| Home | Outlaw Machine, a book by Brock Yates. Amidst the plethora of books -- glorified coffee table pictorial essays on the evolution of the Harley-Davidson motorcycle and factory-blessed biased writings -- Brock Yates' Outlaw Machine Harley-Davidson and the Search for the American Soul stands out, and not just for its silvery metallic dust jacket. The author, who owned a leaky Sportster in the early '60s, traded it in for a clean imported motorcycle and then acquired a Softail in 1995, is an automotive journalist, editor-at-large at Car and Driver. With uncluttered, if somewhat intellectual, writing, Yates sets out to explain the origins of the Harley mystique and to understand the popularity of the Milwaukee machine among the Rolex set.
Yates offers early in his book a thorough analysis of America's reaction to the Hollister events of 1947 and the subsequent impact of the famous photograph of a drunken biker on a pre-war Harley. His portrait of Harleys in popular culture — from The Wild One to Easy Rider is not as inspiring as his history of the first 50 years of the Motor Company, which forms the middle part of the book. But Yates leans heavily on the research of Harry V. Sucher and his Harley-Davidson: The Milwaukee Marvel. Yates' historical analysis, colourfully written, does not blacklist the AMF years and, furthermore, offers an interesting thesis to explain the rebirth of the company, in the 1980s. The author proposes that "riding on this surge of jingoism and the revival of the cowboy mythology came Harley-Davidson, staggering back to life as Reagan re-energized the American spirit." Is it possible to pinpoint the birth of the current phenomena of the Rich Urban Biker and other poseurs? According to Yates, yes: on July 1st, 1987, on the sidewalk in front of the New York Stock Exchange, where its president welcomed executives from the Motor Company (Beals, Bleustein, Willie G., all astride bikes.) "On display in the lobby was a sparkling new Heritage Softail, but the actual anointing, the transference of Harley-Davidson trading from the American Exchange to the haughty precincts of the New York mart, took place outside, where hundreds of razor-cut, Armani-suited, gold-Rolexed, wing-tipped hot-shot traders and brokers swore on the spot that to hell with environmentally correct ten-speeds and Range Rovers for ski trips to Sugar Bush (sic), their next toy would be a god-awful, hellfire Harley-Davidson." After a quick review of Harley in the 1990s, Yates brings his readers around the world, from Singapore to Monaco, in order to discover what is the Harley experience outside the U.S. of A. This epilogue is concluded by one of the worst, most blatant, post-modern, fin-de-siècle rant that leaves a sour taste in the mouth and a rhetorical "What the fuck is that?" in the brain. Which is unfortunate, as Yates' Outlaw Machine is a keeper, an good read and an interesting new perspective on an old subject.
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