June 18, 2025 • 67 mins
This episode features an in-depth conversation with Jonathan Shaw, a legendary tattoo artist and cultural icon. Shaw discusses his tumultuous upbringing in a Hollywood elite family, his rebellious adolescence, and his transformative journey in the tattoo world, including his years in Brazil and New York. He also shares his recovery from addiction and the profound spiritual and personal insights that have shaped his life and career.
Check out Jonathan's latest film
Keep in Touch With:
Instagram: @Seanovenice
Website: https://www.shellvenice.com/
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
This was like fucking Beverly Hills. People that were coming
around the house with the likes of Tony Curtis, carried Grant,
Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando. I mean the cream of Hollywood
or HouseGuests that come, you know, the cocktail party. He said,
I'm this kid, I'm looking at these people like you.
People are full of shit. I hate you all well,
(00:20):
I hate this reality, I hate this world, I hate
this family. Get me the fuck out of here.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Everybody at Seno McFarlane. If you're enjoying The Sino Show,
make sure to follow or subscribe on your favorite podcast
apps so you never miss an episode. New episodes drop weekly,
don't miss out. Oh are you ready? Brother?
Speaker 1 (00:44):
All right?
Speaker 2 (00:45):
I barely slept. I'm so excited. I sit down with
a true outlaw legend, the one and only mister Jonathan Shaw.
He's not just a tattoo artist, He's but a fucking
cultural force. He's a mystic with a needle, storyteller, was
scars and a man who's seen the underworld and come
back with wisdom, ain't and blood in truth? Where to go?
(01:07):
Deep in this Brother's right. Tattoos, transformation and the price
of freedom. Welcome, welcome, welcome, Thank you, brother, thank you.
It's a pleasure. It's an honor to be here with you. Yes,
it's an honor to know you. Let's go back. Your father, Yeah, Artishaw,
big band leader, guru. Your mom is an accomplished actress.
You want to tell us a little bit about your
(01:28):
backstory about.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
That she was a movie star. She's you know, she
grew up in extreme poverty. My maternal grandfather was a
gypsy from Lithuania. Stowed away on a ship when he
was I think fourteen or fifteen years old to America.
He got to America and he totally hid his Gypsy
(01:50):
heritage and you know, just learned English and just became
a gung ho all American guy. He was ashamed of
being a Gypsy. There was a lot of prejudice against
the rama many people back then. I think when he
was like sixteen, he became a marine and went to
war and killed a lot of people. And I think
he was good at that because his father and his
(02:13):
uncles they were robbers. They were highwaymen, and they would
waylay and kidnap travelers back in their home country and
torture them to kill them. And take all their money.
So he was a raging, violent, charming, but violent alcoholic
by all accounts. And I didn't know him because he
(02:36):
died shortly after I was born. But over the years
I managed to, you know, especially when I went into
this deep, deep inventory of you know, my life, my ancestors,
you know, the origins of the multi generational curse. You know, alcoholism, addiction,
you know, violent sex, drugs, rock and roll. When I
(03:00):
had to start really researching you know, every aspect of
you know, what composes this weird entity that I call myself.
So when I did all this deep diving and research
and stuff, a lot of it went into other dimensions,
shamanic practices, and came up with all this this stuff.
You know, who are these people that brought me into
(03:21):
this life? You know, so my mother, she grew up
with her three siblings and just the insanity that they
grew up with, you know, the ultra violent situation in poverty,
you know, my they didn't have any money. And my grandfather,
he was a criminal. He was involved with you know
a lot of shady stuff, you know, mob related stuff.
(03:42):
You know, he might have even been a hip man
for the mob. I mean it was on that level,
and he'd come home, you know, drunk as a fiddler's
bitch and just just just wreck everything. And my mother
is this little girl, you know, just watching all this.
But according to her, she was the apple of his eye.
At the same time, she had this upbringing where you know,
she saw her father, you know, duking it out with
(04:04):
cops and just getting every bone in his body broken
and not stop fighting. He would fight until he was
literally unconscious. So she grew up with this kind of stuff,
and I think when she was sixteen she left home
to become like a chorus girl. She was very beautiful.
At some point she started hanging out with a lot
of sort of high falutin people. At some point she
(04:27):
got into a poker game with a bunch of mobsters.
I think it was oh Frank Kappa Capra. Frank Kapra,
very famous photographer. More she she was good friends with him,
oh wow, And he was going to these underground sort
of casinos, and she begged and cajoled and pleaded with
(04:48):
him to take her to one of these poker games
with all these mobsters, and he was like, no, no,
you don't want to be with these guys. And she
went there. According to the legend, she played poker because
her father was a card shark wow, and had taught her,
you know, all the tricks. So she went in and
sat down with all these fucking wise guys and cleaned
(05:10):
them out, and she had a lot of money all
of a sudden. Meanwhile, her sister, Constance, who was like
when I've written my second mother before she killed herself
in front of us. But anyway, so her sister had
gone off to Italy to make movies. Her sister was
actually an actress, and they had somehow gotten herself over
(05:32):
to Italy and was making movies and was hanging out
with all these very fancy people, you know, like Felini
and Ernest Hemingway and all these you know, intelligency of
Europe in those days. It was right after the war.
So my mother she'd gotten all this money, and a
few days after the poker game, the photographer Frank Kappa
(05:54):
came to her door and said, hey, you know, these
these wise guys weren't real happy about being cleaned up
by some little floozy. It might be best for you
to leave town for a little while until things kind
of cooled down. She took all these, you know, thousands
of dollars and got on an All Italia plane to
join her sister in Italy. And then she became an
(06:17):
actress and her first role was in a movie called
Bitter Rice.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
Oh wow.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
They actually put a picture of her on an Italian
postage stamp maybe twenty years ago, commemorating the new cinema movement,
you know, and all that cultural stuff. So she wound
up being an icon in Italy, came back to America
and met Billy Wilder and was his girlfriend. He'd put
(06:41):
her in a movie that really kind of marked my
life in a lot of ways, just having watched it
as a young kid, a movie called The Lost Weekend,
and she played the bar girl. That movie had a
profound effect on my life now because the movie's about
an outlcoholic writer. I grew up to become an alcoholic brother.
(07:06):
Yeah yeah, anyway, long story, yeah, long story, a lout.
Speaker 2 (07:12):
But it's a good it's a good map, and it's
a map that we're going to breakdown a little bit.
But you know, your dad was this international star, extraordinary musician.
Speaker 1 (07:21):
My dad was like fucking Elvis, right. Michael Jackson, Mick Jagger.
He was a fucking legend. Yeah, he was a Sinatra thaw.
I means he's that big. He was a player and
then but a shitty dad. No dad, no dad, No,
he was a shitty Well he's a shitty man in
a lot of ways, you know, but an amazing genius.
(07:41):
So he was also a sex and love addict, big time. Like,
he married nine times, and he had a thing, you know,
for marrying alcoholic women. If they weren't alcoholic, they were
dysfunctional other ways.
Speaker 2 (07:54):
They had to be troubled.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
There there was something. And so my mother was wife
number seven or eight. But he'd married Lana Turner, Ava Gardner,
you know, and he'd had extra marital whatever his affairs
with the likes of Judy Garland and Billie Holiday. He
started Billie Holiday's career. Wow, hired her for the first
time she ever was in a band. Was my father
(08:17):
hired her? So he married my mother and they stayed together,
not long enough to have me.
Speaker 2 (08:23):
And then you know, he takes off your mom's raising you.
She's getting deep into her alcoholism.
Speaker 1 (08:29):
Oh yeah, right, and it's fucking madnesson chaos. My mother's
an alki. She's married two other guys. She married my
first stepfather, who I really liked, and I was probably
five or six years old, and my last memory was
of her cracking his head open with a marble lampstand
and blood everywhere, and the ambulance and the cops, you know,
(08:52):
taking him to the hospital, and somehow she didn't get
to go to jail for that, but never saw him again.
Shortly after that, she brought home this other guy who
became my stepfather forever. And this guy was just like
your classic enabler, very sick man, you know, just a
(09:14):
milk toast, soy boy kind of man who was her
co conspirator and her alcoholism. So yeah, he didn't drink,
but he was the guy that was good, you know.
I mean Allan, you know, on steroids, untreated Alan on
on steroids, you know, just the worst, passive aggressive, just
a creep of a human being. Oh my god. And
(09:36):
so when they got together, it was like, who are
these fucking people? You know, this is abhorrent to my soul.
I got to get out of here. You know, this
was like fucking Beverly Hills. People that were coming around
the house were the likes of Tony Curtis carried Grant,
Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando. I mean, you know, the cream
of Hollywood or HouseGuests had come, you know, the cocktail parties,
(09:59):
and I'm this kid, I'm looking at these people. I
get people are full of shit. I hate you, allow,
I hate this reality. I hate this world. I hate
this family. Get me the fuck out of here. So,
you know, I started looking for escape at a very
early age. Comic books became a real portal to the
world that I found much more to my liking ec comics.
(10:23):
And then you know, those really gory old comic books
before they came in, you know, made everything sort of
sanitized with the comic book code, so you know, Tales
from the Crypt and you know, all these crime comic
books that would have pleased you know, Bukowski, you know,
probably read them himself as a kid. You know, I
never asked him that, but I wanted to be a
(10:44):
comic book artist. And you know, as I grew a
little older than you know, I was like twelve thirteen
years old and smoking weed, drinking, taking stealing pills from
my mother's medicine cabinet all that. You know, I had
a little group of friends, and we were all kind
of coming from these fucked up family and banded together
and became a gang, and we'd go around and you know,
(11:05):
just do all kinds of delinquent shit, you know. But
at the same time, we were very cultural kids, like
we loved jazz music. We'd go and hang out and
these you know, these black jazz clubs down in the hood,
you know, and sneak in and I saw, you know,
(11:26):
like John Coltrane, you know, I saw Miles Davis, I
saw Anette Coleman, I saw Felonious Monk. I saw guys
like that in these you know, smoky, shadowy little jazz dives.
Several years later, I was just strung out like a labrat,
living in some crash bad and Hollywood, watching my friends
(11:49):
die of overdoses, dropping life flies all around me, and
at some point I realized I was gonna die. Things
were really bad. I just on the road by Jack Kerouac.
I'd stolen it from a from an all night newsstand
that used to be up on the corner of Hollywood
and Kuwenga, and I went in there and they had
(12:10):
a little section with paperback books, and I saw this book.
I saw the title on the road. I didn't know
anything about it. I didn't know who Carawhac was. I
didn't know anything. The title of the book is what
grabbed me, and probably the early seventies. Yeah, so I
saw this book just because the title, took it home,
(12:31):
read it from cover to cover, and I said, that's
the way out, that's the salvation, that's where I could
do what this guy did. And then so I'm just
going out on the road. That was a seed planet.
But I didn't actually manifest until years later when I
was strung out, you know, in Hollywood and really messed up,
and people were dying. My girlfriend died, a lot of
(12:53):
my friends died, a lot of other people. Yeah, we're dying,
you know. And we were, you know, we were like
a dying breed around that time. We were, you know,
this band of stoned out kids, a lot of whom
were geniuses but all fucked up, every one of us.
But in that time period, you know, we we went
with the Manson family for a while, led Zeppelin when
(13:16):
they were in town, rolling Stones when they were living
in la were actually copping dope for Keith by means
of Marshall Chess who was vanishing the Rolling Stones. So
we were always up at Marshall's house. We were, you know,
kind of cool kids on the streets of Hollywood, living
(13:36):
that rock and roll lifestyle, and you know, got to
run with some you know, in the company of some
interesting people. You know. We were hanging out with Jim Morrison,
Frank Zappa. These these guys were you know, kind of
like our big brothers, you know, our heroes, and you
know they were just like, yeah, come out in.
Speaker 2 (13:55):
Hang out right, Yeah, yeah, yeah, Grand Parsons, you know,
all these people.
Speaker 1 (14:00):
You know, yeah, it was it was that time in Hollywood.
Speaker 2 (14:03):
It really was why don't we move to you hitchhike
in New Mexico.
Speaker 1 (14:07):
You know, I'd hung out with Bokowski. I wanted to
be a writer. I was writing and at some point
I said, fuck it, I got nothing to lose here.
All my friends are dying. I'm going to be dead soon.
Something in my spirit just said get out. I didn't
have any money. I kicked out cold turkey in a
dirty little room. We were breaking into doctor's offices. You know,
(14:29):
we had you know, script pads. We were you know,
selling dilauded's. We were yeah, you were the original drugstore cowboy. Yeah,
big time. There was a bunch of us, you know. Anyway,
it was so much, so much, so much. I mean
this has all been written about, you know. I got
to keep it brief on this because you know, by
the fucking book, man, if.
Speaker 2 (14:47):
We get it, you got to be the book right now.
We got to give a version of the book. We
gotta the live the author speaking to us right now,
bud By the book, by the fucking book. We got
all three of them.
Speaker 1 (14:57):
The movie doesn't do it justice, even though it gives
you an ice taste, mane it kind of taste. You know,
first one's free, you know, the.
Speaker 2 (15:03):
First one's free, coming back, by the fucking book, right,
buy some fucking artwork for this matter, I be too.
Speaker 1 (15:09):
Yeah, So at some point I just said, fuck it,
I got nothing to lose. There's a whole world out there,
and I was just like this this ay working. And
so I, you know, wandered down to the highway with
like an overnight satchel, chains of underwear and a pair
of socks and maybe one hundred dollars in my pocket
(15:29):
that I managed to save by not being strung out
having kicked we'd sell drugs and then we'd buy drugs, right,
so we'd have some money, then we'd spend it on drugs.
So now there was a little bit of money left over,
a couple hundred dollars, and I figured that could get me.
I'd seen another book in that bookstore, and that place
(15:52):
where I stole the copy of On the Road from
the other book was Mexico on five dollars a day.
So I'm like, five dollars a day, Okay, I got
two hundred bucks.
Speaker 2 (16:02):
And where you have Vera Cruz.
Speaker 1 (16:04):
Yeah, well, I I hoboed around Mexico. I stuck my
thumb out on the highway, ended up in Mexico. Hoboat
around Mexico for many months, maybe a year, and then
eventually I ended up in this port town called Vera
Cruz on the Gulf of Mexico.
Speaker 2 (16:18):
But that's is that where you saw the sailors with
all the tattoos and that kind of guy.
Speaker 1 (16:22):
I started seeing a lot of tattoos on sailors there.
I was trying to get work on a ship. My
idea was when I got to Vera Cruz, I saw
these ships going and coming and going, and I was like,
I'll get a ship. I'll get work on a ship
and work my way to Brazil. So, you know, I
hung out on the docks and that's where I first
started seeing a lot of tattoos, and that's where I started,
(16:44):
you know, hand poking tattoos on sailors. And you know,
eventually did get work on a ship and ended up
in Brazil.
Speaker 2 (16:53):
And then you started doing tattoos in Brazil, right.
Speaker 1 (16:56):
Yeah, we started. I met some a couple other guys.
This was like nineteen seventy five. I ended up jumped
ship in the north of Brazil, traveled around, got work
on fishing boats, and had made a little bit of money,
not much, but enough money to feed myself for a
little while. But then that money ran out and I
(17:18):
wound up hitchhiking from the north of Brazil slowly all
the way down to Rio Detionnaio. It took probably months
and months to get out there. When I got to Rio,
I fell in with a bunch of kids, kind of delinquents, travelers, alcoholics, addicts,
and we had a great time. Met a couple of
young guys my age who were also interested in learning
(17:44):
to tattoo, but there was nowhere you could learn to tattoo,
especially in Brazil in those days. There was one crusty
old scab vendor in Brazil that had a place in
the back of a whorehouse in the port of Santos,
south of Bridasonnaio. That was the only real bottom five
tattoo men in the whole country. But we started just
(18:04):
fucking around and experimenting. You couldn't get tattoo equipment or
anything like that back in the day, so we started
building like jailhouse kind of machines. You know. One guy
knew how to you know, make something resembling, you know,
a jail house tattoo machine. And then we started fucking
around and building these you know, homemade rigs, and because
at that point, everybody was tattooing by hand, like hand
(18:25):
poking with just needles and you know thread and India ink.
And then we started playing around with you know, building machines.
And then one thing led to another and somebody got
a hold of a real tattoo machine, you know, so
we we were tattooing each other and you know, tattooing
neighborhood kids. And yeah, that's where I started.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
And then you made your way to really learn to
long beach the Pike, right.
Speaker 1 (18:47):
Yeah, at some point, after being in Brazil like that
for years and years, you know, all my friends were like, man,
you're a fucking gringo. You got a passport. You could
go to America and you know and learn to really
tattoo and bring you know, bring some real tattoos stuff.
One of the guys that I kind of grew up
in tattooing with back in Brazil, he wound up to
be become the one of the founders of the Brazilian
(19:09):
chapter of the Hell's Angels. He's still around. He's a
big deal, man, He's a big fucking deal, not just
as a veteran Hell's Angel, but you know, but he's
also a big deal because he's one of the became
one of the primary tattoo man not just in Brazil
but all over the world. He wound up moving to
Europe and starting tattoo shops there, and you know, he's
(19:29):
kind of like an elder dude. And that's those are
my contemporaries. M finding sometimes it's hard to believe that
I'm like, you know, like a you know, a veteran
of the you know, of the tattoo thing. You know,
that we were like really the founders of this whole
situation that that has emerged, you know, over the years.
I mean, yeah, we put in our time and we
(19:50):
did did our ship, you know, and you know, particularly
I was very involved, you know, this this community, with
this world. But yeah, so you know, they they kind
of egged me on to come back to the States
and you know, learn about tattooing and then bring some
(20:13):
of the knowledge and the equipment back home. And so
I did. I went. I went and got work on
a ship again because now I had Seamen's papers from
the you know, from the the first one, so it
was easy to get work on a ship that was
going to the States. They said, oh, you've got to
pass part okay, you can come. And wound up in
(20:33):
Long Beach, the Port of Long Beach, and I'm wandering
around there. I don't know nothing, you know, I don't
know anything about you know, tattoo Where am I going
to find anything? But I knew from when I was
a teenager we used to you know, we used to
sneak out and you know and go down to the
(20:53):
Long Beach Pike, which was kind of like the Coney
Island of the West coast. It was a place. It
was a real rough and tumble kind of place. It
was this old, decrepit amusement park, and it was you know,
populated by sailors and you know, navy yards were nearby,
(21:15):
and sailors from all over the world, bikers, just white trash,
all workers and you know it was It was not Disneyland, yes,
and Disneyland was for cissies.
Speaker 3 (21:26):
You know.
Speaker 1 (21:26):
This was like the real This was like the real deal.
So I remembered from the pike, you know, as a teenager.
I remember staring in the window of all these these
tattoo shops. You know, they had a ton of tattoo
shops and dive bars and you know, amusement park and
penny arcades and then they had tattoo shops. They had
(21:46):
a lot of tattoo shops. It was the place, I
guess on the West Coast where you know, where you
would go if you had it in your head to
get tattooed, you know. So so I got off the
show up there in Long Beach and I'm like, oh man,
you know, I could see the roller coaster and stuff
from you know, from the shipyard, and I was like,
that's where I got to go, and so I started
(22:13):
wandering around there, you know, uh, walked into one shop
you know, hey, you know where I could one of
the tattoo guns get chased out, chased out with a
baseball bat. You know. I guess that's not the right approach.
Back in the day it was, you know, tattoo guys
were you know, pretty uh secretive about their trade secrets,
(22:36):
you know. So so but I managed to meet and
make the acquaintance of some real tattoo guys who took
a liking to me. One of them was Bob Shaw,
who was a legendary tattoo man, you know, and he
(22:56):
took me under his wing and told everybody I was
his nephew because we had the same name and and
he was more of a father to me than you know, wow,
well way more. I mean, he was like my father
in tattoo and he was my tattoo dad, you know.
In writing. Bukowski was my tattoo dad, my tattoo dead,
(23:17):
my writing, my literature dad.
Speaker 3 (23:19):
You know.
Speaker 1 (23:20):
So you know, it's like I think I wrote about
this in the book where you know, it's like we
who don't have fathers, we find our fathers we find
our fathers in the places where we where our destiny
takes us. So it was like already my father he
(23:42):
didn't have father either, you know. Uh so my father
he found his father and these old black jazz men
and like fucking speakeasies in Harlem, you know where he
learned to play the horn. And I found my father
and you know, in the tattoo shop in the you
(24:04):
know sandwich between you know, a dive bar and a
penny arcade in the you know, Long Beach Pike.
Speaker 2 (24:12):
You know, how long did you study with him for?
Speaker 1 (24:15):
Well, I don't really study. I hung out. He wasn't
It wasn't a formal kind of thing. It's not you know.
He let you hang around and then I, you know,
I do you know, go do beer runs for him,
or you know, mop up the puke when somebody got sick,
or chase you know, bums out the door came in
(24:35):
begging for change or whatever. You know. I was kind
of like the shop helper, and I got to watch
him and hang out with him a lot, you know,
just absorb that special wisdom you know that he carried,
you know, and at some point, you know, he started,
you know, he started let me ask a few questions.
So I'd ask some questions and then he'd start explaining
(24:57):
stuff to me, you know, and you know, at one
point he put a machine in my hand and said,
you know, go go tattoo yourself, you know, practice on yourself,
and I maybe we'll let your tattoo one of these
whinos that stumbles in here.
Speaker 3 (25:12):
You know.
Speaker 1 (25:14):
And eventually that's how it went, you know. And yeah,
and you know, I tattooed a few whinos, and you know, uh,
eventually he was like, well, you know, we got a
job for you, you know, and he put me to work.
And so I worked there in Long Beach with him.
Then he moved to Texas, and I stayed there in
(25:35):
Long Beach working with his partner, who was a Colonel
Todd and old Kentucky colonel kind of guy, real shit kicking,
like a real tattoo man. Good guy, but like, you know,
no nonsense. And I worked with him for a while.
And then then nineteen eighty one or eighty two, the
(25:57):
city decided they're going to close the pike. What was
left of it at that point, there was much left
of it anyway, It was kind of decrepit they'd knocked
down the roller coaster. Really, all that was left of
the pike by nineteen eighty two was just a bunch
of dive bars and tattoo shops and a couple of
penny arcades and all the rides were gone. But it
(26:18):
was still the place where like, you know, low rent,
kind of white trash people would come and hang out,
and you know, the cholos were there around, you know,
low riding in there. You know, it's like a real
you know, it was a cool place. I closed down
the Pike and Bob Shaw had moved to Texas, so
I followed him to Houston, Texas and worked with him
(26:41):
there for like about a year, and then from there
I moved to New Orleans and New Orleans to New York,
then back to Brazil. Opened a tattoo shop in British
Honduras for a while. When they had the Falklands War
was going on, I flew from New Orleans down to
Belize City when it was a real shithl This is
back in the you know eighties, early eighties, before tourists
(27:02):
went there. You know, it was a real shithole, man
literally shithole that there was like open sewers on every street.
Whole place smelt like everybody there just shook their pants
at once, you know. So I opened a tattoo shop
right in the main street of fucking Belize City because
they were having the Falklands War in Argentina and the
(27:23):
British had a military base there and they were sending
all these troops to Belize to train and get ready
to go to war in the Malvinas the Falklands were
in Argentina. So I was like, great, there's a military
base right here, and I'm the only guy with a
tattoo shop. I opened the tattoo shop next to a
you know, like a pub that all the troops would
(27:46):
go and get hammered every night. So these guys had
me working twenty four hours a day.
Speaker 3 (27:49):
Man.
Speaker 2 (27:50):
Wow, even being a junkie, even being an Alki, there
was something about you that was like determined. Like you
went to Bukowski, knocked on his fucking door, you found
this great master tattoo, you know, how to go to
find the right people.
Speaker 1 (28:06):
Something in my right and something in my stars just
gave me this cent I love that, this this tenacity,
kind of fearless that way. Weird, Yeah, I never knew
anything like fear, like real fear, until I got sober.
(28:29):
I think that's why I liked liquor and drugs so
much too. Like in the Big Book it says, you know,
men and women drink because they like the effect produced
by alcohol. Well, you know, I think conversely, I, you know,
I drink because I don't like the effect produced by sobriety.
You know, all the fears and all the traumas, and
(28:52):
all the harms and hurts and worries and memories and
you know, delusions and self centered, funky behavior all bubble
up to the surface when you put the plug in
the jug, and then you're dealing with real stuff, causes
and conditions, the demonic possession, you know, because I really believe,
(29:15):
you know, talking about alcoholism. I believe to the core
of me that you know, when they talk about a
spiritual malady, they're not just whistling Dixie out their ass, man,
you know, spiritual malady.
Speaker 2 (29:29):
We got to talk about New York because let's you
go out there and he started a fucking revolution, and
it's what an interesting time to be in New York City.
Speaker 1 (29:38):
It was. It was It's it's almost like I've I
think that's why on some levels, after I wrote these
first two books of this scab Vender memoir series, those
books only take you up to me being about twenty
two years old. There's a lot more or stories, but
(30:01):
I have I think it's been hard for me to
write about those years because they were so impactful in
my life in so many ways. So much went down,
so many things, so many people place as adventures, you know,
and getting you know, sort of successful, you know, and
(30:22):
suddenly becoming like you know this you know, iconic presence.
You know. It was like a lot of my dreams
came true, but they were this all nightmarish. In a
lot of ways. It was good times, but you know,
I was strung out again because I've gotten sober. It's
a long story, but you know, but I before I
got before I I got hooked on liquor and drugs again.
(30:48):
I was actually stark, graving sober in New York. I
was sober, abstinate, but I had no connection to any
sort of healing situations. So I was living like this
crazy unconscious thug man. You know, I was living a
really like rock and roll lifestyle.
Speaker 2 (31:10):
Man.
Speaker 1 (31:10):
You know, I was running with you know, mobsters, hell's angels,
you know fast women, you know, movie stars, rap stars
and all that shit. I mean, I was writing the
thick of It man in New York in you know,
the mid eighties when it was all going down. You know,
I was tattooing, you know, anybody and everybody who you know,
(31:34):
like household names, people's and uh and I was running
with these people. And I was living like, you know,
like a rock star without a fucking band. But I
was fucking stark, raving, fucking crazy. I was nuts. I
was you know, I was talking about untreated alcoholism because
I didn't drink. I didn't have anything to you know,
(31:54):
keep this monster in check. So I was just running
a muck man, you know. And it was all that
just you know. I was married to a beautiful Brazilian gal,
you know, who I loved, dearly, loved forever. We came
up from Brazil together because after you know everything else,
I've gone back to Brazil to fulfill my obligation to
(32:18):
bring tattooing to Brazil and did that and then then
moved back to the States, New York. And by then
I was married to my wife, and we came to
New York together and we built this whole empire and
she was right there by my side through all this stuff,
(32:40):
and I just went ape shit in New York, destroyed
that marriage. You know, we parted ways, you know, with
tears in our eyes, in a you know, loving way,
but you know we couldn't stay together because I was
going this way and she was going that way, or
I should say she was going that way and I
was going that way. So so yeah, and then after that,
(33:06):
it was just all sex, drugs, rock and roll and uh.
And in that period, I created a whole fucking empire
and did a whole lot of stuff and you know,
launched the first real solid, mainstream tattoo magazine. You know,
they had me on David Letterman show. You know, I was,
you know, living that yeah, all this kind of stuff,
(33:31):
you know, tattooing, you know, all these famous people, and yeah,
it was it was a dream come true. And at
the same time, I mean, yeah, I had a good run,
you know, but eventually I you know, crashed and burned
and ate ship and died a thousand deaths, you know,
and that's when I had to get sober. But boy,
(33:53):
you know, a lot so I guess what I'm saying
is all those years in New York, fifteen years, it's
hard for me to really even I haven't been able
to write about it because I think it's kind of
tugs at me, you know, and this in this deep way,
because there's so much went down then, you know, and
(34:14):
there was so many people that I've almost buried a
lot of those memories. They'll come out when it's time
for me to you know, call in the forces that
feed me this stuff, you know, Mack. But it's still
very fresh, even though it's like twenty something years ago.
It's almost twenty five years ago when I, you know,
(34:37):
got sober and left New York and sold everything and
moved to Brazil to write these books. You know. But
but it still feels really so fresh. It's easier for
me to go back to my childhood and my adolescent
years and then it starts getting so fresh and real
that it's it's kind of like painful for me to
(34:59):
rea visit that because you know, I burned a lot
of bridges and lost a lot of stuff, and people
you know, died, and there was just yeah, it was
a hard time, man, I mean, because I felt like
doing these deep dives that itabled me to write these books.
I felt like it was a form of you know,
real spiritual surgery where you go and vivisect your own
(35:24):
life without anesthesia. It was almost a necessity. I was
compelled to do all that writing, and do all that
research and do all that digging. And you know, I
laughed and I cried and I bled when I was
writing this stuff, you know, And I think that's what
people love so much about the books. The people that
do read them, you know, they're like, holy shit, you know,
(35:44):
because it comes from the fucking heart of the wound,
and it's you know, and there's humor, there's dark humor,
and it's you know, I could do that with this stuff.
But some of these wounds are maybe so fresh that
I'm just like, ah, then I just want to go
to the beach, you know.
Speaker 2 (36:05):
Yeah, all right, well listen, we're going to get two
things and then we'll get sober. The Picasso that you
did on that guy, that was fucking beautiful, man, Casso Whisk,
Where did that come from?
Speaker 1 (36:18):
I mean, that's the original incentive for that was there
was an artist, a sort of you know, an underground
artist here in southern California that that I met who
who did some paintings in that style, that sort of
neo cubist kind of style that that I as soon
(36:38):
as I saw it, I was like, whoa, that's exactly.
That just touched my soul in a way that I
was like, Yeah, that's that's going to look good on
somebody's back.
Speaker 2 (36:50):
How did I take you to do that? Tattoo? Poor guy?
Speaker 1 (36:53):
I don't remember. I mean, yeah, but Philip Blue, who's like,
you know, the god of tattooing, was working with me
at the time, and he he was there for that,
and he's he's an interesting cat. I mean, he started
tattooing he was ten years old. His parents were hippies,
(37:15):
gypsy's living in the streets of India. He grew up
on the streets of fucking like Calcutta and shit wow,
and started tattooing. He was like eight years old or nine,
and his dad was this hippie, crazy wild man. They
just made a documentary about him, tattoo guy. And Philip
grew up in this thing and became like it, went
(37:35):
to Japan and studied with like the great masters in Japan,
and then went and studied with Ed Hardy, and you know,
by the time he came to me, he was like
a season tattoo man. And he was only like twenty
years old, and he was like a seasoned tattoo man,
like one of the greatest, one of the greatest that
(37:57):
ever lived, like a legend already at twenty. Now he
must be, you know, in his fifties or something, but
I mean still like a huge legend. Anyway, So he
came to me when he's like twenty years old. He
wanted to work with me. He'd had some drama here
on the West Coast. He'd gotten sort of threatened and
ostracized from a situation, and so I was like, well,
(38:21):
come on over here. You know, I knew him. We'd
met before because I'd worked with the guy named Spider
Webb in New York and Spider was friends with all
these people. And I'd met a lot of people through Spider,
including Philip and his dad, and I'd even met Andy
Warhol through Spider. It was a crazy time, you know,
Oscot all these people around, you know. So but anyway,
(38:43):
Philip came to work with me and we worked side
by side in this tiny little room and that was
the original Fun City tattoo that I'd started in New
York and it was me and Philip Loo and we
were just cracking out, Wow, groundbreaking kind of stuff that
people hadn't seen before, you know. And Philip was a
(39:03):
big inspiration to me because he'd be like he'd be
doing his stuff which nobody had ever seen before, and
then he was like egging me on to do other
kind of different innovative stuff, you know. So I mean
he was a huge influence and I you know, and yeah,
God blessed Philip Man. What a what an amazing artist.
(39:23):
But so anyway, so I had this painting that I'd
purchased from this West Coast artist of this weird cubist
faces kind of thing, and I just had it hanging
on my wall and one day, you know, I said
to this guy who was kind of like my shop helper,
I was like, I want to put that fucking thing
(39:43):
on your back, like you know, from asshole to appetite,
and he was like okay. So we sat down and
made that thing, you know, beautiful, and then you know,
I went on from there to you know, sort of
take off from that painting that this artist had done
(40:07):
that inspired me and I started doing my own version
of that same kind of style, and it's just been
evolving over the years and decades to you know, I'm
still doing that kind of stuff today, you know, just
in different configurations and stuff. But that kind of became
like kind of like a a style.
Speaker 2 (40:29):
Yeah. It with that style, Yeah, style that I wanted. That
style people still do. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (40:34):
I've been on tour for the last two years tattooing
tattoo artists. Ninety percent of my clients are tattoo artists
who remember, you know, the stuff I was doing back
in the nineties, and they're you know, these guys have
been tattooing twenty thirty years now, and they see me
as some kind of reference because when they were just starting,
(40:55):
I was the dude that was in all the magazines
and all this stuff. So they've been very kind and
they've invited me to come and sit in their shops
all across the country and uh tattoo them and their
friends and their you know, their little local tattoo community.
All these tattoo artists will come to me and just
be like, yes, leave out this arm, you know. So
(41:17):
I last two years, I after being retired from tattooing
for almost twenty years, I still drew a lot, and
then suddenly these drawings turned into me coming back to tattooing,
and you know, carving all this crazy artwork onto all
these you know, really cool tattoo people.
Speaker 2 (41:36):
What's alike from all these guys giving you so much
love and respect and admiration, And it's lovely. It's beautiful, man.
Speaker 1 (41:43):
Yeah, it's really hardy to take it in, are you no.
I'm soak it up, man, soak it up. I love it, boy,
I love it because and I'm so grateful. I'm so grateful,
you know, for the opportunity to sort of come back
into a world that's evolved, you know, exponentially to the
point where it's unrecognizable. But that I was kind of
(42:04):
one of the guys that launched that fucking slingshot, you know,
that went so far, and now I come back in
kind of like a little bit like Rip Van Winkle
kind of thing. You know. It's like, you know, it's like,
what the fuck happened here? Man? You know, they this
thing's exploded into like this, you know, ten billion dollar
(42:28):
a year industry. You know, this started in the fucking
back rooms of you know, whorehouses and dive bars and
you know shit like that. You know, we're just and
now it's like this thing. They got TV shows, they
got fucking libraries full of books, and you know, contests
(42:48):
and conventions all over the world every fucking other day.
It's become like this huge culture. It's kind of like
equated to like what rock roll? How to rock and
roll start? You know, it's a little barn and Alabama,
you know, with a bunch of guys just picking and
grinning there, you know, and just taking inspiration from old
(43:12):
blues guys that you know, sitting by the side of
the railroad tracks just playing a guitar, you know, and
you know that it was a very grassroots kind of
folk arety kind of thing. And now look at it.
You know, it's like rock and roll Hall of Fame,
you know, all the stuff, all that, all the stuff,
(43:33):
you know, the fucking hard rock Cafe. I mean, you know,
it becomes a fucking anything these fucking vampires can fucking
cash in on, becomes like, you know, up for grabs.
So you know, with tattooing, it's become like that. But
there's still like an undercurrent, a very hardcore undercurrent of
real tattooed people like guys that honor the the tradition
(43:56):
and the history of the thing and love it and
understand it, you know, have reverence for you know, the
kind of guys that I came up under, you know,
the old school tattoo artists that I learned from. And
now you know, I'm like that second generation and these
guys who are the third generation, they still have that
(44:18):
love and that respect for you know, their lineage, their history.
So it's really pleasant to be around people like that because,
you know, because not only do they treat you with
love and respect, but also they are lovable and.
Speaker 2 (44:32):
Respectable for what you started. The tradition and people honoring
it's a beautiful thing.
Speaker 1 (44:36):
And I like that that tribe. I mean, you know,
there's ship hits everywhere, but you know, I've come across.
But you know, after being almost fifty years in that
tattoo thing, it's like you kind of become kind of
thick skinned. Yeah, there's shithits, you know that. Okay, you
know that's cool. But for the most part, you know,
(44:58):
it's all love. Man. It's been all good, all right.
Speaker 2 (45:00):
One other chapter they were gonna get sober you know,
you like, you collected guns there for a while, and
the government said, oh, you got quite a few guns here, brother,
cachet weapons. I don't know how many felony accounts.
Speaker 1 (45:11):
Were you arrested for, like close to one hundred. Yeah,
pretty serious charges, serious charges. Yeah, they were going to
put me away for you know, decades. Yeah, they were
going to put me behind bars for decades.
Speaker 2 (45:24):
What was going through your head when that happened? Oh shit,
this is where you're actually little scared a little bit.
Speaker 1 (45:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (45:34):
I was just like I was sober. Oh you were sober.
Speaker 1 (45:37):
I was sober man because see when I when I
was running Fun City all those years, you know, I
was running with you know, some shady kind of people,
you know, and I was one of them, and you know,
it was good to have some guns around. And I
just you know, people come and pay me with guns.
You know. I'd acquired a lot of arms, and I
(46:01):
had all kinds of guns. I loved guns. Yeah, something
I might have inherited from my father. He was a
big marksman. He liked guns too. I didn't know that really,
But you know, some of this stuff is just wired
it to your hard drive, you know. But yeah, So
I had a lot of guns. And then after I
sobered up after nine to eleven, you know that was
(46:26):
I sobered up before nine to eleven. Actually I was
sobered for that, but so I sobered up, and then
I just took everything when I decided, after I sobered up,
and nine to eleven happened, and i'd been in Japan
tattooing with the Yakasa. I was tattooed for the Yakasa
in Japan, and nine to eleven happened, and I came
(46:47):
back to New York and after nine to eleven, I said,
this is it. I'm leaving this country. I'm leaving New
York going back to Brazil. And so I took everything.
I sold this building that I owned in New York.
I owned a beautiful building, sold the building, sold the
tattoo shop, packed up everything I owned, stuck it in storage,
(47:14):
shipped a bunch of it to Brazil. But I couldn't
ship all those guns to Brazil. So I put those
in a storage locker in New York City and moved
back to Brazil and stayed there for you know, years
and years and years, and wrote all these books. That's
what I did. I retired from tattooing. I said, I'm
moving back to Brazil. I'm going to be a writer tattooing.
(47:36):
That page is turned, and I'm just going to devote
myself to, you know, writing these books. And I did.
At some point, I took a trip up to New York.
I think I'd had my I've finished writing a bunch
of these books, and now I was getting offered publishing
(47:56):
deals and somebody else wanted to make a movie about me,
and there was all kinds of based on my books,
and there was all this stuff going on. So I
was like, Okay, I'll go back to the States and
start doing this stuff. But I didn't want to live
in New York anymore because I sold my building, sold
the tattoo shop. Didn't want to go back to that life.
(48:18):
So I moved to California and started writing a screenplay.
I was staying at Johnny Depp's house, and he wanted
me to write a screenplay based on my books, and
so I started writing a screenplay for him, which never
really went anywhere. But and then I was living in California.
(48:40):
I was living at Johnny's house, and at some point
I flew to New York for some kind of business,
some kind of meetings or something. I remember when I
was doing in New York. But I was there, and
I was in New York, and I was having dinner
(49:04):
with this dear friend of mine, Eugene Hoots. He's frontman
for a band called Google Bordello, and we were hanging out,
we were having dinner, and my little cell phone rang
and it was this friend of mine who had been
(49:28):
kind of like a kind of like a personal assistant
to me for years and also was one of my editors.
She helped me edit these books, you know, real smart check,
good friend, you know, kind of like my you know,
my little sister. And she called me. She lived in
New York and she called me and she said, hey, man,
the cops just came to my house and they're looking
(49:51):
for you. And I was like really, and I was like,
oh shit. And apparently they somehow they'd gotten into my
storage locker and found all these guns there because I'd
(50:14):
hired some guys that were going to move all my
shit to California, that's where. And these guys, I guess,
they saw these guns and they ratted me out to
the cops. So the cops showed up at the storage
place and they found all this stuff, and they went
to my friend's house looking for me, because that was
the address that was the storage place was registered to.
Because I didn't have a place in New York anymore.
(50:36):
I was staying in a hotel. I was staying in
a hotel, and so yeah, I left the dinner and
I went back to my hotel and I was going
to pack up my shit and get the hell out
of there, get out of town. And my phone starts ringing.
It's the cops. They got my number, and they're like, listen,
(50:58):
we need you to come surrender yourself, you know. And
I was like, yeah, yeah, let me. I'll do that
right now. But I got to talk to a lawyer first,
you know. And they were like, no, no, you have
to come down here now. And I'm like, yeah, yeah,
I get it, but I got to talk to a
lawyer first. So, you know, I'm dialing lawyers and friends
who know lawyers and stuff and trying to, you know,
(51:19):
figure out what to do. And all of a sudden,
the hotel room door just opens and fucking SWAT team
just comes in, Like God, the fucking flower if you
fucking it off, get on the floor and I'm just
like on the floor, and they took me to the
fucking Pokey.
Speaker 2 (51:36):
Yeah, and he got a good lawyer. She did a
good job.
Speaker 1 (51:39):
She sure did.
Speaker 2 (51:41):
Damn brother, you know of the angel that day.
Speaker 1 (51:43):
Yeah, well the real angel was my little brother Johnny.
He heard about it, he got it was on the
rose and he he he bailed. He bailed me the
fuck out of that.
Speaker 3 (51:55):
I mean, I'm this, you know, I'm lee indebted to him,
you know, like, yeah, he got me the top mob
lawyer in New York City.
Speaker 1 (52:09):
And his daughter is Stacy Richmond, who is my lawyer.
And we became such dear friends because you know, I
was sober for like ten years. At this point when
this is all going down, you know, I'm getting I'm
getting raked over the calls for the wreckage of my
past because I'm not living around I'm not toting guns
around town anymore. I'm like this sober kind of you know,
(52:32):
nice guy, you know, a piece of love, kind of
hippie dude now, you know, And you know I'm not
that fucking you know, wild eyed thug from back in
the fun city days. But you know this, my past
came back to bite me in the as it does,
right as it should be, I suppose, you know. Uh So,
(52:55):
so yeah, I went through Oh they took my fucking passport.
I couldn't travel. Yeah, they're pretty serious house arrest. They
took all my computers, all my fucking phones, I mean
any all my fucking journals, they took everything, and a
lot of it never came back. And of course they
took all the guns. There was tons of there's some
nice guns, man. There were some really nice armaments there.
(53:18):
I mean there was grenades, there was all.
Speaker 2 (53:20):
Kinds of ship I saw the pictures. There was all
kinds of like a drug cartel stories. So it was
kind of like that. And this was after this was
post nine to eleven. Yeah, so they a little jumping.
Speaker 1 (53:34):
They thought of me as some kind of fucking terrorists,
you know, they thought, you know, and they knew I
was associated. Yeah, okay, so yeah that was so it
was a dark kind of period, you know. But I
mean because I was like suddenly I was grounded. You know.
(53:54):
They clipped my fucking wings and you know, tore off
all my feathers and I put me in a little cage,
you know. And even after they bailed me out and
I was out of the cage. I was still kind
of earth bound, you know. I couldn't go anywhere. I
couldn't go back to Brazil. I couldn't do shit, you know.
And that went on for years. Interestingly enough, my lawyer, Stacy,
(54:16):
such a beautiful soul, and she, you know, she really
liked me because I just told her, you tell me
jump and I say how high. That's how it goes.
Whatever you say, you're the boss. And she was like, wow, okay,
she's not used to that. She's dealing with all these
(54:38):
fucking thugs, you know, and mobsters, and they're like, fuck you,
I'll tell you what you're gonna do. And I was
just like, listen, I put my fucking life in your hands.
I trust you implicitly. You do what you've got to do,
get me the fuck out of this situation, and anything
you tell me to do, I obey. I learned that,
you know, in AA the early years, I had sponsors
(55:01):
and told me shut the fuck up and obey, just
do what I say. I was I needed that it
worked in your favor so well. So she at one
point she told me to do all this different stuff,
but one thing she told me to do, because we'd
walk around the streets of New York together, like just
after the trials, you know, we'd go out, we'd walk
(55:22):
around these village and I was still pretty well known
in that community. I was famous in that community. And
people were coming up to me every fucking few steps.
People would come up, Hey, John, how you doing a shaw?
You know this and that, And there was a lot
of people who I'd helped get sober, and people would
come up to me and go, I'd introduce this stacy,
(55:45):
you know, and they'd be like, this guy saved my
fucking life, you know, Da da da da da. So
she her ears perked up, and she was like, Wow,
you got all these people that you know, you've helped,
you know, since you've been sober, you know, sponsored a
lot of guys, and you know, just took people to
meetings and you know, you did a lot of good
stuff since you've been sober. That's that's a good thing.
(56:08):
I want you to do this. I want you to
start getting in touch with some of these people twelve
step programs and and get them to write little wreckords,
you know, write little letters of character character reference to
the court. So I did that, and I wound up
(56:30):
with like fifty letters from different people, and some of
them were quite well known, you know. And one of
them was the son of a superior No, one of
them was a security a superior court judge in California
whose son I used to run with and I helped
him get sober the first time around. So anyway, so
I had all these letters, even from judges, from you know,
(56:53):
kind of fancy people, and then just from just garden
variety junkies. But you know, all these people going like
how this guy got me sober? He said, my love,
and so the so Stacy, my lawyer, she presented all
this this character references to the to the to the court.
Turns out that the judge was forty years sober in aa.
Speaker 2 (57:17):
Wow, how about that?
Speaker 1 (57:19):
Apples turned this out afterwards, way after the fact, because
before the trial started, Stacy, my lawyer, and this judge
were in the same elevator together going to some legal
function or whatever. You know, these people hang out together,
and he said to oh, yeah, that tattoo guy, that
(57:40):
client of years. He's gone away for a long time.
As Stacy was like, no, you're on her. I don't
think so he was like, oh yeah, oh yeah, I'm
gonna throw the fucking bucket that's come back. He told
her that. And at the end of this, after he
read all those letters, I get teary eyed about this
because he actually apologized to me when he dismissed the case.
(58:04):
I mean, it wasn't like he was like, yeah, I'm
so sorry you had to go through all this, you know,
because there was other mitigating factors in this thing, Like
some of those guns were legal. They tried to make
it out that they were all hot guns and stuff,
and some of those guns I had bought legally and
had fucking permits for in New York City, and they
(58:24):
bury they tried. Prosecutor tried to bury that to just
make it look as bad as he could. The prosecutor
was Cyrus Vance Junior. Wow, real scumbag.
Speaker 3 (58:33):
You know.
Speaker 1 (58:35):
Yeah, power hungry, fucking reptilian piece of work, you know.
But yeah, the judge dismissed the case and actually apologized
to me and you know, said sorry you had to
go through all this, mister shaw. I was like, what, Yeah,
it was nice.
Speaker 2 (58:54):
Talking to the audience. Right now, what's the most important
thing somebody has to do to get sober.
Speaker 1 (59:00):
Eat shit, die a thousand deaths, crash and burn again
and again and again till that's enough. Nobody sails into
recovery on the wings of victory. You know, I sure
as hell didn't. I had to eat shit and die
(59:22):
a thousand deaths, you know, and I had to be
willing to go to any lengths to do anything that
would lift that merciless obsession from you know, from my soul.
And it's it hasn't been easy, but I wouldn't trade
it for all the tea in China, man, because it's been,
(59:43):
you know, just a rich and fulfilling life. I'm not
going to say it's been pain free because you know,
it's like you can't, you know, you can't create decades
of horrible destruction and you know, unconscious living and then
you know suddenly wake up and you know, walk through
(01:00:05):
a garden of roses. You know it's gonna be uh,
you know, you're gonna have to dredge up some fucking
demonic shit and expose it to the light of you know,
of healing. But you know, if you if if you
don't want to repeat, you know, if you don't want
your past to be your future. Then you're gonna do
(01:00:26):
whatever you gotta do to you know, to u mm hmm.
But you know it usually takes a lot of pain,
you know, paying so long now going on twenty five years, right,
twenty five years?
Speaker 2 (01:00:38):
Yeah, and then what would you say, buddy to the
person's been sober for a while. But life's difficult, life's scary,
life's a little there. They don't want to relapse, maybe
not maybe want to kill themselves that in between spot.
Im just it's just scary to be alive. I don't
and just the world's coming in a little bit. What's
your counsel to that person?
Speaker 1 (01:01:00):
You know? I wake up with that fear in my
heart every morning, and that's why I have to get
straight into prayer and relating my life to a power
greater than myself. I have to get into action. I
have to, you know, ask God to give me the
ability to get out of myself and be a humble servant.
Speaker 2 (01:01:23):
M hmmm.
Speaker 1 (01:01:25):
Because everybody's in pain. This whole fucking world is in pain.
There's nobody in this world that's not suffering some kind
of affliction. And if they're not well, they haven't yet.
I don't think there's anybody in this world that has
not doesn't come equipped with, you know, an existential dilemma.
(01:01:49):
You know, that's just just to par for the fucking course.
So if I'm just one more shit brained now key,
you know, striving to recover, then I'm gonna, I'm gonna,
I'm gonna, I'm gonna encounter challenges and pain just like
(01:02:12):
everybody else in this goddamn world does. So you know,
there's a there's a program of recovery. Nobody ever said
it was going to be easy. But you know, it's
kind of like you know, in in in in the
spiritual practice that I that I work with. You know,
(01:02:34):
we've talked about the plant medicine, you know, in the
church that I that I work with. Uh, you know,
we we have a lot of wise teachings that come
to different as different channels from the astral and one
of them says King King Kohea, if it's all this
(01:03:00):
is all based in Brazil, at what it means is
those who stand firm will get beat up, but those
who run will suffer more. Sooner or later, do you
want to stand firm and get beat up a little bit,
(01:03:21):
or do you want to suffer more? Because you will.
I know that from experience, Like if you don't tow
the line, you know, there's so many you know, God
is patient, but you know the universe has laws that
you know are in effect. And I don't want to
(01:03:43):
you know, not only do I not want to bear
the consequences of not living this life, you know, as
correctly as I possibly can, but I also don't want
to give up all the blessings that I'm that I've
gained because every time I've had to walk through some
dark night of the soul, and there's been many in
(01:04:04):
these twenty five years, every time I've had to walk
through fucking fire to get to the other side of that.
When I got to the other side, I was like,
oh boy, I'm sure glad I didn't drink or kill
myself because this is fucking awesome. You know. The blessing
is to do come you know, but it's work.
Speaker 2 (01:04:25):
It's work.
Speaker 1 (01:04:26):
So if you want to do the work, you know,
keep coming back, man, going back, And if you run, God,
God pity you, man, because it gets worse. I know,
because I know you do. I know, I know you know,
I know you know.
Speaker 2 (01:04:40):
I do know. I know very well. Yep, thank you,
thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.
You know, it's rare that you meet an artist with
your magnitude who's a fucking kind soul, and it's just
you're a special cat man.
Speaker 1 (01:04:56):
But you're a special cast, So you got to meet
a lot of special cast because that's who you are,
Like at tracks like right.
Speaker 2 (01:05:02):
Yeah, I know, but it's it's you know, it's just
nice to play jazz with you. Man, It's just nice
to play right because you're just Yeah, it's beautiful. We're
still here and we're and we're going to continue to
do beautiful things.
Speaker 1 (01:05:13):
God will right, You're gonna make great art and.
Speaker 2 (01:05:16):
I'm gonna crack hard some little light in and we're
gonna keep talking about it.
Speaker 1 (01:05:18):
That's what we're here for. Thanks for making time, man,
Thanks for having me. Man. I can't thank you enough. Lastly,
we got to show the books off this book. Well,
that's a very dark book. That's dark. That's not part
of my Scab Vender memoir Seriesly, well, you watched my movie. Yeah,
and the movie that they made, the documentary they made
about me, was based on the other two books. That's
(01:05:41):
a wait, we can talk about that one too. But
this is this is a two book, two book series,
two book series. There should be four books. Yeah, I
just haven't gotten around to the next two started. Absolute
must reads.
Speaker 2 (01:05:55):
Buy this Buy this book, and give out a shout
out to brother Johnny Depp for his love for you
and all the great things he's doing because he.
Speaker 1 (01:06:02):
And Robert crumb Man one of my childhood here comic
book hero. He did the cover for my book. Yeah,
you know that was the biggest feather in my cap ever.
And so these two books, yeah, those are those are
the books that inspired the movie by the same title,
scap Vendor Confessions of the Tattoo Artist. But the other
book that you held up, Narcissa, that was my first
(01:06:24):
published book, and that book is a dark roller coaster
ride through hell.
Speaker 2 (01:06:31):
What will make people love you and appreciate you more?
Are over on the side now.
Speaker 1 (01:06:35):
That book would make with Kowski crean. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:06:39):
The sal Show is a production of iHeart Podcasts, hosted
by me Cina McFarlane, produced by pod People in twenty eighth.
Av Our lead producer is Keith Carlick, Our executive prouser
is Lindcy Hoffman, Marketing lead is Ashley Weaver, thank you
so much for listening. We'll see you next week.
This was like fucking Beverly Hills. People that were coming
around the house with the likes of Tony Curtis, carried Grant,
Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando. I mean the cream of Hollywood
or HouseGuests that come, you know, the cocktail party. He said,
I'm this kid, I'm looking at these people like you.
People are full of shit. I hate you all well,
(00:20):
I hate this reality, I hate this world, I hate
this family. Get me the fuck out of here.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Everybody at Seno McFarlane. If you're enjoying The Sino Show,
make sure to follow or subscribe on your favorite podcast
apps so you never miss an episode. New episodes drop weekly,
don't miss out. Oh are you ready? Brother?
Speaker 1 (00:44):
All right?
Speaker 2 (00:45):
I barely slept. I'm so excited. I sit down with
a true outlaw legend, the one and only mister Jonathan Shaw.
He's not just a tattoo artist, He's but a fucking
cultural force. He's a mystic with a needle, storyteller, was
scars and a man who's seen the underworld and come
back with wisdom, ain't and blood in truth? Where to go?
(01:07):
Deep in this Brother's right. Tattoos, transformation and the price
of freedom. Welcome, welcome, welcome, Thank you, brother, thank you.
It's a pleasure. It's an honor to be here with you. Yes,
it's an honor to know you. Let's go back. Your father, Yeah, Artishaw,
big band leader, guru. Your mom is an accomplished actress.
You want to tell us a little bit about your
(01:28):
backstory about.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
That she was a movie star. She's you know, she
grew up in extreme poverty. My maternal grandfather was a
gypsy from Lithuania. Stowed away on a ship when he
was I think fourteen or fifteen years old to America.
He got to America and he totally hid his Gypsy
(01:50):
heritage and you know, just learned English and just became
a gung ho all American guy. He was ashamed of
being a Gypsy. There was a lot of prejudice against
the rama many people back then. I think when he
was like sixteen, he became a marine and went to
war and killed a lot of people. And I think
he was good at that because his father and his
(02:13):
uncles they were robbers. They were highwaymen, and they would
waylay and kidnap travelers back in their home country and
torture them to kill them. And take all their money.
So he was a raging, violent, charming, but violent alcoholic
by all accounts. And I didn't know him because he
(02:36):
died shortly after I was born. But over the years
I managed to, you know, especially when I went into
this deep, deep inventory of you know, my life, my ancestors,
you know, the origins of the multi generational curse. You know, alcoholism, addiction,
you know, violent sex, drugs, rock and roll. When I
(03:00):
had to start really researching you know, every aspect of
you know, what composes this weird entity that I call myself.
So when I did all this deep diving and research
and stuff, a lot of it went into other dimensions,
shamanic practices, and came up with all this this stuff.
You know, who are these people that brought me into
(03:21):
this life? You know, so my mother, she grew up
with her three siblings and just the insanity that they
grew up with, you know, the ultra violent situation in poverty,
you know, my they didn't have any money. And my grandfather,
he was a criminal. He was involved with you know
a lot of shady stuff, you know, mob related stuff.
(03:42):
You know, he might have even been a hip man
for the mob. I mean it was on that level,
and he'd come home, you know, drunk as a fiddler's
bitch and just just just wreck everything. And my mother
is this little girl, you know, just watching all this.
But according to her, she was the apple of his eye.
At the same time, she had this upbringing where you know,
she saw her father, you know, duking it out with
(04:04):
cops and just getting every bone in his body broken
and not stop fighting. He would fight until he was
literally unconscious. So she grew up with this kind of stuff,
and I think when she was sixteen she left home
to become like a chorus girl. She was very beautiful.
At some point she started hanging out with a lot
of sort of high falutin people. At some point she
(04:27):
got into a poker game with a bunch of mobsters.
I think it was oh Frank Kappa Capra. Frank Kapra,
very famous photographer. More she she was good friends with him,
oh wow, And he was going to these underground sort
of casinos, and she begged and cajoled and pleaded with
(04:48):
him to take her to one of these poker games
with all these mobsters, and he was like, no, no,
you don't want to be with these guys. And she
went there. According to the legend, she played poker because
her father was a card shark wow, and had taught her,
you know, all the tricks. So she went in and
sat down with all these fucking wise guys and cleaned
(05:10):
them out, and she had a lot of money all
of a sudden. Meanwhile, her sister, Constance, who was like
when I've written my second mother before she killed herself
in front of us. But anyway, so her sister had
gone off to Italy to make movies. Her sister was
actually an actress, and they had somehow gotten herself over
(05:32):
to Italy and was making movies and was hanging out
with all these very fancy people, you know, like Felini
and Ernest Hemingway and all these you know, intelligency of
Europe in those days. It was right after the war.
So my mother she'd gotten all this money, and a
few days after the poker game, the photographer Frank Kappa
(05:54):
came to her door and said, hey, you know, these
these wise guys weren't real happy about being cleaned up
by some little floozy. It might be best for you
to leave town for a little while until things kind
of cooled down. She took all these, you know, thousands
of dollars and got on an All Italia plane to
join her sister in Italy. And then she became an
(06:17):
actress and her first role was in a movie called
Bitter Rice.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
Oh wow.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
They actually put a picture of her on an Italian
postage stamp maybe twenty years ago, commemorating the new cinema movement,
you know, and all that cultural stuff. So she wound
up being an icon in Italy, came back to America
and met Billy Wilder and was his girlfriend. He'd put
(06:41):
her in a movie that really kind of marked my
life in a lot of ways, just having watched it
as a young kid, a movie called The Lost Weekend,
and she played the bar girl. That movie had a
profound effect on my life now because the movie's about
an outlcoholic writer. I grew up to become an alcoholic brother.
(07:06):
Yeah yeah, anyway, long story, yeah, long story, a lout.
Speaker 2 (07:12):
But it's a good it's a good map, and it's
a map that we're going to breakdown a little bit.
But you know, your dad was this international star, extraordinary musician.
Speaker 1 (07:21):
My dad was like fucking Elvis, right. Michael Jackson, Mick Jagger.
He was a fucking legend. Yeah, he was a Sinatra thaw.
I means he's that big. He was a player and
then but a shitty dad. No dad, no dad, No,
he was a shitty Well he's a shitty man in
a lot of ways, you know, but an amazing genius.
(07:41):
So he was also a sex and love addict, big time. Like,
he married nine times, and he had a thing, you know,
for marrying alcoholic women. If they weren't alcoholic, they were
dysfunctional other ways.
Speaker 2 (07:54):
They had to be troubled.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
There there was something. And so my mother was wife
number seven or eight. But he'd married Lana Turner, Ava Gardner,
you know, and he'd had extra marital whatever his affairs
with the likes of Judy Garland and Billie Holiday. He
started Billie Holiday's career. Wow, hired her for the first
time she ever was in a band. Was my father
(08:17):
hired her? So he married my mother and they stayed together,
not long enough to have me.
Speaker 2 (08:23):
And then you know, he takes off your mom's raising you.
She's getting deep into her alcoholism.
Speaker 1 (08:29):
Oh yeah, right, and it's fucking madnesson chaos. My mother's
an alki. She's married two other guys. She married my
first stepfather, who I really liked, and I was probably
five or six years old, and my last memory was
of her cracking his head open with a marble lampstand
and blood everywhere, and the ambulance and the cops, you know,
(08:52):
taking him to the hospital, and somehow she didn't get
to go to jail for that, but never saw him again.
Shortly after that, she brought home this other guy who
became my stepfather forever. And this guy was just like
your classic enabler, very sick man, you know, just a
(09:14):
milk toast, soy boy kind of man who was her
co conspirator and her alcoholism. So yeah, he didn't drink,
but he was the guy that was good, you know.
I mean Allan, you know, on steroids, untreated Alan on
on steroids, you know, just the worst, passive aggressive, just
a creep of a human being. Oh my god. And
(09:36):
so when they got together, it was like, who are
these fucking people? You know, this is abhorrent to my soul.
I got to get out of here. You know, this
was like fucking Beverly Hills. People that were coming around
the house were the likes of Tony Curtis carried Grant,
Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando. I mean, you know, the cream
of Hollywood or HouseGuests had come, you know, the cocktail parties,
(09:59):
and I'm this kid, I'm looking at these people. I
get people are full of shit. I hate you, allow,
I hate this reality. I hate this world. I hate
this family. Get me the fuck out of here. So,
you know, I started looking for escape at a very
early age. Comic books became a real portal to the
world that I found much more to my liking ec comics.
(10:23):
And then you know, those really gory old comic books
before they came in, you know, made everything sort of
sanitized with the comic book code, so you know, Tales
from the Crypt and you know, all these crime comic
books that would have pleased you know, Bukowski, you know,
probably read them himself as a kid. You know, I
never asked him that, but I wanted to be a
(10:44):
comic book artist. And you know, as I grew a
little older than you know, I was like twelve thirteen
years old and smoking weed, drinking, taking stealing pills from
my mother's medicine cabinet all that. You know, I had
a little group of friends, and we were all kind
of coming from these fucked up family and banded together
and became a gang, and we'd go around and you know,
(11:05):
just do all kinds of delinquent shit, you know. But
at the same time, we were very cultural kids, like
we loved jazz music. We'd go and hang out and
these you know, these black jazz clubs down in the hood,
you know, and sneak in and I saw, you know,
(11:26):
like John Coltrane, you know, I saw Miles Davis, I
saw Anette Coleman, I saw Felonious Monk. I saw guys
like that in these you know, smoky, shadowy little jazz dives.
Several years later, I was just strung out like a labrat,
living in some crash bad and Hollywood, watching my friends
(11:49):
die of overdoses, dropping life flies all around me, and
at some point I realized I was gonna die. Things
were really bad. I just on the road by Jack Kerouac.
I'd stolen it from a from an all night newsstand
that used to be up on the corner of Hollywood
and Kuwenga, and I went in there and they had
(12:10):
a little section with paperback books, and I saw this book.
I saw the title on the road. I didn't know
anything about it. I didn't know who Carawhac was. I
didn't know anything. The title of the book is what
grabbed me, and probably the early seventies. Yeah, so I
saw this book just because the title, took it home,
(12:31):
read it from cover to cover, and I said, that's
the way out, that's the salvation, that's where I could
do what this guy did. And then so I'm just
going out on the road. That was a seed planet.
But I didn't actually manifest until years later when I
was strung out, you know, in Hollywood and really messed up,
and people were dying. My girlfriend died, a lot of
(12:53):
my friends died, a lot of other people. Yeah, we're dying,
you know. And we were, you know, we were like
a dying breed around that time. We were, you know,
this band of stoned out kids, a lot of whom
were geniuses but all fucked up, every one of us.
But in that time period, you know, we we went
with the Manson family for a while, led Zeppelin when
(13:16):
they were in town, rolling Stones when they were living
in la were actually copping dope for Keith by means
of Marshall Chess who was vanishing the Rolling Stones. So
we were always up at Marshall's house. We were, you know,
kind of cool kids on the streets of Hollywood, living
(13:36):
that rock and roll lifestyle, and you know, got to
run with some you know, in the company of some
interesting people. You know. We were hanging out with Jim Morrison,
Frank Zappa. These these guys were you know, kind of
like our big brothers, you know, our heroes, and you
know they were just like, yeah, come out in.
Speaker 2 (13:55):
Hang out right, Yeah, yeah, yeah, Grand Parsons, you know,
all these people.
Speaker 1 (14:00):
You know, yeah, it was it was that time in Hollywood.
Speaker 2 (14:03):
It really was why don't we move to you hitchhike
in New Mexico.
Speaker 1 (14:07):
You know, I'd hung out with Bokowski. I wanted to
be a writer. I was writing and at some point
I said, fuck it, I got nothing to lose here.
All my friends are dying. I'm going to be dead soon.
Something in my spirit just said get out. I didn't
have any money. I kicked out cold turkey in a
dirty little room. We were breaking into doctor's offices. You know,
(14:29):
we had you know, script pads. We were you know,
selling dilauded's. We were yeah, you were the original drugstore cowboy. Yeah,
big time. There was a bunch of us, you know. Anyway,
it was so much, so much, so much. I mean
this has all been written about, you know. I got
to keep it brief on this because you know, by
the fucking book, man, if.
Speaker 2 (14:47):
We get it, you got to be the book right now.
We got to give a version of the book. We
gotta the live the author speaking to us right now,
bud By the book, by the fucking book. We got
all three of them.
Speaker 1 (14:57):
The movie doesn't do it justice, even though it gives
you an ice taste, mane it kind of taste. You know,
first one's free, you know, the.
Speaker 2 (15:03):
First one's free, coming back, by the fucking book, right,
buy some fucking artwork for this matter, I be too.
Speaker 1 (15:09):
Yeah, So at some point I just said, fuck it,
I got nothing to lose. There's a whole world out there,
and I was just like this this ay working. And
so I, you know, wandered down to the highway with
like an overnight satchel, chains of underwear and a pair
of socks and maybe one hundred dollars in my pocket
(15:29):
that I managed to save by not being strung out
having kicked we'd sell drugs and then we'd buy drugs, right,
so we'd have some money, then we'd spend it on drugs.
So now there was a little bit of money left over,
a couple hundred dollars, and I figured that could get me.
I'd seen another book in that bookstore, and that place
(15:52):
where I stole the copy of On the Road from
the other book was Mexico on five dollars a day.
So I'm like, five dollars a day, Okay, I got
two hundred bucks.
Speaker 2 (16:02):
And where you have Vera Cruz.
Speaker 1 (16:04):
Yeah, well, I I hoboed around Mexico. I stuck my
thumb out on the highway, ended up in Mexico. Hoboat
around Mexico for many months, maybe a year, and then
eventually I ended up in this port town called Vera
Cruz on the Gulf of Mexico.
Speaker 2 (16:18):
But that's is that where you saw the sailors with
all the tattoos and that kind of guy.
Speaker 1 (16:22):
I started seeing a lot of tattoos on sailors there.
I was trying to get work on a ship. My
idea was when I got to Vera Cruz, I saw
these ships going and coming and going, and I was like,
I'll get a ship. I'll get work on a ship
and work my way to Brazil. So, you know, I
hung out on the docks and that's where I first
started seeing a lot of tattoos, and that's where I started,
(16:44):
you know, hand poking tattoos on sailors. And you know,
eventually did get work on a ship and ended up
in Brazil.
Speaker 2 (16:53):
And then you started doing tattoos in Brazil, right.
Speaker 1 (16:56):
Yeah, we started. I met some a couple other guys.
This was like nineteen seventy five. I ended up jumped
ship in the north of Brazil, traveled around, got work
on fishing boats, and had made a little bit of money,
not much, but enough money to feed myself for a
little while. But then that money ran out and I
(17:18):
wound up hitchhiking from the north of Brazil slowly all
the way down to Rio Detionnaio. It took probably months
and months to get out there. When I got to Rio,
I fell in with a bunch of kids, kind of delinquents, travelers, alcoholics, addicts,
and we had a great time. Met a couple of
young guys my age who were also interested in learning
(17:44):
to tattoo, but there was nowhere you could learn to tattoo,
especially in Brazil in those days. There was one crusty
old scab vendor in Brazil that had a place in
the back of a whorehouse in the port of Santos,
south of Bridasonnaio. That was the only real bottom five
tattoo men in the whole country. But we started just
(18:04):
fucking around and experimenting. You couldn't get tattoo equipment or
anything like that back in the day, so we started
building like jailhouse kind of machines. You know. One guy
knew how to you know, make something resembling, you know,
a jail house tattoo machine. And then we started fucking
around and building these you know, homemade rigs, and because
at that point, everybody was tattooing by hand, like hand
(18:25):
poking with just needles and you know thread and India ink.
And then we started playing around with you know, building machines.
And then one thing led to another and somebody got
a hold of a real tattoo machine, you know, so
we we were tattooing each other and you know, tattooing
neighborhood kids. And yeah, that's where I started.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
And then you made your way to really learn to
long beach the Pike, right.
Speaker 1 (18:47):
Yeah, at some point, after being in Brazil like that
for years and years, you know, all my friends were like, man,
you're a fucking gringo. You got a passport. You could
go to America and you know and learn to really
tattoo and bring you know, bring some real tattoos stuff.
One of the guys that I kind of grew up
in tattooing with back in Brazil, he wound up to
be become the one of the founders of the Brazilian
(19:09):
chapter of the Hell's Angels. He's still around. He's a
big deal, man, He's a big fucking deal, not just
as a veteran Hell's Angel, but you know, but he's
also a big deal because he's one of the became
one of the primary tattoo man not just in Brazil
but all over the world. He wound up moving to
Europe and starting tattoo shops there, and you know, he's
(19:29):
kind of like an elder dude. And that's those are
my contemporaries. M finding sometimes it's hard to believe that
I'm like, you know, like a you know, a veteran
of the you know, of the tattoo thing. You know,
that we were like really the founders of this whole
situation that that has emerged, you know, over the years.
I mean, yeah, we put in our time and we
(19:50):
did did our ship, you know, and you know, particularly
I was very involved, you know, this this community, with
this world. But yeah, so you know, they they kind
of egged me on to come back to the States
and you know, learn about tattooing and then bring some
(20:13):
of the knowledge and the equipment back home. And so
I did. I went. I went and got work on
a ship again because now I had Seamen's papers from
the you know, from the the first one, so it
was easy to get work on a ship that was
going to the States. They said, oh, you've got to
pass part okay, you can come. And wound up in
(20:33):
Long Beach, the Port of Long Beach, and I'm wandering
around there. I don't know nothing, you know, I don't
know anything about you know, tattoo Where am I going
to find anything? But I knew from when I was
a teenager we used to you know, we used to
sneak out and you know and go down to the
(20:53):
Long Beach Pike, which was kind of like the Coney
Island of the West coast. It was a place. It
was a real rough and tumble kind of place. It
was this old, decrepit amusement park, and it was you know,
populated by sailors and you know, navy yards were nearby,
(21:15):
and sailors from all over the world, bikers, just white trash,
all workers and you know it was It was not Disneyland, yes,
and Disneyland was for cissies.
Speaker 3 (21:26):
You know.
Speaker 1 (21:26):
This was like the real This was like the real deal.
So I remembered from the pike, you know, as a teenager.
I remember staring in the window of all these these
tattoo shops. You know, they had a ton of tattoo
shops and dive bars and you know, amusement park and
penny arcades and then they had tattoo shops. They had
(21:46):
a lot of tattoo shops. It was the place, I
guess on the West Coast where you know, where you
would go if you had it in your head to
get tattooed, you know. So so I got off the
show up there in Long Beach and I'm like, oh man,
you know, I could see the roller coaster and stuff
from you know, from the shipyard, and I was like,
that's where I got to go, and so I started
(22:13):
wandering around there, you know, uh, walked into one shop
you know, hey, you know where I could one of
the tattoo guns get chased out, chased out with a
baseball bat. You know. I guess that's not the right approach.
Back in the day it was, you know, tattoo guys
were you know, pretty uh secretive about their trade secrets,
(22:36):
you know. So so but I managed to meet and
make the acquaintance of some real tattoo guys who took
a liking to me. One of them was Bob Shaw,
who was a legendary tattoo man, you know, and he
(22:56):
took me under his wing and told everybody I was
his nephew because we had the same name and and
he was more of a father to me than you know, wow,
well way more. I mean, he was like my father
in tattoo and he was my tattoo dad, you know.
In writing. Bukowski was my tattoo dad, my tattoo dead,
(23:17):
my writing, my literature dad.
Speaker 3 (23:19):
You know.
Speaker 1 (23:20):
So you know, it's like I think I wrote about
this in the book where you know, it's like we
who don't have fathers, we find our fathers we find
our fathers in the places where we where our destiny
takes us. So it was like already my father he
(23:42):
didn't have father either, you know. Uh so my father
he found his father and these old black jazz men
and like fucking speakeasies in Harlem, you know where he
learned to play the horn. And I found my father
and you know, in the tattoo shop in the you
(24:04):
know sandwich between you know, a dive bar and a
penny arcade in the you know, Long Beach Pike.
Speaker 2 (24:12):
You know, how long did you study with him for?
Speaker 1 (24:15):
Well, I don't really study. I hung out. He wasn't
It wasn't a formal kind of thing. It's not you know.
He let you hang around and then I, you know,
I do you know, go do beer runs for him,
or you know, mop up the puke when somebody got sick,
or chase you know, bums out the door came in
(24:35):
begging for change or whatever. You know. I was kind
of like the shop helper, and I got to watch
him and hang out with him a lot, you know,
just absorb that special wisdom you know that he carried,
you know, and at some point, you know, he started,
you know, he started let me ask a few questions.
So I'd ask some questions and then he'd start explaining
(24:57):
stuff to me, you know, and you know, at one
point he put a machine in my hand and said,
you know, go go tattoo yourself, you know, practice on yourself,
and I maybe we'll let your tattoo one of these
whinos that stumbles in here.
Speaker 3 (25:12):
You know.
Speaker 1 (25:14):
And eventually that's how it went, you know. And yeah,
and you know, I tattooed a few whinos, and you know, uh,
eventually he was like, well, you know, we got a
job for you, you know, and he put me to work.
And so I worked there in Long Beach with him.
Then he moved to Texas, and I stayed there in
(25:35):
Long Beach working with his partner, who was a Colonel
Todd and old Kentucky colonel kind of guy, real shit kicking,
like a real tattoo man. Good guy, but like, you know,
no nonsense. And I worked with him for a while.
And then then nineteen eighty one or eighty two, the
(25:57):
city decided they're going to close the pike. What was
left of it at that point, there was much left
of it anyway, It was kind of decrepit they'd knocked
down the roller coaster. Really, all that was left of
the pike by nineteen eighty two was just a bunch
of dive bars and tattoo shops and a couple of
penny arcades and all the rides were gone. But it
(26:18):
was still the place where like, you know, low rent,
kind of white trash people would come and hang out,
and you know, the cholos were there around, you know,
low riding in there. You know, it's like a real
you know, it was a cool place. I closed down
the Pike and Bob Shaw had moved to Texas, so
I followed him to Houston, Texas and worked with him
(26:41):
there for like about a year, and then from there
I moved to New Orleans and New Orleans to New York,
then back to Brazil. Opened a tattoo shop in British
Honduras for a while. When they had the Falklands War
was going on, I flew from New Orleans down to
Belize City when it was a real shithl This is
back in the you know eighties, early eighties, before tourists
(27:02):
went there. You know, it was a real shithole, man
literally shithole that there was like open sewers on every street.
Whole place smelt like everybody there just shook their pants
at once, you know. So I opened a tattoo shop
right in the main street of fucking Belize City because
they were having the Falklands War in Argentina and the
(27:23):
British had a military base there and they were sending
all these troops to Belize to train and get ready
to go to war in the Malvinas the Falklands were
in Argentina. So I was like, great, there's a military
base right here, and I'm the only guy with a
tattoo shop. I opened the tattoo shop next to a
you know, like a pub that all the troops would
(27:46):
go and get hammered every night. So these guys had
me working twenty four hours a day.
Speaker 3 (27:49):
Man.
Speaker 2 (27:50):
Wow, even being a junkie, even being an Alki, there
was something about you that was like determined. Like you
went to Bukowski, knocked on his fucking door, you found
this great master tattoo, you know, how to go to
find the right people.
Speaker 1 (28:06):
Something in my right and something in my stars just
gave me this cent I love that, this this tenacity,
kind of fearless that way. Weird, Yeah, I never knew
anything like fear, like real fear, until I got sober.
(28:29):
I think that's why I liked liquor and drugs so
much too. Like in the Big Book it says, you know,
men and women drink because they like the effect produced
by alcohol. Well, you know, I think conversely, I, you know,
I drink because I don't like the effect produced by sobriety.
You know, all the fears and all the traumas, and
(28:52):
all the harms and hurts and worries and memories and
you know, delusions and self centered, funky behavior all bubble
up to the surface when you put the plug in
the jug, and then you're dealing with real stuff, causes
and conditions, the demonic possession, you know, because I really believe,
(29:15):
you know, talking about alcoholism. I believe to the core
of me that you know, when they talk about a
spiritual malady, they're not just whistling Dixie out their ass, man,
you know, spiritual malady.
Speaker 2 (29:29):
We got to talk about New York because let's you
go out there and he started a fucking revolution, and
it's what an interesting time to be in New York City.
Speaker 1 (29:38):
It was. It was It's it's almost like I've I
think that's why on some levels, after I wrote these
first two books of this scab Vender memoir series, those
books only take you up to me being about twenty
two years old. There's a lot more or stories, but
(30:01):
I have I think it's been hard for me to
write about those years because they were so impactful in
my life in so many ways. So much went down,
so many things, so many people place as adventures, you know,
and getting you know, sort of successful, you know, and
(30:22):
suddenly becoming like you know this you know, iconic presence.
You know. It was like a lot of my dreams
came true, but they were this all nightmarish. In a
lot of ways. It was good times, but you know,
I was strung out again because I've gotten sober. It's
a long story, but you know, but I before I
got before I I got hooked on liquor and drugs again.
(30:48):
I was actually stark, graving sober in New York. I
was sober, abstinate, but I had no connection to any
sort of healing situations. So I was living like this
crazy unconscious thug man. You know, I was living a
really like rock and roll lifestyle.
Speaker 2 (31:10):
Man.
Speaker 1 (31:10):
You know, I was running with you know, mobsters, hell's angels,
you know fast women, you know, movie stars, rap stars
and all that shit. I mean, I was writing the
thick of It man in New York in you know,
the mid eighties when it was all going down. You know,
I was tattooing, you know, anybody and everybody who you know,
(31:34):
like household names, people's and uh and I was running
with these people. And I was living like, you know,
like a rock star without a fucking band. But I
was fucking stark, raving, fucking crazy. I was nuts. I
was you know, I was talking about untreated alcoholism because
I didn't drink. I didn't have anything to you know,
(31:54):
keep this monster in check. So I was just running
a muck man, you know. And it was all that
just you know. I was married to a beautiful Brazilian gal,
you know, who I loved, dearly, loved forever. We came
up from Brazil together because after you know everything else,
I've gone back to Brazil to fulfill my obligation to
(32:18):
bring tattooing to Brazil and did that and then then
moved back to the States, New York. And by then
I was married to my wife, and we came to
New York together and we built this whole empire and
she was right there by my side through all this stuff,
(32:40):
and I just went ape shit in New York, destroyed
that marriage. You know, we parted ways, you know, with
tears in our eyes, in a you know, loving way,
but you know we couldn't stay together because I was
going this way and she was going that way, or
I should say she was going that way and I
was going that way. So so yeah, and then after that,
(33:06):
it was just all sex, drugs, rock and roll and uh.
And in that period, I created a whole fucking empire
and did a whole lot of stuff and you know,
launched the first real solid, mainstream tattoo magazine. You know,
they had me on David Letterman show. You know, I was,
you know, living that yeah, all this kind of stuff,
(33:31):
you know, tattooing, you know, all these famous people, and yeah,
it was it was a dream come true. And at
the same time, I mean, yeah, I had a good run,
you know, but eventually I you know, crashed and burned
and ate ship and died a thousand deaths, you know,
and that's when I had to get sober. But boy,
(33:53):
you know, a lot so I guess what I'm saying
is all those years in New York, fifteen years, it's
hard for me to really even I haven't been able
to write about it because I think it's kind of
tugs at me, you know, and this in this deep way,
because there's so much went down then, you know, and
(34:14):
there was so many people that I've almost buried a
lot of those memories. They'll come out when it's time
for me to you know, call in the forces that
feed me this stuff, you know, Mack. But it's still
very fresh, even though it's like twenty something years ago.
It's almost twenty five years ago when I, you know,
(34:37):
got sober and left New York and sold everything and
moved to Brazil to write these books. You know. But
but it still feels really so fresh. It's easier for
me to go back to my childhood and my adolescent
years and then it starts getting so fresh and real
that it's it's kind of like painful for me to
(34:59):
rea visit that because you know, I burned a lot
of bridges and lost a lot of stuff, and people
you know, died, and there was just yeah, it was
a hard time, man, I mean, because I felt like
doing these deep dives that itabled me to write these books.
I felt like it was a form of you know,
real spiritual surgery where you go and vivisect your own
(35:24):
life without anesthesia. It was almost a necessity. I was
compelled to do all that writing, and do all that
research and do all that digging. And you know, I
laughed and I cried and I bled when I was
writing this stuff, you know, And I think that's what
people love so much about the books. The people that
do read them, you know, they're like, holy shit, you know,
(35:44):
because it comes from the fucking heart of the wound,
and it's you know, and there's humor, there's dark humor,
and it's you know, I could do that with this stuff.
But some of these wounds are maybe so fresh that
I'm just like, ah, then I just want to go
to the beach, you know.
Speaker 2 (36:05):
Yeah, all right, well listen, we're going to get two
things and then we'll get sober. The Picasso that you
did on that guy, that was fucking beautiful, man, Casso Whisk,
Where did that come from?
Speaker 1 (36:18):
I mean, that's the original incentive for that was there
was an artist, a sort of you know, an underground
artist here in southern California that that I met who
who did some paintings in that style, that sort of
neo cubist kind of style that that I as soon
(36:38):
as I saw it, I was like, whoa, that's exactly.
That just touched my soul in a way that I
was like, Yeah, that's that's going to look good on
somebody's back.
Speaker 2 (36:50):
How did I take you to do that? Tattoo? Poor guy?
Speaker 1 (36:53):
I don't remember. I mean, yeah, but Philip Blue, who's like,
you know, the god of tattooing, was working with me
at the time, and he he was there for that,
and he's he's an interesting cat. I mean, he started
tattooing he was ten years old. His parents were hippies,
(37:15):
gypsy's living in the streets of India. He grew up
on the streets of fucking like Calcutta and shit wow,
and started tattooing. He was like eight years old or nine,
and his dad was this hippie, crazy wild man. They
just made a documentary about him, tattoo guy. And Philip
grew up in this thing and became like it, went
(37:35):
to Japan and studied with like the great masters in Japan,
and then went and studied with Ed Hardy, and you know,
by the time he came to me, he was like
a season tattoo man. And he was only like twenty
years old, and he was like a seasoned tattoo man,
like one of the greatest, one of the greatest that
(37:57):
ever lived, like a legend already at twenty. Now he
must be, you know, in his fifties or something, but
I mean still like a huge legend. Anyway, So he
came to me when he's like twenty years old. He
wanted to work with me. He'd had some drama here
on the West Coast. He'd gotten sort of threatened and
ostracized from a situation, and so I was like, well,
(38:21):
come on over here. You know, I knew him. We'd
met before because I'd worked with the guy named Spider
Webb in New York and Spider was friends with all
these people. And I'd met a lot of people through Spider,
including Philip and his dad, and I'd even met Andy
Warhol through Spider. It was a crazy time, you know,
Oscot all these people around, you know. So but anyway,
(38:43):
Philip came to work with me and we worked side
by side in this tiny little room and that was
the original Fun City tattoo that I'd started in New
York and it was me and Philip Loo and we
were just cracking out, Wow, groundbreaking kind of stuff that
people hadn't seen before, you know. And Philip was a
(39:03):
big inspiration to me because he'd be like he'd be
doing his stuff which nobody had ever seen before, and
then he was like egging me on to do other
kind of different innovative stuff, you know. So I mean
he was a huge influence and I you know, and yeah,
God blessed Philip Man. What a what an amazing artist.
(39:23):
But so anyway, so I had this painting that I'd
purchased from this West Coast artist of this weird cubist
faces kind of thing, and I just had it hanging
on my wall and one day, you know, I said
to this guy who was kind of like my shop helper,
I was like, I want to put that fucking thing
(39:43):
on your back, like you know, from asshole to appetite,
and he was like okay. So we sat down and
made that thing, you know, beautiful, and then you know,
I went on from there to you know, sort of
take off from that painting that this artist had done
(40:07):
that inspired me and I started doing my own version
of that same kind of style, and it's just been
evolving over the years and decades to you know, I'm
still doing that kind of stuff today, you know, just
in different configurations and stuff. But that kind of became
like kind of like a a style.
Speaker 2 (40:29):
Yeah. It with that style, Yeah, style that I wanted. That
style people still do. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (40:34):
I've been on tour for the last two years tattooing
tattoo artists. Ninety percent of my clients are tattoo artists
who remember, you know, the stuff I was doing back
in the nineties, and they're you know, these guys have
been tattooing twenty thirty years now, and they see me
as some kind of reference because when they were just starting,
(40:55):
I was the dude that was in all the magazines
and all this stuff. So they've been very kind and
they've invited me to come and sit in their shops
all across the country and uh tattoo them and their
friends and their you know, their little local tattoo community.
All these tattoo artists will come to me and just
be like, yes, leave out this arm, you know. So
(41:17):
I last two years, I after being retired from tattooing
for almost twenty years, I still drew a lot, and
then suddenly these drawings turned into me coming back to tattooing,
and you know, carving all this crazy artwork onto all
these you know, really cool tattoo people.
Speaker 2 (41:36):
What's alike from all these guys giving you so much
love and respect and admiration, And it's lovely. It's beautiful, man.
Speaker 1 (41:43):
Yeah, it's really hardy to take it in, are you no.
I'm soak it up, man, soak it up. I love it, boy,
I love it because and I'm so grateful. I'm so grateful,
you know, for the opportunity to sort of come back
into a world that's evolved, you know, exponentially to the
point where it's unrecognizable. But that I was kind of
(42:04):
one of the guys that launched that fucking slingshot, you know,
that went so far, and now I come back in
kind of like a little bit like Rip Van Winkle
kind of thing. You know. It's like, you know, it's like,
what the fuck happened here? Man? You know, they this
thing's exploded into like this, you know, ten billion dollar
(42:28):
a year industry. You know, this started in the fucking
back rooms of you know, whorehouses and dive bars and
you know shit like that. You know, we're just and
now it's like this thing. They got TV shows, they
got fucking libraries full of books, and you know, contests
(42:48):
and conventions all over the world every fucking other day.
It's become like this huge culture. It's kind of like
equated to like what rock roll? How to rock and
roll start? You know, it's a little barn and Alabama,
you know, with a bunch of guys just picking and
grinning there, you know, and just taking inspiration from old
(43:12):
blues guys that you know, sitting by the side of
the railroad tracks just playing a guitar, you know, and
you know that it was a very grassroots kind of
folk arety kind of thing. And now look at it.
You know, it's like rock and roll Hall of Fame,
you know, all the stuff, all that, all the stuff,
(43:33):
you know, the fucking hard rock Cafe. I mean, you know,
it becomes a fucking anything these fucking vampires can fucking
cash in on, becomes like, you know, up for grabs.
So you know, with tattooing, it's become like that. But
there's still like an undercurrent, a very hardcore undercurrent of
real tattooed people like guys that honor the the tradition
(43:56):
and the history of the thing and love it and
understand it, you know, have reverence for you know, the
kind of guys that I came up under, you know,
the old school tattoo artists that I learned from. And
now you know, I'm like that second generation and these
guys who are the third generation, they still have that
(44:18):
love and that respect for you know, their lineage, their history.
So it's really pleasant to be around people like that because,
you know, because not only do they treat you with
love and respect, but also they are lovable and.
Speaker 2 (44:32):
Respectable for what you started. The tradition and people honoring
it's a beautiful thing.
Speaker 1 (44:36):
And I like that that tribe. I mean, you know,
there's ship hits everywhere, but you know, I've come across.
But you know, after being almost fifty years in that
tattoo thing, it's like you kind of become kind of
thick skinned. Yeah, there's shithits, you know that. Okay, you
know that's cool. But for the most part, you know,
(44:58):
it's all love. Man. It's been all good, all right.
Speaker 2 (45:00):
One other chapter they were gonna get sober you know,
you like, you collected guns there for a while, and
the government said, oh, you got quite a few guns here, brother,
cachet weapons. I don't know how many felony accounts.
Speaker 1 (45:11):
Were you arrested for, like close to one hundred. Yeah,
pretty serious charges, serious charges. Yeah, they were going to
put me away for you know, decades. Yeah, they were
going to put me behind bars for decades.
Speaker 2 (45:24):
What was going through your head when that happened? Oh shit,
this is where you're actually little scared a little bit.
Speaker 1 (45:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (45:34):
I was just like I was sober. Oh you were sober.
Speaker 1 (45:37):
I was sober man because see when I when I
was running Fun City all those years, you know, I
was running with you know, some shady kind of people,
you know, and I was one of them, and you know,
it was good to have some guns around. And I
just you know, people come and pay me with guns.
You know. I'd acquired a lot of arms, and I
(46:01):
had all kinds of guns. I loved guns. Yeah, something
I might have inherited from my father. He was a
big marksman. He liked guns too. I didn't know that really,
But you know, some of this stuff is just wired
it to your hard drive, you know. But yeah, So
I had a lot of guns. And then after I
sobered up after nine to eleven, you know that was
(46:26):
I sobered up before nine to eleven. Actually I was
sobered for that, but so I sobered up, and then
I just took everything when I decided, after I sobered up,
and nine to eleven happened, and i'd been in Japan
tattooing with the Yakasa. I was tattooed for the Yakasa
in Japan, and nine to eleven happened, and I came
(46:47):
back to New York and after nine to eleven, I said,
this is it. I'm leaving this country. I'm leaving New
York going back to Brazil. And so I took everything.
I sold this building that I owned in New York.
I owned a beautiful building, sold the building, sold the
tattoo shop, packed up everything I owned, stuck it in storage,
(47:14):
shipped a bunch of it to Brazil. But I couldn't
ship all those guns to Brazil. So I put those
in a storage locker in New York City and moved
back to Brazil and stayed there for you know, years
and years and years, and wrote all these books. That's
what I did. I retired from tattooing. I said, I'm
moving back to Brazil. I'm going to be a writer tattooing.
(47:36):
That page is turned, and I'm just going to devote
myself to, you know, writing these books. And I did.
At some point, I took a trip up to New York.
I think I'd had my I've finished writing a bunch
of these books, and now I was getting offered publishing
(47:56):
deals and somebody else wanted to make a movie about me,
and there was all kinds of based on my books,
and there was all this stuff going on. So I
was like, Okay, I'll go back to the States and
start doing this stuff. But I didn't want to live
in New York anymore because I sold my building, sold
the tattoo shop. Didn't want to go back to that life.
(48:18):
So I moved to California and started writing a screenplay.
I was staying at Johnny Depp's house, and he wanted
me to write a screenplay based on my books, and
so I started writing a screenplay for him, which never
really went anywhere. But and then I was living in California.
(48:40):
I was living at Johnny's house, and at some point
I flew to New York for some kind of business,
some kind of meetings or something. I remember when I
was doing in New York. But I was there, and
I was in New York, and I was having dinner
(49:04):
with this dear friend of mine, Eugene Hoots. He's frontman
for a band called Google Bordello, and we were hanging out,
we were having dinner, and my little cell phone rang
and it was this friend of mine who had been
(49:28):
kind of like a kind of like a personal assistant
to me for years and also was one of my editors.
She helped me edit these books, you know, real smart check,
good friend, you know, kind of like my you know,
my little sister. And she called me. She lived in
New York and she called me and she said, hey, man,
the cops just came to my house and they're looking
(49:51):
for you. And I was like really, and I was like,
oh shit. And apparently they somehow they'd gotten into my
storage locker and found all these guns there because I'd
(50:14):
hired some guys that were going to move all my
shit to California, that's where. And these guys, I guess,
they saw these guns and they ratted me out to
the cops. So the cops showed up at the storage
place and they found all this stuff, and they went
to my friend's house looking for me, because that was
the address that was the storage place was registered to.
Because I didn't have a place in New York anymore.
(50:36):
I was staying in a hotel. I was staying in
a hotel, and so yeah, I left the dinner and
I went back to my hotel and I was going
to pack up my shit and get the hell out
of there, get out of town. And my phone starts ringing.
It's the cops. They got my number, and they're like, listen,
(50:58):
we need you to come surrender yourself, you know. And
I was like, yeah, yeah, let me. I'll do that
right now. But I got to talk to a lawyer first,
you know. And they were like, no, no, you have
to come down here now. And I'm like, yeah, yeah,
I get it, but I got to talk to a
lawyer first. So, you know, I'm dialing lawyers and friends
who know lawyers and stuff and trying to, you know,
(51:19):
figure out what to do. And all of a sudden,
the hotel room door just opens and fucking SWAT team
just comes in, Like God, the fucking flower if you
fucking it off, get on the floor and I'm just
like on the floor, and they took me to the
fucking Pokey.
Speaker 2 (51:36):
Yeah, and he got a good lawyer. She did a
good job.
Speaker 1 (51:39):
She sure did.
Speaker 2 (51:41):
Damn brother, you know of the angel that day.
Speaker 1 (51:43):
Yeah, well the real angel was my little brother Johnny.
He heard about it, he got it was on the
rose and he he he bailed. He bailed me the
fuck out of that.
Speaker 3 (51:55):
I mean, I'm this, you know, I'm lee indebted to him,
you know, like, yeah, he got me the top mob
lawyer in New York City.
Speaker 1 (52:09):
And his daughter is Stacy Richmond, who is my lawyer.
And we became such dear friends because you know, I
was sober for like ten years. At this point when
this is all going down, you know, I'm getting I'm
getting raked over the calls for the wreckage of my
past because I'm not living around I'm not toting guns
around town anymore. I'm like this sober kind of you know,
(52:32):
nice guy, you know, a piece of love, kind of
hippie dude now, you know, And you know I'm not
that fucking you know, wild eyed thug from back in
the fun city days. But you know this, my past
came back to bite me in the as it does,
right as it should be, I suppose, you know. Uh So,
(52:55):
so yeah, I went through Oh they took my fucking passport.
I couldn't travel. Yeah, they're pretty serious house arrest. They
took all my computers, all my fucking phones, I mean
any all my fucking journals, they took everything, and a
lot of it never came back. And of course they
took all the guns. There was tons of there's some
nice guns, man. There were some really nice armaments there.
(53:18):
I mean there was grenades, there was all.
Speaker 2 (53:20):
Kinds of ship I saw the pictures. There was all
kinds of like a drug cartel stories. So it was
kind of like that. And this was after this was
post nine to eleven. Yeah, so they a little jumping.
Speaker 1 (53:34):
They thought of me as some kind of fucking terrorists,
you know, they thought, you know, and they knew I
was associated. Yeah, okay, so yeah that was so it
was a dark kind of period, you know. But I
mean because I was like suddenly I was grounded. You know.
(53:54):
They clipped my fucking wings and you know, tore off
all my feathers and I put me in a little cage,
you know. And even after they bailed me out and
I was out of the cage. I was still kind
of earth bound, you know. I couldn't go anywhere. I
couldn't go back to Brazil. I couldn't do shit, you know.
And that went on for years. Interestingly enough, my lawyer, Stacy,
(54:16):
such a beautiful soul, and she, you know, she really
liked me because I just told her, you tell me
jump and I say how high. That's how it goes.
Whatever you say, you're the boss. And she was like, wow, okay,
she's not used to that. She's dealing with all these
(54:38):
fucking thugs, you know, and mobsters, and they're like, fuck you,
I'll tell you what you're gonna do. And I was
just like, listen, I put my fucking life in your hands.
I trust you implicitly. You do what you've got to do,
get me the fuck out of this situation, and anything
you tell me to do, I obey. I learned that,
you know, in AA the early years, I had sponsors
(55:01):
and told me shut the fuck up and obey, just
do what I say. I was I needed that it
worked in your favor so well. So she at one
point she told me to do all this different stuff,
but one thing she told me to do, because we'd
walk around the streets of New York together, like just
after the trials, you know, we'd go out, we'd walk
(55:22):
around these village and I was still pretty well known
in that community. I was famous in that community. And
people were coming up to me every fucking few steps.
People would come up, Hey, John, how you doing a shaw?
You know this and that, And there was a lot
of people who I'd helped get sober, and people would
come up to me and go, I'd introduce this stacy,
(55:45):
you know, and they'd be like, this guy saved my
fucking life, you know, Da da da da da. So
she her ears perked up, and she was like, Wow,
you got all these people that you know, you've helped,
you know, since you've been sober, you know, sponsored a
lot of guys, and you know, just took people to
meetings and you know, you did a lot of good
stuff since you've been sober. That's that's a good thing.
(56:08):
I want you to do this. I want you to
start getting in touch with some of these people twelve
step programs and and get them to write little wreckords,
you know, write little letters of character character reference to
the court. So I did that, and I wound up
(56:30):
with like fifty letters from different people, and some of
them were quite well known, you know. And one of
them was the son of a superior No, one of
them was a security a superior court judge in California
whose son I used to run with and I helped
him get sober the first time around. So anyway, so
I had all these letters, even from judges, from you know,
(56:53):
kind of fancy people, and then just from just garden
variety junkies. But you know, all these people going like
how this guy got me sober? He said, my love,
and so the so Stacy, my lawyer, she presented all
this this character references to the to the to the court.
Turns out that the judge was forty years sober in aa.
Speaker 2 (57:17):
Wow, how about that?
Speaker 1 (57:19):
Apples turned this out afterwards, way after the fact, because
before the trial started, Stacy, my lawyer, and this judge
were in the same elevator together going to some legal
function or whatever. You know, these people hang out together,
and he said to oh, yeah, that tattoo guy, that
(57:40):
client of years. He's gone away for a long time.
As Stacy was like, no, you're on her. I don't
think so he was like, oh yeah, oh yeah, I'm
gonna throw the fucking bucket that's come back. He told
her that. And at the end of this, after he
read all those letters, I get teary eyed about this
because he actually apologized to me when he dismissed the case.
(58:04):
I mean, it wasn't like he was like, yeah, I'm
so sorry you had to go through all this, you know,
because there was other mitigating factors in this thing, Like
some of those guns were legal. They tried to make
it out that they were all hot guns and stuff,
and some of those guns I had bought legally and
had fucking permits for in New York City, and they
(58:24):
bury they tried. Prosecutor tried to bury that to just
make it look as bad as he could. The prosecutor
was Cyrus Vance Junior. Wow, real scumbag.
Speaker 3 (58:33):
You know.
Speaker 1 (58:35):
Yeah, power hungry, fucking reptilian piece of work, you know.
But yeah, the judge dismissed the case and actually apologized
to me and you know, said sorry you had to
go through all this, mister shaw. I was like, what, Yeah,
it was nice.
Speaker 2 (58:54):
Talking to the audience. Right now, what's the most important
thing somebody has to do to get sober.
Speaker 1 (59:00):
Eat shit, die a thousand deaths, crash and burn again
and again and again till that's enough. Nobody sails into
recovery on the wings of victory. You know, I sure
as hell didn't. I had to eat shit and die
(59:22):
a thousand deaths, you know, and I had to be
willing to go to any lengths to do anything that
would lift that merciless obsession from you know, from my soul.
And it's it hasn't been easy, but I wouldn't trade
it for all the tea in China, man, because it's been,
(59:43):
you know, just a rich and fulfilling life. I'm not
going to say it's been pain free because you know,
it's like you can't, you know, you can't create decades
of horrible destruction and you know, unconscious living and then
you know suddenly wake up and you know, walk through
(01:00:05):
a garden of roses. You know it's gonna be uh,
you know, you're gonna have to dredge up some fucking
demonic shit and expose it to the light of you know,
of healing. But you know, if you if if you
don't want to repeat, you know, if you don't want
your past to be your future. Then you're gonna do
(01:00:26):
whatever you gotta do to you know, to u mm hmm.
But you know it usually takes a lot of pain,
you know, paying so long now going on twenty five years, right,
twenty five years?
Speaker 2 (01:00:38):
Yeah, and then what would you say, buddy to the
person's been sober for a while. But life's difficult, life's scary,
life's a little there. They don't want to relapse, maybe
not maybe want to kill themselves that in between spot.
Im just it's just scary to be alive. I don't
and just the world's coming in a little bit. What's
your counsel to that person?
Speaker 1 (01:01:00):
You know? I wake up with that fear in my
heart every morning, and that's why I have to get
straight into prayer and relating my life to a power
greater than myself. I have to get into action. I
have to, you know, ask God to give me the
ability to get out of myself and be a humble servant.
Speaker 2 (01:01:23):
M hmmm.
Speaker 1 (01:01:25):
Because everybody's in pain. This whole fucking world is in pain.
There's nobody in this world that's not suffering some kind
of affliction. And if they're not well, they haven't yet.
I don't think there's anybody in this world that has
not doesn't come equipped with, you know, an existential dilemma.
(01:01:49):
You know, that's just just to par for the fucking course.
So if I'm just one more shit brained now key,
you know, striving to recover, then I'm gonna, I'm gonna,
I'm gonna, I'm gonna encounter challenges and pain just like
(01:02:12):
everybody else in this goddamn world does. So you know,
there's a there's a program of recovery. Nobody ever said
it was going to be easy. But you know, it's
kind of like you know, in in in in the
spiritual practice that I that I work with. You know,
(01:02:34):
we've talked about the plant medicine, you know, in the
church that I that I work with. Uh, you know,
we we have a lot of wise teachings that come
to different as different channels from the astral and one
of them says King King Kohea, if it's all this
(01:03:00):
is all based in Brazil, at what it means is
those who stand firm will get beat up, but those
who run will suffer more. Sooner or later, do you
want to stand firm and get beat up a little bit,
(01:03:21):
or do you want to suffer more? Because you will.
I know that from experience, Like if you don't tow
the line, you know, there's so many you know, God
is patient, but you know the universe has laws that
you know are in effect. And I don't want to
(01:03:43):
you know, not only do I not want to bear
the consequences of not living this life, you know, as
correctly as I possibly can, but I also don't want
to give up all the blessings that I'm that I've
gained because every time I've had to walk through some
dark night of the soul, and there's been many in
(01:04:04):
these twenty five years, every time I've had to walk
through fucking fire to get to the other side of that.
When I got to the other side, I was like,
oh boy, I'm sure glad I didn't drink or kill
myself because this is fucking awesome. You know. The blessing
is to do come you know, but it's work.
Speaker 2 (01:04:25):
It's work.
Speaker 1 (01:04:26):
So if you want to do the work, you know,
keep coming back, man, going back, And if you run, God,
God pity you, man, because it gets worse. I know,
because I know you do. I know, I know you know,
I know you know.
Speaker 2 (01:04:40):
I do know. I know very well. Yep, thank you,
thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.
You know, it's rare that you meet an artist with
your magnitude who's a fucking kind soul, and it's just
you're a special cat man.
Speaker 1 (01:04:56):
But you're a special cast, So you got to meet
a lot of special cast because that's who you are,
Like at tracks like right.
Speaker 2 (01:05:02):
Yeah, I know, but it's it's you know, it's just
nice to play jazz with you. Man, It's just nice
to play right because you're just Yeah, it's beautiful. We're
still here and we're and we're going to continue to
do beautiful things.
Speaker 1 (01:05:13):
God will right, You're gonna make great art and.
Speaker 2 (01:05:16):
I'm gonna crack hard some little light in and we're
gonna keep talking about it.
Speaker 1 (01:05:18):
That's what we're here for. Thanks for making time, man,
Thanks for having me. Man. I can't thank you enough. Lastly,
we got to show the books off this book. Well,
that's a very dark book. That's dark. That's not part
of my Scab Vender memoir Seriesly, well, you watched my movie. Yeah,
and the movie that they made, the documentary they made
about me, was based on the other two books. That's
(01:05:41):
a wait, we can talk about that one too. But
this is this is a two book, two book series,
two book series. There should be four books. Yeah, I
just haven't gotten around to the next two started. Absolute
must reads.
Speaker 2 (01:05:55):
Buy this Buy this book, and give out a shout
out to brother Johnny Depp for his love for you
and all the great things he's doing because he.
Speaker 1 (01:06:02):
And Robert crumb Man one of my childhood here comic
book hero. He did the cover for my book. Yeah,
you know that was the biggest feather in my cap ever.
And so these two books, yeah, those are those are
the books that inspired the movie by the same title,
scap Vendor Confessions of the Tattoo Artist. But the other
book that you held up, Narcissa, that was my first
(01:06:24):
published book, and that book is a dark roller coaster
ride through hell.
Speaker 2 (01:06:31):
What will make people love you and appreciate you more?
Are over on the side now.
Speaker 1 (01:06:35):
That book would make with Kowski crean. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:06:39):
The sal Show is a production of iHeart Podcasts, hosted
by me Cina McFarlane, produced by pod People in twenty eighth.
Av Our lead producer is Keith Carlick, Our executive prouser
is Lindcy Hoffman, Marketing lead is Ashley Weaver, thank you
so much for listening. We'll see you next week.
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
The Breakfast Club
The World's Most Dangerous Morning Show, The Breakfast Club, With DJ Envy And Charlamagne Tha God!
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.