Through all of this-the multiple intertwined careers, the fortunes earned and blown, the ups and downs and ups of his personal life (Roth was married four times and converted to Mormonism in the 1970s)-you get the sense of a man who lived a genuinely different life. I don’t know if the text is 100 percent accurate, and there certainly seems to be some notable omissions, but I think it paints the broad strokes honestly and nails a lot of the details, too. It’s a little hard to find, and a bit-scratch that, really-pricey new, but I really recommend picking up a copy and giving it a read if you’ve wondered where all of Roth’s crazy ideas came from-or what kind of a man could come up with such crazy ideas in the first place. Maybe he just didn’t want to talk about it. The book is a little light on info from Roth’s motorcycle-riding phase, which saw him start and run Choppers magazine from 1967 to 1970, but by his own account he doesn’t seem to remember much about it. (And tucked in among all that, he even has a few kind words for Ed Reavie, organizer of that St.

Roth runs through the creation of his cars, from his customized daily rides to the far-out showpieces like Orbitron and Beatnik Bandit, and his attempts to learn to use a personal computer. If you give it time, Roth does seem to cover just about everything-early days of airbrushing, and then silkscreening, shirts, traveling from car show to car show in a cheapo, tire-eating hearse, selling RF keychains, licensing his grotesque monster figures to model maker Revell. Yes, all 169 pages of the book are written in that style, and yes, you get used to it. And I put a cape on him just to make him a little more ‘special,’ but I erased it ’cause I figured that the owners of Superman might get a little upset with my brand of humor.”Īnd so on. 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.

Matco rat fink cars