JEFF OGIBA: I like the frog on the mushroom.
DAN SANTORO: Yeah.
I love that one too, man.
I would really like to do that, to be honest with you.
JEFF OGIBA: Who tagged all these?
How big would you make that?
DAN SANTORO: I'd do probably like--
JEFF OGIBA: Just a little one?
DAN SANTORO: Yeah.
Like that more, you know?
JEFF OGIBA: Like here?
DAN SANTORO: Yeah.
I think that's a good spot for it, actually.
JEFF OGIBA: I don't know.
So I don't know.
DAN SANTORO: Oh, I love that frog.
JEFF OGIBA: Well--
DAN SANTORO: What do you want?
Fucking like American flag rip-out?
Jesus Christ.
Everything I do is silly.
JEFF OGIBA: What does it say, though?
DAN SANTORO: It says that you like fucking Bluegrass.
You don't mind amphibians.
And you definitely get high.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
DAN SANTORO: I think this is an interesting design, simply
because it's not like some kind of famous thing.
It's not like some kind of iconic graphic.
It's not like a Gibson girl or something like that.
But you know it was pulled off of something, which I think is
really interesting.
It might have been pulled off of a candy
wrapper or a cereal box.
I think that's really cool.
In the beginning, we didn't know how to make
a good tattoo design.
Neither of us did.
Right, Jeff?
Jeff is a long-time friend of mine.
We went to high school together.
I learned by doing a bunch of really shitty tattoos on him.
Like in the very beginning, he wanted to just get line
drawings and hardcore band things.
But now, yeah, he just wants to get really funny, goofies.
It's goofy, but at the same, sort of like mystical stuff.
That's what he's into.
I just wanted to do a tiger on his forearm.
And he convinced me to do a tiger on a flying carpet
jumping through atom symbols and like the galaxy and all
this stuff like that.
And normally, that would be a terrible idea.
But it works on him.
And I think I did a pretty good job on that one.
He's just one of those people that, no matter what I do or
do to him, it's all good.
We're friends, you know?
My wife and him were just having a conversation about,
potentially, in the future, opening up a record store.
And then, within six months, we had the grand opening.
So it was just a really cool thing, because it's like a
pipe dream that every kid has with their best friend when
you're in high school.
When we're older, we're going to have a
record store one day.
And half the people don't even talk to their friends from
that time period any more.
And here we are, grown ass men.
And we have a record store.
Sommer is usually the face of this place, up
front making coffee.
Jeff is the record guy.
And I do the antique stuff, when I can.
JEFF OGIBA: We all do a little bit of everything.
I end up in piles of records mostly, dealing with weirdos,
taking phone calls, going out to visit people who--
DAN SANTORO: Try and rob you.
SOMMER SANTORO: [LAUGHS]
-What are some indicators that it's going to be a good buy?
JEFF OGIBA: These are my uncle's.
And he just overdosed on heroin.
[LAUGHTER]
DAN SANTORO: Yeah.
That's usually a good sign, right?
Johnny Thunders got you into heroin.
You know?
Sinatra did not, you know?
JEFF OGIBA: Soon as you hear a little bit of the history, you
know right away that there's a chance.
DAN SANTORO: I had a guy come in here with a bunch of
antique medical charts.
He was a teacher.
And they were in the facility closet of the science lab.
And he had taken them 20 years ago or something.
And they were probably sitting in there for
60 years, you know?
Again, someone that's going to do that is kind of weird.
But I like that.
Those are my people, really, you know?
[LAUGHS]
That's my nationality.
[LAUGHS]
I grew up in a relatively old house.
And my father actually used to have a military store.
My father was a World War II collector, specifically
Italian Fascist stuff.
And then he also dealt in a little German.
And they had that for a few years.
And then, when they closed it down, they brought everything
into the house.
So it was like the scariest thing ever.
I used to go down to try to work on models.
And there'd be two full dressed Black Brigade soldiers
standing next to me.
It was a weird situation to grow up in.
But it was pretty normal to me.
And I actually really loved the fact that that was kind of
normal to my parents.
So it's funny.
Some people walk through the doors here and they're just
hit in the face with, I don't know, the whole store.
They can't wrap their head around why anybody would buy
any of this.
But for us, I mean, this is my life.
This has been my life.
All of us.
It's like I travel on the weekend quite a bit, when I'm
not tattooing.
Flea markets, yard sales, Craigslist.
I get it anywhere I can, you know?
It's a pretty small window of opportunity
for me to get stuff.
So all week, I'm trying to line stuff up.
STEVE BOLTZ: He's a bit of a picker.
I mean, he likes to go to antique
stores and antique fairs.
And then, of course, Black Gold now has given him purpose
in that hoarding.
I think, before, it was just like having stuff.
We all like to just have stuff we like
to look at or whatever.
But now he's got the store.
Now he can actually justify having as
much of it as he wants.
BERT KRAK: A lot of stuff that Dan looks for is kind of tied
into tattooing, as far as what the image is or it's got those
rock of ages things.
It's like classic tattoo motifs that he looks for.
I guess it's stuff that tattooing has borrowed from
the real world, you know?
STEVE BOLTZ: Dan's object hoarding, it comes mainly from
tattooing, I would imagine, even though there's other
influences, because you just are exposed to so many
different types of art.
You think about tattooing now, well, that crawling panther
has been drawn for us already.
You know what I mean?
But there was a time when it didn't exist.
And somebody came in and wanted a panther
crawling up their arm.
Well, Coleman or one of these guys had to find some sort of
reference for this.
And a lot of early designs, they'll come from old
children's books or comics or whatever.
Or the Kewpie is a good example.
A Kewpie was an actual doll.
Then it became a tattoo icon over the years.
But now, because we know that Kewpie so well, well, you go
into an antique store or something and you see a little
Kewpie doll sitting on the shelf, you're like, oh, there
it is in 3D.
DAN SANTORO: Oh yeah.
Here's another thing.
That thing is ready to be a tattoo too.
There's a Kewpie little home butler thing.
But it's a Kewpie.
Who doesn't want that?
My house has, more or less, looked like
this for a long time.
It went from "Star Wars" toys, as much as I can fill.
I thought it was corny for a while.
So then I did the thrasher cut out thing.
As long as the walls just looked like culture
vomit, I was happy.
You know what I mean?
And then it became like tattoo flash.
And then tattoo flash kind of evolved into old circus prints
and lithographs that were what a lot of the tattoo stuff was
derived from, and so on, and so on, and so on.
And then, the next thing you know, you've
got a lot of stuff.
[ORGAN MUSIC]
ELI QUINTERS: It's not a big apartment.
And he's filled the walls.
But it's all amazing stuff, you know?
It's top of the line taxidermy, old tattoo flash.
It's just the way he wants it.
You know what I mean?
It's a good representation of the stuff that
he's passionate about.
[ORGAN MUSIC]
DAN SANTORO: Oh!
I just found this at a flea market.
It's a studio portrait of a mother and two children.
And the two kids are on a taxidermied ostrich.
It's like anything, you know?
You get into collecting one thing.
And then you start to pick up the subtleties that make one
thing more appealing than the other.
I've been flea marketing for a long time.
And if I had seen something like this, I'd probably be
interested in buying it.
But I wouldn't know why.
Whereas now, I'm a little bit more immersed in collecting.
It's pretty easy to pick up on what
makes something desirable.
So to me, that's very desirable.
It's an ostrich.
How often do you see an ostrich in a photo from the
turn of the century?
This is a photo I picked up that I thought was pretty
interesting, just in a box of random photos.
It's obviously some kind of carnival performer.
But she's reading a magazine.
And the back ad of the magazine is, "Tattoo your
lips." Another stony tattooing the inside of a woman lips.
ELI QUINTERS: Very well-studied in stuff of that
era, of when American tattooing came to life.
He knows a lot about that era in history anyway.
And so I think he collects a lot of that stuff.
So he's very well-studied in antique flash.
And he knows a lot about that stuff.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
DAN SANTORO: I have a lithograph of that at the
store right now.
That's the one that I said you see a lot of the lithographs
that old tattooers pulled from.
That particular image, I had never seen recreated as a
tattoo before.
And I had actually obtained this about
five, six years ago.
And I was like, oh, that's the coolest thing.
I didn't know who did it.
It came from the same collection that a bunch of
other stuff that I was told was Coleman came from.
He was a tattooer from Virginia.
He just was the pioneer of a lot of the
style that we see today.
He had a knack for drawing really pretty women.
And everything he did was a step above everything else
that was going on at the time.
This is a famous photo of Coleman outside his shop.
So I've seen this photo hundreds of times.
I was like, oh, if I could only see around the corner of
that, you know?
And then, when this book came out, boom, the other wall.
And that made my day.
100%, that is that.
I was told his shop burned down.
Then a lot of the stuff got kicked to the curb.
And the woman that I acquired a lot of this stuff from, her
husband had gone and, I guess, picked up a lot of this stuff,
literally, off the side of the road.
And so that's why something like that exists.
That was just two of the designs on the sheet that
weren't scorched.
There's a photo of him tattooing.
It's that famous photo of him tattooing with the visor.
There's all the flash on the wall.
He's got one sheet off the wall.
And it's propped up on his station.
And these two designs are on that sheet.
But it had been cut.
A lot of this stuff got cut.
One thing that I really don't ever want to be is
self-absorbed.
And when someone asks me to talk about all these things
that I've surrounded myself with, it makes me feel like
I'm self-absorbed.