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Joel Long
The Ramblings Of
Interview by Alan Thompson
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ALAN: Um, first things first: start off with where were
you born and how old are you?
JOEL: I was born in California…Thousand Oaks. Thousand Oaks
is between Ventura County and L.A., but I haven't lived there for
a long time. 36 years old.
How long did you live there?
I was born there and we lived there for about three years. Then
we moved to Costa Rica and then we moved back to California.
Oh yeah. Right on. And then you stayed there until what—high
school or something?
Oh, no, no, no. We moved all around and whatnot. And basically,
once I met my wife, we moved and ended up down there in Hotlanta
and then that's where I started tattooing.
Right. So basically you started tattooing in Atlanta, out of the
house,— I know you said your buddy, Bruce Chung, is that
right? You said he got you into tattooing. Was that like your
first intro to it, the first thing that sort of got you interested?
Yeah, we met these brothers with tattoos at the State Park and
nobody else would really talk to you about tattooing. They talked
to us so we thought that was pretty cool and that got us thinking
about tattoos. We started thinking about that back then but it
was kind of hard to get anybody to show you, you know? So we
kind of put that on the back burner. I went to commercial art
school like everybody else and then I realized that everything
was gonna be on computer and not be a lot of drawing type of
thing. I did some little things that were like, you know, posted up
in the school—little projects to work on. I decided that I really
didn’t have an interest in that. And I didn’t want to deal with
an industry that I didn't have an interest in or you know, live
the corporate life in a cubicle—like bake a cake for somebody
and then get a crumb because you used their oven, you know?
(laughs) At least you have 50% to look forward to if you start at
the bottom, you know, at least. At least you’re getting half, you
know?
And with tattooing you can have some control, at least, over
what you're doing?
Yeah, to some degree. That's the thing -- the more you work at
it, the more you get to do what you want to do. And the less
you work at it, the more you’re like, "Man, I wish I were doing
something cool." If you do what you want to do, you’re doing
something cool every minute, right?
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