Outlaw
Machine
Harley-Davidson
and the Search for the American Soul
by Brock W. Yates
Hardcover - 202 pages 1 Ed edition (June 1999)
Little Brown & Company; ISBN: 0316967181
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,
anti-establishment 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
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