ROT Rally

The streets are alive with the sound of bikers...

This weekend in Austin we have the Republic of Texas Bikers Rally an enormous event which attracts 200,000, yes that's two hundred thousand, aging Wild Ones from all over Texas and beyond. So the music of the streets this weekend sounds like this...



The main event takes place outside town, went out there yesterday with the intention of seeing Big Brother and the Holding Company (Freddy Krc on drums, filling in because the real drummer was at his daughters' graduation party!) but after 2 hours in the blazing 99 degree heat with no relief from air conditioning I had to make my way back into town.


The atmosphere is unique, the bikers who I am sure were a real and present danger to society 30-40 years ago, are now more relaxed and the attitude is only put on at the weekends and is not at all threatening. I was chatting to a regular attendee who said he'd been coming for a dozen years and had not seen a fight "not like Galveston" which I discovered was a whole different ballgame, "at least one person shot or stabbed each year".


Writing this reminds me of an event 30 years ago in San Francisco which I'm surprised I hadn't thought of earlier... I (young, innocent, confident Englishman) was walking down a street, I think near Fisherman's Wharf, and was marginally aware that people were crossing the road to the other pavement... When I realised that they were doing this to get out of the way of a line of Hells Angels walking towards me it was sort of too late to get away without turning and running, so I went straight on... The Angels didn't make way for me... So there I was facing a line of growling, snarling (well that's what it felt like) bikers... I said to the one in front of me "Hello", there was a moment and then he just started laughing and they waved me through with lots of back-slapping... It took about a minute for reality to set in and my legs to start shaking.