Where Has My Easy Rider Cone?
WHERE HAS MY EASY RIDER CONE?
FROM THE CHOPPER: THE REAL STORY, COMES THE TRUTH ABOUT CAPTAIN AMERICA
PAUL D’ORLEANS
It's the most famous motorcycle in the world, period. Show a random citizen a photograph of the Captain America bike from Easy Rider, and everyone knows what they're looking at. The Captain America chopper transcends its own story; nobody needs to have seen the film, nor recognize Peter Fonda, to understand they're looking at an icon, a magical talisman of Freedom. Far more people idolized that motor cycle than saw the film. All they needed was a photograph of Dennis Hopper (on the "Billy" bike) and Peter Fonda, riding through the anonymous landscape of the American West, modern-day cowboys roaming the land. Free, just free.
When anyone asked, “Who built those bikes?” the answer was invariably wrong. It wasn’t Peter Fonda, nor Dan Haggerty, nor Tex Luce, the usual suspects. The Captain America and Billy bikes were designed by one man, built by several hands, and grew out of an established legacy of AfroAmerican chopper builders in South Central Los Angeles, in 1968. That Cliff “Soney” Vaughs has never been properly acknowledged as the man behind the world’s most famous motorcycle is a complicated story, a result of his personal disinterest in fame, a lack of acknowledgement by Fonda and Hopper, and a contractual settlement with the film’s financiers—Columbia Pictures—to delete his contribution to the film from the final credits.
Who is Cliff Vaughs?
He grew up in Boston and after graduate school in Mexico City moved to LA to make films. His first documentary film What Will the Harvest Be? was
THE CAPTAIN AMERICA AND BILLY BIKES WERE DESIGNED BY ONE MAN, BUILT BY SEVERAL HANDS, AND GREW OUT OF AN ESTABLISHED LEGACY OF AFRO-AMERICAN CHOPPER BUILDERS IN SOUTH CENTRAL LOS ANGELES, IN 1968.
about the rise of Black Power in the South, with interviews by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Stokely Carmichael, and aired by ABC-TV. Vaughs had been riding choppers since 1961 in LA and admits that during the March on Washington in 1963,
“I was building a chopper in my backyard. I knew it was happening, but I hadn’t been politicized.” Vaughs was recruited to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1963 and drove his 1953 Chevy half-ton pickup to Mississippi. Already deep into the custom scene, he laid stainless steel on the truck’s bed, added teak runners, with a white fiberglass tailgate with “SNCC” in big black letters. Outrageous, and an instant target, “In the window I had an “Ole Miss” [University of Mississippi] sticker; I’ve been shot at many times.”
Even more outrageous was riding his blue Knucklehead chopper to Arkansas in 1964, with a white girl on the back.
“The fiery ending of Easy Rider is an example of art imitating life,” Vaughs says. “I was riding my chopper on the highway between Pine Bluff and Little Rock, with a Miss Iris Greenburg on the back. A pickup truck passed us going in the opposite direction, stopped, and turned around. They took a shot at us from behind and missed. They didn’t pursue us any further, so I lived to tell this tale.”
Of all the crazy motorcycle tales one hears about the ’60s,
this is perhaps the hairiest story of all and a sign that Vaughs was both a civil rights volunteer and a bit of a provocateur.
“I may have been naïve thinking I could be an example to the black folks who were living in the South, but that’s why I rode my chopper in Alabama,” he says. “I’d visit people in their dirt-floor shacks, living like slavery had never ended, and it was very tense; I was never sure if the white landowners would chase me off with a shotgun. But I wanted to be a visible example to them, a free black man on my motorcycle.”
Vaughs carried on with SNCC through 1964, which is when he met photographer Danny Lyon, who snapped an infamous photo of Vaughs being bodily lifted, shirtless and shoeless,
by six National Guardsmen in Cambridge, Maryland.
“Stokely Carmichael is holding my other leg in that photo,”
Vaughs says. It’s amazing that Danny Lyon, the first photojournalist documenter of a “1% club” (the Chicago Outlaws in his 1968 book The Bikeriders), should have met Vaughs, the creator of the most famous
chopper in the world, at a Civil Rights demonstration in 1964, while both worked for the SNCC. Vaughs and Lyons would soon produce art related to the chopper that would stand as the finest in their respective fields—Lyons with his photography and Vaughs with his motorcycles and films. And they’d met doing civil rights work in the South, which should explode a few myths about who rides choppers.
MAE WEST, CHOPPER GIRL
Vaughs was working at Los Angeles radio station KRLA in 1967, which is how he met Peter Fonda, interviewing him after Fonda was busted for “pot.” Fonda was intrigued by Vaughs’ chopper and later stopped by his house with Dennis Hopper. The three of them discussed a new film project, which would feature motorcycles. Vaughs recalls, “We ad-libbed a story line: two friends (not quite “bikers”), traveling across America seek-
ing adventure. I offered the name ‘Easy Rider,’ taken from the Mae West performance of the song T Wonder Where My Easy Rider’s Gone’ from the film She Done Him Wrong." A tapestry of Mae West with the song title hung on a wall in Vaughs’ house, given to him as a gift by his girlfriend Suzanne Mansour, a reference to his many absences while off riding his chopper.
Hopper secured initial funding for the movie, and Vaughs was named an associate producer. Money was given to Vaughs to purchase four ex-police Harley Panheads at auction, and he worked with his mentor Ben Hardy to chopperize the first two bikes at his shop on Florence Boulevard in LA. Hardy was a legendary bike customizer, who had built choppers like the Easy Rider machines for many years. Both Captain America and Billy were initially constructed as drag-style bikes, with flat
handlebars and no fork extensions, as were popular with black clubs in the mid-’6os. It was decided by all parties that Captain America should be more radical, so the frame was raked at Buchanan’s, re-chromed at Van Nuys Plating, and the fork extended; the result became the most famous motorcycle in the world. What the world didn’t know, until very recently, was that Captain America was designed and built by Ben Hardy and Cliff Vaughs. As an addendum, Peter Fonda, for the first time in 45 years, publicly acknowledged Cliff Vaughs for his contribution to Easy Rider on November 7,2014. ETU
