SPOKES: Bikes immortalized on screen and in print

LONDON – It’s not just documentaries on bike racing that can save you from the boredom of the bike-less season, TV and movies can ease the pain, too, but it might not be to everyone’s tastes. At times we may have to be a bit creative. So let us embrace The Biker, our long-haired bearded cousins that prefer life in the laid-back lane.

The etymology of a “chopper” is a motorcycle, typically a Harley-Davidson, that has been customized – literally, had bits chopped off it – to make it lighter and therefore faster. American motorcycles are much heavier than their European and Japanese counterparts and designed for a very different tone of riding that requires a big, lazy engine that can slurp up the straight miles in comfort with a prescribed style.

At some point in the history of chopping, when it became clear that the feet-forward, arms-out riding position has as much to do with “faster” as a burrito, “chopping” transmogrified into “custom,” and bikes were altered to satisfy a certain aesthetic, even if said aesthetic was at the detriment to the aforementioned comfort, not to mention speed and handling.

Discovery Channel’s American Chopper has been on our screens for almost 10 years and pretty much does what the name of the show implies: chops bikes in America, all the while presenting a sort of watered-down “American biker” stereotype in a show that features big characters, huge cc’s and acres and acres of chrome.

It’s a fairly standard format. A customer wants a custom bike; the guys at Orange County Choppers design and build a machine to his/her specs by a certain date. But, of course, it’s never as straightforward as that. The key to its success is that it also appeals to the non-biker, the ordinary folk. Them. There is drama, peril, comedy and the simple pleasure of seeing and hearing a tailor-made bike – I say “bike” but some of these things are closer to sculptural, breathing works of art – roll out the garage after all the trials and tribulations of its making... even if said tribulations are a bit made-for-TV. Call me cynical why don’t you.

The show wouldn’t be as half as successful, if at all, if it weren’t for the OCC owner and show’s protagonist, Paul Teutul. Paul falls somewhere close to the everyman idea of ‘Biker’ – a big, inked, moustachioed fellow who manages to walk the aggressive-yet-nice-guy line without falling into chest-thumping sentimentality and/or violence. But the real stars of the show are the bikes themselves, one-off pieces of 100% American beef that are about as subtle as a nuclear holocaust. These hand-built machines aren’t designed to go ’round corners at gravity-defying angles, do 0-60 in the time it takes a duck to quack, even offer a rider all the modern creature comforts of touring…no, they’re designed to look way, way cool. And sound like a symphonic earthquake while they’re doing it.

Sadly, these machines are only affordable to the very well off – bankers, the odd celebrity – in general, people who can afford to buy into the whole “outlaw” thing for a couple of sunny afternoons in a year while maintaining their cozy, privileged lifestyles. The two don’t sit too well with me; indeed, the guys at OCC don’t always seem too keen to see their creations being ridden off by some side-parted accountant who is no more a biker than I am a lap dancer.

Still, it’s a great show, even if a bit contrived by documentary standards, and for those of us with a two-wheel passion, essential.

This brings us nicely on to Sons of Anarchy but for very different reasons. Already in production for a fifth season, this is FX’s biggest hit to date, and it’s not hard to see why. More than any of the shows I’ve reviewed for Spokes this one doesn’t put bikes at center stage but it’s an acceptable distraction from racing. It also happens to be quite brilliant and, bizarrely, Shakespearian, yet with choppers and bike gangs.

Set in Charming, Calif., the show follows the fortunes, or otherwise, of the Sons of Anarchy Motorcycle Club after it was founded in 1967 by a couple of Vietnam vets. Primarily the Sons of Anarchy (or SAMCRO) make a living buying, modifying and selling illegal weapons to other gangs, as well engaging in a spot of racketeering, but they also keep the (relatively) bad guys out of their town, putting them at odds with other bike gangs such as The Nords, Mayans and Lin Triad, but earning SAMCRO respect among their own townsfolk. It’s addictive stuff and looks set to run and run. It would seem that the public’s fascination with the outlaw biker is far from over.

One can’t really mention the chopped motorcycle and not nod respectfully in the direction of Easy Rider. Unlike Sons of Anarchy, Easy Rider is about the bikes. In an intellectual sense, it’s the first movie that turned the motorcycle into an icon. The Wild One presented the motorcycle as a symbol of rebelliousness, but it didn’t stop there. In Easy Rider, the motorcycle isn’t so much a symbol of freedom, it is the epitome of it, and what a glorious, shiny, thunderous freedom it is, too. Very much of its time, Easy Rider may baffle younger audiences with its hippie sensibilities and freeform plot, but it remains a counterculture classic. Apart from the bikes themselves, it’s worth watching for its soundtrack and an almost pre-pubescent Jack Nicholson who injects some much-needed comedy into the alternative heart of late ’60s America, man.

Despite this, there is only one bike movie that checks all the boxes and gets the juices flowing, and, get this, the protagonist of the movie doesn’t even ride a bike; he drives a car! (You know, one of those four-wheeled things you see shrinking in your mirror pulling after away from an intersection).

Mad Max is a homage to the Kawasaki Kz1000, the world’s first Japanese superbike, to the point that the plot, whatever it is, becomes an excuse to see lots of footage of chopped (in the truest sense of the word) Zeds being ridden hard and fast, especially, exclusively really, by the character known as Jim Goose, the coolest biker ever consigned to the silver screen. The sequence of Goose starting his bike and screeching down the road isn’t so much a homage to the Zed; it’s more a fetishization of it. The whole movie is worth buying just for this 30-second scene (it’s easy to find on You Tube), but that would do a disservice to the other glorious Zed shots. And if cars are your thing on the side, Mad Max, played by a then-unknown – and one imagines, untroubled – Mel Gibson rides around in a pretty tidy Ford Falcon XB GT 351, too.

I can’t write about bike movies and not mention The World Fastest Indian. Anthony Hopkins plays Bert Munro, a New Zealand petrol-head who takes his aged Indian to the Bonneville Salt Flats to have a shot at the land speed record, hence the title. It’s a beautifully made little film about man and machine taking on the world with the odds stacked against them. If it weren’t a true story, it’d be more cliché than London fog.

If you’ve tried all of the above, there are a few more worth a mention – of course, The Wild One (note: he’s riding a British bike, a Triumph Thunderbird, just like the one my dad had). Jack Nicholson is back in the saddle with unintentionally amusing Hells Angels on Wheels. Viva Knieval is an homage to the world’s best-known stuntman, and there’s a little oddity from 1970s Australia called Stone that’s worth digging out.

If you’re sick of bikers on the screen, how about a spot of literature? Hells Angels was the great Hunter S. Thompson’s first nonfiction book, and he didn’t do things by halves. Thompson got very close to the club and even became friends with the Angels’ founder, Ralph “Sonny” Barger, among others. But don’t let that give the impression it’s an easy, warm read. At times, it’s the opposite. It’s riveting, fascinating and, at times, shocking. In all, it comes highly recommended.

Jupiter’s Travels by Ted Simon is more reportage than non-fiction, but it’s no less gripping. Simon takes us on a 78,293-mile trip through 45 countries over a four-year period in the mid 1970s on a Triumph Tiger. Despite being over 30 years old, it still stands as one of the great bike travelogues and in an oblique way is a sort of homage to the dying days of the British motorcycle industry.

We’re off to the London Motorcycle Show in the next exciting installment of Spokes, so until then, toodle pip.

# # #

About Jamie Dwelly:

UK-based James “Jamie” Dwelly has been riding bikes since he was eight, started out on an 80cc Yamaha converted by his biker dad for off-road usage. When his mother realized his passion wasn't just a passing “kid fad,” Jamie got a second hand yz1000e Yam, which he happily rode for another three years before retiring at the grand of age of 12 when an accident left him with a perforated disc in his back. At 18, Jamie bought a Yamaha RD200 and has never been without a bike since. After a succession of fast, beautiful bikes, he currently owns a 1976 Triumph Bonneville and is eyeing up another ludicrously nippy crotch rocket to sate his lust for speed. E-mail Jamie at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .