Playing the drums is just like riding a bike. Once you learn, you never forget.

Andy Jordan knows. He has made a career out of both.

Mr. Jordan learned how to play the drums one summer and a few summers later was playing in a band that opened for the Allman Brothers. When the days of blue-eyed soul and beach music came to an end, his name became synonymous with bicycles.

At age 24, when he and his wife, Susan, started Andy Jordan's Bicycle Warehouse on 13th Street, the only business smarts he had was what he learned while working at Winn-Dixie. It's a customer service model that serves him well 33 years later.

His son, Drew Jordan, who was ranked second in the nation in BMX racing at age 11, has followed his dad into the bike business.

"A. I wanted a job. B. I liked bikes," Drew explained. Although he grew up in the shop and worked for his father through high school, he didn't initially think he was going to make it his career.

Andy Jordan never had that chance to work with his father, who was a real estate agent.

"I thought I was going to sell real estate and insurance. Then he died the last day of high school. I thought I would follow in his footsteps. That's why I think I didn't take school seriously," Andy Jordan said.

He slept through a lot of high school, too, that due in part to the night shifts at the Winn-Dixie grocery store on Peach Orchard Road. "I was on my knees for 13 hours one day. When I left, my knees were black and blue. I literally would go to work at 4:30 after school until 4:30 the next morning."

It was a competitive spirit that propelled his musical career and then the business career.

Pallbearers, prophets

Andy Jordan moved from Wrens to Augusta at age 14. He tried to get into the band at school, but was told he wasn't good enough and then given a suggestion that he needed lessons. He took the advice.

"I took private lessons for three months in the summer. I mean intense, every single day, an hour a day. My whole summer was ruined, practicing three hours a day," he recalled.

When he started his freshman year at Butler High School, he was the first chair, much to the chagrin of the senior drummers in the band.

But he didn't know how to play a drum set. He found a band drummer to teach him, using his Winn-Dixie earnings to pay for the lessons.

"I paid him $60 for four lessons. He gave me one lesson and then never showed up again, kept my money," Mr. Jordan said. "My goal from that day forward was to someday take his job away from him. And I did."

He became a member of a band called the Pallbearers.

"I'm ruthless when it comes to competition."

He almost took the job away from another drummer in a different rock band. But then the man retired from the band and gave him the job. Andy Jordan was now playing with the Georgia Prophets. Members of that band would later form Georgia's Best and be called on to open for the Allman Brothers for eight shows in the early days of the Hall of Fame Southern rockers.

"When you're on the stage with 10,000 people in the audience, that's a big charge."

Tommy Hodges Jr. met Mr. Jordan in 1968 trying out for the Pallbearers. The organ player was with Mr. Jordan for a few different bands. He's been a car salesman at Master Pontiac Buick GMC since 1983.

He said Mr. Jordan has a natural talent for drums. "He could hear it and reproduce it."

The Pallbearers had some success. "Our biggest venture, we went up to Massilon, Ohio, for a month. Seems like it was in the fall. We played a club up there. We had a record out at the time," Mr. Hodges said.

He and Mr. Jordan parted ways for a few years, getting back together for Georgia's Best. They played with Bruce Dees, who became a successful record producer, and Warren Gowers, who's been the backup singer for Ronnie Millsap for 25 years. They felt they were Georgia's best, which inspired the band's name. It was a beach music band, Mr. Jordan said, and was regionally popular in clubs and on campuses.

"I went with him a lot until we had a family," said Susan Jordan, who was Andy's high school sweetheart. "Then he started playing mostly local. I enjoyed it."

Mrs. Jordan said her husband was good enough to have excelled as a professional drummer, though it would have been hard to do and have a family at the same time.

When Andy Jordan left Georgia's Best in 1971, he started playing local clubs and working in a recording studio.

"He supported us solely on music until we opened the shop," Susan Jordan said.

Andy Jordan said he gave up drums by being busy, not by choice. Earlier this year, he played his drums for 20 minutes during a fundraising concert. It was the most he'd played in a decade. "What was weird was I got up there and it was like I never quit. Most of the young guys are amazed I could get up there and wail."

Mr. Hodges said he saw Andy last winter during Santa's Wheels when the dealership takes in bikes for Goodwill. His old band mate coordinates the refurbishing efforts.

"He's a promoter. He's always busy out in the community," Mr. Hodges said. "He's got a good business head. He knows he's not going to sit down there in that bicycle shop, twiddle his thumbs and make a good living."

Any talk about getting the band back together?

"Talk," Mr. Hodges said.

Lessons learned

When the 1900s replica bike with the large front wheel comes out onto the sidewalk, the store is open. It is hard to miss the store anyway, the side wall is a mural of Andy and Drew Jordan, along with longtime employee Nate Zukas, riding on the North Augusta Greeneway on their bikes.

"It is amazing what we can do down here beside a paper recycler and concrete place," Andy Jordan said. "You got to be doing something right to get people to drive 25 miles to come down here and go by three other bike shops."

The 57-year-old said riding bicycles consistently for the past three decades has kept him young, even though he doesn't have the locks of a rock star anymore. "I don't think I look as young as I used to, but I feel pretty good."

It was his wife that first got him moving on two wheels.

"I got into biking in the '70s. I bought a bike here locally. I did some research. I research everything I do," Mrs. Jordan said. The bike she bought from an Augusta shop had problems, then there were customer service problems, so she got one in Columbia.

Before even discussing the matter with Andy, she offered to run a bike store in Augusta if the Columbia merchant wanted to open a store there.

"I laid this all on him. He went to Columbia and got a bike, too."

The store opened in 1974. Downtown was alive and well then, Andy Jordan said. He spent six months finding the location for the store, picking downtown because he thought the canal was a natural bike path.

"I didn't know anything about business other than I worked at Winn-Dixie as a bag boy in high school."

What that meant was he understood what customer service really meant. Customer service to Andy Jordan means not putting customers through the Easter egg hunt of finding their own merchandise.

He fired nine people in one day because there was a complaint in customer service. It was in the late 1970s when bikes and mopeds were hot sellers because of the oil crisis.

"I went to a restaurant to eat and a customer said he was treated rudely by an employee. Didn't like the feeling at all. 'You wouldn't be in business without us.' I just fired everybody that day," Mr. Jordan said.

Mr. Jordan said he actually became happier after that because he'd created a monster. The advertising budget needed to sustain it was larger than some businesses grossed in a year.

It is a three-man team now. Drew Jordan came back to work with his dad after he graduated from Augusta State University with a degree in business. Mr. Zukas was 19 when he joined the shop in 1991, coming to Augusta from Connecticut because his father got a job at Savannah River Site.

Mr. Zukas said he's become accustomed to being considered the other son. "The joke is now: Drew's adopted brother, Andy's stepson. Everyone just assumes I'm his son when they come in."

Mr. Zukas said he's been inspired by some of the accomplishments Andy had at a young age, including buying a home at age 19.

"He's the one that got me steered in the right direction when it comes to home ownership. I wanted to buy a used car and fix it up. He sat me down and told me I'm wasting my money. Go buy a house," Mr. Zukas said. "He's always given me good advice."

It is a three-man shop that can do the work of six people, Andy Jordan said, and to keep that going, he pays well. He pays 100 percent of the health insurance premium, something that opens eyes at bike conventions.

"Nate was born with wrenches in his hand," Andy Jordan said. "Everything that boy owns, he has taken it apart to figure out how it works and then put it back together."

Drew Jordan got the store computerized and outfitted with an Internet site. He said there isn't the father-son squabbling that is depicted on television in American Chopper.

"I would say working for family is tougher than working for someone you're not related to because the expectations are higher. It is your family's livelihood," Drew Jordan said.

Air Jordan

"Hey, Drew, how do you turn this thing on?" Andy Jordan called from the device used to custom fit a bike. There are only two of these machines in Georgia, the other is in Atlanta.

"I know how to work it once it gets going," Andy said after the complaint issued from Drew.

"Drew is a very professional type person," his mother said. "He's a great kid. He's got a huge heart."

If it wasn't for the son, Andy Jordan's Bicycle Warehouse would still be using paper receipts without an electronic cash register. "It took me years to get the store computerized," Drew said. "One of my biggest challenges was convincing him we needed to do that."

Drew was born in 1976, two years after the store started. As his father was a novelty in being a young homeowner and businessman, Drew was a young racer.

Drew's interest in the sport was sparked at the age of 4 during a family trip to an indoor track in Greenville, S.C. "I saw it. That's what I want to do, right there. I saw high speed. I saw people flying through the air."

He started competing in bicycle motocross at the age of 5 and ended that career six years later. Along the way he became ranked first in Georgia, second in the nation and placed in a World Cup race.

He stopped racing at 11.

"When you do something for so long as a child, it becomes a job and is less fun. It got to the point where I had to ride my bike."

His interest in BMX came back in the 1990s as a recreation. But there was no local track, so he and Mr. Zukas started one. They talked to the city, got the National Bicycle League involved and it was born in 1999.

Drew Jordan was the announcer at the track for races for two years. The plaque of appreciation hangs in the bathroom at the bike shop, that's where all the awards and newspaper articles hang.

Drew and Nate graced the cover of Snap BMX magazine in 1999, which did a feature on the Georgia BMX scene. It's in the bathroom, too.

Andy and Drew aren't the only cyclists in the family. Susan Jordan is the strongest woman on a bike that he's ever seen, Andy said. She's taken a hiatus from riding her 20 to 50 miles a day in order to get their new house in North Augusta completed.

Drew's sister, Amy, is a good cyclist too, and lives in Atlanta. His younger brother, Tony, died in 1989 at the age of 10. Tony was born with spina bifida and was paralyzed from the waist down. In the years of Tony's life, Andy and Susan Jordan were organizers of a parent-to-parent program for parents of handicapped children.

"Andy put him on the back of the bike, too," Susan Jordan said.

Boom

Pictures, scrapbooks and trophies are gone, consumed in a fire that hit the bike shop in May 1998.

How do you recover from a fire when you have half the insurance you need? Fight like an alligator wrestler, Andy Jordan answered.

The shop exploded at 7 p.m. on a Saturday, two hours after it closed that day.

Drew Jordan said some faulty wiring was smoldering above the drop ceiling. As it turned wood into char, the temperature rose.

It got warm enough in the shop that the air conditioning came on. The flames got sucked into the ventilation.

"The fire marshal said it was like a bomb went off inside," Drew Jordan recalled.

The glass windows were blown out of the front of the store. Merchandise was damaged. The rear of the shop wasn't burned but was damaged by smoke.

It was the loss of personal items that was stinging. Susan Jordan said she remembers Andy wanting to search for the scrapbook.

The business didn't have enough insurance, which prompted a slow recovery. But they had business interruption insurance. "Technically, that meant I and Nate and Drew could all have gone home, said 'Call me when you're finished,' and I would have gotten paid."

A friend told Andy Jordan that his competitors would have loved that. They'd be getting his business without doing anything to earn it.

The three-man crew went to work repairing 100 bikes. Two weeks after the fire, the store moved to an old gas station on Broad Street.

Six months after the fire, Andy Jordan was back home.

"We never missed any business, sales never dropped."

Drew said what he remembered most after the fire was working in the back with burnt tools, no electricity and no water with that distinctive smell of a burnt building.

It was the ferocious competitor that kept the bike shop from dying there.

"I want to feel that I've earned everything that I've done," Andy Jordan said.

Reach Tim Rausch at (706) 823-3352 or timothy.rausch@augustachronicle.com.