Easy Rider Questions

Cafe Society
1

In the movie, Easy Rider how did that redneck mob find those bikers in order to kill Jack Nicholson?

I mean, okay, I could ask why those rednecks got wound up enough to kill Nicholson for simply walking into a restaurant with a shaggy haired Dennis Hopper. I guess rednecks in those days killed any old stranger who came along with a haircut they didn’t like.

There’s dogs baying in the background as the mob is whaling on the trio with baseball bats, so I suppose that bloodhounds were involved. Damn, those rednecks have bloodhounds trained so fine they can sniff out a certain tire track from every other tire track on the highway! That’s some bitchin’ badass dog sniffing right there.

So, how come there’s so few haircut related deaths these days? And why didn’t the mob focus more on Dennis Hopper, since a couple of those rednecks had shaggier hair than Jack Nicholson or even Peter Fonda?

2

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen the movie but Nicholson’s character was a burnt-out local civll rights attorney who was likely somewhat well-known in the area as a “troublemaker”. My guess is he’d gotten many rednecks so pissed off at him over the years that his going into a restaurant with a “hippy freak” like Hopper’s character was the last straw. They probably quietly tailed them after they left (much like what happened with the Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner murders).

3

They were probably not too far off the road, and the campfire would have been easy to spot. Can’t say which side of the Parrish line they were on, though.