Adventures . . .

By John Terence Turner
Stock Asylum Columnist
Oct. 1, 2007

© 2006 John Terence Turner

It all began, as adventures sometimes do, with a misunderstanding.

I had sold a number of large prints of skiing and sailing to a trendy lakeside restaurant in Seattle.

The manager said they would also like some pictures of motorcycling. Specifically, he mentioned motocross and hillclimbs.

Steve Stafford, vice president of the Iron Lords, saved turner some grief by informing another motorcycle group that the author/photographers was "our staff photographer." ( © John Terence Turner ).

A while later I mentioned the conversation to a model with whom I had done some work.

“Oh,” she exclaimed, “I know some guys who ride motorcycles all the time. They’re going to a big race this weekend and maybe we can go along.”

I imagined some young stockbrokers and lawyers with BMW bikes.

How wrong I was.

Saturday morning I put my bag of cameras and lenses into her burgundy Corvette and we went to meet her friends.

“We’re leaving from this bar where they hang out in West Seattle,” she said. This was not the University District, nor Madison Park, two areas where the kind of guys I was imagining would hang out.

I should have been suspicious, but I was too naïve.

We headed not to Alki Beach of West Seattle, but the Duwamish River Waterway, a grimy, industrial section not far from one of Boeing’s big plants and a steel mill.

As we turned off an exit ramp from the First Avenue South Bridge, I saw the parking lot of the Red Feather Tavern and its occupants.

The Iron Lords, tired from a day of racing and various other activities, are pictured during their return trip to Seattle. ( © John Terence Turner ).

I almost had a heart attack.

These were not young executives who rode on weekends, these were outlaws They were the equivalent of the Hells Angels.

Rows of glittering Harleys and their hairy, sunburnt, road-begrimed owners filled the lot.

My friend waved gaily and my hand involuntarily clenched the strap on my camera bag as I thought, “My cameras aren’t insured.”

My situation was the result of a misunderstanding. It is a common word, and is used frequently. It suddenly seemed terribly inadequate to describe the situation in which I found myself.

It needed a modifier — like “catastrophic,” for example.

A biker from behind at the campfire after the races in Castle Rock, WA. ( © John Terence Turner ).

Catastrophic misunderstanding or not, it was entirely my own fault. I was a victim of my own assumptions. I assumed they would be what I wanted them to be but I didn’t inquire if they were.

I hadn’t asked what kind of guys they were, what kinds of bikes they rode.

“Bikes!" They weren’t “bikes!” They were choppers.

Bikes are for people in lycra, sipping lattes in front of Starbucks. Choppers are for dirty, sweaty leathers and heavy boots and joints with beer chasers at the Red Feather.

The new movie in my imagination was now showing me beaten to a pulp in a roadside ditch and my cameras in a pawn shop in Pioneer Square.

I should interject here that a photographer should always do “due diligence,” before a shoot. That is, ask all the possible questions about what you are getting into, and with whom.

That said, had I done that, I might not have gone because pictures of outlaw bikers weren’t what my client wanted. If I had done that, I would not have experienced all of the things I’m writing about in this column.

John Hardleg, whose fight with another biker led to non-injury shooting incident at the Red Feather, enjoys a cigarette and something to drink. ( © John Terence Turner ).

But in real life I was in the parking lot of the Red Feather, meeting a bunch of guys who were eying me suspiciously and who were willing to tolerate me only because I was a friend of a friend.

She had told me one very valuable thing, however: “These guys spend all their money and time on their choppers and they love to have pictures of themselves on their Harleys.”

Following that hint, I began to ingratiate myself with them. I didn’t disguise my ignorance about their machines and they were happy to tell me all about them.

They were members of the Iron Lords Motorcycle Club and their colors proudly proclaimed it.

“Colors” are denim vests with various cloth patches that designate rank and drug preferences. On the back are bigger patches that denote the club and city.

Our destination was Castle Rock, WA, a town of 2,000, located 123 miles south of Seattle.

The event was a 750 cc dirt-track race that had become the reason for an annual gathering of outlaw bikers from the Northwest United States.

The town’s population increases by 50 percent for the weekend of the races. Nearly a thousand outlaw bikers converge on the three-block downtown area for drinking, drugging, various macho displays and to show off their choppers.

En route to Castle Rock, I made myself popular with the bikers by shooting extensively from the open Corvette.

As the double line of choppers roared down I-5 we drove alongside a chopper and I began shooting. The biker invariably looked my way and grinned the sly, pleased look of a proud parent.

Once we arrived, I busied myself shooting the scene.

The two bars were overflowing into the street. Bikers polished their machines, lounged on them, chugged beers and ogled girls and traded drugs in the alleys.

Unbeknownst to me, I had seriously irritated a different club with my photography.

The Third Rail guys I had photographed while they made a display of French kissing to shock the locals, had decided they didn’t like my intrusive cameras and intended to punish me.

They told this to Steve Stafford, the vice president of the Iron Lords because they knew I was with his club.

“Leave him alone,” Stafford improvised brilliantly, “he’s our staff photographer.”

The Third Railers were stunned. “Damn!” they said, “The Iron Lords have a staff photographer! We should have one too.” I was left unmolested.

This picture of two bikers trying to shock the locals by kissing cost Turner a sleepless night. ( © John Terence Turner ).

The mellow mood of the day turned menacing as the sun disappeared.

Conflicts erupted between different clubs, thrown into proximity in the field next to the track where all the gangs had elected to spend the night. There were a couple of fights and a chain-whipping as a punishment for some biker’s offense.

A whole day of drinking and ingesting various drugs created the inevitable social frictions and magnified personality aberrations and psychic warps as the night wore on.

Contributing to the atmosphere was the sound truck, the Iron Lords had brought with them (driven by someone’s girlfriend). Iron Butterfly boomed out of large speakers mounted on the truck’s roof.

The Iron Lords stood in a circle around large bonfire, drinking, swaying and stomping to the music. “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” still resurrects aromas of marijuana sweat and stale beer.

The mood darkened as the races ended and truculent bikers looked for trouble. Accordingly, I decided to be more discreet with my photography. As a tactic to prevent annoying anyone, I pre-focused my Nikon with a wide-angle lens on my intended subjects, lowered it to my thigh and kept my finger on the shutter release.

I waited until someone started up a chopper or for a particularly loud passage from Iron Butterfly or the Rolling Stones to obscure the sound of the motor-drive.

When that happened, I fired off a series of exposures from the camera hanging at my thigh without raising the camera. It wasn’t ideal for composition, but it kept me from being challenged by a crazed, paranoid biker.

The summer continued — profitably for me. Two-by-three-foot black and white posters could be made from any photo for about $6.

I had many made from the Castle Rock trip and sold them to the bikers for $20.

On numerous Friday nights I arrived at the Red Feather with a fat roll of prints for my eager customers. I left with a fat roll of money.

On one such summer evening, I arrived with a bundle of posters, unrolled them on a pool table and distributed them to my customers.

While sitting at the bar talking to one of the Iron Lords, I noticed a commotion outside and saw a stream of bikers and their girlfriends walking out the door to better observe something below the level of the window.

I followed them.

Once outside, we saw the prostrate form of a young man lying unconscious on the sidewalk. His girlfriend was attempting to revive him by slapping him and pouring water onto his face.

“What happened?”

“Oh, some argument. Hardleg cold-cocked ‘im.” Hardleg was John Hardleg, a member of the Iron Lords, a tough-looking solidly-built guy with a blonde moustache that curled around the edges of his mouth.

No one seemed to care if the recipient of Hardleg’s attention revived or not, so we all filed back into the dimly-lit bar for another beer.

Casual violence was as common as a hangover and was accepted just as readily among the patrons of “The Feather.”

After a few moments, we heard a Harley roar to life, followed by the squeal of rubber on asphalt.

“Brad woke up and left.” Somebody said.

Biker gossip continued and another round of beers arrived. The hum of conversation over juke box music was interrupted by what sounded like a gunshot.

Everyone in the booths by the front windows dove onto the floor. Some patrons headed for the side doors. Unwisely, I went to the front door and looked out into the front parking lot.

I saw the recently unconscious Brad crouched behind the tail fin of an older Cadillac. He was pointing a handgun toward the Red Feather and shooting!

At that moment, I realized why I had spotted Brad so readily — someone was pointing him out for me. It was the person behind whom I was standing at the side of the doorway. My eyes had naturally followed the line of his arm. At the end of that arm was a pistol and it was shooting at Brad behind the Cadillac!

I quickly ducked back behind the wall, figuring that if Brad shot back at the holder of the pistol, I could get hit. There were a few eruptions of asphalt where bullets hit the surface of the lot, but this gunfight at the Red Feather didn’t really go anywhere.

Brad had parked his chopper where it was sheltered from view from the Feather.

He crept back to it, cranked it up and raced away.

Within a very few minutes, the crowd in the Red Feather were back to normal, playing pool, drinking beer and listening to the juke box.

Their recovery seemed astoundingly quick. If something like that had happened at the college hang-out named the Attic in Madison Park, there would have been waiting lines in every psychiatrist’s office within miles.

The kissing picture of the two guys from the Third Rail was published in Seattle Magazine as a part of an article I wrote, “Uneasy Riders,” on the biker phenomenon.

One of my friends from the Iron Lords informed me that the publication of that picture had caused the Third Rail to want to retaliate — against me.

The retaliation was planned, he said, to leave me either dead or seriously hurt. They would find me at the Red Feather, lure me outside, surround me and stab me. He told me that the Third Railers would say they acted in self defense.

While the scenario was extremely improbable, it didn’t matter. As it happened, I was pretty busy at the end of that summer. I was getting married and moving to New York for grad school at Columbia. So I just stopped going to the Red Feather.

One night, however, the familiar roar of Harleys invaded the little lane in front of our tiny cottage in a canyon on the shore of Lake Washington, awakening us.

I told Lynda to get in the bathroom and lock the door and keep the lights out. I jumped out of bed, grabbed my father’s old .32 Beretta, chambered a round and got behind our small sofa.

There commenced loud pounding on the front door. I had the Beretta trained on the top half of the door and “screwed my courage to the sticking point” –– or the shooting point in this case.

The pounding continued, diminished and then stopped. The choppers retreated and went away. Hearts pounding, we hugged and kept the lights out — just in case. Sleep did not come easy—but the day dawned and we were still alive.

When we got married, we invited a half-dozen Iron Lords I had come to know and like. They came with their ladies and wore their best dueling shirts.

It was an outdoor reception on a pleasant summer afternoon in Seattle. The Iron Lords were on their best behavior and they added a colorful aspect to the reception.

Then we moved to New York.

While we were on the East Coast, there was fatal shooting at the Red Feather. The state revoked the liquor license and the landlord bulldozed the building and “put up a parking lot.”

But Lynda and I are still married.

(John Terence Turner has been shooting stock photography for 20 years. His work can be seen at Getty Images, Alamy and, of course, The Stock Asylum, where his column appears twice a month. He lives and works in Seattle, WA.)

 

Turner's web site can be found at: http://www.johnterenceturner.com.

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