The Last Daze of Rome

The last time I was in San Francisco was a fast time in San Francisco. I was running from something and found myself running toward all the potential for vice and debauchery that that glorious, beautiful madhouse has in abundance, and at the time it just about worked out right. One particularly late and loose night, I ended up in receipt of a tab of genuine SF junkie acid in return for cranking open the sliding doors of the Bay Area Rapid Transport system for a legless Vietnam veteran in a wheelchair, which is the sort of trade that makes perfect sense at 3am in the depths of the 16th and Mission BART station. Having fried more than enough brain cells for that evening, I slipped the LSD inside my wallet and then forgot clean about it, inadvertently smuggling it back to the UK and through a few subsequent international borders as well. I guess a good way to get away with things is to not realise that you’re getting away with anything. Starting a tale meant to be about a fast time at Wheels and Waves in Biarritz with a tale about a fast time in San Francisco doesn’t make total, or indeed any sense, but then again, thanks to rediscovery of that LSD, neither did Wheels and Waves, particularly.

If I’m honest, prior to going I knew approximately nothing about Wheels and Waves, other than, or perhaps because of, the fact I’d never considered attending, assuming it was exclusively for the rich and the beautiful people, of whom, alas, I am neither. Asking around a few folks not necessarily in the know, a general consensus seemed to surface that it was ‘full of hipsters who can’t ride their motorbikes’, which seemed to further confirm my uninformed opinion. However, when Sideburn asked if I’d like to attend the event and write something about this multi-headed motorcycle fandango out on the coast, I was more than willing to find out for myself. Idle daydreams of whooping it up on the beach with the Duchess of Biarritz and pals were promptly brought bumping back down to something more in keeping with Sideburn’s earthy outlook, however. ‘I can probably sort you a ride there and back, and feed and water you, but there’s no budget for accommodation, so you’ll have to kip on the beach or whatever it is that you do when you go on holiday. Get me a hobo’s-eye view of how the other half party...’ the editor mooted, which sounded just about right to me, although I wished he’d not mentioned my hobo’s eye. Soon enough I was hitching a ride through the night to rendezvous with Gary and Anthony Brown, founder of the DTRA, at a miscellaneous service station on the A1 in order to hop a ride with them down to Biarritz. Due to work being work and life being life, I hadn’t slept for nigh-on 30 hours by the time I finally succumbed to the cousin of death and passed out in the back of Anthony’s van with northern France rushing past us, which lent the trip a nicely woozy, hallucinatory façade, which it never quite fully shook.

The blag was on from the get-go. Even though I’d applied, I hadn’t had confirmation of a press pass, one wasn’t waiting for me, and the €90 price of admission at the gate was looking dangerously like it would impact on my budget for food and booze. Fortunately, I’m not as green as I am cabbage-looking, and having enjoyed some extended periods of grace in previous lives scamming myself into various international festivals (it doesn’t hurt sharing a name with a legitimate journalist who works for music website Pitchfork either... sorry Dave, and thanks) I’ve learnt that hanging around long enough and being polite enough usually works out all right, and before long, the nice lass on the press desk was fastening a red wristband around my arm and my prospects for spending the better part of the weekend drunk in the dirt were looking restored.

It’d be all too easy to be overly cynical about the corporate cluster-fuck Wheels and Waves and its various components have become, and when I got half-drowned in wet mud while helping a good-looking, exquisitely dressed lass figure out what had gone wrong with her period-correct vintage scrambler, which had conked out mid-lap of the Swank Rally (she hadn’t turned the petrol on) it was almost impossible not to be so. But then Sideburn pal and French twostroke fanatic Hubert Bastie almost landed on me when he went off-piste in order to hit a dirt jump in a cordoned-off area of the track, and something clicked within me (besides the archaic and inbuilt survival instinct which jangled my nerves and drowned me in a cold sweat). Yes, all too easy to be cynical when surrounded by throngs of endlessly replicating, expensively dressed rich not-quite-kids in standard-issue matching Deus Ex Machina, old-school tattoo and Red Wing boots on replicating, expensive motorbikes, but there are worse things in life than aimlessly wandering about a motocross track, beer in hand – access all areas with a scammed press pass – high in the Pyrenees, watching rad old bikes hooning about a muddy course. Motorcycles, particularly cool, old motorcycles, particularly cool, old motorcycles being ragged around an unforgiving mud track by riders of all ages and experience, is always going to be the right side of fun, and noisy, and dangerous, and get the sap rising, and I’m struggling to find anything to be cynical about.

Melting pot meltdown. Wheels and Waves' El Rollo flat track pits double as a hangover recovery clinic

A marshal vaguely reprimanded Hubert and me; it’d look bad if a drunk man resembling a low-rent Dennis Hopper in Apocalypse Now, wearing various clunky cameras like strange scarfs, got squashed by a hungover hero on a Husqvarna on a closed-off section of the track. And that was the start and end of any bad noise, as the goodtime semi-chaos ran on amok. In the midst of that semi-chaos, watching Anthony pilot and Gary passenger Anthony’s wonderful BSA B31 sidecar trials outfit through the rutted, muddy turns was more akin to watching a weird, lesser-seen Carry On film than a motorcycle race, with the sound of Anthony shouting ‘IN’, ‘OUT’, ‘NOW IN... NOW OUT’ clearly audible over the noise of the British slogger’s engine, with Gary hanging on/out for grim death, acting out the bawdy instructions.

These recollections are merely fragments from the whole happy hoo-ha

These recollections are merely fragments from the whole happy hoo-ha, as the days and nights have since merged into one long, sunny, spangled memory-mush, with various chunks out of order and/or missing altogether. I do know, however, that I took Gary’s seat in the sidecar and hopped a 40-minute ride back to the main village in Biarritz, which was a particular high point of the weekend (despite me nearly sending Anthony flying off the back when I over-eagerly took hold of the reins while he fumbled with a coat he was trying to put on). Then the picture fades somewhat, and I woke up early the next day face down in a lay-by next to the ocean, which provided the only (and much needed) source of sanitation the entire trip.

It seemed as if the whole thing was about to go sideways, and not in the flat track sense of the word

The race events are only a small slice of Wheels and Waves, which annually floods Biarritz on the French side and San Sebastián, just across the Spanish border, with art and music, skateboard and surf events and other such trappings that modern motorcycledom seems to be ever absorbing into its folds. Not to mention swarms of cool custom bikes ridden in from all over Europe, buzzing around town like a tidy plague of large metallic locusts. It is quite a trip, wandering around the beautiful, winding streets of the olde town, in and among the ever-present rumble and roar of hordes of beautiful motorcycles of every conceivable marque, vintage, excellence and crapulence and is every bit as much of an event as more traditional bike shows, and the fact it’s a rolling spectacle is in a nice contrast to the static events. A wild winter of wet weather, which had persisted right up until the Thursday evening of the opening of Wheels and Waves, had forced the traders and their stalls from their previous beach-front spot into a huge, generic exhibition space, which, when compared to a sea breeze and an ocean view, had its limitations. The fact that the organisers managed to rehouse the whole ‘village’ (the term isn’t that much of a stretch; it is a massive affair) at such short notice is testament to the size of the event and the sway it has for the local area.

Park yer cyncicism. Events like Deus's Swank Rally at Wheels and Waves give lots of people their first taste of racing motorcycles

>There’s a lot of hanging out and about in between the various scheduled stuff at a big event like Wheels and Waves. I guess these times are meant for the captains of industry and business-heads to use to hobnob, booze, schmooze and/or blow cocaine up one another’s hobo’s eyes (or whatever it is bean-counters and industry-heads actually do). Or perhaps just have a kip. I tended to spend these times lurking about, chatting with friends old and new, splashing about in the sea, drinking Gary’s beer stash, kipping on various bits of roadside mud when it all got a bit much, and, on the Saturday of the El Rollo flat track race, held over the border at the San Sebastián horse track, discovering a long-forgotten tab of San Franciscan acid deep down in a recess within my wallet.

A strange, somewhat chaotic edge persisted and grew steadily throughout the day, which was ably aided by the relentlessly repeating Johnny Cash CD blaring out over the PA (we christened it JC – Live at Guantanamo). Meanwhile, the small, tight, rainsodden horse track turned first to liquid shit and then dried in weird grooves and ruts beneath the force of the rag-tag blend of racers’ wheels and clearing, sunny skies. At various points it seemed as if the whole thing was about to go sideways, and not in the flat track sense of the word, but rather topple over into something worse and more dangerous than mild motorised chaos. The LSD took hold right around when I happened to be stood chatting to legendary 1980s skateboard celebrity Christian Hosoi (he was described as a ‘sulphuric skateboard star’ in the official Wheels and Waves programme, in a poetic turn of Spanglish which I still can’t quite fathom) as he was struggling to take a selfie, while simultaneously framing the madcap mud-dash that was the Heavy Metal Mini Bike heat and a very pretty girl sporting what I can only assume was a motorcycle helmet, hidden beneath a huge faux Indian chief’s feathered headdress (which was weird for a few reasons, not least because the girl didn’t seem to have any sort of bike that would warrant any sort of a helmet, let alone one so grand and culturally appropriating). It’s the sort of scene I now associate with Wheels and Waves, which after a while seems completely normal, until you realise that it actually isn’t at all. Adding to the mounting weirdness, out on the track fellow ’80s skateboard pioneer Steve Caballero was wobbling around the left-handed path on a Krazy Horse Indian Scout in the Hooligan class. Skateboard star status or no, bumping bars and uglies with the Brad Hardmans and Leah Tokeloves of this world struck me a little like throwing the Christians in with the lions. But then again, these might just be the heady last days of Rome. It was certainly beginning to feel so.

By that point, I wouldn’ t have been surprised if a tribe of Visigoths had poured over the Pyrenees

Which brings me around to a thought that crept in, which even now I still can’t quite shake: No matter how great in terms of Mammon marketing and the king currency of cool it must surely be to have household celebrities mixing it up with hip-have-a-goheroes as well as genuine thoroughbred speed-demon racers out on the dirt, flat track, and motorcycling in general – let alone semi-competitive motorcycling – is fucking dangerous. Now I’m not usually one for any kind of health and safety regulations. As far as I’m concerned, Motörhead are always right – the faster, the looser, the better. But even I thought what happened during the Hooligan last chance qualifier race was dumb. If you’re unfamiliar, this is the opportunity for riders to make it into the grand final and features the biggest, heaviest bikes in flat-track-land rubbing and racing and often much more besides. Even I realised that allowing a show bike, built by trendy Italian company Anvil, to ride onto the track when the heat was already underway (I guess, in order to capitalise on various photo opportunities for those invested in the event) wasn’t a great idea. When it inadvertently became a factor in a smash up that could’ve been a hell of a lot worse, I was left wondering at what cost was that media exposure worth? An arm, leg, or worse?

It may have been the LSD, the Johnny Cash watertorture, the growing collection of empty beer bottles piling up behind the van and/or the increasingly strong Basque sun beating down upon my fried bonce, but it seemed to me that there was a steady-enough run of near-calamities throughout the day to constitute a classic comedy of errors; Cab very nearly stuffed his Indian into the crowd of photographers gathered in the middle of the track while trying to do a stillborn, rolling burn-out for their lenses. This mag’s own Gary Inman almost high-sided a brand new $50,000 Indian FTR750 during a trial lap, again for the sake of the marketing opportunities and Instagram ‘likes’ as much as anything else. Wonderfully named Dutch racer Dick Straap (I may have wilfully misheard this) stacked it mid victory lap while parading around with the chequered flag. Geoff Co-Built fell off the first place podium oil drum, mid champagne ceremony, buggering up his knee in the process (‘It would have been better if I’d got third,’ he later mused). And the unsavoury cherry atop this increasingly strange cake of a day, was Anthony riding off avec passenger on his BSA straight through a freshly laid human shit languishing in a gap between two parked vans, soiled toilet paper streaming out from the trials tyre’s tread in a long ribbon of dirty protest. By that point, I wouldn’t have been surprised if a marauding tribe of Visigoths had poured over the Pyrenees to rape and pillage us all out of our decadent crapulence, although thinking about it, I’m pretty sure that bit is the acid talking. If all this sounds a bit sceptical and cynical, I can only offer that it is just one stoned man’s stoned recollections of a short, increasingly strange trip. It was also great fun, and a pleasure to be part of. British wunderkind Leah Tokelove smoking the competition in the Hooligan final was a particular highlight, as was the laid-back, fast and loose, arty, party atmosphere that permeates the whole event. Worse things happen at sea than swanky custom bike shows down on the Continental coast, Pappy. For all my initial misconceptions, I had a blast in Biarritz and San Sebastián. If I were writing a fauxhobo’s rough guide to Wheels and Waves, for anyone perhaps suffering similar prejudices, it’d go something like this: If you can’t afford a ticket, blag one. If your bike is non-existent/won’t make it, hitch a ride. Sleep in the dirt. Bathe in the ocean. Revelling in the liberal capitalist fun-time atmosphere is easier and more fun when you manage to avoid paying for anything. If it’s your bag, inadvertently packing a purse full of psychedelic aggregates for when the going needs a shot of weirdness will work. And whoop it up with both the wheels and the waves... Just watch out for any human turds hiding in the long grass on your way out.