STARS AND THEIR CARS
The Raspberries' Rollswagen
 
By George Barris
 
The Raspberries wanted a car to give away.
 
"They'd had a couple of big records," George Barris reminisces, "and they, had been racking their brains to try to think of a way to thank their fans.
 
You can't just go out and shake two million hands, you know—at least, not if you plan, to ever make another record."
 
The plan they hit upon was to entice George to create a special car just for them, and then to offer it in a contest to some lucky fan. In this way they could make some small gesture of, appreciation to the people whose generosity and affection had made them stars.
 
In they came to Barris Kustom Industries, with the great idea uppermost in their minds, but without a specific plan for the car. George talked with them for an hour or so, drawing them out, learning more about them every minute, going to work "as a psychologist," as he puts it; phase one of a Barris custom car.
 
"They were really pleasant kids," George says, "very young, very full of energy, very bright and 'with-it.' Their music, it seemed to me, was very good indeed, so there had to be something about, the car which said both youth and quality.
 
"And yet I didn't feel that it should be something tremendously expensive; that seemed to me to lose the light-heartedness of what they were trying to do, to make winning the car too serious a business. Of course, it couldn't be cheap either, because it was essentially a 'thank you' to their fans."
 
Young…but with quality. Inexpensive…but classy enough to make it a worthwhile token of gratitude. All in one vehicle! And then in the middle of the night, in fact—George got his idea.
 
"Part Rolls Royce, part Volkswagen," he says, "the Raspberries Rollswagen. It was perfect; all I had to do was figure out how to do it."
 
He did it by molding the VW into Rolls shape on the hood, equipping it with a Rolls grille, and altering the rear end a little. Color completed the transformation. Raspberry (what else?) paint, a raspberry wet-look vinyl roof, a raspberry design on the door.
 
Inside, Mitchell fur in a raspberry shade and an ultra-deluxe luxury interior to finish things off. The car was such an unqualified success with the group that George wound up making three of them, "And that was only the beginning," he says. "They were all driving little cars at the time, Fords and Datsuns, and instead of trading then, in for big new ones, the way so many people do—the moment they become stars, the Raspberries decided to customize their old cars. So, you see, I'm still dealing with them, and I see them all the time!"
 
It is characteristic of George that he's as willing to take on a compact Ford or Datsun owned by someone who's on a limited budget as he is to take on a Cadillac Eldorado for someone who can spend all year and never notice the pinch.
 
And, oh, yes, the Raspberries Rollswagen that was given away. It went to a young girl living in a tiny town in Florida whose mother and father had told her not to bother entering the contest because she'd never won anything in her life. She entered in spite of all the parental pessimism, and on the day her car was handed over to her, the entire town—including the mayor—turned out to see. And her parents were there, too.

Tiger Beat Books / July 1973