easy rider trivia

[larry harding]

here is something that is rattling around my head for a while.....o.k. i saw the movie when it came out around 1970. had a subscription to the mag. for a few years when i thought i was a "biker"(now i'm just an old fart who never out grew motorcycles), been to some of the swap meets etc. what i am wondering where the term "easyrider" came from. was it coined for the movie, or was it a biker term before that? just wondering.

[23JDCA 808]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easy_rider_(slang))

[45OZ]

"easy rider "origins

Easy rider originally meant an expert horseman or a horse that was easy to ride

as per wicki"


During the Great Depression a large population of Americans driven by poverty rode the railroad system and the term easy rider (along with hobo and bum) found its way into slang vocabulary to mean a slow moving train and the men that

In the World War II era the slang term re-emerged with a modified meaning, where G.I.s on extended deployment in Asia or Europe (unofficially) employed children to perform the daily mundane tasks so common in the military like tending to barracks, shining boots, and the like, so a G.I. who employed a houseboy coasted through this work and had an "easy ride".


The term had a different meaning in the "free love" cultural era of the 1960s and was first applied to women who practiced free love. A man who lived with this type of woman had a free or easy ride,


The 1969 movie Easy Rider had wandering motorcycle riders as its characters, and due to the notoriety of the movie the term again acquired another meaning to fit into the cultural mores of the time to mean a good, usually Harley-Davidson motorcycle.

Dennis Hopper, the director of Easy Rider, said in the making-of documentary Shaking the Cage: "An easy rider is a person that is not a pimp, but he lives off a woman; he lives off a whore. He's her easy rider. He's the one that she loves and she gives money to. He doesn't pimp her, but he's her easy rider."

I hope this stops the Rattling in your head

[larry harding]

thanks that is some very interesting history. i suspected the term was around long before the movie.