BBB: Wild ones return on motorcycles

What’s the first city that comes to mind when you think of leather clad bikers, mouthwatering barbecue, and hot rods zooming up and down the street? Honestly, Memphis is probably the first one that pops in your head, followed by St. Louis and their spare ribs.

But any Arkansan knows when fall strikes and the rubber hits the road, it’s time for Bikes, Blues, and BBQ (BBB).

Personally, I don’t own a motorcycle, so the only experience I’ve had with BBB is secondhand. I have friends and family who live in Fayetteville and they complain every year when the bikers come to town. They complain that all you can hear for four days straight is bike engines revving down Dickson Street, and unbearable traffic clogging up every single road. Sometimes my friends just up and flee town for the entire weekend to avoid the event. This year, I decided to make the trek up to Northwest Arkansas to experience BBB for myself, and go catch the documentary “Hog Town.”

As I made my way westward on Interstate 40, I didn’t see any bikers until the Clarksville area. Then every so often, especially around Altus and West Fork, a smattering of cyclists would merge into traffic and join the pilgrimage. By the time I reached Fayetteville, I was surrounded by motorbikes, on all sides.

I drove in an ocean of Yamahas and Harleys. This year, BBB was held in Rogers for logistical reasons, as the city of Fayetteville is — still — under a massive construction project. I arrived in the historic district of downtown Rogers and immediately felt the congestion on the roads. I inched my way to the historic Victory Theater, which has been around since 1927. I was taken aback by how gorgeous this venue is with its old school box office, nostalgic balcony seating, and gold trimmings all around the lobby. It was a surrealistic time-warp to see this relic from the Jazz Age slowly fill up with a crowd full of roadsters with their leather jackets, boots, and chaps.

“Hog Town” is a regional Emmy-nominated documentary focusing on the BBB and the relationship that the bike rally has with the locals of Fayetteville. The film explores different points of view from the bikers, the residents, business owners, and the local government. In the first 15 minutes of the documentary, I was a bit worried. Everyone being interviewed had nothing negative to say about the town of Fayetteville; almost all the interviewees claimed they lived in a growing city with a smalltown feel. It almost felt like the movie was a puff piece or travelogue promoting the city. But after the first act, there’s a drastic change of tone, as one person in the documentary basically says: this is a great town, “but don’t come here.”

The rest of the movie goes into detail about how heated things have gotten between the city and the bikers over the last 20 years. One of the residents compares the rally to a yearly hurricane as people flee and businesses close. Now, having experienced the event firsthand, I can understand that point of view. On the surface it does feel like a Kurosawa movie where the evil samurai gang comes in and takes over a small defenseless village. The documentary points out that every year BBB triples the population of the city, which means there’s an estimated 100,000 extra people in the area for an entire weekend.

But not everyone in the city is against the rally; the documentary gives plenty of time to business owners and the mayor. Bars and motels make an incredibly large amount of money over the weekend. The mayor even states that the bikers generate more than $70 million in revenue for the city. Other businesses, like the local bookstore and those that make their living at the farmers market, claim that the bikers drive away their regular customers and they see zero income for that weekend. The film does a great job painting this issue as a complex situation that doesn’t have an easy solution. By the time the credits roll, we realize that towns grow and townsfolk are afraid of change, and we are left with the lingering question of how is the city going to manage this growth, especially as BBB increases every year.

After the movie, I sat down with the director, Raelyn Munneke, in the nostalgic lobby of the Victory Theater, where her kids were in the background selling T-shirts to the audience members on their way out. She is a filmmaker who got her start in Dallas. Nine years ago, she visited Northwest Arkansas and loved the area so much, she and her family transplanted there. Her background is mainly in documentary filmmaking, as she has done several sports pieces for ESPN and The Golf Channel. She started working on “Hog Town” over four years ago as a passion project. Munneke and her producing partner Brandon Carmichael put together a ragtag team of filmmakers — along with help from local film students— to capture hundreds of hours’ worth of footage, filming almost every inch of the city before and during BBB to show just how crowded the city gets, and some of their shots are quite effective in capturing how overwhelming things really become.

Munneke pointed out that she had a pretty easy time getting access to the mayor and the police, but there were several business owners who wouldn’t go on camera because they feared that their opinion of BBB could potentially hurt their business. Other than that, the only other hiccup her production experienced was when they were starting production: she contracted laryngitis and a sinus infection, on top of finding out about her pregnancy. While talking about the rough start to the production, her now 4-year-old daughter was swinging on Munneke as if she was a living jungle gym.

In fact, now that I think about it, there were quite a few children at this year’s BBB. As I walked the streets of Rogers after the movie, the event seemed a lot less intimidating than I had initially feared. All the bikers I talked to were friendly, and they were glad that after a two-year hiatus that they could come back to the Ozarks and ride the windy mountain roads. I guess once I dug below the hard leather surface, I really don’t see what my friends and family were fussing about.