Intermittent Miss with ticking noise, hard start (KZ550)

Having some trouble with my 81 KZ550. I just replaced the head gasket and now it's insanely hard to get the bike to start. Once I finally do get it running, there is a ticking sort of noise at the top of the engine on the left side. There also seems to be a miss in the same (#1) cylinder, because when I pull the spark plug cap there isn't much difference in the idle. Once the bike warms up the problem becomes intermittent. Sometimes the rpms will spike and the noise goes away when this happens, but if I rev the engine, or even just adjust the idle screw to bring the rpms down, the miss, and noise, start again. It sounds like maybe the noise is the exhaust valve, but i'm not sure why a bad valve adjustment would be intermittent. Also, none of these things were happening before I replaced the head gasket, and I didn't touch the valves during that process. Any help would be much appreciated

Have you got the mechanical timing right, or you may have bent a valve when putting the cams back in.

Did you ever find out what the problem was? Think I'm having the same issue after replacing head gasket.

The symptoms in the original post sound like a spark related issue. It could be that spark is jumping from a bad wire to the head which is the ticking sound. When the spark starts going to the plug, the ticking goes away and the engine runs on all cylinders. A bad plug or bad resistor cap could be forcing that to happen.