If outlaw bikers are your thing, then this is the book for you.  Arthur Veno has compiled an anthology of previously published essays to create what might be argued is the last word on the development, growth, and perhaps demise of outlaw biker culture.   This book contains over 500 pages of history on outlaw biker culture in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Scandinavia.  Though the quality and consistency of the writing is uneven, many of the stories told are engaging and interesting, even if one has no interest in the subject per se.   

 

The book is divided into six sections, each with a set of essays examining its subject from various perspectives.  One of the best sections is the first, “The Birth of the Outlaw Biker.”  The section opens with one of two essays by Brock Yates, one of the best riders to wield a pen, whether he is writing about four wheels or two.  “First Contact” is about a first experience with a Harley-Davidson, the bike of choice for most outlaw bikers.  The big Milwaukee machine “symbolizes the best and the worst of a nation whose growth has been fitful, rebellious, disjointed, and cursed by raging crosscurrents and blurred imagery” (11).  This could have been the subtitle of this book, for the essays that follow provide a history of the disjointed growth of outlaw culture.  Yates’s essay is a well-written beginning to a book devoted to exploring the mythology that has arisen around the notion of the outlaw biker.

 

Included in this first section of the book are essays that detail the creation of motorcycle clubs after World War II, as well as the San Francisco Chronicle version of the Hollister “riot” that launched the outlaw biker mythmaking machine.  Most long-time bikers probably already know most of this history, but Yates provides a detailed and excellently written summary of it.  An essay by Bill Hayes, one of the founding members of the Boozefighters Motorcycle Club, provides another view of the Hollister events and the media’s use of that story to create an image of bikers that still endures.  However, most bikers are probably less familiar with the short story by Frank Rooney, “Cyclists’ Raid,” the story of a bizarre, goggle-wearing, motorcycle gang riding with synchronized fluidity coming to terrorize a small town.  This story, combined with various Hollister myths, was the basis of the seminal biker film, The Wild One (1953).  Rooney’s story is of historical interest because of its impact on the creation of the movie, but readers will be struck by how poorly it is written and how little Rooney knows about motorcycles and motorcycle culture.

 

This first section of Mammoth Book of Bikers concludes with several essays about outlaw biker culture’s twists and turns in the 1960s and 1970s.  Essays by Hunter Thompson and William Dulaney (reprinted from IJMS) provide historical perspective and personal insight into the growth of the outlaw biker aura during this period.

 

In the book’s second section, “The Outlaw Biker Lifestyle,” one of the best essays is by Bill Hayes.  As noted above, Hayes was an original Boozefighter, and in a relaxed and humorous style, he notes that the Boozefighters “unconsciously established the archetype of ‘biker’” (142).  The Boozefighters did not set out to be the archetype of anything—they simply wanted to pursue “the most important Boozefighter tradition of all:  Having fun” (144).  I see this search for fun as the essence, the heart of biker culture and why we choose to ride.  Hayes’s history of his club and their desire to have fun details what biking is all about.  Common threads connecting the Boozefighters were a “Spirited and daring character, challenging competitiveness, strong bonding friendship, a caring and giving nature, the love of motorcycling, and brotherhood with bikers. . . . No original ever got put in jail for a serious crime like murder or drugs” (144).  The original Boozefighters captured the essence of two-wheeled life: the love of riding and the joy of riding with friends who share that love.

 

Another essay about the fun of biking, and one of the funniest essays in the book, is “Song of the Dumb Biker” by Bob “Bitchin” Lipkin.  It tells the hilarious tale of a cross-country trip by two west coast bikers little prepared for such a journey, because “living in Southern California tends to spoil you for estimating the rigors of the outside world” (174), especially when hitting the road in December.  Imagine Laurel and Hardy on motorcycles crossing America in winter.  This is a laugh-out-loud essay, but it seems out of place in this section of the book, for the other essays commence a more serious examination of outlaw biker culture in the U.S. and Canada.  These essays, as well as those in sections 4 through 6, provide interesting details about outlaw culture and experiences from insiders and from police who interact with outlaw clubs.

 

Somewhere along the line, what once started as motorcyclists enjoying bikes, camaraderie, and riding was co-opted by a criminal gang mentality.  The joy of biking as Hayes defined it and the dumb mistakes all bikers have made at some point in their riding experience as Lipkin detailed them was slowly overtaken by a criminally driven group of outcasts, narcissists, and sociopaths who claimed to love bikes, but seemed to love crime more.   Spurred on by the press, the Outlaw Biker Lifestyle was born and soon blown into national prominence as a threat to law-abiding citizens everywhere.  A common theme running through many of the remaining essays in this book is the feeling, emerging in the 1960s, of being outcasts from the culture at large, alienated from the mainstream, and finding solace only within a club whose primary role is not to ride and have fun, but to exist as a criminal entity.  Too many of the essays in the book are police reports of criminal club activity, club wars, murders, drug dealing, extortion, money laundering, and prostitution.  These make for, at times, interesting reading as the history of a phenomenon, but overall there are too many tales redundantly told.  A motorcycle club turf war, whether in the U. S., Canada, or Australia, is not an inherently interesting tale.  We are told many facts, but receive few insights into how the joy of motorcycling became overwhelmed and lost in a maelstrom of criminal excess.

 

One of the best essays detailing this side of biker culture is Mark Bastoni’s  “Chrome and Hot Leather,” which originally appeared in Boston Magazine in 1988.  Bastoni writes about a local branch of the most infamous outlaw biker club of all, the Hells Angels.  Bastoni presents the Angels and their interaction with the police, balancing the Angels’ sense of being persecuted with the police’s conviction that the Angels are criminals.  He notes the “unlikely mixture of grudging respect and hatred that characterizes Angel-police relations” (398).  In the end, however, it is apparent that, persecuted or not, the Angels are simply a gang on motorcycles participating in whatever criminal endeavors bring in cash. 

 

The contrast to Bill Hayes’s history of the early Boozefighters could not be more stark.  The Boozefighters were comrades, friends who rode for fun.  Perhaps the Angels had started similarly, but by the time Bastoni wrote (and at least 20 years before) the Angels were “losers, misfits and tough guys” (398) who had no other social outlet than the club.  How had a love of motorcycles devolved into the violent, self-absorbed, at times incoherent outlaw life?  This book does not answer that question.

 

However, there are many other entertaining essays in the book, especially in the section on women, “Old Ladies, Mamas, and Broads.”  The role of women in the outlaw culture is not likely to win approval from the National Organization for Women (NOW), but the essays in this section of the book provide insight into the psychological complexity of women who readily accept a secondary status to their men, perhaps even to the motorcycle. 

 

“The Biker Babe’s Bible” by “Throttle” (Holly French) is just that: an attempt to provide women in “the biker world” (266) some guidance in how to be a good companion to the biking male.  What follows is some very commonsense information on, among other things, riding in inclement weather, riding at night, riding as part of a procession, proper riding gear, how to clean a motorcycle.  The author ranges widely and thoroughly through the aspects of riding that would make anyone—rider or passenger—a better rider.  But she is tough, too.  For example, at the end of her section on riding at night, she says “if you get uncomfortable, it’s your own fault, so keep it to yourself.  Just because you weren’t prepared doesn’t give you a license to bitch. . . . Toughen up.  You are a biker’s Ole Lady” (270). 

 

Though uneven and repetitive (and in need of a good editor’s hand to correct the many misspellings—“grass knuckles”! for example), The Mammoth Book of Bikers provides entertaining reading about outlaw biker culture at a time when that culture has made yet another incursion into American homes via Sons of Anarchy, a new FX network program that plays like a biker soap opera as it spares no stereotype or cliché about biker culture.  Though the vast majority of motorcyclists in the world have little or no interaction with outlaw bikers, the supposed freedom and rebellion the outlaw biker represents (no matter how idealized or false) continues to rattle around within the increasingly empty psyche of the mass media.  I cannot help but wonder when the broader family of bikers will get its due, rather than taking a back seat to the continued focus on the violent black sheep whose need for macho affirmation diminishes all bikers.  Read this book and enjoy the self-mythologizing of many of those involved in outlaw culture.  After all, when outlaw clubs now do little more than sell t-shirts at bike shows, Veno’s book serves as a history of that culture, and as bikers we should all know our history.  But in the end, we will be better off if we just hearken back to that mythological golden age where all of us can come together under the original Boozefighter creed: ride and have fun.