Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga

  That heat’s on everybody, not just you

  To go to war, to be drafted,

  to make money on war jobs & economy, to be destroyed by Bomb, to get busted

  for pot—

  * * *

  To take the heat off, you’ve got to take the heat off

  INSIDE YOURSELVES—

  Find Peace means stop hating yourself

  stop hating people who hate you

  stop reflecting HEAT

  THERE ARE PEOPLE WHO ARE NOT HEAT

  THE MOST OF PEACE MARCHERS ARE NOT HEAT

  They want you to join them to relieve the heat on you & on all of us.

  Take the heat—Anxiety Paranoia—

  off us, AND off the police, off all the fearful—

  REASSURE, and act clearly in such a way

  as to reassure—

  by being kind not

  cruel—

  and it’ll be remembered and responded to.

  Forcing self, others and police into a corner increases heat.

  Beating up on Vietnam won’t take the heat off—

  even if whole country joined Hell’s Angels

  —world will apply heat & world be destroyed—(almost happened thru Hitler)

  Yes time to take the heat symbolism off the Swastika

  and give the swastika back to the Indians & Peaceful Mystics & Calcutta Ganja Smokers

  Can you imagine doing the same for the Hammer and Sickle?

  I’ve seen Jewish Stars, & there is M 13, & LSD & Negro Crescent

  to make HAPPY on yr. backs.

  I called Beatnik or Vietnick not want a way that is not common for all—recognizable & acceptable to all—want a way we can all live together without heat & rejection.

  My desire to share, not

  MONOPOLIZE the images, because I don’t want to be ALONE in Earth.

  I don’t want unnecessary suffering for me, or anybody.—you, the police, the Vietnamese, the entire human universe.

  What is the way out of the heat for you? If stop threat to take over others, then people let you alone.

  Have you stopped threatening the Marcher people yet?

  If you threat, you must WANT heat.

  We’re trying

  to take it off you, & off us, & off the cops, & off the U.S. & off China & off Vietnam.

  The heat is human, emotional, not a law of nature.

  How many Angels really dig your political position aside from its tactics as heat relief?

  How many hate the marchers? really want to bug them? Is it you & Tiny’s personal goof, or really what you all want?

  If you dig POT why don’t you dig that the whole generation who don’t dig the heat war also dig pot and consciousness & spontaneity & hair & they are your natural brothers.

  rather than the moralistic rigid types

  who have fixed warlike negative image of America?

  The great image—which all can buy—is your own ideal Image—

  WHITMAN’s free soul, camarado, also of Open Road!

  I asking you be Camarado, friend, kind, lover, because vast majority of peace marchers

  actually respect & venerate your lonesomeness

  & struggle & would rather be peaceful intimates

  with you than fearful enraged frightened paranoid enemies hitting each other.

  That probably goes for the police too who have human bodies under uniform.

  There are some rigid souls—who believe the universe is evil—frightened of sex & pot & motorcycles & PEACE 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.

  This is a reassuring viewpoint and it would be even more so if the police shared it. Unfortunately, they don’t. Cops who know the Angels only from press accounts are sometimes afraid of them, but familiarity seems to breed contempt, and cops who know the Angels from experience usually dismiss them as an overrated threat. On the other hand, at least 90 percent of the dozens of cops I talked to all over California were seriously worried about what they referred to as “the rising tide of lawlessness,” or “the dangerous trend toward lack of respect for law and order.” To them the Hell’s Angels are only a symptom of a much more threatening thing … the Rising Tide.

  “Mainly it’s the teen-agers,” said a young patrolman in Santa Cruz. “Five years ago it was only a matter of talking to them, telling them in a friendly kind of way just what they could or couldn’t get away with. They were just as wild, I guess, but you knew they would listen to reason.” He shrugged, fingering the .38 Special cartridges that circled his waist. “But now, goddamnit, it’s different. You never know when some kid’s going to swing on you, or pull a gun, or maybe just take off running. The badge doesn’t mean a damn thing to them. They’ve lost all respect for it, all fear. Hell, I’d rather bust a dozen Hell’s Angels every day of the week than have to break up one fight at a big high school beer party. With the motorcycle crowd you at least know what you’re up against, but these kids are capable of anything. I mean it, they give me the creeps. I used to understand them, but not any more.”

  The trends and problems of law enforcement have never interested the Angels, however, and even after their temporary détente with the Oakland police, they still viewed cops very simply as the enemy. Nor do they take much interest in their emotional or ideological connection to other rebellious elements. To them all comparisons are either presumptuous or insulting. “There’s only two kinds of people in the world,” Magoo explained one night. “Angels, and people who wish they were Angels.”

  Yet not even Magoo really believes that. When the party swings right, with plenty of beer and broads, being an Angel is a pretty good way to go. But on some of those lonely afternoons when you’re fighting a toothache and trying to scrape up a few dollars to pay a traffic fine and the landlord has changed the lock on your door until you pay the back rent … then it’s no fun being an Angel. It’s hard to laugh when your teeth are so rotten that they hurt all the time and no dentist will touch you unless the bill is paid in advance. So it helps to believe, when the body rot starts to hurt, that the pain is a small price to pay for the higher rewards of being a righteous Angel.

  This wavering paradox is a pillar of the outlaw stance. A man who has blown all his options can’t afford the luxury of changing his ways. He has to capitalize on whatever he has left, and he can’t afford to admit—no matter how often he’s reminded of it—that every day of his life takes him farther down a blind alley. Most Angels understand where they are, but not why, and they are well enough grounded in the eternal verities to know that very few of the toads in this world are Charming Princes in disguise. Most are simply toads, and no matter how many magic maidens they kiss or rape, they are going to stay that way … Toads don’t make laws or change any basic structures, but one or two rooty insights can work powerful changes in the way they get through life. A toad who believes he got a raw deal before he even knew who was dealing will usually be sympathetic to the mean, vindictive ignorance that colors the Hell’s Angels’ view of humanity. There is not much mental distance between a feeling of having been screwed and the ethic of total retaliation, or at least the kind of random revenge that comes with outraging the public decency.

  The outlaw stance is patently antisocial, although most Angels, as individuals, are naturally social creatures. The contradiction is deep-rooted and has parallels on every level of American society. Sociologists call it “alienation,” or “anomie.” It is a sense of being cut off, or left out of whatever society one was presumably meant to be a part of. In a strongly motivated society the victims of anomie are usually extreme cases, isolated from each other by differing viewpoints or personal quirks too private for any broad explanation.

  But in a society with no central motivation, so far adrift and puzzled with itself that its President‡ feels called upon to appoint a Committee on National Goals, a sense of alienation is likely to be very popular—especially among people young enough to shrug off the guilt they’re supposed to feel for deviating from a goal or purpose they never understood in the first place. Let the old people wallow in the shame of having failed. The laws they made to preserve a myth are no longer pertinent; the so-called American Way begins to seem like a dike made of cheap cement, with many more leaks than the law has fingers to plug. America has been breeding mass anomie since the end of World War II. It is not a political thing, but the sense of new realities, of urgency, anger and sometimes desperation in a society where even the highest authorities seem to be grasping at straws.

  In the terms of our Great Society the Hell’s Angels and their ilk are losers—dropouts, failures and malcontents. They are rejects looking for a way to get even with a world in which they are only a problem. The Hell’s Angels are not visionaries, but diehards, and if they are the forerunners or the vanguard of anything it is not the “moral revolution” in vogue on college campuses, but a fast-growing legion of young unemployables whose untapped energy will inevitably find the same kind of destructive outlet that “outlaws” like the Hell’s Angels have been finding for years. The difference between the student radicals and the Hell’s Angels is that the students are rebelling against the past, while the Angels are fighting the future. Their only common ground is their disdain for the present, or the status quo.

  It goes without saying that some of the student radicals, in Berkeley and on dozens of other campuses, are as wild and aggressive as any Hell’s Angels—and that not all the Angels are cruel thugs and potential Nazis. This was especially true before the Angels got all their publicity. As recently as early 1965 there were less than a half dozen Angels who gave a hoot in hell what was happening on the Berkeley campus. If they’d been seriously interested in Red-baiting, they would have made an appearance at some of the free-speech rallies. But they didn’t show up. Not even to swagger through the crowds and get their pictures in the papers. Nor—at about the same time—did they harass CORE’s picket lines in Jack London Square, in the middle of downtown Oakland. Even in the spring and early summer of 1965, when they were beginning to realize the extent of their infamy, they ignored several golden opportunities to tangle with both civil rights and Get Out of Vietnam demonstrators. They simply didn’t care. Or at least not enough of them cared … and not all of them care even now.

  But the burden of fame made the Hell’s Angels very conscious of their image; they began reading the newspapers like politicians, looking for mention of things they had said or done. And as they dealt more and more with the press, they were inevitably asked to comment on the issues of the day. (“Tell me, Sonny, do the Hell’s Angels have any position on the war in Vietnam?” … “How do you feel about the civil rights movement, Tiny?”) The answers made good copy and it wasn’t long before the Angels discovered they could call a press conference,‡ complete with TV cameras, for the purpose of delivering various screeds and pronouncements. The news media loved it, and although many of the items on the Angels were rend
ered with considerable humor, the outlaws never noticed. They got a great boot out of seeing themselves on TV, and by the time things had come to this pass, there was no question of any ideological deviation within the club. Barger and the other officers spoke for the whole organization, and anybody who didn’t agree could hang up his colors. None did, of course, even though Barger and perhaps two or three others were the only Angels with any kind of political awareness. But if Sonny had a beef with some pinko demonstrators, then by God, they all had a beef. And that was the way it went. Yet there were shreds of evidence, toward the end of 1965, that the La Honda atmosphere was having a gradual effect. One afternoon several weeks before the political crisis Terry was sitting in the El Adobe, sipping a beer and talking thoughtfully about the difference between the Angels and the hipster-radical types he’d been partying with: “You know, sometimes I think we ain’t makin it,” he said. “These other people at least got somethin goin for em. They’re fuck-ups, too, but they’re constructive. We’re too goddamn negative. Our whole bit is destructive. I can’t see any way out for us if we can’t find some other kind of scene besides tearin things up.”

  Six months earlier the Angels’ only real problem had been keeping out of jail, but now they were engagé and had to sit through meetings with other people who were engagé. A few of the outlaws thrived on the new gig, but for most it was only a drag. And to those who could look back on a decade or more of hostile isolation, it seemed like the end of an era.

  No more self-defeating device could be discovered than the one society has developed in dealing with the criminal. It proclaims his career in such loud and dramatic forms that both he and the community accept the judgment as a fixed description. He becomes conscious of himself as a criminal, and the community expects him to live up to his reputation, and will not credit him if he does not live up to it.

  —Frank Tannenbaum,