An exclusive interview with graffiti legend BLADE a.k.a. King of Graffiti
The Montana Cans ICONIC Series celebrates the pioneers who shaped graffiti into a global art form. With its latest release, ICONIC Series #5 – BLADE: Portia Ogburn-Red, the series pays tribute to one of New York’s most prolific writers. BLADE’s name is synonymous with the golden age of subway graffiti, having painted over 5,000 trains throughout the 1970s and 80s. In our exclusive interview, BLADE takes us back to that defining period—sharing memories of his most intense years, the spirit of competition that fueled the movement, and the story behind the very panel featured on his ICONIC can design. A piece of history, captured in his own photograph, now reimagined through the lens of Montana Cans.
M: Let’s crunch numbers. Is it true you painted 5000 trains?
B: Yes, I did, in a period between 1972 and 1984.
M: That’s so impressive! Are there single pieces that you especially remember?
B: I have favorites – my first masterpiece in 1972, which was just red and white. If you look at the pictures from that time today, they don’t seem like a big deal, but when you are fifteen, this was major. Or the one we chose for the design, from 1974, it was a Blade baby letter style and in the background happens to be the building I was born in in the 1950s.
M: That’s amazing! Did you take the pictures?
B: Yes, I took the picture just for the train, only to realize later that there is the building I was born in in the background, just by chance. I mean, I caught a clean train in front of the place I was born what are the odds? It was also the place where my friend Mitch from the Crazy Five lived, who later wrote a book about the Vietnam War called “Tiger Force,” and he won the Pulitzer Prize for it! How many neighbors do you have who have become famous? Most of my friends’ brothers had to go to Vietnam; luckily, I missed it by 23 days because they impeached Nixon. I was 17 and a half then.
M: Crazy! That time must have been amazing. Do you remember how you started painting graffiti?
B: The 1960s were cool, in the 1970s we started painting, just a bunch of kids and teenagers having fun! In the beginning, from 1970 to 72, tags were called single hits. You went out with one can of paint and hit your name as many times as you could on a train. They started calling it tagging in the 1980s. It wasn’t until Superkool 223, who did the first masterpiece that I ever saw on a train in the Spring of 1972, in black with orange designs. When this train was coming, all the kids in my classroom – 30 to 40 – were running to the windows, no matter what the teacher said, to see the first masterpiece ever made! It was really cool. And it’s a big deal. If you’re 15, if you’re 40 – you don’t get it. It was something. It’s an art form created by young people, for young people.
M: Speaking of not getting it at a certain age, how did your relatives feel about you going out painting?
B: Of course, they were not happy about it with all the risks, police, electrocution, and what not. By the 1970s, there were thousands of kids in New York doing graffiti, having a good time, not beefing, not mugging people, or doing any other crazy stuff. I was a graffiti kid with a bunch of paint, doing vandalism, and I was painting pretty colors; that was pretty much the extent of it.
M: Speaking of the supplies, where did you get your paint?
B: Red devil. Until 1977, it was all lead paint, so when they tried to buff it, the paint actually got brighter. But there is no comparison to paint from today; now you have every shade of every color.
M: Do you remember your first piece?
B: Yes, I did it at Baychester layup, with one of my heroes, Hondo one, the first person to take me in 1972. It was one of the most fun nights ever, sneaking around at two o’clock in the morning. You can see it in the great Graffiti Kings book by Jack Stewart, a retired Yale professor who documented what he saw without any favoritism. I was so grateful that he happened to document the first piece I’d ever done, just pure chance.
M: From the first piece you did, you quickly went pretty crazy and did like lots of trains.
B: Yeah. Then, the original Crazy Five and I were doing like 500 trains a year. And from 1974 to 75, a lot of them quit, because everybody was turning 18. And then Comet and I were bringing out 500 trains a year each for 10 years straight. A lot of fun. Most of the time was spent just going out to get the paint. And of course, you didn’t get a lot of time to attend class. You know, those days were different. As long as you checked in at home at eight in the morning, you were checked in for the whole day. So of course, when you get your report card, even though your grades were very low. You had great attendance, which was pretty funny for a while.
M: So how did that work with like school and grades?
B: Well, you know, as long as you could just pass, you know, and get at least CS and B minus, you know, that was well enough to move to the next grade, from ninth to 10th to 11th and so forth.
M: What about the flavor back when you started?
B: In the early ’70s, it was really relaxed. Most of the guys coming home from Vietnam, you know, they weren’t violent anymore. Unfortunately, a lot of them were doing heroin and smoking tons of weed, but all those things made you really mellow. But it was an environment where people didn’t really hurt each other. You know, pretty much it was just smoke weed and go to the movies, kiss girls, and, you know, hopefully you get lucky enough to get a driver’s license so that we did not have to kiss a girl in your apartment behind your parents’ back. But it was even more fun. And taking the girls to the train like train yards and Esplanade tunnel, just painting. And all the music from that time period was The Supremes, Marvin Gaye, James Brown, Kool and the Gang, and the Bee Gees. All those musicians were all out at the same time. So you could go and see one
thing, and then go see Joe Cocker or Sly and the Family Stone, all within the same time period, it was really awesome.
M: Do you think music had an impact on your graffiti?
B: It did on mine, because I mostly like the funk music infusion, and it made me paint that way. It made my hand style more free.
M: How did you consider yourself? An artist, a graffiti writer?
B: Well, just as kids having a good time. There wasn’t a lot of mastery or burning or anything in the early, mid-70s, it was just kids having fun! Little to no beef at all. If you did have a beef with somebody, I’ll see you after school at three o’clock. I got a fat lip, he got a black eye and a broken nose, and it was over. By the weekend, you could be in the same train yard, painting together, borrowing each other’s paint.
M: What did it feel like to paint trains then?
B: The excitement, the adrenaline, knowing at any moment, you could get pinched by the cops coming from both ways at the same time. And of course, the cops at that time weren’t very fast, and most of us were like 65 kilos and very tall. So, nobody could possibly catch us, because if the cops come from both sides, we’d also climb up and run on top of the train, and there’s no 40- year-old cop gonna do that back in the early ’70s.
M: Did you ever run into any problems?
B: No, I’ve never been arrested for graffiti. I’ve never been to jail, or any of that.
M: Could you say that there is a favorite piece, or train, or something you remember the most now?
B: There were so many nights that were just really great fun nights. If you’re on outside layup at Burke and Allerton Avenue, you know, you’re just looking at all your friends. You see arms, just painting, and you’re looking at the sky. All the girlfriends are sitting inside the train, staying warm. And then you go inside and make out with your girlfriends, if you’re lucky, you get to cop a feel, you know? And then you go back out, paint some more, and drink beer and wild Irish rose wine. We always had that because it was 99 cents, so you had to save up for a week to get that.
M: Did the MTA get hard?
B: The police were always chasing us. But you’re really trying to chase 10s of 1000s of teenagers. So it’s like chasing a ghost. We invented climbing up and down the L pillars. There’s a picture in one of the books where you actually see us climbing down the poles, so the cops were on the station patrolling it, and you stand in the middle part and paint all night because you’re standing in the pitch dark. New York City cops are assigned to keep things in order, which is, of course, impossible. How do you stop 10,000 teenagers all at the same time?
M: Could you tell us something about, like, your color schemes and where you found your inspiration, like for the style and the backgrounds and all the ideas for the characters.
B: Basically, I try to create as many original characters as I could. And the color schemes are just, I dream in color. And my first wife, Dolores, would actually wake me up if she saw me dreaming. You know, see me moving in my sleep, or if I’m laughing, or whatever, she’d wake me up. I’d always have, like, a piece of canvas or a stack of paper outside, so I would go out and just sketch it. It doesn’t matter; it’s three in the morning on Tuesday. Sketch whatever you’re thinking at that moment. Boom, get it down on paper, and then draw the colors you visualized in your dream. Well, just for myself and for Comet, we just kept trying to create new concepts and do it more. If everybody else did two or three pieces over the weekend, we would try to do 10. You really can make 500 a year, but we’re doing like window-down whole cars, or one time they took 1010, 10 trains from the one line, and they parked him a block away from Ajax, his house. So Comet and I actually went out and did two-man top to bottom, whole cars on all 10 of them, because we know they’re all going to go back to Broadway. So it looks like you’re getting around all over the place in one night, because we just covered everything. It was really exciting. And we were lucky enough to have a train platform with a beam, so you could reach the top without climbing. Most of the time, when we had to climb up and do huge pieces, we didn’t plan ahead. We just had lots of paint, and you could be walking with whatever a truck had thrown away, like a broken palette – that night, that was our ladder. You know, there are no tools. You find a cardboard or a piece of wood, and you want to make straighter lines. I’m like, Oh, look, there’s a piece of wood that one of the guys left by fixing the train. That way, you can make a straighter line. You know, the following week, you didn’t have it. We improvised right on the spot. Like, wow, we both have like, five or six Silvers each. Now that we have something to climb on, I guess we’ll both do top to bottoms tonight instead of window downs, since we can reach higher. There’s no way to plan for that ahead of time, because you don’t know if it’s going to happen.
M: Would love to hear a bit more about your most important pieces.
B: My swinging letters piece, which Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant documented in the Subway Art book centerfold from Thames and Hudson. There are just so many, because my first masterpiece —even though it looks like crap – I love because it’s the first one, the last blockbuster I ever did. I did it in the Ghost yard with Seen. And of course, I did this one piece in 1979, and I wrote, you can’t beat four aces and a king. And each letter was from the deck of cards. And then I put the king with the Crown and the knife in the middle, and I drew the mountains. So it was like breaking the flat surface’s dimension. In ’79, those were pretty crazy concepts, thanks to Mescaline, haha.
M: How did people react to those pieces?
B: Everybody loved it, because in the 70s, you’re just having fun, and when people were jealous or hating on you, you didn’t go out and destroy their piece. You went out to try to outdo it. Whatever I did, Lee would try to outdo it the following week, and then I’d be pissed off, and I try to outdo what he’s doing, but it made the level go up, like John Lennon and Paul McCartney. And then there were toys in the 80s that really ruined that; they just went around destroying it for no reason. And that, to me, was the most toy thing ever. But I didn’t care, because I was already married and putting my wife through school. It’s already 1980, I’m mid-20s. Gotta go to work. You didn’t only do trains.
M: You also did some other bombings, a little bit of street stuff, right?
B: Yeah, at certain points, every layup and every yard was so hot. There was a point in the middle, late 70s, that every layup and train yard was so hot around the city, we’re like all the police are just surveying everything because there’s no drones back then. So Tom and I would take all the cans we didn’t want that were, you know, flat, matte, and primer, ride the train to the last stop of the line, then walk back, hit walls, and drink beer. By the time you drink three quarts of beer, you know, you’ve just blasted everything, and you could still run like hell after three quarts of beer, you know, because you’re so young.
M: Was there a moment when you realized the impact all of this had on your future life, when Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant made Subway Art?
B: That’s when I realized that, when they were selling so many copies worldwide. And it was really phenomenal, because the Dutch people were the first to discover the New York art form of graffiti through a man named Yaki Kornblit. He had the gallery here, came to America to Grand Street and West Broadway, and I met him there with Henry Chalfant, and that’s when he asked me, Seen, Quik, and Tracy 168 if we could come to do gallery shows in the Netherlands. So no matter what country says they were first, the Dutch people were first because of Yaki! Make sure you got that, because that is a fact! Well, it was great because my wife, Dolores, and I came here, and at the end of the first show, everything was sold to Vincent Vlasblom, Henk Pijnenburg and Willem Speerstra. Pijnenburg and Yaki handed me a check for 10,000 Guilders. 10,000 Guilders in my hands at 25 was very crazy. And then, of course, my wife deposited it so I could not go out and be a knucklehead, which was smart. I love the art form. I love being part of it. I love being from the beginning, almost the beginning of it, and for me now, it’s a great hobby – whether you make money at every show, some shows you don’t make money. That’s just the way it goes, but that you’re being creative. I don’t want to be the guy sitting at home. It’s like, I’m on my way to go play golf or tennis, and the basic backgammon and these other things that you do when you’re old. I don’t want to be the person pushing that damn thing. Well, whatever it is, I’ve got two years and two months before I’m 70, and I’m not pushing that thing.
M: Do you compare your later work in galleries to the Youth Days? How do you look at it?
B: Well, you had to bring the size down. The trains are 65 to 80 feet. So we’re bringing the first paintings from the early ’80s. We’re bringing them down to like six by 15 feet. Even though that seems large, it was tiny compared to what you’re used to doing.
M: You got the title king of graffiti. How do you think you achieved this status?
B: I was the first person to make it to 5000 trains. We were really everywhere. And then I have a picture of the first time I put the Crown on my name in the Spring of ’75.
M: Thank you!
B: I always say for young people, at any time, I have to give a symposium: young people today should get into graphic design, because there’s a future in that. You can design things, clothing, or new concepts. But don’t do it at three o’clock in the morning in a train yard. You know, I got lucky. They could do it the right way through business.
M: If you were young again, you wouldn’t do it again?
B: I’m not answering that because I contradict myself. You know, I’d be in a train yard tomorrow. It’s more fun the way I did it! I’m just fortunate because I had such a fun life. You know, tragedy in life as well. But life was really fun, and I just feel grateful to have influenced so many people around the world to learn about an art form and to know the history of an art form for the people who are there, and there’s nobody left. Everybody who came along with my group has passed away. So I think the only people you can ask now are myself and Fuzz one, I think, are the only two people I can think of off the top of my head that really know the history from the beginning, because Fuzz one was out there before me.
M: Rest in Peace! To end on a positive note, do you have a story you could share?
B: I have 100 running stories, but I’d never put them on film. I’ll let you know one from I believe it’s 1976 would be my closest guess. Comet and I are in the Esplanade tunnel, where we did most of our painting, and the police pretty much had us surrounded. We’re running out of the tunnel. There were other police officers on the platform, jumping off the platform, but they were skinny, so they’re going to really give you a good run. You’re just going to have to really outrun them; the fat guys were inside. One cop says, Stop, or I’ll shoot. It’s the first time you actually hear a gun discharge, but everybody’s like, What are they shooting at you? I didn’t turn around to see if the bullets were coming. I’m guessing he’s either shooting at us or shooting in the air because we’re outside the tunnel. But I distinctly remember running and running and running for a good 15-20 minutes as fast as you could, and running from the top of the train, leaping off the top of the train as your legs are still going, and then landing on the gravel. The rocks and still having to get up the whole ass, because you know the other person’s going to catch up to you while you’re in mid air, you’re just hoping to hit the ground and not break your freaking legs and your feet off and just hauling ass, getting down to the old pool in a way, we could go swimming. And there was a way to climb down a pole there, or just jump off into the trees and then keep running through the Avenue. And also, that was a good Chase story, because the following week, I did not go painting. What scared me was not the chase, but the gunshots. Are you going to really execute teenagers for vandalism? It seemed extreme.
M: Wow, it does!
B: Glad to be here at 68! Graffiti does not really have an age limit. I went out last Summer in Belgium to do a whole car with Seyar, it was really exciting! Cops showed up at the last minute, so I had to practice my running, haha! But we got away with it. The following two days, I felt like a teenager again from all the adrenaline. You can not get that feeling from playing shuffleboard!
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