hell's angels and the illusion of the counterculture

Hell’s Angels and the Illusion of theCounterculture

J O H N W O O D

ON DECEMBER 6, 1969, MEREDITH HUNTER, AN EIGHTEEN-YEAR-old black man, lay stabbed to death on the dusty grounds ofthe Altamont Speedway just outside of Tracy, California. One

of the thousands of young people at the speedway for a free RollingStones concert, Hunter was killed when he was attacked by a groupbelonging to the Hell’s Angels Motorcycle Club, who had been hiredby the rock group to act as security that evening. The Angel chargedwith stabbing Hunter, Allan Passaro, was acquitted of murder in 1971by reason of self-defense (Hunter drew a gun), but nevertheless, theAltamont incident signaled the end of the American counterculture’sdecade-long love affair with the Hell’s Angels. During the 1960s,California’s flower children, seeing the Angels as fellow rebels against theestablishment, cavorted with the bikers at such countercultural eventsas Ken Kesey’s ‘‘acid tests’’ and the Human Be-In. Members of thecounterculture, who saw the Angels as being similar to the violent andindependent yet goodhearted bikers romanticized in the 1954 movie TheWild One, envisioned the Angels as their protectors from the establish-ment. Sixties popular culture fueled the counterculture’s belief in thesupposed link between the Angels and themselves with movies such as1969’s Easy Rider, which portrayed bikers as little more than motorizedhippies. However, the romance between the two groups quickly souredafter Altamont. The only thing surprising about their disillusionment isthat it took so long to occur. With the possible exception of all but theearliest Angels and their immediate predecessors, the Hell’s Angels werevery definitely not a part of the counterculture. In fact, the Hell’s Angels

The Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 37, No. 2, 2003r 2003 Blackwell Publishing, 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, andPO Box 1354, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK

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actually mimicked the mainstream American society that the counter-culture fought so hard to eliminate.

The counterculture’s view of the Hell’s Angels was largely shaped by1950s pop culture, which portrayed the biker as an individualist hero,and incorrectly linked bikers with the countercultural elements of theperiod. Through The Wild One, the major biker film of the era, thefuture members of the counterculture were duped into believing thatall bikers were fashioned from the same mold as Marlon Brando’scharacter Johnny, a sullen individualist who bucks the ultraconformityof 1950s America. It would take several negative encounters with theHell’s Angels in the 1960s for the counterculture to eventually realizethat this assumption was very incorrect. However, more importantthan the film’s portrayal of bikers as individualists is its tendency tolink the bikers in the movie with the counterculture. One strikingexample of the linking of the two groups comes in the form of a scenefrom The Wild One in which young members of a biker gang called theBlack Rebels converse with an elderly bar owner. The bikers confusethe old man with an array of slang meant to evoke the language of thejazz musicians and the Beat poets of the era. While a case can be madefor the Beats being the originators of what would later be called thecounterculture, they were in no way connected to the outlaw bikers ofthe 1950s, and outlaw bikers almost definitely did not speak this way(Reynolds 69). A lesser example of the mainstream purveyors of 1950spop culture linking the Beats with outlaw bikers can be found in thehit 1955 song by Gene Vincent, ‘‘Be Bop A Lula.’’ Vincent, a formermotorcyclist who gave up riding after a horrific accident, performed inblack leather in an effort to mimic the image of a biker inspired by TheWild One. Vincent’s outlaw biker persona, coupled with a song whosetitle evoked the previously mentioned ‘‘scat-like’’ slang of the Beats,caused another mismatch between bikers and the countercultural Beats(Reynolds 86–88). The people who would later become the hippies andradicals of the 1960s would use this incorrect pairing of bikers andBeats, as well as the depiction of bikers as individualists, to make theirassociation with groups like the Hell’s Angels later on. An example of a1960s counterculture figure who bought into the mainstream media’sportrayal of bikers during the 1950s is Bob Dylan. Before he became avoice for the counterculture, Dylan was a leather-jacket-wearing,motorcycle-riding teenager who was said to resemble a Jewish Hell’sAngel (Spitz 58–63).

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The current president of the Ventura Angels, George Christie,explains the romanticism of the Hell’s Angels as the desire fornonbikers, hippie or otherwise, to recreate such nonconformingwestern outlaws as ‘‘Jesse James, Billy The Kid, and Doc Holiday’’(In Search of History). With regard to the counterculture of the 1960s,Christie seems to be accurate in his assessment. Throughout the 1960sand 1970s, the counterculture, with the rest of America, was fed theimage of the biker as the new American outlaw through dozens of so-called ‘‘biker movies.’’ Biker movies had the same misleading effect onthe counterculture as The Wild One did in the 1950s when they werechildren, but unlike in The Wild One, the bikers in these movies wereusually purposely portrayed as Hell’s Angels. These films, often set inthe deserts of the American southwest, rely so heavily on the image ofthe frontier and the outlaw figures of the ‘‘old west’’ that they aresometimes called ‘‘biker-westerns’’ (Wild Ride). These low-budget filmsheld religiously to a standard plot revolving around the plight of anindividualist biker who battles against a corrupt, unfeeling, andconformist society (Rubin 362–63). Maybe more importantly, as wasthe case with the bikers in The Wild One, the outlaw bikers in thesefilms are also often portrayed as being unquestionable members of thecounterculture. The film Easy Rider is the perfect example of this genreof film because it contains both of the previously mentioned aspects. Inthe film, the bikers not only visit a hippie commune and take LSDtrips, but the main character, ‘‘Captain America,’’ played by PeterFonda, is also killed at the end of the film by hippie-hatingtownspeople.

The Angels moved beyond local notoriety when they surged into thenational media spotlight in 1964 with an alleged gang rape of twoMonterey teenagers, and the release of a 1965 report on the club by theCalifornia Attorney General Thomas Lynch. Ordinary Americans werehorrified by the newly famous gang’s exploits, but the counterculturewas intrigued by these outlaws who seemed to be The Wild One’s BlackRebels come to life. In their first interaction with the counterculture,the Angels, in this case the Oakland chapter, were invited to parties bystudent radicals at the University of Berkeley with the purpose ofdiscussing the policies of the ‘‘establishment’’ that both groups weresupposedly united against. Predictably, the Angels were far moreinterested in drugs and women than politics, and quickly tired of thesefunctions. However, LSD-soaked get-togethers held at a La Honda

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ranch owned by Ken Kesey, novelist and head of the counterculturegroup known as the ‘‘Merry Pranksters,’’ provided a more suitableenvironment for the Angels and their hippie fans to interact. Attendedby such countercultural luminaries as Beats Allen Ginsberg and NealCassady, LSD researcher Richard Alpert, writer Larry McMurtry, andthe band the Grateful Dead, these parties provided hippies and radicalswith the opportunity to meet with what they believed to be theirnew nonconforming allies. Despite claims by some, including Keseyhimself, that the Angels showed nothing but goodwill and friendshiptoward the counterculture at these functions, it is evident that this wasnot the case. It is true that the Angels did not kill or maim anyoneduring their trips to La Honda, actions they were usually all too quickto commit, but they did almost lynch a party-goer who had made funof the club, and at one party, several Angels sexually took advantage ofNeal Cassady’s inebriated girlfriend. In fact, some of the MerryPranksters were actually afraid of the Angels and avoided La Hondawhen they knew the bikers were present. The fear held by thesePranksters was confirmed on October 16, 1965, when a peace marchat the Berkeley campus led by Jerry Rubin of the Vietnam DayCommittee (VDC) and Allen Ginsberg was attacked by the sameOakland Angels they had partied with. Despite meeting withGinsberg, Kesey, and the VDC after the attack, Sonny Barger andthe Oakland Angels declared at a press conference that they wereagainst the VDC and the peace movement, and were ready to combatthe Vietcong if the president thought it necessary.

Remarkably, despite this overt demonstration of support for theestablishment, the Angels continued as a presence on the counter-cultural scene. Those in the counterculture apparently could not shakethe media-inspired idea of the Angels being caretakers of Americanindividualism. Even the Diggers, a hippie group that inhabited thefamed Haight Ashbury district of San Francisco, continued theirfriendship with the Angels. Although the San Francisco Angels weremore tolerant of the counterculture than their Oakland counterparts, itis clear that even they were not actually part of the counterculture. Thisis proven by promainstream comments made by San Francisco AngelPresident Pete Knell to Digger and actor Peter Coyote in whichthe biker doubted any future for the counterculture, and chided theDiggers’ lack of ‘‘organization and structure’’ (Reynolds 142). TheAngels also continued to attend the concerts of bands associated with


the counterculture, such as the Doors, the Grateful Dead, and JeffersonAirplane. However, at one such concert, the 1969 Rolling Stonesconcert at Altamont, the murderous actions of the Angels seemedfinally to convince the counterculture of the bikers’ true colors.

Theodore Roszak’s 1968 book The Making of a Counter Culture labelsthe mainstream society that the hippies and their beat forebearsrebelled against as the ‘‘technocracy’’ (4). Roszak describes thetechnocracy, which he likens to the totalitarian society in GeorgeOrwell’s 1984, as being fixated with the concept of order. Methodsused by the technocracy to maintain order include the use of experts torun every aspect of society, the rejection of anything not explainable bywestern science, and the elimination of the individual in favor of thegroup (Roszak XIII, 5, 7–8, 101). On the other hand, Roszak describesthe counterculture as simply the opposite of the technocracy: thecounterculture rejected order and rationality and embraced the mysticand not easily explained (Roszak 124–25). An overview of Angelhistory shows that the Angels, except in the very beginning, sharedand do still share most of the characteristics of the technocracy, not thecounterculture.

It is often reported in the media that the Hell’s Angels were foundedin Fontana, California in 1950. There is some truth to this statement,but the founding and origin of the Hell’s Angels is far morecomplicated than this statement would lead one to believe. First of all,any history of the Hell’s Angels cannot begin without first addressingthe first motorcyclists and motorcycle clubs to appear in California,which also were the first to appear in the United States. Not only arethe early clubs important because they were the progenitors of theHell’s Angels, but also because, unlike later Angels, they bore aresemblance to the counterculture. By the 1930s, the thirty-year-oldHarley Davidson company, and its rival Indian, were supplying theirmotorcycles to a small market of adventurous souls. Due to itsmotorcycle-friendly weather, southern California was the chief domainof these first cyclists, primarily Depression-stricken young mensearching for jobs. In fact, many were so-called ‘‘Okies,’’ the wave ofrural folk who moved west into California during this poverty-strickenera. Although most of these riders were loners, never in one town fortoo long, a few banded together to form loose-knit motorcycle clubs.Regardless of whether they formed clubs, it is easy to see that pre-World War II motorcyclists, with their drifting, unorganized, and

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carefree lifestyle, did not possess traits of the technocracy. It is thecharacteristics of these early cyclists that the counterculture mistakenlyattributed to the Hell’s Angels of the 1960s.

After World War II, the number of motorcycle clubs in California,whose ranks were filled almost entirely by returning veterans, rosesignificantly. Although many of these veterans joined wholesome,mainstream motorcycle clubs, many more would join groups thatwould later become known as ‘‘outlaw clubs.’’ The veterans who joinedthese clubs felt alienated from the society they had left during the war,and were also unwilling to give up the adrenaline rush they hadexperienced in battle. The vets would find the excitement they cravedon the back of a motorcycle. In the words of ‘‘Wino’’ Willie Forkner, amember of one such club called the Booze Fighters, motorcyclesallowed the vets to ‘‘do crazy things with no one shooting at us’’ (WildRide). Along with Willie’s Booze Fighters, groups throughoutCalifornia, including the Pissed Off Bastards, Satan’s Sinners, andMarket Street Commandos, made a lifestyle out of drinking, fighting,and riding motorcycles. Frequently these outlaw clubs would appearat motorcycle races sponsored by mainstream groups such as theAmerican Motorcycle Association (AMA). In stark contrast to the soberAMAers in their ties and racing caps, the unkempt beer-swillingoutlaws often created havoc at the races, the most notable being therace that degenerated into the so-called Hollister Riot of 1947. Thequaint California town of Hollister was host to the first AMA race(called a ‘‘Gypsy Tour’’) since the war, and bikers, outlaw clubs like theBooze Fighters included, descended on the town. What ensued were afew nights of drag racing, public urination, and massive beer sales forlocal bars. However, the media blew the incident way out ofproportion, telling tales of an invasion of an unsuspecting town bythousands of hoodlums.

Although the Hollister incident was much exaggerated by themedia, it and the other exploits of these early clubs point to the groups’rejection of the technocracy, and the embracing of traits that wouldlater be attributed to the counterculture. The main trait that separatesthe postwar outlaw clubs from the technocracy is the fact that, liketheir prewar predecessors, the clubs did not stress organization. In fact,the only aspect of the clubs that hints at organization is the use of clubnames. Also unlike the technocracy, members of these early outlawgroups stressed individuality over the group; members dressed how


they pleased and participated in whatever event they themselves chose.The opposite was true of the AMA, the preferred motorcycle group ofthe mainstream, which held its members to a strict moral and dresscode. After Hollister, the stage was set for the formation of the Hell’sAngels. Ironically, this event would effectively eliminate all character-istics that had linked outlaw motorcycle clubs to the counterculture.

In the early 1950s, motorcycle clubs all over California, fromGardena to Oakland, were independently taking on the name Hell’sAngels and sewing patches of a skull wearing a pilot’s cap on theirjackets. Strangely, these early Hell’s Angels clubs were ignorant of eachother’s existence, and had apparently chosen the same name and logo(which have been linked to a World War II stunt pilot group) simplybecause, according to Angel legend Sonny Barger, they were ‘‘cool ashell’’ (Barger, Zimmerman, and Zimmerman 30). The Hell’s Angels ofthis time, unaffiliated and unorganized, had the same traits that hadmade the previously mentioned postwar clubs akin to the counter-culture. In fact, most of these early Angels were actually formermembers of the World War II veteran-populated clubs such as theBooze Fighters and the Market Street Commandos. However, in a fewshort years, the Hell’s Angels would be transformed into a group asorganized and businesslike as any corporation operating withinmainstream America. What happened that led to such an abruptrejection of countercultural traits? The answer seems to be linked tothe influx of so-called ‘‘war babies’’ into the club. War babies, childrenborn during World War II who began to come of age during the late1950s and early 1960s, were slowly taking over the Hell’s Angels fromthe war veterans who had dominated the group since its founding.Unlike the vets, who had joined the Angels and other outlaw clubs toescape the stifling organization and conformity of what has been calledthe technocracy, the war baby Angels seemed to have joined becausethey craved organization. Sonny Barger, longtime president of theOakland Hell’s Angels, fits perfectly into this description of a war babyHell’s Angel.

Ralph ‘‘Sonny’’ Barger grew up the son of an alcoholic father and anegligent mother in the blue-collar city of Oakland, California. In1955, a sixteen-year-old Barger sought a cure for the boredom of highschool and menial jobs through illegally joining the Army with a fakebirth certificate. Despite good performance and behavior, less than ayear later, Barger’s actual age was discovered and he was discharged

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from the army. In the army, Barger had learned to love militaryregimentation, discipline, and order, and now that he was a civilianagain, he wanted to recreate that atmosphere in his hometown. Bargerfound the perfect vehicle to do just that when he and a group of friendsformed the Hell’s Angels of Oakland in 1957.

When Barger took over as Oakland president in 1958, he wasdetermined to turn the Hell’s Angels into a disciplined ‘‘paramilitary’’organization. The first action he took in this transformation was theconversion of the informal meetings the club occasionally held intomandatory and structured events. Meetings were held weekly (amember was fined two dollars for missing one) and involved thediscussion of the minutes of the previous meeting, new issues, thepayment of the twenty-five-cent weekly dues, and the induction of newmembers. Interestingly enough, despite their image as hooligans andpsychopaths, the image the counterculture perceived, Oakland Hell’sAngels were fined for swearing or fighting at a meeting. The product ofthese early meetings was twenty-four new club rules that coveredeverything from motorcycle theft and drugs to relations with women.However, the most important rules to arise out of the early meetingswere those pertaining to the issues of new members, club officers, andinduction of new chapters.

Early on, the Oakland club determined that their chapter of theHell’s Angels would be governed by so-called ‘‘officers’’: president, vicepresident, treasurer, secretary, and sergeant at arms. In a system theAngels never hesitated to call democratic, officers were nominated fora particular office at meetings and were voted in if they were approvedby the majority. Following the same principle, new members werevoted into the club after a ‘‘getting to know period’’ as a ‘‘prospect’’(prospective member) if the majority agreed. It seems highly unlikelythat the counterculture of the 1960s was aware of the Angel’sgovernmental structure, considering that it more or less simulated thesystem of politicians and bureaucracies that they disdainfully referredto as the establishment.

After the issues of officers and new members had been settled,Barger and the Oakland chapter moved on to the issue of affiliation andthe addition of new chapters. This issue more than any other wouldpropel the Hell’s Angels into mainstream status. From the beginningof his presidency, Barger made it one of his ultimate goals to makeevery chapter of the Angels part of a cohesive group, ‘‘not a bunch of


chapters who just happened to wear the same patch.’’ In other words,every chapter of the Hell’s Angels would be affiliated with each other,unlike the first Angel chapters. It was agreed between the dozenCalifornia chapters that existed in the early 1960s that a new chaptercould be allowed to join the club, from potentially anywhere in theworld, as long as it was voted in by a majority of all Hell’s Angels ofevery chapter. This prior planning proved to be beneficial, since by1966, two new clubs, one in Omaha, Nebraska, and one in Lowell,Massachusetts, had joined the Hell’s Angels family (Barger, Zimmer-man, and Zimmerman 32–35). In response to this expansion and tothe potential profit that could be made from the Angels’ popularitywith the media and the counterculture, in 1966 the Hell’s Angels wasmade a corporation, and five hundred shares of stock were immediatelysold in the new company. Incorporation in 1966, coupled with thecopyrighting of the ‘‘Death’s Head’’ (the skull patch all Angels wear ontheir jackets) in 1972, primed the Angels for the fruitful decades tocome, decades in which the Hell’s Angels would achieve the status of amainstream company.

By the mid-1980s, the Hell’s Angels was composed of sixty-fourchapters and could be found in thirteen countries, mostly in NorthAmerica, Europe, and Australia. During this era of expansion, the rulesthat allow for the management of this global empire, rules that exist tothis day, were put in place. The individual Hell’s Angels chapters stillhold weekly meetings (now called ‘‘church’’), but in response toexpansion, there are now monthly meetings called ‘‘WesCOMS’’ and‘‘ECOMS.’’ A WesCOM (West Coast Officers Meeting) is the gatheringof representatives of every chapter on the west coast of the UnitedStates and Canada to discuss business, and an ECOM (East CoastOfficers Meeting) is the east coast counterpart. Chapters outside NorthAmerica have similar meetings, and every year a ‘‘World Run’’ isconducted so that every Angels chapter on Earth can get together for amass meeting. To ensure the smooth operation of the Hell’s Angelscorporation, Sonny Barger and other presidents during the 1970s and1980s systematically weeded out bikers who were more devoted tomotorcycle riding and partying than making money for the club. Hell’sAngel-turned-FBI-informant Anthony Tait has said that Sonny Bargeronce commented on his clean-cut looks and businesslike demeanor bysaying, ‘‘he was what the Hell’s Angels of the 90’s was about’’ (Lavigne245). It is apparent that the Hell’s Angels of the 1980s, 1990s, and

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today were and are as organized as any business within the technocracy,and a far cry from the counterculture.

One of the positive results of the organization of the Hell’s Angelscorporation, as is the case with any business, was profit. In the late1960s and throughout the 1970s, the Angels made much money offmovies that used their name or logo. In movies such as Hell’s Angels‘69, the Angels received the customary sum for the use of their name,as well as salaries for their work as actors and ‘‘experts.’’ However, todaythe main source of income for the Angels is the sale of T-shirts andother merchandise embossed with the Angels logo at either bikerrallies or over the Internet. Sonny Barger himself sells everything fromstatues bearing his likeness to his own brand of barbecue sauce on hispersonal Web site, http://www.sonnybarger.com. Despite this source oflegitimate income, American law enforcement has continually accusedthe Hell’s Angels of being a large-scale drug trafficking organizationthat brings in hundreds of millions of dollars a year in illegal revenue.This accusation led to dozens of trials throughout the 1970s and1980s, the two most notable being two so-called RICO (RacketeerInfluenced and Corrupt Organizations) trials, the same type used inprosecution of the Mafia. However, unlike the Mafia, the Angels haveemerged from the justice system’s legal barrage virtually unscathed.Despite these victories in court, it is still very evident that the Angelshave been associated with drugs throughout their long history, eitherselling or using drugs themselves. In fact, the Hell’s Angels’ use ofdrugs is one of the main reasons the counterculture felt a bond with thegroup in the first place. However, in actuality, drug use is simplyanother issue that separates the Angels from the counterculture, ratherthan linking them.

One of the main characteristics of the 1960s counterculture was theembracing of everything that was mystical or not explainable by thephilosophy of the technocracy, western science. This counterculturallove of mysticism sometimes took the form of the exploration ofeastern religions, but more frequently the use of psychedelic drugs.With the hallucinogenic drug LSD serving as the primary vehicle, thecounterculture hoped that drugs would allow them to exploreconsciousness and open the door to religious experiences. The Hell’sAngels’ reasons for using drugs during the 1960s, and any other timefor that matter, do not resemble the counterculture’s at all. It first mustbe mentioned that for most Hell’s Angels, the drug of choice is alcohol,


usually in the form of beer. Not considered by the counterculture inany way psychedelic, alcohol seems to dull the senses rather than toexpand them. When Angels use other drugs, whether they bestimulants such as Benzedrine or depressants such as barbiturates,drugs are mixed together and consumed in large quantities in an effortto produce a stupor, a condition that would not seem to aid inconsciousness expanding.

The Angels’ first opportunity to partake of the counterculture’sfavorite drug, LSD, was in 1965 at Ken Kesey’s La Honda ranch. Keseyhad outfitted his ranch with an expansive light and sound system, allin an effort to contribute to the otherworldly and mystical effectsproduced by LSD. Soon after the Hell’s Angels arrived at the ranch,they partook of their first ‘‘caps’’ of LSD. The Angels quickly becameenamored of the drug, and from that point on, took it often. However,despite their affection for the drug, the Hell’s Angels did not take LSDfor the same reasons as the Merry Pranksters and the rest of thecounterculture. Instead of seeking mystical experiences through LSD,the Angels took the drug for the same reason they took any drug: torender themselves senseless. Hunter S. Thompson, associate of theAngels in the 1960s and author of Hell’s Angels: A Strange and TerribleSaga, described the effects of LSD on the Angels as frequently takingthe form of ‘‘fits of crying and wailing’’ or ‘‘catatonic slumps,’’ as aresult of the bikers taking two or three times the recommended dosage(234–35).

It also must be mentioned that besides overindulging in LSD, theAngels have also been known to harass or torture takers of the drugwhile they are under its effects. LSD takers called a bad experience onthe drug ‘‘freaking out,’’ and countercultural takers of the drug, such asthe Merry Pranksters, did their best to surround freak-out victims withlove and security until the frightening effects disappeared. Somemembers of the Hell’s Angels, such as Oakland Angel Terry the Tramp,sometimes encouraged freak-outs for their own amusement. Anexample of this occurred at a party in the early 1970s when, accordingto former Oakland Angel George Wethern, Terry played ‘‘head games’’with a woman on a freak-out until she committed suicide with a pistol(Wethern and Colnett 209). In a similar story, at a 1971 party at thechapter headquarters of the Richmond, California Angels, the drinks oftwo Georgian motorcyclists who aspired to be Angels were secretlyspiked with LSD. The Angels then taunted one of the motorcyclists

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until he became so violent that they tied him up and fed himtranquilizers, an action which ultimately led to his death. The secondGeorgian was then shot because he had witnessed the death of hisfriend.

In the government’s failed attempts to prosecute the Angels for drugtrafficking, the main source of information was Hell’s Angels who hadjoined with law enforcement as informants. It must be noted that itcould be possible, although there is no indication, that theseinformants exaggerated their claims in an effort to cement immunitydeals that they made with the government. However, despite thispossibility, the details of the alleged drug ring that these formermembers revealed must be mentioned if only for the fact that theyshow that the Angels were never the allies of the counterculture of the1960s, but rather their exploiters. It is apparent that the Angels’meetings with Kesey’s Pranksters enlightened the Angels to thepotential money to be made off of the drug trade, rather than to themind-opening aspects of the drugs themselves. George Wethern, anOakland Angel who by the late sixties was making $200,000 a yearfrom selling LSD to the flower children of California, has said that‘‘while a few members would generally sympathize with the hippiemovement, the majority of Angels would exploit it’’ (Wethern andColnett 15, 87–91). Pioneers like Wethern and fellow Oakland AngelTerry the Tramp were soon followed into the trade by most other Hell’sAngels, a trend that led to more than a few Angels becoming quitewealthy by the 1970s.

Although the selling of LSD to the counterculture in the 1960sshows that the Hell’s Angels were not the friends the hippies thoughtthey were, it also more importantly shows that through theirinvolvement in the drug trade, the Angels were taking on traits ofthe technocracy as well. Theodore Roszak specifically addressed theissue of the sale of drugs when he said that ‘‘drug merchandisers areonly the criminal caricature of the American business ethos’’ (164).Roszak essentially was saying that drug dealers are part of thetechnocracy, and the characteristics of the Angels’ drug trade over thelast few decades support his theory. According to law enforcement, bythe late 1970s, the Angels had moved on from LSD to methamphe-tamine as their main merchandise, and with the adoption of this drugas their chief product, the Angels became more sophisticated andbusinesslike. The FBI claimed that the Hell’s Angels had a network of


clandestine ‘‘meth labs’’ all over California that produced the drug forthe club. The labs were either owned originally by Angels, or other labowners were coerced into producing the drug for the club in a mannerthat resembled a corporate takeover. To ensure that their labs anddistribution centers were not discovered, most Angel-owned buildingswere equipped with scanners that could detect police ‘‘bugs’’ andsurveillance equipment that they used to keep an eye on the federal andlocal agents who might be watching them. The best example of howapparently mainstream the Angels’ drug business had become is foundin the arrest of Angel Kenny Owen in 1985. Owen was known asthe Angels’ best ‘‘meth cooker’’ (producer of methamphetamine), andwhen the FBI stormed his house to make the arrest, they foundmethamphetamine, money-counting machines, high-tech surveillanceequipment, $1.5 million in cash, and several computers, one of which‘‘was booted up to Andrew Tobias’s Managing Your Money’’ (Lavigne306).

One of the main characteristics of the counterculture was the loveof individualism. Both the New Left groups of the 1960s, such asStudents for a Democratic Society (SDS), and hippies shared a desirefor individualism, or ‘‘one man, one soul’’ (Roszak 61). Both groupswanted to shape a world that was made up of individuals, not the silentconformist masses that existed under the technocracy. It is on this trait,individualism, that the counterculture primarily based its false linkwith the Hell’s Angels. Having been reared on the romanticized imagesof The Wild One and the yellow journalism coverage of events such asthe Hollister riot, the flower children of the 1960s held quite a fancifulview of the Angels, and bikers in general. Bikers were seen by thecounterculture as throwbacks to the individualist and frontier spiritthat had once made America great, but was sorely lacking in modernsociety. The image of the cowboy on the open plains, the epitome ofAmerican rugged individualism, had been replaced by the Hell’s Angelon the open road. In addition, it cannot be ignored that motorcycleriding itself gives off its own impression of individuality. Robert M.Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, describedriding a motorcycle as a very personal and individual experience thatcannot be reproduced driving a car, which he called being stuck in a‘‘compartment’’ (4). Ken Kesey and other counterculture figures whoadmired those who ‘‘did their thing’’ believed that they had found inthe Angels like-minded individualists (Wolfe 232).

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What the counterculture did not realize before the attack on theVDC and Altamont is that the Hell’s Angels were far from beingindividualists. In fact, it appears that the Angels did not see the worldin terms of individuals at all, but in groups. In their viewpoint, peoplewere divided into two broad categories: Angels and everyone else. Tothe Angels, their group was the only thing important on Earth, and ifsomeone was not an actual member of the Hell’s Angels, with the all-important Hell’s Angels ‘‘Death Head’’ on his jacket, he might as wellnot have existed. This mentality emerged through such practices as ‘‘allon one and one on all’’ (Reynolds and McClure 33). This phrase refersto the belief that if an Angel gets into a fight, every member present isobligated to join in, no matter who the individuals might be or thecircumstances surrounding the fight. Hunter S. Thompson (author ofHell’s Angels) encountered this rule when he got into a fight with anAngel and was immediately pounced upon by six other Angels.Because Thompson was a journalist and not an Angel, every memberpresent was obligated to attack him regardless of whether he wasinvolved in the argument, because the group mattered, not theindividuals involved (Thompson 272–73). Remarkably, GeorgeWethern also encountered this rule when he retired from the OaklandAngels and realized that he had to stay alert and cautious at Angelparties he attended. Despite the fact that he was formerly a vicepresident, Wethern was fully aware that as a retiree, he no longermattered. Should an Angel attack him, the rest of the Angels present,old friends included, would join in on the beating simply becauseWethern no longer wore the club’s patch (Wethern and Colnett 201–04). From these examples, it is evident that the desire for indi-vidualism is simply another trait that the counterculture and the Hell’sAngels do not share.

In response to the killing of Meredith Hunter by the Hell’s Angelsat Altamont, Robert Altman, former writer for Rolling Stone,commented that ‘‘before Altamont they were protecting us, fromGod knows what, but they were protecting us’’ (Wild Ride). Altman,like the rest of the counterculture of the 1960s, had seen the Hell’sAngels as allies in the fight against the establishment. It took a youngman’s death at Altamont to wake them up to reality. The realitywas that the Angels, except at the very first, were not part of thecounterculture, during the 1960s or later. Like the technocracy, theAngels were obsessed with order, and the structure of their


organization, with its system of chapters and meetings, points to this.The Angels did not have the counterculture’s trait of a desire to pursuemysticism and spirituality through drug use. Finally, the Angels werenot individualistsFthe main reason the counterculture allied withthemFbut actually preferred the group over the individual. When allof these elements are brought together, the Hell’s Angels of today verymuch resemble a mainstream organization that the technocracy wouldbe proud to have in its ranks. It is ironic that the technocracy has fearedand rejected the Hell’s Angels for decades, yet the counterculture, thosewho had a right to be frightened, embraced them.

Works Cited

Barger, Ralph, Keith Zimmerman, and Ken Zimmerman. Hell’s Angel:The Life and Times of Sonny Barger and the Hell’s Angels MotorcycleClub. New York: HarperCollins, 2000.

In Search of History: Hell’s Angels. Video. A&E Television Networks,1996.

Lavigne, Yves. Hell’s Angels: Into the Abyss. New York: HarperCollins,1996.

Pirsig, Robert M. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. New York:Bantam Books, 1974.

Reynolds, Frank, and Michael McClure. Freewheelin’ Frank: Secretary ofthe Angels. New York: Grove Press, 1967.

Reynolds, Tom. Wild Ride: How Outlaw Motorcycle Myth ConqueredAmerica. New York: TV Books, 2000.

Roszak, Theodore. The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on theTechnocratic Society and its Youthful Opposition. Garden City, NY:Anchor Books, 1968.

Rubin, Mark. ‘‘Make Love Make War: Cultural Confusion and theBiker Film Cycle.’’ Film History 6.3 (1994): 355–81.

Spitz, Bob. Dylan: A Biography. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1989.

Thompson, Hunter S. Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga. NewYork: Ballantine Books, 1967.

Wethern, George, and Vincent Colnett. A Wayward Angel. New York:Richard Marek Publishers, 1978.

Wild Ride of Outlaw Bikers. Video. A&E Television Networks, 1996.

Wolfe, Tom. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. New York: Bantam Books,1968.

350 John Wood

John Wood is a 2002 graduate of the University of Massachusetts,Dartmouth, and will be entering the history PhD program at TempleUniversity in the fall of 2003. He would like to thank Prof. James A. Hijiyafor the editing and invaluable guidance he provided during the creation ofthis article.


hell's angels and the illusion of the counterculture

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