When Motorcycles Were Cool.

Article By: Chris Callen

“It used to be that the man who rode these bikes made the machine what it was. Today, more commonly, it’s the machine that makes the man.”

This was a quote made by a good friend of mine and although I understood what he meant when he first laid it on me, it wasn’t until years later, when I found myself using his quote in conversation, that I really understood its meaning. It prompted me to think about a time when motorcycling wasn’t as popular as it is today, people who rode were often outcasts as far as society was concerned, but motorcycles, man, motorcycles were just cool!

What we have today in motorcycling is a strange phenomenon. Aging originators of this sport, who are responsible on so many levels for taking motorcycling into world wide social acceptance, have fantastically deep roots in the history of the biker life-style. However, looking back over the years of tenting and part scrounging, they don’t always see the time spent roughing it as glorious nostalgia. They themselves have long since paid the dues to be who they are and many now enjoy the comforts that come from experience. Abandoning their tents for motel rooms and trading in choppers, that needed points and chains replaced by the side of the road, for trailers and reliable transportation. The new crowd that ran into this over the last two decades picked up on the image of how these men looked, but not necessarily the essence of who they were and without the history behind them they may have missed a few important features.

Before I go any further let me try to clarify what exactly I mean about the time when motorcycles were cool. Like my friend had illustrated in his quote, it was the type of rugged individualist who could be found on the motorcycle which gave it such mystique. This was partially due to the overwhelming commitment it took to be a biker in those days. Sure, you could get a bike a lot cheaper then, but buying it was only the beginning. The bikes these cats rode in the early part of the 60's and 70’s were far less advanced than the products we ride around on today. For that reason it was a must that each man know his bike and be able to address any mechanical problem that came up, in case it happened far from home. To get this knowledge, if you weren’t already mechanically inclined, you had to find the guys that did know and pay your dues hanging around with them to learn.

Aside from the basic wrenching, there were very few custom parts companies to just buy parts from. Again, if a new rider wanted to do something cool to his bike he had to find someone that knew “how to” or spend the time to learn himself. This was great for motorcycling in two ways: one was that it pushed the industry to offer custom parts and the other was that it made riders depend on each other for the help they needed. A relationship that made them into brothers and made motorcycling more than just a way to get back and forth to work.

In those days bikes at the average cycle meet were as varied as the people. It wasn’t odd to look down a line of bikes and see choppers made out of Triumphs, BSAs, Harleys, Yamahas and Hondas; yeah even the japers were getting’ chopped man, cause motorcycles were cool. The parts didn’t exactly flow like the “Smoothies” of today (sorry Don, I had to use it) since often they were mismatched from different years and even other manufacturers. One thing was sure, they had great big springer and girder front ends, giant sissy bars and there was almost never a bike that didn’t have a seat for your lady. The people were a breed apart and you never tried to imagine what it was that they did in “real life”, they were bikers and that was enough.

Even the ride, or more specifically the type of ride was different in those early days. The man was constantly an issue, so if you had long hair and tattoos, dressed like a biker or god forbid were actually on a motorcycle, you became a target. In the immortal words of Bouncer, who gave me more valuable insight for this article, “They’d hunt you like a dog just for looking like you do today.” To avoid that type of constant harassment, he went on to tell me, bikers would opt for the less traveled routes or “river routes” which were out of the way and helped you stay under the radar. Today we pick and choose two lane blacktop routes to take in the scenery that you miss from the interstate, and that’s great too, but not a necessity by any means. Today it’s a matter of a better ride not just so that we can ride.

In a conversation about this with another friend, we looked at a book called “The Motorcycle Rider.” It featured many pictures of tramps and their sleds doing what they loved and as we turned the pages he expressed how cool the pictures were. I asked him just exactly what it was that he thought made it cool? In his reply, he said the guys were just tough, the women wild and the bikes were unlike any around today. Yeah I added, but did you notice the way the pictures were composed? Each one had some type of artistic merit, whether the staunch contrast of man, machine and nature or the sense of pure freedom you could see in their eyes as the wind pushed back their hair. These weren’t pictures taken by a famous photographer like Michael Lichter, no, these were just photos from the collection of regular people who had a passion for motorcycling. That goes back to why I believe that if you are very good in your last life you get to come back as a biker; no one lives life fuller than we do or appreciates more along the way.

I do have a light at the end of the tunnel: there is a new generation coming into this thing we all dig and man they have their own way of doing things. Ok, so they think it’s just rebelling against what the average rider is doing when he trailers to the big events and stays in hotels. They might also think that they’re doing it their way when they decided to customize their bike in a buddy’s garage instead of just buying a bike already completed for them. Whatever the motivation, they’re making a decision to live it, to ride the bike, to make friendships that will last a life time, to challenge themselves and the machines they ride. They are doing all the things that we are all now sitting around campfires telling stories about, and after all, as hard as some of those memories were to get through, the reason we tell their stories is that it’s just cool. I mean, when was the last time you heard a good story that started out with “I almost didn’t even fit my bike in the trailer with the rest of the guys” or “They were almost out of the color I wanted” you haven’t and as long as there are stories about sleeping in a ditch over night, or warming up under the hand dryer in a rest stop and sharing a bag of chips when we were riding home too broke to buy food, they will be the things we remember.

When I started seeing this young group of riders living out the old ways, man I was relieved. If they did it just like we did it, and the men before us, and the men before them, then someday there would still be hope. Someday, we’d be able to sit around the camp fire and hear these guys, tell the next generation, stories about the days when motorcycles were just cool!