Ink and Tunes

Jake La Botz has a lot of tattoos — so many he's not even sure how many he has anymore. "It starts getting blurry when your whole back is covered," he says. He also has a lot of friends in the tattoo business. And it also turns out that a lot of his fans are heavily tattooed.

So rather than waiting for his big break, as many musicians often do, he jumped into the fire and decided to tour where his fans were: tattoo parlors. Last year, La Botz played twenty tattoo shops on his Tattoo Across America Tour in support of his gritty blues album Graveyard Jones, which showcases a few things he learned from hanging out in his hometown of Chicago with David "Honeyboy" Edwards, who some call the last living Delta bluesman. This year he's doing more of the same, and he'll be stopping by Kitchens' Ink (757 Santa Fe Drive; 303-573-3791) tonight at 7:30 p.m.

This time around, he's also taking Denver-based filmmaker Jeff Gonzalez on the road to document the tour, which might eventually turn into a full-length film. La Botz is no stranger to being in front of the camera, having had parts in Animal Factory, Ghost World and, most recently, Sylvester Stallone's John Rambo, which is slated for a January release. Visit www.kitchens-ink.com.
Sun., Oct. 14, 7:30 p.m., 2007