Tattoo shops flourish in San Diego, and pretty much always have. Customers used to be perceived, correctly or not, as coming from predominantly military, blue collar or “outlaw” (bikers and ex-cons) backgrounds. In actuality, practitioners and aficionados come from every conceivable social strata, though the clientele for these highly regulated businesses has shifted sharply toward a young, non-military rock and roll demographic in recent years.

Heavily inked bands like blink 182, Limp Bizkit, Suicidal Tendencies, Motley Crue, Pantera, Biohazard and Bad Religion are poster children for the growing new tattoo nation and skin art has already surpassed fad status and is practically a mainstream form of expression among 18-25 year olds.

Images used most often are stock (predesigned) rather than custom (based on a client’s design or request). Flash sets, collected sheets with design illustrations, are sold and traded among tattooists and customers looking for the ideal mark, as well as being available from several catalog sources.

Color sets are usually most expensive at a couple hundred dollars per twenty. The same money will get you around thirty or more black and gray design sheets. One set usually includes images grouped by themes, such as “reapers, wizards, fairies, moons, lizards, Egyptian eye, demons, tribal, dolphins, angels, mermaids and fire dragon.”

You can find collections of these flash sheets in bound books and hanging on the walls at most tattoo shops, and most include rock related images like guitars on fire, band logos, intricate copies of album cover graphics and similar iconography.

San Diego native Judy Parker of Pacific Tattoo on Main Street has been creating tattoos for twenty two years, having begun as an apprentice downtown where tattoo parlors have long been concentrated. “Everyone has flaming guitars, drums, bass, all kinds of instruments. Mostly I just do people’s favorite groups like Kiss, Ozzy Osbourne, things like that. I do the word Kiss with the images of the faces of the characters in each letter.”

She’s also recreated album covers for fans of various bands. “Right now I’m doing one of Great White where I’m changing it so it’s more military. It has a mermaid being pulled up on a fishing hook but I’ve changed it to an anchor.” She mentions a tattoo version of an Ozzy Osbourne cover, but almost reluctantly. “I mean it’s okay but it’s not one of my favorites. I prefer underwater scenes but I do what I’m told because that’s how I make a living.”

Parker has inked for several local musicians but most of her rock tats are done for fans. “I did a Stevie Ray Vaughan portrait. Kiss and Rolling Stones tattoos probably are the number ones I would say. But I get the newer ones that I’m not even familiar with because of my age group. I’m forty and I’m doing things with Bush, bands like that.”

The Ink Spot in Pacific Beach offers sample designs like a skeleton playing guitar, a mouse playing a flaming sax, a flaming skull with crossed guitars, a flying drum, WB’s cartoon Tasmanian Devil bursting through some drums, a skeleton playing a fiddle similar to Phil Garris’ album cover for the Grateful Dead’s “Blues For Allah” and bloodshot eyeballs popularized by 60s poster and album cover artist Rick Griffin. There’s also an iridescent scarab logo made famous by concert poster painters Mouse And Kelley (on albums by Journey and others), variations of which seem to appear at most tattoo shops.

The Inkers Tattoo Company on El Cajon Boulevard near College Avenue has sample sheets which include the usual comic strip swipes and tribal logos as well as some standard rock icons - a flaming guitar, a flaming skeleton playing guitar, flaming music notes, another Journey scarab (yes, with flames), a dragon wrapped around an electric guitar and an old bluesman wearing a long trench coat and playing. Brooklyn transplant Hammer says custom jobs are more popular at his shop than generic stock designs. “For awhile we were doing Social Distortion with the skeleton, that was happening all the time.”

He shows me a striking recreation he did of the album cover for Jethro Tull’s “Broadsword And The Beast,” featuring a Tolkeinesque Ian Anderson wearing Robin Hood tights and sporting butterfly wings, draping his wizened hands across a jewel encrusted sword. “The guy’s in the army, I’ve done a lot on him. That took over three hours and we charge around a hundred dollars an hour.” He’s also done tattoos for members of Epitath and Sledd while others in the shop have worked on the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Regarding Sledd, he says “I did a drum set for Dino [Deluke]. That’s actually his drums, right down to the nuts and bolts. You can see the wing nuts on the adjustable stands.”

Asked how he got involved in tattoing, Hammer says “Like most people I guess. I was in construction at one time and I managed a titty bar, but I used to do [tattoos] as a hobby, kind of a side thing. When I got to the point where I could do it pretty well, people said ‘hey, you should get a shop.’ So I got some equipment, got some inks and started working for the guy who used to own this place. One thing led to another and I ended up buying it.”

He says that few local tattoo artists are formally trained in art and that it’s very much a self taught and apprenticed profession in most instances. “Some of these kids that get into it now, they’ve done three tattoos or they’ve worked out of their garage and they think they can open up a shop. They may be able to do a tattoo at half the price we do but it’s half-assed work. Their shops don’t last long.”

Jonathan Loveless at Escondido’s Art Throb Studios reports that logos are popular with his customers. “Kiss, Korn, Aerosmith, Van Halen. One guy got an Eagles tattoo, the cow skull from their greatest hits album. Someone else got the Boston album with the spaceship on it. A Yes album, many Metallica albums, where we use the skulls, and a lot of Judas Priest.”

Some clients want to imitate the look of a specific rocker. “At a shop I used to work at, a guy came in who wanted the exact same sleeve as Nikki Sixx. They had a pictorial done in a tattoo magazine they wanted to copy. The Chili Peppers armband, Anthony’s, I’ve seen that done many times, or the thunderbird on his back.”

Downtown on Broadway for years, Superfly Tattoo’s display books had wide array of designs and photos, including some nicely rendered music notes done in pointillistic fine dot patterns and designed by Tom Donovan. A photo of one custom job showed an impressivley realistic electric guitar owned by the customer and rendered by Berny Fortini with a colorful flaming sun background and flashing lightning bolts. “This tattoo was a lot of details,” she says with a rich Italian accent. “It took me three hours and a half.” She mentions having done a Guns ‘n Roses logo back in Italy.

Master Tattoo - for years operating on 5th Avenue - was a local fixture since just after WWII, calling itself San Diego’s Oldest Tattoo Parlor. In the late '90s, their shop selections included the ubiquitous flaming guitar, a singing Tasmanian Devil, a skeleton playing an ax-shaped guitar that drips blood, a drum set, music notes set against a rose background, more Rick Griffin eyeballs and Journey scarabs and a buxom half naked woman playing guitar and wearing black tights.

Hiro Lynch’s father founded Master at 317 F Street in 1949 and now, several downtown locations later, Hiro ran the venerable shop with his brother Maurice. “We worked on Rob Halford, the word ‘pain’ right across his belly button. He was doing a concert at the time and came in,” he says, showing me a photo of the former Judas Priest singer. The gray haired Lynch says he had no idea who Halford was but that his nephew Gilbert, who did the tattoo, clued him in. “He’s 32 and he’s hep to all the modern music. [Halford] had a nice visit, he’s a real swell guy.” He says that around eighty percent of his shop’s business is military, due to his downtown location and large selection of service related designs.

Most of the business done at other parlors involve civilian trade - males and females (evenly split, many shops report) in their late teens and twenties. At Ace Tattoo in Ocean Beach, a store name which dates back nearly as far as Master’s, current owner Gary Hoag says “I did a lot of rock and roll stuff in the eighties. A lot of guitars, a lot of drumsticks.” He’s done a Rat Fink tattoo (by legendary hot rod cartoonist Ed “Big Daddy” Roth) for Buddy Blue, who then wrote a song called “The Inker Man” for Hoag.

“You know what the biggest logo for tattooing is? Got to be Led Zeppelin. I’ve done the Man On The Hill [from Led Zeppelin #4 aka ZOSO]. In the 80’s when we were in downtown San Diego, nine out of ten guys said ‘I want the [Led Zeppelin] Swan Song logo.’ And the Rolling Stones tongue. I’ve done Prince’s logo a couple of time.”

One of his past clients is the late comedian Flip Wilson. “Believe it or not, I tattooed the head of his [penis].” Somehow, I manage to resist asking how many penises he’s done.

Hoag has also been asked to immortalize revered real life instruments as tattoos but this isn’t his favorite gig. “It’s really hard to do a guitar because of the strings. I try to talk them out of it, I tell them the strings are transparent anyway, but people still want it.” He does enjoy reproducing album graphics. “I’m getting ready to do Iron Maiden right now, ‘The Number The Beast’ on this guy’s back. We get a lot of people who want their zombie character, Eddie.”

I talk to Casey Loewen after his nearly three hour session with Hoag (he estimates two more rounds before the tattoo is finished). “It’s Eddie standing over the devil, and he has him on puppet strings, and then the devil is standing over a little dude and he’s on strings too.”

Located on his mid-back and the same size as the original LP cover, he says this is the first tattoo he’s gotten in ten years. Both of his older tats are rock inspired. “I was listening to Guns ‘n Roses so I’ve got this cowboy skull with a gun and on the other side of my arm and I have Bon Jovi’s tattoo, the cow skull with the feathers hanging off it, the same one he has on his shoulder.”

So why, after ten years with no new ink, Iron Maiden’s “The Number Of The Beast”? “It just popped in my head one morning, ‘I’m going to fill my back up now.’ ”

The most up to date information about the business of skin art is circulated via newsletters like Skin Scribe from the Alliance Of Professional Tattoists. Topics covered include legislative attempts to ban tattoos (usually for health related reasons - tattooing is still illegal in several states), tax information and financial shelters, disease prevention and ways to limit liability in the event of accidents or lawsuits. The APT in fact offers its members a group insurance program which covers things like negligent scarring and other liabilities peculiar to the profession.

As often discussed in tattoo literature, there are risks associated with tattooing. Complications can include allergic reactions to the ink, existing skin disease flare-ups and keloid scarring. There’s also the risk of infectious disease, to both the inker and the inkee.

In 1987, The Journal Of Applied Bacteriology published a study which identified twenty-two different diseases which can be transmitted with needles, such as syphilis, malaria, tuberculosis, leprosy, blood poisoning and both hepatitis B and C. Becoming wiser about sanitation and disease control, conscientious tattooists had already long since stopped using the same needles on multiple subjects and had been sterilizing all instruments.

According to the Center For Disease Control, there has never been a case documented where someone contracted AIDS as a result of getting a tattoo, with the exception of some prison applications where no sterilization occurred and pigments and needles were re-used and contaminated (prison “ink” is often comprised of little more than burnt checkers and cigarette ashes).

Those applying the tattoos don’t seem to be much at risk of contracting HIV from a customer. “It takes 100 microliters of blood and intramuscular punctures to transmit the HIV virus,” says the APT. “Since the needles used in tattooing are ‘solid core’ (not hollow like a syringe) and HIV doesn’t live outside of our bodies too long, [HIV transmission] is unlikely.”

Statistics reported in the Journal Of Infectious Disease suggest that the odds of getting AIDS from an accidental needle puncture are one in 50,000 - a tattooist would have to stick himself once each time with that many customers to be sure of contracting the virus.

Steve Gilbert, a veteran local inker, says “A friend of mine who had worked successfully as a tattoo artist for over eight years recently quit tattooing because she was afraid of getting AIDS. She had tattooed a man who later died of AIDS...she had accidentally scratched herself with a contaminated needle.”

Though the woman tested negative for HIV, Gilbert says that “The doctor, who considered tattooing an abomination, did his best to frighten her by telling her how dirty and dangerous it is.”

“In spite of popular concern about AIDS,” says Gilbert, “the most serious potential complication of tattooing is still hepatitis B,” a much more virulent and infectious disease. It was in fact a hepatitis B epidemic (supposedly from improper sterilization and contaminated pigments) which caused the New York City Board Of Health to spearhead a successful effort to outlaw tattoos there in 1961.

Most everyone in the tattoo community agrees that the safest way to go is to have an autoclave, a sterilization machine which kills infectious organisms by using heat, steam and pressure at over 270 degrees Fahrenheit. Other accepted methods include gas (ethylene oxide) and dry heat sterilizers.

In addition, licensed shops offer “Single service,” which means that each needle and tube set to be used has been individually packed, sealed and sterilized. All materials used in the process including gloves are disposed of immediately after use, usually in a puncture proof plastic container.

The lingering social stigma and slight medical risks of getting a tattoo can be daunting enough for a prospective client. Taking off a tattoo however has become much more simple thanks to advances in laser treatment. Laser removal can be done as an outpatient procedure and it usually leaves very little scarring, though color variations usually remain. A successful removal depends on factors such as the age of the tattoo, the depth of the ink, the kind of ink used, tattoo location and the individual’s healing abilities.

Smaller tattoos can be removed with excision, where the tattoo is surgically removed and the surrounding skin is pulled together and sutured. Larger images can require skin grafts from elsewhere on the body to fill in the excised area. Other methods include dermabrasion, where the skin is frozen and then peeled down and “sanded” with an abrasive rotary instrument.

Cover-ups with additional images and pigments can also be done in nearly all cases, limited only by the imaginations of the tattooist and the customer.

Marc Herer is not a professional tattooist but he owns a tattoo gun and says he’s done over twenty tattoos on various friends, each of them the exact same design - a Suicidal Tendencies logo. He shows me his own, done on his lower left calf - deep blue interlocking letters rising in 3D relief from an oval metallic base. “A Suicidal tat is the first one a lot of people get,” says Marc. “It kind of introduces you to the culture. Anyone who sees it and is into it, they say something to you, and the next thing you know it’s like you’re in a club and everyone in the club is getting ink done.”

I mention that out of five people I’d met with Suicidal Tendencies tattoos, three of them said it had nothing to do with the band. It was a prison gang mark. “That’s a fairly recent thing, I think. I didn’t hear of that until around last year and I’ve been doing Suicidal tats for five years. I do know that they’ve got a program now where they have volunteer plastic surgeons do free removals or cover-ups if someone’s in jail or they want to get a gang tattoo off them.”

“There’s a big convention downtown now,” he says, referring to Steel-N-Skin, a skin art and piercing showcase event occasionally put on at the Concourse Convention Center by PB’s Ink Spot. “There was a guy in the contest whose whole back was Suicidal stuff, with a border made of bones and something like fifty different individual images in there. It was cool but he was this little guy, really short, so you had to squint really hard to see them.”

AN INTERVIEW WITH WILD MAN FISCHER (repost of earlier deleted entry)

I have dozens of answering-machine messages from Larry "Wild Man" Fischer, onetime Frank Zappa protégé and Doctor Demento perennial. We became friends while he lived at various downtown flophouses in the late '80s and early '90s.

Fischer made occasional public appearances, including a 1988 performance at the San Diego Comic-Con with Bill "Lost in Space" Mumy's band. I helped the filmmakers behind DeRailroaded, a new documentary about Fischer, track down film footage of the concert. I was thanked for my efforts with a (collect) call from Fischer, whom I hadn't heard from in several years.

"They made a comic book about me," Fischer announced. (The Legend of Wild Man Fischer, released last year, immortalized tales such as the time Fischer supposedly took a dump in a fan's closet.) We chatted about mutual friends, and then Fischer asked if I've played any of his records for anyone lately.

I reassured him that, yes, I spin his stuff a lot and, yes, my guests are always amazed. Okay, sometimes horrified, but always amazed.

DeRailroaded recently aired on the IFC Channel and is now available on DVD. YouTube clip below is a bit of animation created for the cartoon, set to audio clips of Larry. All the imagery relates to his life and career. This is actually the full, unedited cartoon - only a portion of it appears in the DeRailroaded film.

The "mean bee" and "happy bee" drawings are by Larry himself. He drew the comic characters for me when he pitched a comic book series featuring his bi-polar bees (I think Flaming Carrot creator Bob Burden, a friend of Larry's considered publishing it). I lent the drawing to Rhino Records for a CD set I wrote liner notes for, only they never returned the art to me. I knew I shoulda sent them a Xerox.....

Long before David Peel, Weird Al, Mojo Nixon and The Rugburns, Larry "Wild Man" Fischer was carving out his own distinctive niche in the history of rock 'n' roll novelty and cult music. A street singer living on the obscure fringes of the L.A. subculture, in early 1968, Wild Man would sing anyone an original song for a dime. He offered these improvised and somewhat off-key ditties to anybody who'd listen, serenading unsuspecting passerbys with his most singular brand of certifiable loonyness.

Wild Man had been in and out of a few mental institutions, but he cut a charismatic figure, barely keeping his voice below a shout as he sang about his life, his dreams, his girlfriends, his family disowning him and any other subject that came into his head at any given moment. Disturbing and introspective songs, with lyrics which made it frighteningly easy to understand the sadness and desperation of Wild Man's merry-go-round world.

Already a cult figure among the city's rock 'n' roll intelligentsia, Wild Man came to the attention of another musical madman with an eye toward the satiric and outrageous: Frank Zappa.

Zappa had just recently begun his own record label, Bizarre, and something about Wild Man's rants intrigued him. In a move which seems strange even for Zappa, he put Wild Man in a recording studio. And let the tape roll. And roll.

Wild Man couldn't play any instruments, though he'd occasionally pick up a guitar and pound on it for sonic punctuation. He rapped and sang to empty air, about his mother and mental hospitals, about fame and circles and how he could move so fast that not even a cat could see him. Zappa filled up a double album of material and then brought in The Mothers to record some musical accompaniment for a few cuts. The GTO's (Zappa's groupies-turned-rock-stars) and wunderkind producer Kim Fowley helped out, and thus was born the album "An Evening With Wild Man Fischer."

Released in late 1968, "Evening With" was somewhat of a sensation, with songs like the a cappella "Merry Go Round" destined to become Doctor Demento staples. "Circle," with The Mothers, was even put out as a single, and Wild Man began playing fairs and clubs all over the country. Rolling Stone even lent credibility to Wild Man's growing rep with a positive review of "Evening With," saying that the double album "captures the total being of one strange member of the human community."

Wild Man would sing about his relationship with Zappa in later songs. He still complains that he never made money from the album and he can't recover the rights to his own masters, which are currently controlled by the late Zappa's wife, Gail. Yet he surprised most everyone by bouncing back in a big way. Then-fledgling Rhino Records was just working toward their first album release, and it was decided that an LP of new Wild Man music would be their premier project. Wild Man had already penned their theme song, "Go To Rhino Records," and next came the full length stream-of-consciousness experiment known as the "Wildmania" LP.

A comprehensive overview of Wild Man's recorded output is unlikely, since Gail Zappa has publicly proclaimed her unwillingness to release the "Evening With" masters, citing it as a poor example of Frank's work. Wild Man kept landing in off the wall projects, however. One new friend and compatriot named Mark Mothersbough, then of those robotic spudmeisters known as Devo, recruited him for an afternoon, to record a song (still unreleased) called "Fun With Your Body."

Except for the occasional concert, Wild Man withdrew almost completely from the music industry around 1985, and he's still disputing royalties owed by Rhino and Paramount (his lawsuit against Paramount was covered in Variety and elsewhere). He moved to San Diego to get away from the city where almost everyone seemed to know who he was.

Moving around between low key and low budget downtown hotels, he quietly became a San Diego street fixture, though he introduced himself only as "Larry" so people wouldn't connect him with his still somewhat famous Wild Man persona. In August 1988, Bill Mumy came to town for the big San Diego Comic Book Convention, along with a few musician friends, all of whom were also moonlighting as comic book creators. Their new band was called Seduction Of The Innocent, after a famous 1950's book which had tried to cite comics as the source of all juvenile delinquency.

Wild Man was coerced onto the stage long enough for an incandescent set which included his doo wop ditty "The Taster" and an a cappella rendering of "Merry Go Round" ("I'm getting a little sick of that song" he now says about his best known tune). The crowd was rowdy and responsive, even those who weren't familiar with Wild Man. His ever increasing volume, enthusiasm and his spasmodic on-stage body language proved infectious, and the audience handed Wild Man the most earnest and sustained applause of the evening. It was a rare performance, one of only two dozen or so "pro" gigs Wild Man can recall playing (he'd backed out on many more, becoming so undependable that few bookings were offered to him after so many no-shows).

Few are aware that, while in San Diego, Wild Man appeared in Rugburns video - the clip was only televised once, on local public access TV, and remains virtually unseen.

Wild Man was offered the chance to appear in the Rugburns promotional video by Bob Duffy, a friend of the band that Wild Man met at the local record store Garage Rock. The video project was being cooked up for the band's major label debut on Priority Records, "Taking The World By Donkey."

The longform promo was shot in various locations around San Diego, interspersed with live clips and interview sound bites with the group, but it is Wild Man's running narrative which propels the oddball project. After airing the one time, nobody at MTV or VH1 was clamoring to show the video, and it was shelved.

Today, Wild Man can't decide whether he wants to ever record again. There is, in fact, some question as to who would even offer to do the recording. His fan base was never large enough to give him hit records, though his notoriety and fame was and is widespread, especially among Zappa's legion of admirers. His psychological problems, like those suffered by Arthur Lee of Love and other Wild Man contemporaries who've never quite adjusted to the world around them, make it difficult for him to deal with the idea of getting back into the music industry.

I asked him if he was happier then or now. "That's a hard question to answer," he offers after a rare and thoughtful pause (Wild Man's non-stop verbal barrage is, by his own admission, overwhelming to many). "I was younger. But now I don't have all the pressure, I'm not always trying to track down royalties and get work. My fame kind of subsided after the seventies. Now I don't get depressed as much."

He did enjoy San Diego and says "I'd like to spend the rest of my life here!" He also likes San Diego 's yearly comic book convention, and even hopes to become involved in comics some day, perhaps with his good friend and biggest rah-rah supporter Bob Burden (creator of the well known Flaming Carrot comic book). He's been drawing primitive cartoons all his life, including illustrations for the jacket of his own "Evening With" debut.

To Wild Man, finding kindred souls in the cliquish comic book community was like finally finding himself a home on the Island of Misfit Toys, with all the other social outcasts and decidedly quirky comic fans and creators.

"I like the people in the comic business," he says. "They take me for who I am and I feel like I can relax at a place like the comic con. They're different from people involved in the music industry. I like them better because...because I'm not doing business with them!"

If he were to record another album, Wild Man does have new material. "I wrote this song the other day, about this guy James, he used to be in The Penetrators. I met him at a bookstore." He then sings me the verse of another new composition, "Nobody's Happy":

"I'm walking down the street and nobody's happy

Yes they are, yes they are

No they're not, they're not happy."

He sings with alternating glee ("yes they are") and glum ("no they're not"). Up and down, back and forth, from depression to manic joy and back again.

Another autobiographical insight from a man who wears his heart, his emotions, and his entire self on his sleeve like perhaps no other performer in rock history.

Wild Man Fischer is happy.

No he's not.

Yes he is.