— San Bernardino County police inspector
In the language of politics and public relations the Angels peaked in the fall of 1965. The Labor Day Run to Kesey’s was a letdown of sorts, because towns all over the country were braced for the invasion, waiting to be raped and pillaged. The National Guard was called out at such far-flung points as Parker, Arizona, and Claremont, Indiana. Canadian police set up a special border watch near Vancouver, British Columbia; and in Ketchum, Idaho, the locals mounted a machine gun on the roof of a Main Street drugstore. We’re ready for those punks, said the sheriff. We’ll put half of em in jail and the other half in the graveyard.
The Angels’ jaunt to La Honda was a sad anticlimax for the press. The outlaws did a lot of strange, high-speed traveling, but it was not in the realm of the five W’s. One of my memories of that weekend is Terry the Tramp’s keynote speech delivered to the police on the highway. He got hold of a microphone tied up to some powerful speakers and used the opportunity to unburden his mind. . . addressing the police in a very direct way, speaking of morals and music and madness, and finishing on a high, white note which the San Mateo sheriffs department will not soon forget:
Remember this, he screamed into the mike. Just remember that while you’re standin out there on that cold road, doin your righteous duty and watchin all us sex fiends and dope addicts in here having a good time. . . just think about that little old wife of yours back home with some dirty old Hell’s Angel crawlin up between her thighs! Then a burst of wild laughter, clearly audible on the road. What do you think about that, you worthless fuzz? You gettin hungry? We’ll bring you some chili if we have any left over. . . but don’t hurry home, let your wife enjoy herself.
It was hard to know, in the triumphant chaos of that Labor Day, that the Angels were on the verge of blowing one of the best connections they’d ever had. Busting up country towns was old stuff, and the cops were getting tense about it. The hippie drug scene was a brand-new dimension — a different gig, as it were — but as the Vietnam war became more and more a public issue the Angels were put in a bind.
For several months they’d been drifting toward political involvement, but the picture was hazy and one of the most confusing elements was their geographical proximity to Berkeley, the citadel of West Coast radicalism. Berkeley is right next door to Oakland, with nothing between them but a line on the map and a few street signs, but in many ways they are as different as Manhattan and the Bronx. Berkeley is a college town and, like Manhattan, a magnet for intellectual transients. Oakland is a magnet for people who want hour-wage jobs and cheap housing, who can’t afford to live in Berkeley, San Francisco or any of the middle-class Bay Area suburbs.* It is a noisy, ugly, mean-spirited place, with the sort of charm that Chicago had for Sandburg. It is also, a natural environment for hoodlums, brawlers, teen-age gangs and racial tension.
* Oakland’s official population is nearly four hundred thousand, but it is the center of a vastly urban sprawl called the East Bay, with a population of about two million — more than twice the size of San Francisco.
The Hell’s Angels’ massive publicity — coming hard on the heels of the widely publicized student rebellion in Berkeley — was interpreted in liberal-radical-intellectual circles as the signal of a natural alliance. Beyond that, the Angels’ aggressive, antisocial stance — their alienation, as it were — had a tremendous appeal for the more aesthetic Berkeley temperament. Students who could barely get up the nerve to sign a petition or to shoplift a candy bar were fascinated by tales of the Hell’s Angels ripping up towns and taking whatever they wanted. Most important, the Angels had a reputation for defying police, for successfully bucking authority, and to the frustrated student radical this was a powerful image indeed. The Angels didn’t masturbate, they raped. They didn’t come on with theories and songs and quotations, but with noise and muscle and sheer balls.