Kandy Koloured Dreams

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Late last year I flew into Los Angeles to report a story on southern California's unique, vibrant, influential car culture. Nearly half a century earlier a slightly more talented writer did the same thing. Tom Wolfe, who would go on to write The Right Stuff and Bonfire of the Vanities was 32 years old and on his first assignment for Esquire. His brief was pretty much the same as mine: go out there, meet the guys building these extraordinary-looking hot-rods and ask why kustom-kar kulture, as they like to spell it, took off in southern California and had such an impact on the wider culture, and whether the lumbering Detroit carmakers could learn from it.

Tom Wolfe is a character in America's unfolding drama

It was a big deal for Wolfe. He panicked and got a terrible case of writer's block and just typed all his notes out in a long memo to his editor, Byron Dobell, who'd arranged for someone else to write the story. But once Wolfe relaxed the easy, impressionistic style in which he wrote the notes made great reading. So Dobell just knocked the 'Dear Byron' off the top of the memo and ran the whole thing in the magazine. The story, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-flake Streamline Baby, is seen as one of the first examples of The New Journalism, even if Wolfe was panicking rather than consciously innovating as he wrote it, and it's one of the best things ever written about cars. I have a copy of the original 1963 Esquire on my desk as I write this, but you can buy the story in the Wolfe anthology of the same name, and there are a few other car-related classics in there too.

I wasn't trying to copy, outdo or update Wolfe's piece. There's no point. What he saw in '63, I saw last year: the great hot-rod builders like the great artists in their studios, building cars of the most perfect stance and proportion for those who could afford them (not cheap), but staying outside the automotive mainstream, with the big carmakers paying attention and doing what they can to capture some of that automotive mojo, but never quite getting it.

Cars like this 'surf woody' helped cement the Barris legend

Counter-cultures don't usually last fifty years, but this one has lasted even longer, and goes back to the end of the Second World War when GIs came home with a need for speed that the old Model A Fords they'd left behind couldn't satisfy. That mixed with the nascent LA art scene and the racing on dry lake beds and illegal late-night public-road drag strips and the weather that encourages summer-night cruising to create the whole kustom kulture. It influenced so much: not just car design but journalism - not just Wolfe's story, but half of America's big mainstream and modded car mags grew out of Hot Rod magazine - and music - Brian Wilson and Little Deuce Coupe - and film. George Lucas's first big flick, American Graffiti, is pretty much the perfect summation of that whole scene. Shot on a tight budget, it was riotously profitable and he wasted the proceeds on some flop called Star Wars.

Ed 'Big Daddy' Roth created a more monstrous myth than that of Barris

And astonishingly, the people haven't changed either. George Barris has been at the chromed hub of Cali's kustom kulture since before the GIs came home. He invented the name. Already, by the time Wolfe met him for his Esquire piece, he was "the biggest name in customizing", and a "solid little guy, five feet seven, 37 years old, and he looks just like Picasso". Wolfe liked the great artist analogy: Barris's ascent, he said, was like "Tiepolo emerging from the studios of Venice, except that Barris emerged from the auto-body shops of Los Angeles".

He was right to make the comparison. While the work of the other great hot-rod builders, like Alex Xydias and Pete Chapouris of the famous SoCal Speedshop focused on pure, perfect automotive form, Barris and Ed 'Big Daddy' Roth pushed on into art, their cars as much free-form scuplture as transport. Roth passed in 2001 but Barris's vast canon of work now includes everything from subtle kustomizations for the Hollywood glitterati of the fifties to the Batmobile of the sixties and countless other movie cars. Detroit was paying attention, and still is. "I was amazed," Barris told Wolfe in '63 about his first trip to Detroit's design studios. "They could tell me about cars I built in 1945. And all this time we thought they frowned on us."

Celebrity hookups were Barris's stock in trade

Artists like Barris and Roth could never go work for corporate behemoths, so instead the global car industry came to them: the biggest change since Wolfe's story is that virtually every major carmaker now has a design studio in southern California, hoping that their hyper-edumacated young stylists will catch whatever it is that makes SoCal cars so great. Meanwhile Barris, at 86 looking like the well-aged pop star he is, keeps at it. To paraphrase William Shakespeare (if you haven't heard of him, think of him as the George Barris of literature): "Age cannot wither him, nor kustom stale his infinite variety"...

George Barris Q&A

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The name George Barris is synonymous with car customising. It was George and his brother Sam that revolutionised the art of custom cars in America back in the forties and fifties by reworking the likes of Ford and Chevrolet cars to emulate coachbuilt designs. Their creativity went on to influence the way Detroit designed cars.

But Barris is of course a household name thanks mainly to his involvement with the TV and movie car scene, the most famous of these being the original Batmobile. George is still busy building cars in his North Hollywood shop and recently took time out, at the age of 83, for his first visit to UK shores. We were lucky enough to catch up with him at the Rhythm Riot's Barris Kustom Show and ask him a few questions about his career.

Influx: Welcome to the UK George, it's great to have you here.

George: Why thank you. It's amazing to know that what we were doing all those years ago has such an influence on today's young people.

Influx: We would love to know where the business began for you.

George: Well my brother Sam and I had been playing around with old cars from a very early age, hopping up the family sedan was our first project. It was some time in 1941 that I was first approached by a customer to perform work on a car. I had the job of installing a set of tail lights in a '32 Ford. The customer was happy, paid his money and a seed was sown.

Influx: Business was booming for you right from the start and you attracted Hollywood stars. Who were your more memorable customers?

George: We were doing work for all kind of flamboyant people. Zsa Zsa Gabor had a Rolls Royce that we reworked for her and we installed a drinks cabinet with crystal glasses and more gold than you would believe. It was however a much more modest star that springs to mind. This young man often visited the shop when he was in town and made a point to get to know every member of staff. He would always strike a conversation, asking how so-and-so's kids were doing at school, or how another guys wedding had gone, he always remembered the little details and called everyone sir. That young man's name was Elvis Presley.

Influx: We're guessing it wasn't all glamour back then, hotrodders and customisers weren't always looked on favourably.

George: Man that's right, I was always in trouble with the cops! They always seemed to be waiting for us when we would take a car round the block for a test run. I would get pulled for different reasons, too low, too loud, I even got stopped once for running dual headlamps! This was the early fifties and every production car has single headlamps so the cops didn't understand. It was only a few years later that every car out of Detroit would have the same headlamp set-up we had designed.

Influx: What is your all time favourite car from the shop?

George: That's a tough one, but if there was one car I could have again it would be the Golden Sahara that I built from a my own wrecked 1953 Lincoln.

Influx: We know you suffered a terrible fire at your shop in the late 1950s. How did you bounce back from that?

George: We lost all but one car in that fire, that was the Model A Roadster pickup "Ala-Kart". We just picked up the pieces and got on with it. We got that car finished for the Oakland Roadster Show and came away with the ‘Americas Most Beautiful Roadster’ trophy. We went back the next year and won it again with the same car, something that had never been done before. Everyone in the shop had a real positive attitude and we have a lot of fun. That's my advice to everyone out there, do what you gotta do and have fun doing it.

Neil Fretwell runs the Vintage Hot Rod Association

We Come from Garageland

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image via Bike Exif

Three-chords, crap equipment, not much talent, lots of enthusiasm. Young men and women have been in garage bands since skiffle was The Next Big Thing, but it was only during the wave of 1977 punk that the garage bands broke big.

Top-selling punks may not have had the same skills as the Stones or Fleetwood Mac, but they offered an alternative that was lapped up. A similar revolution is happening in motorcycle customisation.

Image:Wrenchmonkees

Like punk rock often said it was rebelling against the overblown excesses of ten-minute guitar solos and prog rock, the new generation of custom builders are the antithesis of American Chopper’s fat tyre monstrosities, and showrooms full of 190mph traction-controlled superbikes. And, though the movement started before the global meltdown, its growth has mirrored the fall in sales of big ticket bikes.

The new wave customs are neither chopper nor café racer, but they borrow cues from all genres. They tend to start with unloved, cheap Japanese bikes – though the burgeoning scene is sending prices of air-cooled, spine-frame Jap stuff roofwards. Anything from the 1970s onwards is fair game. Singles, twins, fours; two-stroke or four; Jap, Brit, German, Italian: animal, vegetable or mineral. This isn’t a cult with a basis is performance one-upmanship. It’s creativity and originality (without straying into parody or overt gimmickry) is what pushes the boundaries and attracts the four-figure facebook ‘likes’.

image: Untitled

One reason this style of custom is becoming so popular is due to the fact they’re relatively easy and cheap projects to complete by someone, anyone, with a few spanners. You don’t even need a garage to be in this garage band. Inspired hopefuls see bikes being fawned over on the Net and, like a thousand oiks of previous generations watching Top of the Pops in the late-70s, think ‘I could do that.’

Wheels, brakes and suspension can be changed, but aren’t always. Rake, trail and wheelbase all tend to remain the same. No one is building one-off frames or investing in forced induction or race tuning. Replace the tank, seat and bars with stuff picked up cheap online or at the autojumble. Paint is simple or non-existent. Steel or alloy tanks stripped bare and lacquered or left to ‘weather’ are popular.

image via Bike Exif

Next, junk standard airboxes and exhausts and fit filters and new silencers. If you’re more adept, make a new sub-frame for the stripped-down back end. Fit new tyres – chunky is best - and a tiddly taillight. Voila! But, like a punk band, however much you sneer and spit, if you haven’t got the chops you are going to fail. For the garage-built bike scene, if the stance of bike is hinky, it’ll still look like an unloved bike with a rusty petrol tank and knobblies, however hard you try. There are plenty of those around.

Image: Deus

The godfathers of the scene are the Wrenchmonkees. Based in a cellar in the outskirts of Copenhagen, they modified a trio of big, four-cylinder Kawasakis back in 2008, before moving onto twins and singles. It’s no coincidence two of the original trio of Monkees were professional photographers.

They shot and disseminated their tough street bikes in a fresh, urban style. The Monkees themselves – Per, Nicolas and Anders – didn’t look like stereotypical motorcyclists from any pigeon-hole, either. They wore a gene-defying mixture mountaineering Gore-Tex, full-face lids, dark jeans and skateboard shoes and rode in cities, not the unrealistically empty racetracks of mainstream bike ads.

A new generation of motorcyclists saw them on a new generation of website – blogs that would cherrypick inspirational images from all over the web and mash these images of bikes up with architecture, art, cars, tattooed femmes and historic style icons. The Wrenchmonkees didn’t look out of place.

Coincidentally, Deus puffed spores of goodness from their sweet-smelling Sydney HQ. Though not garage-built, their big dollar Yamaha SR500-based builds were close to faultless and had a cleanliness only a truly well-built road bike can achieve. They’ve influenced a thousand builders from Beijing to Bristol, some who copy on the cheap, others who have moved the game on.

People who wouldn’t dream of wearing full leathers and riding a superbike or pulling on a cut-off denim and riding a chop realised there was a bike scene waiting for them. They just had to make it. And they have.

Rollerburn!

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Images Sideburn/Jonny Wilson/Subsculptures

Britain has some great motorcycle events, but many are as stale as the last supper’s leftovers. A few years after first launching our own independent motorcycle magazine, the Sideburn team started thinking about bigger events. We were jealous of cross-genre shows in Yokohama and Brooklyn and knew British riders needed something more stimulating than sitting in a field wearing a jester’s hat while listening to an AC/DC tribute band.

The result was Rollerburn. Held last November, in Nottinghamshire, it mixed a broad custom show with a slalom skateboard race. It threw in a full, all-girl roller derby match and an art show. Thirty dealers and three bands set up. A couple of Arctic Monkeys paid on the door. Comedian Charlie Chuck destroyed a drum kit. Donkey!

Sideburn magazine focuses on motorcycles that ‘go fast, turn left’ from the worlds of dirt track and speedway, and also the road bikes loosely inspired these worlds and the DIY ethic, but we wanted Rollerburn to have much wider appeal.

The roller girl connection came from feature we did on the cult 1970s movie Rollerball. Roller girls go fast and turn left too. And a lot of them are better looking than the majority of people who turn up at British bike events. They were in.

The show bikes were inclusive too. This wasn’t a chopper show. Exhibits ranged from Shinya Kimura’s Junkyard Phantom (that featured in the movie Iron Man) to a Rossi replica Ducati Desmosedici RR.

The artist Conrad Leach created an 8ft square painting to face the ramp (it was later auctioned for charity) and slalom skaters, some of who turned up on their own Harley lowriders, launched themselves down it.

The highlight of the nine-hour event was world’s first and last indoor Rollerball drag race. Three 600cc dirt track race bikes towed three fearless rollergirls down the 150m strip. The team of TT hero Guy Martin and Catfight Candy won the three-way heat. Candy limped away with friction burns as big as your fist.

People came from all over the UK, France and Spain. The only lows of organising an event like this is the fact it takes over your life in the run-up, when you regularly ask yourself, 'why are we doing this?' That and the fact we couldn’t do everything we wished due to restrictions from the venue. It’s the kind of stuff that made me publicly state 'never again'. The highs are the feedback, in the form of smiling faces on the day and internet buzz after it. That’s what makes me think, maybe we should do it again.

It’ll take some beating, but we’ll try. And there wasn’t a jester’s hat in sight.