STURGIS, S.D. — Down a narrow staircase into the basement beneath a tattoo parlor on Main Street, the Dungeon Bar is aptly named.
The ceilings are low. Natural light is nil. The concrete floor is lumpy and cracked, as if the concrete had been poured atop strewn laundry.
The bar itself feels like a really long steamer trunk, leaving no place to tuck your lower limbs. As crowds fill in, people start banging knees like a Muay Thai fight.
But for longtime visitors to Sturgis during Rally Week, these rough-hewn details are what give the place its sense of comfort, in part because they’re so familiar: The bar didn’t become craggy, it was craggy from the start.
“This place hasn’t changed at all as long as it's been open, and I like that,” said a woman named Jennifer Dyke, pressed against the bar like a tree frog with her knees spread wide apart.
There have been some changes. Today there are many more brassieres hanging from the ceiling, and the bar top has been covered in autographed one-dollar bills, which are stapled over the carved-in names of visitors like Dyke.
“I carved my name in this bar top when I was 18. We all used to do it,” she said.
She scratched at the dog-eared corner of a stapled bill, “It’s probably right about here.”
After almost 40 consecutive years attending the rally, Dyke provides a unique perspective on what brings bikers back to Sturgis year after year.
But as Cowboy State Daily discovered from talking to a variety of longtime rallygoers, there are different reasons they keep showing up.
Why Do They Keep Coming Back?
Dyke made her first trip to Sturgis as a 13-year-old in the early 1980s, riding in from Worthington, Minnesota, on the back of her father’s Honda Goldwing.
If you think 13 is a little young for a place like Sturgis, you wouldn’t be the only one.
“One year [as a teenager] my older brother and I got flashed. It was this guy at the Buffalo Chip,” she said, nonchalantly, as though she’d all but forgotten.
In a later year at the Dungeon Bar, strangers photobombed a picture of her and a friend, and she learned after developing the film that one of the men was posing with a knife aimed at her.
In hindsight, it all feels par for the course, she said. While she’s enjoyed aspects of the rally’s wild side, for her it’s fundamentally about the rides.
“I drink less while I’m at Sturgis than I do any other time of the year, because I don’t drink and ride, and that’s what I come for. I come to ride,” she said.
Like Father Like Daughter
Her passion for riding came from her father.
He was a Norton Motorcycle retailer and Mopar drag racer, who in 1963 won the national titles in stock and modified stock categories in the NARA races, which in 1964 rebranded as the National Hot Rod Association (NHRA).
Her favorite memories are sitting on the back of his Goldwing, and later riding beside him in places like Vanocker Canyon in South Dakota.
It was immersive learning, though not always by the book.
“When I first took my [motorcycle driving] test, I failed because I answered the questions according to what I learned from him. I thought I was riding just fine, but turns out he was doing so many illegal things,” she said. “Then I actually read the rule book, and I’m like, ‘Dad, you don't follow any of these rules!’”
The one rule he followed to a T was sobriety.
He was a fierce teetotaler, making him an anomaly in biker culture known for wildness and debauchery, especially in the ’60s and ’70s.
“Didn’t drink a drop,” Dyke said, adding that she herself is not above tipping them back, but refuses to get on a bike if she has.
On the first day of the 2017 rally, for example, she’d been drinking with friends at One Eyed Jacks, so rather than ride her bike back to her campground, she hitched a ride and had someone else drive her motorcycle back.
The problem was the guy who drove it back was himself drunk, and when he got pulled over by the cops he ditched her bike and took off into the Black Hills on foot.
“I wished someone would have filmed it. Some guy gets off the bike and runs for the hills thinking he’s going to get away from the cops. He spent the whole weekend in jail,” she said, explaining she’d met the man earlier that same night and hasn’t seen him since.
Dyke says that after close to 40 consecutive rallies, much of its magic has been stomped out. Nonetheless, she’ll keep coming.
“I find that over the years I've kind of turned into a local, in the sense that even though I go to the rally every year, I hate the crowd, and I hate all the out of towners that come in,” she said, but added that she’s still going to be here every single year. “I’ll always come out here for the rides. The Black Hills is where my heart is.”
Elsewhere at the rally, long-time Sturgis vets appear to be maintaining a consistent attitude and approach. The rides are great – but so are the concerts and debauchery.
‘Seventh Wonder Of The World’
East of Sturgis, down a long and winding road to the Glencoe private campgrounds, a Canadian man named Shawn Williamson was found double fisting beers and singing along with an Alice Cooper cover band.
He has a big smile and the jovial demeanor you’d find in a farmer’s market vendor. But beyond his good humor, Williamson is a sucker for the rally’s wild side.
He’s been attending Sturgis for 20 years, and his favorite times have been its most raucous, including the street-style fights at the Bare Knuckle Saloon.
“Anyone in the crowd could get up and fight in a ring with these UFC-like gloves. They tried to kind of match people up by size, but you never knew who might get in there,” he said.
“The chicks were fighting too,” he added. “One year the waitress, who was seriously the hottest girl in the bar, got up and fought another girl, and then she went right back to serving drinks, all bruised up, her eyes all swollen. It was wild.”
He’s stayed in different places over the years, but lately he’s taken to the Glencoe campground, in part for its uninhibited reputation.
The infamous “Titty Alley,” for instance, is cited among the campground’s selling points, even as many admit it's not always a visual delight.
“It's free for all. Lots of beads, lots of tits, lots of partying. You’ve got guys walking around with their wangs hanging out too,” he said. “It’s not necessarily all the stuff you want to see. But it’s quite a time.”
Ask around about Glencoe and you're bound to hear stories you might not believe. Open fornication, witnesses say, as well as activities expressly proscribed by the Bible, although you’ll have to search the Torah for a reference, because it’s not suitable for reprint here.
Williamson says another reason he comes back is for the concerts at the Buffalo Chip, where riders once upon a time would watch the concerts from the saddles of their bikes amid the crowds.
His favorite concert was Guns N’ Roses. Though, that had more to do with the crowd’s performance than the band’s.
“Axl Rose was like two hours late getting on stage. And when he finally got on stage, people were booing and throwing beer bottles on the stage and everyone in the crowd was just giving him the finger,” he said.
“Just seeing how all these bikers at Sturgis reacted to it was the best part.”
Williamson has been recruiting his fellow Canadians to join him at the rally.
“I tell them it's the seventh wonder of the world,” Williamson said.
A Father’s Memory Lives On At Sturgis
Williamson and Dyke highlight the differences in how bikers approach Sturgis. But they also reveal that rally goers of different stripes uniformly experience it with a sense of living nostalgia.
It’s a place where memories form easily, and where people can enjoy the comfort of the past and the excitement of something new at the same time.
Sturgis will always remind Dyke of her father. He stopped attending years ago, but she’d been sure to regale him with her experience when she returned. They continued to bond over the topics and memories from the rally.
But this time, he wasn’t around to ask her how it went. Her father passed away earlier this year, making the 85th Sturgis Motorcycle rally both a happy and painful tribute in remembrance.
Reached by phone in the week after the rally, she explained how her experience in Sturgis this year helped her understand things about herself and her relationship with her family.
“I've been thinking a lot about it since, and I find that my brother and I are really routine-oriented. All the rides that we go on, and all the places we visit are the things we learned from our dad. ” she said.
“Our dad took us to Ron’s Cafe. So guess what for breakfast? And our dad taught us all these back roads to get from town to town in the Black Hills, rather than the main highway. So those are the same roads we take now. I’ve got so many memories of my dad out there.”
“It's weird how when for so many years, he was always the leader, we did what he did and went where he went. And now he’s not around, but we still do all of the same things and go all the same places, even without him. He was 85 years old, just like the rally — that’s how we remembered his age.”
Zakary Sonntag can be reached at zakary@cowboystatedaily.com.
