Like a Tattoo: ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Will Stand’
The grand re-opening of Mark Mahoney’s Shamrock Social Club brought out all the feels
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It was weird being a nightclub columnist and a quasi-misanthrope, but there you have it.
For 15 years, I’d rally — jumping in the shower around 9 pm, to hit as many clubs as I could before last call. No need to be anywhere before 10:30 pm as the heat started around 11.
Dark corners were my friend. I liked to observe rather than interact, but that became impossible. Being a columnist for the LA Times when that paper still mattered was a pretty big deal, and they’d find me. Promoters, musicians, club owners, publicists, they’d find me.
The doormen were my friends — they were cool.
A million memories, mostly good.
The sun and the moon and the stars set around two venues — the Viper Room and the Shamrock Social Club, a tattoo parlor on the Sunset Strip, a few blocks from the Viper.
When the Shamrock opened its doors twenty years ago, I was given the honor of the inaugural tattoo.
Never in the history of history has a writer ever beaten out actresses and actors. The people with the faces always win.
But Shamrock Social Club owner Mark Mahoney isn’t just any tattoo artist. He likes the writers.
And thanks to something I wrote about him in the LA Times in the mid-90s on a morning where he’d been disinvited from career day at his daughter’s school, I got the honor of the inaugural tattoo.
For that honor, he received a signed one dollar bill from me, which hung proudly in the Shamrock Social Club for the past twenty years.
Mahoney had his grand re-opening yesterday at a new tony location up the street on the Strip, and I — the quasi-misanthrope who actually loves everyone but preferably from a distance — rallied and committed to showing up. As I made my way to the party, Sade’s ‘Like A Tattoo’ came on the radio, and I thought it a good sign. Happy to say, I made it before the party was over to pay my respect to the gent who gave me my Garbo, Bette, Jean Harlow, Marilyn, Venus, praying hands, swallows, wings that sustain me, et cetera.
I gave Mahoney a hug, and admired the lovely new venue with its lovely new view. I didn’t know most of his new friends, but I think I nodded at Harry Styles.
There were no dark corners, so I stood outside the party and fake smoked, which is my way.
I met a base jumper named Avery who pinned a lovely blossom on my jacket, and an artist named Kelly Lamb who makes art with bones. She admired my coyote bone earrings, and we swapped stories about art for the living and the dead.
I applauded myself for showing up, and made a note to get the tshirt next time.
It’s a simple ‘SSC’ on the front, and ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Will Stand’ on the back.
Isn’t it pretty to think so.
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