It was a cold snowy night on January 8^th 1967 when David Rivera was born in New York City.  He spent most of his childhood growing up in Puerto Rico.  Coming from a poor family, he never had the means to have a lot of the toys the other kids had, so what did he do?  Well he was not about to let that spoil his fun, so he decided to make his own toys, “I have two hands, and how hard can that be? David said.   Well, I’m sure you’ve heard the expression “One Man’s junk is another man’s treasure”, and boy did David ever make those words true.  He began going around the neighborhood, and collecting stuff other kids were throwing away, broken toys & especially old bicycle parts.  Before he knew it, he was using working parts of broken toys & making his own.  OK, so he had a few GI-Joes’s with two left legs & a Action Jackson head, but he managed to have fun.  In many occasions he would show up with a box full of old bicycle parts that looked like he just picked up from a scrap yard.  After a few days, with some patience & a lot of imagination, viola, you would see David ridding his not so new, a bit rusty, but fully workable bike.  But not only did he have the ability to turn a pile of junk into a lean mean ridding machine, he also had the extraordinary skill of negotiating deals.  Till this day I don’t understand how he would get these kids from the neighborhood to actually believe that his multi-colored, front wheel bigger than the back one, Sanford & Son junk pile bike was better than the shinny one they got for Christmas.  So you can imagine the look on our Dad’s face when he would see David with a new bike.  He would ask, where did you get the money for a new bike? He would answer; I made a trade with the boy down the street, my bike for his.  Well, there were a lot of angry parents wanting to have a chat with David.  Now, little did he know, these skills would have an amazing impact in his adult life.

When he was living in Boston working as a truck driver, he made a delivery to a car stereo shop, and he was amazed at the installs that he saw.  All of a sudden he said “that’s what I want to do” yeah right, as if this was that easy.   Well, he purchased a set of MTX speakers that he installed in his Toyota corolla, and mobile audio history was about to be made.  He purchased some equipment from a local shop, and started working on his vehicle with no prior experience, but remember David would say, hey, “I have two hands”.  He started working part time at a local stereo shop, “WITH NO PAY”, in exchange for obtaining the knowledge, and to continue working on his car.  He began applying what he was learning about car stereo on his own vehicle, before you know it; he was entering local car audio competitions, and winning. As he continued moving up the car audio food chain, he began experimenting with new ideas in his installs, one of the most memorable one was when he decided to implement a fish tank in his car as part of the install, thus giving him the name “FISHMAN”.  When Dave decided on this radical idea, a lot of people told him, “It can’t be done, it won’t work” they soon found out that you don’t tell Dave “It can’t be done” well, he did it, and it worked.  The people in the mobile audio industry could not believe what this kid had done to his car. They were amazed at the amount of work and detail of his install.

In 1991 he won first place in his class at the IASCA finals, after only on year of being in car audio.  After that he was about to take the mobile audio industry for one hell of a ride.  When he attended his first CES show with his winning Toyota Corolla, he spotted a camera crew that was filming for a TV show on the Discovery Channel called “Wheels”, he had the nerve of going up to the camera man and telling him “Hey, do you know there’s some crazy guy here at the show with a Toyota Corolla that has a fish tank inside?” “You got to come and film this, it’s just amazing” Dave, I mean, Fishman, convinced the camera crew to follow him across the convention floor to see the car, Dave then confessed that it was his car.  The film crew was amazed at the install, all the motorization, the sound quality & of course, the fish tank. The camera guy told Dave, “You’re good” Well, he did it, he got the car & himself on TV, and I still have tape.  But his 15 minutes of fame did not end there, his Toyota Corolla was featured in Car Audio Magazine that year, since then he has had a total of 16 front covers, and 47 magazine articles.

He’s done Demo vehicles for some big names in the mobile audio industry, Streetwires, Metra, JVC, Jensen, MA Audio, Lanzar, Pyle, MB Quart, Audiobahn, & Phoenix Gold.  He also has done some really cool installs for a few well known athletes like Jevon Kearse, Raul Mondosi, Samari Rolle, & Many Ramirez. Fishman has worked on all kinds of vehicles, Cadillac Escalade, GMC Jimmy, Jaguar, Durango, a breath taking Dodge truck for Streetwire that was featured in three issues of Car Audio Magazine,  & the futuristic Alien Jensen Van.  Who can forget the James Bond looking BMW Two wheeler & the slick Yamaha Wave runner for MB Quart, or the totally trick Golf Cart for MA Audio.  While he worked in a shop in LA, he did an install on one of Michael Jackson’s Limos, and a Jeep Cherokee for Will Smith. These are just a few of the amazing works of art from the guy they call the Fishman.  Ok, he’s a bit crazy & loud, but he has a good heart, and has done a lot for the mobile audio industry.  I remember being with him at a show in Oklahoma, and while many of the other competitors were being very Top-Secret about their installs, and keeping the cars covered under a tarp until judging time, and not wanting to tell you anything about their system, he was just so cool to everyone that was asking him about his car, he even talked to little kids that came around to ask him questions about car stereo, and allowed them to play with the Nintendo he had in his Corolla.  One of the kids said, “What a nice dude”.  After working for several different companies, Dave decided it was time to open his own shop called Fishman Audio.

During this time he continued to do what he does best, outrageous installs. He was constantly looking for new ways to do things as far as installs, motorization & fabrication.  Experimenting with new materials & methods, and always trying to push the envelope just a bit further than anybody else, and always trying things others would say were impossible. Which reminds me of when he was working for Streetwire, before Fishman Audio of course, and building their demo vehicle, this huge Dodge Ram truck.  At that time, 1996, there were no sexy widescreen LCD’s in car audio installs.  Well Fishman was not about to install a dinky little 9” TV inside this massive truck.  He decided he wanted a 20” TV.   So he goes to a local department store to buy this 20” TV only to discover, it doesn’t fit.   The TV is too bulky to fit under the truck’s dashboard.  But that was not about to stop Dave.  He takes the TV apart and notices that it’s just the picture tube & circuit boards inside this big plastic box.   So he decides to eliminate the TV case, & make this steel frame to place the picture tube and circuit board so it would fit in the truck.  Now comes the good part.   All the other employees were telling Dave, this will not work, bad idea, your just going to break the TV if you take it apart.  Fishman says, what’s the worse that can happen?   If the idea doesn’t work, the worse is, I’m out $230.00, the cost for the TV, but if it works, then it’s going to be awesome.   Well, it worked, and yes it was awesome, plus the look on those employees that told Dave it wouldn’t work, priceless.  And that has been Fishman’s philosophy,  “I don’t take no for an answer, I don’t believe in, it can’t be done”.

Throughout the years he’s applied that attitude in his installs, learned to work with a great variety of products, and in some cases combined these products and produce something that nobody has ever done before.  I remember seeing this steering wheel he had made that was unlike anything I had seen before, simply amazing.

While running Fishman Audio, he teamed up with The Installer Institute to teach an advanced installation & Fabrication course called FishCamp, where installers would spend 5 days learning advanced techniques & how to harness their creativity to a new level.  I have had the chance to speak with some of the FishCamp graduates, and they all have one thing in common, they loved everything about the course.  Some of them mentioned that they felt a bit intimidated by meeting Dave because of who he was, and the work that he had done, but after meeting him they realized like Rocky when he fought Drago in Rocky IV,  “He’s not a machine, he’s a man” Dave is just one of the guys.  They mentioned how easy it was to work with Dave, and how he made them feel comfortable right away.  They said it was great to see the Fishman in action, to feel his energy enthusiasm & willingness to help them develop their installation & Fabrication skills.

He also showed an amazing ability to design new products, but did not have the manufacturing resources he needed to make prototypes & test these ideas, well, this was about to change. In 2001 he made one of the most important business decisions of his career.  He teamed up with a very solid & reputable company, Metra Electronics, a leader in the mobile audio industry.  When they saw the ideas & concepts Fishman had for designing new products, they knew this was a great alliance.  He closed his shop in Fort Lauderdale & moved to Daytona Beach.  He is now working For Metra Electronics, building their demo vehicles, helping with the development of new products.  He has a catalog with an entire line of hard to find products to assist his fellow installers,  and even his own line of Speakers grilles called “Fishman Pro Series” that he designed and are being sold at Circuit City, and there’s a lot of new and exciting products designed by Fishman in the horizon.  And for 2005 Fishcamp will be bigger & better than ever.   Not bad for a poor Puerto Rican kid that once said, “Hey, I have two hands, how hard can that be?"