The Bikeriders

I purchased this to give to a friend who is just getting into riding, to give him an idea of what it was like 'back in the day'. When it arrived, I opened it to take a look at it and looking out of these old photos were the faces of some of the people that I had known back in the early and mid 60's...... To make a long story short, I let him take a look at the new book that I had bought myself...and kept it. Amazing pictures! Looking back into the past is alway problematic as our vision of "how things were" rarely jive with reality. We carry pictures in our minds of people and incidents from our past, but when confronted with real images it's a bit of a shocker. Danny sure drives that nail home with this book.

Danny Lyon was a young photographer, living in Chicago in the mid-1960s, and went with a friend to a biker's outing in Wisconsin. He eventually immersed himself in this subculture of men, women and bikes, creating photos that are now an archaeological document of a lost time. Not only are the photos provocative and fascinating, but Lyon writes with a grace and brevity that remind me of Ernest Hermingway (another Chicagoan). Here is one sample: "Back then in Chicago, they had a lot of names for things, names that were of the Midwest and of that city, words belonging to that place and to the people who lived there. One of those words was bikeriders..." One will see in the images that the photographer carries his 1960s intelligence and mind into the people's lives. This is not a book about biker fashions and being cool. It is a chronicle of how some rejected the standard ways in society and set up their own rules of how to live. In their freedom and wandering, the bikeriders exemplify the lost Americans who are forever in search of sensation and meaning.

An amazing collection of incredible photography from an almost undocumented era in American motorcycling. Powerful, moving, deeply authentic. Throughout history, there have always been people who felt that they had nothing left to lose. People who had come to the conclusion that polite society was just a whitewash over something that was rotten to the core. Often, they decided this during very hard childhoods, as they found themselves betrayed by parents who were themselves just too screwed up to love their children. Arriving at 18, mad at the world, a fast bike and a wide-open horizon look pretty good to these people; and if you don't care whether you live or die, you ride that bike fast and crazy and you grab whatever goodies life has to offer, legal or not. I was deeply saddened and powerfully moved by the images in this book. Again and again I got the impression that these are people who are riding away from something as fast as they can, in the ultimately futile hope of outrunning whatever it is. I'd be willing to bet that the pirates of 300 years ago had a similar look in their eyes; a look of sadness and desperation, mixed with the ferocity of an incurable anger. The photographs are works of high art, and from the perspective of a lifelong motorcyclist, it is wonderful to see choppers that were actually built by their owners rather than bought out of a catalog by people who are "squares" 5 days a week. These images remind us of why we motorcyclists got the reputation we're trying to live down; and despite my sadness for the messed up lives I see here, like everyone else I have to look at this book. Nothing is quite as fascinating as the freedom, the tragedy, the passion and the sadness that comes from having nothing to lose in a society that judged mercilessly without wanting to know what they were judging. Give a copy of this book to your white-collar buddy with the store-bought $35,000 bar bike; it might give him a little more understanding of who he thinks he's trying to be.

More a photography book than anything but also has interviews with the people who grace these pages. Chronicles the early years of the Outlaws MC, the pics in this book are amazing. The bridge being ridden across in the photo "Crossing the Ohio River" which is considered by many to be the greatest motorcycle photograph ever is about a five minute ride from where I once lived. Every time I rode across that bridge I thought about that pic. The Bikeriders is one of the few, if not the only, non-sensationalized books having to do with outlaw motorcycle clubs.

If you're interested in bikes, the biker lifestyle, or how the 'outlaw' subculture developed, you must invest in this book. Danny Lyon rode with the Chicago Outlaws in the early sixties and his photographs form a unique visual documentary about the life of the early bike rebels. The photographs are superb; the accompanying texts revealing and fascinating. If nothing else, this book illustrates the origins of the Harley-Davidson 'chopper' and the prevalence of British bikes in motorsport 40 years ago. Simply one of - if not the - finest books on motorcycle culture ever published.