CUT-OFF`S

Chapter 54

CUT-OFFS

( Photo 1 ) . This cut-off belongs to a friend of my mine, Brian, he is mentioned numerous time in my Blogs.

During the 60`s, 70`s, 80`s and into the 90`s, a denim Cut-Off was a must-have if you rode a motorcycle, and you wanted to be identified and associated with a certain type of biker lifestyle.

There were other bikers who did not wear cut-offs, of course this was their personnel choice, the non-denim wearing bikers would just wear the ordinary leather bike jacket or the weather proof wax cotton Bellstaff type jackets, and not forgetting, there was also the odd biker who would wear full one piece leather race leathers to emulate some race track hero like Barry Sheen.

During this long time period, wearing a denim cut-off, put’s you in a biker sub-culture, even if you are not aware of it.

The maker of choice at the time would normally be Levi Strauss or Wrangler, mainly because these two denim makers made hard wearing gear, and could put up with the British weather conditions.

There was no brand loyalty back then, things were picked for practicality and use, it was never to look brand fashionable, so any other denim makers were used, how much money you had in your pocket did dictate what you could afford, the two makers I have mentioned above were the top end of the price range.

The typical cut-off back in the day was festooned with a verity of metal and cloth badges amongst other regalia, there was a large choice of badges to chose from, some of the most popular badges had bike manufactures names like all the Japanese’s makes, British and European maker’s, Laverda, BMW’s etc, another type of badges were the bike Rally badge, a biker would need to actually attend the rally to obtain a rally badge, there was no other way of receiving one, and they were exclusive for that particular rally, one badge would be received at the rally itself, only so many rally badges were made, and once the rally was over that would be the last time that unique rally badge would be issued, also on the cut-off there would have been various cloth badges of various design, I never came across a rally badge made of cloth back in the day, but I believe nowa days it is quite common to receive a metal and a cloth badge at a rally.

There were no given rules on how the badges were arranged on the cut-off, they could be decorated randomly where there was a space on the jacket, or to the owner's personnel choice, I personally just attached them where there was a space.

The actual term cut-off refers to the removal of both of the jackets sleeves at the shoulder, some people also cut the collar off as well, personnel choice once again, this sleeveless jacket was normally worn over a leather jacket, and in most case’s never washed ever again, unless your mother got hold of it, and washed it without telling you.

If you belonged to a motorcycle club, rules may have been applied to the wearing of the cut-off, in some cases you would be expected to wear a club patch on the back of your jacket or possibly a smaller cloth badge on the sleeve of your leather jacket.

An average, normal run-of-the-mill bike club, may go out weekend runs for a couple of hundred miles or spend the weekend in a muddy field getting pissed up ( Rally’s ), as a group/club it was possible they would only have a small cloth patch/badge on their jacket, randomly placed somewhere, these clubs were mainly ( M.C.C. ), ( Motor Cycle Club ), I’ll explain the difference between the M.C.C. patch and the M.C.

Other clubs with a back patch that also sported upper and lower rockers with just a small M.C. patch alongside to the bottom right of the club patch, and above the bottom rocker were a different type of biker, any rider with this set up on his cut-off was a whole different kettle of fish to the average M.C.C. biker.

In the 70`s the cut-off was shared with non-bikers who were heavily into rock bands, these guys also had patches set up on their jackets with mainly the names of heavy rock bands like Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath etc.

Their jackets displayed popular bands of all genders of the time including White Snake, AC/DC even Status Quo.

As the decades moved on, these two sub-cultures of society tended to merge, and coming of the early 80`s, there would be a mixture of rock groups and bike patches displayed proudly on their cut-offs and leather jackets.

During the mid-80`s I attended a bike rally over the boarder in England, I noted a large majority of the younger riders had no or very little bike patches displayed on their jackets, the patches that I noticed were of rock groups, to quote Bob Dylan, times they are a changing.

In the 90`s there seemed to be a resurgence of M.C.C. Clubs, in 1981 the maximum size of learner machines was reduced to 125 cc from 250 cc, this law had the effect of an increase of smaller bike that were used for the sole propose of domestic travel, going to work etc, this affected the amount of people that travelled to rally’s, some low cc riders did struggle to travel to rally’s, mainly within a 100 miles distance of where they lived, the bikes were capable of going hundreds of miles, but the small cc limited the amount of speed and comfort, normally our average speed on a motorway was anything between 80 and 100 mph depending on the weather, speed cameras and police patrols, a small bike would take forever to cover 200 plus miles and the vibration in your hands and butt would stay with you all weekend, a numb bum after riding on a large cc bike was common enough, it would have been torture on a small bike travelling all that distance.

Ten years later the world had turned a few times, and times had changed, it took almost ten years before the rally scene was running at its previous level, there had always been rally’s during this time, but the ( cc ) law slowed it all down a little, with new machines on display in the bike shops, and obtaining back patches was made much easier with new manufacturing techniques that had made it easier to obtain a club design, and to have it made to the customers exact request, in fact the marketplace was flooded with so many options the price was kept low because of the competition between the manufactures.

From my own experience in the early 80`s, trying to find a suitable outlet to have a patch designed and made was very limited and expensive, my friends and I could not find a suitable back patch, we knew what we wanted, we tried various place and nothing came up to what we were looking for, we wanted a large rampant red welsh dragon and there was absolutely nothing available that suited us.

In the end we did what many other clubs had done back then and that was actually to paint the dragon design on to the cut-off itself, we also used a local badge manufacture on Waterton industrial estate Bridgend called Celtic Motif’s to make a small round cloth patch that we could sew on to the sleeve of our leather jackets.

( Photo 2 ) . Dylan wearing his cut-off at one of the rally’s.

Like I have said, what you put on your jacket was your choice, I remember a friend of mine ( Fat Mike ) just had badges on his cut-off, another friend of mine (Wobble ), had a baby’s dummy and a small stainless steel milk jug fixed to the front of his jacket, he also had a small plastic letter ( Y ) which he kept in one of his breast pockets, now and again he would take the letter out of his pocket and wave it in someone’s face and say “ why, why “ I don’t know why he did this, but it made everyone laugh, he found the baby’s dummy on the road somewhere, and the same with the letter Y, but I do remember vividly when he obtained the small milk jug.

We were on a week-long ride across the Welsh boarder into England, the plan was to spend a little time riding round the Black country area, working our way up through the West Midlands and then re-enter Wales in the north, and then head down the Welsh coast road and back home in the south, we called this ride ( THE WORLD TOUR OF WALES ), well it made us laugh, I have written a draft covering the ride, it will take a while for me to rewrite and post on the blog site as the story is quite large, I may break it down into two or three parts like I did with the blog, Frozen.

While we were in England we stopped off at a small English town called Stoke-on-Trent, I believe the town as grown up and become a city now, we rode into the center of the town and parked the bikes up on some rough waste ground, we had ridden non-stop to this point, so we stopped to stretch our legs and find somewhere to eat, we wandered around a little, leaving all our camping kit strapped down on the bikes, we looked for a greasy spoon type café to buy breakfast and rest a while, and surprisingly all the gear was still there when we returned to the bikes.

We eventually found a small café in a side street, it looked a little on the rough side, but we only intended to stop for a little while before we left the town and continued our journey, I ordered a pot of tea, and two cheese and onion packets of crisps for Myself and Gaenor.

The prices they charged us for what we had bought off them was way over what we would have paid back in Wales, because of this high price for just a pot of tea, wobble decided to have his moneys worth, and kept the miniature milk jug that came with my pot of tea, wobble didn’t drink or eat anything, he would not pay the prices they were charging, but he felt justified to take it anyway, we left the café never to return.

Wobble hung the jug on his cut-off jacket by looping some thin twine through the button hole of his breast pocket, and it hung there for years with the baby’s dummy and his letter ( Y ), I believe he still has the milk jug in his possession and most likely the dummy, not sure about the ( Y), he never throws anything away.

Nowa days in 2021, bikers still wear a type of cut-off, but not like the old school cut-offs made from blue denim, but made of black leather, and they call them just (CUTS), mainly because the American bikers refer to them as cuts and not cut-offs.

The modern day black leather cut-offs are bought off the shelves in most bike shops, street outlets and over the internet.

These type of leather cut-off’s, which are technically waistcoats because they never had sleeves to cut off in the first place are worn by older bikers who ride around on large factory custom v-twins, these guys have been greatly influenced in this kind of biker fashionable clothing by the fictional television drama called ( Sons of Anarchy ) and its Mexican spin off series, ( Mayans mc ) which are basically soap operas where the actors ride around on motorcycles, there is a very small element of truth to the plot lines in the drama series, but not a lot, these TV programs have had a great influence on the modern day bikers fashion scene.

You may still see an occasional die-hard old school denim cut-off being worn by a biker, but you would have a better chance of finding rocking horse poop, they are a rare breed nowa days, and you would be very hard-pressed to see one on the roads.

I still have my cut-off from the 70`s, which were also called Originals or Colours, well they were back in the day, my cut-off is in a very fragile condition now, after being exposed literary for decades of British weather, it still as most of the old patches and still as the upper and lower rockers stitched on the back with the painted rampant Welsh Dragon at it’s center, it is far too fragile and precious to be worn, just like this blog my denim cut-off embodies far to many good memories to be careless with it.

I wonder what the evolution of the cut-offs will be in the next couple of decades, going by the current mindset of the present generation of bikers, the wearers will be sporting some fashionable designer labelled type jacket made of a material that matches the paint work on their soundless electric bikes, and will have more safety features than a nuclear power station that does included ( Chernobyl and fukushima dailchi ).

The world changes, and so do biker fashions, let's hope they keep an element of the past in their future choices.

( Photo 3 ). The back of my cut-off , showing my old club colours, I’m allowed to post this Pic, and no other club’s patches mainly because MC clubs are very fickle animals, and I am/was a full member of The Celts mc.