Outlaws on Harleys

...Hell's Angels takes as its major task the removal of all the establishment shibboleths and journalistic deadwood that has gathered about this group over the past few years...

...But if so, one senses that something much bigger and more sinister than motorcycle gangs is being exposed...

...Hunter Thompson has it all in his provocative, readable book...

...They are only more obvious...

...And perhaps it is as children that they are best understood, children forever estranged from mother America, but longing furtively for approval...

...Despite the fact that his subject has proved to be notoriously good copy for the yellow press, Thompson consistently steers his material away from sensationalism...

...The story of the Hull's Angels, properly subtitled a "saga," is a fable for our time, perhaps even an expose...

...Rather, he sees them as simply the most outrageous of a number of manifestations of social cancer spreading through the vitality of this country, certainly no more virulent than the booming napalm industry or the juvenile delinquents stagnating in the sprawling urban ghettos...

...Thompson implies that even the Angels realize that "beyond the initial strangeness, their everyday scene is as tedious and depressing as a costume ball for demented children...

...The "Number 1" on their greasy levi jackets is their sneering reminder that at least they have a statistical personality as the one per cent social incorrigibles...

...Although Thompson is committed to an explanation of the Angels, he does not idealize them or minimize their viciousness...

...These gangs remain as exotic, as foreign to what is thought of as the basic American experience, as, say, the Mafia...

...He may show that the Lynch study, alleging that all Angels are pill-dropping, mad-dog rapists, is not persuasive, but he still documents enough sexual deviancy and chain-and-knife street fighting to shock even the most blase reader...

...But the authority of free lance writer and novelist Hunter Thompson, author of the first reputable book on these mounted outlaws, is based on more than just having seen or studied them: He lived and rode with the Hell's Angels, the "rottenest motorcycle gang in the whole of Christendom," for more than a year before they finally gang-stomped him because of some minor argument...

...But underneath all their studied gangsterism is the same wistful ennui afflicting other segments of American life...

...And Thompson rejects from the onset the comforting notion that the Angels just happened, that they are some sort of peculiar mutant social gene harking unaccountably back to Neanderthal...

...He also is the first to report who the Angels are, tracing their lineage back to the migrants and Hooverville-transients who flooded California during the Depression days...

...He returned from his weird voyage to tell all in a book that is lively, but also well enough founded for any scholarly taste...

...Nor are the accounts in Time of the midsummer madness of these renegades, or even the heavily footnoted expose supervised by California's Attorney General Lynch, calculated to make them into urgent social fact...

...Reviewed by Peter A. Collier TT'or the average citizen, motorcycle •*- gangs exist, if at all, in the realm of popular mythology as a laconic New Yorker cartoon, or as a brief remembrance of Marlon Brando lounging on his bike, exuding petulance in The Wild One...

...and finally quaffing LSD with novelist Ken Kesey and co-existing peacefully with the new generation of Hippies in San Francisco's Haight Ashbury district...

...And his narrative is ultimately the stranger and more terrible because he explains the weird activities of the Angels as the responses of men who feel profoundly "out of it," who have grown up frustrated at being bypassed in a land of plenty...

...sending a telegram to President Johnson volunteering for duty behind enemy lines in Vietnam to "demoralize the Vietcong and advance the cause of freedom...

...They form clans, create rituals and hierarchies to provide themselves with an identity, to belong...

...In this downhill half of the Twentieth Century," Thompson says, "they are not so different from the rest of us as they sometimes seem...

...Traitors...

...Fascinated by the Hell's Angels, but not sympathetic, Thompson avoids all those tired truisms about the origins of criminality...

...Only this explains the bizarreness of their public behavior: using their detente with the Oakland Police to charge, swinging and stomping, into Berkeley's Vietnam Day Committee marchers, crying "Reds...

...Perhaps only someone who has seen them hurtling six abreast in phalanx down all lanes of a California highway—shoulder-length hair flying with the wind, paraphernalia and accoutrements emblazoned with Nazi symbols, taciturn women clinging to their waists—someone who has offered cringing thanks for the armor of the automobile as he is enveloped in the roar of their big Harleys, can acknowledge how real they are...