Hedonism On Wheels

HEDONISM ON WHEELS

The Art of the Chopper enters its decadent period

CRAIG CONSTANTINE

Decadence. Who doesn’t want some? Nominally it’s a bad thing, but so is nymphomania. The dictionary says it’s “a state of deterioration or corruption.” I reckon it’s the party going full-blast, even though it’s 4 a.m. and everyone’s wasted. Rock stardom is decadent. Chocolate is decadent. Slacking in your bathrobe, sipping bone-dry martinis while writing high-dollar articles is decadent...but enough about me. Anything that’S a certain mix of the extravagant, the debauched and the cool usually gets the label. Depp is decadent; Cruise is a zealot with a swagger. Amsterdam is decadent; Vegas just wants to be. Keith Richards is a patron saint of decadence. As are Cobain, Capote, both Ben & Jerry, and the roster of the New York Yankees. And so we arrive in the Decadent Age of Chop. Decadent... what else to call it when Jesse James conjures a chopper from an airplane engine? When Roland Sands summons a 200-hp MotoGP board-tracker from the Circles of Hell.

When Matt Hotch hangs an $85,000 Black Shadow repop mill in a frame the length of a bullet train? When Roger Goldammer gives us the unholy hybrid that is “ExperiMental,” the motorcycle equivalent of an orgy involving midgets, a dominatrix and the Latvian gymnastics team?

Like the decadent period of any art, or civilization, it can be a skunky bowlful. The classic era, with its economy and superconcentrated creativity, is past. Indian Larry’s endlessly inspired variations on a single engine configuration and chassis? They’re gone, sadly, with the man himself. Replaced by exotica, excess and endless one-upmanship.

A chopper was once like this martini. Fixed ingredients mixed just so. The one is vermouth and gin, or possibly vodka. The other, an American V-Twin in a rigid frame. Now we have radial engines, Limey lumps, 250cc tandem-Twins in dirtbike frames, with other freaks and fetishes to come. Even a traditionalist like Berry Wardlaw, a great V-Twin maker, wants to tango. Berry tells me he plans to put a steam engine in a bike. It’ll take awhile to start, then make 1200 foot-pounds of torque!

Readers with unimpaired memories will say, “Ain’t nothing new. Back in the ’60s we chopped anything that had a crankcase. Honda 350s, CB750s, Triumphs, Beezers, even Cushman engines were stuffed into rigid chops that went like stink for 96 miles until the frame cracked.” True enough, but there’s a difference: Back then, you chopped what you had. If you couldn’t pony up for American, you went British or Japanese. That was

a chopper. Commissioning a fuel-injected Vincent engine that costs as much as a fully loaded Dodge Viper.. .that’s sinful, glorious decadence.

I have also heard rumors of unnatural cocktails claiming to be martinis, tasting of chocolate or apple. If there are such things, it’s another example of the culture going off the rails.

At the instigation of the Editor-In-Chief, I did some digging.

He didn’t actually say, “I smell a trend; now go out there and get the scoop, all the angles,” but that was the gist. Okay, but let me refresh the shaker first...

I looked up a man who knows something about exoticengined motorcycles, and as it happens, martinis. Jesse may have his airplane engine, but Arlen Ness was the first to put a jet engine in a chopper, his Mach Ness. “In the old days,” Mr. Ness reflects, “having a Harley in the garage was like having a Ferrari. Now it’s like having a Chevy.” He attributes the oddballengine trend to an overcrowded field. “There are so many builders now, it gets harder and harder to do something different, something new, to stand out in the crowd. The airplane engine is the wildest thing. How it’ll actually work is a different story.”

Then I rang up one Paul Teutel, Sr. of Orange County Chopper fame (and fortune). For me, this was going deep, deep behind enemy lines. When I put on clothes, which is rare, I work on a show called “The Great Biker Build-Off” for cable television. We like to think it’s more documentary-like than Teutel’s own “American Chopper,” which is suspiciously scripted and thoroughly infiltrated by corporations. To get your theme bike on OCC, I’m told, takes upwards of $1 million. “Talk to the enemy,” the Chief had commanded. I’m going in...

For all the menacing biceps and pop-eyed tirades in front of the camera, Senior was geniality itself on the phone. Maybe he had Mikey in a headlock at the time. “Where do you draw the line?” he wondered aloud. “Where to now? Are people more fascinated by a jet motor or a tricked-out traditional custom bike?”

The problem is always bringing something fresh to the tube. “We do it constantly. Every time we do a show,” Teutel says. “It’s more and more difficult for us, know what I mean? Thing that blows my mind is that we do do it. Know what I’m sayin’?”

He says that a lot, “Know what I’m sayin’?” I don’t, because I’d rather head-butt a fork brace than watch his show. But I get the drift that he’s not down with any new trends. “I’m a David Mann guy. All the bikes he drew. I guess I’m a regular martini guy." And finally I know what he’s sayin’.

You can blame us, if you like, all the TV tribe, for corrupting the purity of the American custom. The million-headed tube . monster feeds on spectacle. To grab attention from an evermore-knowledgeable and thus jaded audience, the builders go farther and farther, until they’ve punched all the way through the looking-glass. It’s then you start hallucinating machines like James’ Radial Hell and Goldammer’s ExperiMental.

All right, but haven’t the shops always been doing that, except in different venues? Custom bike building is competition and one-upmanship. Scoring the Best-in-Show at the local bikefest, and the seminude magazine spreads and spike in business that goes with them, always took the flashiest paint job or trickest drivetrain. I think the builders just sort of annexed TV itself as the next Big Bike Show, while stepping up their game. So television isn’t really the cause of the culture’s slide into decadence. More like an accelerant.

Meanwhile, enjoy chopper’s anything-goes era-if you’re not a purist or a historian. The first will be condescending, the other damning, as they are about the decadent period of any art. For the rest of us, it’s a party. A freaky one, to be sure, with some people in bondage and others of indeterminate sex...and it’s now omigod 4:30 in the morning, but let’s pound some energy drinks and see how far we can push it. □