20. The Riot and Movie That Gave Rise to This Kind of Cool Bad Boy Fashion
Try as they might, the authorities’ efforts to maintain order in Hollister proved fruitless. The chaos only ended when the Gypsy Tour ended, and the bikers headed back home. Two months after the Hollister Gypsy Tour, the same biker clubs descended upon Riverside, CA, for the Labor Day weekend. It was another AMA-sanctioned event, and it ended in the same chaos that had engulfed Hollister. Riverside’s sheriff blamed punk kids, and stated that: “They’re rebels, they’re outlaws“. That established the imagery of outlaw bikers.
The Hollister Riot in particular inspired 1953’s The Wild One, starring Marlon Brando. It was the original outlaw biker movie, and the first to examine American motorcycle gangs. It also made biker fashion the height of bad boy cool. A few months later, in March 1948, some of those clubs came together in Fontana, CA, and agreed to merge. They chose a name suggested by a veteran who had served in China with the Flying Tigers’ Hell’s Angels Squadron, which got it from the 1930 Howard Hughes movie, Hell’s Angels. When questioned about the missing apostrophe, Hell’s Angels often retort “it is you who miss it. We don’t“.
