Page 82 - FAST 2024 Calendar Yearbook

"The Recycler," Hushahn says, "people were coming up to my house. This was, like, in 1989/90."
Needing a retail location to set up a shop and seeing that there was "nobody really in the Hollywood area" selling motorcycles, they worked out a deal with a landlord on the Sunset Strip, in a location now called Saddle Ranch Chop House famous for dressed-up mannequins hugging an old western town facade, and today jammed packed with tourists and locals coming to eat, to see and be seen.
"It has been rebuilt after the fire of 1994 and what was Thunder Roadhouse (the restaurant on Sunset Blvd.), is now called Saddle Ranch Chop House by the new owners. Our original Thunder Road Motorcycles shop and store next door is now a pizza restaurant. " Hushahn says. "I actually built the original Saddle Ranch. It pretty much looks the same today, on the outside, except for all the cowboy mannequins and horses the new owners have added on the outside.
Inside it's obviously more like a sports bar. When we built it...sort of like a gen- uine roadhouse...one side was all tin panels and all wood and leather...the seating areas...it was a really cool place." Enter the celebs. "Everybody came," he says, "I had Bruce Springsteen, he bought bikes from me. It was interesting the first song on The Boss' landmark album "Born to Run" is called "Thunder Road."
Lesser stars ventured in, too. "One guy I almost kicked out was...what's his name? The guy from the Allman ...Greg Allman ?" "He smelled and he wanted to buy a bike from me. I almost kicked him out, but somebody told me, 'No, no, no...that's Gregg Allman, dude. He was married to Cher."
This leads me to a story about one of my other beautiful Calendar models around that time named Shannon Wilsey. Greg Allman had met Shannon when she was just 16 and took her on the road with him and the band where she was introduced to drugs and a fast lifestyle. By the time she was 20, Shannon had left Allman and gotten into the porn business in Los Angeles as one of the first Vivid contract girls under the stage name "Savannah".
She was one of the most beautiful models ever, and I was excited to be able to book her for a photo shoot in 1991 which appeared in the 1992 Mikuni Iron & Lace Calendar Motorcycle PinUp Calendar with her on the cover. Savannah be- came one of the most popular adult starlets of the time making over 100 movies by 1993. Then tragically one night, driving home from a party on July 11th, 1994, all high on drugs, she crashed her Corvette into a tree, breaking and bloodying her nose. She walked home and was so distraught when she saw herself in a mirror, still high on drugs and alcohol, she took a gun she had and killed herself. A sad ending to a beautiful girl caught up in the fast Hollywood lifestyle.
"Musicians dug the coming to Thunder Road. Guys like Axel Rose," says Hushahn. "All these rock n' rollers still had good deals, cash burning a hole in their pockets. Red Hot Chili Peppers... all those guys." With cushy record contracts, "of course, they liked these kinds of bikes. All those years in the early 90s, it was crazy."
Hushahn says he "must have had 60 bikes at all times" because he was "sell- ing a lot of bikes per month. When the place grew, he also added a retail parts section. That's when we got Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, and Dwight Yoakam in- volved...financial investors and spokespersons type of thing. They liked the con- cept of Thunder Road, the biker restaurant and store."
Like so many good L.A. tales, how this motorcycle house got its name at the beginning involves an old-time movie poster.
"I had this tattoo," Hushahn recalls. "It was a thunderbird." I then notice an em- broidered orange design on his dark blue polo shirt, realizing he probably wore it
on purpose, for the snaps I said we'd take after the interview. "Like right there," pointing to his chest. He wondered about turning that tattoo into a logo. "We'll call ourselves Thunderbird Motorcycles."
"But it didn't take. My partner Michael was dating this girl," he continues, "and she said, 'Well, that's kind of a stupid name. It sounds like a car. My grandfather made a movie once, and it was called 'Thunder Road'".
"Her name was Katie Mitchum," Hushahn tells me. "Robert Mitchum the actor was her grandfather." She later brought the movie star in so he could sign a huge poster of the 1958 B-movie 'Thunder Road' that Hushahn has on display. Its tagline? "Robert Mitchum roars down the hottest highway on earth!"
Kitsch aside, "he died a few years later," Hushahn says. "He was a big alcoholic, unfortunately. But a nice guy." Thunder Road was named after the 1958 Robert Mitchum B-movie of the same name.
It was unfortunate when "Thunder Roadhouse and Roadhouse (on Sunset) had the fire " Hushahn recalls. "Even though the fire department had come really fast, it was like a toaster oven inside and charred up everything. Everything melted. That was maybe in '93/94."
A guy named Larry offered Hushahn a partnership in what no one knew would be renamed Saddle Ranch, the hottest tourist-drinking gold mine in Hollywood. "I discussed it with Michael," Hushahn tells me, "'Some yo-yo is coming in here and he thinks he's gonna make the next hot thing.'" How could they know? Instead, they sold the place outright. Just a few years ago the restaurant, now a huge tourist spot, was renamed from the original Thunder Roadhouse to Saddle Ranch.
"I don't feel so bad about it because I used the money to buy this property (on Santa Monica Boulevard). I built this and I own this. So this is great."
Thunder Road Classic Motorcycles today, since the fire of 1994 is located at the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard at Poinsettia Drive. A restaurant named Food Lab is a tenant next door in the same building, with a big living or work space loft upstairs.
"When I first built this," Max says, "it was the whole first floor, like 2,500 square feet of mostly retail and bikes. When the custom bike market started slowing down in 1998, I divided up this first-floor space and the Food Lab restaurant be- came a next-door tenant. I thought, 'Well, it's starting to become more of a mu- seum because a lot of these bikes are not moving anymore.'" He also has a big rental loft space upstairs.
Looking around his showroom. "I do older stuff, classic stuff," Max says, telling me he works on Triumphs, Moto Guzzi, BSAs, in addition to the ever-present Harley-Davidson. "I mix it up."
"These are all used and refurbished bikes in the showroom?" I ask.
"Yeah, customized," he answers. "That was always my business. I was never a dealership that sells brand new stock. That would have been boring to me. I need the artistic part, the creative part."
So Hushahn considers himself an artist? "I think so," he says. "That was what really kept me in it. What I always liked was building and customizing the bikes, creating something different. That's what still intrigues me."
Being such a rarified business, a true niche, how does Hushahn stay afloat? "Word of mouth," he says. "I've seen so many shops close down. It's scary." He says there used to be a lot of cash sales. "But it doesn't exist anymore. And the kids now that come in, they can't afford these bikes."
He admits it's the "Older school guys who know about bikes." "But there's still a business," he continues, and Hushahn knows who his customers are. "When
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