Mike Ness

 

of Social Distortion

By Crash and Jimmy Perlman 

I can’t exactly put a date on when punk rock found me, but I do remember when I realized that skateboarding was going to change my life. It was 1984, and I had already started cutting school and getting into trouble with my friends, drinking and trespassing and everything else, when we started jumping fences and stealing wood from the local construction sites, building backyard ramps and wooden skate structures deep in the woods of our Washington DC suburb. I was 12 years old, and the world of teen angst and rebellion was laid out in front of me through a stream of images, actions, and sounds. Graphics of skulls, daggers and snakes were splayed out across skateboard decks. Older kids were shredding on the ramps and in the street, drinking and smoking and right on the verge of becoming outlaws. And last but not least, there was the music, the sounds of reckless abandon fueled by churning guitars, speedy riffs, pounding drums, and shrieking, hypnotizing vocals.
Standing out from among the many bands blasting from my Walkman’s headphones back then was a So Cal punk outfit called Social Distortion, led by the charismatic yet uncompromising Mike Ness. The band was everything we all loved about punk rock, but with an approach that was catchy and melodic. The other bands made us want to smash things; Social D made us want to learn how to play the guitar. And get leather jackets, switchblades, motorcycles, and, of course, tattoos!
Once I was old enough to graduate from high school, still a punk rocker, I knew there was no fucking way I was going to college. No more school for me. I was already a pretty decent illustrator and graphic designer (pre-computer, cut and paste) and I was also dabbling in music with my friends, playing in bands and sometimes warming up practices with a few Social D riffs. So cut to a year after graduation and I’d landed a job in a tattoo shop, a classic biker-style apprenticeship, scrubbing tubes, making needles, et cetera—and I was on top of the world. I was still playing music though, and somewhere along the way I started taking my tattooing gear on the road with the bands I was playing gigs with, offering my services to help cover food or gas or whatever. And I did that for years, working with bands all year long, managing and teching and doing whatever I could on tour, and then going back to tattooing when the tours were over—and that was my life.
Well this year I began working for a band called Lucero, who took a slot on a tour called “Hard Times and Nursery Rhymes,” in the fall of 2010, supporting a band called— wouldn’t you know it—Social Distortion. Yes!!!
When I invited Crash from Tattoo Artist Magazine to the show in Atlanta, he suggested we try to approach Mike Ness for an interview. It made perfect sense to me, as here was a guy in a band that was truly great, that we all respected, and who not only embraced the history and iconography of tattoos, as well as the tattoo community in general, but who also has been churning out ass-kicking punk rock and roll for over three decades. Fuck me!—I absolutely wanted to be involved! And I reveled at the opportunity to give back what I could to two scenes that have formed who I am today. Punk rock and tattoos, like gun powder and flames!
Thank you to Mike Ness and Crash, for letting me be a part of this fantastic moment. Search and destroy!
- Jimmy Perlman



Crash: All right Mike- You’ve been getting tattooed for a long time, so this isn’t a fad thing for you...and one thing I’ve noticed about younger bands is that they tend to just pop up fully tattooed- it’s like ‘instant street cred’ or something...
Mike Ness: That’s commonly referred to as a “Visa Sleeve.”
[Laughs] Right. Yeah. It’s kind of a strange thing to see. But tattoos have been a real part of your life for a long time, and I’m sure you’ve documented many important events in your life through them.
I think it’s more just, you know, things that I like and things that inspire me, more than historic things, I think. For me personally, it’s been more like things that are reflections of me, or things that are in my life.
Right. Can you tell me about the first tattoo you ever got? And if you remember who did it, and what it was, et cetera?
I remember the first tattoo. I don’t remember the artist. But it was at Bert Grimm’s, at the Pike. I was 17, you know, and I drank five beers before I went in [laughs]...and I got this heart right here, and this banner—which I designed myself—and like a typical teenager, I wrote Heartbreaker across it. [Laughs] Like, yeah, beware girls—I’m a heartbreaker. You know what I mean? And back then it was kind of like, I’m 17, I’m looking at a Stray Cats album, and I’m going, “Okay, I just want four”, here, and here, [Mike gestures to both forearms and both biceps] But you can’t just get four, you know? Ha-ha. But it was different back then. That’s part of the reason I’m reluctant to talk about tattoos anymoreit’s that syndrome where, after something cool gets discovered, it can tend to get uncool. And correct me if I’m wrong, but back then, and throughout history, it seems to that tattooing was for anti-social reasons, an anti-social statement. And now it’s become social. So that’s kind of where I have a problem with it. It’s like, “You mean, because you’re sleeved, you and I have something in common?” To me, that’s the same as just living in the same city as me. That’s not really enough for me to want to bro-down, you know what I mean? Not unless it’s the right situation. And “no, I don’t really want to see your tats, nor do I really want to show you mine”. So, with all that said, I had to take my son, who’s 17, I had to take him over to Gold Rush Tattoo, because he called me up, getting ready to get tattooed in a house by I-don’t-even-know-who, and I was like “Bro, c’mon; I’ll come get you right now.” And I took him to Gold Rush, and Eric Jones did a tat on him. I was like, “Trust me, son.” Because there is some amount of preparation that I wish I would have done with my tats, of course. So you know, there’s a certain aspect to going and getting fresh flash tattoos, and having it all be uniform—like I didn’t know that you were supposed to get big pieces first, and all that.

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