Caravan of Pain: The True Story of the Tattoo the Earth Tour Scott Alderman

“It was sad to see his tall figure as we drove away, just like the other figures in New York and New Orleans; they stand uncertainly underneath immense skies, and everything about them is drowned.”
– Jack Kerouac, On the Road

I had the idea for what was to become Tattoo the Earth at 3:45pm on November 18, 1998, at Triple X Tattoo in New York City. Sean Vasquez was finishing a tattoo on my calf that he’d started a few weeks earlier in New Orleans, and we were continuing a conversation about what I should do next with my life. My business career had just gone bust in spectacular fashion, and I wanted to do something unusual, something that had never been done before, something like the greatest freak show ever, like a giant S&M Woodstock, or a festival that combined tattooing and body art with rock bands.
“I’ll call it Tattoo the Earth,” I blurted out.

One hallmark of my campaign to get Tattoo the Earth off the ground, right from the onset, was that anyone I pitched the idea to, or anyone who saw the pitch book, gave me the best contacts they had. Many times they would call the person themselves and put them right on the phone to talk to me. People immediately believed in the idea, and in my ability to pull it off, and wanted to do everything they could do to help make it real. Sean was the first one. He loved the pitch book when I next saw him and told me he’d been thinking about nothing else since our night of drunken inspiration. He also said that our first stop had to be with Lyle Tuttle, one of the tattoo artists I’d learned about in Modern Primitives, the book my Berkeley friends had given me.

The end of my first attempt to launch Tattoo the Earth coincided with my annual February depression, and I had some dark nights of the soul. Rationally and intellectually, I knew my idea was good, and I knew I had a chance to pull it off. But in the depths of that depression I felt like the whole thing was folly, and that I was embarrassing myself running around the world on a losing proposition. Just as I sensed that much of the euphoria I was feeling wasn’t real, I knew from lugging my depression around my entire life that I just needed to ride the episode out and to try not make any major decisions or send an ill-advised email while it was happening. Doing a project with depression is like running a race with weights on your legs; it takes twice as much energy to get to the same place.

My gallbladder was the second non-essential organ I’d lost in the past few years—my appendix went first—and I felt more mortal knowing I was half a lung and a kidney from being in deep shit. The surgery was successful, I felt better immediately, and I started to put some weight back on. I wasn’t sure how much more I could do for Tattoo the Earth, or if it would even make a difference. Sean, Betsy, and I had dinner, and I asked them what they thought we should do next, and their response was a resounding “How should we know?” I had been driving the project since the start, with clear vision and purpose, and no one ever doubted my strategy. But I was starting to doubt it, and doubt myself and the idea, and I felt totally alone.

At the end of 1999, Steve Richards, Slipknot’s manager, and Sharon Osbourne, the wife of Ozzy Osbourne and producer of Ozzfest, had lunch in Los Angeles and agreed that Slipknot would headline the second stage on Ozzfest 2000. They shook on it. Sharon Osbourne had already become one of the biggest players in music by then and was known to be ruthless. She had resuscitated Ozzy’s career in the 1980s after he got fired from Black Sabbath, stealing him from her own father’s management company. Sharon’s father Don Arden was a legend in the music business in England (he managed Little Richard, Small Faces, and Black Sabbath) and was known to be a cutthroat character. But Sharon took him on, and Ozzy’s solo career and Ozzfest were proof of her skill in developing talent.