100 Years of Harley-Davidson
and all I got is this lousy tee shirt....

By one of those strange tricks of fate, the night before I left to ride my Harley Davidson across Europe to the HD Centenary bash in Barcelona I sat down to watch a VHS of "Easy Rider" for the first time in over ten years. And for the next ten days the resonance of that movie, and the ethos behind it, clashed and jarred with the reality of what we have come to accept as the Harley Davidson experience.

For if ever there has been an example of mainstream business taking an exciting, minority culture, re-packaging it and selling it back to the punters; Harley Davidson Motor Company ranks right up there with the big record companies and publishing houses who have cynically sold our lifestyle back to us and got rich on the profits. And how we love it all. For what the Barcelona Open Road Show was about, from where I was standing at least, was riding 1000 miles across Europe then paying £45 for a ticket to enter the wonderful world of the Harley Davidson Retailing Opportunity. Come right on in, folks, and browse the latest product. Talk to us about our low interest finance deals that will put you back on the road on a brand new twin-cam, or pick up some genuine Harley Davidson Motorclothes, all lovingly branded with the limited edition logo, Visa and Mastercharge accepted.

But hey, it's hard to knock HD too much. After all they found themselves riding high on a wave of alternative culture that kept the brand alive throughout the hippie years of the sixties and the tough outlaw years of the seventies, finally to emerge as a profitable brand in the mid eighties. The kudos of Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, of Sonny Barger and the Hells Angels, of Arlen Ness and even Evel Kneivel dropped established street cool right into the lap of the Motor Companys marketing department, a gift from heaven. Who could have resisted the temptation to take the opportunity and milk it for all it was worth?

But for me, Harley Davidson crossed the line into parody with the establishment of HOG, the Harley Owners Group, back in '83. Now don't get me wrong, I have no beef with any individual HOG members and have some good friends who wear HOG patches, but lets get one thing straight. HOG is not a club. It exists solely and purely to capture a target market and sell them more product. HOG patches come free with every new Harley and include admission to a social network which substitutes the grit of a real patch club for invitations to attend more HOG events, most of which provide opportunities to buy more product. It's a wonderful example of closed loop marketing, with each HOG chapter affiliated and ostensibly run by a local dealership. The structure of HOG, with chapters and elected officers, and the oh-so-carefully designed patches with recognisable echoes of outlaw rockers and MC patches, play with an image of dangerous rebellion. But this is safe, sanitised outlaw biking, where everyone travels with a credit card and a toothbrush to officially organised events, usually on new or new-ish HD product. How did we get from Fonda and Hopper crossing the US on a couple of leaky old Panheads with nothing but bedrolls to this?

It's clever marketing, right enough. And how interesting that the real bikers like Barger are kept at a safe distance by the Motor Company, who still refuse to officially acknowledge the existence of the whole outlaw bike club culture while subtly purloining and sanitising the bits they can recycle. Riding through Spain we overtook a group of Dutch bikers, one riding a replica Captain America. When I came across the bike parked up at the Olympic Stadium a couple of days later it turned out to have a softail frame. Much more practical than the rigid original, sure, but why bother? Why reproduce safe, sanitised versions of iconic originals unless you simply want to label yourself as a hopeless wannabe? And maybe we picked the wrong campsite, but I saw little evidence of wild partying and drug taking from the assembled biking folk, most of whom seemed more concerned to find clean showers and be in bed by 11pm.

But from the folks I spoke to, even die-hard HOGers were disappointed with the Barcelona event. We had to camp some 30Km outside the city simply to find space on a campsite. When we did venture into downtown Barcelona we found no signposting to the event at all, and hundreds of European Harley owners riding lost and hopeless around the cities urban motorway network in the 30 degree heat, desperately looking for clues. When we finally arrived at Montjuic Park late in the afternoon we found a huge empty concrete plaza, surrounded by a single row of marquees selling, you guessed it, official licensed product. And some of them even had the cheek to make you queue up in the hot sun and wait for your turn to be admitted to buy something. Admittedly a fair to middling band was cranking out some acceptable rock music down at one end and it was possible to buy huge plastic litre glasses of cold beer, if you had the funds. Craig Jones put on a superb display of stunt riding using a Dyna Super Glide and a couple of Buells, but I was somewhat bemused by the "Top Fuel Drag Bike Display" which took place on a hastily contrived drag strip which couldn't have been more than 30 metres long. Lots of wind and waffle, then a couple of fifteen foot burnouts and that's your lot folks.

Harleys own display of historic bikes was by far and away the most interesting part of the whole gig and certainly kept me engrossed for an hour or so, but in itself didn't really warrant a 2000 mile round trip. And, to be sure, we missed the bands which promised to top off the whole thing with a little style and passion (missing the Pretenders really choked me up, and ten minutes of the wonderful Chrissie Hynde could have given me a whole different perspective on the weekend). But the logistics of getting from the campsite into Barcelona, finding the gig, parking up, then getting back out again without risking getting lost, arrested or having the bike nicked (no secure parking for the humble punters here folks) made the whole thing more trouble than it was worth. Far better to stay near the campsite and explore the local night life, which in our case turned out to be a roadside brothel thinly disguised as a "club". Exotic maybe, but hardly rock & roll. And from the number of bikers present when I popped in for a beer (in the interests of research), far too dangerous a place for HOG members to risk visiting.

And the bikes? Well as with most big bike shows most of the really interesting machinery was outside in the car park. There must have been several thousand Harleys lined up outside the Olympic Stadium when we got there, but even then I was really disappointed with the turn out. Not in numbers, but in the quality of bikes. The majority were new-ish twin cams, all very shiny and glittering in the sun, but no more interesting than the line-up you'll see if you visit your local Harley dealers showroom. I spotted one mid seventies FLH shovel, and an Evo Fatboy which someone had bravely matt-blacked, and that was about it. Just rows and rows of new product with just minor variations in pipes and paintjobs. Admittedly a group of Germans were blasting noisily up and down the main street on what looked like TuV approved chops with big fat rear tyres, but the only other bike worthy of note was a lone Vespa scooter, bravely parked in the middle of an unending line of American vee twins. Where were all the Knuckles and Pans, the Servicars and Flatheads? Goddam it where were the 45 Flatheads which once helped liberate this continent from the Nazi jackboot? After 100 years of history I expected to see bikes a little more mature than this. Proof, perhaps, that the HOG marketing strategy really does work, for more than half the bikes I saw wore "limited edition" centenary emblems and looked about due for their first service.

We had only two days in Barcelona before we had to turn back to Blighty and work, and it says something that our group all opted to spend the second day pottering around the local sites or chilling with the peaches on the beaches rather than venture back to HOG heaven. Frankly, we'd seen all we needed to see in half an afternoon and even our most dedicated HOG patch wearer was souveniered up to the eyeballs.

I love my Harley, I love the engineering and the way it feels to ride. But after the Barcelona experience I'm beginning to wonder if the Harley Davidson brand name has descended too far into naffness. Before I went I was seriously considering a twin-cam Road King for my next bike. Thanks to the Harley Davidson Open Road Show, the Victory Vegas is beginning to look ever more attractive.

Dr.Rod.