even if it was all peaceful and tranquil —
afraid of life, not realizing its harmless emptiness —
These are the people we should be
working on — making love to them —
blowing our minds and theirs —
softening them, enlarging their consciousness
and our own too in the process —
not fighting eachother
All separate identities are bankrupt —
Square, beat, Jews, negroes, Hell’s Angels, Communist
American.
Hell’s Angels Tiny Intervention has probably had good
effect —
forced the leaders marchers to look inside
themselves to measure
how much their march is blind aggression
put-on motivated by rage
confused desire to find someone to BLAME
fight scream
OR
How much the march will be a free expression
of calm people who have controlled
their own hatreds
and are showing the American People
how to control their own fear hatred
and once and for all be done with the pressure
building up to annihilate the planet
and take our part ENDING THE HEAT on earth.
— Delivered as a speech
at San Jose State College,
Monday November 15, 1965,
before students and representatives of
Bay Area Hell’s Angels
Despite Ginsberg’s pleas, Sonny told me a week before the march that he was going to meet it with the biggest bunch of outlaw bikes anybody ever saw in California. Allen and his friends meant well, he said, but they just didn’t know what was happening. So it came as a real surprise when, on November 19 — the day before the march — the Angels called a press conference to announce that they would not man the barricades. The explanation, in the form of a mimeographed press release said: Although we have stated our intention to counterdemonstrate at this despicable, un-American activity, we believe that in the interest of public safety and the protection of the good name of Oakland, we should not justify the V.D.C. by our presence. . . because our patriotic concern for what these people are doing to our great nation may provoke us to violent acts. . . [and that] any physical encounter would only produce sympathy for this mob of traitors.
The highlight of the press conference was the reading, by Barger, of a telegram he had already sent to His Excellency, the President of the United States:
PRESIDENT LYNDON B. JOHNSON
1600 Penn. Ave.
Washington, D.C.
Dear Mr. President:
On behalf of myself and my associates I volunteer a group of loyal americans for behind the line duty in Viet Nam. We feel that a crack group of trained gorrillas [sic] would demoralize the Viet Cong and advance the cause of freedom. We are available for training and duty immediately.
Sincerly
RALPH BARGER JR.
Oakland, California
President of Hell’s Angels
For reasons never divulged, Mr. Johnson was slow to capitalize on Barger’s offer and the Angels never went to Vietnam. But they didn’t bust up the November 20 protest march either, and some people said this meant the outlaws were coming around.
We don’t have a police problem in this community — we have a people problem.
— Former Oakland police chief
It was about this time that my long-standing rapport with the Angels began to deteriorate. All the humor went out of the act when they began to believe their own press clippings, and it was no longer much fun to drink with them. Even the names lost their magic. Instead of Bagmaster, Scuzzy and Hype, it was Luther Young, E. O. Stuurm and Norman Scarlet III. There was no more mystery; overexposure had reduced the menace to an all-too-common denominator, and as the group portrait became more understandable it also became less appealing.
For nearly a year I had lived in a world that seemed, at first, like something original. It was obvious from the beginning that the menace bore little resemblance to its publicized image, but there was a certain pleasure in sharing the Angels’ amusement at the stir they’d created. Later, as they attracted more and more attention, the mystique was stretched so thin that it finally became transparent. One afternoon as I sat in the El Adobe and watched an Angel sell a handful of barbiturate pills to a brace of pimply punks no more than sixteen, I realized that the roots of this act were not in any time-honored American myth but right beneath my feet in a new kind of society that is only beginning to take shape. To see the Hell’s Angels as caretakers of the old individualist tradition that made this country great is only a painless way to get around seeing them for what they really are — not some romantic leftover, but the first wave of a future that nothing in our history has prepared us to cope with. The Angels are prototypes. Their lack of education has not only rendered them completely useless in a highly technical economy, but it has also given them the leisure to cultivate a powerful resentment. . . and to translate it into a destructive cult which the mass media insists on portraying as a sort of isolated oddity, a temporary phenomenon that will shortly become extinct now that it’s been called to the attention of the police.