Rebuilt for speed

You can trace the term “hot rod” -- short for “hot roadster” -- back to 1939, when it was used to describe a sort of speedy vehicle certain Southern Californians were constructing out of factory-issue Detroit automobiles.

These outlaw enthusiasts would take a ’32 Ford V-8 roadster, say, and remove its fenders (and anything else that might be giving it extra weight), trick it up and produce a fairly decent-looking and extremely fast car.

But it wasn’t until the World War II GIs came home that hot rodding really took off. By the ‘50s the movement was in full swing, and Ross Macdonald’s fictional L.A. private-eye Lew Archer was noticing: “Fenderless jalopies threatened my fenders. Hot rods built low to the ground and stacked with gin-mill cowboys roamed the neon trails with their mufflers off.” Narcissistic males “with bold and planless eyes” dragged the boulevards in customized Fords that “came off the highway on banshee tires” and into the 1958 book “The Doomsters.”

Testosterone fueled a California car scene that spread across the country and around the world through magazines produced in Southern California (Hot Rod, Motor Trend, Road & Track), Hollywood movies (“Rebel Without a Cause”) and television shows (“77 Sunset Strip”), and L.A. pop music.

The yen to own and drive a souped-up roadster seemed as basic for some, in the 1950s, as the urge to life itself. “Yeah, I’m only 14,” sang the brother-and-sister Collins Kids (Los Angeles rockabilly performers born in Oklahoma) on their 1958 single, “but I’m goin’ on 15. But I wanna be 16, so I can git me a -- hot rod!”

Eventually, police cracked down, and officially sanctioned drag racing moved the pastime off the boulevards and onto quarter-mile tracks.

But as hot rodding was legally tamed, its trappings became more flamboyant.

In the mid-1950s, a sign painter known as Von Dutch took the old practice of pinstriping into an elaborate new realm on the chassis of rods and motorcycles. At the same time, he developed flame painting, first seen on Alhambra race cars as early as the ‘30s, into a vividly stylized form. The car magazines made Von Dutch’s work famous. (“I’m gonna give it that certain touch,” the Collins Kids sang, “with a leetle bit of -- Von Dutch.”)

Meanwhile, the craft of car customizing, in which automobiles were “chopped and channeled” -- lengthened, lowered and otherwise modified -- was coming into its own. By the 1960s, Hollywood producers hired George Barris, Dean Jefferies and others to create such on-screen vehicles as the Batmobile, the Green Hornet’s Black Beauty and the Monkeemobile.

Then Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, a former Sears window decorator and rod builder, joined the scene.

“Ed Roth was the first to take the custom car or the hot rod into abstraction,” says Robert Williams, Roth’s art director from 1965 to 1970 and founder of the Lowbrow Art Movement. “He did these flipped-out, futuristic cars that didn’t function -- that were really pieces of art.” Roth’s work -- witty, oddly sized fantasy vehicles out of a suburban surrealist’s cartoon daydreams -- became popular through model kits by Revell in Venice.

The fun didn’t last much longer. An era ushered in by returning GIs was essentially ended by a call to war 20 years later.

“The Vietnam War changed everything,” Williams says. “The hot-rod thing really lost its significance: goin’ to the drive-in, takin’ the girl to the movies, hangin’ around talkin’ about cars -- and, you know, bein’ very available for the draft.”

In addition, old car bodies had become rare: “You had to have money to buy them.”

But in the last few years, Williams says, a new generation of enthusiasts -- “rat rodders” -- has sprung up in Southern California and all over the country, driving “primered” cars with dull-gray or half-finished paint jobs, built on junky bodies. “Things crudely welded up,” as Williams describes them, with more than a little glee, “no fenders, mismatched parts -- and things that make the police go nuts.” Half a century later, when no one would have predicted it: a spontaneous throwback to the heyday of hot rods in the 1940s.

“It’s a statement,” says Williams, whose father bought him his first hot rod, a ’34 Ford coupe, when he was 12. “It’s a revolution.”