Looking for America
Looking for America
by
Ian Mutch (first published 2001)
review by
Stephen Kearney
The Independent newspaper, in its obituary on Lord Denning, a one time powerful legal progressive who later went to seed in the mindless bog of English nationalism, mourned of his death at the age of 100 “if only Lord Denning had died at 70”. I was reminded of this very obituary after finishing Ian Mutch’s 317 pages of Looking for America. If only he’d stopped at 89 – page 89, that is.
But just to go back a bit, right to the beginning in fact, I had no idea that this book even existed until I noticed an ad in the Nov/Dec 2020 issue of the bi-monthly journal of the Motorcycle Action Group (MAG) by the editor, no less, one Ian Mutch. (I presume he got reduced rates) Due to his need to clear piles of his self-published books, because they just weren’t selling, he was offering four different titles for ten quid – including postage. Seduced by greed, I bypassed the my normal ‘taste and try’ regime. Believe me, publication of a book doesn’t mean its author can write. Indeed, some so-called best sellers fall short in this regard.
So, what’s it all about? The front cover gives a clue. An empty ‘two-lane blacktop’ runs straight across a lonesome scrub landscape that stretches out into the far distance, until eventually redirected by a distinctive mountain range on the horizon. Stars above (with stripes) complete the message. You can can almost hear the deep twang of a reverb guitar like the soundtrack of a spaghetti western. It’s Easy Rider time again. The visual image is backed up by the flyleaf note.
This is not a book about motorcycles. It’s a book about Americans, and about life. BUT if you can watch a Harley Davidson loaded up with a bedroll and saddlebags, rumble toward the horizon like thunder on vacation, and feel nothing, then this book is not for you.
This looked like a pretty exciting start. For those brought up with some concept of at least some aspect of the American dream at a time when some people might have believed in it, this has quite a pull. In the one book we have not just the USA and its endless evocative highways but also one of its most iconic, yes, icons in the form of a Harley-Davidson motorcycle! Ah yes, the Harley, and you can’t get much more American than that. In terms of recognition, this particular brand punches way above its weight, sometimes with surprising results. In 2007 I was in Ireland on a motorcycle holiday. In the course of visiting my past, I looked up a friend. We went to a pub in a pretty well-heeled area – because that’s where he lived. There I was introduced to a chap and his wife, both a bit younger than myself but probably pretty well heeled too because you’d need to be in this part of town. I was the poor interloper here, the apparent “Gypsy Rover”. Now the wife – I mean this man’s wife – clearly the worse for wear, decided that I was pretty hot stuff (yeah, that drunk!) and as this was the new, church-free Ireland, tedious rituals of etiquette could be dispensed with and anticipation of pleasure engaged with. Coming on, she gushed, prompted by my biker jacket, “do you ride a motorcycle?”. “Yes” I replied, warily observing the husband who was starting to glare. With an almost orgasmic pant she pouted “is it a Harley-Davidson?”. Now, there are red lines and red lines, and there are red lines you just don’t cross. This was one of them. I was simply not going to pretend I was riding a brand I never thought much of, regardless of the temptation. “No” was my short answer. I dread to think what would have happened had I said “yes”. Even as it was, the bearded husband was beginning to look at me with very serious menaces indeed, alternately fingering his Flammenwerfer, Panzerfaust or Sturmgewehr – metaphorically, I hoped.
Such is the power of this brand, it gets more than its fair share of accolades. Of course we all know that the real stars of Easy Rider were the two stylishly customised Harley-Davidsons that just screamed “U, U, USA”. I used to know a guy who was so besotted by the image, that he would go into motorcycle shops and ask for “a clutch cable for a Harley-Davidson” just so he could revel in the imagined awe and respect from all present, they unaware that he hadn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of owning such a machine – and this in Ireland. And then the Daily Telegraph some years back, ran a feature on Harley Davidson, the writer enthusing that the brand was “immortalised by Marlon Brando in The Wild One”, that 1953 Hollywood classic of two-wheeled teenage rebellion. A nice little twist, a nice little flourish to create the desired atmosphere – and never let the facts get in the way of a good story. Marlon Brando didn’t ride the revered American make; he rode a British one in the shape of a Triumph.
So what is the substance behind the myth? My brother once described Harley Davidsons as “pieces of American folk machinery”, reflecting their long history, starting in the first decade of the 20th century, America’s golden era, some call it. Of course Harley Davidson didn’t so it alone. There were quite a few manufacturers from the ‘golden era’ but one by one they faded as cars became cheaper and fashions changed. By 1950 only two American brands remained – and Indian was the other one, itself disappearing in 1953 – producing pretty similar American folk machinery in the form of large capacity, 45º, in-line, V twins designed and refined, as you’d imagine, for reliable long distance cruising in straight lines at moderate speeds while requiring minimal maintenance. Like Howlin’ Wolf, they were “built for comfort, baby I ain’t built for speed”, a bike for a steady rolling man, rolling across America. Speed and corners were not their forte. Elspeth Beard in Lone Rider: The First British Woman to Motorcycle Around the World tells how riding alone across in remote USA on her BMW, she encounters a gang of Harley mounted gorillas (apologies to the genetic ones). She’s doing about 60 on the dead straight blacktop as they start coming up around her with less than honourable intentions. She’s worried. She ups her speed to 70. They up their speed to 70. She ups it to 80. And so do they. Remember, her BMW R60, at 600CC, is half the size of the admiring Harleys. She ups it to 90. And so do they. She’s getting scared. Like Commander Cody in his Hot Rod Lincoln, her “foot was glued like lead to the floor, that’s all there is and their ain’t no more!”. Yep, she was flat out. There was no more escape through speed. Mind you, the pursuing Harleys wouldn’t have had much left in them by now either but still just enough, assuming the warriors could stand the engine vibration. It was looking bad for the Lone Rider. Where’s the cavalry when you need it? And then it arrived. The cavalry arrived in the form of a series of un-American bends in the road. Elspeth could hold her speed through the twists and turns and her suitors couldn’t.
Somewhere along the line, Harleys started acquiring a “bad boy” image, probably originating with the post WW2 emergence of American motorcycle gangs, as epitomised in The Wild One of 1953. But what really brought the brand to max bad was the ultimate motorcycle gang, the Hell’s Angels – and they, as true patriots, rode Harleys as branded badges of individualistic American machismo. They were the “one percenters”, “the one percent who don’t fit and don’t care”. Respectable they weren’t. They started achieving notoriety in the 1960s, appearing as a repulsive oddity to car-bound, status symbol, acquisitive, success fantasising America. They invited “fear and loathing” in the land of the respectable, whose inhabitants they derisively referred to as “citizens”. “Citizens” paid the mortgage, mowed the lawn, went to church, had a real good job and occasionally, very occasionally, even rode a ‘respectable’ motorcycle like a Honda for “a little bit of fun”, reflecting the new growth of the ‘motorcycle leisure market’; remember “you meet the nicest people on a Honda”. On a Harley you met the nastiest!
Harley-Davidson had a problem. What had stopped them going to the wall in the 1950s was bulk orders from American police departments, staffed by men typified in the comic strip adventures of Zip Nolan, Highway Patrol. But we were now in the 70s. Traditional motorcycle markets were changing fast with many long-established brands disappearing – and Harley-Davidson were very traditional. Technically, their bikes were primitive and not a patch on the Japanese competition. Even police departments, once upholders of American exceptionalism, were beginning to drift away to Kawasaki, Honda and BMW.
But Harley-Davidson still had two shots in their locker; sound and vision. To say that the Harley sound, product of a large, narrow angle V twin, is distinctive would be an understatement, with its dirty, loud, uneven gurgle even at tickover, suggesting a latent menace. It seduces the rebel in all of us. So distinct is this exhaust note and so unique to the brand, that HD even have it trade marked. OK they had the sound, and now for the vision or image. What might have been a marketing man’s nightmare, the “bad boy” image, they turned to their advantage. Apart from sound, it was all they had. Adapting a comment on German resistance by an American D Day general, Harley-Davidson didn’t have much but they sure as hell knew how to use it. They saw a marketing opportunity and began subtly playing up to the “bad boy” image, starting to take some of their styling cues from the Hell’s Angels customisation efforts, stripping away much of the bulbous bodywork of some of their previous models, replacing them with smaller and leaner parts from petrol tanks to mudguards. Apart from giving the bikes a lighter and leaner look, though they were still bloody heavy, it also emphasised the heart of the machine, that massive V twin engine, its true USP (unique selling point). These bikes looked – and sounded – like they meant business!
Now, as the Hell’s Angels were a bunch of losers, as Hunter Thompson tells us in his eponymous book of 1967, there is no way that they could have afforded a new machine. Even in 1960s America at the very zenith of the country’s power and prosperity, there were many, many losers, losers in denial who were yet appalled by the Angels, their fellow losers. “If every loser in the United States rode a motorcycle”, writes Thompson, “the whole highway system would have to be modified”. So, Harley-Davidson wanted to avoid the loser market, at least the one that couldn’t pay.
The 1980s saw the rise of the Yuppies – young(ish) and moneyed. It’s difficult to make money legally and be outside the system. So, they were real belongers (citizens!) but some of them wanted to pretend they weren’t. They were conformists playing at rebellion. They wanted an icon that told the world they were different, they were exciting, they didn’t really believe in the system, they were individual, they were a little bit dangerous and they were, above all, not just cool, but super-cool. They bought new Harley-Davidsons. HD made a killing. They sold to a world full of bank managers who, as one journalist described it, “wanted to look threatening at weekends”.
It wasn’t just in America. The marketing message crossed the Atlantic. Sales in the UK boomed too – relatively speaking. It too had its share of bank managers with attitude. It too had its share of customers prepared to suffer for fashion; I mean Harleys are at their best in conditions for which they were originally designed – American ones – you know, the great wide open spaces, endless empty highways beckoning the rider ever on to a new set of adventures beyond the next mountain range, a whole day’s ride away. I’m still looking for that in England. The actual conditions that exist in England in the meantime like narrow streets, congested cities, long traffic jams and rainy weather illustrate, shall we say, the Harley’s limitations. Yeah, they’ll manage those conditions but so do an awful lot of others, usually a lot better. But that’s bank managers (with attitude) for you.
Now, I have ridden a Harley, an almost brand new 1200, in England as well. Belonging to a rich boss who wanted to revel in being a rebel, he let me take it out for a few hours when his new wife interceded for me; suicide ended both their lives separately but I don’t think that can be blamed on HD; they don’t require that much suffering. I don’t deny the machine had a certain presence on the road unlike any other bike I’ve ridden; it’s also the only bike where I got the speedometer and the rev-counter mixed up. Yes, in some ways an impressive device that allows you to rumble along at 70MPH at just 3,000 RPM or even less. Less impressive were the handling and the brakes, both soggy. Overall though, I was struck by how unnecessary the contraption was. I mean, you could achieve exactly the same results with half the number of bits, ultra low RPM cruising excepted.
I understand, however, that there is a special breed of weirdo out there, people who aren’t normal like you and me, who love Harley Davidsons, I mean really love them and who are not bank managers. They have a sort of primeval affinity with those big, simple, crude machines making their own special noise, the bikes that is, that sit on the road like no other. These guys make their Harleys their own, their own special interpretation of the brand for no two are the same. These are the true steady rolling men and Harley Davidsons are their passion with slogans to prove it. “If God made anything better than a Harley” runs one “he kept it for himself”. They think that the Harley Davidson is the highest pinnacle to which man can aspire. They’re wrong of course because everyone knows it’s the 1968 – 70 Triumph Bonneville – and not the later imposters, devils quoting scripture. But let us not mock the afflicted. Ian Mutch is one such.
Founded in 1949, the Harley-Davidson riders club of Great Britain attracted riders whose appetite for traditional men’s machinery overwhelmed all rational thinking. If gorillas rode motorcycles, they’d ride Harleys. Some do.
And that’s what Ian Mutch says in another publication.
Some brands just inspire. Back in the 1970s when Triumph still inspired, a friend was strolling (with an independent air) along a street in Chelsea, proudly sporting a tee-shirt of his inspiration. Up ahead, a man, attired in a biker jacket stepped out of a doorway and, in the best spaghetti western style, began purposefully walking. The jacket was unzipped to reveal his inspiration, yes, Harley-Davidson. The tension rose as the distance closed. (cue suitable mood music) He fixed my friend with a steely eye, issuing his terse, one word, command “Draw”.
But let’s get on with Ian Mutch’s book. Going back to the flyleaf introduction, I was hoping for ‘true grit’, unsanitised America, the America of dive bars and truck stops, the America of dingy motels and beat-up diners, the America where the only sign of the American dream is the nightmare and all the attempts at reality avoidance from cops in cars to topless bars. In short, I was hoping for a glimpse of the other America told through pithy observations, sardonic wit and snappy one-liners on the part of the author and of those he encountered – with a few amusing Brysonesque detours thrown in. And this is what I got – at first.
Ian Mutch starts at the beginning with his arrival in the USA, which is a pretty good place to start. Unfortunately he doesn’t give a date but it seems to be late 1980s (established as 1989 while researching this review). He is a man on a mission. First he has to get his bike, a Harley, of course, and then cruise across the land to California via dive bars and cheap motels. He has to meet people en route, divers and cheapskates, Harley people one way or another, attend (bike) shows, talk to journalists and maintain contacts while never taking anything too seriously. Sounds like my kinda guy – apart from the Harleys, that is.
Of course in the best American tradition, he has to start on a Greyhound bus to get that Jack Keroac flavour. You see, his plane lands in New York but he has to get Ashtabula (I’d never heard of it either) in Ohio, a distance of about 450 miles. How do you get there? By Greyhound bus, of course, as American as, well …. Harley-Davidson, so American it’s in the songs too, like Johnny B. Goode’s mama who “put her little boy aboard a Greyhound bus, leaving Louisiana for the golden west ”. Don’t ask silly questions about taking planes – they’re for wimps. But first he has to get to the bus station at a place called ‘Port Authority’ and this very much engages him in the cheaper side of town. The place clearly made an impression for ‘Port Authority’ has a chapter all to itself.
Port Authority Bus Terminal, if Mr. Mutch is to be believed and I believe him for I have visited Miami, is the very antithesis of the American dream. There the human spirit seems to be reduced to its lowest level or maybe it never got above that level in the first place. It seems to be full of people born on the bottom rung and staying there, knowing they haven’t a hope in hell that anything will change for the better in their lives. Survival is all that matters and you take no prisoners. A seedy, low level, every man for himself attitude prevails, the unfortunates who trip up and fall off the bottom rung, scorned for their stupidity; the woman who loses her handbag, for instance, is described as “crazy” by the other waiting bus passengers. Certainly no-one is going to help. They don’t do sympathy at the Port Authority bus terminal. And they don’t do security either. A constant air of physical menace hangs over the place, causing the author to stay on maximum, nervous alert – just as I experienced in Miami back in 1980. Forty years later the memory has not died. It still stands as the worst place I’ve ever experienced in my life. Group or class poverty can bring out the best in people all around the world. In America it seems to do the opposite – it’s that old exceptionalism, again.
The mean individualism continues even into the bus queue with sloppy organisation exacerbating the sense of chaos and injustice that the desperate passengers wearily accept as their lot, even while loudly protesting.
So, what sort of people ride the Greyhound? Now, you might once have had romantic notions, driven by film, song and literature, that this was a good way to go – like “Ramblin’ Man” who was “born in the back seat of a Greyhound bus, rolling down highway 41”. And of course, Johnny, put on board by his mama. Combine that with the notion that the Americans are the greatest nomads on Earth, mixed in with a very stylish statement in transport taking you to the cities of all the songs, and you could well be forgiven for thinking it would be all a great adventure where you’d encounter interesting people, poets, artists and other free spirits sampling a taste of that nomadic life on the cheap, just waiting to get into songs, books or movies. Well, you’d be wrong and Ian Mutch would soon put you right. And so would Steve Turner who rode that way for the Independent in 2012.
Long journeys on Greyhound buses are primarily for people who are too large, poor, incapacitated, noisy or overloaded to take a plane. Few people take them for the sheer pleasure of staring out at the rich American landscape. The 3.30pm departure from New York to Chicago was full of people with walking sticks, squealing children and odd-shaped packages wrapped in polythene. For the first half of the 17-hour journey I sat next to a student in dark glasses who was returning home after an ill-fated relationship with a single mother he’d met on MySpace. The second half was shared with a generously built woman who spent her time on a mobile phone telling friends and relations about her summer job selling water, ending each conversation with a litany of I love yous that increasingly sounded more like threats than promises.
Ian Mutch could have written that very piece. Indeed, clearly having rapidly wised-up, he chose his seat or, more accurately, his fellow passenger, carefully. And he didn’t witness anyone giving birth – and he never met Johnny B. Goode either.
So, he eventually gets to Ashtabula, meets whom he’s supposed to meet, gets his Harley, a 1985 job, and sets out as a genuine steady rolling man, into the world of dive bars, cheap motels, truck-stops and the rest of underbelly America. He makes detours along the way, meets odd people, visits places here and there, and in the best western tradition, enters Dodge City on page 77 (cleans up the town – er hem) and leaves on page 89, in the best loner tradition of moving on.
This was looking good. I liked the writer’s wit, style, observations and self-deprecating humour. I was sold. I was so impressed I bought four more books from Mr. Mutch, two if which were this very book which I planned to dish out as Christmas presents. OK it was still four books for ten quid but the recipients wouldn’t have to know that. Having further enriched the author, I then continued Looking for America. Maybe I should have gone elsewhere.
The rot begins to set in on page 90. What starts out as buying a buffalo burger, just what you’d expect of a real biker crossing the USA, morphs into a long ramble about the morals of meat eating. It goes on for page after goddam page, like the American highway, all in a very serious academic style that leaves the reader wondering what the point is. I’m not doubting the sincerity of the views or the quality of the writing, but I was just wondering what the heck this man’s personal views on meat eating have to do with the story – a story I had been enjoying up to now. I persisted for a page or five and then jumped to the end of the chapter – and I’m pretty sure I didn’t miss anything. Indeed, I was on the verge of abandoning the book entirely but I continued, hoping for just one more nugget in the pan. Now, just to make a point here, I love detours in literature where people wander off course for a while. Well done, and Bill Bryson is a past master at the art, you feel you are going on a journey of discovery with the author, exploring new worlds and angles before you get back to the main drag, maybe several chapters away. Yet, Looking for America, which is supposed to be all about a journey of a steady rolling man on two wheels across the US of A while absorbing the whole feel of that vast land, comes to an abrupt halt. Movement, forward, rearward or sideways ceases to exist. The author goes into the land of serious. The journey just stops. It is abandoned. The previous style and substance – and the atmosphere – disappear as Mr Mutch gets all no-fun serious. As I skipped the tedium, I hoped it would be a one off. I was to be disappointed.
Bob Dylan’s Maggie of Maggie’s Farm, “talks to all the servants about man and God and law” and so does Ian Mutch, his readers taking the place of Maggie’s servants. We trudge on from the Mutch dilemma on the angst of the carnivore, to belief or lack of it in a deity, to the morality of compulsory crash-helmets, not told in relevant context through pithy one liners or cheap jokes which might have suited the book fine, but as though he were presenting a series of lengthy academic papers to a gathering of learned doctors – who wouldn’t know a Harley Davidson if it ran over them (and then they wouldn’t know anything else either). He might have done other subjects as well, but I soon got the knack of picking up the signs of a lecture ahead to skip a whole chapter, hoping that a better adventure might be coming up over the horizon.
Yes, there are some good bits further ahead where he gets back to what he’s really good at. Some of his descriptions are quite powerful: Grand Canyon seems an amazing place where human beings are utterly dwarfed – our species is put in its place – and his ride across Death Valley conveys a sense of total loneliness, a loneliness that was to be replicated in some other states where you can ride for 100 miles without even seeing another vehicle. Later on, he describes arriving at a Harley Davidson dealership; anxious to make the right impression, he checks his appearance, attire, up-market sunglasses and overall helmet-less style in the bike’s mirrors. He’s got the Harley style, alright. Yep, he is Mr. Cool – and he probably once called the English teacher “Daddio” too. Certain he’s got the look and the style right, and presuming that impressionable eyes are, well, eyeing from the showroom, he eases himself off the big Harley with the studied nonchalance of an Englishman who’s had more Harley miles under his belt than the unseen admirers have had hot dinners, only for the bike to topple over. The embarrassment. Suddenly Mr. Cool gets all hot and bothered. It’s not the only time this happened either as he also tells us.
I was particularly struck by a group of Harley riders he encounters who hate Japanese bikes with passion and intensity. Indeed, another of Ian Mutch’s publications carries a photograph of a group of American Harley riders smashing a Japanese bike to bits with sledge-hammers. This was a real throwback for me. Central to my new biker lifestyle starting in 1968, was hatred of Japanese bikes. I’d rather eat worms, as the old saying goes, than ride a Honda. In an article written over 40 years later explaining how I first fell into and then out of love with traditional British bikes, I had this to say:
Of all the groups in Ireland worthy of my undying enmity, and to my teenage self they definitely were worthy of it, because for me they formed the very antithesis of life force, I chose not one of them to be my main ultimate opposite. Oh sure, I hated them alright, but not quite as much as I hated Japanese bikes. I was like the members of the Popular People’s Front for the Liberation of Palestine who hated the Romans more than anyone else – with the exception of the People’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, whom they hated even more.
Yes, while there are gems to be found in the post 89 section, the book never really recovers. Ultimately, the thread has been lost along with the magic.
Curious as to what others thought, I checked the feedback on Amazon. If you want to find out what a product is really like, read the bad reviews first – and Looking for America has quite a few. 43% did give a 5 star rating but 30% give one star. This is a subject divided. One ‘lone star’ criticises “overblown prose” which I felt, was a little unfair, though sometimes you get the impression Mutch is trying a little too hard and maybe using one adjective too many on occasion.
I suspect that Looking For America might be Ian Mutch’s first book because he clearly has learnt something from the experience. His later efforts, also biker travelogues though some set in earlier times, are a much better read – and they don’t go that much beyond page 89 either. The man has learnt to quit while he’s ahead!
Looking for America review r4 by Stephen Kearney March 2021