Rolling Stone Italy Interview w/ Jeff Johnson- Translated
Music is always very important in your stories. Could you tell us about your relationship with music. You are a musician too: who to listen to you? Who are your favorite artists? Do you listen to music while writing?
Music! Music is life! What a fantastic question to start with. When I was a kid the music in my world was Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Credence, that kind of thing. Some Roy Orbison. When I was maybe 14 or 15 I discovered Sonic Youth, Death Valley 69, and it was like a window opening. These days when I’m writing its everything from Tom Waits to Nick Cave. The Bad Seeds is a great thing in this world. Punk is also still a big part of my daily sound diet, always will be. Its like comfort food. And that’s a kind of music that seems to reinvent itself too, or finds new voices in new places. Take Soweto Township in South Africa. The afropunk band TCIYF is blasting out blistering stuff. A thousand years from now, historians won’t look at reruns of CNN or sort through dead advertising rags like The Washington Post to find out what life was like in our time. They’ll look at the lyrics of our music to find some truth.
What do tattoos, the real main character of your books, mean for you?
Ah yes, the big question with a million answers. The overarching truth is that these days, especially in America, there is a constant pressure to conform. Its always been strong, but today its overpowering. As the pressure grows, so does the popularity of tattoos. Today they’re everywhere, and that surely says something. No two tattoos are the same, just like people who wear them and the people who put them on. Some of them may look alike, true, but you see what I mean. Darby, Delia, the gang at the Lucky Supreme in Old Town, even the people of Old Town itself, they never had any intention of joining the herd. That’s a hard life, living on the edge. But its a good one. Individuality is the surprising new wealth. In the end, tattoos probably mean more than most people realize. They’re just one part of a bigger picture. I’m the wrong guy to suggest this, but it may be true that this big picture is the portrait of progress itself. Only an individual can ask themselves the important questions. If we see inequality, cruelty, injustice, an individual can ask what they can do, then do it. A herd can do nothing of the kind. For every force, there is an equal and opposite force. Newton’s Third Law, expressed here in the struggle against homogenization.
When and how did you start with tattoos?
Good question! I was always drawing and reading when I was a kid, so I figured I’d do something along those lines if I was lucky enough to grow up. I don’t fit in for shit, never did, so the tattoo world was a natural thing for me. Its an industry and a culture full of people with a strong sense of personal identity, so a very loose collective instead of a structured, rigid body. Plus, the stories you hear in the tattoo shop are often amazing. When I first started writing I met two writers who lived in Portland in those days, Robert Sheckley and KW Jeter. Robert Sheckley became a good friend, even though he was maybe fifty years older than me, but both Bob and KW thought it would be a shame for me to quit tattooing, just because of the unexpected value of those stories. Think about it. Eight hours a day with different characters, some good, some bad, some strange and some in crisis, and all of them ready to talk while they’re getting tattooed. It’s a gold mine. A big part of why I know so much about crime comes from this, and that has been hugely valuable in writing noir. People say that if you really want to know about the mechanics of the underworld, the how to and the why not, you have to go into the industrial prison system and get your degree on the inside. That’s certainly one way, but in the tattoo world, I get to interview the people who didn’t get caught, the successful ones who got away, sometimes for hours and hours, year after year. I’ve had front row seats at things that are hard to imagine.
You are a veteran tattoo artist: do you still work at tattoos?
I do! I’m pretty busy writing these days, but I do find the time to pick up my machines. One day a week I’m at the infamous Kilroy’s Tattoo here in scenic Portland, telling stories and listening to them, doing the art hustle. The owner Mark Ledford is an old friend of mine, so it’s a win for both of us. I get away from the computer and he gets a wiseguy for one shift a week. It’s fun. I do guest spots abroad, too. Shout out to Dakini Tattoo in Philadelphia! I did an extended guest spot there while I was working on my novel Deadbomb Bingo Ray, which takes place in Philly. That’s a hard city. Best tattoo shop on the East Coast if you ask me.
How could you define your style in tattoos today? And how is it evolved in years?
I go through phases. My ‘licked’ period, where everything looked like wet candy, went on for years. So glad that’s over. Right now I’m just leaving a long period of black and gray, though elements of that will stay with me forever. Next I’m going to tinker more with perspective I think, using the body itself in new ways. We’ll see.
How has your real life and work inspired your books?
Real life and writing, well, back to Robert Sheckley on that one. Bob said to always base your main character on yourself to some degree if you can. Ultimately writers do this anyway, he claimed, so its better to do it with conviction. Put some of you in there if you can and it will ring true. Darby and I have more in common than I’d like to admit. I was a runaway, all that, made my way early into the relative safety of rock-n-roll and the tattoo world. Makes me laugh to even think of it, but both of those worlds are full of my people. The outsiders, just like Darby Holland. I’m not a particularly peaceful man but I’m trying, just like Darby. And I have a serious passion for Mexican food, too. In the end, to be a good writer you have to have an interesting life, and an interesting life is a good one. It’s a positive feedback loop.
When I think about it, it seems like tattooing, the process of doing that kind of art, has also affected the way I write. You have to concentrate for hours and work without making mistakes. That’s helped me as a writer. I’ve often said that even a crappy tattoo artist is a master of creative problem solving, and that helps. One creative discipline informs the next.
Around the tattoo world are there a lot of people looking for a noir?
Oh yes! Artists seem to like stories almost as much as they like pictures, and noir itself is experiencing a rebirth. We live in a noir now, all of us. The creatives were just the first people to realize it. A kind of switch has flipped. Income inequality, gentrification, the crushing message of the media, it all comes together in a way that reinvents noir for us daily. We are those characters now. We live those kinds of stories. This has become The Age Of Noir. Readers, and I mean bright readers, are drawn to noir because of the truth written between the lines. When I say that the historians of tomorrow will look at our song lyrics to understand life in our time, I should include noir. It speaks volumes.
What about Lucky Supreme: who is Darby? How contemporary is he as a character?
The Lucky Supreme, as a tattoo shop, is a dying breed, but also an incredibly hard to kill phenomena. It’s a street shop, which is different from the new hair salon style shops. In a street shop, the place is alive with drama and stories and music and neon. There’s a rich, layered atmosphere. The carnival origins of the tattoo shop are still strong and vibrant. These books reflect that, the sense of being at the very end of a magical ride in American history. Darby is a typical street shop prize fighter. Creative, resourceful, reactive, inventive. Tough, wild, and free. If you try to burn Darby, he will steal your matches.
You spend your life between Oregon and LA. How is Portland? Why is it so suitable for your books?
Portland is suitable because of the rain! It rains all day, every day, and it will never, ever stop. It’s a beautiful place, too. Incredible food scene, great art and music. LA is a fantastic place too, better than ever. I spend more and more time there.
Lansdale used incredible words for your novels. Who are your masters?
Joe Lansdale is an amazing writer. The Bottoms, the Hap and Leonard books, I love all of it. There are so many writers I admire, really. Of course my old friend Robert Sheckley. The Alternative Detective books were so fun, so great. I really dig Kim Stanley Robinson. The late James Crumley was amazing. Dancing Bear is one of my all time favorite books. So many good books out there. I’m a big fan of Warren Ellis! Gun Machine. I mean, man. Tim Hallinan, Sean Doolittle, great guys. Norman Green! Now, there’s a writer.
What about cinema and TV. Rights for your novels are already been acquired. Are we going to see your operas soon on a screen?
Hollywood! I’ve had an amazing time there, and its getting more and more interesting. I wrote a short film, The Kinjiku, based on one of my stories, and that goes into production in Fall, starring Ron Canada and Tom Hildreth. Great guys and we’ll be working on many other things after that. Recently I’ve been going back and forth with the Nelms Brothers, Ian and Eshom, two of the brightest, most genuine people I’ve ever met in Hollywood. Their new movie Small Town Crime is fabulous. My agent and I have been in negotiations with all kinds of great people about a variety of things, and a few really lucrative and delightful deals have already closed, but I can’t talk about that right now.
Most of the writers I know don’t want to have anything to do with Hollywood. It’s too harsh and scummy and empty. Maybe the tattoo world inoculated me, I dunno, but after my first few really terrible encounters with directors and producers, and I mean, really, really bad ones, I became extremely careful, but I didn’t fold. And its paying off. I love movies, and the golden age of television might be right in front of us if enough of the people who want to make brave, beautiful, wondrous things can get together and overpower the financial dinosaurs and bottom feeders who make formula baby food. You can see the first signs of it. Season one of True Detective is a great example of what I’m talking about. The long story, unfolding in a very cinematic way, with rich storytelling content. And it made it all the way to the bank. Proof of concept. So, we’ll see. Fingers crossed. I’m trying to be a part of that. I’d love to be a part of that.
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