Since 2008, I've been working as a wise and fair judge for the 24 Hours of Lemons race series, traveling to 162 races around the country. That's 14 years of weekends inspecting cars, punishing black-flagged miscreants and—after the checkered flag—eating potluck meals at the big racer party that consumes the paddock on Saturday night. When I took a break from judging to do some racing, I knew what my team would need to make our garage space the hot party spot on Saturday night: a sturdy boombox built from parts harvested from junkyard cars and decorated to match the theme of the team's race car. Here is the story of how I built the Jerry Brown Suede Denim Secret Police Boombox.
The JBSDSPB needed to be very loud, yet sturdy enough to withstand the rigors of life surrounded by flailing tools and distracted racers in helmets and fire suits. At the same time, it needed to be small enough to be attached to the roof of a race car during the inspections, and it had to be able to take its power from any of the commonly available sources of 12 volts DC that might be nearby.
Who is Jerry Brown, who are the Suede Denim Secret Police, and what is the significance of a blue 1974 Plymouth Satellite sedan? Here's my attempt to explain, after the official 24 Hours of Lemons race-recap video for the 2021 Arse Freeze-a-Palooza at Sears Point Sonoma Raceway proved a bit puzzling.
To cut to the chase, Jerry Brown was governor of California from 1975 through 1983 and again from 2011 through 2019 (with stints as mayor of Oakland and California Attorney General in between, not to mention numerous runs at the United States presidency). His first time as governor, he famously rejected the limousine and other perks prized by his predecessor, Ronald Reagan, and had the state issue him a fleet-spec Satellite sedan. Fearing some sort of horrifying hippie-fascist regime headed by Brown, Jello Biafra of the San Francisco punk band Dead Kennedys wrote the song "California Über Alles" in 1980. In that song, the enforcers of the Jerry Brown Hippie Dystopia were the members of the Suede Denim Secret Police, who come for your uncool niece and force your kids to meditate in school.
It's important to know that Jello and the band quickly realized that Jerry Brown's brand of politics wasn't nearly as scary to them as that of the Goldwater-acolyte Ronald Reagan, who was sworn in as President of the United States in January of 1981, and the Dead Kennedys followed up "California Über Alles" with a Reagan-themed version called "We've Got a Bigger Problem Now" that year. I listened to that song obsessively on various crappy cassette decks in the hooptie vehicles I drove in high school. And, if you're going down the "California Über Alles" rabbit hole now (as you should), you'll need to listen to the excellent 1992 Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy cover slamming then-governor Pete Wilson. I was driving a "free" Peugeot 504 at the time and used an 8-track-to-cassette adapter to listen to that album while on the road in my French luxury chariot.
I was 14 and living just across the Bay from San Francisco when that song came out, and naturally I became a serious Dead Kennedys fan during my teenage years. What really made Jello Biafra a hero for me took place the year before, when he ran for the office of Mayor of San Francisco (spoiler, he lost to Diane Feinstein). Jello's campaign really messed with heads, in a good way (the story in his own words may be heard in the video, above) and 13-year-old me took note.
It so happens that I had a job delivering the San Francisco Chronicle during the fall of 1979, and every morning at 5:00 AM I'd go and fold all my papers in the doorway of Encinal Market (which still looks the same, 43 years later) prior to hopping on my Schwinn and doing my route. I'd always flip through the paper for interesting stories before I started, and I obsessed over the tales of Jello Biafra's mayoral effort.
So, from the very moment I became a respected and dignified race official, I knew that a 24 Hours of Lemons team would have to obtain a 1973 or 1974 Plymouth Satellite sedan, convert it to Jerry Brown's gubernatorial daily driver, and create Suede Denim Secret Police outfits to wear around the paddock. For 12 years I hectored teams on the subject, and even as they took my advice on such fine team themes as Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha, Ace Rothstein's Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz and even Screaming Yellow Zonkers, the Jerry Brown Suede Denim Secret Police Satellite remained elusive. Even when I promised to eschew my Lemons Supreme Court duties and join any team racing Jerry's Plymouth… crickets.
A big part of the problem was that most Chrysler B-Body sedans were worth scrap value or less starting in the late 1970s, nearly all of them got crushed decades ago, and the few that remain moldering in driveways and yards mostly end up being used as parts donors for the more valuable pre-Malaise Era Road Runners and Chargers these days. Finally, my friends at Ran When Parked Racing managed to find a ratty beige '74 Satellite sedan in the wilds of the Mojave Desert.
The car would be made race-ready at team captain Corey Dickman's place in Sacramento. This worked very well, because the actual Jerry Brown Satellite now lives at the California Auto Museum nearby and so it was available as a reference.
I'll tell the full glorious story of how the Ran When Parked Satellite was built and how it fared on the race track later on, because there's no way to do that tale justice in a sufficiently economical manner here. Just watch this video of racer Randy Pobst making a Jerry Brown-grade nail-biting pass of a Subaru-powered Beetle and you'll get the general idea of what it was like.
I've built quite a few boomboxes using components I grabbed from discarded vehicles in car graveyards, the best-known being the Turbo II Junkyard Boogaloo Boombox of 2007, which has undergone many modifications over the 15 years it has served as the nerve center of my garage sound system. For the descriptions of many, maybe even most, of the sources I used for the parts in the Jerry Brown Suede Denim Secret Police Boombox, take a look at the gallery above.
My plan was to take scrap plywood I had lying around and build the smallest box that would fit one of the many junkyard-harvested car radios and four of the car speakers I had in my stash. Plywood has become absurdly expensive these days, plus my philosophy of the junkyard boombox demands recycled materials throughout. I had this piece of sanded 3/4" stuff that I'd been using as an X-Acto cutting board for more than a decade, so I decided it would be ideal.
I make a stencil to commemorate generous gifts to the Lemons Supreme Court at each race I work, a tradition going back to the late 2000s. I used the same piece of plywood for cutting most of those stencils, so the JBSDSPB body would be built out of Lemons history. Here we see it beneath the blade as I create the Denver International Airport Conspiracy Theory-themed stencil for the 2015 Colorado race.
In fact, I'd used that plywood when I created the Dead Kennedys-themed stencil for the 2016 Arse Sweat-a-Palooza race in California. Here's the test spray on my garage wall.
I had a dozen or so working car radios in my collection, but only one that would play both CDs and cassettes and cranked out serious volume: this Mitsubishi-built HU-655 out of a 1999 Volvo S70 (or similar; I grabbed it at an All-You-Can-Carry junkyard sale and didn't take notes at the time). I don't know how many watts it has, but it's plenty.
Anyone who has dealt with factory radios from European cars of the 1990s and 2000s knows about the dreaded security-code problem; as an anti-theft feature, these radios require the user to enter a (usually four-digit) code every time the car battery gets disconnected. Enough failed attempts to enter the code and you brick the radio. Sometimes you can find the code written on the owner's manual or even on the radio itself in a junkyard car, but I had no such luck in this case.
Fortunately, a YouTube mechanic who actually knows how to shoot and edit usable video— these abilities are incredibly rare— shared the trick for unearthing the code from an HU-655 (warning, much hexadecimal fun ensues). The code for my radio turned out to be 2465.
I glued some rubber feet to the button of the Volvo radio and made some crude brackets out of plumber's tape (which you can find pretty easily in junkyard vans if you keep your eyes open).
Normally you'd want all the speakers on the same face of a boombox, but this one would need to be able to blast audio to both sides while attached to the roof of a car and thus I designed it with two speakers on each side. The 6x9s came from a 2000 Acura 3.5RL and the 4" round Pioneers were extracted… well, I can't recall. I was building this thing in quick-and-dirty fashion, so I didn't worry too much about sloppy sawing on the speaker holes.
In order to convince the radio that it was still living in a Volvo, I had to emulate the memory power it would receive when the ignition got turned off. Without such power, I'd have to re-enter the security code every single time the JBSDSPB lost external power. So, I used the same sort of A23 battery and cheap holder I use for my $6 Junkyard Car Clock Tester to provide memory power and a nice Omron SPDT relay from a junked Hyundai to switch to external memory power when it exists. Later on, when I realized that an A23 can power the memory circuit in a Volvo HU-655 for about a week at best, I switched to a battery pack with eight AAA batteries.
Once four sides of the box were mocked up, I could get ready for wiring.
Here it is, a very simple setup: radio, four speakers, battery pack and relay. The wood will be glued and screwed together, for maximum strength. As you'll see later in this saga, I came to regret that decision when I wanted to make some post-race upgrades.
Here's the front view.
Once I had a handle on top (sourced from a 1992 Lexus SC 400) and power connectors on the back, I had a working boombox that sounded great. I brought it to a friend's party and we boogied down thanks to car-battery power.
Since this would be a Suede Denim boombox, I needed to cover it with the appropriate fabric. I decided that one of my pairs of cheap Judge Jeans, the ones that always get covered with paint overspray and various engine fluids at races, would be ideal. I chose the very affordable Kirkland jeans I wore to the 2020 Arizona race for this purpose. Remember when you could buy Kirkland-branded tires?
These jeans had the advantage of genuine bribe-stencil paint residue, which gave the fabric added Lemons authenticity when glued to plywood taken from a bribe-stencil cutting board.
I cut up pieces of denim as needed and used staples and Elmer's Glue to attach it to the body of the JBSDSPB. This took longer than all the rest of the project put together and I felt like an idiot for not just using denim-colored spray paint.
One good thing about using jeans fabric, however, was that the back pockets can be used for CD storage. I put one on the top of the box.
The JBSDSPB needed the face of Jerry Brown from the "California Über Alles" era, of course, so I used the famous shot of the smooth-talking, Satellite-driving governor with his then-girlfriend, Linda Ronstadt. Yep, that Linda Ronstadt.
I blew the photo up, printed it out in pieces, glued the pieces to a head-shaped piece of 1/4" plywood, cut eyeholes and applied clearcoat to the front and denim to the back.
The second jeans pocket went on the back of Jerry's head, for cassette storage. It should go without saying that I brought many cassettes found in junkyard cars to the race, including this copy of Led Zeppelin IV. I also brought copies of some of my favorite mixtapes from decades past.
In the world of "California Über Alles," Jerry Brown was the Svengali-like cult leader of the feared Suede Denin Secret Police, and therefore his eyes must be portrayed as excessively hypnotic on the boombox bearing his name. I disassembled a pair of clocks from mid-2000s Mercury Montegos, removed the faces and hands, and replaced the minute and hour hands with spiral-printed discs glued to thin posterboard circles. Then I soldered a jumper wire across the contacts of the clock's "fast-forward" time-setting button, so that the spirals would spin whenever power was applied. I didn't know how long the clock mechanisms would survive when spinning at about 60 times normal speed, but so far they've worked fine for many hours of use. I left the eerie green backlighting of the clocks intact, as one does in this situation.
The clocks are attached to the back of Jerry's face using machine screws and nuts, for easy removal for transportation.
I had to use lots of washers to make the back of Jerry's face emulate the dash of a Montego. The face is held to the main boombox body using four screws, so it's a 30-second job to disassemble the whole thing into pieces small enough to ship or stash in a car trunk.
On the rear of the box, I used a Kia Sorento fuel-pump cover panel to mount the power connector and to provide access to the box's innards.
Power connection is simple: 12 volts DC comes from a battery, power supply, or lighter plug and connects to the screw terminals using fork terminal connectors. The power wires from Jerry's Hypnotic Spinning Eyes (plus any external 12-volt devices you might have on hand, including other boomboxes) connect to the same terminals. There is a fuse inside the panel, to prevent annoying electrical fires in case of a short.
In case the box gets dropped on its back, I added Aisin door strikers from an early Camry to protect the vulnerable power connections. More strikers went on the top and front of the box, just in case. That's a pop-out cup holder from a 2000-2004 Subaru Outback L.L. Bean Edition above the strikers; nearly all my junkyard boomboxes require cup holders.
The speakers are protected by chicken wire stapled beneath the denim. Crude but effective.
Just in case the memory battery dies, the radio's security code is written on the back of the box.
As small as it was, it really cranked out the audio… as long as that audio's source came on cassette, CD or broadcast radio.
After a few days of work, the JBSDSPB sounded and looked great and was ready to be shipped off to the team in California. Once I arrived from Denver later on, I'd assemble it at the track.
When I arrived at the track, I unpacked the JBSDSPB components and laid them out on the Satellite's decklid. The whole thing fits in a box originally intended for an inkjet printer.
I donned my Suede Denim Secret Police outfit and picked up my "Smiling Aura" billy club. Time for the car inspections!
Using the door strikers as anchors, we ratchet-strapped the JBSDSPB onto the roof of the race car and connected a lighter-plug cable from the car to the box. Yes, that's a Jerry Brown bobblehead on the hood; the Sacramento Rivercats Triple-A baseball team gave them away at a game in 2010.
We popped a "California Über Alles" disc into the radio, rounded up "Jerry," "Linda," and the rest of the Suede Denim Secret Police, and got into line for the Friday tech inspections.
Was there an Uncool Niece? Indeed there was, in a Bee Gees shirt. You couldn't get more uncool than that in 1979!
The Satellite was very slow with its zillion-mile 318 engine and Torqueflite automatic transmission, but it proved extremely reliable on the car-killing Sonoma course. We couldn't take it on the track with the JBSDSPB on the roof, but it provided music all weekend and was a hit at the Saturday night party.
My team won both the Halloween Meets Gasoline prize for best theme and the coveted Index of Effluency trophy, and I'd like to think the JBSDSPB contributed to our success.
The JBSDSPB story doesn't end there, though; I realized that it's a real pain having to rely on CDs or cassettes for audio in the 21st century and decided to do some upgrades to create the JBSDSPB v.2, complete with AUX jack and Bluetooth capability. So, I sliced through the denim, removed the screws, and chiseled up the glued-on panels to get to the guts of the box and make some upgrades.
My initial plan was to use a wired FM modulator to get an external audio signal into the Volvo radio via the antenna connector, but Volvo used some ultra-funky RF input setup on the HU-655 and I couldn't make it sound right. Because nearly every factory head unit with built-in Bluetooth requires a CAN Bus signal to function and I didn't want to use an aftermarket head unit, I had to find a junkyard radio with no need for CAN and provision for an AUX input. Plenty of late-2000s Hyundai and Kia radios meet both requirements and are easy to find at your local Ewe Pullet, so I grabbed this one out of a 2009 Hyundai Accent (and photographed it on the trunklid of a brown-on-maroon-on-even-more-brown Cadillac Cimarron in the same junkyard, because it looked cooler that way).
Pro tip for you junkyard boombox builders: every single AUX jack in a junkyard is bad, thanks to car occupants repeatedly pounding ketchup-soaked audio cables into the jacks using bricks (or whatever it is they do). In this case, I had to open up the radio case and do a lot of annoying futzing and finicky soldering work to get the jack on the radio face to work. What you should do is use a radio with the AUX jack located in the glovebox or center console, then tap into the audio-input connectors on the radio harness and use a new jack.
The JBSDSPB v.1 had no controls other than the ones on the radio; you attached power and it worked. Because I wanted to be able to switch between a regular wired AUX input and Bluetooth on JBSDSPB v.2, I had to rig up (at least) one switch and three relays. Here's the initial diagram I made. Always make a diagram for your junkyard boombox, because you'll never remember your clever circuit tricks later on. I stuck with this design, though I ended up ditching the illumination switch as well as the switch for the no-longer-needed FM modulator.
How hard could this be? Let's go!
I ordered some Bluetooth circuit boards at just over a buck apiece and used a router to make a thin spot in the plywood of the front of the box; I don't know how much wood attenuates a microwave-frequency signal, but I figured it wouldn't hurt to do an easy task to increase potential Bluetooth range for a device facing the front of the JBSDSPB.
I used a backgammon doubling cube that I found in a junkyard Subaru as a standoff for the Bluetooth board, gluing everything in place with Shoe Goo. Shoe Goo is amazing stuff, by the way, and I will never attempt to build a junkyard boombox without at least one big tube on hand.
The Bluetooth board needs 5VDC input power via a micro-USB connector, so I invested $7.99 in five little 12VDC-to-5VDC modules with USB output jacks and installed one (not shown in the photo) inside the JBSDSPB. Now I've got enough Bluetooth and power-supply boards for four more boomboxes.
To switch the audio source between the Bluetooth board and an external AUX jack and then feed the output into the AUX jack on the front of the Accent radio, I needed three relays (one for left channel, one for right channel, one for audio-signal ground). I used more Hyundai-sourced Omron SDSPs for the task and used shielded wiring to reduce audio interference. When power hits the coils of the relays, all three switch the audio signal from the AUX wires to the Bluetooth board.
It's getting a little crowded inside the box, but I was able to Shoe Goo the taped-together relays in place (there are four, including the memory-circuit relay). I can reach through the access hole behind the Kia Sorento panel if I need to fix any hardware inside.
I used a map-light switch from a first-generation Lexus LS 400 to actuate the audio-source switching relays and power up the Bluetooth board, along with a blue LED as an indicator light. Pushing the BT button sends Bluetooth signal through the AUX jack on the radio. Note the additional Aisin door strikers, which were needed to protect the switch from damage.
I powered everything up and connected my phone via Bluetooth. Success!
I mounted an AUX input jack and an antenna connector (just in case I ever want to use an FM transmitter at the track to send audio to many junkyard boomboxes, including this one) on the back of the box, Shoe Goo-ing them into place on either side of the Subaru cup holder.
The regular alkaline AA batteries that kept the radio's memory alive lasted about six weeks, which seemed wasteful. I replaced those batteries with some rechargeable NiMH cells.
Now I just throw the memory batteries in the charger every so often and all is well. The Accent radio doesn't have a security code requirement, but I want it to save my EQ and input preferences between uses.
I used plumber's tape to make some simple brackets for the top of the Accent radio.
The bottom radio brackets took a few minutes' more work, but weren't difficult.
I made a denim-covered panel so that the single-DIN Hyundai radio would fill up the opening for the double-DIN Volvo radio, and it all worked well.
For the 24 Hours of Lemons race in Colorado this month, I built a bigger and more elaborate boombox built around a 2009 Kia Spectra radio. The Spectra Slapper Boombox is designed to send both power and audio signal to the JBSDSPB, so both were hooked up together for the now-legendary pit party at the B.F.E. GP race. The Spectra Slapper has dual subwoofers and amplifiers, courtesy of a Lincoln Navigator and a Dodge Caliber with the Boston Acoustics audio system, so it thumps much harder than the JBSDSPB alone; you'll get the full story on that build later on.
