Attention to Detail - Mike McCabe

Always sensitive to the shifting currents of time through which he’s passed, Mike McCabe’s life has been one of discovery and documentation. Artist, author, anthropologist, mentor, motorcyclist, tattooist, teacher and photographer, Mike’s journey has segued from one unique opportunity to another. Before a microculture has completely disappeared, he’s had the good sense to capture the scene. He’s written several books on tattooing and motor culture, including New York City Horsepower. This tome freezes in time an era of urban custom culture focused on the lives of builders both young and old and the often-gritty workspaces where they wrench, and in the case of old factory buildings torn down for modern condominium projects, have wrenched on their rides.

Born in Boston but raised just west of the city in the suburbs near Natick and Wellesley, Mike says he was something of a poor student in school. To provide study motivation, Mike’s dad bought him a yellow Honda Z50 Mini Trail. “My dad was a really nice guy,” Mike explains from his New York City apartment during a recent telephone interview. “He coaxed me into trying to study harder at school because I was a pretty bad student. So, where I lived, it was suburbs that had not been built out yet. It was all still like virgin forest and stuff. It was beautiful. So, he bought me a Mini Trail and at the end of the street was this huge patch, probably hundreds of acres of woods, and that’s where I rode.” His dad had a couple of rules Mike had to follow, including pushing the Honda from his home far up the wooded trail before kicking it to life and never riding it on the street. Plus, Mike always had to wear a helmet. “I had hundreds of acres of tall, thick trees and narrow trails to myself that I rode through for hours,” Mike says, and adds, “It was incredible and life changing.”

Mike had long been fascinated by motorcycles before he got the Z50. And the bribe did encourage him to study more keenly resulting in better grades but much of his education was gained first-hand and through a burning creative desire. “I learned how to draw because my mother’s brother, my Uncle Brad, was an accomplished artist who’d won awards for his drafting skills. As a young kid, I was like, ‘Wow. Brad can really draw,’ and he taught me a little bit, and I got good at it. Once you learn how to draw that opens a whole new world of creative skills.” At eight, he’d saved enough allowance to subscribe to a highbrow classic car quarterly filled with quality photography. He’d study the shapes, lines and forms and would draw his own cars. Uncle Brad, he says, was always encouraging. And, as a young kid in the late ’60s, Mike was also impressed by Ed Roth. He bought Roth magazines, and says, “His machines, the bikes and hot rods were very powerful youth-based signifiers. This was formative, first generation, raw culture. But it was West Coast. Very alluring for an East Coast kid. At that point in the ’60s, that was very original and unchartered, something that seemed ‘wide open.’”

With his drawing skills, Mike went on to study art in upstate New York and became a stone lithographer. “It’s an amazingly beautiful process developed in the late 18th century by Alois Senefelder that involves a giant block of stone. I mean, it’s just this phenomenal, almost mystical process.” Remembering Roth and the seduction of West Coast culture, Mike then transferred to the California College of Arts and Crafts (CCA/C) in Oakland, California [sadly closed as of 2026, and its SF campus purchased by Vanderbilt University. My grandfather attended CCAC! – ed.] For 100 years, from 1922 to 2022, the Arts and Crafts Movement dedicated school was in Oakland before relocating to San Francisco. While in Oakland, Mike would borrow a friend’s Honda CB360 and ride the city’s streets.

He also pumped gas at a Mobile station, and although he had no experience, says he got the job because he wore a Mobile shirt when he applied, “and was hired on the spot.” Mike thought he should attend grad school and applied to the San Francisco Art Institute [also sadly closed – ed.] on the other side of the Bay. He was accepted but the print shop wasn’t what he expected compared to the one he’d left at CCA/C, so he stayed for only a semester. At that point, his younger brother called from New York. His brother’s girlfriend had found a 4,000 square-foot loft on Second Avenue and Houston Street in the East Village, but they needed another person to help pay $500 for a year’s rent. “That was cheap, and I was ready to come back East,” Mike says. In 1979, he moved to New York City searching for some creative companionship and inspiration.

As an aside, Mike mentions the 2025 film “Late Fame” (2025) starring Willem Dafoe (whose first film The Loveless is reviewed here), who portrays fictional New York poet Ed Saxberger. “Coincidentally, the film is set at the same time I was in New York, and it’s like 1978 or ’79 in some of the scenes,” he says. “It’s a pretty accurate portrayal of the downtown New York vibe in the late 1970s, and like me, (Dafoe’s character) was searching for some artistic camaraderie as a young artist.” Mike got a job working as a cook at Eat restaurant on the lively and historic St. Mark’s Place. “It was in a basement and was run by a guy named Barry and it was all this post hippie culture vegetarian food. Barry was a musician, so he hired musicians or artists to be the cooks and the dishwashers. It was a really very positive and creative environment, and all the waitresses were singers and dancers.”

Just a couple of months after moving into the loft, which was situated next door to Provenzano Funeral Home, Mike says he witnessed another eye-opening event; the funeral of East Village Hells Angels member Vincent “Big Vinny” Girolamo. “I didn’t know anything about the club or anything,” Mike explains. “And, downtown New York had this kind of rough-and-tumble reputation, and there’s a wide-open attitude, like a ‘you can do whatever you want’ reputation. I mean, there was there was no police presence in downtown New York. You never saw any cops, and then that huge event with Big Vinny’s funeral went on for like four of five days. I’d never seen anything like that with literally hundreds of guys on motorcycles parked all the way up Second Avenue from Houston Street to St. Mark’s Place, with bikes racing up and down the streets. I was like ‘Jesus Christ. This is totally lawless, but it’s also really inspiring.’ Culturally, this was impressive. Like, ‘what’s going on’?”

Looking to segue from art into anthropology, Mike says he chose this direction due to living in New York and witnessing the ethnic diversity in which he was surrounded. He’d been reading numerous anthropological texts and wanted to explore the field. “It was creative and very multicultural,” Mike says of his New York community. “There’s a huge Hispanic population there, and many languages on the street.” Prior to applying to Columbia, Mike says he’d been documenting life in the neighborhood on 8mm film. He didn’t consider himself a straight A student, and before applying, he called Columbia and made an appointment to meet the chairman of the anthropology program. Mike showed up wearing a shirt and tie and dress slacks with his hair neatly combed and a couple of his films and an 8mm projector in a bicycle messenger’s bag. “I’m in the department chairman’s office and he’s like, ‘Mike, what have you got in the bag?’ I told him I make ethnographic films and that I have been studying on my own. I asked if I could show him one of my films and he looks at me and goes, ‘No, Mike, but I trust that that’s probably a good film,’ and then says, ‘I’m into ethnographic films as well.’ So, that was a good coincidence, right? So, when I later wrote my application I mentioned speaking with the chairman about film, and when I got this letter welcoming me to join the program, I almost fainted.”

While studying anthropology, Mike also became interested in tattooing as a result of moving with his brother from the Second Avenue loft to a two-bedroom apartment on Avenue C. That was a tough piece of real estate in the early 1980s, Mike says, with an active drug trade. But the apartment was $200 a month, and that was within his budget. “It needed a coat of paint, and a change of locks on the door, but that’s about it,” he says. It took Mike and his brother a week to clean and paint the apartment, and he says, “So, here’s another strange coincidence. As I’m walking by with paint and rollers preparing the apartment to move in, there were always these two older guys sitting on the front steps of those two brownstones next to my apartment building. And they were totally, completely, tattooed.”

Mike continues, “The guy from the building on the left was tattooed with all these Tibetan mantras all over his arms and then the other guy was tattooed with American traditional and folk-art stuff. I didn’t have the balls to talk to these guys as the neighborhood was really rough, and you wouldn’t talk to somebody unless you were asked to talk to them. But finally, because I’m going back and forth with the paint and rollers for like a week, they said, ‘Kid, kid come over here.’ They say, ‘Who are you? Where’d you come from?’ Because there were very few white people down there then, it was all Hispanic people and African American people. I’m like, ‘hey, my name is Mike McCabe. This is my brother Jonathan and we’re moving into this building’. And they said, ‘Do you understand what goes on down here?’” Indeed, Mike did, but shortly after moving in, he says he became friends with Thom deVita and Richard Tyler. “I got to know Richard, went into his building and met his wife. He asked if I was an artist, you know, and then he asked if I wanted to learn how to tattoo. And I’m like, yeah, that makes sense. You know, it’s kind of like an outsider art form, and so I apprenticed with him for a couple years to learn how to tattoo.”

Tyler, Mike explains, was originally from Detroit and fought in World War II in the Pacific theater. When he came back on the GI bill, he obtained a degree from the Chicago Art Institute and was also a printmaker. The two shared the printmaking connection, and their conversations covered topics wide and diverse. Apprenticing under Tyler, Mike eventually began tattooing out of his apartment and built up a solid reputation to the point where he was soon sharing a basement studio on Fifth Street. “I was always working sterile, I never fucked around with that,” Mike says. “We were always very strict with that in the studio. The pigments, I had to learn all about, and it was very secretive back then. It’s very mystical. Just like lithography, too, and that inspired me.” Through Tyler, Mike met Ed Hardy, the West Coast tattooist widely recognized as a highly influential artist who revolutionized the art form. “I became friends with Ed, and I still am,” Mike says.

It was, in fact, Hardy who backed Mike’s first book, New York city Tattoo: The Oral History of an Urban Art. “I just happened to get into tattooing in 1980 when there were a lot of these older tattoo artists who were still around who weren’t necessarily tattooing anymore,” Mike recalls. “And, because of my anthropology background, again, I sensed this whole issue of like a fading culture, and I said I gotta get these guys oral history. New York has this kind of interesting identity or connection to tattoo culture with the industrial revolution and then tattooing shifts away from a hand poke method to a mechanized method with the invention of the tattoo machine. The machine was invented in New York, too, in 1891, by Samuel O’Reilly. So, I found all these guys who were very generous with their time and their stories. They didn’t know who I was. And thank God, I got their oral histories and took photographs of them and their old designs and their old machines. Hardy, and his Hardy Marks Publications company, agreed to publish that book, and it was first printed in 1997.” After long being out of print, New York City Tattoo was recently reissued with a third printing.

In 2003, Mike went to China to research an article for Skin & Ink magazine about the early days of youth-based tattoo culture in the communist nation. After writing the story, in 2004, he was hired to teach English in Wuhan, China at the Huazhong Agricultural University. The students, he says, “Were all really nice, coming from humble farming backgrounds.” Mike holds a license to teach ESL, and with his master’s degree in Anthropology, the university in Wuhan was happy to hire him. With his ever-present interest in motorcycles, although not owning or riding one while living in New York, he discovered an underground culture in China dedicated to older Chang Jiang sidecar machines. “There’re 12 million people there in Wuhan, but people were not recreational about having motorcycles. They put the motorcycles to work, and the Chang Jiang sidecars were all full of tools or they had some kind of weird thing to replace the sidecar, and these were working, utilitarian motorcycles.” But when Mike and his now-wife, whom he met in Wuhan, moved to Beijing around 2006, the situation changed. “There, you would see these young kids,” Mike says, and continues, “Mostly young guys who look like ones you would see in the East village with the crazy hair, and they all had Chang Jiangs. They’re all flying around the town on them, and I met this guy (www.beijing-sidecar.com) who was doing a really nice job tricking out these Chang Jiangs with reupholstered seats, and all cleaned up and painted.” Mike was offered a Chang Jiang for about $800, and while sorely tempted, he had nowhere to store it and no way to legally obtain a license to ride. “So, I let the idea go.”

Mike and his wife returned to New York City after two and a half years in Beijing, and he took up teaching full time once again. It was around this time Mike met Indian Larry. “He knew me because of the tattooing, but it wouldn’t be accurate to say that we were friends or anything, we just knew each other. He was working in a side show on Coney Island, he was a crazy guy. And I knew the guy who ran the side show, Dick Zigun. So, it’s like this small kind of community. And because of my art background, I met artist John Copeland and motorcycle builder Keino Sasaki. And Paul Cox. I met them when they were putting together the Brooklyn Invitational custom motorcycle show.” First held in 2009, the show was an invite-only affair, with 20 to 30 custom machines on display in a gallery setting, with the final event taking place in 2018. “And I was interested in documenting this, as I would visit these guys at their workshops,” Mike says.

“Brooklyn, particularly Northwest Brooklyn in Williamsburg, was still pretty rough. You could say it was dangerous and it wasn’t gentrified with little coffee shops, all that shit. It was old factory buildings that were basically just abandoned and so artists, people that I knew, could rent a big giant studio space. And that’s where Copeland and Jeffrey Schad and Keino and Paul, were all in old warehouse buildings where these guys were wrenching on their bikes. And I’m thinking to myself, you know, this is cool. This is like a whole creative motorcycle community that’s able to pull this off because they can find affordable working spaces.”

Mike sought permission to document these artists and builders in their rough-and-tumble studios and was granted the right. “I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about,” Mike muses. “I’m not an expert about motorcycles, but I was sensitive to the creative culture in New York, which has this incredible legacy of youth, creativity, and wild culture. By 2009, that wild culture had moved out of downtown and moved to Williamsburg, Brooklyn. But now, it doesn’t exist in Williamsburg anymore. It’s gone. It’s been gentrified out, and you can’t get an apartment in Williamsburg for less than $4,000 a month, and those old factory and warehouse spaces have been razed and redeveloped.” Mike’s documentation became, as earlier mentioned, his book New York City Horsepower. Since his first book in 1997, Mike has also written Tattoos of Indochina, Tattooing New York City: Style and Continuity in a Changing Art Form, Kustom Japan, and Japanese Tattooing Now: Memory and Tradition.

Now retired from teaching, Mike contributes freelance articles to magazines and sites including The Vintagent about motorcycle culture. And he does put together annual presentations for young New York City tattooists interested in the background and history of the art form. “The young kids really appreciate it,” he says. “They’re all very sweet, really nice kids.” With distinctive perception and an innate curiosity to document culture, Mike’s devoted his life to education; we could all take a page from his book and pay attention to the world through which we pass.