A Farewell to Evel
They say only the good die young, so it makes a weird kind of sense that a man named Evel would live to age 69. Which ain’t as old as it used to be, but, for the star-spangled daredevil Evel Knievel – whose mad motorcycle feats ought to have killed him some three decades ago – it was a ripe age indeed.
Knievel, whose final leap into the unknown came last Friday at his Florida condo, was one of those campy celebrities who seemed to belong only in the ’70s, with his red-white-and-blue jumpsuits, dry-look hairdo, and medallion necklaces. But the maniac from Butte, Montana – whose notable stunts included a 1968 jump over the fountains at Caesars Palace in Vegas and a failed 1974 rocket-cycle blast across the Snake River Canyon – proved a durable pop-culture icon. (He’s even in the Smithsonian as “America’s Legendary Daredevil.”) Draped in the colors of the flag, he made a lot of money by molding himself into a national institution, even though his tough-guy derring-do was utterly foolish, never involving actual heroics but only crazy acts.
In his later years he suffered from diabetes and pulmonary fibrosis, and he’d recently had a couple of strokes, as well as a 1999 liver transplant. An AP news report quoted pal and promoter Billy Rundle saying that, although he’d seen Evel’s death coming for a while, it was still unexpected: “Superman just doesn’t die, right?” But to me Knievel was more like a real-life Batman – a human being obsessively pushing the boundaries of what his mortal body could do. Evel held the world record for the most broken bones (433). I doubt if Superman ever even broke a nail.
But that’s just it, right? People love to watch each other do stupid stuff – as the popularity of MTV’s Jackass attests – and if someone gets a bit smashed up in the process, so much the better. Knievel’s stunts also had an impulsive quality that made them extra kitschy and eccentric – always attractive in this land so reliably excited by the notion of doing something that’s never been done before, even if it’s not a great idea. He seemed to feel that people were inspired by his unwillingness to back down. Maybe, but I think the thrill was more like the sickening one I used to get watching outtakes at the end of old Jackie Chan films, where the Hong Kong action star would show stunts gone horribly (yet titillatingly) awry.
When I was a kid, Evel’s attempt at the Snake River Canyon was a memorable media event, right up there with Nixon’s resignation. A fair number of us tried Evel-influenced stunts on our bicycles. There were Evel Knievel toys and T-shirts, the 1977 action flick Viva Knievel! (starring Evel as himself, alongside such Hollywood heavyweights as Gene Kelly, Lauren Hutton, and Red Buttons), even an appearance on TV’s The Bionic Woman. In the ’90s he was parodied on The Simpsons and celebrated in a song by the punk band Didjits. Yet here in the 21st century, Evel has become even more embedded in the collective consciousness.
Well, he was a die-hard self-promoter to the end, recently having shilled the senior-citizen conveyances manufactured by Legend Scooters, as well as his own conversion to Christianity: A Crystal Cathedral ad showed him in full regalia and announced “Daredevil Takes a Leap of Faith!” But his image flourished in the mainstream, too. Just days before he died, he settled a lawsuit he’d brought against Kanye West for the video to “Touch the Sky.” In this ’70s-flavored 2006 clip, the rapper appears as “Evel Kanyevel,” complete with patriotically decorated jumpsuits, gold medallions, and rocket-cycle.
This past October, Evel Knievel, the Rock Opera premiered right here in L.A. And next year the St. Louis branch of the Six Flags amusement-park chain will open a wooden roller coaster named after Knievel. He was even interviewed for a Vanity Fair profile coming in February.
From the lowbrow to the highbrow, he was fascinating because, by courting death and surviving, Evel Knievel defied oblivion. Somehow, he was always a winner – even when carried away on a stretcher. He couldn’t get out of here alive, of course, but at least when he finally walked away from daredeviling, it was on his own two feet.
Published: 12/07/2007
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