I started climbing up elevated train stations steel collums directly from in the middle of the streets to tag and put some throw-ups and fill-in's with my partners from Brooklyn. I received all access to the in-sides right after ID handed me my first key. back then a.k.a TAB' killed his way to the everyday New Yorkers heart of curiosity. we would literarly destroyer 18th ave lay up everynight and I say this with experience that most of the time we destroyed shit we never went over another writers work, not unless he was wack. I first bombed buses,the BMT lines, then continued with garbage trunks before i decided to carry around clippers that easily opened the fences at Coney Island train yards with the likes of others writers like EK, SHEA, P-BODY and EO. I got caught afew times but as a kid I didn't really care cause it was my life and I was starting to become focused on things other then toys and t.v. and being in the back of a cop car was kinda' like the same thing as being sent to the principals office....it was all the same shit to me anyway.
I admired MIN & BOE for their work habits of doing something new almost every other day and idolized DONDI for his innovations behind pieces blended with characters. then I became a close friend to ID-163 also from Brooklyn, and then was introduced to MUGS the original prez of RTW/WOW crew, ID then brought around WOP,IO and WZ all from RTWoW crew. at this time around 83-84 I chilled out in Marlboro center and Coney Island, 2 specific locations that represented Original Hip-Hop culture but were both at war with one another. JC says: I was there and there was alot of war back then, hip-hop was a serious sub-culture, it was rebelious like punk, but had artistic foundation, it was extremely competitive, everybody was battlen', if you didn't, you were no one!...there was just as much violence then, than there is now, only now alot of heads identify themselfs with a piece(gun), back then it was mostly B-boyin or graff, but the fights came afterward, but mainly with fists or small weaponry like a knife, bat or chain, and alot of heads used chucks. " I learned all the elements that Hip-Hop had to offer, graffiti was the best, you went out and it was like a game to see who got the most ups, and the way you played it was your forte, then I started b-boyin' but wasn't hard into it, really loved the foundations, I remember first seeing a kid who was down with crew called "Rockers Revenge" and the "Romantic Rockers" and chilled with "Break till Dawn" crew and when I saw him I was like, oh' sh*t', "master killer"!..his form and foundations were extremely neat and clean, so that's basically what I wanted to do, but then I saw popping by another kid who had a crew "United we rock", so then I wanted to do that, it was what I really felt comfortable with, I felt that percussion, and couldn't refuse the groove...
eventually I became prez of that crew after I burnt my prez and was handed over another crew by the name of Wild Style that mysteriously was formed and created by about 30 heads in which I was now incharge of, but as it turned out none of them stayed true to Hip-Hop, and like many became just a phase or trend that they hopped on to be hip for the moment but I still loved it and needed some new partners to help me battle better crews cause everything all the other crews were doin' around me sucked!!!...however by now 84-85" I had established a reputation in brooklyn as a fresh popper and was battlin' the better names and some underground legends as well and the better I became at battlin", the more dangerous I started feelin'........why is there someone always waitin' to fight me after the battle now?....not really sure how this became to be a part of the life that defeated this whole purpose.
I grew up lovin' entertainers like fred astaire, stan laurel, mickey rooney, and charlie chaplin and that's when I started devoloping my own style and would constantly try to form as many charcters as possible.
I can remember studying and going down after class in front of the strasberg institute but eveyone would look at me and laugh, even some of the people I knew back then would always tell me to stop and that no one cared about dancin' like that but I had something different in mind.........
