#tonyfitzpatrick

Indian Music, Tony Fitzpatrick, (2004), MoMA: Drawings and Prints

The Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection Gift Size: 13 x 10" (33 x 25.4 cm) Medium: Cut-and-pasted printed paper with ink, colored ink, gouache, synthetic polymer paint, ballpoint pen, felt-tip pen, and pencil on paper

Vegas Penny Flower, Tony Fitzpatrick, 1995, Brooklyn Museum: Contemporary Art

© Tony Fitzpatrick Size: Sheet: 15 x 18 in. (38.1 x 45.7 cm) Image: 6 x 8 in. (15.2 x 20.3 cm) Medium: Copper plate etching with chine colle

***Art work and words by my good friend Mr Tony Fitzpatrick. Thank you for your amazing art and kind words about the Boozefighters.

“Johnny…What are you rebelling against?”

“Whatya’ got?”

–Marlon Brando

The Wild Ones

There has never been a better recruiting tool for motorcycle clubs than this movie. It is based on The Boozefighters, one of the first-ever motorcycle clubs in Southern California. It’s actually based on the Hollister, California “riots” in 1947, a riot so laughably tame it actually amounted to little more than six or seven Boozefighters being arrested for drunk and disorderly for drinking and racing their big American bikes in the streets of the small town, and a remarkably-pussy police force (only seven cops, two of them near retirement–they almost wet themselves) over a summer weekend that scared the shit out of the locals, who’d evidently never seen anyone piss in the street before.

It was not more dangerous than any small town parade with a few rowdy drunks thrown in. Well, a reporter got a hold of it on a slow news day and decided to paint it as the end-all of civilization. The tale of a marauding gang of motorcycle hoodlums proved to be catnip for the Hollywood imagination as well. In one of the string of star-making roles Marlon Brando had in the mid-50s, none produced more juvenile delinquents than the The Wild Ones.

Along with Lee Marvin, who played “Chino”, (loosely based on Boozefighters founding member Wino Willie Forkner) Brando made it downright sexy to be a mouthy asshole on a motorcycle. Soon there were bike clubs all over California and the rest of the country, as well. But nowhere did they have the lifestyle currency that they had in California. Lots and lots of road, through mountains, next to the sea. . .from San Diego to Big Sur, there was lots of American landscape to get lost in and to marvel at from a huge, speeding American Motorcycle.

It’s important to remember that clubs like the Boozefighters, the Flying Tigers and the Hells Angels were formed in the crucible of the second World War. The effects of fighting the war cannot be underestimated in the nihilism that came to characterize some of the nastier outlaw clubs. A great many young men went overseas fully expecting not to return–my own father did.

Upon surviving; a new, more fatalistic view of the world took hold among many veterans and colored their view of the world and their place in it for the rest of their lives.

It is also important to take a longer view and realize this was always the case as it was with William Quantrill’s Raiders, after the Civil War. The immense push westward, by nomadic groups of farmers, cattlemen, prospectors and snake oil salesmen, men who needed to get lost in the bounty and promise of America, hoped to hell all of the hopeful hyperbole was true.

“Go West, young man,” seemed a mantra as well as an idyllic destination.

When “Wino Willie” Forkner returned from World War II, he knew he wasn’t ready to settle into a job settle into a middle-class life and become a regular taxpayer. It didn’t make sense to go from warfare one week to squaresville the next. Warfare had awakened the restless spirit in a great many of these returning vets, as well as the fact that the hearing damage a great many air men had incurred, had inadvertently disqualified them from potential jobs in the still nascent aerospace industry.

Some guys became astronauts and some guys became Boozefighters, Hells Angels, and Gypsy Jokers, and took the endless American road for their home. They went to the Redwing store and bought heavy-buckled engineers boots and strapped on steel.

Harleys, Nortons and Indians tore ass across the California landscape just because they could and nobody was going to tell them different.

This was the birth of the 1%ers; the one percent that didn’t fit in to polite society and didn’t fucking want to.

The Boozefighters never became an outlaw club. In fact, these days they spend a great deal of their time doing good deeds for kids and returning veterans.

They, like the Angels, are resolutely patriotic–a great many of them former soldiers, sailors, and air men. The clubs are very often structured like a military unit. There is also a great love for beer in this club. In fact, they describe themselves as, “a drinking club with a motorcycle problem.”

There are now Boozefighter chapters all over the U.S. and the U.K., as well as Japan. While they are not a criminal club , they are still not a bunch to fuck around with. They don’t back up from confrontation and there are always a lot of them.

There is an old saying among bike clubs that is observed when they are making a public appearance as a club, “Always bring a crowd.”