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Mods & Scooters:
...that's amore
Snappily dressed lads have had a long-burning love affair with these two-wheeled "wasps" of Italy--but how did it start and how did it make its way to American shores?
By Noah Barron
The Obscurantist Online
Mods Jimmy Cooper (Phil Daniels) and Steph (Leslie Ash) descend on the town of Brighton to do battle with Rockers aboard a 70s Lambretta.
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Hollywood's Reflections Scooter Society rides out every Friday with vintage and new scoots alike to look sharp and keep the Mod scene alive.
Photo copyright David Jiro.
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"Sembra una vespa!" "It reminds me of a wasp!" That was Enrico Piaggio when he say the bulbous prototype of the first Vespa motorscooter in 1946.
The first scooters were designed to be small, versatile scooters with entirely enclosed engines--ideal for folks who didn't want to get grease and grit on their clothes while commuting.
This perfectly fit the needs of Britain's growing Mod culture in the late 1950s and 60s. They wore snappy clothes and lived on a shoestring budget, so the cheap Italian motorscooters made sense and didn't soil their pinstripes.
The Mods (shortened from Modernists) were a youth culture focuses on fashion, rebellion and amphetamine-infused dancing, mostly to American soul music.
As mythologized in films such as 1979's "Quadrophenia," the Mods nursed a rivalry with the Rockers, a parallel British subculture of leather-and-Levis-wearing teens who favored American motorcycles and loud rock and roll music. This grudge came to a famous head in 1964 when groups of Mods and groups of Rockers were openly fighting in the streets of Brighton and Margate while on bank holiday, earning the ironic title of "The Second Battle of Hastings."
Made in Italy, Mod in the U.S.A.
Films like "Quadrophenia" and "Alfie," starring Michael Caine came long after the Mod movement had died down in the U.K. As the first wave of ska-revival hit stateside, American teens in the 1980s rediscovered the skinny ties, black-and-white checkers and music of Britain's Mods. Bands like The Specials and Madness paved the way for American ska-punk, dancehall-influenced bands like The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Operation Ivy and Let's Go Bowling in the early 1990s. With the third wave of ska came a rejuvenated interest in Vespas and Lambrettas.
Vespas, which had ceased to be imported into the U.S. during the 80s due to tough emissions laws, introduced two new models, the ET2 (a two-stroke 50cc) and the ET4 (a four-stroke 125 and later 150) designed to produce less smog and use less gas. They were a hit and the modern era of American scootering was born.
Scooterists who had never given up their pint-sized steeds were suddenly joined by legions of weekend riders on clean, efficient, easy-to-ride modern scooters, causing some friction in the underground scootering community between classic riders and new schoolers.
Scooterists today are often far from budget-minded, however. According to Greg Pugh, a seven-year South Bay Scooter Club veteran who has been riding for two decades, he can't help himself but to pour money into his dozen scooters.
"Some of the scooters, I'll put put a 190 [cc displacment] kit on it, a modern Japanese carb, an exhaust pipe, an expansion chamber, it can run you into the thousands of dollars," he says.
"This is a barn find mind you, an $800 scooter, and you put thousands into it, that's just weird. After all of that, it's still topping out at only 80 miles per hour. I don't know, there's something wrong there."
If it's wrong, thousands of American scooterists don't want to be right. Clubs from San Diego to San Francisco ride out every weekend, in the words of Glen Miller of Hollywood's Reflections Scooter Society, "to have a scene and be seen."
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