Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga

by Hunter S. Thompson

  The outlaw hierarchy is always in flux, but the spirit is no different now than in 1950, when the first Angel chapter was formed in the long shadow of the Booze Fighters. The root definition remains the same: a dangerous hoodlum on a big, fast motorcycle. And California has been breeding them for years. Many are independents, indistinguishable from any Hell’s Angel except for the lettering on their backs—“No Club” or “Lone Wolf” or sometimes just “Fuck You.” Perhaps five hundred or so, definitely less than a thousand, belong to clubs like the Gypsy Jokers, Nightriders, Comancheros, Presidents and Satan’s Slaves. About a hundred and fifty—as of 1966—form the outlaw elite, the Hell’s Angels.

  The only consistent difference between the Hell’s Angels and the other outlaw clubs is that the Angels are more extreme. Most of the others are part-time outlaws, but the Angels play the role seven days a week: they wear their colors at home, on the street and sometimes even to work; they ride their bikes to the neighborhood grocery for a quart of milk. An Angel without his colors feels naked and vulnerable—like a knight without his armor.

  A Sacramento cop once asked a five-foot-five, 135-pound Angel, “What’s the big attraction?”

  “Nobody bugs me as long as I’m flying the colors,” he replied.

  The dividing line between outlaws and the square majority is subject to change at any moment, and many respectable clubs have queered their image overnight. All it takes is a noisy fracas, a police report and a little publicity … and suddenly they’re outlaws. In most cases this leads to the breakup of the club, with a majority of the members feeling hurt and scandalized that such a thing could have happened. But those few responsible for the trouble will no longer be welcome in respectable circles. Technically, they become “independents,” but that term is a misnomer because any rider who applies it to himself is already an outlaw anyway. All he lacks is a club to join, and he will sooner or later find one. The motorcycle fraternity is very tight—on both sides of the law—and the most extreme viewpoints are represented by the American Motorcycle Association and the Hell’s Angels. There is no status in the middle, and people who are serious enough about motorcycles to join an AMA club will not take rejection lightly. Like converts to Communism or Catholicism, Hell’s Angels who were once AMA members take their outlaw role more seriously than the others.

  The Angels are too personally disorganized to have any clear perspective on the world, but they admire intelligence, and some of their leaders are surprisingly articulate. Chapter presidents have no set term in office, and a strong one, like Barger, will remain unchallenged until he goes to jail, gets killed or finds his own reasons for hanging up the colors. The outlaws are very respectful of power, even if they have to create their own image of it. Despite the anarchic possibilities of the machines they ride and worship, they insist that their main concern in life is “to be a righteous Angel,” which requires a loud obedience to the party line. They are intensely aware of belonging, of being able to depend on each other. Because of this, they look down on independents, who usually feel so wretched—once they’ve adopted the outlaw frame of reference—that they will do almost anything to get in a club.

  “I don’t know why,” said an ex-Angel, “but you almost have to join a club. If you don’t, you’ll never be accepted anywhere. If you don’t wear any colors, you’re sort of in between—and you’re nothing.”

  This desperate sense of unity is crucial to the outlaw mystique. If the Hell’s Angels are outcasts from society, as they freely admit, then it is all the more necessary that they defend each other from attack by “the others”—mean squares, enemy gangs or armed agents of the Main Cop. When somebody punches a lone Angel every one of them feels threatened. They are so wrapped up in their own image that they can’t conceive of anybody challenging the colors without being fully prepared to take on the whole army.

  For many are called, but few are chosen.

  —St. Matthew

  Since the revelations of the Lynch report the Angels have rejected so many membership bids that one of them said it was “like a plague of locusts.” The majority of would-be Angels are independents who suddenly feel the need for fellowship and status … but in one case the Angels deigned to absorb a whole club: the Question Marks, from Hayward, which became the Hayward chapter of the Hell’s Angels. Other charter applications came from as far away as Indiana, Pennsylvania, New York, Michigan and even Quebec … and when the charters were not forthcoming, a few cycle clubs in the East simply created their own insignia and began calling themselves Hell’s Angels.‡

  As of 1966, the Hell’s Angels proper were still confined to California, but if the general response to their publicity is any indicator, they are going to have to expand whether they want to or not. The name isn’t copyrighted, but even if it were, the threat of a lawsuit wouldn’t be much of a deterrent to any gang of riders who wanted to appropriate it. The Angels’ only hope for controlling their image lies in selective expansion, chartering only the biggest and meanest clubs who apply, but only on the condition that they terrorize anybody else in their area who tries to use the name.

  The Angels won’t have any trouble exporting their name to the East,‡ but the day-to-day realities of being an outlaw motorcyclist in California are not easily transplantable. Bikes are a sunshine thing; they are dangerous and uncomfortable in rain and snow. A gang of riders in New York, Chicago or Boston could only operate in the far-ranging Hell’s Angels style for a few months of the year, while in California the outlaws can move around—except in the mountains—any time they get the urge. This factor is reflected in nationwide motorcycles sales: in 1964 New York registered 23,000 bikes, while California had 203,420—a roughly 9-to-1 ratio. On the other hand, there were more than twice as many motorcycles in New York in 1964 as there were in 1961, when only 10,000 were registered.‡‡

  Using the AMA’s one-percenter gimmick, a sociologist could deduce from these figures that by 1970 New York alone will have some 500 potential Hell’s Angels … about five times the size of the group that managed to blitz the national press in 1965 … and by 1970 every Angel chapter will have a press agent. According to the motorcycle industry, there were nearly 1,500,000 motorcycles registered in the United States in 1965, with an average of 4.1 riders to each licensed bike. (This is a wholly unrealistic figure; 1.5 would be more like it.) By the industry’s count, however, it adds up to slightly over 6,000,000 riders, with more than 1,000,000 of these in California. (This too is questionable; not only is it based on the specious figure of 4.1 riders per bike, but by using the word “motorcycle” without any qualifiers, it conjures up the image of California freeways swarming with huge high-powered bikes.)

  In context the figures are not so menacing. According to the magazine Cycle World and the Los Angeles Times, “Accelerated growth of the motorcycle market is centered on the lightweight division which represents 90 percent of the total.” What the industry calls a lightweight is a very different animal from a “chopped hog,” or Harley 74, and the majority of the little bikes, says Cycle World, “are used for fun, school transportation and trail and desert jaunts by sportsmen.” In other words, the formula for sales in today’s motorcycle market is: “Less weight and little engine equals ‘fun’ and respectability.” And on this basis the industry predicts (at 4.1 per) a hard core of 8,894,000 motorcyclists in the United States by 1967. Again, the industry’s figures are inflated, but considering the booming popularity of two-wheeled transportation, a figure of, say, 6,000,000 for 1967 wouldn’t be out of line … and that of course would mean 60,000 Huns, or the end of the civilized world.

  Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.

  —John Milton, Paradise Lost

  In terms of pure money, the motorcycle industry is a gold mine. One of my recurring nightmares harks back to 1958 … I have just arrived in New York with a $1,000 cushion, and one crisp afternoon in October, I emerge from the subway station in Times Square … I dodge several panhandlers, a cluster
of junkies, two transvestites and a Jehovah’s Witness who talks like Elmer Fudd … and then, on a narrow part of the sidewalk next to the U.S. Army Recruiting Center, I am buttonholed by an unkempt young Japanese who claims to be one of the Honda brothers … he is broke and desperate, needing funds for a plane ticket back to Tokyo, and for $894 he offers me his share of the business, signed over, witnessed and wrapped up tight in the presence of any lawyer I care to name … he shows me his passport and a crumpled batch of motorcycle blueprints; no doubt he is one of the Honda boys … I listen, smile knowingly and buy my way past him with one silver quarter and a subway token, rejecting my luck with a stupid finality and rushing off to some worthless interview.

  Even now any man with the sense to pour piss out of a boot should take all the money he might spend on a new motorcycle and instead buy Honda stock—or any one of about thirty others, including Harley-Davidson, which despite a stone-age concept of management and technology is still the only American manufacturer of motorcycles.‡

  The story of Harley-Davidson and the domestic motorcycle market is one of the gloomiest chapters in the history of American free enterprise. At the end of World War II there were less than 200,000 motorcycles registered in the United States, very few of them imports. During the 1950s, while H-D was consolidating its monopoly, bike sales doubled and then tripled. Harley had a gold mine on its hands—until 1962–63, when the import blitz began. By 1964 registrations had jumped to nearly 1,000,000 and lightweight Hondas were selling as fast as Japanese freighters could bring them over the ocean. The H-D brain trust was still pondering this oriental duplicity when they were zapped on the opposite flank by Birmingham Small Arms, Ltd., of England. BSA (which also makes Triumphs) decided to challenge Harley on its own turf and in its own class, despite the price-boosting handicap of a huge protective tariff. By 1965, with registrations already up 50 percent over the previous year, the H-D monopoly was sorely beset on two fronts. The only buyers they could count on were cops and outlaws, while the Japanese were mopping up in the low-price field and BSA was giving them hell on the race track. By 1966, with the bike boom still growing, Harley was down to less than 10 percent of the domestic market and fighting to hold even that.

  With all its machinery and thinking geared to 1,200-cubic-inch engines, the company has little hope of competing on the light and middleweight markets until at least 1970 … but they still have plenty of muscle in the heavyweight class, and in 1966 Harleys were winning as many big races as BSAs or Triumphs. This hazy equality has not been maintained, however, in the market place. Most H-D racers are custom-built originals, made to order for some of the best riders in America and with much larger engines than their British competitors. Harley has yet to come up with a production model that can compete with Japanese or European imports—on the street, the track or in dirt—in terms of weight, price, handling ability or engine size.

  There is surely some powerful lesson in the failure of Harley-Davidson to keep pace with a market they once controlled entirely. It is impossible to conceive of a similar situation in the automobile market. What if Ford, for instance, had been the only American manufacturer of autos at the end of World War II? Could they have lost more than 90 percent of the market by 1965? A monopoly with a strong protective tariff should be in a commanding position even on the Yo-Yo market. How would the Yo-Yo king feel if he were stripped, in less than a decade, of all his customers except Hell’s Angels and cops?

  ‡ A club called the Detroit Renegades decided to hang onto their identify and go the Angels one better. In January 1966 forty-four of them were arrested when a police raid on their storefront clubhouse netted eighteen pistols. The raid was prompted by neighbors’ complaints that the Renegades’ presence cast a pall of fear on the neighborhood. “They came from out of a clear blue sky,” said a tenant in a nearby building. “And they drink down there. When they get too much, the women in the neighborhood are scared.” Police said most of the outlaws were factory workers and filling-station attendants, ranging in age from eighteen to thirty-three. Despite the elegance of the Renegade uniform—black leather jackets and satin shirts—a neighbor described them as “crummy-looking people.” Later in 1966 an unofficial Hell’s Angels chapter appeared in Detroit. After several well-publicized mass arrests, the leaders appealed to Barger for a national charter—which was still pending in autumn, when this book went to press.

  ‡ In August 1966 the Angels officially changed their patch to read “Hell’s Angels” on top of the skull, “California” underneath. New chapters in the East and Midwest were expected to be operative by 1967. They would be allowed to wear the traditional patch, but with the name of their own state.

  ‡‡ Pennsylvania more than doubled its motorcycle registrations between 1964 (35,196) and 1965 (72,055). Other leading bike states are Florida and Illinois, with more than 50,000 each in 1965, including outlaws.

  ‡ According to Forbes magazine (September 15, 1966), Harley-Davidson sales went from $16,000,000 in the fiscal year 1959 to $29,600,000 in 1965. During the same period, American Honda sales jumped from a niggardly $500,000 to $77,000,000—and kept booming, in 1966, to $106,000,000.

  7

  In a prosperous democracy that is also a society of winners and losers, any man without an equalizer or at least the illusion of one is by definition underprivileged.

  —Sr. Cazador, a sporting type of sorts, with a knowledge of triggers and a good eye for the openings

  They’re a bunch of mean-hair fairies, that’s all. They’re enough to make anyone sick.

  —San Francisco drag queen

  A Hell’s Angel who lived on Thirty-seventh Street in Sacramento was continually being complained about for making suggestive comments to women who passed by his house … “Let’s make it, baby,” or “Hey, beautiful, come sit on Papa’s face.” A patrolman, checking on one of these complaints, first threatened the outlaw with jail and then asked him contemptuously if he couldn’t find “something better to do.” The Angel thought for a moment and then replied: “Not unless it was to be fucking a cop.”

  —From a conversation with a Sacramento policeman

  The current boom in lightweight bikes relates to outlaw motorcycles the same way the bogus Hell’s Angels Fan Club T-shirts relate to the real Hell’s Angels. The little bikes are fun, handy and relatively safe … while the big ones are two-wheeled bombs, and the outlaws who ride them would rather walk than be seen on a Honda, Yamaha or Suziki. Safety and respectability are the last things they want; their machines are dangerous, temperamental and expensive in every way;‡ there has never been an outlaw who saw his bike as anything but a King Kong equalizer, and there has never been one, either, who had anything but contempt for the idea of good clean fun … which is one of the reasons they shun even the minimum safety measures that most cyclists take for granted. You will never see a Hell’s Angel wearing a crash helmet. Nor do they wear the Brando-Dylan-Style “silver-studded phantom” leather jackets, commonly associated with motorcycle hoodlums and “leather fetish cults.” This viewpoint is limited to people who know nothing about motorcycles. Heavy leather jackets are standard even for New York’s Madison Avenue Motorcycle Club, an executive-level gang whose members include a dentist, a film producer, a psychiatrist and a United Nations official. Ted Develat, the film producer, has lamented the image problem that he and the others run into with their leather jackets. “But if you’re practical you have to dress that way,” he explained. “If you take a skid, it’s a lot cheaper to shred that leather than to scrape off your own skin.”

  It is also a lot less painful. An eight-inch circle of raw flesh on your back is awkward to live with and slow to heal. Professional motorcycle racers, who have learned the hard way, wear helmets, gloves and full-length leather suits.

  But not the Hell’s Angels. Anything safe, they want no part of. They’ll stoop to wearing shades or weird goggles on the road, but more for show than protection. The Angels don’t want anybody to think they’
re hedging their bets. The leather jackets were in vogue until the mid-fifties, and many of the outlaws sewed their colors on them. But as their reputation grew and the police began closing in, one of the Frisco Angels came up with the idea of removable colors, to be snatched off and hidden in time of stress. This marked the era of the sleeveless denim vest: In the beginning most outlaws wore the colors on top of leather jackets, but in southern California it was too hot for that, so the Berdoo chapter pioneered the idea of wind in the armpits, no jackets at all—only colors. The next step, logically, will be the dropping of the Levis, and then the image will be complete—nothing but boots, beards, vests and bizarre decorations of the genitalia. A few of the older outlaws still wear leather jackets, especially around the Bay Area, where the winters are cold, but they are definitely not the style, and any independent making a pitch for Angel membership would be rejected as “corny and chickenshit” if he showed up in leather.

  A mass of Hell’s Angels on the road is a sight that no one who ever sees it will forget. Their arrival at a gas station causes panic among attendants. There is simply no way to cope with a caravan of nationally known thugs rolling in, each demanding a gallon or two of gas. One Saturday morning near Oakland I pulled into a service station on Highway 50 and was talking amiably with the attendant about the broiling heat and the general perfidy of machinery … when the station suddenly filled up with outlaw motorcyclists gunning their engines, yelling, and darting back and forth between the pumps. “Holy Jesus!” said the attendant. His manner became distracted. He forgot how much money I owed him and left me to fill my own radiator while he kept a terrified eye on the outlaws. It was a big, brand-new station, with four attendants, but the combined Hell’s Angel-Gypsy Joker contingent was completely in command from the moment they arrived. They pumped their own gas, tossed beer cans back and forth, and rummaged through the racks, looking for fifty-weight motorcycle oil. The five or six motorists at the pumps simply sat in their cars and watched. The attendants moved around cautiously, hoping that none of the outlaws would try to steal something in front of their eyes. Overt theft would call for action, and nobody wanted it. Anyone who has ever dealt with the Angels in a mass will agree that this is one of the worst aspects: at what point do you start protesting minor theft, insult or damage … at the risk of starting an argument that might end in a bloody fight? Is it cheaper to let a hoodlum caravan get off with ten quarts of oil and five tanks of gasoline unpaid for—or should a man risk his teeth and his plateglass windows by insisting that the outlaws pay, to the last penny, for everything they leave with? The dilemma is especially bad for an employee. A filling-station attendant faced with a gang of Hell’s Angels is like a salaried bank teller faced with an armed holdup man. Should a pump jockey risk a beating any more than a teller should risk his or her life to save a bank’s insured money?