John Rooth
John Rooth’s involvement in Two Wheels spanned almost 30 years, including 25 as the magazine’s longest serving columnist. His Gripes of Rooth and Rooth columns, together with Mr Smith and Groff, were the reason many readers bought Two Wheels, and John’s writing was (and still is) like the man himself: honest, insightful, self-deprecating and often hilarious. A Harley tragic, John was Editor of Two Wheels from 1988-1991, and to a magazine that sometimes took itself a little too seriously, he brought a big dose of enjoyment back into the motorcycling mix. A media natural, he has since on to become a brand in his own right, Roothy, specialising in 4×4 adventure touring across print, digital (Facebook and You Tube) and TV. However his passions still ride on Two Wheels.
What do I remember about my time at Two Wheels? A non-stop orgy of bikes, babes and booze basically. Even now, 13 years later, if I think about being editor of Two Wheels I get thirsty, stiff and start looking for my helmet. That’s not good. I’m married now, with three little kids.
But I wasn’t then. For me it started in 1986 when Bill McKinnon dropped by mum’s farm near Dungog. He was editor of Two Wheels, out taking a brand new FZR750 for a spin up the Bucketts Way. Bill and I had been mates since the old University of New England Motorcycle Club days – we held a 25th reunion this year – and he had a problem. Bob Guntrip, his erstwhile assistant editor, was about to ping off to England to write books on war-gaming or something. Bill had a bloke in mind for the job but he wasn’t available for another three months. Would I fill in?
I turned 30 that year and had just come back from a year’s backpacking to celebrate not having anything better to do. After struggling for six years to make a living out of opal mining, my brother Nicko and I had sold up and come back to civilisation. I spent my share on airline tickets, Nick went back to college to finish a degree.
Somewhere in Northern Ireland I ran out of money and Bankcarded a flight back to Australia. That’s why I was staying on mum’s farm, helping with a few long overdue chores and doing a bit of casual teaching at the local high school in between the odd mechanical job for other farmers. If that sounds like an excuse to smoke a bit of pot occasionally, ride the R60 through some hills for a change and spend Friday nights fighting at the pub it’s because it probably was. Life was about as aimless as it can get.
So I went to Sydney and took the part-time job Bill was offering. Imagine the spin-out for a bloke who’d spent so many years living an almost hermit existence in the bush to be confronted by the big city? I had a beard, long hair, about $150 and the old R60 BMW. Another mate, Peter Cusic, was a doctor sharing a flat with one of his colleagues in Coogee. They let me sleep on their verandah, a glassed-in box about twice the size of my swag. I had a cardboard box for a wardrobe.
Fortunately jeans and T-shirts were all that was required at Federal Publishing Company, at least for the editorial staff. It took about five minutes to learn that there were three types of people involved in magazine publishing. Editorial staff were the grubby types who took pride in the magazine’s content, sailed around testing bikes for a few weeks and then worked around the clock for a week getting it written. The advertising people were the cleancut types who made the magazines pay in between giving themselves exorbitant titles like Chief Supreme Worldwide Marketing Executive and fighting over office space. They came in early to show how keen they were, lunched with clients all afternoon and then drove home pissed at peak hour to avoid the booze buses. Finally there were the sundries – secretaries, artists, production people – with real jobs who came in at eight-thirty and went home at five. Most of the sundries were good-looking girls, a fact not lost on a bloke who’d spent most of the last six years looking longingly at gumtree knots.
For someone who’d never had an office job, this Two Wheels caper was a blast. My first day was also Guntrip’s last so after learning about my new job in the publishing industry (“There’s your typewriter, the toilet’s around that corner, we drink at the Royal in Randwick”) we went to the pub for a farewell lunch.
So day one ended with a casual encounter of the sexual kind involving a good-looking female artist, a few hundred Black Russians, a back street in Kings Cross and the bonnet of a Falcon. Day two saw me sleeping under the desk. I think day three I rewrote half a dozen faxes for the events page. I was finding it hard to concentrate. Sharleen, our secretary, had the best-looking butt this side of the black stump. No wonder the super-efficient McKinnon had all the most used files tucked in the bottom drawers. Trust me, watching Sharleen filing beat the hell out of shovelling opal clay.
I was there for a whole week before Bill asked me to pick up a test bike. A taxi ride to Parramatta, a chat with a company rep, a handshake and I was suddenly punting a new Suzuki GSX-R1100.
I was supposed to take it home and bring it to work the next day but we went Silverwater to Coogee via Newcastle instead.
Wow, apart from a couple of brief test rides at dealerships -usually lasting about as long as it took for the salesman to realise they were wasting their time – the most modern bike I’d ridden was Lindsey Dunn’s Kwaka Nine. And that was in 1974.
I don’t count my own 1979 Harley in that. It might have been made in ’79 but the design was straight from the 1930s. Anyway, by ’86 it had long gone to finance more holes in the ground.
The first test I wrote was on a 500 twin which was so memorable I can’t even remember what make it was. But within months I was Two Wheeling for all it was worth, looking at bikes, picking up bikes, talking bikes and riding bikes. Any time off was spent looking at girls, picking up girls, talking about girls and …
The self-imposed drought was over. Like all droughts, when the rain came it came in floods. And that was just the new bike side of it. Letting a thirty-year-old single hairy bloke loose in a publishing company full of good-looking women was a bit like riding a Honda Four with loose cylinder head studs. There were pistons flapping everywhere and smoke as far as the eyes could see.
Three months passed and the bloke Bill had in mind for the job took one on a boating magazine instead. Cuse went into practice down the coast, leaving me to rent his flat. Nicko finished college and moved in, looking for a job.
We started Live to Ride so he could have one. Bill moved on, they made me editor of Two Wheels. With 18 months of journalism experience and less responsibility than a baboon with a hard-on I was running the country’s top motorcycle magazine. In retrospect that’s as silly as letting someone like George Bush run the USA. Like George, I think I got in because someone counted the votes wrong and it was too late to find another bunny.
The dream ride lasted six years all up. In the end it was Sydney that did me in, not Two Wheels. I took a Paso for a test ride up to the Phantom’s place – an old girlfriend who usually got to pick up the bits – and didn’t come back until they’d found someone else. The hustle of city life wasn’t worth the job of a lifetime.
Highlights? Copping speeding tickets, knowing someone else footed the bill. Hiring Seddo, who knew more about my job than I did. Hiring Matho, who knew nothing but soon learned more than me. Sleeping under the desk. Pulling wheelies through town with lovely girls on the back of fast bikes I didn’t own. Learning fiction by filling out accident report forms. Sex in the stationary cupboard after boozy lunches.
Watching the last embers die when Federal Publishing Company burnt to the ground and wondering if any of us had jobs. And endless new bikes. I’ve never ridden a bad motorcycle, they all had something going for them in my books. I was a lousy tester.
In those days we’d usually get in a good ride – a week’s worth of petty-cash-funded motorcycling – every month. The late ’80s saw huge steps in engine performance, realisations by the major manufacturers that good brakes and handling were essential and the slow but inexorable tightening of speed restrictions and policing. The two came together with a clash of speeding cameras and licensing computer hookups that blinded many flat bicky enthusiasts – myself included.
When I left Two Wheels in 1991 I’d already gone back to cruising, I’d bought another Harley and decided I’d had enough of the fast and furious to last a lifetime. A bloke only has to put his balls on the line so many times before some bastard runs over them after all.
Five years later I was back testing bikes, this time for The Bike Show that used to be on community TV. The bikes had grown faster, I’d grown slower still but the whistle of a new machine making big revs is something too good to resist. That time around I did it for free.
There were other reasons I left Sydney. Loneliness for the country life; a feeling of being on an endless treadmill of fast bikes and faster women where someone had pinched the ladder; the desire to go and do something else. I don’t remember now, but I do know that you can have too much of a good thing. Maybe I yearned to mow a lawn, take out the garbage and get told off for dropping clothes on the floor.
But I do remember leaving Sydney. I had a beard, long hair, about $13,000, a Harley and the old R60. The money got cancelled out before long by a wife and kids but the bikes are still there. Always. Thank you Two Wheels for the ride of my life!
By John Rooth, 35 Years of Two Wheels, 2003.
