LET’S RIDE

Sonny Barger’s Guide to Motorcycling

Introduction:

Why Ride?

Back in the 1970s people used to say: “Ride hard, die young, and leave a good-looking corpse.” People said a lot of stupid things in those days. I’m in my seventies today, and that saying seems idiotic to me now. I’ve got a better plan: ride smart, live long, and die of old age. I take good care of myself. I eat a healthy diet, I exercise every day, and Iride safe. I do this not because I’m afraid of dying. I do it because the longer I stay healthy, the longer I can ride motorcycles. If there’s one thing I want you to know about me, it’s that I love to ride. A lot of people know a lot about me, mostly because I’ve written one book about my life and another about my philosophy. Other people think they know me because so much has been written about me over the past half century. Some of it is true, but most is bullshit. And none of it is relevant here; the only thing that matters is that I love motorcycles. You do, too, or you wouldn’t be reading this book. Most motorcycle owners really aren’t serious riders. They ride maybe once or twice on a weekend and only when the sun is out. They don’t get up in the morning and ride to work in the cold or rain. More often than not they get in their cars instead of on their bikes. That’s not me. When it comes to a bike or a car, there is no choice. Unless I’m getting something that’s too big to haul on my bike, like feed for my horses, I take the bike every time. Many times in my life I haven’t even owned a car, but I always had a bike. There have been many times when I couldn’t afford both a car and a motorcycle, so I always chose a bike over a car. My family and I have even had to shop for groceries on a motorcycle, but that’s the way I prefer it. Becoming a serious rider is no easy thing to do. It takes dedication and hard work, but there’s not a lot you can do about it if riding motorcycles is in your blood as it is in mine. You just have to suck it up and do the work. I’ve been fascinated with motorcycles as early as I can remember. As a child, I loved watching bikes roar by our house. We lived on Seventeenth Street in East Oakland, which was still a small town back in the 1940s, and our house was near a stop sign that everyone used to run. Motorcycle cops used to sit in a vacant lot by my home and wait for unsuspecting people to run the stop sign. I’d stand for hours watching the cops take off after traffic violators. The sound of their motors made me feel good. When I was finally old enough to ride, I got a little Cushman scooter. I never got sick of riding it around our neighborhood. I loved the sound, the feel of the wind against my body. After I saw The Wild One, I knew I wanted a real motorcycle. When I was discharged from the army in 1956, the Bohemian thing was big in the Bay Area. I had to decide whether I was going to be a beatnik or a motorcyclist. I picked motorcycles. I’m glad I did because motorcycles are still around while the beatniks are long gone. I bought a 1937 Indian Scout as soon as I returned home from the army. At that time, I was too young to legally own a motorcycle in the state of California, so I had to buy it in my older sister’s name. Despite my age, back in the 1950s no one cared if I rode it; if it ran, you could ride it, whether you had a license or not. The Scout ran, but it wasn’t in excellent shape. It was a 45-cubic-inch (750-cc) side-valve V-twin that put out about 25 horsepower on a good day. If you really cranked on it, it might have hit 75 miles per hour when it was in its prime, but by the time I bought it, its best days were long past and it wasn’t reliable enough to take out on the highway. During the short time I owned it, I never left the city of Oakland. Within a few months I had my first Harley, a 1936 Knucklehead that cost me $125, tax included. This was a much better machine, a 61- cubic-inch bike that was well suited for longer trips. I rebuilt it and put in cylinder barrels and a flywheel from a 74-cubic-inch Knucklehead. Later I stroked it by putting in a flywheel from an 80-cubic-inch Flathead. I rode that bike all over California. When the stroked Knuckle engine blew up, I built a 1958 Panhead motor up to 80 inches and rode that until I traded it in for a brand-new 1961 XLCH Sportster. I got $500 for my Knuckle-Pan and still owed $400 on the new Sportster, which seemed like an impossible amount of money back then. But it was worth it. Sportsters were the hottest bikes you could buy at the time. They ran circles around the Big Twins. I rode XLs for seven years. I’ve never been without a bike since that Indian Scout. That was more than fifty years ago, and I enjoy riding motorcycles today as much as I did when I was a kid. It’s still the only way I travel. If you’re anything like I was and you want to ride a motorcycle no matter what, it’s time to quit thinking and start doing. Jump in, and swim. I’ll explain in the following chapters what you need to do to make that happen, but throughout the book I’m going to stress the importance of getting proper training. Don’t let friends or family members teach you to ride: do it right and take a riding class. We’ll talk about the types of classes that are available in the upcoming chapters, but for now all you need to know is that completing a motorcycle riding class will be the safest way to practice the skills we cover in Let’s Ride. RIDINGA MOTORCYCLE IS EASIERSAID than done. Much of the rest of this book will tell you what to do once you decide to become a motorcycle rider, but the challenges will start before you ever fire up your engine for the first time. You’re going to have to deal with the concerns of your loved ones. As soon as you tell people you’re interested in riding motorcycles, you’ll start to hear an endless stream of warnings, mostly some variation of “Motorcycles are dangerous!” This is true— motorcycles are dangerous, but hey, life itself is dangerous. Everything you ever do will be a risk to some degree. Even doing nothing is dangerous because you’ll get soft and fat and then die of heart disease. Death, after all, is the only sure bet in life. No matter what you do, someone somewhere will tell you it’s dangerous. If you listened to every one of them, you would never do anything. You may crash your motorcycle and get hurt or killed, but you may fall off a curb and get run over by a bus, too, or tonight you could choke on a piece of fried chicken. Statistically, your bathtub might be just as dangerous as your motorcycle; thousands of people die from falling in their tubs every year, but no one tells you not to take a bath. My sister and my dad both tried to talk me out of riding. My dad rode motorcycles with his friends, but when a good friend of his got hurt, Dad quit riding. He even stopped driving cars after that—he took a bus everywhere. He never stopped worrying about me, but he supported my decision to ride. Only you can decide if the freedom and excitement a motorcycle can provide is worth the level of risk. If you’re like me and motorcycling is in your blood, there’s only one answer: “Yes.” I’ve done a lot of things that are more dangerous than riding a motorcycle. Smoking cigarettes came closer to killing me than riding any motorcycle has ever done. Abusing drugs gave me a heart attack when I was in my early forties. But riding motorcycles has kept me active and feeling young and alive over the years, so for me riding a motorcycle is more than worth the risks involved. Once you’ve weighed the pros and cons of riding a motorcycle and decided the rewards are worth the risks, you need to do everything in your power to minimize those risks. Motorcycle riding is dangerous, but you can do a lot of things to make it safer. Much of the rest of this book discusses ways to avoid unnecessary risks and manage the risks you can’t avoid. But first, let’s discuss the rewards of motorcycling and dispel some of the myths that have grown up around bikers. WHENPEOPLE HEARTHAT YOUWANT to ride a motorcycle, they’ll use every argument they can think of to try to talk you out of it, but they won’t be able to argue with the fact that motorcycles are economical to own and operate. For starters, motorcycles are cheaper to buy than cars; the most expensive motorcycles cost about as much as the average family sedan, and the least expensive new motorcycles are cheaper than a used subcompact car. If you shop around, you can pick up a brandnew high-end motorcycle like a Victory Vegas for around $15,000, which is less than you’d pay for a new compact like a Honda Civic. You can get a decent, reliable motorcycle for under $5,000, and in some cases well under that amount. The only cars you can get for that price these days are about ready for the junkyard. Motorcycles are fuel efficient as well. The largest, most luxurious motorcycle uses less gas than the lightest car. The most economical gas-powered cars average maybe 30 miles per gallon, and hybridpowered cars don’t get much more than 35 miles per gallon. Meanwhile the largest, most luxurious touring bikes usually get about 35–40 miles per gallon, and smaller bikes can easily get 50–60 miles per gallon. Gas prices traditionally fluctuate up and down, but with all the talk about “peak oil,” I’ll bet that, over the long run, fuel prices are going to trend a lot higher than they are today. The more they go up, the more money you’ll save riding a motorcycle. A lot of states also allow motorcycles to use their high-occupancy vehicle lanes, meaning you can get around on congested urban freeways more efficiently on a motorcycle than in a car. Another way to save money on a bike is in parking costs. Parking lots often charge less for motorcycles than they do for cars, which makes sense since motorcycles take up less space. If you’re resourceful enough, you can even find places that let motorcycles park for free. For example, if you find a restaurant or other place of business owned by a motorcycle rider, he or she might let you park your bike in the alley or loading area behind the building. This brings up another benefit of motorcycling: a brotherhood exists among motorcycle riders. AS SOONAS YOUSTART RIDING a motorcycle, you’ll find you are part of a larger community of motorcycle riders. The first thing you’ll notice is that other motorcycle riders wave at you, even if you don’t know them from Adam. Here’s a word of advice—wave back. It doesn’t matter if the other rider is some kid on a sport bike, some adventure-tourer traveling the globe on a big dual-purpose bike (we’ll discuss the types of bikes and riders you’ll meet later), or a member of a one-percenter club; that rider waving at you is acknowledging that the two of you are in this together. The least you could do is let the other rider know you get the message. Waving goes back to the early days of riding. When I started riding, bikes were so unreliable that traveling the sixty miles from Oakland to San Jose was considered a big trip. You might only see one other motorcycle the whole way, so when you did, you waved at him. He might even stop and have a cup of coffee with you. At least in part this brotherhood came about as the result of the antimotorcycle hysteria that infected the United States in the years after World War II. With communism spreading around the world and the Soviet Union getting an atomic bomb, you can’t blame people for being scared of just about anything out of the ordinary, and back in those days riding a motorcycle was definitely unusual. I first encountered this prejudice against motorcycles in 1958 while hanging out at a Doggie Diner on Twenty-third Avenue. I’d just been fired from my job and was sitting out in front of the diner when a straitlaced cop pulled up and told me that he’d been down to visit my boss the day before. I realized that he’d been the person who’d gotten me fired. From that day forward, it’s gotten progressively worse. Just a couple of days ago I got a speeding ticket; the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent who pulled me over treated me like I was a damned dog. I’ve paid a lot of money in state and federal taxes, yet I get treated like that when I’m riding my motorcycle down a public highway. BACK WHENI STARTEDRIDING, WHEN people spoke about a motorcycle, they were usually talking about either a Harley or an Indian. In some parts of California, they might have been talking about a Triumph or some other Brit bike, but for most people in the United States the word motorcycle meant either a Harley or an Indian. With those bikes, you had to know how to fix them to ride them. Not just anyone with a fat wallet could walk into a motorcycle dealership and ride off on a new bike because in those days you spent as much time working on your bike as you did riding it. Every time you rode a bike, there was a fair chance something would go wrong before you got back home. These days bikes are a lot more reliable and everyone has a cell phone; if something does go wrong, you can just call for help. But back then if your bike broke down, you had two choices: fix it or walk. To be a motorcycle rider in the early days of motorcycling meant that you had to be a decent motorcycle mechanic, too. In 1958 I rode with a guy named Ernie Brown, who was the vice president of the club I was in at the time. We’d ridden down to Los Angeles and my transmission blew up. We were sitting on the side of the road when another motorcyclist named Vic Bettencourt stopped to help. It turned out that he was the president of a chapter of the same club. I didn’t even know our club had a chapter down there. We’d founded our club because we’d found a cool patch from a defunct club and we liked the patch. We didn’t even know there were other chapters of the club. It was the first time we realized we were part of something bigger than just the club my friends and I had started. Vic took us to their clubhouse and put a new transmission in my bike. He also taught me a lot about what brotherhood was all about. The tendency for bikes to break down all the time kept motorcycles off-limits for people who were trained to be things like schoolteachers and bank tellers instead of grease monkeys. It made riding a motorcycle more or less a blue-collar activity, which set up a class divide between riders and nonriders that wouldn’t be torn down for generations. ANOTHERREASONTHAT MAINSTREAM AMERICAN citizens began to fear motorcycles was because of the press. As long as there have been newspapers, there’ve been newspaper publishers who’ve realized that fear sells newspapers. In the strange days following the Second World War, journalists had more fear to exploit than ever before. It didn’t take much to scare the piss out of the average American in the late 1940s; anything that represented the unknown was frightening, and people who rode motorcycles represented an unknown quantity. The sight of a bunch of greasy-nailed motorcyclists roaring into a gas station was enough to make Mr. Average American wet his pants. Being quick to pick up on anything that exploited the average American’s fear of the unknown, the magazines and newspapers of the day (remember, this was back when hardly anyone had television) published stories on anything and everything that frightened people, whether it was Communist infiltrators, unidentified flying objects, or a bunch of guys out having a good time on their motorcycles. If something wasn’t scary enough to sell newspapers and magazines, the newspapers and magazines would just stretch the truth until it was more sensational. For the most part, I always get along with just about everyone I meet. People fear the unknown, but once they get to know you, they treat you the way you treat them. If you treat people with respect, they’ll usually treat you with respect in return. If someone attacks me, I’m going to defend myself, but I don’t go around doing things to scare people. But the problem comes when people read a lot of the crazy things that are written about me and think they should be afraid. And if it will sell papers and magazines, the press will print whatever crazy story they think people might believe. That’s exactly what they did with a motorcycle rally that got a little boisterous in the small town of Hollister, California, over the Fourth of July holiday in 1947. About four thousand motorcycle riders came to town that weekend, mostly to attend races sponsored by the AMA (American Motorcyclist Association). That was a lot more people than the town expected and things got a little hectic. Eyewitness reports tell of such things as motorcyclists throwing water balloons off balconies, popping wheelies on Main Street, and generally riding around whooping and hollering. There were a few drunken fights, and more than a little street racing, but other than a couple tools being stolen from a tire repair shop, there was no real crime to speak of. One guy was arrested for pissing in the radiator of a car that was overheating; when his buddy Wino Willy of the Booze Fighters Motorcycle Club went to bail him out of jail, he, too, was arrested for being drunk. A total of twenty-nine people were arrested for drunkenness, indecent exposure, and traffic violations, but overall the motorcyclists were just a little rowdier than the cowboys were when the rodeo came to town. Finally one guy rode his motorcycle right into a bar, prompting the owner to call the California Highway Patrol, who cleared everyone out and put a stop to the party. The Hollister event would have gone down in history as just another good Fourth of July party in a small town had not a photographer put a pile of empty beer bottles around a motorcycle and had a guy pose on the bike. He sold the resulting photo to Life magazine, which ran it with a short story about how hordes of motorcyclists were descending on the country hell-bent on destroying everything in their paths. Within weeks motorcycle riders replaced Communists as public enemy number one, which is more than a little ironic considering that most motorcyclists at the time were honorable patriots who had risked their lives serving their country in World War II. They just wanted to have a little fun, and they sure as hell had earned that right. The Life magazine story inspired a guy named Frank Rooney to write a short story for Harper’s Magazine called “The Cyclists’ Raid.” This piece of fiction became the basis for the 1953 film The Wild One. Mostly the film shows a bunch of people having a good time on motorcycles, but back then Johnny, played by Marlon Brando, seemed like the Antichrist to the average American, and the film helped to spread mistrust between motorcycle riders and nonmotorcycle riders. The film might have scared “average Americans” witless, but when my friends and I saw The Wild One as teenagers, we wanted to be just like Chino, the character played by Lee Marvin. Johnny seemed like he spent a lot of time feeling sorry for himself. I don’t care what anyone says; Marlon Brando’s character was a bully, and I don’t like bullies. Whenever something happened, Marlon Brando said, “Me and my boys will take care of it.” It was never: “I’ll take care of it.” Chino had balls, and he knew how to have fun. Lee Marvin’s character was like a real person. He wasn’t out looking to push anyone around; he just wanted to ride his motorcycle and have a good time. He wanted everyone to be together as a group. But as I say, most Americans didn’t see the film the way we did. Where we saw motorcyclists having a good time, they saw criminals who needed to be locked up. By the time I started riding motorcycles, motorcycle riding itself was practically a crime; not only did we have to be on constant vigil against careless car drivers, wild animals and dogs, and other hazards of the road, but we also had to watch out for the cops who would harass us at every opportunity just because of the mode of transportation we preferred. With this kind of pressure on us at all times, it made sense that we would seek the brotherhood found in motorcycle clubs. BACK AROUNDTHE TURNOF THE twentieth century, people formed clubs around just about anything. There were clubs devoted to collecting butterflies, clubs devoted to examining dinosaur fossils, and clubs devoted to studying electricity. It only made sense that people would start forming motorcycle clubs almost as soon as Gottlieb Daimler first bolted a gasoline engine to his two-wheeled wooden Einspur to create the original motorcycle in 1885. Motorcycle clubs remained popular throughout the first half of the twentieth century, but after World War II they became even more popular. Most able-bodied American men had served in the military during the war, and many of them missed the brotherhood they had shared with their fellow soldiers. Motorcycle clubs offered these veterans a way to re-create that camaraderie. By 1947, when the Hollister bash took place, there were dozens of clubs on the West Coast alone. Just about everyone I know belongs to some sort of biking club. Riding alone is fun, but being part of a group provides advantages. With a group, you’ll have someone to watch your back if something happens or help you if you go down. Plus it’s nice to have someone to share the ride with. There are all sorts of clubs, and I encourage every rider to consider joining one for the brotherhood and camaraderie. In 1957 six other guys and I started a chapter of the club I’m still in. Within six months I became president of our chapter, and I remained president for about thirty years. I’m still a member, but I haven’t held an office in the club for more than twenty years. The type of club I’m in—a one-percenter club—probably isn’t for everyone. No club is for everybody, but no matter what kind of riding you’re interested in, you can find a motorcycle club that focuses on it. I’VE SAVEDMY PERSONAL FAVORITE PART of motorcycling for last: freedom. This subject is so important to me that I’ve written an entire book about it. I appreciate all the other benefits a motorcycle provides, especially the brotherhood of riders that forms around motorcycles, but for me in the end it all boils down to the freedom I find on a bike. When I pop the gearshift lever on my bike into first and ride out onto the open road, I leave everything else behind. Before I get on my bike I might be worried about some deadline I have to meet, or some person I have to call, or some other obligation I have to fulfill, but once Iride out of my driveway, I leave all that other stuff behind. There’s no room for it out on the road. I’ve got enough to worry about just trying to avoid all the other drivers yapping on their cell phones—there’s no room for the petty worries that would be on my mind if I wasn’t out on my bike. At least I try to shed all those unimportant thoughts when Iride. Sometimes they creep in, but I do my best to avoid them because they distract me from the business at hand, which is not getting hurt or killed on my bike. Normally I do a pretty good job at clearing the unimportant crap from my mind and focusing on riding my bike. Because riding is such an intense activity, it demands your full attention. On a bike you’re bombarded with all kinds of stuff coming at you, and I don’t just mean other traffic. Riding reveals so many raw sights, sounds, and smells that they can overwhelm you. It can be a little intimidating at first, but I promise that riding will ultimately produce an amplified sense of being alive. Once you let the experience of riding consume you and drive all the useless thoughts from your head, that’s when you really start to enjoy the freedom of riding a bike. It doesn’t matter if you’re riding five miles or five hundred miles; time has little meaning when your head is in the act of riding and it’s just you, your bike, and the road—at least until your ass starts to get sore and the pain interrupts your motorcycle meditation. Later in this book we’ll talk about ways to prevent even that from being a problem. RIDINGREALLY IS A FORM OF meditation. Most religions have ways to help focus your thoughts—meditation, prayer, ceremonies—and in this way riding a motorcycle is a lot like a religion. I’m not going to talk about organized religions here because what people believe or don’t believe is their own business. I don’t talk to people about what I do or don’t believe, and I appreciate when they don’t talk to me about their beliefs. But when it comes to motorcycles, I figure that if you’re reading this book you most likely have an interest in what I believe, at least as far as motorcycles are concerned. And I believe that riding motorcycles is as good a religion as any, and probably better than most. For me, riding a motorcycle is like being part of a ceremony; it’s a sort of transcendent experience some would call holy. I think a lot of my club brothers feel the same way. That’s why we call going to our club meetings “going to church.” The rest of this book will cover the things you need to do to learn to ride a motorcycle, tell you how to buy the right motorcycle, teach you how to be comfortable and safe once you get it, and give you advice on what to do once you start riding. I hope that by getting the proper training, choosing a good motorcycle that suits your needs, and practicing good safety habits once you start riding, you’ll stay strong and healthy and ride for many trouble-free years. Do that and you’ll experience the pleasure that motorcycling has given me for more than half a century. Whether or not you join a club, if you love to ride a motorcycle, you are part of my church.

©by Sonny Barger Production