How Meyagi Turned a Rusted 1994 Fleetwood Into 'Mr. All-Blue Everything'

Most people would have sent it to the crusher. Kevin Mitchell, the Pearland slab builder everybody calls Meyagi, looked at a broken-down, rusted-out 1994 Cadillac Fleetwood and saw a finished car. "Most people would have looked at it as a box of bolts," Mitchell told Texas Highways, "but I could already see the picture in my head."

The picture turned out to be cobalt blue. Texas Highways writer Danielle Lopez met Mitchell at Ricardo's Auto Upholstery in northeast Houston on a Friday afternoon in October 2020, when the car was close to done. By then he had put about a year and roughly $22,000 into it. The result carries a pop-trunk sign that says exactly what it is: Mr. All-Blue Everything.

Mitchell is not a weekend dabbler. He works as a chemical operator at National Oilwell Varco, lives in Pearland and has been building slabs since the early 2000s. In Houston's slab world he is the kind of name other builders call when they need a car done right, and the Fleetwood is a good look at how he works.

From a box of bolts

Before any of the fun parts, Mitchell fixed the engine. A slab has to roll, slowly and loudly, but it has to roll. Only after the car ran right did the modifications start, and almost none of them came out of a catalog of slab parts. They came from other cars.

He installed a panoramic sunroof pulled from a Cadillac SRX. He took side-mirror turn signals off a late-model Mercedes-Benz. The brake lights came from a different Cadillac. A custom-made chrome grille went up front. That is the slab builder's real skill: knowing what fits, from where, and how to make a 1994 car wear it like it came from the factory.

Then came the wheels, and in a slab the wheels are the point. Mitchell's count is six. There are four on the ground, one on the back as an external spare in a continental kit, and a sixth molded horizontally into the rear dash, where you can see it through the back glass. Texas Highways lists that sixth swanga as a recommended touch, not a requirement. Mitchell did it anyway.

The parts list

With the body done, the car went cobalt blue. Inside, Mitchell gutted the Fleetwood's original interior and put in four bucket seats covered in cream-colored leather, a long way from the bench seats a 1994 Fleetwood left the factory with. The last items on the list were the two things every slab is judged on when the trunk goes up: a hi-fi stereo powerful enough to need its own separate battery, and the sign.

The pop-trunk sign is a slab's signature, a slogan or logo mounted like a plaque on the underside of the trunk lid, invisible until the trunk is popped. Some owners use it for a dedication or a boast. Mitchell's tells you what the car is about before you even ask. Mr. All-Blue Everything.

Why the wheels made the man

Texas Highways put Mitchell's car at the center of a bigger story about where slabs come from, and his own history is part of it. He estimated that by the 1990s there were as few as 50 sets of original Cragar wire wheels in Houston. Those 30-spoke wheels, which Cragar introduced in 1983 for the Cadillac Eldorado, poked about 4 inches past the tire and became known as elbows or swangas. Cragar dropped them after two years, and the scarcity turned them into status symbols. Prices for a set of four reached as high as $10,000.

B.G. Porter, who owns the Slab Outlawz body shop in northeast Houston and appears alongside Mitchell in the Texas Highways photos, put it bluntly. "They were called 'dead man's wheels,'" Porter told the magazine. "People would kill for them." Texas Highways reports that changed when Texan Wire Wheels began selling replicas in 2005, opening the hobby to anyone with a few thousand dollars. "It's anyone and everyone," Porter said.

That is the world Mitchell builds in now. Texas Highways reported that he has met slab owners from Florida, Kansas and New York, and that he helped design the interior for a slab Snoop Dogg bought. A West Coast rapper ordering a Houston-style car, and calling a Pearland chemical operator to get the inside right, says a lot about how far the style has traveled.

A canvas on wheels

What makes the Fleetwood worth a close look is not any single part. It is the way the whole car is put together from pieces that were never meant to meet: a Cadillac crossover's roof, German mirror signals, a third car's brake lights, all wrapped in one color and organized around six wire wheels. None of it is subtle and none of it is supposed to be.

Mitchell summed it up himself while looking over the nearly finished Cadillac. "It's like a canvas," he told Texas Highways. "You can paint whatever you want; you can put it together how you want. It's your masterpiece."

For anyone thinking about building one, the takeaway from Mitchell's car is practical. Start with a big American sedan, since Cadillacs, Buicks, Lincolns and Oldsmobiles from 1970 to 2000 are the classic choices according to Texas Highways. Fix the mechanicals first. Then plan for the parts the culture expects, candy-colored paint, a chrome grille, a trunk display and at least five swangas, and budget for the network of upholstery shops, painters and wheel dealers it takes to finish one. You cannot order a slab from a dealership. You build it, or you find someone like Meyagi.