The Extraordinary Life of Billy Ray – Part 2

A few weeks ago we introduced you to the extraordinary life of Billy Ray, A LIFE Magazine photographer who made his career using 35mm film and then successfully transitioned to the digital world in his sixties. Our plan was to highlight Billy in our typical Author Spotlight, but his story was too big for that. The second part of his story isn’t typical of the ones featured on a blog for makers and creators, but it is one for the books (get it?)

Billy was fortunate (some may question that choice of words) to spend a few weeks traveling around with the Hells Angels in California. In case you are unfamiliar, the Hells Angels are an outlaw biker club who make their home in San Bernardino, California. The 1953 movie, “The Wild One,” starring Marlon Brando had created a lot of interest in the movie industry. The club decided to incorporate in California and to copyright their “Death Head” image by becoming the Mother Chapter of the Hells Angels. In case our English majors out there are wondering, they also left off the apostrophe either by accident or design but to this day they are still known as the Hells Angels. When Hollywood came knocking, they were ready. They were the Hells Angels of San Berdoo, Mother Chapter.

Hoping to clean up their image a bit in the pursuit of movie fame, they agreed to LIFE doing a picture story on them. At the time, Billy was based in the Beverly Hills office and was assigned to shoot the story. It was a great opportunity and highly dangerous. He was invited to attend one of the Angels’ meetings in the San Berdoo clubhouse, a place no cop in his right mind would go. (It is still there and even has a website.)

“I took some shots of the meeting, and a couple of them drinking beer and playing pool. It was touchy, but I seemed to get along with everyone.” Billy started going there most days over three weeks. Most of the time they would work on their bikes, drink beer, play pool and joke around. One day, one of their leaders had a bad wreck on his Harley and split his head open because the Angels never wore helmets.

Billy rushed in, took him to a hospital and found a Doctor who would sew him up. Billy recalls how that moment shifted his standing in the group. He was then invited to go on a “big run” to Bakersfield for a long weekend of Hell raising. In the month he spent with the Angels all the real action happened on that weekend.

On the ride to Bakersfield, the Angels liked to cruise at 100 mph and spread out to the width of the Freeway. To say it was memorable was an understatement. Billy tried to take photos from the back of a Harley at 100mph but it was impossible. “The wind was fierce and my eyes watered so much I couldn’t see a thing,” he recalls.

He realized the way to capture the photos would be to shoot from the backseat of an open convertible. The Angels’ two leaders, Doug and Buzzard were riding at the head of the pack and it was a glorious sight. They stopped at the Blackboard Café in Bakersfield which was headquarters for all the bike clubs in California.

There was trouble with the cops, fights with each other, drugs, pills and booze, just what Billy, and any other photojournalist, would hope for. Billy recalled the moment another bike club member grabbed him by his shirt and said he was going to kill him. Doug and Buzzard were with Billy drinking beer and they grabbed the biker before he could throw a punch, and through him out the door. “When that happened, Billy remembered, I knew they had my back.”

A few times, Billy’s Angels would have trouble with someone. The Angels idea of a fair fight was 20 against 1. When the weekend was over the Angels got run out of town and Billy went home to shower and get some sleep. He was happy with the pictures he had taken and off they went to New York. In his dreams, he could see a LIFE cover and a big B&W essay with a byline “Photographed for LIFE by Bill Ray.”

Unfortunately, Billy got word from the Managing Editor, George Hunt, who said “I don’t want these smelly bastards in my magazine.” And that was that. The story was dead.“No living creature saw my photos published until I made a Blurb book, The Hells Angels of San Berdoo ’65, and put it on my website,” he tells us. “The feedback was overwhelming!”

Multiple bike magazines wrote reviews and Billy received fan mail from around the world. The story was finding its place. Success like Bill Ray’s hope to the dead-in-the-water journalistic story. Even though we often work in a world where stories are fleeting or end before they even get off the ground, that isn’t necessarily the end. If you have a great story like Bill Ray and the first attempt to put it out there doesn’t work out, keep at it. Great stories demand to be told, and there is more than one path for them to find their way.