By Beau Allen Pacheco

Last week, a buddy of mine asked me, of all the bikes I’ve owned, which was my favorite?

Well, over the years, I’ve been lucky enough to own some landmark bikes, motorcycles that with their introduction, either raised the bar in motorcycle technology, or were pure classics. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that just as important as the bike, was the time in my life in which I owned it. My enjoyment factor of each bike was heavily influenced by my age, my health, my financial situation and the amount of time I had to ride it at the time.

I loved my brand new Honda Super Hawk 305 that I had as a fifteen year old living in the wilds of South Lake Tahoe. It was a landmark motorcycle and not too much of a beast for me. I loved it. My next bike was a Honda Scrambler that I owned as a seventeen year old living out in the high desert of Sparks, Nevada. I was free to ride the mining roads and deer trails for hours on end, and it was the perfect bike for that time. I loved it.

Then there was the Panhead dresser when I was a senior in high school. I had a full head of hair and I thought I was way too cool for school on that gorgeous bike. It too was a classic, and I loved it.

After that, at 19 years of age, I bought a Sportster that was my first and only foray into customizing. It had custom paint, and a custom seat and pipes. It was gawd-awful fast and those classic Sportys are valued collector bikes now. I loved it.

Around this time, my father who owned a lot of bikes, let me ride his BSA 440 Victor quite a bit. It was crude and cantankerous, but I loved that bike too.

After that were lots of bikes, a 450 Honda with the worst paint job in the world, one of the first inline Honda 750’s, a little blue BMW R/60 that I rode into the ground, a brand spanking new 1975 Triumph Bonneville that was a classic even then, but was so shoddily made that it fell apart underneath me as I rode it. And I loved those bikes.

Then there was the first year that Suzuki came out with their king of the hill, my new 1978 Suzuki GS1000E. It was the year that Cycle World proclaimed that all the manufacturers, Honda, Kawasaki and Suzuki fired their big guns, and the Suzuki was their favorite. I thought so too. I was in my early thirties at the time, and able to fully appreciate how good this bike was. I was young enough to test its limits, had the time and money to take some wonderful long distance trips on it, and it just seemed to fit. When I sat on it, I could swear that they made it just for me. I loved it.

But my favorite of all of them? Well, maybe next time.
In the meantime, what’s yours?

By Beau Allen Pacheco
Tomorrow night is Oscar night, and I wonder if motorcycles will be represented in any of the nominated movies. Thinking back on the plethora of biker movies over the years, some of them I’ve liked, most I’ve hated, I can’t think of any, offhand, that truly represent the motorcycling experience.

Of the cinematic productions that I liked, the two shows that have stuck in my mind are: Little Fauss and Big Halsey, and Then Came Bronson. All the rest were pure Hollywood fantasy. A lot of guys believed in them though, and some of the movies set the tone for the industry.

Mike Corbin, Jedi of Corbin Seats told me that he was in the biker retail biz in the late sixties, and after the movie Easy Rider came out, he couldn’t sell Captain America helmets and sissy bars fast enough. He thought the movie was the best thing that ever happened for motorcycling because a whole generation of new riders were inspired to get on a bike and hit the road. Maybe the movie was worthwhile for that.

On the 25th anniversary of Easy Rider, I commissioned the great movie reviewer Roger Ebert to do a retrospective of the movie for Big Twin Magazine, and he commented that the movie isn’t holding up. Indeed, for a few years after its release, Easy Rider was considered one of the top ten movies of all time in lots of reviewer’s lists, but it has since almost disappeared from those lists.

That’s okay by me, I never thought it was that good in the first place.