I never thought that I would actually physically own a Porsche. Obviously, coming from the working-class Sheffield background that I did, that was a reasonable assumption to make. Okay, I wrote that letter to Porsche when I was ten, but fast-forward into my late teens and early twenties and owning a Porsche was looking increasingly unlikely. Yet here I am, writing a book about my life principally because I am now classed by some people as one of the world’s most high-profile Porsche collectors and modifiers. Funny old world, eh?
So let’s talk about the story of how I became a Porsche guy. First, we need to backtrack a little. Back in 1988, when I was hanging out in Hollywood with all my musician mates and enjoying my rock ’n’ roll phase, I didn’t have a car; I didn’t even have a driving licence. This was because as a teenager in the UK, my dad wouldn’t let me drive his company car, so I actually never learnt to drive back then. I had tried, to be fair. My grandad Joe had a Renault 5 with the stick shift on the steering wheel, and in those days you could go to these old aerodromes on a Sunday and for a couple of quid you could go drive around trying to learn. When I hit seventeen, I took a few driving lessons on the road, but when I took my UK driver’s test I actually failed! So from then on I went everywhere on the bus. It was no big deal to be honest; where we lived in Sheffield there was a bus stop just a hundred yards or so from the front door, so I went everywhere on the bus or I walked.
Even when I got to Los Angeles, I didn’t initially feel that restricted, despite the fact that LA is really a city where everyone drives everywhere. However, after always having to catch lifts or use the buses in Hollywood, I started to get frustrated. I didn’t really have the freedom to do what I wanted to do when I wanted to do it. So I took a driving test at the Santa Monica DMV, and luckily this time I passed. Straight away, I bought a cheap car. No, not a 911, not yet …
Remember my mate Johnny who was in the band and let me stay in his spare room? Well, his stepdad worked at Honda of Hollywood, and one day he said this car had come in on trade, so I went down there to take a look. That particular car was no good, but I ended up buying this 1977 Toyota Corolla 2TC instead. It was white, black cloth interior, four speed, not exactly a mechanical marvel, but I thought it was kind of a cool car for two hundred bucks.
I sort of taught myself how to use a left-hooker by driving that car around for a good few months. Back then I was carefree, I went with the flow. Like I say, that Toyota might not have been a rare Porsche, but I tell you what, that car represented freedom to me. All of a sudden, I wasn’t waiting for someone to pick me up or having to leave somewhere early because my lift was going home. I loved that Corolla and have very fond memories of it. In fact, the Toyota connection still plays with my mind sometimes, because I have vague notions of one day doing an outlaw Corolla.
Eventually, I sold the Toyota for $200, so it had given me free motoring all that time. By then, I had set my sights a little higher, so I paid $6,000 for a Saab Turbo with the SPG package. Venetian Paradise was making good money at that point, and both Linda and I were working hard, so I was happy to spend that much more. We had a work van and this nice Saab, which was a quirky car. Venice was full of Europeans, so you did tend to see a lot of Volvos and Saabs around, which was kinda cool.
By 1992, the business was really booming. I wasn’t going out clubbing any more; it was pretty much a case of working fourteen-plus hours a day, often seven days a week. We were earning real good money. That’s when my eye was caught by a 1974 slant-nosed, wide-bodied Porsche 911. I had seen Porsches around Venice; in fact, they were kind of common. As you’ve seen from the clothing story, Venice is a cultural melting pot, so it was full of people leading alternative lifestyles, lots of creative types, plus transient folk and tourists coming through. There were certainly wealthy people in Venice and quite a few of them owned Porsches.
Now, we need a little historical context here. Buying a car back then was a very different experience to buying one in the modern internet era. Back then it was all about Sports Car Trader and The Recycler, print magazines and swap meets. I often went to the Pomona Swap Meet, which is the biggest such event for cars in the area. I loved Pomona and still do. It’s everything from VW parts to Chevy parts, probably a thousand acres, maybe a thousand cars. It’s not just a ‘For Sale’ and swap meet, it’s a show-and-shine too, so there are all these owners’ clubs displaying their pride and joys. It’s just a great place for car people to meet up.
That’s where I saw this red slant-nose 911. I wasn’t necessarily looking for a slant-nose, but it was seventy-five hundred bucks, and I just kind of bought it there on the spot. That was it. That in itself felt great. I was twenty-five. What a moment!
That to me was literally a dream come true, right there. I’ve spoken about how the clothing had given me that sense of accomplishment, a chance to be creative and work hard to achieve something; well, the Porsche represented a real personal sense of accomplishment, because I genuinely never thought I’d get to own one. This was fifteen years after I fell in love with that Martini Turbo at Earls Court, so to own one in my mid twenties was like, Wow, I’ve arrived.
I couldn’t afford a Turbo, because back then they were probably twenty-five-grand cars. A slant-nose is a car that you either love or hate; they really polarize people. Personally, I love them. I think it’s kind of this Miami Vice throwback vibe from the eighties.
For a while the slant-nose was a very popular look, so a slant-nose wide-bodied conversion of stock 911s was quite a common idea. I’ve read stories from guys that used to do restorations who had customers bring in a brand-new car that they had just bought and have them put flares on it and slant-nosed front fenders straight away; that was a real big trend during that era. There were the European after-market tuners doing work, such as Gemballa, RUF, DP, Kremer, and for a time it seemed like everyone was doing fibreglass conversions. That is one element of the brand that is so great; unlike other marques, Porsche is ultimately customizable, but we will come back to that idea later. If I recall correctly, DP and Kremer beat Porsche to their own punch and issued a version of that fantastic race car as a street 911. The Porsche Special Wishes programme of customer-ordered modifications didn’t really debut the factory slant-nose option until some time later. So the slant-nose was very much of its time.
I just wanted a Turbo-looking slant-nose, and this car was seventy-five hundred dollars. Porsche 911s were affordable back then (I have owned over fifty and, truth be told, only a handful have cost more than twenty-five grand. So I wasn’t spending big money. A lot of the cars have been below ten grand and in the mid-teens). The slant-nose car started out as a ’74 base 911, then someone had put the Turbo flares on there. So the car had the look, it was wide-bodied, it was Guards red, black interior with these flared arches. Therefore the car wasn’t stock to begin with, but I got to customizing and doing a build straight away. It wasn’t like I was messing with a matching-numbers car, one with original engine and transmission and so on, something with huge historical provenance. The car was already modified. It still had the original 2-7 motor in it, so it was kind of a little bit … I’m not going to say ‘all show and no go’, but that 2-7 motor is not the most potent power plant, in my opinion. In fact, I think my Saab Turbo might have been as quick, dare I say maybe even quicker.
There was a lovely guy in Venice called John ‘Otto’ Williamson who was a Porsche expert but is sadly no longer with us. He had an independent Porsche dealership around the corner from Gold’s Gym (made famous by Schwarzenegger in the seventies and eighties), and he did the work for me (the best part of ten years later it was Otto who would get me into the Porsche Owners Club, more of which later). This was also one of my first experiences of the world of ‘Porsche people’, something that I will come back to over the course of my story.
I didn’t have to put a three-litre engine in, of course, but to me the 2-7 just didn’t seem fast enough. I’m like, Fuck, this car looks fast but it’s not fast, so literally within a month I’m over to Otto’s spending a few grand putting a three-litre SC motor in it. The day the new motor was finished, I do remember driving that car up to San Francisco. The three-litre is just more torque-y than a 2-7, you know. It’s not tons of difference, but that was what I could afford. I think it was a four-grand motor swap/install. The car I bought was obviously on a budget, the build was on a budget. I didn’t upgrade the suspension or motor, but at the time I was learning and I was in heaven – I had my own Porsche! I also pulled the carpet out and tried some velvet door panels, put on some chrome rims, just trying to customize it, add my own personality. These were pretty stock customizations that everyone was doing, but I immediately enjoyed adding my own touches, just as I had done with the clothing, the jeans, the hats – and would then do with property and much later the Porsche collection. I have always wanted to add my own individuality to anything that I am creatively involved with. I am fiercely passionate about that way of life, being creative with your own ideas in whatever area you want to work in, and that seems to be something that has struck a chord with people.
I kept that car all the way up until 1999, and I was so proud of it. I must admit I did do some spirited driving in that slant-nose. At one point, I got a letter from the DMV saying that, ‘Driving was a privilege not a guarantee.’ By the time I sold that car, I owned other Porsches, but that first one will always hold very special memories for me.
I’d started off down what I would later call ‘the Porsche slippery slope’ …
At this point, I’m still with Linda, and by then we’d rented a house in Culver City, a cool old 1920s house, so the Porsche was parked in the garage and I was mostly just driving it on the weekends. Still super-focused and motivated with the business, still working very long hours, still enjoying being creative. Venetian Paradise was doing well, but there were an increasing number of challenges. For one, we were no longer able to find enough Levi’s jeans for just fifty cents to a coupla bucks, because the wholesale numbers were so high that we needed volume. Once you start struggling to get your source product, that makes life much harder. Then people started copying us. Where we’d be selling them for $25, these people could get them made in China and sell them in the US for $8. Other people started making cheap knock-off versions of our hats – far inferior but much cheaper, and that diluted the market still more. Then the subculture that had adopted our products so quickly and so widely started to change, as street culture always does. Rave started to die off and grunge was taking over, with a whole different look and feel.
This all meant that some of the key elements of why we had initially succeeded started to alter in ways that we couldn’t control or even necessarily respond to. We noticed at the trade shows that people would stop coming to visit our booth, because sales had dwindled or you could buy the knock-off version of the cheap hats at a stand elsewhere. So what we needed was a new direction. A rebrand.
We were aware of these changes, so we started moving away a little bit from the patchwork styles and began to produce more of what is known as ‘cut and sew’; in other words, making our own clothes. There was still a stylistic thread running through the range, so we had the Black Crowes/Jimi Hendrix/Doctor & the Medics look going on, but now we were creating more original clothing. To a degree, the hats were taking existing ideas as an influence and making them into something different; now we were creating these custom-made clothes from scratch. This was much more intense and creatively demanding, and also the process was far more laborious, but at the same time the end product was being sold for a higher price.
We started to have some success again. A few big-time rappers began wearing our clothes, such as De La Soul, Flavor Flav and Digital Underground. These musicians seemed to like what we were creating. Okay, we weren’t musicians ourselves, but they seemed to like our style. Quite a few of these bands and rappers would come to the house in Venice and we’d make custom stuff just for them.
The rebrand went further than just creating more cut-and-sew items. We had been thinking for a while that ‘Venetian Paradise’ as a brand label was dated, that the business had moved on geographically and also stylistically, and so we decided that the name should change too. One afternoon, a few musicians were round at the house looking at the one-off pieces we were making and one of them said, ‘Wow, this is some serious shit!’
That was another light-bulb moment. That’s when Serious Clothing was christened.
One of the benefits of all those years of hard work was that we had already established an extensive network of stores and wholesalers that we could approach with the new line. Admittedly, the theme-park orders dropped off because the new clothing was not so much their style, but we replaced that with some pretty big alternatives. For example, we started wholesaling to a chain called Hot Topic, which at that point only had five stores, but in time it would grow to have over five hundred. They were buying our hats already, but now they started buying our clothing, too. So there was a new lease of life injected into the company, and a whole new chapter began.
By 1994, Serious had been going for a year, it was a full-on wholesale operation and we had half a dozen or so employees, including an office bookkeeper and a production guy. We’d moved out of the previous premises and into 760 Gladys in Downtown LA, a 5,000-square-foot warehouse that we rented. This space was where Serious really, really took off and grew pretty big. Plus, it was a cool old building, a converted former church. Once we’d moved Downtown, we became a lot more efficient; we weren’t wasting time commuting, people were picking up orders and dropping off supplies, and that helped the business really grow. The Downtown move enabled us to be more productive, which in turn enabled us to be more profitable and spend more time creating stuff, as opposed to wasting time driving around.
I really enjoyed having this renewed success, along with a little bit of notoriety and money in my pocket. I’d got my own apartment (or an apartment in mine and Linda’s names), I was paying tax, I’d got a bank account. All those things that I never had in England. Only a few years after I had been scrapping around for loose change in Hollywood, we were wholesaling about half a million bucks a year.
On a personal level, Linda and I had married, but by 1993 we had drifted apart, ultimately leading us to split up and eventually get divorced. I moved out of the apartment we’d previously shared. We had worked really well together but, like I said, over time we sort of drifted apart and ultimately we went our separate ways. Over the next year or so, I basically bought Linda out of the company.
By this point, Serious Clothing had really taken off. That was also the year that I met the love of my life, my beautiful wife Karen, whom I liked to call my lil’ Georgia Peach. Let me tell you about how I was lucky enough to meet her. I recall first meeting Karen at the New York boutique show. She came into the booth, but we only had a short conversation. She tells the story where I didn’t really give her much attention because I was too busy selling a bunch of clothes to some dude from Miami. But let me tell you, she had certainly caught my eye. How could she not?
Karen was living in Atlanta at the time, she had her own little clothing company called Hooch that was doing well and she was working for an independent designer, too. Hooch is southern slang for whiskey – you know, moonshine. The line was women’s fifties glamour, Marilyn Monroe-type cut-and-sew stuff, with a little bit of a punk rock edge, very cool. Karen was super-sexy. She kind of had a little fifties vibe going on, blonde hair, Monroe-esque, just super-hot, super-sexy. She had a little bull ring through her nose and then later she had her eyebrow pierced. The Atlanta scene was different to LA, so she was very flamboyant, part pin-up girl, part rock ’n’ roll, part Marilyn Monroe, this amazing southern fusion, this mish-mash of styles. Wow.
By then, I’d been doing trade shows for three years or so and I was a well-known face, established in those circles. The goal at these shows was always to do a killer line, launch it at the trade show, ship it and then sell a new updated version. Just keep rolling, more fuel for the fire. It was a lot of graft, but I used to really enjoy some of those trade shows. Sure, they were hard work, but you met some great people. Everyone was sort of in the alternative arena, they were all similarly aged, mid twenties, successful, making creative stuff, doing pretty well. The buyers for the retail stores were also of a similar age, so of course it was business during the day and then partying at night-time, usually in either New York or Vegas.
So I’d met Karen in New York, then a few months later we did a trade show in Miami called the International Jeanswear Show, literally a couple of weeks after Kurt Cobain died in the April. That was where we started flirting at a magazine party at some hotel pool. I do remember there was a photo of her and me together at this party in Miami. I think Karen was wearing a little red Marilyn Monroe-style halter dress and she just looked super-hot. I think I told her that I liked her, but we still didn’t hook up on that trip. Karen was in a marriage that was falling apart, we were similar ages, I was twenty-seven, Karen was twenty-nine, and she was kind of like the ‘It’ girl, even though she was relatively new on the scene. A while later, there was another trade show in New York, and that’s when Karen and I finally hooked up. We went out clubbing together, just the two of us, and we had the most amazing time.
Not long after that, Karen moved from Atlanta to LA with her friends Liz and Chris. These glamour girls ended up renting a twenty-five-foot U-Haul trailer, and Karen drove that to LA with all their belongings. Let me tell you, they attracted a lot of attention from all the guys in LA! They were like Charlie’s Angels; these girls had sort of come from nowhere, we called them the Atlanta Pussy Posse, and everybody wanted to know them. Absolutely everybody was hitting on them. For some reason, I was lucky enough that Karen wanted to be with me.
Karen was a lot more extrovert than I was, but we completely clicked. She started off staying with the parents of her friend Liz’s boyfriend in Costa Mesa, and soon after relocating she phoned me at the Serious office because I didn’t have a cell phone back then. I guess I was a little … not aloof on the phone but not quite as chatty as she had expected, and she tells the story that she came off that call and was like, Well, I guess I misjudged that situation …
What she didn’t know was that I didn’t want to talk in the office in front of people, so as soon as she put the phone down I pretty much raced out of the building and called her straight back from a payphone around the corner. We arranged to meet that Sunday at this local bar called the Dresden in Los Feliz, at two o’clock. I showed up right on time, which I think impressed her (Karen always liked the fact I was very thorough and prompt with arrangements; she was always really kind about that).
Now, I told you Karen had the most amazing style, right? Well, you’ll love what she was driving at the time – an absolutely huge four-door Cadillac from the sixties, which was pretty spunky. Remember, this woman was ninety-five pounds, five foot tall, this petite bombshell riding around in this absolutely massive boat of a Cadillac. Of course, she looked fantastic in it. She showed up in a short miniskirt with some biker boots on and a little T-shirt that said ‘Star Fucker’. I went there in my Saab, because even though I had the Porsche at that point, I didn’t want to appear like I was showing off; I was trying to be low key. I was wearing black swirl velvet pants with pointy shoes, and I think I had a cowboy shirt on or something similar.
For some reason, the bar was closed, so we parked the Cadillac up and I drove her around doing my infamous LA sightseeing tour. I love to show people around LA. I’ve always thought I would be a good tour guide, actually! I love showing people the theatres, talking about the glory days of Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks Jr, United Artists, all those guys in these elaborate theatres Downtown. Then you can drive to see the Hollywood sign, the Griffith Observatory, all that tourist stuff. That night, Karen really enjoyed the full tour and then we ended up at a bar in West Hollywood that had some sort of happy hour on a Sunday night. We met a few friends and were together all the way through to ten o’clock before Karen had to drive back to Costa Mesa. Essentially, after that first date, that was it – we were inseparable.
During those first six months of Karen living with her friend in Costa Mesa, I think she only spent six nights there. She was pretty much spending all her time with me Downtown but still commuting back to Costa Mesa. I was just completely bowled over by her.
She actually moved in with me pretty quickly, around early 1995. We were a similar age and shared similar back-stories, and we were now on the same path, sharing the same mindset. Pretty soon we were finishing each other’s sentences. I will come back to Karen many, many times … but for now, let me just say that we were a match made in heaven.