The whole thing was born, they say, in the late 1940s, when most ex-GIs wanted to get back to an orderly pattern: college, marriage, a job, children — all the peaceful extras that come with a sense of security. But not everybody felt that way. Like the drifters who rode west after Appomattox, there were thousands of veterans in 1945 who flatly rejected the idea of going back to their prewar pattern. They didn’t want order, but privacy — and time to figure things out. It was a nervous, downhill feeling, a mean kind of Angst that always comes out of wars. . . a compressed sense of time on the outer limits of fatalism. They wanted more action, and one of the ways to look for it was on a big motorcycle. By 1947 the state was alive with bikes, nearly all of them powerful American-made irons from Harley-Davidson and Indian.*
* Now defunct.
Two dozen gleaming, stripped-down Harleys filled the parking lot of a bar called the El Adobe. The Angels were shouting, laughing and drinking beer — paying no attention to two teenaged boys who stood on the fringe of the crowd, looking scared. Finally one of the boys spoke to a lean, bearded outlaw named Gut: We like your bikes, man. They’re really sharp. Gut glanced at him, then at the bikes. I’m glad you like them, he said. They’re all we have.
— September 1965
The Hell’s Angels of the sixties are not keenly interested in their origins or spiritual ancestors. Those guys aren’t around anymore, Barger told me. But some were — although in 1965 it wasn’t easy to locate them. Some were dead, others were in prison and those who’d gone straight were inclined to avoid publicity. One of the few I managed to locate was Preetam Bobo. I found him on a Saturday afternoon in the Sausalito Yacht Harbor, across the Bay from San Francisco, getting his forty-foot sloop in shape for a one-way cruise to the Caribbean. His crew for the trip, he said, would consist of his sixteen-year-old son, two seaworthy Hell’s Angels and his striking blond British girl-friend, who was stretched out on the deck in a blue bikini. Preetam is one of only two lifetime members of the Frisco Angels chapter. The other, Frank, retired from the outlaw world after seven years as Frisco president and is now surfing in the South Pacific. Frank is the George Washington of Angeldom; his name is mentioned with reverence, among the other chapters as well as Frisco. He was the best president we ever had, they say. He held us together and he was good for us. Frank had class, and he set many styles — from the gold earring to the purple-dyed beard to the clip-on nose ring that he wore whenever he had the right audience. All during his reign, from 1955 to ’62, he held a steady job as a respected cameraman, but he needed more action than any job could provide. For this he had the Angels, a vehicle for his humor and fantasies, a sop for any aggressions and an occasional chance to bust out of the workday murk like some kind of saber-rattling golem and lay at least a small jolt on people he had no other way of reaching. Frank was so completely hip that he went down to Hollywood and bought the blue and yellow striped sweatshirt that Lee Marvin wore in The Wild One. Frank wore it ragged, and not only for runs and parties. When he felt the Angels were being persecuted beyond the norm he would make an appearance in the police chiefs office, wearing his Hollywood sweatshirt and demanding justice. If that didn’t get results, he would go to the American Civil Liberties Union — a step that Oakland’s Barger has flatly ruled out because of its Communist implications. Unlike Barger, Frank had a wry sense of humor and a very sophisticated instinct for self-preservation. In seven years at the head of what was the biggest and wildest of all the Hell’s Angels chapters, then and now, he was never arrested and never had an intramural fight. Even the Angels find his record amazing. Preetam had to win his vice-presidency by fighting seven Angels in the space of one week — three in one night — and whipping them all to sore pulps. But that was Bobo’s gig; before the Hell’s Angels came into his life he was one of San Francisco’s more promising middleweight boxers, and it was no feat for him to put down a half dozen unsuspecting tavern brawlers. Later, when he became a karate expert, he happily destroyed a new generation of challengers.