MAGAZINE

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2001 Cover

WHAT’S HAPPENING

You are probably unsung. We’ll bet that you know somebody who is notorious and consider him a pal or at least a good acquaintance, but who knows YOU? Some of us must be forgettable humans. Doesn’t matter, now, does it, Boys? We found this iron in some kind of search for fulfillment and it can come in the dark with no one else on the road. You don’t have to have someone else in that coupe cockpit when it’s real dark and there’s no other traffic and you can fantasize that it was 50 years ago and the engine sounded the absolute same to some cat back then.... who was way ahead of his time. You did something like this now because you coveted that act then....OR sometime since then you READ about that act and fancied it.......and had to make it happen for yourself.

Now, Jess says it’s better with a Buddy........may be.......we think that there can’t be conversation all the time, though. When his dawg ass is asleep with his greasy head rattling on that 8" side light, it’s like being alone any damn way. You are left to your own thoughts and he’ll only be good if you need a push start or something - an’ that ain’t gonna happen.

On that dark and lonely, the headlights of the coupe will only light up just enough road to get by. And that two-lane (no interstates in this dream) is crowned so you have to aim at the line a little...... and it begins anew: You appreciate the car. Nobody is there with a frickin’ baby carriage sayin’, "I think my Grampy had a car just like it.......do you drive it every day?"

It has a harmonic; a sound, a step.

And you can influence it with subtle twist of your wrist, a flex of your toe, and sometimes, when you feel like it is appropriate, you can slow it down, grab a gear (you DO have a gear to grab, don’t you?) and you can make violence happen. You can stop, because in the best of all possible worlds - in our vision - there is no traffic out here. Just a two-lane lined with eucalyptus (YOU-CUY-LUH-PEE-TUS) trees, a straight, newly-paved A.C. road going for about 1.5 miles. So you stop. You listen to the thing idle, and it’s really civilized but you know there’s a demon in there........a genie in the bottle........and who owns the magic? You do, Jazzbo.

You have the magic to let the genie out of the bottle.

There’s still music coming out of somewhere from a few miles back but.........hell, man, that was years ago.......we have a need to exceed............yeah........ turn it down.....yeah...Off.

You drop the hammer. The tach is lit barely enough to help you get it right, but you’ll do it by ear anyway. You can feel the thing break loose and sway sideways a little. Not too much, but you know you have to feather it some in first anyway and you’ve done it - literally - a thousand times, so you back off a little and the tires stop squealin’ and the motor - gawd that motor - is out there and the goddamn chassis flexes and you can feel it and you can’t wait to shift...as fast as you can......to see how little you allow the chassis to unwind, and the whole rig pumps up again.....and now we get to do it another time....winding up further in third and we’re thinkin’ how fast this is gettin’ to be and how good it feels, and how straight it goes ..........with that clock-wise twist on the body........and the next one is easy, too...frickin’ power shift straight back, you don’t release the throttle, and this bad, Raggedy Andy P.O.S. is just haulin’ ass a little over a C-note on this country road and then, before you lose your concentration you just back off and listen to the thing slow itself down with compression all the way to a lug, and then you pull over onto a gravel turn-out, stop it, pull the e-brake, leave it running, get out and go over to the right rear of it, lookin’ at it in the total darkness with the engine cacklin’ (sure sounds good cleaned out, eh?) , and the lights shinin‘ out into the wilderness. And you look and listen. Functional art. Perfection. It does all it was intended to do.

Then the big ugly goofball in the car gets out the right side and says, "What was THAT about?".

And takes a piss right in front of you.

IT COULDA BEEN THIS COUPE....IF CHUCK RODGERS WOULD LET YA BORROW IT!!!

CHECK IT OUT.

Then there’s the bunch of hicks that hang together and ALL of them have bad taste. How’d that happen? Haven’t they been readin’ your posts? Didn’t they have the class, the good sense, the presence of mind, to flat-ass walk up to you and ask, "Hey what would YOU do?"

There’s no explaining it, is there? Well, maybe. The eye can‘t be good or bad, but taste or opinion can be. It‘s all relative. You may be here because Hop Up comes near agreeing with you about how ya oughta do the rod/custom tango, and what the cars should look like and how you should act and...well, birds of a feather.......but we think that familiarity (it‘s been my car for 15 years, and the longer I look at it the more correct it gets", budget, magazines (?), access, peers, all contribute to what YOU think is the righteous look.

We heard a rant about a particular part and the criticism was based on "They’re expensive and I made my own, so mine’s better". Well, we’ve seen both, and we KNOW that the expensive part had it’s origin on big cars of the thirties, looks better, works better, the other looks home made and, like a lot of homemade parts, has charm because it is homemade, and is GREAT because it is homemade, in the SPIRIT of the hobby, but it ain’t better. Believe it. You looked at yours long enough (familiarity), you did it yourselves (pride of authorship), the gang praised it (hang with people who like you), but it ain’t better. It’s plenty good, but it ain’t better.

We know of a senile old-woman-rodder who is a great craftsman, has marginal taste, and you can not have a conversation with him without having to agree with him that he is the ‘best‘. Beyond the "I’m so clever" horseshit, you have to suffer the inevitable, "and your ‘buddy’ is shitty". That’s where we draw the line. Don’t mess with my guy if I’m just being polite listening to you brag about your fool-ass-self.

Hop Up Guys wouldn’t suffer these fools. Others who do, do so for mercenary reasons. Prospectin’ for access. Or for a discount.

This hobby is one that requires a lot of craft and a good eye. Both inspire jealousies in men and thus become one of the few unpleasant parts of it. Problem is: MADAME up there thinks there’s a finite amount of praise to go around and is so horny for it that if YOU get some praise...he’s thinks he’s LOSING some. He thinks it was against his account. Wrong. There is plenty (praise) to go around and Hop Up is here to heap some more of it

. Stick around, Amigos Mios. There’s a world of cool stuff around River City to show ya.. It IS the center of the Hot Rod Universe, ya know?

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