Goodbye to Carnivale Tattoo

Well, after 15 years in Palma, our sister shop and Spanish heroes, Carnivale Tattoo, have closed their doors. More than just a shop, Ivan organized concerts, exhibitions and published an incredible book, The Carnivale Tattoo Songbook. A collection of handwritten lyrics by songwriters with accompanying flash tattoo designs painted by various tattoo artists. The traditions of music and tattooing have always been kindred spirits and this was the first book of its kind. Carnivale Tattoo may be closed but the Carnie Family lives on. I was honored to write the artist’s foreword and am attaching it below because it describes my experiences with tattoos and music and the fact they are inseparable. Yes, the prose is a bit syrupy and dreamy, but that was the idea…Faulkner has always been an idol. Thanks for stopping by.

Andy

Juke joints and tattoo parlors, beer-stained bar tables, green soap lingering like smokey bbq.  I was way past my teenage curfew. Midnight in Memphis.  Rock and Roll was the devil’s music and tattoos mistakes that sailors and soldiers and bikers and whores made and paid for.

There was Rocky’s Tattoo “Open at Midnight” …The heavy charcoaled steel door deferentially open…an homage to the midnight breeze and silent paean to safer times.  Straining against broken cinderblock, the walls glowed with a hundred collective years of tradition. The tattered mediocrity of the watercolored wizards softened by neon, lawless cigarette smoke, and the forceful rite of tradition. 

There was the old and spidered sidewalk bluesman…a withered life broken like his high-E string. The bottle of duct-taped Mad Dog, purple grape flavor, kept the fretting hand sharp and easy as the Madison traffic. The outside of the Antenna club his haunt, hideaway and office. The jagged, old tattoos on his chalked arms saving what remained of his story. He mumbled and stumbled while buying us underaged punk-rockers cheap beer from the Mid-Town Piggly Wiggly. Our scrounged change keeping the Mad Dog near…and where, at the very edge of memory, the fortified wine danced a two-step with his minor blues.

I’m not sure if I knew music before I knew tattoos…the mixed musical buffet of the Deep South was like having stray dogs in the yard…always around, rarely noticed and often stepped on. Were the stained and sunburned tattooed forearms of aging veterans, the quick-stick Cracker Jack prizes, or the needled band logos jabbed in Bic pen black any less leashed to memory? Even the oak trees seemed born with initialed hearts.

I’ll never again be in Memphis on a storm-streaked June night waiting for GG. Allin or the Circle Jerks…with it’s streetlights and scattered beercans, the broken hearts and the raindrops, Madison Avenue all brake-light red…yellowed with the skies of a summer evening all-ages storm. The Antenna club is gone…Rocky’s Tattoo “Open at Midnight” is gone…Spaces, not places, that mined and minted a small slice of the American spirit…offering the muzzled wailful blues of late night individuality. Songs and paintings the midnight barks of stray dogs…

If not a substitute, than certainly a solace, this book.  The handwritten lyrics and the soft colored fades of dedicated craftsmanship…the honed storytelling of song…the roses and hearts and daggers…the dogs in the yard…the brushstrokes and ink blots…the sore fingers and the spit-shaded lips.

Here are the songwriter and the tattooer… each folding the taped and glued parchment of a collective arcana. Kneading it’s archetypes until the voiceless become the shouting roar of today.  Organizing the vast chaos of story-telling tradition…its skulls and ballads, its pin-ups and train songs…their soft brushes and sharp pencils whistleblow that mournful warning:  We can’t know where we’re going if we don’t know where we’ve been.

Enjoy