Motorcycle Classics Magazine – The ExhaustNotes Blog

A Distant Memory: Memphis Bike Night

By Joe Berk

This is a sort of a Wayback Machine post, one that goes way back. It’s from June of 2012, which is way before Gresh and I started the ExhaustNotes blog. I used to write the CSC Motorcycles blog (it’s where I started as a blogger). I was thinking about Tennessee the other day and I remembered that I had written a blog about the Memphis bike nights, but I couldn’t find it in the ExNotes archives. Then I realized: It predated ExNotes. It was a CSC blog.

I have got to be the luckiest guy on the planet. I’m taking this great tour through the South, and yesterday we found ourselves in Memphis. Memphis is a great city for many reasons, not the least of which is Graceland. As I mentioned in the CSC blog yesterday, Susie and I took the Graceland tour and we loved it. It was beyond awesome. I’m a great Elvis Presley fan, and the opportunity to visit his home was not one to be missed. Folks, if you ever get to Memphis, Graceland is a must!

Well, our good fortune did not end there. We had an awesome dinner at the Rendezvous, a super barbeque joint my good buddy Georgia Robby recommended. Folks, trust me on this…barbeque just doesn’t get any better than this!

The Rendezvous in Memphis…the best of the best!

After our great dinner, we moseyed on over to Beale Street. That’s kind of like the Memphis version of New Orlean’s Bourbon Street…it’s the place to be in Memphis. We noticed a lot of motorcycles heading that way, and then, hey, we saw that the street was shutdown…and it was nothing but motorcycles! Turns out that Wednesday night is Motorcycle Night on Beale Street! Check this out…

Midweek Memphis Moto Madness on Beale Street!

The Memphis moto night is one big street party, folks! We were having a blast talking to the riders there. They saw my California Scooter shirt and everyone wanted to know about the CSC bikes. It was awesome. We met a lot of people and made a lot of friends.

The photo below shows Carl and Ryan, a father and son team. These are cool guys. Carl was on his Gold Wing, and Ryan was on a CX500 he and Carl rebuilt. Ryan just graduated from technical school, and when his father asked him what he’d like for a graduation present, Ryan just asked to go with Carl on his next motorcycle trip. That’s pretty cool stuff, folks.

Wisconsin Carl and his son Ryan…riders extraordinaire!

We actually rode alongside these guys about 100 miles east of Memphis without meeting them. Susie recognized the Gold Wing when we saw them again at the Memphis moto night. Talk about a small world!

I grabbed a lot of photos on Beale Street. Every body was having a good time. I asked the fellow below if I could grab a shot, but he kept smiling for every shot and looking like too nice of a guy. I asked him to strike a tougher pose, and wow, did he ever!

We were having a lot of fun. We noticed police officers at each intersection making sure that Beale Street allowed no one other than motorcyclists, and I asked a couple of them if I could grab their photo. They said sure, but only if Susie was in the picture…

The police officer on the left looks like he’s having a good time…but the guy on the right looks like he wanted me to explain that traffic ticket I never paid…

Well, hey, the next day we had an absolutely awesome Memphis breakfast. I had a French toast fluffer-nutter with whipped cream and blueberries, and hash brown sweet potatoes with marshmallow.

There’s peanut butter and bananas sandwiched between those slices of French toast!

Hash brown sweet potatoes with marshmallows!

Steve saw the above photos and told me I might need to lower the gearing on my CSC motorcycle when I returned to California.

The next night we made it to Mobile, another great southern US city. In the morning, we toured the USS Alabama, a floating museum just outside of Mobile. It was beyond awesome. The ship bristled with guns. I was amazed, and I have to tell you, it’s worth a trip to this part of the country just to see this magnificent battleship. After seeing the USS Alabama, we followed the Alabama Scenic Byway to the Emerald Coast in Florida’s panhandle, and we had a great grilled amberjack dinner in Fort Walton Beach. Imagine bone white sand and emerald green water, and you’ll have a pretty good handle on Florida’s Emerald Coast.

That trip was 14 years ago, and I remember it like it was yesterday. Good times brought to life once again through the miracles of the Wayback Machine! The blog you read above evolved into a Destinations piece for Motorcycle Classics magazine. You can find it and more here.

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A “How To” Howdy Do

By Joe Berk

As you may know, I’ve been writing for Motorcycle Classics magazine for about 20 years. It’s hard to believe, I know. I mostly write the travel-oriented Destinations pieces, with the occasional feature story on a motorcycle or an interesting business. A new editor (good buddy Mark) suggested I start a series focused on how to do selected maintenance activities. My first thought was that it wasn’t such a good idea, but I learned a long time ago it’s never a good idea to argue with people who buy ink by the barrel, so I took Mark’s suggestion to heart.

My second thought was that a How To series should be a fairly easy thing to do. I wrote the shop manuals for CSC a few years ago. There, the approach was to have one of CSC’s maintenance experts perform the maintenance activity with me snapping photos through the process. I already had the photo approach nailed (f/8, Aperture mode, on board flash, all with my trusty D810 and Sigma 50mm macro lens). The photos became my notes. I processed the pics in PhotoShop, I added a bit of text to each, and the shop manuals basically wrote themselves. I knew I could use the same process for the Motorcycle Classics How To series, and I was right.

If you subscribe to Motorcycle Classics, you’ve already seen a few of these (and if you don’t subscribe to the magazine, you should). I did a story on how to service drum brakes with Emma Booton up in Marina (she’s wonderful), another one on wheel lacing with good buddy Kenny Buchanan of Buchanan Spoke and Rim, and lately I’ve been doing a series with good buddies Moe, Steve, and Lindsay at Cycle Garden in Indio, California. I enjoyed making friends at all these places, I enjoyed learning the processes, and I enjoyed writing the stories.

You can see the Motorcycle Classics stories I wrote here. It’s been a hell of a ride. You can also buy Destinations, a collection of some of my favorites.

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One Up, Three Down

Those of you who subscribe to Motorcycle Classics magazine may have seen my article on good buddy Andrew’s Norton P11. I was very proud of that piece and its photos, until I found out that I got a few things wrong. The most significant faux pas was my description of the shift pattern, which I mistakenly assumed was the same as a Triumph’s. All my ‘60s and ‘70s Triumphs were one down, a half click up for neutral, and all the rest up (just like on most of today’s motorcycles). BSA was the same way. When I rode good buddy Steve’s Norton Commando of the same era it was one down and three up. That’s the natural order of things, right?

The shift lever on the right side of Andrew’s P11A. It’s one up and three down. They even stamped it for me at the factory, and I still got it wrong. Andrew owns British Motorcycle Gear.

Ah, not so fast. Norton did it differently. On a Norton, it’s one up and three down. Just like it’s marked on the transmission. Just like my photo above shows.

So why did I get it wrong in the MC article? Chalk it up to old age and carelessness, I guess. I sure am embarrassed about it. I should stick to things that are harder to get wrong (maybe I should be a presidential election pollster for the New York Times).

Steve’s Norton Commando in the San Gabriel Mountains. It’s one down and three up, as God intended.

You might be wondering: What about Steve’s Norton Commando, which had the conventional one down and three up shift pattern? As it turns out, more than a few Norton owners reversed the shift pattern on their bikes to make them like the rest of the world, which can be accomplished by installing a mirror image cam plate in the Norton’s AMC gearbox. That’s evidently what happened to Steve’s bike way before he owned it, and way before I rode it.

Guys who have the original Norton gearbox pattern write that it’s the more natural of the two shift patterns. When you want to go faster, you push down on the shift lever. It’s kind of like stepping on the gas, I guess. Foot down, go faster. Thinking about it, it makes sense.

You know, I didn’t think too much about the Norton’s controls layout when I wrote the P11 article (and obviously, what little thinking I did was not enough). I wrote another MC story about a 1913 Thor several issues back, and if I would have made a mistake, I would have thought it would be in that article. On that one, I had to study my photographs and think about what each lever, pedal, valve, and twist grip did (and there were a lot of each); there was no one to explain it all. After I had done that, I actually found a guy who owned a 1914 Thor (how many of them can there be?) and he told me I had it right. But on that Norton…I’ve ridden a Norton, I’ve owned a bunch of Triumphs and one BSA, and I just never thought I’d get it wrong. But I did. Mea culpa.

Oh, two more things:

1. 1. Merry Christmas and Happy Hannukah. They’re both on the same day this year, which is very unusual.
  2. That photo at the top of this blog? That’s the P11A, Andrew (on the left), and good buddy Harry (aka the Norton Whisperer).

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The Janus Halcyon 450 and Motorcycle Classics Magazine

Joe Gresh’s recent blog on the Vintage Japanese Motorcycle Club and their magazine is, like all of Gresh’s writing, outstanding. So much so that, as he suggested, I became a VJMC magazine subscriber.

I’d like to suggest another magazine, and as you have no doubt guessed from the title of this blog, it’s Motorcycle Classics. I think it’s one of the best motorcycle magazines in existence. Part of that is due to MC‘s quality…glossy paper, a great page count, great photos, and great writing. And part of it is I get to see my work in MC‘s pages on a regular basis. Most recently, it’s my story on the new Janus Halcyon 450. Sue and I had a great time visiting with the Janus team in Goshen, Indiana, and the Halcyon 450 motorcycle is a winner. Pick up a copy of Motorcycle Classics magazine and read the Halcyon 450 article. Better yet, subscribe to Motorcycle Classics.

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Want to read more about Janus motorcycles in action? Check out the Baja ride we did with Janus!

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Tulsa and Oklahoma’s Green Country

You may recall that about a year and a half ago I did a blog on our visit to Oklahoma and the great riding in the eastern half of the state around the Tulsa area. I wrote a piece about that for Motorcycle Classics magazine and you can get to most of it online here. You can pick up a copy of the latest issue at your local newstand. Better yet, subscribe to Motorcycle Classics.

Your two blogmeisters (yours truly and Joe Gresh) have been published in several motorcycle magazines and other publications both in print and in the digital world. You can get to a partial compendium of our articles by clicking here for me and here for Gresh (or by clicking on either of the above photos).

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Dancing with the Devil

Another blog title dilemma. I went with the one you see above. I almost went with “Quoted by the NY Post.”

This is a blog about a dynamite So Cal loop ride, one that I covered for Motorcycle Classics magazine a couple of years ago and one that was (as the saying goes) critically-acclaimed in the NY Post. No kidding. I’ll get to that in a second or two. First, the ride: It’s circumnavigation of the San Gabriel Mountains, with a stop at the Devil’s Punchbowl State Park. The Punchbowl was burned out during one of the recent California wildfires, but it will be back. Here’s the route:

This ride includes a stretch along the northern side of the San Gabriels, a hop over the San Andreas Fault, Mt. Emma Road to cut around the northwest corner, the magnificent Angeles Crest Highway, and more. I like to start south of the San Gabriels and head up through Cajon Pass on I-15, grab the 138, and then take a quick left on Lone Pine Road. That’s a nice long climb up into the San Gabriels, it’s desolate, and it’s scenic.

I wrote up this ride for Motorcycle Classics, and suprisingly, the NY Post newspaper had nice things to say about it. They prepped an article critiquing other motorcycle mag articles, but they liked my piece. Here’s what they had to say:

Funny how it’s Motorcycle Classics, a magazine focused more on the bike than the ride, that really revved our two-wheeled wanderlust.

Joe Berk takes us on a ride through a passage in California’s San Gabriel Mountains called “The Devil’s Punchbowl.” The piece opens with a picture of a San Andreas Fault sign. Berk only gets one page to draw us in, but he has us ready to put our keys in the ignition.

“The Nirvana-like northern segment through the San Gabriels’ scenic twisties is … where the fun begins,” Berk advises. Later he describes a “ragged and rugged canyon” created by “a misbehaving San Andreas fault.”

Having indulged in the “crisp pine-scented mountain air” and taking in views of the Mojave Desert to his right and the San Gabriel summits to his left, Berk stops to recommend the French toast at the Grizzly Cafe. “You can thank me later,” he writes.

You can read the NY Post article here (you might want to see what they said about a couple of the other moto mags) and the Motorcycle Classics Devil’s Punchbowl story here.

You probably already know this, but both the guys who write the ExNotes blog (yours truly and Joe Gresh) are well published. You can read some of Gresh’s work here, and some of mine here.

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The Destinations Deal Ride: One of the best ever!

When I wrote the blog for CSC Motorcycles, we organized several multi-day rides (trips through Baja, the western US, China, Colombia, and more). One of my favorite rides was the Destinations Deal tour. It started out as an idea by the real marketing whiz in the CSC organization (who likes her anonymity, so I won’t mention her name), with directions to include some of the best destinations in the southwestern US. As I organized the ride, I realized all the spots I selected were featured in stories I wrote for Motorcycle Classics magazine. CSC wanted to offer a discount on any new bike purchased for the event, the Motorcycle Classics columns were all titled Destinations, and the ride quickly became known as the Destinations Deal Tour.

The ride was awesome: Topock, Laughlin, Oatman, the Grand Canyon, Route 66, Zion, the Extraterrestrial Highway, Tonopah, Death Valley, Shoshone, Baker, and then home. Just over 1500 miles in 6 days on 250cc motorcycles…it would be exactly what the doctor ordered.

The Destinations Deal was one of the best rides I ever did. Old friends and new friends, great weather, great stops, great roads, and great stories combined for an awesome week. The roads, the riders, the restaurants, the camaraderie…it all clicked on this one. But don’t take my word for it. Take a look at the photos.

Leighton and a killer hot dog in Topock on the Colorado River just as we crossed into Arizona. You get a discount coupon for the local coronary care unit when you order this meal.

A few of the boys and their RX3s in Oatman. Clark Gable and Carole Lombard stayed in this hotel back in the day.

Wild jackasses roam the streets in Oatman. I could have a lot of fun captioning this photo.

On our first night, we stayed in the Colorado Belle, a riverboat hotel on the Colorado River in Laughlin, Nevada. It was our first day and we rode through three states already. Gresh and I closed the bar that first evening. They had a live group doing ’60s Motown hits and the music was fantastic. Or maybe we just had a few too many cervezas. Or maybe it was both. The trip was off to a great start.

Day 2 on the way to the Grand Canyon. The weather was perfect for the entire ride.

Velma and Orlando, who rode two-up on a brand-new blue RX3. Orlando taught me Spanish on this ride: El naranja es el color más rápido.

Another shot of the most photogenic couple you’ll ever see on an adventure ride, this time using a super-wide-angle lens on my Nikon. You can actually see the curvature of the earth in this photo.

Good buddy Rob, with who I’ve ridden several times in the US and Mexico, buys a drink for a new friend at the Grand Canyon.

On the road to Zion along Arizona’s Highway 89A after visiting the Grand Canyon. This was a glorious ride.

Marble Canyon in Arizona as we re-crossed the mighty Colorado River.

Zion, the Crown Jewel of our National Parks. This was shaping up to be one of the best trips ever. From left to right, it’s Dan The Man, Orlando and Velma, Gary in the back, Leighton, Willie, and Rob. Add Gresh and yours truly, mix well, and you have the makings of a grand adventure.

My buds in the rear view, as we waited for a group of big horn sheep to cross the road. You could say the delay was baa-aa-aa-ad, but it was worth it to see those magnificent big horns.

The next day it was on to Nevada for the long trek to Tonopah. We took the world-famous ExtraTerrestrial Highway. Here’s a shot of shot ET after he phoned home.

Selfies in Rachel, Nevada, where Joe Gresh made friends with an elderly waitress. She schooled Uncle Joe on the finer points of place settings, ketchup assignments, and more. You had to be there to fully appreciate the training session. It was funny as hell.

On the ET Highway, headed toward Tonopah. The riding was incredible; the camaraderie even better. We set a sedate pace to conserve fuel. Everyone did over 70 mpg (even Orlando and Velma, riding two up). Folks commented that they liked the slower pace. I did, too.

After a night in Tonopah, it was on to Death Valley (entering from the northeast) the next morning. It was awesome. That’s Willie, Dan, and Gary.

The entire valley, as seen from Dante’s Peak. Death Valley is an exceptional destination. If you’ve never been to Death Valley, you need to go.

The crew (from left to right) included Gary, Willie, Orlando, Rob, Velma, Dan, Leighton and me (I was on the other side of the camera). Gresh was there, but he spun off to see Stovepipe Wells in Death Valley that afternoon. He had his reasons.

We stayed in Shoshone our last night. The Shoshone Inn had a fun firepit outside. Gresh bought the beer. It had been a grand ride and it would end the next day. I think we doubled the population the night we were in Shoshone.

Dinner in Shoshone. Like every meal on the road, it was awesome.

Back through Baker after a freezing early morning ride, breakfast at the Mad Greek (another great meal and a popular motorcycle stop), and then home. What a week!

We did a lot of grand trips at CSC, and it did a lot to help publicize the RX3. Baja, the Western America Adventure Ride, the China ride, the Colombia ride, and more. I did a similar ride for Janus Motorcycles (Janus makes another great 250cc motorcycle) through northern Baja with a couple of their execs and it, too, was awesome (you can read about that one here). There’s a lot to getting these rides organized and there are always things that can go wrong (personalities, bike issues, etc.), but I’ve been lucky. Every one has been a hoot!

This is a good time to buy a CSC or Janus motorcycle. Both companies are running awesome Thanksgiving sales. Check out both motorcycles; you’ll be glad you did!

Royal Enfields in Baja

The Bullet in Baja. The new 650 Interceptor was a strong and reliable motorcycle. The Bullet, not so much, but it wasn’t the bike’s fault. Read the article, and learn more…

Some say the adventure doesn’t start until something goes wrong; by that measure, the Bullet was every inch an adventure bike…

Ah, quoted again. That’s my line, and you can read it online in the latest issue of Motorcycle Classics magazine.

Good times and great bikes in Baja, and the story is in the current issue of Motorcycle Classics magazine.

Our story of the Baja Enfield adventure is now available online, and you can read it here. Joe Gresh and I rode the new 650 Interceptor and an older Bullet, and we had a blast. Great food, great riding, beautiful people, and we said hi to the whales. It was awesome!

Motorcycle Classics: Tecate!

Tecate, Mexico. On Royal Enfields. Good times.

Hey, Motorcycle Classics magazine is running my story on Tecate in the next issue! You can read it here. More good news: I have another story in that same issue. Buy a copy if you’re not already a subscriber!

A cool T-shirt, a cool review, and the Wizard of Oz…

A quick few updates today, folks…

Good buddy Chris sent this photo to us a yesterday wearing a T-shirt he said was made with ExhaustNotes in mind. I think I agree…

More good news…you can now buy Destinations through Motorcycle Classics magazine. They gave a nice review, and if you click on the photo below, it will take you to the MC store.

Things are hopping in Colorado. I got caught in a hail storm yesterday on a drive through the eastern part of the state, and the weather was ominous. They tell me a tornado touched down about 6 miles from where I was. The weather is similarly imposing today…here’s a photo showing the skies a few minutes ago…