Is the closing of Jesse James’ Long Beach shop the end of an era?
In the beginning there was Denial: People will always need places to live and choppers to ride. Then Anger: The Craigslist ads WERE ALL CAPS AND DEMANDED TO BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY! DON’T WASTE MY TIME WITH LO-BALL OFFERS THIS IS A GENUINE ACME CHOPPERS PORK BELLY DELUXE $50,000 FIRM! Then came Bargaining and release of the Caps Lock: Over $50,000 invested in this genuine General Custer Custom Flying Arrow featured in Greasyriders magazine. Make me an offer, must sell. Now there’s Depression but we’re calling it Recession, and for many, there’s Acceptance: Well, maybe we did get a little carried away with the spending, but the chopper really is practical transportation and it looks nice in the three-car garage next to the Hummer and Cayenne and your breast implants, hon.
Howard Kelly, former Manager of Communications and Marketing at S&S Cycles, purveyor of many of the mighty V-Twins that powered the chopper craze, says the custom world was seeing signs of stress as early as 2004, when Harley-Davidson began seriously ramping up production. At the millennium, H-D was producing around 200,000 bikes a year, and the long waiting list for a new Hog drove potential buyers into the arms of other “manufacturers.” In 2006, H-D production hit the high-water mark: 349,196 bikes. “When the Harley dealer had a showroom full of bikes and color choices,” says Kelly, “that special feeling began to wane, a feeling that translated vertically to the custom world.
“Shops that had never had to chase down business were suddenly enrolling in Marketing 101 classes. It was a shocking thing to see shops that had been attending shows with a big rig suddenly show up with a pickup truck and a 20-by-20 pop-up tent.”
“The tightening of the American leisure-fund belt flushed away a significant number of shops, and the few remaining were duking it out for the business that remained. Then, home-built, primered and rough-finished bikes were suddenly in vogue, and the coolest kids were now riding bikes resplendent in mud, bailing wire and used parts—a change that affected everyone in the custom world from distributors to parts manufacturers to shops. The dollar flow slowed to a molasses crawl.”
Then came the real money crunch and the complete desiccation of the home-equity well.
While the iron was hot, though, nobody struck harder and more skillfully than Jesse James of West Coast Choppers. From the first time we met James in 2000 or so, WCC on Anaheim Street in Long Beach was a literal hive of activity. In addition to the 40 or so guys building things, there was the shop up front selling T-shirts as fast as they could print them, the lines of tourists, the TV shows, the Walmart clothing deals, Garage magazine, Sandra Bullock…
Alas, what’s left is what you see above, a pair of lonely choppers in what was once the thriving showroom and offices of WCC. Ms. Bullock left in a huff (and who could blame her?), JJ’s house on the beach recently sold for $4.5 mil instead of the $6.75 asking price, and word is that James has decamped for Austin, Texas, and his other smaller concern—Austin Speed Shop. In fact, he confided to us a couple of years ago that Austin suits him better than Long Beach ever did. Inside sources tell us he might like to have the Bombshell McGee episode to do over again, but other than that, his timing seems not to have been so bad at all. Is this the last chapter for the self-described Vanilla Gorilla? Hardly…
He had a good run in the spot light, new shop in TX should bring him back to more of a custom builder instead of the TV persona he’s became in CA.