THE PASSION OF THE BIKES II
Music is important as well, and I was happily tapping away to the hard rock stylings of Stone – who pressed all of my "I love that song" buttons with ease. They're a tight, sharp, hard-rockin' outfit I would happily pay good money to see again. All too often I have suffered through messy bands whose members had clearly taken a day off from the fast food industry to abuse their musical instruments in public, and it was great to see this wasn't the case this Good Friday.
And Stone was just the support band. The rockalicious Black Label was the headline act, but my aging constitution prohibited me from staying for their gig – which I have heard was thunderously great.
Of course, the organisers understand that most people have the attention span of a balloon and thoughtfully provided a raft of motorcycle-related distractions to soothe everyone's panic when they ran out of show bikes to look at – mad bastards from the St George MCC banging out flat-track demos on the trotting track, madder bastards from FTPstunts doing evil things on their stunt-bikes, and Extreme FMX defying death and smashed internal organs on their lairy chookies.
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The amount of money and attention to detail on some of these is astonishing |
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Uncle Bill builds the kinda fat-fronted bikes I could love deeply |
One could say that all the man-bases were covered, adequately and completely – and far more effectively than sleeping through a church service dealing with Roman administrative justice in the provinces.
But it is pointless to cover the man-bases without covering the bases for the man's partner and their offspring. On this great Friday, the ladies could spend long periods of financial irresponsibility at the stalls and the children could go climbing on the supervised rock wall or be fed to the live reptiles on show not far from the rock climbing set-up.
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Sometimes, stunting needs to be paused so that the parties concerned can re-adjust stuff |
Now let us set aside all the goodness that was there and attend to the elephant in the room. The elephant that is only present in the fevered imaginations of those who have a) never been to an outlaw motorcycle show; and b) actually believe what they read in the mass media about "bikies".
And since I know that many of you have not been to an event like this, it is my duty to speak the truth to you.
Here is the truth.
You and your hot and sassy girlfriend are safer at one of these events than you are in the pub on a dole-week Saturday night.
Do you know why?
It is because there is an immense amount of true hard men around. And true hard men have no interest in bullying people, intimidating folks and generating an atmosphere of nervousness and trepidation. The only people who get off on doing that are worthless shitheads that do not dare to go to shows like this because getting pissed up and acting like a dickhead doesn't go down well at events run by outlaw motorcycle clubs.
Trust me on this.
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This revolved all day on its own pedestal of glory |
You will encounter more grief, fake bad-arsery and chest-puffing at the Australian Tennis Open (especially when the Croats get their Nazi on) than you will at an event like this, where people actually smile and say "Excuse me" if they inadvertently bump against you in the crowd. No-one goes to these events looking to get liquored up and into some kind of UFC-based death match in the car-park. It just ain't like that.