Big Daddy
Battersby
Thanks
--
T. M. Battersby, stuccoist.
http://www.battersbyornamental.com
tbatt...@satx.rr.com
Battersby
> I heard that Ed Roth has died. Does anyone have any info on this??
Ed 'Big Daddy' Roth; Car Designer, Cultural Icon Created Rat Fink
By RANDY LEWIS, Times Staff Writer
Ed "Big Daddy" Roth, the sign painter turned car designer whose
outrageous automotive creations and grungy cartoon alter ego, Rat Fink, made
him an outlaw icon of Southern California pop culture of the 1950s and '60s,
has died. He was 69.
Roth's wife, Ilene, found him dead Wednesday in his workshop near their
home in Manti, Utah, said his business associate and friend, David Chodosh.
The cause of death had not been determined, Chodosh said Thursday, but he
said Roth had been in good health.
In fact, Roth had been at work Wednesday morning on the latest in a long
line of custom vehicles. He had first gained fame with the Beatnik Bandit in
1958 and a fiberglass hot rod called the Outlaw in 1959.
His influence on the culture of Southern California was huge, said Ellen
Fleurov, museum director at the California Center for the Arts in Escondido,
where Roth's works are on display in "Customized: Art Inspired by Hot Rods,
Lowriders and American Car Culture."
"He really is the Big Daddy," Fleurov said. "He and Von Dutch and Robert
Williams represent the trio of legendary figures who really shaped the
aesthetics of hot rod culture and the art that came from it."
One of Roth's cars was featured in the recent exhibition "Made in
California: Art, Image and Identity, 1900-2000" at the Los Angeles County
Museum of Art.
"Our specific purpose," said Howard Fox, the museum's curator of modern
and contemporary art, "was to reveal the influence of the automobile
generally, and the concepts of speed, the aesthetics of sleekness and the
interest that painters and sculptors of the 1960s had in new materials we
often associate with these fast-paced racing cars, and with "Big Daddy" Roth
in particular.
"You can clearly see that influence on the arts, and it certainly had a
bigger influence here in the West than it did in the East, where New York
largely dominated the art world."
Nora Donnelly, who organized the "Customized" exhibition for the
Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, where it premiered last fall, said:
"An enormous amount of people have been influenced by him, in the hot rod
art world as well as in the contemporary art world."
"His stuff was all outrageous," said Dick Messer at the Petersen
Automotive Museum in Los Angeles, where the Outlaw car now resides. "He was
creative, but outrageous."
Roth developed Rat Fink in the '50s as the underground culture's
response to Mickey Mouse. Rat Fink's sinister glare, razor-sharp teeth and
bulging, bloodshot eyes became ubiquitous on T-shirts, posters and car
decals in the '60s. The character's wise-guy, street smart attitude lives on
in such descendants as Bart Simpson, Ren & Stimpy and the foulmouthed "South
Park" kids.
The Revell company sold millions of Big Daddy Roth model car kits, from
which Roth received a royalty of 1 cent each.
It was a Revell publicity man who came up with Roth's nickname after
telling him, "We can't put 'Beatnik Bandit by Ed Roth' on the box."
Roth, who was 6 feet 4, mentioned that he had been called "Big Ed" in
high school, so the publicist suggested "Big Daddy," which Roth loved.
Revell, however, lost its love for Roth when he began hanging out with
members of the Hells Angels as his interest in customizing motorcycles grew.
The company canceled his contract in 1967.
"I know what I am," Roth told The Times in 1973. "I'm a weirdo. I never
grew up."
His fans admired the energy and anti-establishment attitude he carried
throughout his life. In the last two decades, as art museums and other
institutions have begun taking a closer look at pop culture, Roth and his
peers gained more respect from the academics who had long dismissed their
works as lowbrow.
"He was a very singular figure and probably one of the best-known
American artists in the country," Robert Williams, who worked as Roth's art
director from 1965 to 1970, said Thursday.
"But he got absolutely no academic recognition. He took what he
inherited from Von Dutch and, between them, they created an American art
form."
Roth was born March 4, 1932, in Beverly Hills to German Lutheran
parents. His life was intertwined with cars and pop culture from the
beginning: His father worked as a limousine driver for silent film star Mary
Pickford.
In elementary school, Roth entertained himself by drawing pictures of
airplanes, hot rods and monsters, which were to figure prominently in his
most famous creations.
He bought his first car, a 1933 Ford coupe, when he was 14. He earned
an engineering degree from what is now East Los Angeles College because he
wanted to learn more about automotive design, but later described his
college years as a waste of time. He also served in the Air Force.
In the late 1940s, he became fascinated by a new compound called
fiberglass when he saw a Ford ad showing how a car made of the material
would deflect a sledgehammer blow.
He used fiberglass extensively in creating exotic cars that were
extraordinary to behold but mostly impractical to operate.
"The Outlaw runs," said the Petersen museum's Messer, "but you won't be
driving it very far unless you're about 3 feet tall."
The Outlaw became an immediate hit at car shows when Roth introduced it
in 1959. After Revell started producing the model kits, Roth was able to
open a studio in Maywood.
It became "sort of a subcultural Grand Central Station for the time,"
recalled Williams. Actors, writers, bikers, would-be artists and all manner
of humanity stopped by at all hours, said Williams. One writer who was
attracted to Roth's world was Tom Wolfe, who wrote about the scene in his
book "The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby."
But while Rat Fink T-shirts and other merchandise and Big Daddy Roth
model kits were spreading his name and works into the mainstream, Roth
preferred life on the fringes.
He invested all his money in launching a magazine, Choppers, devoted to
outlaw motorcycle culture. Increasingly respectable hot rod magazines
refused to carry advertising for Choppers, however, and it was a failure. By
1970, Roth was forced to sell his collection of custom cars, 15 vehicles for
which he received a total of $5,500.
The Choppers venture also cost him his wife, who divorced him. He
decided it was time to reexamine his life, and he turned to the Book of
Mormon after a friend gave him a copy.
"I started looking deeper, thinking of things I had done," he told The
Times in 1981. "I guess everybody does that around 39 or 40." He remarried,
to a Mormon woman with two daughters, and converted to that faith and became
an elder in the church.
He remained in Southern California, but stayed away from the car
culture that had long fascinated him. For much of the 1970s and into the
1980s, he worked as a graphic designer for Knott's Berry Farm, where he
designed menus and painted billboards.
He continued to attend car shows periodically, as one of the few
superstars of the hot rod world.
But he remained primarily devoted to his fourth wife, Ilene, and her
four children.
No funeral or memorial services have been arranged, but the second
annual Rat Fink Party is expected to go on as scheduled on July 21 in
Woodland Hills, said organizer and Roth associate Jeffrey Hillinger, also
known as Moldy Marvin.
In addition to Ilene, Roth is survived by four stepchildren from
Ilene's previous marriage and five sons from his first marriage.
Gary Waller
There was a line of models introduced a few years ago. I saw them in
Modeler's Resource magazine (and website)/
There was a pretentious Acura commercial lately, that "they were sculpting
in steel" it was a shame that Big Daddy never got the recognition he
deserved, he was a true sculptor in steel.
I have spent the last week or so working with a tig welder, very experienced
in custom cars, building armatures for fake rocks. Check out the custom car
and bikes on a new kids show on Fox called Los Luchadores - a Batman type
show with "Mexican Wrestlers" as the heroes. You might appreciate the humor.
"Battersby" <tbatt...@satx.rr.com> wrote in message
news:zYwz6.35944$wx.89...@typhoon.austin.rr.com...
Battersby
> Thanks for the info and memories Tom.
A Tribute to the King of Hot Rods
By David Burge
CNS Commentary
April 06, 2001
When I read the news it felt like a cold sting. Ed "Big Daddy" Roth -
pioneering hot rodder, artist, American icon and my hero - dead of a heart
attack at 69.
For most people, the name may only ring a faint bell. Some may remember his
mind-boggling custom cars or the plastic model kits based on them; more may
remember his slyly subversive alter ego "Rat Fink," or the wild,
tire-smoking monster t-shirts produced by Roth Studios. Bookish types might
recall him as the subject of Tom Wolfe's 1963 The Tangerine Flake
Streamlined Baby. For the curious, here's his story.
Ed Roth was born in Los Angeles in 1932, the son of German immigrants, and
the location and time would prove to be serendipitous. An embryonic hot rod
society had already emerged in California, young men who raced their "gow
jobs" ("hot rod" being a relative neologism) across the dry lakebeds of
Muroc.
By the time Roth reached his teens, Southern California hot rod culture was
in full bloom, fueled by the easy money of the booming postwar economy and
the ready availability of used Fords with flathead V-8s.
Like thousands of other LA high school boys in the late '40s, Roth pieced
together a souped-up short - a '36 Ford coupe - much to the consternation of
his Teutonic father.
Beyond hot rods and girls, though, he had little direction. While he had
some artistic talent - mostly confined to notebook margin doodles - his
grades were limited by his penchant for daydreaming and clowning.
After graduation he spent a stint in the Air Force, entertaining his buddies
with his wild cartoons and tales of the exotic roadsters he and his friends
back West had constructed for "drag racing," another term unfamiliar to most
Americans in 1950.
After his discharge, Roth returned to California and soon married. Now a
family man, he looked for honest work but honestly couldn't bear it.
Instead, he teamed with a hot rodding friend, Tom Kelly, who suggested
starting a car-painting business.
Joining them was Kelly's grandfather - "The Baron" - an inscrutable 80-year
old Hoosier who had mastered pinstriping, apprenticing in a 19th century
farm wagon factory.
The team was a hit. In the late 1950s, the Baron, Kelly and Roth garage in
Bellflower was overflowing with area hot rodders, seeking a Baron pinstripe,
a Kelly scallop or a Roth 'flake - a technique where crushed shells or metal
is added to the paint to give it various degrees of glitter.
During slow times, though, Roth would amuse some of the customers by
painting wild monster cartoons onto t-shirts using the shop's spray paint
equipment. This also proved to be a bonanza, and hundreds would request one
of Big Daddy's weird designs.
After a falling out with Kelly and Baron, Roth struck out on his own as
"Roth The Crazy Painter." He traveled to car shows where he perfected his
technique and sold $3 monster shirts to a hungry market of adolescent boys
eager to impress their friends and outrage adults.
It was also at these early 1960's car shows that Roth became determined to
push the creative envelope in car customization. With limited metalworking
skills, he was at a disadvantage against customizing masters like George
Barris, Darryl Starbird or Dean Jeffries. Was, that is, until he discovered
Fiberglas.
There has seldom been such a natural click between artist and medium; Roth
would buy the gooey stuff by the barrel, pouring it into plaster molds that
he had created by hand - literally. Without benefit of tools, plans - even a
tape measure - Big Daddy would simply knead the plaster into the desired
shape, letting the car happen, like a gearhead Jackson Pollock.
And when the molds were cast off, they revealed some of the most stunning
sculptural statements ever to sprout four wheels. Using his unique method,
Big Daddy produced a steady wave of outrageous asymmetric show cars
festooned with bubble tops, cantilevered third-eye headlights, pearlescent
three tone fuchsia paint and blindingly-chromed engines (sometimes two or
three). He christened them with names every bit as exotic; Outlaw, Beatnik
Bandit, Orbitron, Rotar, Mysterion, Druid Princess.
The wild creations were a hit wherever they were shown, and the Revel
Company produced millions of replica scale models kits that finally made
Roth financially secure. Each box pictured the car with the disembodied head
of Big Daddy floating gleefully above it, flashing his ever-present
subversive goateed grin.
About the same time, he also developed his trademark "Rat Fink" character, a
satiric take on Mickey Mouse with Roth as his demented Walt Disney. A
drooling, obese, fly-infested green rodent leering in a red tanksuit, Rat
Fink somehow managed to maintain an odd non-threatening sweetness.
He also continued to develop other business interest, selling millions of
mail order monster t-shirt that would inevitably be confiscated by
disapproving parents. To keep coming up with fresh designs, Roth Studios
employed talented artist such as Robert Williams who would go on to fame in
the "serious" gallery world.
By the early seventies, though, it appeared the zeitgeist had left Roth
behind. Model and T-shirt sales declined, as hot rod culture seemed a
hopeless anachronism when gas lines stretched around the block. Once
celebrated by some intellectuals an important influence on Pop Art, he was
far too 'outside,' too guileless to get an invitation to the next art world
paradigm shift.
Worse for Roth, he found it increasingly difficult to maintain a presence in
the hot rod world. Never fully accepted there (many hot rod builders
objected to his use of fiberglas and allegedly shoddy workmanship), he was
shunned by some car shows for building "noncars" - car/motorcycle hybrids,
electric cars and the like. Even among outsiders, Big Daddy was an outsider.
He continued to ply the auto show circuit and build a few cars until his
children were grown, and developed deep religious convictions. He moved to
Utah, distancing himself from the metalflake cartoon culture he created.
His exile would be short lived, however. By the mid 1980's, a collector
market sprung up around Roth memorabilia and a new generation rediscovered
the joy of his eccentric vision. A burgeoning "Low Brow" art movement fully
embraced Big Daddy as one of their own.
He was discovered by many on the Internet, where hundreds of sites are
devoted to the him, his art and his cars (the official site is
www.ratfink.org). Roth appreciation continues to grow, and with the annual
Rat Fink Reunion in Santa Fe Springs, California, it has finally been
institutionalized. Sadly, the next reunion will have to carry on without Big
Daddy presiding as its clowning eminence gris.
While he may not merit a half-page obituary in the New York Times, there are
some of us for whom Roth will always remain an icon: the wild 1960s
subversive who truly loved American culture and celebrated its excesses. To
a kid from that era, he was the world's coolest grown up; a favorite uncle
with a sly smile, a cool car and an uncanny ability to draw the most hideous
cartoons of your teacher.
Was his stuff really art? I don't know art, but I know what I like. And I
loved Big Daddy Roth. Goodbye, Ed, I'll miss you.
Copyright 2001 David Burge.
Gary Waller
from water clay, hardwall perlite plaster (a United States Gypsum product)
and hand laid fiberglass. I use this plaster all the time - it carves and
scrapes very well using sheet metal shapes@20 gauge) and then the fiberglass
would be polished for full effect. I was told by "an expert" as little as
three weeks ago, that this technique "would not work" - I now wish I could
have showed him the Roth rods.
Battersby
> I think an important point is that his most wonderful creations were made
> from water clay, hardwall perlite plaster (a United States Gypsum product)
Ed's Plaster Recipe: "30% hardwall plaster and 70% vermiculite and enuff
water ta make it a pasty mix about like bread dough" "Ed Roth 8/31/00"
> and hand laid fiberglass. I use this plaster all the time - it carves and
> scrapes very well using sheet metal shapes@20 gauge) and then the
fiberglass
> would be polished for full effect. I was told by "an expert" as little as
> three weeks ago, that this technique "would not work" - I now wish I could
> have showed him the Roth rods.
--