Let’s start at the beginning, when did you start and what got you into writing in the first place?
Well, when I started it was the mid 90’s, shit was smashed, everyone I knew wrote and it was people from all walks of life, you know it was skate boarders, hip hop kids, punk rock kids, jocks, preppy kids. Everyone had a marker and everyone had a name and a lot of stuff was written on.
Just taggers or did they take it further?
Most of the kids that I knew were mainly just taggers, maybe they did a one letter throw up. I guess there was some kids who could do pieces but it mostly one letter throw ups or just tags.
So where you came from did they have established writers, like older heads or were you the first generation?
Oh no haha, I was definitely not the first generation. I grew up in the Bay Area so I was definitely not first generation.
Ohhhh ok hahaha
There was already a really established writing scene. At the time there was people coming from various parts of the country too like New York, Boston and DC. You had like KR, Shok, Alert 5AV, all of the classic stuff. Twist, Reminisce, Dug One, TMF, Tempt, Bles, Felon, Spie, Giant. Too many names to remember.
Golden Era!
Yeah, that’s the stuff I saw when I was growing up so seeing that was amazing. I was also really influenced by US crew, specifically this dude Orfn who was really up. He had tags everywhere I went. He just had tags, tags, tags, tags, tags. As a kid it blew my mind. Him and this guy Rvrs (who also could do some pretty dope pieces) and this guy Marvl. They were all in US and were big influences. They were older than me but like you would go to a skate spot and they would be there skateboarding, they were around. RIP to all 3 of those guys.
Wow ha ha ha, well it starts to make sense to me now all the cutty spots you do. What an era, that’s without a doubt one of my favourite eras in graf and I’ve only seen pics of it, thankfully it was really well documented I can’t imagine what it was like coming up at that time.
Yeah and sometimes we would head over to Berkeley or Oakland and there was guys like Dream and Gigs who were really good at piecing and we would see their stuff, it was pretty insane. There was so much graf out there, and it felt like a completely different scene than SF. The highways were absolutely crushed in the east bay, not to mention track sides and street spots. The whole bay felt like it was rocked when I started writing. I wish I was better and that I did more in that period, but I was just starting and had no clue what I was doing.
Amazing! I assume Erupto327 wasn’t your first tag, is there any story behind the name and the number?
Nothing too exciting, I mean I was writing Erupt and there was a point in 95/96 where a lot of people were doing O’s on the end of their tags like Twisto, Bleso, Sekto, Tempto. No one really brought me up, so I was just taking in everything I could and learn whatever I could so I tried the O at the end and it kind of stuck. The number was basically influenced by the New York stuff, the classic subway writers. I didn’t see Subway Art back then but I saw the other one, Spray Can Art from the public library of all places, so I saw that and learned about the numbers. I was saw freight trains pretty early on, and there was this guy that would paint freights back then, he wrote King 157 and he had a number so I thought “this is kinda cool seeing people with numbers “, but it also made my word ten thousand characters long!
You mentioned your exposure to freights, how did that come about?
My friends Sibl and Eidr from GTB crew went to high school with a good friend of mine. They had been writing longer than me and when we linked up they already knew a bunch of graf spots including a couple freight spots. We used to go and take pictures in the day and catch tags, and then sometimes we would go in and paint at night.
Where you piecing at that point or was it more simple stuff?
I mean I was trying to piece, they weren’t good and I wish it was all simple stuff and I wish I had letter structure but you know sometimes you learn things the hard way! Sometimes it was only 1 or 2 letter bubble letters with like 6 colours, well maybe not 6 but a bunch of colours, just trying to, you know, it was very mid 90’s graf. It wasn’t my best moment style-wise but it was fun.
What a legendary time to be active, no matter what you were doing you were there and you were doing it while having fun, that’s all that matters. Was doing freights a big thing for people in SF at that time? I see everyone complaining now that freights are absolutely smashed, at that time where you painting on clean cars?
Yeah, they were mostly clean cars. I definitely would see SF heads up on freights a bit, some people cared more about them than others. There was some groups of people from all over the Bay that were really into doing them. For me it was always a treat to do them back then since I didn’t have a car. We would try and do pieces but we were painting big active yards at night so we definitely weren't able to do really wild stuff. I would see stuff on them back then that was from New York and LA, which was really cool. I feel like back then there was specific parts of the country that you would see stuff from. It was kinda cool. Magazines were big back then and sometimes you would see some crazy CBS piece with characters and lots of colors and be like “whoa this is crazy, this is in Can Control WTF”! It was a mix of that pre-internet time and also just being so excited to see anything. I think for me any graf I saw was mind blowing even if it sucked. You would see Phoenix Arizona next to an outline and you would be like “ Holy shit this train went to all the way Phoenix”! It just seemed unfathomable as a kid.
The distance those things travel and the amount of people that see them it makes perfect sense to hit them. In doing some research for this interview a lot of people told me that at one time you we’re one of the most active freight writers, putting in crazy numbers, is that right?
I did put in a lot of numbers, maybe from 98-2002 I really prioritized painting freights. I was doing them before that and I never really stopped doing them but I think that period was extremely active for me on those things.
People were throwing around numbers, some saying you did over 500 freights in a year, would that be accurate?
You know I don’t remember really tracking numbers so I don’t know. It might have been more than that, might have been less I don’t know.
Well I guess if you’re not denying that number it must have been in and around!
I did a lot but I mean counting things that are super small versus what people do now which is practically a half car every time it’s not the same ball game you know? But I guess if you want to put a number on it I've done 500 in a year. Probably more in my most active freight years.
Well I don’t want to be pissing off any of the freight aficionado’s, I was just trying to get a rough estimate to show how active you were.
Yeah, when Worm and Ghoul started A2M crew we all did a little bit more of a push on freights. This dude Worm lived in Texas and painting freights was his priority. He would have a calendar on his wall and every day of the week would be marked 7, 10, 12 and that was the amount of freight panels he did that day, he painted every day and I think the rest of us were trying to keep up with that.
A2M was something I wanted to ask you about, it seems like it’s omnipresent in any of the freight documentation I’ve seen, obviously it’s one of the best known freight crews, how did you hook up with them?
I’d known Ghouls for probably 3 or 4 years before they started A2M so when he started it he knew I was into freights and yeah …
Was it a freight crew, I believe there are crews that are strictly freight crews over there?
I think it was originally meant to be a crew for freights but then sometimes we would write it on dumpsters and be like “ well the dumpster is metal” because it was Addicted 2 Metal that’s what it meant. I guess it wasn’t meant to go up on walls and stuff but I know it happened. Not many of us were specifically "freight writers". And yeah, there are definitely crews here that strictly do freights.
I guess it’s like some of the clean train crews now, they only put it up on there and nowhere else I just didn’t think people were doing that back then.
Moving away from freights, something people seem to always have a story when your name is mentioned like“ I was in the back end of Idaho in a truck stop that looked like it hadn’t been used in 100 years and a looked down and saw an Erupto scribe”! It seems like you were ahead of the curve on the cutty spot stuff, was that intentional or were you just doing your thing without thinking about it?
I don’t like giving myself credit for stuff but I think it’s a little bit of both. There was people that I mentioned earlier such as Orfn that were doing cutty spots way before me but they were Bay Area-centric and when I left the Bay Area I went to places that people didn’t do cutty stuff. I was really just taking that style of writing to places where people didn’t write like that. I would ride the Greyhound bus a lot before I had a car and with Greyhound they would wake everyone up and be like “ We’re in the gas station parking lot in the middle of Kansas, 30 minute food break”. I would get out and walk around and catch weird tags in the middle of nowhere.
And when I had a car I drove across the country a few times and stayed in various cities. I think I was really just trying to do as much as possible in as many places as possible. At that time I thought that if you were really active you couldn’t live in a city for more than 6 months or it would get too hot. I started using etch bath pretty early on, probably 98 or 99. Not a ton of people knew what that was at that point and I was using that a bunch in cities where they had no clue what it was.
I was on a road trip 5 or 6 years ago I don’t even know where we were and we stopped at a gas station and the only thing on the bathroom mirror was a scribe of mine from 20 years before so I was like “ I guess I’ve been here before “!
I read online that you were one of the first to go “all country”. Did that happen because you were traveling a lot with life shit or was that getting up based?
I don’t know if anyone can really go all country here, it’s too big. I mean you can have spots and tags running in lots of cities, but if you’re actually trying to have a consistent heavy presence and get past the buff and beef I don’t think so. For me I was just traveling and moving a lot; I basically was just going places where I knew people, and any cities I passed through on the way. There’s places I’ve been that I don’t even remember going to. I don’t remember spending any significant amount of time in Philly in the early 2000s and one time I was in a bar in SF and a writer from Philly came up and was talking to us, he asked what I wrote and when I told him he was like “ ohhh you have a tag on the dumpster outside my work in Philly, that’s really cool I’m gonna buy you a drink”! I was like “ok, cool, I don’t remember doing that but ….”
It seems like people almost expect to find something by you wherever they go, that’s a high level of saturation. It makes total sense to me now that you came up looking at the likes of Orfn and the US guys with all the whiteout, streak and scribe stuff you do. Did you have certain goals when you were bombing these places, not specifically numbers but maybe a minimum you wanted to get done?
No, nothing like that. I’d be happy with doing one thing because sometimes I couldn’t even do that. But more is definitely better. Every situation is different, you could be with your family or civilians and you can’t really just be like “hey everyone look over there”… you just gotta take advantage of a situation if it’s there.
Can I ask, what do you rate in a writer? What do you look for in a writer?
Well what catches my eye is style. I kinda like it all I don’t consider myself a legal wall writer but if I see a sick piece on a legal wall then it’s still a sick piece. At this point I like to do stuff that’s fun so if I see something and I think “that looks fun” that’s really what catches my eye. I always get really excited when I see someone that’s super dope and I’ve never heard of them. They aren’t all over Instagram or people aren’t sending around their pics so you see it and you think “who the fuck is this? this shits fucking rad”. That’s always exciting and traveling is really good for that.
Yeah I totally agree, I love to go to a city and ask who are the local hero’s because a lot of the time the guys you know from there have taken a lot of inspiration from them and that’s where they style lineages begin. On the style thing too I remember when we were walking around in New York and we saw that character Archer TD did.
Oh yeah!
Even though we had been walking everywhere and seeing pieces, rooftops, full colour burners we just saw that and both agreed “damn he just killed everyone with one can “!
I know you had lived in New York at one point, can you remember what was the main differences in painting there compared to the Bay?
I was painting a lot when I moved out of SF and was trying to do a lot of big street level stuff. I knew the city really well and was extremely comfortable painting there. So for me going from that to a place like New York required a lot of adapting. Having to paint in front of cameras, dodging a heavy police presence, dealing with constant people on the streets. You had to really look at surfaces before you painted somewhere, because you’re an out-of-towner and this gate has tags that have been burning for 15 years and you don’t want to be that person who went over something they shouldn’t have.
Living in New York was really inspiring for me, I love that city. I think I learned a lot and I definitely changed the way I was approached graf. I made my stuff a lot simpler.
Really?!
Yeah, at least me pieces and fill ins. Not so much my tags and simples. I think seeing stuff still running from the 90s and seeing how fucking amazing some of it still looked made me want to make stuff more timeless.
Damn, I would have thought the opposite that NY would make people go slightly wilder with their stuff but I totally understand what you mean by that.
There was a point where I showed a friend some pictures of pieces I had done with a couple other people and he was like “huh, who would have thought you would have done the most legible thing”?
One of the things that’s like a land mark spot to me every time I’m in NYC is that rooftop you have with Nekst
The red one?
Yeah, how did you link up with him?
We met in Houston in like 2000 or 2001 back when I was moving around a lot. Basically right after he and Vizie had been put on A2M. When I moved back to the Bay Area, he came out for a visit and eventually ended up moving there for a few years, before both of us ended up in New York.
Rest in peace to Nekst.
What keeps you going at this stage?
Really just focusing on the parts of graf that are fun and doing my best to avoid the rest. I don’t hang out with many writers and try to stay out of other people’s drama.
To view an exclusive video of Erupto painting a piece at Martinez Galley's 207th Street location please click on the artists tab.