Can't Stop Won't Stop (24 page)

While filming, he had become captivated by Lee Quiñones's handball court murals—animals and spacemen floating and roaring off the walls in bright comic-book colors. “I would ask kids in the neighborhood, who painted these murals? And they'd go, ‘Lee!' Like it was the most obvious thing cause he's so famous, one of the most up graffiti artists in New York City. And I'd say, ‘Okay, where can I find him?' And everyone would go, ‘I don't know, he's around but he's kinda secretive. He's hard to find.' ”

When Lee ventured by the set one day, Ahearn cornered him. “He had this big afro and he was this skinny kid with a motorbike. And I'd say, ‘I want to work with you on this movie.' And he said, ‘Bet.' And I said, ‘Well, how can I get to you? Do you have a phone number?' ‘Nah, I'll just be around.' And then he'd never be around,” laughs Ahearn. “He was mythical.”

In June 1980, the Co-Lab collective took over an abandoned massage parlor in Times Square at 41st Street and Seventh Avenue for a massive exhibition. “Everyone just sort of rushed in, bumrushing the place and throwing artwork up,” Ahearn says. “There was a lot of street art at the time, and there was a lot of homeless people making sort of weird things on the street, that all became part of the show. So graffiti slipped in there, it seemed like a very natural thing to include in the show.”

The show would be widely reviewed, remembered as historic. A new crop of graffiti-inspired “street artists” were introduced in the show—Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kenny Scharf and Keith Haring. And Ahearn finally got to work with Lee Quiñones and his partner, FAB 5 FREDDY.

Frederick Brathwaite was a tall slim African American raised in the do-or-die Bed-Stuy. He looked out at the world from behind his ever-present Ray-Bans, as if he had just stepped out of Minton's Playhouse.

He had spent his childhood in casual proximity to Black genius. The bebop elite frequented his family's house, people like Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk, Clifford Brown, and Freddy's godfather Max Roach. His grandfather had been an associate of Marcus Garvey. His father, an accountant, was in the audience at the Audubon Ballroom when Malcolm X was shot. Freddy was born with an awareness of walking proudly through history.

Brathwaite wanted to become a serious artist. But he was also searching for an artform he could organize his own worldview around—the same way his father saw his world through jazz. He found fresh energy in the Brooklyn mobile DJ scene, at shows thrown by Grandmaster Flowers, Maboya, and Pete DJ Jones. On hooky trips he went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to study its collections of art and armor. He immersed himself in Caravaggio, Duchamp, Boccioni and Warhol. And he tagged BULL 99 and SHOWDOWN 177.

Graffiti brought it all together. “I had looked at all the movements that were kind of radical, like Futurism, the Dadaists, the Impressionists, the Abstract Expressionists into the Pop Artists. To me, it was like, wait a minute, this shit is a lot like what graffiti is,” he says. “So I was thinking about how to make moves into the art world, but still keep the integrity of what graffiti was.”

He too was inspired by Lee Quiñones's work, and decided he needed to meet the artist. Sometime in 1978, he boldly strode into Lee's high-school classroom. Before being told to leave, Freddy whispered to Lee to meet him outside after school. Lee was suspicious, but when they spoke, they realized they had found the perfect foil in each other. Lee was shy and elusive, Freddy radiated confidence and cool. Lee kept his thoughts to himself, Freddy talked to anyone. Through Lee, Freddy met the rest of the Fabulous Five—all in various stages of retiring from the lines—and was brought into the crew. As FAB 5 FREDDY, he painted trains and walls and publicized graffiti in the downtown art scene. In early 1979, he appeared in a
Village Voice
article about graffiti, smoking a cigarette under Lee's GRAFFITI 1990 mural, and offering his contact info. By the end of the year, the two had landed the first graffiti art show in Italy, at the Galleria La Medusa.

FAB floated right into the burgeoning downtown scene. He hung out at
Interview
magazine editor Glen O'Brien's cable access show, a central hub of the New Wave/No Wave movement. He partied at the Mudd Club with Deborah Harry and Blondie, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and Andy Warhol. At the same time, he was checking out Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Four at the Smith Houses with Lee, and collecting bootleg cassettes of all the rap crews. The nineteen-year-old found himself moving through two very different worlds, and he had both the charisma and the desire to bring them together.

Bambaataa's vision of a revolutionary youth culture was unfolding before FAB's eyes and he began to see what his role could be. “As a painter at the time, and having read a lot about art, I wanted to make sure that we weren't perceived as folk artists,” he says.

“Not everybody doing graffiti had aesthetic intentions, but many did. Those that did were the ones that drove the development from just simple tags to elaborate
window-down wildstyle. Those heads were on some creative shit. I wanted to make sure that the scene that I was coming from was actually seen in that light, basically that we were smart enough to understand that game as well,” he says.

“I once read somewhere that for a culture to really be a complete culture, it should have a music, a dance and a visual art. And then I realized, wow, all these things are going on. You got the graffiti happening over here, you got the breakdancing, and you got the DJ and MCing thing. In my head, they were all one thing,” he says. FAB understood the history of artistic movements, and he realized that he was right at the beginning of a big one. He had an idea to set it off.

At the Times Square Show, Mudd Club and Co-Lab co-conspirator Diego Cortez introduced Charlie Ahearn and FAB 5 FREDDY. FAB had seen “The Deadly Art of Survival” and knew Ahearn could be just the person to speak to. Ahearn recalls, “Fred told me that he wanted to make a movie with me. He said, ‘We should make a movie about this graffiti thing', and he said he knew Lee Quiñones. So I said if you can bring Lee to me, come by tomorrow and I'll give you guys fifty dollars ‘cause I wanted them to do a mural outside the building. They came by the next day. And I said, ‘Okay, here we are, the three of us.' That became the beginnings of the idea of
Wild Style
.”

Ahearn and FAB began a year of immersion in the culture, finding themselves one night in a far corner of the north Bronx, at a party presided over by Chief Rocker Busy Bee and DJ Breakout. “It was in a place called The Valley. It's in a large park and it was dark. I remember there was a dub reggae band playing and the other side was hip-hop music. And we wandered to the hip-hop music,” Ahearn says. “I often wonder what would have happened had we ended up going toward the dub band.

“Fred and I were standing by the side of this little tiny stage,” he recalls. “This guy next to me later told me he was sweating bullets because he thought I was a cop. Everyone
always
thought I was a cop. I don't blame them. For a year that I was hanging out there, I never saw anyone that was from downtown or that was white hanging out in any place I went to.

“So Busy Bee was there and he says, ‘What are you doing here?' and I said, ‘I'm Charlie Ahearn and I'm here to make a movie about the rap scene.' And he
takes me by the hand and he leads me out on the stage where there's a microphone and there's an audience.”

Ahearn's twin, John, had moved to the Bronx two years before, and was becoming something of an art-world star for his cast sculptures of his neighbors on Walton Avenue, an area where the Savage Skulls had once roamed. Another close associate, Co-Lab member Stefan Eins, had opened a gallery he called Fashion Moda on East 147th Street at Third Avenue in the heart of the South Bronx. “The Bronx was a hip place to go if you were an artist, everybody was going up there,” Charlie says. “But
this
was not the same. It was a totally different scene—high school kids—and it was wild.

“It was dark and Busy Bee leads me out onto stage, to the microphone—and you gotta understand, everybody who is anybody in hip-hop is right
there
. The Funky 4 were there, Mercedes Ladies, all these people were all in the audience right there. So Busy Bee puts his arm around me and he says, ‘This here is Charlie Ahearn and he's my movie producer. We're making a movie about the rap scene.' Boom! That's all it took.”

Ahearn and FAB became regular guests of the biggest rap crews in the scene, frequenting clubs like the Ecstasy Garage, the T-Connection and the Disco Fever. As he had done at Smith Houses, Ahearn took pictures, made slides, and brought them back to project them on the walls of the clubs. He was practicing his activist art.

When he met graf writers CRASH and DAZE, he walked them the short distance from their residences to meet Eins at the Fashion Moda. “No graffiti artist had ever heard of Fashion Moda,” Ahearn says, despite the fact that the gallery was only two blocks from the Writer's Bench. “CRASH organized the ‘Graffiti Art Success for America' show. Fashion Moda became one of the capitals of graffiti in a month.”

FAB 5 FREDDY was thrilled to be meeting all of his Bronx heroes, and he began opening doors for them downtown. Grandmaster Flash says, “FAB was like one of the town criers. He would come into the hood where whites wouldn't come and then go downtown to where whites would, and say, ‘Listen there's some music these cats is playing, man, it's hot shit. You gotta book these guys.' So I got my first taste of playing for an audience that wasn't typically Black.”

FAB invited Bambaataa down to play at Keith Haring's black-light art exhibition in a tiny church basement on St. Mark's Place called Club 57. It was exactly the kind of opportunity Bambaataa had been waiting for. The crowd loved it, and FAB brought Bam and his Zulu Nation DJs, Jazzy Jay and Afrika Islam, back to play at venues like the Jefferson Hotel and the Mudd Club.

In April 1981, FAB curated an art show at Mudd Club called “Beyond Words: Graffiti-Based, -Rooted and -Inspired Work.” The line-up read like a who's-who of the punk, subway graf, and street art scenes. Photos by Cooper and Chalfant hung next to canvases and installations by Lee, PHASE 2, LADY PINK, ZEPHYR DONDI, John Sex, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Alan Vega, Iggy Pop and FAB's notorious running partner, RAMMELLZEE, an eccentric painter and freestyler obsessed with military codes and alphabet armaments.

At the opening, FAB brought in the Cold Crush Brothers, the Fantastic Freaks, and Bambaataa's Jazzy Five MCs to perform. “That was the first official time when hip-hop really hit downtown,” FAB says. “It was wildly received. All these cool new wave heads came down and loved it. I knew nobody had a sense or clue about anything because barely any real rap records had hit the market commercially, maybe ‘Rapper's Delight,' but nobody really understood it as like a scene.”

When the hip-hoppers met the rockers, parkies, and freaks downtown, a weird new nightclub elite emerged. “We used to go to Bowl-Mor and we would bowl,” ZEPHYR laughs. The high-flying, Studio 54, velvet-rope, VIP-exclusive club era was over. People were going downtown where gutter-familiar scenesters mixed freely, the picture of a wild and fabulous new pluralism.

“We had this team called the Pinheads,” ZEPHYR says. “It was a big mix of people from the Mudd Club. FAB 5 FREDDY was down with us, and Grace Jones used to come down and go bowling.
⁵
These very new-wave/punk type people from downtown, less eccentric folks, some of the old hippie dudes like me and my boys. And then of course, from the Bronx, you had a little more macho folks. Everything overlapped. It was really surreal.”

On the season's shortlist, race and class segregation was out, cultural crossover was in. “There was this shifting and mixing that was very exciting to people,” says Ahearn. “The racial thing was a big deal. Mixing a lot of Black,
Puerto Rican and white people downtown all together is very combustible, because people are coming from very different types of areas and they are getting used to the idea that they can hang out with each other.”

Before long, the elite of the art-world came calling. Once cloaked in secrecy and code and executed under the constant threat of violence, graffiti suddenly became a very public performance, for the consumption of high society. The temporary and fleeting tried to fix itself as permanent.

Graffiti had flirted with the big-time in 1973, when Hugo Martinez secured for his elite graffiti union, the United Graffiti Artists, a Twyla Tharp commission and a downtown exhibition at the Razor Gallery. UGA got an avalanche of publicity, including a
Newsweek
article, and even sold some canvases for as much as $2,500. But by 1975, UGA had fizzled amidst slacking patronage and internal discord. Other similar community-based efforts to bridge graf and the art world, like Jack Pelzinger's NOGA and ALI's Soul Artists, also eventually faded.

As the 1980s arrived, Modernism was dead. Minimalism and Conceptualism had become increasingly cold, detached, cerebral, feeble. The art world thought it was ready for something authentic and passionate, something innocent and incandescent. It wanted to feel deeply again. After an era of self-referentiality and white-room obscurantism, the art world wanted a door-opening gust of the sights, smells and tastes of the real world.

Upper Manhattanites and Europeans who had supported the explosion of Pop Art during the 1960s rushed in to buy anything marketed as graffiti. In a year, Jean-Michel Basquiat—who had never painted on a train—went from homelessness to international art stardom, commanding as much as $10,000 a canvas. Teenage bombers found they could cut school and pocket $200 for a quick canvas on the way to the lay-up.