Bikes, Blues and Boomers

Back in the summer of ’72 I lived with a bunch of bikers in North Little Rock who rode with a motorcycle club called the Road Barons. It was a lot of fun. Even though I didn’t ride, they didn’t mind me hanging around, because I was always pretty quick to pick up a guitar. They were a raggedy-ass bunch (but I was kind of raggedy-ass myself). We usually had about four bikes apart in the front yard (or living room), as they were continually looking for parts for their panheads, flatheads or shovelheads. I’ll bet they didn’t have more than $500 in each bike.
Take a walk down Dickson Street this week and you’ll see a different picture.
You’ll still see quite a few raggedy-ass bikers, but you also see a lot of do-rags hiding twenty dollar haircuts. Today a Harley Fat Boy will set you back, what, eighteen grand? You gotta have means to put a ride like that under you. And from what I hear, there’s a pretty good demand for what Harley is putting out.
I think it’s the same phenomenon that’s driving the market in vintage guitars. You have a big group of folks who have come into a little money in their maturity, and are saying, “I want a guitar just like I had when I was in high school playing with the Mohicans, that I sold to go to med school.” And, of course, there’s a finite number of ’68 Teles, so the price just keeps going up. That’s why I’ll never get one of those ’59 Les Pauls like Mike Bloomfield played that are now going for over $100K. I guess there are a lot of products like that: muscle cars, toys, baseball cards, comic books. So whether your interest is sixties Strats or Softails, you’re just gonna have to pay more. Damned doctors.