In honor of Dead & Company’s three days of concerts in Golden Gate Park in August, we’re celebrating their fans with a series we’re calling &Company Town. Today: Tattoo artist Salem Ofa.
- First show: Long Island, NY, 1994 (second night of five)
- Number of shows: 60 (including all iterations of the band)
- Farthest he’s traveled for a show: New York
- Song he’s most hoping to hear: “Let it Grow”
Three decades ago, Salem Ofa was homeless, drug addicted and living on eight hours of sleep per week on Haight Street. He describes himself back then as a techno-raver-little-graffiti-kid, buying his acid from the hippies in the neighborhood, which was a safe place to be homeless back then.
Then he found the Grateful Dead.
Ofa had hit rock bottom but bonded with the hippies, or “the kids” as he calls them, who convinced him to go on tour — meaning follow the Grateful Dead cross-country. He caught a ride in the back of a U-Haul with six or seven of those kids and found himself in his first Grateful Dead parking lot in Eugene, Oregon. “It fucking blew me away, dude,” Ofa said. “Blew me away.”
He didn’t actually manage to get into the concert in Eugene, but the parking lot scene alone was so moving that he decided to follow the band to Anaheim, San Diego, back up north to Oakland, and then, after a long Greyhound ride, to Richfield, Ohio, all without ever stepping foot into a show. It wasn’t until he got to Long Island, New York, that he was “miracled,” Deadhead-speak for scoring a free ticket. He finally saw the band he’d been pinballing around the country for.
Today, Ofa is the owner of Eye of the Tiger Tattoo, a tattoo parlor in the Sunset. For the last 13 years, he’s specialized in Grateful Dead ink.
Clients representing every conceivable social strata come to him for tattoos of the band’s imagery: skull and roses, Stanley Mouse and Alton Kelly’s ice cream cone kid, a million variations on steal your face, portraits of Jerry Garcia, even some of Phil Lesh. This is fan art taken to the level of permanence, an expression of appreciation for the band and its music that will literally last a lifetime. (His and other tattoo artists’ Dead-related work can be found in Gratefully Tattooed, a coffee table book he published last year.)
“To be that enthralled and that inspired by something like music, you know, to get it tattooed on them for life — that’s some shit right there,” Ofa said. “That's amazing to me.” He said he both understands his clients devotion to the band and is “stoked” to be able to share the experience of inking it for them.
Ofa stopped following the Dead in 1995 and started teaching himself how to tattoo. In 1997 he found work in a small shop, and his living room in Berkeley. In 2013, he went to hear Furthur, the band founded by two former members of the Dead and saw so many old friends and acquaintances from Dead shows in the ’90s, it felt like a high school reunion. Many of them, Ofa learned, wanted Grateful Dead tattoos. He was only too happy to comply.
“It became my thing, it became my favorite thing to tattoo, considering the type of clientele that come with that scene, right?” he said. “We’re doctors, lawyers, and street punks, you know what I mean? Like every level, man. We’re everywhere.”
That same year, he started “Bolt Day.” After a Furthur show at the Greek Theater in Berkeley, he handed out flyers advertising $20 three-inch tattoos of the Grateful Dead lightning bolt, a symbol the band first used to mark its equipment. As Bolt Day grew in popularity, Ofa eventually moved it to early August, aka Jerry Day, to commemorate the Grateful Dead’s lead guitarist who died in 1995.
Now, Bolt Day attracts about a dozen tattoo artists from around the country who specialize in Grateful Dead images. Clients pay $100 to $150 for one of 13 different tattoos (representing the 13 corners of the bolt) in an inking marathon that has gone until 4 a.m.
This year, Bolt Day was going to be in Denver, Colorado until the three Dead & Company shows in Golden Gate Park were announced and he decided to keep it local. (Don’t worry, Denver: Ofa says he’ll be back for you next year.)
“It’s a no-brainer to do it here,” Ofa said. “We’re all going to be here.”
