Sailor Jerry

Transcription

[MUSIC PLAYING] ERICH WEISS: My name's Erich Weiss, and I am the director of the documentary "Hori Smoku Sailor Jerry." It's a documentary about the life and times of Sailor Jerry Collins, who is an infamous tattoo artist who was based in Honolulu, Hawaii from the late '20s to when he died in 1973. I think during the movie, my image of Hawaii changed and shifted, because I'm from the East Coast. I'm from Philadelphia. So Hawaii really is another world away. And when you think of Hawaii, you think of hula girls and pig roasts, that kind of thing. And researching for the film, I learned about where Jerry tattooed. And that was Hotel Street, which is Chinatown area. And it's always been kind of notorious because that's where soldiers and sailors would go to drink, meet a lady-- usually a lady for hire-- and get tattooed. And I listened to stories about how seedy and dirty and dangerous that area was, and I was attracted to that. -That's pretty awesome. ERICH WEISS: Well, hello. It's Mike Malone. Kandi Everett. -Damn! ERICH WEISS: There's a lot of people that are still here that were tattooed by Sailor Jerry. And you can find people that worked in Jerry's shop just after when Mike Malone took it over. It was called China Sea then. So there are continuous lines of history that you can follow. And people that remember what Hotel Street was like, and what that era represented. There's Mike Brown, who's still working here. Around the '70s, I think that's when Chinatown started to really go on its decline. And Mike Brown worked at China Sea during that time period. And now he's working in Waikiki. MIKE BROWN: Oh yeah, it was Skin Deep Tattoo, in the heart of Waikiki. Right next to the Tiffany building. The majority of our tattoos here are done on tourists. Plumerias, hibiscus, turtles, koi fish. We do have guys that come in and want a traditional style tattooing. I can do it no problem because that's what I started out doing, was that style work. So I have no problem with that. I grew up in suburbs of Los Angeles. A little town called Pico Rivera. Yeah, most of the people I hung out with had tattoos. All the older guys did. Peacocks like this. I think the peacock was the most-used image at that time, in the late '60s. I think that the old junkies used to do it to hide their needle marks. That was the whole significance of it. They'd get the body here, and then the tail would come down there. And this arm, was a little bit of my recreational drug abuse caused me to have surgery on my arms. Kids love it. I was not doing real good in California. I guess everybody knows. I was a drug addict, and I needed to get away from the drugs that were there. So I came here. Got away from those drugs, and soon found other drugs here. But I would go through downtown on my way to Waikiki. And I'd look down the street to see if the shop was open. It was never open because at that time Mike Malone was in the process of opening a shop after Sailor Jerry died. He had died in June, and I moved here in the beginning of August. So it still had the Sailor Jerry sign out front. So one day, I noticed the shop was open. I walked in, and met Mike. That was the only tattoo scene that was going on here at that time in '73. So I just started coming around the shop, and then from there, we started hanging out together. Back in the old days in the '70s, there weren't a lot of haoles here-- or white people. We were definitely the minority at that time. And so if you met somebody that was a haole-- and you were a haole-- you became friends with them if you wanted to have friendship. Because the locals really didn't take to us that good in those days. They were real hesitant because all the stigma of Captain Cook. And from then on, how they've raped and pillaged the islands. Before I started tattooing, came over here in '73. And I like to eat sweets, always have. So I decided, well, maybe I'll be a baker. So I went to baking school for a while. Then Malone set me up in a donut shop across the street from tattoo shop to plug up the business where the other Filipino guy used to work. I pursued baking for another few years. And then come 1977, I was through with it. I told Malone, teach me how to tattoo. If I could see something, I could copy it. But I wasn't always real good at making stuff up out of my head. I've always had trouble with that. MIKE BROWN: Lance McLain, Kandi Everett, Mike Malone and myself. And that was it. Mike would be real friendly on some days, and real grumpy on other days. It would just depend on how it was going for him that day. MIKE BROWN: Well, real clean, real bright. Sailor Jerry's designs, most of it. And then Mike had painted up a lot of his designs too. But for some reason, we sold a lot of the Sailor Jerry bulldogs and eagles. Just seemed like the '70s, everybody wanted bulldogs and eagles. That was mainly all I did back then. But we did mostly Marines and Navy on military pay days. Back then, they got paid every two weeks by cash. It was just production shop when military pay day. We'd do 10, 15 people in a 12-hour shift. And you couldn't do any body work in there when you had a military pay day. All you did was backs and arms. Back then, if you tattooed 3 to 5% of the population, you were probably being very liberal. It seemed like nobody got tattooed back then. I'd get on the bus, and I had this big dragon on my arm, and little Chinese ladies wouldn't even sit by me. They were afraid of me. I went to the first tattoo convention in Reno, Nevada. It was before National Tattoo Association started. So I went over there with Mike. He had just finished my back piece, and wanted me to enter it in the contest. Went to the convention, and I saw that tattooing was starting to get really good. And you could make a decent living at it. Back then, only people that were in the tattoo business were the only people that came through the door, it seemed. Nobody made very much money because everybody was gambling that weekend. It wasn't a real good idea to have a tattoo convention in a place where they have gambling, I don't think. Thom Devita was there. Huck Spaulding was there. And then Ed Hardy, and Mike Malone and I. That's right. Jack Rudy was there, and Charlie Cartwright. He was a character. That's where Ed and Mike met Jack Rudy, and saw the work he was doing, and were just blown away by that single-needle work he was doing. Oh yeah, we were doing four and five needle outline tattoos. Bright colors. They were doing all single needle black and gray-- using a shader too, but it was all just black and gray. Real fine, more realistic than what we were doing. I moved back to the mainland in 1979. I thought I could get a real job for a while, and realized it wasn't for me. So I went right back to tattooing and started working for Ed Hardy at Tattooland in East LA. One that looks like a little gingerbread house. There it was strictly tattooing gang bangers. That's all we did was just tattoo gang bangers, day and night. They didn't mind. We were one of the only shops. Freddy Negrete. He was the only one that was-- he grew up in the barrio, and he was a gang banger too at one time. He was from South San Gabriel-- or no, San Gabriel, excuse me. I say South San Gabriel, he'd get mad. He was from San Gabriel, or Sangra, they called it. They'd get girl's heads, peacocks, roses, and names. Do a lot of names there. I could do a decent script name when I worked for Malone. And then afterwards with Jack Rudy and Freddy Negrete, I had to learn how to letter better if I wanted to get more business. So I studied their style of lettering. And Jack would show me stuff, and so would Freddy. And from there, I sort of developed my own style, I guess.