The Fish Pack

In 1989, then-truck driver Dave "Fishman" Rivera made a delivery to a shop in Boston. What he saw captured his imagination and inspired him to take a new turn in his life. A year later, this self-taught installer had built his first system in his Toyota Corolla. He took First Place at IASCA and hasn't stopped building custom cars since. Last time we saw Fish, he had upgraded his daily driver, a Ford Expedition (CA&E May '05). It was a dream OE upgrade, something you wished that Ford could offer as a special options package. Also, it was something different from the man who first won fame (and his nickname) by incorporating a fish tank into a car. He took a step toward sleek elegance and that aesthetic continued into the vehicle he showed at the Kenwood CES booth this year-a spectacular '56 Bel-Air. We spoke to Fish about the build and his plans for the future. (Look for stories on the build of this Bel-Air in future issues of CA&E.)

CA&E: You've done something different with this Bel-Air. Your last vehicle that we featured, a Ford Expedition, seemed to be heading in this direction. How do you think you've evolved as an installer from your first builds 18 years ago to the present?
Dave Rivera: I've become more mature and know when to say it's enough. In the past, it was never enough. "I need to do more, I need to do more." Don't get me wrong; I still have the same passion and I still push the envelope to the very end. But today, I can say, "OK, you know what, that idea is just not worth it." Also my attention to detail has gone up a lot from my previous years. And also experience-when I build a car, I just close my eyes and start to think of everything that I've seen before and everything that I've done before and do something totally different. I really thought about that after finishing the Expedition. Everybody liked that classiness, the fact that it was a daily driver, that it wasn't all fiberglass-it's a car you can use. With this car I wanted to do something really classy. Most of these guys that do these old cars, they're restoring the cars. But the owner of the car [Horacio Lugo], after seeing my Expedition, he goes, "Fish, there's no rules. These are the keys to the car. Do whatever the hell you want to do with it."

CA&E: So you actually wanted to do a classic car for a change?
DR: Yes, we wanted to do an old car for the past 10 years. I almost did a couple but the owners of the cars had the wrong mentality. They wanted to put a strain on me and limit me on my creativity. And you can't do that to me. In other words, I don't care how much money you've got-if I cannot express what I have inside of me in a car, I'll say no. I'd rather live on my savings than do something in a car that is not what I want to do.

CA&E: How does your design process work? Do you envision something for the entire car or do you start with one piece, such as in the dash, and then build from there?
DR: I go one thing at a time. I can never design a whole car. Some people want to sketch what the car's going to look like-I can't do that. I only think of something and the idea evolves to the next idea. There's only one time I tried to visualize the whole project and I tried to sketch it-it looked nothing like the sketch. The first thing I designed was the dashboard and in the middle of the dashboard was the TV. Everything else in the car evolved from that idea.