Hell's Angel: The Life and Times of Sonny Barger and the Hell's Angels Motorcycle Club

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More About This Book

Overview

Narrated by the visionary founding member, Hell's Angel provides a fascinating all-access pass to the secret world of the notorious Hell's Angels Motorcycle Club. Sonny Barger recounts the birth of the original Oakland Hell's Angels and the four turbulent decades that followed. Hell's Angel also chronicles the way the HAMC revolutionized the look of the Harley-Davidson motorcycle and built what has become a worldwide bike-riding fraternity, a beacon for freedom-seekers the world over.

Dozens of photos, including many from private collections and from noted photographers, provide visual documentation to this extraordinary tale. Never simply a story about motorcycles, colorful characters, and high-speed thrills, Hell's Angel is the ultimate outlaw's tale of loyalty and betrayal, subcultures and brotherhood, and the real price of freedom.

Editorial Reviews

From Barnes & Noble
The Barnes & Noble Review
July 2000

High on the Hog

No spiking the club's booze with dope.
No throwing live ammunition into bonfires on runs.
Weapons will be shot only between 0600 and 1600 hours.
No messing with another member's wife.

Such are among the rules codified by Ralph "Sonny" Barger for his infamous brotherhood of hogriders. Sonny Barger is no angel; he's a Hell's Angel. In fact, he's one of the founding members and High Priest of the Hell's Angels Motorcycle Club (HAMC) and has survived four reckless decades of drug abuse, murder, mayhem, incarceration, political clashes, throat cancer, and endless tanks of gasoline to tell his story — finally, for the first time, the real story. In Hell's Angel, Barger reveals with disarming candor the behind-the-scenes history of the most feared and notorious motorcycle club of all time, which he started with his buddies in post-World War II Oakland, California, more than 52 years ago, after scoring his first Harley at the age of 18. As Kerouac and friends were shambling cross-country in a beat-up Buick, Barger and his Angels were burning tread marks in the tar and instilling fear, envy, and wanderlust into the heart of America. In the years since, the Angels have been (or been viewed as) everything from the death of the '60s (following the pivotal Altamont stabbing at a Rolling Stones gig) to the epitome of the wild, freewheeling life on the open road to Reagan-era scapegoats for every crime ever committed.

At last, it's time to set the record straight — and, fresh off an18-stop book"run" from Chicago to L.A. along America's "Main Vein," Route 66, Barger aims to do just that. So get your motor runnin' and head out on the highway.

Seattle Times
“Hell’s Angel chieftain Ralph ‘Sonny’ Barger has led one interesting, bad-to-the-bone life.”
More Reviews (1) Fewer Reviews
From The Critics
“Barger paints an engrossing picture of a distinctive subculture that receives precious little literary attention.”

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780060937546
  • Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
  • Publication date: 10/28/2001
  • Edition description: Reprint
  • Pages: 288
  • Sales rank: 69,283
  • Product dimensions: 5.31 (w) x 8.00 (h) x 0.64 (d)

Meet the Author

Ralph "Sonny" Barger is the author of Hell's Angel: The Life and Times of Sonny Barger and the Hell's Angels Motorcycle Club. A master mechanic who has owned and operated his own bike shops, he currently lives in Arizona, where he rides every day.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

Muster To Custer


A motorcycle run is a get-together, a moving party. It's a real show of power and solidarity when you're a Hell's Angel. It's being free and getting away from all the bullshit. Angels don't go on runs looking for trouble; we go to ride our bikes and to have a good time together. We are a club.

Most Hell's Angels are great riders. A group of Hell's Angels cruising down the road, riding next to each other and traveling at a speed of over eighty miles an hour, is a real sight. It's something else, a whole other thing, when you're in the pack riding. It's fast and dangerous and by God, you better be paying attention. Whatever happens to the guy in front of you is going to happen to you. It's different from other vehicles. You gotta be alert. Like Fuzzy, an Oakland Angel, once said, "God damn, we do eighty-five or ninety in the rain sometimes. I don't even go that fast in my car!"

When Hell's Angels chapters started getting chartered outside the state of California in the late sixties, that's when we first started our cross-country rides like the USA and World Runs. We'd meet up with the new clubs along the way, and they'd join the run. Man, we used to ride from Oakland to New York on those early rigidframe bikes, and they bounced around so much that if you drove sixty miles in an hour you were making great time. The vibration left you tingling and numb for about an hour after you got off your bike. lf you covered three or four hundred miles in a day you were hauling ass. The other big problem then was that we'd have to find gas stations every forty miles or so, since those old-style bikes with small tanks couldn't make itpast sixty miles. Today, on a Harley FXRT, with their rubber-mounted motors and big gas tanks, you not only get a smoother ride, you can log five or six hundred miles a day on a few tanks of gas without breaking a sweat.

The big differences between the Hell's Angels and the rest of the motorcycle world are our bikes and the way we ride. This is serious business to us. Our bikes are us. We know that. The cops know that, and everybody else should know that too. The law and the road are one. Even today, if the cops know a large group of Hell's Angels is headed somewhere, they'll show up in force, alerting neighboring police forces along the way. This mutual assistance pact they set up has been used against us for as long as I can remember. It's no different today than it was thirty years ago. We keep going and they keep coming around with all their surveillance methods and radio equipment watching us and keeping tabs. We don't look for trouble or have intentions of starting any, but by God, it always seems to be around.

The reactions of law enforcement can depend on where you are. We were on the road tearing through the Texas panhandle and on into Oklahoma. As we approached Oklahoma City, ten or twelve Oklahoma state troopers pulled onto the freeway and escorted us right through the city limits. They didn't even want us stopping for gas.

In Texas a cop asked me, "Excuse me, partner, but ... why do you and your friends carry those big knives?"

I told him, "Because we're all felons and we can't carry a big gun like you."

Another time in Missouri, fifteen of us were sitting by the side of the road taking a break when a state trooper pulled up, got out of his car, walked up to us, and said, "Mind if I ask a stupid question?"

"Not if you don't mind a stupid answer."

"What are fifteen Hell's Angels from California doing sitting on the side of the road in Missouri?"

"We lost four or five of our people and now we can't figure out where they're at."

The trooper thought for a few seconds. "I just might be able to help you. I could get on my radio and start checking around and help you find them." He radioed around to a bunch of stations and other troopers, and once he located them, he gave us directions on how to meet up with our lost brothers.

On the other side of the coin, there was a cop in Texas who spotted us on a highway outside of Amarillo, got scared, or else thought he was doing his job, and called for reinforcements.They roadblocked the highway in front of us with machine guns.Another time on our way to South Carolina we were stopped and each of us was ID'd.It took over two hours, and all for nothing.Cops can be assholes when they want to be.

The Hell's Angels Motorcycle Club has four or five mandatory runs per year and probably fifteen or twenty parties and smaller runs.If you multiply that by the forty years the Oakland club has been around, that's a lot of motorcycling.But of all the runs, there is one in particular that sticks in my mind, and that was the time we descended on the big annual Black Hills motorcycle run in Sturgis, South Dakota, in 1982.I'll try to describe it as best I can remember it, because in my mind it separated the sheep from the goats.We code-named that run "Muster to Custer."

There was another motorcycle club-whose name I won't mention because it is a big club and we've been at odds with them for years-who in early 1982 had said publicly that the only reason the Hell's Angels didn't go to Sturgis was because they went to Sturgis.

Customer Reviews
Average Rating 4.5
( 63 )

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  • Posted May 14, 2011

    Reliving family stories

    I brought great joy to hear these stories told the the one and only Sonny! Well writen and true to the facts and open.

    3 out of 3 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted March 17, 2011

    This book is hardcore and well written!

    If you have any interest at all in the motorcycle club culture this book is a must read. It gives a pesronal insight that is second to none since since it comes from the first in command! You can tell Sonny has a passion for motorcycles as well as his club and brothers. Read this book!

    2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted May 4, 2010

    more from this reviewer

    I Also Recommend:

    One of the best i've read

    This was a very good read, I enjoyed it very much!

    2 out of 3 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted December 5, 2011

    disappointment

    The book is just one we are bad and this is what we did over and over again. It was a disappointment it may have been better if he would have had help with writing it.

    1 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted July 16, 2008

    Fantastic!!

    Hell's Angel will bring out the outlaw motorcyclist in you. From the first to the last you will feel like Sonny is telling you about his ups and downs throughout his time with the Hell's Angels. You will gain a respect for their brotherhood and devotion for each other. You won't be able to put this book down.**Enjoy**

    1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted August 23, 2011

    Highly Recommend... Couldn't put the book down!

    One of those books that you stay up into the wee hours of the night reading even though you know you should be sleeping to be at your best for work in the morning. Sonny's dry sense of humor is hilarious and very candid.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted December 13, 2006

    Very good

    If you are into motorcycle groups, or the hells angels, or modern day rebels this book will suit you well, I read this book over summer and I really enjoyed sitting down and reading it.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted July 29, 2005

    Excellant, Exciting and Insightful

    One of the best books I've read. Sonny Barger teels it like it is. The formation of one of the largest Motorcycle Gangs in the country shows the changing climate in the nation along with the need for freedom.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted December 16, 2003

    Expose' on the Angels lifestyle

    Interesting view of one of the original bike gang/club's in America. I share with Sonny Barger the love of H-D motorcycles and chopping but I can't idolize the outlaw lifestyle he lived.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted November 1, 2002

    Awsomely suspenseful

    The summery of this story was a very tough story. It is a five star rated story because he throws his great life away.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted July 21, 2002

    More than enough...

    Sonny Barger gives you more than enough Hell's Angels stories than you could ever imagine. Barger leaves nothing out in telling tales of the motorcylce crusades across the country. Stories that will blow your mind away about drugs, Prison life and of course girls.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted September 5, 2002

    AWESOME!!!

    Your books are awesome.Brotherhood is is something true,and you have proved that in your books.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted June 27, 2002

    Great Book

    Once you pick it up, you cannot put it down! Barger did a great job depicting his life and all the excitement and hardships he endured starting the Hell's Angels Motorcycle Club. I only wish that there were more to tell. After reading this book I want to meet the man behind the story.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted September 18, 2001

    RALPH 'SONNY'BARGER IS TO MOTORCYCLING, LIKE 'GOD IS TO HEAVEN'.

    I CANNOT THINK OF A HEAVEN WITHOUT GOD, NOR CAN I THINK OF MOTERCYCLE WORLD WITHOUT 'SONNY' HIS BOOK LET ME IN HIS WORLD FOR A SHORT WHILE. THIS WAS A PRIVLEGE I WILL ALWAYS REMEMBER.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted April 27, 2001

    Setting the Pace

    You will hear the throaty roar and feel the vigration of a good road machine as you cruise past these pages about a real life leader of the pack. The motorcycle club subculture has been an important theme in Hollywood (from The Wild One to Easy Rider) and in recordings (the song, Leader of the Pack). Everyone who sees the Hell's Angels has an opinion about what is going on, yet few have had a first hand relationship with a member. This book gives you a behind-the-scenes look at what it was like for Oakland's leader of the pack, one of the first branches of the Hell's Angels. I grew up in San Bernardino (Berdoo in the book) which was an even earlier branch of the Hell's Angels than was Oakland's group. Some people I went to high school with joined the Hell's Angels. We all heard many stories about the group, and what went on. We treated these people with extreme caution and gave them a wide berth. The book brings out an ethos of freedom (the open road) combined with a masculine emphasis on being respected and being loyal to friends. At the same time, there is an underlying sense of the frontier marshall, wanting to clean up those who were challenging law and order. Behind that there is a disregard for the rules most of us follow, whether in speed, drugs, theft, or violence. This book is filled with deaths, injuries, and destruction. The Hell's Angels live in a dangerous world, and that doesn't bother them. What would bother them is not following their code of ethics. Having read about all of the things the Hell's Angels are supposed to have done in the last 50 or so years, it is interesting to hear it from the other side. Although you probably won't want to emulate Sonny Barger in too many ways, you'll certainly never forget him. If you love motorcycles (as many of us do), you'll be moved by his loving descriptions of various bikes. He was truly the wild one at the head of the bike pack. I would suggest that you not share this book with impressionable adolescents. Donald Mitchell, co-author of The Irresistible Growth Enterprise and The 2,000 Percent Solution

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  • Anonymous

    Posted February 25, 2001

    The Truth About An American Legend

    This book was recommended for me to read by my boyfriend, who does follow the Hell's Angels; not as a biker, but just as a 'fan.' Finally know the truth about the man and the myth. The man who has fought for what he believes in. The truth and way that he and others want to live. Keep on riding Sonny, along with the rest of you.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted January 2, 2001

    The Story straight from the Horses mouth !

    THIS IS A RECOUNT OF THE GENESIS OF BIKER CLUBS.The thing that you can say is the rules that society makes are an evolutionary process.[Not Darwin type,the real kind]In this book you will get a real sense of what an organization based on a mans word can accomplish.As it is told ,the life of a Clubmember has a code similar to the the Mafia.Meanwhile the government is exposed for what they are ,tyrants ,by Sonny's recounting these stories.The times have changed and the Angels much like the Mafia members were disallusioned by the free living and cavalier lifestyle.I think it was very honest of the founder of the HAMC to tell this side o the story ,and the members stories who have fallen by the wayside ,many died for the same reason they lived ,pushing everything to the limit ,living on or even over the edge. Bottom line ,interesting ,revealing,and fasinating!

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  • Anonymous

    Posted November 25, 2000

    Righteous story!

    Sonny has done another great service for those of who ride, and have riden, not because it is the 'cool' thing to do. The book accurately and truthfully portrays a way of life that is foreign to most Americans. More importantly it portrays a level of commitment, self reliance and personal responsibilty that only we bikers are left to enjoy in modern America. Above all else, it is true, it is honest and it is accurate. Well done in every regard, brother!

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  • Anonymous

    Posted October 5, 2000

    Interesting read about a menace to society

    I had a lot of preconceived opinions about Sonny Barger and HAMC, and expected this book ('straight from the source')to deflate most of them as yellow journalism and media hype. Au Contraire! If a fraction of the tales reported by this 'living legend' is true, these cretins are as bad or worse than the Nazi SS.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted July 4, 2000

    Sonny--The Man-The Legend

    Sonny couldn't have told it in a more straightforward, honest way. He remembers the 'good old days' just as they were. Of course, he is the one who made the memories for us all. Thanks, Sonny, for letting everyone who picks up the book, know just what it is and was to have ever been a biker in our country.

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