Born to be Wild
Every once in a while I see some sort of special event that catches my fancy. A few weeks ago I stumbled on an online ad for a one-night-only 50th anniversary showing of Easy Rider at Radio City Music Hall. It’s actually 50 years, two months and six days since the first day of release of the movie on July 14th, 1969, Bastille Day. Fifty years is a long time. Easy Rider was about freedom. The freedom to buy and sell drugs for a profit. The freedom to put your money literally in your gas tank rather than a bank. The freedom to jump on your motorcycle and ride across country. The freedom to sleep under the stars. The freedom to just be who you are in a world gone hostile. I booked the show, not because the movie was so great (it’s actually pretty cheesy as I remember it), but because it invokes the America of my youth, the passions of my youth, and it takes me back to the carefree days of hopping on my motorcycle and riding across Europe with my American flag on the shoulder of my flea market army jacket and my silver helmet with the Robert Redford Downhill Racer “USA” in black lettering on the front.
Peter Fonda, Wyatt or Captain America in the film, made it a month past the 50th anniversary. He was 79 when he took the double barrels of lung cancer, not unlike what happened to Wyatt and Billy on that long levee road in Krotz Springs, Louisiana. Billy was a sullen and hirsute stoner played by Dennis Hopper, a guy who came to symbolize the lost anti-establishment 1960’s. It’s funny, Hooper’s career spanned the James Dean Rebel Without a Cause 1950’s, the rebellious 60’s on a chopper with Peter and Jack, the late Vietnam ‘70’s of Apocalypse Now with a bald Colonel Kurtz Marlon Brando, the town drunk in 1986 Hoosiers stepping in for Gene Hackman, and the Deacon Smoker of Waterworld to Kevin Costner’s Mariner. Ever the man at the fringe of mainstream life and culture, he died in 2010 at 74. The third man of note in the movie, the one that was nominated for an Oscar, was Jack Nicholson. Jack is going strong at 82, though he hasn’t made many movies since he killed himself off in The Bucket List in 2010.
I dove into these show tickets with the freedom and abandon that seemed appropriate to the cause. That is to say, without checking first with Kim. I bought four tickets for this revival spectacular at the world’s grandest venue at Rockefeller Center. It’s a movie, despite having some accompanying on-stage musicians to give us some serious Steppenwolf vibrations, so choosing seats had to be thought through. I got the higher-priced, but not over-the-top tickets for the front mid-section of the orchestra. The front mezzanine was crazy expensive, and the orchestra seats were six times the price of a regular movie, but what the hell, it’s a once-every-half-century event. We will dine at Del Frisco’s Grille at Rock Center with equal abandon and not beyond meat.
Picking guests to invite for a 50-year-old movie of this genre also takes some thought. There has to be an appreciation of the art form (I mean movies in general, not cheesy, seemingly homemade, movies). They should be of an age to appreciate the 1969 era, which was transformational to most of us. Some think Woodstock in ‘69. Others think Moon Landing or Cornell Student Union takeover. I think of Easy Rider. Given the biking theme of the movie, it might have been best to find someone who rode in 1969 like I did, and still rides now avidly, like I do. That’s a hard find for a Friday night in Midtown, so I reached out to two of my favorite people, Terry and Paula. It was a long shot, but I scored. So we four will head up to Rockefeller Center for a special evening of steaks and cheese.
The 1960’s took me from the age of six to sixteen. I went from liking Ike to hating Nixon with the interregnum burden of the tragically lost youth of Kennedy and the confusing reality of Johnson (confusing because for a good ol’boy grifter from Texas, he pushed for a Great Society). I went from worrying about how short to crew cut my hair to how long to grow my pork chop sideburns. I went from riding my used bicycle around the cracker-box suburban neighborhood in Madison, Wisconsin to riding my Triumph Tiger 650 TR6R across Europe. The sixties ended with Easy Rider. I never did drugs. I never owned guns. I looked a bit like Billy around the facial hair, but I was never long and lean like Wyatt. What I shared with Wyatt and Billy was a love for the open road on the back of a powerful motorcycle.
I didn’t know it at the time, but the role played by Jack Nicholson, George Hanson, is more like me than either Wyatt with his idealism of peace and love or Billy with his pragmatic suspicion of The Man. George is a cross-cultural statement that represents (to me, anyway) the change from the staid fifties to the business-like seventies. He is a lawyer wearing a suit, who still worries what Mama’s going to think but has a great big freak flag that wants to be flown. He is dying for the freedom that Wyatt and Billy have and he joins them on their journey because it’s time for a change and he is prepared to seize the moment with a football helmet and a knee-high uncomfortable seat on the back of Captain America.
The theme song for Wyatt and Jack as they cross the bridge into New Orleans is Steppenwolf’s Born to be Wild:
Get your motor runnin’
Head out on the highway
Lookin’ for adventure
And whatever comes our way
Yeah Darlin’ go make it happen
Take the world in a love embrace
Fire all of your guns at once
And explode into space
You cannot beat those lyrics for inspiration as you start a motorcycle ride into the southwestern United States, something I do every May. But the George Hanson song is If You Want to Be a Bird by that ever-famous group The Holy Modal Rounders, and it speaks to getting high and coming down hard into reality, much like the sixties ending and moving into the harsh realities of the stagflation of the seventies. Its tag-line ending was:
If you want to be a bird
It won’t take much to get you up there
But when you come down land on your feet
I managed to land on my feet in the early seventies, not as the gold helmeted engineer I planned to be, but the pin-striped economics and finance guy I became. I am thus a reverse George Hanson. I went from doing what suited my generational peers (the engineers on one side and the hippie save-the-world crowd on the other) to what suited the times. It so happens it ended up suiting me as well since I may have been born to be wild, but in the paraphrased words of Forrest Gump, wild is as wild does.