HOT ROD Podcast: South City Rod & Custom Owner Bill Ganahl

MotorTrend

Brian Lohnes

Transcript

00:00:00 (dramatic music)

00:00:02 - Welcome everybody to this episode of the Hot Rod Pod,

00:00:09 Where It All Began.

00:00:10 I am Brian Lones, lead broadcaster for the NHRA on Fox,

00:00:14 and a guy who's been around the Hot Rod universe

00:00:16 for about 20 years now, because people keep hiring me

00:00:18 to do freelance work and make unfortunate decisions

00:00:20 like this, but this guy right here is Hot Rod,

00:00:23 the editor of Hot Rod Magazine, John McGann.

00:00:25 We're talking to Bill Ganahl on this episode.

00:00:27 Bill runs, well he's Pat Ganahl's son,

00:00:30 who's a former editor of Hot Rod Magazine,

00:00:31 plus he's well accomplished on his own right

00:00:35 as a top notch car builder in the country at this point,

00:00:39 runs South City Hot Rods in Hayward, California, Bay Area,

00:00:44 and he is most known, I guess this year,

00:00:47 for the striped paint job on the '34 Ford

00:00:50 that lit the world on fire

00:00:52 at the Grand National Roadster Show.

00:00:53 - This was the car that was unveiled with barf bags

00:00:56 at the Grand National Roadster Show

00:00:57 because they knew how polarizing the paint job would be.

00:01:00 The one thing you have to know about Bill Ganahl

00:01:02 is he has a degree in English literature,

00:01:04 and then went on to become a Hot Rod builder.

00:01:06 So the fascinating part about this conversation to me, John,

00:01:10 is we really get into the depth of the art

00:01:13 of building a hot rod, but also we get into the depth

00:01:15 of the business of owning a hot rod shop,

00:01:16 which is a fascination for me

00:01:18 and maybe for many of you as well.

00:01:20 - Lessons he learned along the way,

00:01:22 and he had a pretty good background

00:01:24 working for Ray Brizio and doing a lot

00:01:27 of high-end restoration work.

00:01:28 And then he goes out on his own and realized

00:01:30 like he basically knew nothing,

00:01:32 but he's made it work, and his work is the work,

00:01:37 and the awards have proven that this year.

00:01:40 - So many people in the aftermarket

00:01:42 and in hot rodding have opinions,

00:01:43 but the fascinating thing about Bill

00:01:45 is he has very strong opinions,

00:01:46 but also has great context to back them up.

00:01:49 This is a conversation that I expected

00:01:51 before we began to have some depth,

00:01:52 but I didn't know how deep in we would go,

00:01:54 and it's something that I think people

00:01:55 are really gonna enjoy.

00:01:57 - It is, and we mentioned it just briefly

00:02:00 in the discussion, but he wrote his own feature

00:02:03 for the car in Hot Rod, and when he first approached me,

00:02:06 and he mentioned that he was kind of happy

00:02:08 to have written something in every magazine

00:02:11 that his dad was involved with,

00:02:12 but when he first approached me,

00:02:15 it was something that as a rule, I don't--

00:02:17 - Yeah, you don't get to write your own stuff.

00:02:19 That's what we're here for.

00:02:19 - No, he was like, "Just take my job away from me."

00:02:22 But I'm like, "Well, he's packing all the time.

00:02:23 "I'm sure he could put a few words together

00:02:25 "in a coherent fashion," and he did,

00:02:27 and he does in this discussion, too.

00:02:30 - We know you're gonna love this.

00:02:31 David Freiberger was part of the discussion,

00:02:32 and whenever the discussion needed a little gasoline

00:02:35 dumped on top of the fire,

00:02:36 David was all too happy to provide it.

00:02:38 Enjoy every word of the depth of hot rodding

00:02:40 with Bill Gnau.

00:02:42 - Hey, everybody, welcome to this episode

00:02:44 of the Hot Rod Pod, Where It All Began.

00:02:46 Bill Gnau is our special guest,

00:02:47 and I'm joined by the rest of the panel

00:02:49 of inquisitors here, David Freiberger and John McGann.

00:02:52 John, of course, the editor of Hot Rod Magazine.

00:02:54 David Freiberger, a guy who, in his younger years,

00:02:56 was the editor of Hot Rod Magazine,

00:02:58 and then got old and graduated

00:02:59 to the world of internet television.

00:03:00 - Yes, exactly, and I haven't been doing much of that

00:03:03 this week, and finally, yesterday,

00:03:04 I got a chance to walk around and see some of the show,

00:03:06 catch up with some of the aftermarket folks,

00:03:08 and it's been a good time.

00:03:10 - John, what were you able to do

00:03:11 once we got out of here yesterday

00:03:13 for making our show with the Ring Brothers?

00:03:15 - I took a break.

00:03:16 - You did, you just took a nap.

00:03:18 - I took a nap. - That's fun.

00:03:20 - No, I had some work to do, so I was on the computer.

00:03:22 - Yeah, making all the content for hotrod.com.

00:03:24 - Yep, yep, yep.

00:03:25 - Yeah, they've got a full crew of people out here

00:03:26 doing that, I see KJ, the punkins.

00:03:28 - Yeah, yeah, gotta feed the website, always.

00:03:30 - The beast, gotta feed the beast.

00:03:32 So, we're here with Bill, and David,

00:03:34 I think you should set Bill up, because of the fact

00:03:36 you guys, you go way back, multiple generations

00:03:38 of this guy's family, basically.

00:03:40 - It's true.

00:03:41 I guess, not to take away from what he's accomplished

00:03:45 recently, because Bill, you have been in the news

00:03:48 big time recently with a couple cars.

00:03:49 You built the Good Guys Trendsetter Award just yesterday.

00:03:53 And so, I think when we talk about your dad,

00:03:56 I think that is a big relevance for your background,

00:03:59 but it's not the important thing about you.

00:04:02 You understand what I'm trying to say?

00:04:03 - I've been riding his coattails since--

00:04:05 - Yeah, I'm sure, that's what I'm trying to avoid.

00:04:07 And his dad is, of course, Pat Ganahl,

00:04:09 who was just a legendary journalist,

00:04:12 a huge inspiration to me.

00:04:15 He was the editor of, was he the editor of Street Rotter,

00:04:17 or on the staff at Street Rotter in '71?

00:04:19 - No, editor eventually, yeah.

00:04:20 - Right, editor eventually, and then he went

00:04:22 to Sunset Magazine, oddly enough, I think a lot

00:04:24 of people don't realize that.

00:04:25 And came back, was on staff of Hot Rod Magazine,

00:04:28 was the editor of Hot Rod for about 35 minutes.

00:04:31 (laughing)

00:04:32 Which, there's some good stories behind that as well.

00:04:34 He brought back Rod & Custom from the dead,

00:04:37 and the reason he was just a hero to me

00:04:40 is because he was so straightforward,

00:04:42 he did the things that management didn't want him to do.

00:04:44 His attitude was always, I'm here for the audience,

00:04:47 not for the company, not for the management.

00:04:49 - To a fault, yeah.

00:04:50 - To a fault, yeah, more so.

00:04:51 And I've gotta tell the story about the wake,

00:04:53 which was like the greatest wake I've ever been to.

00:04:56 And Bill's there, and his T-shirt says?

00:04:59 - Was my dad a dick to you?

00:05:00 (laughing)

00:05:03 - And you know what, he could be.

00:05:04 My favorite story was, do you have a house painter

00:05:07 pinstripe this thing?

00:05:08 - Yeah, yeah.

00:05:10 - He would say things like that to people.

00:05:12 And I don't know if I told you this story,

00:05:15 maybe I did that night, that when I interviewed

00:05:17 to be on staff of Hot Rod Magazine,

00:05:19 it was actually with Jeff Smith for Hot Rod,

00:05:22 and with Pat for Rod & Custom.

00:05:24 And it was like two or three months between the interview

00:05:28 and when I finally got hired, and Pat later told me,

00:05:31 he's like, I kept telling Smith,

00:05:33 if you don't hire this guy, I'm going to.

00:05:35 And eventually that's what forced Jeff

00:05:37 to hire me at Hot Rod.

00:05:39 - My dad created the illusion of scarcity for you.

00:05:41 (laughing)

00:05:42 - Yes, yeah, exactly, he created the demand

00:05:45 and the deadline.

00:05:46 - Yeah, and so not only did he inspire me as a kid,

00:05:49 but also a very big part of getting me that job

00:05:52 and mentoring me while I was doing it.

00:05:54 Rod & Custom, which was him, was right down the hallway

00:05:57 from where I sat outside of Gray Baskerville's office,

00:06:00 who was obviously another huge influence in my life.

00:06:03 And he would come by and bust my chops all the time.

00:06:06 - I'm sure he was a great mentor

00:06:08 if you did everything exactly as he said.

00:06:11 (laughing)

00:06:12 - Yeah, I'm sure, so you seem familiar with this process.

00:06:14 - I've had 45 years of "mentoring," in quotes.

00:06:19 - Well, the one I'll give you,

00:06:20 before we move on to more cogent subjects,

00:06:23 when David stepped away from the magazine in 2008,

00:06:26 Rob Canan took over as the editor.

00:06:27 So Rob has this big meeting,

00:06:29 and he invites basically everybody

00:06:31 that was a freelancer to his house.

00:06:33 And so I ended up going to Rob's house for like a week,

00:06:35 basically living on his couch.

00:06:36 And so as the day comes for the meeting,

00:06:38 here comes your father, here comes Dave Wallace,

00:06:40 here comes all these people that it's like,

00:06:42 I don't even belong within 100 yards of these guys,

00:06:44 and I'm sitting in the same room with them.

00:06:45 And so as we're going around the room,

00:06:46 kind of pitching these different stories,

00:06:49 get to your dad, and he said, "Listen."

00:06:51 He said, "I opened the magazine last month,

00:06:54 "and there was this pilot Mustang."

00:06:56 And I thought, oh God, this is my story.

00:06:58 (laughing)

00:06:59 And just proceeds to just augers it into the ground.

00:07:02 - Oh no.

00:07:03 - And so I'm like, and so of course, Robbie and Rob,

00:07:06 he looks at me and he says, "Do you have a rebuttal?"

00:07:08 (laughing)

00:07:10 And I looked at your dad, I said,

00:07:13 "Well, okay, take the car away, what about the words?"

00:07:15 He says, "You know, the words are actually okay."

00:07:16 I said, "I'm fine here then."

00:07:17 - There we go, we're good.

00:07:19 - And to me, he was a guy who had standards,

00:07:22 and I had no problem with that.

00:07:23 And that car, to him, had no business being in that magazine.

00:07:27 And I think that is, to me, one of the endearing things

00:07:30 that I look back and what he accomplished and everything,

00:07:32 and why I respected him so much,

00:07:34 is the fact that he did have a standard.

00:07:36 And I don't think a lot of people,

00:07:37 not to say that there's no standard anymore,

00:07:39 but to defend it that vehemently,

00:07:41 I think was a really cool thing.

00:07:42 - Brought to you by the guy who also did Caddyhack.

00:07:45 - Right. (laughing)

00:07:45 - Yeah, yeah.

00:07:46 - But Caddyhack, which was a story in Hot Rod Magazine

00:07:48 about taking a big Hank and Cadillac sedan,

00:07:52 throwing all the staff in it,

00:07:53 making it as heavy as they possibly could,

00:07:55 running it down the drag strip,

00:07:56 and then progressively taking parts off of it

00:07:59 until it was nothing but a bare frame going down the track.

00:08:01 And there was a lesson in that,

00:08:02 which was obviously light makes might,

00:08:04 you know, speed out of weight.

00:08:05 - The thing ended up running like 12s,

00:08:07 and it was a floor pan with a steering wheel

00:08:09 and a four-point roll bar.

00:08:10 It was unbelievable.

00:08:10 - I think 12s is a little of a hyperbole.

00:08:14 - Yeah, it is a little bit.

00:08:16 - One thing he couldn't get it to do

00:08:17 was go slower than his daily driver 1960 Bug.

00:08:20 (laughing)

00:08:21 - You know, which was another awesome thing about him

00:08:23 is that, at least as far as I know,

00:08:25 he never had a brand new car.

00:08:26 - Never, no.

00:08:27 - He was always driving the older projects.

00:08:29 Obviously, the iconic '56 Ford.

00:08:32 Yeah. - Yep.

00:08:33 - And all the cowl bugs.

00:08:34 It was funny to watch him fold himself out of a cowl bug.

00:08:37 - I look back, and I don't know how he fit in that thing.

00:08:40 - Yeah, for the people who have never seen Pat Ganahl,

00:08:42 he's known as Too Tall Ganahl.

00:08:44 He's had to have been 6'6".

00:08:46 - 6'8". - 6'8"?

00:08:47 - Yeah. - Wow.

00:08:48 - Yeah. - Yep.

00:08:49 He was 6'8" in his younger days.

00:08:50 I think he kind of was getting a little shorter

00:08:52 as he grew older, but yeah, no, he's a tall dude.

00:08:54 - Yeah.

00:08:55 - But look, let's move on to the current and the present,

00:08:57 and the real reason we wanted to have you here

00:08:59 as a guest this week as we get this series started.

00:09:01 And, you know, David talked about the headlines

00:09:03 that you've been in really constantly.

00:09:05 I mean, it's been, you've built a lot of very cool stuff,

00:09:08 but when we look at the truck you guys got awarded for

00:09:12 at the truck show this year,

00:09:13 of course the coupe that we're gonna talk about,

00:09:15 and these are things that are conversation starters

00:09:20 in the best of ways, right?

00:09:21 These are not things people look at and just go,

00:09:23 "Oh yeah, that."

00:09:24 People have opinions on this stuff,

00:09:26 and I think that's a really important part

00:09:27 of why we wanna have a conversation,

00:09:29 'cause you've got great opinions as well.

00:09:30 - Oh, I do, yeah.

00:09:32 Apple didn't fall too far from the tree.

00:09:33 (laughing)

00:09:35 - And we wanna kick it off.

00:09:36 I mean, where do you wanna begin?

00:09:38 The Trendsetter Award is a big one,

00:09:40 and that was just kind of revealed to you last night,

00:09:43 but you said everybody else was in on it.

00:09:44 - Yeah, well this is, I mean,

00:09:46 I'm still not sure this really happened.

00:09:48 You're catching me the morning after it was awarded to me.

00:09:51 Yeah, I mean, the good guys have done a lot for me

00:09:54 over the years.

00:09:55 Winning awards, unfortunately,

00:09:58 is necessary in this business,

00:10:01 and, you know, they've bestowed a lot of them on me,

00:10:06 and very recently.

00:10:07 I mean, we just won two top 12s in the same year,

00:10:10 which is, I mean, I don't,

00:10:14 I'm glad they did it, but, you know, I'm still stunned.

00:10:17 - And to be clear for the audience,

00:10:19 your business is South City Rod and Customs

00:10:22 building hot rods.

00:10:23 - Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:10:24 But so, you know, getting the Trendsetter Award,

00:10:27 it's kind of ironic, actually,

00:10:28 because we build traditional,

00:10:30 very traditionally inspired cars, you know.

00:10:33 - I was gonna ask you about that.

00:10:35 - Yeah.

00:10:35 - It's strange that they would identify that

00:10:37 as somebody setting a trend,

00:10:38 when really you're perfecting a trend

00:10:40 that's been around since the dawn of hot rodding.

00:10:42 - Well, I take it as a huge compliment,

00:10:44 because I'm trying to make tradition relevant

00:10:48 in the modern context of the business here,

00:10:51 and if you look at SEMA right now,

00:10:53 I can count on one hand

00:10:55 how many early hot rods there are here.

00:10:57 - Oh, yeah, that's true.

00:10:58 - And so, to now be, to stand out,

00:11:00 because we're building traditional hot rods, is weird.

00:11:04 I'm 45, you know, so I'm at a kind of middle ground

00:11:09 of age groups of people who are into custom cars,

00:11:12 and I use custom cars as like a blanket term

00:11:14 of anything that's custom.

00:11:15 And, you know, I just went from Woola Rock,

00:11:19 the Gathering at the Rock,

00:11:20 which is a very small, very traditional show,

00:11:24 and if you went there, you feel like traditional,

00:11:26 very traditional hot rodding is alive and well

00:11:29 and flourishing, and then the next week I'm coming to SEMA,

00:11:32 and I'm the only traditional car in the entire building,

00:11:37 you know, but to be able to say that I'm a trendsetter,

00:11:41 I don't know, and I'm not arrogant at all,

00:11:44 I just, you know, I would not have given me that award,

00:11:49 but if I have any reason to accept it, you know,

00:11:52 I'm proud to say that we are continuing tradition

00:11:55 into the modern culture of hot rodding,

00:11:59 and I wanna keep it alive.

00:12:00 I feel like it's part of my duty, you know,

00:12:04 if anything for my dad, part of keeping on the legacy

00:12:07 of people who've come before us,

00:12:09 and I consider it kind of a mission, really, you know.

00:12:13 Nine out of 10 people who look at the cars we build

00:12:18 probably don't know very much anymore

00:12:21 about what the inspiration for how they look even is,

00:12:26 but if they can engage with it

00:12:29 and start a conversation about 'em,

00:12:30 then it's kind of keeping a little bit of that alive

00:12:32 and in the conversation, so I'll take credit for that.

00:12:36 - Why do you think that they have become so noticed?

00:12:39 - Well, Kobe's car is just,

00:12:42 it's impossible not to notice.

00:12:45 - This is the car that we're talking about

00:12:46 that came out a few years ago in bare metal.

00:12:48 It's a 33 or four?

00:12:50 - It's a 33 body with a 34 grille,

00:12:52 so we call it a 34 'cause the grille really identifies it.

00:12:54 - Sure. - Yeah.

00:12:55 - And it was in bare metal, had a early Hemi in it,

00:12:58 stack injection, big setback, zoomies,

00:13:01 looked like a vintage drag car

00:13:03 with a modern twist on the thing,

00:13:04 and most recently, they painted the thing

00:13:06 in what is the headline news.

00:13:08 It's sort of an outrageous stripe.

00:13:11 I don't even know how to describe it.

00:13:13 - Kind of a strobe stripe.

00:13:14 - Yeah. - Strobe stripe

00:13:15 in multiple colors of earth tones, orange, brown, gold.

00:13:19 - It was inspired by '70s, late '60s, early '70s,

00:13:22 psychedelic paint jobs.

00:13:24 It's not really far on the spectrum

00:13:28 of a psychedelic paint job,

00:13:30 but that's what its inspiration was,

00:13:31 and it's definitely far enough

00:13:32 to make people talk about it.

00:13:34 - There was many cars back then

00:13:35 that were striped that way.

00:13:36 - Absolutely. - I think of the

00:13:37 Carroll Shelby Don Perdome Top Fuel car,

00:13:39 red, white, and blue striped that way.

00:13:41 I think Crazy Cuda might've been that way.

00:13:43 There was a station wagon I can think of

00:13:45 that had just a bunch of vertical stripes on it.

00:13:47 So as you talk about how you're building on tradition,

00:13:51 I think a lot of people looked at that car,

00:13:52 and as you said a few moments ago,

00:13:53 they had no idea where that was coming from

00:13:56 and didn't get that context.

00:13:58 - Not at all.

00:13:58 The biggest reaction was,

00:14:01 why the hell would you put stripes on this car?

00:14:03 Kobe, the owner, Kobe Gewirtz, is an artist.

00:14:09 He does graphic design.

00:14:11 - And is incredible at it.

00:14:12 - Yes, he is, yeah. - Oh, yeah, yeah.

00:14:13 No, he's brilliant.

00:14:16 But he comes at the Hot Rod as a piece of art.

00:14:22 And like Robert Williams with Prickly Heat,

00:14:26 which we talked about a lot while we were doing the car,

00:14:29 it's an object of art, and it's a canvas.

00:14:34 But putting those stripes on the car,

00:14:37 one of the comments we got a lot was,

00:14:39 why would you put stripes on this car?

00:14:40 It fights the lines of the body.

00:14:42 And that was literally the point.

00:14:44 - Yeah, yeah, I was gonna say.

00:14:47 - That was the whole juxtaposition

00:14:49 and the reason for doing it.

00:14:51 And if people don't understand it,

00:14:52 we knew people weren't gonna,

00:14:54 that all people weren't gonna understand it.

00:14:57 - Well, you displayed it first

00:14:58 at Grand National Roadster Show with barf bags.

00:15:00 - We put barf bags out because,

00:15:01 so we were in Joe Campani's paint shop

00:15:05 laying out the stripes.

00:15:07 And I think we were just having fun and laughing

00:15:10 and Joe Campani walks out of the paint booth

00:15:15 and he just out of nowhere goes,

00:15:17 we should give barf bags to people who don't like it.

00:15:20 And Kobe and I looked at each other

00:15:22 and we're like, oh, we're doing that for sure.

00:15:24 Yeah, so he designed a logo for 'em

00:15:27 and then signed 'em and gave 'em out to,

00:15:29 especially the people who didn't like the car.

00:15:31 - Yeah. - Yeah.

00:15:32 - And in the artistic sense,

00:15:34 isn't this the goal of any artistic project?

00:15:38 Is to create a piece that places,

00:15:40 that makes people look at it and think about it.

00:15:43 And it's not necessarily the point

00:15:45 to make everybody love it,

00:15:46 but it's, I think great art, no matter what the form is,

00:15:49 causes people to look at it and either,

00:15:51 and make a call on whether they love it or not.

00:15:53 - Well, so for me personally,

00:15:56 to be the person to build this car

00:15:58 is so far out of my comfort zone,

00:16:00 so far out of my typical style of build.

00:16:02 When people walk into my shop,

00:16:04 I tell, I've told a lot of people,

00:16:07 I've never painted a car more than one color before this.

00:16:10 - Wow. - I like subtle,

00:16:12 I like classy, I like timeless.

00:16:15 And if you're gonna build a car

00:16:16 for X amount of hundreds of thousands of dollars,

00:16:18 you don't want it to be a joke in five years.

00:16:23 And some people want that,

00:16:26 some people wanna come to SEMA.

00:16:27 If you've got enough money to build a car every year,

00:16:30 then you can come and make a splash

00:16:32 and then go put it in your garage and never see it again.

00:16:34 And that's fine. - Oh, sure.

00:16:35 - And some people do that.

00:16:36 - The graveyard of stuff that comes out of this show

00:16:38 and just is so garish. - That's a good point.

00:16:40 - I mean, it's thousands of cars over the years.

00:16:43 - Yes, oh, there's so many.

00:16:44 And I don't wanna build those cars.

00:16:47 If somebody came to me and said,

00:16:48 "I wanna build a million plus dollar car

00:16:50 "just to win an award," I'd talk about it.

00:16:52 I'm not closed minded to it,

00:16:58 but it's just not my typical thing.

00:17:00 I really look at, let's build a car that you can drive

00:17:03 and in 20 years, it's gonna be as cool as it was today.

00:17:07 So Kobe's car, he really forced me into that realm.

00:17:12 And I just, he kind of, I joke about this.

00:17:16 I think in my mind, Kobe wanted it to be uglier,

00:17:19 and I'm using that with figure quotes,

00:17:22 than it turned out.

00:17:24 And some people might say it's as ugly

00:17:25 as it can possibly be.

00:17:27 That's fine.

00:17:28 But he was talking about doing vertical stripes on it

00:17:31 and wider stripes, and he had some renderings done.

00:17:34 And I looked at it and I kind of,

00:17:35 I think I said at one point, I was like,

00:17:38 if it's gonna be ugly and come from my shop,

00:17:40 it has to be good ugly, not bad ugly.

00:17:43 And we just were very copacetic through the entire thing.

00:17:48 And Kobe really, as an artist with a vision,

00:17:51 he really let me and Donnie and the guys at the shop

00:17:54 add our own influence to what the ultimate outcome was.

00:17:59 And I think we reached a good happy medium

00:18:04 with our intentions with the car.

00:18:06 It's not ugly enough that, I mean, it was a risk.

00:18:09 It could have literally been a laughing stock

00:18:12 and ruin my career.

00:18:13 You know, I mean, if you want to be extreme about it.

00:18:15 >> Right, he'll never work in this town again.

00:18:18 >> And when we first debuted it at GNRS,

00:18:22 we pulled the cover off with people filming it,

00:18:26 and it just went nuts with people just,

00:18:30 you know, social media commenting,

00:18:33 either loving it or hating it.

00:18:35 We knew, obviously we had the barf bags,

00:18:37 we knew it was gonna be a talking point,

00:18:40 but we had no idea how serious people were gonna be

00:18:45 about how much they hated the thing.

00:18:48 And it could have gone either way, I think, at that point.

00:18:52 I know you kept commenting on, I would post,

00:18:54 like, everyone hates it.

00:18:55 And I was not trying to hype that up.

00:18:59 I'm a self-effacing person, so if I do something

00:19:01 where I'm nervous, people aren't gonna like it.

00:19:03 Like, I make jokes and I laugh.

00:19:05 >> I'm tired of it as a marketing shtick.

00:19:08 >> It was great at the beginning, but I feel

00:19:10 that it's just gone a little bit far,

00:19:11 because from what I see, the love outweighs

00:19:14 the hate by quite a bit.

00:19:16 >> Yeah, but you said too far.

00:19:17 That was only like a couple weeks after.

00:19:19 It wasn't that long after.

00:19:21 And I've since stopped saying it, you know.

00:19:23 But when it debuted, it was,

00:19:27 the way I received the information that I got,

00:19:32 it was 50/50 for sure.

00:19:34 And I felt like it could have gone either way.

00:19:37 If it didn't, being on the cover of Hot Rod magazine

00:19:42 just validated our choice big time, you know.

00:19:46 And that, and then winning the Hot Rod of the Year

00:19:49 with the good guys.

00:19:51 And there's people now who come up to me,

00:19:54 ah, when you unveiled that thing, I just,

00:19:56 I don't know how I felt about it,

00:19:58 but it's really kind of growing on me.

00:20:00 My reaction to them is like, can I cuss on this end?

00:20:04 My reaction is, you don't get to like this car.

00:20:08 >> Good.

00:20:09 >> You know, I say that jokingly.

00:20:10 I like that people are coming around

00:20:12 and now it's probably 80/20.

00:20:14 You know, I really do feel like

00:20:15 there's way more people that like it.

00:20:17 People come up to me all the time at shows.

00:20:19 We've been touring the thing all year and it's been nuts.

00:20:22 >> The big question is,

00:20:24 you're the trendsetter of the year now.

00:20:25 Does that mean people are going to start to do that?

00:20:27 >> Yeah, when does that?

00:20:28 >> Man, you knock that off and it's going to be,

00:20:31 you just knocked off these guys.

00:20:32 It's so, so blatant if you were to pick up that idea.

00:20:36 >> So two responses to that.

00:20:38 One is at the trendsetter award banquet,

00:20:42 my speech started off with,

00:20:44 I promise that stripes are not going to be part of the trend.

00:20:47 And number two, you know, I've even just here at SEMA,

00:20:51 I had a guy come up and was just like,

00:20:52 I've saved the Hot Rod article.

00:20:56 I've been looking at this.

00:20:57 I want you to build me one of these.

00:20:59 And my response was like, just like this?

00:21:02 'Cause I'm not going to do that.

00:21:04 But I don't know if somebody came and asked me

00:21:06 to build something comparable that I would even do it

00:21:09 because you can't do that twice.

00:21:11 >> Yeah, no.

00:21:12 >> If you did it a second time,

00:21:14 it would just be another one of those.

00:21:18 >> So he says thereby insulting everybody

00:21:22 who's in their garage building one right now.

00:21:23 Well, yeah.

00:21:25 >> Well, yeah.

00:21:27 I don't want to discourage anybody

00:21:29 from building what they want to build.

00:21:31 And I was having this conversation

00:21:33 with somebody just here also.

00:21:34 Hot Rodding is supposed to be self-expression.

00:21:39 And there's supposed to be no wrong answer.

00:21:42 You're literally building what you want

00:21:44 out of whatever you want for you.

00:21:47 And if everybody hates it, but you love it, then--

00:21:51 >> That's fine.

00:21:52 >> Yeah, who cares?

00:21:53 Me as a builder, I'm building stuff for other people.

00:21:56 And like I said earlier, shows matter, awards matter

00:22:00 in terms of your reputation and building your credibility.

00:22:03 >> Does that ethos that you just mentioned though

00:22:06 still exist in the modern world?

00:22:08 Because we've now trained ourselves

00:22:11 that everything we do has to be projected out to everybody.

00:22:14 Right, so a guy in his garage in 1960

00:22:17 in Southern California is building his car for him.

00:22:20 And he's going to go out and drive it around.

00:22:21 And his circle of friends are going to see it.

00:22:23 And that's going to be it.

00:22:24 And maybe one of his buddies likes it,

00:22:25 the other one doesn't.

00:22:26 But now this guy is going to build this thing.

00:22:28 And every flipping opinion is going to be shared on it.

00:22:31 So--

00:22:32 >> Well, and if you're going to be influenced by it

00:22:34 and do it, you have to take it next level.

00:22:36 That's the thing about social media.

00:22:38 Everything's got to be bigger, better, faster, louder

00:22:40 at every single step.

00:22:42 But there is also influence.

00:22:45 Like, is Bob McCoy the 40 Ford with the flames on the front?

00:22:49 >> One of the best ones.

00:22:50 >> Everybody did that after that car came out.

00:22:53 And so influence could lead people to do variants

00:22:57 of what you did with that car.

00:22:59 >> Yes, and the difference in my mind is that Kobe's car,

00:23:04 you know, so the stripes, painting a psychedelic paint job

00:23:08 or stripes on a dragster was not to make the car

00:23:10 look good, per se.

00:23:11 >> Attract attention.

00:23:12 >> It was to make it gain attention.

00:23:15 So if you're talking about a trend that is just,

00:23:19 hey, look at me, you know, I don't think that's a good trend.

00:23:21 I think that what we did with Kobe's car was do that

00:23:24 at the right time and the right place to shake things up.

00:23:27 In a way that kind of needed to be done.

00:23:30 Not needed to, that sounds, you know, highfalutin.

00:23:32 But, you know, it was a good time to do it.

00:23:34 And I think it did a good thing because people are talking

00:23:37 about traditional cars, they're talking about color.

00:23:40 My hashtag was going to be, you know,

00:23:42 make cars colors again.

00:23:43 >> Yeah.

00:23:44 >> You know, we're just at a point where everything's

00:23:48 muted earth tones and, you know.

00:23:51 >> We're seeing a lot of earth tones this week.

00:23:53 >> Yeah, yeah, and that's fine.

00:23:55 You know, trends are trends.

00:23:57 And again, but though that's the paradox of hot rodding

00:24:01 is that you're building something for self-expression

00:24:03 that's supposed to be unique and an expression of yourself.

00:24:06 But then they all kind of start looking the same

00:24:08 because everyone's like, I like that trend.

00:24:09 And then they just sort of start building the same thing.

00:24:12 And that's what we're, I'm trying, you know,

00:24:14 painting that '40 Ford pickup.

00:24:17 >> That's what I was going to transition to

00:24:18 because you didn't pigeonhole yourself with the coupe.

00:24:22 You moved on to the '40 Ford pickup.

00:24:24 >> Absolutely, and thank goodness.

00:24:26 (laughing)

00:24:28 But you know, the truck is way more along the lines

00:24:31 of what I personally want to build.

00:24:35 Not that I didn't, I mean, I wanted to build Kobe's car

00:24:37 and it's bad ass.

00:24:39 I love driving that car more than anything we've built.

00:24:42 It's super fun, it's a hot rod, it's visceral.

00:24:46 It's what a hot rod should be.

00:24:47 I like customs, you know, I came from more of liking customs

00:24:51 and then I got a job working for Brizio's building hot rods.

00:24:55 And people don't build customs to the level

00:24:57 that they do hot rods, so if you have a business,

00:25:00 that's kind of what you need to do.

00:25:01 But that truck is really kind of a,

00:25:03 it's a mix of both, I think.

00:25:05 It's low in the front and has a hot rod look,

00:25:09 but it's definitely a custom vibe to it.

00:25:12 >> And it ticks pretty much all the boxes

00:25:14 you mentioned earlier, like the simplicity, the elegance.

00:25:16 I mean, that is, to me, that's really

00:25:19 the defining feature of that truck.

00:25:21 It is as elegant, really, as you can make

00:25:23 one of those things look.

00:25:24 And the beautiful curvature on the body of those things,

00:25:27 but the color, all of it, it's, yeah.

00:25:29 >> Well, thank you, first of all.

00:25:31 A '40 Ford pickup, you really can't screw up.

00:25:35 I mean, you can, I've seen them screw up.

00:25:36 >> I can.

00:25:37 (laughing)

00:25:40 >> Fair enough.

00:25:40 Yeah, but you know, they're just,

00:25:43 they're beautiful shapes right off the gate.

00:25:46 So whenever I look at a car, I just look at

00:25:50 what are the few things that I can change

00:25:52 to accentuate what it already is,

00:25:55 not to change it into something

00:25:57 that it wasn't to start with.

00:25:59 And we do a lot of work just doing

00:26:01 subtle modifications on cars that

00:26:04 most people don't know are done,

00:26:07 but they look at the car and just think,

00:26:09 wow, that's a good looking one of those.

00:26:11 And I tell my customers, I'm like,

00:26:13 you're going to spend a lot of money on things

00:26:14 that people aren't really going to know happened.

00:26:17 (laughing)

00:26:18 You know, and that truck's a perfect case in point.

00:26:21 Again though, you know, you can do all the work

00:26:24 in the world and make the body look the way you want,

00:26:28 you know, throw money at it.

00:26:30 If you don't paint it the right color,

00:26:32 it's all for nothing.

00:26:34 And that truck's a perfect case in point

00:26:36 of putting the right color on a body.

00:26:38 >> You know what's a strange reaction I had to it

00:26:40 is that, was it a '49 or a '50 Chevy that your dad built?

00:26:45 >> '52.

00:26:46 >> Yeah.

00:26:47 '40 seems to me to be like the teal or aqua version

00:26:52 of that orange color or peach color he had on that car.

00:26:55 >> Oh, oh, you mean the '53 that he built for the magazine?

00:26:57 >> That's it, yes.

00:26:58 >> Oh, I'm sorry, he had a '52 himself.

00:26:59 Yeah, no, the '53 that he built for the magazine.

00:27:02 >> Right.

00:27:03 >> Yeah.

00:27:04 >> Do you see what I mean about how it sort of has

00:27:04 the same color temperature or depth or something?

00:27:06 >> Yeah, oh, absolutely.

00:27:07 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:27:08 >> But in a different color?

00:27:09 >> Right.

00:27:10 >> I don't know, it's hard to describe it at design terms.

00:27:11 Kobe would be able to nail what I'm talking about.

00:27:13 >> Yeah, yeah.

00:27:13 No, it is, I mean, that's what we wanted

00:27:15 was that kind of like, you know,

00:27:18 we were thinking a little more '60s.

00:27:20 I think my dad, when he was building that car,

00:27:23 he put a color that worked for the '80s.

00:27:26 >> Right.

00:27:27 >> 'Cause that's when he was building it,

00:27:27 but it was better than most of the peach--

00:27:31 >> Pastel.

00:27:31 >> Pastels that came out in that time.

00:27:33 So he rode the line pretty well with that, I think,

00:27:35 and did a great job at that time.

00:27:37 >> And that car went to like his cousin or something?

00:27:41 >> Yeah.

00:27:42 >> Yeah.

00:27:43 >> Yeah, we won't, I won't go into any of that.

00:27:45 >> Okay.

00:27:46 (laughing)

00:27:47 >> Cool.

00:27:48 >> He was bummed that that car, you know,

00:27:49 kind of went away and--

00:27:52 >> Oh, I did hear that rant.

00:27:53 >> Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:27:54 >> Okay.

00:27:55 >> Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:27:56 >> That was one of his rants, yeah.

00:27:56 >> Yeah.

00:27:57 >> Yeah.

00:27:58 >> But anyway, the '40 pickup you just built won--

00:28:01 >> America's Most Beautiful Truck.

00:28:02 >> The world's most--

00:28:03 >> Right, yeah.

00:28:04 >> World's most beautiful truck.

00:28:05 Greg, the owner, will let you know,

00:28:08 it's world's--

00:28:09 >> World's most beautiful.

00:28:09 >> Not America's, it's world's.

00:28:11 So they, so first of all, they,

00:28:14 it's a Grand National Roadster show

00:28:16 that we do every year, have a booth.

00:28:18 It's one of the best indoor car shows

00:28:20 in the country, I would say.

00:28:21 >> That's great.

00:28:22 >> They saw the, you know, the popularity of trucks

00:28:26 and realized that trucks have a lot of shows,

00:28:30 but they don't really have a good indoor type show

00:28:33 that's like GNRS, so that's the niche

00:28:35 they were trying to fill.

00:28:37 And we just, I went because they said,

00:28:42 "Hey Bill, can you bring some trucks?"

00:28:44 And I had like seven trucks in the,

00:28:46 all local that I could bring,

00:28:48 so I chose out of those and we brought four.

00:28:52 And I could only fit three in my booth.

00:28:54 So I just said to Greg, "Why don't we put it in

00:28:57 "for the WNBT?"

00:28:59 W World's is, they said that they did that

00:29:03 because they wanted, they didn't want it

00:29:06 to be just American trucks.

00:29:08 >> I see.

00:29:08 >> So it's not technically that they're really saying

00:29:11 it is the most beautiful truck in the world,

00:29:12 they just wanted to be inclusive.

00:29:14 But Greg thinks that it's because it's the most

00:29:16 beautiful truck in the world, and so do we really.

00:29:18 >> Sure.

00:29:19 >> But no, we were lucky to go to the inaugural show.

00:29:21 It was very good, but of course it's a new show,

00:29:23 so it's going to grow and get better over time.

00:29:27 We snuck in and snagged the first one.

00:29:29 Basically is what happened, I mean.

00:29:31 And we're, talk about a show, I mean,

00:29:34 SEMA's kind of the same way, it's apples to oranges.

00:29:38 Like, how do you judge a 40 Ford pickup

00:29:41 against a square body C10, against a four by four,

00:29:45 against an international, you know, I mean,

00:29:47 it's just, they were all over the place.

00:29:49 And we were, I would say, lucky that the judges

00:29:52 appreciated traditional, you know, styling.

00:29:57 But the truck, the most arrogant I will get

00:30:01 is to acknowledge that I believe that truck is beautiful.

00:30:04 >> Yeah.

00:30:04 >> I really do, it's one of my favorite cars,

00:30:07 vehicles that we've built, and it just, the color,

00:30:11 like I said, it's a 40 Ford pickup,

00:30:12 you can't screw 'em up.

00:30:14 >> But you can perfect it.

00:30:15 >> Well, if anybody thinks that,

00:30:18 I will take that as a huge compliment, yeah.

00:30:20 >> One of the things you and I had spoken about

00:30:22 on the phone a couple months ago is,

00:30:24 it's interesting you say that you're all about tradition,

00:30:27 but you also look at some of the big awards,

00:30:29 and you're like, this car breaks no new ground.

00:30:31 It just, it's won an award,

00:30:34 but there's nothing special about it.

00:30:35 I think the judges are rivet counters in that case, right?

00:30:38 >> Yeah.

00:30:39 >> Yeah.

00:30:40 >> You're not lining up all the screws,

00:30:41 and you're like, I want something that makes a statement

00:30:44 that has some pizzazz, yet at the same time,

00:30:46 you're fighting for traditional hot rods.

00:30:48 >> Well, yeah, so we're building,

00:30:53 I don't know that I should be throwing out numbers here,

00:30:55 because I always get self-conscious,

00:30:57 especially when we come to somewhere like SEMA,

00:30:59 there are millions of dollars built here.

00:31:02 >> Yeah, for sure.

00:31:03 >> Millions, and all the guys in the industry,

00:31:07 you see something win, and everyone's like,

00:31:09 how much do you think that one cost to build?

00:31:11 And then you hear numbers going all the way

00:31:13 from one million to 10 billion,

00:31:15 and you're like, well, it's somewhere in there.

00:31:17 But my cars, so far, have been,

00:31:21 I build driver cars, and I don't mean they're door slammers,

00:31:25 I mean they're drivers.

00:31:28 I build them to work, to function.

00:31:30 I want my customers to drive them.

00:31:32 That's what cars are for.

00:31:34 And I'm not building million dollar cars

00:31:36 to compete for an award.

00:31:39 But what I'm trying to do is build a car

00:31:41 that I can put in competition for one of these awards

00:31:44 against million dollar cars,

00:31:45 and it's not going to be laughed out of the competition.

00:31:48 And I've somehow, with the people who are around me,

00:31:52 Campani Color painting the cars,

00:31:54 Chris Plant doing the interior,

00:31:57 Danny DJ Designs doing the interior,

00:31:59 everybody just has helped me up the level of our cars

00:32:04 for what I consider a bargain

00:32:05 for the customers I'm building them for.

00:32:07 And a bargain, that's still hundreds of thousands of dollars.

00:32:10 But to come here and compete,

00:32:13 like Kobe's car made the top 40 at SEMA,

00:32:16 and there's people here with million plus dollar cars

00:32:19 who didn't get in, or were probably pissed.

00:32:21 But to your point, we're building cars

00:32:24 that are visually exciting, or so good looking,

00:32:31 hypothetically, that they can't ignore them

00:32:34 and not at least engage with them

00:32:37 in the conversation about awards.

00:32:40 And that's awesome.

00:32:41 I feel self-conscious because I don't want to be the guy

00:32:46 who comes in and steals an award

00:32:47 for someone who spent two million dollars

00:32:49 to win that award and are pissed that we did it.

00:32:51 >> Yeah, that hurts your feelings, I know.

00:32:53 >> It does.

00:32:54 (laughing)

00:32:55 >> It really tears you up.

00:32:56 >> But on the flip side of that,

00:33:00 if that's the case, if it simply comes down to the fact

00:33:03 of he who spends the most wins the most,

00:33:05 then the whole thing's just invalidated anyway, right?

00:33:07 I mean, the whole thing just literally becomes flim flam.

00:33:11 >> And some people would say that that's the way it is.

00:33:13 Literally, I mean, there are certain shows,

00:33:15 if you're going by points, I mean,

00:33:16 it's what happened to the AMBR in the '70s

00:33:19 when cars just got crazy.

00:33:21 A lot of car shows were how many things

00:33:23 can you change on this car?

00:33:25 Not how can you make it better,

00:33:27 how many things can you change?

00:33:29 And so people would come one year, they'd lose,

00:33:32 so they'd go home and just change another 20 things

00:33:35 on the car, add things, not take away.

00:33:39 >> That's how we got Mercedes headlights

00:33:41 and 52 Chevys.

00:33:42 >> Yeah, I don't miss that.

00:33:45 >> Well, it's still happening.

00:33:46 >> Is it?

00:33:47 All right.

00:33:48 >> I would say, I won't name the shows,

00:33:50 but there are certain shows where, I mean,

00:33:51 that's still really what's going on.

00:33:53 We joke that the ugliest car often wins.

00:33:58 >> Sure.

00:33:58 >> And again, that's very subjective and opinionated,

00:34:03 what's ugly, but I feel like there are no,

00:34:07 like I said earlier, there's no rules,

00:34:10 but there are rules, and different people

00:34:14 in different niches have different concepts

00:34:17 of what those rules are.

00:34:19 I'm very opinionated, I'm traditional,

00:34:21 so if I can go out and appreciate a Ring Brothers

00:34:25 weird truck for the craftsmanship,

00:34:28 and it may not be aesthetically what I like at all,

00:34:31 but I'm a builder, so I can go look at anything

00:34:33 and be like, wow, that's a crazy thing

00:34:34 they did right there.

00:34:35 >> Yeah, the execution.

00:34:36 >> And the execution and the craftsmanship is just insane,

00:34:39 but I have a very specific idea of what I want

00:34:42 them to look like, and that's more important

00:34:45 than how much it costs, how many modifications,

00:34:47 I mean, like I said, I'll build stuff

00:34:49 that has a thousand modifications on it

00:34:51 that nobody's even going to know happened,

00:34:54 and I'm fine with that, as long as they think

00:34:55 it looks good.

00:34:56 >> Would you ever do a muscle car?

00:34:57 >> I'm doing one right now.

00:34:58 >> What is it?

00:34:59 >> So we're doing a '68 Charger.

00:35:02 First of all, I did build a '65 GTO before,

00:35:05 and it was kind of a driver, so it didn't really

00:35:08 get a lot of attention, but it was on the cover

00:35:10 of Street Rotter, but behind a '34 Ford.

00:35:13 It was the first muscle car that was on the cover

00:35:15 of Street Rotter.

00:35:16 >> Yeah, when they expanded the entry.

00:35:17 >> I'm pissing people off every --

00:35:19 (laughing)

00:35:20 >> Yeah, I'm stepping away.

00:35:22 >> Yeah, but yeah, so we're doing a '68 Charger

00:35:25 that we're hoping to get done for the Sloniker

00:35:27 at GNRS in three months, so I don't know why

00:35:30 I'm here right now, first of all.

00:35:31 >> Yeah, you're busy.

00:35:32 >> Yeah, and it's a step outside of the stuff

00:35:37 that we typically do, but I'm also,

00:35:41 I have to be cognizant of staying relevant,

00:35:44 but I want to build the Charger.

00:35:45 It's going to be a South City-style Charger.

00:35:48 It's not going to be pro-touring.

00:35:50 It's not going to have 3D-printed valances

00:35:53 and spoilers and (beep) on it.

00:35:54 >> Yeah.

00:35:55 >> Which I'm not saying disparagingly,

00:35:56 I'm just saying it's not our style.

00:35:58 So we had Evod do custom wheels for it,

00:36:03 but I picked a Polara hubcap.

00:36:05 >> Uh-huh.

00:36:06 >> Nice.

00:36:06 >> And it's going to look like a very original,

00:36:08 like it could've come.

00:36:09 So it's going to be stock plus,

00:36:12 but it's not going to be, first of all,

00:36:15 it's not going to be a million-dollar car.

00:36:17 It might be close, but it's going to be one color.

00:36:22 (laughing)

00:36:24 It's going to have a,

00:36:26 Danny from DJ Designs is doing the interior,

00:36:28 so where we're really stepping out on this one

00:36:30 is that we're going to do a modern,

00:36:33 traditionally with inspiration from the stock,

00:36:36 but it's going to be all CAD-rendered, 3D-printed,

00:36:41 CNC'd, so that's where it's going to be

00:36:43 a step away from the norm for me,

00:36:45 but I'm excited to do it.

00:36:47 And so to answer your question,

00:36:48 if somebody came and said they wanted to build a Pacer

00:36:50 or a Gremlin or something, like--

00:36:52 - Right.

00:36:53 - I would find a way to make it a South City car

00:36:55 and make it cool.

00:36:56 - As long as the check cashed, right?

00:36:58 So, yeah.

00:36:59 (laughing)

00:37:01 But like--

00:37:01 - I do it sometimes when the check doesn't cash.

00:37:03 - Yeah, well, that actually brings up another point

00:37:06 I think we wanted to talk about, which is,

00:37:08 I mean, your dad built cars in his garage.

00:37:09 You work for Brizio.

00:37:11 Is it worth owning your own shop?

00:37:13 Should a kid who's--

00:37:14 - Before we go all the way down that rabbit hole,

00:37:16 one question just to finish up the point on the Charger.

00:37:20 The Charger would strike me as the type of car

00:37:22 that attracts, that's the type of car to me

00:37:24 that makes the phone ring at your shop, right?

00:37:26 Because of just, you know, we walk around,

00:37:29 we looked at the Ring Brothers Charger,

00:37:30 like not to use the same model,

00:37:31 but we look at what they're doing.

00:37:33 The 32 gets an insane amount of attention,

00:37:36 and maybe the one guy calls up and says,

00:37:37 "I want one just like it."

00:37:39 But when you build this Charger that you're doing,

00:37:40 to me, that strikes such a wide,

00:37:42 throws such a wider net on a potential customer base.

00:37:45 Is there any risk in all of a sudden,

00:37:49 the muscle car calls start coming in so fast

00:37:52 that it's like, ah, am I gonna send myself down away?

00:37:54 Because obviously you're conscious of how you want

00:37:57 your shop to produce stuff,

00:37:59 what the range of stuff you want it to produce.

00:38:01 - That's something that I think about constantly.

00:38:04 Running, you know, the tug of war between running a business

00:38:08 and being an artist is real, and it's difficult.

00:38:13 The identity of your,

00:38:15 I call our shop Identity Crisis Hot Rods.

00:38:17 (laughing)

00:38:18 Because, you know, I mean,

00:38:19 over the years I really have done,

00:38:21 a disparate variety of cars.

00:38:25 We built one of the first C10 pickups

00:38:28 that was done to a really high level,

00:38:31 the Mafia truck that we built for Sean Provost,

00:38:34 who then took it and started his own shop

00:38:36 using that truck as his poster child for his shop.

00:38:39 Not bitter at all.

00:38:40 (laughing)

00:38:42 But no, but it was a really fun build

00:38:44 because it was totally out of the,

00:38:45 it was a '70 C10.

00:38:47 And I'm like, well, let's make,

00:38:48 he came and kind of was just like,

00:38:50 Bill, what do you want, do what you want with it.

00:38:53 You know, so we built it very,

00:38:55 with subtle modifications,

00:38:57 but really nice for a C10 at that time.

00:38:59 I think we were kind of,

00:39:00 - Had a lot of half a step ahead.

00:39:01 - Ironically, we were like at the forefront of,

00:39:03 but that was just 'cause Sean brought us that truck.

00:39:06 But afterwards, I mean, I joked that he,

00:39:09 I mean, it's not a joke, he really took it

00:39:11 and, you know, used it as fodder to start his own shop.

00:39:15 I would have been upset if that's what I wanted to build.

00:39:17 - I see.

00:39:18 - But because it was sort of a one off deal,

00:39:21 I mean, I literally didn't even,

00:39:23 I've never even spoken this out loud before.

00:39:26 - You were emotionally attached to the work

00:39:27 to make sure the work was done correctly,

00:39:28 but you weren't emotionally attached

00:39:30 to what it ended up being.

00:39:31 - And I might be dumb for not having pushed that,

00:39:35 you know, more because we do get calls for trucks

00:39:40 and we've done a few,

00:39:41 we've done a couple of patina trucks,

00:39:43 a couple of really nice C10s.

00:39:45 But to me, I just look at the car and the,

00:39:49 my vision of it is, comes always from the same place.

00:39:54 You know, so it doesn't really matter what the car is

00:39:56 and if we have to do more muscle cars in the future,

00:40:00 I don't dislike muscle cars at all.

00:40:04 And if somebody will let me do it the way I,

00:40:07 I at least have my input, then I'm all for it.

00:40:11 And that's why we're doing it.

00:40:12 I mean, you know, putting this in the Slonikers,

00:40:14 I don't think it's gonna win the Sloniker, period.

00:40:17 But it'll be putting our name on that type of build

00:40:21 and I don't want those to be all the calls we get.

00:40:24 - Right.

00:40:25 - But if it's some of them

00:40:26 and we start doing some of those, that's great.

00:40:29 - Yeah, going back to what I was asking about,

00:40:32 about just running the shop,

00:40:34 and that's one of the considerations

00:40:35 is you get to pick your customers at some level.

00:40:38 - Well, that's the goal.

00:40:39 - Yeah.

00:40:40 - Build up to being able to be discretionary.

00:40:43 - You came into this with a passion

00:40:45 and now you're running a business in California

00:40:47 and dealing with, you know,

00:40:49 just Air Resources Board and whoever else.

00:40:52 Would you do it again?

00:40:53 Or would you continue working at somebody else's shop?

00:40:55 - Man, so when I worked for,

00:40:57 I worked for Roy Brizio for 14, 13 or 14 years.

00:41:02 And that's tough to say because I really weaned off.

00:41:04 I started working four 10s

00:41:06 and then I went down to three days a week

00:41:08 and I was moonlighting at my shop

00:41:10 and built four or five cars while I still worked for Roy.

00:41:13 And he said, you know,

00:41:18 "Billy, do you really,

00:41:20 "I don't, do you know what you're getting into?"

00:41:22 - This is the story I was trying to trigger.

00:41:24 - Yeah, he, you know, Roy,

00:41:27 a lot of guys start at shops

00:41:29 and then leave and do their own thing.

00:41:31 And it happens.

00:41:32 And a lot of the times it creates rifts

00:41:34 between the employer and the guy who went on their own.

00:41:38 Roy, I call him my Bay Area dad.

00:41:40 Like he's just been supportive of me.

00:41:43 While I worked at his shop, I learned everything.

00:41:45 I mean, most of what I know there,

00:41:46 obviously I grew up in car culture,

00:41:49 but he was, he started sending me work

00:41:53 when I went on my own.

00:41:54 I chopped a bunch of tops for him, did metal work.

00:41:57 And he was super gracious.

00:41:59 Today, I've heard him,

00:42:01 he's been in interviews for Hot Rod and different magazines

00:42:03 and has literally shouted out that I, you know,

00:42:07 I'm one of the guys who's carrying on Hot Rodding

00:42:10 in his opinion, in the right way, you know?

00:42:13 So, but yeah, the answer, sorry,

00:42:17 I'm never going a straight line to the answer.

00:42:21 Yeah, no, but the answer is yes, I would do it again

00:42:24 because I just want to build my cars.

00:42:27 You know, I want to build what I want to build.

00:42:29 And I got to do awesome work at Roy's.

00:42:32 He let me do all the rest.

00:42:35 Like in addition to building cars,

00:42:37 he let me do all the historic restoration stuff there.

00:42:40 I got to restore the Jack Calori 36,

00:42:45 one of the raddest customs of all time.

00:42:48 And one of the lesser known ones too,

00:42:50 but the Sam Barris Merc I got to restore.

00:42:54 I got to restore the Ollicart.

00:42:55 - Oh wow, okay.

00:42:56 - Yeah, and kind of re-restore the McMullen Roadster.

00:43:00 I mean, I got to work on just pinch me amazing cars

00:43:04 and I'm literally pulling panels off

00:43:07 and seeing where Sam Barris put lead on them.

00:43:10 - Yeah, it's wild.

00:43:11 - It's nuts, yeah.

00:43:12 And just, I was 27, 26 or seven

00:43:16 when we took the Calori car to Pebble Beach

00:43:18 and won the class as a 27 year old.

00:43:21 I mean, I was just like drinking beer

00:43:23 and around all these snotty Americans

00:43:28 speaking with a British accent

00:43:30 and I'm just like pounding beer and I'm like.

00:43:32 (laughing)

00:43:34 - That was, I mean, some great, great experiences.

00:43:37 And there's something to be said

00:43:39 for just getting a paycheck that's steady

00:43:41 and you go home at five and don't think about business

00:43:46 until you get there at eight the next day.

00:43:48 Running a business is a 24 hour, seven day a week job

00:43:53 and you have responsibilities.

00:43:57 We got guys working at the shop that now I'm like,

00:43:59 I can't just cut and run if I want.

00:44:02 - This guy's got a family,

00:44:03 this guy's got to feed his kids.

00:44:04 - Yeah, and they're family to me too.

00:44:07 It's cliche, but you spend more time with them

00:44:11 than your family, your real family sometimes

00:44:14 and me to a fault.

00:44:16 - When you look back,

00:44:18 like especially when you're first getting yourself

00:44:19 established on your own two feet

00:44:21 and you have that, I don't want to call it a safety net,

00:44:24 but you have that stability of the regular job,

00:44:27 what mistakes did that allow you to avoid?

00:44:29 What did the experience at Brizio's

00:44:31 allow you to avoid failing on early

00:44:34 that sinks a lot of guys?

00:44:35 - Well, just the transition from working at,

00:44:39 I never jumped in feet first to having my own business

00:44:43 because like I said, I started working a little less

00:44:46 and a little less, so I had that at least

00:44:49 smaller and smaller paycheck,

00:44:51 but something to be like-- - It's coming in.

00:44:54 - At least pay some of the rent

00:44:56 and Roy never said, Billy, it's one of the,

00:45:01 he never said that, he let me go build a car

00:45:03 that won custom of the year while I was working for him.

00:45:06 Not to say that that's, if I was building 32 Fords,

00:45:11 maybe he would have been a little less encouraging,

00:45:15 but I almost think if I had built 32 Fords,

00:45:18 he would have encouraged me.

00:45:20 I mean, he told me, he gave me plenty of advice.

00:45:24 He said, when I worked for him at the peak,

00:45:28 he had 16 employees there and he basically said,

00:45:32 it's not worth it, whatever little bit more money

00:45:35 you make from it, which is not,

00:45:37 it doesn't equal the number of employees you have.

00:45:39 It doesn't work that way.

00:45:40 - Diminishing returns. - It's diminishing returns.

00:45:42 And he's like, if you do this,

00:45:44 you want to have four, five, six guys.

00:45:47 He's like, that's the sweet spot.

00:45:48 So he gave me advice like that that was invaluable

00:45:52 and I didn't even know how valuable it was at the time.

00:45:54 I was just like, oh, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:45:57 - Right, sure, yeah.

00:45:57 - And now, however many years into it,

00:46:00 over a decade on my own, it's all absolutely true.

00:46:04 - Yeah.

00:46:05 - And also I learned some things not to do from him.

00:46:08 Like anybody, he's got his very specific vision

00:46:13 of how to run a shop and not that it's wrong,

00:46:16 it's just some of the things are, yeah,

00:46:18 like I don't want to do that that way.

00:46:20 So I'll tell the really short story

00:46:25 of how I got the job at Brizio's.

00:46:27 I went to, I moved to San Francisco to go to college

00:46:33 and the only, you know, everybody thinks I was born

00:46:36 with a silver spoon and that I'm here because of my dad.

00:46:39 My dad didn't help me in much any way, shape or form.

00:46:43 Even at home, you know, he didn't teach me how to weld.

00:46:45 I would go out and when he wasn't in the garage,

00:46:49 light up the oxyacetylene and waste all the gas

00:46:52 and then he'd come and be pissed because he's like,

00:46:54 where's my oxyacetylene?

00:46:57 But he told me to go, he's like,

00:47:02 I know Roy, just go in and ask for a summer job,

00:47:05 pushing a broom, driving the shop truck, whatever.

00:47:07 It might be a fun job to have

00:47:08 rather than working at a Starbucks.

00:47:10 And so I did and it just happened to be the week

00:47:13 that his shop parts driver had quit.

00:47:17 - Perfect.

00:47:18 - It was, and he's like, hired.

00:47:21 If that guy hadn't have been leaving,

00:47:23 I probably wouldn't have gotten that job at Roy's.

00:47:26 And if I hadn't gotten that job at Roy's,

00:47:27 I'd be an English professor right now.

00:47:29 I mean, literally that might be the one little thing that--

00:47:33 - Is that what you're going to college for?

00:47:35 - Being a--

00:47:36 - Like an English major?

00:47:37 - Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:47:38 Yeah, no, I studied literature.

00:47:41 (laughing)

00:47:42 - I love it.

00:47:43 - Yeah. - It's hilarious.

00:47:43 - But not, yeah, I mean, I wanted to be a writer

00:47:45 and I think I probably would say at the time

00:47:48 I wanted to be a writer and I'd probably, you know,

00:47:51 teach English, you know, as a day job.

00:47:54 But through college, I started working for Roy

00:47:58 and he almost immediately let me start working on cars.

00:48:01 I drove a shoebox Ford, a 50 Ford.

00:48:03 And--

00:48:04 - Oh, I remember that car.

00:48:05 - Yeah, I put probably over 200,000 miles on that car.

00:48:08 Daily driver for a long time.

00:48:11 And a guy had a 50 Ford and Roy's like,

00:48:14 you got one of these?

00:48:15 This guy wants to lower it, can you do it?

00:48:16 And I was like, yeah.

00:48:18 - Yeah.

00:48:19 - So, I mean, he really just let me work right off the bat,

00:48:22 which was, again, you know, just lucky,

00:48:26 very, very nice of him, you know, to do that.

00:48:30 And I got the bug, you know, and started,

00:48:34 instead of taking English or history courses,

00:48:37 I took metallurgy courses.

00:48:39 I found a TIG welding class that I could take.

00:48:41 - Nice.

00:48:42 - And so by the time I graduated, I was like, screw this.

00:48:44 (laughing)

00:48:45 And also through college, saw like the bureaucracy of it

00:48:48 and like how it wasn't what I thought, you know,

00:48:50 naively as a kid.

00:48:51 And I'm like, hot rodding's way more fun.

00:48:54 And my family growing up was a do what you love,

00:48:57 not what makes money.

00:48:59 And clearly that's been the case.

00:49:01 (laughing)

00:49:02 - And so that was actually kind of led into a question

00:49:04 I wanted to ask you, and you mentioned the naivete

00:49:07 to some degree of how things work.

00:49:09 And you're so grounded in how you explain things

00:49:12 and how you've laid your business out,

00:49:13 but everybody has a picture in their head.

00:49:16 So 10 years ago, does the picture you had

00:49:19 had in your head 10 years ago for what South City

00:49:21 was going to be match what South City is?

00:49:24 - Not a bit.

00:49:25 Even starting off on my own,

00:49:28 I don't think I ever had a plan.

00:49:29 - Okay.

00:49:30 - I would have been happy working by my,

00:49:33 I was a one man shop for many years.

00:49:36 And I'm an only child.

00:49:38 I have some of the traits of an only child,

00:49:41 and one of them is I'm super comfortable being by myself.

00:49:44 I'm probably on the autism spectrum.

00:49:47 I can just sit, I have so much patience,

00:49:49 I can just sit there and work on something

00:49:51 for hours and hours.

00:49:53 And I'm happy when I'm doing that.

00:49:55 But the business side of things, in California,

00:49:58 you can't rent a shop and work by yourself

00:50:01 and make any money whatsoever.

00:50:03 So I realized that I needed to get employees.

00:50:06 I had one to start with.

00:50:08 And it just kind of snowballed,

00:50:12 like without any intention.

00:50:16 That sweet spot of four to five, six guys,

00:50:19 that's where I've ended up.

00:50:20 And it wasn't intentionally, it's just--

00:50:22 - Naturally how things landed.

00:50:24 - It's really hard to find employees.

00:50:26 - I can't imagine, I can't imagine.

00:50:27 - Yeah, and in California it's even worse

00:50:30 because you're fighting how much overhead you have

00:50:34 versus trying to pay guys a living wage

00:50:37 to do what we do that's not taught in schools.

00:50:41 - You need artisans and craftsmen too.

00:50:43 The pool is already this small and you keep shrinking it.

00:50:46 - And they can go, A, they could go be a union plumber

00:50:51 and make as much or more maybe than what we do.

00:50:54 And B, they could go do it in their own garage

00:50:56 and make more than what, they don't know

00:50:58 that they're really not going to make.

00:51:00 They're like, I could go charge $75 an hour in my garage.

00:51:03 And they think they're making $75 an hour,

00:51:05 it doesn't work that way.

00:51:06 But you're fighting all of those factors.

00:51:11 So I've just really gone where luck

00:51:16 and serendipity takes me.

00:51:20 I'm really, really lucky to have a good core group

00:51:26 of guys working at the shop.

00:51:28 It's a good vibe, it's a fun environment.

00:51:31 The reason why my voice is hoarse

00:51:34 is we just went out and celebrated together last night.

00:51:37 We can go do that and it's really fun.

00:51:38 Even the Campani Color does our paint.

00:51:41 He's a separate business, but he worked for Rizzios with me.

00:51:44 And we both sort of went on on our own at the same time.

00:51:46 So we've been together.

00:51:47 He's painted almost everything that I've built.

00:51:50 Chris Plant, and now Danny.

00:51:52 Chris Plant has done a lot of my interiors.

00:51:54 Now Danny from DJ Designs moved into our complex.

00:51:57 So we have paint, builder, and interior

00:52:01 all literally in the same complex.

00:52:03 - Reminds me of Tony Nancy and,

00:52:06 who was the chassis shop immediately next door to?

00:52:08 - Was Don Law next?

00:52:09 Was it Law? - No.

00:52:10 - I know exactly who you're talking about.

00:52:13 - Woody?

00:52:14 - No, it was in the Valley.

00:52:17 - But it is the same basic situation.

00:52:21 Yeah, it's like you just need to go to this one driveway

00:52:25 and you can get pretty much anything.

00:52:27 Yeah, exactly.

00:52:28 We need to start a Chrome shop there and we'd be set.

00:52:31 - Well, there's no more Chrome shops in California.

00:52:33 - That's illegal now too.

00:52:35 - Roy tried.

00:52:37 Most people probably don't know it,

00:52:39 but he started a Chrome shop for a couple years

00:52:43 in the middle of his long career.

00:52:45 And it flopped so hard that he just bailed on it

00:52:50 and used Sherms or whoever from then on.

00:52:53 - Fuller.

00:52:56 - Ken Fuller.

00:52:57 - Ken Fuller, okay.

00:52:58 - Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:52:58 - I think in any career, and even in my own life,

00:53:02 and maybe you guys too, it's like you have these visions

00:53:04 of stuff and it's like, when I hit this plateau,

00:53:06 I'm gonna know I made it.

00:53:08 And everybody has this vision of like,

00:53:10 the balloons fall out of the ceiling

00:53:11 and it's like you get showered.

00:53:13 - When's that coming for you, Brian?

00:53:14 - Well, that's the point, right?

00:53:17 That's the point to me, at least in my own life,

00:53:19 when you make it somewhere, you achieve something

00:53:22 or you get this moment that you've created in your head

00:53:24 is like, oh, when this happens.

00:53:26 And then you get there and it's like,

00:53:28 oh, now kind of on to the next one.

00:53:31 - Is it the same for you in the sense of

00:53:33 when the shop's getting going,

00:53:34 when the business is starting, it's like,

00:53:36 all right, when I land this, or when this award

00:53:38 comes my way, this is gonna be the thing.

00:53:41 But the satisfaction maybe isn't necessarily

00:53:43 getting the thing, but what follows?

00:53:46 - I don't know if you're satisfied,

00:53:48 then I don't know what motivation you have

00:53:51 to get up in the morning.

00:53:52 I really, I take, I try to take all of the awards

00:53:57 and magazine footage, coverage,

00:54:01 with a very healthy humility,

00:54:04 because you take it when you can and it's super fun.

00:54:09 It's amazing, the first time I got a car

00:54:12 on the cover of a magazine,

00:54:14 it was one of those moments where I'm like,

00:54:17 oh my God, it just was surreal.

00:54:21 But you realize real quick that the next day

00:54:23 you gotta get up and go into the shop and work again.

00:54:27 So these moments are little,

00:54:30 and I'm the kind of guy who, I keep telling everybody

00:54:33 that this year has to be the pinnacle of my career.

00:54:37 Like it can't go up from here,

00:54:39 it's all just downhill from here on out.

00:54:41 - That is very Fryburger, by the way.

00:54:44 That is a Fryburger-ian outlook.

00:54:46 - Yeah, exactly.

00:54:49 But it also keeps you on your toes, too.

00:54:51 I really just wanna go build cars.

00:54:56 I love cars.

00:54:58 I just, from being a kid,

00:55:00 the fact that I ended up doing it for a living,

00:55:04 making a hobby into your business,

00:55:06 is it kills your hobby in a certain way.

00:55:11 And not entirely, but it changes it entirely.

00:55:14 And so building my own stuff is just,

00:55:17 like I'm old, I feel old at 45 even doing what we do.

00:55:20 My dad kept telling me, he's like,

00:55:22 you're not gonna be able to walk by the time you're 65.

00:55:26 And it might be true, but I've built one car for myself

00:55:30 in the past over 10 years.

00:55:33 And I enjoy, like I said, I'm on the autism spectrum.

00:55:37 I love just going in and working on things.

00:55:40 And it doesn't bug me too much

00:55:42 that I have to give 'em away when we're done.

00:55:44 I'm really lucky that our customers let me,

00:55:47 a lot of 'em are local, so I can go say,

00:55:49 hey, Mark or whoever, can I borrow the truck for this show?

00:55:53 Or Tony Jurado just let me drive his 40 Ford

00:55:56 all the way back from Oklahoma.

00:55:59 So I feel like I'm still, even though I don't have my own,

00:56:03 oh, I do have my own car now, my RIV,

00:56:04 but I feel like they're all kind of my car in a way,

00:56:08 but I don't have to pay the insurance

00:56:10 or the registration on 'em. (laughs)

00:56:12 But yeah, no, again, all the way back to your question,

00:56:16 I don't really look at these as goals,

00:56:21 or like, they're benchmarks that we're lucky

00:56:24 to have achieved in just addition to doing what we love.

00:56:29 It's just icing on the cake.

00:56:32 If I think about it theoretically or logically,

00:56:35 they're great for establishing our reputation

00:56:39 and legitimizing the shop, and hopefully,

00:56:42 regardless of what type of car they're calling about,

00:56:44 it's gonna create more business,

00:56:46 and then you're able to select the customers

00:56:49 that you wanna do stuff for.

00:56:51 So I think I think about that more in retrospect

00:56:55 than as a goal that I'm trying to achieve.

00:56:58 - Maybe true for you guys, but just for me personally,

00:57:00 when I get turned off by people who come out and say,

00:57:05 "Someday I'm winning this," right?

00:57:07 And for me, it's like, I never verbalize stuff like that,

00:57:11 and when you get to where you maybe achieve that thing,

00:57:15 that's where the satisfaction comes in.

00:57:16 But my stomach turns when I hear,

00:57:18 and I don't know if the same for you,

00:57:19 but it's just like when somebody says,

00:57:20 "I'm gonna win the FN Riddler someday."

00:57:22 It's like, mm, I, you know?

00:57:25 - Yeah, as a builder, if a customer comes in and says,

00:57:29 "I wanna win this," that's a huge red flag for me.

00:57:33 I don't ever build something,

00:57:35 or I never have built something with the intention

00:57:38 of taking it to a specific award.

00:57:41 Our calendar revolves around shows,

00:57:46 Grand National Roadster Show and Good Guys Pleasanton

00:57:49 are two kind of touchstones halfway through the calendar

00:57:52 that we sort of base everything on,

00:57:53 and then there's a bunch in between.

00:57:55 But I don't, you know, I just said

00:57:58 we're building the '68 Charger for the Sonicer.

00:58:00 I don't mean we're trying to win.

00:58:01 I really don't think we're gonna win it.

00:58:03 - You said that, yeah.

00:58:03 - Yeah, I really don't, and I mean that.

00:58:06 I've said that about certain awards

00:58:08 that we have actually ended up winning,

00:58:09 and I just am like, that's being in the right place

00:58:12 at the right time. - But it's a great thing

00:58:13 to go, "I wanna participate,

00:58:15 "but I don't have an expectation

00:58:16 "that's gonna crush my soul."

00:58:17 The (beep) approach is, "We're going to win the Sonic."

00:58:20 - Yeah, right, right, yeah.

00:58:21 - To me, tactful approach is,

00:58:25 "We're gonna go and be in the league.

00:58:27 "We're gonna be in the conversation."

00:58:28 - It's all, you know, I like the motto,

00:58:31 "Under promise and over deliver,"

00:58:33 and I try to do that with everything.

00:58:35 I set realistic deadlines.

00:58:38 I pride myself, you know, setting ourselves apart as a shop

00:58:41 largely has been getting cars done, period,

00:58:45 and getting them done when we say

00:58:47 we're gonna get them done.

00:58:48 - It's a big deal.

00:58:49 - And I didn't, I was, again, naive.

00:58:52 That's just how you do things.

00:58:54 - Sure.

00:58:54 - And I always had that perspective

00:58:56 and didn't realize that I was setting myself apart

00:58:58 the whole time, and Donnie, like Donnie,

00:59:01 who has been with me the longest,

00:59:03 he's like, "I came to work at your shop

00:59:04 "because I saw you actually finishing cars."

00:59:07 - Oh, yeah. - I've worked at a lot,

00:59:09 this is him quoting, "I've worked at a lot of shops

00:59:11 "where I work on something and I invest my emotion into it

00:59:14 "and it never sees the light of day, it never gets done."

00:59:18 So, you know, that makes me proud in a way,

00:59:22 but I didn't even know that it was something to be proud of.

00:59:24 - Yeah, well, goals get you there.

00:59:25 - Yeah, and, but being realistic about those goals

00:59:28 and not bringing a customer in,

00:59:30 enticing them with unrealistic goals.

00:59:33 I can build this for X amount of dollars

00:59:35 when it's half of what the thing's gonna cost,

00:59:37 or I can finish it by this show

00:59:39 when it's half the time it's gonna take.

00:59:40 - Yeah, the free candy windowless van of hot rodding.

00:59:44 - Yeah, yeah. - Come on in.

00:59:46 - Yeah, right, yeah.

00:59:46 - If I can just shift gears quite a bit,

00:59:50 you know, I love the history of Hot Rod Magazine,

00:59:52 I know that John is invested in that,

00:59:54 you know, Brian, you're a student of this,

00:59:57 you've lived so much of it,

00:59:59 and I think of the stuff you've been involved in,

01:00:01 restorations and everything,

01:00:02 but there's a car that I love

01:00:04 that's hanging on your shop wall,

01:00:06 and it's the Lobuck Special,

01:00:07 which your dad built in the pages of,

01:00:09 it was Hot Rod, not Rod and Custom.

01:00:11 - Hot Rod, yeah. - It was Hot Rod.

01:00:12 - Yeah, because he had to do the Floyd Lippincott

01:00:14 back over his head. - Exactly, right.

01:00:16 So it's an altered, you know,

01:00:18 Hemi drag car and everything,

01:00:20 and at the time, Peterson didn't allow

01:00:23 personal project vehicles in the pages,

01:00:25 and so Pat did this with the help of a lot of other people,

01:00:28 and came up with Floyd Lippincott the Third,

01:00:32 which is a throwback to Floyd Lippincott Jr.,

01:00:34 which is a name that Bob Moravez used

01:00:36 to avoid his parents knowing

01:00:37 that he was driving a dragster in the '60s,

01:00:39 so there was that tie-in.

01:00:41 And that car went away.

01:00:42 Pat bought it back, right?

01:00:45 - Well, but we bought it back.

01:00:47 - You did. - Yeah.

01:00:48 So, well, both of us.

01:00:49 I think we went halves on it.

01:00:50 - Okay.

01:00:51 - So it went to Sidney Allen's collection,

01:00:56 who literally stored it in his collection of cars museum,

01:01:01 and that's why it just was preserved

01:01:04 exactly the way it was in the '80s.

01:01:08 And Sam Strube, who you know well.

01:01:11 - Yeah, he was driving it at Famoso

01:01:13 when I saw the thing for the first time.

01:01:14 - He, that crazy MF-er,

01:01:16 literally with the same tires on the front,

01:01:20 he put slits on the back.

01:01:22 The tires that are on the front of the car

01:01:23 are on my wall are the tires that were on it in the '80s.

01:01:26 And he went out and basically just gunned it

01:01:29 and ran like a 9.5 first time out on the track.

01:01:34 And my dad, so when he got it,

01:01:37 of course he told us and was like,

01:01:39 "Hey, I got the car, it's super cool."

01:01:41 He went in with another guy, a partner, but Sam drove it.

01:01:44 And my dad was like, "Put a two-speed, put a trans in it."

01:01:49 I mean, it's direct drive, it's just old, cheap.

01:01:51 I mean, literally it's the low buck special,

01:01:55 and then in quotes underneath it says,

01:01:56 "El cheapo especial."

01:01:57 (laughing)

01:01:59 He built it, I mean, my dad's never made a dime in his life

01:02:02 really to speak of.

01:02:03 So everything was on a shoestring,

01:02:05 but he just figured out ways to do these things.

01:02:08 And the car, so Bob McCray drove it when he first built it.

01:02:13 - It was one of that Fremont comeback thing

01:02:16 that your dad was so much involved in getting nostalgia

01:02:19 drag racing back into a thing.

01:02:21 - Absolutely, exactly, which is crazy to think.

01:02:23 So in '80 whatever, it was only 20 years really gone.

01:02:28 (laughing)

01:02:30 And it was nostalgia.

01:02:31 - Yeah, the antique drags, right?

01:02:32 It was where they first kind of started,

01:02:33 it was first labeled the antique drags

01:02:35 in some of those race tracks.

01:02:36 - That was a little bit of a different thing.

01:02:38 - They ran a bunch of really old stuff then.

01:02:40 - It was bangers and flatheads and stuff like that.

01:02:42 - Which my dad was not for.

01:02:43 (laughing)

01:02:45 But yeah, so it was, I mean, it was,

01:02:48 I think it ran consistent low nines.

01:02:50 I don't think it ever made it into the eights.

01:02:52 I can't remember if it did or they were like real close,

01:02:55 but it was just a fun atmosphere

01:02:59 to going out to the drags and hanging out with,

01:03:01 I mean, my dad got later, did the Adams and Enriquez car

01:03:05 and had Gene build the engine and tune it,

01:03:08 and Don drove it.

01:03:10 I mean--

01:03:11 - And I think he was instrumental in bringing back the M&V,

01:03:13 the Gray Baskerville.

01:03:14 - Absolutely, I remember the day,

01:03:16 I remember the day that they gave it to Gray.

01:03:19 And I've never seen Gray like sentimental before,

01:03:22 but he was moved.

01:03:23 - He was.

01:03:24 - And I was probably like 12, something like that,

01:03:27 super young and I didn't appreciate what I was watching.

01:03:30 I remember it and I'm glad I have the memories,

01:03:31 but at the time, I was just like,

01:03:33 why is this old man crying?

01:03:34 - Uh-huh.

01:03:35 (laughing)

01:03:36 And just sometimes I feel that we know

01:03:37 what we're talking about

01:03:38 and the audience doesn't necessarily.

01:03:39 Gray Baskerville was a guy who worked

01:03:41 at Hot Rod and Rod and Customs starting in 1967, '68.

01:03:45 He got hired into the book division, another mentor to me.

01:03:48 And in the '60s, he and a guy named Ernie Murashige

01:03:52 and Paul Horning were involved in drag cars

01:03:55 that were called the M&V,

01:03:56 which was because Ernie ran M&V Automotive

01:03:59 at the corner of Marion Vernon in Pasadena, California.

01:04:02 And anyway, they won 63 NHRA Nationals

01:04:06 with that car in class.

01:04:08 - Don't pose that as a question to me.

01:04:09 - I am.

01:04:10 (laughing)

01:04:11 I'm looking to you for that answer,

01:04:12 but it's about right, 63 or 64.

01:04:13 - Somewhere, yeah, somewhere before.

01:04:15 It was definitely pre-'65.

01:04:16 - If you don't know, I don't know that anybody knows.

01:04:18 (laughing)

01:04:19 - It's about right.

01:04:20 - Yeah.

01:04:21 - And anyway, the car went away

01:04:22 and then in 1982 or three,

01:04:26 your dad was a part of a bunch of people

01:04:29 who got all together to build a recreation of the car

01:04:32 to surprise Gray with at one of these

01:04:34 Nostalgia Reels in Fremont.

01:04:35 - Exactly, yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:04:36 - Had the cool long headers and the whole deal.

01:04:38 It's a really neat looking piece.

01:04:39 And David and I spend way too much time

01:04:42 inside the Peterson archive, the online photo archive,

01:04:44 and I was just rolling through whatever year it was.

01:04:47 And that whole, I mean, there's hundreds of photos

01:04:49 from that day in there, and it's pretty,

01:04:51 you can tell how much the moment meant,

01:04:53 not just to Gray, but really to all the guys

01:04:54 that were there as well.

01:04:55 - All the guys, Shapouris.

01:04:56 - Yeah.

01:04:57 - Man, I wish I could think of all the other people

01:04:59 who were in the photo, it was fantastic.

01:05:01 - So the Gray Baskerville story that relates to my dad

01:05:05 and that car, ties everything together,

01:05:07 is that car was yellow,

01:05:09 and it was a very specific shade of yellow.

01:05:13 Like, you know, and my dad had his '56 F-100

01:05:17 that if you knew Pat, it was just everywhere.

01:05:21 He drove the out of it and he used it as the push truck

01:05:24 for the low buck and for the Adams and Ricas car.

01:05:26 It was his parts getter.

01:05:28 - It was like his only car, really.

01:05:30 I mean, he drove the VWs and the other things,

01:05:32 but it was his signature.

01:05:33 You saw that thing, you knew the two-tall was there.

01:05:34 - And it was bright yellow, so it stood out.

01:05:36 Yeah, you noticed it.

01:05:37 So when, around the time that they gave Gray the car,

01:05:42 I remember Gray looking at my dad's truck at one point,

01:05:47 and my dad would say, I think,

01:05:49 that his favorite color was yellow.

01:05:51 He liked yellow for some reason.

01:05:52 But the truck was like kind of a,

01:05:54 it was next to Gray's car, it was like super pale.

01:05:59 And Gray was like, that's not yellow,

01:06:01 that's (beep) yellow.

01:06:02 And the next time my dad painted the truck,

01:06:06 which he painted many, many times,

01:06:08 'cause he, you know, just over the years,

01:06:10 it was a much darker shade of yellow

01:06:12 the next time he painted it.

01:06:13 (laughing)

01:06:14 - Yeah, you know, he told me a great story one time,

01:06:16 which I'm sure you can fill in the actual details,

01:06:19 but it was something like working in the driveway,

01:06:20 moving the cars around, and he fired the truck up,

01:06:24 which was in gear, which took off,

01:06:26 and hit the back of the Volkswagen,

01:06:27 which rolled into the Roadster.

01:06:29 - Yeah. - Is that about accurate?

01:06:30 - That, so, I will say that my dad's stories

01:06:34 got more hyperbolic as they went.

01:06:37 So you got one of the tail end of that,

01:06:39 telling of that story. - Right.

01:06:41 - I believe that, so, as I remember it,

01:06:44 it was his '52 Chevy that had the column shift on it,

01:06:47 and he swears it was in neutral.

01:06:50 But the first time, he put a 283 in it,

01:06:51 he finally got rid of the six,

01:06:53 because I think he couldn't get it to stop leaking oil.

01:06:55 So he, then he finally put a V8 in it.

01:06:59 But yeah, he fired it up,

01:07:00 and it ran into the back of his Roadster.

01:07:02 It was only two cars that got screwed up.

01:07:03 - It was only two, I don't know.

01:07:04 - It wasn't three. - Yeah, I heard four.

01:07:06 - Yeah, yeah. (laughing)

01:07:07 - And then it exploded like the gas station.

01:07:08 - Yeah, yeah, yeah, the whole,

01:07:09 he had to rebuild the whole garage after that,

01:07:11 it was crazy. (laughing)

01:07:12 - Yeah. - Yeah.

01:07:12 - Look, I think this has been

01:07:16 a really enlightening conversation,

01:07:17 and sincerely, thank you for taking the time to do this.

01:07:19 We know you're scheduled to use events, it's crazy,

01:07:21 and the fact you guys got to go out and celebrate,

01:07:23 and you still dragged your ass out of bed

01:07:24 to come hang with us is a big deal.

01:07:25 - Oh, this is, I mean, like you got,

01:07:27 we were talking about awards and everything,

01:07:29 just the fact that you would ask me

01:07:32 to come do a podcast with Dave Freiberger,

01:07:34 and, you know, it's, it's surreal,

01:07:37 in a way I will always feel like the kid

01:07:41 who works at Brizio's, I think, for the rest of my career.

01:07:44 - It's a good thing.

01:07:44 - And just, not to drag out,

01:07:47 if you guys wanna stop this, - Yeah.

01:07:48 - but at the awards last night,

01:07:53 getting the Trendsetter Award,

01:07:55 they named the people who'd gotten it previous,

01:07:59 and it's like this list of names

01:08:01 that I'm like, - You're heroes.

01:08:02 - those are all my heroes, - Yeah.

01:08:04 - what am I doing at the end of this list?

01:08:05 You just disgraced the list.

01:08:07 (laughing)

01:08:08 - Desecrated, the whole thing is desecrated.

01:08:10 - Yeah, and I said that,

01:08:11 I said that to one of the SEMA people,

01:08:13 and their response was,

01:08:15 "Well, I guess you gotta get better."

01:08:17 (laughing)

01:08:19 So I'm like, hey, that's not inaccurate.

01:08:21 I look at all this as incentive

01:08:24 to really keep improving and doing,

01:08:29 I feel like it's an obligation, in a way,

01:08:33 to keep traditional hot-rodding going,

01:08:36 and I really look to the people who came before us.

01:08:40 There's a lot of guys who are building cars out here

01:08:44 who don't know who Gray Baskerville is.

01:08:46 - Right, yeah.

01:08:47 - And that makes me sad, not mad,

01:08:51 but a little bit like, I wish people,

01:08:54 and with Hot Rod, you guys have been doing a really good job

01:08:57 of bringing the historics back into play,

01:09:00 which I think is very, very important.

01:09:03 You're gonna get some people who don't care

01:09:05 and just turn past that page,

01:09:06 but for whatever percentage of the people who read that

01:09:09 and have knowledge of where all of this came from,

01:09:14 to me, it's more than just playing with cars.

01:09:18 It's American culture.

01:09:20 My dad always looked at this as culture,

01:09:22 as a sociology, more than just cars,

01:09:27 and that might sound grandiose,

01:09:29 but I feel like we give meaning

01:09:34 to what we feel like is meaningful.

01:09:39 It doesn't inherently have meaning.

01:09:40 It only has meaning if we believe it has meaning

01:09:44 and remember the history of it and why we're here.

01:09:47 So I just feel like that's my the more you know moment.

01:09:52 And also my dad having passed away,

01:09:58 I never looked at what I do as fulfilling a legacy

01:10:03 or anything, but it just makes,

01:10:06 it changed everything in a way that's very poignant for me.

01:10:10 More than just losing my dad,

01:10:13 all the knowledge that he had.

01:10:15 - Incredible.

01:10:16 - And 90% of it was in his head.

01:10:19 And I'm like, I think when I'm working at the shop,

01:10:22 and I don't know that it will ever end,

01:10:24 whenever I had a question, I'd be like,

01:10:26 oh, I gotta call my dad, and that's never gonna go away.

01:10:28 And now it's just like,

01:10:30 now I gotta call Dave Freiberger.

01:10:31 (laughing)

01:10:32 - Yeah, you don't wanna do that.

01:10:34 Actually, what you could do if you're in the audience

01:10:36 is you could probably go on Amazon

01:10:37 and buy one of any number of books by Pachydeaux.

01:10:40 G-A-N-A-H-L.

01:10:42 And the Lost Dragstrips books,

01:10:44 the Lost and Found Hot Rod stuff.

01:10:47 How-to books on how to paint.

01:10:50 It goes way back.

01:10:51 Some of the stuff you'll need to find on eBay

01:10:53 because it's out of print.

01:10:55 And of course, you can go back to the incredible tome

01:10:57 of magazines that he contributed to over the years.

01:10:59 Rodder's Journal, I forgot to mention earlier.

01:11:01 - Yeah, he would say,

01:11:04 he is a very different person, I think, behind the scenes

01:11:08 than what a lot of people saw in the industry, so to speak.

01:11:12 But he was always afraid of losing his mental acuity.

01:11:17 And so he would be like,

01:11:20 if he couldn't remember one person's name,

01:11:22 he'd be like, oh my God, I'm getting Alzheimer's.

01:11:24 - Hey, this guy, I spent enough time with him

01:11:27 that it's like he's channeling your father.

01:11:29 (laughing)

01:11:30 You've literally just taken words out of his mouth.

01:11:32 - Then just like David, he would go and rattle off

01:11:35 20 esoteric facts that nobody else knows,

01:11:39 and he would just be like,

01:11:40 but why could I remember that guy's name?

01:11:41 (laughing)

01:11:44 - Yeah, that to me is like, we look back

01:11:47 and you can read historical books,

01:11:49 and these books are based on people's journals.

01:11:51 That's how we know how people lived

01:11:52 hundreds and hundreds of years ago.

01:11:53 And that doesn't exist anymore.

01:11:56 We have this electronic fashion

01:11:58 that one day the server could fry

01:12:00 and everything's fricking gone.

01:12:02 And it's kind of, to your point,

01:12:04 like it's a cliched thing to say,

01:12:07 but it's like, oh, we gotta sit all these people down

01:12:08 and get all these stories out of 'em.

01:12:10 You just, no one has the time or whatever.

01:12:12 But yeah, that to me becomes the titanic loss,

01:12:14 is when you lose the person,

01:12:16 especially because of what's in the cranium.

01:12:18 It is just--

01:12:19 - Pat's knowledge of the origins of hot rodding,

01:12:21 and especially customs, lowriders.

01:12:24 Oh man, lowriders, another topic.

01:12:26 I found out lowriders were okay because of your dad.

01:12:28 (laughing)

01:12:29 - He, you know, a lot of these things,

01:12:32 some of 'em I already knew,

01:12:34 and some you learn way after the fact,

01:12:36 is just how much people appreciated his open-mindedness.

01:12:40 - Yeah.

01:12:41 - People-- - Well.

01:12:42 (laughing)

01:12:43 To a point.

01:12:44 - But, well, but, I mean,

01:12:48 in relation to how very opinionated people think he was,

01:12:52 and he was in certain ways,

01:12:54 but then he would surprise you in such a different thing

01:12:57 and be like, "Oh yeah, I love lowriders,

01:13:01 "and I wanna promote them."

01:13:02 - You can appreciate the whole--

01:13:04 - Yeah, he just was a very--

01:13:06 - Aspect of the industry.

01:13:07 - You couldn't ever guess

01:13:10 what was gonna come out of his mouth.

01:13:12 - Was the most important part of that,

01:13:13 if it was done well, and it was done with some respect

01:13:17 to what the genre of it was?

01:13:19 Didn't matter what the genre was,

01:13:20 but he could look at a lowrider and appreciate

01:13:22 that this car was well-constructed.

01:13:23 It was built with a clear thought process.

01:13:26 - Yes, absolutely, and more so, or in addition to that,

01:13:31 it is a whole culture that,

01:13:37 why are these separated?

01:13:39 You know, it's a huge car culture,

01:13:42 and I think he was more like,

01:13:43 if it's got four wheels and it's custom,

01:13:46 why are we putting these boundaries between these things?

01:13:49 - He put a mini truck on the cover

01:13:50 of the first swimsuit issue of Hot Rod.

01:13:52 - Yeah, yeah, which, whole other story about that.

01:13:55 (laughing)

01:13:56 - Probably don't have time for that one.

01:13:57 - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:13:59 No, I really appreciate being involved.

01:14:03 I think I said, after you allowed me,

01:14:08 I asked if I could write the article for Kobe's car,

01:14:11 because I like to write, I like to validate the fact

01:14:14 that I went to college and wasted an entire college tuition.

01:14:18 But, you know, I've now had cars on the cover

01:14:23 and articles written by myself in every magazine

01:14:26 that my dad worked for.

01:14:27 - Awesome. - That's cool.

01:14:28 - Except Sunset.

01:14:29 - Except Sunset, you're right, damn it!

01:14:32 (laughing)

01:14:33 - Just destroyed his--

01:14:34 - This is the man's gift.

01:14:37 This is David's gift.

01:14:40 - So impressive.

01:14:41 - In moments, in these nice moments,

01:14:43 you think you're enjoying a nice moment,

01:14:45 and then it's like, oh wait, no, there's a fly in the sea.

01:14:49 - And to your point, it makes me feel like

01:14:51 my dad is alive and well.

01:14:52 - Sorry! (laughing)

01:14:54 - That's awesome.

01:14:55 Well, now, like you said, you never really

01:14:58 have achieved your goal.

01:14:59 (laughing)

01:15:00 I thought I had that one knocked off, but.

01:15:02 - Fantastic.

01:15:04 - And on that crushing note.

01:15:05 - Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a perfect way to end.

01:15:08 - Roll the credits.

01:15:09 Once again, Bill, thank you.

01:15:10 - Yeah, thank you guys.

01:15:12 - It's the depth of what you do,

01:15:15 like, you know, we've talked to other builders,

01:15:17 and to me, it's so much less about just like

01:15:21 the high line stuff, understanding what motivates

01:15:24 and drives you guys, and then understanding

01:15:25 how you can make the business work,

01:15:26 to me, it's like, it's a fascination.

01:15:28 - It's two different talents,

01:15:30 and a lot of people don't have both.

01:15:32 - Yeah.

01:15:32 - And I don't know that I really have both,

01:15:34 I'm just winging the business side of things,

01:15:36 which a lot of people do, and somehow,

01:15:38 I haven't crashed the business yet.

01:15:40 (laughing)

01:15:41 - Well, bring me in!

01:15:43 (laughing)

01:15:44 I can do it!

01:15:45 - He can finish the job in no time flat.

01:15:48 Guys, anything else you wanna throw in?

01:15:49 - No, good stuff.

01:15:51 - Yeah.

01:15:51 - I love reminiscing, and I love what you're doing

01:15:52 for the future.

01:15:53 - Thank you, I appreciate it.

01:15:55 - I do wanna say your English degree didn't go to waste.

01:15:58 - Yes.

01:15:59 - I loved the article you wrote.

01:16:00 I've never let a car builder write their own

01:16:03 car feature before, ever.

01:16:04 - Yeah.

01:16:05 - That's not something we do, but I told Bill

01:16:08 after I read it that I'd hire you in a second.

01:16:11 (laughing)

01:16:12 I wish you could stop what you're doing

01:16:14 and help me out with the, 'cause we read a lot

01:16:16 of bad writing.

01:16:17 (laughing)

01:16:18 We read a lot of bad writing, so.

01:16:19 - Yes, we do.

01:16:20 - I'll take that as a huge compliment.

01:16:21 Thank you, thank you.

01:16:22 And I did interview to work for the magazines

01:16:26 at one point in the middle of my tenure at Brizio's,

01:16:30 and I feel no offense to anyone here that I was

01:16:33 very fortunate I didn't take that job at building cars.

01:16:36 - Yeah.

01:16:37 - We all feel the same way.

01:16:38 - Yeah.

01:16:39 - 'Cause you'd make us look bad as writers,

01:16:41 you'd make us look bad anyway, but no,

01:16:42 it all seems to be working out.

01:16:44 - Yeah, thank you.

01:16:45 (laughing)

01:16:46 - That's gonna bring us to the end of this episode

01:16:48 of the Hot Rod Pod, where it all began.

01:16:50 Once again, big thanks to Bill, big thanks to David,

01:16:52 big thanks to John.

01:16:53 We'll be back with more shows here from SEMA.

01:16:56 We got more people to talk to,

01:16:57 and this series is just getting started.

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