Street Smart

9 x 12

Oil On Linen Board

I'm merely a poser when it comes to motorcycles,  limited to only doing doughnuts on my son's honda 75 in the backyard . I have been infatuated with the biker phenomenon though since childhood.  Bored out of my skull one evening as my parents were having dinner with some neighbors, I asked if I could go upstairs and check out their son's double drum kit that I had heard about. He was away at college, and his parents saw no harm in letting me venture up there and bang away a bit. When I walked in and turned the light on, the first thing I saw was a giant poster of two long hairs on beautiful choppers crossing a bridge somewhere in the desert. It was the coolest thing I had ever seen, and later found out it was Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda on the opening credit scene of Easy Rider crossing the Colorado River into Arizona.  It was much later before I actually was able to see the movie that managed to escape the B-rating stigma of the 1960's biker films and received a nomination for best screenplay and best supporting actor for Jack Nicholson at the 1970 Oscar Awards.
Having only seen it on video in a vcr in high school, I couldn't believe my eyes later in college when I saw an advertisement in the Daily Tar Heel that the old film would be shown at the Carolina Union Auditorium at midnight that coming up Saturday. Some friends and I stuffed as many beers as we could into a backpack and watched in awe as the huge speakers bellowed out the rumble of the bikes as the big screen brought this timeless classic to full life with the old skips and scratches of the old theater movies on reel. I will never forget it.
A few years ago, I attended a painting workshop in Sedona which is only about 20 or so miles south of Flagstaff where all of the desert scenes for Easy Rider were shot. Highway 89A has become a shrine of sorts for biker purists as this was the route used in the movie to film the scene of picking up the lone hitchhiker. With some time to kill one day before we started painting, I took my rental car up 89A to Flagstaff and found the old hotel that the two tried to check into at the end of the credits at the beginning of the movie. The building is still standing, but is privately owned and sits on a dead-end stretch of old highway that used to be the old Route 66 that was still being used at the time of the film. The owner let me peek inside and the "No Vacancy" sign was in the biker bar just a mile back up the road.

Sedona and Flagstaff are not short of motorcycles of any sort due to the connection of the movie, but street and touring bikes like these prevail. A red Fatboy with ape hangers caught my eye,  my camera and eventually my linen panel.