Saturday 28 January 2012

SEGMON VON HEINTZ - SEEING 'MAXINE' FOR THE FIRST TIME NEARLY 20 YEARS AGO TOTALLY SHIFTED MY PERSPECTIVE ON CONTEMPORARY CHOPPERS

BY 1994 I'D BOUGHT A BRAND NEW SPEED TRIPLE, [YES, THE ORANGE VERSION] I WAS STILL BUYING 'CLASSIC BIKE' EVERY MONTH AS I HAD SINCE ABOUT '90, I HAD FINISHED HAVING MY '74 T140 REBUILT, PUT A NEW 351 CLEVO IN MY ZC FAIRLANE AND BASICALLY HAD NOT HAD TOO MUCH INTEREST IN CHOPS . . . .

Reason being, back then, certainly here in Australia, most chops, especially the ones we saw coming into Classic Bike Tune, were fucking horribly butchered, ugly as sin Trumpy's, Beezers and the occasional 750/4 that were owned by guys who clearly wanted a Hoggly . . . I was fully into altered, performance enhanced, ultra 'rideable' classics . . . preferably T120's and 140's.

As far as choppers went, there was fuck all cool, little finesse, even less engineering talent and generally no hope of ever riding the things in anything less than a straight line. Even the Harley crew of the late eighties and early/mid nineties in Oz seemed preoccupied with 16" solid front wheels, billet accessories and silly paint jobs lifted from the current hot rod scene, yuk !!!

Funny thing was that I had always been into the post war 'bobber' thing and the halcyon days of the sixties to early seventies chopper scene, especially a lot of the rides that were built to be flogged and flailed, whether 'Frisco' or East Coast in style, they were about speed, performance and being ridden flat out in all situations.

In late '94 while wating to pick up a couple of wheels that needed new tyres fitted from one of the local 1% club owned Harley workshops, I was flicking through the new edition of "Iron Horse" and came across a bike that reminded me of the "Billy Bike" which had always been a red hot fave of mine.

That bike was "Maxine", it was compact, tough, functional and way cool, a real fucking hot rod in the traditional sense of the term and it had been put together by a bloke with an equally chilled name, one Segmon Von Heintz, which instantly linked in my head with Ed Roth and Von Dutch for all the right Teutonic reasons. He also went on to have a hand in the legendary "Babylon Taxi", but that's another story entirely.

As it turned out, both bike and builder were to become significantly influential in the rebirth of what has now become the almost pop fodder chopper movement, unbeknownst to me at the time, he was also close mates with one English Don and a fella by the name of Indian Larry, from a time way before Biker Build Off and Discovery Channel Syndrome.

WELL, THAT'S ANOTHER PIECE OF MY SOUL LAID BARE, THAT BIKE SKEWED MY TAKE ON MODERN CHOPS AND WHAT COULD AND SHOULD BE POSSIBLE . . . FORM DEFINITELY FOLLOWING FUNCTION . . . I'M JUST STARTING ON A '74 SHOVELLER AND I'LL BE FULLY STOKED IF IT CAN LOOK HALF AS GOOD AS SEG'S . . .

*** I'VE STOLEN AN ENTIRE PAGE FROM SEG'S OLD "PSYCHO CYCLES" BLOG TO ILLUSTRATE NOT ONLY THE NATURE OF MAXINE BUT ALSO BECAUSE OF THE OTHER PHOTOS AVAILABLE, CLICK ON THE LINK BELOW OR POST TITLE TO BARE WITNESS . . .
Psycho Cycles Inc

No comments:

Post a Comment