Pappy & Harriet's, Pioneertown, CA
When you hear the Desert calling …
… and that call is sounding a lot like "BIKES! BEER! BANDS!!", then you bet that „Pappy & Harriet’s Pioneertown Palace“* is behind it, and it’s an invitation to the Chopperfest #3. The last years have seen an ever growing influx of punters, so they had expanded the venue, and there was enough space for our W&W tent and brand evangelist and metal magician Mattias "LeBeef" Andersson.
It was he who had brought some of the essential W&W stuff,
devised to help those ancient choppers enjoy another couple of decades of potatering happily down the road. And where choppers are, there are also lots of chopperistas, and plenty of discussions of OEM numbers, period correctness, the temperature of beer, the bands to play the night away, the next chopper shows, the next bike project, tank art, barn finds, roadside breakdowns … so many topics, Mattias couldn't come away from the stall for even a minute. Still he had time to snap a few pics and shoot a few clips. Which tell us that in and around Pioneertown Palace a fine party was going on. The tumbleweeds weren’t happy though, and we didn’t ask the armadillos and the rattlesnakes. They sure were delighted when the racket stopped, at least until next year, when the desert will start calling again.
*Random info about Pioneertown, CA,
for your next camp fire chat, or your next pre-party, wherever: some 120 miles to the North East of LA, between Yucca Valley and Joshua Tree National Park, on the edge of the Mojave desert, after the war a few rich film guys bought some land and built a film set town in the look of the pioneer era. (Very) old style on the outside, the latest mod cons on the inside: air condition, ice cream parlour, bowling alley, motel, all you need to make life in the desert even livable. They imagined using it for making movies and a lot of money too. The name they used wasn’t picked because of the real pioneers, but because one of them had been a member of a band, The Sons of the Pioneers. This music bent is still palpable today: Pappy & Harriet’s Pioneertown Palace usually has some really cracking bands performing, and great names in the music business have played here: Paul McCartney, Robert Plant, Lorde, Arctic Monkeys, Queens of the Stone Age, Leon Russell, Vampire Weekend, Sean Lennon, The Hives…