Up Front

UP FRONT

It’s all right

David Edwards

IT IS THE AUTUMN OF 1964. JOHNNY Carson has been host of “The Tonight Show” for two years. The fall TV season sees the debut of several new series, including “The Munsters,” “Daniel Boone,” “Gilligan’s Island” and “Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.” President Lyndon Johnson is faced with civilrights unrest at home and a growing military involvement in Southeast Asia. Gas costs 33 cents a gallon, the nation is reading Le Carre’s The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, Yogi Berra’s Yankees have just lost the World Series to the St. Louis Cards. And a song about motorcycles is climbing the pop-music charts.

I ’m gonna wake you up early, ’cause Fm gonna take a ride with you

We ’re going down to the Honda shop, I tell ya what we ’re gonna do Put on a ragged sweatshirt, Fll take you anywhere you want me to

The song was “Little Honda,” a 78rpm single by a group called (I do not jest) The Hondells. Heard today, the song has a boppy, Beach Boys kind of feel, with good reason. It was written by Brian Wilson and Mike Love, prime movers behind the famous surfrock group, as a companion piece to the band’s hot-rod hits “Little Deuce Coupe,” “Shut Down” and “I Get Around.” The Boys didn’t do so well with “Little Honda,” but it was a hit for the Hondells, riding the crest of a motorcycling wave that was sweeping the country, and reaching number nine on Billboard's “Hot 100” chart.

If we’re to believe the press releases of the era, the Hondells all rode lightweight bikes, but little more seems to be known about the group, which had lesser success with songs like “My Buddy Seat,” “Hot Rod High” and “You’re Gonna Ride With Me” before fading into rock ’n’ roll obscurity. If people remember anything of “Little Honda” today, it’s likely to be the words to the catchy chorus.

First gear, it ’s all right Honda, Honda, faster, faster Second gear, lean right Honda, Honda, faster, faster Third gear, hang on tight Faster, it’s all right After the precipitous decline in motorcycle sales during the 1980s, it’s difficult to comprehend the extent of the industry’s boom in the 1960s.

Throughout the Fifties, yearly sales hovered around the 50,000 mark, mostly to mechanically adept adventurers, crusty long-time enthusiasts and ex-G.I.s in search of post-war kicks. Then came Yamaha and Honda in 1959, Kawasaki in 1963 (at first sold under the Omega banner) and Suzuki in 1964 (with the grammatically flawed “Suzuki Are Here” ad slogan). Sales jumped to 150,000 in 1963 and were bumping 300,000 by the time “Little Honda” was released a year later, on the way to an all-time high of 1.5 million in 1972. In 1964, Honda held 65 percent of the overall U.S. market.

It’s not a big motorcycle, just a groovy little motorbike

It’s more fun than a barrel of monkeys, that two-wheeled bike

We ’ll ride on out of the town to anyplace I know you ’ll like

During 1964, both Time and Newsweek chronicled the dizzying good fortune of the Japanese Big Four in America. In an article titled “TwoWheeled Chic,” Time said that “The Japanese look in motorbikes is the hot new trend in U.S. transportation. They are buzzing all over the place.” The article told the story of Star Koerner, a young executive who had borrowed a friend’s bike. “The first two nights I had it, about 18 girls asked me to take them for a ride,” said Koerner. “I said to myself, ‘My God, I’ve got to have one of these.’” Within two years, he had moved up to a Honda 305 Super Hawk (and found a wife).

Newsweek devoted three pages to the boom, focusing on the Honda line, which then ranged from the $245 Cub 50 step-through to the sporty, $665 Super Hawk. “Hondas, should any parent not yet know, are selling like pizza pies among well-scrubbed, perfectly sane young people in the U.S., and have become the shining badge of status among high-school-age American kids,” reported the magazine. An Atlanta mother sighed that her teenage son “had just gone Honda crazy.” A Houston father caved in and bought a Cub 50 after his son pleaded, “But all my friends have them!”

It climbs the hills like a Matchless, but my Honda ’s built really light

When I go into the turns, I hang on tight

We better turn on the light so we can ride my Honda tonight

It’s a silly tune, sung in a simpler time, but it caught the mood of the nation back then. Cycle World's Paul Dean, who worked at a Honda dealership in an east-coast university town during the mid-1960s, remembers that “All the Japanese bikes were on a roll, but Honda was in a class by itself in terms of volume. Having a Honda dealership in the mid-’60s was like having a license to print money. One day, we rolled close to 40 bikes out the front door.”

Those times probably are gone forever. But after almost a decade of steady decline that saw new-bike sales plummet by as much as 20 percent a year, there is some very good news. The figures are just in for 1991, and new-bike sales are up for the first time since 1984. This in spite of a terrible recession in the general economy. It’s not a big increase, less than 5 percent, but as a sales-and-marketing man for one of the Big Four told me recently, “There’s a lot to be said for arrows pointing up, not down, and the preliminary results for 1992 look to be up a few percentage points yet again.” It’s too soon to call this a trend, but there is reason for hope. “Remember, what goes around, comes around,” the official said.

Is it too early to put a call into Madonna, R.E.M. or Garth Brooks? □