Timeless look with a dash of New Orleans-inspired magic.
Inspired Flavor
Any blues musician understands that you better know your chops if you go down to the crossroads. Chris Callen applies a similar thought process to custom bike building. At the intersection of history and design, 'Bone Daddy' is a contemporary chopper that captures a timeless look, with a dash of New Orleans-inspired magic.
Photos courtesy of Cycle Source.
Design Skill
While not practicing his chopper voodoo, Callen is the editor and founder of Cycle Source magazine. In continuous publication for twenty-four years, the magazine is the go-to source for custom builds and industry news alike. That comprehensive knowledge base leads Callen to his own crossroads, one where skill and creativity jostle each other for equal footing.
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Look Back
Callen cautions that while new technology allows fabricators to excel technically, there are drawbacks to rapid advancement. To his trained eye, he believes that many builders have lost sight of, or have never delved into, the history and culture of custom bikes. He offers the sage advice that “builders today would do well to stop and look back at the past.”
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Invited Art
Putting his words into practice, Callen plies his craft at Flat Broke Chops & Rods—a Tarentum, Pennsylvania shop he co-owns with longtime friend Mark Persichetti. The impetus to Bone Daddy was an invitation from renowned photographer and curator Michael Lichter, to participate in What’s the Skinny – Motorcycling without the Fat, part of the Sturgis Buffalo Chip’s 2019 Motorcycles as an Art exhibition.
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Literal Capture
This was not Callen's first time, having exhibited in the show on two previous occasions. With experience manifesting as wisdom, he decided to delve deeper into the overall thematic. A donor 1997 XL motor and a proprietary Flat Broke frameset the build stage. Moving away from the literal meaning of 'skinny,' Callen set out to capture the early ethos of chopper building.
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Proven Combination
The goal was to build a functional chopper while staying true to a minimalist look. With a tight, thirty-day build window, the result was nothing short of a soul-trading, Faustian bargain. The frame sits at 9'' up and 2'' out overstock, resulting in a whopping 42-degree rake. Callen stated that this stance is a proven combination of aesthetics and rideability.
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Common Culture
Bone Daddy is a name whose origin has been lost. Meaning boss or authority, it is rooted in the occult and can be traced to the literal 'throwing of bones,' a form of fortune-telling. Part of popular culture, it is a common name for BBQ joints wanting to state their prowess, and also appears as a character in Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas.
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Mythical Terms
'Legba's Ruin,' lettered on the oil tank is a bit more complicated, but brings us back to the crossroads. It is possibly a combination of 'Man's Ruin,' once a popular tattoo acknowledging the pitfalls of vice, and Legba, the mythical African trickster—acknowledged as the devil in contemporary terms. The literal interpretation is that Callen went through 'hell' to make this 'bad to the bone' chopper.
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