Back in the '60s, everyone carried a guitar case. In their cars, walking down the sidewalk, climbing the stairs, in the elevator, alongside them on the bus. Tuned up and ready, people of all ages strummed guitars, plucked banjos, sawed fiddles and thumped bongos. A trio from Manhattan, a single gal on an Indian reservation, a poet from Hibbing, Minnesota, people from big towns and small, people that had never sung a note were suddenly big fans of the Carter Family, or Lightnin' Hopkins or Joseph Spence or Flatt & Scruggs. People got in deep, soul-searching conversations about "isn't it a shame Robert Johnson died so young?" or "what a bummer that Dylan went electric." You remember Dylan: he was God. Joan Baez was Mary Magdalene and Peter, Paul and Mary were… well, Peter, Paul and Mary. It was downright religious. Folks even stirred their coffee with tuning forks. It was called the folk movement and everyone jumped onboard.

Then along came commercialism. Goodbye Weavers, hello New Christy Minstrels. So long Blind Lemon Jefferson, hello Harry Belafonte. Pete Seeger was banned from The Smothers Brothers Show and T.V. pitchman Art Linkletter's white-bread son Jack hosted a G-rated tele-extravanganza called Hootenanny. In the blink of an eye, it all went mainstream. What was cool became lukewarm and what was exciting, exhilarating and full of discovery became third-rate, the same as before and boring.

Years later, nearly forty years later to be exact, we have another major artistic phenomenon in our midst. Only this one isn't for the ears, it's for the eyes—and it's called tattoo. Everywhere you look people have tattoos: in their cars, walking down the sidewalk, climbing the stairs, in the elevator, on their biceps on the bus. Tattoos on their butt cracks, tattoos on their necks. Tattoos on their hands, tattoos on their backsides. No problem; drop them pants right in the middle of the room?tattoos on their knees, tattoos on their thighs, tattoos on their flang-dang-doodles, for god's sake. The whole place has gone crazy, I tell you. Crazy!

And then we have the TV shows. Kat Von D and the rest of the crowd, all acting out some version of the tattoo world that was thought up by a bunch of publicists and marketing geniuses, who learned everything they know about ink from a bunch of '50s prison movies. Each one with dollar signs for brains, doing all they can to promote the idea of twenty-minute backpieces, heart-wrenching why-I-got-my-tattoo stories and doing everything they can to perpetuate the myth that tattoos are for bikers, axe murderers, sweet young girls with vacant stares and an infinite array of reality sleazebags, party hardies, wild-eyed gangsters and lap dancers.

Some, many of whom have been in the industry for ten, twenty and thirty years, predict it will all come crashing down. And there will be an enormous sucking sound as tattoo shops, equipment suppliers, flash artists and tattooed rap artists do an earth-shaking about face and stampede en masse to the local Katherine Von Drachenberg Jiffy Laser Removal Boutique.

Hey, wait a minute. That's baloney! Tattoos aren't like music. Tattoos are like only one thing that I know of: tattoos! And as far as the whole tattoo industry coming crashing down, septuagenarian Lyle Tuttle has ridden about half a dozen of these tattoo-popularity roller coasters. And he's still here.

I rest my case.

Bob Baxter
Editor in Chief

baxter@skin&ink.com
www.skinandink.com