Dave Schools is the bass player of the band Widespread Panic, but he’s got hobbies that have nothing to do with music. Oh yes, he has an extensive vinyl collection, but he is also proud to have every Wacky Package trading card in the first original 15 series. And Schools collects Hot Wheels cars, particularly the Redline series.
Collectors Weekly: How big is your collection today?
Schools: I probably have a couple thousand cars. I have hundreds of Hot Wheels still in their blister packs. I have complete arcs of models, all the colors and all the color variations. There is some argument in the collecting community as to how some of these off-colors happened. Some people think they’d change the paint while the cars were still moving through the assembly line, so a couple cars would slip through and get painted in a bizarre shade. But color has always been tough one for me because I’m colorblind.
Collectors Weekly: So, do you gravitate to the shapes?
Schools: Yeah, the shapes of the cars, along with the shapes of the main colors on the cars. I really liked the Super Chromes, the shiny, non-color versions. I really like the variations of the tampos on those. And I liked the Heavyweights and Revvers series. But I haven’t been collecting actively in six or seven years because I moved into a smaller place, and moving a couple of thousand Hot Wheels in glass cases is a real problem. I had a much larger house with a lot of wall space for these mirror-backed, Plexiglas, individualized-compartment kind of display cases. People would just laugh when they saw them, but it was the product of several years of being a bachelor. When I wasn’t on the road with the band, I was collecting.
Read the rest of the interview with Schools about his Hot Wheels, his Wacky Packages, and his record album collection, at Collectors Weekly.