American
Chopper History
The
world of high fashion is dominated by a
small number of couturiers whose glamorous,
one-of-a-kind, over-the-top, and
extravagantly expensive apparel debuts each
season with much fanfare in the salons of
cosmopolitan capitals throughout the world.
From runway to rack, their designs initiate
a process of trickle-down style in which Wal-mart
copies dominate sales. The motorcycle
industry, too, pays close attention to the
seasonal splash of high-priced, high fashion
at similarly aggrandized media events. Only
instead of the runways of Paris, Milan,
Tokyo, and New York I give you the streets
of Sturgis, Daytona, Hollister, and
Milwaukee. Instead of anorexic models
wearing the latest Givency, Dior, Miyake,
Armani, and Versace I give you the steroid-
and silicone-enhanced bodies epitomized by
professional wrestlers and strippers astride
the trendsetting creations of the builders
represented within these pages. But this
book is not about people who ride
motorcycles per se or the hedonistic lives
they might lead. It’s about guys who build
$70,000 motorcycles to die for. It’s about
their legerdemain with sheet metal, and
their legendary personas. It’s not about
biker culture; it’s about how these bikes
are culture. Choppers are literally vehicles
of self expression. Their creators have a
talent for carving, pounding, and welding
solid blocks of aluminum and sheet metal
into art that moves, and moves the beholder.
Handcrafting motorcycles is as much a way of
life as a business. In his book Zen and the
Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Robert Pirsig
wrote, “The ancient Greeks never separated
art from manufacture in their minds, and so
never developed separate words for them.
Actually a root word of technology, techne,
originally meant ‘art.’” That fits the
bill nicely. Custom builders are the
arbiters of change in the world of
commercially produced motorcycles. What they
define as high fashion—or, as the case may
be, cool, trick, or bitchin’—will
eventually drift down into the corporate
abyss of mass production and media
hyperbole. Nevertheless, this volume
celebrates their work as more than mere
popular entertainment. The building and
riding of choppers is an American art form
as indigenous as jazz. Its improvised riffs
have given rise to as many mechanical
doodads, chrome thingamajigs, bars, frames,
forks, tanks, and tires—and different ways
to combine them—as there are notes in a
Charlie Parker saxophone solo. And with the
exportation of these kinds of eccentricities
to other cultures, chopper style has become
as recognizable in Riyadh as in Rochester.
But if I may put that simile aside, I began
this introduction with a testament to
choppers as high fashion, and I’d like to
stick with it. It’s not the kind of
fashion you’ll see in Vogue; because
instead of décolletage you’re going to
get stretch in the top tube. Instead of
chiffon and taffeta you’re going to get
chrome and iron. Instead of the allure of
haute couture, I give you a greasier glamour
in the name of haute moteur: Art of the
Chopper. There’s a line in Quentin
Tarrantino’s film, Pulp Fiction, in which
Butch, a boxer played by Bruce Willis,
contradicts his girlfriend: “It’s not a
motorcycle; it’s a chopper,” he scolds.
It is a remarkable comment in the context of
a film that is as fashionably cool as is it
notorious for the gruesomeness it ignores
with a vengeance. It violently demands your
attention for the sake of art. It is the
motion picture equivalent of a chopper.
Choppers too demand attention. If you park
the latest Ducati, Honda, Yamaha, BMW, or
stock Harley-Davidson on a street corner in
any city or town in the world, only a few
passersby may pay much attention. But bring
on a slammed to the ground, stretched and
raked-out, big-bore V-twin chopper bedizened
with blinding chrome, pipes out the wahzoo,
and a radical paint job and you will indeed
attract a crowd! Such a motorcycle, like any
other coveted work of art, becomes the
center of attention wherever it rolls into
public view. An object for contemplation,
not mere transportation, choppers are
paradoxical: They are the sacramental
objects of a culture that worships
profanity. They are vulgar and ostentatious,
and yet achingly beautiful. Their presence
will always provoke opinionated remarks, as
will any object of desire. Incidentally,
never would a rider park one where he
couldn’t keep an eye on it; not for fear
that it might be purloined, but because
every parking spot represents a new tableau
to enjoy. Today, baby-boomers have
instigated a renaissance in the high art of
the low rider, the chopper’s unruly but
stylish combination of iron, oil, chrome,
paint, rubber, and decibels. But, whereas
some people are satisfied with what comes
off the rack, say, a stock Harley with a
daub of chrome here and a smattering of
extra horsepower there, or even a
“Wal-Mart” chopper, a connoisseur will
demand something tailor made, something
jaw-dropping different at a commensurably
one-of-a-kind, jaw-dropping price. Owning
and riding a custom chopper is an
egomaniacal self-indulgence. As Eddie Trotta
says, “It’s better to look good than
feel good!” But it also represents a
defiant stance against mediocrity and
conformity, as long as you have the
pecuniary clout to turn substance into style
just for the hell of it. Owning a custom
chopper is the dream of many riders. The
word custom implies a high degree of
individuality and a paragon of style; that
is to say it has all the characteristics of
being hand crafted after a unique design. It
has panache. Picture the difference between
a Ford and a Ferrari. Now, put the body of a
top-fuel dragster on the Ferrari and add
about a gazillion horsepower! By contrast,
the Harley-Davidson Motor Company refers to
“custom” as what the actual riders of
custom bikes call “billet barges.”
Many are good looking to be sure. And they
are distinctive; but only insofar as one
bone-stock Harley looks pretty much like any
other without the addition of bolt-on
accessories. Therein lies the verisimilitude
of so many motorcycles cluttered with
chrome. They are not customized; they are
personalized. Now consider the term chopper.
Just the opposite of billet barge, it was
coined to describe the kinds of motorcycles
from which superfluous parts have been
removed, or chopped off, to give them the
clean and uncluttered lines consistent with
the aesthetic and historical values their
riders enjoy. They have an obvious Harley
heritage (i.e., the V-twin motor, the
rhythmic rumble of the exhaust, the chrome,
and the arms-out, knees-to-the-breeze riding
position), but they also have an edge that
is more avant garde than the enduring
expression of Harley’s 1903 legacy. Not to
get into the history of choppers here, but,
at first they weren’t so much built as
they were deconstructed from stock
motorcycles. Chopper style, to be
technically correct, is the result of a
subtractive process. A chopper “builder”
strips machines designed and mass produced
by corporate culture to their bare
essentials, hops up the horsepower to make
them faster, which of course is socially
unacceptable, and adds a few innovations and
embellishments to make each one unique. When
all the trappings of factory decoration and
government-mandated conformity come off
(gewgaws, gauges, reflectors, and flashing
lights), the result should reflect one
person’s subjective vision with a
dissimilitude that is the mechanical
equivalent of a wild animal staking out
it’s territory. It once seemed to me that
the be all and end all of motorcycling was
to own a Harley-Davidson. The idea of owning
and riding a Harley a dozen years ago seemed
like a radical proposition to most people.
The contributions of the Harley-Davidson
Motor Company are still at the core of
motivation for innovation within the
industry. The real American Idle, if you
will, is potato-potato-potato. But the
enormous success of Harley-Davidson in
recent years has led to hard-ass bikers
rubbing shoulders with the mainstream of
society and not liking it. Riding has almost
become wholesome again. Regardless,
immediately after I got my first Harley the
word stock acquired a new significance in my
vocabulary. This new and somewhat
disparaging meaning struck blows to my bank
account and my ego. Drinkers and gamblers,
overeaters and sex addicts alike can find
empathy within groups of repentant peers;
but a Harley-Davidson owner is destined to
skulk forever in the purgatory of
one-upmanship. To buy a Harley-Davidson
motorcycle is merely to put a down payment
on the parts you’ll have to buy to make
yours look unique. The next step up from
personalizing a Harley is to buy or build a
custom motorcycle. When you’re ready to
reach for the top shelf, it’s time to
visit a custom chopper builder. Today,
although the culture of cool is prevalent,
the idea of literally chopping up an old
bike to give it a new look seldom holds
true, because chopper style today is less
representative of what it once was and more
so a vision of what it will be in the
future. The so-called “old school” is
matriculating to higher education. Existing
stock bikes aren’t so much modified as
they are begun from scratch with a
particular “chopped” look in mind.
Still, all modern choppers are derived from
old-school choppers based on the classic
Harley-Davidson design. Exemplars of chopper
style have always probed for increasingly
radical ways to express the idea that less
is more. Indeed, each chopper is a kind of
motor-head haiku, a biker’s best
expression of beauty. Although it is by no
means as subtle, the best examples are
poetry in motion nonetheless. To wit, look
at the innovative work Mike Brown is doing
in Tennessee; bound to influence the look of
choppers to come when it hits the streets.
Contrast his bikes with those of Tom Rad in
Minnesota, who builds them as if time had
stood still. Somewhere between futuristic
and quaint lies what I like to call the art
techno work of Europeans such as Alan Lee
from Belgium. Choppers aren’t back;
they’ve been around for forty years. The
only difference is that the media has
discovered them. Their popularity with the
general public and riders alike will wax and
wane with hemlines and double-breasted
suits. Chopper style continues to evolve in
all kinds of directions. According to Jason
Martin, the recent influence of cable
television on the popularity of choppers
helped people understand that, “When
they’re buying a bike from a true builder,
they’re not buying a motorcycle; they’re
buying a representation of that artist.”
Martin believes that TV performed a service
to the industry. It explained for the first
time to a large audience, not just the
rationale for owning a chopper, but it also
justified how much time it takes and how
much it costs to build one by hand. There
are any number of mechanics who can bolt a
bike together. There are many talented
fabricators and painters too. But those who
can combine these disparate ingredients and
subordinate them to a singular vision of
motorcycle artistry are few and far between.
I
suppose if you were being pedantic, you
could trace the history of the Raleigh
Chopper right back to that fateful day late
in 1930 when Henry Ford unveiled the Ford
Motor Company range of cars for the 1932
model year. Why? I hear you cry? Because
that car was the first to have a Ford V8
engine, and with it was born Hot Rodding and
Customising as we know it today. All over
America, but of course centred around
California, people started putting that
ol`flathead V8 into just about any car that
would take it, the 1932 became a Kustom
Klassic, and slowly the trend for changing
what came from the factory started to hit
the Motorbike world also. If we jump forward
a few decades, by the mid 1950s the
California custom scene was in full swing: A
certain style of motorcycle was firmly
established when this picture of Ralph
"Sonny" Barger was taken in May
1959. The engine was highly tuned, the frame
was stripped to bare necessities, the front
end was lightened and stretched. But most
important from our historical viewpoint, two
factors stand out, first the fitment of high
"ape hanger" handlebars... purely
a style statement, and secondly the fact
that the rear mudguard had been cut in half
to save weight (and look cool). This process
was known as "Chopping" and the
style of bike had taken its name from this,
the style was the Harley-Davidson CHOPPER
.And the guys who built them, had younger
brothers.......... Eventually we arrive at
our "seat" as mentioned in the
title of this piece, An American Bicycle
saddle manufacturer called Pearsons Majestic
had developed a seat for bicycle polo.. Yes,
riding around with a stick in your hand
trying to pot goals, just like Prince
Charles. But cooler. The seat was long and
thin, and needed supporting at the rear by a
tube hoop attached to the rear wheel nuts.
For bicycle polo, the seat was fitted to 20
inch bikes, with low flat handlebars. Now,
bicycle polo never really caught on
(surprised?) but Pearsons persevered with
the solo polo seat, trying to sell it
through cycle accessory shops. Jumping
quickly back to those Californian younger
brothers, They had seen the potential of the
seat, the rear support hoop looked like a
motorbike sissy bar, and as motorcycles and
bicycles shared a similar handlebar
thickness,fitting 15 inch high apehanger
handlebars was easy.. No one knows whether
it was a reject polo bike that got the
treatment, or whether it was a purpose built
chopper bicycle, but the fact remains that
some unknown Californian kids back in the
very early 1960s produced, in their back
yards, the first bicycle to bear the name
'Chopper'. Huffy is an American bicycle
company based on the west coast, and rumour
has it that they tried the polo saddle/apehanger
combination on a 20 inch bike in 1962. That
rumour has built to legend status over the
last few years on the American Musclebike
websites, but quickly jumping to historical
fact, a guy named Al Fritz was working as a
concept designer for the giant Schwinn
bicycle company in the early 1960s and he
also saw the California chopper bikes, and
he also took note.... I think this fact
alone indicates that the apehanger bike
craze was fairly big on the west coast by
1962, with two major bike companies sitting
up and taking notice. The Huffy soon faded
from sight, but Al Fritz took what he had
seen back to his bosses thousands of miles
away in Chicago, and built a 20 inch bike to
demonstrate what he had seen out west. This
polo seat and apehanger bike, legend has it,
was no hit with the bosses of the super
conservative Schwinn Corporation, but Al was
sure he was on to a good thing, and
persevered. His perseverance won over in the
end, as in June 1963 the first Schwinn
Stingray 20 inch bicycle rolled into dealers
stores all over the USA The Stingray was an
overnight success, thousands were sold in
the first month, and Al Fitz had a grin
going from one ear to the other...... A new
era in bicycle history had begun....The
Musclebike had arrived.
Upon
returning from World War II, soldiers seemed
dissatisfied with the motorcycles that were
being built by Harley-Davidson and Indian.
The bikes they had rode in Europe were
lighter, sleeker, and were much more fun to
ride. These vets started to hang out with
other ex-soldiers to relive some of the
camaraderie they had felt in the service.
These groups of buddies realized that their
motorcycles needed changes that Harley was
not providing. These new "bikers"
(another new term at the time) started their
"chopping" by removing or
shortening (bobbing) the fenders on their
bikes. This made the bikes look cool and
uncluttered. They originally called the new
chopped bikes "Bobbers". The bikes
kept evolving through the 60's and in the
70's and they started to call them
"Choppers". In 1969 the movie
"Easy Rider" was released which
brought the Chopper into the public eye.
That movie set into motion the wave of cool
Choppers and Chopper builders that we see
today. People wanted a Chopper and nobody
was building them so they had to go build
them themselves. Just what is a Chopper? The
Chopper is created by removing or
"chopping" off unnecessary parts
from the bike. Who needs a windshield, front
fenders, big headlights, clumsy blinkers,
crash bars, big seats, etc? Chop them off
and make the bike sleeker and lighter.
Bikers started raking the front end so the
tire was further from the bike, it gave the
bike a cool look, which goes a long way with
a biker. Handlebars were raised high and
called ape hangers. The front tire was made
thinner and the rear tire was made fatter.
Some bikers even removed the battery and
used a magneto to reduce weight. The gas
tank, headlight, and blinkers were all made
smaller. Anything deemed to be unnecessary
was removed. This made for a bike style that
was unique and tailored to each rider since
each rider decided just what needed to be
done to his bike to create the Chopper he
desired. As individual backyard mechanics
started to get noticed, more talented
designers started building Choppers and
their work became highly sought after. An
individual now no longer needed to actually
do the Chopper work, just express what he
wanted to a Chopper designer and the
designer would do the rest. Arlen Ness was
one of the first and most recognized such
designers. In the 1990's, the Chopper
movement was revitalized. Although Harley
Davidson is best known in the biker world,
there are many other brands that people use
to build Choppers. To many chopper riders,
it's the end product that matters, not the
name brand, but there will always be a
segment of bikers that only want Harley.
Choppers started because riders were
dissatisfied with what Harley-Davidson was
producing. Rather than abandon H-D, riders
streamlined the H-D bikes by removing excess
equipment and then modifying the engines,
rake, and suspension. The result was a
personalized bike much like the bike in Easy
Rider. The steady evolution of the
motorcycle continues. New factory bikes are
more and more technically sophisticated with
plenty of accessories, yet the Chopper
continues to thrive as riders seek that
minimalist simplicity that only the Chopper
can supply. Are Choppers here to stay? You
betcha! The Discovery Channel has helped by
bringing the Chopper to the masses and the
more people that see em, the more that want
em!
