interview with ian and amaryllis of falcon motorcycles

this interview should have been published four months ago but it wasn’t. i will exact my revenge one day. until then, i’ve lit the proverbial bridge on fire and stuck a pirate flag stapled to a ***** into the ground as a warning of what is left to rot on the other side.

then i hid a cassette radio in a tree and pushed the play button on something by night ranger or 38 special or something. it doesn’t matter. what does matter is that i need to get a beer.

there. you’re motorin’! what’s your price for flight?

anyway…. here is the interview with falcon motorcycles.

how i met amaryllis knight on facebook after a particularly testy exchange of messages with nobody important is a story unto itself. the chase was quickly cut to and she wrote to challenge what i had proffered about them. i asked her for an interview. she had to think about it. after a few weeks, she and ian agreed.

muah ha ha ha ha!

since, they have prayed for the health of the young dog i removed from his place on death row. i told them how this interview would expose them as people who struggle and dream as we all do. they called my phone and actually asked my opinion about things. i told them they would be better understood. they said, “maybe you shouldn’t write that incredibly libelous sentence.” i told them i would not misrepresent them. they believed in what you are about to read before i ever wrote it. i told them i would only tell the truth.

from november of 2010 until june of 2011, this is what happened.

lance dawes took most of the pretty pictures.

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TR: A few years ago Ian was building Trump bobs and selling them on eBay for about six grand. In 2008 you two partnered and the new-born Falcon emerged seemingly overnight with the Bullet, a 1950 Triumph Thunderbird bored out and tweaked into a boardtrack bobber commissioned by actor Jason Lee for 45 grand. How did Ian go from being the common man’s bike builder to that of creating elite one-offs few are lucky to own? Were you at the right place at the right time? Is Amaryllis a member of the Bilderberg Group? Did a favored deity answer a prayer? Was it voodoo? Jealous motherf***ers everywhere want to know.

IB: After discovering the Internet through eBay, I was approached by many life coaches and individuals who knew the ways of Landmark Forum, EST, Avon, Lesko, PSI, Tony Robbins and Abraham. Through these skills, I was able to start generating checks in the mail by harvesting alpaca fur, applying for government programs that gave me free money and selling cheap speakers as high end overstock speakers out of my white van, stolen from my boss.

There were no secret societies or schemes, but the first Falcon shop was located under a Santeria Botanica in Echo Park, so it is funny that you mention voodoo. It’s a long story. Here’s the skeleton of it:

I started building my first bike on my back patio when I was 19. I was completely obsessed and spent every minute outside of my day job trying to get my 1967 Bonneville basket on the road. I had no idea what I was doing and had little money to afford mistakes. At the time it felt like I’d just sold the family cow for a few mystery beans. Nothing about what I had in front of me seemed to fit right and there were dozens of holes that wouldn’t accept a standard or metric thread. I was soon to learn about Joseph Lucas, “the prince of darkness” and “patent holder for the short circuit.” I learned about Whitworth, BSP, BST and other acronyms that were very esoteric to me.

It was a real eye opener but I was smart enough to check my ego and ask a lot of people for advice. My best friend Joe who’d built his Triumph from scratch, along with a local shop called Rabers, pointed me in all the right directions and I was able to put my first bike together. I became an addict and found my next fix in the form of a Norton Commando heap. All of the mechanical elements were readily accessible for my two projects but there was a very limited selection of aftermarket parts. Disenchanted and unable to honestly ride a bike around that didn’t exactly feel like me, I started doing my own body work, making my own fasteners, fabricating whatever I could in order to remove the mass-produced parts and really make it my own. This is what I truly love to do.

Many years later I realized that I’d reached a point where I was working a job I hated in order to afford the thing I loved. I woke up one morning and had an epiphany: If I could get by building bikes, I would be a much happier person than having a steady paycheck and having a pit in my stomach, feeling like I should be doing something else with my life. I lived on couches, borrowed money to buy a tent to live in, moved to LA, and camped in my friend Jay’s back yard for a couple of years. I picked up odd jobs whenever I could just to be able to build bikes. I was happy. I sold a lot of Triumph bobbers on eBay and it was the first time in my life that I felt like I was doing what I truly wanted to do. I got to build bikes the way I envisioned them and other people got to decide how much they were worth. I was approached several times by people wanting me to build them a bike and I said no. I thought it would make things difficult customizing a bike specifically for someone else.

TR: Sounds like a story I’ve heard from a dozen builders. It’s their way or the highway, except they didn’t live in a tent and few talk about turning down customers. You told money to f**k off because you believed in something else?

IB: I wanted to focus during the builds and didn’t want them giving me design ideas. That just felt weird to me. I finally caved and did a bike outside of eBay. To my surprise, it was a liberating experience. There were things I’d always wanted to do but hadn’t been able to because it would take too long and I would starve trying to fund them myself. I still undercharged the guy for the amount of time I put in but I didn’t care because I got to build a better bike. Anyone who has ever built or made a British bike quickly discovers that to get them right, it takes a lot more time and patience than you plan for. I also had to be honest with myself about the fact that up until then, I was basically making the same bike over and over as far as lines and overall feel was concerned and I wanted to evolve, to do something different.

I was dreaming about exploring every idea I’d ever had about motorcycles and wanted to challenge myself to the point where I felt overwhelmed as I did when I bought my first bike and had no idea how to put the thing together. I didn’t want to settle and I didn’t want to repeat my ideas any more. I broke away from eBay completely and started making bikes via word of mouth. Each bike kept getting more involved and required new levels of fabrication. The whole time I was thinking about what I would do to various British bikes if I could refine them and take them as far as my mind and ability would let me. About that time a friend of mine brought Jason by…

TR: As it often is, it’s who you know. And you knew someone who knew someone. *******.

IB: Yeah, I guess it is in some ways. The friend who brought him by was one of my previous customers. Jason saw him riding his bike one day and asked if we could be put in touch. By then, I was ready and excited to put all of my saved-up ideas for a pre-unit Triumph into one bike and he was open to all of it, including the amount of time and higher level of detail I hadn’t been able to achieve in the past. It was good timing and I’m really grateful that it worked out and he could see what I was envisioning and believed in it.

AK: It’s wild how interconnected everything can be or is. Looking back at the series of events that has to happen for something to happen the way it does makes it miraculous that anything does! Meeting Ian was like that…

IB: Yeah, Amaryllis and I met right around the beginning of the Bullet build and it turned my world around. She was the first person I’d met who truly shared my values and ideas about so many things; music, traveling, books, motorcycles, life. We met when she was looking for her first bike and she found one that I’d built. She’s 5’4″ and the bike was built for a guy who’s 6’4″, which was kinda funny, but we matched. We were engaged a day and a month later (having both sworn we’d never get married) and we started Falcon together soon after that. Neither of us knew anything about running a motorcycle company, but I guess that was a good thing because we didn’t want to be like any other motorcycle company. She stayed up until three in the morning every night learning how to design and code our website, learning the ins and outs of starting a business in California, and she had an innate feeling about how the bikes should be presented. I really liked her ideas of keeping it clean and simple, let the bikes be the focus, not the wallpaper and additional personality that would only take away from the bikes. “The bikes have enough personality on their own,” is what she kept telling me. My good friend Sash works for a grip and lighting company with a studio. One of his photographer friends, Noah, wanted to take pictures of the Bullet because he said he couldn’t stand the s**tty pictures we took that were on the website at the time. I worked on his wife’s bike for three weeks in return for him taking the studio shots. That was really the beginning of Falcon. It just kind of happened after we both put everything we had into finishing the Bullet.

Back to your original question, the only deal with the devil that we have made is in the form of a bank loan, mortgage, and a line of credit, but there’s nothing unusual about us in that sense. I do use the Lord’s name in vain sometimes when we get our electricity bill, though.

TR: F***ing power companies. Didn’t the USA outlaw monopolies a hundred years ago? Let’s hurt them all. Then we can all live in tents! Like Bedouins! But with elite motorbikes. Yeah.

IB: Yeah, the elite bike thing. I hate the idea of building “elite bikes.” That’s very far from my intention, but by the nature of how the world works, and only making one bike a year because of the time it takes to take them to the extreme, I guess that’s what they’ve become.

Nothing about what we’re doing is trying to be elite, though. It’s a real challenge trying to do everything in-house; keeping the manufacturing of our Factory Falcon Parts in America and creating jobs for talented people in this crappy economy, but we’re proud of trying to do that, even though it’s challenging. It hasn’t come easy but its allowed me do something with my life that I’ve spent a large part of simply imagining until now. If I could afford to pursue my ideas to the fullest and not sell the bikes, I would. If I could make them for the person who I knew would appreciate it more than anybody in the world, regardless if they could afford to pay me to build it, I would. But that’s not realistic. The reality is that if Falcon is going to survive and keep employing our guys in the shop, and hopefully break even one day…

TR: Break even? Is it loans for a big and beautiful shop with the best tools and equipment that exists somewhere near downtown Los Angeles or should your bikes be 150 grand? Maybe both? And did you get your loans from American Express?

IB: No, Amex didn’t give us the loan. The Amex ad was about the owners of small businesses working hard against all odds in this economy; a potter, a farmer, a diner owner, and a bike builder. We agreed to do it because there were no logos, no corporate stuff, just anonymous people working, doing their thing in America, trying to be creative and positive and make ends meet in a tough economy. We saw it as a good way to represent custom builders as guys who deserve to be a seen as a part of the hard working American workforce, just like everybody else. We both privately feel it’s about time that bike builders are seen as real people working away in anonymous shops, not just TV stars living some kind of glamorized version of life. Not that I’m knocking that, just that entertainment is rarely like reality.

Moving forward , the value of our bikes are going to have to be enough to cover our costs, which is more than most people could afford to pay, including me. What we are building now is on an entirely new level. I stopped hoping and dreaming that the world worked differently a long time ago when I realized that it clashed with making my actual dreams come true.

AK: I appreciate your first question, too. I think we all know that there’s no such thing as emerging as an overnight success, although it can seem that way from the outside looking in. It’s like popcorn. I’m sorry, I’m totally obsessed with popcorn today…

TR: I like popcorn. Does this bar have popcorn? Hey barkeep? Do you have popcorn? No? You know the salty flavor makes people drink more, right? Yeah. Note to your manager. Okay guys, I’m lost. Ian, you stopped hoping and dreaming for the world and then what? You sold your brand to American Express? You know they helped crash our economy, right? Hold on. I’m sorry. Amaryllis, please continue.

AK: Well, one moment popcorn is a little tough kernel, and the next it’s a giant fluffy cloud. It’s easy to forget or not think about the immense amount of external and internal pressure, heat, steam, and turning itself inside out that has to happen before you can see the result. I think anybody that says whatever success they get doesn’t come from a lot of hard work is not being honest. Hard work and preparation can only take you so far, it’s true. A lot of timing and sometimes luck, or being in the right place at the right time comes in to it, too. Because of the Legend of the Motorcycle show, where we took the Bullet minutes after its final assembly, literally, we got press suddenly out of nowhere and it became kind of like a snowball rolling downhill, gaining momentum. I’m talking as though we’ve “succeeded,” and we’re nowhere close to that yet. We have yet to make any money on a bike build.

TR: Hence the tents. I understand but I’m concerned with Ian’s statement that how the world works clashes with his dreams. At this stage, can’t you make the world work within your dreams? Are you a master or a slave?

IB: I’m a slave to what I love, and I hope to get closer to mastering it some day, that’s my goal, daily. I wish it was that easy. What I meant by the world clashing with my dreams…. In my dreams, I’d be living in Never Land as a pirate…

TR: ARR!

IB: …and money wouldn’t have anything to do with anything. It would be all about living and doing what I loved with no connection to reality or how the world works. In real life I have this crazy yearning to build full-on, one-off bikes around rare engines. But the reality means that in order to do it, I had to grow up and realize that it means I have to earn enough to be able to keep moving forward and fueling the realities of the dream. It’s a dream with a huge mouth and giant multi-stomachs that need to be fed. It’s going to be hard to make this all work, and it’ll ultimately depend on people out there liking what we’re doing enough to support it and believe in it, so that we can keep going. Wishing the world worked differently is pointless. I just have to do what I do, and be grateful for the people who trust me and can afford to pay me to do my job to the best of my ability.

AK: We’ve just begun and like Ian said, we’re learning every day about how to try to make this work. Right now, we feel like we’re in a really exciting place but we’re going to have mountains of challenges and vast responsibility and debt to cross before we can make Falcon thrive. It makes us lose sleep sometimes but it’s worth it overall because we really love and believe in what we are doing. We get to wake up every day to do something with heart, which we are both very grateful for. It’s the same story that we all face – or at least those of us lucky enough to live in in the US and other first world countries – we wake up and have to do our best to make things happen in the way we’d like them too, and if we work hard enough and stick to it long enough, good things sometimes cross our paths.

TR: Amen, sister. I understand your desire to grow but still, because I think Amex and bankers in general are the largest part of the problem because they’re literally trillionaires who will begrudgingly give you a few bucks that most in this economy most can never repay at the interest rates they demand. They fund both sides of every war. James Madison, as well as many of our nation’s founders, knew of their evil. Mr. Madison even stated that “history records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controlling the money and its issuance.” Today we call that “the Fed.” It’s a conglomerate of private bankers, not anything “Federal.” They steal from the people. Why did you choose debt instead of growing slowly with word-of-mouth, creating relationships with jerks like me, or nicer folks with more readers, while believing that your work would carry you upward without a bank loan? I don’t think that it is as you say, “how the world is,” Ian. It’s a perspective that people believe due to so much media repeating it over and over. And don’t forget that American, and most foreign media, is owned by these same bankers and their puppet corporations that build war machines and nuclear plants. It might take longer to “succeed,” but you’d be free. This is who I am and what I’ve seen. I dig the desire to get out from under a tent after a while, too, so you don’t have to defend yourself, but I’d be sad to find that after a lifetime you guys wouldn’t even own your business. It also seems incongruous with your previous statements about “doing it your way,” and turning business away if it wasn’t right. How is a bank “right?”

AK: We may have to send them a check every month, which is stressful for anyone with debt, but we are doing things that we love, and are able to delve into it all in a way that allows us to develop, explore and create beyond anything we’ve ever done previously. For us that is beautifully freeing, at least at this stage in our lives. Before I met Ian, I delivered babies for a living, working with mostly single moms and teenagers, and in refugee camps, and I enjoyed supporting other people through their life journeys and responsibilities. Ian’s motorcycle work had been growing slowly by word of mouth for over a decade. Neither of us had any reason to take on additional debt of any kind. When we met, time suddenly felt like it was moving really fast, and ideas about children came into our minds for the first time, as well as wanting to truly reach for the sky and make our deep-down goals come true. True creativity, true exploration, true risk of ourselves and for everything we believed in. It was like being knocked out and waking up a deeper person, and we were willing to take on new burdens to help create a foundation for trying to build our bigger dreams upon.

TR: Does it take a bank loan to have babies now?

AK: Not necessarily, but it often takes bank loans to be able to develop and grow a business. With Falcon, our goal was to stretch our creative abilities to their furthest extreme with each build, and there was no way that either of us would have had been able to create the ability to do that without being willing to take the plunge.

IB: I’d been growing my business slowly ever since I moved into the tent about ten years ago. I enjoyed growing it that way and if I hadn’t met Amaryllis I would’ve probably carried on at my own pace like that. But after we met I had this strong sense that I wanted to carry her, too, and kids one day. Everything changed. It was scary but I realized that I didn’t want to just do the same thing any more, even my motorcycles. I started to be more honest with myself too. Like I said earlier; I wanted to challenge myself to the point where I felt overwhelmed again, like I did when I bought my first motorcycle. I didn’t want to settle anymore, and I didn’t want to repeat any of my designs ever again. I wanted each bike to keep getting more involved and require new levels of fabrication, skill, and thought. I wanted to keep evolving with every build. We both felt that we’d need to be willing to risk everything, even our financial futures, if we wanted to realize that potential, and we knew that we were going to need a lot more than we had to get there. We had no idea that we’d get the kind of attention we started to get. It’s not about that for us. We took loans out so we could put our money where our mouths were and get to work. We wanted to build something bigger than just us, have room to grow into, and some fuel to grow with. People told us we were crazy to be risking more than we had in order to follow our hearts, but it felt like the right thing, and even though it feels crazy sometimes, it still feels right.

AK: It took us a year of collecting our thoughts and ideas and forming them in to a formal plan before we could persuade a bank to trust us enough to help get us get started. Going to the bank and asking guys in suits for money for motorcycles? Not an easy feat. I think maybe the voodoo worked that day…

TR: I guess that takes as much nerve as a do-it-yourself approach. I know you guys have the voodoo. Maybe we’ll call it magic. I’ve written business plans before. Besides being time-consuming, you have to sell it. I’m really not much of a salesman, I simply want to write and sometimes fly like a superhero but without the responsibility. You want to build bikes. It’s hard hitting that edge where you realize you have to write that plan and, “f**k! I need to spend a month doing nothing but writing corporate **** for ******** in ties who will judge me.” Selling different ideas, in any economy, takes nerve.

AK: It’s still “do it yourself,” too. It’s all still us. Our business plan might as well have been a Peter Beard diary twenty inches thick and tied together with a belt, except with grease and old stock package labels instead of antelope blood and snake skin. We know that there are rumors within factions of the closely knit bike community about us selling bikes that we had made a ton of money on, about us being funded by white robed druids; the mafia; our family; or the colossal money tree that mutated from the LA River in our back yard. You’ve even fueled some of them! But unfortunately for us, the reality is a lot more tedious and mundane and took a lot more energy and work.

TR: Yeah. That’s why the next round is on me. I believe I misjudged you last year. I don’t agree with the banker stuff, but I ought to let it rest since you build such nice bikes, you believe in your way, you trusted me to not screw you here, and we’ve become friends. I’m sorry, dear. You guys have the right to make your own decisions and not be concerned with the judgments of ******* armchair critics. Cheers.

AK: We’ve heard them all, but we’ve never really tried to publicly defend ourselves. We’re just doing our thing. People who actually know us, or who feel genuinely connected to what we are doing and care about it, will make their own opinions based on reality. No matter what you say in interviews, it gets filtered down to slick, perfectly structured paragraphs and the personality and soul can leave the original meaning. The facts can get hazy or even entirely misconstrued at times. It even happens with high quality publications. I feel like I could say “I ride bikes in the park” and someone will quote it as though I said, “I stride dykes in the dark,” as if it’s total fact. What’s the point of even arguing at that point? It’ll just look like we’re being defensive. Some of these warped windows into reality, together with the fact that we’re both private people who work hard behind the scenes and only show the fruits of our labor (or popcorn), has led to a couple conspiracy theories out there in the custom bike world. I’m a strong believer that the truth always comes out in the end. The truth for us is that we work our butts off and are probably nuts to be risking as much as we are to build a handful of bikes, but we love what we do so we’re happy to take that risk. Hopefully people will enjoy and appreciate the bikes, the effort and creative work, our dedication to motorcycles and the passion for making them, rather than focusing on whispered myths.

TR: Thank *** this isn’t a high-quality publication! Now, about the dykes in the dark…. lipstick or the other kind? No! I know it’s the lipstick kind. Seriously, though. You guys do get hammered sometimes, and I was far from the only one playing Thor. I remember one thing in particular that set me off. You had just released a beautiful video of the Kestrel riding through desert mountain roads. It looked great. The lighting was dark and wintry. The music was beautiful. The bike sounded like a hot rod about to win the race and then, in a split second moment, a shot of a motor that was milled from a solid piece of aluminum was dripping oil. I totally f***ed with you guys about that, writing “if I paid a hundred grand for a bike I’d be ****** if it leaked oil.” I was told that only old Harleys leak oil. This was a brand new machine and better than a mere rebuild. So what’s the deal with the oil leak?

AK: Sorry to disappoint again, but the truth is far more dull. I am very supportive of whoever wants to love whom, but I’m a one-man woman. I do like to ride actual bikes in the park though, wearing lipstick, with Ian.

TR: Dang. Bi-sexual chicks are so rad.

AK: You’re incorrigible! As for the dreaded “oil leak video,” it’s funny. Ian had just finished the Kestrel and had a crazy look in his eye, so we drove into the desert with our buddy Matt at two a.m., and got there as the sun was about to rise. We both had Canon 7D cameras and we spent the whole day either lying on the ground with dust being blown into our eyes and mouths, or in the pickup trying our utmost to keep up with Ian who had turned into a maniac…

TR: Excellent.

AK: Ian and I are creative people, and so is pretty much everyone around us in one way or another. Any chance we get to make something; a part, a drawing, a video, a piece of music, we take it. Matt edited our footage and Ian and his band wrote and performed the music for the video. His buddy Elliot did the sound editing.

TR: The music rocked.

AK: We were excited to have caught that drop coming out of the oil breather. We felt it expressed a moment in time perfectly, that it showed the motorcycle wasn’t powered by an electronic engine like so many bikes today. It was a machine with moving parts and oil. It breathed. It was alive! A few blogs, including yours, went ballistic. We were confused about the negative attention at first, until we realized that it was coming from people that didn’t know enough about vintage British engines. Many of these engines have oil breathers and their sole purpose is to “breathe” oil. It has nothing to do with a leak, it just releases drops of oil when the engine’s hot and has been running for a while. The Kestrel breather tube begins at the top of the crank case and runs to the bottom of the engine where it opens, just out of the camera frame in that moment. I’m glad that innocent little drop had no idea about the amount of fuss it would cause, because the video wouldn’t be as fun if we hadn’t caught it in its full, sixty-frames-per-second glory! But then again, I’m no film director nor a camera man. That’s just my personal opinion.

TR: Well then. With this toast I am once again humbled but shall congratulate you on one of many builds that will hurt all bankers!

IB: I used to use unicorn fat as mustache wax but ever since Amaryllis told me it was cruel, I started to install those ‘lil oil breather babies on all my bikes so I can reach down and keep my ‘stash nice and tight after blowing in the wind, see. I think I might patent it.

TR: Dude, that punk from OCC will do it for ya!

AK: A punk at Orange Coast College? I grew up in the 70s by Camden Lock, London, among the OG punks, so I guess I’m jaded. In my opinion, anyone at OCC calling himself a punk in 2011 can’t be more than a shadow of the real deal. That said, we’ve needed patent & trademark help for a while now for this crazy bolt Ian designed. Can I get his number?

TR: I don’t know the number any more. I believe it’s been disconnected due to unpaid charges or too many prank calls. I forgot which. My meaning by writing “punk” was the “get off my lawn” kind of punk; a Clint Eastwood kid about to get shot in the face for being a dumbass. Anyway, you’ve done other things besides birthin’ babies. Care to thrill us with some stories?

AK: Oh ***. I don’t know where to start. I left home when I was 13 and haven’t lived with my parents or family since. I’ve always loved adventures and following my own path, and have ended up in all kinds of situations which make me love the diversity of life, and living it, and has made me appreciate how little choices change everything. The fun stories are ones I’ll tell you about when you come visit us…. When Ian met me I was a doula and apprentice midwife delivering babies full time, intermixed with working at refugee camps in West Africa. I took off right after we met to drive in a car rally from London to Mongolia, which was wild, and since then I don’t really have that many exciting stories because all I do now is work on Falcon!

TR: Is it apparent to you since the Bullet and the Kestrel you’ve developed a style others are now mimicking? I’ve seen builders from all around the world building bikes that look like yours. Is it flattering, a little frightening, or what?

IB: I’ve always embraced the fact that builders will always “borrow” and get inspired by ideas from other builders. It just means I need to keep going in my own direction and evolving ideas from the purest place within my imagination. By staying true to that I hope to create unique motorcycles that are nearly impossible to copy even if I tried to copy it myself. It is disappointing when someone tries to copy without adding any imagination of their own, though, but that really doesn’t happen much.

TR: The bikes I’ve seen which have used your work as inspiration do have their own elements of unique imagination. Getting back to the music for that desert Kestrel vid, it really did rock. Care to expound upon your musical endeavors, Ian? As a former strung-out singer, songwriter and guitar playing musician in LA, I’m interested to find out. I know you folks are humble, but is it all for fun or do you have rock star dreams?

IB: Music for me has always been very personal, whether it’s music I choose to listen to or music I play. I never set out or had the intention of being a rock star, I just love to write, record and play music live. Mostly, it keeps me sane because even though it is similar to the bikes in intention, the process is opposite in reality. The motorcycles are imagined in my head, then made into physical form, and the music is created on a tangible instrument and only remains in memory after it is played. One always seems to feed into the other and this creates a sort of symbiotic balance.

TR: Symbiosis. You two seem to have that on many levels. What kind of music and or musicians do you like and/or listen to?

IB: I can appreciate all types of music with the exception of Adult-contemporary-new-age-jazz-world-trip-hop-lounge music. Currently we have Lloyd Miller, The Melvins, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Django Reinhardt, The Allman Brothers, Converge, a bit of the o’l Ludwig Van, Peter Green-era Fleetwood Mac, The Misfits, Tom Waits, Desert Sessions, Boris, Astrud Gilberto, Mastodon, Tchaikovsky, Godspeed, Nick Cave, Spirit, and Blind Willie McTell on heavy rotation, but it changes all the time.

TR: Well guys, I’m happy we were able to share some things that should clear up a few misconceptions about you and Falcon Motorcycles. We could go on for hours but I’ve got to meet with my World Domination Council regarding fluoride and eugenics, so I must cut this short. Before I go, I’d like to congratulate you on your recently finished bike, the Black Falcon, your 1952 Vincent Black Shadow which you’ve allowed us to photograph for this interview. It’s truly an amazing machine.

Thank you for allowing my readers the opportunity to discover why you do what you do, about your dreams and struggles, and especially your honesty and trust in my vision for this interview. You both tackled the biggest myths and most negative accusations about you and Falcon with honesty and humor.

Now…. When is a good time for me to come by and take the Black for a spin?

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