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Hot Rods, Woodies and Desire: Rick Ross interviewed by Greg Bellerby

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Greg Bellerby: You’re an artist, building a hot rod -- does that make you an artistic hot-rodder or are you a hot rodding artist?

Rick Ross: I'd have to say artist first, since that's what I've done most of in my life -- living with the muse. Hell -- I'm both!

GB: How did your interest in hot rods start?

RR: It would have started when I was a teenager, in the mid-fifties. I was born in 1940 so in '56, I was sixteen, and just had my driver's license. At that time in Vancouver the Californian phenomenon known as hot rods was taking a foothold here. So as a teenager, like a lot of teenagers even today I'm sure, these extraordinary vehicles caught my eye. However, although I made a couple of attempts at building one, I never had enough skill or money to finish it.

GB: You mentioned before that you had been at the Motorama.

RR: Yes, at the PNE [Pacific National Exhibition]. As a matter of fact one of the cars that I saw there, and this would be 1957 or 1958, was a Model T, like the one I have just been working on, called the "Lemon Street Coupe". It was bright yellow and that actually influenced the colour of the first hot rod that I built in the early eighties, as a tip of the hat to those earlier days.

GB: The car that you have just got on the road is your second car. Can you just say a little bit about the first car?

RR: The first car was kind of an accident, I suppose. My children were at an age when a second car was a consideration, and the art school had moved from downtown Vancouver to Granville Island requiring a few more bus exchanges so I started to look for an appropriate vehicle. In the process of doing that I came across an old Model A pickup, in pieces. This certainly was not what I had in mind, however in considering the implications of putting it all together a lot of twenty-five-year-old memories drifted back. This time I saw the parallels in materials and process to my experiences in art-making, and then by the time I considered the cultural and social aspects of the automobile as well, I soon had boxes of Model A parts all over my studio.

GB: So did you have to do a certain amount of research before you started working on the first car?

RR: Well, I should have done more research than I did. I thought that I could sort of pick up where I left off but of course a tremendous amount had changed in those twenty-five or thirty years hot rodding. So had I. A lot of reproduction parts and quality materials were available, and safety was much more of a consideration. As a consequence I had to go back through some construction I had already started, had to slow down a bit. This gave me a chance to meet like-minded people and get re-involved in motor sports, and the research came about by doing, much like my art practice.

GB: You showed that car at the Charles H. Scott Gallery back in 1985. What was your thinking around doing that as a project, taking the car from the shop, from the garage and putting it into a gallery space?

RR: Well, it was as I say, a project that started out simply as needing a second car. Over the four years or so of building the pickup I became quite involved with the practical and social aspects of car culture. Some of my colleagues and students were questioning what they saw as some sort of repressed adolescence -- something not worthy of the attention I was giving it. What I saw, however, was the process of building as a way of understanding the automobile -- an object having such an influential impact on our lives -- and death! Anyway in discussions about this with Ted Lindberg, who was then the director of the Charles H. Scott Gallery, he offered to show the pick up in the gallery, between scheduled exhibitions. This was a great opportunity to try to present my curiosities and concerns and, as it turned out, the timing for the show came at a point when the car had been disassembled and painted -- I was just about to reassemble it -- it was perfect timing. By showing it disassembled it would give some insight to the mysteries and complexities of the basic components -- wiring, brake lines and so on normally covered by the body or skin. Ted was very supportive and even wrote a statement for a small publication. I called the show "The Lesson".

GB: So you finished one car, got rid of that car and started a new project. When was that and what was the inspiration for that?

RR: Well, don't forget, I drove that pick-up for almost nine years before I sold it, but it was shortly after I showed the pick-up -- in 1986 or 1987 in a telephone conversation with a friend of mine -- about cars or art, I can't remember -- either way, I was doodling with a pencil while talking on the phone and the doodle kind of became a panel body car -- what is referred to as a Woody Wagon. I pinned the sketch to the wall and in time began to wonder if it would be possible to actually fabricate that body style. It was based on a model T so I started slowly gathering parts for it, on and off. Anyway in 1992 I began in earnest to plan for its construction. I really wanted to keep the pick-up because it was the first I had ever completed and had running -- lots of my life invested -- but I had no space for it and I needed the money for the T project. The new owner still has it. He lives on Hornby Island, Phil Harrison, he and I went to art school together.

GB: It’s now 2004.

RR: Yes (laughs)

GB: That’s a time span of eleven years working on this one car, so it was a long process. And I gather that this is a complicated project and maybe more complicated than you had first imagined it would be.

RR: Indeed.

GB: You didn't imagine that this was going to take eleven years?

RR: I did not. You're right, it took a lot longer than I thought. I had foolishly thought that since it took me four years to build the other one, and I was a bit of a novice after coming back into it after 30 years, that it would be a shorter process. I met a lot of people in the industry, hobbyists and professionals. I knew what I wanted to do, and I knew what I had to do, in terms of the framework and the chassis and the steering components and things like that. I thought, now that I know who to go to and what has to be done this should come together fairly quickly -- certainly no more than the four years it took to do the other one. In fact I over-confidently thought at one point maybe two or even three years but it didn't happen that way.

GB: Why was it so complicated? What were the things that took the most amount of time? What were some of the challenges?

RR: Challenges they were, I had assembled it in my mind. I had seen the parts, and the pieces, I'd seen the body and I'd seen the panels and I had put it together which is what gave me the confidence to say yes I think it can be done. But the body style is what we call in the hobby a phantom body, that is a body style that was never made by Ford, the original manufacturer of the Model T. So basically from the front door post back had to be fabricated and made up by myself. I had nothing to start with. It had to be mocked up or in someway drawn out in cardboard, much like one would do a maquette for a installation or a piece of sculpture.

GB: So you were using your imagination at this point to, even though you are basing it on a real car, construct something that never existed before.

RR: Yes, exactly, and that’s what took more time than I had thought, the complexities of "how to". There is a great freedom in being able to do what we want -- the question is what is it that we want. So it took a lot of decision making in terms of how to best go about it, in a visual sense what it was going to actually look like, and to figure out the construction steps -- so that, for example, one had to make certain cuts first, before second and third steps so as not to get too far ahead and be unable to go back into it. So basically it required a series of mock-ups, maquettes, first in foamcore and cardboard using a hot glue gun and then in scrap wood, in fir and softwoods to see in three dimensions how the pieces would have to go together -- how to make one side mirror or the other -- where the hinges were going and how they would operate. So that's what took a tremendous amount of time. In fact, I even had to make some of my own machines and tools to do this stuff. The frame, the motor, the suspension, what we call a rolling chassis came together comparatively quickly, probably in the first two years. The rest of the time was taken up with the bodywork -- well, that and life having its own agenda.

GB: So it was complicated in the sense of trying to work with a form that didn't exist before and having to incorporate conventions like a power window. And how do you get a power window, which is a mechanical device, to work with an invented form that has complex curves ...

RR: Compound curves, yes well trial and error basically. The window mechanism was what we call an "after market" kit. That is to say the motor and the gearing that moves the window up and down comes as a kit along with the electrical wiring. But to make it fit my particular situation as with a lot of stuff that i did buy, had to be modified to fit the situation. So it was a matter of making up a whole door, again out of scrap, and actually building the brackets and assembling the electric motor and making sure that it was going to do what I wanted it to. Once I was happy with that I was able to take measurements and patterns and transfer that to the maple when it actually went into maple.

GB: The final wood that you chose ... it is a Woody. Maybe you could explain what a Woody is.

RR: Yes, it's a term that came to be applied to wooden bodied cars which first appeared, to be truthful we would have to go back to 1919 and I believe Ford was one of the first to make what they called a depot hack. Hack having historical reference to a horse drawn carriage that would carry passengers as well as freight and the depot came from the fact that they would often take these horse drawn carts to the depot to pick up passengers and their freight and take them to the hotel for example. Model T first came out with one of these basically a Model T chassis on which they built, I'm guessing, somewhere like eight or ten passenger wooden bodied depot hacks that had no doors just openings to walk through into bench seating much like a church pew and that is where it started. The first production station wagon, which is again a reference to going to the train station in a wagon, these were a little more sophisticated in that they had doors, they were a little smaller and they were first produced by Ford in about 1928. That’s where the term station wagon came from. Because they were wooden bodied they affectionately became known, I think in the sixties through the surf phenomena in California, as Woody Wagons and that’s where the term as far as I know came from.

GB: The current car really is a composite, it’s not a kit, almost everything is built, manufactured by yourself, or is brought in from some other point. Its not that you were trying to reproduce a Model T ... things like the seats are different, the steering wheel is different, the gauges are different ...

RR: It's a combination of home fabrication, or stuff built one off for this particular car and what is available through the automotive hobby, what we call aftermarket parts built by people for people making hot rods. So for example the steering column is a late model GM column but it has been modified by a company that makes columns to fit a hot rod application. The suspension is modeled after a Model A or a Model T suspension but using modern materials with modern bearings in them so that the ride is a lot nicer, the pieces are a lot safer the metallurgy involved in making the axles and the spindles, the radius rods and the connecting pieces is all modern, in some cases using stainless steel. So it echoes the older style suspension visually but it is better constructed. The brakes are four wheel disk, which they certainly didn't have in 1926. So there's modifications made to just about everything. Externally it appears to be a 1936 Model T, but its underpinnings, how it sits -- its stance -- the V8 engine says "hot rod", modifying that which is ordinary into something extraordinary.

GB: I was going to ask you about the connection between, like maybe you can define this in simple terms, like hot rod where does that term come from?

RR: It's interesting. The term, as simple as it is, nobody really seems to know for sure. Even back through the books that I've read on the history of hot rodding. Some early examples were called "gow jobs" -- I really don't know what the hell that means! Some oldtimers say that the heat a hopped-up engine generates heats up the internal parts, among which are the connecting rods on the pistons, resulting in "hot rods".

GB: There is also, if I remember correctly, they are not the same idea or same def there is a difference between a hot rod and a custom car. so therefore can we talk about how you see the difference between a hot rod and a customized car?

RR: Generally speaking a hot rod was a modified vehicle from the 1920s to mid 1930s, usually a Model T or a Model A, where body parts were removed and/or the suspension lowered. The hot rod was really born in the late 1930s on dry lake beds or salt flats in California. These cars were inexpensive and plentiful for young men to buy, and they were taken to the salt flats to see how fast they could go -- first by removing fenders and windshields to reduce wind resistence, then by improving engine performance. Custom cars came later, in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The quintessential custom was the chopped '49 Merc (Mercury). The sutom car was typified by the extensive bodywork -- the chopped top (lowered roof), and details added from newer or different models, like tail fins and dual headlights. Although the engines were dressed up, these cars were intended for cruising -- low and slow. Because there were no plastic fillers or bondo in those days they used lead for the bodywork, so they were also called "lead sleds".

GB: Your car is a hot rod.

RR: My car is a hot rod. Although customs were around in my teen years when I was first taken by these visual phenomena, my leanings were always toward the hot rod. There was something more direct, more basic, more rough and ready that appealed to me. Also something that was a little more accessible. Custom cars take a great amount of skill unless you have tons of money and have other people do it. Not to say that hot rods don't take skill, but it's a different kind of skill.

GB: Customizers are in the world of shapeshifters whereas hot rodders are this elemental process where you are kind of working with an aesthetic. It seems to me that there are rules, design rules or aesthetic rules, within the world of hot rods. There's only so much you can do before it becomes something other than a hot rod.

RR: You're absolutely correct, you've hit the nail on the head. What's important with most cars but hot rods in particular is what is called the "stance". That is, the look, in particular how the tires fit the wheel wells. Hot rods typically are much lower in the front than in the back. It’s a design aesthetic that follows through to contemporary cars in fact – wedge-shaped. It had to do with certain mechanical advantages to this low stance in the front, one is called weight transfer. We don’t want to get too esoteric here. Hot rods were made to go fast, customs were made to go slow. Low and slow is for customs, hot and fast for hot rods. They have an aesthetic attached to them, one that is particular to hot rods is stance, the aggressive, in-your-face stance.

GB: There also seems to be a certain kind of nostalgia. Most hot rods seem to be based on a real car that really existed, even though you’ve invented a lot of it.

RR: Yes.

GB: It still looks like a Model T, or one of these cars from the 1920s.

RR: There’s another distinction I should bring in here. The hot rods from the early salt flats era tended to take things off as I mentioned earlier. And the reason they took things off was to make the car lighter and a bit more aerodynamic, as much as you could for a model A or model T. People being people and mechanics being mechanics, the mechanics would fiddle with the cars during the week and take them out and race during the weekends. Well, you could take them back and fiddle with them on Monday night and the first thing you wanted to do was try them out. You didn’t drive all the way back to the salt flats, so they would try them out in the streets. This led to street racing of course and the first cars that were seen by other impressionable teenagers at the time would be these cars with no fenders, no windshields, very basic seat, no interior, and the aesthetic, although it was intended for the salt flats, was picked up by these kids in the city. What happened then of course, a lot of kids built these cars, people got killed, laws and regulations came in, and this was when drag strips began to be born.

GB: And a roll bar.

RR: And a roll bar. I didn't look forward to zipping down the highway at highway speeds in a small wooden box, I might end up in a small wooden box if you know what I mean.

GB: I'm interested in maybe coming back to the relationship between working on a hot rod and being an artist. I mean, there's your relationship to the process and materials, but what is the connection between the two practices?

RR: I don't think that I could comfortably say that customizing or hot rodding is art, as you or I might understand it. Certainly the skill can reach very high levels, but intention of fine art making and fine car making are different. Art, as I think of it, goes to another place -- engaging the viewer in a particular, internal way. But none of the principal connections of the two practices would be the hot rod as statement, passing information to the viewer. It seems that my art practice goes against the grain of academically-based, theoretical practice, and I remember one of the compelling attractions to hot rods for teenagers was that they gave us our own voice, something against the status quo, against convention. It gave us the voice that we didn’t have.

Rick Ross - red engine - detail from hot rod construction




Rick Ross - hot rod drawing ("the doodle")




Rick Ross: wooden joints for hot rod




Rick Ross: hot rod construction




Rick Ross - hot rod construction




Rick Ross - hot rod construction




Rick Ross - hot rod construction




Rick Ross - hot rod construction




Rick Ross - hot rod construction




Rick Ross - hot rod construction




Rick Ross - hot rod construction




Rick Ross - hot rod construction




Rick Ross - hot rod construction