SOCAL CULTURE: LIFE IN THE FAST LANE.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Writer

In the '60s and '70s, everybody in Southern California was, like the popular Who song said, goin' mobile.

Until, that is, they weren't. But even increased traffic congestion and the gas shortages of the early '70s proved only temporary roadblocks to the region's steady-rolling culture.

``In those 20 years, we got a dose of reality,'' notes Leslie Kendall, curatorial manager of L.A.'s Petersen Automotive Museum. ``In 1960, confidence was high, America could do anything. The war had been won 15 short years earlier. If you weren't an automobile dealer on the American market, you didn't exist. This is where all the money - and all the optimism - was.''

Then ``things started to happen: John Kennedy's assassination, the flower children movement, the movement toward conservation of natural resources. The public's confidence took a couple of hits . . . Convertibles went away; that free-spirited, extroverted, open-air feeling was no longer appropriate to the time. But those things started making a comeback after the '70s recession and Nixon's resignation, when people started to feel like things might be getting a little bit better.''

The Los Angeles area as we know it was designed with the car in mind, so it's little wonder that, by the time it more or less settled into its present form in the early '60s, residents' lives were inextricably intertwined with their vehicles.

The vast, postwar housing subdivisions that covered the San Fernando Valley had all been laid out with a motorized populace in mind. The very horizontal nature of the growing megalopolis (as opposed to previous cities that had built up rather than out) and the intricate freeway network that L.A. pioneered and the rest of the country copied made driving a must.

Southern California had a history of flamboyant motoring - from the extravagant movie star limos of the '20s and '30s, through generations of outlandish convertibles, from the Hell's Angels and other motorcycle clubs that thrived in outlying desert communities to the explosion of hot rods and other custom cars that marked the late '40s and '50s.

But the '60s saw the emergence of trends that linked personal transportation and particular lifestyles like never before, and influenced other sectors of pop culture in the process.

The most resonant example of this was the surf woody. As the '60s dawned, California's fun-in-the-sun image was at its zenith, and wave-riding came to represent the most romantic aspect of it.

The Beach Boys and Jan and Dean created a whole rock 'n' roll subgenre about it (and, along with their drag racing songs, helped establish the connection between motoring and music that would expand exponentially over the next 20 years). Frankie, Annette and Gidget made movies about it. And they all drove around in woodys.

The vehicles themselves were actually used station wagons that Detroit had stopped producing a decade earlier. The real wood paneling built into their exteriors was difficult to maintain, which prompted many owners to trade them in for all-steel models.

But the mild Southern California climate was particularly kind to the delicate wagons. Their bigger-than-average cargo spaces were perfect for both hauling long boards and for sleeping in on extended surfing safaris. And since no one who could afford a good car wanted them, they could be had for as little as $75, within the price range of mostly young, cash-strapped surfers.

Indeed, the woody's intrinsic lack of value at the time also made it perfect for the hang-loose surfer lifestyle. When one broke down, it was no loss just to grab your board, abandon it on a coast highway and get another one. And of course, woodys were perfect for the bikini-clad dawn of the sexual revolution; not for nothing were the roomy vehicles nicknamed Daddy's Nightmares.

Automotive fever dreams more accurately describe the fantasy car movement initiated by Ed ``Big Daddy'' Roth's 1959 Outlaw. Originally built to promote Roth's California T-shirt business, the aqua blue, fiberglass-bodied buggy was the first of many molded-from-scratch dream machines that, though often impractical transportation, expressed the outlandish artistic spirit of '60s L.A.

Roth went on to insert his ideas into other areas of pop culture with car-related Rat Fink logos and Weird-Os plastic model kits, while designers such as George Barris drove the race for wackiest-looking motorcars onto film and television lots (``It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World,'' ``The Beverly Hillbillies,'' ``Batman''). Meanwhile, less mechanically inclined consumers took to personalizing strange-looking, mass produced cars like Volkswagen Bugs with decals and clip-on accessories.

Carefree California living reached both an apotheosis and a turning point with the late '60s counterculture era. The expanded sense of personal freedom and lifestyle choices was accompanied by an increasing sense of polarization and paranoia, and this was reflected in the emblematic vehicle of the time.

``When vans took hold, it was as if everybody wanted their own little isolation chamber on wheels,'' the Petersen Museum's Kendall notes. ``They wanted to protect themselves from the outside and nurture themselves.''

Not to mention blast music, get blitzed out of their skulls and give Daddy a whole new range of nightmares he never would have dreamed possible in the comparatively innocent surf woody era.

``And when you're indulging in those kinds of activities, you want to isolate yourself,'' Kendall adds with a laugh, noting that blacked-out windows and other environment control accessories grew in popularity during the same period.

World politics punctured this and other gas-powered pipe dreams (such as the power-obsessed muscle car movement) when fuel shortages hit in the early '70s. All of a sudden, guzzling vans and GTOs were out, small and high-mileage Japanese imports were in.

It was a move toward four-wheeled practicality uncharacteristic of the California mind set. Toyota felt our psychic pain, and opened the first corporate design facility in Southern California in 1973, to get local input on what drivers in the world's leading auto market liked. Honda, Nissan and Mazda soon followed, and by the next decade most American and European manufacturers also had design centers here.

The results of this included sunroofs, cup holders and more versatile cassette players instead of clunkier, less programmable eight-track sound systems - in short, what people who spent a lot of time driving in the warm climate of the world's entertainment capital would want.

These innovations quickly spread across the country, just as mass pop culture was becoming a more pervasive part of the American scene. What had been a distinctly regional car culture at the dawn of the '60s had evolved into something more generic by the '80s. But like its influence on other aspects of late 20th-century culture, L.A. attitude had a lot to do with how people everywhere related to their cars.

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2 Photos

Photo: (1) The car industry thought it had a winner with the '58 Edsel, but the unusual design proved to be one of automaking's biggest flops.

Evan Yee/Staff Photographer

(2) The Volkswagen's relatively low cost, fuel economy and cuteness made it the vehicle of choice for generations of Americans.