The Brooklyn based street wear brand Mishka celebrated their 10th anniversary last night at Stage 48th last night. For me Mishka turning 10 was less about a party for a clothing company and more about seeing family grow up. When I moved to Brooklyn 7 years ago I happened to move a few blocks from Mishka’s base of operations. I vaguely knew a few people from the brand in nightlife and when they had a warehouse sale I stopped in because it was a few blocks away from my apartment. They didn’t even have a store yet, much less the stores they have in Brooklyn, LA, San Francisco and Tokyo. I ended up leaving their warehouse with a couple things including one of their Keep Watch hats, all black with the famous eyeball on the front.

I wore that hat pretty much every day for a year. Eventually someone from Mishka approached me about shooting a lookbook for them. They wanted to do a nightlife themed book and figured I was a fan of the brand because I wore the hat every day. The truth is I liked the hat but I didn’t want to shoot a look book for clothes. I had done two look books for clothes before and both times the brands failed before I even got the gear. The lookbooks were never even published. I had learned my lesson so I said no. They kept bugging me about it over and over again until I finally agreed.

The shoot ended up being the Spring 2009 lookbook  and while I am not a big fan of the photos I am so glad I did it. Yeah, I ended up with some free clothes but I also gained a family. Back before Mishka took over the world you would see people in Mishka and you could walk up and say hi because they were friends with somebody you were friends with. Wearing the eyeball meant you were down with all the other kids Keeping Watch.

In the nearly five years that have passed since we shot that lookbook Mishka has blown up like you wouldn’t believe. I recently got a chance to check out their massive new office space in Greenpoint and I just was excited for Mikhail and Greg. Their office has a god damn bar in it. So proud of those dudes and how far their little t-shirt company has gone in just the five years I’ve known them.

So last night I went to their party at Stage 48 and saw King Louie and World’s Fair and had some fun but the party isn’t nearly as important as what it meant… seeing the Mishka family grow up. And yeah, I took some photos and once again I shot something for Mishka for free because they will pay me back in a lot more than clothes.

Speaking of all this, I am going to announce it officially next week, but Mishka LA is going to be the location for my Route 66 book release party on October 11th and we are going to do something in NYC too but that’s a bit up in the air right now. This party in LA is going to be amazing and it never would have happened if I didn’t shoot that lookbook back in late 2008. Thanks Mishka and congrats on your 10th birthday!

Click here to see all the photos I took at Mishka’s 10th Anniversary at Stage 48.

Finally back from Dallas and I had a blast at the Sailor Jerry Presents Elm Street Music & Tattoo Festival. Day three was a lot of fun because it was the slowest day and I got to hang out with a lot of the tattoo artists and other people at the convention. By 8pm people were mostly done tattooing or just finishing up and there was a raffle for a 1984 Harley-Davidson motorcycle, a Fender guitar and a Tim Hendricks tattoo machine. All the money went to True South, a charity that helps people injured in motorcycle and bicycle accidents. I video taped the raffle so there aren’t many pictures but they raised a ton of money and later people who donated to True South got a chance to play in a massive game of dice to win another Harley, but more on that later.

Sunday was also a lot of fun because my friend Alysha Nett showed up and I spent most of the day hanging out with (and taking photos of) her. After she left I did quick photo shoots with two girls I met on the first day of the festival but I think they chickened out and don’t want their pictures online. You can see a preview on my NEW Instagram though…

After the tattoo part of the convention was over there were after parties at Three Links and Wit’s End. Three Links ended the night with a solo show from Jim Heath of the Reverend Horton Heat. I left right after his set but I think all the tattoo artists and friends ended back at Oliver Peck’s place for some sort of insane after the after party that I should have attended since I didn’t get any sleep anyway. I skipped out early because I had to get photos to clients before I left for the airport and I hopped to get a few hours of sleep. At least one of those things happened.

In conclusion, the Elm Street Music & Tattoo Fest was an amazing time and I hope I get asked back again next Friday the 13th cause I had a lot more fun in Dallas than I thought I ever could. Big thanks to Oliver Peck & Elm Street Tattoo, Sailor Jerry and the Dallas Observer for having me out!

Click here to see pictures from day three of the Sailor Jerry Presents Elm Street Music & Tattoo Festival in Dallas Texas.

Ps. There are random pictures of Rhett Miller from the Old 97s in this gallery because he happened to be playing next to Three Links and I stopped in for a second to check it out.

Yesterday was day two of “Sailor Jerry Presents the Elm Street Music & Tattoo Festival”. I didn’t get any tattoos on day two but I had a lot of fun. There was skate boarding, tons of rock and roll and of course more tattooing. Bowling For Soup were the headliners yesterday and there were a bunch of tattooed babes hanging out everywhere. No complaints.

I hung out on the half pipe out back and shot kids skateboarding for a while. I shot a bunch of skate stuff when I was in high school but I didn’t have that many friends that were any good so I have really only shot skate stuff a couple times in the last 15 years. Sports photography, and especially skate photography is such a specialized thing but I had fun anyway. I got a couple of nice shots but my favorite might be the one of a board flying at me. It actually hit me in the face but the shot was worth it. The shot is always worth it.

Bowling For Soup headlined Trees but I was more excited about the headliners over at Wits End across the street. Dallas Uber Alles were an awesome Dead Kennedys cover band and I had a lot of fun fucking shit up in their mosh pit. It also made me realized how many Dead Kennedys songs I don’t know. That was pretty surprising since they were one of the first punk bands I ever listened to.

This fest has been so much fun so I gotta thank the homie Oliver Peck and Sailor Jerry for bringing me out to Texas. Half my family is from Dallas and I have spent a lot of time here and this is the first time I ever had any fun… (Although I did fire a gun for the first time here.)

Click here to see all the photos from day two of Sailor Jerry Presents The Elm Street Music & Tattoo Festival in Dallas, TX.

Yesterday was Friday the 13th and that means one thing, cheap #13 tattoos! Getting the #13 tattooed on you has historically been a way to ward off bad luck and in recent years it’s become a tattoo shop tradition to give out small inexpensive #13 tattoos every Friday the 13th. Tattoo artist Oliver Peck and his shop Elm Street Tattoo in Dallas, TX have taken that idea even further. Oliver has 13s tattooed all over his body and once broke the world’s record for most tattoos in a 24 hour period by tattooing 13s on people.

This year Oliver and his shop launched “Sailor Jerry Presents The Elm Street Music & Tattoo Festival” on Friday the 13th in Dallas. On day one of the festival they had something like 100 tattoo doing Friday the 13th tattoos during the whole  24 hour period. The festival lasts all weekend and features tattooing all day and bands all night. The convention took over four venues on Elm Street in Deep Ellum. The actual tattoo convention is taking place in the Prophet Bar and bands are playing at Trees, Three Links and Wits End. Day one was a lot of fun and the Reverend Horton Heat headlined Trees and I used to love those guys so it was awesome to see them for the first time in over a decade.

I should mention, that I was supposed to be in Dallas at midnight but I didn’t get there until 4pm on Friday because of a canceled flight and a nightmarish runaround that had me spend 11 hours of my life at LaGuardia airport. To celebrate the worst travel day of my life, and to help ward off bad flight luck, I got a Friday the 13th tattoo myself… Rana Almiron, a tattoo artist who flew in for the festival from Argentina, tattooed the Delta Airlines logo on me with the number 13 on top of it.

Now click here to check out all the photos from Friday the 13th at Sailor Jerry Presents the Elm Street Music & Tattoo Festival in Dallas, TX.

Fools Gold Records threw it’s annual Labor Day party yesterday at Williamsburg Park in Brooklyn. It’s the first one that I’ve been in town for and it was a hell of a party. So much was going on that I am gonna try to make this write up as brief as possible because if I don’t it will end up at like 5000 words and no one wants that.

I walked in right as World’s Fair were playing and they were jumping all over the stage. I had never heard them before but they put on an awesome show and I would check them out if I were you. Plus one of em told me he was a Driven By Boredom fan, so I fuck with them now. Also during their set one of the dudes from Flatbush Zombies jumped off the stage in a raft and I got a couple of insane photos of that so that ruled.

Just Blaze came out and DJ’d between World’s Fair and the Unibros reunion. Fool’s Gold Co-Founder and serious unibrow haver A-Trak teamed up with fellow unibrow having DJ Boys Noize to form the DJ super team Unibros. People were psyched and A-Trak’s brother and 1/2 of Chromeo Dave 1 came out threw Fool’s Gold T-Shirts at everyone and the kids in the crowd lost their damn minds because for some reason there is nothing more important on earth than a t-shirt when it is thrown from a stage.

Mykki Blanco came out with A-Trak for a couple quick songs and then Migos came out and tore shit up and I had Versace Versace in my head for the rest of the day. There set was actually really fun and there were a million people on stage at that point so for part of their set I was just sort of sitting on the stage shooting over my shoulder and enjoying their set.

Up next was Run The Jewels the collab between El-P and Killer Mike. Both those dudes have been doing this shit for a very long time and their tag team shit is pretty great. Killer Mike seemed genuinely psyched to be there and be in NYC and kept shouting out New York and thanking the audience for inventing hip hop, although my guess is that there might have been four people in the audience that were alive in the late 70’s and I am pretty sure none of them were living in the Bronx back then…  but their set was great and they use the same artist (Nick Gazin) to do their artwork as my shitty punk cover band so I support that.

A$AP Ferg was up next and had been waiting for that shit. I’ve seen A$AP Rocky a few times and both times the shows were pretty fucking wild so I was really looking forward to Ferg. When I saw Rocky hanging out back stage I was extra pumped. Unfortunately so was everyone else and they had to clear the stage and the photo pit was filled with random VIP peoples so it was a pain in the ass to shoot. Instead of doing the reasonable thing and kicking out everyone without a media pass the security guards kicked everyone out and started being total assholes to everyone for no real reason. I tried a few things to get on stage but shit was shut down. I decided to just go through the crowd so I could get my Rocky shots but by the time I got to the front they were just ending.

Fortunately I was able to get on stage for Danny Brown and he brought out Rocky again. I am sort of a huge Danny Brown fan at this point after shooting him three times and I was pretty excited for his set. He tore that place down and it was by far the best set I have seen him do. Although in defense of his other performances one was before anyone had ever heard of him, once was at the Gathering of the Juggalos and once was at one of the worst festivals I have ever been to… Anyway, Danny fucked shit up and there was a bunch of weed smoking and Twerking on stage and it was magical.

Lastly, A-Trak and Armand Van Helden brought out the big bad duck and did a rare Duck Sauce set. At that point I was so exhausted and I had an awesome bruise on my leg that I have no idea how I got so I took off about 15 minutes into their performance. I mean there are only so many photos you can take of people DJing in front of a giant fucking duck. Seriously though, that duck is amazing and they give out duck bills to all their fans and make amazing music videos so yeah awesome, etc.

The point of this tale is that the party was fucking amazing and a great way to end the summer. And shout out to Fool’s Gold co-founder Nick Catchdubs for hooking up the VIP passes for me and my intern and for growing Fool’s Gold into this awesome thing that it is. He also DJ’d before Run The Jewels and for some reason I forgot to mention that in the 850 words above this sentence. This write up has clearly gotten out of hand. Let’s look at some photos.

Click here to see a huge gallery of photos from the 2013 Fool’s Gold Day Out at Williamsburg Park.

I didn’t spend at on of time this year shooting bands at The Gathering of the Juggalos. The line up usually includes a who’s who of hip hop legends, but this year the theme was “The Rise of the Underground” which really seemed like an experiment to see if juggalos would pay to see just juggalo bands. It turns out, maybe not… the festival was the least populated of the four I have attended, but there were still some decent acts.

Aside from the bands I have already posted (Icp, Twiztid, Onyx, Wolfpac and Tech N9ne) my favorite musical acts of this years Gathering were Blowfly, Rittz and Lil Wyte with Jellyroll. Blowfly is a legend and I have wanted to see him for years. He played in the middle of the night and was as amazing as expected. I explained him to someone as “imagine a 70 year old man dressed as Superman doing some sort of rap funk music about sex”. That’s pretty on point. I bought a t-shirt. Rittz is a pretty impressive rapper. If you don’t know about him you should google that shit. I saw Lil Wyte at the Gathering last year and was impressed and he killed it this year. The juggalos were getting live.

I wasn’t as psyched to see Sevendust or Soulfly because I hate nu-metal but Sevendust actually put on a pretty good show and I got a pretty great shot of their lead singer and his crazy dreads. Big Hoodoo played his first ever set at the Gathering so I think juggalos were psyched about that, or maybe not at all. Not really sure. Kottonmouth Kings were looking really old, but it seems like they are still able to write new songs about smoking weed. Swollen Members were playing their first US show since Madchild got banned from the country for associations with the Hells Angels. Razhel played again and did some beat boxing or whatever the hell he is all about these days. Um… ABK still has a lisp and I can’t listen to his music, but he actually seems like good people from what I can tell. I am probably missing some bands but  I just spilled coffee all over my office so I clearly need more coffee right now.

I have another Gathering update coming later today but this is it for the music. See you guys in a minute.

Now click here to see the rest of the live music performances from the 2013 Gathering of the Juggalos.

Tech N9ne is quickly becoming one of my favorite artists. I remember the first time I went to the Gathering of the Juggalos I showed my friend the list of bands. He’s a huge hip hop head and I thought I could impress him with some of the mainstream acts like Method Man & Redman, Warren G and Afroman (okay, maybe not Afroman) but he was only impressed with one name Tech N9ne. I didn’t even know his music back then but I checked out his show and ended up shooting pretty much the whole set.

Fast forward three years and I love the guy. His music is insane and he raps about 100 miles and hour and everyone loves him from underground hip hop heads, to juggalos to the mainstream. His new album is the #2 rap album on the Billboard charts. That’s fucking amazing. Juggalos love him and you see almost as many Tech N9ne and Strange Music tattoos as you do ICP tattoos. It’s pretty impressive and Tech N9ne shows the love back, showing up to the Gathering every year and even rapping about them in a song called Face Paint.

Anyway Tech N9ne puts on a fucking amazing show and juggalos love to show him their tits. This gallery is very NSFW because of that. It wasn’t quite as impressive when he was running around with 100 bras in his hand, but it’s still amazing how good he is at getting boobs out. As a photographer and a pervert it’s greatly appreciated. The bouncers appreciated it too…

I also got an amazing shot of Tech N9ne getting hit with a muddy shoe. Not sure what kinda asshole throws a shoe at Tech N9ne but I got the shot right as it hit him. You can see it coming for him in the background of the previous shot. I didn’t even realize I had the shot until I looked through the photos later. Tech rolled with it and barely even reacted. Hard as a motherfucker.

Now click here to see the full gallery of Tech N9ne photos from the 14th Gathering of the Juggalos.

Ps. If you want to see even more juggalette boobs I just uploaded hundreds of nude ‘lette pics to the DBB Mobile App!

I didn’t shoot a ton of bands at this years Gathering of the Juggalos. I mean, I would shoot the first song of people’s sets if I happened to be around, but with no huge acts like in past years I spent most of my time shooting people and not musical artists. But, tere were a few exceptions. On Thursday night Onyx and Wolfpac played in the fucking middle of the night on the second stage and I wanted to see them both.

Wolfpac I wanted to see because I have become friends with them over my years at the Gathering because they have a love for naked girls and violence. Their shows involve a lot of naked strippers, fire spitting and goons in hockey masks trying to start fights with the crowd. I saw them more than 10 years ago and they played pretty much the same set then as they do now, but it’s always a fucking shit show and great to photograph. (In their defense they actually have a new album out. Square Peg Round Hole out now!)

So click here to see all the very NSFW photos of Wolfpac at the 2013 Gathering of the Juggalos!

Onyx I wanted to see because I fucking love them. I remember being 12 years old in my bedroom moshing with my little brother to “Slam”. I have no idea how my parents even let me own Backdafucup when I was 12 (they confiscated Appetite For Destruction and As Nasty As The Wanna Be) but I had it and I loved it. About two years ago I pulled that shit out and started listening to it again and it totally holds up. I saw Onyx last year at the Gathering and Fredro and Sticky Fingaz fucking murdered it. This year they played at 4am to a smaller crowd but by the end of their set several hundred people had gathered and they fucked shit up as expected. Seriously they are so fucking raw.

Now click here to all the photos of Onxy and the 2013 Gathering of the Juggalos!

The Insane Clown Posse founded Psychopathic Records to release not just their records, but records of other terrifying clown faced rappers. The first of these was the band Twiztid who quickly became nearly as popular as ICP in the juggalo world. When you go to the Gathering you see nearly as many Twiztid tattoos as hatchet men. Since the last Gathering Twiztid left Psychopathic to go out on their own and as much as they tried to squash it most juggalos know about the infighting between the two bands.

ICP and Twiztid also Votron together to form two different rap groups, Dark Lotus and the Psychopathic Rydas, the former being a huge favorite at the Gathering. A lot of people wondered if Twiztid would even play the Gathering much less Dark Lotus and the Rydas. As it turns out all three played and for Lotus and the Rydas it might have been the last time. It seemed like at times during all of their sets members got teary eyed and there seemed to be a lot of love between the two groups despite the going of separate ways. I guess we will just have to wait until next year to see if they will play again

And yes I realize that if you aren’t a juggalo you couldn’t possibly care about the beef between ICP and Twiztid and yes I realize if you ARE a juggalo you know all this shit and don’t need my explanation. So I guess what I am trying to say is that this write up serves no one so just go look at these photos or just skip to naked photos somewhere else on my site.

By the way, all four sets went off well and Twiztid got a great reaction from the crowd. ICP’s set was of course the biggest event of the Gathering and despite complaints about them doing the same set as always people were losing their mind and the “Faygo Armageddon” that the end every set with is pretty amazing. Say what you will about ICP but they put on one hell of a show. I have yet to meet someone who has seen them and not been at least a little bit impressed.

Click here to see all the photos of the Insane Clown Posse, Twiztid, Dark Lotus and The Psychopathic Rydas at the 2013 Gathering of the Juggalos.