![]() ![]() Like your favorite doom-metal album that no one had heard of five years ago, choppers became mainstream, which went entirely against everything that choppers themselves should represent.Ī chopper should be a handmade death-machine, plain and simple. ![]() They couldn’t print the T-shirts fast enough. It was the dawn of the commercial custom chopper era. ![]() The public ate it up, and for the next five years, a dark cloud hung over the motorcycle world. Seeing the public’s reaction to the “cult of cool” built around the West Coast Choppers brand, marketing wizards and television executives went to work looking for bike builders that were interested in some lucrative work.īefore you knew it, no new product launch, feature film, or video game marketing campaign was complete until it had a custom themed chopper to go along with it. There’s no doubt that Jesse James earned his success, a self-described “glorified welder” that stumbled into the spotlight and paved the way for similar “bike build-off” programming to take over the airwaves.Īnd in a sense, all that business is exactly what put choppers out of commission. That was back in 1992, and it took a long time for the grassroots garage builds to grow into the wildly expensive and unique “what will they think of next” bikes that started popping up on reality TV shows. To be fair, even the original West Coast Choppers brand started out of founder Jesse James’ mom’s garage, and it was mainly a screen-printing business that built bikes on the side. But there’s a difference between the choppers of excess built for celebrities with bottomless budgets and the chopper itself as a style icon.Īnd while I can’t agree that layering dark sunglasses over a bandana was ever stylish, let’s talk about what put choppers themselves out of style and out of business. Praise be to the most high.įor the most part the retro-cool crowd has moved on to scramblers, cafe racers, and bobbers to get their fix for classic style and attitude. The days of the $100,000 custom chopper have come and gone. But something happened, and both the t-shirts and the candy-paint-and-chrome bikes themselves seem to have all but disappeared… It doesn’t seem so long ago when you couldn’t drive two blocks without seeing someone on the sidewalk with an “Orange County Choppers” T-shirt or a “West Coast Choppers” sticker on the back window of a pickup truck. ![]()
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