Taking monster steps toward auto innovation

Jesse James was grinning like a man who’d just robbed a bank. It was midafternoon, and the scene was a massive Long Beach garage where a Discovery Channel camera crew rubbed shoulders with an elite team of grease monkeys. Blues and rock music from a boombox nearly drowned out the scream of power tools, but not quite.

Linebacker-solid, his tattooed biceps straining a black

T-shirt, James -- along with five assistants -- was busy hammering and welding together the team’s latest automotive hybrid, a half-gutted PT Cruiser it was converting into a tree mulcher. You won’t find it in your local Chrysler showroom, but this might be the smartest, thriftiest thing to come out of Detroit, by way of Southern California and cable TV, since Henry Ford rolled out the Model T.

For Jesse Gregory James, 33, a Long Beach native and distant relative of the legendary outlaw, it was all in a day’s work here in the Wild West of contemporary auto design. While the Big 3 are busy cranking out more bland, boxy SUVs, James is taking apart the cookie-cutter mind-set of the commercial auto industry -- one bolt at a time.

“I just like it because of the fact of all these people driving around in their PT Cruisers, thinking they’re cool,” said James, pausing from his labors. “That’s how I’m secretly getting my revenge, by taking all these cars that are weak style, weak name, and totally obliterating them. But in a nice way.”

And that, folks, is the basic formula for “Monster Garage,” which airs weekly on Monday and Saturday evenings. Take a brand-name, everyday vehicle. Think up some outrageous yet curiously arresting and possibly even practical new use for it. Then turn James (the program’s host) and his rotating crew of helpers loose with a skimpy $3,000 budget, plus a few thousand more in donated materials. Give them just five days to come up with a functional vehicle that does something no car of its type ought to be able to do. Whatever materials aren’t recyclable get sold on EBay.

Oh, and by the way, it has to look good too. Let’s see Lee

Iacocca take that challenge.

You have to wonder, as James and his fellow heavy-metal folk artisans sometimes do, what might happen if Detroit’s engineers and bureaucrats had to work under the constraints of “Monster Garage,” where everything -- time, budget, manpower -- is severely limited. Everything, that is, except imagination. Who knows? Maybe America’s roads wouldn’t be jammed with so many dull-looking Jurassic vehicles running on juice from the age of the stegosaurus, instead of cars that evoke Michael J. Fox’s time-tripping Delorean in “Back to the Future.”

So what are Detroit’s new ideas for the 21st century? Well, according to a new show at L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art, one of them is “Retrofuturism.” The brainchild of Ford design guru J Mays, a graduate of Pasadena’s Art Center College of Design, retrofuturism is a nostalgic exercise in creating updated versions of automotive classics like the Volkswagen Beetle and Ford Thunderbird.

MOCA has allotted several large galleries and a number of blithe wall-text panels to Mays’ designs, but not much in the way of a critical edge. If not for the absence of female models draped across the car hoods, museum visitors might think they’d accidentally stumbled into the Detroit Auto Show, where several of these objects appeared previously.

High-powered art

But not one of MOCA’s shiny new prototypes radiates as much brash wit and aggressive forward-thinking as the vehicles James and his crew have made for “Monster Garage.” Four-wheeled folk art, the collection includes a Chevrolet Super Sport Impala that morphs into an ice-rink smoother; a Geo Tracker that doubles as a hot-air balloon(!); and a stripped-down yellow school bus, rigged up with a propeller and rudder, that splits in two, sprouts a horizontal deck and turns into a pontoon boat.

“You want to see some people with the weirdest expressions you’ve ever seen in your life? Drive a school bus into a lake and see what happens,” said Alex Anderson, the garage’s manager. That’s exactly what James and his gang did recently, taking their monstrous creation to Lake Havasu, where they rode it into the water and sat barbecuing hot dogs while chatting with passing boaters.

A self-made entrepreneur, James is the founding owner of West Coast Choppers, a custom motorcycle shop that features a tank filled with live sharks and crafts designer bikes for the likes of Keanu Reeves and Shaquille O’Neal. James has spent years honing his fabrication skills while acquiring a cult following of bikers, celebrities and the sort of people who don’t like others telling them that something can’t be done.

In proof of his own growing celebrity, last month he made People magazine’s list of the world’s sexiest men. “I’d rather be the National Welding Society Man of the Year,” he said, only half-joking.

He runs a tight shop, but the atmosphere is relaxed enough to allow drop-in visitors like Wayne of the band Static X, who came by one afternoon to apply to be on an assembly crew -- if he can meet James’ tough standards. (Remember the days when rock stars and other pop artists were inspired by cars, rather than the other way around?)

In Detroit, “retrofuturism” means never having to say you’ve been stuck in a creative midlife crisis for half a century. James’ designs, however goofy their appearance and limited their practical application, have the guts and technical know-how needed to shake up the design status quo, and autophiles are paying attention. Several of his vehicles were on display last weekend at the Petersen Automotive Museum, and they’ll be touring other auto-related functions this fall and winter.

Mathew Zabas, who worked with James on the mulcher car and owns a specialty motorcycle store in San Diego, said the auto industry needs to try making big leaps in technology and design, rather than retreating into an idealized past or doling out just enough innovation to justify a higher-priced version of the same old thing.

“We’ve got the technology and we’ve got the money,” he said. “It needs someone who’s not afraid to say, ‘Let’s do it differently.’ Let’s jump ahead 10 steps. We’ll all get there faster and pollute the air less and be safer.”

Maybe we’ll even get there in style. Meanwhile, anybody out there need a used PT Cruiser? Gets pretty good mileage. Eats branches, too.

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Reed Johnson can be reached at reed.Johnson@latimes.com