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Jesse James & His Beautiful Machines
Nathaniel Welch
powerHouse Books
November 2007
On Sale: November 1, 2007
112 pages
ISBN: 1576874141
EAN: 9781576874141
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Photography
He’s a welder and a gearhead, a tattooed wiseguy, and
stone-cold TV star. Jesse James works with his hands, making
custom motorcycles for big spenders who like their choppers
loud and built from the ground up. James got famous as the
host of TV’s Monster Garage and Motorcycle Mania, but it all
begins at his West Coast Choppers factory in Long Beach,
California, where James and his crew piece together these
epic handmade machines, welding and sculpting an array of
gleaming pipes and fenders from scratch and polishing every
detail right down to the magnum shell casings that decorate
West Coast gas caps. The bikes are fast, but building each
one is a year-long process, and the waiting list is long.
Jesse James (named for the Old West outlaw and distant
cousin) is a one-time juvenile delinquent who became an
international pop culture phenomenon, a grease monkey
superhero with a blowtorch, and an impossible success story
that began in his mother’s garage in 1993. He does it now
for both love (of his machines and their aluminum engines)
and money: He has a giant $100 bill tattooed across his
back, and the words "Pay up, sucker!" written in the palm of
one hand. He’s not joking. In Jesse James and His Beautiful
Machines, photographer Nathaniel Welch documents that life
and every step of the creative process in a collection of
elegant, grease-stained portraits of people and the
motorcycles they create—the welding, sandblasting, painting,
fueling—and of James himself roaring along some Long Beach
highway on one of his beautiful machines.
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