Volume 6, Issue 1: Spring 2010
Special Issue: Motorcycle--Beschleunigung und Rebellion?
Book Review
Riding on the Edge:
A Motorcycle Outlaw’s Tale
by John Hall
Minneapolis, MN: Motorbooks, 2008
ISBN-10:0760332762
ISBN-13: 978-0760332764
Christopher Thrasher
Most men are lucky to live one life. John Hall has lived two.
As a young man he served as president of the New York chapter of the Pagans Motorcycle
Club from 1967 to 1969. After spending time in prison for his role in a bar
fight that went awry, he began a new life as a scholar, college professor, and journalist.
Hall uses the skills he gained in his second life to recount the story of his
first life. Riding on the Edge is an
engaging and provocative book that will appeal to general readers and provides crucial
insight into the outlaw biker, that rare breed of motorcyclist who refuses to
accept mainstream societal standards of behavior, one of America’s few unique
cultural creations.
Hall is a master storyteller, and his book is worth reading
for the sheer entertainment value. It is a rough and rambling narrative filled
with adventure and romance. Hall writes in highly descriptive prose that wraps
the reader in the sights, smells, and textures of the world he experienced as a
youth.
A greasy, smelly moldy old couch with a
coil spring worming its way up your ass in a
cinderblock clubhouse that used to be a
chicken coop was the height of decadence. If you
needed a shower to enjoy yourself, the
outlaw life was not for you. Cleanliness may be
next to godliness, but in the outlaw world of Muspell [the “land of desolation” in Norse mythology],
cleanliness was for candy-asses, and we were cowboys. (168)
The Pagans ride center stage, as a brotherhood of young, motorized,
desperadoes cruising the asphalt at reckless speeds. They struggle against the
story’s villains, an assortment of rednecks, mobsters, and cops. Time and again,
the Pagans battle their enemies with tough talk, fists, and knives in bar room
brawls where injuries are common, but deaths are rare. Women form a key part of
Hall’s narrative. Some are random girls in search of a good time with a dashing
outlaw and Hall muses that many modern teenagers might choke if they knew that “when grandma was their age, she used to
hump Pagans on the cellar floor” (100). Other women in the Pagan’s world are
mothers, sisters, grandmothers, and serious romances. Even the hardest of
hearts will appreciate the tenderness in Hall’s tales of starcrossed lovers. Riding on the Edge is a captivating story,
but it has far more to offer the reader than simple entertainment.
Riding on the Edge is an invaluable resource for researchers. There are few primary sources on
outlaw bikers and most of the ones that do exist focus on the predominately
west coast Hells Angels. Hall’s account fills in the gaps by serving as the
primary source on east coast bikers, specifically the formative years of the
Pagans. Hall repeatedly calls the reader’s attention to the differences between
the early Pagans and the accepted, modern, vision of outlaw bikers.
The men Hall rode with bore little resemblance to the stereotypical
outlaw biker of the twenty-first century. They were almost all under thirty,
skinny, with greased hair who preferred Patsy Cline and Jonny Cash to anything
rock and roll had to offer (25). They wore simple racing leathers, which “looked
more like a Lloyd Bridges scuba suit than a Marlon Brando biker jacket” (97).
The biker image was still sorting itself out and some of their members sported
appearances unheard of for modern outlaws that included khakis, western style
vests, homemade sandals, pointy-toed cowboy boots, and clean shaven faces.
Hall makes a distinction between outlaws and criminals and
argues that the Pagans he knew were outlaws. “Criminals are crooks who
manipulate the system to get rich. Outlaws simply don’t give a shit” (15). He
presents the Pagans as working class youths who worked hard, if irregularly, at
blue-collar jobs for the money that financed their poverty-level party
lifestyles, “we were stone broke most of the time” (204).
Not long before Hall became a chapter president, the Pagan’s
world began to change. Hall’s observations on inner city decline will assist
students of urban studies, working-class history, and drug culture in gaining
greater insight into the American east coast during the late sixties.
.
. . drugs, in particular speed pills, began to work their way down to the
redneck class, and all hell was about to break loose like on the Day of
Ragnarok. Between the collapse of heavy industry, and racial violence, whole
communities like Newark, New Jersey, Homestead and Norristown, Pennsylvania,
and Greenpoint, Maspeth, and Ridgewood, New York, turned from being decent
working class neighborhoods into shitholes, often only in a matter of months,
Bikers didn’t make the shit, they just got caught up in it like everyone else. (62)
The temptation was too much for many jobless and depressed bikers
who sought solace in the little magic pills that allowed them to party for days
on end. This convinced some of the more conservative Pagans to drift away from
the brotherhood (62). Drugs became an increasing problem for the Pagans, just
as they became an increasing problem for the rest of America (226 - 227).
Drugs were at least partially responsible for a battle over
the club’s soul. Moderate members wanted the brotherhood to evolve into an
association of middle-aged men with families and responsibilities, who loved
motorcycles, but valued a respectable middle-class lifestyle (146). Another
group wanted to transform the club into an organized crime syndicate (147).
Hall and most of the key members were determined to remain outlaws, but wanted
to keep the hardcore criminal element at arm’s length (146).
Perhaps Hall’s greatest contribution is his claim that “Outlaw
clubs tend to reflect strongly the region of the country that spawned them”
(66). Every outlaw club is a little different. Their symbols, identity, and
personality vary between clubs and even among chapters. Hall’s suggestion that
this is the result of regional differences is insightful, thought provoking,
and unprecedented in the literature. He spends much of the book reinforcing
that theme of geographic reflection in the Pagans.
The Pagans are the product of boys from rural Maryland who spread
their organization north and west. While the club contained a handful of
African-American, Jewish, and Puerto Rican members the vast majority were decedents
of the “Celts, Hunkies, and Germans” (26) of north west Europe and they choose
a symbol that reached back to their cultural roots. Dark Surt, a demonic
guardian, emblazoned their colors with his comic book like image (26, 32). Unlike
the west coast Hells Angels, who embraced Nazi paraphernalia to shock members
of the mainstream (for example, see Hells
Angel: The Life and Times of Sonny Barger and the Hells Angel Motorcycle Club by Sonny Barger 38), Hall argues the Pagans wore swastikas because they
symbolized a raw and ancient form of manliness that club members aspired to.
The Pagans were always more of a confederation than a nation
and the regional variations were visible between chapters. Southerners from the
Pagan territories in Maryland and Virginia wore more rebel flags and southern
crosses than the northerners who decked themselves out in Nazi regalia (27).
The racist symbolism rarely went more than skin deep. The club accepted members of other
races (26), and enjoyed an alliance with the Pharos, an all black motorcycle
club (97). Hall explains: “Racial prejudice, as most people know it, tends to
be a luxury of the law-abiding middle class. Folks who are busting their hump
everyday to make the nut and stay one step ahead of the law at the same time
can’t afford to reject ‘good people’ on the basis of color” (100). While the
Pagan’s symbolism was important, Hall argues it was more about identity, geography,
and rebellion than exclusion (97).
Hall writes in direct response to the literature on the
outlaw biker. He sees police officers, snitches, and college professors as self
appointed experts who make money telling the nation about the outlaw menace and
he thinks “it is time someone talked back to them” (301). Riding on the Edge seeks neither to whitewash nor to demonize
bikers, simply to share John Hall’s unique and vital perspective.
Someone
had to do what I did in this book. Many of the guys I rode with are dead.
Others are in jail. By a twist of fate, I got to learn how to write, I got to
be the college professor, and I got to be a journalist. Like Ishmael in Moby
Dick, I alone am left to tell their story. (301)
Hall’s isolation provides the work’s only stumbling block. Riding on the Edge presents one man’s recollections
of his own past, not a comprehensive history. While Hall does nothing to
inspire mistrust, the reader must remember that time often distorts memories in
even the sharpest minds and that a single witness is unable to testify to
anything outside their own limited field of vision.
Feel free to post your reactions to our web board and continue the conversation with other readers.
Login here: http://www.nova.edu/WWW BOARD/FAR/ijms_ferriss
The login is ijms
The password is vroom
(Please note that login and
password are all lowercase.)
Images and text copyright © International Journal of Motorcycle Studies