Red · Rocker
Red · Rocker
Phase II of Jesse James’ plan for total world domination
BY DAVID EDWARDS
JESSE JAMES IS JUST LIKE YOU and me, an incorrigible gearhead who... what’s that... you’re not married to former skin-flick goddess Janine? Yeah, well me neither. But aside from that, Jesse James is just like you and me...huh? Well, no, actually, I don’t tool around town in a Ferrari 360 Modena cup-racer-and even if I did, I probably wouldn’t have the stones to paint it primer-black and lay on flames and a big Iron Cross. All right, continuing, other than the Xrated wife and the blasphemed Italian sports car, Jesse James is just like you and me...what now!? No, I do not have a top-rated cable-television show in the all-important 18-35 male demographic. No, People magazine did not pick me as one of its Sexiest Men Alive (though for this I blame some sort of clerical cock-up). And, no, football stars, steakhouse impresarios and male underwear models are not lining up so that I might take their $75,000 and build them a custom motorcycle.
Okay, reload. Except for the women, the cars, the fame and the fortune, then, Jesse James is just like you and me. Only cooler.
Which is why in the spring of 2002, American Honda dropped off a VTX1800 motor, a suitcase o’ money and said, “Build us something.”
Just how did Honda, maker of machines for the “nicest people,” hook up with Jesse James, bad boy of the American chopper scene, whose great-great-greatgrandfather actually was cousin to the notorious outlaw gunslinger?
“That’s exactly why we went to him,” says Tony Schroeder, senior designer at HRA, American Honda’s design wing. “It’s so outside the Honda box. We wanted to go in an experimental direction.”
But, c’mon, Jesse James? Isn’t he the eternal adolescent, Peter Pan with body art and a pet pitbull?
“Jesse’s a unique character-he’s got that artist attitude, but he’s also got gasoline in his blood,” says Schroeder, the man behind the NAS 1000 concept sportbike and one of the driving forces responsible for the Rune coming to market. “He’s not just narrowly focused on choppers, either. He knows a lot about other bikes, vintage machines, the history of motorcycling. He’s really well-rounded.”
The only stipulation laid down was the bike had to have suspension front and rear. “He had free reign to do whatever else he wanted without our input or okay,” says Schroeder, “it just couldn’t be a hardtail.” Not that everyone at American Honda was fully onboard at first. In fact, there was a chance that the “Jesse Bike” might not ever see the light of day. This has happened with outside design exercises in the past-several bikes done by Arlen Ness in the 1980s are locked up deep in the bowels of HRA. Happily, James’ handiwork did not suffer that same fate, unveiled in December at the Cycle World International Motorcycle Show in Long Beach, just a few blocks from where it was built at West Coast Choppers. Or maybe some Honda higher-up decreed that there better bloody well be some PR value returned for the rumored $250,000 they had to shell out.
“Some of the people worried in the beginning were very pleased at the outcome,” says Schroeder of the finished product. “It’s a wonderfiil piece of art, very impressive,”
“I knew they would call,” James says quite matterof-factly. It might have been Harley-Davidson or Yamaha or Honda, but he was ready when approached by a major manufacturer. Jesse James, King of the Neo-Chopper, was going mainstream. Honda needn’t have fretted about a hardtail.
“No way was I going to build a chopper,” James says. “Anybody could do that, a Honda with a bunch of WCC stuff on it. Too easy, too obvious.”
At first, he toyed with the idea of crafting a jumbo 305 Scrambler, the seminal 1960s dual-purpose bike. You can still see that inspiration in the exhaust system’s heat shields, but what James delivered to Honda a year later was a hulking red-and-chrome café-racer, albeit one that looked as if it had been run through a medieval torture chamber.
Like the classic “Norvin,” which slotted a Vincent V-Twin into a Norton Featherbed frame, the VTX motor looks impossibly big for its home, as if it had to be persuaded into place with a bullwhip, a chair and a loaded revolver.
“I was really good at Legos when I was a kid,” jokes James, who knows a thing or two about short wheelbases and quick handling thanks to the YZF-R1, turbo Hayabusa and Bimota sportbikes in his garage. “I put the engine and wheels where I wanted, then forced things to fit. Sort of like connect-the-dots.”
Such cajoling resulted in a machine that is strangely in touch with the times. It arrives when Triumph is about to let fly with its Thruxton Bonneville, Kenny Dreer in Oregon is genning up an all-new Norton 952 Commando and Ducati is polling Internet users to see if its trio of sporting retro-replicas (see Roundup, this issue) should be built. Is the age of the Neo-Café-Racer upon us?
Like any memorable motorcycle, Jesse’s Bike has several standout signature items. The eye is immediately drawn to the organic, artfully curved downtubes, sandwiching a radiator bent to match, and attached to engine and frame with flying buttresses of flat steel. Rather than trying to hide the radiator like a red-headed stepchild as some designers do, or making a big deal of it a la the Harley V-Rod, James simply and cleanly integrated the rad into his café VTX’s silhouette.
Borrowing from the hot-rod car world, rear suspension is via a Goodyear airbag, ride-height adjustable thanks to an electric pump squirreled away under the tail cowl. Damping is provided by an ordinary steering stabilizer mounted on the left. Probably not production-ready, but it seems to work.
Everybody wants to know about the “inboard” rear brake. Again, this is car stuff, familiar to all Jaguar E-Type owners. A rotor doesn’t care whether it’s spinning on a driveshaft or a wheel, and relocating the VTX’s allows the CNC-machined rear rim and the swingarm’s scythe-like right side to be shown off to full effect. Very nice touch, if a little dangerous-looking. (And, yes, cute little guard notwithstanding, Elonda’s product-liability types no doubt went into full tooth-suck mode at the thought of pants cuffs, bootlaces, errant fingers, etc, getting buzz-sawed in the whirling rotor.)
Bodywork, what little there is, James cut and handhammered out of steel before sending off to the chromer. And every pipe-bender on Earth has to be wondering why he didn’t think of the heart-shaped exhaust ends.
Unlike his “El Diablo” shop choppers, which nowadays are largely exercises in picking paint, pinstripes and pipes, none of this was easy, none of it was accomplished quickly. “It kicked my ass,” admits James.
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I caught up with Jesse three weeks before the bike’s Long Beach debut. He was on the set of his Discovery Channel hit “Monster Garage,” being fitted for a Deist triple-layer firesuit-with old man Deist himself manning the tape measure. The protective gear would be required for the show’s latest project: James’ Toyota Célica celebrity-race car, stretched 3 feet and with a Rolls-Royce Bristol Viper jet helicopter engine shoved up its backside. One of the crew guesstimated the contraption would go 225 mph. A boom camera flew about the room, zooming in and out, up and down. Sparks flew, welding torches spat flames.
In another room sat two completed vehicles, a Reynard formula car rigged up as the world’s fastest white-line painter and a Peterbilt transformed into a gargantuan trike. “Yeah, 1550 foot-pounds of torque, it just boils the tires!” James enthuses. This is still fun for Jesse, who as an 11 -year-old restored a vintage Schwinn, entered a bicycle show and was promptly offered $800 for it, setting in motion his current lifestyle.
But it's clear Jesse is a little tired today: Being a hot property will do that. This is his 38th episode of "Monster Garage" and he's just re upped for another year. Last night, he'd flown in on the red-eye after being Pontiac's guest at the new GTO V-Eight press launch. Jesse James, the business empire, needs constant attention. West Coast Choppers' waiting list is 50 people deep and the operation is expanding to another build ing. There's the "Choppers for Life" apparel line (six figures in sales just at Daytona Bike Week!) and the www.chopperdogs.com pay-per-view website. There's the new custom car-wheel busi
ness (three styles, the top-of-the-line “.357” 26-inchers going for a cool $2200 per comer). There’s co-ownership of the Jesse James/MacTools NHRA Top Fuel dragster, one of the quickest cars on the circuit, no small source of joy for Jesse, who was once kicked out of the Pomona Wintemationals for sneaking in some beer. A former BMXer, he also sponsors Brian Deegan’s “Metal Mulisha” freestyle motocross team. Lately, James has become enamored with Figure-8 racing and runs two cars in that particular brand of craziness.
In 2004, he’ll be on the silver screen, too, in the featurelength movie Jesse James Rides Again, a year-in-the-life documentary that includes a ride across Mexico with Kid Rock, a long-time WCC customer. You’ll also be able to buy Jesse James signature tool sets at-no foolin’-Wal-Mart stores! We are fast approaching All Jesse All The Time.
Maybe that’s why the VTX café-racer is so important to him. It’s a reminder in crimson red and gleaming chrome that he is, after all, just like you and me, an incorrigible gearhead who loves riding.
“I just want people to know that Jesse James still builds motorcycles,” he says. § Done. □
