Weirdo Art and T-Shirts are Born!

Of Mouse and Men...
A Brief History of the Weirdo Shirt

No one seems to know how they got their name. Most agree that ‘weirdo’ was one of the many ways teens referred to themselves back in the early to mid-Fifties. Anyone or anything that was daring, out of the mainstream, was labeled as ‘weird’, and hey, it was cool to be a weirdo. So when drawings of wild looking monsters sticking out of hot rods, gear knob in hand hangin’ a big shift, began to appear on the backs of the t-shirts of just about every cool dude in town... bingo! The ‘Weirdo’ Shirt was born.

Speculation that the name resulted as a reflection of the person credited with starting the whole ‘craze’ isn’t too much of a stretch either, since research shows that “Ground Zero” was none other than that most reluctant of trend setters (not to mention World-class eccentric), Kenneth “Von Dutch” Howard. Hard to believe that one disinterested man could be the father of what has come to be known as Kustom Kulture? Not really, if you consider the times.

The Beat Generation was tailor-made for a true creative genius like Dutch and he lived it to the max. Times were good and teens and young adults were looking for someone to show them the way. The coffee-shop-and-bongos set had its Kerouac and Ginsberg, the hot rod set had Von Dutch, a man whose art took precedence over everything else...and Dutch hated the very thought of all this trend-setting crap. He had no use for any leadership roll of any kind nor the money that it might generate. He just wanted to be left alone to do his art on his own level, which was just what he was doin’ with his gun and knife making, custom engraving and that wild freeform pinstriping that he was so famous for. So how is it that this Kultural icon is responsible for what has become one of the most enduring art forms of the 20th century?

Master T-shirt designer/artist Ed Newton told me that back in the mid ‘50s, cam grinders like Ed Iskendarian would silk screen T-shirts with their logos in one color on the back to advertise their products. With that in mind, many a young guy would take a black marker and draw up his own T-shirt with cam logos, his car club logo, a favorite racecar, or whatever, on the back. Dutch was asked to punch up a faded club logo on some guy’s shirt so, as the story goes, he loaded up an airbrush with black 1-Shot lettering enamel and outlined and shaded the faded art, solving the guy’s problem and launching a craze at the same time.

Robt Williams, world-renowned artist, cartoonist, and creator of his own art genre remembers Dutch airbrushing several of his own shirts with wild Dali-esque designs, many of which were quite grotesque. People of severe disproportion, their eyes bulging out their heads and the like. Works with a very bohemian beatnik flavor that reflected the times. From there, given Dutch’s popularity, it’s not hard to imagine people seeing these works, and going home to copy them on their own shirts, thus legitimizing the new Von Dutch-inspired craze.

By the mid-to-late-Fifties the rod and custom scene was in full swing and many of the Southern Calilornia artists, painters and pinstripers sought to capitalize on the growing popularity of the Weirdo Shirt craze. To meet the exploding demand for these shirts people like painter/pinstriper Dean Jeffries and legendary hot rod cartoonist Pete Millar all picked up the airbrush and made the quick buck knockin’ their own Weirdo styles out as fast as they could...but it wasn’t fast enough. Enter pinstriper/custom painter/show car builder/promoter extraordinaire Ed “Big Daddy”  Roth.

A hot rodder who spent his time in high school cartooning all over peoples’ notebooks, Roth took up pinstriping and flame painting after he left the Air Force in 1955. The Weirdo Shirt craze hit when he was working with an old Studebaker factory pinstriper known as The Baron. It wasn’t long before Big Daddy joined in the fray. He began by doing his own drawings of Dutch’s surrealistic work, making them into decals and eventually rendering his own designs on the shirt backs.

Always a hard working and seemingly tireless innovator, Roth designed, hand built, and painted some of the most ingenious, crowd pleasing show rods and customs ever created. With little exaggeration, Roth appeared to have his hand in just about everything cool that was going on at the time. And when the Weirdo Shirt craze took off, he hit the ground running at full speed, blazing an airbrushed trail all up and down the west coast.

He began painting shirts wherever anyone would let him, including drag strips, car shows and fairs. And, perhaps most importantly, he took out ads in many of the national rodding magazines. Mail orders began to pour in, and there was no way Roth could paint all those shirts himself. So he began taking on what became a series of helpers over the years. Some of his alumni: brushman Tom Kelly, a little known but extremely talented character called the Crazy Arab, Richard Ash (who later worked for Mouse), the incomparable father of Lowbrow art, Robt Williams, and later, the man who would come to alter the look of the Weirdo Shirt most dramatically, Ed “Newt” Newton.

Now at about this time, in Detroit, an 18-year-old budding artist named Stanley Miller burst on the scene. Like Roth, he had been cartooning all through school, and at age 15, Stanley began doing flame jobs and pinstriping on the weekends. When he saw a “Roth & the Baron” ad in a rodding magazine that advertised airbrushing T-shirts, he knew he’d found the ideal market for his work. He picked up an airbrush and some Prang paints and began painting his cars-and-monsters art on the neighborhood kids’ shirts.

As his local reputation grew, Stanley began taking out ad space in the same rodding magazines as Roth. And it wasn’t long till his shirts became famous all over the country. Shortly thereafter, Stanley, who had adopted his childhood nickname of Mouse as his trademark, began traveling to car shows all over the east. His now-famous huge-eyed-no-nosed-enormous-mouthed-sharp-fanged scruffy-bearded character “Freddie Flypogger”, was repeatedly placed in, or bursting out of, just about every rod or custom conceivable. It was on one of these trips that he and Roth finally met.

It was 1960. Mouse was busy airbrushing at this car show in Pittsburgh when up pops this big guy with a beard and no shirt. Roth asks Stanley if he would mind if he set up and painted next to him. Mouse said okay, even though he had secured exclusive rights to be the only shirt painter at the show. After Big Daddy gave Stanley his “Just-watch-me-kid-an’-you-might-learn-sumpin’ especially-how-to-make-$300-instead-of-$100” speech, they both embarked upon what would become a rivalry that would last through the first half of the decade, and would see Roth come away with arguably the most famous cartoon character in hot rodding history.

Mouse and Big Daddy began appearing at shows together over the next few years. I first saw them at the Detroit Autorama in 1961 (That was when I began drawing the Weirdos, too). They each had signs up, one saying “I hate Roth”, the other,”I hate Mouse”. It was terrific for business, especially for Mouse, because, as Stanley remembers of their first meeting: “Roth was good... but he was slow. He did some nice detailed renderings... but I was zipping along and fully coloring my shirts...He made his $300...I made $1000 that day”.

The two ‘adversaries’ did many of these car shows together, until Stanley finally headed west in 1965. It was during this time that “Design Creep” was becoming quite apparent to Stanley, which I would think would be inevitable both ways. Now this is where the wicket could get sticky. Here, we’ll briefly touch on the origin of the Rat Fink.

According to Robert Williams, who was Roth’s art director through the mid-to-late Sixties, the name probably came from the old Steve Allen Tonite Show. Turns out, Mr. Allen used the term ‘rat fink’ quite a bit on the show and, as the phrase became quite popular, Roth most likely picked it up from there. The body and stance of R.F. resembles that of a character from the 50’s called a Nebbis, which Roth was said to have been quite taken with. The evolution of Rat Fink most likely originated as a direct result of Roth’s association with Stanley Mouse. Roth is said to have had the idea for the character early on, and that it germinated from his musings about what Mickey Mouse’s father might look like. Mouse, on the other hand, had been drawing rather nasty looking rats for quite some time (there’s one on the cover of his catalog #3 c. 1962), just sees his Freddie Flypogger character with a long nose and hairy ears.

In all likelihood, there is some validity in all of the aforementioned scenarios. Nonetheless, the hot rodding icons that are Ed “Big Daddy” Roth and the Rat Fink, have come to represent this art form and, for that matter, Kustom Kulture itself, to hundreds of thousands of people across the globe. When people see my version of the Weirdo Shirt, almost without exception they say, “Hey, that’s like Roth’s Rat Fink!”

By the time Stanley Mouse finally made it to the left coast, where he took up painting at drag strips and car shows, both he and Roth were far and away the most well known of the Weirdo Shirt painters. Mouse and Big Daddy were into all sorts of products. Both were silk screening many of their designs on the shirts, and offering things from decals and stickers to sets of bubble gum collector cards and even model kits. But when Stanley went to San Francisco and got his first look at the wild rock-music-inspired poster art being created there, he followed his innate passion for fine art and embarked upon the next stage of his long, distinguished career, as one of the handful of artists who literally defined the decade of the Sixties as one of the most legendary poster artists of all time. This left Big Daddy Roth to carry the torch pretty much alone. Now during the early-to-mid ‘60s, as the demand for the Weirdo Shirts grew, Stanley had help from a young guy named Ron Bizer, along with Richard Ash (who had had a falling out with Roth). Among Roth’s ‘helpers was Art Center-trained Ed “Newt” Newton, the man who took the Weirdo Shirt to the next level.

While Roth was on the road, Newt drew virtually all of the designs that were silk screened on the shirts (some 450 designs all told). These pieces became the most recognizable and famous works out of Roth’s stable. As Mouse told me recently,”...as far as drawing cars, Newt was the very best.”

When Newt drew a ‘64 GTO, it looked exactly like a ‘64 GTO. The engines, even the way over-sized smoke-belching tires and mag wheels were rendered in perfect detail, as were the monsters, ferocious slavering animals, and weirdo guys erupting from the vehicles hangin’ the big shift...and all in living color. Newt told me that he felt he’d ruined the genre by being so meticulous in his detail work, but after all, that was what he was trained to do, and the sales of those shirts went into orbit. By the mid to late ‘60s, with Mouse all but out of the Weirdo business, that left only Roth and a Columbus, Ohio outfit called Roach Studios to carry the load.

By 1966, Newt was tiring of the strict and demanding schedule Roth held him to, and he longed to sign his own name to his work for a change. So when the Roach Studios guys offered him a job as their creative director, Ed packed up and headed for the Midwest. It was then that Robt Williams slid into Roth’s art director position, which he held for the next five years. But as luck would have it, by the late ‘60s the T-shirt craze began to undergo another of its inevitable changes, making the full circle and coming back to what started the whole thing in the first place. The Weirdo was being replaced by product logos.

The mid ‘70s found Roth sign painting at Knott’s Berry Farm to earn a living. Stanley Mouse was in Santa Fe pursuing his life long love of fine art. The most visible hot rod cartoonist/artist was Williams who turned his painted scenes of ‘50s Kustom Kulture into posters that sold to hard core rodders and collectors. Then there were his avant garde paintings filled with mayhem and the ironic juxtaposition of finely painted flora and fauna and wonderful cartoon characters, many of which have a hot rod of some kind as its focal point...Witness the creation of the genre known as Lowbrow Art.

With Li’l John Buttera and Boyd Coddington taking rodding into the techno-zone by way of Billetland, it began a trend that is still quite evident today in the incredible hand-built Foose-ish giga-buck rods that, like your mother-in-law’s living room, you’re afraid to sit in ‘cause you might get Big Mac breath on something that cost $5 million an’ you’ll have ta buy ‘em a new one. Hardly the environment conducive to wearin’ a shirt with a snot-slingin’ lop-eyed Magilla bangin’ third gear while protruding from one of these “Gees-this-rod-cost-four-years-of-my-salary!” cars...wouldn’t you agree?

Ah, but the good ol’ days of the Weirdo Shirt had a profound effect on thousands of ‘Boomer youth back then, and produced many a hero worshipper (not unlike myself) who continued to draw like Big Daddy, Mouse, Newt and the rest. And, what you get when their progeny invoke hard-core KK (Kustom Kulture) aficionados’ Rule #11 (I’ll make up 1 thru 10 later): Never underestimate the power of the Rat Fink!, coupled with Life Rule #7: What goes around, comes around., is an inevitable re-birth, as it were, of that totally happinin’, severely laid-back, completely ginchy ‘50s way of life that the nouveau-hip have resurrected and made their own...and once again, the Weirdo Shirt has “shot into the Top Ten on the Tuned-in Decks, Cats an’ Cuties!”

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