Greasers

Youth bands who introduced street style, a clothing style. La Honda, California, 1965: the meeting between Ginsberg, Ken Kesy and his Merry Pranksters with Sonny Barger, head of the Hell’s Angels, is remembered as one of the most productive intersections in the history of counter-culture. On that occasion, bikers took acid for the first time during a party that lasted two days and concluded with alliances. The Grateful Dead, presented in a embryo formation among the Merry Pranksters, would always employ the Hell’s Angels as their bodyguards in the future. Janis Joplin officially inherited them often wondering why and the Stones, on the advice of Jerry Garcia, successfully used the English contingent for the concert dedicated to Brian Jones in Hyde Park in 1969. They tried again, some months after the conclusion of the American tour, and the result was the Altamont mess. When the Angels arrived in La Honda they were already very different from the Bikers triumphantly embodied by Brando: Kenneth Anger, in Scorpio Rising, had already given a more updated version. Their style became decidedly baroque with chains, fringes, and studs. On the leather jackets, whose sleeves were sometimes cruelly removed, there were an enormous number of badges and signs that were very often ideologically worrying. Besides the Hell’s Angels, other bands included the Satan’s Slaver, Diablos, and Road Rats. All of them had a ostensibly demoniac behavior and they repeated their famous motto, “Better your sister in a brothel, than your brother riding a Japanese” (meaning a bike, of course!), while riding their Harley, Norton or Guzzi bikes.