Sam Joos
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Carson Allen, the owner of Denver’s Foo Dog Motorcycles, has loved bikes since he was a kid, but music was his first passion for many years. He grew up in Billings, Montana, and the second could, he recalls, he moved to Las Vegas to play keys for post-hardcore band Escape the Fate. He stayed with the group for a year before joining Seattle-based On the Last Day, a post-hardcore act that put out one album on Victory Records. After that, Allen formed his own band, Me Vs. Myself, which signed to Capitol EMI Records and recorded an EP with production by members of the Goo Goo Dolls. That all happened about ten years ago, and it was a quick, head-spinning process.
“Within ten months, we signed to a major and were doing big things,” Allen says. “That was an interesting, kind of fast-paced thing I hadn’t experienced musically. It had been an uphill grind.”
He still looks back on the era fondly, as he was able to meet and work with musicians he admired, and his music saw some radio airplay. But the label’s ownership changed hands, sinking everything in the pipeline, including Allen’s would-be breakout album.
“It was one of those blows,” he recalls. “When the guy who signed Katy Perry says you’re going to be the next Beatles, you start to believe that shit. You see how much money they’re putting into it, [and] you really start believing it.”
He moved on as a solo artist, releasing music in various genres, and currently plays in the Denver act Something Witchy with his wife, who had never been in a band before.
“[She] and I are the primary songwriters,” Allen says. “We’ve had our friends come play live with us.”
Allen has spent most of the past twenty years bouncing back and forth between Denver, Seattle and Montana. Seattle, although a creative mecca, was too hard to live in, in part because of the constant rain and gloomy weather. Denver eventually won out, not least because sunshine is good for people who like to ride motorcycles.
“I love Seattle very much, but Denver is more how I was raised – just the mentality out here and how the people are,” he says. “I love it out here.”
Allen always dreamed of one day starting his own motorcycle company, and for the longest time, he imagined that the funding would come from some big single he recorded and released to amazing fanfare and sales. But the actual impetus behind Foo Dog Motorcycles arrived unexpectedly, when he saw the positive result on his wife’s pregnancy test. Although the excitement of a new family – and anxiety over how to fund it – finally killed his desire to be a rock god, it has made his music more personal.
“Something clicked,” he says. “The music I wrote was so fucking real. I was experiencing completely new emotions I hadn’t felt before, just knowing your life is about to change; you’re going to be a parent. Your relationship with the love of your life is about to change, bringing someone into it. Something changed in me.”
He founded Foo Dog in 2019 with a $500 loan, which he used to buy his first motorcycle to fix up and start the brand, which focuses primarily on bikes from the ’60s and ’70s. Allen has since moved from a garage in his backyard to a big facility in Park Hill with co-owner and mechanic Derrick Smith and numerous employees.
He’s also using the space to plant his musical roots: He plans to use the shop as a venue for musical performances and a gathering place for Japanese-motorcycle fans. And that’s needed, he notes: A sentiment still exists among some in the bike community that they’d rather see a sister working in a whorehouse than a brother riding a Japanese-made motorcycle. (The actual nomenclature used is too racist to print here.)
But as Allen knows, a sizable subculture of Japanese-bike enthusiasts exists across the world. Fan organizations such as the Vintage Japanese Motorcycle Club, founded in 1977, celebrate the vehicles, and the internet is awash with listings for the bikes and websites dedicated to their upkeep and repair. Many a backyard has an old Honda, Kawasaki, Yamaha or Suzuki leaned up against a wall gathering rust, a reminder of a hobby swallowed by the march of time.
Allen counts himself among the disciples who worship at the altar of Japanese steel. The community varies widely, he says. A monthly meetup and ride at his shop draws a pretty diverse group of people, who come out to talk bikes and ride around Denver.
“They’re older guys, guys who grew up with these bikes,” he notes. “They’re the hipster kid who doesn’t want the same whip as everyone else. … And it’s not just a men’s scene. There’s tons of women.”
He tolerates a bit of online ribbing from the Harley-Davidson folks, who sometimes employ the “sister in a whorehouse” line or call to say – often with a dismissive attitude – that they have a bunch of Japanese-made bikes for sale, cheap. The callers don’t see the value in them, and Allen has driven away more than once with a treasure trove of gear that was sitting in a barn out in the country.
Of course, some people just need to see to believe. Allen set out for the famed Sturgis Motorcycle Rally this year with one of his favorite bikes, a green 1973 Honda CB 350. A majority of people who go to Sturgis ride a black Harley, the most common color and arguably the coolest. But they liked his little green Honda.
“It was the star of the show at Sturgis,” he says. “I took this little green bike up there in a sea of black [Harleys]. I’d park it on the strip and leave a stack of stickers on the seat. I’d come back and the stickers would be gone.”
Allen says he’s gotten plenty of business from guys living in South Dakota, Wyoming and Montana who bring their Japanese-made bikes down to Denver for work. A nostalgia has sprung up around them. Although many of these older men eventually bought the big Harley of their dreams, they might have started off on a Honda and are returning to it. Allen says they were more accessible for people in the ’70s, particularly for young people just getting started, as they were relatively inexpensive and fairly easy to work on. The companies made a lot of them, too, as evidenced by the junkyards and barns Allen travels to to pick up bikes and parts. He does a lot of searching online, as well.
“It’s popping off,” he says. “I started this business, and I didn’t know I’d found an interesting untapped market. It’s been weird. I still work my ass off, but I’m seeing actual, tangible results from it.”
Allen’s first bike was a 1980 Honda Z50, which he learned how to work on through trial and error, going from small dirt bikes to full-sized ones. It became a side hustle after a while, fixing and flipping old bikes. He’s been amazed at how they’ve gone up in value over the past few years.
“It’s insane,” he says. “Bikes you’d spend a couple hundred bucks on back in the ’70s are now five-, six-, seven-thousand-dollar bikes. I’ve learned the market was going pretty crazy for these things. I said, ‘Hey, I’m going to focus on these.'”
And he’s actually located that first Honda – not one like it, but the actual bike.
“It’s currently on a farm in central Montana,” Allen reports. “I’m going to be scooping it up later this year. I’ll be able to restore it for my kid.”
For more information, visit foodogmoto.com.