Issue #243 Birth of Cool | Cool, Bikes, Uncool, Were, Hot

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Issue #243 Birth of Cool

Written by Robert Smith
Wednesday, 16 July 2008
In 1953 came a movie that changed forever how people viewed motorcycles and their riders. In The Quiet Man, John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara play star-crossed lovers…oh, sorry: wrong movie. In The Wild One, Marlon Brando and Mary Murphy play star-crossed lovers against a backdrop of outrageous motorcycle antics, paving the way for Super Bikes; and with a propensity for dysfunctional brawling later caricatured in American Chopper. Whatever. For the first time, in The Wild One, bikes—and the guys who rode them—were cool. (Well, most of them. Brando’s Johnny turned out to be a whiner who finally got the girl, and then didn’t seem to know what to do, in spite of her suggestively caressing his motorcycle’s front fork tube. Un-cool.) What made them cool? Well, there was the nihilistic rebel thing: (“Hey Johnny, what are you rebelling against?” Answer: “Whaddya got?”) Then there was the romance of the open road—a bunch of guys, in the decade that normalized a suburban family lifestyle, doing what other men in cookie-cutter jobs wished they could do: go hog wild. Then there were the bikes. British bikes were cool because they were more competition oriented, so Johnny rides a Triumph Thunderbird. Johnny’s nemesis, Chino (Lee Marvin) drives a bobbed Harley—a nod to the flat-track ethos—very cool at the time. And hanging all through the movie is an undercurrent of latent violence. That was cool too. I already knew motorcycles were cool when I snuck in, underage, to watch The Leather Boys at the Odeon cinema in Hounslow. The British biker movie’s main theme—a gay-straight love triangle—went right over my head: there were bikes, bikers, street racing, the Ace Café … it was too cool for words. (It’s still worth renting for the street racing scenes and as a commentary on blue-collar life in pre-Beatles London.) Perhaps the ultimate cool motorcyclist, though was Steve McQueen: he even died before he got old so, unlike Brando, he never became un-cool. What made McQueen so cool was that he was (or could have been) his own stunt man. As well as riding hot bikes and driving hot cars competitively in the movies, he did it in real life, too. McQueen was Brando’s rebel with all the cojones and none of the angst. Extra cool. Hundreds of B-movies tried to emulate The Wild One and its sixties’ “sequel,” Easy Rider. Along the way, motorcycles and the guys who rode them automatically became cool. Honda did try to make motorcycles un-cool with their “nicest people” campaign, but that fizzled out, and bikes were cool again. So movies had an important role in making motorcycles cool, and bikes have remained cool ever since, in spite of Wild Hogs. And therein lies the danger that bikes might lose their cool: the ubiquitous baby boomers in their search for lost youth, have evolved the profile of the motorcyclist. Wild Hogs may be a parody, but it also has a valid message: motorcycling is what balding, pot-bellied old guys do. They’re trying to look cool, of course—and that’s seriously un-cool. IF YOU’VE EVER SEEN THE BRITISH TV CAR SHOW TOP GEAR ON BBC Canada, you’ll know about the Cool Wall. That’s where the show’s hosts stick pictures of cars they subjectively classify as un-cool, cool and “sub-zero.” In the process, they’ve outlined some general characteristics of what makes a cool vehicle. For example, any car that’s trying to be something it’s not is seriously un-cool. Cars that might potentially be bought by the wives of highly paid soccer players are also un-cool—which excludes some otherwise cool exotic machinery. Of course, coolness is highly subjective, so the presenters rarely agree. So are there cool and un-cool motorcycles? Of course. Here’s my personal “cool wall:” Honda Super Cubs are cool, because retro is cool right now; Ducati Hypermotards; Vespas; Triumph Bonnevilles (the first one) and Speed Triples; Tritons (those home-made Triumph-Norton hybrids); Norton singles and big twins; Laverdas, Guzzis, any Italian singles; airhead BMWs; flathead Harleys; Indian Scouts; naked Gold Wings; ratty seventies Japanese multis; home-made café racers and streetfighters. I could go on. Being hot is cool too, if that makes any sense. And the hottest bike around at the moment is the Honda CBR125R. For not much more than the price of a plastic-and-pot-metal scooter made in you-know-where, you get a real motorcycle, scaled down in size but not in spirit. How cool is that? I know riders who are buying them to commute as well as those learning to ride. And the CBR125R was Honda’s best-selling bike in Canada in 2007. But once a hot bike stops being hot, it stops being cool too. Custom chrome choppers were red hot, but now they’re so last week. Ewan and Charley made adventure bikes hot—so hot, BMW sold more than 100,000 R1200GSs in four years. But a world-traveler wannabe with a GPS and foreign-decal-covered aluminum panniers on a dualsport that’s obviously never been off-road? Lukewarm at best. What do I think is un-cool, then? Heat-wrap on header pipes; how sad is that? It looks like the same stuff my dad used to lag our water pipes in winter back in the ‘fifties; rear tires more than 180mm wide—they’re rarely there for traction or handling, just for their poser value; bikes called “custom” or with “king and queen” seats; anything with a turbo or nitrous bottle; BMW R1200C (what were they thinking?); Ducati Multistrada (great bike in a bad suit); Gold Wing look-alikes; any bike with automatic anything … You get the idea. Let me know what you think’s cool and un-cool. I’m waiting! 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