The women of the Hell’s Angels were bad, brassy, bombshell ‘old ladies’
Queens of the road, on the far side of the law
It’s a peculiar happenstance of history and geography that California is the last true bastion of Wild West ethos. That a place so densely populated and observed can still be considered “expansive” is the same self-mythologizing we’ve come to expect from Berkeley professors and middle-aged punks. But to some, California will always represent the ideal convergence of land, sea, and rugged individualism (a sentiment which tracks unapologetically from white settlement and 19th century resource exploitation through Summer of Love nostalgia and present day liberal smugness). But while hippies were forging a pervasive sense of California cool in the late 1960s, homegrown outlaw motorcycle clubs were dropping a turd in the veggie burrito of Golden State exceptionalism. And they looked damn cool doing it.
Photographer Bill Ray spent a month shadowing the San Bernardino chapter of the Hell’s Angels in 1965. His pictures are emblematic of the club’s carefree lifestyle — at home on the road, in pool halls and road houses, pummeling brews, and thwarting the man — but Ray also got close to the women who rode with the Angels. These tagalong teens and “old ladies” are some of the most captivating subjects in his series, though we know very little about them.
In an interview with Time, Ray explained his interest in the women he met while on the assignment for Life magazine:
“One thing about the Angels that I found fascinating, and something I’d never given much thought to before I started photographing them, was the role that the women played,” he said. “The girls weren’t there in chains, or against their will or anything. They had to want that life if they were going to be accepted by the Angels. These guys were kings of the road. I don’t think they ever felt they had to look around for girls. Girls would come to them, and they would take their pick. And then they’d tell them where to sit and what to do.”
The Angels were the most notorious of the motorcycle clubs to emerge in California after World War II, and by the mid-sixties were coming under increasing scrutiny by lawmakers and the public alike. Biker gang hysteria was spreading like wildfire when Hunter S. Thompson started profiling the San Francisco chapter in 1965, and exploitation films like Roger Corman’s The Wild Angels would soon establish an entire film genre dedicated to outlaw stories. The rest of the decade would see numerous other iterations on the theme, including the landmark 1969 film Easy Rider. But Ray’s images offer a refreshingly candid portrait of outlaw culture seen not for its explicit criminality, but as an honest expression of youth romanticized.
Unfortunately Ray’s photos, and the accompanying article by Joe Bride, were never published. Dismissing their subjects as “those smelly bastards,” LIFE’s managing editor George Hunt deemed the story unfit to print. But the pictures have emerged in later years as one of the earliest, and most telling portraits of biker gang reportage. More so for the ample emulsion Bill Ray committed to the Angels’ “old ladies” — their girlfriends and female coconspirators on the long road to freedom.
“At the root of their sad stance is a lot more than a wistful yearning for acceptance in a world they never made; their real motivation is an instinctive certainty as to what the score really is. They are out of the ball game and they know it–and that is their meaning; for unlike most losers in today’s society, the Hell’s Angels not only know but spitefully proclaim exactly where they stand.”
— Hunter S. Thompson
“The generally bizarre flavor of their offenses and their insistence on identifying themselves make good copy, but usually overwhelm–in print, at least–the unnerving truth that they represent, in colorful microcosm, what is quietly and anonymously growing all around us every day of the week.”
— Hunter S. Thompson
