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He became a Mormon and stayed mostly away from the car culture for much of the 1970s and '80s. Roth long ago stopped being a wild man, although he still wore his colorful costume at car shows. In 1970, he was forced to sell 15 of his custom cars for a total of $5,500. He lost all his money on an ill-fated motorcycle magazine called Choppers. Roth after he began riding and designing souped-up Harley-Davidson motorcycles and hanging out with Hell's Angels. 'I bow and kiss all the girls' hands,' he told me."
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"He bought a full set of tails, silk hat, boiled shirt, cuff links, studs, the whole apparatus, for $250, also a monocle, and now he comes to shows like that. "Roth entered a kind of reverse rebellion," Wolfe wrote in the essay that was later included in his book "The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby." Roth demonstrated his trademark independence when Revell asked him to spruce up a bit when he appeared at car shows and elsewhere.
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Roth also signed a licensing agreement for the company to make models of his hot rods.Įven as stores all over the country were selling out of models and monsters, The figures were placed in individual miniature cars. Roth turned out a gruesomely distorted portrait of each member. It started when a local hot-rod club asked him to design an emblem. Though his cars made him famous in California, his national fame among teenage boys came from his airbrush paintings of monsters.
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Among his masterpieces was Road Agent, which was handmade from stock car parts, with chrome-plated axles and springs, a plastic canopy and two side-mounted auxiliary fuel tanks - all painted in eye-popping candy-apple colors. He sold nerf bars (custom bumpers), gearshift knobs and candy-apple paint - a clear lacquer painted over base colors. Then he went into the hot-rod business full time. He rented garage space to start a business pin-striping cars, charging $50 to $150 to paint designs in 1/64-inch strips. He briefly tried college, served in the Air Force for four years and got a job as a clerk at a Sears store in Los Angeles. "Whenever I put anything on the car, I'd tell him it was to make it safer." "My dad was strict," he told Life magazine in 1964. His first car, purchased when he was in high school, was a souped-up 1934 Ford.
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He learned how to work with tools from his father, who had been trained as a cabinetmaker in his native Germany. Roth was born in Beverly Hills on March 4, 1932. He was also one of the first to use fiberglass to sculpture automotive bodies. Roth pioneered the detailed discipline of decorating cars known as pin-striping. At the least, Big Daddy was a leader in what is now seen as an art movement to turn standard Detroit cars into virtually unrecognizable but absolutely mesmerizing dream vehicles.Īlong with Von Dutch, famous for his Flying Eyeball, Mr. "The kids idolize me because I look like someone their parents wouldn't like," he said in 1964.Ĭommentators have suggested his rubber-burning, anti-authority, rebellious approach - reminiscent of Mad magazine - presaged Vietnam War protesters and Bart Simpson. Roth, a huge man with wild clothes and sunglasses who spoke in beatnik jive, looked very much like someone who would give life to bizarre visions. "He not only developed the iconography for the subculture of hot rods, but also contributed to the attitude and the whole outlook of many young artists," she said, mentioning the underground comic illustrator Robert Williams, among others. Roth's influence extended beyond a cult following. Nora Donnelly, who organized this exhibition for the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, where it was first shown, said Mr. Roth's work is currently being shown at the California Center for the Arts in Escondido, San Diego Co., as part of an exhibition called "Customized: Art Inspired by Hot Rods, Lowriders and American Car Culture." Roth was, Wolfe said, "the most colorful, the most intellectual and the most capricious" of car customizers. Roth "a surrealist in his designs, a showman by temperament, a prankster." Tom Wolfe, in an essay in Esquire in 1963, was one of the first to elevate what insiders call "Kar Kulture" to this higher level.