Riding with the Hells Angels: Bill Ray’s 1965 LIFE Assignment
Photographer Bill Ray and writer Joe Bride walked into the Hells Angels' world at almost the exact moment the rest of America was deciding what to make of them. It was 1965. Newspapers were full of motorcycle-gang stories, Hunter S. Thompson was beginning the reporting that became Hell's Angels, and LIFE wanted its own look inside.
Ray and Bride got closer than most. They spent more than a month around the San Bernardino chapter, moving through the clubhouse, bars, the road to Bakersfield, police encounters and all the dead time in between. Then LIFE killed the story.
1965 and the New Motorcycle Outlaw
The Hells Angels were not new in 1965, but their national celebrity was. A widely reported 1964 incident near Monterey had pushed California motorcycle gangs into headlines, and the state attorney general's office produced a report on the subject. The Nation handed that report to a broke young Hunter S. Thompson and paid him $100 to investigate.
Thompson's “The Motorcycle Gangs” appeared on May 17, 1965. He would spend much of the next year around the Oakland and San Francisco Angels and turn the article into a book. At almost the same time, Ray and Bride were working the San Bernardino side of the story for LIFE.
Easy Rider was still four years away. Ray was photographing the motorcycles and people that helped create the stereotype, not guys copying it afterward.
Big Daddy Roth Opens the Door
Joe Bride got the introduction through Ed “Big Daddy” Roth. Bride had been reporting on Roth's Southern California hot-rod operation when the Hells Angels were all over the news. Roth knew Angels and did business with them, so Bride asked if he could arrange a meeting.
The answer came with conditions. Two Angels met Bride at Roth's shop, blindfolded him and drove him into the mountains. When the blindfold came off, he was at a bar surrounded by motorcycles. He played nine-ball with an Angel, won two out of three games and negotiated permission for himself and Ray to shadow the club.
That access lasted more than a month. Ray later said the main thing was convincing people he had nothing to do with the police. He did not try to dress like an Angel or pretend he was one. He showed up with a camera, treated people with respect and kept coming back.
Inside the Berdoo World
Ray's photographs are strongest when nobody is doing anything designed for a headline. Members hang around. Motorcycles are prepared for the run. Women sit in bars. People drink. Someone sleeps. Somebody else watches the street.
Ray summed up the attraction and the problem in one sentence from the original article: these were people who rejected the stability and security most Americans were working toward. The bikes, bars and club were the alternative.
“This was a new breed of rebel. They didn’t have jobs, of course. They absolutely despised everything that most Americans value and strive for — stability, security. They rode their bikes, hung out in bars for days at a time, fought with anyone who messed with them. They were self-contained, with their own set of rules, their own code of behavior. It was extraordinary to be around.”
Ray did not pretend the scene was harmless. He remembered pot smoking and seeing Angels beat other bikers behind a bar. He also said he never personally witnessed the deeper criminal activity newspapers were assigning to them. What he did notice was that nobody seemed to work and there was always money for beer and gas.
Members, Women, Reporters, Police and Locals
LIFE's captions put names and roles to quite a few faces. Hambone, Buzzard and Big D are named. Joe Bride and Bill Ray appear together in one frame. Other captions identify women riding with the Angels, a sheriff's officer and Bakersfield locals.
Some of LIFE's wording is very much from 1965, especially the repeated use of “old ladies” for women traveling with the Angels. That was the magazine's language with these photographs, and it puts the reader right back in the period.
The photographs also show how much of the Angels' power came from simply appearing together. A teenager staring at the motorcycles or a man in a suit inspecting a row of Harleys tells you exactly how unusual the sight still was.
The One-Percent Patch Was Already There
The broader Ray assignment includes a photograph of a rider named Roseberry wearing the diamond-shaped 1% patch. By 1965 the symbol was already part of outlaw-club identity.
The clean little origin story says the American Motorcyclist Association answered the 1947 Hollister trouble by declaring that 99 percent of motorcyclists were law-abiding and only one percent were outlaws. The exact AMA quote behind that story is a lot harder to pin down than the legend. I would not bet a Panhead on the wording.
There is no ambiguity about Ray's 1965 photograph. Roseberry was wearing the patch. Whatever route the term took getting there, it had arrived.
Bakersfield, Police and a Hillclimb
The Bakersfield run gives the assignment its most public scenes. The Angels made the Blackboard Cafe their temporary base, police watched them, locals watched the police watching them, and the motorcycles filled whatever space was left.
The companion road photographs follow the ride, crashes and roadside stops in detail. Here the useful part is the crowd around the bikes. One LIFE frame shows an Angel being frisked by police. Another identifies Roseberry while he is being fingerprinted. The club, the cops and the people watching them were all part of the same Bakersfield scene.
Then the group found a motorcycle hillclimb and wanted to participate. Organizers initially refused, the discussion became tense, and eventually the Angels were allowed in. Ray was photographing motorcycle culture colliding with itself: club bikers, organized competitors, sheriff's officers and spectators all in the same place.
Bill Ray and the Open Road
Ray understood why the motorcycles could turn rough characters into a romantic picture. He compared the biker on the highway to the cowboy myth—real life was harder and dirtier than the version people wanted to imagine, but the silhouette worked.
“There’s a romance to the idea of the biker on the open road. It’s similar to the romance that people attach to cowboys and the West — which, of course, is totally out of proportion to the reality of riding fences and punching cows. But no doubt, there’s something impressive about these Harley-Davidsons and bikers heading down the highway. You see the myth played out in movies, like Easy Rider, which came out a few years after I photographed the Angels. You know, the trail never ends for the cowboy, and the open road never ends for the Angels. They just ride. Where they’re going hardly matters. It’s not an easy life, but it’s what they choose. It’s theirs. And everyone else can get out of the way or go to hell.”
The bikes help explain why the myth stuck. These are working customs, not polished museum pieces: Harley big twins with modified front ends, high bars, stripped bodywork, road gear and repairs accumulated from actual use. The chopper was still being invented one motorcycle at a time.
LIFE Never Used It
Ray and Bride did the hard part. They got inside, stayed there, brought back photographs and copy, and gave LIFE a story few other magazines could have made. The managing editor still killed it.
Bride later remembered George Hunt dismissing the idea because he did not want to publish a piece on “those smelly bastards.” Ray said that was simply how some assignments died at LIFE: one editor did not like it, and the work went into the files.
Decades later the LIFE/TIME archive finally published the photographs with Ray and Bride's recollections. Ray also issued the work as Hells Angels of San Berdoo '65: Inside the Mother Charter.
LIFE's readers never saw them in 1965. We get the whole mess now—people, motorcycles, cops, bars and all—before the movies cleaned the outlaw biker up into a costume.