The Mama Tried Show 2016 – Milwaukee

Photos & Words by | Jun Song

I was pretty excited to head out to Milwaukee to check out the Mama Tried motorcycle show. I wasn’t too interested in the bike show itself, but more in the ice racing they have every year during the show.

As it turns out, beautifully warm weather – perfect for a cruise on your motorcycle – is a terrible weather for ice racing. Because of the unusually warm weather during the weekend, a layer of ice on the frozen lake had melted, making the condition inappropriate for the ice racing. So it got canceled…. Now what.

I’ve been to enough motorcycle shows to say that the Mama Tried show is quite different. I’m more used to guys wearing tight selvedged denims with expensive hipster hats at bike shows, and the Mama Tried show was definitely none of that. If your apparel wasn’t 90% black and didn’t have any tattoos, then you probably felt out of place at this dark show (literally dark). With girls getting their ass tattooed in the corner the show floor, the show felt very raw, which I felt it was very fitting to the home of all things HOGs.

Now back to my “dark” comment. The venue so was poorly lit that anyone would have a hard time seeing what any of the bikes on the floor looked like. People literally walked around with flashlights, if not with lights from their phones. A photographer needs light. I don’t like using flashes and since I wasn’t expecting such poor lighting, I didn’t even have my tripod. So these are pretty much all the photos I could take, but trust me, there were many more cooler bike at the show.

One comment

  1. Yeah really disappointed about the lighting at the show. Hope they fix it next year. But on the other hand, the show had more bikes and the place was packed right when the doors opened. Good times!

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