SLEAZY RIDERS

EASY RIDER (1969)
dir: Dennis Hopper

SLEAZY RIDERS
MAD #135, June 1970
w: Larry Siegel
a: Mort Drucker

While the studios were still counting on big-budget musicals do be their successes, they released Easy Rider (singular, not plural), thought nothing of it, and it became a smash success for them, being one of the only studio releases to speak to the youth of the time.

Wyatt (Peter Fonda) and Billy (Dennis Hopper) set on a trip from Los Angeles to New Orleans. What MAD can't say (or couldn't 51 years ago) is they got their funds for the trip through a drug deal, and it's hidden inside a compartment in Wyatt's gas tank.

MAD still hadn't gotten over the difference in tastes between the generations' music, and this is how they portrayed the songs of Steppenwolf and Jimi Hendrix.

On the first night of their journey, they are turned away from a hotel because of their appearance and camp outside.

They pick up a hitchhiker and drop him off at the commune where he lives, they check it out out of curiosity, and stay because they're attracted to the free love, going skinny dipping with two of the girls there.

As they come through a small-town parade, they ride in it on their motorcycles, and get arrested for crashing the parade. In jail they meet George (Jack Nicholson) a lawyer who's there for public drunkenness. He springs them out and joins them on the next leg of their trip.

Here's where the parody and the movie part ways. The three of them get angry stares from rednecks at a diner and leave. That night as they're sleeping outdoors, those same rednecks beat them and kill George. Wyatt and Billy get to New Orleans, screw around with hookers at Mardi Gras, and take acid with them in a graveyard. On the way home, they're shot by different rednecks.

They also bond with George while camping and turn him on to marijuana before he's killed.

SLEAZY RIDER
Sick # 74, March 1970
w: Fred Wolfe (Paul Laikin)
a: Bill Robinson

Sick doesn't shy away from drug references.

The hitchhiker doesn't look anything like this.

The Jack Nicholson character is drawn as George Wallace for some reason.