Category: Lambretta

The Return of Scomadi

Scomadi Turismo Leggara 250
Speaking of the undead*, while we were hibernating for the last few (six) months, Scomadi came back to life. You may remember “Scomadi” as the sixth or seventh name given to the Piaggio-engined vintage-body “Lambretta” that was being hyped for years by the Khurana family (who went on to stick Lambretta stickers on Adlys), CMSI (who went on to Chinese-scooter obscurity), and PM Tuning/Lambretta Innovations. Apparently, PM Tuning finally realized that a mass production run was never going to happen and decided to finally go ahead and build the things themselves in small batches. The first batch of ten Scomadi Turismo Leggara 250**s feature carbon fiber bodies and sell for £7000, which would have been a likely-but-ridiculous price for a production version, but really isn’t a ridiculous price for a hand-built slick-looking collectible modern Lambretta. Cheers, mates, we’ll gladly test one for you! In any case, we’re glad to see all that work finally paying off.

PS: Scomadi, you need a title tag in the header on your website. Right now, your site is listed in search engines as a blank space!

* Italjet, not Haiti, I’m not Pat Robertson, geez.
** Italian for “League of 250 Scum, on Tour”.

Lambretta Pato 125N appears at EICMA

More to say about this later, but check out the Lambretta Pato 125N. This is the same company that’s been selling the “Chrome Verizon logo”-style generic Chinese scooter in Italy as the “Lambretta Pato” for a few years, so it’s almost surely a typical Chinese engine/frame with a plastic bodywork, like the “Venti/La Vita” is to the Vespa.

Team S Equipe

Neville Frost

(Isle of Man) regulations stated that “works” teams weren’t allowed, so the guys formed their own team christened “Team S Equipe.” Unknown at the time was the fact that “Equipe” in French means “Team…”

A must-read account of the Arthur Francis S-Type Lambrettas and the men who raced them, with loads of truly awesome photos and memorabilia.
Continue reading “Team S Equipe”

The “American Girl in Italy” Lambrettista

Surely you’ve seen the poster, it has graced countless dorm rooms, and hangs in every other Italian restaurant in Chicago. Ruth Orkin’s photo “American Girl in Italy” has been a popular symbol of Italy for decades, but the first thing any scooterist sees is the early Lambretta to the right of the frame. Corriere della Sera recently tracked down the Lambrettista (now 79 and living in America) and interviewed him,. From what little sense the Google translation makes (he’s a Clint Eastwood lookalike? What?), it sounds like a fascinating story.

Electric Lambretta GP?

dscn0053gp1The current issue of Scoot! Magazine features an ad from GP200.net promising an “All-Electric GP200e” with a photo of a vintage Lambretta GP.

The link redirects to Wheego.net, which features absolutely no info on the scooter. Wheego is an electric car company that like most electric car companies seems to have already hyped their vehicles profusely, then missed a few self-imposed deadlines. Wheego is apparently backed by EarthLink founder (and ex-Mobil-exec) Mike McQuary, whom I will never forgive for the hour-plus I spent on the phone cancelling my EarthLink account, but my distrust of this endeavor goes beyond that experience.
Continue reading “Electric Lambretta GP?”

VVV: Rancid, Rancid, Rancid

Rancid: A little ska, a lot of punk, almost cartoonish machismo, it’s no wonder they’re a scooterist favorite. And it doesn’t hurt that their videos are loaded with scooters. Welcome to a triple-play Vespa Video Vednesday.

Artist: Rancid
Song: “Salvation”
Album: Let’s Go (1994)
Scooter(s): Several vintage Vespas and Lambrettas
Scooter content: about 15 seconds
Jump to the good parts: 1:22, 2:08

After a few weeks of VVV, we start to see a pattern develop: when you need some subbacultcha cred, just call the local club and have ’em show up for the video shoot. In this case (my favorite Rancid song, if you care), the boys are on the run from the suits, and they get chased through an alley full of scooters, which later join in the chase. Good footage, the scooters dont’ seem too extraneous, and it’s a good song. I bet this video sent a lot of punker kids to the classifieds looking for scooters.

VVV listmaster David Smith says there’s a scooter in the video for Rancid’s biggest hit, Time Bomb, but I’m not seeing it. Maybe at 1:16? (Sorry, can’t embed that video. Amazingly, the YouTube videos linked from Rancid’s site were removed by their label, and some of the ones that remain have embedding blocked)

Artist: Rancid
Song: “Red Hot Moon”
Album: Indestructible (2003)
Scooter(s): 4 vintage Vespas
Scooter content: 3 seconds
Jump to the good parts: 0:00

Rancid hasn’t gone away, they pop up with a new album every few years (the latest came out a couple months ago). This video is for a lesser known track from 2003, but it’s a good one. It appears to be shot in and around the historic New York City club CBGB (which sadly closed last year), and the opening shots feature a group of mods and rockers parked in front of the club. From there, the video goes all over the place, with some live footage, and a couple different storylines, and we don’t see the scooters again, but if David’s right (I’m sure the comments will be full of people telling me how blind I am), that makes three videos with scooters from one well-known and famously uncompromising band, two of them fairly big hits. That’s going to be hard to top.

Spider Man and more scooter comics

Eric tweets that the new issue of Amazing Spider-Man (#602) features Mary Jane on a Lambretta. Is that computer-generated art or a gouache painting? And why is Mary Jane so huge? I avoid comic book stores because I’ve chosen to waste all my disposable income on scooters and records, but I might have to pick that up.

Eric runs Modern Buddy, and even if you hate Twitter, follow his “Scooterism” on RSS, it’s always great stuff.

Speaking of comics, Eric (OTHER Eric) at Chicago Scooter Club recently posted a roundup of scooter comics, including Chynna Clugston-Major’s “Blue Monday” and “Scooter Girl” series and a new “Mods and Rockers” comic. And don’t forget Ed Brubaker’s Deadenders and The Originals by Dave Gibbons of Watchmen fame.

VVV: JDiggz “Make It Hot”

Vespa Video Vednesday is back, on an actual Vednesday! Here’s a good one that I think ten people sent me two years ago when it was new and I never even watched until I saw it on David Smith’s master list that inspired this enterprise:

Artist: JDiggz
Song: “Make It Hot”
Album: Memoirs of a Playbwoy (2007)
Scooter(s): Series 1 Lambretta, Vespa P-series
Scooter content: about 30 seconds
Jump to the good parts: 1:11, 1:42, 4:08

Canadian rapper JDiggz’ tune doesn’t do much for me, but it’s at least innocuous. The fact that the video is so totally incongruous to the song kinda makes it better, and the fact that they steered clear of the obvious gang-war motif buys them some points, too. It’s very nicely shot, and fun. JDiggz looks totally slick, and his posse of mods and hot-pantsed bootie chicks is somehow funny and believable.

The La Dolce Vita-esque intro is funny, but doesn’t really fit with the Quadrophenia thing. Though it appears to be a TV175, the Series-1 Lambretta predates the mods-and-rockers era, and the P-series Vespa is even more out of place. Of course JDiggz fans could care less about that. It’s obviously shot in Toronto on a leftover Jackie Chan movie set, which doesn’t really evoke London or Brighton, but JDiggz looks just about as wobbly and uncomfortable on a scooter as Phil Daniels.

Remember that time we had an idea for a regular feature and only kept it up for three weeks? Check back next week and see if we can break our record!

VVV: Third Eye Blind, “Semi-Charmed Life”

So we’re back with the second installment of Vespa Video Vednesday, only a couple days late, and this time we’ll choose a video at random from David Smith’s list… Ah, crap, not this one…

Band: Third Eye Blind
Song: “Semi-Charmed Life”
Album: Third Eye Blind (1997)
Scooter(s): Many vintage Vespas and Lambrettas
Scooter content: 30-40 seconds
Jump to the good parts: all over the place

This is the sound of late-nineties douchebaggery, the sound of Spin-Doctors-wannabees stomping on Kurt Cobain’s grave throughout the second half of the decade. To be honest, it’s not a terrible song, it’s catchy enough, but its oversaturation in commercials, movies, shitty parties, and Sabrina the Teenage Witch was more than enough to make these guys rich, and they probably hate the song more than I do. It’s such a chick flick cliche that even chick flicks make fun of it now.

I didn’t have a TV for the second half of the nineties, so I never saw this video until a few years ago. I don’t imagine I would have cut the song a break even knowing about the scads of sweet vintage scooters in the promo clip. If you turn down the sound, and you aren’t prone to seziures from the EXTREME! NINETIES! ONE! SECOND! EDITS!, there’s a lot to see here. Clearly they rounded up a So-Cal club at the height of the vintage glory days (Burgundy Topz? Secret Society? someone will post an angry comment and tell us, I’m sure) and you can see in the scooterist’s faces, they’re hoping the song doesn’t catch on and immortalize the two afternoons they spent hanging out with these guys.

Check in next vednesday! Ve promise it vill be better.

It’s about TIME…

Chad Schaefer (months ago) passed along five great stories from TIME Magazine’s newly-available-online archives. They were decades-old to begin with, so you’ll forgive the delay. Here are some excerpts, click the title to see the full stories.

Speed

TIME, October 17, 1955
…Italian motor-scooter enthusiasts, often harshly criticized for their desire to dominate the road, were still glowing at [79-year-old Pius XII’s] understanding words to a group of Vespa riders: “Those who complain of your noise, do they ever think that your speed may take you to church in time for Mass, or that you may be rushing a sick person to the hospital? Be patient with those who abuse you.”…

Rocks Round the Clock

TIME, August 14, 1964
… Suddenly, the kids began ranging through town in packs, stopping traffic, banging on cars, chanting (“Up the Mods”), looking for trouble. They raided cafes for dishes and glasses to throw, knives and forks to brandish, chased each other up the beaches and down the streets under a hail of rocks and crockery. On the promenade, herds of noisy Rocker motorcycles roared incessantly; buzzing them in hand-to-handlebar combat were enough Mod motor scooters to hold mass Vespa services.…

Fuzz with a Buzz

TIME, January 13, 1967
…the New York police have found a way to let one man cover the ground of five: the motor scooter. Police Commissioner Howard R. Leary has already checked out 575 cops on 80 Vespas and Lambrettas. And he has just asked for funds to buy 300 more. Eventually, he wants all 2,000 patrolmen to mount up…

Drunk astronauts and cosmonauts on scooters in Paris

(no original title) TIME, June 13, 1969
…the next morning [U.S. Astronaut] McDivitt hustled out to the Air Show, where he and fellow Apollo 9 Crewmen David Scott and Russell Schweiclcart showed Cosmonauts Vladimir Shakalov and Alexei Yeliseyev around the American exhibit. The proceedings started somewhat stiffly; then a bottle of bonded bourbon was broken out and things began to loosen up. By the time the revelers reached the Russian exhibit with its plentiful stock of vodka, they were saluting everything from Snoopy to space medicine. Toasted to a light crisp, the space travelers finally piled onto their Vespas and scooted back to the American pavilion—two hours late for their ensuing engagement.…

Victim of Affluence

TIME, February 7, 1972
…In 1970. only 55,000 Lambrettas were sold compared with 180,000 a decade earlier. Faced with the realities of a stronger economy, the late Innocenti’s son and nephew, who now run his company, have stopped production of the Lambretta in Italy but will keep a parts depot. They are arranging a deal with the Indian government and a Bombay company to move Lambretta production to India beginning in 1974…