I don’t want a pickle (jes’ wanna ride my motor-sickle)
My topic for this installment of my continuing commentary
on life is theoretically the British versus the American motorcycling culture…and believe me, it is vastly different. What prompted this rumination on two-wheeled death wishes, you perhaps wonder? Simply, the fact that a neighbor and fellow MC’er gifted me with a huge stack of the British motorcycling magazine, ‘Classic Motorcycle’.
Normally, such a gift would be enthusiastically received with thanks but in this particular instance, the magazines (although ranging from 1980 and 2019, and including ‘CLASSIC BIKE’ and ‘THE CLASSIC MOTORCYCLE’, the two primary MC magazines from the UK devoted to older machines) are quaintly redolent of musty, frusty traditional English culture. As one might guess, they focus principally and obsessively on older British bikes (BSA, Norton, Triumph, etc., and their countless one-offs and variants). Excluding the occasional article on period Italian bikes (Moto Guzzi, Ducati, Bonelli, et al), there were (in all of the 100+ magazines I went through) only three or four articles on older Japanese bikes, which I am slavishly devoted to, having discovered Nipponese motorcycles at the tender age of 14, with my very first bike, a 1962 Honda C-110 SuperSport with 49 cc’s of raging displacement! Over the years, I have remained faithful to my rice-burners, favoring Hondas, Yamahahas and Qwikasfukies (never quite made the leap into Suckzuckis, oddly).
Although I too marveled at the many beautiful Italian bikes
and drooled over the unaffordable classic Beemers, I never quite considered myself flush enough to be able to give one of them a home in my garage, back in my poor student days. To this day, I still regret not having had a BMW R50, R60, R69 (in white),or an R90S, since those bikes were the El Supremo class act in the Berkeley subculture of the 70s, and I have lusted even more recently after the R75, R90S and the R100S.
Truth be told, aside from my favorite Hondas and Qwikasfukis, the only Italian bike I’ve ever had a disproportionate pang for is the Motto Guzzi V7 Stone, which exemplifies the modern ‘naked’ state-of-the-art, Italian street bike style, for me. That’s one sexy machine too, but alas taking care of German and Italian bikes can be quite the expensive proposition (unless you do all of your own work). Since my mechanical skills are limited to what I can do with two all-thumbs hands and a 70+ year old brain, and owing to the paucity of shops that specialise in repairs and maintenance to those bikes in this neck of the woods (Sacramento, the erstwhile ‘capital’ of the State of Californica (sic), hard as that might seem to believe), I’ve stuck with Hondas, Yammies and Qwikasfukis and even then, finding shops that will work on ‘90s through 2000 Jap bikes (merely a convenient contraction for ‘Japanese’, for all any fussy PC snowflakes hiding out there, and no disrespect intended) is quite an ordeal!
Motto Guzzis have regular special maintenance requirements
that are again somewhat problematic and as many of us Jap bike fans have learned, MOST MC shops these days tend to concentrate overly on SELLING, rather than servicing what they sell…a disturbing development that many older (mature) owners find to be quite a shock (opposed to younger owners, who tend to run their bikes hard and ragged, without a lick of TLC until they self-destruct). It’s analogous to the plight of new Fiat automobile owners who fall in love with the cute little ‘new 500’ Fiats and then find that they must travel to the horribly traffic-congested San Francisco Bay Area every time their Italian wheels hiccup! Bummer, dudes and dudettes!
But, getting back to the core of my topic, in America we tend to have two almost equally divided camps: the Hardly-Goodson (as I call ‘em) crowd and the Jappers. In America, as the single most revered US-made motorcycle, Harley has for decades locked into a state of arrested development that began when the first motorcycle ‘bikesploitation’ films (like Brando’s ‘The Wild One’ and the equally classic ‘Easy Rider’) came out in the 50s/60s. The ‘Bad Dude’ image that they celebrated fitted perfectly into America’s secret love affair with crooks, rascals, conmen, scoundrels, criminals (that gained strength from the wild, wide-open lawless days of the American Frontier West) and today we have absolute legions of aesthetically emasculated, mild-mannered doctors, bankers, hedge-fund brokers, and lawyers who buy Harleys so they can ride around affecting the image of a bad dude to offset and shake-off the pussy-cat nature that otherwise obtains in all those ‘upper-end’ professions. It’s a standing joke among the more enlightened Japper crowd, who disdain the cosplay role-playing that so many Harley-dudes’ affect.
That is, of course, not my style, nor do I belong to the other main MC camp, which are the speed-crazed, rice-rocket enthusiasts…generally young riders of high-performance, sports-type, one-off Japanese motorcycles who are obsessed with noise, high-revs and brain-freezing speeds on the streets.
Both types are a real pain to ordinary (non-rider) people, but of course there is a third group I haven’t mentioned yet: those like me who just appreciate finely wrought motorcycle engineering and ride moderately, with inordinate consideration for always taking excellent care of their mechanical mounts.
T.E. Lawrence, the famous ‘Lawrence of Arabia,
was one of these types. While he also had a penchant for speed and wind in his face, he was first and foremost a cultivated individual with a broad range of interests (as well as a very early member of the ‘Ton-Up’ Club)….a true ‘man for all seasons’, but of course not without his kinky, esoteric side as well. Lawrence preferred what is acknowledged by most connoisseurs as the most beautiful and state-of-the-art motorcycle available in the 1930s, the sublimely sophisticated Brough Superior SS100, iterations of which his close friend George Bernard Shaw kept him supplied with (he was on his 7th when he had his fatal accident on one).
There are a lot of this sort of individual in the UK, which has a cycle culture that varies considerably in its common ancestral motorcycling roots of the early 1900s. I’d venture to say that a lot of that difference derives from the fact that in the UK, transportation by motorized two-wheeled vehicles early-on became an important means of getting around for people who couldn’t afford the much greater costs of operating an automobile. By contrast, in the United States, motorcycling quickly became more of a sport than a practical solution to one’s ‘getting about’ ability. Both of these factors were noteworthy.
In both the UK and America, however, sporting aspects of cycles were significant, although given the lack of long stretches of straight roadways in the UK, activities such as hill-climbs tended to predominate, whereas in the us, with its much greater land area, racetracks saw most of America’s motorcyclists’ participation.
Then again, Harley-Davidson quickly established
a lock on American motorcycling enthusiast interest, as other distinctly American marques fell away over the years. This same reputation as uniquely ‘American-developed iron’ came to embellish the H-D brand far beyond any intrinsic grip on enthusiasts it may have had. This was both a good and bad thing, naturally, since H-D quickly locked into its early engineering technology and remained largely the same for decades, while other (foreign) marques continued to develop their own engineering concepts over the years. H-D, in contrast, was soon resting on its laurels.
After WW2, H-D took on an even more static image as returning GIs, used to the adventure, danger and excitement of warfare, and often unsuited for a quiet, calm ‘reentry’ into civilian culture, were quickly swept up in the antecedent dynamics of the ‘Bad Boy’ image that Hollywood reflected and exploited in its early 50s/60s ‘biker gang’ movies.
Eventually, what there was of American interest in early US motorcycle racing activity was subsumed within the American car-culture, which both a strong post-war economy and a booming US automobile industry promoted and supported. Interest in motorcycle racing, which had originally attracted a fair share of the motorcycle crowd, therefore fell considerably off when car owning became a widespread trend, rather than something capable of being afforded only by wealthier people. And with not just consumer culture expanding and turning interest away from motorcycles as cheap/fun transportation but with specialised automobile racing developing a strong enthusiast base, what was left of American motorcycling eventually dwindled to just a vestige of its former self (comprised mostly of ‘bikers’, whose generally unsavory image profoundly soured any popular public regard for two wheeled vehicles). Thus H-D cycles locked into its ‘bad-boy’ image, for better or worse, and until the Japanese began to penetrate the American consumer market with its brilliantly conceived and engineered, whole new approach to motorcycling (the famed Honda ‘You meet the nicest people on a Honda!’ advertising campaign of the late50s/early 60s), H-D was the only game in town for die-hard American motorcycling enthusiasts.
Hold that thought as we turn to the UK,
which, contrary to developments in America (and along with many war-torn nations on the Continent), retained an interest in ordinary motorcycling as a feasible alternative to costly automobiles out of sheer necessity. Far too many of today’s younger people (who lack even the most remote glimmer of understanding of history) utterly fail to recognise the fact that the United States along emerged as the sole post-war economic powerhouse. The UK, French, Italian and German nations all continued to suffer severe post-war impacts on their economies for several decades following cessation of hostilities. Thus, in the UK, motorcycles were not merely a pleasant recreational option as they were in America, but an absolute necessity. This singular difference resulted in the two totally dissimilar and uniquely different two-wheeled cultures that obtained in both nations.
All of these dynamics, in turn, are even today still reflected in many aspects of the UK’s motorcycling community. When I began going through all those old English magazines, I was immediately struck by the fact that today, a great many Anglo-Saxon motorcycling enthusiasts are much older men that their counterparts in America. In today’s America we tend to have two identifiable groups, therefore: fairly old Hardly-Goodson devotees and considerably younger Japanese sports bike owners. There’s hardly any middle ground, such is the polar nature of any commonality they might otherwise have shared.
Back in the 50s/60s, when British motorcycling
was at its zenith, with its ‘café-racer’ crowd of very young people who terrorized English society with their ‘Ton-Up’ street racing, they, like their counterpart American ‘motorcycle gang’ stereotypic models, severely put off most adult Brits that would otherwise have taken an interest in cycling. With the same effect coloring public opinion in America (thanks a heap, Hollywood!), there was very little middle-ground to operate on. By the time Honda’s ships docked on America’s shores as part of their whole new and totally unique market penetration strategy of the late 50s and early 60s, the world was absolutely ripe for Ochiro Honda’s brilliant new approach to extant motorcycle riding marketing efforts.
To say Honda took the world by storm is NOT exaggerating things. Even in the UK, although English motorcyclists tended to be staunch traditionists, preferring English-developed motorcycling marques to Honda’s new wave of ‘fun, unthreatening and recreationally appealing’ vehicles that the average person could enjoy, safely cosseted from any taint of the ‘bad-boy biker image. America was quite ready for this but as events would show, the UK was not!
The strong nationalistic bias for British-made products and against their dangerously attractive Asian counterparts would ultimately lead to some very hard times for UK motorcycle marques, until it finally realised that resistance was commercially futile and they had better get ‘on-board’ with the new Japanese philosophy.
Among motor enthusiasts, whether two-wheeled or 4-wheeled,
there have long been cynical jokes about some of the characteristic foibles of the British machines. One of the most common was a reference to the English Lucas Electrics Company (i.e. “Lucas, the Prince of Darkness”, and so forth). Even the most revered, English-made motorcycles all suffered from this, since England took an inordinately long time to come up to speed to match the Japanese technological advances in 4-stroke engineering. Nortons, BSAs, Triumphs, all were stricken with this liability. As for German machines (BMW), they too seemed to be developmentally frozen in time and BMW almost seemed to revel in its frusty, no-nonsense and precise but old-fashioned, pre-war engineering products, along with Jawa, CZ and a host of other European marques.
One could argue convincingly that much of this again related to the fact that while so much of the West still suffered markedly from the ravages of WW2, America almost alone had come through with not just its industrial infrastructure but its whole commercial economy entirely intact. However, I point out the differences responsible for the mind-set variance between English and American motorcycle consumers as a necessary key to understanding why English motorcycle fans tend to be very old-fashioned and somewhat slow to embrace newer technologies.
I mentioned earlier here that today
in the UK, a preponderance of true motorcycle enthusiasts tend to be much older men. This is partly due to the fact that many of them have achieved a fairly high level of material affluence in their professions/work and can now afford to indulge their hobbies with less restriction. England’s younger population similarly have been caught up in ‘car-culture’, enjoying the commercial elan and status of fancy, expensive automobiles (and unwilling to suffer the vagaries of weather as two-wheelers must). Then too, almost all of the older English enthusiasts were former café-racers in their youth and motorcycles bring with them a fond nostalgia and remembrance of good (if economically strapped) youthful times.
Back in America, these days we have the previously mentioned, older Hardly-Goodson devotees and the much younger Japanese sports-bike crowd. It is propitious to pause here, brief, to take a closer look at this second group.
Several factors, I feel, may be singled out as contributing profoundly to what I call today’s American ‘boy-racer’ sports-bike mentality. These individuals are generally young men (in their 20s, or even late teenagers in many cases) who have bought the latest high-performance Japanese sports bikes, thanks to readily available credit and the relative ease of obtaining motorcycle drivers’ licenses in America. All of the Japanese motorcycle marques offer machines that just a few years ago would have astounded older riders. The so-called ‘sports-bike’ in reference is a legally ‘street-able’ version of what the major motorcycle marques produced for international racing competition. With its sexy, flashy appearance matched fully with performance capabilities (0-60 in 2.5 seconds, top end speeds of almost 150 mph or more), the typical Japanese sports-bike on today’s market (with anywhere from 600 to 1000-cc’s-plus displacement) is a potential killer in the wrong hands or operated with the wrong attitude (e.g. insufficient regard for safety). That’s not to say that older, lower powered motorcycles can’t kill one equally well but the super Japanese sports-bikes one may today buy for from $9K to about $16K or so can kill you oh so much faster, given the plethora of road hazards motorcyclists face (i.e. distracted drivers, careless motorists, larger SUV and trucks vehicles, recklessly speeding individuals, et al., and a motoring public that simply doesn’t take notice of either bicyclists OR motorcycles on the ‘share-the-road’ byways we all must use).
In aviation, there are a number of jokes
about high-performance military aircraft versus much smaller lightweight civilian aircraft (such as small Cessnas) in that flying fast-mover jets is inherently risky and dangerous, but so are Cessnas, since they can just barely kill you! The same is true of motorcycles to a large extent, since a small 50cc Honda can kill you just as readily as a large 1000cc Kawasaki ‘super-bike’ can. Speed makes far less difference, of course, than the observation of good basic safe-driving practices, no matter what you’re driving. Still, a powerful motorcycle can still get you to that fatal moment of departure from this mortal coil much faster than a Honda 50!
Both groups of cyclists (the H-D crowd AND the Jap pocket-rocket types) have their fair share of mouth-breathing, 3-brain-cell morons in the driver’s seat, naturally, given the vagaries of everyday human nature, but even if one applies stringent caution and safety every single second spent on a motorcycle, there are still no absolute guarantees against imminent disaster!
I suppose that the UK also has its share
of these puerile ‘boy-racer’ types but given the fact that Britain doesn’t enjoy the same wide-open spaces we do, the opportunities for grossly unsafe speeding on English roadways are not QUITE as plentiful.
One of the problems we face today (mainly in America) is that there is very little effort expended any more on training drivers (all drivers, both 4-wheelers and 2-wheelers) how to coexist safely on our roads. It is also a fact that younger people may lack sufficient maturity and experience to understand the need for safety while driving, hence when you combine a young person with a high-powered sports-bike, it can be (and often is) a recipe for extreme danger (faster reaction times or not!). Schools have utterly given up on any vestigial driver training programs and aside from a basic written test, little effort is made to fully impress ‘new drivers’ (no matter the age) on how critical safe driving habits are to prevent accidents.
In a true socialist state (instead of the current ‘Socialist States of America’ we’re in the process of becoming, thanks to radical progressivism), it would be rather easy to prohibit anyone from buying a super-powerful motorcycle unless they were able to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that they had both the maturity and awareness needed to drive safely. In America, however, because we exist in an erstwhile (theoretical, nowadays) democracy, we simply cannot legislatively prohibit anyone from owning and riding a vehicle safely because some easily offended soul would quickly begin to scream that it’s a violation of his/her/its basic rights!
Moreover, because we’re motivated by a strong capitalistic ethic, enforcing humanely beneficial ethics is always a poor secondary motive to producing corporate profits, which are greatly enhanced by selling inappropriately powerful, potentially hazardous machines to a typical dulled-down, unreflective and quite possibly totally unmindful ‘average’ citizen.
But to return to the ‘US versus THEM’
dichotomy that defines the US MC culture and that of the UK, this all came through very clearly in those 100+ magazines I was recently given by a friend. Today’s US MC subculture is quite different from its Anglo-Saxon counterparts. We have (as I have said earlier), those who prefer fast Japanese bikes to less-agile and more archetypal Harley-Davidson mounts, with the Jappers being as a group much younger than the H-D people (most of whom seem to be older men…with a few women tossed into the mix to leaven things out)! In the UK, I would venture that a preponderance of MC’ers are also much older men, many of whom were enthusiastically ‘into’ the 1950s café style bikes of those times back then but who today look upon bikes with a keen sense of times-gone-by and more than a dollop of nostalgia for the flown, sweet bird of youth!
Today, given the high cost of motorcycles and the attendant supportive concerns (insurance, moving violations, greater possibility of accidents), despite the relatively high percentage of discretionary spending income, things such as rising inflation concerns, an economy that is tanking as we speak (despite all the rosey, cheery pep-talks by Biden et al), the formerly booming Japanese motorcycle market may well suffer accordingly.
Of course, young men and speed are difficult to keep apart, as we all know (or should know) and as long as bikes are available via bank loans and credit, we will continue to have a needlessly higher-risk driving environment. Meanwhile, know anyone who wants scads of vintage Brit motorcycle magazines? Free?
-----------------------------------
END NOTE:
I’ll close this installment of my peripatetic blog with an account of today’s ‘unhappy adventure’ in the local park.
It’s raining cats and dogs in this part of the California Central valley today, so I took the pup (our female, 14 year old Siberian Husky) out for a walk to our local park. This park is adjacent to the Cooledge Public Library and it is, coincidentally, just across the street from a City ‘Dog Park’, where dogs are allowed off-lead to freely mix together. The Cooledge Park is also a ‘Dogs-must-be-on-leash’ park and we have recurrent problems there with scofflaws who, despite a plethora of signs posted in the park advising that it’s a ‘leashed-dogs-only’ area, routinely ignore this and let their dogs roam freely there.
Unfortunately, most people seem to be unmindful of the need to keep strange dogs well-separated, unless they are in an official (off-lead) ‘dog park’. Such was the case once again this AM as I was walking our pup over there.
When I first entered the park I spotted a fellow with two dogs, one a GSD (German Shepherd Dog) and the other an older Black Lab, both of which were off leashes. Managing to stay well away from this, when I was coming back on the other perimeter of this park with my girl, I spotted this guy directly ahead of me, coming in my direction. With no other option, I firmed up my grip on my girl’s leash and moved forward, hoping the other person had enough sense to put his dogs on leads and thus avoid any unpleasant dog/dog encounters.
Nope, although he did put the GSD on a lead, he left the Lab off the other leash he carried and that dog came running over to within a foot or two my girl, who is predictably reactive when a strange dog comes over almost nose-to-nose with her. Naturally she lunged and I had a good grip on her, as I always do whenever circumstances like this occur. At this point I advised the other guy to get the Lab on a lead and suggested that since there was a sanctioned ‘dog park’ just across the street, perhaps he should take his dogs over there. No acrimony implied, calmy suggested, and I then thanked this jerk for restraining his Lab.
The conversation went downhill from there and although neither of us used any profanity, he called me an ‘old man’ (the first time THAT’S ever happened!) and said I needed to train my dog to not be belligerent. Oh yeah! When I pointed to the signs and told him that’s beside the point…which is that the park is not for ‘off-lead’ dog use…he began to square off (body language) and if we had not both had dogs that needed to be managed, it might well have come to blows.
Clearly, people like this jerk do not understand that while their own dogs may be well-socialised, other people’s dog may not be quite so friendly to other dogs when one is on a restraining leash and the other is not. It’s a basic 'dog-behavior thing’, of course, hence the need to keep dogs separated unless it is mutually agreed to let them engage in close-quarter ‘sniff-introductions’. Regarding my girl, she is a rescue, like almost all of our previous 7 Husky dogs and although very gentle and friendly to both people and infants, has a very high ‘wolfiness factor’ (determined by an assay of her genetic DNA), with a consequent strong (and typical Husky) prey-drive around small dogs and cats. She does fine in a ‘free-dog park’ situation, off-lead with other dogs of a similar size but does not react well (while restrained by a leash) to be approached by a strange dog that is OFF-leash. People like the jerk in reference seem unable to grasp the nature of such dog/dog dynamics, hence his belligerence (I am assuming…that and the fact that he’s also probably just your basic ignorant asshole…).
At this point, a neighbor (about 100 feet from us and across the street) saw what was developing and yelled out some supportive words and clapped loudly, signaling to both of us that I was within my rights and the other fellow was not. That was greatly appreciated, since I hadn’t brought my cell phone and couldn’t get all this on video.
Finally, not wanting to allow this to get any further out of hand (but righteously stung by the insulting dismissal of being told I am an ‘old man'...he appeared to be late-30s/early 40s and white), I told him “Let’s just end this here” and started to move along on my way.
It could have ended very differently, of course, and quickly become needlessly physical, simply because he chooses (like so many others) to assume that statutes, laws and city codes don’t apply to him! People like this are impossible to reason with, in my experience, but it’s a basic problem we are forced to cope with throughout our whole society in America and it’s one of the main reasons why people don’t get along over simple matters that common sense should otherwise resolve.
Well after this ‘pickle’ (like the one Arlo Guthrie didn’t want in his song) ended, I took the pup with me in the car and stopped at the above neighbor’s (‘Steve’) home across the street from where this all took place, to thank him for his spontaneous show of ‘support’ in the encounter, taking with me a new ball-cap from a motorcycle shop in Dublin, Ireland, as a small token of appreciation for his gesture. Since he has a motorcycle himself (and belongs to a motorcycle club), we had that in common at the outset, but he’s also a Vet like myself (another link) and…from what I gathered in our ensuing conversation…a very balanced, logical, astute and fair-minded person, as well.
So we stood there in the rain for a few minutes, bonding and chewing over what had gone down, and he showed me his expensive, late model Harley-Davidson Electro Glide, which he obviously babies and takes good care of (not that I’m any kind of a H-D fan; still, it was a great little Harley if you like such things)! Then, just before I left, he asked me if I like lemons (which I and wifie do) and handed me a big bag full of them. Since wifie makes hellaciously good lemon cookies (using fresh lemons), I plan to take a plate-full of them over to him later. A small return for his generosity.
Did I mention that this neighbor, ‘Steve’, is African-American? Probably not, but he is and it reminded me once again of Dr. Martin Luther King’s passionate, heart-felt plea that we regard each other as individuals, rather than as ‘blacks’ or ‘whites’, and to strive to treat each other with the mutual respect all human beings deserve, instead of using divisive, race-related qualifiers in our interactions.
Coming BACK FROM ‘Steve’s’ home, a bit later, in the still-pouring rain, I found myself feeling measurably less angry and resentful of the park jerk’s belligerent attitude this AM. But I’m still smarting from being called an ‘old man!’ That was truly a cheap shot!
And so it goes, here on this small, turbulent and always restive island called Earth… No wonder Alien life forms (if they exist) don’t want to reveal themselves to us. If it isn’t despotic dictators threatening the entire planet with nuclear Armageddon, it’s self-focused jerks with unleashed dogs insisting that the rules don’t apply to them!... Sigh!
------------------------------------------
Of relevance:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOOWGExuaP8&ab_channel=DouglasSloggett
https://motorcyclestudies.org/volume-14-2018/a-cultural-history-of-the-motorcycle-song-by-arlo-guthrie-misao-dean/
PS: Bob Dylan sang en excellent version of Guthrie's 'The Motorcycle Song', if you're interested.
,
