The American Motorcycle Icon : Its Not What You Think
It is said that the cruiser is America's motorcycle. After three decades as the best selling on-road type in North America there is little doubt that the large, V-twin powered bike with foot forward controls is the preferred format. Pop culture and the motorcycle media have long ago declared the cruiser as the archetype of American motorcycling. After all, what is more American than a Harley-Davidson roaring down a desert highway?
Well if you set aside popular iconography, the facts point to something dirtier.
North America is a vast and largely empty expanse of nature populated by adventurous peoples. Whether your roots are aboriginal or of recent or ancient migrant stock, most of us like to indulge in private explorations both physical and cerebral. Our culture owns the road trip. We champion this freedom to roam the roads which is why the cruiser works so well here for so many people.
But ask most North American motorcyclists where they got their first taste of motorcycling and they will likely tell you it was on some form of dirt bike. For many it was a small two-stroke ridden across a field. For others it was aboard the fleets of knackered dual-sport rigs operated by colleges as learner bikes. Or if you grew up in the rural north as I did it was wailing down a street in a cloud of blue smoke on the back of an unlicensed Serow XT225 wearing a borrowed helmet with no chin straps to buy a popsicle from a gas station. Dirt bikes introduce Americans to motorcycles, and they pervade into American motorcycle households long after. They are, by the numbers, the most common type of bike on our shores.
During most of the history of the motorcycle North Americans rode most of the bikes they owned on dirt most of the time. The cruiser owes a lot of it's form and layout to this reality. Harley, Indian, Henderson and the rest designed their big twins to handle the rough roads and rough hands of users the majority of whom lived on farms in isolated communities with few paved roads. Long fork rake, wide handlebars and balloon tires are not conducive to crisp road-holding, but stability and shock absorption over uneven ground.
As time marched on the basic motorcycle evolved into two distinct groups: most with a on-road bias and those with a distinctly off-road one. The former continued to fragment into the bewildering array of genres and niche categories known today while the latter was eventually distilled into the motocross motorcycle.
The great American motorcycle boom of the late 1960's and 1970's saw over a million new bikes sold per year and the lionization of the motorcycle in popular culture with films like On Any Sunday, Easy Rider and TV shows like ChiPs. By the 1990's the baby boomers who drove that sales bonanza aged away from deadly road missiles like Kawasaki's H2 Mach 3 towards more relaxed, more romantic and decidedly tamer motorcycles like Harley-Davidson's Electraglide. By the early 2000's, with reality TV shows about choppers on every night, exploding sales of large cruisers and substantial marketing to that end, the general public could be forgiven for thinking that the cruiser was the non-plus-ultra of moto culture.
But every other winter weekend across North America, 50,000 spectators pack stadiums in large cities to watch Supercross events, featuring riders doing unearthly things with dirt bikes to the deafening sounds of rock music and fuelled by energy drinks. In small towns throughout the heartlands kids and adults gather on hot summer nights to race on dirt ovals under the flood lights. In the back woods, hunters, woodsmen and friends blast along logging roads into the vastness of North America's wild spaces.
The humble dirt bike is in many ways the purest distillation of the classical motorcycle and of idealized American values. They are a result of necessity. They are practical, easy to work on and frugal. Devoid of superfluous adornment, these narrow planks suspended by two skinny wheels represent the very least amount of equipment needed to be a motorcycle.
Dirt bikes are completely at home in any household regardless of social class. Cruiser riders may or may not relate to sport bike or scooter enthusiasts but everyone is welcome on the dirt. The intense tribal rivalries that often stain motorcycle culture don't exist on bikes with knobby tires because once in the mud everyone is the same shade of brown. To ride in the dirt is universally appreciated, and doesn't conflict with an individual's on-road motorcycle values. A motocross machine can share a garage with any other type of motorcycle.
Since 1970, dirt bikes have overall outsold every category of road bike. More dirt bikes remain in the total operational fleet because they don't require paperwork or insurance to be employed. Europe's off-road motorcycle concept, the scrambler, may be enjoying a minor resurgence and cruisers still shine on the road, but the numbers are in. The dirt bike is the most common and accessible type of motorcycle in in the land, as well as the most democratic. What could be more American than that?