THE GANG'S ALL HERE.(Brief Article)

A Hell's Angels photo portfolio, by Sylvia Plachy

HOLLISTER, CALIFORNIA

Without prejudice, I passed up the chance last month to buy a five-dollar copy of a panoramic photograph inscribed "Northern California Gypsy Tour, Bolado Park, Hollister, California, 1937." It depicted three hundred or so peaceable-looking citizens (motorcyclists, most of them minus their machines), plus several children--a clean-cut bunch, lounging on the grass, attired as if about to head off for some tennis. A charming enough artifact, I thought, but not one that offered any insight into what makes the present-day Hollister economy go ka-boom every Fourth of July weekend, when between eighty thousand and a hundred thousand bikers and gawkers descend upon the place.

Ten years after that photograph was taken, a far more memorable and consequential portrait was snapped, this time on San Benito Street, Hollister's main drag, in front of Johnny's Bar & Grill. That photograph is still the centerpiece of the behind-the-counter decor at Johnny's, framed along with the cover logo from the July 21, 1947, issue of Life, in which it was first published. It shows a heavyset fellow in a motoring cap, khakis, and leather boots straddling a motorcycle while clutching a beer bottle, with several empties lying in the foreground. A headline and subhead say, "CYCLISTS' HOLIDAY: HE AND FRIENDS TERRORIZE A TOWN," and a one-paragraph caption describes a Fourth of July debauch--how "4,000 members of a motorcycle club roared into Hollister . . . quickly tired of ordinary motorcycle thrills and turned to more exciting stunts." Traffic laws were flouted, vehicles were "rammed into restaurants and bars, breaking furniture and mirrors. . . . Police arrested many for drunkenness and indecent exposure but could not restore order."

No one in Hollister today minds--nor, it seems, did anyone protest in 1947--that this journalistic account was based upon a mostly fictitious premise. What actually materialized that Fourth of July was the equivalent of a couple of frat parties on steroids--an unseemly exhibition of drunken, uncouth behavior, perpetrated by a gathering of out-of-town motorcyclists who temporarily had the constabularies overmatched but who in the end paid their traffic fines and did their brief time in the pokey. The celebrated photograph was staged the day after the noise subsided. Instead of a terrorist invader, the loutish-looking beer guzzler was a photographer's prop--a poseur in a tableau that was lifelike up to a point, but above all Life-like, and basically bogus. Nevertheless, the episode proved, in the long run, to be extremely good for business.

In 1996, a year shy of the fiftieth anniversary of the Life photograph and whatever had led up to it, some biker-friendly Hollister boosters began envisioning the first Hollister Independence Rally. "A group got together and approached the city," Ellen Brown, the current executive director of the rally, told me. "But the city-government people were not holding their arms open. They didn't want a reenactment of 1947, as they understood it. They weren't looking forward to raping and pillaging." The group persevered, however, and the necessary permits were granted. Though many businesses boarded up for the weekend, the 1997 event proceeded without serious complications. "By the third year," Brown said, "we had won most people over."

Nowadays, the local establishment proudly proclaims Hollister "the birthplace of the American biker," mindful, no doubt, that the image commonly evoked by the term "American biker" is not the weekend hobbyist--the Orange County accountant or the San Fernando Valley dermatologist who gets his jollies riding his Harley-Davidson Road King to the golf course--but the hairy prole in greasy Levi's, the lineal descendant of the cowboy who has skipped several consecutive Saturday-night baths, the creature who would just as soon dismantle a small California town as overhaul an engine. Which is to say that Hollister has deliberately embraced a cliche whose provenance can be traced to Marlon Brando's performance as the alienated antihero of Stanley Kramer's 1954 movie "The Wild One." For some reason, most bikers have been willing to overlook that "The Wild One," in addition to being the first biker picture, was the first laughably awful biker picture. Hollister, in ...