Words by Jason Lee. Cover image by other Jason Lee.
We wanna be free! We wanna be free to do what we wanna do. We wanna be free to ride! We wanna be free to ride our machines without being hassled by The Man. [pause] And we wanna get loaded! And we wanna have a good time. And that’s what we’re gonna do…
Tho’ you may know the immortal words above from hearing them at the beginning of Primal Scream’s epochal 1990 indie-dance crossover hit “Loaded” and/or the opening of Mudhoney’s psyched-out grunge freakout “In ’n’ Out of Grace” from a couple years previous in both cases the sampled dialogue was lifted from Peter Fonda (who died in 2019, RIP) playing a nihilistic Hells Angel biker in The Wild Angels which in 1966 was Roger Corman’s latest low-budget cinematic provocation (the “King of the B’s” passed earlier this year, RIP) a film whose success led to a seemingly endless cycle of ‘cycle movies made mostly for the grindhouse and drive-in circuits and thus the genre of bikers-sploitation was born…
…films that like The Wild Angles projected America’s id and all the creepy-crawlies contained therein onto the crumbling silver screens of this nation’s most disreputable cinematic landscape and people ate it up like a box of stale Junior Mints with The Wild Angels being a chef’s kiss of shameless provocation (the “funeral party” scene in particular is still harrowing today and it says something that the freakin’ Hells Angels actually sued for defamation but hey’re no Black Skulls still) thus marking the starting point of bikers and biker culture taking on the mantle of modern-day “cowboys of the 20th/21st century” seeing as westerns were pretty much passé by the late ‘60s other than “revisionist westerns” that is made by directors like Sam Peckinpah whose blood-soaked magnum opus The Wild Bunch came out in 1969 and ditto for the Oscar-winning anti-western Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid…
…and ditto 1969’s Easy Rider which likewise starred Peter Fonda as a rebellious biker on an odyssey fated (spoiler alert!) to end in tragedy this time starring alongside co-stars Jack Nicholson and Dennis Hopper vs. Nancy Sinatra and Bruce Dern (Hopper co-wrote the film with Fonda and Terry Southern) and with the two leads named after Wyatt (Earp) and Billy (the Kid) the biker-as-modern-day-cowboy-type-iconic-figure-circuit was complete but with the main characters portrayed less as reactionary sadists as in The Wild Angels and more as progressive-minded, doobie-smoking folk heroes who elected to live outside the constricting parameters of mainstream society who like the idealized cowboys of yore were “rebellious, nomadic and clannish, often perceived as violent or dangerously antisocial”…
…cuz here’s a film that pinned the Vietnam debacle and the widely noted societal malaise of the late ’60/early ‘70s on Americans losing touch with the freedoms of the frontier era (not “freedoms” for all involved tho’ obviously) and “freedom” (however defined) more generally once there were no actual physical frontiers left to explore but with manifest destiny woven deep into the bones of the national characters many Americans felt stymied even if they couldn’t put their finger on why exactly feeling compelled to explore and expand personal horizons instead by means of (for example) riding motorcycles, taking drugs, making and consuming cool ground-breaking music and/or independent films, and so on cuz truly we’re a bunch of restless muthaf***ers…
…and when it came to newest frontiers around all these things (bikers, drugs, music, movies) Easy Rider was there at the right time and the right place as a practically DIY project (DIY for movies, anyway) made for a scant $400,000 then going on to gross $60,000,000 and with that the New Hollywood was born (Hollywood’s newest frontier natch) which gives an idea of how powerfully the biker archetype resonated and still does in the American psyche in its constant, desperate search for conquest and setting oneself apart with the movie doing another service to humanity in replacing the bongo-drum loving bikers of previous biker-sploitation films with a soundtrack full of heavy metal thunder and groovy hippie rock heard during the film’s extended chopper-riding sequences which displayed a semi-fetish-y quality (the clothes, the star actors, the bike technology) that built on Kenneth Anger’s super fetishistic underground sensation Scorpio Rising (1963) the first movie or so it’s been said to unite the holy trinity of black leather jackets, motorcycles, and rock ’n’ roll…
…which at last leads us to our subject for today which is Mag Electric’s recently debuted music video for their song “Mean Machine” with Mag Electric being a power trio from the borough of Brooklyn featuring Jack Simchak on guitar and vocals, Scott Meyer on bass, and Bill Peluso on the skins, a band that combines bloozy hard rock á la Deep Purple with QOTSA-worthy stoner rock vibes or better yet The Sword or Mastadon-worthy stoner-doom atmospherics alongside a healthy dose of heavy psych rock á la the Black Angels with some boogied-out pub rock influence thrown in for good measure to where if it were 1975 one could easily see Mag Electric touring the UK pub circuit with Dr. Feelgood and Status Quo…
…but of course that’s all an approximation cuz Mag Electric as hinted at by their name are a biker band plain ’n’ simple as witnessed in the aforementioned music video which includes a brief clip from Easy Rider alongside near-subliminal inserts of skeleton art and random explosions and Kelly Rohrbach running in slow motion and drag racing and a Mod vampire with bloody fans and and a T-800 Endoskeleton holding a machine gun and let’s just say Beavis and Butthead would love this video plus there’s a number of loving shots of motorcycle stuff like pounding pistons, duel clutch transmissions, and a Hello Kitty handlebar safety bell all of which I’m making up cuz I couldn’t tell a carburetor diaphragm from an ignition circuit breaker if you held a gun to my head…
…and if you’re going by the video and nothing else it’d be easy to believe Jack, Scott, and Bill might do just that with most of its running time being made up of the threesome looking vaguely menacing, “mean as a mean machine” with tight shots of faces and fingers playing instruments thus lending the video a semi-fetishistic patina Kenneth Anger woulda approved up with the boys modeling custom Mag Electric jean jackets with the sleeves cut off and this is exactly the kind of music you’d expect to hear blasting from the speakers of the busted-up Trans-Am the stoner kids always congregate around after high school lets out in the parking lot only entering the vehicle to rip major bong hits or to huff biker crank for the harder cases…
…but here’s the thing and don’t tell any of ‘em I said this but Mag Electric are really nice guys or at least they are in the confines of Otto’s Shrunken Head and the Kingsland where the Deli booked them to play in the past months but regardless their music sounds mean and of course its members are actual bikers or at least a couple of them are anyway with the salient point being how effectively they evoke bikerdom in their sonics and visuals like take the main riff of “Mean Machine” for instance…
…with its elemental yet oddly mesmerizing dare we say “graceful” melody providing the sleek, metallic framework to the song itself with it’s long and winding shape evoking a 1967 Triumph Chopper with a Captain America paint job thus perfectly evoking the American coat of paint put on the British roots of heavy metal at its most Sabbathy (played a tick or two slower and this is *totally* the great undiscovered Sabbath riff) with Bill and Scott’s super in-the-pocket rhythmic propulsion serving as as the fine-tuned engine driving the whole humming contraption forward with plenty enough low-end torque to spare…
…and so on and so forth for the other seven songs on Mag Electric’s debut LP Full Throttle which came out earlier this year that’re similarly built on the classic mechanics wit the timeless character and style of vintage biker-based rock eschewing extraneous bells and whistles (besides the Hello Kitty bike bell, that is!) which only makes them easy to modify and customize like with the minimalist chug and mind-warping dub sonics of “Ride” morphing into full-on guitar shreddage with bass counterpoint…
…or the driving psych-rock fantasia of “Iron Horse” (shades of Mastadon) or the head-nodding shuffle beat and machine-gun drum fills of the instrumental “Slippery Slope” or the album-closing “To The Boneyard” which adds a little organ and indie-rock jangle to the mix but otherwise would make a credible hair metal song if Jack sung in a screechy falsetto which he very much doesn’t and finally getting back to where we started, lyrically, all these songs are either explicit about bikes or if not they most definitely embody the 5 Golden Roles of Bikerdom as we’ll helpfully lay them out for you here:
#1 — Don’t tread on me i.e. leave me the f*ck alone and let me get along with my own business (“Thorn in my side”)
#2 — Go hard or go home (“Full Throttle”)
#3 — Recognize and honor your role as modern day inheritors of the American individualist mindset and mythos and treat your bike with the same reverence as a cowboy would his or her finest steed (“Iron Horse”)
#4 — As an adjunct to #3 being a real biker isn’t a hobby or even a lifestyle, it’s a full-on identity and there’s no such thing as retirement (“To the Boneyard”)
…and finally #5 and hopefully we don’t make the guys blush with this one but quite apart from cultural mythos and identity politics is the golden rule that motorcycles and the people who ride them are f***ing sexy beasts when you get right down to it which is quite literally true when you thin about it from an admittedly phallocentric point of view cuz here we’re talking about riding a big ol’ hog that you straddle and wrap your legs around like a tornado of pounding pistons throbbing between your legs as you alternately thrust the gas and the breaks to slow things down and speed things up until you find the perfect rhythm all the while fondling and squeezing the throttle going for as long as you can until you ultimately, hopefully, reach your point of destination if you know what I mean and I think that you do and if you don’t we’ll end here by encouraging you to take a look at the drummer’s tonguing technique below…