FEATURE ARTICLE — July 1999
ASK ZEKE
By Zeke Owen
I have a letter here from Christopher Herrin, and he lives on East 4th Street in Long Beach, California. I'm going to try to synopsize it for the sake of brevity. Basically he says he noticed that I'm given respect as one of the old-timers, and yet I look pretty young. If you look at the caption under the photograph there, it has a date on it of 1962. I'm 58 now, so I can imagine what you might be guessing when you look at that photo.
Anyway, he wants to know about my background, how long I've been tattooing, who taught me, what attracted me to tattooing and am I into other forms of artwork? He says he knows he asked a lot of questions, but that they are really just one big question. Also, do I think that tattooing has suffered as a result of losing old-timers such as Bob Shaw, Paul Rogers and others?
Well, Christopher, I hate to use the word "suffered." We're not suffering, but it is a loss when you lose people who are taking the business forward in terms of artwork, the sterile chain of events (my favorite phrase), improving everything about it—the public relations, the mechanics, sharing their knowledge with you, providing some enthusiasm. Passing on the baton, as it were.
It's always difficult to answer some of these letters when you don't tell a little bit about yourself. It makes me wonder when you mention someone like Bob Shaw or Paul Rogers, because there were other people years before them like Sailor Jerry Collins, Captain Keith Collins from Honolulu—one of my favorite people—and it just goes on and on. I worked in Bob Shaw's shop years and years ago. He was not only a wonderful person with a great sense of humor, but he could tattoo like nobody's business. He had his own style, of course, and he helped me a lot. And, not only that, but he wouldn't hide anything like some of these guys do. Some guys don't tell you anything. You've got to ask them. But that's a good way to learn, too, isn't it? For example, I watched him bend his needle bar, his outliner needle bar, once when it would spray a little ink. He just straightened it right out. I still do that today, and it works. Years and years ago in the 1960s when I was in San Diego, Cliff and June and I used to have lunch together. And, one day, Cliff brought over a machine that he could not stop from spraying when he worked with it. And I said, "Give me that machine, Cliff." And I took it down to my shop. I tried and tried and tried everything I could to get that thing to stop spraying. Finally, I tried a drastic move. I took a pipe cleaner and cut it into about an inch long. I shaped it into a "V" with the center, the apex of the "V," about half again as long as the two extended arms on the outside of the "V." I hooked my rubber bands to each side of that, pulled it down over the needle bar, put a little dot of Vaseline on it, fired it up, and it didn't spray a drop! It looked like heck, but he had bet me lunch the next day that I couldn't get it to stop spraying. He laughed about that for a while. Eventually, after it ran it a while, it would wear through the fuzz on the pipe cleaner, and the friction from the twisted wire would wear on it and it wouldn't function properly. Of course, today, there's 20,000 other ways to stop that kind of spraying and we'll get into that some other time. But the point of it is, the things we learn from these older guys were really a solid foundation for the future of this business. And they deserve some credit for that. It takes a lot of work. It takes hours and hours of fooling around and tinkering around in the shop in the back of your place.
Next year will be my 41st in the business. Not 35 or 40, as some people will have you guess, but definitely my 41st year that I've been making a buck at it. I started tattooing about 1953. I was 13 years old and I lived in Los Angeles, hanging around with the guys from out on First Street in Brooklyn. They called it "First Flats." There were guys like Art, Peron, Blackie, Gravel—a few other guys. We used to hang around where somebody had a halfway house and we'd hang around and play cards and have a beer and tattoo each other. So I started drawing designs. I figured, "Hey, I'm going downtown to check out a real tattoo shop." So I did. I went down to First Avenue, and there was Lou Louis and Ernie Sutton tattooing down on 5th and Main in L.A. A little tattoo shop next to an arcade there. So I walked in. I thought I was a fresh kid. I had my khaki pants with little thin cuffs, with my French-toed shoes, suede jacket, shirt buttoned all the way up and hair ducktailed out. And I wandered in there, looked around and saw some really boss looking designs. It really blew me away. It was obvious that these guys, to me, had drawn these things themselves and then painted them themselves. It was a little of a mystery how. And the art, the designs of tattooing, were certainly all by themselves in the graphic world of art. They had that appeal for tough kids from tough neighborhoods. They were slick. Of course there was other stuff, but that was what I was interested in at the time. So, after I asked two or three questions, this great big curly headed guy who must have weighed 265 sitting back there in the back of the shop said, "Hey you kid, get outta here before I start a shoe factory on your ass." I didn't even know what he meant, I was so shocked.
The guy who threw me out of the shop that day was Ernie Sutton. And about three or four years later I was back again. Only this time I was armed with a pencil and paper in my pocket. A guy came in one day and wanted to know if they had a picture of a front view of a motorcycle coming right at you with a skeleton riding it. And, at that time, they had a little side view with a checkerboard scarf, but no front view. So I whipped out my pencil and paper, and I said, "Hey, does it look something like this?" And I drew one up for him, and, man, that was it. And that's what got me into the business. Ernie saw I could draw a couple simple little cartoons and away I went. "Okay kid." That was it. I hung around for about a year. I swept the place. Nobody ever swept a tattoo shop in those days, unless you were trying to get 50¢ to buy a bottle of Thunderbird wine or something like that. But I guess a lot of winos lost some money, because I was down there after work every day. I lied about my age when I was 15 and got a job at Lucky Auto Supply. Well, I wasn't living at home; I was living in a garage my friend let me live in. I went down to the unemployment agency run by a little crippled Jewish fellow who knew I lied about my age, but he could see my problem and he hooked me up at Lucky Auto Supply. But I had to provide an I.D. to show them that I thought I was 16 and could work. It didn't take me long to do that. In those days, the California Driver's License was just black and white, and a lot of the guys who were riding bikes were working at blueprint companies like Rapid Blueprint. Some of them had six or seven different Driver's Licenses. You got a lot of tickets making a living. So I had no problem getting I.D.s hanging around with the bikers in those days. Anyway, one day, Ernie finally decided to break me in. We had a little grade-school desk that has an arm and a desk on one side and a little place underneath to put your books. That's what I started tattooing. In those days we had ink that was black, red and green, and that was it. There was a guy over in Hawaii that was using blue and white and all those colors. But, other than that, I don't remember ever seeing any other colors except black, red and green. The red was from some company in New York, and it wasn't even really red—it was orange. It wasn't even red-orange—it was orange-orange. And the green—Permanent Pigment had just put out a Philistine green—they got away from the old pea green that was before my time. That was World War II color that didn't last long and was hard to get in. And, boy, they took off on those colors, because with the combination of the red and the green you had a little brown to put in the eagles. So, actually, if you wanted to mess around you had black, red, green and brown.
Anyway, Ernie eventually opened a little shop out in Venice, California, across from Lawrence Welk's
ballroom there on the pier near Santa Monica. And we had a sign that they'd gotten from somebody who had gone out of business called Electric Jim's. So I was Electric Jim for some years out at Venice. In those days it was Jack Kerouac, the Dharma Bums, Venice, the beatnik guys with the bongos—that's what we had in those days. We had a few Seabees that used to come down from Oxnard and just a touch of military. On Main Street in L.A. we used to get a lot of Marines who came down from Barstow, the supply depot and 29 Palms and up that way. Of course we were near the bus station, and there would be some traffic out of there that was military. But, basically, that's about how I broke in—doing a combination of civilian and military traffic on Main Street, Skid Row and Los Angeles, California.
It hadn't been too long since the price of names had risen from 50¢ to $1 when I started tattooing with Ernie Sutton and Captain Jim. And how could I leave out Teddy—Teddy Warner? He was a tough guy. He was a three-time loser safe cracker. He'd been at Alcatraz on the same tier as the Birdman and knew a whole bunch of those guys. They used to stop in once in a while, and I'd listen to them talk about the Old Days. They'd been chased around, sent to the joint, got out, and Ted got into tattooing. I guess that's what kept him on the straight. He was quite a character. I miss all those old people and all the fun we had in those days. And all the help they gave me. And I'll tell you what; it was a loss to a lot of us. Some of them were a lot of help to me.
No one single moment and no one single individual started or really got me going in this business. There's so many different things—the appeal of the tattoo design, the mystery of why and how they went on, how they stayed there, the curiosity about the artists who were putting them on—the very same questions that you ask in your letter were on my mind when I was 15 years old. There's been a real big change in the business. A lot of the fun part of it is gone, to me. The mystery of tattooing in the '50s and '60s, as I knew it, has long since passed. People come into my shop thinking they know more about it than I do, and they have one tattoo or an uncle who had tattoos.
I hope that answers your question, Christopher. At this moment in my life, I can say that the most satisfaction, personal satisfaction, that I've gotten out of this business is that I don't feel I've wasted my time.
Sa ya. Zeke.