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Chicago, Illinois

Chicago Freedom Expo

By Bob Baxter with photographs by Bernard Clark

Dan Collins and I go back several years, so, even though it was a "first-ever" event and I never do "first-ever" events, when Dan called to say he was producing a new Freedom Expo in Chicago, I said, "Yes." Hey, I consider Dan and Sage's Valley of the Sun Tattoo expos in Mesa, Arizona some of the best organized and most enjoyable tattoo events that I have ever attended. But, alas, Dan's Chicago Freedom Expo was not all that we hoped for. Fraught with problems from the beginning, this Windy City celebration of body art was supposed to be a foot back in the door of the ever-burgeoning tattoo convention scene in a city that, historically, had nothing but fizzles at the hands of other less illustrious entrepreneurs. No such luck.

As life would have it, Dan had a rash of personal problems, ended his relationship with Sage and, from what I gathered from his emails over the years, Collins relocated to the Midwest, had gotten his life together and was on the straight and narrow, ready to return to the tattoo convention business. This was good news, because we always liked Dan and had some marvelous experiences at his past events. Ever accommodating, Dan was responsible for allowing The Playboy Channel to do a video story on my photographing tattoo attendees at his popular Mesa event. While I was shooting models, Playboy was videotaping me at work. It all ended up being a fifteen-minute television segment, but it never would have happened without Dan's help and support. He was a very good organizer and knew how to bring lots of attractive young women with great tattoos to his shows. Because of the way tattoo magazines are structured (pretty girls on the cover, pretty girls featured in the articles), it was always great to go to Dan's shows. But times have changed and, what with the plethora of tattoo events around the country siphoning off the crowds, you don't see a lot of women showing off their ink on the convention floor, like you used to five or ten years ago. Valley of the Sun was one of the last conventions to attract a significant number of appropriate subjects to photograph, which is why it was perfect for the Playboy shoot.

Just like Rick Harnowski's fabled gatherings in Green Bay, Wisconsin, or the ones put on by Steve Peace in Canada, at Dan's shows, when you needed something, whether it was a roll of paper towels or a chicken sandwich, someone started running to get it for you. I liked the event so much that I had Dan invite my dear friend Keone Nunes from Hawaii to participate and bring his hand-poked Polynesian tattoo art to the Southwest tattoo fans. Hey, I even brought my wife-to-be Mary to the show. This was clearly one of my favorite tattoo events and I felt extremely confident inviting Mary, Keone and Playboy to participate in Dan's (and Sage's) warm hospitality. Then the ceiling fell in and Sage took over the event. Sage runs a solid show, too, but we all missed Dan.

So, when I got an invitation to cover his new expo in The Windy City, especially since Dan was covering our airfare and hotel and even though I never cover a first-time event, I agreed, without hesitation. My understanding was that Dan had worked through his personal difficulties and was making a comeback. Plus, I really, really wanted to visit the Field Museum. In fact, we were so excited about it that Bernard, Mary and I teamed up with Larry Brogan and Jessica Weichers (she's the artist who inked that bumble bee in my hand) and spent the day visiting, in my opinion, the most amazing natural history museum I have ever seen. We spent the entire day checking out everything from a completely reconstructed Tyrannosaurus rex to an absolutely spellbinding exhibit of Oceanic art, not to mention countless stuffed-animal dioramas, some of which were first exhibited in the eighteen hundreds. It was truly the highlight of our trip to Chi Town, because the tattoo show itself was a disaster.

Where do I start? Okay, the hotel. Now keep in mind that Dan Collins is a friend and even though I told him that I was probably going to pan his event, we're still buddies. So, just like I have done for fifteen years with Skin&Ink, I'm going to report what for, for me, was the truth and not gloss over the details and write a happy little puff piece. Instead, the purpose of my review might be better defined as an extended word of warning to others in the tattoo world who are thinking of putting on a tattoo event without being intimately tuned in to today's tattoo scene and the infinite demands for realizing success.

The hotel. The best thing about the Hyatt was its proximity to the Chicago O'Hare Airport. There was even a free shuttle, but, no matter how you cut it, its one-thousand-plus rooms were situated directly under the flight path of about two Boeing 747s every sixty seconds and, if you opened the window to let air into your room, the sound was deafening. The rooms themselves weren't bad. It would have been nice to have a high-def television with more than twelve channels, but that was the least of our problems. Since the only other restaurant was at another hotel down the street and around the corner (Gibson's steakhouse), we were pretty much confined to the fare at the grill downstairs. The dinner on the first night that we arrived was pretty good (prime rib), but, next morning, we almost broke a tooth on the granola and, next day, the salmon on the bagel was so passed being fresh that I was sick to my stomach the entire weekend. I reported this to management and was given a seventy-five dollar credit on my bill. I'd like to say that we made due at the convention's cafeteria-style food line, but with their tasteless seven-dollar-and-fifty-cent Italian sausages on a roll and terrifying sloppy Joes, we mainly survived with protean bars from the gift shop.

The convention itself was in a straight line, just across the street from the Hyatt. That's if you were crow. However, this was not the case. The special hotel doorway to the convention center led down a seemingly endless hallway with multiple twists and turns reminiscent of that famous backstage scene from the move Spinal Tap. It was long, it was lonely and it was a drag for artists staying at the hotel who had to schlep their gear. Why the event was not staged at the Hyatt or even a local Ramada Inn, is a mystery, especially when the interior hall of the convention building was more like a hanger for the Spruce Goose than a cozy art gathering. The official area was cordoned off with pipe and drape, and you could see that we were surrounded by immense, football-field-sized areas of with cement floors and steel rafters. The sound system, which resembled those large conical affairs we've seen nailed on poles in the TV series Mash, made everything broadcasted by the famous master of ceremonies, Rico, totally garbled. I've always liked Rico for his flamboyance and energy, but it was wasted on this lousy sound system.

Sure, there were several excellent artists on hand—Boog Brown, Phillip Spearman, Larry Brogan, Uncle Tim Heitkotter and Horiryu from Japan, for example—but, for the most part, I'd never heard of most of the artists present and, considering I witnessed booths so crammed with people (three artists, three customers, and a half dozen witnesses eating sandwiches) that it was clear several of the participants didn't know anything about preventing cross-contamination or practicing the sterile chain of events.

Dan told us that there were a hundred and forty or so booths, but that's not what I counted. There were much less, and those that were operational were mostly made up of vendors selling products that had nothing to do with the art of tattoo or the desire to elevate tattoo art into fine art in the minds of the participants and customers through the door. For one reason or other, several of the vendors had previously backed out and Dan had to fill them with third-rate choices, in order to recoup his losses. Among the worst were a booth selling dildos, a couple of strip clubs (with girls in G-strings sucking down whiskey sours all day), a cigar maker, various sexual aids and lubricants, and a fill-out-this-form-and-win-a-hundred-dollars-toward-your- next-tattoo booth. To add insult to injury, the word "tattoo" was spelled "tatoo" with one T, which just goes to show just how out of touch the vendors were with the world of body art. If this were a Steve Peace event, Steve would have tossed the vendors and the tattooists in the contaminated booth out the door and onto the street.

Oh, did I forget to mention the SWAT teams and the barking police dogs? It seems a fairly well-know sleaze-bag promotion company that previously had a couple of failed events in Chicago, got wind that Dan was putting on his Freedom Expo in "their" town and caused a stink. Word has it that these unnamed promoters communicated threats to Dan that prompted the Chicago Police Department to position a dozen-and-a-half armed and bullet-proof-vested officers to body-search everyone that came through the line. The subterranean parking lot was stacked with squad cars and you could hear the German shepherds barking through the pipes and drapes. All this is not to mention, of course, the rival motorcycle clubs that had also contacted Dan and shared their upset at his presenting a tattoo show without their specific approval.

The highlight of this entourage, was their clearing the hall about an hour after the doors opened, so the local health department could check all the booths for cleanliness, or whatever they did. I say "whatever," because, aside from collecting two-hundred-and-fifty dollars per artist, the health people clearly didn't know what they were doing. Several artists told me that various health inspectors that checked their Illinois shops would stick a bare hand into the contaminated wastebaskets and poke around the used gloves and paper towels. In any event, everyone, artists and customers alike, had to exit the floor, wait forty-five minutes and re-enter, one-by-one, through the cadre of armed police officers.

I should have guessed this was going to happen. When I saw the billboards on the highway for the Freedom Expo with the word "tattoo" nowhere in sight, I knew Dan was in trouble. He says thirty-five hundred people showed up on Saturday (after predicting a cool ten thousand) and with that, when everything was said and done, he cleared, after expenses, about nine grand. But I heard later that the police doubled their bill as did the owners of the convention hall and Dan lost money. Ah, the joys of being an entrepreneur.

As always, Dan was courteous and helpful to us, although several of the booth holders complained that he "didn't have time to talk to them," but seemed to have enough extra minutes to get a rather large rib tattoo right across from a booth that was upset about Dan's allowing a booth from a competitive shop that they were suing for using their identical shop name a mere two aisles away. Believe me, after seeing hundred-yard-long lines at conventions by the likes of Durb Morrison, Steve Peace, Tramp Welker, Brian Everett, Mario Barth and Takahiro Kitamura, I felt bad for Dan and the poor attendance to his event. I know the guy really cares about tattooing and felt in his heart that he could make a big comeback in this energetic and multi-faceted city. It's hard enough to put an event together without being hassled by posers and people whose egos are so inflated that they once declared that they owned (!) the word "expo" and would sue anyone who used it for a tattoo event. It must have been a nightmare for Dan, except for the fact that he seemed quite all right with the proceedings and assured me that anything I said about the event, pro or con, was okay and that our friendship was more important.

All said and done, I have to hand it to Dan. He is, after all, just a human being trying to make a living. To his credit, he didn't abandon his friends, get defensive or make up a lot of stupid excuses. He took it like a man and, from what I gather, is probably going to give it another try down the road. This was the very last tattoo event that Bernard and I would be covering for Skin&Ink, which is a major bummer, but, on the other hand, it was just another dramatic example that the dysfunctional world of tattoo is full of pitfalls and, unless you know exactly what you are doing, the tattoo universe can be one gigantic black hole.