![]() ![]() Hopper co-stars as the the mustached hippie rider Billy, but the arguable leader of the duo is the flag-bedecked Wyatt (Peter Fonda), celebrated by his pal as “Captain America”. Set to classic rock like The Byrds, Jimi Hendrix, Roger McGuinn, and Steppenwolf, we follow two bikers in their journey across the United States, from the open desert of the southwest into the close-knit conservative communities of the deep South. To some, it explores the death of the American dream through the concept of freedom, asking what it really means to be a free American. When I learned the second Saturday of October is commemorated as National Motorcycle Ride Day, I realized I’d gone far too long without shining a sartorial lens on Dennis Hopper’s iconic cult classic, Easy Rider.Ĭonceptualized by Hopper, Fonda, and screenwriter Terry Southern, Easy Rider‘s chaotic production and controversial themes have been the product of considerable discussion since its release during that seminal summer of ’69. Peter Fonda as Wyatt, aka “Captain America”, freedom-loving bikerĪcross the southern United States from Los Angeles through Louisiana, February 1968 ![]() ![]() I’d put Wyatt around that age too.īut Fonda made it beyond that, to 79 farewell but not goodbye, Easy Rider, and thanks from all of us, wherever we are.Peter Fonda as “Captain America” in Easy Rider (1969) Vitals The Perfect Age of Rock ’n’ Roll, directed by Scott Rosenbaum, explores the uncanny fact that Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Brian Jones and Jim Morrison all died at 27. Ulee’s Gold revitalised his career in 1997. He is honest about his own career on the snakes-and-ladders board of the movie industry, and the writing on his family deepens this existential solitude he is raw on the appalling relationship with his famous father, Henry, and the gradual disappearance of his mother from any role in his life.Įasy Rider was of course not Fonda’s only film. Fonda’s candid memoir Don’t Tell Dad is a litany of confrontations with authority, in which he usually comes out on top – but their telling oozes a certain sorrow, albeit magnificent. It was existential: like Jack Kerouac, even Albert Camus, Fonda encouraged, inspired and – in another way – was responsible for that sense of self-imposed “un-belonging” that has propelled my life (for what that is worth) and, more importantly, some of the best writing and music of my generation.Ī sense of exile in the land where you were born a sense of identity that only feels at home when it is nowhere, or at least in between one place and another.įonda practised this in his real life: he often said that motorcycles were his “only focus” he loved sailing. As I write this, the descendants of those thugs who battered George, then shot Wyatt and Billy to death converge on Portland, Oregon, for a far-right rally where they can spit their same murderous hate in a bastion of liberal tolerance – what they perceive as Fonda-land, on the west coast.Īt a deeper level, Fonda’s hitting the open road was more than geographical and even cultural. This was Fonda’s message, and genius: whether he foresaw it or not, he presented in his most famous film not a dawning of the age of Aquarius, but a bitterly riven America.įeel familiar? Though my generation watched Fonda’s open-road strike for freedom drop-jawed, we now behold the vindication of his darker vision. While the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Buffalo Springfield and the Byrds (who recorded The Ballad of Easy Rider) proclaimed the new liberation within the mind and on the streets, Fonda tested it to the limit, and his character Wyatt paid the price with his life. He took the 1960s dream out of the comfort zone, away from Haight Ashbury, Sunset Boulevard and Greenwich Village, out into real America – where it twisted into nightmare. In this way, Fonda was the cautionary tale in all that summer of peace and love. But we didn’t want to be attacked by club-wielding rednecks, we didn’t want the bad trip, and certainly didn’t want to be gunned down on a lonely road. ![]() Either way, people my age watched Fonda on the edge of our seats, wanting to be him to feel that liberation through wind and speed across America’s boundless space, to be by that camp fire. On the other hand, Fonda’s film was the first to portray LSD as a horror show. Of course it has dated, the fact that the road trip was funded by smuggling cocaine from Mexico has lost its romance, as has the whole – in retrospect grotesque – glorification of drugs. Easy Rider was the 35mm celluloid Woodstock it was the reckless hippy gypsies’ manifesto of endless asphalt ribbon. ![]()
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