Caravan of Pain

Book excerpt: Brace yourself for a roller coaster thrill ride as you join the Tattoo the Earth 2000 summer tour of America, the most insane tour ever inflicted on a continent. Featuring twenty of metal’s biggest bands, including Metallica, Slipknot, and Slayer, plus Filip Leu, Sean Vasquez, and the world’s best tattoo artists, these renegade outsiders pissed off all the wrong music business heavyweights but left delirious inked fans in their wake. Caravan of Pain is a rip-roaring music business underdog tale: compelling, hysterical, and cautionary. Its unique peek inside the world of music festivals, metal, and tattooing gives the reader a front row seat to a watershed time in our culture at the turn of the millennium. Told with candor and humor by the tour’s creator Scott Alderman and illustrated with memorabilia and never-before-seen photos, Caravan of Pain is a story of inspiration, persistence, and the dark side of following a dream. "...a rare chronicle of the era in which tattooing went from an underground activity to a part of the mainstream—a shift that Tattoo the Earth can lay claim to having energized. A highly entertaining account of one of rock's most colorful tours." - Kirkus Reviews "...provides interesting, hilarious and often harrowing insight into an era when tattooing was still largely an underground subculture and metal was feared by many." - Revolver "For anyone thinking of starting something like this it shows that you better do a deep background check into the type of people that you might be dealing with if you choose to move forward." - Kevin Lyman, Warped Tour Founder