The Bulldog Bash by Bel Mooney. |
As they draw near to the founding father of the notorious motorcycle club, huge men look overwhelmed. Tattoos quiver. Some confess they can't read but have 'waited for this for twenty years'. One wants a book signed to his son, but can't spell the name. Shuffle, shuffle... and at last the moment arrives. Wow, man - he's really there, 62 now, with a face that has made enemies weep, and a body tuned from bench-pressing. The thumbs-upwards handclasp, a mumbled greeting, lean forward to hear the icon whisper (throat cancer has left Barger speaking through a valve), 'Good to see ya, man'. Then the inexorable movement of the queue pushes yet another biker outwards - dazed, moist-eyed, blown away by meeting his hero. To straight society Sonny Barger is an unholy thug, a convicted felon, a man whose life has been devoted to violence and crime. But here at the Bulldog Bash his presence is a visitation - as if the Pope dropped in to give his blessing to a gathering of the faithful. In this sunny place of worship, the priests are back-patch hell-raisers; Holy Communion is beer and burgers, and the religion...? Of course, it's the machine whose praises we sing: all hail Harley and Honda; halleluiah - and we'll ride out together to a chopped, chromed heaven. Mind you, I know a woman who knows a woman who used to come to the Bulldog Bash each year to get laid. It was not the bikes, but the bikers themselves that drew her - thousands of them in a field just outside Stratford-on-Avon, so many without women you could take your pick. Though there are plenty of female riders now (proud of their leopard-spotted Harleys and super-charged Japanese rockets) and the usual contingent of those who like 'packing double' (not a sexual feat, but riding pillion) - still, the Bulldog Bash is predominantly masculine. You stand at the gate and count the solitary riders, and about one in twenty is female, if that. The ancient, aggressive, testosterone-fuelled ethos of the Hells Angels and other clubs filters down through biker culture, and though the men may applaud women who ride and race, their old obsession with breasts and buttocks in iconography, fashion and entertainment would do Hefner proud. The puniest boy racer dons his leathers and fills out to fit the image, growing, expanding, deriving all power from the machine between his thighs. Looking around at the men at the Bash it's hard not to think of lads and their mutual teasing: 'His is bigger than yours'. The different biker tribes come together to look at what the others have, and parade their own. First come the tough Angels and other outlaw clubs: Satan's Slaves, Nomads, Flying Deuces and so on. Next in the sauntering machismo contest are the more mainstream clubs: Ogri MCC, Chopper Club, United Bikers of Britain, followed by the upmarket Harley Owners Group - whose leather waistcoats are soft and clean, who might run their own businesses but enjoy cuttin' loose on the glorious V-twin at the weekends, making like Marvin, Fonda, Hopper and McQueen. The Japanese bike tribe takes itself very seriously: high-octane performance (they wouldn't take a Harley as a gift), on monstrous, aerodynamic Yamaha's, Suzuki's, Honda's and Kawasaki's. The blue, white and red-leathered boy racers line up beside older riders who spent a fortune to clip fractions of seconds off their personal drag strip best. In between all these wander those who flogged along the motorways on clapped out old Jawa's, and MZ's to look, yearn, and get drunk. Normally none of these groups would mix - indeed, there's a sneery rivalry between devotees of Harleys, 'rice rockets' and classic British bikes. But for one weekend, on a disused airfield just south of Stratford-on-Avon, the brotherhood of bikers comes together - a closer gathering than at any pop festival. All classes, all ages - all (and here I return to the sisterhood of bikers too) drawn together by a secret knowledge that the act of riding is itself a statement. It says, 'Look at me - I'm different to all those people safe in their cars and houses. You can't cage me because hey - I don't give a damn!'
They start arriving late afternoon on Thursday, zip, zip, zip, along the B4632, to hand tickets to the phalanx of Angels at the entrance to Long Marston, before rolling on to find a camping spot, and spring the little tents. Unpacked, they wander to explore the site: the stalls selling burgers, pizzas or Chinese, the rifle range, the shopping village offering everything from tie-dyed babygros to exhaust pipes. You can assault your stomach on the terrifying bungee capsule and your knees on the mini road-racing circuit, or inhale the gentle cannabis smoke in the rave tent, which looks as if it flew like a spacey butterfly over from Glastonbury to settle in this field. There's a vast beer/stage marquee, and two tattoo parlours where you submit to the whining needle in full view of the other punters. Already a pretty blonde called Linda is having something drawn on her buttock, smiling when I ask if it hurts. I imagine a butterfly or rose... but no. This work of body art depicts a biker hero: Dennis the Menace. 'I thought of Minnie the Minx, but me and my boyfriend - we like Dennis. It's the Beano, y'know?' She hugs me briefly and walks off, somewhat gingerly, to the beer tent - where wine and spirits sell only by the bottle. Now Hazel Stewart arrives from Frome in Somerset - 3 hours' slog on the overloaded Honda 400 Superdream she's had for three years, with her tall 12 year old son on the back. Athol looks distinctly nervous - as anyone might be, first confronted by the sights and sounds of bikerdom. Scottish Hazel works part time, studies part time, and writes stories and poems. Atholl may wonder what his mum's brought him to, but she feels at home already. She likes the idea of showing her son a glimpse of part of her past. 'It's so long since I've spent time with a crowd of bikers. I've changed - yet a part of me remains the same, hedonistic girl I was in my twenties. It was her who motivated the trip. The sensible mother side of me is horrified at the risk of putting my son on the bike, and spending all the money...' Thursday night on the hard ground, and Hazel and Ath can't sleep. All around, the noise of shouting, people arriving late, looking for loos and falling over, engines revving. But on Friday morning (when the action starts properly) they sit watching the drag racing in hot sun and Atholl, like most twelve-year-old boys, is in his element. There's a long, long queue back, two by two, of riders waiting to test themselves and their machines on the quarter mile strip. With every conceivable type of person and bike there, competition is absent. This is about seeing how fast you can clock it along the quarter mile stretch from a standing start - that's all. I spot a woman who looks as if she could be a teacher. This is Julia - a Personnel Manager from Plymouth, and a biker for twenty years. She's riding a Suzuki Bandit 1200 which she's had dyno-ed, so now, much money later, all the flat spots are ironed out and it goes. Julia's observed more and more women riding really fast bikes: 'It's got to be done', she grins. When it's time she holds on the front brake, lets rip with the throttle, disappears in a blue cloud of smoking rubber to make the tyres hot and sticky, moves up to the drag lights, hunched, tense, watches them change, and... eeeeerrh... uh... eeeerrrh... uh... She screams the stretch in 12.4 seconds, then cruises back to the queue to go for 12. Speed is all. But the number of people in wheelchairs or on crutches at the Bash, not to mention Dave, the handsome boy racer who pulls a wheelie at over l00mph along the full stretch with his useless left arm strapped down... all remind you that this is a dangerous game. The drag racers know that to boost an engine with nitrous oxide is to shorten its life. That the buzz of riding fast is living for real; doing a ton alongside death and hoping your precious machine can outrun him a while longer.
This year's Bulldog Bash is overshadowed by the death of Dr Maz Harris, the biker/writer/PhD who was UK spokesman of the Hells Angels. Maz was a founding member of the Bulldog Association; one of the Angels who thought it would be a good idea to put on this unique event for all bikers. Each year he watched it grow from 2,500 people to this year's expected 23,000, and worked to make sure its organisation was impeccable, its image good. On May 31st he died on his Buell, and the classic Hells Angel funeral made the front pages. In Arizona Sonny Barger was devastated by the news. Hells Angels here, in Europe and in the US wept at the loss of a brother. 'Wouldn't you?', asks Bilbo - the Bulldog Bash administrator (Wessex Chapter) who was one of Maz's closest friends. 'The weather's the best it's ever been for the Bash - that's for Maz' says Angel press officer, Ken - showing a soft side surprisingly common among bikers. He says they intend this Bash to be the best ever: 'It's the only memorial Maz'd want.' Spend more than a few moments with wild, vermilion-haired Indi Archdate, who was to be married to Maz Harris just weeks after he was killed, and you realise the extent to which the man's spirit haunts the event. She talks about him all the time, her hands shake, proudly she shows her new tattoo - arrows sweeping from a piston through a Death's Head, and the words, 'IN LOVING MEMORY - MAZ - 1949-2000'. Indi's passion for motorcycles started when she was 7, she's been a HND student in business studies as well as an apprentice motorcycle mechanic, and now makes a living from test-driving motorcycles and writing about them: the most glamorous biker in the business. At 18 she ran away with Maz who was seventeen years older. They were 'off and on' for fourteen years, as long as the Bulldog Bash they worked on together. Finally, Indi says, they were ready to settle down. Then came the phone call... She couldn't live without bikes and is finding it hard to live without Maz. 'When he died I went on working at the press releases he'd started. I think he'd be proud of me'. Her back displays 'Maz's favourite tattoo'. It's a Grim Reaper, striding forward, scythe at the ready, staring with empty sockets from her smooth, tanned skin. If Indi is aware of the irony she does not show it. Everywhere at the Bash there are skulls: air-brushed on tanks and helmets, dangling from necks and ears, inked on flesh, printed on t-shirts, painted on leather, engraved on air-cleaners and timing covers, shaped into candles and ashtrays... grinning and whispering, 'Hey, I'm just around the comer waiting for you, Biker - like I was for Maz'. The video in the beer tent shows terrifying spills, the riders miraculously getting up and walking away. A man's t-shirt has FEAR emblazoned across it. All this cranks up the same message - revving it into the red: Live now and pay now, party on down because time is running out. Indi says she'd like to test drive a car at 500mph, because if the skull called your name at that speed, 'You wouldn't know about it, wouldn't feel a thing' - it would be just screech and bang into the blackness and 'hallo!' to the old Grim Reaper. In truth - what committed biker wants to die slowly in a bed, grovelling to pain?
It's fitting the Bulldog Bash is held on the disused airfield which, in 1944 served as a base for the Tomahawk fighter planes that escorted the American Flying Fortress long-range bomber raids into Germany, since the Hells Angels derive their history and ethos from a military past. The term 'Hells Angels' was first used by a squadron in WWI: from then on bomber units and divisions of solders thought up cool names to indicate their toughness. In addition, motorcycles played an important role in both wars. Then after World War II, the camaraderie of military life was missed by the young men who returned with a swashbuckling taste for danger, 'unafraid to ride full-throttle and kick ass', as Barger puts it. The ground was ready for the Hells Angels. The (copyright) winged Death's Head that appears on the back of every Angel jacket can be traced back to similar insignias on the 85th fighter squadron and the 552nd medium bomber squadron. Those men flew into the likelihood of death each time they pulled back the joystick and rose into the equipoise between heaven and hell. Their pose was rough and tough: their swaggering sense of brotherhood the means by which terror was kept at bay - even laughed away. Similarly, Hells Angels see themselves as the epitome of toughness, masculinity, freedom - the image of the frontiersman or anti-hero. This idea is deep within the American psyche. Sonny Barger's book shows how the biker finds identity through the club and through the Harley: 'motorcycles are the be-all, end-all of what this club is all about'. At l00mph-plus, with nothing between the rider and the road surface, a patch of wet might mean instant oblivion, and there is transcendence in the danger. The fact that the Angels must (according to the rules) ride out together means the danger is often shared. That ethos of brotherhood annihilates alienation. Wearing the patch, the colours, necessitates acceptance of a system as strict as any Masonic lodge, with the same guarantees of support. Hazel Stewart confesses she feels far safer, 'as a lone woman with her son' at the Bulldog Bash than at Glastonbury (say) or any other festival. It's the Angels' gig: they devised it, they organise it, they meet daily with the police, fire service and council, and they police it 'with zero tolerance' - as an ex-policeman-turned-security man whispered to me with approval. In fourteen years there hasn't been one arrest, and no crime, unless you count the hash cookies and fudge being hawked at a couple of pounds a pop. Rob somebody's tent and risk of a couple of Angels taking you to task? I don't think so. Though an elderly biker from Devon moaned to me that the Bash was too expensive (£30 for the weekend) because 'the bloody Angels are all about money now' and a woman on a Ducati told me, 'Let's face it, they're all drug-dealers, money-launderers, and arms-traders, and - don't quote my name - they scare me'... most others seems to hold the Angels in esteem, if not affection. Though image management has gone on in a big way and HAMC is now an international corporation, with websites and merchandise, you don't become a member through service to the Rotary Club (which happens to sell fruit and milk on site). Still, Andy and Baz, the London Angels 'minding' Sonny Barger, have no need for their prizefighter stances here. It's as onerous as looking after Cliff at a convention of matrons: the biggest danger death by hugging.
On Friday night a small posse of Surrey HOG members arrive on their Harleys. There's Vera Sommer and Anne Leguen de Lacroix from the Surrey Ladies of Harley. Vera (riding a 1340cc Heritage Softail) has her own Marketing Consultancy; Anne (on a Hugger) works for the UK and International Press. With them are Ernst (Vera's partner and a financial broker), Harry (a designer), Chris (who works for a company dealing in office infrastructures) and Kit (retired now, but used to work on an oil rig). They've been to the Bash before - for people-watching, bike-watching, and bopping. Vera loves 'the atmosphere, the camaraderie'. The woman with 'Biker Chicks Rule' on her chest hates the anachronistic sexism of the Hells Angels, but thinks they're 'commercial and clever'. She and the gang have come to have a good time - and after lolling in the evening sunlight by the beer tent, they move on to dance most of the night beneath a magical revolving light show, which transforms everyone into a performer. Elsewhere, Indi Archdale is up until dawn, drinking smoking, getting her hottest high from hurrying into the air in the bungee capsule at £15 a go. But Hazel Stewart and her son turn in early again - worn out by sun and noise. The beer tent rocks and heaves. Hundreds of Bulldog-Bashers pour into the site for Saturday alone, and the campers whiz out to stock up on booze and food. A few miles away, bewildered tourists in Stratford-on-Avon ask what's going on. The bikers have landed. A rotund, beaming policewoman, supervising the parking of dream machines, tells me, 'I've been doing this for fourteen years and they're great people. There's never any trouble'. Later, on the site, I hear exactly the same thing from Steve Newman, Environmental Health and Housing Officer for Stratford Council: 'I've been co-operating on this with the Angels since it began and they're delightful. They get things done'. Twice I'm told a tale from two years ago: man loses his wallet with £200 in it, goes to the lost property office with no hope of recovery, gets it back. 'Wouldn't happen at Glastonbury, would it?', asks venerable Angel Bilbo, adding proudly, 'People come here to party, to share a run with the Angels and feel part of a biker family'. Meanwhile Sonny Barger is signing yet more books for more well behaved devotees (1,628 copies shifted) as well as posing with his mean-looking brothers for a fashion shoot. What? This is too squeaky clean and safe - like a day out in Skegness in the fifties... Sleaze is what's needed here - real, get-down greasy stuff like you associate with bikers, the honest-to-badness whiff of dirt. It doesn't come with the topless car-wash, where (in the absence of cars or bikes) four jolly girls hook up their cropped t-shirts and push their breasts into the happy smiling faces of lads who've paid £5 for five minutes of mammary delight in soapy water. It doesn't come with the slick 'Fun Lovin Criminals', who headline on Saturday night in a crammed tent. It doesn't even come with the before-midnight strippers who prance about the stage, strutting, kicking, teasing - and leaving their G-strings in place. No - real sleaze stalks the stage after midnight. It isn't witnessed by Vera Sommer and the Surrey HOG's, grooving in the trance tent again but not drinking because they're leaving early in the morning. Nor by Hazel Stewart who is partying all night with new friends, while Atholl (confident now and loving the whole thing) sleeps in the tent dreaming of Aston Martin's. Earlier Indi Archdale had said to me, 'You've got to see this band, Impotent Sea Snakes' - you'll love them'... but she doesn't bother in the end, retiring at midnight for a change, like a good girl not a genuine biker chick. I'm left to sup white cider (big mistake but the bar is almost dry, only one brand of beer and cider left) and feel doubly queasy at the antics of the act which suddenly puts the sh** back in the Bash. A heavy rock band with four exotic dancers and a man on stilts sounds innocuous enough, but soon the 'Impotent Sea Snakes' draw 'yuks' from men and women alike. A mixture of rock, vaudeville and sheer perversion, they take you places you really don't want to go - I mean, your average biker is happy to slaver over normal strippers but gawks in open-mouthed disbelief at a naked woman threading syringes through her own breasts and upper thighs. Masks, whips, a cross drawn across a guy's back with razor... not to mention clothes pegs clipped on nipples and on shaved labia. At least the skinny lead guitarist gets his cock out too - but you rather wish he hadn't. I think, who is this for? The answer is - it's 'for' The Extreme, that's all - pushing out the boundaries so far even the hardcore bikers peer into the darkness with trepidation. The Hells Angels may be family men, and the Bulldog Bash oh-so respectable - but hiring the 'Impotent Sea Snakes' keeps them ahead of the game. Which means over the edge. Worse is to come. At lam 'Kamakazi' takes the stage. This bunch deals in straight-up S&M - the presence of a dwarf on stage an added guarantee of non-politically-correct shock-horror. Standing alone in the fast-diminishing crowd I watch one performer drive a nail through another's tongue, who swings a weight from his new metallic accessory. 'Oh, that is gross!' I call out to nobody in particular, and 'It's worse than gross', says a Scottish voice beside me. Andy from Fife, veteran of ten Bulldogs explains his theory that these late acts are a ruse to make everyone flee to their tents, so the noise can shut off and the well-heeled folk in the area won't give the council a hard time. 'Just wait 'til they stick meat-hooks in his back and drag him along the ground', he adds. Too close to the stage, I retreat to the bar - where an Angel, socialising with his friend in a wheelchair and their two glamorous wives, is getting fed up with a liquor-addled fool who leers over to chat to the women. Twice he's sent packing, but makes the mistake of returning to apologise. The Angel's had it up to here... so a fast, ferocious shove sends the man cannoning back, flying to the ground in a clatter of empty beer cans. He scrambles up and wisely flees while the Angel turns to explain to me, with utter reasonableness, that any man would do the same. If a guy can't have a drink with his wife..? Up on stage unspeakable things are happening, and it seems to me that the drunk got off very lightly. After all, he might have met a fist. Or worse... Saturday night collapses towards dawn in a haze of smoke, booze, raunchier strippers, crashing disco, trippy rave music, and the noise of a hundred little parties around flares flickering dangerously in the night air. In the morning the site wakes to a rocking, collective hangover which makes the prospect of packing up and straddling the machine as welcome as a blown gasket. The rain comes too - grey clouds massing after two hot days, and great drops spattering down on the squashed food debris, mountains of cans, and drifting paper containers. Hazel Stewart and I meet up - both wearing shades against the punishing grey daytime, moaning 'Never again' for the nth time, then cackling - what the hell, we had fun. In the press cabin Indi Archdale is already packing up papers and computer, her tribute tattoo covered now with a leather jacket against the chill. It's over. Something else casts a pall. The Hells Angels are shocked and 'down' because death did arrive at the Bulldog Bash this year. Quietly, the police have come to the camping area reserved for HAMC and friends. A five-month-old baby suffered a cardiac arrest - a cot death - in the early hours, and the family is at the hospital. Bulldog organisers huddle with the police. It's quiet, well organised. Sadness increases with the rain - ricocheting off tanks painted with the winged Death's Head, puddling on stitched leather seats, and dancing along the plastic ribbons cordoning off the site where the baby died. It's as if there is always a reckoning, somewhere, for someone - but who'd have thought innocence would take the punishment? The Angels don't believe in God or justice, just fate. And, mercifully ignorant of this event, the Bulldog Bashers wearily fold tents and roll up sleeping bags, pulling the bungees tight. It's over for another year, and we wave goodbye - nothing in common except the motorcycles that transported us to a couple of days of freedom. Ah...the beautiful and the ugly bikes, the whining ones and the rumbling ones, the top-fuel monsters, customised Harleys, and rough little rat bikes - all given equal style just by lining up here. One by one they buzz their booted, jacketed owners from the bleak airfield: hunched black figures on laden metal, visors down against the rain, reborn to ride the risky wet tarmac back into real life - whatever that may be. And sharing the confidence of the 'club' - that whatever you ride, it's a full tilt boogie. |
Sonny Barger has flown in from the States and is signing books. The queue winds back over the grass - as it has for two and a half hours already - as orderly as a gaggle of matrons at a literary luncheon. But this is no conventional publisher's event, no gathering of best-seller-devourers. We are at the 14th Annual Bulldog Bash, the great biker-fest organised by the Hells Angels, which gets bigger each year. Tattooed, pierced, some almost toothless from fighting and neglect, the bikers edge forward to buy the 'Chief's' autobiography - a blunt, brutal account of Barger's forty four years as a Hells Angel.