The Aging Rebel

Yesterday, well known motorcycle enthusiast Ralph “Sonny” Barger asked his social media followers and fans to tell Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation to let go of his story, contained in his 2000 book Hell’s Angel: The Life and Times of Sonny Barger and the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club. In a post on his Facebook page, […]

Ralph Hubert “Sonny” Barger, a still active member of the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club and an icon of American individualism, announced on his Facebook page yesterday that he is moving back to Oakland. And, when he gets there he will register to vote. And, after he registers he intends to vote for Donald Trump for […]

George Christie’s reality television program, Outlaw Chronicles, will end tomorrow night with an episode titled ‘Sonny vs. George.’ So far the show has been equal parts fantasy, vengeance and profit opportunity and there is no reason to expect that the final episode will be different. The History Channel describes the show like this. “In an […]

George Christie’s television show has problems. The other night  Outlaw Chronicles: Hells Angels was cablecast opposite Kurt Sutter’s The Bastard Executioner and its audience dwindled. It is now averaging about 915,000 viewers per airing. The show’s audience peaked with the second episode. Entertainment executives usually prefer that television shows build audiences rather lose them. On […]

Ralph “Sonny” Barger is still annoyed by George Christie’s “reality” television The Outlaw Chronicles, or as Barger prefers to call it, The Out Bad Chronicles. Barger was an Angel before and during Christie’s tenure. Barger remains a member. Christie does not. There is obviously bad blood between the two men and while Christie uses the […]

One of the million or so people who have been watching George Christie’s reality series on the History Channel, about what it is really like to be a Hells Angel is very well known Hells Angel Ralph “Sonny” Barger. Barger has been taking notes while he watched and he has offered to share them here. […]

“Pride and memory were having an argument,” the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once quipped. “Memory said ‘It was like this’ and Pride said, ‘Oh no! It couldn’t have been!’” For the last three weeks on the History Channel, former Hells Angel George Christie has lectured a weekly cable audience of between one and two million […]

There is going to be another attempt to make a film about the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club. According to multiple published sources, Rob Weiss will adapt Sonny Barger’s memoir Hell’s Angel: The Life and Times of Sonny Barger and the Hell’s Angels Motorcycle Club for the screen. Weiss has an extensive filmography and he has […]

My all time favorite death threat, sent from a proxy server in Germany, was “Somebody ought to shove a little steel in you.” What I liked was not the originality of the sentiment – lots of people want to stab me – but the onomatopoetic alliteration, which I thought was absolutely inspired. The repetitive esses […]

If you haven’t seen Dead In 5 Heartbeats on a big screen yet, your time is running out. The film, based on Ralph “Sonny” Barger’s 2004 novel of the same name will screen twice in Los Angeles tomorrow and once in Tucson next Friday before its release on DVD. The Los Angeles screenings will be […]

Clifford Park “Skip” Workman died Saturday in New Harbor, Maine. He was one of the last of the original Oakland Hells Angels and his life was interesting and fully realized. Skip Workman joined the club while he was still in the Navy. After a nasty motorcycle accident in 1957, Sonny Barger rebuilt his bike for […]

Where you are going is always where you are. The destination is always the getting there. So at the end of all my journeys it is 45 degrees and gray. I am sitting all alone at a red light on an empty stretch of Pacific Coast Highway. There is not a cop in sight so […]

Biker books are always written by one of two categories of authors – either the “participant observer” or the “objective journalist.” The books by objective journalists are usually the worst. Yves Lavigne and Julian Sher epitomize this style; crass and self-righteous. But some of the books by participant observers like Doc Cavazos, William Queen and […]