- You don't want respect.
You want appreciation.
Appreciation is respect.
Everybody has a mission.
Everybody has a talent.
Follow your talent.
Just go out there and just do it.
There's a will; there's a way.
But just go on and earn it.
Don't cheat it.
(soulful rhythm and blues)
When I grew up in the Montebello area,
there were lowriders and there were muscle cars.
The cool thing about lowriders and why they became
my favorites is because they're family-size cars
until you lower them.
Then you bring out all the dynamics of the body style.
They're sleek and they're low,
and they open up a certain way and they even
look more sexy.
So to me, that's what I liked about the lowriders
besides all the colors you could put on them.
The cars were lower then.
They just looked crazy.
They looked like UFOs just landed.
That's what it looked like to me,
and I really liked that look more than a Mach One.
I seen all these clubs,
and me and my brother,
we would just take model cars
and shoot flaked paint over 'em.
Find cotton from the medicines, you know,
and take that and stick them in the wheel wells
because that was the style back then.
And stick tires on there upside down next morning.
We would get up then flip the car over and
"Wow! Look how that looks!"
And that's those things,
lookin' at the model cars,
you could take any car,
lower it on the floor
and the design of the car,
it just looked evil.
It looks crazy.
So I loved 'em.
I have a 1968 Cadillac El Dorado.
This car is chopped about three inches,
has a slanted windshield, suicide doors.
It has a full glass roof on it.
I changed the frame.
Everything is custom.
The car's completely one off.
The interior is a Ferrari tanned leather,
which I designed after the 2016 Cadillac CTSV Coupe.
So the whole dash is done by the Engle Brothers.
We designed it, did the dash out of metal.
I also did the same thing when we dropped in an LSA
supercharged engine in it.
You could see there's 14-inch wire wheels on the car.
The car was painted candy red and some other mixture
of colors by Paul Stoll, who's from PPG.
I always wanted a red from back in the days
when they used to have all the poison lead materials,
so he had his own little concoction that he designed
inside the training center and he painted it for me.
I'm also well known in the lowrider industry
for two other cars.
One is a 79 Lincoln Continental and the last version,
which became a Lowrider of the Year.
It was called Las Vegas.
And this car was full custom.
It had a suicide door,
a door that folded down.
It was a crap table, as everybody knows.
It had vintage slot machines in the back.
Roulette table for a console.
21 table for a dash.
And it had all the murals and themes from all
the latest casinos that were in Vegas,
including a show girl on the front of the hood.
It was a one-of-a-kind car for its time.
The other well known car now dates me.
It's a 1971 Buick Riviera that I have.
And that one is called Dressed to Kill.
It was also themed out.
It was in candy tangerine like I did it
in a graveyard theme with some guy playing
with sunglasses, crying.
A ghost.
And the whole theme went in there,
all the way to the coffin seats were done in velvet leather.
You know, it won its fair share of awards, you know.
And that's still would be my all-time favorite
because you never forget where you first started.
When I grew up in the Montebello area,
there were Lowriders and there were muscle cars,
so I got my fair share of looking at lowriders, too.
I wanted to get a square-looking car
back in 73, 74 and it was an LTD.
Went down to a car lot,
took my dad with me and my brother,
but I couldn't get it.
My dad goes, "They want too much for it."
I go, "Well, how about if I get the Buick?"
And my dad turned around, and he goes,
"You want that one?"
I go, "Yeah."
So I knew if I went Buick,
he was ready to co-sign and I drove
right off of that thing,
and I'll never forget going down the street
through Whittier Boulevard taking home,
thinking I don't know if I fit in.
I had long hair.
That was the style then.
I was white complected,
so what is he doin' involved in this?
He doesn't belong in this.
And when people would see me in it,
I thought I was going to get dirty looks.
You get accepted.
You're one of us now.
It doesn't matter the color of your skin.
All that matters is the colors on the cars.
My dad is Irish and German.
German Irish.
He was from St. Louis, Missouri.
My mom was born in Los Angeles.
My mom worked at a malt shop by the old winery in LA,
and my dad took a train after the war.
Came out here.
Met my mom.
And within two weeks, they got married.
My dad was a truck driver.
He worked very hard.
I think third grade
he put us in Catholic elementary school,
St. Thomas Aquinas.
Becoming an altar boy,
and I really did honestly like it.
In fact, I think I was serving mass until I was about 18.
I just didn't want to let it go.
You know, going through Catholic school
and being an altar boy,
if you served a mass twice,
it was a sin,
so I'd run in the confessional
and do a confession and come out and do the mass again.
And when freshman year began,
we had a brother there that asked,
"Is anybody here, we know that there's a few of you guys
"who want to become a priest."
So I raised my hand.
Me and two other guys.
He goes, "Come on.
"Come with me."
So we went on the hallway,
and we're just talkin'.
He goes, "Across the street,
"there's a girls' high school, Sacred Heart.
"Goes it's full of girls.
"At the end of school or recess,
"they come walking by here,
"you should look at them and make sure
"you guys know what you're doing."
And that kind of helped along the way, too.
So you know, I thought about it,
and I just put to the side.
I saw girls and I changed my mind about certain things,
and then I just went on from there.
And then, you know, you're young and you're in love.
Gone were those priest days.
So I had a small family already in my senior year.
And you do the best thing.
Back then, back then it was the right thing to do.
You know, I went out there and I got a job.
Things don't always work out.
Responsibilities come first,
and I had the fork of the road.
I had to make a right hand turn.
I'm fortunate at that time.
I'm sure that that depressed my parents.
You know, that's not what they wanted.
That's not what my dad worked hard for.
He kept my mom at home to keep that house right.
The next thing you know,
through his business, he gets me a job
working at a restaurant supply store.
And then my mom,
"Mijo, you know.
"Your dad, he seen you today working, why buyin'?
"You know and that's not what he wanted out of you.
"He didn't want you to do what he does."
And I kind of let him down,
though I didn't know that.
I was making pretty good money,
and it was feeding my hunger to build the cars.
So I worked for Northrop a couple years,
and it was time for my dad to go, man.
And he just goes,"You know, I don't want to do this no more.
"I'm going to let it go to you and your brother."
I'll never forget the day he gave me the keys
to his truck, and he goes, "Here you go."
I took over that business all the way through
for 25 years.
I did everything he did,
and you know and he passed away.
And I know to this day that when he went,
his mission in life was to give us a better life,
and that life was not to follow in his footsteps.
I just lost my mother not too long ago,
but she lived almost to about 89.
There wasn't a day she didn't miss my dad.
And I used to always go back and,
"What did Pop think?
"What did Pop say?"
It kind of hurt me.
You know he wanted you to become somebody.
You were supposed to be the one.
You know, my dad,
if he seen me now then you know he's got to be proud
of where I'm finally at,
but he knew I had the cars.
I think he thought I was insane about cars.
That's all I cared about.
I think he understood the club
and how I owed them.
And how I would never leave them
because he liked those guys, too.
And he never bothered me about that.
But it's the things he never told me,
and I got to now,
you know, as you grow older now,
I realize a lot more how my dad
really was with me.
How he brought me up.
Why he's my hero.
Even in his last days,
all he just said, is you know,
Joe, just be good.
That meant.
That meant everything to me.
I'm going to lose it.
After graduating from high school and all of that,
you know you lose your friends.
So I had like four or five good friends left,
and I always had this one friend that I always
went to school with,
that I always looked up to.
It was Raul Gras.
And I'll always remember I made a phone call one time.
"Hey, what are you doin'?
"You still doing anything?
"I'm painting my car, Joe."
We were going to re-name the club.
It was New Life.
It was going to be called Lifestyle.
I got into it.
I joined.
I became president about a year and a half.
When Lifestyle started, it was a good car club.
I think we took over the number one spot,
and we held it for a long time.
We represented LA.
It was us against the world.
That was my mentality.
Out of the 43 years in Lifestyle,
I was probably the president for 35.
I turned into a dictator, a communist.
I've been called all kinds of names,
and that's who I was.
And that's how you had to do things
with Lifestyle car club.
I mean, I used to yell.
It was military.
But you know, it was always about quality
and setting the trend.
We had to be the first ones to do this and do that,
and then Lowrider Magazine approached me,
and they asked me to get into their Hall of Fame
for a leadership award.
It was a highlight in my life,
and as things went on down the line a little bit,
I was approached again and offered to become
editor of Lowrider Magazine.
Being the editor of Lowrider consists of many jobs.
I make the selection on the cars.
I try to mix up the colors, years, and makes.
I push for everybody that deserves their car club
or their car to be in the magazine and as years
have gone by, then I became also the tech editor.
I help a lot with the shows now.
With the entries, the judging, the move-in.
I take down the Vegas show.
I also attend the Autorama shows.
And as I go out, I get to meet these different clubs,
their families, different nationalities.
If you're in this thing,
like I've said,
it's all one color.
I want them to get involved.
I want to see them compete.
I want to see them strive.
And I want to help them get there.
And I want to make them believe
because I was there.
The things that I'm very grateful for
is all these people are all my friends.
People tell me to this day,
Joe, this is your retirement.
This is your dream.
That you've went to heaven.
You shouldn't even be paid,
and I have to agree.
You know, I have worked for a great company.
Okay, there's a stereotype on Lowrider.
I think that now that Lowrider has become
more commercialized,
people are getting a chance to see us on videos, movies.
You have to have a good job.
You have a lot to lose.
By having a car that you just spent five years
and 30-40,000 to build.
When you have something of value,
you have to take care of it.
People, I think, are starting to see that.
But to most of us,
we want to show-off those cars and say,
"Hey, man.
"This is what I built.
"This is my personality."
But you want to really enjoy them and get out there
because that's what the sport is all about.
So I'm into that.
When I'm going to go to the liquor store,
and I got get blood pressure pills at CVS,
I still like to drive those cars.
We're not different.
Our cars are different,
and that's a cool thing.
For a lot of us,
it's an art and it's a culture.
Once you get involved and you do earn it,
it's a way of life.
My name is Joe Ray.
I'm the Chief Editor of Lowrider Magazine,
and I'm a Lowrider Roll Model.
(mellow upbeat synth, strings, rhythmic drums)