Hells Angel The Life and Times of Sonny Barger and the Hell's Angels Motorcycle Club

The autobiography – the dangerous life and wild times – of Sonny Barger, the legendary leader of the Hell’s Angels.

The autobiography – the dangerous life and wild times – of Sonny Barger, the legendary leader of the Hell's Angels Motorcycle Club.

Keith Richards walked over to me after finishing 'Love In Vain' and told me the band wasn't going to play any more until we stopped the violence. 'Either these cats cool it, man, or we don't play,' he announced to the crowd. I stood next to him and stuck my pistol into his side and told him to start playing his guitar or he was dead. He played like a motherfucker.'

Sonny Barger is the Hell's Angel of all Hell's Angels, the motorcycle club's de facto leader for nearly thirty years, the man immortalised by Hunter S. Thompson in the classic Hell's Angels as 'nothing short of Winston Churchill when it comes to leading people'. He's feared and revered by people on both sides of the law. Now Hell's Angel sets the record straight – from the club's formation in the 1940s to the height of their notoriety twenty years later, from Sonny's first-hand account of what really happened with the Rolling Stones at Altamont to his lengthy periods of imprisonment, from his fights with rival gangs and the police to his own battle with cancer. Sonny Barger has ridden with the Angels for forty years, obeying no law but that of the HAMC. For the first time, this is his own – and their own – story.

The autobiography – the dangerous life and wild times – of Sonny Barger, the legendary leader of the Hell’s Angels.

Sonny Barger is the Hell’s Angel of all Hell’s Angels, the motorcycle club that has been the scourge of America for over forty years.

Sonny was their de facto leader for much of that time, the man who Hunter S. Thompson immortalised in his 1965 classic Hells Angels, noting ‘Barger is nothing short of Winston Churchill when it comes to leading people’. He’s been called an American legend and he’s feared and revered by people on both sides of the law. From the club’s formation in the 1940s to the height of their notoriety twenty years later, from Sonny’s first-hand account of what really happened with the Rolling Stones at Altamont to his periods of imprisonment, from his fights with rival gangs and the police to his own battle with cancer, ‘Hell’s Angel’ sets the record straight.

Sonny Barger has ridden with the Angels for forty years, obeying no law but that of the HAMC. For the first time, this is his own – and their own – story.