The Runaways and their bad motorscooters.
 
It has been a while since I’ve put together a mega-post full of images of rock stars engaged in activities such as hanging out at the beach, playing records, or roller skating. This time around I’ve managed to cull photos of rock royalty with their motorcycles—or just posing along with a sweet Harley Davidson or classic Triumph. Much like a motorcycle, the idols in this post are synonymous with badassery—just like weathered battle jackets, dirty leather, and doing 60mph on a tight curve.

In January of this year I wrote a post about the time Judas Priest vocalist/motorcycle enthusiast Rob Halford challenged Queen’s Freddy Mercury to a “motorcycle race” after he saw Freddy glamming it up with a bike in the video for “Crazy Little Thing Called Love.” Halford was miffed at Mercury for using the bike as a prop and wanted him to prove he was man enough to ride one. If there is one thing I believe we can all agree on, it is the following: Rob Halford and Freddie Mercury are both quantifiable badasses, and they both look great in leather chaps. I’ve posted photos of other musical luminaries you’d expect to appear in this post such as Lemmy Kilmister of Motörhead, members of Led Zeppelin, life-long biker Sly Stone, and Marc Bolan because, in general, Marc Bolan loves riding on top of things. And just so you know there are a plethora of photos featuring cool girls getting their bad-motor-scooting on such as Françoise Hardy, The Runaways (pictured at the top of this post), Debbie Harry, Chrissie Hynde, and the great Doro Pesch of Warlock. Ladies and gentlemen, start your engines!
 

1975.
 

KISS, mid-70s.
 

Sid Vicious.
 
More motorcycle madness, after the jump…

Rob Halford and Freddie Mercury.
 

“I’ve always found it ironic that a certain aspect of gay culture has also chosen to dress this way. I’m not into that kind of thing though. I guess it’s whatever floats your boat y’know? I’m what you’d call a very vanilla kind of gay guy.”

—Judas Priest vocalist Rob Halford on his fashion choices.

Judas Priest frontman Rob Halford is known for many things. Aside from being one of the greatest metal vocalists of all time, Halford’s cultivated image of head-to-toe leather and spikes is synonymous with heavy metal itself. In fact, when the band performed on Top of the Pops on January 25th, 1979, Halford’s badass bondage-style getup spread like wildfire across the world and would soon become the go-to look for headbangers. Another thing Halford is widely known for is his love of motorcycles and if you’ve seen Priest live, then perhaps you’ve been lucky enough to see Halford ride out on stage on one. Which brings me to another mythical story involving Halford and a man he refers to as his “ultimate hero,” Queen vocalist Freddie Mercury.
 

Rob Halford circa 1979/1980.
 
The year was 1980 and Queen had just released their eighth record The Game in June. Audiences went completely bananas for the album and showed a particular affinity for two songs you likely know all the words to, “Another One Bites the Dust,” and “Crazy Little Thing Called Love.” The band would later earn a reputation for releasing unique videos for their songs, and the video for “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” is no exception. In the video, Mercury is dressed up like an outlaw biker in a stage production of the 1961 film West Side Story complete with an authentic but stationary motorcycle which Mercury straddles along with his blonde video girlfriend. And Rob Halford was having none of it.

According to Halford, after he saw the video he went on BBC Radio 1 and challenged Mercury to a real “motorbike race.” I know I’m not going out on a limb saying if the event had actually transpired, it would have been one of the greatest moments in TV history. Sadly, Mercury never responded to Rob’s challenge. Here’s more from the Metal God who walks among us on that:

“I never heard back from him. Freddie is my ultimate hero. The closest I ever got to Freddie was in a gay bar in Athens on the way to Mykonos with some friends from London. We kind of glared at each other across the bar, in a kind of smiling, winking way. When we got to Mykonos, I was determined to track him down, but I couldn’t because he’d rented this huge yacht. It was festooned in pink balloons and it just kept sailing around the island.”

More after the jump…

 
It really all began with the bicycle in the 1890s when wheelmen clubs across America started promoting the bicycle as a new sport—an enjoyable way to travel, exercise and spend free time. Similar clubs opened up in various parts of Europe, but while these were mainly the preserve of the wealthy and leisured class, Americans had the greater opportunity through the cheap mass production of bicycles, the space, the inclination, the time and the desire to get about on two wheels.

There were literally millions of bikes in the US by end of the 19th century. Very soon women were taking to the road and cycling their way across town and city and into history. The women’s rights activist Susan B. Anthony said something to the effect that the bicycle did “more for the emancipation of women than anything else in the world.” Women she said were “riding into suffrage on the bicycle.”

Not everyone agreed or was even happy with this. One crotchety dinosaur at the Washington Sunday Herald newspaper in 1891 described “a woman on a bicycle” as “the most vicious thing” he had ever seen. But like the dinosaur such attitudes soon extinct as once women were off on their bikes, there was no just stopping ‘em.

In parallel with the rise of the bicycle was the development of the motorcycle which was originally just a bike with an engine—though some had four wheels for balance instead of two. By 1903, Harley-Davidson sold their first motorcycles. The demand was soon fierce and companies popped up across the States producing motorbikes with thrilling names like the Marvel, the Indian and the Excelsior.

When the Indian motorcycle company added front and back shock absorbers to their motorbikes in 1915, the once far-fetched notion of long distance travel on two wheels quickly became a reality. That same year mother and daughter Avis and Effie Hotchkiss completed a 9,000 mile roundtrip by motorcycle from New York to San Francisco. In 1916, Adeline and Augusta Van Buren traveled across country on their motorbikes.

Now let’s just stop and think about these two long grueling incredible journeys. At the time there were no proper freeways. Most roads were dirt and dust. And women traveling on their own a century ago would have had to fend off unwanted advances and the unwarranted censure of every hick town they visited. Also, these women had to know how to fix their bikes when things went wrong.

By the 1920s a new generation of pioneering women bikers were taking to the road and traveling across continent. One such woman was Vivian Bales who became the first female biker to appear on the cover of Harley-Davidson’s Enthusiast magazine. Vivian was a little over five feet tall and and lacked the physical strength to kickstart her own bike but she still made a 5,000 mile trip across country on her flathead engine D-series Harley-Davidson in 1929.

Vivian wasn’t the only pioneering woman who rode into history on her motorbike during the 1920s. These photos of women bikers in America and Europe—mainly from around this decade—document the two-wheeled revolution that brought a new kind of freedom for women.
 

Avis and Effie Hotchkiss, 1915.
 

The Van Buren sisters.
 
More pioneering biker chicks, after the jump…

Brigitte Bardot posing on a yellow Harley-Davidson chopper built by Maurice Combalbert.
 
It’s fairly well known that golden haired French film goddess Brigitte Bardot was a huge fan of the Solex (or “Velosolex”), a kind of moped/bicycle hybrid which the bombshell was widely photographed riding around in the 1970s. No stranger to knowing how to have a good time Bardot was also photographed tooling around while looking flawlessly beautiful on other kinds of motorized two-wheelers such as a Yamaha AT-1 for which Bardot did a series of 1971 print advertisements clad in hotpants and white gogo boots.

Some of the most iconic photos of the actress/model/singer and animal rights activist (Bardot dedicated herself to helping animals after retiring in 1973) and a motorcycle were taken along with a Harley-Davidson custom built by Parisian chopper pioneer Maurice Combalbert when Bardot performed her wacky love proclamation to the iconic motorcycle on her 1967 French television special Brigitte Bardot Show.

Here’s a nice selection of Brigitte Bardot looking cooler than any of us will ever look on various motorcycles, as well as a few where she’s making riding a regular bike look like the best time ever.
 

 

More Bardot on bikes after the jump…

 
I never saw myself writing “badass” and “cat” in the same sentence, but these are some seriously cool cat motorcycle helmets straight out of Russia. I dig the one that looks like an extra evil Cheshire Cat with that devilish grin. That helmet looks like it ain’t gonna take no shit.

The Neko helmets come in 12 different designs and are made by Russian company Nitrinos. The prices can range anywhere from $495 to $595 depending on which style you want.

I’m sure these things have been crash tested, but I wonder how the impact with the ears on the helmet affect the human skull? Is it safe? Perhaps I’m overthinking this?

 

 

 
More after the jump…
 

 
I’ve already written an item for DM on Secret Weapons, David Cronenberg’s near-incomprehensible TV short from 1972 about a dystopian state that uses mind control drugs and a rebel biker gang that opposes it—in that movie, however, despite the stated existence of a biker gang, there were scarcely any motorcycles to be seen in it. That problem, at least, does not arise in Cronenberg’s 1976 short The Italian Machine.

It’s almost jaw-dropping how much progress Cronenberg had made between these two movies. The Italian Machine relinquishes all aspirations toward big-dick sci-fi in favor of a far more nuanced, engrossing, unfussy meditation on technology, art, decadence, and, shall we say, the pet obsessions of warring subcultures. The idea of the movie, which lasts only 23 minutes, is that a bunch of motorcycle buffs, having learned that an incredibly rare and high-quality Italian motorcycle, specifically a 1976 Ducati 900 Desmo Super Sport, has come into the possession of a local art enthusiast who intends to keep it in his living room as a sculpture, take on the moral imperative of liberating the machine from its outré confines and restoring it to its rightful purpose of kicking ass on the open road. 
 

 
What The Italian Machine, which first appared on the CBC television program Teleplay, most resembles is a really good short story; more specifically it reminds me a great deal of J. G. Ballard, which isn’t very strange considering that Cronenberg adapted Ballard’s Crash a couple of decades later. In The Italian Machine, Lionel, Fred, and Bug are three motorcycle nuts who enjoy the kind of nerdy oneupmanship that probably features on every episode of The Big Bang Theory. Upon finding out the identity of the Ducati’s purchaser, one Edgar Mouette, they concoct a plan to pose as a magazine crew of photographers doing a spread on Mouette’s interiors. That Ballardian angle resides mainly in Mouette and his cohorts, philosophical aesthetes to the max (when they’re not taking cocaine). Once Lionel and his buddies gain entry, it is the viewer’s task to decide which side is the nuttier of the two. Eventually they do get ahold of the bike, at which point their own ability to fetishize the machine unexpectedly manifests itself.

Truly, a top-notch piece of work, very in line with the many dark masterpieces Cronenberg would make in the years to come.
 

 
Now this is the kind of motorcycle you want to be seen riding when you turn up late to that Halloween party. This customized skeleton bike is a definite head turner—the bike Ghost Rider really should have had.

Take a look at the craftsmanship going on here: a hammer forged bike frame made from a skeleton rib cage and spine, with arm bones as front forks, bony hands as wheel hubs, and a skull with 32 teeth and a headlight in each eye socket. This beauty was almost entirely handmade by self-taught metal worker John Holt in his basement workshop in Boone County, Illinois, in 2004 and 2005. The bike has a 2.3-liter Ford engine with a variable flow hydraulic drive. The bike weighs 850 pounds; if made to stand up straight, the skeleton would be over nine feet tall.

This was the first bike Holt ever built—though he previously made a suit of armor in 1995—and he “fashioned the design” from a plastic model of a skeleton. Holt calls his bike “Iron Death.” Yep, that sounds right.
 

 

 

 

 

 

Thanks to Duke Sandefur, via Vince Lewis
 

1971
 
Kickass or badass—whatever you wanna call these tough biker ladies—here’s a selection of vintage photos of real-life motorcycle riding women.

Anke Eve Goldmann, 1958
 

Ann-Margret rode a classic Triumph T100
 

Bessie Stringfield
 

Some 70s Harley kickstarting action
 
More after the jump…
 

 
Motorcyclist Jack Sanderson was incredibly lucky to walk away with only minor injuries after his bike crashed on the Cat and Fiddle Road, in Buxton, England.

The accident happened after Sanderson overtook two motorbikes and swerved to avoid an approaching car, as he told the BBC:

” I was too impatient. I should have stayed on the white line, I saw the car, and thought right I’m going to have to go off there.

“I’m just happy to walk away with my life and maybe it could be a lesson to others. If it slows anyone down by just one mph then that’s something.”

Sanderson was thrown from his 600cc Kawasaki bike down a 40 ft embankment. The whole accident was filmed by Sanderson’s helmet camera and he posted the video on YouTube to warn other cyclists and drivers.  You might want to skip ahead to around the 2:10 mark.
 

 
Via the Manchester Evening News.