BANDIT vs. SWEETWATER
The New Easyriders Gulfstream 800
“Silver Flash Air Extravaganza”
Luxury, Speed & Journalistic Lunacy
The Accidental Encounter
Episode 1
By Idella Sweetwater, PhD
Chief Cheerleading Officer, CCO
He was taller than I expected. His stride, as he crossed the scorching New Mexico sand in gleaming black western boots, was long and commanding. He wore faded jeans, a western shirt, sleeves rolled up. He had on an open cowhide vest, the brass snaps gleamed in the humorless July sun. His chopper tilted lazily on one chrome leg, a trail-hardened cowhand leaning against a bar.
I’d been warned by the other women about Bandit. “Those Rock Hudson good looks are bait, sweetie. Don’t swallow the hook.” “He’s a rapscallion, a mountebank. He’ll break your heart, and both lungs,” one literate ex told me with an injured scowl.
Their advice was always the same. Steer clear. Run! And whatever you do, never, ever make eye contact. You won’t have what it takes to pull out and then you’re on the ride, sister.
What a bunch of bleeders, I thought, ditzy broads need to get a life. I watched Bandit stride towards the small, dilapidated waterhole known by the sun-faded clapboard sign above it as “The Sorry Mexican”. I wasn’t here to get swept up by some swaggering, 70-something, James Dean, badass. I was here to do the thing I’m best at; business.
I knew Bandit, or Keith Ball, to use a less ridiculous moniker, had just purchased the motorcycling publishing empire known as Easyriders. He’d bought the whole thing, cash on the barrelhead. Now Bandit controlled everything; every issue ever published, the semi trucks, the printers, the staff, the headaches, the tonnage of a formerly massive publication that was and still is the pinnacle of motorcycling everything—just as all that was motorcycling was in a steep tailspin, a flameout, a “Mayday, Mayday,” plummet.
He also now owned one other key element: the direction of the next generation of Easyriders. This was where I was about to bet the sum of my career capital next. Sure, the industry has seen ups and downs like any industry, but never anything like this nosedive-under-full-power. Today’s younger generations don’t think, don’t drink, don’t blink and live in a digital fog of nothingness and endless social media waterfalls. They’re drones “locked in” as the psychologists say, unreachable.
Perhaps. Perhaps not.
That’s why I was here. I know a business opportunity when I see it and I know how to close. I’d followed Bandit’s career even back when I was a teenage girl riding stolen motorcycles in Georgia—hey, a girl’s gotta ride something big and dangerous, right?—and I knew if anyone could turn this juggernaut around and make a business bonanza out of it and bring the marvel of print-and-ink back into vogue, it was Bandit, former Editor-in-Chief of Easyriders for something like 25 years before he rolled off to stand up his next successful publishing project that would rock the motorcycle world; Bikernet. Whether or not he knew his timing was perfect—and I had reasons to suspect he might—I knew it was.
I was here to get my delightful backside, all-naturally arresting topside, dazzling locks, high-beam smile and 120-inch, high-compression mind in front of this newly-minted CEO, get hired and be a part of this soon-to-be epic ride, this print wheelie, a page-turning flat-tracker. Because I know with this guy at the helm, anything is possible.
Why? Ball-s—pun intended—plain and simple. He was one of the reasons Easyriders had once had a larger global subscription base than that overrated liberal rag, Time, and he was back.
You see we humans are analog, not digital. We desire more than that which is comprised of zeroes and ones, something not pixelated, not “fixalated” and stuck inside a 3X4-inch screen. Sure, websites are great, convenient and always in your face for updates, but sooner or later we humans need to hold something in our hands that we can touch, heft, interact with using our sensory perception, not just keystrokes and blind gazing at ones and zeroes.
Humans want to feel. That’s why motorcycles exist. Motorcycles aren’t practical, they aren’t tactical, they aren’t sensible, they aren’t terribly safe, they aren’t convenient. But you can smell the pines ripping past, hear the wind roar in your ears, feel the raindrops bite your cheeks and feel the big-twin thunder rumble through your thighs and up your spine until you think your heart will explode and your adrenal gland will explode into flames.
Hence, motorcycles exist out of indelible human need. We humans want the feeling of a long, thick, fat, rolled-up magazine in our hand, or shoved in our back pocket as we rocket or rock-it, you decide.
Digital, marvelous as it is, can never be print-and-ink anymore than digital could replace a gleaming ground-up chop sitting in the garage early in the morning, fueled up with and for great new stories, tech articles and flat-out fun, just beckoning you; swing a leg over me and let’s get after it, sister.
The mistake the industry made wasn’t incorporating digital. Digital is great. It was dumping print and going only digital where they missed the curve and ate bridge railing.
Digital can never be a tangible thing you can hold when you read it. You can’t hand digital to that handsome guy at the bar to break the ice, like you can a magazine. You can’t intentionally leave behind “a digital” on the pool table or bar knowing the next lucky person who comes along will get a bump, a thrill when they come upon it, like you can with a magazine, like finding a $20 bill lying in the grass.
There is no suspense in waiting for the next issue with digital. Digital never pauses, it never stops being there. It can rub your mental G-spot numb. There is no thrill of seeing that motorcycle-bedecked PAPER cover on the newsstand staring back at you, daring you to buy it, to take the ride, grab me, take me, spread my pages wide and get to know me. It’s just different to read on wood like a grown adult.
It is time. The younger generations, like mine, are about to get something cool, real and unlike anything they’ve ever known or had. An all-American magazine.
Yes, with my credentials I could easily have gone into one of the Big Five, the top bank and asset management titans and played money genie. But even though I’ve got a head for business that would make Gordon Gekko drool, and, if I may say so, other ass-ets that would cause the same emission, I cannot stand the tedium of the gutless, greed-driven corporate universe. My most recent position, helming a large division of a private, family-fund management firm, taught me that. You say “HR” and I don’t think “human resources”. I think “Hotties Riding”. I’m not a “resource”. I’m me, Idella Sweetwater, I’m young, (I’m hot), I’m smart as hell, educated to the nines, and business is what I do.
But I do business in the material realm, and I ride in the material world. Nobody rides digitally. The idea of making business out of long, hot, blazing tailpipes, thundering big-twins between my legs, screaming winds and curves that would make a Vicky’s Secret “angel” fall off the runway, get me hot and quite bothered. I can’t make cyber zeroes sexy. But I can make American iron tearing down the blacktop, in print, real sexy and real, real profitable. And it’s show business, baby, not show art. If you get that order backwards you won’t be in business long enough to get to the art part. I intended to become the Salvador Dali of the revival of print-and-ink.
I’d watched as print-and-ink had slowly, silently passed away in that “silent death” due to digital, as each new “digital generation” of fog-eyed youth oozed out of their basement womb and into existence—my own Gen-Z included (born 1997-2012)—and thumbed their way to total sensory anemia on their a-hell-of-a-lot-smarter-than-they-are-smart devices, print-and-ink, that marvelous invention dating back to the era of plant-based writing sheets called “papyrus” in Egypt, was stupidly allowed to pass away. Nobody in the audience voted for that fool’s move. It was the shareholders, the board room dinks, the CE-Nos who killed the glorious magazine. Why? Even they couldn’t tell you beyond, “Cost!” “Digital revolution!” Dipshits.
I’d had my eye on a major print-and-ink comeback for some time, because I still remembered when my daddy used to get the new issue of Easyriders every month at the house when I was riding behind him on his ’79 Shovelhead through the breezy hills of Georgia.
This opportunity was enormous. Bandit had just set up a landslide event. Youth today don’t know what they’re missing, poor rotters. But when they find out, when they get that first thrill of a magazine hitting their doorstep, their mailbox, the coffee shop table, they will devour print-and-ink just like their moms and dads and grandparents did. I was certain of it.
I just needed the right shot. I’d scoured hundreds of now digital-only publications. None passed the test. They were all weak, catering to the numbers, the shareholder value, sucking the prodigious proboscis of the “social media” phenom-turned-yawn-off.
Not this one. The Easyriders move was different for two reasons. The first was bikers. They’re always way up front in the American charge for liberty, freedom of expression, freedom of movement. Bikers customize their wallet chains, their brakes, their very flesh with tattoo ink. They invented “early adaptor” by knocking two wheels off of four and getting low on the curves. Second, Keith “Bandit” Ball, the “godfather of motorcycling”. His silly ladykiller reputation aside, the man knows publishing and he was born with a big motorcycle between his knees; ahem. I knew if anyone had the smarts, the experience and the lengthy odometer to figure this revolution out and cash in big, it was Bandit. That’s why I’d stalked him for several weeks—in business we call it “bizdev”, business development—to find the perfect opportunity for an “accidental encounter”. And this was it.
I knew he had this meeting on the books. I knew where it would be. I knew it would be a good meeting with an old friend, so he’d be in a good mood. I knew the meeting location was a small, remote bar so distractions and second and third-order events like goofy star-struck bimbos who don’t know the first thing about business, would be minimized. Everything was perfect.
Bandit strode into the bar vanishing from the blazing sun into the cool darkness of the bar. I got up from the outside table where I’d been seated behind dark glasses, under a baseball cap, with a cactus for cover, and walked in to take my place at the “table in the corner” as they say on Wall Street.
My mission was to secure a job, but not just any job. I was going to be Bandit’s Chief Operations Officer. He didn’t know this yet, but I did. I might never know publishing like Bandit, who was pushing 35 years of experience building two of the world’s best known publications of all time, but I know operations. It’s my “Rainman” thing. I can take a Swiss watch and add 20% efficiency by jerking out all the slack those sloppy Swiss engineers leave behind.
My immediate mission now was to be unnoticed, cutoff-jeans, rattler-hide boots, simple white crop/drop-top and all, while I read the room, namely Bandit’s table, and then be noticed at precisely the right time, in precisely the right way, both on my terms.
(To be continued…)
Editor's note: That's right, next week we will post the next chapter. You have three to go on the Easyriders blog, with the final chapter hitting wood in the March/April issue. It's all nuts. Hang On!
--Bandit
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