THE BLITZ BOYS

Fred and Hugo from Blitz Motorcycles in Paris brought two of their latest creations to Toulouse for a ride, and managed to park themselves in front of The Vintagent's camera so many times, and so successfully, that a Blitz photo album basically created itself.

While this portfolio certainly looks like an advertisement, are we selling custom motorcycles, rides in the French countryside, beer, or handsome young men with beards?!  Perhaps all of the above.  Of course, a little advertorial ambiguity never hurt commodity fetishism...'selling the lifestyle'... (and if you haven't read your Kapital, just remember Karl Marx famously quipped "I am no Marxist.")

I did toss the little Yamaha SR-based special around a gravel road near the village of Milieu de Nulle-Part, and found the bike light and extremely manageable while machine-gunning pebbles into the blue fluffy-cloud skies of southern France, fishtailing madly down the lane on full throttle.  While this machine is intended to battle traffic on the gladiatorial streets of Paris, its flat-tracky visual cues were borne out on the loose stuff - big fun.

I didn't ride the BMW special, but heard it described by another rider as 'a Punk bike', which is a far cry from the 'rubber cow' nickname given the early R75/5.  Perhaps Blitz is onto something; inexpensive, low-sheen, vintage-based customs meant to do well in modern traffic.  Fred and Hugo certainly thrashed the beasties along the gravel-spotted country roads of the Midi-Pyrénées, proving at the very least, faith in their own handiwork.

In the 1980s, such stripped-down and punked-up bikes were the hot ticket for Tavern to Tavern racing in San Francisco, but you could never buy such a machine, unless a friend was upgrading (often to a '60s Britbike), then usually the 'stock' parts were bolted back on, as there was zero resale value for a stripped motorcycle.  Scrounged together on very limited budgets, we rode them everywhere, hard and fast, cherishing our youth and the erotic possibilities of speed, pack riding, and harmlessly transgressive behavior.  Bikers, in short.

Blitz has taken this concept - the urban custom - and run with it, pushing what was originally a junkyard aesthetic to new and occasionally controversial places.  At their core, these Blitz machines are 'biker's bikes', built to be ridden.