22 | N OV E M B E R
2 – 9 | 2 0 1 2
W W W. S A N TA B A R B A R A S E N T I N E L .CO M The two-headed Mercury Cougar poses the ageold question: Are we coming or going?
by Jana Mackin
A journalist and a poet, Jana has lived everywhere from New Orleans and Butte, Montana to Saudi Arabia, where she taught English to children. Her articles have appeared in numerous publications, including The Washington Post and San Francisco Examiner. She now lives in Goleta.
Flashback
A Two-Headed Car Brings Goleta Girl Back to UCSB in the 1970s
U
CSB was a pretty interesting place back in the early 1970s. There were all kinds of things going down politically, and student demonstrations, burning bras (banks too) and hippie intellectualism were basically par for the proverbial course. All of that was balanced by a generally laid back approach to most everything as well as some fairly wild beach parties. Beach parties where wine—even the occasional hallucinogenic compound—was consumed. (Not by me, of course.) I’ve even heard that Jim Morrison wrote The Crystal Ship while gazing out at an oil platform during one of those parties at Sands Beach in the late 1960s but I, um, can’t confirm it. Let me put it this way: The whole scene was pretty far out, man. It was a great time to be a part of the UCSB/Goleta community for sure. And I’m glad to be back in Goleta now, some 36(+) years later. Last week, I was walking down South Fairview Avenue near Daley Street when I
K athleen C ooper f
F i n e Pa p e r s
Wedding Stationery •
Personal Writing Papers Calling Cards •
Letterpress & Engraving
Holiday Cards Personal & Corporate
e
La Arcada Courtyard 1114 State Street • 17 Santa Barbara 805 • 886 • 5482
KathleenCooperFinePapers.com
suddenly heard “Oh Wow! Oh Wow!” My eyes drifted over to Nick George, a 20-yearold SBCC student and Goleta resident. He had stopped in his tracks in front of McLean’s Auto Body & Paint Shop and was staring up at something, mouth gaping. “That is crazy,” said George emphatically, “blows my mind.” It blew my mind just to hear that kind of banter—it almost brought me back to my beloved UCSB of years past. I smiled and followed his gaze up to the object of his fascination. And, just for a second, I thought I might actually be having a flashback to one of the aforementioned wild beach parties. (Whoa.)
What Comes and Goes at the Same Time? I couldn’t quite tell what I was looking at for a moment, but then it was clear: A 30-foot, two-headed car sitting on steel columns high above the yard of McClean’s. It had no tail end, just two front ends, fused together in the middle, heading in opposite directions. Trippy. This impossible objet d’art exudes a custom car zeitgeist harkening back to a time when design legends Sam Foose, Sr. and Alain Clenet created fantastic automotive bestiaries from within their Goleta digs— typically old aircraft hangers and garages. Out of the heady ethers of such design geniuses, Mike McLean sculpted his twoheaded car, creating a coming-and-going vehicle out of the business ends of a couple of Mercury Cougar XR-7s. The sculpture is a hybrid-cross between custom vehicle and art car; a visual pun that is street legal and can be driven around town, much to the delight of happy—and sometimes confused— onlookers. Looming high over the yard, the Cougar has Sphinx-like qualities, and thus poses a potentially troubling riddle to the (hippie) intellectuals amongst us. “What comes and goes at the same time?”
McClean’s A Local Landmark McLean’s Auto Body & Paint Shop has been part of the local automotive scene since Mike set up shop in 1970 (just after the Bank of America building burned to the ground in Isla Vista). The two-headed car is not only the stuff of local car lore but a bona fide pre-GPS landmark as well. McLean, a St. Louis car boy who was
roadster some referred to as the “American Rolls Royce”—reportedly had a sticker price of $50,000.) “We were friends,” said Clenet, 68, in a telephone interview from his Santa Ynez residence. “He never told me what he was going to do, then I go out and I see the thing and it cracked me up. I couldn’t believe it, somebody with that sense of humor and talent.”
Not Just an Art Car Mike McClean, local artist, living legend, in his shop on South Fairview.
driving almost before he could walk, bought his first car at 13-years-old for $50. He learned his trade by doing, both on the track and in the garage. In 1967 and 1968, he raced super-stock at Alton Dragstrip in Illinois. Then he moved to Glendale, and later to Goleta, where he worked at Foose’s Project Design custom car shop located at the site of what is now the Elephant Bar Restaurant. “You won’t see too many cars like that,” said McLean, now 67, who does much beside cars. For example, he skydives and is licensed to fly single and multi-engine aircraft as well as rotocraft. He also owns a couple 1999 Plymouth Prowlers, a 1967 Camaro, and a 1979 Ford truck. About 11 years ago, McLean survived a horrific auto and semi-tractor trailer accident on Patterson Avenue in front of Jordano’s Inc., where McLean swerved to miss a car that pulled out in front of him. Swerving caused him to hit an 18-wheeler nearly head-on. The accident should have left him “brain dead, blind, wouldn’t know how to talk, wouldn’t know anybody.” McLean said he was in a coma for nine months, recovering a year and a half after the accident.
Building the Beast “When I was a kid I saw a ‘49 Ford made the same way on top of a body shop,’’ he said. “I just saw the two-headed car and I said, ‘I’m going to build that someday.’” Someday arrived around the same time as the genesis of Generation Y, when McLean asked his friend and neighbor, Alain Clenet, founder of Clenet Coachworks, Inc., for a couple 1979 Mercury Cougar bodies. Clenet was fabricating his cars around Mercury Cougar chassis out of an aircraft hangar across the street from McLean, so he didn’t need the bodies. (At the time, the Clenet Series 1––a neo-classic
“It’s an art car,” said Philo Northrup, ArtCar artist and ArtCar Fest Co-Founder, in (yet another) telephone interview from his Reno residence. “The definition of an art car is that it is permanently modified by an artist in an artistic fashion and is street legal.” However, Northrup also views this sculpture as a hybrid crossover and the missing link between the Custom and Art Car movements. The two-headed cougar welds the car customizer’s design, body, paint, craft and mechanical skills with the art car artist’s idiosyncratic and often whimsical aesthetic. The car’s coming-andgoing statement is amplified by the fact the vehicle is as much a custom car artifact as a harbinger of the Art Car movement that began around 1979. Further, the car echoes the mid 1960s Finish Fetish fine art moment in Los Angeles that drew in part from custom cars’ and hot rods’ cool, smooth paints and finishes, said Northrup. And the sculpture’s location in the Goleta-Santa Barbara area is important as an intersection between the movements in Southern and Northern California car culture. In other words, despite geographical and cultural differences, the car is still a common denominator. “Cars are recognizable to everyone as a symbol,” said Northrup. “Cars are our common vocabulary.” And what are we as a culture but the accretion of symbols and signs that help guide us on the roads of experience? What’s more fitting than a two-headed car, an archetypal utterance of our common vocabulary, to challenge us to face the most pressing question of post-modern existence? Are we coming? Or are we going? “It doesn’t really matter,” said Clenet, “it’s sculpture. [McLean] drove the machine, then he put it on the pedestal. It is a vestige of a past civilization.” With that, I found myself chatting comfortably with old friends back on the beach in 1974 at UCSB. Thanks guys… great car.