"A highly entertaining account of one of rock's most colorful tours." - Kirkus Reviews
Caravan of Pain: The True Story of the Tattoo the Earth Tour
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.
Praise for Caravan of Pain:
Kirkus Reviews
"It’s most notable, however, for offering readers 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."
Revolver
"...provides interesting, hilarious and often harrowing insight into an era when tattooing was still largely an underground subculture and metal was feared by many."
Press for Caravan of Pain:
Worcester Mag
Scott Alderman’s ‘Caravan of Pain’ allows him to Tattoo The Earth one more time.
The Arts Fuse
Tattoo the Earth Festival — A Heavy Metal Underground Reunion, and the Old Guys Delivered
Set against a backdrop of New York City in the grungy, glittering 1980s, "Get Off" is a memoir about desperate living, hidden promise, double lives, and the danger of getting too much too soon.
This eloquent, entertaining, sometimes absurdly hilarious book is a tale of how an anxious theater nerd from Long Island created and ultimately emerged from a hell of his own making. Written as a testament for his young son, Scott Alderman's account of his wasted youth and hard-earned manhood will resonate with and inspire anyone who has been lost and struggled to find their way back.
"This is the voice of a natch'l born raconteur with the courage to venture to the darkest spaces of the human heart with uncanny compassion and deep honesty." - Oliver Trager, Author of "Dig Infinity!"
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After getting thrown out of college, Scott Alderman began working in the live music business, first as a roadie and stage manager in rock & roll, and then as road manager, agent, and club owner in the jazz business. After getting clean in 1987, he worked in human services as a counselor at an AIDS hospice in New York City, and at psychiatric hospitals and methadone clinics in Washington, D.C. and San Francisco. In the nineties, his career included stints in management and operations, first at Lehman Brothers and then at Morgan Stanley. The turn of the millennium saw Scott launch the Tattoo the Earth festivals, and in 2001, after the law banning tattooing in Massachusetts was overturned, he produced the first tattoo festivals in the state.
He has published two memoirs: Get Off: The Sordid Youth and Unlikely Survival of a Queer Junkie Wonder Boy (2020), and Caravan of Pain: The True Story of the Tattoo the Earth Tour (2022).
Scott has a B.A. in literature and writing from Columbia University. He lives in Massachusetts with his wife and kid.