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"FacebookPinterest\n\nEvery Thursday we dig into the pages of vintage GQs to dust off the styles, stories, and crazy ads of the past\n\nIt has been a long time since the Rock Store Caf\u00E9, buried deep in Malibu canyon, has been a way station for the two-wheeled outlaw. Sometime around the late 80's there was a changing of the guard in biker bars all over California. The glass-chewing Hell's Angels type lost real estate to the dentist-out-for-a-weekend-jaunt type. In March of 1990, an article appeared in GQ called \"Hell's Yuppies\" that examined the yuppification of motorcycling, a phenomenon that has continued right up until today.\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nThe interesting story here though is not that motorcycling has spent the last quarter century becoming socially respectable, it's that socially respectable people have spent the last quarter century trying to look like motorcycle outlaws. At least on the weekends anyway. Roll up to the Rock Store Caf\u00E9 on any given Saturday or Sunday, and you will see leather vests, leather chaps, heaps of denim, and the occasional Kaiser helmet. You will also see a cornucopia of expensive iron\u2014Harleys, Triumphs, Ducatis, and yes, even Japanese bikes. All of which, or at least most of which, is owned, worn, and operated by a collection of businessmen, lawyers, doctors, dentists, real estate developers, etc.\n\nAccording to the 1990 article, no one is sure when this trend started. \"There are those who say that without a doubt it was Mickey Rourke's (or Stallone's or Schwarzenegger's or Dan Aykroyd's or maybe even Jay Leno's) riding his Harley-Davidson around town that put the biking bee in other well-to-do men's bonnets.\" From this 2013 perspective, it's hard to imagine Dan Aykroyd as some sort of cool-guy inspiration but there it is. Whatever the case, it's clear that in 1990 some rich dudes started riding motorcycles, which announced to other rich dudes that it was now a socially acceptable way to have fun. And while this article mentions that some of these yuppie bikers adopted styles of the outlaw biker, many of them looked like they came, \"out of a J. Crew catalogue.\"\n\nThe key difference between now and then however is that the Rich Urban Bikers of the early 90s came to \"shit holes like the Rock Store to lose themselves among the fugitive kind.\" But stop by the Rock Store today and you won't really find any of the fugitive kind. Rest assured, Jax Teller isn't waiting there to pound anyone's face in. Instead, you will find a bunch of middle to upper class men dressing like they were the fugitive kind. We are in a culture that in many ways is more about consuming cool than creating cool. In the 1960s, guys like Steve McQueen rode their way into American mythology aboard Triumph motorcycles. Today, you go into a Triumph dealership and buy a McQueen inspired Scrambler, a McQueen T-shirt, and a McQueen branded Barbour jacket. As Hunter S. Thompson wrote in an article for The Nation that eventually became the book Hell's Angels, \"Probably the most universal common denominator in identification of Hell's Angels is generally their filthy condition.\" Most of the bikers found on a Sunday at the Rock Store are wearing clean pressed jeans, unspoiled Harley branded leather jackets and vests, and, at most, a well manicured goatee. Hardly the reckless band of outlaws that inspired fear across the Californian heartland 50 years ago.\n\nSo the question then is, why pretend to be a weekend outlaw? It's simple; the outlaw represents freedom. Freedom from the cubicle, freedom from the nanny state, freedom from mortgages and cell phone bills and responsibilities. It's hard to imagine a Hell's Angel worrying about whether their home loan is variable or fid APR, and for a few hours on the back of a motorcycle, even an orthodontist can feel like a Hell's Angel. Bob Hall sums it up best in \"Hell's Yuppies\" when he says,\"There's a phone in my car; my secretary knows where I am twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week\u2014she can reach me in the car, she can reach me at home. I mean, I'm always reachable. When I get out and go on the Harley now, I'm capturing some of that memory. I'm unreachable. Nobody knows where I am.\"\n\nRead the full \"Hell's Yuppies\" story here"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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