June 2, 2010

BOOK REVIEW: ‘Big Sid’s Vincati’: Building a Special Motorcycle Brought Father and Son Together

Reviewed By David M. Kinchen
Huntingtonnews.net Book Critic

Don’t let the unusual title or the pictures of motorcycles on the front and back covers of Matthew Biberman’s “Big Sid’s Vincati” (Plum, a Penguin imprint, 288 pages, photographs, $16.00) throw you: This is a book for just about everyone — especially fathers and sons — not just motorcycle nuts.

It’s the story of the complicated relationship between Sidney Biberman, born 1930 in Norfolk, VA. and his son, Matthew, born in 1966 and a professor of English at the University of Louisville, Louisville, KY. “Big Sid” Biberman — he’s 6-5 and weighs 300 pounds — is a legend among motorcycle devotees. He’s a master tuner of Vincents, a defunct and legendary British motorcycle brand — bikes that were the fastest production machines before the era of the Hayabusa and other “rice burner” “crotch rockets.”

Big Sid could listen to a Vincent Black Shadow or Rapide and determine what was wrong with the machine and proceed to fix it. Today, motorcycles are computer controlled, just like cars, and motorcycle mechanics are basically computer geeks who get their hands dirty. Back in the day, tuners like Biberman used their instincts and experience to let the bike tell them what was wrong. They were — and are — good listeners. His clients included famous motorcycle collectors like the late Steve McQueen and Jay Leno, as well as ordinary owners in Virginia and across the nation who sought out Biberman to tune their bikes.

I discovered this book by reading about Big Sid in Motorcycle Classics magazine, which compelled me to seek out and read the Hudson Street Press hardcover edition last year. I’ve been into scooters and motorcycles all my driving life, which dates back to January 1955 when I received my Illinois driver’s license. I rode Cushman scooters and bought my first bike, a Honda 50, in 1967. I’ve owned a Triumph; a Yamaha; a Kawasaki police bike; Hondas, including an early GoldWing; a BMW; and a two-stroke Spanish street bike called the Bultaco Metralia –an example of which was included in the famed Guggenheim motorcycle show “The Art of the Motorcycle” which I saw at Chicago’s Field Museum — and other odds and ends. I no longer ride, but I devour motorcycle magazines, so the story of how Big Sid and Matthew Biberman created a special motorcycle from a 1970s Ducati GT chassis and a Vincent V-twin engine and transmission was a natural for me.

Big Sid loved both Vincents and Ducatis — some models of which boasted frames designed by an Englishman — so it didn’t take much convincing on his son’s part for the two to begin work on “Polly,” the name they gave the Vincati, in honor of the widow of donor parts for the machine. To look at it, Polly looks like she came off a production line, the modifications are so well done. It’s not the first Vincati — that honor goes to a group of Australians who created the first bikes with Vincent engines in Ducati frames — but it’s probably the most pristine.

The saga of “Big Sid’s Vincati” began while Sid, estranged from his wife, was recovering from a heart attack. He was living near Matthew and his wife Martha, who plays a role in the book, along with their daughter Lucy. In its treatment of family relationships in the context of motorcycling, the book reminded me of Robert Pirsig’s “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” but Matthew Biberman’s book has its own distinct, non-derivative voice.

Growing up in the Hampton Roads area of coastal southeastern Virginia, Matthew Biberman bonded best with his dad when they took off on their bikes and road south to North Carolina’s Outer Banks. Big Sid’s father, Joe Biberman, was an abusive man who employed his son in his butcher shop and was scornful of his aspirations for higher education. Sid wanted to attend an engineering college in Milwaukee, but the closest he got was maintaining army vehicles in Germany during his military service in the early 1950s. Before he was drafted, Big Sid hung around the region’s bike shops and became a fan of Vincents and other British bikes. Before the advent of the Japanese, the Brits produced bikes that were objects of desire — and the Vincent was at the top of the totem pole.

Constructing the Vincati brought father and son together, but it also created rifts between Matthew and Martha, which are dealt with very well by the author. The rifts were bridged and everyone lived happily ever after, despite some motorcycle accidents that reminded me of my mishaps on two wheels. You’re considered a virgin rider until you’ve laid your bike down!

If you’re a bike nut, “Big Sid’s Vincati: The Story of a Father, a Son, and the Motorcycle of a Lifetime” is a natural. If you aren’t, read it anyway and discover a memoir that will stay with you forever.

Websites: www.bigsid.com; www.penguin.com

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Billy Joel’s “Captain Jack”: An Appreciation

by Matthew Biberman

April 25, 2010, 6:58 pm

Leno, Joel, and Alex Puls outside Leno’s Garage

A thumb’s up from Billy Joel for my book BIG SID’S VINCATI wouldn’t change anything. Copies wont suddenly fly off shelves. But ever since my friend Alex told me Joel has a copy of my book I keep hoping to hear from him. Alex wrenches Bill’s bikes, 8 of which he took on the road with him when he went on tour earlier this year with Elton John.

Like quite a few motorcyclists I have heard from, Alex likes to write and has his own creative aspirations. It must be something about spending so much time with your head in a helmet—you get used to spinning out thoughts. His boss however has chosen to remain silent.

He did however agree to sign a copy of his commemorative box set of The Stranger and give it to my dad.

Sid and I have been listening to it recently out in the garage while we work on readying our race bike for its appearance on Leno. The work session yesterday was like an outtake from Big Sid’s Vincati. I put on the Carnegie Hall concert disc, taped just prior to the Stranger sessions. It catches Joel at an early creative peak. Listening to it, I remembered seeing him back in 78 on the 52nd Street tour. It was my first rock concert. Sid took me.

As I listened to the disc, I thought back to that night: Joel had played many of the same songs and with much the same gusto. I was twelve and I was blown away. Nothing had prepared me for the spectacle and the showmanship. I had never seen a light show before. I had never watched a seasoned performer work a crowd, banging on the keyboard, running around the stage and goofing with band mates, milking effects in hit songs like “Big Shot”—extending and bending the note—and repeating key phrases—“oh no no no no no you had to be a BIG SHOT, didn’t you, didn’t you, didn’t you!”

But above all I remember the power Joel got out of his piano during the overture-like openings that remain his signature on songs like “Say Goodbye to Hollywood,” “The Ballad of Billy the Kid,” and of course, “Captain Jack,” a tune that has to stand as one of the greatest of the modern rock era. For me, this is, in fact, the quintessential Billy Joel song. Joel wasn’t alone in playing rock in a symphonic style. Far from it. The Beatles had already recorded “A Day in the Life”; and even more of an influence is Pete Townsend, when he took The Who into keyboard driven epics such as Baba O’Riley (“Teenage Wasteland”). And even closer to Joel’s work is Springsteen with songs like “Jungleland” and it would be wrong to leave out Meat Loaf and the whole Rocky Horror Picture Show phenom, but no one else mastered the form like Joel, who made the power ballad story song seem like the natural offspring of Debussy or Liszt.

For fun you could cue up all these songs and play the moment I am trying to describe. Lennon singing “I’d love to turn you on,” and the symphonic crescendo begins… Keith Moon adding the staccato drum hits while Daltry sings, “they’re all wasted!” and then the synth tracks begin to build . . . Springsteen talking the end of Rat, gunned downed: “And they wind up wounded, not even dead . . . tonight . . . in JUNGLELAND” and the crescendo of strings begins. None of these moments however are as emotionally effective as what Joel manages to achieve with “Captain Jack” when the band quiets for him to sing between snatches of notes:

Ah, but there’s no place to go anyway and what for

You’ve got everything, but nothin’s cool

They just found your father in the swimming pool

And you guess you won’t be going back to school anymore

Caught up in the memory while working out in the garage yesterday, I kept hitting replay while Sid and I installed the generator on Tina. With successive plays, Sid began to focus on the lyrics. “Captain Jack? What is that—dope?”

“Heroin.”

And when Joel sings, “Your sister’s out on a date and you just sit home and masturbate” Sid laughs, amused at the candor and the rhyme. Suddenly, and with great clarity, I remember him laughing at it back when I played the record in his apartment out in Ocean View in Virginia.

It was the brief time when Sid had actually showed some back bone and moved out of the house to get away from my mother. Most weekends he would stop by the house and get me. We would eat at Famous Pizza at Wards Corner and catch a movie. Then we would go back to his apartment. After he went to bed, I would sit up on the fold out couch in the front room and think while I played my Billy Joel records. I didn’t have any homework to do and nothing to look forward to but going for a motorcycle ride in the morning.

Later Sid would move back. When I asked him why, he said, “I don’t mind living alone. I mind dying alone.” I don’t think I would ever fully forgive him, or my mother, who much later, could only excuse her decision to go along with the reconciliation by saying, “I felt sorry for him. I guess I’m only a mother at heart.”

It may all sound depressing but listening to music in my father’s apartment wasn’t. It was peaceful. Those nights remain some of the most pleasant of my memories.

Tricked out and road ready!