Omni: What do outlaw bike clubs say about mainstream culture?

Wolf: It shows the need for symbolism. The human animal is not satisfied with rational benefits: there must be a psychological payoff. The motorcycles, club, symbolism, all makes them — okay, if you will — like a primitive tribe. It’s interesting that the strengths allowing outlaw clubs to survive are the same qualities theoretically valued by our culture: interpersonal commitment, political participation, responsibility to one’s fellows. But you cannot have a political system governing the United States that can accomodate individual decision-making. If you talk to a biker he’ll say, “The club gives me the freedom to be who and what I want.” The club does that through equality and participatory democracy. Everyone gets a say. Once a decision is made, that’s the decision and everybody follows it. This is what the outside world doesn’t see about them.

Omni: How do you explain the Harley mystique?

Wolf: The Harley-Davidson rider who works with his bike is able to put more of himself into the bike. It becomes an extension of his soul, whereas the other bikes are simply a means of transportation. The Germans are obsessed with the Harley-Davidson. Now, why is a country that has Bavarian Motorworks so obsessed with the Harley Davidson? BMW produces a perfect machine, with heated handlebars, ABS brakes, but it can be a perfect machine and still have no soul. The Japanese bike is a perfect machine yet it sounds like a sewing machine. It does everything wonderfully well, yet misses the point because it doesn’t have a connection between a bike and the rider. Harley has the James Dean image, the American frontier heritage, the open ride. When Germans buy bikes, they don’t just buy the machine, they buy the subculture. They buy Marlon Brando hats, the leather jackets.

Omni: Do most outlaw bikers come from a blue-collar background?

Wolf: None of the Rebels or any bikers with whom I associated during my ten years as an active biker originated in the upper-middle or upper class, and few held professional, managerial, or administrative positions. Becoming a biker is a class-specific response to the general problem of self-actualization. Outlaw bikers tend to come from the lower working class, and police profiles of outlaw clubs confirm this. Like myself, most of the Rebels were the sons of men who labored. My father was a Canadian Pacific Railway blacksmith and my mother was a janitress. My first adult job was cleaning up and moving carcasses for a Canada Packers slaughterhouse. Many values bikers have are lower-working-class values. Upper-class people may have other ways of satisfying the same needs — surfing, mountain climbing, sky-diving, or what have you.

Omni: Why does the lower working class produce candidates for a biker subculture?

Wolf: Because the modern-day urban setting lacks symbols and activities around which to build personal identity. Often the only identity available to a manual laborer is that of a cog in an impersonal machine. The same pattern repeats itself day after day with no prospect of change. Whether you call it alienation or anomie, the laborer is deprived of adequate psychological payoff. If the laborer is a young man in search of himself, he will find nothing in his self-image at work to excite him. He’d best look elsewhere. Men who are chained to these circumstances share a compelling desire to escape.

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