īolstered by excellent critical reviews in publications such as the Los Angeles Times Magazine, Phoenix's slide shows quickly grew into bigger and more elaborate events which started appearing all throughout Los Angeles, including at such prestigious venues as the REDCAT at the Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Egyptian Theatre, the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre and the Museum of Contemporary Art. Get in touch with your inner Americana, embrace it, have a sense of humor about it, and proudly share it with the whole wide world. Describing his shows as "history disguised as comedy and comedy disguised as history", he has been quoted as saying "My goal, first off and foremost, is to entertain people, but just below the line of entertainment is to educate and respect the past", hoping that through humor he can instill an appreciation and admiration for mid-century culture in people otherwise uninterested or unaware of such topics. ĭespite the overtly comedic tone of his slide shows, Phoenix has stressed that his shows are explicitly about honoring and celebrating American culture rather than mocking it. Phoenix now takes an observational comedy and storytelling approach to his slide presentations, usually attempting to employ a narrative using what few facts Phoenix can derive from the slides' annotations with his knowledge bank of history and pop culture trivia as well as juxtaposing slides from different collections, though he emphatically states that he never fabricates any portion of his narration. According to Phoenix, he originally intended for his slide shows to be straightforward and serious presentations, but the inherent kitsch of his slides invoked frequent laughter from the audience, prompting Phoenix to restructure his show with a more comedic tone. His first public event, entitled "God Bless Americana: The Retro Vacation Slide Show of the USA", was held at the California Map and Travel Store in Los Angeles in 1998. Encouraged by his friends, Phoenix took a chance at presenting one of his shows to the general public. Phoenix began developing his slide show in the mid-1990s when he would show his collection with accompanying commentary to his friends and acquaintances at private parties. Fascinated by the vivid color depictions of a bygone era and culture as well as its cars, architecture and fashion, Phoenix began scouring thrift stores, flea markets and estate sales buying boxes of old slides taken from the late 1940s to the early 1970s, soon amassing a sizable collection of thousands.
In 1992, Phoenix was shopping for vintage clothing in a Pasadena thrift store when he came across a shoebox labeled "Trip Across the U.S., 1957" which was filled Kodachrome color slides of an unidentified family's vacation photos at numerous roadside landmarks. According to Phoenix, after repeatedly getting fired from every design job, he returned to his first passion and began a second career buying and selling classic cars. In 1982, Phoenix moved to Los Angeles and enrolled into the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising, after which he started working as a fashion designer, recalling his first job as picking up pins off the floor at a fashion house that made appliqué-embroidered women's clothing. Phoenix's obsession with classic cars ultimately served as a gateway into an enthusiastic interest in mid-century architecture, fashion and photography.
He has traced his love of things vintage and retro back to his early childhood years spent on his father's used car lot, where he became enamored with the tailfin designs of Space Age-era American automobiles and eventually became able to identify the make, model and year of every car which came through the lot by the time he was six years old. Phoenix was born in Upland, California in 1962 and raised in neighboring Ontario, the son of a used car salesman and a "happy homemaker who made everything from scratch".