Civilization and its Discontents. By Sigmund Freud. Trans. James Strackey (New York: Norton, 2015): 14-15. 276 Alice Echols discusses the limitations of this notion that “the personal is political” in her study of radical feminism, indicating that it was also an obstacle for the New Left more broadly. Echols, Alice. Daring to be Bad: Radical Feminism in America 1967-1975. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). Meanwhile, Thomas Frank's Conquest of Cool is essentially dedicated to the idea that the counterculture was deluded into believing that individual expression was inherently subversive.

114 costume. And, if the outlaw biker's rebuff of modern hygiene appalled the American mainstream of the mid-1960's, so did his outlandish dress, which many observers identified as a kind of horrible costume:

“My first impression when I walked into the Blue Blaze was that I had blundered into some sort of obscene children's party...The decorations glinted oddly in the dim orange light, and the whole place had the ludicrous air of a costume party.”277 Bill Murray felt that bikers' costumes contributed to the disorienting, outrageous atmosphere of the Blue Blaze, and we've seen that his police escort believed that bikers were capable of anything when they were dressed up. Of course, bikers were always dressed up, although they were often reluctant to acknowledge as much. Sonny Barger, for instance, claimed that he started wearing a Nazi belt because it was offered to him for free and he needed one, attempting to recast his outlandish wardrobe choice as an instance of obdurate functionalism that expressed a certain hyper-masculine obliviousness to style. Of course, Barger's explanation is wildly implausible, and elsewhere he admitted to relishing the extent to which the belt pissed people off: an outcome that he surely anticipated. Indeed, pissing people off was the primary motivation behind most bikers' sartorial choices, although their memoirs are full of careful descriptions of their clothing and accessories that reveal a more studied interest in fashion and it effect. Bikers were especially concerned with their so-called colors, garments that displayed their official club logo and local chapter identifiers: usually a leather or denim jacket, often with the sleeves cut off. We've seen, of course, that two factions of the Hell's Angels went to war over the design of this item, and bikers were also invested in the various badges that typically embellished their colors, displaying the subculture's arcane symbology.

This practice seems to reflect bikers' ambivalent relationship with martial identity, both replicating and subverting the military's emphasis on the expression of hierarchy and quantified performance metrics through medals, ribbons, patches, etc. Bikers were very serious about their colors, which they were supposed to defend unto death; yet, the meaning behind most of their patches was decidedly ironic,

277 Murray, “Hell's Angels.” Rpt. Mammoth Bikers, 96.

115 rewarding various anti-social activities like drug consumption and the public performance of certain depraved sexual acts.

Many bikers took the carnivalesque dynamic implicit in the relationship between their brazen colors and the decorous military uniform to a ludicrous extreme by adopting a wardrobe that was more self-consciously costumed, including items like top hats, canes, exotic pets toted as accessories, hair dye, earrings and nose rings, tattoos, and bullwhips. While Barger, Weathern, and other biker memoirists seem determined to distance themselves from the counterculture, they are, none the less, eager to note that hippies of the late 1960's copied their style. We've seen how bikers' beards and long hair affected an anti-modern aesthetic that was soon adopted by hip students, and bikers pioneered other elements of the surreal, psychedelic style of the 1960's as well. Indeed, Sonny Barger described

Terry the Tramp, in particular, as an avant garde figure with respect to fashion:

Looking back, he was a trend-setter. Between the beatniks and the hippies, Tramp grew his hair real long, wore a full beard, and had large tattoos all over his chest and shoulders. He carried a long bullwhip around with him, and when you heard it crack you knew he was close by....Terry took the Hell's Angels from its greaser image of the 1950's to the hipper, longhaired look of the 1960's. He dressed mainly in black leather, but he also wore bright psychedelic colors and walked with a San Quentin penitentiary shuffle.278

In England, Willis's biker boys continued to operate within a greaser aesthetic that was common to working-class youth culture. Their style did not cultivate the disorienting effect of a costume. American bikers of the 1960's, however, did strive to discomfit observers, abandoning the postwar greaser paradigm for something altogether unfamiliar and unsettling. They engaged in a kind of masquerade, and this emphasis underscored their peculiar brand of bohemianism. Indeed, Barger's description of

Terry's innovative style begins by mentioning his middle-class upbringing: “Terry was a drifter, although he was raised in a middle-class family in Sacramento.”279 When Barger describes Terry's San

Quentin penitentiary shuffle, then, he is observing something other than the relatively straightforward

278 Barger, Hell's Angel, 72. 279 Ibid.

116 exaggeration of working-class dress and address that we see in the greaser aesthetic; Terry is a middle- class kid who is affecting a mark of extreme marginalization and combining this distorted gesture with a host of other perplexing signs to create an evocative masquerade. And, as Barger insists, the counterculture soon followed suit; in short order, what Murray calls the ludicrous air of a costume party came to define the style of the counterculture, as we see in Norman Mailer's description of the protesters who marched on the Pentagon in 1967:

The hippies were there in great number, perambulating down the hill, many dressed like the legions of Sgt. Pepper’s Band, some were gotten up like Arab sheikhs, or in Park Avenue doormen’s greatcoats, others like Rogers and Clark of the West, Wyatt Earp, Kit Carson, Daniel Boone in buckskin, some had grown mustaches to look like have Gun Will Travel—Paladin’s surrogate was here!—and wild Indians with feathers, a hippie gotten up like Batman, another like Claude Rains in The Invisible Man—his face wrapped in a turban of bandages and he wore a black satin top hat.280

In these costumes, of course, we see a discombobulating survey of American mythology mixed with surrealism that represents a deliberate effort to deploy carnival as a political force.

THE GROTESQUE

Bikers consciously employed elements of masquerade to facilitate the dissolution of the individual into the collective of the club and to mark themselves apart from society. Even more important to bikers was the grotesque, which constitutes the marrow of their aesthetic, reflecting their preoccupation with the material reality of the body and its permeability, while giving free expression to their expansive affinity for vulgarity. As Watson observes, among bikers the concept of personal freedom was closely equated with offensive behavior. Again, for bikers, society was conceived as a feminized matrix of prudish rules, as we see in an article for Easyriders in which Don Sharp posited the biker as the heir of the pioneer: “They got a gut-ful of a world where a guy couldn't fart in public

280 Mailer, Norman: The Armies of the Night: History as Novel, the Novel as History. (New York: Plume, 1994): 91.

117 without being jailed, so they piled women and kids into wagons, took a rifle in one hand and an ax in the other, and split. They were a raggedy-assed, hairy face bunch who spit through their teeth and didn't give a shit what Miz Grundy might think about it.”281 Bikers felt that they had accomplished something when they could induce revulsion in citizens: “When you walk into a place where people can see you, you want to look as repulsive and repugnant as possible.”282 Repugnance, then, was an ideal among bikers; thus, the incessant references to farting in Easyriders would delight a pack of middle-school boys, while a non-sequitur cartoon from that publication seems geared to the same sensibility, depicting a filthy biker seated incongruously in an elegant restaurant with the caption:“Hey man, bring me a horsecock san and a side order of shit on a shingle, and a couple of brews.”283 Here, we see how bikers imagined themselves in relation to bourgeois society: intruding into their orderly sanctum to confront them with a nauseating spectacle. The cartoon biker is literally eating a pile of shit, and he is figuratively rubbing that shit into the faces of onlooking citizens. Thus, bikers' affinity for filth surpassed a simple defiance of normative hygiene routines, venturing deep into the grotesque: “At times a turd would come slinging through the air—shit splattering upon each other's faces. No one was to remain without filth upon his body.”284 Here, Frank Reynolds gave free reign to his flair for epic prose, offering an excrement-filled melee as a kind of profane ablution. Of course, while a turd may well have been slung on occasion at biker parties, Reynolds's account of bikers smearing each other in feces in a writhing mass, which is not corroborated by other sources, seems obviously hyperbolic.

Reynolds, in collaboration with Michael McClure, is deploying the grotesque as a self-conscious aesthetic posture: one of his preferred modes.

Indeed, in another passage describing a sordid biker party, Reynolds recounted: “Now there was ruckuses, cursing, spitting, hugging, kissing, drinking, vomiting, mauling, smelling, voices raised in

281 Sharp, “Fuck It,” 17. 282 Thompson, Hell's Angels, 109. 283 Cartoon. Easyriders September 1974: 10. 284 Reynolds, Freewheelin Frank, 105.

118 deepest pitched anger like a performance of a cloak-and-dagger play.”285 Here, it is not entirely clear what Reynolds means with his cloak and dagger metaphor, but it seems as though he is highlighting the performative, melodramatic nature of bikers' interactions. He is addressing the overarching quality of amplified surrealism that defined their lifestyle, and he is calling attention, again, to bikers' grotesque resistance to modern subjectivity and its characteristic visual paradigm, in particular.

Modernity was defined by a distinct emphasis on sight over the other senses.286 Baudelaire's flaneur, who is often cited as the prototypical modern subject, is a consummate watcher, and visual observation is also characteristic of scientific management techniques and the entire disciplinary apparatus of modern authority: not to mention mass culture itself. This emphasis on watching assumed negative connotations within the counterculture, which followed the Frankfurt School in identifying mass- mediated spectacle as the definitive medium of hegemonic social control. For the restive young people of the 1960's, sight was associated with the mixture of passivity, deliberation, and restraint that characterizes rationality. And bikers, who were admired for the anti-logical simplicity of their thought, were perceived to be stridently active, intrepid, and stimulated by more basal senses like smell. As we see in Reynolds's passages, bikers themselves cultivated and embraced this association. In the activities that Reynolds highlighted—vomiting, mauling, smelling—we see an intense focus on the senses other than sight that invokes the grotesque body of carnival.

Indeed, Reynolds approvingly observes of one of his club-mates: “Freddy, from Oakland, with his chubby pot-belly and meaty-like hands, was stumbling about the floor like a blind bull.”287 Here,

Freddy's body is described as excessive and animalistic with particular attention drawn to his blindness,

285 Ibid, 6. 286 Juhnani Pallassma observes: “The gradually growing hegemony of the eye seems to be parallel with the development of Western ego-consciousness and the gradually increasing separation of the self and the world; vision separates us from the world whereas the other senses unite us with it.” And he references Mandrou's claim that sight was the third most important sense before the 20th century. Pallasmaa, Juhani. The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses. (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2012): 28. Adnan Morshed also emphasizes the quintessentially modern nature of detached aerial observation in particular, notably in the context of planning. Morshed, Adnan. “The Cultural Politics of Aerial Vision: Le Corbusier in Brazil (1929)” The Journal of Architectural Education. 55,4 (2002): 201-210. 287 Reynolds, Freewheelin Frank, 29.

119 a quality that reappears in an appalling episode from George Weathern's memoir. One night in 1972, while incarcerated in the Mendocino County Jail, Weathern took bikers' hostility to the visual paradigm of modernity to a horridly literal extreme by stabbing pencils through both of his eyes. Weathern himself does not describe the incident, allowing an excerpt from The San Francisco Chronicle to introduce the topic in the epigraph to the thirtieth chapter of his Wayward Angel memoir, but he does describe the grotesque aftermath:

As they approached, I tilted my head far back and peeked under one swollen eyelid to get a fuzzy half- view. My hands and feet were manacled, no slack in the chains. My eyes were puffed twice normal size, ringed in black and dotted by burn marks, with a pencil hole through one eyelid. When I hobbled close to the bars, my sister—though she dealt with mangled accident victims as a nurse—was jolted visibly, and Helen fainted.288

Weathern, of course, did not mutilate his eyes and nearly blind himself to protest modernity. He was in the midst of a period of PCP abuse, and he was in jail facing a long list of felony charges that had him contemplating turning state's evidence against his club-mates; in fact, he had recently fired seven bullets into his longtime friend, business partner, and fellow Oakland Hell's Angel, Zorro. Yet,

Weathern's description of his wounds and the reactions they elicit, along with a subsequent account of eating his own feces in prison and smashing his head against the walls, are not simply the grim details of a troubled man's biography but an effort to deploy the grotesque. If Reynolds exultantly observes that Freddy stumbled blindly like a meaty beast, Weathern likewise seems to relish figuring himself shackled like an animal, raving and blinded.

Indexical Bodies

Thus, bikers were intensely focused on the physical body and its boundaries. One of the idiosyncrasies of their narratives is that everyone is introduced by their height and weight. This is true

288 Weathern, Wayward Angel, 250.

120 even when these measures are entirely unremarkable: “Zorro, a slender 6-foot-1, was a pool hustler...“Okie,” 5-71/2 and 140 pounds, was another from an unhappy home.”289 This habit can seem almost like a parody of the all-American jock culture that bikers disdain, but it is quite earnest, and it is grounded in a very different relationship to the body than the one expressed in sports culture, where body metrics are similarly fetishized. As we have seen, under capitalism, the fragmented body is viewed as a commodity, a set of quantifiable potentialities. But, it is not a commodity quite like any other because this potential to be developed and exploited remains dubious; even as modernism engages in a kind of prosthetic thinking about the body, a buoyant faith that it can be augmented and refined by technology, modernism also continues to posit the body as a potential reverse salient in the progress of human achievement, an immutable source of primitive lack. Bikers, of course, privileged this atavistic body, which was construed as the locus of their authentic existence: “I had to express my pain and outrage and to reaffirm my own existence. Because there was nothing else, I picked up my own feces. I patted it, molded it, looked at it. I smelled it and ate some of it.”290 When bikers list each other's height and weight, they echo the dissecting, rationalizing perspective of capital, but their aim is quite different; they are trying to ground identity in the irreducible reality of the physical body as an expression of their authenticity, as George Weathern did by tasting his own feces. For bikers, to know someone, to be introduced, was to encounter a physical body.

Bikers, then, imagined themselves to be more engaged with reality than the deluded citizens around them, and they conceived of their bodies as records of their real experiences: “the regimen of slugfests, all-night drinking, and grueling riding hardened us.”291 In particular, bikers had a strong affinity for tattoos, scars, grime, and, most importantly, long hair: “Man, it's like this, among my people, our long hair really means something to us.”292 Long-hair and beards are a form of natural

289 Ibid, 78. 290 Ibid, 181. 291 Ibid, 27. 292 Reynolds, Freewheelin Frank, 16.

121 accumulation; they comprise a particular kind of historical record that underscores the reality of the body as an organism progressing through time toward death, rather than an immutable commodity suspended in the uncanny timelessness of the market. Thus, bikers embraced shoulder-length hair when men of the nascent student counterculture were still working incrementally toward a modest lengthening of their sideburns. In yet another grotesque passage from his memoir, Frank Reynolds provided a consummate example of how bikers idealized the excessive bodies of carnival and their indexicality, calling particular attention to the effect of long hair:

George Zahn, vice-president of the Frisco Chapter, with the face of Van Gogh the painter... rolled upon the bar floor with another member in total drunkenness. Other members mauled and fell into each other and cursed loudly as their long hair swung and sweat poured from their faces making streaks in the dust and grime of the long ride. It smelled of Hell's Angels on the scene.293

Here, the bodies of Reynolds and his fellow Angels are already caked in grime from riding exposed on their motorcycles, and, in turn, as they fight, the sweat that pours from their greasy hair carves heinous rivulets in this rank accumulation, indexing their depravity. A related image appears in George

Weathern's discussion of bikers' unconventional sexual appeal. As part of their aesthetic of sublime self-deprecation, bikers consistently and gleefully described themselves as ugly, and Weathern's account of the specific attributes that defined their ugliness recounted that women who were attracted to bikers had to overlook “funky clothes and oily hair,” adopting a new perspective that allowed them to see “raw masculinity in tree-stump thick tattooed arms or sexuality in lean bodies strung out by irregular meals, late hours, and drugs.”294 All of the characteristics that Weathern listed, of course, construed the body as a passive index of authentic experience.

Bikers, then, defied the hygienic paradigm of modernity, adopting a grotesque aesthetic that highlighted the body's permeability, conceiving of it as a malleable record of lives led in extremis.

Once again, their position was a self-consciously anachronistic one inflected by class. As part of the

293 Reynolds, Freewheelin Frank, 29. 294 Weathern, Wayward Angel, 117.

122 transition from manliness to masculinity, bourgeois males began to experiment with developing, objectifying, and displaying the male body in ways that had been considered working-class. In the nineteenth century, the bourgeois preoccupation with covered bodies was not merely a hallmark of sexually repressed prudishness but an expression of class hierarchy. During the antebellum period, of course, slaves' vulnerability to having their bodies stripped and displayed provided a potent symbol of their degraded status, and free laborers were also likely to have their bodies exposed, whether they were performing dirty, heavy labor such that clothing was not feasible or, increasingly, competing in a public athletic contest. Yet, as they began to embrace masculinity with its anti-modern overtones, bourgeois men of the early twentieth century became increasingly fascinated with the possibility of displaying their own bodies. John Kasson describes the career of Eugene Sandow as exemplary of this transition and the class tensions that underwrote it. Sandow was a strongman who transcended the sideshow milieu of his predecessors, becoming a vaudeville fixture and frequently giving private performances for New York's elite. To achieve this rarefied acceptance, Sandow added a patina of classical allusion to his act, typically performing in a fig-leaf and striking poses from Greco-Roman art, and he shifted his emphasis from feats of strength to a more contemplative display of his body, which he transformed into a virtually unprecedented mass of highly articulated muscle. Indeed, even more than his classical references, it was Sandow's ability to train and transform his body in this manner that made him a subject of particular fascination for the bourgeoisie. Kasson explicitly contrasts Sandow's sculpted body with that of heavyweight champion and working-class hero John L. Sullivan, whose own well-developed muscles were obscured by layers of fat that served to cushion his opponents blows and also reflected Sullivan's relatively laissez-faire training methods. Although he kept his training methods secret, Sandow's physique was the product of highly routinized weight training, which was a quintessentially bourgeois innovation.295 295 Kasson, John F. Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man: the White Male Body and the Challenge of Modernity in America. (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001): 30-33, 75.

123 In fact, the innovation of weight training captures the ambivalent reciprocity that defines the dynamic of cultural exchange between social classes; it represents a bourgeois appropriation of certain working-class ideas about masculinity and the male body but also a corrective repudiation of those ideas. Carolyn Thomas de la Pena captures this dynamic in the story of fitness pioneer George

Windship, who became a gymnastics devotee as an undergraduate at Harvard during the 1850's but went on to devise an early weight-lifting machine, along with associated training regimens and explanatory medical theories, after he was embarrassed by a street-corner huckster with a novelty strength-testing device. Windship constructed his health-lift to quantify and develop muscular strength and proceeded to build his body into an impressive instrument capable of lifting massive weight, and he was not content with his results until he had employed his innovation to humiliate a local laborer who was known as one of the strongest men about, returning the disgrace that had been visited on him.

Thus, the emergence of modern weight-training methods represented a bourgeois reinterpretation of working-class notions of masculinity, reflecting a new desire among the bourgeoisie to possess and display powerful bodies, combined with a characteristic bourgeois emphasis on systematized performance metrics and scientific rationale.296 And once the bourgeoisie established their new paradigm for the modern, machine-built male body, the working-class, in turn, ambivalently embraced that model, adopting the practice of weight training and certain elements of the lean, highly articulated, and symmetrically developed ideal that rationalized training methods promoted. However, over time, the working-class also established divergent aesthetic criteria and protocols for the activity of body building that would have been anathema to men like George Windship. Sandow embodied this mulitvalent exchange. If he exemplified and helped engender a transition in which bourgeois men came to privilege the display of powerful bodies as a constituent element of masculinity, he also embodied a simultaneous exchange in the opposite direction, as bourgeois methods for training the body and

296 de la Pena, Body Electric, 55-57.

124 concomitant aesthetic standards exerted an influence on the working-class.

Bikers found themselves in a fraught position given these developments. As the working-class adapted and reinterpreted the bourgeois ideal of the machine-built modern body, bikers' resistance to this standard might read as feminine, rather than anti-modern or genuine. As the body continued to serve as a locus for ambivalence about modernity, these conflicting attitudes were frequently registered through reference to gender. In general, the female body was imagined to be stubbornly natural, undisciplined and excessive, and the grotesque body of carnival, which underscores fecundity and penetration, is, of course, quintessentially female. By contrast, modernity understood the male body as something that must be produced; masculinity itself was imagined as a kind of prosthesis, a cultural artifact or technology.297 By celebrating the organic, grotesque body, bikers gravitated toward a female identification that potentially undermined their bombastic masculinity. Such a gender inversion was somewhat compatible with their investment in carnivalesque inversion, but, given their overriding commitment to masculinity, any feminine identification had to be carefully managed. And this balancing act is apparent, in particular, when bikers talk about body-building. Body-building is something that is alluded to indirectly in numerous biker narratives. It is apparent that many bikers were engaged in the activity, but it was always discussed somewhat obliquely. Easyriders, for instance, which billed itself as a comprehensive guide to the biker lifestyle and provided advice on numerous topics of ancillary interest to bikers, like gun collecting, never seemed to discuss weightlifting, although it frequently noted that individuals were particularly strong or well-muscled.

Of course, this reticence is not surprising, as the biker aesthetic eschewed precisely the type of disciplined self-improvement implicated in body-building. By the 1960's, body-building had been widely adopted by the working-class, and it had even become a particular preoccupation of prison culture. In fact, although it is not discussed outside of the caption, Sonny Barger's memoir includes a

297 Armstrong, Modernism Technology.

125 photograph of himself with four other men lifting weights in California's Folsom Prison. Yet bikers seem to have recognized that there is something intrinsically bourgeois about weight lifting, even when alternative aesthetic criteria are introduced, as they were throughout the process of working-class adoption of the pastime. Bikers did not plan ahead or work incrementally toward quantifiable goals, and they did not prize immaculate, well developed bodies. Again, bikers conceived of their bodies as indexes of their authentic experiences; a chiseled physique was likewise indexical, but it was an index of judicious workouts and proper nutrition: artificial virtues that were anathema to the biker. However, if bikers rejected the whole ethos of rationalized self-improvement and, with it, modernity's identification of the male body as a prosthetic technology, it was difficult for them to completely reject body building. Bikers wanted to be viewed as the undiluted residue that was left when the artifice of civilization was stripped away, but they wanted that residue to be understood, specifically, as a concentrated form of masculinity: or, as George Weathern's phrased bikers' deviant sexual appeal, raw masculinity. Bikers, then, attempted to chart a compromise position with respect to body building.

When Weathern elaborated on the attributes of this raw masculinity, he referenced bikers' tree-stump- thick arms: another indexical image with which he implied that bikers' muscularity is the result of some natural process of accumulation rather than the product of a disciplined training regimen. Ultimately, it is apparent that bikers did pursue body-building, but they did so somewhat furtively, preferring to imagine their muscularity as a natural correlate of their outsize masculinity.

Sonny Barger included a rare direct reference to body-building when he introduced readers of his memoir to Armond Bletcher, a club member who was murdered in 1975: “Armand Bletcher stood six feet eight and weighed in at 350 pounds. He was so strong he could pick up a couple of motorcycles and put them in the back of a pickup truck. In the early 1970's Armand could bench-press 705 pounds, but he had to arch his back to do it. He was never in competition, but he took steroids and was

126 unbelievably big.”298 It is worth noting the familiarity with which Barger discussed body-building in this passage, assuming that his audience understands the significance of an arched back during a competition bench-press; however, Barger did not ultimately endorse body-building and its peculiar conception of the male body. While he acknowledged the claim of the fragmented and commodified modern body by sincerely offering and exalting one quantitative measure of Bletcher's strength—his

705 lb. bench press—he also stipulated that that this data point was invalidated by Bletcher's refusal to conform to the standardized procedure dictated by the governing bureaucracy of competitive body- building, and he seemed to place more value on Bletcher's functional strength as expressed in his ability to lift two bikes: the kind of strength that defined premodern working-class ideas about powerful bodies, like that of George Windship's local rival.

In this context, Barger's ardent account of Bletcher's steroid use is particularly interesting.

Steroids are a technology that facilitates precisely the type of augmentation that animated modernist fantasies, but Barger did not place Bletcher's use of the drugs within this modernist framework of performance enhancement; Bletcher did not compete: at least not legitimately. Barger, instead, concluded his assessment of Bletcher's steroid-aided strength with his own qualitative valuation: “[he] was unbelievably big.”299 Thus, Barger seemed to see steroids as a virtue, though not because of their ability to expand human capacity according to rationalized criteria. He seemed to value their contribution to grotesque excess. There was something obscene in Bletcher's exaggerated body, and it was precisely this quality that made him a beloved figure among bikers. Indeed, in general, Easyriders aimed to stress their intimate familiarity with the world of outlaw bikers without endorsing any specific clubs or their members. Armond Bletcher was an exception: someone whom Easyriders claimed as one of their own, listing him on their masthead as Big Armond Bletcher, Arbitrator and Bill Collector, and frequently invoking him in editorials. Of course, these references, like his honorary title, invariably 298 Barger, Hell's Angel, 87. 299 Ibid.

127 referenced his striking physique, as we see in one reader's letter to the magazine: “I've noticed in previous issues that you turn certain editors who make mistakes over to Armond. Is he really as big as you say he is?”300 Bletcher was a totem figure, embodying bikers' grotesque physical ideal. He was indifferent to rationalized metrics but surpassingly powerful none the less: his body excessive, undisciplined, and overflowing, coursing with toxins and fantastically augmented, yet somehow organic and unaffected. He was powerfully build but not synthetic: natural, yet indelibly masculine.

Pained Bodies

Modernity made pervasive use of the machine analogy to understand the human body.

Victorians conceived of the body as a closed system running on finite reserves of energy, but Beard and others redefined the body as an open system capable of accepting and adapting extrinsic energy inputs, just like a machine.301 This idea underscored a kind of intimacy between man and machine that came to define modern conceptions of the body, which tended toward cyborgian fantasies of amalgamation and enhancement. The biker's relationship to his motorcycle was, of course, particularly intimate; yet, bikers also labored to draw a sharp contrast between their begrimed and beleaguered bodies and their immaculate machines, reveling in their corpulence and underscoring the frailty and permeability of their human bodies: a preoccupation that was distilled, as we have seen, in the looming possibility of a motorcycle crash resulting in catastrophic injury. Indeed, bikers tended to relish stories of gruesome injuries. Hunter Thompson titled his essay for the Guggenheim's 1998 Art of the Motorcycle exhibit

“Song of the Sausage Creature,” employing a morbid, colloquial epithet for crash victims that typifies bikers' sardonic humor regarding accidents and their aftermath. One injury that occurs to some degree in most motorcycle accidents is what bikers sarcastically call road rash: the abrasions that come when 300 Halliday, Sue. Letter. “Big Armond” Easyriders September 1974: 6. 301 Armstrong, Modernism, Technology, 9.

128 a human body tumbles and slides along an asphalt or concrete surface. In a high-speed crash, a rider can be virtually skinned alive and reduced to raw tube of flesh: a sausage-like creature that is no longer recognizably human. Of course, the idea that we are all just meat effectively encapsulates bikers' nihilism, which is part of why they delight in the macabre.

The broken body of the crash victim was the apotheosis of the biker's particular articulation of the grotesque, which operated against modern conceptions of the body and the sanctity of individualism. Again, George Weathern recalled that, when he was initiated into the Hell's Angels, he was given an official club patch but didn't have a cutaway jacket onto which it could be sewn, at which point Angels' president Sonny Barger intervened: “'Don't worry,' Sonny said. He tossed me his old colors, the death's head patch stained with blood from a jaw-breaking spill.”302 Here, Sonny Barger does not just fail to discard a gruesome memento of a personal episode of terror and anguish; he offers it as a legacy within the specific context of an initiation ritual that aims to enact Weathern's dissolution into the collective of the club. And the same dynamic informs another dramatic scene from Weathern's memoir, in which the state's modern practices for individuating bodies are contrasted with bikers' emphasis on the deconstructive effect of the grotesque: “Helen stopped to talk to Magoo, his arms tattooed with his state and FBI criminal identification numbers, his gut girded in bandages. He was propped against a tree, booze and grass scattered around him, a hippie girl fussing over him. “I hit the pavement at sixty-five and eight bikes piled into me,” he explained. “The revolver in my belt did a number on my guts.” He showed nine inches of stitches on his belly.”303 Criminal identification numbers, of course, represent the exercise of authority through the quintessentially modern practices of surveillance and record keeping, and Magoo has ironically tattooed these abstract identifiers on his arms, contrasting the state's rationalized transcription practices with bikers' grotesque indexicality.

While the state and its citizens keep organized records to capture a synthetic reality, the biker 302 Weathern, Wayward Angel, 10. 303 Ibid, 193.

129 accumulates authentic tattoos and scars; this is the contrast that is underscored by Weathern's biker pieta: a sublimely grotesque spectacle composed around Magoo's overflowing body. In Weathern's portrait, Magoo's guts are literally spilling out, while signifiers of sexuality and profligate drug use abound, further suggesting excess and permeability.

Magoo's grotesque, broken body also presents, crucially, a spectacle of pain. Physical suffering represented an aesthetic virtue for bikers, extending their fascination with death and facilitating their assault on the modern conception of individualism. As Eileen Scarry observes, in pain we encounter death and the annihilation of self: “Each [pain and death] only happens because of the body. In each, the contents of consciousness are destroyed. The two are the most intense forms of negation, the purest expressions of the anti-human, of annihilation, of total aversiveness, though one in an absence and the other a felt presence, one occurring in the cessation of sentience, the other expressing itself in grotesque overload.”304 The body in pain, then, is a grotesque body, a body that resists dualism, insisting on itself so insistently that it overwhelms our reflective consciousness. In pain, we find relief from what Bataille terms the ceaseless operation of cognition. Lears, of course, describes fascination with pain as a central preoccupation among his turn-of-the-century anti-moderns, and Scarry elaborates on the nature of this fascination, suggesting that the nineteenth century bourgeoisie romanticized pain as an escape from the neurotic obsession with self that was coming to define their class and the modern world itself. When

George Weathern recounted consuming his own feces and resorting to various forms of self-harm while incarcerated, he described these gruesome actions as attempts to reaffirm his existence, locating his identity in something tangible and undeniable. Thus, as with bikers' insistence on recording everyone's height and weight, there is a certain objectivist impulse behind Weathern's presentation of his instinct to bang his head into walls or consume feces; yet, the existence that is affirmed in this corpulence and profanity is not the existence of the rational modern subject; it is something altogether grotesque and 304 Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: the Making and Unmaking of the World. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987) 31.

130 deranged. And it was precisely this type of self-abnegation that sparked the imagination of the counterculture: “We are working toward a new revolutionary identity...in the experimenting behavior, the wild, multi-colored looks and underneath all the hair struggles a search for a new meaning in life, for a personal apocalypse.”305 Here, Rubin begins by invoking carnivalesque entropy and mutation, and he concludes with a wonderful rendition of the grotesque body, or the body in pain: a personal apocalypse.

Drugs

The grotesque also helps to elucidate bikers' enthusiasm for recreational drug use, which cemented their budding relationship with the Bay Area counterculture, although subtly divergent attitudes about the nature and significance of the drug experience ultimately sowed conflict between the two groups. Bikers actually remained ambivalent about drugs, with outlaw clubs typically maintaining official rules against their use and disparaging addicts.306 In Britain, Paul Willis notes a strong disdain for drugs among his biker boys, which he relates to their preoccupation with confronting reality, and their American counterparts seem to have maintained the same attitude: at least rhetorically.

They were determined to embrace the sordid truth of man's existence without evasion, and they had no interest in transcendence. Thus, the counterculture's paradigm of drug experimentation as mind- expansion never resonated with bikers, who pursued a very different form of superfluity: a grotesque indulgence in excess per se that strained the integrity of the body. Elaborating on his observation that the Hell's Angels consumed drugs “like victims of famine turned loose on a rare smorgasbord,”

Thompson asserted: “They use anything available, and if the result is a screaming delirium then so be

305 Rubin, “Elvis Kills Ike,” 11. 306 Thompson looked askance at the Angels' claim that “there are no dope addicts in the club.” Thompson, Hell's Angels, 203.

131 it.”307 This is the attitude expressed in Barger's account of bikers' commitment to sleeping where they fell. Bikers celebrated utter dissipation and incapacitation, seeking out the point at which the beleaguered, ravished body simply overwhelmed and dissolved cognitive function. Indeed, Weathern himself included an even more grotesque episode of screaming delirium: “Or picture Winston and me ripping our brains with PCP, literally banging our heads together, digging the sounds, saying over and over, “I'm a dummy. I'm a dummy.”308 Again, here, Weathern and his companion pursue drug use as obliteration; their mental faculties are not expanded or reoriented but nullified in a way that expresses bikers' nihilistic sense of authenticity, dissolving the integrity of the individual rational actor in much the same manner that the body in pain simply overwhelms the illusion of coherent rational thought that constitutes modern subjecthood.

SEXUALITY

These same qualities of grotesque excess defined biker sexuality, which likewise combined the destabilizing quality of carnival indulgence with overtones of bikers' characteristic sadism and nihilism, creating a kind of dark carnival. As with drug use, expansive, experimental sexuality was an ostensible common ground between bikers and the counterculture that ultimately reveals the profound differences between their respective world views. The essence of bikers' grotesque sexuality was an emphatic hostility to monogamy and an interest in depravity and abjection, along with a puerile scatological bent.

In the Easyriders piece “Typical Tuesday” by I.M. Jones, we encounter a succinct sketch of this attitude. It is a first-person narrative that begins in the present tense, forcing the reader to confront the world from the narrator's perspective as he wakes up hung-over in an empty house. He is eager to buy drugs and bellows for his old lady: “Hey! Lard-ass!” When he finds her, he recollects the previous 307 Ibid. 308 Weathern, Wayward Angel, 170.

132 night: “Put a hand on the ol' lady's nice, warm leg. Rubbed a bit. Pretty damn quick, she spreads 'em, and wham! I feed her the popsicle! No shit, man, I swear she went two feet, straight up, without movin' a muscle. She let out a scream, farted, and hit the floor arunnin', takin' a swipe at me on the way by. I was laughin' so hard I forgot to swat her back.”309 Our narrator then shifts back to the present tense to describe making breakfast, which somehow leads him to recollect the time fellow bikers made him unclog a toilet with his bare hands. Thus, we see how bikers' sexual fantasies cultivate a ludic air, bouncing between the sadistic and the scatological and eschewing any hint of romance or affection.

Indeed, Mark Watson observed that their sexual attitudes, first and foremost, idealized extremism in the form of anal sex, cunnilingus, fellatio, and group sex, and this extremism extends also to rape and even bestiality, which was a common theme in bikers' sexual discourse if not in practice. Ultimately, bikers' sexual posture reproduced a familiar dialectic, as bikers depicted themselves in terms that were both self-aggrandizing and wildly self-deprecating, imagining themselves as irresistible alpha men with inordinately large genitals in one moment and repulsive, disease-ridden, predatory, and abusive perverts in the next. Accordingly, they defined their sexuality by their enthusiasm for two seemingly incongruous acts: rape and cunnilingus.

Gang Rape

It was the 1964 Monterrey Rape case that brought a new generation of outlaw bikers to the attention of the national media. The accused Hell's Angels were ultimately acquitted, but the rape stigma endured, in large part because bikers themselves cultivated that stigma, as we have seen in

Frank Reynolds's blustering account of his record of sexual violations. But, bikers were not just notorious rapists; they were associated, specifically, with gang rape. The sociologist James Quinn

309 Jones, I.M. “Typical Tuesday” Easyriders September 1974: 17.

133 claims that early clubs actually had train rooms specifically dedicated to these ritual violations, adding that, although the institution of the train room had disappeared, the tradition of the train endured:

“Trains occur roughly once every six to eight weeks.”310 Quinn has a penchant for incredibly specific, grandiosely authoritative claims, but, if his assertions about the precise frequency of trains are dubious, references to trains are ubiquitous in the writings of bikers and their chroniclers, including the most sympathetic accounts. Whatever the actual frequency of trains, they not only occurred, but bikers saw them as a definitive element of the subculture, even if they, personally, chose to abstain for whatever reason.311

We have seen how bikers exaggerated a distinctly anti-modern emphasis on the salutary effects of masculine aggression, constructing rape as a kind of authenticity, and bikers' emphasis on gang rape, in particular, both reinforced and complicated this stylized primitivism. Bikers consistently identified the source of their penchant for group sexual violence in an ethos of profound mutuality. Early bikers did not have much access to sexual opportunities, and Barger noted that “if somebody screwed a girl, then chances are she was the town slut and everybody fucked her. In the 1950's, the most pussy anybody got was lying about it or going to Tijuana.”312 Here, Barger's reference to everybody is another instance of bikers' characteristic self-deprecation, meant to suggest that any woman who found herself in the company of the Hell's Angels was likely to be sexually indiscriminate: someone who had already pursued sexual experiences with more desirable men and probably earned the scorn of the mainstream community in the process.313 But, everybody has another distinct meaning in the context of bikers and their mores. If a biker had a woman who was sexually willing, he was expected to share that resource,

310 Quinn, James, and D. Shane Koch. "The Nature of Criminality Within One-percent Motorcycle Clubs." Deviant Behavior 24,3 (2003): 281-305. Rpt. “Sex and Hedonism Amongst One-Percenter Bikers.” Mammoth Bikers, 310. 311 Reynolds, for instance, celebrated the train as a club institution but also referred to dedicated train enthusiasts among his cohort as “the deviates,” implying that they were a distinct subset of the club's membership. Reynolds, Freewheelin Frank, 102. Barger also seemed personally disinterested in trains. Barger, Hell's Angels 312 Barger, Hell's Angel, 98. 313 Of course, bikers also depicted themselves as indiscriminate. Easyriders voiced a familiar refrain when it told a letter writer: “Most bike riders dig any kind of woman.” “Another Question” Easyriders September 1974: 8.

134 often to the point at which that willingness was strongly tested or even wantonly trampled. Thus, in his account of an Angels' gang-rape, Thompson stipulated that the scene hovered in his mind “somewhere between a friendly sex orgy and an all-out gang rape.”314 For their part, biker sources are consummately blunt about about what happened in these scenarios: “It was the same old story—a limited orgy that became something else as more and more guys lined up for service.”315 Bikers considered it a privilege of brotherhood to line up in such a circumstance, a correlate of their one on all, all on one policy regarding combat.

Danny Lyon's interview with Kathy offers rare insight into bikers' practice of gang-rape from the perspective of a female insider, providing more nuance to this same old story, as Kathy reflects on an incident in which a case of mistaken identity almost led her to be sexually assaulted. In her case, word circulated through a large biker gathering that a woman in a red dress had volunteered to pull a train, and Kathy, who was also wearing a red dress, was dragged into an upstairs bedroom by several unfamiliar bikers. Ultimately, her boyfriend intervened, and she attempts to tell the story in a humorous way in keeping with the mistaken identity trope, but she also concludes: “when they were done with me

I think I woulda taken a gun.”316 Yet, if Kathy was unequivocal about the psychic violence and anguish that she would have experienced if subjected to a train, she was conflicted about the nature of other trains she had witnessed: “Well, here they pulled a train on this girl, up in the room. But she was willin', you know, she liked Sonny and this and that.”317 We can only imagine, of course, the fraught emotions contained in Kathy's ambiguous use of this and that, and similar wavering is apparent even when she attempted an emphatic defense: “And I've never seen 'em, really, take anybody that wasn't willin'. I never have. Except in Dayton. But our guys didn't do that.”318 Not only did Kathy concede that she had

314 Thompson, Hell's Angels, 184. 315 Weathern, Wayward Angel, 143. 316 Lyon, Bikeriders, 83. 317 Ibid, 82. 318 Ibid.

135 witnessed other bikers commit rape but her defense of her guys was qualified with the word really.

Ultimately, when Kathy noted that the woman whom she witnessed willingly pull a train liked sonny and this and that, we get a sense of how bikers interpreted consent and how Weathern's same old story typically unfolded; to consent to any type of sexual contact with one club member was to consent to anything that the body of the club saw fit. Thus, when Kathy complained that she was at the party with her boyfriend and had no interest in group sex, her protests were entirely ignored; word had already been passed that the woman in the red dress was a communal resource.

This curious understanding of consent was commonsensical among bikers, for whom the train achieved an iconic status, as we see in a cartoon from Easyriders. The action of the cartoon, which simply shows men standing in line with a woman's lower legs barely entering the frame, takes place off-stage and is not named. It is assumed that anyone who has a basic familiarity with the world of bikers will recognize the scene, and, in this sense, it functions as something of a meta-commentary on the iconic nature of the train; to identify the ambiguous scene as a gang rape is to get the cartoon.

However, the cartoon also finds humor in juxtaposing the quotidian and the violently profane in a surreal way. In drawing attention away from the rape itself and onto the social dynamic between the men waiting their turn to commit rape, it asks: is waiting in line to commit sexual assault like waiting in line at the grocery store? This question goes to the heart of how the biker troubled modern assumptions about individuality. The ubiquity of waiting in line is a signature of modern life, which is often characterized as an exercise in self-restraint and delayed gratification. To be modern is to internalize a regime of discipline, and the line symbolizes this process, which constitutes the essence of

Freud's psychology with its dichotomy between the Id and the Ego. Indeed, in a New York Times article on the growing popularity of fee-based opportunities for line-cutting, titled “Want to Save Civilization?

Get in Line,” Matthew Malady defends the line as a bulwark of democracy and civilization itself:

“Which is to say the line is not a persistent social nuisance. It's one of our most noble collective

136 achievements.”319 For Malady, a world without lines is nothing but a savage Hobbesian wilderness: a hostile landscape where a bestial act like rape would be expected. What do we make, then, of people who wait in line to commit rape: who employ the reasoned restraint of modernity toward psychotic, primitive ends?

Quite apart from the supreme trespass against the sanctity of another individual that is implicit in any act of rape, the type of intimate sharing involved in the activity of gang rape runs contrary to the fundamental assumptions of modern individualism, which are bound up in the concept of property.

Significantly, while Thompson claimed that there were trains taking place at the Angels' regular bar on any weekend night, he only recounted one of these episodes in detail, and it can hardly be a coincidence that Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test describes the same scene, which featured one highly particular detail: “At one point, when the action slowed down, some of the Angels went out and got the girl's ex-husband, who was stumbling drunk. They led him into the shack and insisted he take his own turn. The room got very nervous, for only a few of the outlaws were anxious to carry things that far.”320 Thompson's reaction to this ghastly spectacle, which unfolds over several pages, was fraught and contradictory, and he never revealed precisely what he meant by that far. It is possible that some of the Angels who initiated the abhorrent drama envisioned a spectacle of retribution, but that type of vicious misogyny would not be considered particularly extreme in the Angels' milieu, and it certainly does not seem to be sadistic revenge that discomfited Thompson.321 One sense in which the episode represents an extreme is fairly obvious, although unacknowledged by Thompson. Considering that the ex-husband's participation was coerced, the Hell's Angels effectively raped him, compelling him to perform a sexual act against his will. Although recent scholarship has de-emphasized control,

319 Malady, Matthew J.X. “Want to Save Civilization? Get in Line.” The New York Times Magazine May 21 (2013). 320 Thompson, Hell's Angel, 185. 321 Thompson remarked, enigmatically, that “The impression I had at the time was one of vengeance,” leaving us to wonder whether his impression had changed and how? Regardless, the revenge motive was imputed to the Angels and not the ex-husband, and it does not seem to explain why Thompson dwelt on this episode in particular.

137 domination, and humiliation as constituent elements of rape, these elements are undoubtedly present in the case of the ex-husband, and the taboo nature of male rape can partially explain why Thompson's sympathy for the ex-husband is charged with obvious disdain.

Yet, the taboo against male rape is only the beginning of Thompson's ambivalence. Thompson observed that he last saw the incoherent victim dancing with the ex-husband, though barely moving. It is a morbid yet tender scene, revealing Thompson's sympathy for both and suggesting an enduring bond of affection between them. And, ultimately, it is the nature of this bond that is interrogated by the grisly spectacle in such an unsettling way. The young man was not impressed to perform as a vengeful ex but as a de facto husband; thus, the Angels came as close as possible to forcing a man to participate in the public gang-rape of his wife, which is the sadistic horizon that Thompson believed few were willing to approach. And the prospect of spousal gang rape represented an unspeakable extreme for Thompson because of the ambiguous way that such a violation both lays waste and perversely reinforces the underlying assumptions of modern, companionate marriage. Prior to the twentieth century, marriage was explicitly a property relationship, and wives themselves were a de facto form of property, denied full subjecthood and full citizenship, as they were precluded from holding property themselves.

Modern companionate marriage, then, was defined against this legacy of coveture, and the extreme objectification that Thomson witnessed seems to represent a kind of horrible atavism. However, as

Viviana Zelizer argues, even as we have disavowed the convention that women themselves are a form of property, we have moved to embrace a model of mutual possession rather than expiating the property concept from our definition of marriage. The reality that spouses have a possessive investment in one another is belied by layers of social convention and ritual that emphasize and reemphasize the emotional and spiritual nature of the marriage bond, but it is there, forever menacing: an exposed nerve.322

322 Zelizer, Viviana A. The Purchase of Intimacy. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).

138 And the issue of sexual access, in particular, pulls at the tenuous threads of our modern understanding of companionate marriage. At the time of Thompson's sojourn with the Hell's Angels, marital rape did not yet exist; it was an oxymoron, as men were still entitled to nearly unfettered sexual access to their wives' bodies, which were defined as a form of marital property. Of course, a husband's possessive investment in his wife's body was an unusual form of property. Unlike other property, it was not transferable, and Joanna Bourke, in her work Rape: Sex, Violence, History, reflects on the paradoxical status of sexual access as property by considering the story of William Morgan, an RAF officer who persuaded three enlisted men to accompany him home from a bar and rape his wife.

Ultimately, the three men were convicted, whereas Morgan himself could not even be tried: “Daphne

Morgan appealed to the justice system. Her husband couldn't be prosecuted for rape because she was still married to him.”323 Of course, even the advent of marital rape as a crime, which is yet to achieve widespread enforcement, did not resolve the tangle of sex and property; if one was no longer allowed to rape one's spouse, the law still held that one was entitled to have sex with that spouse, retaining refusal of sexual access without due cause as a tenet of divorce law. One way to read Thompson's sadistic horizon, then, is to see it as a sublimation of the property principle latent in our definition of marriage: to see the ex-husband conscripted to play the role of William Morgan, the husband who cavalierly violates his wife, sharing her supremely objectified body with unknown revelers. Of course, the inverse extreme is also immanent in the same dark spectacle. Again, Thompson never quite decided what to make of the ex-husband. He couldn't seem to decide whether the ex-husband was made to feign nonchalance by the Angels for the sake of their lurid psychodrama or whether he simply did not feel jealousy or a strong desire to protect his former lover: did not act on his property claim. And, this latter possibility is clearly disturbing to Thompson as well.

Ultimately, bourgeois marriage is a delicate balancing act that embraces and denies the property

323 Bourke, Rape, 50.

139 relationships embedded within it, and this particular spectacle is uniquely horrifying because it promiscuously mingles extreme expressions of both impulses: treating a woman like chattel but also refusing to behave in a proprietary way towards her by sharing her body indiscriminately. The effect, which was so unnerving for Thompson, is carnivalesque; it amplifies the quality that bikers very deliberately sought to achieve with their well-publicized affinity for rape and their particular penchant for gang rape. In his account of the Bass Lake Run, Reynolds insisted: “The moon was full and the howls of women as they were being raped rang out in the night...The cops did not dare come in. If they had come in they would have been ripped clean off their flesh and probably eaten.”324 Here, Reynolds explicitly tied rape to a pervasive defiance of social hierarchies that bleeds into surreal grotesquerie, and this dynamic continues as Reynolds ironically contrasted bikers' proficiency as rapists with the hegemony of expertise and specialization that defines modernity and the ascendance of the bourgeoisie:

“Professional is not a good enough word for this Hell's Angels kind of play. It's putting it down in the way it is and people better damn well see it...The country thinks it's got some production lines; they ought to line up with our production line of women! It would make all those suburban cats howl.”325

Here, Reynolds again suggested that the underlying reality of the Great Society was a kind of baldly extractionary violence, engaging bikers' lurid version of the carnivalesque to offer the train as a metaphor for mass-produced consumer society.

This same carnivalesque tension, in which opposing extremes are mingled and collapsed, is apparent in the way that bikers engaged with commercialized sex. Commodified sexuality, of course, exists in the penumbra of patriarchal logic, which enshrines the convention that women are a form of property but tends to deny and restrict female sexuality, preferring to commodify its absence in the form of virginity. Thus, patriarchy exhibits a conflicted attitude toward commercial sex, exemplified by

324 Reynolds, Freewheelin Frank, 105-106 Elsewhere, Reynolds recounts biting someone in a fight, adding “If I could have caught the soft part of his nose I would have bit it completely off.” Ibid, 54. 325 Ibid, 102.

140 St. Augustine, who famously endorsed prostitution, adopting a utilitarian position that accepted the inevitability of carnal sin and hoped to preserve the chastity of the many by sacrificing that of the few.

Ultimately, while patriarchy objectifies women, the level of control and objectification involved in the sex trade is too literal for its taste. And the market itself is forever slippery and entropic; it does not bend to any ideology except its own, which raises the typically unrealized but always lurking potential for women to seize control of their own commodification and place men in a disempowered position.

Indeed, pimping, which might be cast as the consummate profession of patriarchal domination, is instead typically denigrated as a form of unmasculine dependence on women. Of course, the rabidly unchivalrous persona of the pimp presented an appealing identity for bikers, and the sex trade was important to the financial support of individual bikers, as well as to many clubs themselves. As James

Quinn put it: “The subculture's definition of 'class' also predisposes bikers of both sexes to define prostitution as lucrative, expedient, and easily justifiable.”326 Quinn, like Marc Watson, emphasizes the fact that commercial sex was simply part of the milieu of saloon society, which formed the foundation of the biker subculture, casting sex workers as, in essence, bikers' female peers. This activity was also, of course, a natural extension of bikers' attitudes about the status of women: “An ol' lady's rockers are referred to as a property patch. This infers that she is the property of her ol' man, and, through him, his club.”327 In practice, bikers had a range of relationships with women, including rather conventional arrangements. Marriage was common. Yet, as Quinn notes, rhetorically, women were construed as property, and relatively insignificant property at that, as they were typically described as interchangeable base objects.

If Quinn suggests that commercial sex was simply ingrained in the biker habitus, he also notes that some clubs pursued prostitution as a studied entrepreneurial endeavor and their primary source of revenue. Thus, bikers' relationship to commercialized sex was highly variable, with some clubs 326 Quinn, “Criminality” Rpt. Mammoth Bikers, 301. 327 Ibid, 302.

141 dependent on the sex trade, while others pursued it opportunistically or not at all. What varied far less were bikers' representations of the subject, which focus on a few highly particular tropes, contextualizing commercial sex within the bikers' carnivalesque aesthetic. The most significant of these tropes is the auction, in which a woman's body is sold to the highest bidder in a grim bit of barroom theater. The auction is, of course, the apotheosis of objectification and commodification, invoking chattel slavery and the disconcerting extremes of capitalist logic; yet bikers' darkly comic auction narratives involve an ambiguous twist, invariably concluding with the same gleefully nihilistic and misogynistic punchline, when the auction is won for a truly paltry sum of money offered in jest: “One of the most notorious was 'Garbage Head,' a San Bernadino reject who hustled quarters at bars by clamping her legs together and begging for Kotex money. We auctioned her body off one night, but fourteen cents was the highest bid.”328 Thompson told an identical story in which the winning bid was

12 cents, as well as one in which a mama was unsuccessfully offered in trade for a gallon of gasoline, and he speculated about these young women's perceptions of their experiences, suggesting that it would be interesting to have insight into the mind of someone who undergoes such profound degradation, before aborting this attempt at empathy and dismissing the debased women as effectively lacking self- awareness: “Most mamas don't think about it, much less talk. Their conversation ranges from gossip and raw innuendo, to fending off jibes and haggling over small amounts of money.”329 Here, of course, it seems that it is Thompson himself who would prefer not to think about the process of objectification that these women undergo.

Yet, while Thompson took the auction story that he related more or less at face value, wondering how it would feel to “understand that [your] only talent is not worth fifteen cents or a gallon of gas,”330 the underlying event, if it ever took place, was undoubtedly designed more as a grotesque

328 Weathern, Wayward Angel, 11. 329 Thompson, Hell's Angel, 161-162. 330 Ibid, 161.

142 spectacle than an actual commercial endeavor. Certainly, Weathern's detail about the objectified woman in his auction narrative hustling quarters for Kotex money sets a surpassingly grotesque tone for his hideous vignette, and the same grotesque quality defined the auction trope whenever it was employed by bikers, who used it to express their darkly carnivalesque sensibility. Through the spectacle of the auction, bikers delighted in baldly commodifying a human being: taking the rationale of the market to its disavowed logical conclusion only to deny that their taboo commodity had any value, thereby creating a delirious parody of the market and the overblown chivalrous hypocrisy of patriarchy as well.

Again, while patriarchy objectifies and commodifies women, it employs the rhetoric of chivalry to conceal this reality. Bikers, by contrast, objectified women and rubbed it in their faces, calling this authenticity. They were determined to be ecstatically unchivalrous, and George Weathern expressed this sensibility in his caustic assessment of the bonds that joined bikers and their female companions:

“Plenty of women viewed us as the James Gang reincarnated and went for our leather-denim- motorcycle erotica. The ones who lasted either could take lots of abuse or had no place to go.”331 Here,

Weathern placed no stock in the biker mythos, undercutting any notion of bikers as romantic figures to make it clear that they viciously abused women and did so simply because they could. Contrary to

Quinn's assertion, Weathern hardly seemed concerned with employing this abuse as part of a long-term strategy to develop economic resources by conditioning women to perform as sex workers. Indeed,

Weathern suggested that these women were viewed as preeminently expendable: that their abuse was not instrumental but opportunistic and performative. Again, we have seen how “Smackey Jack” boasted to Thompson that he carried a pair of rusty pliers with which he removed women's teeth,332 and this kind of outlandish abuse does not represent the functional terror of the pimp, who aims to condition

331 Weathern, Wayward Angel, 11. 332 Again, some of Thompson's claims have been refuted, and Thomson himself seemingly took this one with a grain of salt. Smackey Jack may or may not have performed amateur dental surgery with rusty hand tools, but it seems safe to say that he wanted Hunter Thompson and his readers to believe as much: that he found some meaning in that particular fabulation.

143 behavior; it represents terror per se employed as a grotesque spectacle. Ultimately, while bikers pursued the sex trade to varying degrees and undoubtedly engaged in the calculations and compromises necessary for that enterprise, in their public pronouncements and narratives they presented themselves like “Smackey Jack” like feral monsters from some carnival nightmare. Rhetorically, they treated women like sexual objects; yet, they refused to place any value on those objects. Sex was not offered, cynically, as a commodity; instead, bikers plunged again into nihilism, emphasizing the degraded, bestial nature of all sexuality and all human relations.

Cunnilingus

Of course, this is the same nihilistic message that was expressed in bikers' cultivated reputation for rape; yet, the implications of this posture were complicated and inverted by the biker's other great sexual affinity: cunnilingus. If we return to Frank Reynolds's rape narrative, in which he relished his victim's resistance—“Sobbing and moaning the tiny brunette stood up, saying 'Please don't hurt me!'”333—Reynolds also maintained that, once he had violently subdued his young victim, he immediately performed cunnilingus until she had an orgasm. Reynolds's claim is consistent with the pathology of rapists, according to Groth and others, who emphasize that rapists frequently insist that their victims enjoyed the sexual encounter: not as a means of mitigating their victims' lack of consent but in order to underscore the feeling of omnipotence that they sought by undertaking a sexual assault in the first place. Yet, the subject of cunnilingus and female sexual pleasure does not appear only in

Reynolds's or other rape narratives; it is a recurrent theme within the biker subculture: one that relates ambiguously to bikers' trenchant misogyny. Commentators on the Hell's Angels, in particular, invariably dwell on their arcane rituals and symbolism, and they tend to fixate, specifically, on the

333 Reynolds, Freewheelin Frank, 117.

144 angel's wings that many members affix to the jackets that bear their club colors.334 In 1965, the

Saturday Evening Post tactfully referred to these wings as emblems of indecent acts, and they were, in fact, awarded for public performances of cunnilingus.335 Sometimes, bikers' enthusiasm for this act seems quite ingenuous: like they were, indeed, attempting, in a small way, to invert sexual power dynamics and celebrate female pleasure. When Easyriders received a letter that they titled “Needs

Lessons” in which a reader asks about a book that might instruct him in how to better perform cunnilingus, the magazine's response was: “You can't make a mistake. You can just become better at it

—so jump in and get your eyebrows wet.”336 Meanwhile, in his paranoid “Taking it Easy” section, which began every issue of Easyriders, “Spider” frequently railed against repressive obscenity laws that targeted specific sexual acts, especially those proscribing cunnilingus.337

Of course, in keeping with the dynamic of carnival, bikers' enthusiasm for cunnilingus was, ultimately, an inversion that was neither a revolution in gender relations nor a hollow, ironic gesture but both of those things at once and something in between. Bikers could express genuine, affirmative interest in female pleasure, but that emphasis was always subsumed within their aesthetic of sublime self-deprecation and depravity: “When we talk about eating pussy we make it sound as dirty and vulgar as possible—to make someone barf.”338 Bikers then glorified cunnilingus principally insofar as they defined it as a grotesque act. Indeed, in the Easyriders story “Earnin' His Wings” the narrator describes performing cunnilingus on a woman who has just participated in a train and notes that she ripped a fart

334 Hunter Thompson, of course, discussed this symbolism at length, establishing it as a common point of reference for popular discussion of the Hell's Angels. His observations were basically confirmed by the memoirs of Angels themselves. 335 Murray, “Hell's Angels.” Rpt. Mammoth Bikers, 102. 336 Letter. “Needs Lessons” Easyriders November 1974: 20 In another exchange, the magazine corrected a letter writer who said “chicks are for dudes to fuck and that's all!” by admonishing him: “Don't forget scarfin'” “Woman Hater” Easyriders January 1975: 8. 337 In the May 1973 issue he suggested: “In a lengthy article about the Hell's Angels, an undercover investigator copped out that it was impossible to infiltrate the Angels because their initiation rites require a variety of illegal activities, including an unnatural sex act with a woman....(There is no truth to the rumor that they are starting a hair pie class at police academies.?” Spider. “Unnatural Sex Act—Defense Against Infiltration?” Easyriders May 1973: 4. 338 Reynolds, Freewheelin Frank, 8.

145 as soon as he completed his task.339 Likewise, after he relates how he gleefully defiles his own clothes and describes eating various bugs in some detail, Danny Lyon's informant Bobby Goodpaster concludes: “Next to eatin' cunt I would eat a bug.”340 Goodpaster and the Easyriders correspondent who recounts how he earned his wings are clearly less concerned with sexual experimentation and gratification than they are with shock and revulsion, and this desire is even more apparent in the conceit of the Angels' red and black wing variants, as we see in Frank Reynolds's explication of red wings:

“The Angel mama at the time is menstruating, on her period, and real bloody. It is considered the nastier she is, the more class is showed by the member who goes down on her in front of everyone—at least six members—and how he goes about it, while everyone witnesses.”341 Black wings, of course, were awarded to club members who executed this performance with a black woman: clarifying the underlying dynamic of the wings, in which bikers cultivated their own abjection by engaging with reviled objects. The women with whom Angels earned their various wings existed, to them, only as perverse totems.

Thus, these women's pleasure was irrelevant; their bodies were desired as taboo objects and, especially, as gateways to the grotesque. Again, the grotesque body of carnival is, quintessentially, a female body. Within that schema, women appear as figures of excess who are both threatening and revered, and bikers certainly reproduced this ambivalence. In a curious letter to Easyriders from 1974, one female correspondent boasts:“I'd die if I couldn't give head and ball every night—and can any ol' lady's man go seven or more times a night? I can, and I get variety as well.”342 Here, the letter writer celebrates her own voracious and varied sexuality, stating outright that men cannot fulfill women's sexual needs, and the magazine seems to tacitly endorse her position. Of course, Easyriders editors frequently included—and likely contrived—letters that they knew their readers would find

339 “Earnin his Wings” Easyriders February 1975: 64. 340 Lyon, Bikeriders, 82. 341 Reynolds, Freewheelin Frank, 15-16. 342 Letter. “A Mama Speaks Out.” Easyriders September 1974: 6.

146 inflammatory, and this letter might well have been just such an instance. Yet, they often included these provocative letters as an opportunity to clarify their own position by rebutting the letter writer, and this letter did not receive a response. In this instance, female sexual insatiability is seemingly offered as an exhilarating model for bikers' own disorderly sexual expression; however, another account of women's ravening, grotesque appetites combines this enthusiastic response with more ambiguous and even censorious impulses:

Sure, we'll take whatever we can get...But I've never yet heard a girl yell rape until it was all over and she got to thinking about it. Let's face it, a lot of women can't make it with just one guy at a time, they can't get their jollies. But the trouble is that sometimes a girl wants to stop before we do, or maybe while she's taking on fifteen guys in the back of a pickup truck somebody heists a few bucks from her purse -- so she flips her lid and brings the heat down on us.343

Here, Thompson's informant began with a bit of bikers' characteristic self-deprecation, suggesting that they were generally scorned and sexually indiscriminate, and then he transitioned into an account of women's immoderate appetites that is utterly matter-of-fact and apparently affirmative, only to conclude with a misogynistic flourish, suggesting that female desire was, indeed, a threat to bikers' cherished masculinity.

Similarly, bikers described their sexual partners as repugnant, ugly women with excessive bodies, continuing to elaborate their proclivity for the grotesque and echoing their ecstatically debased self-presentation but also deploying a certain misogynistic rebuke. J.M. Jones, of course, described his old lady as lard ass, while we learn that the body of Grumble Rumble's old lady “consisted of size 44 tits and a 48 waist,”344 and these descriptors were offered as a perverse commendation in the same way that Weathern described the sexual appeal of bikers emanating from “lean bodies strung out by irregular meals, late hours, and drugs.”345Meanwhile, Thompson's description of the Angels' mamas provides another occasion on which he both documented and instantiated bikers' grotesque aesthetic:

343 Thompson, Hell's Angels, 182. 344 “The Tale of Grumble Rumble” Easyriders November 1974: 26. 345 Weathern, Wayward Angel, 117.

147 “The mamas aren't pretty, although some of the newer and younger ones have a sort of demented beauty that erodes so fast that you have to see it happen, over a period of months, to feel any sense of tragedy.”346 Here, Thompson's reference to the eroding beauty of these young women calls our attention to the inevitable decay and deterioration of the body, while contracting the time-frame in which this process of decay occurs creates a truly grotesque, or demented, portrait. These mamas, like their consorts, seem to have particularly indexical bodies, and they seem, also, to share bikers' more degenerate sexual proclivities. Indeed, just as bikers frequently joked about their own bestiality, George

Weathern quipped that his club-mate, Al Perryman, once complained that a “ horny 'mama' nearly screwed the testicles off his dog.”347 Again, this characterization of mamas as sexually insatiable operates within the ambivalent tradition of carnival and its particular relationship to the female body;

Perryman seems to have offered the anecdote admiringly but not without overtones of scorn and ridicule.

And we can see bikers continuing to negotiate this tension in Easyriders's Mutha character, who was a staple feature of the magazine. Mutha was the female alter-ego of the Easyriders editorial staff, responding to readers' letters with wry vulgarity and self-deprecation. She was an idealization of the female biker, represented by an obscene pen-and-ink caricature, who addressed readers in the grotesque voice of burlesque.348 Thus, when a letter writer, identified as “Strange Person, Leonia, N.J,” asks

Mutha “I've got to know—so tell me, does your tits really sag that much and does your breath really smell like dirty feet?”349 Mutha replies: “They don't seem to sag as much in a dark room—as to my breath, it depends on who I just had fun and games with.”350 Many of Mutha's letters unfold according to a similar pattern: she is insulted and demeaned; her body, in particular, is described as repulsive, and

346 Thompson, Hell's Angels, 161. 347 Weathern, Wayward Angel, 115. 348 For an account of the female voice of burlesque, see Allen, Robert Clyde. Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). 349 Strange Person, Leonia N.J. Letter. “Tell Me, Tell Me” Easyriders January 1974: 53. 350 Ibid.

148 then she turns the tables by drolly affirming the writer's allegation and one-upping him with her own vulgar twist. The same formula plays out in another letter that addresses the enduring theme of bikers and gang rape: “Recently 17 of us bikers got busted on a gang rape charge because some spaced-out dingbat screamed rape. We were cleared of all charges, but why do you suppose that dingbat screamed rape?” In response to this obviously fictionalized inquiry, Mutha says: “I'm not sure. All I know is that after the tenth guy things sorta get hazy.”351 Here, Mutha places herself in the role of a dingbat that screamed rape, and we see the ambiguous position that she occupies as the idealization of female bikers' sexuality; ultimately, Mutha is not sexually enlightened and experimental but simply depraved; she is a willing victim who undercuts her victimization by embracing it: someone who is immune to bikers' sadism because she shares their nihilistic worldview.

Ultimately, in spite of their efforts to style themselves within a grotesque sexual aesthetic that featured distinct feminine overtones and their frequent affirmative gestures toward multifarious female sexuality, bikers were basically hostile to female sexual expression. Indeed, another bestiality anecdote distills the virulent misogyny that was sometimes belied by bikers' public advocacy of inclusive and expansive perversion. Thompson, as part of his discussion of the Angels' propensity for successfully navigating rape charges, suggested that the dubious circumstances in which sexual encounters with bikers were typically initiated mitigated against successful prosecution. He recounted a number of incidents in which accusers were revealed to have willingly participated in acts that would have scandalized any American inclined to answer a jury summons and quoted a biker who offered the story of a Los Angeles woman and her St. Bernard to demonstrate the eagerness with which some women pursued sordid sexual encounters with bikers to their later regret:

Another girl rode a motorcycle up from Los Angeles and insisted on joining the club. The Angels told her she could, but only after she showed some class. “Man, what a nutty broad,” said one. “She came to the party the next night with a big St. Bernard dog, and what an act she put on! I tell you it damn near

351 Mutha. “Screamed Rape!” Easyriders December 1972: 22.

149 blew my mind.” He smiled wistfully. “After that, she took on everybody. Christ, what a bitch she was! She went right out of her gourd when she realized we weren't gonna let her join the club. She called us all kinds of shit, then she went out to a phone booth and rang for the cops. We all got busted for rape, but we never heard nothin more about it, because the broad split the next day. Nobody's seen her since.”352

Here, while Thompson's source admired this woman's bravura and her grotesque sexuality, he scoffed at the idea of allowing her to join the Angels. The club, of course, never even entertained the notion, and when they revealed this reality to the woman, her performance was transformed into something humiliating and degrading: a punishment for her presumption. As with Mutha, the abuse that this woman underwent, willingly, exists within the realm of the deliriously mad-cap and carnivalesque, and the circulation of this narrative operated against the hegemony of patriarchal monogamy. Yet, again as with Mutha, it also functioned to re-inscribe a rather conventional brand of misogyny. Indeed, George

Weathern actually compared the abuse that some old ladies and mamas received to slavery, describing an incident in which several members dragged a woman into a basement, where they “stripped her, lashed her to a post, then peppered her body with BB's until she was impressed with the rule: women should be seen and not heard.”353 Weathern adds that this was done with the consent of her old man; thus, this particular incident represents the very apotheosis of patriarchy: woman as voiceless subordinate. When it came to women, bikers even betrayed a certain ambivalence with respect to bourgeois norms. Weathern also observed that “members came up with surprisingly good looking women sometimes,”354 suggesting that, in spite of their insistence that “we'll take whatever we can get" and their gleeful descriptions of their partners' excessive, repugnant bodies, bikers desired and sought conventionally attractive women. In fact, Sonny Barger was particularly preoccupied with conventional beauty standards. He titled one chapter of his memoir “The Maid of Livermore” in reference to his second wife's past as a local beauty queen and dwelt at length on her physical appearance and

352 Thompson, Hell's Angels, 182-183. 353Weathern, Wayward Angel, 115. 354 Ibid .

150 abandoned modeling career. Of course there is an ironic element to Barger's boasting; even as he praised her so, he was also boasting about corrupting and defiling her, and he included the mugshot from her arrest on Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) charges along with her old pageant and modeling photos as a paradoxical double-boast. Thus, once again, when bikers encouraged women to defy patriarchal standards, it was only in an effort to employ them as props in bikers' own disorderly posturing.

Homoeroticism

Ultimately, then, if bikers' boisterous affinity for cunnilingus and female perversion disrupted and complicated their status as brutish gang-rapists only to covertly recuperate a riotous brand of fantastic misogyny, the subculture's overt homoeroticism existed within a similar dynamic.

Homoeroticism and homosexuality were identified as defining attributes of biker clubs from a very early date, and Thompson was exasperated by the persistence of this line of argument: “Any attempt to explain the Hell's Angels as an essentially homosexual phenomenon would be a cop-out, a self-satisfied dismissal of a reality that is as complex and potentially malignant as anything in American society.”355

Thompson was correct that any attempt to explain the biker subculture as a homosexual phenomenon would be facile, and he recognized that this pat explanation persisted in order to foreclose more nuanced analysis and because the press was able to use the notion of biker homosexuality to evocative aesthetic effect: “The secret-queer factor gave the press an element of strange whimsy to mix in with the rape reports, and the outlaws themselves were relegated to new nadirs of sordid fascination. More than ever before, they were wreathed in an aura of violent and erotic mystery....brawling satyrs, ready to attempt congress with any living thing, and in any orifice.”356 What Thompson didn't quite 355 Thompson, Hell's Angels, 83. 356 Ibid, 84.

151 acknowledge was the strong correlation between the sensationalistic portrait of homosexual hedonism authored by the press and the outlandish, carnivalesque image that bikers themselves cherished and cultivated.

Bikers of the 1960's seemingly wanted to be identified as sexually omnivorous, brawling satyrs.

Indeed, one of their preferred methods of attracting attention and discomfiting citizens was to vigorously make-out with one another: “the Hell's Angels are notorious for their public displays of

French kissing and flying-tackle embraces.”357 Indeed, casual homoeroticism was ubiquitous within the biker ethos, as we see in Solari's offhand reference to a circle jerk in the “Pasadena Run.”358 And, although scholars like Nickolas Goth and Jean Bimbaum insist that gang-rape is not homoerotic,359 popular perceptions suggested quite the opposite, and bikers undeniably played to those perceptions by advertising their propensity for trains. Meanwhile, Easyriders frequently seemed to provide unvarnished, sexually transgressive advice, replying to an inquiry that asks, “what would make a crank smell?,” by advising: “You really should rinse it off now and then—at least after every third or fourth broad, dude, or whatever.”360 Or, in the same vein, they answered the inquiry, “What do you do when you're making out with some 'chick' and you reach down to cop a feel and grab hold of a hard-on that's bigger than the one you have?,” by encouraging the letter writer, who was identified as “Puzzled in

Detroit,” to “Nibble on his ear.”361 Certainly, there is a tongue-in-cheek dynamic to these consultations.

The advice is not literal, and it treats gay sex as an absurd source of levity. But, it does not seem to treat gay sex with derision. The underlying levity is, plausibly, the expansive, ambivalent laughter of carnival and not the cruel censure of the satirist. Indeed, when Don Sharp celebrated the legacy of the

357 Montgomery, Randall. “One-Percenter Subculture.” Canadian Journal of Criminology and Corrections (1976). Rpt. Mammoth Bikers, 164. 358 At one point, Solari's narrator remarks to the judge: “You know, Your Honor, while we were at the docks, we got into this circle jerk, ya know?...Do you know how far Ed 'The Squirt' Salmaski jizzed?” Solari, “The Pasadena Run” 70. 359 Groth, Nicholas A. and H. Jean Birnbaum. Men Who Rape: The Psychology of the Offender. (New York: Plenum Press, 1979): 115. 360 Mutha. “Something is Wrong” Easyriders April 1975: 24. 361 Mutha. “Puzzled in Detroit” Easyriders November 1974: 20.

152 pioneer, he offered: “They had a code, too, which generally held that if one guy screwed sheep and another goats, it was those guys' business.”362 Here, again, Sharp's curious formulation of the libertarian frontier ethos seems like a limited but unambiguous assertion of his comfort with homosexuality.

And chroniclers of the biker subculture have not known what to make of bikers' seemingly affirmative relationship with homosexual activity. If Thompson seemed somewhat uncomfortable with his informants' homoeroticism, castigating the press for perpetuating discussion of the topic, the sociologist Randal Montgomery was absolutely unhinged by the subject: “In regard to sexual ambivalence and homosexuality, the author's first encounter with the Road Gypsies made him walk out of the 'meeting' when he saw a few members engaged in homosexual 'horseplay' activity...and the levity and girls' giggling was not enough to convince him that some type of orgy would not ensue.”363 Once again, Montgomery made it clear that the topic of homosexuality represented an established framework for analyzing the biker subculture, and his own discomfort with the topic ultimately provides insight into how bikers understood the homoerotic overtones of their activities. After Montgomery fled the meeting that he feared might devolve into some kind of orgy, he was confronted outside by the club president who attempted to reassure him with ambiguous results: “Despite outlaw disclaimers that such activities are simple horseplay or showing-off to upset onlookers, one is reminded of the sexual duality in human beings. Innate homosexual tendencies can either be socially repressed or encouraged and just because the Outlaw biker subculture is less repressive is not to say that its members are more queer than the rest of us.”364 Montgomery's subjects, then, understood their homoerotic play as impish provocation: a carnivalesque performance meant to disorient and incite domineering citizens. For his part, Montgomery regained his composure and returned to the discourse of sociology, but he still seemed to believe that he had seen some type of homosexual activity, even as he conceded that bikers

362 Sharp,“Fuck It,” 17. 363 Montgomery, “One Percenter.” Rpt. Mammoth Bikers, 164. 364 Ibid.

153 may not be alone in harboring such impulses.

Of course, the homoerotic ambiance that Montgomery believed he detected at the Road Gypsies meeting is exactly what Kenneth Anger wanted to create for the audience of Scorpio Rising, his 1963 short film that explores biker iconography and offers a seminal queer reading of popular culture, deftly obliterating the fine line between homosocial ritual and homoeroticism. Anger filmed a Brooklyn biker club over a short period of time. All of the members were straight, and their girlfriends were present for much of the filming. None the less, once Anger edited the footage and interspersed carefully selected images from mainstream media sources, like comic strips and Hollywood movies, the bikers' activities seemed profoundly homoerotic.365 Although they were short-lived and unknown to the outlaw bikers of the 1960's who followed, the Satyrs of Los Angeles was an openly gay motorcycle club founded in

1954.366 California's thriving postwar gay subculture was drawn to the motorcycle, and Anger's work articulates the biker's emerging iconic status within the gay subculture, an affinity that ventured into the extremes of camp parody by the 1970's. Scorpio was not part of the biker exploitation genre that emerged in the mid-1960's, and it is not part of the larger canon of biker films that begins with The

Wild One. It is not included in the montage of bikers on film that plays on a loop in the Harley-

Davidson museum. Instead, it is oriented to the overlapping undergrounds of esoteric art films and postwar gay culture.

The biker subculture was simply confused by Scorpio. The Rag's review of the film, by Greg

Barrios, speaks from the perspective of someone familiar with the biker subculture and exhibits considerable insight into the film, yet struggles to contextualize its overt homoeroticism: “Also, the homoerotic elements seem overstated, with multiple images of males posing in inviting gestures. But this seems more of a stylistic device that emphasizes the narcissistic vanity of certain cyclists as well as

365 Schneemann, C. "Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising ″. Film Culture 32 (1964): 9-10. 366 Kraft, Kate. “Los Angeles Gay Motorcycle Clubs, 1954-1980: Creating a Masculine Identity and Community” Thesis. Yale University, 2010.

154 the way cyclists may appear to other males (especially homophiles).”367 Barrios's observation that the film's homoeroticism is overstated and that it invokes the perspective of homophiles is accurate, although he did not quite apprehend the aim of Anger's project. While Barrios called Scorpio “the most nearly authentic representation of the cycle cult” to date, Anger was not concerned with verisimilitude; he both drew attention to the unacknowledged homoerotic elements in conventional behaviors to subvert the operation of normative values and deliberately exaggerated those overtones in order to create a unique representation that spoke to a gay audience. The homophilic gaze that is referenced by

Barrios is, unapologetically, Anger's gaze. Thus, Barrios was not quite in on Anger's queer reading, and, while he maintained a very favorable impression of the film, he noted that other bikers were nonplussed: “However, some cyclists are unable to identify with this film. This might stem from the fact that Anger simply wants to show that the cyclist isn't beyond criticism; that in recreating their mythology he can deflate it at the same time.”368 Again, in Scorpio, biker mythology is not so much deflated as it is re-imagined and re-purposed. When Barrios says that bikers object to their mythology being 'deflated,' it seems as though that objection would stem, to some degree, from their discomfort with Scorpio's homoeroticism, although it is unclear why Barrios would be reticent about naming that discomfort. Ultimately, Barrios and the bikers for whom he purports to speak do not seem unduly threatened by Anger's queer reading of their subculture, and they actually seem rather comfortable with the notion that the public perceives bikers as objects of homosexual desire.

Certainly, the Hell's Angels, who were aware of Scorpio and saw the film at San Francisco's

North Beach Theater in 1964, were completely unconcerned by its overt homoeroticism. The theater promoted its 1964 screenings of Scorpio with a collage of press clippings about the Angels, and the

Frisco chapter made a point of seeing the film, which did upset them, although not because of its homoerotic content. According to Thompson, the Angels recognized the film's homoeroticism but felt 367 Barrios, Greg. “Anger's 'Scorpio Rising' Finest Underground Film.” The Rag 1,23 (1967): 10. 368 Ibid.

155 that it manifestly had nothing to do with them. They did not think that anyone could mistake them for the bikers represented on screen, and it was actually this factor that irked them: first, because they craved publicity and approached the film in the hope that it would be, however indirectly, about them, and second, because they felt that they had been rather cynically exploited for publicity without compensation. They were not perturbed by Anger's representation of homosexual desire. However,

Randal Montgomery's implication that this response was conditioned by bikers' inhibition is utterly misguided. Bikers may have seemed licentious and unrestrained vis a vis the stilted bourgeois mainstream, but, as we have seen, their performance of anarchic license took place within strict adherence to their own values and not within a laissez-faire climate of inhibition. The concept of inhibition connotes an expansive sexuality that is adventurous and affirmative, whereas bikers' sexuality, while expansive, ultimately aimed to achieve a more narrow effect of depraved nihilism. In the case of their apparently tolerant attitude toward homoeroticism, in particular, bikers' stance was actually based in an anachronistic articulation of the relationship between sexuality and gender that

George Chauncey identifies as characteristic of the urban working-class before World War II. Chauncey observes that it was the bourgeoisie who began, in the early twentieth century, to conflate gender and sexuality, creating a strict binary between hetero and homo and stigmatizing a range of homosexual contact that had previously been quite common. This perspective effectively became hegemonic by

World War II, extending into the working-class so comprehensively that, by the last quarter of the century, when bourgeois sensibilities began to shift again in response to the gay liberation movement, prewar saloon society was the last place that scholars thought to look for gay activity. When bourgeois progressives began to reform their own attitudes about homosexuality, they identified working-class sentiment on the subject as particularly retrograde and projected this attitude into the past.369

But, when Chauncey looked closely at the sexual mores of inter-war urban saloon society, he 369 Chauncey, George. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Makings of the Gay Male World. (New York: Basic Books, 1994).

156 found that openly homosexual men who affected a stereotypically female gender performance were tolerated in this milieu, where it was also acceptable for men who conformed to conventional masculine identity to engage in homosexual activity, provided that they performed the normatively masculine role in those encounters. In this context, an overwhelming emphasis on gender effectively subsumed the idea of sexuality as it exists in our current colloquial understanding with its stark hetero/homo binary. Indeed, even the rhetoric of gay liberation has tended to operate within this same paradigm, interpreting sexual preference as an innate part of the immutable core of individual identity.

Yet, when Frank Reynolds matter-of-factly related that he received oral sex for the first time from a

“homosexual unashamed”370 at age 14, he was describing an experience that would have been common for straight, working-class youth in prewar America. Reynolds's encounter took place during the 1950's and is recounted without qualification in 1967, indicating that, for certain socially marginal groups, those types of experiences and the intense focus on masculinity that underwrote them seemed to have endured well after World War II. Indeed, Reynolds's encounter took place in a jail cell, and, while mainstream depictions of prison life invariably focus on instances of violent homosexual coercion between inmates, depicting these encounters as profoundly sadistic responses to an unnatural environment occupied by socially deviant men, Chauncey himself hints that the homosexual culture of jails and prisons, where violent sexual assault is actually atypical, may be imported into those institutions by the socially marginal groups who find themselves incarcerated as much as it is indigenous to the penal institution and its unique constraints and pressures.371 In the mid-1960's, the

Angels continued to exist in this marginal environment, and Thompson recorded an example of its characteristically blasé attitude toward certain types of homosexual contact in a snippet of conversation with an unidentified club member: “Just the other night in some bar downtown I had a queer come up to me with a big tenner...he laid it on me and said what did I want to drink? I said, 'A double Jack 370 Reynolds, Freewheelin Frank, 88. 371 Chauncey, Gay.

157 Daniels, baby,' so he told the bartender, 'Two of those for me and my friend,' and then he sat down there on the bar rail and gave me a hell of a blow-job, man, and all I had to do was smile at the bartender and keep cool.”372 Again, because he performed the normative male role in this homosexual encounter, the

Angel did not feel that his behavior indicted either his sexuality or his masculinity.373

For the American mainstream of the 1960's, however, that kind of homosexual contact had become entirely taboo. Bikers took note and, as we have seen, incorporated homoerotic display into their carnivalesque sexual aesthetic. Frank Reynolds's memoir, however, seems to reveal a rather different orientation to homoeroticism and homosexuality: an openness and malleability that is akin to queerness, although his memoir is difficult to apprise. On the one hand, Reynolds was known as something of a free-spirited figure within the Angels' most experimental chapter—George Weathern called him a hippie—and his memoir was composed in collaboration with Michael McClure. It is easy to imagine that flourishes like Reynolds's frequent, Whitmanesque references to the fullness of his cohort's beards may have been contributed by the beat poet. On the other hand, Reynolds's memoir was published in 1967 while other biker memoirs did not appear until decades later. In the late 1960's, bikers were some of the last American men whose intense focus on gender identity conditioned a relative indifference to sexual orientation. By the time Weathern, Barger, and others began writing memoirs of their heyday, those mores had faded into the past, forgotten and erased. Indeed, James

Quinn, observes that a range of bikers' miscreant sexual traditions, like earning wings and trading old ladies, had disappeared by the 1970's. He explains this process by referring consistently to bikers' conventionalization.374 Even Thompson's unnamed source, who casually recounted the barroom blowjob that he received from a queer reveals the subtle erosion of the values that underwrote this sexual omnivorousness, as his repeated insistence that he was paid for the encounter—“Shit, man, the

372 Thompson, Hell's Angels, 82. 373 Of course, the fact that Thompson did not use the Angel's name suggests that maybe Thompson himself did feel there was something taboo about the incident. 374 Quinn, “Criminality” Rpt. Mammoth Bikers, 311.

158 day they can call me queer is when I let one of these faggots suck on me for less than a tenner”375— seems to indicate a degree of defensiveness. Chauncey observes in his study that it was utterly commonplace for heterosexual men to pay for sexual encounters with fairies, or male prostitutes who maintained a female affect. Here, the Angel's comments suggest that the role of an eager john to an open homosexual had become taboo, even in the marginal environs of the Hell's Angels world; he underscored that he was the one who received payment, carefully negotiating the gender implications of this transaction by casting himself, not in the feminine role of a disempowered sexual commodity, but in the masculine role of an opportunist hustler who thrives by flouting bourgeois morality and exploiting a weaker man who cannot control his own desire.

Thus, Reynolds was probably an anomalous biker whose memoir was shaped by Michael

McClure's aesthetic vision and his politics, but Reynolds's narrative was also recorded before a dramatic shift in bikers' attitudes about homosexual contact: a period of conventionalization. Certainly, in 1967 Reynolds viewed homosexuality in a rather benign light. The story about his jail cell encounter reflects the sexual mores that Chauncey notes as typical of working-class Americans prior to World

War II, and, as we have seen, it has many precedents in biker discourse. His discussion of Allen

Ginsberg, however, suggests something else: “The same night, outside the house, I heard someone say,

'Allen Ginsberg is a fruit...' Sending vibrations meaning stone homosexual, as if he were trying to warn us to stay away from this man. I was so shocked by the deprived-sounding man who said this that I wanted to go immediately and love Allen sexually, to show how great and real it is to be.”376 Here,

Reynolds expresses strong empathy and perhaps desire for the poet, and the passages in which he describes “Lovely Larry,” a fellow Angel who died in a motorcycle crash shortly before Reynolds composed his memoir, are even more suggestive than this response to homophobic attacks on

375 Thompson, Hell's Angels, 82. 376 Reynolds, Freewheelin Frank, 64.

159 Ginsberg:377

After I got out of jail I always spent lots of time alone—this was in the aftermath of Larry's death. When I would get high up on LSD and in the peakness of it play many Dylan songs that Larry and I used to play and trip with, then I'd feel waves of shock go through me when I thought of Larry. I would stand and would feel like a mountain as I rose up, I'd call out into the night, 'Come and sit by me Larry! Oh, Larry of darkness, you the spirit in the phase of death, let us sit on one another's knee again!' In the highness of LSD I'd feel his whiskers across my cheek and neck—as we used to hug, and I would lick his face and he would lick mine. I could feel the weight of him crushing my knees and sitting down. And I could hear him saying, 'Run down the sea trip to me.'378

Again, in spite of their attempts to live contingent, ephemeral lives and their contempt for public displays of emotion and formal rituals of all kinds, bikers did have a tradition of elaborate funerals and, to a lesser extent, rending, hyperbolic mourning.379 But, Reynolds's emotions seem particularly frayed and raw when he reflects on his departed friend. Obviously he had an emotionally intimate relationship with Larry, and, when he dreams about caressing him again and feeling the weight of him, it certainly seems possible that they were lovers, although it is likewise possible that McClure's editing is providing a queer reading to the homoerotic overtones of Reynolds's narrative with its buoyantly grotesque aesthetic.

Of course, whatever the nature of Reynolds's relationship with Lovely Larry or Allen Ginsberg, bikers did not abide homosexuality. Indeed, Terry Orendorff observed that his Vagos had only two rules: No Drugs and No Faggots. We have seen how bikers' interpretation of this first rule was typically quite malleable, and their interpretation of the second could seem similarly pliant. Easyriders frequently dispensed seemingly ingenuous advice on homosexual contact, while Randal Montgomery was utterly convinced that the bikers he studied were engaged in something other than mere horseplay when they kissed and groped each other. Yet, even when they engaged in this type of explicit sexual contact with other men, that activity did not violate bikers' own anachronistic understanding of their

377 Reynolds alleged that police killed Larry, whose death was officially blamed on an unidentified motorist. Reynolds, Freewheelin Frank, 12-13. 378 Ibid, 113. 379 For example, the poem “A Brother Lost” that appeared in the June 1974 issue of Easyriders is painfully maudlin. “A Brother Lost.” Easyriders June 1974: 18.

160 anti-gay rule. Even Reynolds was quite clear that he was not a homosexual. Bikers' embrace of homoeroticism served merely to tease puritanical citizens; bikers understood this contact as another form of taboo, offensive behavior that could express their defiance of social norms and their affinity for carnivalesque inversion, and it served, ultimately, to re-inscribe their brand of masculine license and to further marginalize actual homosexuals.

LIMINALITY

Bikers, in their grotesquerie, were consummate liminal figures, crossing boundaries between the sacred and the profane, life and death. We've already encountered Grumble Rumble as an outlaw biker who showed class by refusing to balk when faced with death, and, as the name implies, he was also a supreme grotesque: “Grumble Rumble awoke and filled his eyes with his 'ol lady's bod, which consisted of size 44 tits and a 48 waist. He then filled his gullet with a gallon of genuine hardcore rotgut antifreeze, not being content with ordinary brew. Continuing his daily routine, he jumped on his monster 102-inch shovel (which he filled with his own piss because it had such a high octane rating) and burned out of the bedroom....”380 Here, Grumble Rumble's body is defined by excess, appetite, permeability, and the cycle of consumption and excretion. It is surpassingly grotesque, and it provides another example of the way that bikers exaggerated and parodied modern interpretations of the body.

As Americans came to understand their bodies as machines, they experimented with methods for consuming the same energy that powered their mechanized world, attempting, in particular, to partake of electricity. There was something decidedly grotesque about these endeavors, which were especially focused on the issue of sexual potency; yet that quality was mitigated by the curious way that electricity functions.381 Part of the appeal of electrical therapies was their invisibility. As we have seen, 380 “The Tale of Grumble Rumble.” Easyriders November 1974: 58. 381 de la Pena, Body Electric, 137.

161 modernity privileges hygiene in an unprecedented way, equating it with moral uplift and the progress of civilization. Thus, electricity came to symbolize the birth of the modern world in no small part because it operates silently, odorlessly, and without the ubiquitous, foul residue that defined the industrial age with its reliance on coal.382 Electrical therapies typically delivered a mild shock but left no trace on the body, preserving the myth of its integrity. This system of energy exchange demanded that the body be open to foreign inputs, but the system was, ultimately, hygienic, scientific, and rational. Grumble

Rumble similarly participates in an open energy cycle that runs from machine to human and back again, consuming a chemical additive that is designed for automobiles and fueling his motorcycle with his own urine, but, as Grumble Rumble transcends the limitations of the body, he only becomes more grotesque and more degraded; his is not a clinical augmentation but a profane excess that leaves pungent, offensive traces. Again, if modernity sought to improve the human body through technological intervention, it also imagined the body as an atavistic obstacle to such rationalized advance.383 Grumble Rumble embodies both of these extremes; he is a mechanized super-human and a primitive beast. Indeed, it is significant that Grumble Rumble consumes antifreeze, in particular: a chemical fluid that is essential to automobiles but also widely recognized as a cheap intoxicant stereotypically associated with the same scorned lower-class habitus with which bikers identified. This resonance again subverts the notion that Grumble Rumble's body's is usefully enhanced, instead linking the body's stubborn corpulence to a larger context of social atavism.

What's more, antifreeze is frequently employed by suicides, again invoking Gothic poverty and underscoring Grumble Rumble's liminal status; he starts his day with an act that would undoubtedly kill him. Thus, Grumble Rumble's death at the conclusion of the story is not a tragedy; he was never quite human to begin with, and he was always half dead: a liminal state that was evoked consistently within

382 Henry Adams, for instance, underscored these qualities of odorlessness, silence, and invisibility when he identified the dynamo, or electric motor, as the emblem of the modern age. Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams. 1918. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973): 380-381. 383 Armstrong, Modernity, Technology, 3.

162 the biker subculture, as in the name of one outlaw club that called themselves the Coffin Cheaters. As

Scarry observes, whenever it can be said that death is soon, the process of dying has already begun.384

For the biker, death was not necessarily imminent. It was not necessarily nearby in this temporal sense, but it was always close, lurking in intimate proximity, just one loose piece of gravel away. Indeed, it was a common refrain among bikers' critics that they had a death-wish. Of course, this was incorrect.

Bikers were not suicidal. Rather, as Murray put it: “They choose to live as close to death as possible.”385Scarry's The Body in Pain looks at Sartre's character Ibbieta, a soldier who is taken prisoner and sentenced to die. When faced with the prospect of his imminent death, Ibbieta, who had been utterly committed to his cause, now sees ideology as quaint, if not farcical. Indeed, reality itself assumes the absurd air of carnival:

Spain and anarchy, dramatic realities a few days earlier, are now without immediacy and meaning. Nor is his sense of country and cause revitalized by his face-to-face confrontation with his enemy interrogators: he describes their gestures, dress, opinions and acts as looking ludicrously small, “shocking and burlesqued;” rather than feeling angered at their ideology or their brutality, he feels embarrassed by their seriousness, their silly and sententious ignorance of their own mortality. This loss of country and conviction is only one of many signs of the new weightlessness of world and self.386

Scarry even calls particular attention to the fact that Ibbieta no longer has any desire to communicate with his sweetheart: “The woman he loved...is now so irrecoverably remote that he rejects the chance to speak the few words of a farewell message.”387 Thus, as death approaches, Ibbieta seems to see the world through the jaundiced, anti-romantic eyes of a biker.

Negotiating this liminality was a delicate balancing act. In June 1974, Easyriders published what readers immediately labeled “The Death Issue,” which featured a collection of particularly morbid artwork from David Mann, as well as a number of fictional pieces in which bikers die. R. Orren's short- story “Ride to Oblivion,” for instance, begins as so many Easyriders pieces do, tracing a ritual of

384 Scarry, Pain, 32. 385 Murray, “Hell's Angels” Rpt. Mammoth Bikers, 106. 386 Scarry, Pain, 32. 387 Ibid.

163 anticipation and escape that defines the motorcycle in opposition to the constraints of work: “Just a few minutes now and it'll be quittin' time at this motherfuckin' factory. Man, am I glad today's Friday! I don't have to work this weekend, either. Just do nothing but ride, fuck, and get high!”388 Orren continues with a formulaic account of anti-biker prejudice, relating instances of harassment at a local gas station and menacing threats from hostile motorists, but the story ends with a jarring twist when the narrator is struck and killed by a speeding tractor-trailer. A similar story follows, and a few pages later,

“Down the Road” provides a twist on this twist, as it is not just the audience that learns that the narrator dies but the narrator himself who gradually realizes that he is already dead. Many readers were discomfited by the issue and voiced their objections:

My husband just received his June copy of Easyriders. Having read it, I am quite disturbed with all the preoccupation with death. Even David Mann's painting! I'm sure we all have known someone who has been killed or seriously injured because of carelessness either on his part or more often on the part of some nut behind the wheel of a car, but we're certainly not obsessed with death....A biker lives to ride— he doesn't ride to die.389

The magazine's response to this reader's consternation and her insistence that bikers do not harbor a death wish was: “We were just on a trip.”390 As the response indicates, “The Death Issue” was less about postulating a literal connection between motorcycles and death and more about continuing to explore the grotesque as an aesthetic that contemplates the permeable and perishable nature of the body. Indeed, on the page opposite Orren's “Ride to Oblivion,” the issue featured a piece called “Fart

Fantasia,” a curious profile of Joseph Pujol, the turn-of-the century French flatulist who performed musical numbers by expressing gas from his anus. It is a seemingly incongruous bit of juvenile scatology that, of course, connects to the larger theme of the issue through the grotesque.

In general, Easyriders preferred to address death within this surreal terrain of the grotesque, rather than engaging with the rituals that marked death for the bourgeoisie. In an issue from 1977, they

388 Orren, R. “Ride to Oblivion” Easyriders June 1974: 15. 389 Oliva, Marguerite. Letter. “Preoccupation with Death” Easyriders September 1974: 8. 390 Ibid.

164 made a rare exception, publishing images of a funeral in their “In the Wind” section, a regular feature of reader-submitted photos. The move was unusual enough to warrant an explanation, which

Easyriders provided by noting that funereal content would fill the magazine if they did not maintain a policy of excluding it, adding that bikers do not need any reminders of their intimate acquaintance with death: “But we're all aware of the hazards we face, as we're chased through life by our personal demon, and we know that—from time to time—we may be confronted with tragedy. We learn to own up to it; it's part of our lives.”391 This casually intimate relationship with death is captured in a sublimely understated letter to the editor in which one Easyriders reader memorializes his partner: “I would like to know if you people would print a few words in memory of my ol' lady, who was killed while riding with me. She used to bring your mag home to me from the City (N.Y.). She helped me build the 74 that killed her, while I was lucky enough to walk away from the accident. Her name was Lynn.”392 L.J.

Fairlawn, N.J., as the correspondent was identified, was not a professional writer. He was, perhaps, uncomfortable using the written word to express himself. Yet, his epistle seems deliberately terse: not so much reticent as calculated to suggest a matter-of-fact comfort with death. Like “Dirty Dave,” who pointed out the irony that his bike was undamaged in the crash that paralyzed him, L.J focuses on a perverse twist of fate, noting that he, the bike's driver and builder, was unharmed in the accident. And, like “Dirty Dave,” L.J's tone was not plaintive but wry and nihilistic. The line between life and death, both men suggested, is insignificant.

As we've seen, motorcycle clubs were often dedicated to staging conspicuous funerals for their members; yet, they styled these affairs to achieve a similarly grotesque effect, undercutting the formality and gravity of bourgeois funerals and casting themselves, again, as liminal figures who viewed death impassively. In a sense, outlaw clubs seem to have functioned as something akin to funeral societies. The lives of the socially marginal young men who joined these groups were otherwise 391 “In the Wind at a Brother's Funeral” Easyriders March 1977: 28. 392 L.J. Letter. “Remembering his Ol' Lady” Easyriders January 1975: 10.

165 likely to pass unnoticed, and the promise of being lavishly mourned seems inextricably tied to the sense of identity that clubs offered. Like their cherished colors and insignia, their ritualized funerals also reflected bikers' enduring, if ambivalent, fascination with the military. Of course, biker funerals were not conventionally solemn affairs. The funeral procession provided another opportunity to occupy public space in a disruptive, confrontational manner, and the service, as we saw in the case of

Chocolate George, whose memorial spawned a melee in Golden Gate Park, often provided the same.

These typically informal events were decidedly carnivalesque, mingling ardent emotional profusion and earnest remonstrances of brotherhood with delirious irreverence, which functioned, in the biker world, as its own kind of deference. This effect was captivating to observers, and the funeral as carnival is a well established trope within biker films. Roger Corman, who was always wonderfully forthright about the superficial nature of his work, insisted that his pioneering contribution to the biker exploitation film genre could be traced to a single indelible image from Life Magazine: a line of Hell's

Angel riding their choppers in a funeral procession.393

Thus, as we have seen, Corman's seminal film The Wild Angels takes place on a funeral run, as club members journey to the rural home town of “The Loser,” who dies after he is shot by police. The film concludes with the extended, orgiastic desecration of the small church in which the Loser's family has attempted to stage a conventional memorial service: a scene that contains several elements that have become well-worn biker tropes. First, the corps of the Angels sits bored and indifferent through a trite homily until the club leader, Peter Fonda as “Heavenly Blues,” interrupts to insist that the lord never did anything for the Loser and that all they want is to be left alone. An almost identical scene

393 This story has been repeated frequently—among other sources, it appears in Osgerby's Biker, and it is featured prominently on the Wikipedia page for the film—but it seems apocryphal. Life took photos of the Hell's Angels in 1965, including an image of a funeral procession, but did not publish that work. If Corman saw a published image of a Hell's Angels' funeral run, it is likely that he saw an image of Chocolate George's funeral that appeared in the August 29 (1967) issue of the San Francisco Chronicle and was reprinted as a locally popular poster. He would have seen that image after making Wild Angels but before the publication of Philip Di Franco and Karyn Browne's Movie World of Roger Corman in 1979: the source in which Corman's claim about his inspiration for the film originated. Di Franco, Philip and Karyn G. Bowne. Movie World of Roger Corman (New York: Chelsea House, 1979). Qtd. Irish Rich. Applied Machete. Rpt. Ciprian. “Hell's Angels: Chocolate George's Last Ride.” My Chopper. Ro December 10 (2011). Web.

166 appears in the Easyriders story “Remembering a Brother,” which also repeats the familiar trope of bikers' pathological obscenity, as the narrator who ultimately interrupts and castigates the priest in the midst of his brother's memorial does so in a morbidly profane vernacular that is presented as a form of authenticity. Next, after the Wild Angels have assaulted the local minister and confined him in the

Loser's coffin, the Loser's liberated corpse is propped-up to observe as the service descends into a bacchanal during which his girlfriend is coerced into taking heroin and raped. Again, the idea of manipulating corpses to mimic their participation in this type of grotesque revelry appears consistently in biker narratives, including “The Pasadena Run,” in which the outlaw club's Rose Parade crew includes a number of stolen corpses: “The four dead guys were all squared away, and they just stood there smilin'--probably from feelin' the broomsticks we shoved up their asses to keep them from bendin' or snappin' in half—and in their suits and ties they didn't have much to do with the Heritage of

America, but they looked so good we left them there anyway to kind of add a conservative touch to the proceedings.”394 Finally, when the Wild Angels quit their base frolic and venture to the local cemetery, they stand over the Loser's grave with nothing to say until angry townspeople throw a brick, instigating a brawl. As police sirens begin to wail in the distance, Heavenly Blues's girlfriend Mike pleads with him to flee with her, but he insists that she leave with another club member while he stays behind with nowhere to go. Of course, similar violent encounters with local citizens punctuate Easy Rider and numerous biker narratives going back to The Wild Ones. Ultimately, the moral that emerges from this constellation of tropes, reflecting bikers' relationship to death and the funeral ritual, is two-fold and somewhat paradoxical. On the one hand, bikers insist that conventional funeral rituals reflect nothing but superstition and phony sentiment: that citizens, who relate to each other only through the market and the artifice of bourgeois culture, cannot fathom the depth of the bonds that join bikers. On the other hand, they suggest that death and loss are an unsubstantial matter, implying, even, that the boundaries

394 Solari, “The Pasadena Run,” 73.

167 of the individual subject and the boundaries of life itself are malleable. As liminal figures, bikers' relationship to death had a dialectical quality; superb nihilists, they insisted that the reality of death constituted the only truth and the sum of human existence, and this insistence actually rendered death a rather quotidian matter: an intimate companion and a familiar part of life.

Pragmatism

Bikers' status as liminal figures was reflected in their peculiar relationship to modern formulations of individualism. While the biker's popular appeal has often been formulated as a celebration of individualism and personal freedom,395 close observers of the subculture reject the notion that bikers embody either of those qualities, often with a healthy dose of condescension: “The Angels make a show of being free from social restraint, but they also have a charter, elect a president, vice president, secretary, treasurer, and sergeant at arms, and collect dues. They must wear a uniform and drive a certain kind of motorcycle, must attend meetings regularly, must not join other clubs, and must do what the leader says. The conformity an Angel lives under would depress an executive trainee.”396

Murray is just one of a host of journalists and scholars who make this same basic point; bikers' bombastic insistence on their individualism was simply fraudulent. These critics are, of course, correct that bikers were not consummate individualists, but, by interpreting their failure to express individualism very narrowly, as an instance of hypocrisy, they fail to understand a far more critical dynamic of the biker subculture. Ultimately, bikers did not so much fail to embody individualism as deconstruct it, pursuing an altogether different version of freedom. At a glance, the Angels' demented first principle—that an Angel is always right—seems like a wildly immodest affirmation of individual license, but the actual aim of the rule was to regulate group behavior in a way that eroded the basis of 395 For instance, during the 1970's, Harley-Davidson marketed itself as “The Great American Freedom Machine.” 396 Murray, “Hell's Angels” Rpt. Mammoth Bikers, 106.

168 modern individualism. The rule was not, really, calling on each Angel to do whatever he wanted; the

Angels did celebrate hedonism, but the proper context of the rule was their ecstatic belligerence and the imperative for solidarity that it created; the purpose of the rule was to ensure that Angels backed one another in confrontations without equivocation or deliberation. Thus, the rule did not say, ultimately, do whatever you want; it said, back your brother even when he's obviously in the wrong. And the effect of the rule was not just to enforce solidarity but to compel members to behave as irrational actors: to forswear the basic principle of modern individualism.

In his memoir, George Weathern admitted that their perverse first principle was a source of tension within the club: “the most troublesome rule was the most basic one: 'An Angel's always right.'

Time and again it compelled members to back each other in public—even when one Angel was clearly out of line.”397 Indeed, he said that members often fought each other at club meetings after someone would express his resentment toward a member who had compelled everyone to fight for an illegitimate or trivial reason or against a personal friend who did not belong to the club. They were not, after all, a mob of irrational animals, but they did work to cultivate that impression; they wanted everyone to know that they were absolutely unified and that they were not swayed by conventional notions of right and wrong, reasonable and insane. They wanted violence to be an organic extension of their identity. Indeed, Willis observes that bikers attempted to mix masculinity and aggression with normal life and suggests that this effort carried disruptive potential.398 That potential was realized insofar as bikers' peculiar articulation of violence as a collective undertaking lacking instrumental motive worked to undermine the way in which modern individualism is constructed. Individualism, of course, emerged from the Enlightenment as something of a paradox, resting, in essence, on the recognition that we are all unique in the same way; we all share the same basic structures of feeling, experience the same pains, and have the same desire for self-determination. The notion of an 397 Weathern, Wayward Angel, 95. 398 Willis, Profane Culture, 29.

169 inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness captures this paradox neatly; we all have the same innate something that makes us want to express our individuality and pursue a unique, self-directed path. We are the same but different, and we are the same precisely in our desire to be different. Thus, universalism and individualism are bound in a dialectic.

Bikers often described their violent encounters in a way that confuted this dialectic, recounting grisly violence against others with depraved relish and no hint of remorse: “I got one kick in that I'll never forget. Someone had the meaty sailor by the ears and his face was being held directly above my right foot while someone was tryin to hit it with his fist. I made like the champion on the Wheaties box and brought my foot back and in the full thrust my boot met his nose and mouth squarely as if I were kicking a football. He went into a slump as if he were dead and fell face first into a pool of his own blood.”399 On one level, Reynolds's lurid vignette provides ironic commentary on the ways in which violence is sanctioned within the American middle class. His victim is an American serviceman, and he playfully parodies the widely celebrated violence of popular sports. For the bourgeoisie, the military and the gridiron are the arenas in which the expression of violence is noble and affirming, and bikers enjoyed extending a working-class tradition of deflating this hypocrisy.400 But, there is nothing ironic about the ghastly pleasure that Reynolds takes in inflicting pain. For him, this horrific episode provides a fond memory, and none of the details seem to demand qualification, much less apology. There is no hint that the serviceman's pain even enters his consciousness. Yet, just a few pages later, Reynolds describes being beaten by police with plaintive hyperbole: “Each time I hit the pavement gushes of blood surged through my brain in technicolor-like feeling. The pain was so intense and so great—it was pain I never had imagined before or ever heard described.”401 It is easy to dismiss this disjuncture between how Reynolds views—or doesn't—the suffering of his sailor victim and how he views his own

399 Reynolds, Freewheeling Frank, 35. 400 Oriard, Michael. Reading Football: How the Popular Press Created an American Spectacle. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994): 142. 401 Reynolds, Freewheelin Frank, 44.

170 anguish as shameless hypocrisy or the stunted narcissism of a pathetic man-child, and it would certainly be a mistake to dismiss either of those factors entirely. However, Scarry begins her study of the body in pain by observing that our own pain and the pain of others are two distinct orders of events and that the reality of the latter remains forever dubious. Reynolds, then, is not alone in his obliviousness toward his victim's suffering. Pain's resistance to linguistic expression ensures that is is ultimately unshareable. Yet, the effort to see the pain of others and to find some medium in which to discuss and redress their suffering defines the project of liberalism.

It is in this context that the disconnect between Reynolds's desire to inflict pain and his overwrought rumination on his own agony represents a profound affront to modern conceptions of individualism. Bikers seemed to express a lack of sympathy so profound that it amounted to a refusal to recognize the claims of universalism, leading to a rejection of the priority of individual rights. Indeed, bikers did not believe that others had rights, even of the most basic sort, like the right not to be mauled.

This observation illuminates the logic behind the outlaw biker's curious habit of employing citizen as their preferred slur. At core, a citizen is a rights-bearing individual. A citizen defends himself as an individual by invoking a universal category, by insisting that he is fundamentally like others. This reasoning was anathema to bikers; such a figure was contemptible to them. Bikers viewed defending oneself or one's property by recourse to a mere abstraction like rights as essentially passive, or feminine, and Sonny Barger clarified this dynamic in discussing the relationship of the Hell's Angels to other outlaw clubs:

When all the other clubs wanted to be treated as equals, the Hell's Angels ended up leaving the One- Percenters. We didn't feel they were equal, and no matter what, we weren't ever going to treat the other clubs the same way we treated ourselves. While the rules were you couldn't steal a One-Percenter's bike, and you couldn't rat-pack a One-Percenter, we didn't feel the other clubs deserved to be treated like Hell's Angels by other Hell's Angels.402

Barger refused to respect the most basic rights of others—not to have their property stolen, not to be

402 Barger, Hell's Angel, 41.

171 brutally beaten in an unfair fight—because he rejected the central premise of enlightened humanism and liberalism: that others are his equals in some fundamental way. Again, the Angels had already determined that the vast majority of Americans, whom they derisively labeled citizens, did not deserve their respect; here, Barger was describing the Angels' rift with the other members of a self-selecting extreme fringe of the motorcycle community: the 1%. The Angels could not abide treating even their fellow outlaws with minimal consideration. And, crucially, it was not because the Angels believed that they were actually superior in any meaningful way that they declined to respect the basic rights of their peers. As we have seen, Barger said “we didn't feel they were equal,” but he did not elaborate on how, exactly, the Hell's Angels were superior, and he made it clear that the point was mute: “no matter what, we weren't ever going to treat the other clubs the same way we treated ourselves.” For Barger, other people did not matter simply because they were other people. Their suffering does not matter because it was theirs. Given Reynolds's euphoric description of kicking a serviceman until he collapsed as if dead, it seems that the suffering of others was simply incomprehensible to the Angels: so much ephemeral abstraction.

CONCLUSION

Willis identifies a similar quality of profound chauvinism in his biker boys, and it is this very quality that leads him to offer his subjects as something like ironic, post-modern heroes, as he presents an oblique defense of their racial prejudice, in particular. Willis does not exactly condone his bike boys' racism or the solipsism that underwrites it, but he tentatively presents their stilted outlook as a refreshing contrast to the universalizing rhetoric of liberalism:

One could even argue that this kind of response to outside groups and strange events is healthier than a 'liberal' one. Coming from the other end, much has been written about the dislocating, distorting, disorienting effects of news medium capable of relaying realistic visual and audible pictures of the

172 most alarming and brutal events from around the world in an instant. If the middle-class liberal is to respond to each of the events in a compassionate, humanist and imaginative way, his feelings would be so ravaged, and relativized, as to destroy any coherent perspective at all.403

Willis goes on to claim that minorities prefer honest disdain coming from a clear sense of boundaries to well-meaning but condescending liberalism, remarking that liberal feeling, as conditioned by the press, is fundamentally alienated.404 Of course, the quintessential feeling of liberalism is sympathy, as opposed to empathy. It is empathy that Willis is invoking when he refers to a compassionate, humanist, and imaginative response. Putting oneself in another's shoes in an act of imagination. As Willis notes, in a world of global media, to empathize is to be subjected to an unending barrage of suffering. It is untenable. Sympathy, by contrast, is a species of affect in which the sympathizer responds intellectually, rather than emotionally. Sympathy employs universal laws to affirm that a given situation is tragic, unjust, or simply painful; it does not ask us to actually feel but to demonstrate that we understand the correct emotional response to a given situation. And sympathy is, of course, the sacrament of liberalism. Thus, Willis charges that liberalism is dishonest; it is mere affect.

Willis attempts to recuperate the illiberal prejudice of his bike boys by presenting them, in contrast, as exemplars of unaffected honesty. Rather than offering their obeisance to Enlightenment universalism with a hollow performance of sympathy, the biker boys unapologetically embrace their own peculiar values. Willis sees in them a kind of pragmatism, a conscious effort to live within the highly particular reality they have chosen to construct, and George Weathern certainly sounds like a pragmatist himself when he chastises younger members of the Hell's Angels for failing to comprehend the necessary balance between individual license and the autonomy of the collective: “The importance of the code escaped them. Rather than signifying the freedom to live by your own rules, the code was viewed as an obstacle to personal pleasure and gain, like the California Penal Code.”405 Again, many

403 Willis, Profane Culture, 34. 404 Ibid, 35. 405 Weathern, Wayward Angel, 158.

173 observers, including a number of journalists and scholars, have sided with the hedonistic younger generation of Angels against Weathern, making the argument that bikers are hypocrites because they bombastically celebrate freedom and individuality while enforcing their own strict rules. We have seen how Murray compares the Angels to conformist executive trainees, and the same observation with the same snide tone appears time and again in the work of journalists and scholars. Yves Lavigne writes

“Such is the plight of the Hell's Angels, who impudently claim to be the last free men, though shackled by their narrow vision of life to a violent ride on a dead-end road of their own making.”406 And, of course, for his part, John Wood calls them technocrats, again because they followed rules and submitted to a hierarchy: “Like the technocracy, the Angels were obsessed with order, and the structure of their organization, with its system of chapters and meetings, points to this.”407 Even Watson said that, for bikers, individualism was not a practice but a defense against criticism, an observation that seemed accompanied by overtones of condescension.

Of course, not all rules are the same; it matters who makes a rule, what that rule aims to accomplish, and how that rule is justified. “Rotten Richard” Barker made this point concisely: “A Hell's

Angel is in an honor society, man. We live by some of the strongest rules going—and if you break one, you might not have the chance to break another—that's how strict we are. But they are our rules—not something somebody lays on us.”408 The dichotomy between individuality and conformity that Murray,

Lavigne, Wood, and Watson employ to castigate bikers defines a quintessentially modern paradigm the operation of which depends upon the tacit assumption that rules are universal. But Barker and

Weathern recognized that rules are not, in fact, universal and that freedom and obedience are not antithetical; they understood that, when their biker subculture functioned, it was because members were committed to constructing a particular reality. At times, Thompson actually seemed to gesture toward a

406 Lavigne Yves. Hell's Angels: Into the Abyss. (New York: Harper Collins, 1996): 1. 407 Wood, “Hell's Angels Illusion,” 336-351. 408 Barker, Richard. Qtd. Weathern, Wayward Angel, 217.

174 similar recognition. During his account of the morning of the Bass Lake run, Thompson noted that a particular pop song interrupted the Angels as they discussed the fact that police efforts to bar them from reaching Bass Lake had only cemented their resolve and made any last-minute change of destination untenable: “We'll build a world of our own—that no one else can share. And our sorrows we'll leave far behind us there.”409 According to Thompson, this song made the whole scene jell. Meanwhile,

Thompson characterized one Mama's tribute to the Angels as surprisingly eloquent, observing that she put the whole thing in a nut: “'Everybody believes in something' she said. 'Some people believe in God.

I believe in the Angels.'”410 Like the lyrics of the pop song that Thompson chose to highlight, this quote suggested that bikers operated purposefully as grubby pragmatists. And, ultimately, that kind of pragmatism represented one kind of freedom, whereas the hedonistic freedom to pursue personal pleasure and gain represented another: the illusory freedom of capitalism, underwritten by enlightened individualism. Thus, Willis's begrudging admiration for the solipsism of his bike boys anticipates the vogue for pragmatism that has accompanied post-modernism. He sees in the bike boys the will to construct reality as they see fit: a marginal group constructing and defending their own bricolage.

Easy ride communes

409 Thompson, Hell's Angels, 111. 410 Ibid, 162.

175 Chapter 3: Frontiers

As we've seen, bikers' liminality and their engagement with carnivalesque disruption coexisted uneasily with their professed commitment to a particular brand of trenchant individualism. Watson and

Wolf, among others, defined them, ultimately, as failed individualists, while the counterculture saw them as the model for an anti-modern, irrational solidarity that might form the basis of an authentic community.411 And this tension was distilled in the most persistent motif of the biker subculture: the frontier, which was invoked incessantly within bikers' discourse: “Their prose, poetry, and editorials paint a picture of the contemporary biker on his Harley as the spiritual descendant of the frontiersman on his horse.”412 While the motorcycle industry and its advertising efforts have frequently indulged this trope to the point of self-parody, western iconography remains a seductive and inevitable referent for bikers' self-presentation and for representations of the subculture across disciplines and genres. Roger

Corman, of course, expressed the appeal of this analogy with characteristic bluntness: “[I] saw the

Hell's Angel riding free as a modern day cowboy. The chopper was his horse”413 Indeed, one of the opening scenes of Easy Rider draws the same analogy with the same lack of subtlety. When Wyatt and

Billy need to fix a flat tire, they stop at a ramshackle ranch and ask to borrow some tools, at which point the camera frames a lingering shot of the withered rancher shoeing a horse in the foreground wile

411 Sassoon points out that new social movements of the period eschewed ideology, aiming to transform reality itself and discovering the importance of ritual and tribalism for organizing symbolic action and creating alternative social structures. Sassoon, Joseph. “Ideology, Symbolic Action, and Rituality in Social Movements: the Effects on Organizational Forms” Social Science Information. 23: 4 (1984): 863-871. 412 Wolf, Rebels, 56. 413 Osgerby, Biker, 56.

176 the two bikers work on Wyatt's machine in the background. Ultimately, Easy Rider does not belong to the genre of biker exploitation films that Corman originated in the mid 1960's, but it certainly shares that genre's preoccupation with western mythology. As Bill Osgerby notes in his book on bikers, which is actually subtitled, How The Original Cowboy of the Road Became the Easy Rider of the Silver

Screen, biker exploitation films were effectively slipshod retreads of existing Hollywood westerns, and themes of vigilantism and wandering, especially through desolate landscapes, define the genre.414

But even prior to Corman's innovation, bikers were consistently associated with the mythical west, a habit that Hunter Thompson resoundingly mocked when his subjects presented him with a cherished clipping from the Oakland Tribune that compared them to the Texas Rangers. Thompson provoked his subjects' ire by belittling the Tribune, which he referred to an atavistic endeavor, and the author of the prized column, one Lucius Beebe, expressing utter disdain for the whole western analogy:

“It had never occurred to me to compare Tiny to Bat Masterson. Or Terry to Billy the Kid. Or Sonny to

Buffalo Bill. Even after Big Daddy put it all in a nut I still missed the connection.”415 Of course,

Thompson's scorn was typically a reliable index of a convention's popular appeal, and the trope of the biker as cowboy has been inexorable; even academics seem unable to resist the analogy, as we see in

Daniel Wolf's account of his first contact with his research subjects: “It was like a scene out of a western movie: hard-faced outlaws in the bar, downing doubles while waiting for the stagecoach to arrive.”416 The fact that Wolf would employ this cliché at a crucial juncture in his ethnography suggests its immense gravity within the subculture. Indeed, the idea of the biker as a cowboy or western outlaw is not, ultimately, a mere cliché; that identification has been so persistent and exerted such an influence on bikers themselves that, in spite of its flagrance and its camp overtones, western mythology has been

414 Osgerby, Bill. "Sleazy Riders: Exploitation,“Otherness”, and Transgression in the 1960s Biker Movie." Journal of Popular Film and Television 31:3 (2003): 98-108. 415 Ibid, 55. 416 Wolf, Rebels, 15.

177 pivotal to the subculture's self-definition and public reception.417

The dominant meaning of the mythical cowboy, of course, coalesces around the idea of taming the frontier. It is the cowboy who clears the way for the rationalized progress of civilization. The cowboy subdues a pernicious environment and the unruly others who occupy it, and he serves as an extension of the foundational myth of western society since the enlightenment: the myth of the autonomous individual with its peculiar Hobbesian assumptions about man's relationship to nature and to his fellow man.418 The cowboy, then, is a figure of consummate self-reliance: a free agent stoically navigating a chaotic world with only his native sense of reason and justice. He is at home in the wilderness, where life is nasty, brutish, and short, and, from the vantage of his detractors, he is himself something of a nasty brute; violence defines his milieu, and he serves as the sharp point of American expansionism. As an exaggerated figure defined by swaggering jingoism, he simultaneously distills and deflects our recognition of Native American holocaust, perpetuating a polite fiction about genocide and empire, which we understand, through the myth of the cowboy, as the unforeseen but inevitable byproduct of individual heroic struggles in a hostile environment, rather than a coordinated state policy.419

Of course, members of the counterculture were among the cowboy's most vociferous detractors.

Indeed, the underground journalist Jakov Lind invoked the cowboy as the embodiment of American aggression from the colonial period through the war in Vietnam: “To annihilate the weak is possible and therefore permissible to the moral conscience of every ordinary citizen—providing he gets away

417 Osgerby, like many popular observers, conflates the cowboy and outlaw archetypes in his subtitle and when he observes: “The last American hero/antihero, the biker's image of trenchant independence and rugged individualism harks back to the mythic figures of the cowboy and the Western pioneer. Davie Crockett, Wyatt Earp, and Jesse James have long since bitten the dust, but the biker has assumed their mantle.” Osgerby, Biker, 8. 418 Johnson, Michael L. Hunger for the Wild: America's Obsession with the Untamed West. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas) 111. Again, Osgerby is quite explicit about the analogy and its underlying mythology: “Just as the hardy frontiersman personified the sense of personal freedom and robust self-reliance at the heart of the American Dream, the biker has come to symbolize American ideals of confidence, resourcefulness, and individual liberty.” Osgerby, Biker, 8. 419 Johnson, Hunger for the Wild, 111. Osgerby concedes of the biker/frontiersman: “Sometimes he's been out-and-out mean and ugly.” Osgerby, Biker, 8

178 with it. As the cowboys got away with it.”420 For the counterculture, the cowboy was a potent symbol of the dominant culture they wished to reject. Yet, frontier mythology remained a persistent motif of the counterculture. They did not, ultimately, renounce the popular notion that the frontier experience had defined American character; instead, they vigorously embraced that Turnerian assumption and sought to redefine American character by radically reinterpreting the frontier. Thus, when Lind denounced the legacy of the cowboy, he immediately plunged back into the repertory of frontier mythology in pursuit of some symbolic figure that could invert the meaning of the cowboy: “Yet I for myself, rather chose to be a Red Indian.”421 Ostensibly, this choice to become a Red Indian represented a radically revisionist assay of frontier mythology and a blunt critique of American culture. For Lind, the conquest of the frontier was not a valorous exercise that forged Americans' uniquely spirited character; it was

America's original sin, and his wish to become a Red Indian represented a desire to invert American history and undermine the ideological foundation of the Great Society. Indeed, the Red Indian appears consistently in counterculture discourse as an anti-establishment figure, as in a typical article for The

Rag by Thorne Dreyer in which the Indian promises to disrupt campus politics: “On the [University of

Texas] campus there is a hallowed tradition called Round-up. That's when all the cowboys get together.

This year there will be Indians, too.”422 The Indians, in question are, of course, The Rag's readers. Like

Lind, Dreyer suggested that students themselves were becoming subversives by choosing to be Indians, a position that was elaborated in The Barb's review of Easy Rider: “It is as though the vanishing

American had returned in the sons and daughters of the white conquerors as Leslie Fiedler suggests.”423

Again, this reviewer imagined the counterculture choosing to become Red Indians: magically

420 Lind, Jakov. The International Times (London) November 14-27. Rpt. “Jakov Lind: Bares White Man-eaters: of Cowboys and Cannibals.” The Berkeley Barb 3,25,71 December 23 (1966): 5 Similarly, Slotkin observes that “'Custeristic' was the adjective applied by nonviolent radicals to proposals for terrorism in the councils of the New Left.” Slotkin, Richard. The Fatal Environment: the Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890. 1985. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998): 15. 421 Ibid. 422 Dreyer, Thorne. “Flipped-out Week” The Rag 1:21 (1967): 1. 423 “Easy Rider and the Sterile Cuckoo.” The Berkeley Barb. 9,22,225 December 12-18 (1969).

179 embodying the insurgent spirit of native culture and enacting a very literal inversion of dominant frontier mythology.424

Playing Indian

Of course, this fascination with racial transformation and the possibility of reversing American history by choosing to be a Red Indian or somehow assimilating an essential Indianness was not so much an inversion of the frontier legacy as an extension of its core preoccupations with a revised emphasis. Racial ambiguity has been at the very heart of frontier discourse from its inception. Indeed, so-called captivity narratives, or white colonists' first-person memoirs of their temporary, involuntary residence among Native Americans, were arguably America's first literary genre. Typically, these narratives were stories of Christian redemption in which God's love preserves the narrator through a sojourn in an alien culture that is manifestly horrifying. They were stories of piety rewarded with metaphorical and literal salvation, but they were also, more subtly and ambiguously, stories of temptation and exoticism, in which the possibility of racial transgression, especially in the form of miscegenation, charged a host of lesser enticements. For instance, in her seminal captivity narrative,

The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, Mary Rowlandson repeatedly describes being forced to eat her captors' unusual fare, insisting that the food was foul and thanking God for rewarding her faith by transforming its taste in her mouth, but she also recounts on one occasion: “I asked her to let me boyle my piece of Bear in her Kettle, which she did, and gave me some Ground-nuts to eat with it: and I cannot bear to think how pleasant it was to me.”425 The temptation here is seemingly innocuous: to indulge in a bit of culinary tourism. But, for Rowlandson and her audience, that temptation to

424 Indian imagery was ubiquitous within the counterculture, notably in the summer of 1967 edition of the underground San Francisco Oracle. Slotkin says: “'Counterculture' radicalism identified strongly with a rather traditional vision of the American Indians as the 'Noble Savage' alternative to civilization gone wrong.” Slotkin, Fatal Environment, 17. 425 Rowlandson, Mary White. The Sovereignty and Goodness of God. 1682. (Boston: Bedford Books, 1997): 85.

180 acknowledge the delectableness of native cuisine spoke to the larger temptation that was implicit in all captivity narratives: the temptation that was embodied by Eunice Williams, daughter of socially prominent minister John Williams, who authored his own captivity narrative after being seized by the

Mohawk during Queen Anne's War. Williams's daughter Eunice was taken along with her father and four siblings, but she was not released with them two years later in 1706; she had been thoroughly assimilated by the Mohawk, eventually taking the name Kanenstenhawi. Over the next four decades,

Williams and the Massachusetts Bay Colony negotiated for her release to no avail. Kanenstenhawi had married a Mohawk man and had a family; she did not want to return to Massachusetts. And so she refused, even when the colony raised a hefty bounty to entice her. She never told her captivity tale. She simply became Mohawk.

The counterculture imagined themselves in the role of Kanenstenhawi, repudiating their parents' corrupt culture and siding with oppressed native populations in Vietnam and elsewhere.426 Of course, the expression of radical sympathy with Native Americans as part of a critique of Anglo-American culture has itself been one of the most persistent features of Anglo-American culture, from the Boston

Tea Party to the antebellum popular stage and beyond: a tradition of dissent that has, perversely, become a buttress to hegemonic whiteness and American expansionism.427 With these cultural forms,

Americans continued to deflect recognition of Native-American genocide by suggesting that they themselves had somehow subsumed the spirit of the indigenous population: a bit of magical thinking that we see quite clearly in The Barb's reference to Leslie Fiedler, which presents youthful insurgence as a recurrence of Native-American cultural opposition. Americans have consistently posited themselves as the heirs of some ineffable Indianness. Whether they depict this cultural inheritance as a magical transfer bequeathed by the tragic, vanishing Indian, or the hard-won legacy of frontier conflict

426 Deloria notes that part of the appeal of Playing Indian is the opportunity it presents to vicariously become the victim of U.S imperialism. Deloria, Philip Joseph. Playing Indian. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998): 161. 427 Lepore, Jill. The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity. (New York: Knopf, 1998): 193.

181 and privation, Americans insist that they possess all that was noble and vital in the indigenous population and the wilderness landscape of North America, thereby implying that they boast an authenticity and purity that escapes decadent Europeans. In this formulation, Indians did not hinder the indomitable progress of Anglo-American civilization; they simply augmented it.

There was, of course, a certain obvious hypocrisy and cynicism to these figurations, and the influential western historian Phillip Deloria acknowledges the role that various forms of symbolic racial transgression, which he terms playing Indian, assume in deflecting genocidal guilt. But he also contextualizes the practice within the liminality of carnival masquerade and the ambivalent traditions of medieval misrule. The desire to identify with the victims of U.S imperialism, then, was not just a fever dream of white guilt steeped in craven hypocrisy but part of a desire to explore historical contingency. From the colonial-era onward, Indians have posed the ultimate counter-factual in

American history: what if we were Indians? Their presence invariably serves to stimulate thinking about the process of cultural construction and the lurking arbitrariness of values and historical outcomes, pointing to a litany of could-have-beens, almost-weres, and what-ifs that have charted

America’s course through history. Indians necessarily call attention to the constant policing of racial boundaries and social identities that is required in order to construct historical narratives and national identities. Thus, Americans have become preoccupied with Native-American imagery and various forms of playing Indian when they have encountered moments of cultural crisis, and the Indian trope has proved particularly useful for renegotiating ideas of citizenship, national identity, and masculinity.428 Of course, just as carnival and the popular culture forms that have extended its traditions of masquerade, inversion, and semiotic play have tended to destabilize identity positions in order to reinforce existing hierarchies, playing Indian has achieved a similar effect, ultimately bolstering the power of whiteness and perpetuating the victimization of Native-American populations by allowing

428 Ibid.

182 Anglo-Americans to defect recognition of Native-American genocide and its beneficiaries, positioning indigenous culture as both already past and forever immanent: inevitably vanishing yet safely subsumed within Anglo-American institutions.429

Yet, as we have seen, Lindley and Jameson observe of carnival and popular culture respectively that, in the tumultuous play of signifiers that facilitates these forms, the possibility of destabilizing existing hierarchies remains, whatever the usual outcome. Thus, the counterculture's fascination with

Indians perpetuated a tradition of playing Indian that has furthered white supremacy, but radical young people returned to that dubious tradition in the hope that this time would be different; their admiration for native cultures, they thought, was authentic and pure and informed by a wholesale rejection of hegemonic postwar culture and its racist underpinnings. They embraced the figure of the Indian, then, in order to posit an alternative social order, rejecting, in particular, the Great Society's boisterous claims to progress. Indeed, with their exploration of Native-American identity, the counterculture was questing after a moment in which the linear flow of history itself was confounded: “History has chosen us—born white in middle-class America—to reverse centuries of America. History has chosen us—the inheritors of the best money could buy—to vomit up our inheritance. Rip off that white skin, tear down that

American mask, flush those credit cards down the toilet bowl.”430 Here, to escape whiteness is not just to atone for the colonial past and escape the weight of historical guilt but to escape the historical process as it has been understood within the Enlightenment tradition: to escape the very notion of progress as it is framed within the western capitalist paradigm. Jerry Rubin's call for America's middle- class youth to vomit up their inheritance and tear down their American masks invokes the millennial

429 Slotkin places the counterculture's fascination with the American Indian firmly within this tradition: “The iconography of beads and headbands, the adoption of 'tribal' life-styles as a form of communalism untainted by political association with communism, the rationalization of drug use as a form of mystic religiosity, the linkage of political and ecological concerns, the withdrawal to wilderness refuges and the adoption of an outlaw or 'renegade' stance toward larger society —all of these phenomena so special to the sixties were acted out as if they were not innovative at all, but merely repetitions of an older patter.” Slotkin, Fatal Environment, 17. 430 Rubin, Jerry. “Elvis Kills Ike” 11.

183 rapture of Wovoka's Ghost Dance and the anarchic mirth of carnival, which disrupts hierarchy and calls attention to the circular nature of time. Rubin suggests that civilization is always a masquerade.

Beneath official western narratives of progress, the reality of human history is characterized by entropy and mutation, and the counterculture employed the figure of the Indian in order to invoke this underlying reality of radical contingency as they sought a heuristic politics that acknowledged the unpredictability of human endeavor and the circularity of time: “There is no right or wrong tactic or strategy. Things always turn out differently than you expect them to—always--not necessarily worse, but different. Error produces truth. Movements are built on failure.”431 For the counterculture, the frontier was a black hole that collapsed linear historical narratives like the myth of manifest destiny; it was a place where history could be unwritten.

And, even the cowboy figure, who was so frequently associated with the ineluctable conquest of

Manifest Destiny, was not wholly alien to this more anarchic vision of the frontier. Historical cowboys were, of course, a diverse group; they were, effectively, proletarian workers: their ranks drawn from the same multiracial mix of desperate men who filled similarly harrowing jobs. And, from the right perspective, the mythical cowboy is a somewhat ambivalent figure himself. Colonialism is, ostensibly, a method for replicating a given parent culture in a new landscape; its underlying ideology is deliriously chauvinistic, expressing a supreme arrogance about the universal merit of the parent culture.

But, colonialism necessarily includes a fantasy of escaping the bounds of the parent culture and its peculiar values: a desire to encounter the other.432 And the cowboy embodies this dialectic. Cowboys clear the way for civilization but only by enacting a flight from its constraints. From one vantage, they are a distillation of Enlightenment values and capitalist logic; yet, from another vantage, they are noble savages. They carry the banner of civilization to its margin only to lay it down. Ultimately, then, the

431 Ibid. 432 McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. (New York: Routledge, 1995).

184 cowboy is not the antithesis of the Indian but the embodiment of an uncanny union between the

Enlightenment tradition and the savage wilderness. He is a white Indian, and those great archetypal enemies are really two sides of the same coin, which is the frontier itself: where civilization is forged and where it dissolves. It is entirely appropriate that children play cowboys and Indians rather than cowboys vs. Indians because the fantasy of the frontier is about liminality: about existing in between, about being both. Like the band of colonists who orchestrated the Boston Tea Party, disguising themselves as Indians, not in order to effect a genuine imposture that would conceal their guilt, but in order to symbolically embrace transgression and assert their cultural difference from England, the cowboy, ultimately, assumes the attributes of the Indian in order to create a hybrid identity that is both

European and indigenous.

Cooper's Leatherstocking tales provided the foundation for the western genre in American literature, and they revolve around the adventures of Natty Bumppo, a white man raised by Indians and the progenitor of the cowboy archetype. Plenty of observers, like Hap Stewart, who denounced the

Hell's Angels as reactionary thugs in his letter to The Barb, associated bikers with cowboys in the sense that Jakov Lind invokes the cowboy as a chauvinistic brute bent on the annihilation of others. For them, the biker was a modern cowboy because he embodied the undercurrent of licentiousness and vicious narrow-mindedness that has characterized American masculinity.433 Yet, for their admirers within the counterculture, bikers were modern cowboys in the ambivalent tradition of Natty Bumppo. Indeed, if the cowboy was the irresistible referent for representations of the biker, the Indian was almost as popular. In a typical example from a 1967 article titled “Dancing in Hell,” The Barb makes this comparison very casually: “The tribe of Hell's Angels dismounted, secured their mounts in front of

California Hall in San Francisco while the City Cavalry in Blue circled the perimeter of the Angels' camp.”434 Here, The Barb does not belabor their metaphor, which equates the Hell's Angels with Native 433 Owenby, Subduing Satan. 434 E.W. “Dancing in Hell.” The Berkeley Barb 4,6,76 February 10 (1967): 4.

185 Americans just as casually as Corman transfigured those same Hell's Angels into cowboys. Indeed,

Sonny Barger used a similarly off-hand Native-American analogy when he attempted to describe the exhilaration of a club run and came up with: “It was like I became Chief Crazy Horse leading the charge with hundreds of motorcycles all going eighty miles per hour.”435 Barger's emphasis on the idea of becoming Chief Crazy Horse was his way expressing the liminality of the biker; he wanted to emphasize that he was not employing a metaphor but expressing a deeper fluidity of identity: one that again recalled the protean figure of Natty Bumppo, who also goes by Hawkeye and The Longue

Carrabine.

By the turn of the twentieth century, the western genre embraced a more imperialist perspective, and Bumppo, with his volatile identity and ambivalent relationship to the process of American expansion, became something of an anachronism; yet, by the 1960's, popular western narratives were again emphasizing the cowboy's liminal status and his fraught relationship to the Enlightenment tradition. Indeed, Hollywood's so-called revisionist westerns, like The Wild Bunch or Dirty Little Billy, expressed some of the counterculture's desire to subvert the Great Society's dominant assumptions about social progress and affluence; they were inclined to present the west as a grim landscape of privation and the cowboy as a crude, cravenly opportunistic figure who belies the rational guise of civilization.436 Obviously, the biker as cowboy fit well into this aesthetic, and it was this darker, revisionist western genre, in particular, from which biker exploitation films extrapolated their themes, ratifying and continuing to shape bikers' close identification of the frontier with the anarchic dissolution of social restraints that we see in Don Sharp's “Fuck It!” piece for Easyriders, while also positioning the biker as a racially hybrid figure in the tradition of Natty Bumppo. Of course, Roger

Lovin was particularly brazen in designating motorcyclists as hybridized racial others. For him,

435 Barger, Hell's Angel, 7. 436 Noys, Benjamin. "Western Nihilism." (2012): 1-11. In: Historical Materialism Ninth Annual Conference, 8-11 Nov 2012, SOAS, London. (Unpublished)

186 nomadism was not simply a general philosophy of presentness; it was an extension of Native-American and other dispossessed cultures. Thus, his Complete Motorcycle Nomad begins with the epigraph “for

Boyathly, whom the Mexicans called Geronimo. He wasn't much for fences,” and concludes with a discussion that links bikers with Plains Indians and Zulus.

DECONSTRUCTING WHITENESS

But bikers were not understood simply as noble savages embodying a nebulous Native-

American commitment to freedom. Through the lens of the frontier, bikers' anti-modern effort to live in the contingent present was understood as a distinct critique of postwar racial politics, which bikers further complicated with their efforts to style themselves as ecstatically repugnant outsiders. Indeed, the biker's rise to public notoriety and counterculture cachet coincided with a period of intensified Civil

Rights struggle and cannot be understood apart from that development, as their self-styled stigmatization and marginalization, with its carnivalesque overtones, proved to be uniquely provocative in the specific context of violent racial tumult. Ultimately, as avatars of the frontier and exemplars of a peculiar strain of unregenerate, mutant whiteness, bikers complicated America's mid-century racial binary in a way that proved seductive to the counterculture as it encountered the limits of liberalism.

Baucom argues that expressing sympathy for enslaved blacks represented the birth of liberalism,437 and it is easy to see white engagement with the Civil Rights Movement as its apotheosis. Yet, as American liberalism seemed poised for its final triumph, many leftists anticipated a Pyrrhic victory, questioning the sympathetic foundation of the liberal worldview.

Of course, throughout the development of liberalism, many individuals sought a more expansive sympathy than the narrow rhetorical compassion expressed in liberalism's reasoned support

437 Baucom, Ian. Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005): 227-251.

187 for universal rights, and this desire frequently ranged into forms of aestheticized racial transgression that borrowed from popular culture's ambivalent and frequently eroticized racial representations.

Indeed, this dynamic was especially pronounced during the interwar years, when the American left experimented with Marxism at the same time that it embraced the popular appeal of black expressive forms, generally eschewing the politics of sympathy at the core of liberalism. Rather than defining the black population as tragically downtrodden and in need of aid, leftist intellectuals beginning in the

1920's increasingly identified white culture itself as bereft, alienated, and in need of salvation, both promoting and mirroring burgeoning popular enthusiasm for black culture, in general, and jazz, in particular.438 As black culture was identified as a salutary influence on white America, racial progressives looked to deconstruct Jim Crow by trespassing the color line, rather than focusing as intently on reforming and uplifting black culture toward a universal liberal standard. These individuals were no longer content to remain aloof, expressing their sympathy for black America and rendering institutional aid; they wanted to experience black culture, and they became convinced that the effort to cultivate an expansive and empathetic form of cross-racial identification was of greater political efficacy than programmatic liberal support. With the arrival of the Great Depression and the rise of the

Cultural Front,439 the emergent leftist tendency to venerate black culture as the truest expression of the

American folk and the only available source of authenticity in a debased land dovetailed perfectly with

Marxist figurations of the oppressed black community as a preordained source of revolutionary change: a position that was especially influential after 1928, when the Communist Party identified African

Americans as belonging to a distinct nation entitled to revolutionary self-determination.440 Although this assessment, which was further elaborated and developed by Harry Haywood, was grounded in

438 Brown, Jayna. Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern. (Durham, Duke University Press, 2008): 216-227. 439 Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front: the Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. (New York: Verso, 1998). 440 Young, Lowell. Intoduction. The 1928 and 1930 Comintern Resolutions on the Black National Question in the United States. (Washington, D.C: Revolutionary Review Press, 1975). Web.

188 esoteric Marxist criteria like the status of the southern Black Belt as a national territory, it also neatly paralleled the cultural inertia of the age, echoing the intellectual community's dialectical interpretation of black culture as both basal and avant garde: the wellspring of genuine organic culture and the leading edge of insurgent modernism. Ultimately, the notion of racial transgression as an evocative act of empathy with political overtones underwrote the whole aesthetic of the Jazz Age, as well as the succeeding Beat Generation.441

Of course, a more sophisticated understanding of the mechanisms by which race is constructed makes it apparent that the kind of cross-racial identification that flourished during the extended Jazz-

Age period only re-inscribed racial hierarchy. When we think of whiteness as a hegemonic concept and not a sum-total of the thoughts and actions of people who are biologically white, it is clear that, in order to ameliorate the effects of racism, it is necessary to undermine the conceptual foundation of whiteness.

By penetrating black culture, Jazz-Age radicals and the Beats after them actually reinforced the integrity and power of whiteness. This paradoxical phenomenon is apparent in Chester Anderson's fascinating critique of counterculture mores, which appeared in a 1967 issue of The Barb. Anderson, who came of age in Greenwich Village during the 1950's as part of the Beat generation, addresses the younger counterculture cohort as a wise elder attempting to remind naive young bohemians, who seem increasingly disengaged from Civil Rights and even jazz, of the indispensable virtue of black culture and its unique, generative relationship to white bohemianism. Yet, Anderson's celebration of black culture, which relies, ultimately, on romantic racial essentialism, embodies the limitations of aestheticized racial transgression as politics even as it calls for greater engagement with Civil Rights.

First, Anderson waxes nostalgic about his own cultural awakening a generation ago: “When I, all ignorance & yearning, moved in 1952 from Memphis. Tennessee, to Greenwich Village & accidentally

441 Mailer, of course, when he discussed the term hipster, located the whole aesthetic within an effort to appropriate black cool. Mailer, Norman. The White Negro. (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1957). And, as we will see, Chester Anderson, writing for the Barb, unambiguously identified white bohemia as as effort to inhabit an imagined black cool.

189 became a hipster, the thing that gassed me most was SpAdEs [sic].”442 Anderson goes on to describe a transgressive white community that took its inspiration from black culture, noting that he observed the same thing in North Beach in the late 50's: “The spades, my dear brothers, are our spiritual fathers.

They turned us on. They gave us jazz & grass & rock & roll, in the early beat days they provided a community for us, from the beginning they were our brothers deeper than blood, & now we & they don't like each other. If it weren't for the spades, we would all have short hair, neat suits, glazed eyes, steady jobs & gastric ulcers, all be dying of unnameable frustration.”443 For Anderson, black culture is inherently subversive, existing basically as an inversion of white culture. Thus, while his account of black culture is intensely admiring, it is also decidedly racist, relying on deterministic stereotypes that move toward objectification and fetishization. Indeed, the real merit of black culture in Anderson's schema is what it has to offer enlightened whites, who become doubly advantaged: able to borrow and inhabit black cool at their leisure without completely foregoing the privileged status endemic to whiteness in a white supremacist society, while blacks cannot escape the limitations of their seductive, earthy authenticity.

Anderson, of course, seems blind to the way that blackness is circumscribed by his fawning, superficial tribute; yet, he feels that it is the young people of the 60's counterculture that have a budding problem with racial insensitivity. Indeed, the point of his article, which is titled “TROUBLE IN

BOHEMIA,” is to chastise younger bohemians for what he perceives to be a disengagement from Civil

Rights: “Then, January, I came here, sanctuary, & jumped into the psychedelic community with all the joyful abandon of an otter in water. Gradually, though, something dawned on me, clouding my joy. To wit: HAIGHT/ASHBURY IS THE FIRST SEGREGATED BOHEMIA I'VE EVER SEEN!”444

Anderson's tone is rather alarmist, but Tom Wolfe makes a very similar observation about the racial

442Anderson, Chester “Trouble in Bohemia” The Berkeley Barb 4,9,81 March 3 (1967): 7. 443 Ibid. 444 Ibid.

190 dynamic of the Haight and San Francisco at the beginning of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, expressing consternation at an apparent sea-change in the bohemian ethos. Wolfe, like Anderson, had just come west from New York, where he was steeped in the Beat generation's jazz-based avant-garde sensibility, with all of its negrophilia, and he was shocked to discover that the west-coast scene was bereft of black influences, even of the superficial variety: “The whole old-style hip life—jazz, coffee houses, civil rights, invite a spade for dinner, Vietnam—it was all suddenly dying....It had even gotten to the point that negroes were no longer in the hip scene, not even as totem figures.”445 From

Anderson's perspective, the younger counterculture generation has encountered bohemianism through their interest in recreational drugs, as opposed to an engagement with Civil Rights, and they have failed to correct their racial hang-ups. Of course, the essence of Anderson's own racial politics is captured succinctly in Wolfe's snide reference to the use of Negroes as totem figures. For Anderson, spades are his spiritual fathers, who saved him from a square haircut and the nebulous but ineluctable frustration of affluence; they are precisely totem figures.

Thus, the Beats, like other avant-garde groups before them, attempted to disavow bourgeois society largely through an aestheticized investment in black culture. They engaged in a form of symbolic cultural transgression that pushed beyond liberal sympathy: beyond mere intellectualized recognition and acknowledgment of others' suffering, striving toward actual empathy, only to falter under the strain of their blind privilege and essentialism. Jack Kerouac thought he was vacating his privileged racial identity and accessing something real, something empathetic and vital, when he worked alongside Mexican migrant laborers and made love to them, but, of course, his ability to come and go from that world at his leisure only magnified the indomitable privilege of his whiteness. When it was time to leave, he called his mother for bus fare. When it was time to publish a literary account of his adventure, he had the connections in New York to do so.446 The New Left was somewhat more 445 Wolfe, Acid Test, 10. 446 The counterculture generation was very critical of Kerouac. On the occasion of his death in 1969, The Barb opined that

191 savvy about the socially constructed nature of race, jettisoning the politics of transgression that was central to the Beat aesthetic: the totemism of Chester Anderson's rhapsodic tribute to his spiritual black fathers that Wolf encapsulates in the slogan invite a spade for dinner. The New Left attempted to abandon this focus on cultural transgression in order to begin, instead, deconstructing whiteness, but this endeavor contained paradoxical impulses. Some factions of the New Left, recognizing the superficial nature of Beat transgression, attempted a more comprehensive and immersive identification with black culture and politics, sometimes with farcical results. In an article for The Barb titled“WHAT

HAPPENED IN CHICAGO-AN ANALYSIS THE WHITES: A CLOWN SHOW,” Marvin Garson describes a recent meeting of the National Conference for New Politics in Chicago, suggesting, “there are aspects to it which can only be grasped if you yield to the fantasy that it was a play staged by blacks for their own edification, using white actors.”447 The gist of Garson's criticism seems to be that white conference attendants, in their zeal to demonstrate their identification with the Civil Rights cause, made a spectacle of themselves as they solicited black validation for their performance of radicalism. Of course, Garson himself seems to be participating in a similar performance, as he refers disdainfully to the convention's few official black participants as “Tom-looking black couples set among the whites.”448 Here, by denigrating black delegates as Toms, Garson rather aggressively positions himself as a Civil Rights insider; he is not merely a sympathetic supporter of the Movement but someone who seems to imagine himself inhabiting its ethos and, indeed, embodying its more militant horizons. By contrast, for all his euphoric celebration of black cool and its beneficent effects and his horror at the segregated Bohemia of the Haight, Chester Anderson seems to place whites in the role of wary onlookers when it comes to the actual struggle of civil rights, suggesting that it is imperative for Bay

“there's nothing sadder than an old hipster,” further belittling him as the author of “one good book.” The Berkeley Barb, 9,16,219 October 24-30 (1969). 447 Garson, Marvin ““What Happened in Chicago-an Analysis The Whites: a Clown Show” The Berkeley Barb 5,10,109 September 15-21 (1967): 9. 448 Ibid.

192 Area bohemians to befriend the black community, lest “[THEY] WILL BE BURIED when the Filmore erupts again.”449 If Anderson imagines himself redeemed by black culture, his relationship to black politics is more equivocal; indeed, he depicts the Civil Rights Movement and its convulsions as a threat to white bohemians, offering the liberal sympathy of friendship as a defense. By contrast, in Garson, we see the younger counterculture generation's expansive identification with black politics as part of a desire to push beyond the hollow affectedness of sympathy and stylized cultural transgression. His cohort was not threatened by black militancy. If anything, they were, perhaps, jealous of black militants, over-identifying with them and blundering into clownishness in their zealous determination to demonstrate empathetic solidarity.

Other veterans of the New Left, however, moved in the opposite direction, renouncing white guilt and cultural transgression to explore and revise whiteness in a way that seemed, to observers like

Anderson and many others, precariously close to white chauvinism. Rossinow finds this tension distilled in an episode from the 1965 SDS convention, where the University of Texas cohort became embroiled in a controversy precipitated by a physical confrontation between one of their delegates, Bob

Speck, and Less Ellis, a black SDS'er whom Speck felt had been sexually aggressive toward a female conventioneer. The incident was particularly fraught as it was readily framed by many SDS delegates as a group of retrograde southern white men responding boorishly to a black man's sexual advances toward a white woman: an untenable lapse in SDS's core mission.450 But, charged with political regression and apostasy, the UT cohort went on the offensive, attacking SDS leadership by suggesting that they had naively fetishized blacks in their fervid desire to express empathy and affect a radical political posture. The UT faction detected, within the culture of SDS, a lingering totemism and essentialism in the vein of Chester Anderson's ingenuous admiration for the authenticity SpAdEs, and

449 Anderson, “Trouble in Bohemia,” 7. 450 Rossinow quotes Scott Pittman referring to Speck, specifically, as a “reformed redneck” and Carolyn Craven describing the entire Texas delegation as “draft-dodging crackers.” Rossinow, Authenticity, 198.

193 they renounced that romanticism by insisting that white guilt could not form the basis of a social movement: a sentiment that tapped an undercurrent of disenchantment with SDS's narrow focus on

Civil Rights that was especially prevalent among members who were drawn to the emerging counterculture.451 Meanwhile, of course, black activists were also wary of white students' over- identification with the Movement. If these ardent white radicals seemed clownish from a certain vantage, they were, none the less, quite adept at interjecting themselves into decision-making positions within Civil Rights organizations, and their eager support often felt more like co-optation to black organizers. The final irony of Garson's clown show was that, in order for white activists to receive black approval for their performance, blacks had to assume the role of passive spectators within their own movement.

Thus, in 1966 SNCC voted to exclude white members, a move that Greg Calvert, adumbrating the position advanced by UT SDS'ers during the Speck imbroglio, described as a hidden blessing: “We owe SNCC a deep debt of gratitude for having slapped us brutally in the face with the slogan of black power, a slogan which said to white radicals: 'Go home and organize in white America which is your reality and which only you are equipped to change.'”452 For Calvert, who derided liberalism as guilt- based, moving beyond liberalism did not mean undertaking a more comprehensive identification with black culture; it meant reconsidering whiteness and exploring various possibilities for deconstructing its repressive power. Certainly, the appeal of an essentialized black cool continued to seduce members of the New Left and the counterculture who embraced this deconstructivist project, but these individuals did move away from credulously offering symbolic cultural appropriation as a political program in the way that Chester Anderson and his cohort had done, instead exhorting white people to reform themselves by reinventing whiteness. Indeed, Jerry Rubin offered this faction's cris de corps when he entreated students to tear down that white mask. Here we see a recognition of the socially 451 Ibid, 199. 452 Ibid, 195.

194 constructed nature of race that is absent in Jazz-Age and Beat formulations of racial transgression, which instead favored the wearing of black masks as a form of titillation. Indeed, Rossinow defines the counterculture specifically as the New Left's effort to deconstruct and reinvent whiteness.453 When the

New Left was ejected from SNCC, he suggests, they accepted that they had to make their own revolution, and they felt that their first step in doing so was to become marginalized. The counterculture, then, was a purposeful effort to live white disenfranchisement.

Of course, these divergent approaches to transcending sympathetic liberalism form something of a dialectic. The factions of the New Left that were willing to go to the most extreme lengths in order to extricate themselves from hegemonic whiteness and divest themselves of their skin privilege frequently saw their efforts double back into a delirious imposture of blackness. We see this dynamic in

The Rag's account of a conversation with H. Rap Brown of the Black Panthers: “Brown said that the increasing militancy and revolutionary tactics of white leftists have brought them closer to black militants. 'We have a common problem now—our extermination.'”454 Here, we see a painfully self- conscious desire to win Brown's approval that certainly invokes Garson's clown show, but we also see a genuine effort to better understand and expose hegemonic power structures by transmogrifying whiteness rather than appropriating signifiers of blackness. The counterculture's objective, as Rubin saw it, was to turn whiteness itself into something threatening and reviled: something that authorities would seek to exterminate as it became almost indistinguishable from blackness. Indeed, in another column for The Barb, Rubin recounted a conversation with Black Panther Huey Newton in which he delivered an ecstatic report about the shabby treatment of his Yippie group during the 1968 Democratic

National Convention: “I told Huey that in Chicago Yippies were treated like blacks—denied service in restaurants, thrown out of stores, their asses kicked by pigs in back alleys. Out of this came the

453 Ibid, 13-16. 454 “Brown Raps with White Left” The Rag 2,7 (1967): 15.

195 beginnings of a sense of real revolutionary community.”455 Rubin, then, was eager to define the counterculture and its self-expression within the context of a lager strategic effort to deconstruct whiteness, and he understood that the ultimate effect of such a deconstructivist program was to achieve a sense of heightened empathy for the black community: indeed, to become a marginalized, de facto minority themselves.

Thus, rather paradoxically, the success of the counterculture's deconstructivist project was measured by the degree to which white cultural insurrectionaries were able to achieve what they perceived to be a state of virtual blackness. And Larry Freudiger's article for The Rag, “It's Happening,

Baby: The White Revolution,” provides a particularly salient description of this process, exhibiting the way that white activists' initial engagement with the Civil Rights Movement evolved into a preoccupation with the possibilities of transgressive whiteness that often became, itself, a heightened form of racial imposture. Freudiger explained that he had spent the previous summer of 1966 in

Lowndes County, Alabama, where he had participated in SNCC's voter registration efforts. Bloody

Lowndes, where SNCC's efforts spawned the militant Lowndes County Freedom Organization that pioneered the Black Power slogan, along with use of the Black Panther icon, was a flash-point for the radicalization of SNCC, but Freudiger had little to say about Lowndes and much to say about Austin:

“Upon returning to Texas I discovered that we had been making a revolution all along and hadn't known it. Could I have known, when I first set foot on the U.T. campus and found myself persecuted by sub-civilized fratrats because of my curly flowing hair that less than one year later a group of similarly shaggy musicians would be hailed as heroes for singing the virtues of marijuana and LSD?”456

Freudiger had come to understand hegemonic whiteness as a social construct, and the solemnity with which he offers dropping LSD and listening to rock music as political actions stems from his

455 Rubin, Jerry, et al. “Yippie Panther Pact Pipe-dream no.2: Open Salvos from a Black/White Gun” The Berkeley Barb 7,15,164 October 4-10 (1968). 456 Freudiger, Larry. “It's Happening, Baby: the White Revolution.” The Rag 1,11 (1967): 6.

196 exuberance at the possibility of being white in a way that was not exploitative.

Indeed, the psychedelic scene consciously turned away from the type of racial transgression and cultural appropriation that had been second nature to Chester Anderson and his cohort, attempting, instead, to ground its aesthetic in forlorn or marginal white folk traditions. In 1967, The Barb ran a negative review of the Magic Mountain Festival in which the author complained that he “suffered secondhand Motown at the hands of the incredibly pseudo-spade Spyders until the more hip Berkeley

Philharmonic came on.”457 A generation earlier calling something incredibly pseudo-spade might well have been a compliment, but, here, The Barb employs it as an epithet meaning juvenile and passe; the author ultimately abandons the festival to visit a Diggers happening that was also attended by the Hell's

Angels and the The Grateful Dead: another of the Bay Area's more hip acts. In fact, while The Grateful

Dead became the iconic band of San Francisco's psychedelic rock scene, it is significant to note that the

Dead evolved out of a jug band that affected an Appalachian folk sensibility.458 Whereas first- generation rock music was grounded in blues forms and related expressions of black culture, by the mid-1960's, avant-garde rockers were cultivating an interest in bluegrass and musical traditions that were imagined to be specifically white or even hillbilly.459 This was their attempt to change white reality, as Greg Calvert had implored them; they began to construct their new reality with something that they identified as indelibly white yet authentic: marginal, downtrodden, and completely apart from the apparatus of modern technocratic hegemony.

Thus, Freudiger ended his “White Revolution” column by announcing that it would be his last;

457 “Magic Mountain Fervor Leaves Post-teen Cool” The Berkeley Barb 4, 24, 94 June 16-22 (1967): 5. 458 The band's original keyboard player, Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, sometimes rode a motorcycle, and his persona was frequently identified as that of a biker, as his nickname suggests. In his brief biography of McKernan from The Grateful Dead FAQ, Tony Sclafani observed: “Pigpen was also notable for the biker clothes he wore.” Sclafani, Tony. The Grateful Dead FAQ: All That's Left to Know About the Greatest Jam Band in History. (Milwaukee: Hal Leonard Corporation, 2013). 459 John Hartigan observes that the epithet hillbilly seems to carry a self-consciously anachronistic element that makes it other than strictly derogatory, especially within the context of country music, where it is used to valorize an imagined authentic past for certain musical forms. Hartigan,John Jr. Odd Tribes: Toward a Cultural Analysis of White People. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005): 123.

197 he was moving to San Francisco: the front line of his white people's revolution . In this sense,

Freudiger's personal journey seems to embody the neat relationship that Rossinow draws between the

New Left and the counterculture, capturing, in particular, the weight that he assigns to the formal break between SNCC and its white membership. Indeed, although Freudiger does not mention the event, his column appeared just one month after Stokely Carmichael was elected SNCC chair on a separatist platform, and Freudiger's new personal direction seems to closely reflect the lesson that Rossinow ascribes to that final rupture within SNCC; instead of inserting himself into SNCC's voter registration efforts, he would work to reinvent whiteness from within, cultivating a politicized lifestyle that would be inherently corrosive of the status quo. This turn inward and away from black culture was apparent in

The Barb's distaste for the Spyders, while Rossinow observes that an obscure outpost like Austin,

Texas, became an unlikely counterculture hub within the context of a growing desire to fuse psychedelic experimentation with country music and a broadly libertarian frontier ethos that traded in western motifs and a kind of anachronistically uncouth rural whiteness. Indeed, another San Francisco- based band, Commander Cody and his Lost Planet Airmen,460 who derived their musical influences from the honky-tonk genre and titled their second LP Live From Deep in the Heart of Texas, embodied this impulse. They received a favorable review in an August 1969 issue of The Barb that spotlights and seemingly affirms Cody's criticism of the New Left: “The grim political atmosphere and cliquey music scene are the main obstacles to getting through to Bay area audiences...The hipsters couldn't dig us, but the few greasers in the audience did.”461 The grimness of the political atmosphere in the Bay Area, of course, came from the New Left's focus on Civil Rights and its enduring engagement with Marxism.

By contrast, the politics of the counterculture was defined by little more than anarchic play: “Referring to the platform of Ann Arbor's White Panther Party, Cody said, 'We are not specifically a revolutionary

460 The band formed at the University of Michigan: another of the campuses that Rossinow associates with the Prairie Power faction of SDS and that organization's turn toward the counterculture. 461 Frayne, George (Commander Cody) Qtd. Fury, Jake. “Real Country Rock” The Berkeley Barb 9, 8,210 Aug 22-28 (1969): 4.

198 band, but we do believe in fucking in the streets.'”462 Yet, as Cody's quote—and, especially, its framing by The Barb—makes clear, whiteness was not merely incidental to the counterculture's playful hedonism: not strictly a byproduct of the privilege that underwrote this preference for sexual and pharmaceutical exploration over the type of concerted political action favored by the New Left. From the counterculture's perspective, they were pointedly subverting and reinventing whiteness by, as Cody has it, fucking in the street, and they sought out white folk traditions to ground the aesthetic experiments that accompanied this assault on hegemonic whiteness.

Ostensibly, then, the counterculture's psychedelic white carnival, while it eschewed direct political action, continued to operate in loose accord with the Civil Rights Movement. The reality, of course, was far more ambiguous. Freudiger's account of his new direction, for instance, does not seem particularly strategic. Indeed, his recent activity in Lowndes was not discussed whatsoever; instead, he seemed eager to move on, making no effort to link his experiences in the Civil Rights Movement to his plans for drug experimentation and hair growth in California. Presumably, Freudiger remembered what he had seen in Lowndes and envisioned his white revolution developing in a complimentary or, at least, parallel relationship to the black Civil Rights Movement, although the fact that he did not spell out this relationship is telling; ultimately, his SNCC experience was presented as a hazy recollection: part of the unenlightened period before his revelation. And, if Freudiger seemed relieved to leave the Movement and its struggles behind, Chester Anderson, of course, suggested that many other soldiers in the white revolution, who entered the counterculture slightly later, drawn by its anti-authoritarian posture and exuberant hedonism, were wholly indifferent to Civil Rights, Marxism, and anything resembling traditional politics. For these young people, the counterculture's emphasis on deconstructing whiteness was not moored to the Civil Rights Movement's push for racial justice, and it morphed into a paradoxical form of intensified racial transgression in which many within the counterculture seem to

462 Ibid.

199 have imagined that they had actually become black: that they had become the targets of repression and censure and the symbolic other against which the venal American mainstream defined itself.

Indeed, the counterculture began to produce surreal fantasies of white persecution that eclipsed anything jazz hipsters had attempted in the mode of racial imposture. The Rag, for instance, published the article, “Take It On The Chin: Facial Discrimination At Conoco Station,” in 1967, recounting a sit- in style protest conducted by white students at a local gas station owned by a good ol' boy who had allegedly instructed his employees to discriminate against male customers with beards.463 Meanwhile, in another Rag article, Anthony Howe extended this line of thinking about the calumny and discrimination faced by hippies to its delirious apotheosis: “Well, ten years ago it would have been

NIGGERS and twenty years ago it would have been JEWS, but now I guess it's US.”464 Here, Howe is describing the experience of getting jumped in Zilker Park with three male friends, including Mike

Baudette, the original Bent Spokesman, and he continues, somewhat more temperately, observing that the “situation of Texas hippies vis-a-vis their physical well-being could rightly be termed very dangerous.”465 In these instances, the counterculture's experiments with cultivating stigmatization seem to lose any thread of connection with Civil Rights. With these reckless metaphors and hyperbole, students did not merely inflate their identification with aggrieved minorities; in their own minds, the obstacles that they faced as a result of their self-styled marginality actually supplanted the struggles of historically oppressed peoples. If they had set out to push beyond sympathy and into empathy, they did not, ultimately, gain insight into the black experience of discrimination; instead, they decided that they had become the new NIGGERS. Indeed, this same distorted metaphor appears in another Rag article by

Cal State instructor Jerry Farber: “'THE STUDENT AS NIGGER' A COURSE IN HOW TO BE

463 A similar protest aimed at a local restaurant was documented by The Barb in January of 1966: “Long-haired Men Put Out” The Berkeley Barb 2,3 January 21 (1966). 464 Howe, Anthony. “I Would Suggest that the Situation of Texas Hippies Vis a Vis their Physical Well-being could Rightly be Termed Very Dangerous or Paranoia” The Rag 1,11 (1967): 11. 465 Ibid.

200 SLAVES.” Farber began with a series of dubious analogies between the organization of campus life and Jim Crow, decrying the persistence of separate dining facilities for students and faculty and the existence of “an unwritten law barring student-faculty lovemaking,”466 which he compared to Southern anti-miscegenation laws. His thesis was blunt: “STUDENTS are niggers. When you get that straight, our schools begin to make sense.”467 Of course, beneath Farber's salacious metaphor, the marrow of his critique of higher education operated strictly within the conflictual, inter-generational politics of authenticity, as he suggested of students: “[They] write like they've been lobotomized. But, Jesus, can they follow orders!” Farber insisted that, in his classroom, the only legitimate authority was truth itself.

Thus, whereas Howe suggested that white radicals had become the new NIGGERS by making themselves reviled and inciting violent middle-class hostility—by, in effect, successfully deconstructing whiteness—Farber seemed to feel that the counterculture's campaign against authority and inauthenticity, which amounted to adolescent malcontent writ larger, had become the imperative moral and political issue of the day; for him, students were niggers and even slaves because their lack of freedom served as an indictment of their society. For Farber, white students' resistance against the placid oppression of bureaucracy and affluence was the equivalent of a Civil Rights Movement.

Bikers and Race

The enormous symbolic appeal of the biker figure to radical youth of the 1960's originated in this pursuit of transgressive whiteness, with its contradictory impulses toward intensified identification with black radicalism and the cultivation of a peculiar brand of narcissistic, self-consciously white bohemianism. The motorcycle was particularly associated with this latter ambiguously chauvinistic sensibility, which expressed a closer identification with the ethos of the counterculture than that of the 466 Farber, Jerry “The Student as Nigger: a Course in how to be Slaves” The Rag 1,23 (1967): 6. 467 Ibid.

201 New Left proper. Rossinow actually notes that the 1965 UT SDS delegates, who accused the body of the organization of reifying white guilt in the wake of the altercation between Speck and Ellis, were indelibly linked to the motorcycle in the minds of the SDS establishment, who saw the Honda 250 that

Charlie Smith rode from Austin to the convention in New York as an emblem of the emergent Prairie

Power faction: the SDS contingent from Midwestern public universities that was particularly steeped in the counterculture and its experimental libertarian sensibility. Meanwhile, The Barb's review of

Commander Cody, in which Cody scorns Bay Area audiences, mocking the self-serious politicos of the

New Left to advocate fucking in the street, was accompanied by the image of a motorcycle.468 Thus, the motorcycle and the biker functioned as unofficial emblems of the counterculture, embodying, in particular, its anarchism and some of its more frivolously hedonistic and anti-intellectual indulgences, including its disinterest in Civil Rights. Yet, the New Left did not entirely forswear the biker, who also managed to provide a model for their deliberate effort to engineer white disenfranchisement.

Bikers seduced the New Left by offering a paradoxical, marked whiteness. They were indelibly, emphatically white insofar as they were renowned for their racial chauvinism, yet outside observers also consistently identified them as something other than white. Even within the subculture, racial attitudes were often inconsistent or contradictory. The sociologist Mark Watson suggested that white supremacy was an important value among his biker subjects but allowed that regional factors—his field work was conducted in Tennessee—were likely to have strongly influenced this finding.469 Nationwide, bikers wore Nazi regalia and cultivated a fascist sensibility, but their membership was not typically racially exclusive, and white supremacy per se was not part of their ethos, which is what the American

Nazi party discovered when they made overtures to recruit the Hell's Angels as a motorcycle corps:

468 Indeed, a similar dynamic prevailed on the New Right, as Rabecca Klatch observes that Young Americans for Freedom ran two wildly opposing reviews of Easy Rider in their official publication New Guard, with the favorable appraisal advancing the perspective of a counterculture-inflected libertarian minority within the radical youth right. Klatch, Rebecca E. “The Counterculture, the New Left, and the New Right” Qualitative Sociology 17:3 (1993): 199-214. 469 Watson, “Righteousness,” 340.

202 “George Lincoln Rockwell approached me from the American Nazi party. He completely missed the point when he asked me to organize a Nazi motorcycle corps for him. Man, the stuff we wore was bike riding gear, it wasn't our philosophy.”470 George Weathern observed with pride that his cohort came from “tough racially mixed neighborhoods,”471 and we have seen that the Angels actually maintained a collegial relationship with a black motorcycle club from Oakland, the East Bay Dragons, whose founder, Tobie Levingston, included a foreword by former Hell's Angels president Sonny Barger in his memoir of the club.472 Levingston candidly admitted that the Dragons emulated the Hell's Angels, describing Barger as a personal friend from before either were involved with motorcycles.473

Meanwhile, if Orendorff claimed that the name of his club originated as a contraction of vagabonds, it seems certain that he is only partially correct and that the name actually represents a modest example of biker multiculturalism; it can't be a coincidence that vagos is, in fact, the Spanish word for vagabonds, whether that means that the name issued directly from Spanish-speaking, Mexican-American members of the club or that the word vagos had already migrated from Spanish into the argot of the tough racially mixed neighborhoods that Weathern invoked. Similarly, a clique within the Hell's Angels distinguished themselves by wearing a small patch that read Dequelo, and, although law enforcement sources frequently cited the patch as indicating a club member who had violently resisted arrest, Sonny

Barger insisted on a different origin: “Some guys also wear 'Dequelo,' which means roughly 'No quarter' or 'No mercy' in Spanish.”474 Indeed, Cisco Valderrama, longtime president of their Oakland chapter, was just one of many Mexican-American Angels.

Yet, as George Weathern observed, racist overtones were pronounced within the club: “Racial feeling varied from member to member, but in general the club stood for redneckism and white

470 Barger, Hell's Angel, 38-39. 471 Weathern, Wayward Angel, 31. 472 Of course, Weathern did say that: “Things were different, and sometimes rougher, when we battled black bikers.” Ibid, 30. 473 Levingston, Soul on Bikes, 77. 474 Barger, Hell's Angel, 39.

203 supremacy.”475 Certainly, within popular discourse, virulent racism became a signal attribute of the outlaw biker. Indeed, in a widely circulated story from his 1976 autobiography, The Greatest: My Own

Story, Muhammad Ali claimed that he threw his Olympic gold medal into the Ohio river after being harassed by a motorcycle gang in his native Louisville soon after his return from the 1960 summer games in Rome. The story is regarded as apocryphal by subsequent biographers, like Thomas Hauser and David Remnick, who view it as a pat and overly cinematic explanation of Ali's radicalization—and the accidental loss of his Olympic medal.476 By 1976 Ali had converted to Islam and been banished from the sport of boxing for denouncing Vietnam as a colonial war and refusing to perform military service. The story of this encounter with white reprobates is meant to succinctly explain how an ingenuous young Olympic hero, known then as Cassius Clay and celebrated as an affable ham, became the politically engaged and uncompromising black Muslim known as Muhammad Ali, and the fact that

Ali's pursuers are bikers contributes immensely to the tale's pat quality, especially coming, as it did, in

1976, soon after the cycle of biker exploitation films had run its course. Those films typically presented bikers as spectacularly repugnant racists, and, during a period when the staid liberalism of Civil Rights became the new American political orthodoxy, bikers became conspicuous emblems of a menacingly atavistic brand of obstreperous white supremacy.

The biker exploitation films of this period were, of course, hyperbolic, and we have seen that it is possible to trace multicultural influences within the biker subculture, but casual racism was certainly the norm among bikers, while sensational episodes of violent racial chauvinism, like those presented on screen, were not unprecedented. Weathern's memoir, in particular, includes several episodes of extreme racial antagonism, including a disquieting episode in which a white longshoreman looking to purchase a used motorcycle was apparently murdered over a superficial racial transgression: “Beyea—along with

“Moldy Marvin” Gilbert—recently had been charged with fatally stomping a twenty-four-year-old 475 Weathern, Wayward Angel, 30-31. 476 Hall, Ray C. “Was Medal Thrown in River? Tales Still Vary.'” Courier-Journal. Com. Gannett. August 30 (2010). Web.

204 longshoreman who made the mistake of using the thumb-clasping 'nigger's handshake' when he came to inspect a motorcycle.”477 Here we have Willis's clear sense of racial boundaries taken to a ghastly extreme, and this same sense of tribalism and boundary preservation informs another of Weathern's outlandish anecdotes. One night in the summer of 1965 a black man arrived at the El Adobe, which was then the Angels' regular bar and de facto clubhouse. He drank several rounds at the bar before the

Angels imagined him to have issued some provocation—both Weathern and Thompson described him as a large, powerful man, suggesting that his stature alone was interpreted as an implicit challenge—at which point the assembled Angels began to savagely beat the man, eventually leaving him unconscious in the parking lot. They then proceeded to spend the next night camped on the roof of the bar in an improvised foxhole, armed with machine guns, anxiously awaiting a race war: “I helped the club stand guard on the roof of the El Adobe, a club hangout where the ultimate race war was scheduled. About the only action was an old black guy running down the street after he looked up and saw Tramp leveling a rifle.”478 Weathern seemed faintly disappointed that this race war did not materialize, though, again, this is not because the Angels were neo-Nazis. They did not necessarily have a problem with their black Oakland neighbors per se, but, if racial tension could propel a round of violent antagonism that would animate their lives and imbue the club's ambiguous mission with urgency, they were all for a race war.

Of course, outsiders saw in this willingness to engage in racialized warfare a paradoxical mirroring quality that actually undermined bikers' whiteness. Bikers were frequently pitted against militant factions of the black community in a dichotomy that ostensibly identified a relationship of extreme antagonism but also presumed a degree of symmetry of equivalence. For instance, Hunter

Thompson claimed that a tacit allegiance existed between the Hell's Angels and the Oakland police,

477 Weathern, Wayward Angel, 240. 478 Weathern did not give a date for his recollection, but it seems that the same incident, which was also mentioned by Barger, informed a story for the Barb: “Hell's Angels Rumor Bugs the Ghetto” The Berkeley Barb 1,15 November 19 (1965).

205 who were ready to deploy the Angels in order to suppress any uprisings within the city's increasingly volatile black ghetto.479 In this arrangement, the Oakland police assumed that the Angels were particularly hostile to black militancy, but they also seemed to assume that the Angels were fundamentally like black insurgents in some way: that they were somehow the white equivalent of the

Oakland-based Black Panthers. Thompson obliquely reiterated this analogy when he interposed a quote from Reverend G. Mansfield Collins regarding the Watts riots in his discussion of police response to the Angels' Bass Lake run. “Here's a man who doesn't have any identity. But tonight he has the Los

Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles Fire Department upset. He has the National Guard called out. Tonight he is somebody. Tonight he has an identity.”480 Ultimately, Thompson suggested that the Angels were radically disenfranchised losers who claimed a perverse status by provoking police repression, casting the bikers in the same light in which many viewed urban rioters and even the Black

Panthers.

The contrary effect of this mirroring for bikers' racial identity is apparent if we return to Bill

Murray's influential Saturday Evening Post article, which opens with a looming conflict between the

Hell's Angels he is interviewing and a group of young Negroes. Once again, Murray positioned bikers as violent chauvinists who targeted racial minorities. Yet, Murray's description of the very first Angel he encountered betrayed a more ambiguous relationship between the bigoted bikers and the black youths Murray imagined as their natural adversaries: “One Angel, fat and curly-headed and thick- lipped, with his back to the jukebox and his arm around the neck of a tiny girl with stringy blond hair.”481 Consciously or not, although the latter seems highly improbable, Murray provided a distinctly racialized portrait of this young Angel, quoting directly from the tradition of minstrel caricature.

Indeed, it is not just Murray's description of the Angel's physical features that is indelibly racialized; his

479 Kieffner, in particular, discusses Thompson's claim: Kieffner, "Myth, Reality” 480Thompson, Hell's Angels, 112. 481 Murray, “Hell's Angles” Rpt. Mammoth Bikers, 97.

206 sketch of the dynamic between this biker and his female companion is likewise charged with unmistakable racial overtones. Murray placed the biker with a slight blond woman, a familiar archetype symbolizing fragile and imperiled white womanhood, even if his reference to her stringy hair reminds us that this particular white woman is lower class and may somewhat imperfectly express the ideal of the chaste female idol. Murray underscored her vulnerability by dwelling on the physical disparity between her and the biker and suggesting latent violence in his description of their posture, recording the position of the biker's arm as around her neck, rather than, perhaps, over her shoulder. This scene operates unambiguously within an American tradition of racialized rape mythology, and the Angel's next line, of course, underscores this theme by addressing sexual perversion: “how's about we all get in the shower together?”482 Thus, even as they were held up as examples of retrograde, working-class white racism, bikers were simultaneously positioned as vile non-white others whose lascivious deviance invoked the specter of miscegenation.483

This tension emerged time and again, as the biker was consistently figured as both the antithesis of restive black youth and their mirror image. It is a similar dynamic to the one that Allison Graham identifies in films of this era, in which she sees working-class southern whites castigated for their supposedly inexorable racism and effectively scapegoated for America's grim history of segregation and white supremacy, while also being used as metaphorical stand-ins for black culture, especially in the popular imagination's more lurid and stereotypical figurations. At the time, Hollywood was cowed by segregationist sentiments and unwilling to feature black characters onscreen, so the rural, working- class white southerner became an oblique way of representing blackness. But this inchoate metaphor did not just present an opportunity to portray black culture in a covert way that was palatable to mainstream audiences with their white supremacist sensibilities; actually, by approaching blackness

482 Ibid. 483 Hall, Jacquelyn Dowd. "'The Mind That Burns in Each Body: Women, Rape, and Racial Violence." Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983): 328-49.

207 indirectly, Hollywood was able to present it in ways that would have been equally intolerable to those within the emerging liberal consensus on Civil Rights: to recuperate familiar minstrel tropes without being charged with racism. For instance, Robert Mitchum's Max Cady character in Cape Fear, from

1962, is what Graham terms a demonic cracker: a vicious, ignorant brute and an unregenerate racist.

Yet, he is also a surrogate for the specter that Glenda Gilmore terms the incubus: the mythical figure of black male criminality and rapacious lust that Murray invoked in his sketch of the young bikers at the

Blue Blaze.484 Cady has just been released from prison, and he is determined to sexually assault the virginal daughter of Sam Bowden, the bourgeois progressive white-southern defense attorney who represented him at trial and whom he blames for his conviction. With a black actor, the film would play as an anachronistic brand of crude race-baiting, but casting the villain as a working class white southerner allows the audience to indulge that subtextual reading while the film overtly advances the consensus white progressive view on race relations, affirming the virtue of Civil Rights and blaming the persistence of discrimination and inequality on an ignorant minority of the white community.485

Murray's description performs the same sleight of hand; he disapprovingly cast the group of bikers, who are about to brawl with a group of innocent young Negroes, as ignorant, reactionary racists, but when he elaborates on their depravity, he does so using familiar stereotypes that present them as racial others: as de facto back men. Ultimately, the Angels were, paradoxically, othered by virtue of their violent chauvinism.

The Linkhorns

If the nature of hegemonic whiteness is its imposture of universality, then the whiteness of the

484 Gilmore, Glenda E. "Murder, Memory, and the Flight of the Incubus."Democracy betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and its Legacy: (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998): 73-93. 485 Graham, Allison. Framing the South: Hollywood, Television, and Race during the Civil Rights Struggle. (Baltimore: John's Hopkins Press, 2001): 116-165.

208 outlaw biker—the whiteness that George Weathern matter-of-factly termed redneckism—was a very different kind of whiteness; it was the marked and renounced whiteness of white trash. Indeed, white trash was a recurring trope in Thompson's examination of biker identity, and he had his own name for this distinct subclass, derived from the surname of Nelson Algren's protagonist in A Walk on the Wild

Side, a 1956 novel that provided, according to Thompson, “one of the best historical descriptions of

American white trash ever written.”486 Dove Linkhorn, the son of a besotted evangelical preacher who earned his meager living cleaning septic tanks, is an uneducated, petty criminal from South Texas who has a series of misadventures in the underworld of prohibition-era New Orleans, and Thompson elaborated his conception of white trash by tracing Dove's ancestry back to the indentured servants of the colonial era—“the dregs of society from all over the British Isles”—transforming Linkhorn into an expansive label for a peripatetic class of despised and disenfranchised white Americans whose wanderings he continued to follow from servitude in the seaboard colonies into the foothills of

Appalachia and beyond:

They were not pioneers, but sleazy rearguard camp followers of the original westward movement. By the time the Linkhorns arrived anywhere the land was already taken—so they worked for a while and moved on. Their world was a violent boozy limbo between the pits of despair and the Big Rock Candy Mountain....They kept moving until one day in the late 1930's they stood on the spine of a scrub-oak California hill and looked down on the Pacific Ocean—the end of the road.487

The Angels, of course, represented the California terminus of the Linkhorn journey, and Thompson's reference to the oblivion of the ocean, where the road ends, was meant to be foreboding, recalling

Frederick Jackson Turner and multiple generations of Americans reformers who identified western migration as the only hope of preserving the moral order of American cities. He seemed to suggest that the biker is what we get when the frontier closes and the nation's forlorn human effluent pools and stagnates.

Yet, if Thompson invoked this abiding Turnerian fear about what would happen if the boozy, 486 Thompson, Hell's Angels, 147. 487 Ibid, 148.

209 dissipated American rabble is not carried westward by the inertia of expansionism, he also placed the

Linkhorns outside the process of the frontier as Turner defined it, locating them outside the embrace of whiteness and, perhaps, outside the process of history itself. Thompson's Linkhorns were not, after all, pioneers; he pointedly referred to them as sleazy rearguard camp followers: the penumbra of America's manifest destiny. For Turner, of course, American virtue was forged by the frontier, and, while the experience of hacking civilization out of the wilderness lent Americans an uncouth savage quality that contrasted with refined Europeans, his conception of American virtue was, none the less, bound inextricably to whiteness. It is particularly significant, then, that Thompson excluded the Linkhorns from the bracing frontier conflict experienced by pioneers. In so doing, he positioned them as lazy parasites who had not undergone the process of Americanization: coded racial others. Indeed,

Thompson's harangue on the Linkhorns consistently tied the biker phenomenon to the fate of the nation with a certain Gothic flourish, cultivating a mood of atavism by introducing ambiguous elements of racialized pseudo-science: “By 1950 many Linkhorns were participating in the money economy; they owned decent cars, and even houses. Others, however, broke down under the strain of respectability and answered the call of their genes.”488 Thompson actually proceeded to recount the story of a

Linkhorn who became a wealthy car dealer, married a beautiful Spanish actress, and moved into a mansion in Beverly Hills, only to sneak out at nights to drive his hot-rod Ford, drink moonshine, abuse prostitutes, and drag-race hoodlums.

The story, of course, echoed Faulkner's description of Colonel Sutpen, the wealthy delta planter who boxes his own slaves by moonlight, indulging the debased proclivities that were fostered during his impoverished Appalachian youth.489 Like Sutpen, the Angels can never quite escape Appalachia:

“nobody who has spent time among the inbred Anglo-Saxon tribes of Appalachia would need more

488 Ibid, 149. 489 In his own footnote, Thompson referenced Faulkner's short-story “Barn Burning” as “another white-trash classic.” Ibid, 147.

210 than a few hours with the Hell's Angels to work up a very strong sense of deja vu.”490 For Thompson, the Linkhorns are pathologized. He is teasing their story from American history, but they do not quite belong to history; biology is really the appropriate medium for the Linkhorn narrative, and they become, for Thompson, a genus more than an ancestral lineage: his own project one of taxonomy rather than genealogy. Indeed, to Thompson's eye, the few ethnically diverse members of the Angels, who don't belong to the forsaken Linkhorn lineage, are being transmogrified: “The few outlaws with

Mexican or Italian names not only act like the others but somehow look like them. Even Chinese Mel from Frisco and Charley, a young Negro from Oakland, have the Linkhorn gait and mannerisms.”491

Ultimately, of course, Thompson's account of the Linkhorns and the westward march of civilization's bereft hangers-on is meant to be darkly humorous; the denigration that he directs at lower-class white

Americans is genuine, but it also provides something of an ironic take on progressive-era sociology and its dubious legacy, parodying iconic works like Dugdale's study of the “Jukes” family.

The Angels were not, of course, a recrudescence of Appalachian atavism; they were cultivating their own peculiar version of bohemianism by consciously embracing and performing marginality.

Thus, with his account of the Linkhorns, Thompson is actually participating in the biker aesthetic even as he deconstructs it: something that he does on many occasions. Indeed, a characteristic example of biker humor, presented as a letter to the editors of Easyriders magazine, provides a portrait of bikers that offers a more crude but immediately recognizable version of Thompson's Linkhorn caricature:

I am a deserter from the Army. My family lives in an old school bus down by the tracks. My father is an incurable alcoholic and mother is bedridden with a bad case of the clap. Since my older brother is serving a life sentence for rape and sodomy, we are totally dependent upon my sister who is a call girl. For the last year I have been dating my cousin and we have an illegitimate child. Now I have met a lovely girl from one of the towns finest families, and she wants to marry me. Her father promised us a home and a car. Now my problem is this: Should I tell her I'm a biker?492

The punchline to the joke here is that being a biker is more repellent and more taboo than being the

490 Ibid, 149. 491 Ibid, 150. 492 “Dirty Ernie's Buddy.” Letter. “I have a Problem” Easyriders February 1973: 37.

211 lower-class amalgam of poverty and sexual depravity offered by the putative letter writer, identified only as “Dirty Ernie's buddy.” The biker is positioned as the apotheosis of white trash, which is precisely how bikers expressed their peculiar notion of authenticity: through an aesthetic of sublime self-deprecation that co-opted popular formulations of white disenfranchisement and took them to an ecstatic extreme.

This process is especially apparent in George Weathern's account of his club's redneckism. To some extent, of course, the redneck was a preexisting category into which mainstream citizens placed bikers, who simply recognized this reality. Thompson, of course, when he was not presenting them as the heirs of some innate Appalachian pathology, suggested that bikers' stylized efforts to embrace a certain strain of class-bound degradation were simply a defense mechanism: an attempt to preempt scorn that was bound to affix to them as members of a repudiated minority within the white population.

Yet, Thompson also acknowledged that most of his subjects were not truly disenfranchised examples of white trash but downwardly mobile dropouts, noting that “their parents seem to have had credit.”493

Indeed, if Weathern's assessment of his club's status and racial identification registers a certain resignation, it is significant that he says his Angels stood for redneckism, rather than saying, for instance, that they were a bunch of rednecks. The aim here is not to recuperate the redneck label as a defensive posture. As John Hartigan observes, when that strategy is employed, individuals who affirm their white trash or redneck identity simultaneously deflect scorn onto a remaindered population within their own disfavored class that is positioned as truly repugnant and irredeemable: genuine White

Trash.494 Of course, it was precisely this calcified residue of the truly abject with whom bikers identified rhetorically.

Ultimately, then, while bikers themselves did not echo the New Left in discussing race as a social construct, and it would be a misrepresentation to suggest that deconstructing whiteness was part 493 Thompson, Hell's Angels, 145. 494 Hartigan, Odd Tribes, 122-23.

212 of their agenda, it would also be a mistake to lose sight of the fact that biker identity always represented a voluntary form of self-stigmatization. Again, of all the terms that they could have employed to describe the stodgy mainstream Americans against whom they defined themselves, bikers, with their delirious affinity for obscenity and violence, chose the curiously sedate citizen to express their contempt. Their goal was to achieve a state of radical disenfranchisement: to exist outside the universalizing rhetoric of liberalism, which placed them, whether it was their precise aim or not, outside the embrace of hegemonic whiteness. Ironically, then, while their specific pronouncements on race were aggressively retrograde, bikers managed to disavow their whiteness with aplomb. And they did this, not by exploring the boundary between black and white but by redoubling their investment in whiteness in a way that proved subversive, concocting a parodic exaggeration of working class values that became a grotesque: redneckism. Redneck-ism was a practice: an ethos. It was not a label that bikers accepted passively but a comprehensive aesthetic that they pursued in opposition to citizenship; it was a peculiar affectation that expressed their brand of working-class bohemianism.

Meanwhile, the New Left cultivated its own marked whiteness with very limited success. While it certainly drew mainstream disdain and even horrific repression in a number of conspicuous incidents, like the actions of Chicago police during the 1968 DNC, or the National Guard massacre at Kent State, the New Left was, for the most part, protected by skin privilege. Indeed, one of the more surreal and oddly poignant moments of the 2002 documentary The Weather Underground is when Bernadine

Dohrn reflects on the murders of Fred Hampton and other Black Panthers by authorities and remarks, almost wistfully, that, even at the height of their militancy, when they were bombing government buildings and the FBI was resorting to illegal tactics in order to track them, the Weathermen were protected by their whiteness. They were never murdered in their beds like Fred Hampton, and, indeed,

Dohrn herself is now a professor. Here is someone who was utterly determined to renounce her whiteness, who waged a terrorist campaign of violence against the authority of the United States in

213 order to shed her skin privilege, and basically failed. The bikers of the 1960's, however, came rather close to shedding their whiteness. In 1965 the Hell's Angels drew a statewide police mobilization for their weekend camping trip. Indeed, Thompson, who estimated total membership in the club at less than 200 and dwindling at the time, dedicated much of his book to chronicling law enforcement's hysterically disproportionate response to this weekend jaunt: a level of official overreaction that necessarily invoked the legacy of Jim Crow. According to California authorities, the free movement of this handful of bedraggled young men, most of whom had no criminal records to speak of, somehow posed a dire threat to public safety. And it was this element of the Angels' performance that appealed to many within the counterculture and the New Left who wanted to be like blacks, not in the sense that jazz hipsters had imitated black modes of speech and dress, but in the sense that they imagined themselves to be a revolutionary vanguard that stood completely outside of mainstream culture. Bikers turned their backs on universalism and humanism, and they cultivated a marked whiteness: a whiteness that did not borrow black cultural idioms but did invite open disdain from white Americans and did attract egregious reprisals from law enforcement and upstanding citizens.495 While bikers lived in fear of vigilantes, authorities devised targeted laws to prevent them from riding in groups of three or more and generally attempted to hound them out of existence: "'If a couple of them stick their heads up and appear on the streets now,' said a police sergeant, 'the first patrol car that sees them stops them for questioning. If we can't find anything else, we can almost always learn that they have traffic warrants outstanding against them. That's enough to get them off the street, and it really bugs them.'”496 Indeed,

Frank Reynolds insisted that his friend “Lovely Larry” was actually killed by police.

495 Stories about being deliberately run off the road by motorists were common, while the Easyriders article “Yes Virginia, they Still Shoot Bikers” suggested that the type of vigilante action against bikers that was a staple of biker movies also occurred in real life: “You thought Easy Rider was Just a Movie—Right? Well, get this. A biker was hassled in some way (he wasn't given a chance to give his side, but we know, don't we), and he apparently got so pissed that he beat on the car's window with his helmet as he rode his bike alongside. The car owner pulled a .45 pistol and blew the biker away. But that's not all. The motorist was set free—it was declared justifiable homicide in Birmingham, Alabama. What danger was he? Just that he was a biker.” Spider. “Yes, Virginia, they Still Shoot Bikers,” Easyriders April 1974: 4. 496 Thompson, Hell's Angels, 40-41.

214 Bikers themselves volubly protested what they perceived as prejudice and discrimination leveled against them, but they did not compare their own treatment to the oppression faced by racial minorities. Yet, tellingly, the idea that bikers were somehow de facto black men featured prominently in counterculture figurations of the biker subculture. The action of the seminal Wild Angels begins when the Loser is gunner down by police officers, and one of the pivotal scenes in Easy Rider takes place in a rural southern diner and riffs on Jim Crow, with our biker protagonists figured as a reviled minority targeted by reactionary paranoia. In the scene, Wyatt, Billy, and George sit apprehensively at a table waiting to be served while a party of young women looks on, scandalized but titillated, as a multi- generational group of men, including the local sheriff, delivers a stream of ridicule and veiled threats, ultimately forcing the wary bikers to flee, still hungry. The men's calumnies, which George snidely terms “rural witticisms,” demonstrate bikers' superb ability to deconstruct whiteness, with each barb playing on their ambiguously debased racial identity. The first slanderous salvo comes in the form of a proposal to cage the hirsute drifters and display them for paying customers, a suggestion that, of course, evokes the tradition of the carnival freak show, which Rachel Adams notes was among the counterculture's preferred metaphors for its own cultivated outsider status, with freak entering the argot of 60's youth in myriad affirmative uses.497 But this pointed reference to freak shows also recalls the legacies of Ota Benga, Saartjie Baartman, and other African descended people who were displayed like animals, as the jeering locals' next witticism makes apparent: “I thought their mothers were maybe frightened by a bunch of gorillas, but now I think they were caught....They look like refugees from a gorilla love in.”498 From there, the racial overtones of the defamation become even more overt, as the youngest member of the group offers: “Maybe we should mate him up with one of those black wenches out there,” which leads into an explicit discussion of the trio's racial identity. When one of the men

497 Adams, Rachel. Sideshow U.S.A.: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination. (Chicago,: University of Chicago Press, 2001): 9. One slogan of the Weathermen was “Freaks are revolutionaries, and revolutionaries are freaks,” while references to 'freaking,' 'getting your freak on,' 'letting your freak flag fly,' etc. were common. 498 Easy Rider, Columbia, 1969.

215 insists that the bikers are green, presumably suggesting that they are aliens, another opines that they are white, to which a third declares, gruffly, “They ain't white,” which stands as the last comment before the trio of bikers decide to leave. That night, any doubt about whether the bikers are white is erased when they are ambushed in their campsite and savagely beaten, with George succumbing to his injuries: effectively lynched. For the counterculture, then, the biker had successfully torn down his white mask.

COUNTERCULTURE COWBOYS

If bikers presented an appealing spectacle of illiberal, marked whiteness, that allure was intensified by bikers' affinity for violence. In popular representations, the counterculture is often treated as synonymous with the antiwar movement.499 The very word peace, used as both an exhortation and a greeting, remains the most enduring cliché of the era. However, the counterculture was also exploring violence and its anti-modern connotations long before factions of the New Left committed themselves to terrorism. Images of rioting in Watts and elsewhere had a profound effect on white youths, and the underground press was waiting expectantly for the next eruption of violence. Chester Anderson, of course, concluded his column with a fretful warning about when the Filmore erupts again, and the same breathless tone appeared in a number of Barb articles that speculated about impending riots, including “HIPVILLE TO SURVIVE TAKE HEED,” which asked of looming riots: “What do they mean to you, as white hippies, at.al.?” For the underground press and its counterculture audience, the eruption of violence in America's urban black ghettos was a portentous historical force. In an article about the upcoming Democratic National Convention in Chicago that was illustrated with a cartoon of

499 Wikipedia opens its description of the counterculture by remarking: “The aggregate movement gained momentum as the African American Civil Rights Movement continued to grow, and became revolutionary with the expansion of the US government's extensive military intervention in Vietnam.'

216 a blunderbuss firing a ball, The Barb observed: “The only silent presence in Chicago is probably the most important. The city's vast black ghetto stretches out near the Democratic convention hall...No one, except themselves, knows what Chicago's black militants will do if the fuse is lit at Lincoln Park or the

Amphitheater.”500 Here, we see the lingering influence of the Communist Party's Haywood Thesis charged with equal parts foreboding and giddy anticipation.

Eventually, the latter impulse prevailed, and underground reportage on urban unrest was filled with palpable titillation, as radical students stopped waiting to see how the next disturbance within the black community would unfold and began to imagine placing themselves in the midst of insurgent violence. Indeed, when one of its reporters was maced in October 1967, The Barb responded with an exultant banner headline: “THE TERROR THE HEAT EXPLODES! BARB ACE GETS MACE.”501

Meanwhile, a second article in that same issue, titled “A Dose of Danger? IT BURNS, BABY,” provided advice for readers about mace and its effects, encouraging them to anticipate—or, perhaps, inviting them to fantasize—that they might be maced in the near future. Ultimately, while many of the individuals who consumed these increasingly overwrought accounts of rioting had a genuine belief in the cause of Civil Rights, they were also undeniably captivated by the romance of violence in the streets, identifying riots with the joyous excess and anti-hierarchical mirth of carnival: “All systems have broken down in people rioting. Riots break down oppressive tight life-boxes; riots are celebrations, participatory events. The rules of the game are re-defined in the instant. Power changes.

History is telescoped.”502 From the perspective of the counterculture, white violence was perpetrated through the military-industrial complex. It was deployed to construct the type of linear historical narratives that Rubin rejected in his ode to rioting. White violence was narrowly strategic. It was covert, and it was hypocritical. Urban rioting, by contrast, seemed spontaneous and organic, and it

500 Rubin, Jerry. “A Gun for each Yip” The Berkeley Barb 7,8,158 Aug 23-24 (1968): 11. 501“The Terror: the Heat Explodes: Barb Ace gets Mace” The Berkeley Barb 5, 16, 114 October 20-27 (1967): 2-5. 502 Rubin, Jerry. “Elvis Kills Ike: America the Fat Man” The Berkeley Barb 6,11,134 March 8-14 (1968): 11.

217 promised to belie the true nature of state violence, which was, itself, beneath the facade of strategic imperative, rather like rioting. In fact, Roszak described the entire official program of postwar

American affluence as “the white man's legal equivalent of looting.”503 Thus, Roszak concurred with

Jakov Lind, whose assessment of bourgeois morality and the legacy of the frontier likewise cast the history of white America as an exercise in opportunistic, nihilistic predation.

Ultimately, then, the radical press covered the violence that accompanied the Civil Rights

Movement with a sense of ebullience that began with rapturous coverage of riots and increasingly veered into delirious flights of apocalyptic fantasy as these young journalists developed a stylized aesthetic of carnivalesque violence that circled back, ambiguously, to the mythology of the frontier and frequently deployed the modern avatar of that entropic, savage landscape: the biker. This development played out quite clearly in the pages of The Barb, a publication that embodied what passed for orthodoxy within the fractious New Left and exhibited an official commitment to non-violent political activism. Indeed, in 1969, The Barb published a series of articles that critiqued what they termed The

Violent Generation: “The members of the Violent Generation are rebels without a cause, thrill-seeking gladiator types who gain sado-masochistic pleasure from violent confrontation with the Heat.”504 The

Violent Generation, then, was not their parents' generation, which had concocted the Vietnam War, nor any of America's genocidal pioneering generations; The Violent Generation was a subset of their own peers who were enthralled by anarchy. It was a label that seemed to police the boundary between New

Left and counterculture: between conscious political actors and the type of thoughtless thrill-seekers who were seduced by the swaggering nihilism of bikers. Yet, if The Barb ostensibly endorsed non- violent political mobilization, its pages were full of vicarious thrill-seeking that flirted with ecstatic anarchy, and this had been true for several years leading up to Super-Straight's criticism in “The Violent

503 Raszak, Counterculture, 67. 504 Super-Straight, David. “The Violent Generation: Second in a Series” The Berkeley Barb 9,6,208 August 8-14 (1969): 12.

218 Generation.” As we've seen, the publication was eager to offer its readers advice on the effects of mace, and, in many instances, its accounts of hypothetical riots were simply exultant. In one such article, titled “ RESISTANCE GROWS ON DAY OF TERROR,” The Barb predicted: “Dissent is through!

Resistance is here! The last day of dissent in the history of peace activities in America may have taken place in Oakland, Monday, Oct. 15, 1967.”505 Clearly, The Barb could not restrain its infatuation with the prospect of revolutionary violence, which was explicitly endorsed by Jerry Rubin in its pages:

“There is no such thing as the antiwar movement. This is a concept created by the mass media to fuck up our minds. What's happening is energy exploding in thousands of directions and people declaring themselves free.....I'm not interested in the so-called anti-war movement—I'm interested in Detroit,

Newark, campus disruptions, everyone smoking pot, people learning to speak out and be different.”506

Ultimately, Rubin was interested in jubilant, anarchic violence writ large, and he was specifically preoccupied with the prospect of including white students in the action. In his “A GUN FOR EACH

YIP,” in which he discussed mobilization ahead of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago,

Rubin observed with grandiloquence: “If a confrontation erupts between Chicago police and Yippies or the Mob Comm protesters, it will be the nation's second massive collision between establishment troopers and white middle-class youth.”507 Rubin was impatient for white youths to instigate their own riotous anarchy, as the counterculture wholly abandoned the spectatorial appraisal of urban riots that we see in Chester Anderson's fretting over the when the Filmore erupts again; instead, white students were eagerly awaiting the opportunity to participate in urban unrest. Thus, the “WHITE PANTHER

STATEMENT,” published in a November 1968 issue of The Barb, referenced Stokely Carmichael's call for 20 million arrogant black men and seemingly imagined The Barb's readers responding to the same violent imperative: “for the first time in America there are a generation of visionary maniac white

505 “Resistance Grows on Day of Terror” The Berkeley Barb 5,6,114 October 20-26 (1967): 3. 506 Rubin, “And in America,” 8. 507 Rubin, “A Gun for Each Yip,” 11.

219 mother country dope fiend rock and roll freaks who are ready to get down and kick out the jams—ALL

THE JAMS.”508 These jams-kicking mothers certainly seem indistinguishable from the Violent

Generation that David Super-Straight finds so repugnant. Indeed, they are hardly distinguishable from bikers: violent white maniacs.

Masculinity

Notably, the White Panthers' visionary white dope fiends shared bikers' hyperbolic masculinity with its overtones of euphoric, regenerative violence. Indeed, in the closing lines of their November

1968 statement in The Barb, they reiterated their assessment that white students were becoming as insurgent and dangerous as black militants and placed that judgment in a distinctly gendered context.

The White Panthers began by echoing Chester Anderson: “The actions of the Black Panthers in

America have inspired us and given us strength, as has the music of black America.”509 However, they were hardly content to appropriate an aestheticized soupcon of black cool in order to ameliorate the ennui of stilted suburban existence. After listing Coltrane, Malcolm X, and LeRoi Jones as inspirational figures, they proclaimed: “These are men in America. And we're ass crazy as they are, and as pure.

We're bad.”510 The White Panthers did not want to be sympathetic observers of the black struggle; they and their cohort wanted to be bad themselves. And, of course, they defined that badness by reference to black masculinity. In a sense, of course, that position was deeply ironic, as many black men interpreted segregation as systematized emasculation. Yet, as Michelle Wallace notes, the Civil Rights Movement generally overcompensated for this historical affront, constructing itself as an exercise in patriarchal redemption by adopting an element of performative machismo that the white media, in turn,

508 “White Panther Statement” The Berkeley Barb 7,23,172 Nov 29-Dec 5 (1968): 13. 509 Ibid. 510 Ibid.

220 exaggerated to great effect and to the abiding ardor of the counterculture, which responded rapturously to this media caricature because it resonated with their own operating assumption that white men were hopelessly domesticated: “This is one reason that males and females get along so poorly, because the males, products of Suburbia, are immature little boys.”511 This contradictory situation, in which black men and white men both seemed to have encountered their own emasculation in the image of their counterparts, distilled the dialectic of modern masculinity, which was shaped, to a great degree, by the peculiar distorting effect of the color line. DuBois, of course, characterized the color line as a nexus of competing gazes that combined intense scrutiny and obfuscation,512 and we see this distorting mirror effect quite clearly in the ideological shift from manliness to masculinity, which involved bourgeois reformists' projected fantasies of black primitivism, as well as their studied admiration for historically black modes of gender presentation, which had been formulated, in the first place, partially in response to the bourgeoisie's racialized gender paradigm and its particular imagining of black men. And, this dynamic was reproduced by men of the counterculture, who turned to socially marginal groups like the

Black Panthers and the Hell's Angels to revise their concept of gender.

While the rise of masculinity during the early twentieth century disrupted the hegemony of manliness, interjecting violent sports like football and primitivist fantasies like Tarzan into the very heart of male identity, postwar notions of masculinity still retained the emphasis on patriarchal domesticity that formed the core of the manliness ethos. As we have seen, the bourgeoisie conceived of an activity like football as a forum in which violence could be safely contained toward beneficent, therapeutic ends; they did not license wanton brutality. For the counterculture, this position was brazen hypocrisy; they believed that the Great Society was founded precisely on brutality. For some, the obvious resolution to this situation was to work toward peace and to eschew the established campus

511 Super-Straight, David. “The Violent Generation: Third in a Series” The Berkeley Barb 9,7,209 August 15-21 (1969): 9. 512 Smith, Shawn Michelle. Photography on the Color Line: W.E.B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).

221 culture of football and fraternities. Yet for others, the answer was to drop all the timid bourgeois rationalization and embrace ecstatic violence outright. The answer was riots. The answer was bikers.

The answer was real masculinity untempered by lingering manliness. Indeed, the evolution of western films during the 1960's provides a window into this ferocious drift in the enduring conflict between manly restraint and masculine wantonness, as the cowboy of the classic western embodies the qualities of restraint and rectitude that define manliness, while revisionist westerns of 1960's and their biker exploitation offshoots celebrate the licentiousness and cavalier violence that are characteristic of masculinity. Thus, in his account of white students' protest against their treatment at a local filling station, Thorne Dreyer seemed almost chagrined by the protest's non-violent nature: “Fehrman says no force was used by the demonstrators. This was, he feels, the result of being outnumbered and disorganized rather than of some non-violent philosophy.”513 In a similar vein, Jerry Rubin celebrated the counterculture's willingness to fight back: “Fighting back changes the way blacks think of white rebels. Their original bias is to think of long haired people as being effeminate.”514 Here, of course,

Rubin was painfully explicit about the role of the color line and its distortions in shaping the counterculture's understanding of masculinity and encouraging its embrace of violence.

In this context, the symbolic appeal of the biker is still more obvious. Masculinity was, of course, the dominant value of the biker subculture, which viewed the outside world—and hippies in particular—as weak, effeminate non-men.515 And members of the counterculture largely shared this assessment; they understood themselves to be domesticated, alienated specimens of a feminized suburban landscape shaped by consumption-driven affluence, and they wanted badly to reform themselves: to jettison the popular notion that they were singularly committed to non-violence and to avert the timid taint of suburbia. If bikers imagined themselves “basking in the condescending or

513 Dreyer, Thorne “Take it on the Chin: Facial Discrimination at the Conoco Station” The Rag 2,5 (1967): 5. 514 Rubin, “Yippie Panther Pact” 515 Watson, “Outlaw Motorcyclists,” 37.

222 mortified stares of prim women locked into marshmallow lives with marshmallow husbands,”516 many hippies shared that fantasy. They shared bikers' assessment of suburban males as flaccid and domesticated, and they longed to be bad: to be violent. Bikers were one faction of white society, in particular, that was broadcasting its enthusiasm for primitive, anarchic, masculine violence. They were a riot waiting to happen. The genius of the biker subculture was how it made violence seem exuberant and gleeful: carnivalesque. Members of the Weathermen described how they had to train and steel themselves to break windows and confront police during their Days of Rage campaign in Chicago in the fall of 1969. In an effort to bring the war home, as John Jacobs had termed it, they made a principled choice to enact violence, but none of them were really comfortable doing so. They were reluctant to destroy property; they were afraid of the police, and they interpreted their trepidation as more evidence of how inhibited and alienated they were.517

Bikers, by contrast, presented themselves as unbridled maniacs who fought cops for fun.

Indeed, in his memoir Frank Reynolds complained that the Oakland chapter of the Angels excluded his

San Francisco chapter from its periodic rumbles with the Oakland police: “Oakland had its little fun games of ripping and romping with the cops quite frequently...This is their private fun—they never let us in on this.”518 Bikers effectively treated the police like a rival club and frequently did the same with military personnel, engaging in mutual combat whenever they crossed paths with uniformed agents of the state and delighting in the carnivalesque spectacle that ensued: “A woman that was tending bar shouted out, 'It's the United States Navy—ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MINDS?' I heard someone scream back—'FUCK YOU, AND THE UNITED STATES NAVY!'”519Of course, to some degree, this violent opposition was underwritten by a certain affinity; many bikers were military veterans, and they often had personal relationships with local police, so many of whom came from the same lower-

516 Weathern, Wayward Angel, 111. 517 The Weather Underground. Dir. Sam Green and Bill Siegel. Docurama, 2002. Film. 518 Reynolds, Freewheelin Frank, 132. 519 Ibid, 35.

223 middle-class environs that fostered motorcycle clubs. Indeed, two founding members of the Hell's

Angels later became police officers, while Charles Griffith originally conceived of The Wild Angels as a film that would dramatize the ironic parallels between a motorcycle gang and the motorcycle police who pursued them. But, bikers' hostility toward law enforcement could have a genuinely malevolent edge, especially as police pressure on outlaw clubs mounted in the wake of the Lynch Report and subsequent publicity.520 If Reynolds suggested that Oakland Angels fought with police in mutually agreeable recreational combat, he also fantasized repeatedly about murdering police and insisted that cops genuinely feared bikers: “The cops never did a fucking thing. If they had we'd have kicked the living shit out of em.”521 Meanwhile, the Easyriders piece “Welcome to Hell” likewise casts police as pathetically intimidated by bikers. The story constructs a grisly and wholly nihilistic revenge fantasy in which a biker uses his dying gasp to kill the police officer who has just shot him after panicking when the biker was not cowed by his harassment.

These figurations were hyperbolic, but they reflected an increasingly nasty antagonism between bikers and law enforcement, and, for many members of the New Left and the counterculture, who were simultaneously enamored of the Black Panthers and self-consciously engaged in a white revolution, bikers' exuberant willingness to resist state authority, coupled with the state's bullying efforts to suppress outlaw clubs, offered an irresistible spectacle, providing a white mirror for the righteous black violence with which they were so enthralled. Even bikers' lack of underlying political motive for their violent actions proved alluring. In typical fashion, bikers discussed their confrontations with police in terms that were both fantastical and sublimely understated. Frank Reynolds exhibited this contradictory position when he suggested that kicking the shit out of police—or even eating them—was entirely normal activity. Bikers wanted to be viewed as agents of spectacular violence, but they were also determined to affect a blasé attitude about this bloodshed, which they defined as an intrinsic part of 520 Packer, Jeremy. Mobility without Mayhem: Safety, Cars, and Citizenship. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008). 521 Reynolds, Freewheelin Frank, 7.

224 ordinary life. Thus, the counterculture saw in them a kind of serene white violence that mirrored what they perceived as the natural integrity of the black community's riotous militancy, and they also saw a ludic, primitive violence that answered and exposed the cynical violence of the state.

Frontier Apocalypse

This admiration for the outlaw biker and his insouciant white violence operated within the counterculture's enduring engagement with frontier fantasy, distilling the counterculture's fraught relationship to the New Left and the Civil Rights Movement. On the one hand, the biker offered something of a model for discontented white youths to violently challenge authority in a manner that extended the principled resistance of Civil Rights activism. On the other hand, the figure of the biker embodied a certain apocalyptic ethos that was fundamentally libertarian, hostile to organized politics, and even conducive of certain fantasies of conquest. This same tension appeared in a critique of the

Vietnam War by Stew Alpert, in which he gestured toward the explicit Marxism of the Cultural Front but also embraced a politically ambiguous tradition of violent popular spectacle:

Pretty Boy Floyd never heard of Mao Tse Tung but he learned and applied the tactics of guerrilla war completely on his own....When I think of Charley Floyd I think of some Okie gas station attendant who has just been drafted into the Vietnamese War...I like to think that this guy who drinks heavy and has “born to raise hell” tattooed on his wrist will come back like Charley Floyd came out of the Missouri Penitentiary, determined to take on the man by any means necessary.522

As we have seen, radical intellectuals of the Cultural Front found themselves awkwardly sidelined; doctrinaire Marxism ascribed to them scant agency, basically consigning them to breathlessly await the radicalization of the working-class. And there were echoes of this conventional Marxism in Alpert's vignette, as he assigned a portentous historical onus to anonymous working-class kids, adopting a secondary role for himself in which he hopefully predicted that the experience of conscription into a

522 Alpert, Stew “A Tale of Two Floyds” The Berkeley Barb 8,12,168 Mar 21-27 (1969): 7.

225 colonial war would turn these working-class kids into guerrillas, importuning the emergence of

“thousands of Pretty Boy Floyds” in the 1970's. Yet, Alpert also moved away from classical Marxism.

For one, he suggested that Pretty Boy Floyd was a de facto Marxist, implying that revolution is an intuitive response to repression that does not need to be intellectualized or historicized. This posture, which embodied the New Left's romantic politics of authenticity, represented a departure from the historical determinism of classical Marxism with its conceptual rigor and its narrowly prescribed roles for historical actors. For Marx, a bank-robber like Pretty Boy Floyd was merely a criminal, but Alpert was moving toward a highly aestheticized conception of revolution that freely borrowed from capitalist mass culture. If the Cultural Front aimed to create a novel repertoire of cultural expression that was consistent with Marxist ideology and conducive to building a revolutionary community, Alpert and the counterculture took existing cultural artifacts and promiscuously mingled them with their streamlined

Marxism. For Alpert, Marx's class revolution was hybridized with the populist, libertarian themes of the pulp western and its successor: the gangster film.

The appeal of the biker within the iconography of the counterculture was premised on this same hybridization; indeed, Alpert's description of the Okie gas station attendant who promised to become a revolutionary guerrilla—who “drinks heavy and has 'born to raise hell' tattooed on his wrist”— unmistakably invoked the outlaw biker. When Kieffner describes the biker as “possibly the only highly- esteemed minority group that could have made a determining difference in the Counterculture

Revolution,”523 he seems to be addressing their ability to embody a certain working class authenticity while also participating in the psychedelic carnival of the counterculture and expressing its bohemian, anti-modern ethos. Kieffner is, like Alpert, still tenuously committed to the idea that revolution will arise ineluctably from the working-class. Ultimately, of course, factions of the New Left could not wait for the Okie gas station attendants and outlaw bikers to take up arms and could not contain their own

523 Kieffner, “Myth, Reality”

226 violent frontier fantasies; they jettisoned Marx's revolutionary narrative entirely and became the bank robbers of the 1970's themselves. And this development was essentially predicted in Bruce Johnson's exultant reflection on Naked Angels, which appeared in a July 1969 issue of The Barb. Johnson made a small nod to the traditional working class, noting that “all of the bad mother-fuckers out of the grease pits of Rouge [are] riding Harleys.”524 But, Johnson's primary concern was with fictionalized bikers and what they portended for the counterculture; indeed, he was enraptured by the emerging genre of biker films, in which he saw apocalyptic prophecy: “They are destined to become as classic as Westerns— only Westerns were legends and dealt with the projected past. Motorcycle flicks define our future, and our future is one of gangland violence, measured in horsepower cubic centimeters and steel tonnage.

Get ready.”525 As the review continues, it becomes apparent that Johnson's exhortation, Get ready, is not meant to be foreboding or cautionary; he awaits the eruption of gangland violence with giddy anticipation. In fact, he believes he has already felt the first bracing percussions of this impending anarchy: “When I was back in Detroit two weeks ago, the motorcycle gangs (like everybody else now in Motown) were wired to the bone. Clubs were being decimated in bloody shootouts.”526 If this description of a violent tit for tat between two Detroit motorcycle clubs seems irrelevant, if not anathema, to The Barb's readers, Johnson disagrees, insisting that bikers provide a template for young people to seize meaningful power over their lives and survive in a post-apocalyptic society:

Naked Angels was made by a dude who used to be managing editor of the L.A. Free Press, and it was made for you and all the other bad-assed tough kids across the country. Relate to this: this film will tell you more about what is going to be happening in America than reading the “red book” everyday will. Why? Because this film is about us, and for us. It's about brothers who don't just bullshit and sign petitions and write programs. They do what they say. They get together, git down, and take the Power over their own lives...America is becoming a gangland, you know, and to survive and be free, you're going to have to get yourself together with a tight brotherhood who can deal with all the types of shit

524 Johnson, Bruce “Naked Angels Laid Bare” The Berkeley Barb 9,1,203 July 4-10 (1969): 12. “Rouge” is a reference to Ford's massive River Rogue factory. Johnson was a Detroit native and discussed this throughout his article. He also noted that these Harley riders “had all that overtime bread” to pour into chrome and other customizations. Thus, he attempted to include the traditional industrial working-class in his vision. 525 Ibid. 526 Ibid.

227 put down in Naked Angels.527

Here, the nebulous boundary between the New Left and the counterculture is being policed from the counterculture side. For Johnson, the New Left is weak and ineffectual; it is passive and consumed by superfluous communication, especially in the form of vacuous, feminine orality: bullshit. Here,

Marxism is lampooned and biker exploitation films proffered as a more authentic revolutionary template. Of course, bad-assed tough kids seems an improbable description of The Barb's readership, and Johnson seems to recognize as much, offering an exhortation and a predictive fantasy rather than an account of present realities; he believes that radical students can and should become like bikers.

And Johnson was not the only one who imagined student activists becoming swaggering, bad- assed cowboys, as we see in a delirious manifesto published in an October 1968 issue of The Barb. The

Manifesto, titled WE ARE OUTLAWS!, combines the bombast, obscenity, and gleeful anarchism of the futurist manifesto with the iconography of pulp westerns and the argot of the psychedelic counterculture:

THERE ARE NO LIMITS TO OUR LAWLESSNESS We defy law and order with our bricks bottles garbage long hair filth obscenity drugs games guns bikes fire fun & fucking—THE FUTURE OF OUR STRUGGLE IS THE FUTURE OF CRIME IN THE STREETS. WE ARE ALL CRIMINALS IN THE BLIND EYES OF PIG AMERICA—In order to survive we steal cheat lie forge deal hide & kill—The Future Belongs To THE Free Spirit of THE OUTLAW And we take the outlaw's oath: ALL PROPERTY IS TARGET ALL LAWMEN ARE ENEMY! From now on Total Disregard for the man's homes jobs polls streets stores churches daughters sons pets media culture game goals laws + orders. WE ARE THE FORCES OF CHAOS AND ANARCHY WE ARE EVERYTHING THEY SAY WE ARE AND WE ARE PROUD OF IT—WE ARE OBSCENE LAWLESS HIDEOUS DANGEROUS DIRTY VIOLENT + YOUNG.

In addition to the anachronistic use of the term lawmen and the appearance of the banner headline

“WANTED,” the manifesto was illustrated with images of cowboys pointing guns. Like Bruce Johnson, the manifesto's authors were taking the projected past of the Hollywood western and, in turn, projecting that into the apocalyptic future, attempting to turn myth into history; thus another floating headline

527 Ibid.

228 proclaimed: “THE CITIES aRE The NEW FRONTIER. [sic]” And, if the pulp western was an obvious point of reference for the authors of the Outlaw Manifesto, so too was the biker subculture. Indeed, the manifesto, which specifically mentioned bikes, along with filth, obscenity, drugs and various signifiers of masculine violence, might as well be called “WE ARE HELLS ANGELS!” When the manifesto declared, “POLITICS is how we LIVE,” it echoed Art Johnson's desire for a total alienation: for an immersive lifestyle of resistant anarchy that the counterculture saw modeled in the carnivalesque excess of the biker subculture. But, the actual content of the authors' politics remained ambiguous. A whiff of Marxism lingered, perhaps, in their disdain for property, but the manifesto did not elucidate any coherent doctrine, and it expressed virtually no sense of righteousness: just the rapturous nihilism and the intensive masculine violence of the frontier gunslinger as imagined by Hollywood.

The Outlaw Manifesto, then, captured the paradox of the counterculture as white revolution.

The counterculture wanted to deconstruct whiteness, which they understood as a cynical form of bureaucratized exploitation that neutered its own beneficiaries with affluence. However, while they eschewed the transgressive racial appropriation and imposture that had inspired previous generations of white radicals, they remained enthralled by the Black Panthers and the specter of black nihilism.

Ultimately, they wanted to be Bad: to be feared and even despised, for this disdain was the only possible proof that they had successfully shed their privilege and compromised the smoothly implacable operation of hegemonic whiteness. Yet, this desire to be bad, to be reviled and to divest themselves of their skin privilege, steered the counterculture toward a version of whiteness that circled back to colonial fantasy. Indeed, the authors of the Outlaw Manifesto actually embraced the mythical cowboy, whom Jakov Lind had positioned as the embodiment of white America's hypocrisy and viciousness. And the paradoxical implications of this gesture were apparent in Jerry Rubin's 1968 article from The Barb. The article opened with a self-flagellating invocation of white guilt, affirming a revisionist reading of American history as cavalcade of repressive violence: “We are the sons of the

229 men who slaughtered the Indians, forced the blacks to the South as slave labor.”528 Yet, as Rubin proceeded, his argument took a curious turn. He continued to critique the Great Society and to subvert the rhetoric of civilization by identifying with Indians and blacks against hegemonic whiteness, but, as his emphasis shifted to an exposition of bourgeois conformity, suddenly and perhaps without his full intent, the symbolic function of the frontier in Rubin's schema was wholly inverted: “All the structures have been built, all the roads mapped, all the institutions created, all the adventures over. You adapt, conform, be sociable, stuff yourself with food. Yesterday America needed industrialists and pioneers— today she needs soldiers, bureaucrats, and a mass apathetic public.”529 In his final lines, Rubin celebrated industrialists and pioneers, characterizing their efforts to build structures, roads, and institutions as part of a great, life-affirming adventure that contrasted with the anomie of suburban existence. He seemed to momentarily forget that these adventurous builders were largely responsible for the genocide and exploitation for which he set out to atone in his opening lines. Thus, although the counterculture aimed to reject the legacy of the frontier insofar as it abjured American chauvinism and the strain of Cold War ideology that defined itself in the quest for new frontiers of technology, extraction, profit, and rationalized control over the environment, it ultimately returned to very familiar fantasies of venturous conquest to express its own aesthetic of insurgent presentness and contingency.

ENTROPIC TECHNOLOGY

From the perspective of the counterculture, the colonialist overtones of its frontier reveries were obviated by the anti-modern framework in which it explored these figurations and, especially, by its hostility to technology. Philosopher of technology Michael Adas observes that technology did not merely facilitate colonial conquest; it came to inform the underlying ideology of white supremacy that 528 Rubin, “Elvis Kills Ike,” 11. 529 Ibid.

230 impelled expansionism in the first place.530 Indeed, it was this conflation of technology and progress that led turn of the century Americans to argue that their conquest of the Philippines was not just morally permissible, as Lind had it, but morally imperative, insisting that the provision of indoor plumbing and other modern technologies was tantamount to salvation.531 Student radicals of the 1960's, who defined their emerging counterculture in opposition to technocracy and the Vietnam War, were particularly sensitive to this rhetorical relationship between technological progress and colonialism.

Indeed, Rubin used the machine as a metonym for American aggression in Vietnam, expressing his unambiguous sympathy for native Vietnamese: “Heroic and noble it can be to die defending one's homeland; but in Vietnam the foreign invader with his machine can find no nobility in death.”532 For

Rubin, the machine was synonymous with conquest, and it was antithetical to organic community: a value that was important to the counterculture as it continued to elaborate the anti-modern themes established by disaffected turn-of-the-century Americans. This idealization of localized, natural social relationships was apparent in the romantic nationalism of Rubin's reference to dying heroically in defense of one's homeland, but it was expressed most conspicuously and indelibly in the counterculture's various experiments in subsistence-based communalism. The idea of the commune remains, of course, one of the icons of the counterculture and a frequent subject of caricature. For the counterculture, the prospect of living off the land represented a rebuke of technocracy and the exploitative, hierarchical relationships typical of modern structures of power. It was an exercise in primitivism that extended the counterculture's preoccupation with playing Indian.

Of course, as we have seen, playing Indian was not, ultimately, about becoming Indian or forsaking Western civilization but about existing in-between two worlds in a contingent moment of

Utopian paradox, and the counterculture's experiments in communal subsistence living certainly

530 Adas, Machines 531 Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Barbarian virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876- 1917. (New York: Macmillan, 2001). 532 Rubin, “Elvis Kills Ike,” 11.

231 contained this same tension, as we see in a 1968 Barb article that chronicled the travails of a group of hip youngsters attempting to live off the grid in California's Big Sur: “The recent experience of Steve

Booker shows the patterns of anti-hip prejudice in the Sur. According to Booker, many persons have been pressured into living dangerous miles into the wooded hills away from the 'civilized' strip of highway, due to hassles by the roadside merchants.”533 The author did not elaborate on the origins or intentions of this hip community, but they were undeniably playing Indian; indeed, the appearance of an article titled “TRIBAL CONVENTION WELCOMES NON-INDIANS” on the same page as the piece on Steve Booker and his hip friends in the Sur underscored this fascination with racial transformation and native lifestyles. While the author did not explicitly delineate the motivations of

Booker and his companions, it was clear enough that they were attempting, in some capacity, to tear down their white masks and live off the land: a task that was easier said than done, as Booker's ironic complaint, echoed by The Barb, revealed. These hip youngsters, of course, were neither pre-Colombian

Native Americans nor trained survivalists; their version of a subsistence lifestyle seemed to involve camping along the Pacific Coast Highway, where they had access to resources like restrooms, mass- produced food, and amenable tourists, and Booker was upset that his cohort had been denied this access by local merchants. The Barb affirmed Booker's grievance and the fantasy underlying his group's lifestyle, placing civilization in quotation marks to impugn the western notion progress, even as the hip dropouts' exclusion from local gas station bathrooms was lamented.

Of course, Booker's hypocrisy was hardly novel, and it was, perhaps, not even hypocrisy; the contradictions of his position were inherent to playing Indian and the dialectic of frontier fantasy. When

Thoreau was at Walden, he received provisions from friends and maintained correspondence. When

Anglo pioneers settled the American west during the late nineteenth century, they subsisted mostly on canned goods from Chicago. But, in the text of Walden, Thoreau's helpers are kept offstage, just as the

533“Seeks Freemen Freedom Rodes for Big Sur” The Berkeley Barb 6,21,145 May 24-30 (1968): 5.

232 piles of tin cans that littered frontier settlements do not appear in western films.534 Those excisions were necessary to preserve the fantasy of escape from civilization and its entanglements. Yet, from another vantage, that hypocrisy does not represent a betrayal of the frontier fantasy but its very marrow. In their work, Reading National Geographic, Lutz and Collins observe that a preponderance of that magazine's most popular images involve the conspicuous juxtaposition of traditional society and modern technology. In that affinity they detect an ambivalent amalgam of nostalgia and white guilt provisionally reconciled by a modern commitment to development.535 But Leo Marx might offer a slightly different reading of those same images with their conflicted presentation of technological intrusion. If we lament the corruption of authentic traditional societies and atone for our role in wresting these populations from tranquil isolation into modern subjugation even as we affirm our commitment to the paradigm of progress, it would seem that we also fantasize about existing in the fleeting moment of paradox captured in those images: that we are, perhaps, even more nostalgic for that juncture point of incipient modernity with all of its chaotic disruption than we are for the state of placid primitivism that we imagine just outside the frame of these images. Indeed, if the commune and a general back-to-the-land ethos remain among the more recognizable counterculture signifiers, the counterculture was not, ultimately, interested in completely renouncing technology; they were actually inclined to identify a sublime quality when certain rudimentary technologies were employed in an unsettled landscape.

Ultimately, the counterculture wanted to revise the political context in which machines operated: to have have technology without technocracy. Thus, a certain DIY ethos, especially in relation to mechanization, was one of the defining attributes of the counterculture. For instance, the counterculture's fascination with the Volkswagen, which has been reduced to a visual cliché, was rooted

534 These cans, the fabric of the industrialized economy that they represented, and their excision from Hollywood representations of the West are discussed by Patricia Limerick in The Legacy of Conquest: the Unbroken Past of the American West. (New York: Norton, 1988): 18. 535 Lutz, Catherine A. and Jane L. Collins. Reading National Geographic. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).

233 in their desire to formulate an anti-technocratic relationship to the mechanical world. It was the rudimentary design of the VW engine and the possibility of maintaining one's own vehicle, even in a remote, hostile landscape, that endeared the VW to the counterculture, which made a best seller of John

Muir's self-published 1969 text How To Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: A Manual of Step by Step

Procedures for the Complete Idiot. Muir, an aerospace engineer, wrote the book after leaving his position at the infamous defense contractor Lockheed to become a car mechanic in Taos, New Mexico.

The book is full of anecdotes that reveal a counterculture sensibility, and Muir's follow-up, from 1973,

The Velvet Monkeywrench, made the subversive bent of his vernacular automotive repair philosophy explicit, proposing to do away with the United States of America. In colloquial idiom, a monkey wrench is, of course, something that interferes with a given plan or program, and the phrase originates in reference to industrial sabotage; therefore, it is a perfect icon of resistance to technocracy, invoking a tradition of machine-breaking and connecting this form of resistance to a more generalized disruption of the planning apparatus of modernity. A monkey wrench is a mechanical tool that resists the imposition of mechanization under technocratic conditions. The VW itself, then, was a monkey wrench of sorts: a piece of technology that seemed suited to an alternative paradigm of mechanization: which it was. The VW was conceived in the early 1930's, and it was the heir to Ford's quest for a universal car with its peculiar strain of technological utopianism. Like the Model T and the Soviet-bloc cars of the

Cold-War era, it was cheap, crude, and pliant, while its immutable styling was drab, at best, striking many observers as obtrusively ugly. In the context of populuxe America, it was an utter anomaly that the counterculture identified as somehow resistant to domestication, suburbanization, and consumerism.

234 Bush Fixes

The willfully archaic VW, then, was a car that was more like a chopper: a monkey wrench par excellence. The biker subculture combined an ardent, even sublime, enthusiasm for a specific technological artifact with a signal aversion to rationalized technological systems and consumerism, identifying expansive aesthetic implications in the ability to find improvised technical solutions and in the use of salvaged materials. Bikers repaired and customized their vehicles using detritus gleaned from the apocalyptic landscape of America's burgeoning junkyards, and classic modifications associated with the biker subculture included springer front suspensions extended with Ford radius rods and the re-use of Ford tombstone tail-lights. Obviously, to some extent, these strategies were simply practical, an observation that Barger offered as he elaborated on how bikers went about modifying their makeshift machines: “Next we'd toss the front fender, then cut the back one or make an even thinner fender from the tire cover mount of a 1936 Ford. That made a beautiful back fender for a Harley with a sixteen-inch tire, and it was practical too.”536 Used car parts, which were ubiquitous, could be cheaply obtained and were readily adapted to use on motorcycles. And the junkyard also yielded other useful materials, like lengths of bent tubular steel that might become handlebars. Bending tubular steel requires specialized equipment; it cannot be done in a typical garage. But, bent tubular steel could be found in abundance at any junkyard, amidst the accumulating populuxe ephemera. As Barger explained: “Hell's Angels didn't buy a lot of parts. We made them. I made the first set of high bars that I ever had from the chairs of those old chrome tables in the fifties with Formica tops.”537 Ultimately, while the junkyard offered undeniable practicality, it also defined a specific aesthetic that saw peculiar virtue in salvage and petty theft, distilling bikers' overarching emphasis on contingency.

Thus, in an article about the most convenient sources from which to steal gas, Jim Gerlach 536 Barger, Hell's Angel, 57. 537 Ibid.

235 rhapsodized “Owning a Hog brings out the adventurer in me, the pioneer, innovator, creator, and most important—thief.”538 On the surface, siphoning a few cents of gas did not seem particularly adventurous or transgressive, but, within the context of bikers' salvage aesthetic and its romantic frontier fantasies, the expedient of siphoning someone else's gas became a symbolically freighted act that was consistently presented as emblematic of the motorcycle subculture and its values. Another article for Easyriders titled “Scooted People Never Change,” which was actually a reprint of a decades- old article by the deceased John MacDonnell, described how the author's attempt to become a mercenary soldier fighting with Pancho Villa turned into a desert sojourn with a motley band of motorcyclists, and MacDonnell's reminiscence dwelt, in particular, on this multi-national band's habitual gas theft. Meanwhile, yet another article from the same issue of Easyriders advised: “Get yourself a Chopper Credit Card—a short length of rubber tubing.”539 To this day, fuel gauges are not standard equipment on motorcycles, and this inability to precisely monitor fuel consumption, combined with the fact that motorcycles' fuel tanks are necessarily much smaller than those of automobiles, while the distance between gas stations is typically dictated by the capacity of the latter, means that running out of gas is, like breaking down, part and parcel of riding a motorcycle. Of course, this characteristic deficiency was accentuated by outlaw bikers who often customized their motorcycles by adopting even smaller tanks, creating a significant obstacle for themselves: “The other big problem then was that we'd have to find gas stations every forty miles or so, since those old-style bikes with small tanks couldn't make it past sixty miles.”540 Once again, with their decision to reduce their fuel-carrying capacity, a fault that was endemic to the motorcycle was purposely exaggerated by bikers and given expansive symbolic weight. For bikers, being stranded was an eventuality, and they relished the resultant frontier atmosphere of lawlessness and entropy: the fact that these mishaps required extemporaneous solutions

538 Gerlach, Jim “Gas Stops Along the Way” Easyriders April 1974: 17. 539 “Energy Crisis” Easyriders April 1974: 53. 540 Barger, Hell's Angel, 2.

236 that frequently involved petty criminality.

Another small but telling example of how bikers tied relatively routine instances of spontaneous problem-solving to their exalted conception of frontier masculinity comes from a 1973 Easyriders article on a custom motorcycle that featured an unusual oil tank. The bike's owner and builder had already appeared in the magazine, when another chopper of his design was profiled under the title, “I built it in a barn and I chromed it in the chicken house,” and the ethos of populist, makeshift self- sufficiency that informed Easyriders's presentation of that endeavor was only amplified in their treatment of his next effort, a chopper that was, as Easyriders declared: “Built in Iowa—complete with oil tank thugged from a lawnmower!” The magazine's use—or, perhaps, invention—of the verb thugged to describe what others might term recycled or salvaged speaks to the way small instances of technical improvisation carried immense symbolic weight within bikers' frontier aesthetic. A thug is, of course, a brutish criminal, and to thug something would, presumably, mean to misappropriate it, likely through violence. Yet, in this instance it seems unlikely that violence was necessary for our Iowan biker to obtain an old lawnmower gas tank that probably belonged to him in the first place. Obviously,

Easyriders's description of this modest act of re-purposing as thugging was hyperbolic, but it was also appropriate; their readers could, in fact, draw a direct line between thuggishness as a manifestation of wanton, fearsome masculine aggression and the act of salvaging a piece of suburban landscaping equipment because they both had the frontier fantasy as a point of reference. Thug worked as a synonym for salvage in this context because Easyriders's readers were able to interpret re-purposing an old gas tank as part of an effort to live outside the hegemony of the market and the constraints of the regulatory state; that modest act of technical improvisation functioned, symbolically, as a token of masculine self-reliance that invoked the entropic landscape of the frontier and its capricious rigors.

In this context, the so-called bush-fix maintained an almost mythical status. Indeed, a bush-fix appeared in the parable with which the Bent Spokesman introduced himself to his readers:

237 Short of disassembling the entire bike, I removed the points cover. The subway ticket that I had used as an insulator had disintegrated. Meanwhile, a 60-year old Norman had come buzzing up on his 60cc Velosolex. He insisted that I had carburetor problems.....Broken motorcycles do not usually need new parts. In fact both Harley and Indian have factory original all-purpose coathanger wire on the market. I have some anyway.541

This anecdote about breaking down in Normandy, appearing, as it did, in Baudette's very first column as the Bent Spokesman, spoke directly to the Spokesman's understanding of what made the motorcycle a compelling subject, and it implicitly addressed a question that would have been on the minds of many readers: why does an underground student newspaper have a column about motorcycles? For Baudette, the prospect of breaking down was integral to the appeal of the motorcycle, as was the prospect of resolving such mishaps without recourse to specialized technical apparatus. Indeed, Baudette's account of his ability to resolve a mechanical break down with a spare bit of wire encapsulated his effort to position the motorcycle as an emblem of the counterculture's understanding of presentness and authenticity as modes of resisting technocracy. When Baudette referenced factory original all-purpose coat hanger wire, he was parodying the logic of the market and lambasting technocracy. His complaint was that corporations trade on our ignorance to sell us factory-original replacement parts—installed, of course, by a factory-certified mechanic—when we could typically resolve the fault ourselves with simple items from our own waste-bins. In opposition to the hegemonic regime of certified expertise,

Baudette offered a world in which rudimentary machines are maintained creatively by autonomous individuals. And Baudette's glorification of the bush-fix was very much in line with the biker aesthetic.

Terry Orendorff, in fact, placed a bush-fix that was virtually identical to the one Baudette referenced— he employed a matchbook as opposed to a subway ticket to prevent the points from shorting—in a significant passage from his memoir, and Roger Lovin articulated the apotheosis of this fantasy in the introduction to his 1974 text, The Complete Motorcycle Nomad: “furthermore, we all know that we are at least as capable of surviving in the wastelands as Tarzan, and yearn for the opportunity to prove

541 Baudette, Mike “The Bent Spokesman” The Rag 1,1 (1966): 6.

238 it.”542 Lovin admitted that this fantasy is nonsense but called it powerful nonsense, and John Kasson certainly agrees, observing that the Tarzan myth is closely related to the fantasy of playing Indian.

Tarzan is another white Indian: another attempt to undermine the sovereignty of reason in western thought and to subvert the staid paradigm of manliness by appropriating gender identities associated with racial others.543

The bush itself was, of course, the liminal space of colonial encounter. It was not the field of war, where colonial hierarchies were imposed by the west's superior technological apparatus, but the nebulous space of colonial exploration, where the white colonizer was exposed and vulnerable and where the value of western technologies was often dubious.544 In this context, it is important to note that bush-fixes are also referred to by various racial epithets: notably, nigger-rigged. To call something nigger-rigged is, of course, pejorative, but, as is so often the case with white assessments of black culture, the epithet contains deep ambivalence. Ostensibly, to call something nigger-rigged is to denote its technical deficiency. It is a label that invokes primitivism, distilling Adas's observation about the use of machines to measure men. Nigger-rigged measures black men's technical acumen and finds them wanting. Yet, an undercurrent of admiration for the resourcefulness and resilience of black culture is barely concealed by the vulgar racial epithet. Indeed, the term's meaning is inflected by its proximity to jury-rigged: a valorizing epithet for improvised technical solutions originating in nautical terminology.

Bikers' affinity for bush-fixes, then, found transcendence in a highly particular unsettled landscape.

They used machines to measure themselves as men, but they did not identify with progressive technologies and the official rhetoric of civilization with its overt white supremacy. Instead, they embraced primitive, perverse machines, and they placed themselves in the liminal bush, where western

542 Lovin, Roger. The Complete Motorcycle Nomad: a Guide to Machines, Equipment, People, and Places (Boston: Little Brown, 1974): 5. 543 Kasson, Houdini Tarzan, 186-215. 544 Latour, Bruno. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society. (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1987): 215-220.

239 technologies often faltered and where the goal was not to impose western superiority but simply to survive, which often required adapting to native custom.

In a sense, then, the bush-fix operated within an aesthetic that rebuffed dominant narratives of progress and western superiority. In the bush, the colonizer was at a disadvantage. As Bruno Latour notes, most western technologies only work in an environment that has already been rationalized; they require an overarching technological system. Cars are not particularly useful without readily available gasoline and roads, which depend, in turn, on systems for refining petrochemicals, mapping, etc. When

Rubin referred contemptuously to the American presence in Vietnam as the foreign invader with his machine, he invoked this expansive technological landscape, and Adas fixes the surreal horizons of this mindset in his discussion of a machine that was supposed to traverse the Vietnamese countryside, devouring variegated marshland and jungle to extrude stable, uniform roads in its wake, thereby allowing the American military to actually make use of its supposed technological advantage by transporting all manner of wonderfully sophisticated war machinery. It didn't work, and Adas ultimately suggests that America lost the war due to a certain technological hubris: a credulous assumption that their superior technology was simply indomitable.545 And the bush-fix, while it celebrated a certain type of mechanical acumen, manifested a similarly skeptical attitude toward technological systems and the rhetoric of mechanized superiority.

Yet, if some machines, like tanks and artillery that could not be deployed in the Vietnamese jungle for want of adequate roads, did not work in the bush, undermining the notion of a universalized, technologically endowed western superiority, certain technologies were so potent that they remained effectual even outside the rationalized environment of the West, while others even gained an uncanny power through this dislocation. Indeed, as Adas notes, the central parable of colonial fantasy is the encounter between a small band of armed westerners and the thronging natives. The natives do not

545 Adas, Dominance, 412

240 understand the westerners guns and instruments, and they are either obliterated or awed and enraptured, willingly subjugating themselves.546 In these figurations, colonial encounter is presented as a phenomenon of machines out of place and time. The colonizer arrives, literally, from the future. Whatever their specific functions, the technological artifacts in this context serve, ultimately, as time machines, transporting the colonizer to the past where he is endowed with fantastic power. There are countless variations on this theme, but the upshot is the same; an ordinary technological artifact, carried into a savage landscape, transforms an elemental battle for survival. And this dynamic defines the core of American frontier fantasies, especially those that operate in the more ambiguous tradition of Natty Bumppo. These tales subtly renounce the dogmatic western ideology of civilization with its indelible overtones of scientific racism in favor of a highly contingent individual superiority that, none the less, consistently happens to align with dominant formulations of white supremacy. The white protagonist in these narratives triumphs by rejecting certain pillars of Enlightenment thought and inhabiting a liminal racial identity, but he is invariably the one who triumphs, often with the aid of a specific technological artifact.

The cowboy of myth is a noble savage with just the right leavening of civilization. In the pulp westerns of the nineteenth century, this soupcon of civilization was frequently provided through class signifiers, often by providing the cowboy with a secret aristocratic lineage,547 suggesting that, although he seemed feral and other, his apparent profligacy and viciousness contained a core of Anglo-Saxon nobility. But, we can also think of the cowboy's ability to master technology as another way in which he can be imbued with the necessary virtues of civilization, and this is where his relationship to his gun is especially important. Cooper's Leatherstocking tales, of course, established the western genre, and his protagonist, Natty Bumppo, or Hawkeye, is closely identified with his rifle. Indeed, the relationship is not just anthropomorphized but eroticized; another of Bumppo's appellations is the Longue

Carrabine, and this sobriquet is repeated like an incantation throughout the Last of the Mohicans, which

546 Adas, Machines, 1 547 Smith, Henry Nash . Virgin Land: the American West as Symbol and Myth..1950. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978).

241 actually ends with an assembly of Native Americans chanting “The Longue Carrabine.” The gun is the real hero of many cowboy tales, and the cowboy with his gun is something of a middle landscape unto himself. Leo Marx observes how Americans consistently imagined that the powerful and evocative technologies that were rapidly transforming their society could be magically reconciled with their pastoral ideal to create a hybrid state that preserved Jefferson's rural idyll while embracing mechanized prosperity and imperium. In this tradition, the cowboy with his gun is a noble savage who has mastered what little merit civilization and its technological advances has to offer. Indeed, if we ask, “what is an

American?,” there seems to be a long tradition that answers: an Indian with a gun. Thus, a cornerstone of American Revolutionary War mythology is the supposed use of Indian tactics by Washington's forces, especially in conjunction with their Kentucky long rifles: an ungainly piece of technology that evolved on the American frontier in outrageous contradiction to European precedent. Most commentators on motorcycles emphasize the parallel between the cowboy's horse and the biker's motorcycle, which is often called an iron horse. Yet, the motorcycle is more analogous to the cowboy's gun, and motorcycle literature has consistently positioned the biker as a liminal figure in the tradition of Natty Bumppo: an avatar of the bush. His superiority is founded on his rejection of the rationalized apparatus of western technology but also on his intuitive mastery of a rudimentary but powerful machine with which he has developed an intimate rapport.

Technological Sublimity

Again, the counterculture was captivated by this middle landscape of noble savages wielding crude, erratic machines. They did not, generally, envision a wholesale retreat from the modern technological world; they were more typically concerned with combating technocracy, or “turning the

242 pig's technology against him,”548 and they gravitated to evocative machines that seemed to defy technocracy's imperatives and deconstruct its narrative of progress, making icons of the ungainly VW and the perverse chopper. In the 1960's, the American motorcycle represented a paradoxical piece of technology. It was a mass-produced machine, but it wasn't truly domesticated. Indeed, it seemed somehow indelibly primitive. Ultimately, bikers nostalgically embraced an early-modern understanding of the machine that was tied to an anachronistic conception of male autonomy, and their customized choppers operated within the tradition of the technological sublime. The sublime has typically been understood as a contemplative aesthetic posture. Yet the sublime aesthetic is distinguished by its peculiar visceral dimension: by the powerful emotions that it engenders. Indeed, Nye critiques formulations of post-modern sublimity for neglecting the necessary element of terror within the mechanism of the sublime, in which the mind, confronted with an anguishing, unassimilable spectacle, feels threatened by dislocation and turmoil but ultimately finds deep satisfaction in its own ability to reestablish order.549 And, again, Nye describes the technological sublime as more of a cultural practice than an aesthetic, echoing the logic of the 1960's counterculture by lauding its direct confrontation with reality. The technological sublime then is defined by the same tension between chaos and control that characterized Kant's formulation, but that tension is externalized and consciously enacted; the dialectic of the sublime is performed in the physical world as a poignant struggle. And this struggle reenacts the birth of the modern world; it captures the ambivalence that people felt when they were both threatened by technology and giddy to be subsumed by it: to see the world remade in the image of the machine.550

This early-modern understanding of machines with its sublime overtones is the subject of

Barbara Welke's Recasting American Liberty, which examines how the expansion of technological

548 In one of their official statements, the White Panthers proclaimed: “The spirit of the people combined with the Pig's technology will put the Pigs out to pasture for good.” “White Panther Party Statement” The Berkeley Barb 8,13,169 March 26-April 3 (1969): 3. 549 Nye, Technological Sublime, xx. 550 Ibid, 61.

243 systems like the railroad defined the contours of modernity and transformed our understanding of individual agency and citizenship. Traveling through antebellum America, Tocqueville was taken aback by the physical dangers that Americans accepted as routine, especially in the realm of transportation.

Whereas European rail companies laid parallel tracks to irrevocably separate trains traveling in opposite directions, American carriers, eager to save money and expand as rapidly as possible, often ran two-way traffic on a single line, introducing the possibility of catastrophic head-on collisions between trains. They also created conditions in which collisions between trains and other vehicles were common, declining to regulate crossings where rail lines intersected with public roads and often failing even to mark these dangerous interchanges. Even the process of getting on and off the train was dangerous for passengers. Many stations did not include platforms, forcing travelers to descend precariously steep steel ladders or jump onto uneven ground, and it was not even standard procedure to bring trains to a complete stop when they reached a given station. Because it required a tremendous expenditure of energy to recoup the maximum traveling speed of a steam-powered locomotive and its rolling-stock after reaching a full stop, railroads expected passengers bound for more remote locales to leap from a slowed train when they approached their destinations, a procedure that resulted in numerous injuries and deaths. Meanwhile, of course, passengers often undertook risky behavior without any encouragement, and rail carriers made little effort to constrain such activities, whether it was moving between cars while the train was in motion or even leaping from a speeding train at some point closer to a passenger's final destination than the actual station.551

Welke examines court documents relating to the profusion of lawsuits that resulted from train passengers' frequent mishaps, noting that other transportation technologies, such as steamships, also produced a litany of injuries and deaths but had yet to develop the corporate structure that made lawsuits against railroads a lucrative proposition. What she uncovers, as more and more women began 551 Welke, Barbara Young. Recasting American Liberty: Gender, Race, Law, and the Railroad Revolution, 1865-1920. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001): 46.

244 to travel by rail during the late nineteenth century, is a strikingly gendered pattern in the disposition of these cases. For over a decade, through the 1880’s and beyond, when the injured passenger was male, the courts invariably ruled against him, while precisely the opposite was true of female plaintiffs, even if the circumstances of the mishap were identical. Welke relates this startling incongruence to underlying cultural assumptions about the gendered nature of power relations and individual agency; if a man was instructed by a railroad employee to jump from a moving train, his actions were, none the less, his own and the consequences his to bear as an autonomous man. However, a woman, by definition a dependent subject lacking autonomy, could not be expected to act in contradiction of a male authority figure, or, for that matter, to answer fully for any of her actions. And this tension was only heightened when technology interceded. Women, forever estranged from the modern world, were expected to be befuddled by technology; indeed, Welke includes an account of progressive reformers' earnest attempts to work through the public schools in order to educate young women in the proper technique for embarking and disembarking streetcars: instruction that men, of course, did not require.552

However, if men did not require special instruction in how to interact with technology, it was not because they necessarily possessed a facile mastery of the mechanized world. In the early twentieth century, engineers were lionized as as paragons of modern masculinity because of their ability to exercise control. Engineers were in control of themselves and their emotions, and they exercised absolute control over technology, which allowed them to manipulate both the natural world and the social environment in unprecedented ways.553 Yet, at the end of the nineteenth century, the logic that precluded men from collecting damages when they were injured while riding trains depended on a rather different understanding of the nature of technology: “The early law of accidental injury reflected both the idea that technology was imperfect, mysterious, and only partially submissive to human

552 Ibid. 553 Tichi, Cecelia. Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature, Culture in Modernist America. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987).

245 control and the idea that free men encountered dangers voluntarily in choosing a particular mode of transport.”554 In many ways, then, bikers appealed to this early-modern conception of man's relationship to technology; their hyperbolic masculinity rested on the perception that motorcycles were inherently dangerous machines that resisted absolute control, and they endeavored to enhance this impression, modifying their bikes in order to dramatize the precariousness of the control they maintained over their retrograde machines. Indeed, Wolf's account of the psychology of motorcycle riding highlights precisely this tension, noting how it is enhanced by bikers' insistence on constructing and modifying their own machines: “What remains constant is that the biker creates a situation that is a challenge to the machine he has built and the skills he has developed. It is a test of courage that requires the biker to act despite fear or doubt. Risking it all returns a sense of self-control, confidence, and personal power.”555 Machines that embody the technological sublime inspire awe because they represent the apex of our ability and our dominion but, precisely in so doing, threaten to irrevocably expose our limitations. Hunter Thompson did not invoke the technological sublime specifically, but he was certainly attuned to this dynamic: “Big bikes, Ferraris, and .44 Magnum revolvers are something beyond fun; they are man-made machines so powerful and efficient in their own realms that they challenge a man's ability to control them, to push them to the limits of their design and possibilities.”

These machines are so awesomely powerful, Thompson suggested, that the only way to find their limits is to exceed our own. In his essay, “Song of the Sausage Creature,” he recounted being given the opportunity to ride a Ducati 900, mounting the bike with the terrible and exhilarating knowledge that it was powerful enough to surpass his ability as a rider, and, ultimately, narrowly avoiding a catastrophic crash. In 1965 he had not been so lucky; he crashed at high speed on a rain-slicked road, and he crashed in particular manner: by going over the high side. Thompson found a particular aesthetic virtue in this type of crash, which occurs when a rider enters a turn too aggressively and gets pushed to the edge of 554 Welke, Recasting Liberty, 83. 555 Wolf, Rebels, 55.

246 the roadway and beyond, quoting an Angel on the subject: "We've all been over the high side, baby.

You know what that is? It's when your bike starts sliding when you steam into a curve at seventy or eighty. . . She slides toward the high side of the curve, baby, until she hits a curb or a rail or a soft shoulder or whatever's there, and then she flips. . . That's what you call making a classic get-off, baby."556 The high side, then, is an articulation of technological sublimity; it is the point where we encounter limits: of a machine's capacity, of a rider's ability, of the laws of physics, and, in many instances, of the human body's resilience.

American bikers of the 1960's did not have access to the high-performance machines of their era, but they modified their obsolete Harleys in such a way that they created their own jury-rigged technological sublime, which was endowed with paradoxical elements of anti-modern nostalgia and grotesquerie. We have seen how accidents were recounted incessantly by bikers, who indulged a number of macabre affectations. Hunter Thompson, of course, adopted the the biker's characteristic mixture of bravura and nihilistic understatement to describe his own gruesome crash, providing a lurid account of the accident itself and the resultant injuries: “I have visions of compound femur fractures and large black men in white hospital suits holding me down on a gurney while a nurse called “Bess” sews the flaps of my scalp together with a stitching drill.”557 Yet, Thompson also insisted: “There is nothing romantic about a bad crash.” His lengthy passage recounting the incident was nothing if not romantic, but his insistence otherwise was also consistent with bikers' peculiar attitude toward accidents, only some of which were identified as righteous events. Ultimately, even outlaw bikers did not value recklessness per se. Thus, as Paul Willis observed, depending on the circumstance, the spectacle of a crash might be interpreted either as a negation or a consummation of bikers' core values:

The motor-bike death was a highly specific affirmation of lived values. Those values concerned not transcendentalism, but precisely the capable handling of the bike: the mastery of a powerful alien

556 Thompson, Hell's Angels, 92. 557 Thompson, Hunter S. “Song of the Sausage Creature” The Art of the Motorcycle (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1998): 45.

247 technology. Death through stupidity held no value. The significant death came only after physical limits had been pushed to the full, after the body had made massive attempts at control, after the boundaries of skill had been passed, when the rider could do nothing more to save himself. That was 'the way to go': at the point of maximum exertion and skill.558

Again, the story of Grumble Rumble is illustrative. He crashed because he refused to yield and admit defeat, and, crucially, he crashed while running neck-and-neck with a superior machine; thus, his crash represents not the absence of skill but its apotheosis: the realization of physical limits through a sublime expression of skill. If the sublime exists on the boundary of control and chaos, it cannot be fully realized until that boundary has been located, which necessarily involves spinning into the gyre of annihilation and plumbing the depths of terror and anguish always beckoning in the lurking possibility of the crash.

The crash was romanticized insofar as it expressed the technological sublime, and when bikers suggested that only those who had crashed could be considered real bikers, they expressed the centrality of the technological sublime to their overall aesthetic. Someone who had never crashed might embrace the danger of motorcycling out of foolishness or naivete, and in that case their performance would not be sublime but merely lucky. Precisely this consideration emerges in the curious disdain for drugs that Paul Willis traced among his bike boys. Willis suggested that they were afraid of expanded consciousness or transcendence, and he attributed this trepidation to their overwhelming insistence on grounding identity in discrete material interactions taking place in the here and now. Yet, ironically, it was Willis's subjects who consistently referred to those who took drugs as being afraid. Of course, they were identifying a very specific type of fear that exists in relation to the motorcycle's articulation of technological sublimity. Although Willis did not use that term specifically, he was unambiguous in his assessment that the essence of motorcycling, from the perspective of his subjects, existed in asserting control in the face of an overwhelming threat of chaos and violence: “Their attitude was not one of

558 Willis, Profane Culture, 16-17.

248 submission to the motor-bike, but one of assertion of control....It is precisely, therefore, confidence in the controllability, the unequivocality, of the physical world which expands to envelop and control the ferocity of the motor-bike—not vice versa.”559 Thus, the biker boys identified intoxication as a cheater's way to face the fear inherent in riding: one that also precluded a definitive reassertion of control.

Indeed, Willis observed that the biker boys referred to drugs as “Dutch Courage.” Of course, this attitude seemed to diverge sharply from the values expressed by American outlaw bikers, who

“gobbled drugs like victims of famine let loose on a rare smorgasbord.”560 Yet, if we pay close attention to the way that American bikers talked about their prodigious drug use, there emerges a surprising degree of overlap with the values of Willis's abstemious biker boys and a subtle but distinct contrast with the ethos of the counterculture. For instance, the Hell's Angels, while they pioneered the use of psychedelic drugs among bikers, actually maintained an official policy against any drug that could impair the operation of a motorcycle. They were drawn to the transgressive implications of drug use and the grotesque aesthetic of excess that drugs fostered, but they struggled to reconcile these effects with their abiding commitment to the technological sublime and its overtones of masculine stoicism.

Ultimately, bikers employed an idiosyncratic and finally nonsensical definition of impairment that was undeniably hypocritical, but they also tended to describe their drug experiments within a framework of sublimity, echoing accounts of their relationship to motorcycling. Indeed, George Weathern recounted a battle with Frank Reynolds in which the two raced to consume drugs while maintaining coherence:

“Neither of us could walk away. First man to gulp would lose. We dueled, trying to see who could push his fantasies furthest. Then we argued, all the while toking, snorting, and popping—like gunfighters passing a bottle of red-eye, half-hoping the other guy would fall off the chair. We went through word games, mind games puns, and relatively normal raps, then there were signs Frank's head was

559 Ibid, 16. 560 Thompson, Hell's Angels, 203.

249 softening.”561 In this formulation, the aim was not to transcend the self but the opposite: to keep your shit together: a biker rendition of the sublime with its emphasis on courting chaos only to reassert control.

In his American Technological Sublime, Nye notes that his own concept of the technological sublime contrasts with Kant's account of sublimity, which privileges the reassertion of control over the initial threat of chaos. Willis's biker boys, then, with their outright rejection of drug use, seem to have pursued sublimity with a slightly more Kantian inflection than American outlaw bikers, and mainstream American motorcyclists were still more Kantian, eschewing the macabre and taking offense at the notion that they were daredevils. Motorcycle historian and former racer Phil Schilling, for example, was particularly hostile to the pseudo-poetic paeans to liberating danger that circulated among outlaw bikers and their admirers, unequivocally defining the imposition of control as the essence of motorcycling: “And the wind-in-the-hair, bugs-in-the-teeth rubbish had little to do with it.

Motorcycling generates a sense of mastery in the rider.”562 Meanwhile, Melissa Holbrook Pierson's essay, “To the Edge: Motorcycles and Danger,” invokes the concept of eustress, which she borrows from the endocrinologist Hans Selye and describes as “the pleasurable stress found in the mastery of risky sports.”563 Eustress, then, is a version of the technological sublime, and in her book The Perfect

Machine, Pierson develops this theme at length. Pierson confesses that she was terrified to begin riding and that this feeling of abject fear has never been far from her mind; indeed, she seems to have made a conscious choice to project all of her anxieties onto her motorcycle where she can grapple with them in a focused encounter that, ultimately, becomes intensely stimulating. For her, the thrill of riding is about experiencing the ultimate triumph of reason and will. Again, her schema skews decidedly toward the

Kantian, but it operates unmistakably within the aesthetic of the technological sublime; the fear of

561 Weathern, Wayward Angel, 159. 562 Schilling, Motorcycle World, 12. 563 Pierson, Melissa Holbrook. “To the Edge: Motorcycles and Danger.” Art of the Motorcycle, 91.

250 being obliterated by this piece of machinery is the precondition for the joy that she experiences in mastering it.

The process of maintaining precarious control that defines the technological sublime extends a kind of communion between man and machine: an intimacy that begins with a visceral perception of danger that is, in essence, a premonition of the horrible intimacy that is immanent in the mangling catastrophe of a crash. Motorcyclists navigate the boundary between chaos and control and defer this horrible intimacy with another form of union between man and machine: one that is expressed through mechanical skill and insight: “Beyond the simple union of balance, the motorcycle telegraphs the rider in never-ending streams. The impulses flow back through the handlebars, footpegs, and saddle...Surrounded by rushing wind and the engine's mechanical thrashing, the rider speaks a body language with his machine and the road below. Nothing need be lost or filtered out. This body-talk, a kind of nonverbal language which man and machine carry on, proceeds directly.”564 Once again,

Schilling suggested that motorcyclists relate to their machines without the distortion and superfluity of language, invoking a familiar notion of firstness or, as Willis had it: “The sheer mechanical functioning of the motor-bike—the engineered hardness of metal against metal, the minutely controlled explosion of gases, the predictable power from the swing of machined components—underwrites a positive and durable view of the physical world. Abstraction shrinks in the mouth of technology.” For Schilling and

Willis, this direct, unfiltered communication suggested a profound psychic bond between motorcyclists and their machines, a theme that was, of course, commonplace in motorcycle literature. As we've seen, the nature of this bond was sometimes exaggerated to cartoonish extremes, with anthropomorphized motorcycles figured as romantic partners, but Daniel Wolfe offers a more temperate assessment of this closeness that is explicitly grounded in the technological sublime; “A biker is a man who has turned to a machine to find himself. He has learned to how to find both meaning and pleasure in the man-

564 Schilling, Motorcycle World, 12.

251 machine relationship, and he uses his motorcycle to create peak emotional experiences that are worth living for.”565 With this formulation, Wolfe effectively defines the biker as someone who explores and elaborates the concept of technological sublimity.

This pursuit took on new resonance in the context of the technological landscape of the 1960's.

If Nye presents the technological sublime as the lingua franca of modern America, by the postwar period, it was becoming a dead language. For critics like Thomas Hine,whose Populuxe explores the latent ideological assumptions behind the science fiction inflection of mid-century popular design, and

Langdon Winner, modern technologies failed to achieve technological sublimity because they were at once too familiar to inspire awe and too overweening and terrifyingly invasive to provide the necessary frisson of the technological sublime, which requires that a technological artifact must exist in a tenuous equilibrium, threatening chaos and violence but yielding to precarious control. It is precisely this tension that was lacking in the innocuously user-friendly yet inscrutable high-tech consumer goods that proliferated during the postwar years, transforming Americans' domestic spaces and work routines.

Indeed, the public actually intervened in the design of the era's most celebrated piece of high technology in order to interject an element of turbulent sublimity into a technological spectacle that seemed overly rationalized . In his analysis of the Cold War space race, Howard McCurdy notes that

NASA's first manned missions were fully automated, until public pressure compelled the agency to empower its astronauts and give them more control over their vessel: a move that was symbolized by the inclusion of a window in later designs. In NASA's estimation, a window was superfluous, but the public wanted to see astronauts as heroic aviators and not helpless guinea pigs.566 NASA had engineered a perfectly rationalized technological system, but the public intervened to engineer a spectacle of technological sublimity in which the astronauts performed a struggle to maintain uncertain

565 Wolf, Rebels, 31. 566 McCurdy, Howard E. Space and the American Imagination. (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997): 215.

252 control of an awesomely powerful machine.

Motorcycle riders, of course, performed the same struggle, and their exertion was imbued with vital, even primitive, overtones. Daniel Wolf explained the feeling of riding a chopper by suggesting that: “it allows [the rider] to transcend himself by virtue of having overcome a primal challenge and conquered his own fears.”567 Wolf''s choice of the word primal is significant; it suggests a danger that is visceral, elemental. The most recent example of the technological sublime that Nye offers is a NASA shuttle launch, the first of which occurred in 1981. Of course, it is really the thrusting rockets—a decades older technology—that provides the sublime element of a shuttle launch, overwhelming onlookers with earth-shaking noise and vibration to reproduce the instinctive terror that previous generations experienced while riding speeding trains, driving across immense steel suspension bridges, or even pedaling bicycles. But, the technologies of the postwar period and beyond have not achieved this effect. The space shuttle was a high-tech piece of transportation technology in an era when the cutting-edge of technological development had gravitated away from locomotion and toward electronic communications and bio-medical engineering. These realms do not preclude technological sublimity, but they do not seem to offer the immediate, visceral perils and pleasures that characterized technologies of the early modern period. It requires a certain amount of specialized knowledge and perhaps an imaginative leap to experience the sublimity of the transistor, which was the essential building-block of the postwar revolution in electronic communications. Indeed, by way of contrasting it with the motorcycle, Phil Schilling said of the transistor: “It neither moves nor glows nor hums. It is just there, working with faceless anonymity and cold efficiency.”568 Motorcycles, of course, remained wonderfully intuitive. They continued to feel dangerous, evoking the sublime technologies of the machine age. Thus, within the biker subculture, the American tradition of the technological sublime was perpetuated and celebrated and also imbued with a nostalgic quality. 567 Wolf, Rebels, 55. 568 Schilling, Motorcycle World, 16.

253 In contrast to the cold efficiency of the transistor and other marvelously consistent but woefully unalluring mid-century technologies, the archaic Harley was identified within the biker subculture and among its growing admirers as charmingly vital in its fallibility, and it was frequently depicted as downright primitive: not simply less rationalized and consumer-friendly than Detroit's automotive offerings but disquietingly atavistic, even bestial. Indeed, Brock Yates portrayed his local Harley dealership as a forbidding place where high technology and expertise were anathema: “He grunted a response to the kid's question.....Other men lurked against workbenches. They wore grimy denims and sported heavy engineer's boots gleaming with caked motor oil. They smoked heavily, filling the morbid room with gray clouds that mingled with the belching and backfiring of the Harley they were attempting to tune with large screwdrivers.”569 Yates's description of the macabre environs of a Harley dealership anthropomorphized the motorcycle itself, which is given a churlish demeanor, while there is something downright sinister in the action of the mechanics with their outsized instruments performing what Yates termed crude ministrations. The whole scene is antithetical to the sterilized atmosphere of a

Chevrolet dealership, more closely resembling Melville's rendition of the Pequod's smoky try-works, where whales are rendered into oil in putrid fires stoked by their own burning flesh:

These fritters feed the flames. Like a plethoric burning martyr, or a self-consuming misanthrope, once ignited, the whale supplies his own fuel and burns by his own body. Would that he consumed his own smoke! for his smoke is horrible to inhale, and inhale it you must, and not only that, but you must live in it for the time. It has an unspeakable, wild, Hindoo odor about it, such as may lurk in the vicinity of funereal pyres. It smells like the left wing of the day of judgment; it is an argument for the pit.570

There is something similarly demoniac in the elemental labor of Yates's mechanics, and his image of a deconstructed motorcycle sitting in its effluence is downright grotesque, as is his reference to the machine farting and grumbling. If functionalism posits the machine as an organism in order to invoke the poetic rhythm and harmony of a natural world in which form follows function in a nuanced symphony, here the motorcycle's organic qualities suggest something rather different: the chaotic, 569 Yates, Brock, Outlaw Machine. (Boston: Little Brown, 1999). Rpt. Mammoth Bikers, 8. 570 Melville, Herman. Moby Dick. 1851. (Chicago: Newbury Library, 1988): 422.

254 violent struggles of Hobbes's state of nature in all its bestial abandon. Indeed, hog is the preferred nickname for the Harley-Davidson, a moniker that captures the Harley's tendency to invert the typical connotations of mechanized technology. A hog is a foul, corpulent beast. A hog is slovenly and erratic.

And the hog moniker draws on an enduring association between swine and a pathologized white otherness. Eric Lott notes, for instance, that the famed rebel yell was not a boisterous cheer but a demented, feral shriek derived from a hog-call; it was meant to instill visceral terror, marking the rebels' descent into monstrous, subhuman bestiality, and the hog-call has continued to signify a degenerate strain of white southern masculinity, most memorably in the 1972 film Deliverance, in which a portly bourgeois Atlantan on a camping trip is made to “squeal like a pig” while he is sexually assaulted by deranged rednecks.571

Thus, the connotations of the Harley as hog reinforced bikers' status as atavistic social deviants sunk in redneckism. Their machines somehow emanated primitivism. Indeed, bikers seemed to recall the nightmarish Morlocks of H.G Wells's The Time Machine: a sub-human, subterranean race of laborers that has merged bodily with the inscrutable and demonic machines they serve. Bandit actually seemed to invoke their spirit when he reflected on the way police reacted to the sight of him on a particularly hoary chopper: “The damn Man was on me like flies on shit—they musta thought I was straight outta the center of the earth.”572 Ultimately, bikers consistently evoked primal danger and overt violence in contrast to the highly abstracted threats posed by modernity. This dynamic, for instance, defines James Ward's interpretation of an obscure 1963 British science-fiction film that features bikers:

The Damned. The film opens with a biker gang victimizing an American tourist and seemingly establishing themselves as our villains. However, the narrative eventually shifts its focus to the activities of a scientist working on a nearby military installation, and it is, ultimately, the oblique violence perpetrated by this functionary that looms larger than the posturing delinquency of local teens, 571 Lott, Keynote. 572 Bandit “Bandit Takes a Trip” Easyriders February 1975: 25.

255 as we learn that the base harbors captive children who have been radioactive since birth as a result of government experiments. The bikers do nothing to specifically redeem themselves, but their transgressions are made to seem quaint in contrast to the threat posed by the military-industrial complex and its byproducts.573

Again, this contrast between the extemporaneous, brazen violence of swaggering bikers and the lurking, endemic perils of modernity had particular resonance for the counterculture with its remonstrance against technocracy, which was embodied in an emerging critique of Detroit. In 1965

Ralph Nader published Unsafe at Any Speed, a bit of muck-raking consumer advocacy that alleged systematic bias against safety within the auto industry, citing the Chevy Corvair as an inherently flawed design. The book went on to garner tremendous public attention, achieving a vaunted status within the counterculture, in particular, although it may seem odd that the same insurgent young people who embraced the romantic anti-modernism embodied in the licentious biker and his conspicuously dangerous motorcycle also embraced Nader's legalistic appeal for auto safety. Of course, both phenomena share a subversive orientation toward Detroit. Thus, the appeal of Unsafe at Any Speed was not its demand for safer cars per se but its exposure of hidden threats lurking beneath the facade of progress, security, and affluence: its revelation of the delirious incompetence and absurdity at the core of bureaucratic rationalism and its disclosure of the sheer mendacity of corporate advertising. The counterculture had come to suspect that, as in The Damned, it was the prudent men in their sterile lab coats whom we had to fear far more than the ferocious-looking young men in the streets. And bikers, in spite of their disdain for hippie politics, certainly shared this paranoid perspective on modern authority.

Indeed, Frank Reynolds, after recounting a recent fight and reflecting on the time he bit a cop's face, referenced a movie called The Children of the Damned, speculating that, through the use of LSD, humans will acquire telepathic powers that they will use, like the children in the movie, to “control the

573 Ward, “Outlaw Motorcyclists,” 381-407.

256 insane doctors of the button.”574 That arcane turn of phrase wonderfully captures the counterculture's critique of Detroit and American technocracy. For them, the absolute control over technology embodied in the button was simply a demented illusion, whereas the social control facilitated by technocracy was very real. And, Reynolds's response to technocratic rationalism, which he characterized as its own perverse from of insanity, is a familiar one advocated by the counterculture: psychotropic drugs, carnival, purposeful insanity.

CONCLUSION

Indeed, the motorcycle itself was, ultimately, understood as a form of purposeful insanity that mirrored, distorted, and exposed the placid insanity of American technocracy by nostalgically recuperating an early modern relationship to the machine that was characterized by the ecstasy and the intimacy of the technological sublime. Ironically, one of the pioneers of this species of nostalgia for nascent modernity and its particular relationship to the machine was Henry Ford himself, who is so often figured as the father of modern corporate industry. By 1930, Ford was becoming marginalized within the Ford Motor Company, and he spent more and more of his time working to construct his

Greenfield Village: a simulacrum of a Victorian farming town. What's curious about Ford's version of this time-capsule project is that he sought to preserve the imagined organic farming community in the very moment of its obsolescence, calling attention to and even celebrating the very innovations that would eventually displace that entire way of life; indeed, Greenfield's highlight attractions included exhibits like the Wright brothers' bicycle shop and a replica of Thomas Edison's Menlo Park lab.575

574 Reynolds, Freewheelin Frank, 55. While both films feature sinister scientists, there does not seem to be any direct relationship between The Children of the Damned (1964) and the film that Ward discusses, These Are the Damned (1961), although both were likely influenced by The Village of the Damned (1960). 575 Skramstrad, Harold K. Preface. Working at Inventing: Thomas A. Edison and the Menlo Park Experience. 1989. William S. Pretzer. (Baltimore: John's Hopkins University Press, 2002): 6-7.

257 Ford continued to believe wholeheartedly in the potential of mechanization to improve society, even as he was consistently befuddled and disappointed by the emerging modern world around him; accordingly, he fetishized the moment of invention itself.

Ultimately, Ford was a stubborn Utopian and absolutist. Utopianism is almost necessarily a fantasy of stasis, and this was certainly true of its first technological manifestation, which emerged during Ford's youth, when works like Bellamy's Looking Backward, from 1888, reached a mass audience by imagining a world in which machines provide for all of our material wants, inexorably delivering us from drudgery and privation. Of course, that felicitous result depends on our wants remaining constant. Machines can deliver a Utopia, so long as our needs and desires remain fixed in the moment before the machine's intercession. Indeed, this paradox haunted Henry Ford's own career at

Ford Motors, where he pushed the company that he founded to the brink of bankruptcy in the 1920's by refusing to answer the design and marketing innovations pioneered by GM, clinging, instead, to his spartan utilitarian bias, which was a manifestation of his peculiar understanding of mechanization and its Utopian promise. For Americans to want green cars seems innocuous enough, but Ford apparently recognized that to allow such concessions was to open Pandora's box, allowing a mechanized Utopia to slip through our fingers. If only we could remain provincial Victorians: but with cars and light-bulbs.

This was was Ford's fantasy; thus, he was loathe to allow the car to become a commodity—he resisted national advertising until 1927576—rather than a marvelous invention. In many ways, then, as Thomas

Hughes observes, Ford's conception of technology, if not his politics, was ideally suited to the Soviet

Union, where the market was anathema but industrialism was venerated.577

Ford did not want to change the Model T because he recognized that to accede to the evanescent market was to squander Utopia and because his own ecstatic relationship to mechanization was rooted

576 Marchand, Advertising, 7. 577 Thomas Hughes notes that Ford himself was revered in the Soviet Union, which promoted his Fordson tractor enterprise. Hughes, Thomas P. American Genesis: a Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm, 1870-1979. (New York: Viking, 1989).

258 in the technological sublime with its preference for undomesticated machines that were perfectly imperfect: sublime. Ford valued the macho associations of his Model T, and he seems to have been been seduced by the paradoxical promise of the sublime, celebrating the Model T and Edison's light bulb for the chaotic disruption that they brought to the staid Victorian world but also for their potential to perfect that world. Ultimately, for him, the rupture was the Utopia. And, if we return to Jerry

Rubin's contradictory fantasy of pioneers, what we see, really, is a similar nostalgia for nascent modernity, a fantasy of rupture that engages a desire for encounters with powerful yet undomesticated technology. It is a fantasy redolent of masculinity that has, perhaps, a particular appeal to white men, in whose virtually sole possession the tenuous control of early modern technology resided and for whom the pleasures of the technological sublime were largely reserved.578 Rubin rejected the ideology of colonialism outright, but he was enthralled by the process of the frontier as it was defined by popular myth: by the crude activities of clearing and building, and the rough ethos of an improvised, liminal society in which everything was contingent and white men were left to their own devices, challenged to contrive new techniques in order to survive. If the counterculture is often associated with a certain back-to-the-land impulse informed by a rather naive strain of noble savagery,579 Rubin's comments make it clear that this fantasy was not necessarily hostile to technology. The inventions that take place under a regime of technocracy are perused with the specific aim of bolstering the status quo, and the counterculture rejected such innovations, but they longed for the same type of crude and disorderly machines that animated Henry Ford, locating a close analog in the chopper. Thus, Daniel Wolf's description of motorcycle riding as a quest for peak experiences through managed encounters with powerful machines couches the technological sublime within the argot of the counterculture's politics

578 Nye underscores the democratic nature of the technological sublime, but this is is a period in which American democracy was still constructed by the slogan “free, white, and 21.” While women were about to receive the right to vote, as we have seen in Welke's work, even a streetcar was considered a dubious environment for a woman, while Marvin emphasizes the fact that minorities were consistently depicted as unable to decipher modern technology. 579 Slotkin, Fatal Environment, 17.

259 of authenticity, suggesting that the motorcycle offers an experience of presentness that is transformative and disruptive of existing hierarchy.

Again, what really defined the biker subculture was neither individuality not conformity but contingency. If bikers' many conflicts seem petty to the outsider, the subculture deliberately constructed a social world in which that strife had deep meaning. The world of the outlaw biker was full of threats and obstacles; it was a life lived in extremis: lived from one crisis to the next. Bikers chose to exist in the world in a manner that ensured conflict because they actively wanted to cultivate a psychological state of fraught urgency: “If you were at a bar partying, or wherever you might be, down the street or at the bike shop or walking in the fucking park smelling the flowers....look out—the shit is on.”580 Here,

Barger is specifically referring to the tense atmosphere surrounding the wars that his Oakland chapter fought with their cross-bay rivals in the Frisco chapter, but the urgent quality of the existence that he describes is what the Angels aspired to create on a continual basis: an unpredictable world of lurking threats and outrageous possibilities. Thus, in an Easyriders article titled “A Day In The Life: Or, why bikers are bikers,” the author, Renegade, compares bikers to Vikings and remarks “Every element is still spontaneous and a challenge, each confrontation with the Man is an entirely different situation.”581

The reality that bikers constructed was defined by trial and exigency, and it was this quality that captured the legacy of the frontier as the counterculture imagined it: as a mode of presentness that subverted modern formulations of technocracy in particular. Bill Murray, like may other observers, characterized the motorcycle itself as an instrument of anarchy and a means of escape: “the motorcycle is the chief instrument the Angels use in the achievement of freedom and power...smash through the sad square world that hems you in, leaving no past behind you, expecting nothing of the future, living strictly in the moment and the immediate thrill.”582 Here, Murray betrays an unmistakable admiration

580 Barger, Hell's Angel, 149. 581 Renegade. “A Day in the Life: or, Why Bikers are Bikers.” Easyriders February 1980: 30. 582 Murray “Hell's Angels,” Rpt. Mammoth Bikers, 105.

260 for bikers and, especially, for the motorcycle, again suggesting that the motorcycle necessarily exists within the tumultuous flux of the present, identifying it as a machine that is suited to the liminal frontier, which is both past and future and where the deliberative life of the modern rational actor is subsumed by sheer urgency.

For Renegade, the biker lifestyle was defined by unpredictable obstacles, which included spectacular, violent confrontations with the police but also more quotidian travails, like the mechanical break-down that features prominently in “A Day In The Life.” As in other instances, this posture represented an exaggeration of attitudes that were prevalent among more mainstream motorcycle riders, who revered improvised bush fixes and cherished the motorcycle's relative unreliability vis a vis the automobile. Like Renegade, Mike Baudette placed an anecdote about mechanical break-down at the heart of his first Bent Spokesman column, while Roger Lovin observed: “I have faced—successfully— bears, fires, hurricanes, armed husbands, and Viet Cong, and I tell you that none of them are as dangerous as the average mile of public highway.”583 Lovin framed this boast as a complaint against the highway system and heedless drivers who imperiled motorcyclists with their general disregard and frequent contempt, but it was precisely the perils and surprises of the road that he ultimately found exhilarating. Indeed, Lovin's whole conception of motorcycling revolved around the idea of nomadism: life lived in the highly contingent flux of the present. By amplifying motorcyclists' perverse affinity for break-downs and the entropy of the road, bikers made a virtue of the motorcycle's apparent defects, and they troubled mid-century assumptions about the nature of technology. Throughout the postwar period and into the 1990's, American motorcycles were decidedly more prone to mechanical failure than automobiles, and this was especially true of the customized machines favored by bikers. But, bikers did not consider this fundamental unreliability a drawback to riding motorcycles; in fact, break-downs were almost fetishized within the subculture: embraced as opportunities to encounter chaos and respond with

583 Lovin, Motorcycle Nomad, 66.

261 a mixture of stoicism, nihilism, and resourcefulness that distilled core values of the subculture.

.Again, Easy Rider explicates the underlying logic of the biker's relationship to the frontier from the perspective of the counterculture. The Barb identified the film as an inversion of the Western in which the legacy of the Indian finally prevails, and it pointedly attempts to invert modern assumptions about technology in particular. We have seen how the film's resentful townspeople disparage its exotic, wayfaring bikers as potential space aliens, and that is not the only mention of extraterrestrial life in the film. When George joins Wyatt and Billy, he samples marijuana for the first time and delivers an unhinged campfire soliloquy about an alien race that is already living among us, concluding his description of their civilization: “ Because of their technology, they are able to feed clothe, house and transport themselves equally and with no effort.” The ideology that George imputes to this alien civilization, of course, represents a distilled form of technological Utopianism, echoing the underlying assumptions of technocratic Cold-War America. Ultimately, George trails off and starts giggling, expressing the filmmakers' assessment of that kind of naive faith in technology. For the counterculture, the motorcycle was the opposite of the U.F.O. If the U.F.O. was, like the transistor, inscrutable, operating effortlessly within a seamless and encompassing technological apparatus designed to ensure universal prosperity through glutted material abundance, the chopper was a primitive machine that navigated a chaotic landscape of privation, facilitating a sublime masculine performance: a modern analog of the cowboy's cherished, idiosyncratic gun.

262 Chapter 4: Chopper

The effect of the carnivalesque anti-modernism that bikers were able to create was inseparable from the reality of the motorcycle itself, which served a totemic function within the biker subculture but also existed as a distinct technological artifact, structuring the routines and practices that defined bikers' lives while embodying particular aesthetic priorities and design traditions. As Terry Orendorff explained: “An Angel's bike could be many things—his power symbol, his equalizer, his sex object, his religious object, and often his sole possession. A good chopper evaded precise definition, but you knew when you had one.”584 Orendorff's suggestion that a motorcycle was frequently a biker's sole possession was a particularly common trope within the subculture, and we've seen that when Hunter Thompson wanted to capture the radically contingent nature of bikers' lives, he suggested that a motorcycle was the only tangible trace that survived their deaths. Thompson also specified that a dead Angel's bike was not sold but was raffled among his fellow club members, a gesture that captured the way bikers endeavored to define their motorcycles as something other than a commodity. When Cisco Valderrama argued that the Angels invented the idea of a biker lifestyle, he derided recreational riders as posers who readily parted with their bikes for a price: “As soon as the shit comes down, their bike is the first thing they sell.”585 If the nature of a commodity is its universality, or its ability to convey fluidly from one party to another, for Valderrama and his club-mates, a motorcycle was not a commodity; it was

584 Ball, Terry the Tramp, 41. 585 Valderrama, Cisco. Qtd. Barger, Hell's Angels, 49.

263 something indissoluble from personal identity, inalienable. It could only be transferred upon death and then only to a member of a biker's surrogate family.

This posture, which defined the relationship between a biker and his motorcycle as one of extreme intimacy, engendered a number of cliches, including bikers' tendency to anthropomorphize their motorcycles, often depicting them as romantic partners: “It is hard to describe my motorcycle, yet it is within me—I have deep feelings for it...My bike has replaced a woman in the sense of love for something near.”586 In some sense, this tradition extended bikers' anti-romantic pose, rejecting the conventions of middle-class courtship by ironically transposing them onto an inappropriate target.

What is highlighted, really, in these ardent paeans to their machines, is their refusal to flatter and honor women. However, there also seems to be a deep reserve of sincerity shaping these romantic tributes.

Ritually venerating these machines presented an opportunity for bikers to engage in species of maudlin sentimentality that was otherwise antithetical to their blustering masculinity, as we see in an Easyriders piece in which a biker prepares to ride home in the snow:

I dropped back down onto the saddle and kicked my Hog over. The vibration tingled my blood, and I felt warm all over. The putt seemed to know. But it sat there and talked to me in its own special way. I could tell that it was going to take everything I had to slip into gear and drive that snowy road home. Bat at this instant we are both well tuned, both together, and both road hungry motherfuckers. But the road is white now. Does the Harley understand? I think it does.587

Of course, this rhetoric of intimacy and the accompanying mytho-poetic prose could be rather superficial, which is precisely Valderrama's complaint when he suggested that too many riders who insisted that they live to ride and ride to live also sold their bikes when money got tight or the weather turned cold. Obviously, emotional profession alone did not define the biker subculture. But neither was it defined by privileging the motorcycle among one's possessions or even by avidly dedicating oneself to riding. Ultimately, the subculture was realized and propagated in the activity of repairing and modifying motorcycles: building them. When the sociologist Mark Watson describes how he became a 586 Reynolds, Freewheelin Frank, 90. 587 Grote, Ron “After the First Snow” Easyriders April 1975: 50.

264 participant-observer within the biker subculture, he observes: “building a bike gave me legitimation and access to local biker groups.”588 The activity of building a bike could be almost literal. Some bikers custom-fabricated almost every component of their bikes, beginning with the frame. They disassembled and rebuilt a bike's engine and power-train, boring cylinders and exchanging or modifying gears to create specific desired effects: usually explosive acceleration: “We'd cut down the fly-wheels on the left side to make them lighter so the bike would take off quicker...For quick takeoff as well, we put in new cams and solid push rods, installed bigger valves and new pistons, punched out the carburetor, and put closer-ratio gears inside the transmission with bigger sprockets to make our motorcycles accelerate faster.”589 But other bikers performed only relatively minor interventions in the configuration of their machines: shortening a fender, interchanging the handlebars, or removing the clutch latch. These modifications were not esteemed as highly as more comprehensive customizations, but they also qualified as building a bike. To build a bike was to use one's skills and ingenuity to alter it. It was to invest one's labor into it, which had a perverse effect on the bike's status as a mass-produced commodity embodying the alienated labor of a factory worker in Milwaukee or Springfield.590

Chopper

Willis is emphatic on this point. Operating within the Birmingham School's elaboration of counterculture themes, he defines the biker boys' subculture as a transgressive bricolage in which the vile, inconsequential, mass-produced flotsam of late capitalism is re-imagined and reconstituted: “And

588 Watson, “Outlaw Motorcyclists,” 32. 589 Barger, Hell's Angel, 59. 590 A typical Easyriders article underscored the painstaking labor that went into a chopper, contrasting it with the mass- production paradigm: “Even Henry Ford could see there's one hell of a lot of work in this motorcycle. The motor mount itself had to be shaped, filed, chromed, then welded to the frame, and finally partially painted over to hide the bead.....And to this you can add the small but necessary parts that had were made: foot-pegs, axles, and a brake linkage.” “If at First You Don't See—Try Again!” Easyriders February 1973: 17-18.

265 yet from the rubbish available within a preconstituted market these groups do generate viable cultures, and through their work on received commodities and categories, actually formulate a living, lived out and concretized critique of the society which produces these distorted, insulting, often meaningless things.”591 For Willis, subculture is an inherently oppositional space; it is, as Art Johnson puts it, a living protest vote, a way of being that erodes bourgeois hegemony. Again, Willis is particularly interested in what he calls the dialectical process of material culture: the reciprocal dynamic in which artifacts shape the very people who design, construct, and use them. Thus, his conclusions about the subculture of his biker boys are inseparable from his observations and assumptions about the nature of the motorcycle.592 And Willis's brand of dialectical analysis is an even more important tool for any investigation of American bikers with their audacious tradition of motorcycle customization, or chopping: The chopper was a cultural text that expressed bikers' understanding of the world, including their peculiar views on technology, masculinity, and status, and the act of building a chopper was essentially biographical, as Thompson recognized: “The fact that many Angels have virtually created their bikes out of stolen, bartered or custom-made parts only half explains the intense attachment they have for them....The outlaws tend to see their bikes as personal monuments, created in their own image, however abstract, and they develop an affection for them that is hard for outsiders to understand.”593

Here, Thompson's statement that bikers virtually create their machines from purloined castoffs gestures toward the practice of bricolage, while his conception of choppers as abstract personal monuments certainly captures some of the dialectical quality that preoccupies Willis.

Thompson, then, makes a fitful effort to understand the chopper itself as a social practice, while other accounts of the biker subculture failed to examine the chopper in any depth, although it is invariably acknowledged and often admired by these observers. Typically, the chopper figured in these

591 Willis, Profane Culture, 4. 592 The most recognized authorities on American bikers have tended to pursue a more conventional ethnographic approach, 593 I am suggesting, via Geertz, that the activity represents a form of deep play, and Thompson seems to offer a similar insight. Thompson, Hell's Angels, 86-88.

266 investigations as an evanescent source of titillation, contributing a certain ambivalence to these authors' relationships to their subjects, a dynamic that Thompson actually identified at work in Bill Murray's portrait of the Hell's Angels for the Saturday Evening Post: “Murray's view of the Angels was wholly contemptuous but he was very much taken with the sight of at least one of the brutes on a hog.”594 For

Murray, there was something perversely alluring about the Angels' customized motorcycles: something sublime in the way Blind Bob, an inarticulate earthbound slob, gracefully handled his outlandish machine. Roger Corman, of course, claimed that he decided to make a film about the biker subculture after he saw saw one indelible image of choppers in Life magazine.595 The content of that film, which became The Wild Angels, was largely secondary; Corman knew that capturing the chopper on celluloid would command an audience's attention, and dilatory scenes of choppers traversing the western landscape set to a rock soundtrack became the formula for the biker exploitation genre that included some three-dozen films over a ten-year period: all attempting to capture the mixture of revulsion and longing that defined Bill Murray's reaction to Blind Bob. The chopper distilled all of the biker's anti- modern signification in one irresistible idol, transforming the biker into an evocative anti-hero, rather than a contemptible, repugnant loser.

Thus, within journalistic and sociological investigations of the biker subculture, there was a persistent emanation of disappointment; on closer inspection, the biker always seemed surprisingly, frustratingly banal. As we've seen, Hunter Thompson gibed that the whole Hell's Angels phenomenon could be resolved if someone were to donate a piece of rural property on which the Angels could cavort and pursue their obnoxious but ultimately tiresome predilections undisturbed. His implication is that the Angels posed no real threat to society and held no enduring interest for cultural observers; their conflicts with law enforcement and with innocent citizens, which were grossly overstated, stemmed

594 Ibid, 90. 595 Again, Corman did not base Wild Angels specifically on one image of a Hell's Angels funeral from Life, as he claimed, but it seems credible that the impetus for the film came from a superficial familiarity with bikers through the media and a visual attraction to the chopper, in particular.

267 almost entirely from their efforts to occupy public space for recreational purposes, which Thompson regarded as a straightforward result of their lack of resources, as opposed to a politically motivated campaign of self-assertion and instigation. Elsewhere, in his inimitable way, he complained that their company was simply boring and irksome: “Their sloppy histrionics and inane conversations can be interesting for a few hours, but beyond the initial strangeness, their everyday scene is as tedious and depressing as a costume ball for demented children.”596 And the sociologist Daniel Wolf was likewise skeptical that the outlaw biker represented a unique or particularly disruptive subculture, dismissing the notion that they existed defiantly apart from society: “Ironically, for most bikers this separation is largely symbolic. While the principles of the hedonist biker psychology leads to a search for a free and unconditioned lifestyle, the experiences of the biker do not represent a radical departure from street culture. With little difficulty one can find male examples of hard riding, heavy drinking, risk taking, and sexual exploits in all lower-working-class bars.”597 Thus, Wolf seemed to concur with Lavigne and

Wood, suggesting that bikers were hypocrites who failed to express genuine individuality. Of course, when Wolf reached this pat, almost dismissive conclusion with its apparent overtones of contempt, one wonders why he felt compelled to dedicate a significant portion of his life to studying such a group.

What compelled him to suspect that bikers might be other than utterly banal, typical creatures of saloon society? Ultimately, it seems that his sense of resentment, which was shared by other close observers of the biker subculture, was conditioned by a sense of heightened expectation that actually stemmed from these authors' largely unrecorded reactions to the motorcycle itself and, especially, to the visual appeal of the outrageously customized motorcycles favored by American bikers of the 1960's: the chopper.

Long before he spent tedious hours in their drunken, sub-literate company, Hunter Thompson was enraptured by the sight of outlaw bikers riding their custom choppers. In fact, when Ballantine

596 He continued: “There is something pathetic about a bunch of men gathering every night in the same bar, taking themselves very seriously in their ratty uniforms, with nothing to look forward to but the chance of a fight or a round of head jobs from some drunken charwoman.” Thompson, Hell's Angels, 85. 597 Wolf, Rebels, 57.

268 Press, following the success of his May 1965 article for the Nation, “Motorcycle Gangs: Losers and

Outsiders,” provided him an advance to conduct an expanded study of the Hell's Angels, Thompson's first instinct was to obtain his own chopper: “I tried unsuccessfully to have the Angels find me a cheap, secondhand—and legal—Harley 74, customized in the latest outlaw fashion.”598 Ultimately, then, in many ways, the wounded tone of the frequent barbs that Thompson directed toward the Angels seems to represent the residue of his rapturous attraction to these machines: disillusionment: If the mainstream press identified the Angels as incorrigible deviants who posed a threat to public morals, Thompson seems to have hoped that the press was onto something; he seems to have felt that he would have a natural rapport with anyone who could elicit such hysterical disdain from the American establishment, and this belief was buoyed by his unequivocal admiration for the chopper. Thus, when Thompson expressed his disgust for the Angels' latent fascism, he did so by contrasting their reactionary antics with the disruptive potential of the chopper itself: “Despite the anarchic possibilities of the machines they ride and worship, they insist that their main concern in life is 'to be a righteous Angel,' which requires a loud obedience to the party line.”599 Here is Thompson's version of the familiar lament that bikers are somehow failed individualists, and it is significant that he framed this criticism by invoking the anarchic promise of the chopper itself, suggesting that bikers did not quite deploy these evocative machines as the subversive instruments they clearly were. Even after enduring the obnoxious idiocy of the Angels' camaraderie and the gruesome violence that came with it, from the disquieting episodes of sexual assault and degradation that he witnessed to the vicious concert of boots and fists visited on his own person that finally ushered him out of their company, Thompson had nothing but admiration for the chopper and its disruptive potential.

The chopper was so ludicrous and beautiful and compelling and immediately iconic that observers felt it had to mean something profound, and if the Hell's Angels and other bikers proved 598 Thompson, Hell's Angels, 89. 599 Ibid, 72.

269 unable to articulate a coherent ideology or agenda, the chopper itself continued to intimate subversion.

Thompson identified incipient anarchy in the chopper, and the constituents of the counterculture seem to have done the same. They saw, in the gracefully powerful yet fragile form of the chopper, a poetics of insurgent presentness, and they were enraptured, feeling certain that the men who rode these sublime machines must share their revolutionary vision, even when faced with evidence to the contrary. After the debacle of Altamont in 1969, when Hell's Angels hired to act as concert security repeatedly battered members of the festival audience and eventually stabbed to death a young black man, Meredith Hunter, evidence to the contrary was ascendant, and, over the intervening years, a general consensus has consolidated around John Wood's position that there never was much of an affinity between outlaw bikers and the student counterculture: that bikers were, in fact, a group of violent reactionaries who cynically abused their counterculture admirers. Indeed, Sonny Barger himself endorsed this retrospective consensus and encapsulated the enormous appeal of the chopper when he offered: “The sixties were the best thing that ever happened to the Hell's Angels. Every hippie was glad to give you his old lady to fuck, sometimes in exchange for a ride on your motorcycle.”600 Barger's assertion is undoubtedly hyperbolic, but his sardonic boast expresses an undeniable truth insofar as hippies were enthralled by the chopper, and it captures the mutually irreconcilable nature of the two subcultures' values. By the 1970's, the counterculture had learned its lesson about the outlaw biker and his politics, but the chopper remained an irresistible icon.

A chopper was just that: a motorcycle that had been modified through an editorial process of reduction and substitution that aimed toward an overall effect of radical simplification and improvisation. Thus, Bill Murray's rapt account: “The Angels reduce a machine to its essence, jamming the seats down, stripping away the chrome and extras, replacing standard parts and fittings with improvisations of their own, turning what started as a 'garbage wagon' into a 'chopper.'”601 As with so 600 Barger, Hell's Angel, 130. 601 Murray, “Hell's Angels.” Rpt. Mammoth Bikers, 105-6.

270 many elements of the biker persona, like bikers' embrace of discomfort, risk, and contingency, the chopper stylized and exaggerated the qualities that Americans identified with motorcycles more broadly. In particular, chopping both exalted and parodied the attributes of the Harley-Davidson, which was, after 1953, America's only domestically manufactured motorcycle. Harley, struggling economically, did not substantively alter its design between 1935 and 1970, and it is on the basis of this static quality that Darwin Holmstrom deemed the Harley-Davidson the a priori motorcycle, suggesting a timeless quality of spare purity.602 For more technophilic motorcycle enthusiasts, the slow, unreliable mid-century Harley was not pure or archetypal but laughably obsolete.603 However, Holmstrom's assessment captured an alternative interpretation that took root within the outlaw subculture where

Harley's stagnant design was considered timeless, unadorned, and brutally efficient in its unrefined simplicity. Thus, as chopper-builders proceeded to delineate their aesthetic by stylizing these peculiar qualities of the Harley-Davidson, a version of functionalism formed the core of their aesthetic: an emphasis on lean forms, economy, and performance measured by the simplest metric of straight-line speed. Ostensibly, chopping aimed to achieve greater acceleration and speed by reducing a bike's weight; thus, the process focused on the removal of extraneous components and superfluous material, as Sonny Barger described: “First we would take the windshields off, then throw out the saddlebags and switch the big old ugly seat (with springs) with a smaller, skinny seat. We didn't need all those lights either. We converted the oversized headlight to a smaller beam, replaced the straight handlebars with a set of high bars, and replaced the bigger gas tanks with small teardrop-shaped tanks.”604 In addition to removing or replacing certain components and performing basic modifications, like shortening the rear fender, which had been a common practice among proto-outlaw clubs during the immediate postwar years, bikers began to modify or custom-fabricate more integral elements of the

602 Holmstrom, Darwin. “The A Priori Motorcycle.” Foreword. The Harley-Davidson Century (St. Paul: MBI Publishing Company, 2002): 7. 603 Fuglsang, Motorcycle Menace Rpt. Mammoth Bikers, 16. 604 Barger, Hell's Angel, 56.

271 motorcycle, including the front fork assembly and the frame itself. Over a relatively short period during the early-to-mid 1960's, a pattern of favored modifications coalesced into a recognizable chopper form that was remarkably consistent.

THE AUTOMOBILE

In many ways, the chopper's identity and enduring appeal began with the way that it exaggerated a general tendency to define the motorcycle as an anti-car. Willis refers insistently to the inherent properties of the motorcycle, but those properties are, of course, the result of a process of social construction, and that process has relied to a great degree on contrasting the motorcycle with the automobile. The car is the keystone of modern culture, embodying its dialectic between entropic liberation and monolithic rationalism. On the one hand, the car symbolizes radical atomization and fluid identity through mobility: the destruction of geographically-circumscribed kin networks and the exhilaration of the individual liberated from the parochial community and its constraints. On the other hand, it represents the ascendance of the bourgeois nuclear family, as well as the transformation of that family from a unit of production into one of consumption, all fostered by the rise of the corporation and the hegemony of advertising. For Marx, the one admirable thing about the bourgeoisie was their capacity for destruction and their wholesale irreverence toward tradition.605 The products of their industrial revolution dismantled the old order but only to enshrine a new regime based on capital, and the automobile is the ultimate symbol of this process. It did as much as any innovation to erode the basis of traditional society, but it has become a cultural monolith in its own right.606

For the philosopher and political scientist Marshall Berman, the automobile and modernity are virtually synonymous, a conflation that is especially prevalent in the United States, where the 605 Berman, All that is Solid, 100. 606 Ibid.

272 automobile achieved virtually universal adoption at a remarkably early date.607 This unique circumstance of the automobile's almost immediate, comprehensive adoption has dramatically altered the way Americans perceive the motorcycle as well as the automobile. Generally, it is possible to think about the motorcycle, within a comparative framework, as characteristic of a specific stage of modernization that precedes universal automobility. This schema holds true of Britain and western

Europe, where the motorcycle had its heyday during the inter-war years; Japan, which became a motorcycle society after World War II, and China and southeast Asia, where the motorcycle is becoming the preeminent form of transportation today. In these societies, the motorcycle has had a prosaic identity. Specific subcultures of motorcyclists, like the rockers in postwar Britain, or the bosozuka in late twentieth century Japan, have developed subversive reputations, but these groups have never defined the larger community of motorcycle riders. Even as British rockers captured headlines during the mid-1960's for a series of anarchic riots in the seaside resort towns of southern England, most Brits continued to associate motorcycles, generally, with tradespeople and the quotidian world of the prewar village. In inter-war Britain, where cars and light trucks were beyond the financial reach of the working class, specialized motorcycle sidecars were produced for specific trades, so that a painter could readily carry his ladders and buckets while a plumber carried spare lengths of pipe, etc. By the

1960's, these working motorcycles, which had begun to be perceived as quaintly anachronistic, were still a common sight, and they defined popular perceptions of the motorcycle much more so than the defiant rockers.608

Ultimately, in this developmentalist schema, the United States is the exception that proves the rule. Here, where universal automobility arrived with startling alacrity in tandem with the onset of modernity itself, the motorcycle was never a common form of daily transportation. Instead, motorcycles were typically considered supplemental recreational vehicles, and it was this 607 By 1930, the U.S contained 217 cars per 1000 people: effectively one per household. Davis et al. (2011). 608 Walker, Mick. Motorcycle: Evolution, Design, Passion. (Baltimore: John's Hopkins University Press, 2006): 98-100.

273 understanding that bikers resisted with their insistence on employing their motorcycles as their primary form of transportation: riding them, as Thompson observed, even to get a quart of milk. Of course, this choice struck many Americans as perverse. In the absence of a historical precedent for understanding the motorcycle as an expedient and economical form of transportation that provided a plebeian alternative to the automobile, the choice to ride a motorcycle seemed willfully deviant to most

Americans, and the publicity surrounding the biker subculture came to substantively define popular perceptions of motorcycles and motorcyclists in general. Indeed, Phil Schilling characterizes this bias as common sense among Americans: “Common sense—and the wisdom of majority numbers—sided with automobiles. Motorcycles were dumb transportation; cars were up the transportation ladder from motorcycles, so motorcycles must be low-brow...In practical America, what could be more absurd than owning a frivolous, dangerous vehicle?”609 In America, then, the semiotic contrast between the motorcycle and the automobile was amplified, a development that became especially portentous during the postwar years, as the nation's infrastructure was reconfigured to facilitate an unprecedented reliance on the automobile for domestic transportation at the same time that the American automotive industry consolidated its position of global preeminence, establishing itself as a bulwark of the U.S. economy.

Indeed, during these postwar years, the car became virtually synonymous with the nation itself, embodying the fantasy of universal affluence through incremental technological advance that was so central to American Cold War ideology. Americans tended to see technology as a democratizing agent, a means of securing mass affluence that made traditional conceptions of class irrelevant.610 It was this fantasy, of course, that informed Henry Ford's quest for a universal car, encompassing both his determination to produce an automobile that was affordable for the common man and, especially, his underlying assumption that such an outcome was possible through technological development. In

609 Ibid, 54. 610 Gideon, Sigfried. Mechanization Takes Command: a Contribution to Anonymous History. (New York: Norton, 1969): 467-468.

274 Europe, it was taken for granted that the working-class would never obtain and simply did not require automobiles.611 For Americans, however, faith in their classless society was sustained by faith in the relentless progress of technology. And motorcyclists broke this faith, stubbornly embracing a backwards technology and placing themselves outside the imagined community of universally affluent modern citizens.

Of course, by mid-century, Henry Ford had been displaced within the Ford Motor Company, and the industry had scant interest in a universal car. Manufacturers worked, instead, to create brand hierarchies that would allow them, as David Gartman expresses it, to sell more car, rather than more cars.612 And they achieved this stratified differentiation within their product lines in large part by constructing narratives of technological progress, offering their more expensive vehicles as examples of cutting-edge innovation. Ultimately, the industry enshrined a quintessentially American combination of consumer democracy and whiggish faith in technology, assuring consumers that the marvelous new conveniences and enhancements realized by Cadillac owners would accrue to Chevy owners in due time. Consistent with this strategy, manufacturers took their styling cues from the cutting-edge aeronautics industry, aligning themselves, symbolically, with the vaunted technologies of America's highly publicized Cold War defense initiatives and formulating a populuxe aesthetic that promised both abundance and relentless innovation.613 Motorcycle design, by contrast, stagnated. Motorcycles of the postwar period did not imitate jets. Harley's designs from 1935-1970 are virtually indistinguishable, and they began to strike contemporaries as incongruously austere; indeed, by the early 1960's, the

Harley seemed downright archaic, a quality that informed the motorcycle's overtones of working-class disorder. In the pages of his Motorcycle World, Phil Schilling quoted W.H Parsons, who predicted, at the end of World War I, in spite of motorcycling's status, at the time, as an expensive gentleman's sport,

611 Flink, James J. The Automobile Age. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998): 45. 612 Gartman, Auto Opium, 141. 613 Hine, Populuxe, 128.

275 that: “The real stuff underneath, the foundation upon which the prosperity of industry must stand, will be the lads who ride for the fun of it and who must pay for their fun by the sweat of their brows.”614

Shilling observes that “Parsons' logic turned strange corners” in order to reach this conclusion, suggesting that observers found something inherently vulgar about the motorcycle, identifying it with the working-class on aesthetic, rather than demographic, grounds. And, Schilling suggests that

Americans shared this bias, finding the motorcycle antithetical to the new prosperity of the 1920's:

“everyone was racing forward to get rich, to prosper, to enjoy more things. A better car fit the New

Prosperity, and so did tube radios, and second bathtubs. Stark motorcycles didn't fit—no matter if princes rode them.”615 If the motorcycle's starkness made it incommensurate with the affluence of the

1920's, this tension only increased during the halcyon postwar years, when Harley's antiquated machines became the centerpiece of a subversive subculture.

For Schilling, the motorcycle's starkness did not fit America's acquisitive ethos; it was not merely unstylish but threateningly irrational: “Danger was the greatest impracticality of all.”616 Of course the emergent counterculture disagreed; they saw reason as their enemy, identifying modern rationality as a grotesque perversion that ultimately set itself against humanity. Indeed, Roszak voiced a common counterculture refrain when he posited the holocaust as the sinister fruit of rationality:

“Behind the Wagnerian facade, the Nazi death camp stands as the masterpiece of social engineering in which the cry of the heart was systematically drowned out by the demands of genocidal efficiency.”617

If the Nazi death camp provided an ultimate symbol for the insanity of reason, the automobile came to represent the banal face of that same evil, with Marshall Berman concluding his history of modernity,

All That is Solid Melts Into Air, by offering the gruesome spectacle of the Cross Bronx Expressway as a requiem for modernism. For Berman, The Cross Bronx represents the farcical apotheosis of

614 Schilling, Motorcycle World, 54. 615 Ibid, 55. 616 Ibid, 54. 617 Roszak, Counterculture, 78.

276 modernity's drive toward planning and technologically enhanced control; in its asphalt expanse he sees a human community perverted by the needs of the automobile, a vital neighborhood eviscerated.618

Ultimately, then, the Cross Bronx embodies the sterile horror of bureaucratic rationalism, revealing the omniscient perspective of the urban planner and modernity itself to be the very antithesis of reason: a ludicrous nightmare. Ruth Schwartz Cowan expresses a more benign form of that discontent when she observes: “to many Americans, the automobile has come to represent both the blessings and the curses of technology.”619 Indeed, she goes on to compare the car to the enchanted mop in Disney's The

Sorcerer's Apprentice: the one that promised to magically relieve the apprentice's toil only to compound his misery in unexpected ways. She suggests that the car has a similarly paradoxical quality and that

Americans feel a profound ambivalence about its role in our society.

If stark motorcycles did not fit the prosperity of postwar America, the chopper only amplified this dissonance, departing radically from the bombastic populuxe aesthetic of the mid-century

American automobile, which represented the apex of the Big Three as a commercial force and the culmination of a design progression that began in the 1920's, when the automobile started to undergo a process of domestication and commodification.620 As cars became mass-produced consumer goods, they became much easier to use. Early automobiles required a considerable amount of exertion to operate. Just starting those cars could be laborious and even perilous, since drivers were required to manually turn-over the engine with a steel crank: a procedure that could actually break a driver's arm.621

Battery-powered electric starter-motors eliminated this particular peril for a majority of drivers by

1920, and, by mid-century, a host of innovations, like power steering and brakes, had fully eliminated the physical effort that defined the activity of driving for early car owners, while features like air-

618 Berman, All that is Solid, 291-295. 619 Cowan, Ruth Schwartz. A Social History of American Technology. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997): 225. 620 Gartman, Auto Opium, 13-14. 621 Kline observes that the Model T, in particular, was gendered masculine because of this hazard and Ford's utilitarian ethos. Kline, Robert R. Consumers in the Country: Technology and Social Change in Rural America. (Baltimore: John's Hopkins University Press, 2000): 69.

277 conditioning, automatic transmission, and improved suspension made driving not just simpler and less taxing but utterly facile and comfortable. During the late 1950's and early 60's, a number of American automobiles, like the Edsel, actually featured push-button transmission selectors, and cruise control, which was available by the mid-1960's, further extended this fantasy of fully automated, effortless travel.622 In tandem with this movement toward rationalized controls and ease of use, the car also underwent a semiotic transformation, becoming synonymous with the American family and the burgeoning landscape of suburban affluence. This development represents the process of domestication, which is a particular form of closure: the mechanism by which relevant social groups reach a consensus about the meaning of a specific artifact.623 By the 1960's the automobile was synonymous with the middle-class family and its environs and habits. Indeed, Toby Levingston, whose

East Bay Dragons motorcycle club began as a car club, observed that he and his friends turned to motorcycles in 1959 in large part because their automobiles had become so knit into the fabric of domestic life that they were no longer available for male leisure:

Not a lot of families during the late 1950's had two or three cars parked in the driveway like they do now. Families needed that one car in the garage to run errands to keep the household going, especially on weekends. It was harder and harder for our members to tie up the car during weeknights, weekends, or the wee hours to hang out with their brothers. Since many of us were married men, we still needed some kind of alternative vehicle to buy us freedom and time away from the crib.624

The car, then, had become integral to the operation of the family unit; it had become domesticated.

As the car became easier to use and symbolically entwined with the nuclear family, it also became a seamlessly integrated aesthetic object, its flowing sheet-metal, lustrous paint, and brilliant chrome setting the tone for consumer-oriented mid-century design. This process too began in the 1920's when mass-production automotive firms like General Motors began to emulate the smooth, unitary aesthetic pioneered by custom luxury auto-makers, initiating a consumer revolution in the industry.

622 Hine, Populuxe, 123. 623 Bijker, Bicycles, Bakelites, 84-88. 624 Levingston, Soul on Bikes, 70-71.

278 Early cars flaunted their mechanical parts because auto enthusiasts were eager to embrace the automobile as a machine.625 The engine was, of course, the preeminent symbol of the modern age. At the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the enormous Corliss Engine famously captivated audiences, as did the 1900 Paris Exposition's electric dynamo, which Henry Adams figured as the avatar of the impending twentieth century. People made pilgrimages to view these iconic engines, and they were likewise enthralled by emergent, engine-driven transportation technologies; locomotives, ships, and eventually airplanes all became emblematic of progress and modernity, and Americans, enraptured by these technological marvels, contrived to symbolically possess them through postcards and souvenirs.626 With the automobile, this quintessentially modern power was available for undiluted private consumption, and many first-generation car owners were technophiles who coveted the vehicles as totems of industrialized modernity, relishing the opportunity to partake intimately of the engine's novel might and vitality.627 As Sally Clarke observes, these early adopters were not making a rational investment in a product with proven utility; they were, first and foremost, automotive enthusiasts who assumed financial and corporeal risks in order to explore the vehicle's inchoate potential, effectively collaborating with manufacturers to develop the automobile and define it as a viable consumer product.628 As an automotive market emerged, consumers continued to be excited by the car as a machine, and, within this context, technical attainment remained the ground of competition between firms and the basis of their advertising appeals.629

However, automotive design soon moved to downplay and even conceal the car's mechanical features. Craft workers producing luxury touring cars gradually created an aesthetic that assimilated the disparate components of the automobile, erasing the vestigial elements of the carriage configuration

625 Gartman, Auto Opium, 24. 626 Meikle, “Domesticating Modernity” 627 Stilgoe, John R. Metropolitan Corridor: Railroads and the American Scene. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983) 628 Clarke, Sally H. Trust and Power: Consumers, the Modern Corporation, and the Making of the United States Automobile Market. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 629 Gartman, Auto Opium, 24.

279 and producing an unified auto form that quickly spread to mass-production firms.630 In the 1920's, GM, in particular, moved to conceal the mass produced nature of its product beneath a sensuous, integrated surface as part of a comprehensive effort, under new president Alfred Sloan, to appeal to consumers by focusing on styling, as opposed to technical innovation. GM's styling initiative introduced practices that became standard throughout the industry, like modeling prototype cars in clay, maintaining a hierarchy of discrete models, and ceremoniously unveiling an updated version of each model with every new calendar year.631 Ultimately, even the recalcitrant paternalist Henry Ford followed suit, using styling updates to court consumers, with his Model A tepidly followed GM in emulating the integrated automotive form originated by custom manufacturers. The Model A was more curvilinear and altogether less carriage-like than its ungainly predecessor, with a lower roof line and lower ground clearance: styling cues that would be incrementally articulated by the American auto industry through the 1960's. With the eclipse of the Model T and the ascendance of styling, Henry Ford increasingly disengaged from the management of the Ford Motor Company, retreating, as we've seen, to his

Greenfield Village, where he indulged an obsolescent brand of technological utopianism with

Jeffersonian pastoral overtones. Meanwhile, the Ford Motor Company joined with GM and Chrysler in tacit agreement to make styling and marketing the forum for their ongoing sales competition.632

Throughout this period, the development of automotive styling unfolded within the auspices of streamlining, a broad aesthetic sensibility that embraced fluid, natural forms and the romance of velocity, elaborating the strategies of custom automotive fabricators and concealing the car's chaotic mechanical systems beneath a sinuous surface.633 In this sense, streamlining might be interpreted as an ambivalent response to the penetration of mechanized technologies into Americans' daily lives: a nostalgic flight from the alienating complexity of modern technologies that gestured toward a pastoral

630 Ibid . 631 Ibid, 79. 632 Ibid. 633 Ibid.

280 landscape in which our stolid tools took supply organic and immediately legible forms.634 For some observers, streamlining assuaged modern anxieties by presenting an illusion of continuity, posing a false unity between the natural world and the mechanized one. However, while some ambivalence is always present in our reactions to socially transformative technologies, streamlining, ultimately, represented a buoyant effort to embrace and celebrate the mechanized world, rather than a retreat from it. Indeed, in principle, streamlining itself was another technology; its sensuous curves were supposed to represent scientifically ordained aerodynamic perfection. Of course, the fluid forms that came to dominate automotive styling, industrial design, and even architecture from the 1930's through the

1950's, were not those promoted by designers who took the science of streamlining seriously: “The stylists again triumphed, as the aesthetic illusion of technological progress took precedent over its engineered reality.”635 Yet, as Gartman's lament suggests, aesthetic streamlining, while not a technology in itself, none the less exhibited a fundamentally affirmative relationship to technology. Scientific streamlining operated within the logic of Bellamy's static technological utopianism; its underlying assumption was that the perfect form of any technology was identifiable and achievable. Indeed, while

Ford himself rejected it, the devotees of scientific streamlining were the ones who continued his quest for the universal car. Aesthetic streamlining, by contrast, was less classically utopian. It represented more of a futuristic aesthetic, engaging a fantasy of integrated, progressive mechanical systems and betraying a desire to see technology evolve even more quickly than it had: to deliver on the science- fiction visions that charged modern Americans' engagement with the mechanized world. Aesthetic streamlining concealed the mechanical components of specific artifacts in order to create a comprehensive mechanized aesthetic that imagined a totalized technological environment imitating the seamless integration of the natural world that it finally usurped. Thus, it represented a new species of

634 It is this popular interpretation that Kasson rejects: Kasson, John F. Civilizing the Machine: Technology and Republican Values in America 1776-1900. (New York: Grossman, 1976): 166. 635 Gartman, David. "Tough Guys and Pretty Boys: The Cultural Antagonisms of Engineering and Aesthetics in Automotive History." Automobile in American Life and Society (2006). Web.

281 technological utopianism that eschewed Bellamy's relatively static vision of society free from the terrible nagging of material want to embrace a progressive fantasy of technological augmentation and endless mechanized progress.

Aesthetic streamlining also operated as part of the automobile's ongoing domestication. Thus, it did not so much deny the technological nature of specific artifacts, like the automobile or the radio, as it did constrain the acceptable use of those artifacts, fitting them to an encompassing domestic ideology. The first significant cohort of car owners were wealthy urbanites who purchased the novel vehicles in order to pursue recreational touring, an expensive hobby that promised no remuneration and antagonized almost everyone else who employed the nation's public roads.636 But, competing uses of the automobile soon emerged. Certain professionals, notably doctors and traveling salesmen, saw potential utility in the car's uniquely flexible mobility and began to purchase cars as business investments. Meanwhile, the mass public and rural Americans, who were initially slow to embrace the automobile, did so quite enthusiastically during the 1920's, providing their own understanding of its proper function and meaning. Farmers tended to approach the car as an adaptable power source, frequently modifying their modest, mass-produced vehicles to serve as pick-up trucks, tractors, or stationary engines that could power a variety of mechanized equipment.637 Thus, the flexibility of meaning that characterized the automobile's development prior to the achievement of domestication and closure was closely tied to the malleability of the early mass-produced automotive form itself: the mechanical simplicity and functional transparency that made these vehicles easy to modify. This tractable quality applied particularly to Ford's utilitarian Model T, which was the favorite of America's rural population. With its boxy, tripartite body reinforced by wooden framing members and its erect passenger compartment, riding high above the ground on simple axles and large-diameter, wooden- spoked wheels, the Model T was indelibly a horseless carriage, as early automobiles were often called. 636 Kline, Consumers, 57 637 For example, washing machines or wood-choppers.

282 The Model T's engine was simply grafted on to the familiar carriage form, and its power was transmitted through a series of readily identifiable and easily accessible mechanisms. It was not a major leap to redirect the power of the engine from the car's wheels to another device where it might be usefully employed, and Henry Ford himself initially relished these improvisations,638 which operated within a do-it yourself ethos that Ford himself championed as a great booster of the small farmer.639

In time, however, Ford came to see the brand of populist ingenuity that adapted his Model T to serve as a multipurpose farm implement as a threat to his bottom-line, and he moved to assert control over his product, first cajoling his dealers to admonish customers that any modifications would void their warranties and then introducing a variety of specialized models and accessories that preempted the need for customers to undertake their own customizations. These moves coincided with the company's embrace of styling and promoted the larger processes of domestication and commodification. The car was being turned into a black box: an integral artifact that was employed by consumers in a highly prescribed manner that required little of their input.640 And streamlining was central to this larger development, which was understood in gendered terms. In 1908 Ford purchased a Detroit Electric

Model C for his wife. At the time, it seems that he conceived of this electric car as a domesticated version of his utilitarian Model T. The electric car, of course, did not require its driver to manually crank the engine, and it operated without the noise and exhaust that characterized internal combustion vehicles, making it generally safer and simpler. Indeed, the electric car was almost fool-proof: thus, supposedly suited to women. Yet, the electric car did not quite emerge as a safety car or ladies' car in the way that the safety bike emerged to challenge the high-wheeler. Instead, the Model T itself was streamlined and domesticated: made more like Clara Ford's Detroit Electric. By 1919, the Model T had an electric starter motor, and by 1927 it had been displaced by the Model A, which featured the

638 Kline, Consumers, 73. 639 Segal, Howard P. Recasting the Machine Age: Henry Ford's Village Industries. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005): 27. 640 Kline, Consumers, 73.

283 streamlined styling that typified luxury touring cars and reputedly appealed to women.641 Indeed, styling was invariably discussed by the Big Three and throughout American industry as a concession to female sensibilities, and this attention to the way that women perceived consumer products implied something more expansive than these products' likely ability to attract female buyers. Again, within the enduring rhetoric of separate spheres, women were positioned as civilizing agents and guardians of civic virtue. In this context, to create a car that successfully appealed to women was to position the car as a socially beneficent technology: a domesticated technology.

VERNACULAR FUNCTIONALISM

In the case of the motorcycle, domestication remained an incomplete process into the 1960's, especially in the United States, where a struggling Harley-Davidson failed to introduce substantive design innovations throughout the postwar period. Indeed, in his history of the motorcycle industry Phil

Schilling pays German manufacturers a slightly backhanded compliment by remarking: “One could set off on a BMW, or an NSU, or a Zundapp, and know that it would perform as reliably as an automobile of the period. In that sense, the postwar German machines, 175 cc and larger, were among the first nonretarded motorcycles.”642 Once again, it is in explicit contrast to the automobile that Schilling reaches his whiggish judgment: with the partial exception of certain German bikes, postwar motorcycles were stunted and underdeveloped; they were retarded. Significantly, Schilling's specific charge is that these motorcycles were unreliable. Reliability is, at core, a technical issue, and part of his criticism is that motorcycles were technologically unsophisticated. For him, lack of technological advance is prima facia evidence of deficiency. But, unreliability also invokes a constellation of related

641 Gartman observes how pervasive this logic was in his Auto Opium, noting that he believes that such arguments existed to provide a rationalization of men's own interest in styling: Gartman, Auto Opium, 98. 642 Schilling, Motorcycle World, 128.

284 but distinct shortcomings that address a fault in the process of domestication, rather than a lack of technical attainment per se. Schilling alludes to this aspect of unreliability as well, when he suggests that most postwar motorcycle riders could not count on their vehicles to reach their intended destinations. This risk was perhaps an even more significant factor informing popular perception of the motorcycle as a perverse, obsolescent machine than the danger of injurious crash with which motorcycles were also commonly associated. For technologies, reliability is the essence of domestication and commodification; a technological artifact cannot be employed by the mass public until it can offer predictability and convenience such that it requires no substantive input from the consumer, who likely has no knowledge of its workings This is the black-box effect that Kline addresses in his Consumers in the County; a vehicle that cannot be relied on to reach its destination is not a fully viable mass commodity. Thus, especially in the postwar American environment of universal automobility, the motorcycle was consigned to the category of recreational novelty at best and machine that did not work at worst. Indeed, when Schilling blesses postwar machines from NSU and Zundapp with the contrary plaudit non-retarded, he is suggesting that other mid-century motorcycles were just that: invalid, useless, non-functional.

In addition to the factor of reliability, which postwar motorcycles did not posses, the process of domestication and commodification coalesces around styling: another trait that remained anathema to the motorcycle industry to such an extent that starkness was perceived, by Schilling and others, as inherent in the motorcycle. While Gartman describes the essence of automotive design during the

1920-30's, when the car became a domesticated mass commodity, as an effort to create a “smooth organic shell to hide the fragmented, mechanical reality”643 of the mass-produced auto, Phil Schilling insists: “Motorcycles, no matter how modern, appear as assemblages of separate parts.”644 Indeed, he suggests that motorcyclists ridicule the scooter's smooth exterior and eschew any attempt to conceal the 643 Gartman, Auto Opium, 14. 644 Schilling, Motorcycle World, 14.

285 their vehicles' functional mechanical elements: “There have been attempts to streamline and style motorcycles, but such packaging has always courted disaster with enthusiasts. A motorcycle can't be cowled in sheetmetal. The engine must look like an engine; a good portion of the tube framing must be visible; the wheels should be open.”645 What Schilling suggests is that the motorcycle, as a socially constructed cultural artifact, cannot sustain streamlining and related innovations without compromising its dominant meaning. For Schilling, the meaning of the motorcycle cannot be separated from a particular, functionalist disavowal of styling and the masculine overtones of that posture, and it cannot be separated from its binary relationship with the automobile. For Schilling, a motorcycle is inherently a stringent machine and not a domesticated commodity, as he indicates when he refers to streamlining as packaging that motorcycle enthusiasts cannot embrace. Packaging, in colloquial usage, is a superficial veneer that accompanies a commodity and appeals to consumers: in particular, to feminized consumers who are seduced by artifice. For Schilling and many others, it is apparent that motorcycle enthusiasts revile such appeals and resist the entire process of domestication.

Of course, it was not always true that motorcyclists insisted on functionalist austerity. The chopper has become so iconic and exerted such an influence on the subsequent course of motorcycle design that it has effectively been naturalized, obscuring alternative design possibilities and the historical circumstances that shaped the chopper aesthetic. Certainly, when Indian Motorcycles introduced its 1940 Indian Chief and subsequent designs for that model, the company seemed inclined to pursue the populuxe aesthetic favored by Detroit: “The huge 1948 Indian Chief, the apex of mid- century camp (pinstripes, decals, big red swooping fenders), in the same way encapsulates America's extravagant postwar spirit. It's the motorcycle equivalent of the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami.”646 This extravagant design impulse did not ultimately flourish within the American motorcycle industry

645 Ibid, 16. 646 Kimmelman, Michael. “Seeing Machines as Art and the Guggenheim as a Machine.” New York Times June 26 (1998): 37. The Fontainebleau and other work by Morris Lapidus is also referenced by Hine as the quintessence of populuxe architecture. Hine, Populuxe, 149.

286 principally because of institutional factors. Indeed, Indian was on its last legs when it introduced the avant garde Indian Chief in 1940, and it was defunct within five years of producing the bombastic 1948 model that strikes architecture critic Michael Kimmelman as camp. While the postwar years brought unprecedented prosperity for Detroit's Big Three auto makers, the American motorcycle industry faced near ruin. Detroit discovered that styling was a more economical form of competition between manufacturers than technical development, but it was hardly cheap. Although the Big Three found ingenious ways to differentiate their vehicles and create the illusion of innovation and novelty by deftly employing relatively inexpensive, superficial design modifications, executing these minor styling updates, when performed on an annual basis within a system of mass-production, required enormous capital investment in stamping and casting equipment, not to mention design services. Harley, alone in the American industry after 1953, was not in a position to make such an investment. Thus, the stark lack of styling that typified their postwar models was not necessarily a response to a broad consumer preference for severe, functional forms among American motorcyclists. As we have seen, Harley and

Indian initially tried to keep pace with Detroit in their styling efforts, and, prior to the emergence of the outlaw motorcycle subculture in the 1960's, when motorcyclists worked to customize their bikes, their priorities generally followed suit. The prewar motorcycle community was comprised predominantly of so-called dressers: middle-class touring enthusiasts who earned that appellation by dramatically accessorizing, or dressing-up, their bikes. Dressers formed themselves into an array of clubs that emphasized wholesome, family-friendly recreation and enforced strict codes of propriety, typically requiring their members to don military-style uniforms for club outings. These uniforms reflected dressers' bourgeois moral sensibility and concomitant aesthetic conventions, which echoed those of the

Victorian parlor: aggregation, ornamentation, and sentimentality.647

Dressers represented the core constituency of the AMA, against whom outlaw bikers defined 647 Ames, Kenneth L. Death in the Dining Room and other Tales of Victorian Culture. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992).

287 themselves, as Tobie Levingston described succinctly in his memoir of the East Bay Dragons: “All kinds of spectators showed up to watch the Star Riders, the Buffalo Riders, and the Jolly Riders. Like the Star Riders, these clubs were all dressed in snappy uniforms. We made sure we were the last to arrive on the scene all raggedy. Whenever we rode up, we heard comments like, 'Here come them dirty

Dragons'...we scared the holy hell out of the families barbecuing in the park with their kids.”648

Levingston's memoir includes a 1953 image of the Berkeley Tigers to underscore the aesthetic contrast that his Dragons cultivated. In the photo, the Tigers, who are in uniform, wearing western bow ties, pearl-snap shirts, polished riding boots, and jodhpurs, generally affect a hybrid of the Royal Canadian

Mounted Police and Hank Williams's backup band as they pose formally around an immaculate Harley with whitewall tires, tooled saddlebags, and a luggage rack. Levingston and his brother briefly joined a similar club, but they complained that the the Peacemakers, which was a coed organization, was consumed by spousal bickering. Levingston, of course, wanted to participate in a club that would provide escape from the constraints of domesticity. Thus, his Dragons rejected the decorous style that characterized existing clubs in their snappy uniforms, cultivating a defiant, masculine ethos.

However, the Dragons did not immediately embrace the spartan chopper; when it came to motorcycle customization, the aesthetic contours of the outlaw biker's opposition were not immediately apparent or foreordained. During the postwar years, as a subversive subculture began to develop within the motorcycle community, particularly among groups of WWII veterans, many of these riders began to experiment with modified bikes called bobbers because their rear fenders were cut short or bobbed.

Bobbing, then, moved toward a spare, functional aesthetic, and the bobber was a clear precursor of the chopper. However, the economy of the bobber represents only one possible aesthetic trajectory for motorcycle customization. Indeed, motorcyclists within the same milieu of disaffected veterans and proto-outlaws that pioneered the bobber continued to formulate their own aesthetic of agglomeration

648 Levingston, Soul on Bikes, 94.

288 and excess that echoed and parodied the gorged and gaudy style of dressers, outfitting their motorcycles with a multitude of horns and reflectors, along with various beaded appliques and fringe treatments. Hunter Thompson specifically noted of the East Bay Dragons: “The Dragons have the same kind of half-mad élan as the Angels, and a group of them wailing down the highway is every bit as spectacular. They wear multicolored helmets, and their bikes are a flashy mixture of choppers and garbage wagons—all Harley 74s”649 Here, Thompson's reference to garbage wagons does not denote bloated factory-stock bikes but these outrageously adorned outlaw contrivances, which also appear alongside bobbers and early choppers within the environs of the Chicago Outlaws in Danny Lyon's The

Bikeriders. In fact, the Harley-Davidson Museum's modest exhibit on customization features several examples of this fantastically embellished aesthetic, which echoed that of England's scooter-riding mod subculture.

Hybrid

There was no inherent preference for sparsity among motorcyclists, including among self- consciously subversive factions of that community. American manufacturers abandoned their fledgling programs of progressive styling during the postwar years because they lacked the resources to continue those efforts. By the 1960's, Harleys were perceived as archaically spare, and bikers, whose customization efforts had experimented with both functionalist economy and baroque ornamentation, gravitated toward the former. Yet, the classic chopper of the 1960's was hardly devoid of embellishment; bikers continued to adorn their machines with various baubles and emblems, and garish paint jobs were standard, with bikers pioneering the psychedelic color palette that became synonymous with the counterculture and quickly found its way into commercial art and advertising of the period.

649 Thompson, Hell's Angels, 229.

289 Ultimately, the chopper embodied the same tension that defined the contemporaneous emergence of pop art: the ironic interplay of mass-produced consumer goods and iconography with elements of traditional handcraft. The outlaw dressers who appear in Danny Lyon's The Bikeriders employed fringe treatments, beading, and various appliques, lending their machines a curious textured effect that was distinctly handmade. These vehicles were recognizably mechanical, but they were also tactile, pliant, and intimately personal, expressing a paradoxical techno-organic quality. And chopper builders amplified this paradox. They eschewed busy applique work and fringe, which was patently nostalgic, instead favoring an austere industrial look, but within this aesthetic, they employed rudimentary tools and techniques to undertake truly comprehensive hand-crafted modifications of their mass-produced vehicles: altering the frame and front-end, fabricating their own gas tanks and handlebars, and reconfiguring the bike's control mechanisms. Thus, their handiwork was both more subtle and more pervasive. In some ways, a chopper looked more like a stock Harley or an American automobile than a bloated dresser. Bikers abhorred the automobile industry's general aesthetic of facile ease, total comfort, blithe prosperity, and vacuous styling, but they also borrowed crucial styling cues from

Detroit, modifying their bikes to create a long, low silhouette while indulging in an abundance of chrome and candy paint. The chopper, then, did not reject the populuxe aesthetic of mass culture outright; it subverted that paradigm by embracing its values in conjunction with a nostalgic anti- consumer posture of aggressively masculine self reliance and vernacular craft.

Kouwenhoven

Thus the chopper's functionalism carried contrary impulses; it did not embody the arid, euclidean functionalism of continental modernism with its overtones of restraint and taste. In addition to incorporating garish elements typical of populuxe commercial design, the spartan, functional

290 simplicity of the chopper was inflected toward a rugged, do-it-yourself ethos that intimated danger.

John Kouwenhoven's Made in America, published on the eve of the populuxe era, explored this sensibility, which he termed vernacular engineering: a peculiarly American mindset in which autonomy, masculinity, and technology are imbricated. Kouwenhoven suggested that Americans have long been identified with a folkish approach to designing machines. He recounted the testimony of the

English engineer David Stevenson, who traveled around America in 1838: “[David Stevenson] reported in his Sketch of the Civil Engineering of North America that after minutely examining all the most approved American steamboats he could trace no general principles which had served as guides for their construction.”650 In contrast to Europe, where engineering was an academic discipline closely aligned with the sciences and machines were constructed according to abstract principles, Stevenson and others observed that antebellum Americans seemed to employ a heuristic model of technological innovation. By the Second Industrial Revolution, when Europeans began to take serious note of

America’s technological achievements and to inquire much more systematically into American engineering methodologies, this suspicion was confirmed, and Americans began to be perceived almost as mechanical savants. Engineering, in America, was pursued by untrained amateurs who operated without scientific principles or carefully vetted designs, and this ad hoc practice yielded a peculiar unity between man and machine that resulted from the conflation of designer, artificer, and workman: “For one thing European machines were less likely to be improvised than those made in the

United States; they were rarely made for the personal use of the designer, or even of the buyer, but rather for a workman employed by the buyer, and this required that they be made to operate as nearly as possible without the intelligence of the workman.”651 These individuals, who impetuously built practical machines for their own use, preferred working with inexpensive, highly malleable materials,

650 Kouwenhoven, John Atlee. Made in America: the Arts in Modern Civilization. 1948. (New York: Octagon Books, 1975): 28. 651 Ibid, 22.

291 like wood, and their designs were typically flexible, adaptable, and disposable. When locomotive power was employed, Americans favored crude, overpowered engines with large displacements and long strokes. These engines were inefficient but impervious, powerful, and easy to repair or modify, and Harley's V-twin remains a quintessential example of the form.652

Kouwenhoven also suggested that American engineering, like other folk practices, was collaborative. He noted that there was no single author responsible for the design of the legendary

Yankee clipper ships: the fastest commercial vessels of the age of wind and a source of curiosity for

European observers, who interpreted these ships and other technological artifacts from America as authorless, artless, and even thoughtlessly naïve, imagining that they embodied an organic unity of form and function. Indeed, American vernacular engineering became the crucial aesthetic inspiration for European high modernism, and Kouwenhoven himself was actually primarily concerned with the aesthetic merits of America’s techno-vernacular: “It is this unique factor of a democratic-technological vernacular which has been overlooked in our estimates of art in the United States.”653 Kouwenhoven, then, did not particularly examine the gendered subtext of vernacular engineering or its historical legacy beyond the context of continental modernism. For Kouwenhoven, it was important to elevate

Americans' naïve genius for engineering to the level of true artistry. Writing within a modernist paradigm, he wanted to position vernacular functionalism as a kind of proto-modernism.

Yet, in spite of the formal similarities in their output, the underlying motivations and assumptions of vernacular engineers and modernists were often quite opposed. For their part, bikers ultimately belonged more to the former category, as their peculiar articulation of functionalism gestured toward a refined, gracefully spare aesthetic reminiscent of continental modernism but also relished garish elements of conspicuous ornamentation and even overtones of primitivism. On the surface, bikers’ design rhetoric, like that of continental modernists, focused on hard-nosed efficiency, 652 Ibid . 653 Ibid, 13.

292 disavowing ornament: “Every scoot we feature is a street bike—we won't have it any other way. No show bike bullshit or weird fiberglass creations.”654 Here, Easyriders's reference to weird fiberglass creations and show-bikes disparaged superficial customizations: ornament. Again, the official origin- myth of the chopper maintained that the goal of chopping was to reduce a bike's weight, thereby increasing its performance, at least according to the quintessential American criteria for motor vehicle performance: straight-line speed. Obviously, this justification was rather frail. Raked front ends, for instance, which lengthened the fork tubes by as much as 18 inches, actually added weight. Raking, by lengthening a bike's silhouette, created a visual effect of forward movement but did nothing to actually make a bike faster. Raking also compromised a bike's handling, and a rebuilt, raked front-end typically had no brake: again, qualities that do not actually produce a faster bike but do, rather effectively, evoke the idea of heedless velocity. In this way, chopper-builders were, indeed, very much like functionalist modernists who decried ornament but included non-traditional superficial elements in their work, like the I-beams mounted on the exteriors of Mies van der Rohe's signature buildings, which provided a visual effect of verticality while adding rhythm and texture to his compositions but bore no weight.

Exposed I-beams became a cliché of architectural modernism, and they neatly encapsulate the movement and its philosophy, which was ultimately less interested in reorienting the design process around a holistic understanding of function and more interested in drawing visual attention to the functional elements within existing design practices, recontextualizing these forlorn, mundane features as aesthetic objects. Exposing steel support members actually tended to operate against function, as the concrete in which these elements were typically clad provided fire-proofing, but international style modernists created a new ornamental vocabulary by fetishizing and aestheticizing mechanization itself, cajoling a novel expressive quality from the astringent industrial look of mass-produced structural steel and related materials.

654“He Can't Believe It.” Easyriders January 1974: 6.

293 Again, a similar strategy was apparent in chopper-builders' approach to design, as they endeavored to subtly draw visual attention to their motorcycles' mechanical systems. Indeed, this dynamic is particularly evident in the way they addressed the gas tank, which is one of a bike's most flexible and visually prominent elements. A motorcycle's gas tank almost invariably sits on the top rail of the bike's frame, right between the rider and the handlebars. As its only function is to contain gasoline, it could assume almost any shape, making it is a prime candidate for a weird fiberglass creation or some other novel construction. Yet, chopper-builders chose to keep the shape of their tanks rather simple and traditional. If they made the effort to custom-fabricate a tank, they favored a streamlined tear-drop or peanut shape not at all dissimilar from factory designs, but the standard procedure for chopper-building was simply to swap the capacious stock gas-tank that came on a large- displacement Harley, like the bikers' preferred 74, for a smaller gas-tank salvaged from a Mustang or a

Sportster. Fabricating a custom gas-tank was commended among chopper-builders, but featuring a smaller gas-tank was absolutely de rigeur, and Sonny Barger observed, significantly, that the objective of adopting a smaller tank was to make the engine's cylinder heads more visible: “The tanks were changed for looks, because the wide and thick stock tanks on a Harley covered up the top of the motor.”655 In addition to its considerable sheer size, the factory gas-tank on larger Harleys was bifurcated, allowing it to sit lower by straddling the frame rail. This combination of a large tank riding low on the frame's top-rail almost completely obscured the cylinder heads, which most observers found to be the most visually alluring elements of the engine: asymmetrical mounds of stainless steel that have consistently engendered poetic reverie in bikers. The cylinder heads that Harley employed from

1936-1947, in particular, had a sculptural quality that was both sensuously organic and austerely industrial, and they were known colloquially as knuckleheads: a visual metaphor that captured this combination of anthropomorphic guile and spartan utility.

655 Barger, Hell's Angel, 56.

294 These machines were prized above others by bikers of the 1960's, and they have continued to be favored by bikers, who divide the entire history of Harley-Davidson into distinct eras identified by subtle variations in cylinder head configuration. Indeed, the Harley-Davidson Museum actually has a large exhibit dedicated to this seemingly picayune detail. Clearly, the museum's directors anticipate that guests, conditioned by the enormous visibility and influence of the biker subculture and the chopper, will have some basic familiarity with the peculiar taxonomy of the Flathead, Knucklehead, Panhead, and Shovelhead, which has been adopted as a mainstay of Harley's corporate mythology. For chopper- builders of the 1960's, smaller gas tanks made these visually compelling cylinder heads more visible by literally removing a visual obstruction, and they also shifted the proportional balance of the motorcycle, making the engine seem larger and drawing attention to its Gothic array of push-rods and finned cylinders, which, like the exposed steel and concrete of international style modernism, defined a seductively contrary form of ornamentation. Chopper-builders reoriented viewers to see these unassuming items as beautiful objects.

In so doing, they insisted, like European high modernists, that real beauty was simply an aspect of utility, aestheticizing the motorcycle engine and its mechanical features because they seemed to represent the ultimate reification of function. All of an engine's components were designed to perform under rigorous conditions, working toward an unambiguous, singular end: relentless forward motion.

No effort was spent beautifying these items. To do so would have compromised their ability to perform their indispensable role in the minutely coordinated symphony that is internal combustion. And, for performing their humble but highly particular roles, bikers identified these components as, in fact, beautiful. The cooling fins, which provide additional surface area for the engine's cylinders, allowing them to be cooled by onrushing air, were beautiful, and the push-rods, which flank the engine's cylinders like fragile flying buttresses and translate the constant rotational motion of the crankshaft into the staccato linear movements of the intake and exhaust valves, were beautiful. Even the unseen

295 internal components of the engine were beautiful: “Too bad we can't show the inner workings of the engine and the fine, hand-crafted work of setting up and hand-lapping the internal parts, because the same artistic touch was used in assembling the engine...There is true mechanical art involved in the functional construction of this machine. So much art, in fact that it appears a wizard penetrated the sanctity of his garage, changing it into a studio of perfection.”656 Indeed, within the logic of

Functionalism, the fact that these elements were typically unobservable only enhanced their beauty.

Easyriders's insipid reference to wizards would certainly draw scorn from continental modernists, but the wizard metaphor is simply the magazine's way of expressing the fundamental imperative of functionalism; it is their way of conveying the idea that a machine is beautiful because it embodies an underlying concurrence of form and function that exists outside the agency of the artificer, capturing a transcendent organic quality of harmony.

Indeed, this idea that intimate exploration of the mechanical properties of the motorcycle actually yields a kind of communion with nature is routine in motorcycle writing and reflects an important element of America's vernacular engineering tradition that appealed to the counterculture.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, of course, is effectively dedicated to dismantling the false dichotomy between technology and nature. Prisig's tao is precisely the unity of the two, which he found in the functional harmony of the motorcycle. Meanwhile, Bill Carpenter advanced the same idea in the vernacular of the counterculture when he offered, in the pages of The Rag:

Riding a cycle, even very expertly, keeps us (unless we be wonderfully enlightened) in assent to the Western hangup of, and dominion over nature. One sits on a screaming engine, thinking of the force being generated to do his will, and of the expertise necessary to overcome the natural tendencies of friction and gravity. One must truly have made it to comprehend—to grok—that an internal combustion engine is as natural as a muscle or wind.657

Again, even as they formulated a critique of technocracy that explored anti-modernism and indulged in a certain romantic noble savagery, the counterculture continued to embrace mechanization; they simply 656 “Man! Talk About An Ear-Ringin', Drag-it-in-the-dirt, Far-out Knuckle: Well, Here it is!” Easyriders July `1977: 33. 657 Carpenter, Bill. “The Bent Spokesman.” The Rag 1,20 (1967): 6.

296 did so within a highly circumscribed and aestheticized context: a particular vision in which mechanization operated in concert with nature and in defiance of the byzantine artifice of technocracy.

Of course, it is precisely this type of fantasized middle landscape that Leo Marx, writing in 1964 during the emergence of the counterculture, identified as typically American. And, while Marx's

Machine in the Garden drew primarily on examples from literature, John Kasson and others have identified similar figurations within the actual history of American technological development. For instance, Louis Sullivan's avant-garde architectural work employed innovative building techniques and served as an inspiration for international style modernism, with its glass box austerity, but it also featured sensuously organic ornamental treatments. This apparent contradiction was rooted in

Sullivan's germ theory, which Henri Dorra suggests was “tantamount to positing an organic unity encompassing both structure and decoration.”658 The germ theory held, essentially, that art and science were indissoluble; it was Sullivan's Tao and the root of his aphorism form follows function. Sullivan's early skyscrapers combined a starkly mechanized aesthetic signature with elements of lush handicraft, extending an American vernacular tradition. Indeed, in his Civilizing the Machine, Kasson insists that

American vernacular engineering was not a naive expression of some collective mechanical genius or a prevision of European functionalism but an autonomous design tradition that responded to its own distinct priorities: notably a republican imperative to combine beauty and utility. According to certain modernist critics, the baroque filigree and folk ornament with which nineteenth-century Americans adorned their otherwise spartan machines represented a form of prevaricating; Americans were capable of responding almost euphorically to machines, but they balked at their own fervor and grasped for a dilutant of nostalgic sentimentality, attempting to domesticate the machine and reconcile it with tradition, refusing to acknowledge its revolutionary impact or the titillation they felt when confronted

658 Dorra, Henri. Symbolist Art Theories: a Critical Anthology. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994): 111 Nye makes a similar observation, suggesting that Sullivan, with his organic ornamental treatments of high-tech, austere forms, was not an incomplete modernist but a visionary looking for something else. Nye, Technological Sublime, 94.

297 with the historical rupture that it represented. Kasson disagrees. For him, when Americans applied ornament to the machines that they built, they were not domesticating them or concealing their true nature but further celebrating them; the filigree and patriotic iconography was not an attempt to camouflage the machine but an index of just how beautiful they found it: so beautiful that they wanted to underscore its status as art by decorating it.659 And Sullivan's germ theory captures this holistic vernacular understanding of the unity between mechanization, art, and nature.

The chopper extended this same tradition. It was contrary. If chopper builders aspired to a version of functionalism, choppers hardly resembled the sober Midwestern grain elevators that appeared in Le Corbusier's manifesto Towards a New Architecture, and still less did they resemble Le

Corbusier’s own creations: the sterile euclidean environments that defined the international style and became synonymous with restraint and taste, especially in the United States, where elite cultural institutions like the Museum of Modern Art proselytized on their behalf. While the international style was severe and antiseptic, appealing to rarefied aesthetic sensibilities, choppers, in sharp contrast, were brazen, gaudy, and hedonistically populist. Chopper-builders did endeavor to remove as much sheet- metal as possible, reducing a motorcycle to its indispensable mechanical components and eliminating the expansive surfaces that provided opportunity for decoration on other vehicles, but the surfaces that remained on a chopper were embellished with garish excess. This was especially true of the gas tank.

As we have seen, chopper-builders reduced its size and declined to experiment with unconventional shapes and adornments, but they relished painting their gas tanks in brilliant, iridescent colors.

Levingston observed of his Dragons' palette that “colors varied between turquoise blue, yellows

(Benny Whitefield's specialty), loud metalflake orange, deep purples, even pink with black trim,”660 while Sonny Barger started a trend by painting his gas tank with a can of phosphorescent orange spray- paint that he stole from a highway road crew. 659 Kasson, Civilizing the Machine, 159. 660 Levingston, Soul on Bikes, 86.

298 Bikers cultivated a similar gaudiness in their unrestrained use of chrome: “Whatever we could possibly chrome, we'd take over to the chrome shop on forty seventh-avenue.”661 Unlike conventional forms of accessorizing or ornamentation, chroming drew attention to the ornamental properties of functional mechanical components; yet chrome was anathema to dogmatic modernists for whom truth in materials was an article of faith. In spite of the fact that it functions as a protective coating, chrome is an applique that belies the true nature of the alloy steel beneath, allowing it to impersonate stainless steel. What's more, for high modernists, its brilliance made it suspiciously similar to traditional ornaments made from precious metals, which they emphatically disavowed. Indeed, high modernism and its emphasis on functionalism arose as mass-production techniques were democratizing goods.

Thus, while the international style reflected a genuine affinity for technology and the prospect that it could engender a new age of reason, it also represented an anxious response to the proliferation of mass-produced knock-offs of traditional luxury goods as new manufacturing techniques allowed for the creation of intricate ornamental detail without the intensive skilled labor that had been required, historically, to achieve such effects.662 In general accord with the labor theory of value, the ornamental abundance that had signaled fine craft and status in an era before mechanization instead came to signal cheapness and over-eager tackiness by the turn of the century. Indeed, when Adolf Loos famously declared that ornament is crime, he was not speaking metaphorically about the shameful violation of beautiful, unadorned objects with superfluous embellishment; he was speaking hyperbolically but very literally about the pathological affinity for ornament that he saw as characteristic of primitive or degraded minds. Loos, living through a period when ornament was suddenly available to the masses, felt that the lower-classes were like children; they were enthralled by shiny objects, frills, and baubles: the hallmarks of a Victorian sensibility that struck him as not merely passe but atavistic.

By mid-century, chrome was symbolic of this enduring elitist disdain for popular taste, as it 661 Ibid, 85. 662 Meikle, Jeffrey L. Design in the U.S.A. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005): 62.

299 became synonymous with the styling excesses of Detroit's postwar populuxe era. Chrome even came to represent a kind of shorthand for the hegemony of the Big Three, who seemingly conspired to sell bloated, technically deficient cars by aggressively marketing superficial styling innovations to a gullible public.663 As David Gartman observes, during this era, there was scant functional difference between GM's bottom-of-the-line Chevy and its top-of-the-line Cadillac; the dramatic price difference between the two was attributable almost entirely to styling, and it was made manifest in the Cadillac's abundance of chrome, in particular.664 In this context, then, chrome did function something like a precious metal, acting as a conspicuous signifier of wealth per se. And, while chrome also complimented the chopper's functional aesthetic in significant ways, redefining exhaust pipes and oil tanks as beautiful objects, bikers certainly responded to chrome as a status symbol within Detroit's hegemonic metaphysics. Indeed, in a 1975 issue of Easyriders, Bandit expressed ambivalence about a more austere bike that he built, noting with dismay that his own club mates took one look at the bike and assumed that he was too broke to chrome it: “cause they thought the only reason I didn't have a flashy scooter was that I couldn't afford chrome.”665 Meanwhile, in a similar vein, Tobie Levingston referred to spray-paint derisively as Mexican chrome but admitted that his East Bay Dragons sometimes resorted to this ersatz rattle-can chrome in order to feed their addiction to its shiny allure.

Thus, bikers did share some of Detroit's assumptions and preoccupations. Chrome represented the intersection of their vernacular functionalism, with its anti-consumer overtones, and their status- seeking pop exuberance. It enhanced their emphasis on the aesthetic properties of mechanism itself, but it also betrayed their fascination with certain elements of Detroit's superficial extravagance. In this sense, they resembled the automotive subculture of hot-rodders, for whom David Gartman exhibits scant regard in his Auto Opium. Gartman, who offers an incendiary critique of Detroit's manipulative

663 Hine, Populuxe, 13 . 664 Gartman, Auto Opium, 156. 665 Bandit, “Bandit Takes a Trip,” 25.

300 business practices and the Big-Three's controlling sway over mid-century American culture, feels that hot-rodders ultimately provided a tragically ironic recapitulation of Detroit's aesthetic priorities. Detroit employed streamlining to offer an illusion of wholeness, concealing the reality of mass-production, and hot-rodders, in turn, invested their hand labor to perfect this illusion. For instance, the visible seams between body-panels on mass-produced cars are one of the telltale traces of the assembly line, while one of the signature practices of hot-rodders was to painstakingly mask those seams. In the postwar era, they did so by employing malleable lead as a filler, earning the moniker lead sled for a certain kind of stretched and sleek custom car that represented the apotheosis of Detroit's streamlined aesthetic, presenting an illusion of lush organic wholeness rather than variegated, mass-produced flotsam. And the chopper similarly echoed many of the key visual tropes that defined mid-century automotive styling. GM's longtime styling chief, Harley Earl, who was with the company from 1927 to 1958, once offered a sardonic assessment of his legendary career: “My primary purpose for twenty-eight years has been to lengthen and lower the American automobile, at times in reality and always at least in appearance.”666 Longer and lower is also a succinct appraisal of chopper-builders' overarching objective. Classic choppers invariably employed obsolete rigid frames, which had no rear suspension and rode considerably lower to the ground than standard bikes of the period. Meanwhile, raking the front-end could also lower a bike's center of gravity,667 and raking invariably extended the bike's wheelbase, sometimes quite dramatically. Thus, a long, low, chromed-out chopper with an immaculate paint job was not completely antithetical to a mid-century Cadillac. Ultimately, bikers continued to work within the tradition of vernacular functionalism and managed to create their own machine aesthetic that was a hybrid of functionalist austerity and populist ornamental abundance.

666 Earl, Harley. Qtd. Gartman, Auto Opium, 95. 667 This would happen when the the forks were not extended in proportion to the angle of the rake.

301 Tools Without Handles

The chopper, then, extended an autonomous vernacular tradition that represented an affirmative celebration of the machine, but it did, in fact, introduce an ambivalent element into popular discourse on technology: not in the way that bikers related to their choppers as machines but in the way that choppers as machines relate to the technological landscape of postwar America. If chopper-builders eschewed the arid functionalism of continental modernism and leavened their own vernacular functionalism with garish flourishes of Detroit's populuxe hedonism, they also worked self-consciously against Detroit's aesthetic and the ethos of mass-production and specialization that defined industrialized modernity and reached its apogee during the postwar era, sparking a backlash that informed much of the social agitation of the 1960's. As Winner noted of that decade: “Social scientists, politicians, bureaucrats, corporate managers, radical students, as well as natural scientist and engineers, are now united in the conclusion that something called 'technology' lies at the core of what is most troublesome in the condition of our world.”668 The critics whom Kasson corrects for reading ambivalence into the way nineteenth-century Americans adorned their machines with elements of folk art, were, of course, products of this extended moment of ambivalence: the Nuclear-Silent Spring era, in which a wary attitude toward technology increasingly seemed intuitive for Americans. By mid- century, the conformist specter of Organization Man or the Man in the Grey Flannel Suit was an established source of popular anxiety.669 As Frankfurt School rhetoric filtered into the ideology of the

New Left, this percolating critique of middle-class orthodoxy and bureaucratic ennui found a perfect compliment in emergent criticism of the culture industry, the military-industrial complex, and the ethos that united these monoliths: technocracy. Technocracy means rule by technicians, but it also implies governance in the interest of technological development; thus, in Roszak's expansive definition, 668 Winner, Autonomous Technology, 2. 669 Frank, Conquest of Cool, 37-38

302 technocracy is essentially modernity itself: the whole future-oriented metaphysics of reason and progress. And, in the context of the counterculture, the word became a kind of shorthand for an elastic, sometimes paranoid critique of modernity as an amalgam of technology and social control.

This perspective encouraged young people to reinterpret the inane flotsam of industrialized affluence as a potentially sinister agglomeration, questioning the virtue of modern technology's most conspicuous gifts: the bounty of consumer appliances and tools that purportedly made life in the Great

Society so desirable. Indeed, in his Autonomous Technology, Winner’s central concern was with the dominion of technique, or the proliferation of organization and surveillance as technologies in and of themselves, but he unequivocally related this struggle against new structures of political domination to the shifting power relations between individuals and the specific technological artifacts that shape daily life. For Winner, the way that we interact with tools and machines as part of our quotidian existence is directly tied to the extending reach of systems like bureaucracy and fascism; he suggested that our tools have become tools without handles; rather than extending our field of action, amplifying our intentions, and performing according to our will, it is our tools that require us to adapt to their needs.670

Referencing Emerson, Winner suggested that our tools are reagents, that they act upon us. At the most obvious level, this inversion occurs when a tool-user is no longer the architect of those tools and finds them incomprehensible or even magical. Winner noted that we constantly employ tools that we can neither design, nor modify, nor repair, and of course, this circumstance is precisely the opposite of the arrangement that Kouwenhoven celebrated as quintessentially American, in which designer, artificer, and user are synonymous.

Winner's concern about the alienation that results when we fail to comprehensively understand our tools and relate to them only as passive consumers has been a staple of motorcycle discourse: “As the twentieth century turns into its final quarter, lovers of nuts and bolts feel cheated. Accelerating

670 Winner, Autonomous Technology, 29

303 technology piles mystery upon mystery inside contrivances which surround, serve, and victimize us.

This invisible technology first perplexes, later overwhelms us.”671 Schilling's lament was ubiquitous across the spectrum of motorcycle literature: from outlaw bikers and their boisterous admirers to a more recondite figure like Robert Pirsig, whose Zen began with the observation that his traveling companions did not perform service on their BMW touring bikes, did not understand something as basic as a choke, and seemed determined, ultimately, to wholly deny the technological nature of their coveted machines. Pirsig's friends were quintessential examples of the wary attitude toward technology that Winner identified as typical among Americans of all persuasions during the 1960's. And, somehow, they embraced the motorcycle precisely as an antidote to the ennui of modern, mechanized existence.

This is the motorcycle dialectic; it is a piece of technology that seems to subvert the technocratic hegemony of the Great Society. It is a machine, but it connotes romantic escape, anarchic dissent, and the balance of nature to such a degree that Pirsig's companions were wholly unwilling to engage with or acknowledge its own mechanical nature: “Of course John signs off every time the subject of cycle repair comes up, even when it is obvious he is suffering for it...To get away from technology out into the country in the fresh air and sunshine is why they are on the motorcycles in the first place.”672 Of course, this paradoxical identification of the motorcycle as an example of organic harmony developed out of Americans' persistent habit of contrasting the motorcycle with the automobile. Pirsig's friends prevaricated when he pushed them to elaborate their relationship to their motorcycles, but their feelings toward the automobile were unambiguous and forthcoming: “'It was just those people in the cars coming the other way,' she said. 'The first one looked so sad. And then the next one looked exactly the same way, and then the next one and the next one, they were all the same...It's just that they looked so lost,' she said. 'Like they were all dead. Like a funeral procession.'”673 For Pirsig's companions, the

671 Schilling, Motorcycle World, 16. 672 Pirsig, Zen, 23. 673 Ibid, 17.

304 automobile embodied technocratic society, and the motorcycle, by default, captured a romantic humanism that was absent from the rationalized modern world. Pirsig, of course, disagreed, arguing throughout his text on behalf of a unity between the technical and the existential, or the artistic and the scientific: a unity that is the Tao. Pirsig wanted his companions to become true lovers of nuts and bolts; he wanted them to recognize that the motorcycle was not simply a romantic counterpoint to the automobile and the overweening complex of modern technology, but a piece of technology in its own right, and he wanted them to embrace the fact that it was precisely in understanding the motorcycle as a machine that they could actually begin to escape the hegemony of rationality.

If motorcycle discourse in general has gravitated toward a critique of the opaque nature of modern technology, rhetoric surrounding the chopper has, of course, amplified this complaint. Thus,

Easyriders seemed to echo Winner when it asked: “Why is DOT [Department of Transportation]

(whose phony cycle experts have been unable to con experienced riders into accepting their synthetic statistics and mandatory Utopia of gadgets) resorting to a national push aimed at the general public to pass mandatory helmet laws now?”674 This quote originated in the crusade against helmet laws that increasingly defined the motorcycle community during the early 1970's, but the magazine's hostility to statistics and the criticism implied in the curious and evocative phrase mandatory utopia of gadgets invoked a more pervasive conflict with postwar consumer society, affluence, and modernity itself.

Statistics are, of course, the lifeblood of bureaucracy and one of the constitutive instruments of modernity. To see individuals as belonging to abstract types and to see the force of history as a matrix of competing and overlapping likelihoods based on the interaction of these distinct types is to see the world through modern eyes.675 All statistics are synthetic insofar as they represent an abstraction of reality,676 and we have seen how bikers disdained such abstractions, beginning with the synthesis of

674 “Give 'em Hell.” Easyriders June 1974: 11. 675 Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic, 43. 676 Ibid, 275.

305 thought and emotion that is language. Thus, Easyiders's reference to synthetic statistics registers a specific objection to the veracity of the DOT's published findings on motorcycles, but it also neatly invokes bikers' contempt for statistics in general, which are not just a crucial tool of modern electoral politics but the basis of political authority in the modern age: a hegemonic construct that undergirds the entire edifice of official judgment against which bikers defined their subculture.

Gadgets, by contrast, seem fairly benign. They are modest tools that tackle quotidian challenges, often with a delightfully off-kilter brand of ingenuity. But Easyriders's reference to a mandatory utopia of gadgets suggests something sinister. Here, gadget is used derisively. Here, a gadget is the farcical residue of high modernism and its utopian faith in technology; it is a superfluous machine that purports to rationalize and improve human existence but serves only to complicate and diminish it. During their famous Kitchen Debate in 1959, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev sneered at

Vice President Richard Nixon's credulous enthusiasm for American consumer appliances, asking,

“Don't you have a machine that puts food into the mouth and pushes it down.”677 Bikers were staunchly anti-communist, but Khrushchev, in this instance, seemed finely attuned to their aesthetic. He was suggesting that, far from being an index of social progress or a proxy for military strength against the backdrop of a technologically-driven Cold War arms race, as Nixon implied, America's labor-saving consumer appliances were simply infantilizing. And this was precisely the criticism that bikers offered of helmet laws and various regulations restricting their ability to modify their vehicles: even the grotesque image of food being automatically shoved down a throat was wonderfully consistent with biker humor. For Khrushchev, there was something paradoxical in the agency that comes through technology; the very power that technology offered threatened to become a kind of obscene dependence.

Thomas Hine describes this dynamic wonderfully in his meditation on the ambiguity of the 677 Krushchev, Nikita. Qtd. Wiesner, Merry E., Julius R. Ruff, and William Bruce Wheeler. Discovering the Western Past: A Look at the Evidence Since 1500. Vol. 2. (Wadsworth Publishing Company, 2003): 392.

306 push button: “The push button is a symbol of power, but it makes the person who pushes it seem a bit dumb, even useless.”678 Hine identifies the push-button as simultaneously too easy and too opaque. We control push-button technologies absolutely and effortlessly, but our control is superficial, even illusory, because we do not ultimately understand how or why these devices work. With nuclear armament and the popularization of the button as a metonym for the American commander-in-chief's control over this awesome power, it became commonplace to refer to the American president as the most powerful man in the free world, but, when JFK seriously contemplated pressing the button in

1961, he felt cowardly, impotent, and simply dumb.679 And Hine notes that the rapid proliferation of push-button technology in consumer goods during the 50's and 60's brought that same ambivalence into the prosaic world of suburban affluence. For most applications, push-button controls did not offer a discernible improvement over conventional switches or dials. Instead, the spread of push-buttons reflected the aesthetic and ideological imperatives of a certain Utopian strain of modernity: “push buttons carried a further promise—that one day all drudgery would disappear and that almost every task that was dirty or dangerous could be carried out by unseen machinery, activated by the tiniest flick of a finger.”680 This idyll of drudgery-free ease is the mandatory utopia of gadgets that Easyriders decried. For the heirs of America's vernacular engineering tradition, push-button luxury was an emasculating dystopia: a conclusion that appealed, likewise, to the counterculture with its frontier fantasies.

The bikers of the 1960's distilled an emerging critique of technocracy, but they did not renounce technology per se; instead, they captured much of the ambivalence that modern Americans had begun to feel about their Janus-faced machines, which seemed to be the agents of their bondage as well as their liberation. Bikers dramatized and performed a specific relationship with technology that was

678 Hine, Populuxe, 135. 679 Ibid. 680 Ibid, 125.

307 actually quite affirmative and intimate, but they did so in a disquieting way that subverted the dominant paradigm of man-machine intimacy established by technocracy and consumerism. Poetic rhapsodies about the bond between bikers and their machines have been, of course, a conspicuous cliché within motorcycle literature. And, amidst these saccharine masculine reveries, which echo archetypal tales of men and their cherished prosthetic technologies, like the story of Lancelot and his Excalibur, some observers continued to identify the chopper as a comical mechanical penis, casting the biker's articulation of man-machine intimacy as an absurd, faintly pathetic form of compensation. But many others who observed this intimacy saw the chopper as a tool with handles, a unique artifact that was designed, built, and operated by an autonomous man: an artisan who resisted corporate hegemony by misappropriating a mass-produced commodity. In one of his more cynical moments, Thompson offered a rather glib assessment of this dynamic: “In a world increasingly geared to specialists, technicians and fantastically complicated machinery, the Hell's Angels are obvious losers and it bugs them.”681 Of course, if their inability to compete economically in a world characterized by specialized skills and increasingly esoteric technology placed them on the social margins of American life, the spectacular way in which they called attention to this marginalization and expressed their contempt for the

American mainstream made them a media fixation and earned them widespread admiration. During the late 1960's, many observers, including Thompson himself in extended sections of his profile in which he praised the Angels for their pugnacity, or their “anarchic, para-legal sense of conviction,”682 did not feel that the Angels were obvious losers. They saw in the Angels' relationship to their choppers, in particular, a romantically archaic dedication to self-sufficiency.

The chopper was a tool with handles: quite literally. One of the definitive design features of the chopper was the substitution of cartoonishly exaggerated custom handlebars for the Harley's temperate stock bars. At the extreme, this custom apparatus might rise two feet higher than factory equipment, 681 Thompson, Hell's Angels, 52. 682 Ibid, 253.

308 forcing a rider's arms into an almost vertical position and earning the moniker ape-hangers: a typically self-deprecating reference that captured the distinctive gesture of this unusual riding position and distilled the atavistic, illogical connotations of bikers' insistence on perverting the more ergonomically correct, neutral riding position dictated by Harley's factory configuration. Ape-hangers stylized a popular figuration of chopper-riders tenuously clinging to a raw engine as it careened down the road, suggesting that choppers were crude machines operated by brute force. Indeed, ape-hangers were almost a visual pun that mocked the drudgery-free, push-button aesthetic of populuxe. They implied that controlling a motorcycle was not meant to be a facile endeavor by creating a paradoxical effect: on the one hand, these stretched, ape-hanger handlebars compromised a bike's handling, giving the rider less exacting control of the motorcycle; yet, precisely in making the rider's control more tenuous, the rider's role in piloting the vehicle was emphasized and dramatized. The act of piloting the vehicle was made to seem laborious and even gallant.

Although they could be fatalistic about many aspects of their lives and their society, with regard to their machines, bikers insisted on their agency, underscoring their skill as riders and maintaining a strong sense of authorship over their customized machines, especially vis a vis manufacturers:

“Everybody knows an H-D stocker, or any stock bike, is just good raw material. It's got to be refined a little to get what you want.”683 The rudimentary design of the mid-century Harley made it easy to interchange parts, and the chopper phenomenon involved hundreds of small motorcycle shops where enthusiasts assembled dramatically stylized bikes from a medley of factory-produced components and custom-manufactured one-offs. In this context, factory bikes were regarded almost contemptuously as mere fodder for the expression of bikers' own priorities, which aligned, broadly, with the tradition of vernacular functionalism, eschewing the consumer marketplace. As much as possible, bikers fabricated or salvaged the parts they needed, otherwise relying on the secondary market of swap meets, flea

683 “Is This Sporty Fast Enough for Ya.” Easyriders January 1975: 52.

309 markets, and auctions. As Thompson put it: “many Angels have virtually created their bikes out of stolen, bartered or custom-made parts.”684 Within the subculture and its ethos of salvage and self- sufficiency, the police auction, in particular, attained a mythical status. As George Weathern made clear, bikers relished the irony of appropriating and transforming a police vehicle, especially when that process involved illegal activities: “The police unwittingly helped us make illegal bikes into legal ones in the following way: Some Angels would go to police auctions and pay cash for worn-out patrol

Harleys. Then they would install serial-numbered parts from the police Harley “hog” in a stolen motorcycle of later vintage. The end product was a new motorcycle for the auction price. What could be better proof of ownership than a police bill of sale?”685 Most bikers, however, simply relished the opportunity to obtain a castoff Harley for a nominal price and transform it into a righteous chopper, which they did legally. While repurposing police vehicles provided bikers with a delicious bit of irony, it was the aesthetic implications of the salvage process itself that held far greater significance for them.

Indeed, if the chopper that originated at a police auction was idealized, the sin qua non of choppers was the one that began as a so-called basket-case: “The scoot you see here has been completely rebuilt and redesigned twice—and like most righteous bikes, it started as a basket case.”686 A basket case, of course, is a bike that is truly derelict: destined to be stripped and sold piecemeal in various parts baskets. Thus, Terry Orendorff recounts that he found his first bike, a Harley 74, abandoned along a nearby alley and brought it home in pieces at age twelve: “With a wooden cart that he used to collect metal scrap he hauled the big Harley home piece by piece. Harold Tuttle encouraged him to buy a two- dollar Harley-Davidson manual, and he began to collect tools like they were gold coins. Terry stashed the Harley parts in the washer shed off their dorm garage.”687 The basket-case represents the quasi- mythical origin story of the ur chopper, but a righteous chopper was not a simple salvage or restoration

684 Thompson, Hell's Angels, 86. 685 Weathern, Wayward Angel, 43. 686 “High Perch Seat and Long Sissybar” Easyriders February 1974: 48. 687 Ball, Terry the Tramp, 33.

310 project; the objective was not to return a forlorn bike to its pristine original state but to create something entirely new that adhered to an idiosyncratic set of values. A righteous chopper was a true bricolage, a knitting together of disparate cast-off elements. In fact, there is a certain dual meaning in the term basket-case, which refers to a bike that was destined for the parts baskets and also to a bike that has been conjured from those baskets: a wholly new artifact comprised of discarded flotsam. A righteous chopper combined both of these qualities, inflecting and subverting the meaning that adhered to mass-produced motorcycles that were bought and sold in the marketplace.

Thus, while it is commonplace in popular commentary on bikers to tout their allegiance to

Harley-Davidson—the preferred way of expressing this sentiment is to note the prevalence of Harley tattoos on bikers' bodies688—there is actually an ambivalence and, perhaps, even an irony in these tributes. Indeed, Easyriders asked: “Can you imagine how dull life would be if Harley did everything right? Think of those screwed up parts we wouldn't have to replace, and those junk stock pieces we wouldn't have to trashcan. Shit, most of the dudes making custom parts would be broke—and bored.”689

Ultimately, bikers' reverence was certainly not for the Harley-Davidson corporation; nor was it even for the Harley as a motorcycle. What bikers admired about the Harley was its manifold shortcomings and the opportunity that those flaws and foibles presented for them to express themselves; they revered the

Harley precisely for what it was not and for what they had contributed to its legacy: “We destroyed the original Harley design and image by taking stuff off 'their' bikes and replacing them with our very own parts. Some Harley-Davidson shops refused to sell us anything. Members used to have to send their old ladies to pick up parts.”690 Here, Sonny Barger depicted an antagonistic relationship between bikers and the Harley-Davidson corporation, and he unambiguously claimed the lion's share of the credit for the

688 This cliché has also become a marketing parable. For instance, the website Marketing Accelerator.com observed: “When your customers tattoo your logo on their body, then you have reached the Harley-Davidson epitome of 'tattoo loyalty'!” Dinkelacker, Drew. “Harley Davidson—Tattoo Loyalty.” Marketing Accelerator.com June 24 (2014). Web. 689 “The Speedy Wasn't Alone.” Easyriders September 1975: 12. 690 Barger, Hell's Angels, 62.

311 design and development of the American motorcycle on behalf of his biker cohort, rather than the moribund manufacturing firm that attempted to thwart their initiative, sneeringly placing Harley's ownership of its own product in quotation marks. Thus, while a radically asymmetrical relationship emerged between Detroit’s Big-Three and the hapless American consumer—again, Gartman titles his influential history of the industry Auto Opium—bikers continued to wield considerable negotiating power when it came to the physical configuration and semiotic impact of their machines. With overall motorcycle sales at a low ebb and burgeoning publicity surrounding the biker subculture, Americans of the 1960's, when they imagined a motorcycle, likely pictured something that was designed by men like

Sonny Barger and Terry Orendorff rather than engineers in Milwaukee, and they understood its social meaning, as well, largely in the terms laid out by those self-styled degenerate maniacs.

Bikers valued what they had turned the Harley into rather than the Harley itself, and they increasingly recognized that the ways in which their activities resisted the process of domestication and the hegemony of corporate publicity and advertising had political consequences. This insight is latent in Barger's suggestion that Harley didn't really own its own product, and it was articulated quite explicitly in numerous items from Easyriders. For instance, in a 1973 profile of a custom chopper,

Easyriders offered:

Here's a damned good example of the fact that old Harleys never die—they're just rebuilt. Who can honestly say that this white pearl masterpiece isn't a helluva lot more beautiful than was the original design when it first saw daylight in 1961? Sure, there are a few people, like the highway officials in New Jersey who seem to believe that a bike is weakened if there is any modification to the manufacturer's original design, but this is like saying design cannot be improved upon, that we don't gain engineering knowledge through the years, and that manufacturers never make mistakes. The many recalls Detroit makes every year, to say nothing of common sense, certainly refutes that thinking.691

Here is an unequivocal invocation of vernacular functionalism as a political practice. Easyriders was disdainful of the mass-produced vehicle designs emerging from Milwaukee and Detroit, but the magazine did not express its contempt as a matter of taste; rather, Easyriders delineated a conflict

691 “80-Incher from Delaware (Delaware?)” Eayriders March 1973: 24.

312 between competing modes of political power and competing epistemologies. The specific context of this article was New Jersey's recent spate of safety regulations, which questioned the road-worthiness of choppers, banning many of their signature features, like raked front-ends; in response, Easyriders accused lawmakers of colluding with manufacturers to bolster corporate profitability by reifying manufacturers' design preferences as a universal standard while dismissing what the magazine termed the engineering knowledge that we gain through the years. This accumulated engineering knowledge is precisely the vernacular tradition, and Easyriders insisted that it had as much validity as corporate- funded, scientific research and development.

Ultimately, Easyriders's editorial position consistently decried safety regulations as a cynical gambit by manufacturers to sell more ancillary products, like helmets, and to retain control of their core product by undercutting amateur mechanics and their customization efforts. Again, outlaw bikers defined themselves self-consciously in defiance of the American Motorcycle Association, which had tended to function as a mouthpiece for manufacturers. When a fringe faction of peevish bikers left the

AMA to unite under the 1% label with which they had been dismissed and maligned by that organization, this move was simply an impudent gesture: a typically contrarian display that was not overtly political. But, Easyriders was able to connect the dots between the corporate hegemony of the

AMA and the police authority of the state: “Stock bikers are seldom roused—its the individualist who dares not to conform to the AMA-MIC fostered, and promoted, goody-two shoes image, who is the target of harassment.”692 Here, Easyriders charged that police harassment of bikers, which became prevalent in the late 1960's and early 1970's, recapitulated the ongoing conflict between the AMA and the subculture of bikers who flouted its rules; police, in effect, acted on behalf of manufacturers, targeting bikers who had conspicuously rejected their factory output and cultivated their own aesthetic and their own networks for obtaining parts and servicing their machines.

692 “Heat Gets Hotter” Easyriders October 1972: 8.

313 During the 1960's, the outlaw element of the outlaw biker appellation was understood to refer to this subculture of customization and its underlying politics; it did not invoke pervasive criminal activity but the tradition of vernacular engineering: “'Cause I look at a scooter, man, that's completely chopped, man, and every part on it he either made himself or bought special for it. Now look at that dude, man, and that dude's an outlaw. Whenever he rides, man, part of that scooter is him 'cause its got his ideas and it's just hum.”693 Cal, one of Danny Lyon's interview subjects, scoffed at people who bought brand- new fully-equipped Harley-Davidsons; indeed, bikers had a derisive term for these stock machines:

“We called them 'garbage wagons,' but the 700-pound Harley stockers rolled like two-wheeled

Cadillacs.”694 Here, Weathern invoked the Cadillac—icon of Detroit's populuxe style and the ethos of conspicuous consumption that underwrote it—as the antithesis of the chopper, and he suggested that

Harley's stock bikes operated within the same aesthetic as the bloated Cadillac, embodying the same push for domestication and commodification that characterized the rise of the Big Three. For bikers, the motorcycle was not a consumer durable. It was not something to be purchased, compliantly, from a corporation that had mastered the process of mass-production and fostered the teleological development of motorcycle design. Their reverence for Harley-Davidson was paradoxical, as their real affinity was for their own creation, the chopper, which used the Harley as raw material, exaggerating and parodying certain of its attributes but subverting its dominant meaning. As Weathern suggested,

Harley-Davidson wanted its machines to be perceived as two-wheeled Cadillacs: big, comfortable, eye- catching, all-American cruisers that suggested a gaudy democratic affluence. Bikers wanted something else entirely, groping their way toward their own machine aesthetic that extended the American tradition of vernacular functionalism and improbably preserved ideals of autonomy, mastery, artisanship, and resistance into the age of mass-production, mass-consumption, and mass-media.

Bikers contextualized this practice of vernacular functionalism within their ethos of radical 693 Lyon, Bikeriders, 74. 694 Weathern, Wayward Angel, 41.

314 collectivity. The activity of chopper building relied on collaboration and communal networks of barter, reciprocity, and information exchange. Every issue of Easyriders featured at least one photo-spread of a custom motorcycle, and the accompanying text almost invariably recounted the process of building that bike, typically highlighting the communal nature of the endeavor: “Ed's scoot has been going through various stages for about a year and a half. It's been sort of a community project. Friend Harry Payne built the engine and the electrical box behind it, and welded the ridges on the tank; Marty pinstriped the frame in green and painted the design on top of the tank. Renee did most of the molding.”695 Building a chopper drew on the resources of existing social networks, and it also forced those networks to expand in pursuit of specialized parts and knowledge, a process that was frequently romanticized in motorcycle literature: “And wrenchin' a sled together makes ya vibe with shops and people all over the place, too

'cause no area's got a monopoly on pieces that ya need for your putt.”696 During the 1960's, chopper building was a marginal activity. There were very few specialty manufacturers catering to custom builders and their priorities, and knowledge about who these individuals might be and how to contact them was passed along through informal social networks linking enthusiasts. Indeed, the pages of

Easyriders were full of solicitations. And this collaborative engagement, which was integral to the tradition of vernacular functionalism, became central to the biker mythos as well: “He also discovered the nature of a biker's support group in the men who helped him learn to use tools, understand the inner workings of the beast, and oversee his growing knowledge about the big overhead-valve motorcycle.”697 Here, Terry Orendorff was describing the Harley 74 he found in an alley and carted home in pieces, and he completely dropped the pretense of rugged individualism that so often shrouded the subculture, with its flagrant western motifs, in favor of a sentimental ethic of mutual aid. Indeed, vernacular functionalism was offered as a kind of emotionally intimate male bonding.

695 “Why Is This Man Smiling” Easyriders June 1973: 18. 696 “Scooter Trash Stick Together” Easyriders May 1976: 41. 697 Ball, Terry the Tramp, 34.

315 For its part, Harley-Davidson actively discouraged chopping, forcing the activity into these informal, vernacular channels, as it chastened its dealers, like Henry Ford before them, that customized motorcycles should not be covered under warranty. In turn, as we've seen, those dealers were often uncooperative and hostile toward chopper builders, making it difficult for them even to obtain simple replacement parts. Ultimately, however, Harley's desire to thwart customizing activity was overshadowed by the company's own struggles. Corporate headquarters in Milwaukee had tenuous control over its discontinuous network of dealers, and chopping continued to thrive in this climate of benign neglect: “The motorcycle industry was a slow-moving, low-pressure, hobby-store operation...The coffee pot perked unceasingly, because motorcycle shops were good places to sip coffee and kill time.”698 In a 1976 article, Easyriders counseled readers that they might consider building a bike around Harley's smaller 45 engine, because the fact that those engines were produced for the army during World War II meant that there were an inordinate number of spare parts available for them. During the war, buoyed by government contracts, Harley was able to produce bikes in true mass quantity and to generate a commensurate number of replacement parts for those machines, but, thereafter, as consumer demand for motorcycles ebbed and Harley failed to modernize its production and distribution systems, spare parts became increasingly difficult to locate. To an extent, then, the biker subculture and its commitment to vernacular functionalism evolved to fill a vacuum left by floundering manufacturers. In the same way that the spartan form of the chopper responded to the rudimentary design of Harley-Davidson's obsolete factory output, bikers' embrace of vernacular functionalism, with its emphasis on collaboration and improvisation, responded to Harley's lack of professionalized service and consumer support. Again, when Easyriders described the subtle satisfaction that bikers received from developing a far-flung network of contacts, which they did because no area's got a monopoly on the pieces that ya need, the magazine took for granted that local

698 Schilling, Motorcycle World, 140.

316 dealerships would not be able to meet bikers needs; the representative biker in their “Scooter Trash

Stick Together” narrative was, instead, pursuing parts across the geographic breadth of the nation through an impromptu social network.699

While the ascendance of the Big Three to a position of globo-corporate preeminence involved the proliferation and comprehensive modernization of American automotive dealerships,700 Harley's dealer outlets remained grim, uninviting, and even forbidding. This dynamic is apparent in Brock

Yates's vivid description of the Harley dealership where he was introduced to the biker subculture:

Properly costumed, he had become a member of a tiny, exclusive clique headquartered in a grease- stained warren on the edge of town. There a strange, lanky man ran a dealership for Harley-Davidson motorcycles. It was off-limits to decent folk, a corral for outriders and bandits, bikers and weirdos who rode motorcycles, more a collection of shacks than a real building. The floors were soaked black with motor oil and littered with shards of piston rings, broken chains, shattered cylinder heads, and bent forks—the effluvia of a thousand haphazard repairs. Outside leaned a rabble of old motorcycles, bare- boned frames, piles of shredded tires, and broken engines, a graveyard of outlaw machinery tended by the gaunt man who knew all and was all regarding motorcycles—the high priest in the smoky Harley temple.701

Yates was creating a coming of age parable, so he employed an ecclesiastical metaphor, emphasizing his own supplicant status and the esoteric nature of the knowledge harbored by the motorcycle community, which he described as cabalistic. But, beneath this hyperbole, he was also providing a fairly accurate description of Harley's jumbled dealership network: a disjointed series of grimy repair shops characterized by a pervasive ethos of amateurism. Unlike the local Chevy dealership, which would have been located in an eye-catching modern edifice along a prominent commercial strip, Yates's remote, grease-stained warren did not contain a back room stocked with carefully cataloged factory- original parts; the denizens of his smoky temple operated informally, within the tradition of vernacular functionalism, affecting an ad hoc sensibility that Yates characterized as occult. These were not

699 “Scooter Trash Stick Together” Easyriders May 1976: 39-43. 700 Chester Liebs indicates that auto dealerships became technologically sophisticated pieces of architecture that were dramatically styled, opulent, and prominently located. Liebs, Chester H. Main Street to Miracle Mile: American Roadside Architecture. (Boston: Little Brown, 1985): 77-91. 701 Yates, “First Contact.” Rpt. Mammoth Bikers, 8.

317 technicians sharing the fruits of modern scientific research and development; again, Yates referred to their repairs as haphazard, recounting them “attempting to tune [the Harley] with large screwdrivers:”702 a description with which he implied that the simple tools these mechanics employed were inappropriate and that their prospects for success were dubious.

This characterization of bikers as desultory mechanics operated against a dominant modern cultural formulation that tied male prowess with technical proficiency,703 but it encapsulated bikers' peculiar articulation of masculinity. Carolyn Marvin describes how men working in the emerging profession of engineering bolstered their status by underscoring their male prerogatives and by staking their fledgling authority to the eminence of text, denigrating colloquial knowledge grounded in the orality that typified marginal groups. Making an analogy to the Catholic church, she describes these male engineers as a priestly caste who attempted to consolidate their power by exercising control over sacred texts: in this context, trade journals and technical manuals.704 By contrast, Yates's mechanics do not seem to have a service manual handy in their murky warren, lurking in the coiling smoke of their cigarettes. Yet, if they do not partake of textual authority, neither are they consigned to the vacuous orality that marks women and racial minorities as technology's excluded others. Rather, their communication is sub-lingual: a grunt. If orality connotes feminine superfluity compared to the masculine economy of scientific text, Yates's mechanics evince a primitive masculine austerity in their communication. They are not modern men whose status is enhanced by their technical fluency but anti- modern men who engage with machines in a haphazard way.

702 Ibid. 703 Tichi, Shifting Gears. 704 Marvin, Old Technologies, 9-23.

318 Conspicuous Dysfunction

Yates's description of this shabby, almost infernal, Harley dealership confounded mid-century expectations about technology and its environs. For all their manifest dissimilarities, modernist functionalism and populuxe hedonism were both amenable to the logic of technocracy, which presupposed that government should operate, not just through the use of technology but in the interest of technology. Technocracy was governance that identified its own primary function as the promotion of technological development under the assumption that better technology necessarily creates a better society, and this same assumption was expressed by modernism and populuxe alike. The chopper, while it did not renounce technology, did undermine this underlying assumption of technocracy by introducing an evocative and paradoxical element of bedraggled primitivism into a familiar fantasy of mechanized dominion and social advance. Again, it did this by stylizing the attributes of the Harley-

Davidson itself, which had, by the 1960's, become an anachronistic marvel of mechanical inefficiency.

Harley did not significantly update its models between 1935 and 1970, after it was purchased by the sporting goods conglomerate American Machine and Foundry, which introduced novel styling updates and attempted to rapidly increase production in an effort to recoup market share from the Big Four.705

Harley's signature 45 degree V-twin engine was notorious for leaking oil, burned valves, warped cylinder heads, and deafening noise, and it appeared increasingly antiquated during the 1960's as more sophisticated machines from Europe and especially Japan finally penetrated the U.S market. In this context, the archaic Harley engendered a unique pathos in observers: “More than any other machine, the big Harley-Davidson increasingly relied on its machine charisma.”706 While most machines are

705 Those styling innovations are spurned by contemporary Harley enthusiasts who define the whole AMF era as a kind of sojourn in the wilderness. AMF was not happy with the acquisition either and sold the company back to a group of Harley executives in 1981 after its unsuccessful modernization effort. Whereas 5% of Honda's machines failed a final quality inspection, the figure was 50% for Harleys during the AMF era. Kotha, Suresh, and J. Dutton. Transformation at Harley-Davidson. Case Study. New York University, 1996: 8. 706 Schilling, Motorcycle World, 156.

319 associated with dispassionate sterility and control—and it is these associations that were stylized by continental modernists like Le Corbusier—the Harley managed to convey a combination of unrestrained, dangerous power and vulnerability: an emotional association that complemented the barbaric physical appearance of the outlaw-biker himself. Indeed, Phil Schilling referred wistfully to

Harley's “brutish, visceral charm,” and Brock Yates identified the Harley with a certain human frailty and poignant audacity: “Take your squeaky-clean, primrose-perfect rice burners, your Jap scrap that started every time, ran like a fine watch, and were so fast they’d scare you witless; you take those vapid, soulless techno-wonders and stick ‘em!”707 Unlike the discomfitingly perfect Japanese bikes of the period, 1960's Harleys were decidedly fallible; indeed, kitty-litter was considered standard equipment for Harley dealers of the era, who used it to absorb the oil that leaked inexorably even from the brand-new machines in their showrooms.708 Choppers, of course, were typically still more fragile and unreliable. Terry Orendorff remarked that his Vagos couldn't ride twelve miles together before someone broke down, adding jubilantly: “It was a time of wild, chromed-out, unreliable choppers, built by men with little mechanical experience but packed with passion for the open road”709 Bikers, then, continued to honor the unity of man and machine, but their peculiar celebration of the machine subverted mainstream assumptions about the progressive nature of technology. The chopper was not, ultimately, simple and functional; it was simple and crude.

And the chopper's crude aura became a self-conscious and nostalgic counterpoint to the technocratic hegemony of Detroit as bikers developed a perverse aesthetic of conspicuous dysfunction that operated within the broad parameters of functionalism while flaunting inefficiency and even atavism. Chopper creators often sacrificed components that were designed primarily for the comfort

707 Yates, Brock. Outlaw Machine: Harley Davidson and the Search for the American Soul. (Boston: Little Brown, 1999): 158. Meanwhile, Schilling suggested that established bikers “regarded Japanese motorcycles as too slick, too refined, too civilized.” Schilling, Motorcycle World, 153. 708 Barger, Hell's Angel, 55. 709 Ball, Terry the Tramp, 72.

320 and safety of the rider. Ostensibly, these choices were a byproduct of their commitment to bare functionalism, but the sacrifices were often pursued as ends in and of themselves: part of an obtuse aesthetic that gloried in violating basic assumptions about the nature of technology and what constitutes a working machine. For instance, one of the definitive features of the chopper was the rigid frame: a frame without rear suspension. Suspension is any mechanism that absorbs impact at the juncture between a vehicle and its wheels. Even a crude suspension, like leaf springs, dramatically improves the handling of any vehicle, as well as contributing immensely to the comfort of passengers. Suspension was standard on Victorian carriages. It was standard on the Model T. And it was standard to have both front and rear suspension on European motorcycles after World War II. Harley's larger bikes, however, did not include rear suspension until 1958. Instead, they offered small springs mounted underneath the seat, which did nothing to improve the handling of the bike but did somewhat ameliorate the brutalizing effects of the rigid frame configuration for the rider. Chopper builders of the 1960's, of course, eschewed Harley's new, fully-suspended frames and invariably removed even the modest under-seat springs of the vintage design, discarding the entire factory seat assembly to bolt a streamlined seat directly to the frame's top rail. Sonny Barger described the effect: “we used to ride from Oakland to New York on those early rigid frame bikes, and they bounced around so much that if you drove sixty miles in an hour you were making great time. The vibration left you tingling and numb for about an hour after you got off your bike.”710 Here, Barger dropped any pretense that chopping was, primarily, a strategy for improving performance. Lack of suspension impaired handling such that it actually forced chopper riders to slow down.

Ultimately, forswearing the rear suspension was an aesthetic choice. We have seen how a rigid frame allowed a bike to ride lower to the ground and how this effect complimented bikers' proclivity toward visual streamlining, but the rigid frame also had aesthetic consequences completely apart from

710 Barger, Hell's Angel, 2.

321 the bike's silhouette; indeed, the tingling and numb sensation that Barger described was integral to bikers' overall aesthetic. Again, bikers viewed themselves as motorcyclists in extremis. If riding a motorcycle was, in general, somewhat uncomfortable and unsafe, at least compared to driving a car, bikers amplified those qualities; thus, riding an uncomfortable bike—even an unwieldy or unsafe bike

—became a macho badge of honor as bikers playfully undermined and inverted the popular assumption that a machine should be efficient, rational, and constantly evolving toward a more perfect realization of its narrow mission. This dynamic is apparent in Mike Baudette's description of the typical chopper, which he referred to as a true Goose bike: “The frames are rigged and lightened; every extraneous knurl is taken off. The engines are stroked with cams and lightened flywheels and valve train. The forks are raked to the point that turning is virtually impossible. The clutch is an in/out suicide foot arrangement. They lose 69% of their braking by removing the front brake. The pedal for the rear brake is minuscule and hidden away; so it's only luck that finds it for a panic stop.”711 Baudette's description began with a nod to functionalist priorities, but it quickly slid into a giddy catalog of gratuitous danger.

For Baudette, the chopper aesthetic included reduced braking power, seemingly as an end in itself.

Indeed, the whole suite of standard chopper modifications, from the rigid frame to the absent front brake and the suicide clutch mechanism mentioned by Baudette, was designed to subtly streamline the visual form of the motorcycle but also to dramatically increase the difficulty and peril of piloting it. Early motorcycles, in order to imitate the automobile, were often set up so that the rider operated the clutch with the left foot and shifted gears with the left hand, using a lever mounted on the side of the gas tank. Harley retained this configuration as its standard until 1952 and as an option until

1974. This arrangement was fairly dangerous because the rider had to remove one hand from the handlebars in order to shift and because, without a neutral gear, the left foot, busy operating the clutch, was not free to provide balance when the bike came to a stop. If a rider were stopped at a light and the

711 Baudette, Mike. “The Bent Spokesman.” The Rag 1,5 (1966): 15.

322 bike started to lean to the left, the rider would instinctively put that left foot down, at which point the clutch would be released, engaging first gear and sending the bike lurching into the intersection. Short of installing a neutral gear, manufacturers tried to mitigate this danger by designing a locking mechanism that allowed the clutch to be secured in the engaged position, freeing the rider's left foot to provide balance. Chopper builders, however, typically replaced the entire factory clutch assembly with a rudimentary peg and lever, reintroducing the possibility of unexpectedly and catastrophically plunging into a busy intersection. And, in conjunction with this clutch modification—called a suicide clutch for obvious reasons—bikers would also remove the tank-mounted factory gear-shift, replacing that with another simple lever attached directly to the transmission, thereby forcing riders, not just to remove the left hand from the handlebars in order to reach the gear-shift positioned on the gas tank in front of them, but to reach blindly beneath and behind their bodies in order to do so. This distinctive movement provided the origin of the jockey shift appellation,712 as the gesture of a rider reaching from the handlebars to the shift-lever beneath the rider's haunch resembles a jockey going to the whip, especially when a rider accelerates hard, executing a rapid series of gear-shifts.

Of course, the simplified clutch and gear-shift mechanisms that chopper builders preferred contributed only marginally to the chopper's austere, functionalist visual signature. The clutch-lock, in particular, was visually unobtrusive, and it seems necessary to conclude that cultivating danger per se was also a priority for these designers. Indeed, in a typical description of one of their featured choppers,

Easyriders gloried in the way chopping impaired a bike's handling: “then the sleek machine was stretched out until it flexed like a leaf spring and handled like a loaded freight train.”713 Here,

Easyriders echoed Mike Baudette and his choice to include a reduction in braking power among the enticing chopper's signal attributes. Gratuitous danger, then, was an undeniable element of the overall

712 Alternatively, the East Bay Dragons called it a “butthole shifter” in reference to its location and, no doubt, as an extension of bikers' grotesque sense of humor. Levingston, Soul on Bikes, 86. 713 Broken Rod. “Cut n' Bend” Easyriders September 1977: 32-37.

323 chopper aesthetic, a posture that was consistent with the subculture's overtones of fatalism and various macabre affectations. However, if danger was valued as a lurid affront to bourgeois safety- consciousness, it had even more value to bikers insofar as it facilitated their quest for the technological sublime and provided a heightened backdrop for skilled performance. Deliberately making a bike more difficult to ride increased the danger of riding that bike in tandem with the skill required to do so, and that skill was something that bikers actually prized. For all their delirious self-deprecation, in the arena of motorcycle riding, bikers took considerable pride in their abilities and wanted to be recognized as adept: “I even mastered the rear mount jockey shifts that were the rage. They demanded precise movements—one hand steered while the other hung back, shifting gears.”714 Here, Weathern made it clear that, in addition to streamlining the visual profile of the motorcycle, chopping aimed to create a unique challenge for riders. Once more, with this endeavor bikers effectively exaggerated qualities that seemed inherent in the motorcycle vis-a-vis the car. Compared to driving a car, riding a motorcycle requires skilled coordination, with each limb performing multiple functions. Barger, then, provided a remarkably honest and succinct assessment of the chopper's aesthetic of conspicuous dysfunction when he offered: “Choppers were stripped down for speed, looks, and ultimate discomfort. After we got through with them, they weren't the easiest bikes to ride, but what the hell, at least we looked cool.”715

For Barger, looking cool was an extension of looking uncomfortable, and it was irrevocably tied to the unique physical challenge presented by the chopper and the way this challenge helped to develop and intensify the experience of the technological sublime

Thus, if Randall Montgomery insisted that choppers were only good for showing off, Sonny

Barger effectively agreed; both parties accepted that the chopper enabled a macho performance, although Montgomery found that performance unconvincing: “such modifications involve considerable time and effort, cost hundreds of dollars, create great stress on the fork tubes and steering head, and 714 Weathern, Wayward Angel, 9. 715 Barger, Hell's Angel, 61.

324 make the machine handle so awkwardly that only a big brave man is capable of maintaining some control. The Outlaw chopper is a machine that only outlaws want to ride, and which only outlaws are stupid and reckless enough to ride. [sic]”716 This opinion was a common one. We have encountered

Donald Hammond as a vituperative Easyriders correspondent who compared choppers to mechanical penises, and it is interesting to consider the specific characteristics of the chopper that he identified in conjunction with that metaphor: “Why take a soundly designed machine and prostitute it into such distorted travesty, with inferior road-holding qualities? Why go back to old-fashioned rigid frames and small-diameter front brakes? Come to think of it, perhaps I know the answer: Your 'choppers' look like mechanical penises!”717 None of the features that Hammond listed are actually phallic, but his accusation was not really that the choppers look like penises but that the chopper's aesthetic of conspicuous dysfunction, with its pointedly atavistic embrace of technical deficiency, represents a kind of buffoonish, false machismo; like Montgomery, he did not accept their definition of the chopper as a macho machine. He did not feel that bikers look cool by subverting the modern paradigm of comfort and technologically-mediated facile proficiency.

Rat Bikes

Bikers pursued their perverse aesthetic to its logical extreme in the rat bike, a variant of the chopper that became popular among bikers during the mid-1970's but never captured the imagination of the general public. A rat bike was a motorcycle that had been thoroughly abused; it was a run-down, wretched machine. Marc Watson described a rat as “an old, dirty, neglected, unmodified bike, which functions almost in defiance of its ratty appearance.”718 Thus, while the chopper combined a

716 Montgomery, “One Percenter Subculture.” Rpt, Mammoth Bikers, 162. 717 Hammond, Donald. Letter. “Visions of a Mechanical Penis!” Easyriders February 1973: 6. 718 Watson, “Righteousness,” 342.

325 functionalist emphasis on economy and simplicity with garish flourishes and surreal distortions, the rat- bike had none of the latter. While the chopper was kept immaculate in pointed contrast to bikers' own disheveled appearance, the rat-bike echoed bikers' personal squalor; it was grimy and forsaken. Indeed, when a rat-bike appeared in the August 1977 issue of Easyriders, the accompanying narrative noted that the featured bike was often mistaken for a derelict piece of farm equipment.719 And that was the essence of the rat bike; as Watson noted, the incongruous fact that it ran at all was the root of its charm.

On some level, then, the rat bike represented an extreme articulation of functionalism. It was completely devoid of ornament: guileless. It existed only to travel from point A to point B. Of course, function is always a moving target. Locomotion is not necessarily the only function of any vehicle.

Various forms of performance and display remain potentially legitimate vehicular functions, and the very notion of functionalism implies an aesthetic that is distinct from bare utility. Ultimately, of course, even the rat-bike had such an aesthetic, employing gratuitous abuse to achieve its desired effect. Rather than chrome and garish paint, the rat bike was embellished with rust, damage, and an array of conspicuously sloppy and haphazardly improvised repairs. One rat-bike exhibited in Easyriders featured two exposed wires casually secured to the handlebars rather than a turn-key ignition switch, a length of old motorcycle chain employed as a shift linkage, and a host of similar ad hoc repairs, all of which were flaunted in close-up photos.

Thus, the rat-bike so fully exaggerated bikers' aesthetic of conspicuous dysfunction that it approached a reification of the subculture's cherished bush-fix. In the rat-bike, contingent, emergency solutions were made permanent. The rat-bike was an attempt to crystallize bikers' ethos of presentness, and it expressed their studied disinterest in motorcycles as technological artifacts. Easyriders was never invested in the kind of technical detail that defines most special interest publications. They never included nuanced discussions of compression and gear ratios or even straightforward quantitative

719 Hangover. “Tobacco Rat.” Easyriders August 1977: 18-23.

326 measures of performance like horsepower. They simply did not identify themselves as gear-heads:

“You dudes who have the stomach to run through this drivel every issue know that the staff isn't on much of a gear-head trip. For one thing, the bro's around here think that good times mean buildin' a scoot that's mellow and practical—and not squeezing the last half-horsepower out of the engine. For another, most of us are usually too wasted to do any high-precision wrenching anyway.”720 The rat-bike was the perfect expression of this too-wasted-for-precision school of mechanics, but it remained something of a private joke or guilty pleasure into the 1970's. Indeed, one of Easyriders's earliest references to rat-bikes appears in an article from April 1974 titled “Fantastically Beautiful (ulp!) Rat.”

Obviously, the title's parenthetical ulp! suggests a certain ambivalence, and the tone of the article is consistent, presenting an ambiguously sarcastic defense of the magazine's decision to feature a battered rat in its pages. Four months later, the magazine still felt compelled to explain the concept of the rat- bike to readers of the article “Talk About a Meat Machine!,” while their affinity for these cobbled- together makeshift brutes retained the equivocal ambiance of an inside joke.721 Indeed, in another

Easyriders article, Bandit claimed that, during the early 1970's, he was derided by outsiders and pitied by his own biker brothers for riding his rat-bike: “When my first rat bike hit the streets three or four years ago, I felt like the first black to drink from the town's fountain...And my puttin' partners would pat me on the back (with beer bottles) and tell me how bad they felt, 'cause they thought the only reason I didn't have a flashy scooter was that I couldn't afford chrome.”722 But, Bandit also made it clear that bikers' attitudes toward rat-bikes had shifted dramatically by early 1975, when the rat-bike was seemingly having a moment: “But time buzzed on and the word came down that rat bikes weren't just for rats...I couldn't pick out my sled from the rest of the basket cases parked in the mud.”723 Of course,

720 “Is This Sporty,” 52. 721 A subsequent letter from a befuddled British reader makes it clear that the rat-bike was also a strictly American phenomenon. 722 Bandit. “Bandit Takes a Trip.” Easyriders February 1975: 25 723 Ibid, 26. Watson called the rat-bike “the epitome of righteousness.” Watson, “Righteousness,” 342.

327 the rat-bike never displaced the chopper. It was a diversion that distilled bikers' primal self-presentation by extending the chopper's peculiar strain of vernacular functionalism, with its overtones of resistant amateurism and delirious dysfunction, to its logical conclusion.

Ultimately, however, the rat-bike's distillation of the anti-modern themes immanent in the biker subculture was almost too perfect: too literal. To fully embrace the rat-bike was to squander some of the sublime tension that bikers had created in the chopper, which was retrograde, improvised, and conspicuously dysfunctional but also vividly, outlandishly fantastical, impeccable, and even futuristic.

Bandit addressed this possibility when he observed that his own brothers scorned his first rat-bike and pitied him, and the risk implicit in the rat-bike's aesthetic of privation was fully elaborated in another

Easyriders article titled “Badland Bike,” in which Renegade profiled a chopper that belonged to a

Hell's Angel: “I let a couple of punks look at this Hell's Angel's bike, and they figure the damn thing ought to be a fuckin' rat...they think an outlaw is supposed to wear grease-soaked Levis and torn rags and ride a mechanical disaster glued loosely together with grime and hot parts....Well, here's living proof to all the citizens who feel Hell's Angels or any other outlaws are too deranged to be successful at anything besides doing time.”724 In general, of course, the Hell's Angels cultivated the impression that they were deranged losers, and the public expectation that outlaw bikers wore filthy clothes and rode bikes comprised largely of stolen parts is one that the outlaws themselves cultivated. But, if bikers delighted in being reviled by the public, it was important to them that their status was a perceived as a choice. They were repugnant because fuck you, not because they were incompetent failures. Ultimately, if bikers themselves recognized and celebrated a kind of ingenuity and impetuousness in the humble rat-bike, they also recognized that the public could only see a worthless piece of junk ridden by a grimy moron too poor and ignorant to maintain his crude vehicle. The general public could not be counted on to understand the nuance of the rat-bike, which was only a rat-bike when it was ridden by someone

724 Renegade. “Badland Bike” Easyriders August 1977: 59.

328 with mechanical skill and otherwise a pathetic basket-case. The rat-bike was a monument to a specific set of crude skills. It is something like a primitivist painting: a studied imitation of naivete that was essentially nostalgic even though it did not invoke a specific style of the past. What it evoked, really, was redneckism: the pathology that expressed bikers' stylized abjection.

JAPAN'S BIG FOUR

The rat-biker represented the inevitable apotheosis of the chopper aesthetic, with its hostility to vacuous novelty as championed by the Big Three and its ethos of passive populuxe consumption. As we have seen, choppers were conceived as the unruly alter-ego of the American automobile. But, especially by the early 1970's, when the rat-bike became a favorite of the biker subculture, chopper- builders also worked in pointed defiance of a movement toward domestication and commodification that was taking place within the motorcycle industry itself, as Japan's Big Four became a dominant force in the U.S motorcycle market. Indeed, bikers' hostility to Japanese motorcycles and their riders evolved to form a bulwark of the biker subculture's mythology: “An outsider might consider Harleys and Hondas as simply different brands of motorcycles. The prospective biker must come to view them as symbolic opposites. As far as the outlaw biker is concerned, there is only one motorcycle, the

Harley-Davidson 'hog.'”725 The Japanese motorcycles that rapidly came to dominate the American market during the 1960's originated in a very different environment than Harley's lumbering V-twins. It was the motorcycle that provided mass-mobility in postwar Japan, creating a burgeoning industry governed by extremely competitive conditions from which a handful of firms emerged as global innovators in the field of mass-production. By the early 1960's, Japan's motorcycle industry had its own

Big Four—Honda, Suzuki, Yamaha, and Kawasaki—and these firms pioneered a number of widely

725 Wolf, Rebels, 37.

329 influential industrial techniques, including so-called just in time delivery, a method that effectively allowed producers to shift overhead costs and risk onto their supply networks by refusing to stockpile the materials and components required in their manufacturing processes.726 The policy was emblematic of postwar Japanese industry's ability to maintain flexibility and adaptability within a system of mass- production, and it became a widely emulated, even paradigmatic, tactic of corporate industry by the end of the twentieth century, entering popular consciousness in the United States during the 1980's and

1990's, when the arrival of Japanese automobiles on the U.S market forced Detroit's Big Three into a belated attempt to reform themselves in the image of their ascendant Japanese competitors.727 Thus, there was a tremendous institutional contrast between Japan's Big Four and the moribund motorcycle manufacturers of Britain and America, who still relied on artisinal production techniques to an alarming degree, contenting themselves with plying an established niche market of hobbyists.728

This disparity was apparent in their respective attitudes toward racing, an inveterately macho endeavor with dubious remunerative potential for investors. Harley and British firms like Triumph and

B.S.A poured considerable resources into their factory racing programs, competing on the World GP circuit. The Big Four did not invest in racing: at least not until 1959 when Honda began a programmatic campaign to conquer World GP in anticipation of launching a major export initiative.

Honda began its racing program with an entrance in the smallest class of competitive racing, 50cc, which was largely disregarded by established racing interests. In short order, Honda was dominating

50cc racing, and they moved into the 250cc class, continuing to win: “In the years 1959-1966, Honda won sixteen world championships and had 138 grand prix victories—unprecedented and still unmatched.”729 Established racing interests waited with trepidation for Honda to enter the prestigious

726 Kotha, Transformation, 8. 727 Harley also began to employ Just in Time methods in the early 1980's. Ibid. 728 Schilling, Motorcycle World. Kotha and Dutton observe that “the Harley product that AMF has acquired was essentially a hand crafted machine.” Kotha, Transformation, 5. 729 Johnson, Live to Ride, 66.

330 500cc top class of World GP and reacted with consternation when, instead, Honda abruptly discontinued its entire racing program. Having proven a point about the sophistication of their machines vis-a-vis European competition and extracted what they viewed as the limited research and development value of World GP racing, Honda simply abandoned the pursuit; they had scant interest in more trophies. For Honda, racing was a calculated business decision. It was not a macho imperative but a gambit in their ambitious export strategy.730

And that strategy met with enormous success, with sales of Japanese motorcycles surpassing

Harley and propelling a dramatic expansion in overall motorcycle sales within the U.S.731 Indeed,

Thompson wryly observed of this development: “The story of Harley-Davidson and the domestic motorcycle market is one of the gloomiest chapters in the history of American free enterprise.”732 He went on to relate how Harley, which had a virtual monopoly on the booming American motorcycle market at the beginning of the 1960's, found itself with about 10% market share by 1966. The other

90% was, of course, largely controlled by Japanese manufacturers, who met with such enormous success thanks, in large part, to their efforts toward domesticating the motorcycle. The Big Four were catering to a mass consumer market, and, in conjunction with their modern managerial and production techniques, they offered inexpensive, reliable vehicles that were easy to operate and visually appealing.

Phil Schilling describes the postwar German machines as the first motorcycles that were as reliable as a car, and, by the 1960s, Japan's motorcycle industry had surpassed this mark; in sharp contrast to a

Harley-Davidson, consumers did not need mechanical skills to contemplate owning a Honda or a

Kawasaki. And, what's more, Japan's lightweight, modestly powered and modishly styled machines managed to approximate the comfort and accommodating ease of the automobile: the affable icon of

730 Ibid. 731 In his own footnote, Thompson recounted: “According to Forbes magazine (September 15, 1966), Harley-Davidson sales went from $16,000,000 in the fiscal year 1959 to $29,600,000 in 1965. During the same period, American Honda sales jumped from a niggardly $500,000 to $77,000,000 -- and kept booming, in 1966, to $106,000,000.” Thompson, Hell's Angels, 75. 732 Thompson, Hell's Angels, 75.

331 American populuxe with its emphasis on prosaic luxury. Hondas did not leak oil. They did not require mechanical tinkering or arduous, frustrating exertion to start. They were not loud.733 The Honda 50, with its innocuous 50 cc engine concealed beneath a streamlined plastic cowl, did not seem dangerous, either as a machine or as a social statement. Indeed, the Honda 50 entered the American market with an iconic advertising campaign that passive-aggressively invoked the subversive connotations that had come to define Harley-Davidson, announcing in 1963: “You Meet the Nicest People on a Honda.”

Schilling succinctly summarizes the rhetorical appeal of this now legendary ad, which is mentioned in every popular history of the motorcycle and featured prominently at the Harley-Davidson museum:

“The machine said fun, not danger.”734 Thus, the Nicest People campaign was not just a slander against the biker subculture but an encapsulation of Honda's larger commitment to the domestication of the motorcycle.

Part of the reason that the so-called 'nicest people' ad has become so iconic is that, although it defamed them, the ad's shorthand encapsulated American bikers' own self-presentation, reinforcing their swaggering, rabidly antisocial persona and marking Honda with an enduring aura of timidity.

Even when Honda introduced the CB 750 in 1969, a bike that could obliterate almost any Harley on the road in a race, bikers continued to disdain the amiable Japanese imports. Because of its performance, the CB 750 could not be readily dismissed with the usual macho invective, but bikers consistently denigrated CB 750 riders, positioning the consumer-friendly Honda as always and forever inauthentic.

Indeed, Wayne Johnson called it “a motorcycle that seemed not to be a motorcycle,” observing that

“you didn't have to know squat about the bike to own or ride it.”735 Again, bikers ultimately constructed the chopper as a macho machine by eschewing speed and racing, which they dismissed as metrics of a specific type of rationalized performance that had no meaning to them: “Take your squeaky-clean,

733 Johnson, Live to Ride, 67. 734 Schilling, Motorcycle World, 136. The campaign is so iconic that it inspired a plot on Mad Men. 735 Johnson, Live to Ride, 69.

332 primrose-perfect rice burners, your Jap scrap that started every time, ran like a fine watch, and were so fast they’d scare you witless; you take those vapid, soulless techno-wonders and stick ‘em!”736 Here,

Yates somewhat atypically admits to being scared witless by the performance of Japanese imports, but it ultimately seems to be something other than speed and the associated physical perils that Yates finds unnerving and threatening with respect these motorcycles, which he disparages as rice burners and Jap scrap. Yates seems to be creating a similar dynamic to the one that James Ward identified in The

Damned, positioning the modern Japanese techno-wonder as something to be feared even by men who casually embrace death and dismemberment. In this formulation, it is the artificial, incomprehensible nature of the Japanese bike's speed that is to be feared, rather than the possibility of crash and injury.

Yates's specific charge—that high-performance Japanese imports were soulless—reflected an obvious racial stereotype, but it also captured this notion that there was something menacingly opaque about the new, highly sophisticated machines.

Of course, if Japanese motorcycles, which were so reliable and so sophisticated that they did not require or invite riders' intervention, were considered threatening in their inscrutable efficiency, they were dismissed as pathetically deracinated and domesticated for that same reason: ridiculed as mere commodities ridden by poseurs. Rhetorically, chopper-builders placed significance on greater performance, but that emphasis was subsumed within their tangentially related aesthetic priorities. In the early 1960's, the only performance motorcycles available to American consumers were British machines like the B.S.A Lightning or the Norton Commando. Outlaw clubs made exceptions to their

Harley-only policy for these Anglo imports, in part as a sign of respect for their closest allies during the

Second World War in which so many first-generation outlaw bikers served but, also, in deference to the technical prowess of these machines. However, these potent British motorcycles were generally beyond the financial reach of American bikers, who, instead, made do by transforming the archaic Harley into

736 Yates, Outlaw Machine, 158.

333 something more formidable. At least, that is the mythical origin of the chopper. But, in 1969, a CB 750 cost $1,495. These bikes were not immediately available on the secondary market to the same degree to which Harleys were, but they were certainly accessible. Yet, American bikers continued to impugn

Japanese machines, with outlaw clubs precluding their members from riding them. To a degree, of course, this attitude reflected bikers' racism and expressed their peculiar brand of patriotism, but this antagonism must ultimately be understood as part of bikers' strategy for constructing authenticity vis-a- vis the larger community of motorcyclists and as a reflection of their commitment to the aesthetic of conspicuous dysfunction with its anti-modern overtones. Indeed, apart from the political context of bikers' affinity for British motorcycles, this attraction reflected the fact that British machines of the postwar period shared many of the Harley's foibles: leaking oil, faulty electrical systems, and impossible to locate replacement parts. Indeed, British bikers closely echoed their American counterparts when it came to their estimation of Japanese motorcycles: “It was cold logic, not love, that produced a machine such as the 903-cc Kawasaki Z-1. Love was the bailiwick of the old-school hobbyists. Love and Old World craftsmanship were poor businesses.”737 It was a version of this British romance of love and Old World craftsmanship that continued to define the motorcycle subculture in the

United States: the technological sublime and vernacular functionalism.

If bikers defined themselves in opposition to Honda riders, Honda was happy to embrace that dichotomy, feeling that their constituents represented the more profitable side of that demographic divide: thus, the 'nicest people' ad. This ad took on mythic proportions: “From the start, there was an almost irresistible assumption that somehow this advertising slogan and campaign created the second coming of motorcycles in America.”738 As Schilling notes, focusing on the ad and its rhetoric ignores institutional factors that were likely more important to Honda's success in the 1960's. Harley-Davidson and its British competitors with their love and Old World craftsmanship approach, or, as Thompson 737 Schilling, Motorcycle World, 159. 738 Ibid, 133.

334 phrased it, their “stone-age concept of management and technology,”739 were trapped in a cycle of low sales and low productivity. Without robust sales, they were unable to modernize their facilities and, thus, unable to dramatically increase production, which would have provided the opportunity to reduce prices and likely increase sales. So, the potential magnitude of the American motorcycle market remained unrealized when Japanese imports arrived at unprecedentedly low prices. Focusing too much on the 'nicest people' ad can lead us to believe that Honda created demand for motorcycles among people who had not previously wanted them by employing a compelling rhetorical strategy that, in effect, offered an alternative definition of the motorcycle's social meaning. It is almost certainly more accurate to say that they tapped an existing potential market by producing inexpensive, reliable motorcycles in tremendous volume. They likely would have done the same with a different ad campaign, and it is actually possible that they would have had even more success if they had opted to subtly exploit the subversive reputation that surrounded American motorcycles.

The 'nicest people' ad is significant insofar as it neatly encapsulates Honda's efforts to domesticate the motorcycle; however, it is important to remember that outlaw bikers, if they denigrated imported motorcycles, defined their choices primarily in contrast to the automobile and the bourgeois mainstream with which it was synonymous. Honda took major steps toward domesticating the motorcycle, but even a Honda, which equaled and even surpassed the reliability of an American automobile, was a far cry from a car. The CB750 was a soulless techno-wonder to some, but it did not even have an electric starter motor: standard equipment on Model T's beginning in 1919. The Honda famously started on the first kick and did not require riders to master the arcane ritual involved in bringing a Harley to life, but turning-over a CB750, even once, was no mean feat. And, all of its reliability and consumer-friendly refinements could not keep a rider warm when temperatures fell, or dry in the rain, or safe in a bone-crunching collision with an automobile. In a nation where two-ton

739 Thompson, Hell's Angels, 75.

335 living-rooms on wheels plied expansive modern roads by the millions, burning through low-cost gasoline to reach fantastic speeds, riding any kind of motorcycle still seemed wantonly dangerous to many observers.740 Thus, for members of the counterculture in particular, a Honda could readily embody the same anti-modern themes that informed their attraction to the outlaw biker. The Rag's Bent

Spokesman, who rode a vintage Indian and peppered his columns with casual references to the internal politics of outlaw clubs, also spoke highly of Hondas, and The Rag's most loyal advertisers included a number of dealerships and repair shops that catered more to coeds on inexpensive Japanese imports than to the outlaw fringe of chopper builders. We have seen how the Bent Spokesman suggested that outlaw bikers were evolving into beatniks, and he also attempted to knit together the worlds of the biker and the student counterculture by addressing students on their Hondas as a part of a biker community. For the Bent Spokesman, it would seem that Hondas could also leave glorious slicks in all kinds of neighborhoods: that they could also disrupt the inoculated world of affluence defined by the hegemony of the automobile. Indeed, a letter of complaint to Easyriders revealed the extent to which young Honda riders identified with bikers, apparently to the annoyance of the latter:

All these assholes who read Easyriders and then think all bikers are counter-culture heroes are a pain in the ass as far as I'm concerned. Every time I go out for a putt, I get big smiles and peace signs from citizens and power signs from dudes on chopped 350 Hondas...Don't get me wrong, I know some righteous dudes who ride Hondas, and some of the new people ain't half bad, but as far as I'm concerned, I'd rather have it like it used to be. Hard, looked down upon, but tight and together people.741

The new people that this correspondent referenced were the young people who propelled an upsurge in overall motorcycle ridership by responding to the availability of consumer-friendly Japanese imports, but his account of their beseeching admiration for hardened bikers, as well as their peace pins and power signs, suggested that they also responded strongly to the subversive connotations that bikers had lent to the motorcycle.

740A Cadillac Fleetwood from the 1950's weighed in excess of 5,000 lbs., while a more typical sedan like a classic 2-door '57 Chevy Bel Air weighed well over 3,000lbs. 741 Judge. Letter. “Big Smiles” Easyriders February 1975: 10.

336 Thus, the counterculture recognized a certain affinity between Harleys and Hondas, even as

Honda's corporate public relations played-up the contrast between its clientele and the biker subculture that affiliated itself with Harley-Davidson: a distinction that bikers themselves drew with even greater hyperbole. Yet, while they never tired of mocking Japanese motorcycles and their riders, bikers could also recognize a certain congruence and even symbiosis between themselves and these credulous new motorcyclists. Another Easyriders article begrudgingly acknowledged that Honda riders might sometimes evolve into bona fide bikers. In his 1973 profile of a custom chopper, “Dog Breath” related such a transformation with mock incredulity: “Don't ask me how he did it (I didn't ask), but just four measly months before these photos were taken, the owner of this tasty bike was just barely outrunning tire-biting dogs as he cruised the scene on his—are you ready for this?—Honda 90.”742 Here, the illusory nature of the boundaries that divided American motorcyclists was playfully acknowledged even as it was re-inscribed by “Dog Breath's” teasing censure of this chopper builder, whose Honda- riding origins, “Dog Breath” suggested, marked him with a lingering inauthenticity: “This is a helluva nice guy and all that, but his puppy love fixation on his 'Blue Bitch' was getting to me—I don't know why, but I can't stand being around people who are that damned happy. Doesn't he know there's nothing in this screwed-up world to be happy about?”743 For “Dog Breath,” his subject had mastered the techniques of chopper-building, but he hadn't fully embodied the biker's nihilistic attitude. Ultimately,

Easyriders was unwilling to completely forego the rhetoric of Harley versus Honda, which provided such a succinct rubric for biker identity, but they were willing to acknowledge the reality that many individuals moved between factions of the motorcycle community: that many Honda riders admired the chopper, while plenty of outlaws were initiated into motorcycling on the smaller, more accessible

Japanese machines. Indeed, a letter to the editors of Easyriders from Frank Mendelsohn described a fairly typical experience: “Your mag had me junk a new '72 Honda 450 that I had just bought and 742 Dog Breath. “He's Had it Only a Short While, and He's Already Calling it a Bitch” Easyriders May 1973: 31-33. 743 Ibid.

337 learned to ride on. I went to the police auction and purchased a '68 Harley and I'm having it made into a chopper.”744 Thus, the bilious scorn directed at Honda riders by bikers sometimes represented a kind of winking hazing or fraternal rivalry. Again, the outlaw biker represented an exaggerated caricature of more mainstream motorcyclists and not an outright rejection of their values.

This thread of continuity uniting the two ostensibly opposing factions of the motorcycle community was particularly apparent in their respective cultures of customization, which shared an ethos of technological sublimity with overtones of anti-consumer, vernacular functionalism in spite of their rivalrous posturing and conspicuous stylistic departures. If Harley enthusiasts created the chopper, devotees of Honda and other Japanese marques who wanted to transfigure their mass-produced machines typically worked within the cafe racer aesthetic, which originated in postwar Britain with a subculture of young motorcyclists who raced between roadside cafes. The contrast between the cafe racer and the chopper echoed disparate European and American approaches to automotive design, with the cafe racers privileging quickness and maneuverability while choppers shared a quintessentially

American bias toward bullish straight-line speed and relaxed, sustained cruising. Thus, while the chopper rider's characteristic riding position was almost recumbent, splayed legs raised and arms elevated, the signature of the cafe racer was a radically forward-leaning riding posture that emulated the competitive racers who inspired many of the cafe racers' styling cues. The cafe racer aesthetic made its way to the United States during the late 1960's and early 1970's, just as the new crop of high performance Japanese imports arrived on the market, and Americans frequently conflated the two, amplifying their existing bias against Japanese imports to paint cafe racers as feminized and superficial, as we see in a fantasized confrontation from Easyriders, in which a biker named Andy successfully bests a cafe racer: “'A chromed nut doesn't mean shit,' Andy snorts.....'It's a bomb in disguise. It's not just a rat—it's a 91.5-inch rat that assassinates the unwary ass-up cafe dude regardless of what he's

744 Mendelson, Frank. Letter. “Bad Influence?” Easyriders October 1972: 8.

338 on.'”745 Again, cafe racers were distinguished by the forward-leaning posture that they borrowed from competitive racers, but the connotations of describing Andy's antagonist as an ass-up cafe dude are obvious; indeed, the same homophobic subtext emerged consistently in bikers' musings on the subject of the cafe racer, like Easyriders's sarcastic account of the cafe racer's attributes from December 1974:

According to some biker rags the long, narrow, chrome front ends are growing shorter and being replaced with highly lubricated telescopic shorter forks. The comfortable, sweeping pullbacks are shrinking in favor of stubby clip-ons, and no longer will the rider be content to kick back comfortable against the soft breasts of his passenger; but rather he will allow his chest to pound against his gas cap, strain his neck with the weight of a heavy helmet to peer at the passing scene from over his fairing— and without a passenger.746

Here, Easyriders scoffed at safety features like windshields and helmets, painting cafe racers as timid and domesticated, and the magazine dwelt on the issue of passengers to further impugn cafe racers as men, suggesting that they do not attract women and, perhaps, that they have no inclination to do so.

Of course, chopper-builders also made scant provision for passengers.747 Ultimately, the two subcultures were working toward parallel expressions of the technological sublime, and their rivalry often amounted to wrangling over competing definitions of functionalism. In the Easyriders parable about Andy and his ass-up rival, Andy invokes a chromed nut as an indictment of cafe racers' priorities, leveling a charge of superficiality that is returned in Cycle Magazine's homage to the cafe racer: “Cafe racers may produce the next departure point for motorcycle styling. Choppers could never do that; they are built for visual impact, and function has little place.”748 Of course, Cycle Magazine is basically correct about the chopper's emphasis on visual impact;749 there is a real irony in Andy's use of a chromed nut to censure cafe racers for frivolous vanity, when, as we have seen, chrome enjoyed a revered, if somewhat paradoxical, status within the chopper aesthetic. In order to amplify the contrast 745 “Talk About a Meat Machine!” Easyriders September 1974: 47. 746 “Who Says Choppers are Dead?” Easyriders December 1974: 42. 747 On many choppers, the only option for a passenger was to sit on the bare fender. 748 Cycle Magazine. Rpt. Easyriders September 1974: 11. 749 The magazine's prediction that the cafe racer would provide the impetus for future styling innovations in the motorcycle industry was also accurate: at least in the short-term. In 1974, Willie G. Davidson, still working for the company under AMF control, conceived the Harley XLCR or Cafe Racer, which was released in 1977 and met with woeful sales. Ultimately, though, Harley revived its fortunes by appropriating and exploiting the chopper legacy.

339 between Andy and his cafe-racer rival, Easyriders actually placed Andy on a rat-bike, as opposed to a classic chopper, because the classic chopper, of course, combined functionalist austerity with garish ornaments and delirious, dysfunctional transfigurations, while the rat-bite embodied a more literal- minded functionalist conceit. And Easyriders is basically correct about the cafe racer as well. During the 1960's, British firms were, like Harley-Davidson, mired in a cycle of low productivity, inefficient manufacturing techniques, low sales, and wanton spending on the macho indulgence of competitive racing. Cafe racers, like their chopper-building American counterparts, responded with an ambivalent, parodic exaggeration of this peculiar situation and the obsolescent but evocative machines that it produced. Thus, as with the chopper, the ostensible project of cafe racers was to coax improved performance from an archaic design, and the overarching design philosophy was functionalist. Like choppers, cafe racers were stripped-down: their fenders shortened or removed entirely; their gently upswept factory handlebars replaced with abbreviated horizontal clip-ons; their conspicuous rear-view mirrors exchanged for discrete bar-end dental mirrors; and their ample air-boxes, which were typically concealed by a body-panel bearing the bike's make and model badges, discarded in favor of minimal pod air-filters attached directly to the carburetor and left exposed, creating a negative space beneath the seat: a window allowing observers to look right through the heart of the machine.

The creation of this negative space, which also involved exposing the bike's frame to view, was emblematic of the cafe racer aesthetic, and it has a close parallel in the effect that chopper-builders sought to achieve when they adopted smaller gas tanks in an effort to expose the engine's cylinder heads. Chopper builders sometimes removed a bike's factory air-box and the chrome medallion that concealed it, but, on Harley's V-twin engine, which had its carburetors located in the crux of the V created by the 45-degree offset between its two massive cylinder blocks, the air filters were oriented perpendicular to the bike, and any reduction in their size only increased the visibility of the carburetors, rather than yielding the kind of negative space that could be created behind an engine that had its

340 cylinders configured in the inline format typical of British and Japanese machines. However, by selecting a smaller gas tank that did not protrude below the top rail of the bike's frame, chopper- builders created their own pronounced negative space; on a classic chopper, the cylinder heads are fully visible, as is a portion of the frame, and it is possible to see through a substantial window between the engine and gas tank. Within both of these traditions, the effect of these negative spaces, beyond expressing a functionalist emphasis on lean forms, was to underscore the motorcycle's inherent fragility, exposing the fragmentary nature of the entire assemblage. Instead of presenting an illusion of integrity, of an indissoluble whole, a perfect commodity that admitted no intervention or manipulation, the chopper and the cafe racer offered visions of contingency; they were presented as spare frames onto which disparate elements had been affixed in an improvised manner. Indeed, whereas factory motorcycles of all makes invariably featured black frames that were meant to go unnoticed, chopper- builders and cafe racers typically painted their frames in eye-catching complimentary colors. And, cafe- racers were particularly enamored of bikes that featured mismatched frames and engines, speaking with reverence of Frankenstein oddities like the Triton: a powerful Triumph Bonneville engine shoe-horned into a lightweight Norton Featherbed frame.750 Like chopper-builders, they wanted to assert their authorship and subvert the hegemony of mass-producers; thus, salvage and transposition became bulwarks of their aesthetic.

Both subcultures reacted to the stagnation of Anglo-American motorcycle design by embracing a rough functionalist aesthetic with masculine, vernacular overtones. Beneath their insistence that their design innovations enhanced the performance of these obsolescent machines, both sought, really, to impart a fragile, handmade quality to their bikes, calling attention to the enduring malleability of the motorcycle form and underscoring its physical precariousness as part of their effort to evoke the technological sublime, which defined the overarching precept of both aesthetics. British bikers, of

750 Osgerby, Biker, 121.

341 course, cultivated a more Kantian interpretation of the technological sublime than their licentious

American counterparts, and their cafe racers certainly embodied this predilection, privileging control and maneuverability without engaging in the perverse extremes of conspicuous dysfunction that defined the chopper; yet, at root, the two subcultures pursued complimentary design imperatives.

Indeed the mercenary eye of the inveterately square trade press immediately saw through their false dichotomy: “Cafe enthusiasts today represent not just another fragment of the motorcycle market. On the contrary, they represent, in many respects, an amalgamation of two seeming radically opposing trends, and the ranks of chopper enthusiasts have already seen mass defections toward the functional trimness of the coffee bar racers.”751 Motorcycle Industry recognized that the cafe racer represented an elaboration of the chopper's emphasis on vernacular functionalism.

CONCLUSION

Lears suggests that his turn of the century anti-moderns failed to substantively alter American social conditions because they were preoccupied with process; they reproduced the superficial forms that characterized a prior era without accessing that era's particular metaphysics: without recapturing the underlying feeling that engendered the cultural expressions they admired. Their own feeling was simply one of nostalgia, as we see in the example of the Arts and Crafts Movement, which attempted to resist industrialization and practice unalienated labor through an obdurately literal revival of the medieval guild system. Ultimately, the movement became little more than a therapeutic outlet for its bourgeois enthusiasts. By eschewing mechanization, they ensured that their output would not impact the mass market, and their precious, hand-crafted wares became expensive totems that symbolized a

751 Motorcycle Industry. Rpt. Easyriders December 1974: 11. It is worth noting too that, in spite of its reputation, the infamous XLCR looked a lot like the factory-produced pseudo-choppers that became so coveted by consumers in the 1990's.

342 socially engaged reverence for the artisan but failed to impact contemporary labor conditions. Lears cites Henry Adams as the exception to this tendency toward formalism among nineteenth century anti- moderns; while many of his Brahmin peers busied themselves crafting rustic furniture or redesigning their episcopal churches with Gothic flourishes, Adams attempted to find a contemporary analog for the awesome mixture of rapture and dread behind medieval religious practice and its closely related modes of artistic expression.752 Of course, he found, ironically, that the feeling behind medieval veneration of the virgin was confluent with his contemporaries' adulation of the mechanical dynamo. It was toward the machine that modern subjects felt the agony and the ecstasy of medieval faith; it was in the technological sublime that they found transcendence, joy, and meaning, and, indeed, Nye presents the technological sublime as modern America's popular faith.

Bikers themselves looked back nostalgically at the early modern period and its formulation of the technological sublime, but they did not merely reproduce the iconography of this era. Instead, in the chopper, they created a radically new technological artifact that engendered a sublime response in an period when that type of intimate interaction with powerful, undomesticated machines was exceptional.

Bikers stylized the tradition of vernacular engineering as an anti-modern practice. Engineering, for them, was not technical but collaborative, even primitively ritualistic. Yet, the chopper was not strictly atavistic: not a simple inversion of Detroit's aesthetic and ideological position; that was the rat bike.

The chopper, instead, captured the ambivalent tension of Pop art, and it was this tension that, ultimately, made bikers such alluring figures. If bikers invoked the atavistic Morlocks, they also continued to reference a strain of buoyant science-fiction fantasy embodied in the iconic figure of the rocket-man, whose final amalgamation of man and machine promised to liberate mankind from its abject, corpulent, and gravity-bound existence: “Nothing like them had ever existed. In some ways they appeared to be a kind of half-breed anachronism, a human hangover from the era of the Wild West. Yet,

752 Lears, No Place, 280.

343 in other ways they were as new as television.”753 Bikers embodied a lingering uncertainty about the relationship between mechanization and progress, suffusing this signification with conspicuous sexual overtones. Indeed, for Ted Polhemus, the outlaw biker’s ability to exist simultaneously as sci-fi fantasy and pre-civilized totem was a recipe for overt eroticism: “On the one hand, the perfectly lubricated, pneumatic dynamo of the Sex Machine heralds a sci-fi future in which desire is unhindered by the friction of emotion, conversely, The Animal—its beastly urges unconstrained by culture and civilization—harks back to a pre-human age when instinct ruled and hairy, sweating apelike men and women rutted with abandon in a jungle paradise.”754 Bikers themselves cultivated this dialectic, in particular, by simultaneously obscuring and emphasizing the boundary between themselves and their motorcycles. Bikers were, of course, exultantly filthy, and they were begrimed, in particular, with oil and grease: the characteristic effluent of their mechanized doubles. Yet, bikers went to great lengths to ensure that their machines themselves remained immaculate. In the Pasadena Run, bikers nonchalantly dismissed the Rose Parade Committee chairman's charge that they were vile and unkempt but reacted violently when he suggested the same about their motorcycles. Likewise, when Thompson's law enforcement source remarked disdainfully that “[the Angels] sleep on grease-caked beds,” he added, more ambiguously: “but their bikes are spotless.”755 Ultimately, bikers embraced the disorderly, primitive connotations of the Harley as hog, but they simultaneously celebrated the science-fiction overtones of their intimate relationship to these personal machines.

753 Harris, Bikers, 16. 754 Polhemus, Ted. “The Art of the Motorcycle: Outlaws, Animals, and Sex Machines.” The Art of the Motorcycle, 58. 755 Thompson, Hell's Angels, 85.

344 Conclusion: Biker Exceptionalism: Risk, Post-modernism, and the Insane Doctors

of the Button

The biker was a seductive figure because he embraced danger in a way that evoked the highly poiticized premodern concept of taboo, as opposed to the modern category of risk. Indeed, bikers exposed and decried the way that structures of power continued to shape our understanding of risk in spite of its ostensible neutrality. They did this when they complained that NHTSA regulations unfairly

756targeted their improvised creations, reifying factory designs as safety standards when they were merely the preference of monied mass producers, and they did this when they resisted popular innovations in motor vehicle insurance during the 1960s and 70s, especially the state of New York's no- fault insurance mandate, from which motorcyclists were excluded. Like compulsory liability insurance, another innovation that was introduced in Massachusetts as early as 1925 but saw widespread adoption during the 1960s, no-fault was conceptualized during the inter-war years but did not gain notoriety until it was publicized by the academic work of Robert Keeton and Jeffrey O'Connell in 1965, prompting 19 states to adopt some form of no fault insurance between 1971 and 1974. In most of these locales, no- fault became an option available to consumers, while elsewhere it was mandated by law. The logic of no-fault is straightforward. Conceived as a pragmatic effort to eliminate the high cost of investigation and litigation associated with automobile accidents, the policy simply opted to forego any effort to

756 Keeton, Robert E., and Jeffrey O'Connell. Basic Protection for the Traffic Victim: A Blueprint for Reforming Automobile Insurance. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1965).

345 determine which driver was responsible for creating a motor vehicle accident.

Yet, this simple premise relied on a subtly profound reconsideration of the nature of causality within the complex system of our modern roadways: a metaphysical shift that made the inclusion of motorcyclists within this new model problematic. Deviating from a strong historical tendency to define mishaps on the road as events caused by irresponsible individual actions,757 accidents, within the new paradigm of no-fault, were conceded to be endemic to the modern traffic system itself, such that fault could be understood as something that was borne equally by all participants within that system. Yet, the public did not accept the idea that the motorcyclists' assumed risk was, for all practical purposes, merely the risk endemic to the traffic system as a whole divided equally among all participating motorists. Motorcyclists were effectively labeled non-legitimate participants within the traffic system and excluded from the protections of no fault,758 imagined to be always somehow culpable for what befell them on the road. They made the perverse choice to ride inherently dangerous machines. They assumed irrational risks. They were pathological others. Ultimately, the no-fault paradigm could not assimilate bikers, who embodied a certain primitive threat. Yet, many observers felt that their aggressive, obstreperously taboo behavior presented an alluring contrast to the modern landscape of risk mitigation. Again, this is the contrast that James Ward identifies in his work on biker films, observing that bikers provided a rather quaint form of menace when contrasted with the opaque malignance of the military industrial complex and its twisted rationality. Likewise, it is this same contrast that informed the biker subculture's denigration of Japanese motorcycles and its perverse admiration for Harley's manifest inadequacies. No fault insurance attempted to extend and refine the modern impulse to rationalize the road and administer its hazards. Yet, the innovation of no-fault and compulsory liability insurance schemas also exhibited the fundamental incoherence and subtle erosion

757 Blanke, David. Hell on Wheels: The Promise and Peril of America's Car Culture, 1900-1940. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007): 105-106. 758 This is literally true in New York, while in other states motorcyclists' participation in no-fault coverage is simply resented. Many medical insurance policies also list motorcycling as a dangerous activity that may void coverage.

346 of that modern paradigm, as those models' clinical pragmatism belied schismatic assumptions about the nature of causality and risk.

In Hell on Wheels, David Blanke chronicles the emergence of auto safety as a public issue, noting that early auto enthusiasts defined themselves as part of a virtuous community. This attitude was epitomized by the sanguine assurance of driver's ed pioneer Albert Whitney, who “imagined that driver education would come to be used to teach not only the skills of shifting and steering, but more profoundly how to 'live acceptably in the modern world.''759 For Whitney, the road was a microcosm of modern America's technologically mediated democracy, and it offered an ideal educational tool for instilling democratic virtues. Of course, these buoyant hopes began to erode with the the public's growing awareness of the tremendous damage associated with automobile accidents. By the 1920's, road safety became a matter of public concern, although, initially, the issue seemed rather straightforward. When auto accidents were first identified as a social problem, Americans exhibited a strong bias toward defining the troubling phenomenon as the result of accident-prone individuals and their negligence: an agglomeration of isolated events caused by personal defects. Indeed, in addition to the usual newspaper editorials that castigated the accident-prone and offered facile generalizations about who they might be—invariably pundits postulated near-total overlap between the accident-prone and some maligned minority group—considerable scientific effort was dedicated to identifying these motorized deviants, all to no avail; the existence of a discrete caste of pathologically inept drivers seemed self-evident, but identifying and classifying these defectives proved elusive. Eventually, it became apparent to most observers that the accident danger was simply endemic to the environment of the road, rather than confined to specific malefactors, and an effort was finally made to rationalize and improve the road system. Recognizing that individual drivers had accidents under particular conditions, states introduced safety-minded innovations like divided lanes, cloverleaf interchanges, controlled rail

759 Blanke, Hell on Wheels, 2.

347 crossings, and better signage. As with the transformation of train travel a generation earlier, it was the road system itself that was reformed, rather than the behavior of accident-prone individuals.

And the success of this reform process, which included the proliferation of automotive insurance as a means of mitigating the collateral impact of accidents, is precisely why the influential

German sociologist Ulrich Beck designates auto accidents a quintessentially modern hazard, setting them in opposition to the elusive post-modern perils that he examines. For Beck, post-modernism is an orientation in which a quintessentially modern preoccupation with the distribution of goods yields to a focus on the distribution of risks, and he offers pollution and nuclear radiation as the characteristic risks of the post-modern age: risks that are diffuse, abstract, and perhaps even incomprehensible. In sharp contrast, automobile accidents are finite, visceral, and immediately threatening.760 However, if we look at the evolution of our attitudes about the road and its perils, we can see how the mindset that Beck identifies with the post-modern risk society is not confined to new risks like nuclear radiation and water pollution; in fact, we can see the emergence of this sensibility in the transformation of distinctly modern risks like auto accidents. As drivers began to accept that their own competence did not provide sufficient defense against the perils of the road, they found, in a rationalized modern road system and especially in the mechanism of insurance, tools with which they could predict and tame the chaos of the roadway and buttress themselves against any residual uncertainty. However, by the 1960s, conventional insurance did not seem to be providing sufficient protection from our motorized bedlam, and the industry went through a period of rapid transformation.

Again, insurance is one of the definitive instruments of modernism, and in many ways it was conceived specifically to address the vicissitudes of weather, notably for the benefit of investors in commercial shipping. Insurance, it seemed, could temper the damaging effects of erratic weather while

760 Beck, Ulrich. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. Trans. Mark Ritter. (Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1992).

348 scientists worked toward a comprehensive understanding of climate systems.761 Yet, at the very height of the 1950s golden age of expertise, events abruptly demonstrated that we didn't really understand the weather at all. Barry Commoner, in his seminal work on environmentalism, The Closing Circle, offers the startling arrival of a radioactive rain shower in the grimy industrial town of Troy, New York, on a balmy spring day in 1953 as parable of modern hubris in which a misplaced faith in our own ability to rationalize and govern nature was exposed by the revelation of nature's infinitely complex, entropic reality. After World War II, the United States continued developing its highly secret nuclear program, testing atomic weapons in remote areas of the South Pacific and the Nevada desert. These remote locations were chosen to foster the secrecy that shrouded the entire nuclear program and because experimenters recognized the horrible magnitude of these new weapons, which could level entire cities.

Yet, even as they recognized this astonishing power, they imagined that the effects of their radical new weapons would be relatively isolated. They knew, for instance, that radiation would reach into the stratosphere some 33,000 feet above earth's surface, yet they assumed that it would simply stay there indefinitely, gradually decaying. Instead, within months, rogue atoms were falling on Troy, where they were detected by scientists unaffiliated with the nation's secret nuclear program. As word traveled within the scientific community, researchers around the world made similar discoveries, locating radiation in layers of dust and afternoon thundershowers, and the observation that this radiation was concentrated in specific geographic locales offered a watershed moment for climatology: the chance revelation of currents in the upper atmosphere and the intimation of complex global climate systems beyond anything researchers had imagined.762

Commoner uses this story to inform a critique of the scientific method that is entirely consistent with the thinking of the counterculture, offering the exposure of our utterly crude knowledge regarding

761 In his Technological Utopianism in American Culture, Segal highlights a moment in Bellamy's looking Backward in which it is explained that in Utopia: “We have absolute control of the weather.” Segal, Techological Utopianism, 27. 762 Commoner, Barry. The Closing Circle: Nature, Man, and Technology. (New York: Bantam Books, 1972): 53.

349 basic weather systems as a cultural as well as meteorological turning-point that effectively marked the birth of post-modernism. Indeed, Beck's concept of the risk society is perfectly distilled in Commoner's parable, with its observation that the very mechanism that embodied our fully-realized control over nature—the atomic bomb—also exposed our ignorance and left us more vulnerable than ever. And it was during this same period that Americans, finding that insurance had not really solved the problem of auto accidents and their consequences, pursued a number of novel schemas that unwittingly acknowledged the final impossibility of a comprehensively managed environment. In pursuing a more perfect mechanism for controlling the capricious outcomes of the traffic system, schematic departures like no-fault and compulsory liability insurance severed the tangible threads of causality that defined the modern world view. Like Wile E. Coyote striding obliviously onto thin canyon air, these modifications behaved like rational refinements of the analytical tools intrinsic to insurance and modernity itself, even as they plunged into a baroque parody of reason that defied common sense.

Thus, from a certain perspective, the metamorphosis of auto insurance during the 1960's exposed the farcical nature of rationalism. For Marcuse and his admirers in the counterculture, the notion that the most rational, risk-averse way to handle the destruction wrought by car accidents is to disregard underlying causes and individual responsibility would have represented a delicious bit of irony. If the fundamental illogic of no fault is denied, the policy represents a delirious parody of modernism. Yet, if that illogic is embraced, no-fault can be understood as a quintessential artifact of

Beck's post-modern risk society. From this vantage, no-fault recognizes that traffic accidents are inevitable and typically lack readily identifiable, unidirectional causality, such that they cannot be reduced to an individual's failure or even to a flaw in the traffic system. Indeed, no-fault holds that accidents are like the weather; they are omnipresent, eminently quantifiable, yet governed by natural laws so inscrutable that they seem like the workings of fate: highly predictable in the aggregate but utterly unpredictable in any specific occurrence. Under a no-fault paradigm, fault continues to exist, in

350 theory, but we acknowledge that the resources required to ascertain fault do not exist or that the identification of fault does not offer a discernible material improvement for affected parties. If Mary

Douglas posits risk analysis and its erroneous quest for true causes as a quintessentially modern rubric, the no-fault innovation is preeminently post-modern, asserting that, whether or not verifiable truth exists, it is not really worth the effort to locate because the system works better without indulging such a preoccupation.

The biker stands doubly estranged from this new paradigm, which has been unable to accommodate him. On the one hand, the biker's behavior is seen as dangerously irrational in a taboo, primitive mode. The risk that he assumes is too great. Yet, on the other hand, no-fault and compulsory liability themselves covertly eschew the rational actor model, suggesting that individual fault is irrelevant while effectively forestalling independent risk evaluation to recuperate an overtly politicized mode of evaluating danger that upholds collective judgment. Thus, bikers were sometimes idealized as exemplars of a decidedly modem emphasis on individual choice and responsibility. Drivers accepted the notion that accidents were not completely preventable, either by their own proficiency or by the sweeping reform of our traffic infrastructure, and they also came to believe that other drivers could not be trusted to act responsibly or to accept accountability for their actions.763 Bikers, by contrast, invariably defined themselves as a uniquely skilled and virtuous community. In this sense, they recalled the ethos of early automotive enthusiasts, who insisted that the road was a crucible in which democratic and fraternal values were distilled: “If we go out on a run, and one of us goes down or just simply runs out of gas, he's not alone. Even if we aren't together, if there's a phone, there's help.”764 Indeed Lovin's

Complete Motorcycle Nomad includes a ham-fisted parable about a stranded motorist who is eventually discovered in his car with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to his head and a note explaining that he did not want to live in a world in which nobody would stop to assist a fellow motorist. 763 The introduction of compulsory liability insurance, in particular, reflects the latter judgment. 764 Garfield, Letter. Easyriders, 8.

351 And motorcyclists could be equally hyperbolic when assessing the difficulty involved in operating their vehicles: “The skills and techniques used to pilot a motorcycle are different from those used to drive a car. They are kin to the skills used in piloting airplanes, in sculpting, in some branches of theoretical mathematics, and in laser-beam surgery.”765 Even within the outlaw subculture, in which danger as a form of social taboo was typically embraced, often along with distinct overtones of fatalism and nihilism, great emphasis was placed on skill. We have seen how the chopper's aesthetic of conspicuous dysfunction enabled bikers to deliver a sublime performance of machismo that relied on impairing their machines' responsiveness to control, and this tactic also facilitated a heightened exhibition of skill: “I even mastered the rear mount jockey shifts that were the rage. They demanded precise movements—one hand steered while the other hung back, shifting gears.”766 Although

Easyriders sometimes insisted otherwise as part of their political rhetoric, arguing that choppers were not more difficult to operate than conventional motorcycles, within the community of chopper enthusiasts there was, in fact, a broad and exuberant consensus that their custom machines were surpassingly volatile and that this quality was desirable insofar as it demanded greater skill of riders:

“Two hundred pounds lighter, untested increments faster, and more temperamental, it challenged you to new limits.”767 If car drivers increasingly accepted the idea that their own skill could not necessarily prevent accidents, acquiescing to a wide range of safety regulations and insurance reforms that began in the 1920's, motorcyclists stubbornly resisted that acknowledgment and its legislative implications:

“There is no denial that a helmet will help you out in a crash but if some farmer in a pickup barrels out onto 222 or some old lady runs a stopsign on Rio Grande, the only thing that will hwlp [sic] you are your wits and your knowledge of the bike, something the legislature can't vote into existence.”768 Here,

Dan Barton is willing to concede that helmets do, at least, help prevent injury in the event of an

765 Lovin, Motorcycle Nomad, 148. 766 Weathern, Wayward Angel, 9. 767 Ibid, 42. 768 Barton, Dan ““URUURUURRRr!!!! screech bopp! Bash!” The Rag 12,2 (1967): 14.

352 accident, even as he insists that skill is a more reliable prophylactic. But other bikers could not abide even that small concession. In a Road Rider article in which he critiqued helmet laws, Roger Hull offered a novel and preeminently specious argument by suggesting that helmets were actually dangerous insofar as they gave novice riders a false sense of security.769 It is a contention that seems absurd prima facia except, in the context of bikers' magnified emphasis on skill.

In these ways, bikers were actually stubbornly modernist. Like the frontier itself, with which the subculture was consistently paired, bikers could either deconstruct or amplify and parody modern formulations of the individual. For some, bikers were consummate individualists. For many others, they were, in fact, failed individualists; their slow choppers were pathetically obsolete machines disguised by garish superficial flourishes, while their clubs demanded rigid conformity. But, for their most vociferous admirers within the counterculture they were neither; instead, they were avatars of the entropic, liminal frontier. They deconstructed modern conceptions of individualism and accessed an alternate reality. Thus, Paul Willis describes bikers as post-modern pragmatists wedded to their own idiosyncratic perception of the world; even as they also somehow embodied a particularly close congruence with reality, their laconic speech, undissembled desires, and close acquaintance with fear and mortality marking them as particularly authentic. Ultimately, bikers invoked an early formulation of modernism with distinctly masculine overtones: something more akin to literary modernism with its emphasis on entropy and the instability of identity. Bikers strove to live in the present, eschewing the future orientation of modernity and it rational actor to cultivate a carnivalesque aesthetic that embraced fluidity through costume and the grotesque. And they expressed an exuberant affinity for machines that was similarly malleable. In contrast to the rationalized matrix of technocratic society, in which an overweening profusion of domesticated technologies seemed, to observers like Roszak and Winner, aligned with repressive social control, bikers invoked an era in which machines were brutely powerful

769 Hull, Roger. “Road Rider” Easyriders September 1974: 11.

353 and unpredictable and men risked their bodies to interact with these contrivances. Thus, they pioneered a nostalgic articulation of the technological sublime that has only grown more prevalent in our culture as the process of deindustrialization has advanced and as we have continued to debate the counterculture's critique of modernity and its relationship to technology.

Indeed, bikers remain key ciphers for popular reinterpretations of the 1960's and ruminations on masculinity. In the recent, critically acclaimed television series Sons of Anarchy, the titular motorcycle club supports itself by dealing weapons and racketeering; yet, the show's mercurial and prototypically handsome central character, Jax, feels ambivalent about these endeavors. Jax's step-father, Clay, played by the cartoonishly paleolithic Ron Perlman, is the current club president, but in the show's first episode Jax discovers a journal belonging to his deceased biological father, a co-founder of the club who we eventually learn was murdered by none other than Clay. The journal reveals Jax's father's allegiance to the counterculture and his desire to turn the Sons of Anarchy into a peacefully subversive fraternity dedicated to expanded consciousness. Thus, Jax is established as our begrimed Hamlet, and the whole show becomes a reflection on the origin mythology of the American biker as Jax grapples with conflicting articulations of masculinity and freedom, vacillating, in the best American tradition, between a kind of bestial license set against the backdrop of frontier nihilism and a vision of growth and transcendence rooted in solidarity that also stakes claim to the frontier legacy, embracing its emphasis on liminality, contingency, and experimentation.

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2 Douglas, Mary. Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory. (London: Routledge, 1992). Dreyer, Thorne “Take it on the Chin: Facial Discrimination at the Conoco Station” The Rag 2,5 (1967): 5. Dreyer, Thorne. “Flipped-out Week” The Rag 1:21 (1967): 1. Drutt, Matthew. ed. The Art of the Motorcycle. (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 1998). E.W. “Dancing in Hell.” The Berkeley Barb 4,6,76 February 10 (1967): 4. Earnin his Wings” Easyriders February 1975: 64. “Easy Rider and the Sterile Cuckoo.” The Berkeley Barb. 9,22,225 December 12-18 (1969). Easy Rider. Dir. Dennis Hopper. Columbia Pictures, 1969. Film. Easyriders, November 1974: 21-24. Echols, Alice. Daring to be Bad: Radical Feminism in America 1967-1975. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). Edwin A. Roberts, Jr. National Observer. Rpt. “Biker's Digest: Miscellaneous Quotes from Other Biker Rags.” Easyriders April 1974: 11. Ellis, Lee. Theories of Rape: Inquiries into the Causes of Sexual Aggression. (New York: Hemisphere, 1989). Energy Crisis” Easyriders April 1974: 53. Fallding, Harold. "Secularization and the Sacred and Profane." The Sociological Quarterly 8.3 (1967): 349-363. Farber, Jerry “The Student as Nigger: a Course in how to be Slaves” The Rag 1,23 (1967): 6. Flink, James J. The Automobile Age. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998). Frank, Thomas. The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture,Counterculture, and the Birth of Hip Consumerism. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). Frayne, George (Commander Cody) Qtd. Fury, Jake. “Real Country Rock” The Berkeley Barb 9, 8,210 Aug 22-28 (1969): 4. Freudiger, Larry. “It's Happening, Baby: the White Revolution.” The Rag 1,11 (1967): 6. Fuglsang, Ross Motorcycle Menace: Media Genres and the Construction of a Deviant Subculture. Diss. University of Iowa, 1997. Rpt. “800 Pounds of Steel” Rpt. Veno, Arthur. ed. The Mammoth Book of Bikers. (Philadelphia: Running Press, 2007). Garfield, Jay. Letter. Easyriders April 1977: 8. Garson, Marvin ““What Happened in Chicago-an Analysis The Whites: a Clown Show” The Berkeley Barb 5,10,109 September 15-21 (1967): 9. Gartman, David. "Tough Guys and Pretty Boys: The Cultural Antagonisms of Engineering and Aesthetics in Automotive History." Automobile in American Life and Society (2006). Web. Gartman, David. Auto Opium: a Social History of American Automobile Design. (New York: Routledge, 1994). Geertz, Clifford. “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight.” Daedalus 101.1 (1972): 1–37. Web. Genet, Jean. Our lady of the Flowers. Trans. Bernard Frechtman. (New York: Grove, 1991). Gerlach, Jim “Gas Stops Along the Way” Easyriders April 1974: 17. Gideon, Sigfried. Mechanization Takes Command: a Contribution to Anonymous History. (New York: Norton, 1969). Gilmore, Glenda E. "Murder, Memory, and the Flight of the Incubus."Democracy betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and its Legacy: (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). Ginsberg, Allen. “To the Angels.” The Berkeley Barb 1,15 November 19 (1965): 2. “Give 'em Hell.” Easyriders June 1974: 11. Gook. “In Memory.” Easyriders. May 1980: 52.

3 Graham, Allison. Framing the South: Hollywood, Television, and Race during the Civil Rights Struggle. (Baltimore: John's Hopkins Press, 2001). Greenberg, Gary. Manufacturing Depression: the Secret History of a Modern Disease. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010). Grote, Ron “After the First Snow” Easyriders April 1975: 50. Groth, Nicholas A. and H. Jean Birnbaum. Men Who Rape: The Psychology of the Offender. (New York: Plenum Press, 1979). Hall, Jacquelyn Dowd. "'The Mind That Burns in Each Body: Women, Rape, and Racial Violence." Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983): 328-49. Hall, Ray C. “Was Medal Thrown in River? Tales Still Vary.'” Courier-Journal. Com. Gannett. August 30 (2010). Web. Halliday, Sue. Letter. “Big Armond” Easyriders September 1974: 6. Hammond, Donald. Letter. “Visions of a Mechanical Penis!” Easyriders February 1973: 6. Hangover. “Tobacco Rat.” Easyriders August 1977: 18-23. Harraway, Donna Jeanne. Simians Cyborgs and Women: the Reinvention of Nature. (New York: Routledge, 1991). Hartigan,John Jr. Odd Tribes: Toward a Cultural Analysis of White People. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005). “Havoc in Hollister Motorcyclists Take Over Town; Many Injured” San Francisco Chronicle July 6 (1947): 1. “He Can't Believe It.” Easyriders January 1974: 6. “Heat Gets Hotter” Easyriders October 1972: 8. Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: the Meaning of Style. (New York: Routledge, 1991). “Hell's Angels Rumor Bugs the Ghetto” The Berkeley Barb 1,15 November 19 (1965). “High Perch Seat and Long Sissybar” Easyriders February 1974: 48. Hine, Thomas. Populuxe (New York: Knopf, 1986). Holmstrom, Darwin. “The A Priori Motorcycle.” Foreword. The Harley-Davidson Century (St. Paul: MBI Publishing Company, 2002). Holquist, Michael. Introduction. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and his World. 1965. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). Horseman, Reginald. Race and Manifest Destiny: the Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981). Howe, Anthony. “I Would Suggest that the Situation of Texas Hippies Vis a Vis their Physical Well-being could Rightly be Termed Very Dangerous or Paranoia” The Rag 1,11 (1967): 11. Hughes, Thomas P. American Genesis: a Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm, 1870-1979. (New York: Viking, 1989). Hull, Roger. “Road Rider” Easyriders September 1974: 11. Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. 1932. (Ernst Klett Sprachen, 2007). “If at First You Don't See—Try Again!” Easyriders February 1973: 17-18. “In the Wind at a Brother's Funeral” Easyriders March 1977: 28. “Is This Sporty Fast Enough for Ya.” Easyriders January 1975: 52. Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Barbarian virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876- 1917. (New York: Macmillan, 2001). Jameson, Fredric. "Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture." Social Text (1979): 130-148. Johnson, Art, “A Theory of Hip; Part One 'What Have You Got?'” The Berkeley Barb 3,23,69 December 9 (1966): 1.

4 Johnson, Bruce. “Naked Angels Laid Bare.” The Berkeley Barb 9,1,203 July 4-10 (1969): 12. Johnson, Michael L. Hunger for the Wild: America's Obsession with the Untamed West. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas). Jones, I.M. “Typical Tuesday” Easyriders September 1974: 17. Joseph. “Ideology, Symbolic Action, and Rituality in Social Movements: the Effects on Organizational Forms” Social Science Information. 23: 4 (1984): 863-871. Judge. Letter. “Big Smiles” Easyriders February 1975: 10. Kasson, John F. Civilizing the Machine: Technology and Republican Values in America 1776-1900. (New York: Grossman, 1976). Kasson, John F. Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man: the White Male Body and the Challenge of Modernity in America. (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001). Kaye, H.R. A Place in Hell: the Inside Story of the Hell's Angels—the World's Wildest Outlaws. 1968. (Los Angeles: New English Library, 1970): 13. Qtd. Harris, Maz. Bikers: the Birth of a Modern Day Outlaw. (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1985). Keeton, Robert E., and Jeffrey O'Connell. Basic Protection for the Traffic Victim: A Blueprint for Reforming Automobile Insurance. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1965). Kellner, Douglas. “Critical Theory and the Culture Industries: a Reassessment. Telos 62 (1984-85): 196-206. Kieffner, Gary L. "Myth, Reality, and Revenge in Hunter S. Thompson's Hell’s Angels." International Journal of Motorcycle Studies 1,2 July (2005). Web. Kimmelman, Michael. “Seeing Machines as Art and the Guggenheim as a Machine.” New York Times June 26 (1998): 37. Klatch, Rebecca E. “The Counterculture, the New Left, and the New Right” Qualitative Sociology 17:3 (1993). Kline, Robert R. Consumers in the Country: Technology and Social Change in Rural America. (Baltimore: John's Hopkins University Press, 2000). Kotha, Suresh, and J. Dutton. Transformation at Harley-Davidson. Case Study. New York University, 1996. Kouwenhoven, John Atlee. Made in America: the Arts in Modern Civilization. 1948. (New York: Octagon Books, 1975). Kraft, Kate. “Los Angeles Gay Motorcycle Clubs, 1954-1980: Creating a Masculine Identity and Community” Thesis. Yale University, 2010. Krushchev, Nikita. Qtd. Wiesner, Merry E., Julius R. Ruff, and William Bruce Wheeler. Discovering the Western Past: A Look at the Evidence Since 1500. Vol. 2. (Wadsworth Publishing Company, 2003). L.J. Letter. “Remembering his Ol' Lady” Easyriders January 1975: 10. Latour, Bruno. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society. (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1987). Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012). Lavigne Yves. Hell's Angels: Into the Abyss. (New York: Harper Collins, 1996). Lears, T. J. Jackson. Fables of Abundance: a Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1994). Lears, T.J. Jackson. No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). Lepore, Jill. The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity. (New York: Knopf, 1998). Letter. “A Mama Speaks Out.” Easyriders September 1974: 6. Letter. “Needs Lessons” Easyriders November 1974: 20 Letter. “Whee Mommy” Easyriders February 1974: 6. Levingston, Tobie, and Keith Zimmerman. Soul on bikes: the East Bay Dragons MC and the Black Biker Set. (Motorbooks

5 International, 2013). Liebs, Chester H. Main Street to Miracle Mile: American Roadside Architecture. (Boston: Little Brown, 1985). Limerick, Patricia. The Legacy of Conquest: the Unbroken Past of the American West. (New York: Norton, 1988). Lind, Jakov. The International Times (London) November 14-27. Rpt. “Jakov Lind: Bares White Man-eaters: of Cowboys and Cannibals.” The Berkeley Barb 3,25,71 December 23 (1966): 5 Lindley, Arthur: Hyperion and the Hobbyhorse: Studies in Carnivalesque Subversion. (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996). Lipton, Leonard “I Ran For My Life from the Oakland Cops” The Berkeley Barb, 1,11 October 22 (1965): 3. Long-haired Men Put Out” The Berkeley Barb 2,3 January 21 (1966). Lott, Eric. Keynote. “Division Street, U.S.A.” American Studies Graduate Student Association Conference, University of Texas (2009). Lovin, Roger. The Complete Motorcycle Nomad: a Guide to Machines, Equipment, People, and Places (Boston: Little Brown, 1974). Lupton, Ellen and J. Abbott Miller. The Bathroom, the Kitchen, and the Aesthetics of Waste: a Process of Elimination. (Cambridge: MIT List Visual Arts Center, 1992). Lutz, Catherine A. and Jane L. Collins. Reading National Geographic. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). Lyon, Danny. The Bikeriders. (New York: Macmillan, 1967). Lyon, Danny. The Bikeriders. (New York: Macmillan, 1967). “Magic Mountain Fervor Leaves Post-teen Cool” The Berkeley Barb 4, 24, 94 June 16-22 (1967): 5. Mailer, Norman: The Armies of the Night: History as Novel, the Novel as History. (New York: Plume, 1994). Mailer, Norman. The White Negro. (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1957). Malady, Matthew J.X. “Want to Save Civilization? Get in Line.” The New York Times Magazine May 21 (2013). “Man! Talk About An Ear-Ringin', Drag-it-in-the-dirt, Far-out Knuckle: Well, Here it is!” Easyriders July `1977: 33. Marchand, Roland. Advertising the American Dream: Making way for Modernity, 1920-1940. (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1985). Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization: a Philosophical Inquiry into Freud. 1955. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966). Marvin, Carolyn. When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking about Electric Communications in the late Nineteenth Century. (New York: Oxford University Press). McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. (New York: Routledge, 1995). McCracken, Grant. Big Hair: A Journey into the Transformation of Self. (The Overlook Press; Woodstock, NY, 1995). McCurdy, Howard E. Space and the American Imagination. (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997). Meacham, Wm. “On Revolutionary Violence.” The Rag 3,21 July 10 (1969): 10. Meikle, Jeffrey L. “Domesticating Modernity: Ambivalence and Appropriation, 1920-1940.” Ed. Wendy Kaplan. Designing Modernity: the Arts of Reform and Persuasion , 1885-1945: Selections from the Wolfsonian. (New York” Thames and Hudson, 1995). Meikle, Jeffrey L. Design in the U.S.A. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). Melville, Herman. Moby Dick. 1851. (Chicago: Newbury Library, 1988). Menand, Louis. Introduction. Civilization and its Discontents. By Sigmund Freud. Trans. James Strackey (New York: Norton, 2015). Mendelson, Frank. Letter. “Bad Influence?” Easyriders October 1972: 8. Miller, Walter B. "Lower Class Culture as a Generating Milieu of Gang Delinquency." Journal of Social Issues 14,3

6 (1958): 5-19. Montgomery, “One Percenter Subculture.” Rpt. Veno, Arthur. ed. The Mammoth Book of Bikers. (Philadelphia: Running Press, 2007). Montgomery, Randall. “One-Percenter Subculture.” Canadian Journal of Criminology and Corrections (1976). Rpt. Veno, Arthur. ed. The Mammoth Book of Bikers. (Philadelphia: Running Press, 2007). Morshed, Adnan. “The Cultural Politics of Aerial Vision: Le Corbusier in Brazil (1929)” The Journal of Architectural Education. 55,4 (2002): 201-210. Motorcycle Industry. Rpt. Easyriders December 1974: 11. Murray, William. "The Hell's Angels." Saturday Evening Post 20 (1965): 32-39. Rpt. Veno, Arthur. ed. The Mammoth Book of Bikers. (Philadelphia: Running Press, 2007). Mutha. “Puzzled in Detroit” Easyriders November 1974: 20. Mutha. “Screamed Rape!” Easyriders December 1972: 22. Mutha. “Something is Wrong” Easyriders April 1975: 24. Noys, Benjamin. "Western Nihilism." (2012): 1-11. In: Historical Materialism Ninth Annual Conference, 8-11 Nov 2012, SOAS, London. (Unpublished) Oliva, Marguerite. Letter. “Preoccupation with Death” Easyriders September 1974: 8. Oriard, Michael. Reading Football: How the Popular Press Created an American Spectacle. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994). Orren, R. “Ride to Oblivion” Easyriders June 1974: 15. Osgerby, Bill. "Sleazy Riders: Exploitation,“Otherness”, and Transgression in the 1960s Biker Movie." Journal of Popular Film and Television 31:3 (2003): 98-108. Osgerby, Bill. Biker: Truth and Myth: How the Original Cowboy of the Road Became the Easy Rider of the Silver Screen. (Guilford: Globe Pequot Press, 2005). Owenby, Ted. Subduing Satan: Religion, Recreation, and Manhood in the Rural South 1865-1920. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Pres, 1990). Packer, Jeremy. Mobility without Mayhem: Safety, Cars, and Citizenship. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008). Pallasmaa, Juhani. The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses. (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2012). Perlman, Allison. "The Brief Ride of the Biker Movie." International Journal of Motorcycle Studies 3,1 (2007). Web. Pierson, Melissa Holbrook. “To the Edge: Motorcycles and Danger.” The Art of the Motorcycle (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1998). Pierson, Melissa Holbrook. The Perfect Vehicle: What is it About Motorcycles. (New York: Norton, 1998). Pirsig, Robert M. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values. (New York: William Morrow, 1974). Polhemus, Ted. “The Art of the Motorcycle: Outlaws, Animals, and Sex Machines.” The Art of the Motorcycle. (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 1998). Quinn, James, and D. Shane Koch. "The Nature of Criminality Within One-percent Motorcycle Clubs." Deviant Behavior 24,3 (2003): 281-305. Rpt. “Sex and Hedonism Amongst One-Percenter Bikers.” Rpt. Veno, Arthur. ed. The Mammoth Book of Bikers. (Philadelphia: Running Press, 2007). Reavis, Dick. “The Revolution...That Never Was.” The Rag 1,21 (1966): 9. Renegade. “A Day in the Life: or, Why Bikers are Bikers.” Easyriders February 1980: 30. Renegade. “Badland Bike” Easyriders August 1977: 59. “Resistance Grows on Day of Terror” The Berkeley Barb 5,6,114 October 20-26 (1967): 3. Reynolds, Frank, and Michael McClure. Freewheelin Frank: Secretary of the Angels. (New York: Grove, 1967).

7 Rossinow, Doug. The politics of authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left in America. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). Roszak, Theodore. The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and its Youthful Opposition. 1969. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). Rowlandson, Mary White. The Sovereignty and Goodness of God. 1682. (Boston: Bedford Books, 1997). Rubin, Jerry, et al. “Yippie Panther Pact Pipe-dream no.2: Open Salvos from a Black/White Gun” The Berkeley Barb 7,15,164 October 4-10 (1968). Rubin, Jerry. “A Gun for each Yip” The Berkeley Barb 7,8,158 Aug 23-24 (1968): 11. Rubin, Jerry. “And in America we are Learning to Become Vietcong.” The Berkeley Barb 6,1,125 January 5-11 (1968): 8- 9. Rubin, Jerry. “Elvis Kills Ike: America the Fat Man” The Berkeley Barb 6,11,134 March 8-14 (1968): 11. Rubin, Martin. “' Make Love Make War': Cultural Confusion and the Biker Film Cycle." Film History (1994): 355-381. Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: the Making and Unmaking of the World. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). Scherer, John. “Your Left Swingarm Assembly Is Fractured” Easyriders February 1973. Schilling, Phil. The Motorcycle World. (New York: Ridge Press, 1974): 12. Schneemann, C. "Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising ″. Film Culture 32 (1964): 9-10. Sclafani, Tony. The Grateful Dead FAQ: All That's Left to Know About the Greatest Jam Band in History. (Milwaukee: Hal Leonard Corporation, 2013). “Scooter Trash Stick Together” Easyriders May 1976: 39. “Seeks Freemen Freedom Rodes for Big Sur” The Berkeley Barb 6,21,145 May 24-30 (1968): 5. Segal, Howard P. Recasting the Machine Age: Henry Ford's Village Industries. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005). Segal, Howard P. Technological Utopianism in American Culture. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). Sharp, Don. “Fuck It!” Easyriders May 1975: 50. Silenius. “New Haight Happens to Sound of Angels.” The Berkeley Barb 3,25,71 Dec 23 (1966): 1. Skramstrad, Harold K. Preface. Working at Inventing: Thomas A. Edison and the Menlo Park Experience. 1989. William S. Pretzer. (Baltimore: John's Hopkins University Press, 2002). Skull. “The Videot” Easyriders. December 1977: 68. Slotkin, Richard. The Fatal Environment: the Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890. 1985. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998). Smith, Henry Nash . Virgin Land: the American West as Symbol and Myth..1950. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978). Smith, Shawn Michelle. Photography on the Color Line: W.E.B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). Solari, J.J. “The Pasadena Run” Easyriders September 1975: 19. Spider. “Unnatural Sex Act—Defense Against Infiltration?” Easyriders May 1973: 4. Spider. “Yes, Virginia, they Still Shoot Bikers,” Easyriders April 1974: 4. Stamberg, Maggie. “A Demonstration of the Absurd” The Rag 2, 7 (1967): 9. Stewart, Hap. Letter. “The Beautiful Angels.” The Berkeley Barb 5,10,109 September 15-21 (1967): 4. Stilgoe, John R. Metropolitan Corridor: Railroads and the American Scene. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983). Strange Person, Leonia N.J. Letter. “Tell Me, Tell Me” Easyriders January 1974: 53.

8 Super-Straight, David. “The Violent Generation: Second in a Series” The Berkeley Barb 9,6,208 August 8-14 (1969): 12. Super-Straight, David. “The Violent Generation: Third in a Series” The Berkeley Barb 9,7,209 August 15-21 (1969): 9. Talk About a Meat Machine!” Easyriders September 1974: 47. Taylor, Mark C. and Marquez, Jose. “Cycles of Paradox.” The Art of the Motorcycle. (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1998). “The 40 Hours That Shook Hollister Charge of the Motorcycle Brigade”San Francisco Chronicle July 7 (1947): 1. The Berkeley Barb, 9,16,219 October 24-30 (1969). “The Speedy Wasn't Alone.” Easyriders September 1975: 12. “The Tale of Grumble Rumble” Easyriders November 1974: 26. “The Terror: the Heat Explodes: Barb Ace gets Mace” The Berkeley Barb 5, 16, 114 October 20-27 (1967): 2-5. The Weather Underground. Dir. Sam Green and Bill Siegel. Docurama, 2002. Film. Thompson, Edward P. "Time, Work-discipline, and Industrial Capitalism." Past and present (1967). Thompson, Hunter S. “Song of the Sausage Creature” The Art of the Motorcycle (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1998). Thompson, Hunter S. Hell's Angels: a Strange and Terrible Saga. 1966. (New York: Random House, 1999). Tichi, Cecelia. Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature, Culture in Modernist America. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987). Twitchell, James B. Twenty Ads that Shook the World: the Century's Most Groundbreaking Advertising and how it Changed Us All. (New York: Broadway Books, 2000). Wadhams, Samuel. “The Adequate Man: How to Get a Cheap Motorcycle and Not Crash It.” Deadspin. July 29 (2015). Web. Walker, Mick. Motorcycle: Evolution, Design, Passion. (Baltimore: John's Hopkins University Press, 2006). Ward, James. “Outlaw Motorcyclists They're Not: A Contrarian Reading of Joseph Losey's These Are the Damned (1961) and Sidney Furie's The Leather Boys (1964).” The Journal of Popular Culture 43,2 April (2010): 381-407. Watson, Mark J. "Outlaw Motorcyclists: An Outgrowth of Lower Class Cultural Concerns." Deviant Behavior 2.1 (1980): 31-48. Watson, Mark J. "Righteousness on Two Wheels: Bikers as a Secular Sect." Sociological Spectrum 2,3,4 (1982): 333-349. Weathern, George, and Vincent Colnett. A Wayward Angel: the Full Story of the Hell's Angels (Guilford: Lyons Press, 2004). Welke, Barbara Young. Recasting American Liberty: Gender, Race, Law, and the Railroad Revolution, 1865-1920. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). “White Panther Statement” The Berkeley Barb 7,23,172 Nov 29-Dec 5 (1968): 13. “Who Says Choppers are Dead?” Easyriders December 1974: 42. “Why Is This Man Smiling” Easyriders June 1973: 18. Willis, Paul E. Profane Culture. (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978). Winner, Langdon. Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1977). Winters, Pete. “The Breeze Past the Knees” Easyriders January 1975: 17. Wolf, Daniel R. The Rebels: a Brotherhood of Outlaw Bikers. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991). Wolfe, Tom, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1968). “Woman Hater” Easyriders January 1975: 8. Wood, John. "Hell's Angels and the Illusion of the Counterculture." The Journal of Popular Culture 37.2 (2003): 336-351.

9 Yates,Brock. “First Contact.” Rpt. Veno, Arthur. ed. The Mammoth Book of Bikers. (Philadelphia: Running Press, 2007). Yates, Brock. Outlaw Machine: Harley Davidson and the Search for the American Soul. (Boston: Little Brown, 1999). Young, Lowell. Intoduction. The 1928 and 1930 Comintern Resolutions on the Black National Question in the United States. (Washington, D.C: Revolutionary Review Press, 1975). Web. Zelizer, Viviana A. The Purchase of Intimacy. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).

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