A Tale of Two Bikers
A TALE OF TWO BIKERS
IGNITION
WANDERING EYE
BIKE RIDERS AND THE REAL CAPTAIN AMERICA
PAUL D’ORLEANS
The new Whitney Museum of American Art in NYC is not where you’d expect to find two icons of chopper culture, but then again, they’re currently exhibiting photographer Danny Lyon’s career retrospective, Message To The Future. Lyon is best known among motorcyclists for his 1967 book The Bikeriders, documenting his membership in the Chicago Outlaws Motorcycle Club, and his images from that period fill a room at the Whitney.
Lyon discovered motorcycles in 1962 and spent 1965 photographing and interviewing his friends from the Outlaws M/C. At the exhibit, you can don headphones and listen to his tapes from “Cockroach” and “Kathy,” which were later transcribed for The Bikeriders. The book is both documentary and art, and art-school photographers have copied images like “Crossing the Ohio” for 50 years now. One needn’t have seen an actual Lyon photo to know his style; it became the visual language of Bohemian motorcycling ever after.
Before his stint with the Outlaws, Lyon was a staff photographer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the civil rights group behind the sit-ins and protests in the South. His SNCC photos were widely publicized in the period and look sadly contemporary given today’s racial unrest. One photo in the Whitney is searing: a black man, clothes half torn off, suspended mid-air in a human tugof-war between gas-masked National Guardsmen and protesters. That man was Cliff “Soney” Vaughs, another SNCC photographer and a friend of Lyon. Both men were motorcyclists, it turns out, though Vaughs was five years older and had brought his bike to the South.
Vaughs, a photojournalist and filmmaker, joined the nascent LA chopper scene in 1962, buying a modified Harley-Davidson Knucklehead, which he’d later carry to Arkansas in the back of his half-ton Chevy pickup with “SNCC” painted in large red letters on the tailgate and an Ole Miss sticker in the window. “I was shot at many times,” he noted in my book The Chopper: The Real Story.
Vaughs ultimately returned to LA to work for KRLA, where he made the civil rights documentary What Will the Harvest Be?, in 1965. He interviewed Peter Fonda in 1967 after a marijuana bust, and the pair bonded over Vaughs’ choppers (Fonda had just starred in The Wild Angels). That led to discussions for a new film project, “a Western with motorcycles,” for which Vaughs, as associate producer, provided tales from his life as a chopper rider in the South, the title Easy Rider, and the choppers for the film (Captain America and Billy, the latter of which was built by his old pal Ben Hardy), which became the most famous motorcycles in the world.
Vaughs died earlier this year on July 2. For reasons outlined in The Chopper, he didn’t see Easy Rider until September 2015, when he was an honored guest at the Motorcycle Film Festival in Brooklyn. Vaughs’ contribution to motorcycle culture had nearly been forgotten, and the Film Festival became his de facto career retrospective. To me, he really was Captain America. And while touring Lyon’s Whitney show, I reflected that these two men, who had such an impact on “alternative” motorcycle culture, met while working on racial justice issues in the early 1960s. I wanted to stand by that terrifying photo and tell everyone about Vaughs and choppers and Easy Rider but decided it was probably better to do it here.
1963 THE YEAR DANNY LYON AND CLIFF VAUGHS MEET AS PHOTOGRAPHERS FOR THE SNCC
$1,263 ASKING PRICE FOR A FIRST-EDITION HARDBACK OF THE BIKERIDERS ON BOOKFINDER.COM
$42,000,000 DOMESTIC BOX OFFICE SALES FOR EASY RIDER
