the Documentary

Story Brian Scotto

Jesus had Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and thank his pops, the hi-rise movement had Lance Ponting and Daniel Perez, co-founders of East Coast Ryders, to document the scene from its conception. For over five years, their Street Life DVD series has mixed car culture straight from the Dirty with a music video format courtesy of Miami rap group Piccalo. The product grew as fast as the content; now, it’s so hot, bootleggers are duping more ECR DVDs than new Tom Cruise flicks. So RIDES had to break bread with Lance and find out how and why they have followed this trend from the underground, plus provide a quick higher-learning history and predict its life in the mainstream. Now read up, and peep the pics, too…

RIDES: Okay, we’ve seen a gang of DVDs, but ECR goes beyond just car show footage, you guys actually capture these cars wildin’ out. What up with that?

LANCE: Yeah, these guys take the cars that they’ve worked on so hard and drive ‘em over medians and up onto the sidewalks. They’ll take it out on the grass and start doing doughnuts with rocks flyin’ all up at the candy paint. And once one car is doin’ it, three more join in.
You gotta respect heads willing to beat on their showcars, but does it ever get dangerous for you?
The most dangerous times are when we’re out filming at the MLK Parade or something like that. You aren’t only looking out for cars but there are dirt bikes and Banshees [quads] just whizzin’ by [on the sidewalk].

Hey, it makes for great footage, and isn’t that just showing the culture?
We capture people in their raw form and let everybody else make the decision of what it is and who it is. Somebody, one day, will put it into words and tell the story a little bit better or be able to describe it to the mainstream. We just keep it as the streets.

So how did ECR get its start?
Danny was a low-rider guy and I’m just a car guy—I love cars. We had been followin’ [the scene] and takin’ photos and putting them on the website. It wasn’t East Coast Ryders, yet, the site was still Digital Wheels.

So what prompted the move from pictures to the moving picture?
I had made a video for the Miami Zoo Crew doing [motorcycle] stunts. That was the first, and I was itchin’ to do something else. In 2001, we dropped our first East Coast Ryders. It was about Impalas and low-riders blended together, because that was the lifestyle of south Florida. Then, knee deep in production, all of a sudden people were putting 20s on cars—at the time 17s and 18s were the biggest. So we actually changed the format of the video halfway though.

20s have done more for car culture than turntables have for music. Okay, maybe that’s a stretch, but 20s changed the game.
When that 20 came out it jumped from 17s, and we just looked in amazement, like, “This will never be topped. This is history right here!” Why would they make a rim any bigger? Then overnight, 23s and 24s were coming out. We were lookin’ at fours sayin’, “How we going to get these on cars? This isn’t going to work.” Sure enough, people started cuttin’ and choppin’ and putting ‘em on cars. It took people 20-point turns to spin around and the cars were really cut up but they still looked awesome.

We are gonna go out on a limb here, and guess this is when the lifts started. Correct?
Yeah, everybody was about how low could you go, but once somebody lifted something up it was like, “Wow, this is something new.” It had never been done before. Everybody was lookin’ at each other like, “Why didn’t we ever think of this before?”

So, who gets to take credit for thinkin’ of it first?
The Blue’s Clues car from our first video. We went into the shop; they had his car up on the lift. The [mechanic] was weldin’ up the suspension and he told me “yeah, the car is gonna be that high.” I’m thinking “that’s crazy!” That car rolled out of there on those sixes. The weekend after, Karl Krantz’s Montecut came out on sixes. They were both high, and that was it. Everybody went nuts over seeing those cars high and literally, it was overnight that people stopped choppin’ and started lifting, and that was East Coast Ryders.

I’m pretty sure our boy Karl would claim to be first, but now that we’re done with the history lesson, what’s the future gonna bring us?
I think there are gonna be more hybrids. People are going to be experimenting with hydraulics, and airbags with lifts and big rims. They’re going to be integrating a lot of different techniques that are done to other types of cars to get up higher or change ride heights. And I’m sure as big as the companies make a rim…is as big as they’ll put on a car.

Yeah, and how about the future of ECR?
We gonna keep following this movement for as long as it goes. And now that everybody is on board, from the other states—even Cali is building big rim cars—to the national magazines such as yours, creating a lot of interest, I see it all growing in leaps and bounds in the next five years.
Word, we’ll see ya there, rolling 12-feet high on 36s.