It wasn’t organized crime, as it became. But I don’t think you wanted to cross them.
Filmmaker DON SHEBIB on early bikers
Twenty-seven-year-old filmmaker Don Shebib read an article about new bike clubs in Toronto in 1965 and immediately wanted to know more. He was trained as a sociologist and fringe groups fascinated him. His first professional documentary was about surfers in California, and something about these hometown bikers seemed like a natural follow-up. Neither surfers nor bikers trusted the media, which made them all the more authentic and interesting. “The bikers were just a little rougher around the edges,” Shebib said in an interview. “They were very similar to surfers. Talking of how free they felt on a bike or on a board. They’re classic rebels.”
Shebib went to a hamburger joint on the Danforth near Warden Avenue in Scarborough where the Canadian Lancers hung out. In those early days, bikers had hangouts more than real clubhouses. Most of them were greasy spoons, like the Army Navy Club on Spadina Avenue in Toronto for the early Satan’s Choice, before they shifted over to Aida’s Restaurant at St. Clair Avenue and Kingston Road. Shebib kept going back, trying to get to know the club members. The Lancers appreciated the respect and began opening up to him. He learned that most of the Lancers were in their late teens and early twenties but their ranks also included an ex-con in his thirties who had served time for theft, and a forty-four-year-old veteran of World War II named Ken. The military connection made sense. The bike clubs forming in California at the time were established by veterans of bomber squadrons who had been issued motorcycles to get around air bases and conserve gasoline during the war.
As a trust developed, Shebib began meeting members from neigh-bouring clubs. One, Edjo, lived west of Toronto, by the lakeshore, and ran the Vagabonds. Edjo, aka Captain Ed, was a savvy man who could sometimes be found behind the wheel of a red Cadillac convertible or Italian sports car. He ran a charter boat company and a motorcycle shop. His Vagabonds met on Britain Street, near Moss Park at Queen and Sherbourne Streets, and in a downtown laneway near the Art Gallery of Ontario. “I thought he was a riot,” Shebib said of Edjo.
The bikers had attitude and were tough. They liked their beer, booze and marijuana. A couple of them pimped out their stripper girlfriends. Several were middle-class kids who bridled when their parents pushed them toward university and the professional life. Many didn’t see belonging to a motorcycle club as a permanent thing, but more of a temporary state of mind. “It was a lot of booze, broads and bikes,” Shebib said. “It wasn’t organized crime, as it became. But I don’t think you wanted to cross them.”
As Shebib began to work on his documentary with cinematographer Martin Duckworth, Guindon shook up the biker community with a sudden move that startled police and bikers alike. He merged his Phantom Riders with the Canadian Lancers, the Wild Ones from Port Credit and the Throttle Twisters from Preston (near Kitchener, an hour west of Toronto). There were now 110 members in his club, which suddenly made them the largest motorcycle club in the country. As a final, provocative jab, they took the name and patch of a club that Sombrero had driven off the road twice: Satan’s Choice. It was an intimidating name that would make outsiders think twice about giving its members a hard time. Those who knew its history would be even more impressed.
Guindon imagined how it would enrage Sombrero to see more than a hundred of the grinning devil patches roaring past him on the highway. As an added bonus, they could finally lay to rest the lame patch of the ghost riding a motorcycle that had haunted the Phantom Riders.
Shebib recorded their thoughts on film, like how they grandly said they rejected materialism and valued no possessions beyond their bikes. They boasted about how they were rejecting conformity, even though they were conforming to a newly invented culture of their own in a tight-knit group. The bikers expressed something between pity and contempt for members of mainstream society and the importance they placed on security, money and haircuts. “They let other people rule their lives,” one member said on camera. “We just laugh at them.”
There was a summer camp or hootenanny feel to the bikers Shebib filmed, especially when they sang “Satan’s Choice We Roll Along” to the tune of “Merrily We Roll Along.” Club meetings were held in an apartment above a store—a far cry from the metal doors, security cameras and barbed wire that would one day become common features of biker bunkers. Shebib also followed them with a movie camera to the Heidelberg hill climb near Kitchener, where they showed off their riding skills.
The opening chords in the soundtrack of Shebib’s documentary were performed by John Kay, who sang for a band called The Sparrow. Within a few years, The Sparrow evolved into Steppenwolf and those opening chords were developed into “Born to Be Wild,” which was used in the soundtrack to the Hollywood blockbuster movie Easy Rider.
Shebib’s documentary featured a rotund biker called “Tiny,” one of a countless number of Tinys in the biker world. Guindon also made a fleeting appearance. He didn’t object when Shebib called his documentary Satan’s Choice. While Guindon didn’t like the way many in the club came off as scruffy whiners, he liked the attention.
Not long before, a club named Satan’s Choice had been forced off the road by a braggart in a fancy shirt. Now Guindon’s club had laid claim to that fearsome name as their own and become known, and even feared, from coast to coast.