Outlaw Machine: Harley Davidson and the Search for the American Soul - Hardcover

Yates, Brock

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0316967181 ISBN 13: 9780316967181

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company, 1999

Synopsis

Outlaw Machine is the story of one of America's most enduring cultural icons. It tells the definitive history of Harley-Davidson motorcycles and their place in America's history.

About this title

Review:

The Harley-Davidson motorcycle, writes Brock Yates, is a quintessentially American machine: "flawed but honest and forthright, bombastic and audacious like the nation that produced it." Anyone who has pulled off the road to let a pack of Hells Angels roar by, or who has watched an executive trade in his Rolex for leather chaps and a custom Softail, also knows that the allure of the Harley is its rebellious, bad-guy mystique. In Outlaw Machine, Yates sets out to document the history of Harley-Davidson, as a company and as a symbol that helped create--and now sustains--American motorcycle culture.

What Yates gives us, in prose that aims for the sound and fury of his subject but sometimes suffers from a lack of agility, is a modern American success story--"the long ride of the Harley-Davidson into the mainstream." It is the story of how the Harley became the vehicle of choice for rebels and outlaw bikers; how the company distanced itself from this media-enhanced, antiestablishment image as it suffered the onslaught of Japanese imports; how the company stumbled, close to bankruptcy, into the '80s when it realized that the hard-core biker contingent exhibited unequaled brand loyalty. "If this rebelliousness, this sheer vitality and off-the-wall lust for the elemental life could somehow be tapped to offset the seamless onslaught of the Japanese, perhaps ... Harley-Davidson could survive."

Harley-Davidson has capitalized on its "reputation of veiled menace" to establish a marketing niche for the record books, and its classically styled, gleaming machines have become one of the most sought-after status symbols of the '90s. Yet Yates suggests that the Harley's power transcends the mainstream's co-option of its renegade image. "If that rumble, that ungodly roar, that death threat to collectivism and convention dies away, it will be time to turn out the lights." --Svenja Soldovieri

From the Inside Flap:

The legendary story of Harley-Davidson's rise to power--not only as an international industry leader but as an American cultural icon.

How did the Harley-Davidson motorcycle, originally a machine for casual riders, evolve into a symbol of defiance and liberation? An embellished 1947 Life magazine article about a California town terrorized by gangs of motorcycle punks changed the world's perception of motorcycles from sporty machines to menaces-to-society, and as the loudest and heaviest bikes on the market, Harley-Davidsons were considered the baddest of them all.

Outlaw Machine chronicles the fascinating social history that built Harley-Davidson's reputation--including the rise of Hell's Angels and the counterculture classic Easy Rider--and, more entrancing still, the bike's and its company's storybook rise to international fame and popularity. Written by renowned automotive journalist Brock Yates, Outlaw Machine is the definitive book on the Harley-Davidson and its place in American culture.

About this edition

• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0316967181
• ISBN 13: 9780316967181
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272