Big Daddy Roth created the anti-Mickey Mouse,
and his cars made him the patron saint of hot rodders and kool
daddy-o’s. Dominic Ali gets into the passenger seat with America’s
quintessential automotive rebel.
by Dominic Ali
Only Ed Roth would cite the inventor of the
Volkswagen Beetle as his greatest influence, or a wire-feed
welder as his favorite medium. But when you’re universally known
as the Big Daddy, been immortalized by Tom Wolfe in The Kandy
Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby and popularized a uniquely
new American folk art, you’re allowed to be a little car-obsessed.
Since the 1950s, car customizer Ed Roth has been turning cars
into art. Pop culture and the art world haven’t been the same
since.
Roth is a cult icon--not just to hot rod aficionados but to
fans of the uniquely twisted. His most famous creation, the
ugly rambunctious fly-attracting rodent called Rat Fink, started
out as a simple T-shirt design, but has become something of
an outsider art icon and has appeared on customized cars, motorcycles,
T-shirts and tattoos for almost forty years. Rat Fink paved
the way for today’s bad boy pop culture icons like South Park.
But on a larger scale, Rat Fink helped popularize so-called
low-brow art. Roth’s style, dismissed as kitsch was relegated
to the backrooms and basements of the art world. But it was
there, amid the flypapers and dirty 10W-30 oil cans, he gave
birth to Rat Fink, his reaction to the antiseptic Walt Disney
characters with their saccharine sweet dispositions. Years later,
pop artists such as Andy Warhol and Keith Haring would take
their own swipes at Uncle Walt’s Mouse, further blurring the
lines between “low” and “high art.” It’s no surprise that one
of Roth’s most famous disciples was cartoon surrealist Robert
Williams, of Juxtapoz magazine.
Besides creating Rat Fink, Big Daddy is a legend for his customized
cars. By adding cheap fiberglass bodies, to cars found in wrecking
yards, Roth’s eccentric creations looked as if they’d just screamed
off the pages of a comic book. Where else would you find wildly
experimental vehicles featuring futuristic plastic bubble-tops
and exposed engines? The names were equally fun-loving: Wild
Child, Mad Dragger, Mother’s Worry, Beatnik Bandit, and Mysterion.
The work of Roth, and other car customizers can still be seen
today, especially in automobiles like the BMW Z3.
Big Daddy’s hot rods were kinetic multimedia sculptures for
the masses. In addition to the car’s body, interior, and decorations
there are other considerations: “Even in the muffler sounds
there’s kool and then there’s loud. Those things are all things
that add up to a kool custom or a kool hot-rod,” says Roth.
The first kinetic sculpture was made by Marcel Duchamp, and
Big Daddy’s crazy designs continued the tradition, offering
a thrilling Dadaesque ride into the possibilities of what an
automobile should be or should look like.
Although the terms customized cars and hot rods are used interchangeably,
to true aficionados, there’s a subtle difference. “Custom cars
were usually lowered back and had fenders, while hot rods were
lower in front and had no fenders. Custom cars were made for
getting girls. Hot rods were made for going fast,” says Roth.
Roth was born in 1932 to immigrant German parents in Beverly
Hills, California. He doodled characters in his school notebooks
while a youngster during World War II. Later on, the car-obsessed
teen scavenged junkyards for discarded tank and jeep parts from
the war effort.
Ironically, Roth’s first creations were customizations of old
any-color-so-long-as-it’s-black Fords. “The thing about Fords
in those days was that everything was interchangeable with each
other, including the motors and hydraulic brakes. You could
put a ‘44 model engine onto a ‘30 model Ford.” The scrap metal
and idle hands went into maniacal mechanical experimentations.
Just how wild? Roth recounts his ethos at the time: ”One carburetor
would go well, maybe two would go better.” Because they were
assembled from scrap parts, extraneous devices such as windshields
and fenders were eschewed. The result was a lighter car that
could fly--especially when the teenagers drag raced on the street.
The first car he chopped was an early-1930s model Ford, and
he encountered stern artistic critique right at the beginning--from
his father, a cabinet-maker.” When I chopped my first car up,
he was turning red, but he didn’t do nuthin’.” Gas was plentiful
during America’s postwar prosperity, and suddenly young people
had disposable cash to indulge in pursuits like drag racing
and customizing cars. While other youngsters tried to escape
the middle class confines of suburbia, Roth continued experimenting
with car customization.
Changes in car technology like dual-valve engines started coming
from Detroit in the mid-1950s, and Roth would put big ‘55 Chevy
engines into small Ford Model-A cars. Roth’s powerful one-of-a-kind
autos gained rebellious cache among drag racing hotshots, the
same way Marlon Brando’s leather jacket and motorcycle did in
The Wild One.
In 1958, Roth was gaining notoriety as a car customizer. Around
this time he started attending car shows and his art branched
in a different direction. At these events he would use felt
pens to draw names and designs on shirts and bomber jackets.
Roth soon shifted to T-shirts, and was one of the first artists
to use an air brush to speed up the process.
Eventually the plastic model company Revell, teamed up with
Roth to market miniature vehicles driven by outlandish monsters.
The mass produced models gained Roth new fans--thousands of
youngsters who adored the fun-loving drag racing monsters. The
kids loved the models because they scared their parents. And
best of all, they were kool.
In addition to the old Fords, the Big Daddy stamp of approval
also goes to the 1967 Volkswagen “Beetle,” designed by his hero
Dr. Ferdinand Porsche. Before he died in 1951, Dr. Porsche also
developed autos for what became Daimler-Benz, and the automobile
marquee that bears his name. But it’s the humble Volkswagen
that Roth loves: “It was built from the inside out. All the
other cars are built from the outside in. They get the designers
to design the body, and then they’ve got to squeeze the shock
absorbers and the engine in. But Porsche didn’t do that.” He
likens the Volkswagen to that other German gift to the world,
the Bauhaus school of design.
The Bauhaus is as far away as you get from Utah, where Roth
currently lives and produces cars. And he still races his cars
in the street. The Rat Fink is also alive and well, not only
on the T-shirts and posters which comprise the majority of Roth’s
business, but also in models, comic books, trading cards, and
any of the 20 products that Roth licenses. Font company House
Industries even markets digital typefaces based on Roth’s unique
lettering style.
Roth estimates he’s completed 40 cars over the years. Once he’s
exhibited his creations at the “World of Wheels” car shows,
they’re then offered to a museum. Only if they’re turned down
by the museum will the cars be sold. Roth prefers the cars to
be in a museum, so that kids can see them, and he has a number
of cars on display at the Louvre for car buffs, the National
Auto Museum in Reno, Nevada. The rest of his creations are in
the hands of private collectors, but are rarely exhibited at
car shows. “My responsibility ends once it’s been in a car show,”
say Roth. “After that it’s in the public domain.”
The same feeling holds true for his graphic art; he doesn’t
mind when people copy his designs, except when it comes to the
Rat Fink. “I don’t feel like I drew it . . . I don’t feel like
I own it. I feel like I’m the caretaker of it.” And he does
take care of it, retaining a group of attorneys in Salt Lake
City who are kept busy with trademark infringements. Roth even
asks tattoo artists who ink the rodent on skin to include his
name in fine print on the offending body part. And they do.
Big Daddy wants Rat Fink to have a life beyond his own. He wants
Rat Fink to attract flies and stick its tongue out at polite
society forever. “No matter how old I get or whatever happens
to me, he’ll be around.“ And for fans of low-brow art, that
is kool baby, kool.
