 |
Greg
Irons (1947-1984)
Gregory
Rodman Irons was
born September
29, 1947 in Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania. His
father was in advertising
and his mother
was a registered
nurse. Greg attended
Upper Marion High
School up until
the 10th grade
and was involved
in just about every
aspect of the school
newspaper. Greg's
brother Mark said
that Greg displayed
intense interest
in art at an early
age, even at the
risk of spankings. "He
used to scribble
all over the walls
when he was young,
and mother would
wash them off and
tell him to stop.
Then one day, she
moved the bed to
vacuum under it,
and she saw that
Greg had crawled
under the bed to
draw all over the
baseboards there." Greg
was a self-taught
artist, whose early
influences were
the Mad pocket
book reprints featuring
Kurtzman, Elder,
Wood, and Davis.
Irons moved to San Francisco during
the winter of 1967 and created
a rock poster for a band playing
at the ballroom, The Western Front.
With this printed poster in hand,
Irons went to see Bill Graham and
got an art gig for an upcoming
concert at the Fillmore Auditorium.
Ultimately, Bill Graham Productions
commissioned Irons for a series
of posters for great bands of that
era, including Moby Grape, Paul
Butterfield, Jefferson Airplane,
Crosby-Stills-Nash & Young, Albert
King and Santana, to name just
a few. Many of these posters can
be seen in the book The Art
of Rock.
1968 found Irons in London doing
animation and working on the Beatle's
classic animated film Yellow
Submarine. On his return to
San Francisco in 1969, he resumed
his work on rock posters for Bill
Graham's Fillmore Auditorium and
Chet Helm's The Family Dog and
began designing album covers for
Mercury Records and Bill Graham's
Fillmore label. During this period
he produced promotional material
for Jefferson Airplane's label,
Grunt Records. One of my favorite
album covers was the one he did
for Jerry Garcia's bluegrass band,
Old and In the Way. This album
has been re-issued with the original
Irons's artwork. Look for it!
Poster and album work eventually
led to Irons being published in Yellow
Dog, a Print Mint commix where
he was invited by Bob Rita to do
a comix of his own. This resulted
in Heavy, published in 1969
and a second comix Light,
followed soon after. A Yellow
Dog cover is seen to the right.
The 1970s found Irons illustrating
Tom Veitch's stories. Ron Turner
of Last Gasp published a lot of
this material and it was there
that Irons began producing regularly.
Last Gasp's first book, Slow
Death #1, which came out on
the first Earth Day April 1, 1970,
featured an Irons's cover. One
of the more obscure collaborations
with Veitch was The Mick Jagger
Story, about Jagger's testicles
being snipped off by a groupie.
The story was ready to be published
by Rolling Stone when Jagger got
wind of it and put a stop to it.
It was eventually published in
the newspaper Organ.
Although Irons took a lot of heat
for the sex and violence in his
work, he was not afraid to tackle
social issues. His Auto-Be Recycled was
a commentary on the wastefulness
of the auto salvage industry, cover
seen below. The Legion of Charlies tackled
the Charles Manson story and the Town
That Fought To Save Itself was
commentary about the environment.
He also did a piece on the horrors
of whaling and Slow Death #10 was
about cancer.
Irons felt that the reason he never
received the recognition enjoyed
by some of his contemporaries in
the comix world was because he
did not have a continuing character
for readers to follow, such as
R. Crumb's Mr. Natural or Gilbert
Shelton's Freak Brothers. Irons's
did have Gregor, the Purple-Assed
Baboon. This was a character that
Irons felt was a metaphor for him.
However, it wasn't until his later
years that he used Gregor in his
art.
In an interview with Cascade
Comix #19 Irons talked about
Gregor: "His name is Gregor.
Like Gregor Samsa in "The Metamorphosis".
He was a cockroach, but this guy
is a baboon. He's not really a
baboon, he's a mandrill, but I
call him a baboon. A lot of the
writers and people that I like
talk about monkeys in different
places, like William Burroughs....
it's just an image that struck
me."
By the mid 1970s, the underground
comix business began to fall off
and Irons started doing more book
illustrations. This work paid better
than comix and during these years
Greg worked for Troubadour Press
and Sunset Books as well as doing
a series of coloring books for
Bellerophon Books. It was around
this time that Irons began to move
into the tattoo business. He had
been tattooed many years earlier
and admitted that tattoos had always
fascinated him. His first tattoo,
done in the 1960s, was the word "tattoo" on
his left forearm.
Guitarist Peter Kaukonen recalled
returning from a Jefferson Starship
tour in 1972 with new tattoo work
from Thom deVita of New York City.
Peter said that when Greg saw this
work and heard what Peter had paid
for it, he began thinking about
doing tattoos for a living. Greg's
first tattoo equipment was mail
ordered from Spaulding/Rogers around
1975. His first tattoo (that he
did on himself) was crows and a
skull on his right ankle. Peter
is the proud owner of Greg's second
tattoo, a Japanese style frog.
Greg was doing this tattooing at
his house but soon realized that
he needed to get into a shop situation
to really learn the art. This led
to the start of his professional
tattoo career in 1980 at Dean Dennis's
shop at #394 Broadway in San Francisco.
The leather jacket as seen above
was painted by Greg. 
Dean Dennis had learned the trade
from Lyle Tuttle in the mid 70s
at the #30 Seventh Street shop,
before opening his own place at
#1523 and later #1543 Webster Street
in Alameda, California. This location
was just minutes from Dean's San
Francisco home, as well as being
home port to many navel personnel.
Dean worked in Alameda for several
years before leasing the #394 Broadway
shop. To the left is an acetate
stencil of one of Greg's designs.
At this time I (C. W. Eldridge)
was working in Calgary, Canada
with Paul Jeffries. I left there
on Christmas Day 1979 to work with
Dean when he offered me a job at
his new location. We started to
work on the shop right away. The
#394 Broadway storefront doesn't
exist today, but at that time it
was located between the Mystic
Eye (occult supplies) and the Tibet
Shop (Himalayan head shop). Affording
views of the Transamerica Pyramid,
San Francisco Bay and the topless
clubs of North Beach, we thought
it to be just about the perfect
tattoo shop location in the world!
The storefront itself was an old
meat market equipped with a metal
rail near the ceiling (for sliding
animal carcasses) and a wooden
freezer box. We cut a large window
in the side of the freezer box
and set up our tattoo stands in
the freezer itself. Being a large
shop, we were able to put a small
gallery space in the waiting area
and held art shows by artists like
Dave Mann and D.E. Hardy. At first
Dean and I worked alone in the
shop but in the years that followed,
Terry Tweed and Leo Zulueta worked
there as well. Ed Nolte, then silk
screener extraordinaire, first
introduced Greg to Dean. Ed had
been doing the silk screening for
the newly formed Last Gasp Comix
in San Francisco. Nolte had known
Greg since the 1960s and had printed
many of Greg's designs on T-shirts.
By the 1970s, Ed was doing a lot
of silk screening for San Francisco
tattoo shops and knew of Greg's
interest in tattooing. It was during
one of the Barbary Coast Gallery
shows that he introduced Irons
to Dean. From this meeting Greg
was offered a chance to get into
the tattoo business. 
Greg started working the six to
midnight shifts at the #394 location.
It was soon very obvious that Greg
was going to quickly move up through
the ranks. All those years of poster
and comix artwork served him well
in the tattoo world. He had developed
a drawing style that lent itself
naturally to tattooing. It was
during this time at Dean's that
Greg drew up his first flash set
to be produced for sale. This four-sheet
set was never produced, but some
of the designs ended up on the
1982 set that he did with Pete
Stephens.
Greg worked at Dean's for a year
or so and then went north to work
at the Tattoo Emporium in Seattle,
Washington with C.J. Danzl and
Pete Stephens. This connection
with Stephens produced two of the
most sought after sets of flash
in the 1980s. The photo to the
right is an example of Greg's tattooing.
Late 1982 found Irons back in San
Francisco tattooing for Henry Goldfield
at #404 Broadway. Seen below is
a flyer that Greg did while working
with Henry Goldfield. During these
years Greg built up a loyal following,
tattooing at, and designing t-shirts
for most of the American conventions.
Greg put out a very well received
second set of flash in 1984. By
this time, he was having a big
influence on the tattoo world;
his flash designs were beginning
to show up everywhere. It was not
since Mike Malone in the 1970s,
that one person so changed the
look of U.S. tattooing with their
production flash.
After a couple of years tattooing
on Broadway, Greg developed an
ulcer and was in need of a vacation
(even if it was a working one).
He went to Europe for a bit of
R&R in Amsterdam, followed by a
month or so of tattooing with Tattoo
Bertje in Oostende, Belgium. Greg
arrived back in the States in time
to attend the September 1984 tattoo
convention in Houston, Texas. He
shared a booth with the Tattoo
Archive , and as always, Greg's
tattooing was in great demand.
Having a work ethic that was unmatched,
Greg would be one of the first
on the convention floor in the
morning and one of the last to
leave at night. Greg was able to
make enough money from this convention
to take his dream vacation to Thailand.
Just before leaving for Thailand,
Greg was offered a position at
D.E. Hardy's world famous Realistic
Studio in San Francisco. He was
very excited about this opportunity
and produced several back piece
designs to be hung in the shop
on his return. The photographs
below are more examples of Greg's
tattooing.
On November 14, 1984 Greg was hit
and killed by a city bus in Bangkok.
As fate would have it, Greg had
just received a magic tattoo from
a Buddhist monk in Chiang Mai.
In a postcard written at that time
he said, "The tattoo came complete
with religious ceremony at a monastery
in the out-back, took three days
to negotiate, but worth it. The
100 year old monk blessed it and
gave me a secret mantra to go with
it." So much for magic tattoos!
Gregory Rodman Irons was laid to
rest with a Buddhist ceremony at
the Berkeley Buddhist Temple on
November 24, 1984. The Rev. Kusada
read passages from the Sutra, Iron's
name was then offered, and friends
and relatives took incense and
spoke some thoughts of him, sprinkling
his cremated remain with incense.
Tattoo
Archive © 1992
See flash,
a book, convention
poster, a
buiness card, rock concert poster, and a window
sign by
Greg Irons in our online store.
|
