I only got to know Artie much later, when I was in my 30’s. I split home and took to the streets when I was around 14. Well, basically raised by wolves, actually (laughs). I was just a baby, y’know, so I was raised by my mother. After that, he split, never to be seen or heard from again. So it wasn’t exactly a Leave it to Beaver storybook childhood, y’know? (laughs). My earliest childhood memory is of my mother emptying a gun in my father’s general direction, she wasn’t a very good shot, thank God, (laughs), and then him grabbing the gun out of her hand and beating the shit out of her. Jonathan’s parents: jazz legend Artie Shaw and Hollywood actress Doris Dowling It was all love and kisses at first, but predictably, the relationship degenerated into a battle of raging artistic egos, and that’s what I was born into. I think my mother was like Wife Number 7 by the time they hooked up. It’s a classic pattern for people like that, repeating the same dysfunctional behaviours, always expecting different results, Einstein’s classic definition of insanity. He was also what’s known today as a sex and love addict, a textbook co-alcoholic, who kept getting tangled up with, um, problematic women. That and his undeniable genius, not just as a musician, but as an intellectual, a writer, a philosopher, a curious mind, all those factors contributed to making him a very difficult, conflicted, unhappy man, personality-wise. I mean they guy was basically like Elvis or Mick Jagger in his day. Like attracts like, right? He was basically what could be described as a narcissistic sociopathic personality: traits that were pretty much exacerbated by the extreme level of fame and success he attained in his music career. I mean it’s the good old law of attraction. And my father, Artie, well, even though he didn’t drink, he was every bit as nuts as my mother was, with his own weird pathology. She loved me and she meant well, she really did, but she just didn’t have the emotional tools to do very well as a mother, poor thing. Despite being a beautiful, talented, intelligent woman, she was pretty much insane during my formative years and beyond, mostly due to her alcoholism. My mother was a hopeless alcoholic, a raging, violent mess in a dress. And that made them pretty unqualified to be successful parents, God rest their souls. My parents were both complicated people, geniuses really, but they had a lot of, um, how can I put it, deep existential personality disorders, problems stemming from their own miserable childhoods. But for simplicity’s sake, I can tell you that, sadly, it was a childhood not unlike that of too many children growing up in America. JS: Well, I’ve covered a lot of that ground in my memoir books (The first book of Jonathan’s multi-volume memoir saga, SCAB VENDOR – Confessions of a Tattoo Artist, is set to be released on Turner Publishing in early 2017), so there’s not much I can add to a story that’s taken me almost 20 years to write. SV: What was it like growing up with a famous Hollywood screen actress as a mother? (For those who don’t know, Jonathan Shaw’s mother was Hollywood femme fatale Doris Dowling – best known for her roles in Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend and the neo realist Italian classic Bitter Rice and his father: jazz legend Artie Shaw.) How would you describe growing up in old school Hollywood with such famous parents? This is Jonathan Shaw – bruised, brilliant and unapologetically raw. Rocker, Sage, Artist, Poet and Proud Outlaw of Our Age.
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