Beau Boeckmann is a man out of time. He personally looks, acts, and interacts with cars like this was 1968, not 2008. In a time where “custom car” means a prop from The Fast & Furious movies, Beau Boeckmann looks elsewhere for his inspiration. For Beau, it’s not a Custom Car, it’s a Kustom Kar, and that should tell you that wild is just a starting point, and not the end. It tells you that things are going to get more lunatic before they get anywhere near something Vin Diesel would drive.

“Cars must have SOUL!” Boeckmann exclaimed in recent phone interview with Wired. There was something in the inflection of his voice, something beyond the SoCal twang that was reminiscent. There were vague visualizations of crazy guys in tee shirts, with goatees, wearing top hats, pontificating like Ahab at the mast, before chugging a quart of Coke, picking up the Air-brush and getting back to that flame job. The vague visualization is of Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, a guy, even for Southern California, who seemed barely tethered to The Good Earth.

Wicked, bitchin’, mean and gnarly were all applied to the creations of “Big Daddy”, and even today, his creations make more modern forms of elocution like sick and off the hook seem understated. It is into this design arena, a place where Salvador Dali looks like Piet Mondrian, that Beau Boeckmann chooses to dwell.

Boeckmann looks to the likes of George Barris, most famous for designing the Batmobile, The Munster Koach and the truck seen on The Beverly Hillbillies, or Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, who’s most famous for designing, well, for being Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, as well as inventing Rat Fink, and more custom cars, sorry, Kustom Kars, than Harley Earl could shake a T-Square at.

Indeed, it is Boeckmann who did the re-hab on “Big Daddy’s” Orbitron. A show car from 1964 that that vanished soon after its debut, turned up a few months ago in Mexico in basket-case shape where it was serving as a makeshift dumpster in front of an adult bookshop, and then into the talented hands of one Mr. Beau Boeckmann, Esq. of Southern California. He completely restored the car at his shop atGalpin Auto Sports (G.A.S.) with input from Roth experts and employees that were part of the original build.

It couldn’t have wound up in better hands.

Boeckmann is a third gen Southern California kid. His dad went from salesman to owner of Galpin Ford, one of the company’s largest dealers in the world, and young Beau grew up in a world where, as he puts it, “Custom cars were normal.” No, not stripe decals slapped on the side of the latest grocery getter, think custom vans with fish tanks and stained glass windows, and enough shag carpet and Rayon/polyester blend fabrics to make Dirk Diggler feel right at home.

Beau’s first custom was a ‘52 Ford, and in 2000, he started doing custom cars to order out of the Galpin shop. Sure, he’s also known for doing the cars on MTV’s “Pimp My Ride”, but he looks at those as “fun” and “something to do” when not going down the road previously traveled by the likes of Messer’s Barris & Roth.

“Cars from the 1930s are IT! Totally my fave cars of all time ... “ he drifts of into silence on the other end of the phone line. “Packards! Oh baby, those were cars! Not that you’d mess with something like that, I’m talking the overall design. Just perfect!”

And who are we to argue.

Liking one particular car or another is, as always, a matter of personal taste. Indeed, some of Beau Boeckmann’s work, like the Scythe show car pictured here is extreme to say the least. What cars like this do is something more important and beyond themselves. They don’t point a way forward, they do not say, “In the future, ALL cars will look like this.” What Beau Boeckmann’s work, like the work of George Barris, and Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, say is, “Why not think of a car like THIS! What if we emphasized a car that’s free from its mechanical underpinnings? What if we were to make a car that was nothing BUT its mechanical underpinnings?”

What if ... what if ...