Or ‘How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the TRX’
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve really liked the TRX850 since I bought it a couple years back, and it made me regret not buying one back when they were being sold as the desperately unpopular critter they were back pre-Y2K. Sadly though the green was my least fave colour to start with, and the green on this one was looking old and tatty, along with the once repainted yellow wheels looking very battered. With shed space all filled up and my opportunities to ride far less frequent than when I was working at Yamaha World, a cosmetic overhaul was the most logical step. Take a bike I loved riding, and make it one I could also love looking at. I’ve always loved the retro Marlboro Racing colour schemes, I’ve seen a couple of other TRXs done up in similar tribute styles overseas, and riding around on a Rainey YZR500 tribute would feel pretty bloody cool…
…but to say that is the beginning and end of the story would be a lie.
The inclusion of not only the colour scheme (like on the World GP edition of the XSR900) but also the Marlboro logo was a very conscious choice, and this is where Project Marlboro starts to move beyond bike and into some form of art.
Humanity, on most measures you could contemplate, is heading into the abyss. The gap between rich and poor is widening at an alarming rate. Whether it be the Middle East, Ukraine or wherever the hell happens next, we’re killing in the name of whatever with gusto. We’ve ignored every warning sign on climate change for decades, and the most ‘advanced’ country in the world has just re-elected a huckster on the basis that he can somehow miraculously turn back the clock to put things Back The Way They Were. The echo chamber of corporation-led social media has got us angrier and shoppier than ever before as we roar towards The Singularity. Our children are hooked on technology dopamine hits in a way that maximises revenue for the 1% and we probably won’t know just how major that impact will have been until this generation of young addicts have counted the cost of the damage (but hey, as long as the NASDAQ keeps heading North then who gives a shit, amiright?) Wherever you look, we’re the most informed we’ve ever been as a species, and yet somehow we’re going backwards in a hurry.
Enter Project Marlboro.
Aside from loving the livery, I was interested to research the history of one of the more popular advertising campaigns for a deadly substance ever made. The rough, rugged, outdoorsy Marlboro Man, perched atop his horse, looking out across his domain…
Except of course until they died of lung cancer or other smoking-related diseases. Out of the twelve actors who played the Marlboro Man throughout the decades the campaign ran in various forms, five of them died early deaths on account of the product they were promoting.
And yet they kept on doing it, probably because it looked awesome. Better to be dead and macho than alive and, well, you know.
Stanford do a nice summary of the place of the Marlboro Man in the grotesque history of tobacco advertising for anyone keen on seeing the full history of how the brand attempted to connect rugged manliness with their product – worth a read (and a good reminder that none of this is new).
All the while, the Marlboro red and white liveries were seen on 500cc GP bikes, Formula 1 cars and all manner of racing vehicles around the world. They even ran their own series – the Marlboro Challenge. Watch the Goodwood Festival of Speed and you won’t have to wait long before you see the famous, familiar and fabulous design that harks back to some earlier time when we knew less and cared even lesser, before we started to see our species heading towards the tyre wall without the braking power to pull up in time.
And that’s what made it important to have the Marlboro logo included as part of the livery – we all know its wrong, evil and has killed millions worldwide, but a good chunk of the world won’t give a toss – it looks cool.
To me, that’s where we’re at as a species – looking at the evidence ahead of us and what we really need to change, and then very consciously saying ‘fuck it’ and doing the opposite (sometimes by finding ‘alternative facts’, and sometimes not even bothering as we ride the shark into the volcano). I wanted to do Project Marlboro as commentary on not just the world we live in, but also to point out that I’m no better than anyone else in this regard – to paraphrase Palahniuk, I’m the same decaying organic matter as everyone else, I’m part of the same compost heap…
I do contemplate whether by doing this I am disappearing up my own nihilistic arthouse cloaca. Will this be seen as my OK Computer or my Kid A? My Dark Side of the Moon or my Final Cut? My Joshua Tree or my, well, just about everything that came after the Joshua Tree? To be honest, I stopped giving a shit about such things a while ago – in the words of Kurtz, I am beyond their timid lying morality, and so I am beyond caring.
This bike represents the eternal victory of marketing over science, desire over logic and style over sense. If Project FZR was a journey into myself, then Project Marlboro is a comment on how human nature remains unchanged in spite of the horrors around us and ahead of us.
It represents the tension of the fabulous and the frightening, the awesome and the awful, a marker of where we’ve come from and where we’re headed.
This, my dear readers, is Project Marlboro.
Specs:
– 1997 Yamaha TRX850
– Polished forks
– R6 calipers with braided lines
– Keihin flatslide carbs
– Delkevic end cans
– Paint by Nightmare Designs
– Teardown and reassembly by Yamaha World (thanks Nate)
– Parts sourcing and precious cargo haulage by Big Dan