get along with everybody. But you love everybody because of the cars. We’ve got every walk of life in the club. A lot of times back in the day it was ex-gang members. You can’t be an active gang member and be in the club, because you will bring too much drama to the club. The club has a lot of blue collar construction guys, mechanics, tattoo artists, car painters, there’s everything. We’ve even had police officers. We don’t put it on blast, but the cop needs to know he is going to be around a lot of guys drinking, maybe smoking some weed. That’s not what the club is about, but anybody that is half-way cool - that’s what’s going to be going down. The club’s been around 30 years now, so over 30 years a lot of people come and go. Right now it’s over 70 deep, a bunch of new and old guys, so you get a good combo of people. If you are lucky enough and get asked to come around a meeting or an event where Lifestyle is at, you won’t hear rap music, you won’t hear Vincente Fernandez coming out the car. You’ll most likely hear Jim Morrison, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, or Neil Young blasting out of these custom painted cars. The reason is the same members who started the club, are still active in the club. That was the music in the 70s, so it’s carried on in a lot of the cars we have. For example, the Pink Floyd car, which is candy pink, the LA Woman car with Jim Morrison murals all over it, and the Moonflower car. My ’62 is called Soul Kitchen. That’s one of the things that makes us different. When people think of East LA and low riders, they think of Hip Hop or Spanish music. They don’t think of Dark Side of the Moon blasting out of the Lincoln Continental.
Lifestyle Car Club is not a hopping car club, its not three wheel motion, its not about entering hop contests, it’s about how low can your car lay. How low can it slam? Another thing that makes us different and old school, when you’re driving down the street, and you get a flat tire, the first thing you do is unscrew your plaque and pull it down. Then you tend to your tire. The last thing we want to see is a broken down car with a plaque in the back. There’s only one chapter of Lifestyle, it’s located in Los Angeles. People have moved here just to be in the club. The reason we do that is to never confuse or water down the plaque. If you go to Texas, they have different tastes and ideas on how to build cars. You need to let them do that, that’s what makes everyone original and stand out. But if we have a club in Texas, and they let other people in, and we start beefing with our own club, then it all falls apart. That’s the biggest problem with most car clubs, their chapters don’t get along. They have different ideas of what it’s all about. To me it’s a way of life, that’s why the club is called Lifestyle – from arguing with your old lady, to paying the chrome bill before the phone bill; your woman could get jealous, because your Sancha – your woman on the side, is your car. Your girl is saying can he put that much compassion and no holds barred, do whatever it takes attitude into me? So it causes tension. But you know what? When you’re at the car show, and your car is laying on the floor of the car show, the greatest feeling in the world is to have a Lifestyle plaque in the back window. When you look in that rearview mirror, and it says Lifestyle in gold letters, you know you made it. You know you’re in the history books of low riding.