I put the initials RF on the pot belle, er … chest … to symbolize his nutty name. After that, the drawing of Rat Fink just oozed from the pencil. “Up to then I had not the foggiest idea of what I was gonna draw so I quick put two eyeballs down first & then the jagged teeth. Sitting in a diner “back in the ’50s, I think,” Roth started doodling his warped, devolved counterpoint to Mickey Mouse on a greasy napkin: It feels more like sitting down with the guy and letting him ramble for a few hours than reading an autobiography.Īlmost right off the bat Roth clues us in to the real Rat Fink origin story. Roth makes no real attempt at a coherent narrative here, or even a logical timeline-it’s pure stream of consciousness, so gonzo it’s probably all true. It turned out to be of the more interesting automotive-related books I’ve ever read, and it's the closest I’ll ever get to burrowing into the head of one of the car world's most out-there icons.Įd Roth with the Druid Princess. My dad bought the book, originally published in 1992, some years ago, and at some point I stole it from him. He made some cool cars, for sure, but what relevance did a wacky well-nigh undrivable showpiece like Mysterion really have to me? As a kid I thought his slavering, power-shifting monsters were creepy and that Rat Fink was kind of gross, which is probably all the proof you need to know I was born a total square.īut awhile back I pulled Confessions of a Rat Fink: The Life and Times of Ed “Big Daddy” Roth off my shelf. It’s hard to imagine, say, the late George Barris going anywhere with so little pomp and such a deficiency of circumstance.ĭespite my young brush with kustom kulture greatness, I don’t think I really understood Roth growing up. I’ve seen junk-sellers at Hershey with more elaborate setups-and probably bigger crowds around them. There’s something really humble about this whole scene, what with the mighty Rat Fink himself hawking trinkets out of a tent at an out-of-the-way Midwestern car show. We should have had him pinstripe the Little Red Wagon-that would have been really cool to have. We roll up to a pop-up canopy with folding tables piled with pins, gewgaws and, naturally, T-shirts-lots and lots of T-shirts.Īnd there’s an old guy, Roth, I presume, underneath or around the canopy selling his stuff. I almost certainly wanted to be somewhere else. Only, I do sort of remember it-one of my earliest glimmers of memory, in fact-or at least my brain is doing a good job weaving a plausible reconstruction out of scraps: It would have been a hot summer day, and I was (I think) riding in a Little Red Wagon. Ignace Car Show in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and I would have been too young to remember any of it. It would have been in the early 1990s at the St. As family lore has it, I met Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, car customizer and weirdo underground artist extraordinaire, once.
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