Today’s interview, which I particularly care about because unlike the others we were able to do in person, was about a month and a half ago when TKid was in Rome. He made himself available for the interview, we left immediately for Rome Fiumicino -where he was staying- he greeted us in the room, we thanked him for his helpfulness and professionalism, we got on the balcony and chatted for an hour or so. Here is the interview for you…

So the first question is: what was it like in New York when you started in those years?

I started writing graffiti in 1973. I was a street bomber and I was a toy. I wrote King 13 was my first name and I was in gangs. I did this too. I joined another gang, became Sen 102, and in 1977 I got shot in the leg and stomach. When I got shot and quit the gang I became T-Kid 170 in September of 1977. I started hitting the train right after I got out of the hospital. The whole street culture was developing, the music, the DJing, the MC, and it wasn’t called hip hop. It was just called jams, we would have a jam in the park. Kool Herc and Grandmaster Flash were the most popular but there were a lot of them. There were a lot of people that were doing Red Alert, Casanova, all these other guys and you know but those were the main guys that were rocking it. So you had the music going on. The culture was starting to develop. people started wearing Adidas because they come from Europe, the fat shoelaces, towards the end of the 70s. And it was you know the transformation coming in 76, 77 where people started wearing Pumas It was Adidas and Pumas but before that, it was Pro keds and Convers you know. Fila comes in the late 80s, Diadora, and some other shit from Italy too. Fila comes first and then Diadora. And that’s how street clothing developed, the basketball shoes…. it was popular to wear those things.

So that’s how it was, but there was still a lot of drugs in the street, a lot of gangs…. Fortunately, it was starting to change slowly and the culture started developing, what later became hip hop But it was a mixture of things, graffiti was its element, graffiti was there all the time, the clothing and the dancing and the DJing and the music that came later.

From our point of view, New York seemed like a magical place in those years, that was the perception we got from documentaries, fanzines, and other media. Was it?

It was a real magic place, I mean there were a lot of things going on, and a lot of new clubs started popping up, like the Fever. You had all these places on T-Connection they were starting to come up because you got to understand that for our age, for the young group that we were in, we couldn’t get into clubs so we started making our own thing. Most of our jams were in the parks and the streets.

What was it like for you to be a teenager in those years?

In those years it was like everything was new, I saw everything happening, it was like watching a whole new world come up. It was exciting because we were painting trains and we were creating stuff and we were starting to see new things happen. Not the old conservative stuff, the bullshit, and everything was starting to change. Everything became different: the style of clothing, where we were able to go, and then to hear our music on the radio. To see our art in the galleries was amazing for us

In the early days, could you have imagined that graffiti would become what it is now? A worldwide culture.

When I started painting trains and getting down break dancing I never thought that it would leave New York. Nobody imagined that. Thanks to people like Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant when they put together the book: Subway Graffiti Art. Or when Henry Chalfant and Darren Silver put together the documentary: Star Wars.

My first trip to Europe was a commission job in London in the UK for TDK Tapes. I painted a mural for this but it was still a small culture in Europe, then later on it just grew and grew. It became more popular here in Europe than it’s than it did in New York, and that to this day is amazing to me! I never thought this would happen you know, and, unfortunately, people love Hip Hop, Graffiti, and break dancing more in Europe and overseas than they do in New York, it’s crazy man. You still have people that do it, but it’s not as big as it was back then in those days, and guys like me from that era were one of a kind. We’re special people because we’re the ones that developed this culture, that saw this happening, this shit, we saw this and we didn’t even know what we were doing we were just doing. Being ourselves, we were just doing what we normally do, and to see it just go everywhere and now you guys do it and you guys love it and appreciate it and took it to the next level, you know, it’s fucking amazing. I’m very happy that I’m part of that, I’m part of the foundation, and we did it well. It' We are guys like me, guys like Cool 131, Skeme or Part One. That was one of a kind.

In those years, was competition with other writers a motivation to raise the bar?

Oh, we were always trying to burn each other when it came to graffiti when it came to anything we always try. The DJs try to be better than the other DJs, the writers try to be better than the other writers, the dancers and the breakdancers try to be better than the other breakdancers, it was very competitive, it was high energy, very intense and very very hard. I mean we would fight each other. It was like football fanatics you know, it was like that it had the same mentality, everybody was proud of what you did and you wanted to be better. It just you know raised you that’s why guys like me got good real quick. I learned from the best I learned from Padre Dos and Tracy 168. I learned from these guys and I really listened and looked at what they were doing. They taught me everything I needed to know. They told me to always look at what I see and try it if I see something I like, incorporate it into my piece but don’t do the same thing just incorporate it and make it somewhere my own. Man that’s what I did and I became really good, I became one of the best from that time, and I’m still I mean compared to today to this day I still could paint, and people look at me and they say:

“Damn man you know you’re 61 years old and you still climb fucking up trains down this that and you’re still doing this shit”

and I’m like:

“Yeah man, because you know this is what keeps me going this is my motivation man the passion, my passion for this shit is never ending”

What is it like to be part of a culture that was developing? What is it like to be part of a community of artists that was forming? Creating rules, styles, and more

It was very competitive, it was you made your crews, your cliques, and you stuck together with your guys and you competed with everybody because it was so competitive and guys like me would take a train yard and I would make it my own. The other guys couldn’t come there, there were who could come and who could go in our yard. Nothing is stronger than the family you know and my friends were my family and that’s who I mainly stuck with a strong bond with them and together we were able to do a lot and be better than a lot of people because we did this together

If I think of New York graffiti I like to imagine the subway full of graffiti, and that’s the first thing that comes to my mind right. It was a strong symbol? Ever since I could remember the trains were full of graffiti from when I was a little kid it was always there it was more in the late 70s early 80s there was too much of it because now there was no space and everybody was going over everybody, but from I want to say from the late 60s to the mid-70s you started seeing it all over the place on the trains, it wasn’t a lot of colors, it was mostly tags and stuff at first and then later on towards like 74/75 that you started to see style develop.

I mean you had Phase2 and those guys doing the bubble letters riff trying to make some mechanical styles and stuff like that but it started from that it started to develop into more intricate stuff. In the late 70s early 80s the hand styles on the tag started to become more prolific more stylish and it was like the trains were just bombed with graffiti you couldn’t get into a train without it being bombed it was very rare when you would catch a clean train and when you did it didn’t stay clean for long (laughs ed).

They said it was a “cancer”, that it was cancer on the subways, that it was an ugly thing. If you looked at how the conservative society was at that time, because it was very conservative people liked everything to be perfect make believe everything was fucked up underneath these are the biggest fucking crooks the city was falling apart the infrastructure was all fucked up the bridges the fucking trains. They were just robbing money from each other from the government from the people and they needed somebody to blame they took graffiti as the as we say the scapegoat you know the escape so that instead of pointing a finger at them they could point it at everybody else that’s what the government was doing see guys like me know this shit because I know a lot of things I worked for the government and I know what they did and how they would get money from the federal government to keep the train clean and they would just start doing nothing, so they could keep getting the money, the same thing with repairing bridges it was very corrupt New York City. I hate to say it but you know it was very corrupt politically all these republican motherfuckers were so fucking corrupt. It was ridiculous, it was a sort of competition.

Do you feel that graffiti today still has the power they own so like uh the feeling of the value of revitalizing and revising our space.

Well, it had the strength to take space and make people realize that there is such a thing as public space that can be used to create. Graffiti is one of the most powerful tools there is, it’s been used throughout history for different reasons either political or, just for whatever reason territorial, and is the most powerful tool on the planet when it comes to communication.

That’s why big corporations are now using it to sell clothes, to sell products, to sell Mountain Dew or coca cola because it speaks to everybody it crosses all boundaries religious age cultural boundaries whatever, it crosses everything and it speaks to everybody has something to say whether it’s good or bad they have something to say

When you started what were your biggest inspiration also if there was not a developed artist community maybe you take inspiration from another type of art?

When I started my motivation I wanted to do the street bombing, I put my name everywhere all over the neighborhood, I was a street bomber but later on, I saw the creative part of it the artistic part of it, and yeah there was a community of graffiti artists that were just good and they inspired me like Padre Dos, Tracy 168, Mark 198 these are the names I saw a lot, they were doing nice work and colorful work and I saw that and that motivated me to to do the outside of train so when I became T-kid I stopped bombing insides streets and just started doing whole cars outside, end to end window down burners, I started doing that and that was like my motivation just became turning this ugly steel this dirty place into something beautiful. I hit the trains because they needed to be hit they needed it you know it was up to me to make sure it was you know looking better because the government wasn’t doing anything they tried to stop us but stopping us was impossible to this day it’s impossible to stop us we’re still doing it

In those years New York was full of art forms, and lots of artists were settling in the city from the most underground to the mainstream. How did they perceive the graffiti movement? like Andy Warhol and others

Guys like Andy Warhol embraced the culture because they felt the energy it had, so photographers like Henry or Martha Cooper, these producer guys, started seeing the energy behind it and understanding that this was something special. It was amazing and they felt they needed to document it. All the artists embrace it man that’s how you got guys like Basquiat or Keith Herring they knew the power of this art form that it was very powerful and they became part of it and like I said guys like Andy Warhol embraced it man you know I don’t know how other people felt about it but those particular artists they were just they loved it

Also, how do art galleries see graffiti?

At first, there were a lot of well art galleries that always saw the dollar value, they saw the money they could make and they made money, and they made a lot of money. They made some great collections and they saw that this in the future was going to be something and that’s why now especially in France and other countries in Europe they have exquisite galleries, exquisite collections of old artwork.

How has graffiti been integrated into the Hip Hop world, I mean if they are part of the same culture, many say that graffiti is a different thing?

Graffiti was always an element of its own. It was brought into the hip-hop culture but it was always on its own, it stood there before hip-hop. A lot of the writers were involved with hip-hop. Graffiti was multicultural you have white, black, Puerto Rican everybody was doing it you know you can’t say that it was just for the minorities when white people were in it too in fact white ones were the ones who started it if you really think about it those were the first ones to come in you know Taki 183. These guys they’re white, they’re Greek and Italian and Irish, and yeah man it’s fucking amazing man, most of the guys are Albanians, it’s crazy man the multicultural that you find inside graffiti.

It was an element of its own, it was incorporated because of the connection, especially in those times in the late 70s when New York especially the Bronx, where this shit started (laughs ed), where the hip hop culture started was mostly black and Latino, and there was a lot of black and Latino graffiti writers that went to the jams wearing their jackets, their fat shoelaces, their bell bottoms with the graffiti on the side, jackets with the graffiti on the back with laces running down the side, and when people saw this they were like: “oh shit and that’s fucking dope you know let’s bring it into the culture and it became part of the hip hop culture” but like I said graffiti was always on its own yeah

The last question. For us, at least for those who live in Italy, hip-hop was born in New York. How did New Yorkers experience the fact that in other cities they started doing graffiti? I mean, what do you feel like when in those days you see hip hop and graffiti going through the whole USA and you were happy about that?

I was proud, I was very proud to see my culture, you know, something I was part of that I was in the beginning when it started that I saw with my own eyes grow up to become something amazing that people just embraced that everybody liked and it became so controversial and so radical and you couldn’t stop. So many people hated it but they couldn’t stop it so I’m very proud that I’m part of that culture to see it become a phenomenon to see it become worldwide yeah man that’s something good man I’m proud of it.

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