Leanings
LEANINGS
Guitars and motorbikes
“HOW MANY GUITARS DO YOU HAVE now?” I asked my old friend David Rhodes this summer when I dropped by for a visit. David is a writer who lives on a farm in Wisconsin and collects vintage electric guitars.
“About four dozen,” he said.
David and I get along pretty well, probably because I'm one of the few people he knows who doesn’t bat an eye at the idea of owning four dozen electric guitars. I not only approve, but applaud. Besides being a kind of fascinating historical archive done in hardwood, varnish and mother-of-pearl, David’s collection has the added value of making my own paltry hoard of six guitars look like the work of a sane man. In other words, my wife thought I was out of my mind until she met David. Now I appear almost normal. Shoplifting pales next to the Great Train Robbery.
It’s hard to explain to an outsider why a man would want more than one electric guitar. (In high school, it was hard to explain to my parents why a man would want even one.) Unless you are steeped in the history and aesthetics of Rock ’n’ Roll, Blues, Jazz or Country music, you aren’t likely to care that Chuck Berry sounds best on an ES-355 Gibson, or that Fender Stratocasters with maple necks sound and feel different from those with rosewood necks. (Clapton uses a maple neck version; ’nuff said.) Old guitars are both cultural icons and expressions of mood, so if you feel like playing a Les Paul Gibson and all you've got is a Gretsch Country Gentleman, you’re just flat out of luck. Stuck with Greek, when you’re hungry for Mexican.
Motorcycles, of course, are the same way. At least for some of us.
It is possible to get by with just one motorcycle, I'm told, and lead a fairly normal life. Single-bike ownership, after all, is the very thing for which dual-purpose motorcycles were created: To go anywhere and do everything reasonably well. Get yourself a good XL or KLR 600 and you can ride to the Arctic Circle, see the dusty side of Baja, commute to work or carve up a canyon, all on one bike. You’re set for life, right?
Wrong. Dual-purpose is about six purposes too few, if life is to have the proper balance and variety. For instance, what if you’ve got an XL600 in the garage and suddenly take a fancy to the idea of polishing and admiring the kind of inch-deep chrome pipes and mufflers found only on old Nortons and Triumphs? Ever try to find one piece of good chrome on a modern dual-purpose bike? Or what if you do own an old Triumph and want to ride to the Arctic Circle but are not fond of hitchhiking in the cold and living with timber wolves? What if you’ve got a nice, longlegged BMW for touring, but suddenly get homesick for the insane racebike whoop of a high-revving Japanese Four?
Funny you should ask. Those are the very questions I’ve been asking myself lately.
The reason, as you might have guessed by now, is that I’ve had the same two bikes for nearly five years— a KZ 1000 Mkll and an old XL350. Good bikes. Great bikes, even. Trouble-free, competent, honest machines on which I can go almost anywhere, across continents or deep into the desert. The discerning eye will note, however, that there are no British Singles or vertical Twins in this little collection of two; no American or Italian V-Twins; no lightweight canyon screamers with the souls of GP bikes; no tail-geared German Boxers to lope over thé open highway with seven-league boots. In other words. I’ve got some serious gaps here, holes through which you could drive an aesthetic, philosophical and functional truck.
The cause of the problem is that for the past five years, my wife Barbara and I have been Saving For a Flouse. Yep. The original gold-plated guilt trip. The one you see reflected in the bloodshot eyes of house guests who’ve slept on the hide-a-bed in the living room once too often (the one with the steel bar across the rib cage, just beneath the Wonder-Bread-thin mattress), their mute, accusing stares asking, “How can a guy spend all his money on motorcycles and live in such a tiny excuse for a house? Why doesn’t his wife divorce him? And, while we’re at it, who’s in the bathroom?”
Well, we sold some bikes, saved our money and, just this year, bought the house. Three bedrooms, two bathrooms, family room, nice yard with rose bushes and trees, two-car garage. The world is now safe for house guests and relatives, the dreaded hide-a-bed is gone, I’ve paid my debt to society and the guilt trip is over.
Buying the house was Plan A. Now it’s time to activate Plan B.
Plan B is a complex, long-imagined strategy in which I make up for lost time and past error by gradually tracking down clean versions of at least three of the bikes I never should have sold, and a few others I’ve never owned but always admired. First on the list is a late-Sixties, high-pipe 650 Triumph TR6C Trophy Special. After that I’ll stay flexible, ear to the ground, eyes peeled, for targets of opportunity, like the ’74 black-andgold Norton 850 Commando and the CB400F Honda and the . . . well, I won’t run on. One thing at a time. I’ll find them all, eventually, if there’s any money left after house payments.
The only other thing that could possibly slow me down is if I run across a certain Les Paul Gibson, the famous Black Beauty model with three Humbucking pickups. The kind Keith Richards used to play . . .
Peter Egan
