On this episode of The Downshift
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MotorTranscript
00:00 You just can't call yourself a car enthusiast unless you get into the roots of who these guys are.
00:06 The Alexander Brothers are one of those icons and these guys are OG.
00:10 They're as important to the automobile world as Elvis is, as Little Richard is, as Chuck Berry is to rock and roll.
00:28 Pop culture begins to just take over the country in the early 60s.
00:32 General Motors and Ford Motor Company, Chrysler started paying attention to what was happening in the world of hot rodding.
00:38 And eventually all of them beat a path to the Alexander Brothers doors.
00:42 Larry and I had a pretty good eye for, we love things clean and neat.
00:46 We made it look like that's the way it should be.
00:49 They built a Deora for Chrysler Corporation which is now an iconic toy for Hot Wheels.
00:55 Nobody knew what Hot Wheels was and they came to us and said, sent us a letter,
01:01 "We would like to use your car in something called Hot Wheels, but we need the rights to it and we'll give you $350 for the rights."
01:10 And we thought, well, it'll get some little advertisement for us.
01:15 So we just said, "Okay."
01:18 Still one of their best sellers.
01:23 Mike Alexander is one half of the Alexander Brothers.
01:26 He and his brother Larry started a custom and hot rod shop there in Michigan after World War II.
01:32 I had a very mechanical background. Larry was good in the detail and welding.
01:37 You need to have both. You need to have somebody that has the body skills, the fabricating skills,
01:41 to produce the things that you can envision in your mind.
01:44 We always made sure that it made good sense when you modify something like a steering or brakes or move stuff around because we like to build cars that work.
01:56 The next thing that takes place is beyond being able to pour lead, melt lead, and work with lead, you've got to have somebody that can paint it.
02:03 We painted cars together and sometimes I'd paint a complete car.
02:07 We had to paint at night when the dust settles down on things.
02:11 He was in Detroit. He was at a deficit just from that point of view because of the weather and because of the simple fact that they couldn't get their hands on Deuces and '33, '34 Fords
02:22 that weren't rotted all to hell from Detroit winters and the salt that was on the road.
02:27 So they approached it from a different perspective and started customizing cars.
02:32 Rather than replacing rotted body panels, making their own and producing a car that was unlike anything that was going on in the West Coast.
02:40 They might as well have been in Antarctica.
02:42 They were as far outside the mainstream of attention as someone could be.
02:47 Hot Rod Magazine in 1948 was the internet.
02:51 If you were into cars, if you were into hot rodding, you got your information, you got your influences, and you got your parts by reading and looking through Hot Rod Magazine.
03:01 I met George Barish, a nice guy and everything else.
03:05 He looked at some of the pictures on the wall we had there and he says, "This work is great.
03:11 Why don't you get something into West Coast Magazines because we really don't know much about you guys."
03:17 "Well, we've tried," he said, "but they always reject them for color or for lighting or not the right background."
03:26 So we gave up on them and he says, "Send one to me and I'll show you how we get it in the magazine."
03:31 He came back and sung their praises, told everybody what these guys were capable of, how out of the ordinary it was compared to what was happening here in California, and got Hot Rod to pay attention.
03:42 So George got in the magazine.
03:45 George's way of getting them to pay attention was to go back there and photograph the place and to some extent, at least from Larry and Mike's point of view, claim ownership.
03:54 The first words in the magazine, George referred to the A Brothers as his East Coast division of Barish Customs.
04:03 They were just starting to get their notoriety on the West Coast.
04:06 The Beach Boys used their car for the cover of their iconic, now classic, legendary album with the little Deuce Coupe on the cover.
04:14 Again, that was a car that the brothers built not in a way that would have happened on the West Coast.
04:19 The owner of the car found a '32 Ford, a three-window coupe, and it was rust from the waist down like everything else was back there.
04:27 The bottom of his door was all rust. The framework was rusty.
04:32 So we thought, "If you've got to go through all the trouble of making a new bottom for the door, why don't you just do something crazy underneath the door and add some more looks to the car?"
04:46 They built these huge strikes and vents on the side of the car that are now infamous.
04:52 But they did it to basically hide the rust and get rid of all the junk on the car that they couldn't use.
04:58 That wouldn't have happened here.
05:00 So the brothers changed the direction of hot rodding and custom cars to some extent.
05:05 Yes, rust sometimes did influence us.
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05:21 A car like Vision 33, you can spend a million and a half or more building a car like that.
05:27 I just wanted a real neat little rod.
05:30 Pretty soon we went a little farther and ran into Chip Booth. I was telling him I'm going to build a little '33.
05:38 So here's old Chip. He starts doing a sketch right away.
05:42 I said, "I want to make this like the little Deuce coupe, but just mildly though."
05:47 He did the original sketch for me.
05:50 It was really neat, but it was much farther than I wanted to go.
05:54 I thought I could just build it, taming it down, but between the coaching I'd get here and there, it ended up what you see today.
06:03 When Mike showed up for the photo shoot here at the studio, we took a good lap around it to highlight some of the things that he loved about that car.
06:10 The details on the Vision 33 are too numerous to list.
06:14 There's not a piece of metal or a panel on that car that hasn't been changed or altered.
06:19 The skid plate underneath the entire engine compartment was carved from a solid piece of billet aluminum.
06:25 It's a huge piece of jewelry underneath the car.
06:28 There's a floating center console and touch screens that are there to work the same way your iPhone or your Droid does with the heat of your fingertips.
06:37 I always mention it's the A-Brothers car. It'll have our crest on it.
06:42 Larry in spirit is with us today, and I know it's something he would have, if we were building it together, he would have went 100% with me on it.
06:53 I was advertising that this is it, the last one, but this was supposed to be just a simple little car.
07:02 You can see what we ended up with. It's hard to tell. You never know what's going to happen.
07:07 I'd like to say it's the last one, but I really can't say it could be the last one. Let's put it that way.
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