Hell’s Angels. A Strange and Terrible. Saga by Hunter S. Thompson

* In August 1966 the Angels officially changed their patch to read Hell’s Angels on top of the skull, California underneath. New chapters in the East and Midwest were expected to be operative by 1967. They would be allowed to wear the traditional patch, but with the name of their own state.

** Pennsylvania more than doubled its motorcycle registrations between 1964 (35,196) and 1965 (72,055). Other leading bike states are Florida and Illinois, with more than 50,000 each in 1965, including outlaws.

Using the AMA’s one-percenter gimmick, a sociologist could deduce from these figures that by 1970 New York alone will have some 500 potential Hell’s Angels. . . about five times the size of the group that managed to blitz the national press in 1965. . . and by 1970 every Angel chapter will have a press agent. According to the motorcycle industry, there were nearly 1,500,000 motor­cycles registered in the United States in 1965, with an average of 4.1 riders to each licensed bike. (This is a wholly unrealistic figure; 1.5 would be more like it.) By the industry’s count, how­ever, it adds up to slightly over 6,000,000 riders, with more than 1,000,000 of these in California. (This too is questionable; not only is it based on the specious figure of 4.1 riders per bike, but by using the word motorcycle without any qualifiers, it con­jures up the image of California freeways swarming with huge high-powered bikes.)

In context the figures are not so menacing. According to the magazine Cycle World and the Los Angeles Times, Accelerated growth of the motorcycle market is centered on the lightweight division which represents 90 percent of the total. What the industry calls a lightweight is a very different animal from a chopped hog, or Harley 74, and the majority of the little bikes, says Cycle World, are used for fun, school transportation and trail and desert jaunts by sportsmen. In other words, the formula for sales in today’s motorcycle market is: Less weight and little engine equals ‘fun’ and respectability. And on this basis the industry predicts (at 4.1 per) a hard core of 8,894,000 motor­cyclists in the United States by 1967. Again, the industry’s fig­ures are inflated, but considering the booming popularity of two-wheeled transportation, a figure of, say, 6,000,000 for 1967 wouldn’t be out of line. . . and that of course would mean 60,000 Huns, or the end of the civilized world.

Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.

— John Milton, Paradise Lost

In terms of pure money, the motorcycle industry is a gold mine. One of my recurring nightmares harks back to 1958. . . I have just arrived in New York with a $1,000 cushion, and one crisp afternoon in October, I emerge from the subway station in Times Square. . . I dodge several panhandlers, a cluster of junkies, two transvestites and a Jehovah’s Witness who talks like Elmer Fudd. . . and then, on a narrow part of the sidewalk next to the U.S. Army Recruiting Center, I am buttonholed by an unkempt young Japanese who claims to be one of the Honda brothers. . . he is broke and desperate, needing funds for a plane ticket back to Tokyo, and for $894 he offers me his share of the business, signed over, witnessed and wrapped up tight in the presence of any lawyer I care to name. . . he shows me his pass­port and a crumpled batch of motorcycle blueprints; no doubt he is one of the Honda boys. . . I listen, smile knowingly and buy my way past him with one silver quarter and a subway token, rejecting my luck with a stupid finality and rushing off to some worthless interview.

Even now any man with the sense to pour piss out of a boot should take all the money he might spend on a new motorcycle and instead buy Honda stock — or any one of about thirty others, including Harley-Davidson, which despite a stone-age concept of management and technology is still the only American manufacturer of motorcycles.*

* According to Forbes magazine (September 15, 1966), Harley-Davidson sales went from $16,000,000 in the fiscal year 1959 to $29,600,000 in 1965. During the same period, American Honda sales jumped from a niggardly $500,000 to $77,000,000 — and kept booming, in 1966, to $106,000,000.