Bleak Beauty Blog

ON THE MAKING OF THE BOOK, THE BIKERIDERS

“I used to be afraid that when Angels became movie stars and Cal the hero of a book, the bikerider would perish on the coffee tables of America. But now I think that this attention doesn’t have the strength of reality of the people that it aspires to know, and that as long as Harley-Davidsons are manufactured other bikeriders will appear, riding unknown and beautiful through Chicago,  into the streets of Cicero. “ From the 1968 introduction to The Bikeriders. 

Now that Jeff Nichol’s film has brought so much attention to the book published fifty six years ago by the Macmillan Company it seems appropriate for Bleak Beauty to comment on the making of the book. Put together over a number of years, no one in New York City, the center of American publishing would publish it. Finally Alan Rinzler, a courageous editor at Macmillan offered Lyon a contract for it, slipped that in with many books he was editing that season and it came back “approved.” The book was issued for $2.95 in soft back with “Adventure” printed on the back. The first edition was lacking in ink and seven of the forty-nine pictures were out of register. Within three years the book was remaindered. Lyon bought the last case for sixteen cents a copy.

Going forward The Bikeriders would be issued three more times. First, in 1998 by Jack Woody, and Twin Palms in an enlarged edition that was printed in gravure in Japan. Then in 2003 Chronicle brought out the third edition which included color pictures that MacMillan had not reproduced because of the cost, and also included a third introduction by Lyon. Finally, in 2014, Aperture brought out a facsimile edition of Lyon’s original book with gorgeous reproductions. It took the author forty-six years to see his vision of an inexpensive, beautifully reproduced picture book, a work of journalism, to be finally realized. 

 The Bikeriders was inspired by among other things, James Agee, William Shakespeare, Norman Mailer, and a self-educated curator of prints and drawings from Kentucky named Hugh Logan Edwards who walked with crutches and to whom the book is dedicated. It was never intended to just be a book about motorcycles. It was many things. It was a portrait of blue collar Americans, at the time ignored by what was later dubbed “the media.”. It was also an attack on journalism as it was being practiced in America which the author, correctly thought, was leading the country to disaster At the time, 1965, TV news was fifteen minutes long, and dominated by “Uncle” Walter Cronkite. The use of photography and text was dominated by Life and Look Magazine. Lyon, saw them all as not telling the truth to the public. He particularly targeted Life Magazine for destruction. Nor did he believe in “telling stories with photographs” , a myth perpetuated by Life. Photographs were visual. Stories were told with words.   

      With the book, Lyon was inventing a new form of reporting. Taken from reality, he felt the power of his subjects, real people, was so powerful that they didn’t need a story. Reality was the only story he believed in. It is the individual characters, all real, that make the book so compelling. The photographs are romantic as Lyon admired and looked up to all of them, but the tape recorded text revealed the darker and often comical sides of their lives. It is the combination of these two elements, finalized with ink on paper, that make The Bikeriders, so compelling. He thought of this new form as “Photo-Literature.”

    Nor did Lyon make the book in isolation. It was in fact the first of a trilogy that would for the future be arguably the most outstanding record of what America was like in the sixth decade of the Twentieth Century. The Bikeriders, The Destruction of Lower Manhattan (Aperture), and Conversation with the Dead (Phaidon) . Later Lyon was finally able to publish his work on SNCC, Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement (Available from Bleakbeauty) . All four of these projects were done in seven straight years, from 1962 through 1969.  Politically the work was proof that an individual could have great influence, that corporate journalism was a disservice to truth and was leading the country to disaster, and that over time the truth will out.