***In The Time Of The Hard Motorcycle Boys- In Search Of History: Hell’s Angels

DVD Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

In Search Of History: Hell’s Angels, starring, well, the various generations of Hell’s Angels since 1948, 2006   

Several years ago when I was trying to finally reconcile myself with the hard upbringing I had had in my old working-class town of North Adamsville south of Boston I mentioned to some new friends that in high school in the early 1960s I had been drawn to and repulsed by the hard ass motorcycle guys from Boston who roamed at will through the streets of our town to get to Adamsville Beach. The beach a local rendezvous for bikers, babes, and watching “submarine races” after midnight. Not all of those together and maybe none together depending on who was down there any given night. Who meaning what young women, and what kind were drawn to that locale when those guys with their chrome-infested bikes came to a stop. The drawn to part of the motorcycle guys for me was that they were “cool,” outlaw guys with those big motorcycles blazing and I fancied myself a rebel. The repulsed part was that they would trash the beach, would pick on regular guys to try to “make” their dates (and hassle those dates too with ugly language and gestures which appalled most of them), and thought nothing of beating up guys for just looking the wrong way at them. In the end I feared them more than saw them as heroic figures, but that was a close thing. All of these points kind of encapsulates the subject of the In Search of History documentary about the most famous outlaw motorcycle club around, the post-World War II West Coast-born Hell’s Angels.

Needless to say after watching this exploration of the roots, the behavior, the legend, and the meaning of the Hell’s Angels as a sub-culture that was not the end, but rather the beginning of thinking through the great American night bike experience. And, of course, for this writer that meant going to the books, the films and the memory bank to find every seemingly relevant “biker” experience. Such classic motorcycle sagas as “gonzo” journalist, Doctor Hunter S. Thompson’s Hell’s Angels and other, later Rolling Stone magazine printed “biker” stories and Tom Wolfe’ Hell Angel’s-sketched Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (and other articles about California subset youth culture that drove Wolfe’s work in the old days). And to the hellish Rolling Stones (band) Hell’s Angels “policed” Altamont concert in 1969. And, as fate would have it, with the passing of actor/director Dennis Hooper, the 1960s classic biker/freedom/ seeking the great American night film, Easy Rider. And from Easy Rider to the “max daddy” of them all, tight-jeaned, thick leather-belted, tee-shirted, engineer-booted, leather-jacketed, taxi-driver-capped (hey, that’s what it reminds me of), side-burned, chain-linked wielding, hard-living, alienated, but in the end really just misunderstood, Johnny, aka, Marlon Brando, in The Wild One.

This documentary touches all those bases and as usual with an In Search of History production is filled with “talking head” commentators from definitive long-time Angels’ leader, Sonny Barger, the above mentioned Hunter Thompson the most credible writer on the subject, various law enforcement types and sociologist to place the Angels in the cultural context. Plus plenty of good photographs and film clips taken at the time to move the fifty-minute sketch along.