’04 ’til infinity
How RIDES got to be all Donked Out.
In early ’04, Ying Yang Twin Kaine showed up to an empty parking lot in the ATL for his RIDES photo shoot. While many rappers floss their advance checks in whips, Kaine stunted in a Miami Dolphin-blue ’84 Box Caprice sitting on 23-inchers. He had paid less than $7500 for his hooptie, and was proud of it. CDs were scattered throughout the car, what looked like potato chips covered the floor and wires snaked out from under the dash. Yes, it had a flip-out LCD screen, a full re-trim and a Momo wood-grain wheel that would bring any OG back to ’87. Yet, it wasn’t a Bent, a Lambo or any other six-figure baller whip, it was just a box…and we loved it.
Later that summer, Editor-in-Chief Datwon Thomas—in Miami for MTV’s Video Music Awards—found himself jaw-dropped on Collins Avenue, which he called the “concrete catwalk for neon-
colored, skyscraping, slow-creeping cars the likes of which [he’d] never seen before.” Okay, we had all seen boxes and bubbles scrubbing on 22s, but they always looked like sleds slapped together—far from the show-caliber cars rolling high in South Beach.
It would be nice to say the rest was history, but the trick now was to gather all these cars for a shoot, and then sit and wait for the perfect time to strike the reader with some next-level ammo. Understand, like dropping a platinum album, you don’t do it without proper set-up. It was apparent that this trend could be the next thing. A year later, the timing felt right. Everyone at the office, including our ad guy David Zuckerberg, aka “Goober,” was bubbling over with the idea of boasting Donks, Boxes and Bubbles in our publication. Luckily, the trend was even closer to boiling over. After watching an East Coast Ryders Street Life DVD, we sought out co-owner Lance Ponting to help us arrange a shoot in Miami.
The minute the UPS package arrived containing the photos, we knew we had a problem—the cars were even hotter than expected, and Ken Reid’s photography was brilliant. Contributing writer Maurice Bobb then delivered the copious copy, and we had a cover feature on our hands. But WAIT! RIDES is a celebrity car mag, right? Well, in the magazine business, you put the hottest thing you got on the cover, so our boy TV/radio host, Funkmaster Flex shared a split cover with a Box Chevy that stacked a few more feet than him. We dropped the collectors’ cover in the South, and within a few weeks of it hitting the stands our inboxes were full of Donk, Box and Bubble love. We came back two issues later with some more heat from Miami. We featured Karl Krantz’s Montecut, a seven-foot Monte Carlo-Cutlass hybrid rolling on 28s that raised the bar on how to build a hi-riser. That same ride shocked and awed millions inside the RIDES booth at ’05 SEMA. It was on, so we packed our bags for a 17-day road trip through the Dirty South’s hi-riser reppin’ regions, and this magazine you hold in your hands was born.
Now the rest, will one day be history…
