Tobie Gene Levingston, Keith Zimmerman and Kent Zimmerman
MBI Publishing
2003
263 pages
Tobie Gene Levingston is the president for life of the East Bay Dragons Motorcycle Club, a one chapter, three patch (well.. in some photos their cuts have three patches) club based in Oakland California. The East Bay Dragons are also a blacks-only club that co-exist peacefully with the Oakland Hells Angels even though the HA are fiercely territorial with other clubs that claim the same space as them. Levingston professes a long-lasting friendship with Hells Angels patriarch Sonny Barger, who has written a brief foreword for his friend’s memoir, and furthermore the writing here is assisted by the same two Zimmerman brothers who helped Barger write Hells Angel.
The East Bay Dragons are the first outlaw black club in the Bay area of Northern California, at least that is the impression I get from Levingston’s memoir. The author discusses his life, beginning as one child of a large family formed by sharecropper parents in Louisiana, progressing to his family’s move to California where he started a car club with friends and some of his brother in the 1950s. The car club evolved into a motorcycle club, and a club that formed as outlaws in opposition to some of the already existing straight-laced and neatly dressed black-only motorcycle clubs. Over time, the Dragons developed their own style for chopping bikes that was heavily influenced by the Hells Angels but also by an aesthetic sensibility that had them riding brightly coloured motorcycles, as seen in some of book’s colour photographs.
Soul on Bikes includes many of the kinds of anecdotes that are standard fare of biker memoirs. Brawls, arrests and close-calls with police, the sometimes congenial and sometimes hostile relationships with other bike clubs, and the dangers and thrills of motorcycle riding, are all remembered fondly by Levingston. Tobie Gene’s memoir also includes numerous accounts of interactions with the Hells Angels, and the book features a middle-aged Levingston giving a big smile while standing with Barger and his wife at some function.
The book’s major point of interest is that it sheds some light on what its author says is a much larger phenomenon than what is represented in existing culture, that is the world of black motorcycle clubs. While the East Bay Dragons are one club in Oakland, Levingston says that there are possibly a hundred such clubs in the Los Angeles area alone, indicating that there is much more potential literature on this subject as the “black biker set” is not mentioned in books like Daniel Wolf’s The Rebels, or Aurther Veno’s The Brotherhoods which provide a more academic view on the biker subculture.
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