I first met Keon at a legal wall in the Bronx. While we were painting, I noticed he was wearing Half Cabs. I told him those were my favorite skate shoes. "You're a skateboarder?" he asked me. I said yeah. He put his can down and took out his phone and showed me a picture of a dude skating a pool and said, "that's me in 1977." It was then that I realized I had my next subject for this project.
I got into skateboarding first. A bunch of the kids on my block skated, but none of them wrote graffiti. This was on Church Avenue in Flatbush, Brooklyn. And remember, Brooklyn back then was a different place, as was the whole city. Neighborhoods were either all white, all black, or all Puerto Rican. That's it. And there weren't many skateboarders at all. At that point my hair was long and I wanted to be one of the Dogtown boys. Skateboarder magazine had just come out, and we'd see pictures of guys skating banks and so on, but we didn't have that here in the city; that wasn't our landscape. So my friends and I would look for different types of terrain to get radical. We found little waterfall pools in front of buildings in Brooklyn that had banked walls to keep the water in. So we skated those and would eventually get chased out by the doorman. Brooklyn College also had all-brick banked flower gardens that we would skate.
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| Keon in Kings Plaza, Brooklyn 1977 |
Then I went to high school on 74th Street in Manhattan. That's where I met Andy Kessler, who was such a little rowdy and wiry dude, as well as a great skater. I also met Puppethead at that time, and Billy Gately who would vic all the Upper East Side kids who had just gotten new FibreFlex boards. We'd skate around the conservatory lake and hills in Central Park, and also all the pools in Riverdale. We were always getting chased out, but it was just about the fun of skating around with a pack of kids. We were like a posse of kids skateboarding. We were like the Dogtown kids of the east coast.
Then in about 1979, '80, a couple of skateparks were built on Long Island. One in Northport and one in Farmingdale. I would skate these parks with my cousin, Tim. There was another place in Huntington, Long Island, which was an old warehouse that was turned into a skatepark.
I ended up getting on this guy Bernie's skate team. Bernie made a prototype skateboard called RHI, started a team, and had a tryout at the Farmingdale skatepark. It was just S runs, no vertical. Tim and I made the team. Bernie took us to an expo at the New York Coliseum on 57th Street and Columbus Circle, where we met some of the California teams. This was a huge thing for me because I idolized these people. I met Russ Howell (the 360 king), Steve Shipp, and Curt Lindgren. Curt, who was on the Free Former team and who invented the kickflip (originally the "Curt flip"), and I connected, so he asked his agent if he could come to Brooklyn with me. Curt ended up sleeping over my house and skating our spots in Brooklyn. This was like having a rockstar sleepover. I was in such awe of this guy.
Then there was Amyer's pool. My friend Luke Moore, who was a surfer/skater, was a caretaker for a mansion in South Hampton, Long Island, owned by an old lady named Mrs. Amyer. She had an emptied kidney-shaped pool in her backyard. We had the place all to ourselves. Glen E. Friedman came out to Amyer's with us and shot photos of Luke, which got into Skateboarder Magazine. And in 1981, I won the Blizzard Skateboard Contest in Central Park, both in freestyle and slalom.
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| Keon shredding Amyer's pool. |
How did you get into graffiti?
There was this kid in my neighborhood named Bill Hartung who would do bubble letters on the bottom of his skateboards. Everything was "Cat." Bill would write, "Cool Cat," Crazy Cat," "Top Cat." So I wanted my name on the bottom of a skateboard, and Bill gave me Crazy something, And I was just in awe of the bubble letter artwork he did. And this was on an old Roller Derby wood deck with metal wheels, before the clay wheel had come out. That was about 1974 or '75. I was also seeing bubble letters from All 1, Comet, Cliff, CA (Captain America) on the trains, which reminded me of Bill's skateboards. So between seeing what was on the trains and on Bill's skateboards, that's pretty much what got me into graffiti.
I'm an Ex Vandal now, but in my neighborhood (Flatbush, Brooklyn), they were the premier group back then in my very segregated-black, white, Puerto Rican-neighborhood. They were young teenage black kids. That's who I used to see up: Scooter, Daddy Cool, Wicked Gary (who was one of the presidents), Savage, DINO NOD, Pinto. These were kids who had tags all over my neighborhood. I never knew any of the Ex Vandals back then except for The Block and Savage. And it was almost like looking at things that were threatening to a certain point. With all the markings on the wall, and being a white kid in an all-black neighborhood, it was a scary time and a scary place. But I liked the graffiti tags. It's funny, because now, as I'm 40 years older and not really writing graffiti other than on legal walls, the Ex Vandals put me in their group to further their name.
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How did you get your tag?
First I had Tex, then Mad Cal (which are my initials). Then some of the funky soul came out, and I got my name from an Eddie Kendricks song, "Keep On Truckin'". Keon, short for Keep On.
Who did you look up to in skating?
Jay Adams was my favorite skateboarder. And of course all the Dogtown kids. I didn't really look up to them as much as I looked up to the palm trees and what it was out there (California) that we didn't have out here and always dreamed about.
Who did you look up to in graffiti?
Comet-I loved his letter styles. All 1 and TJ 159. You know the show Welcome Back Kotter? Well, the train that passes through Midwood High School in the opening credits - any one of those guys on that train was my idol. I always wanted to write my name like they did, but I had parents, especially an Italian father, who I had to answer to. So I couldn't go out at two o'clock in the morning. Therefore, I was more of a street/truck tagger, rather than a train bomber. I had maybe four, at best, pieces on a train, which were all done with my friend Joust on the M train at the Sheepshead Bay/Kings Highway layup. I met Joust at a street fair on Cortelyou Road in Brooklyn. We were best friends - skate partners first, then graffiti partners.
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| Joust & Keon tags rockin' at CBGB |
What is it about these two subcultures, skating and graffiti, that they attract a lot of the same guys?
They were both about rebellion. I was a rebellious kid, and they were both ways to be different. It was a way of seeing yourself outside of the muckety muck. And these subcultures always coincided. For example, I worked as a skate guard at the Roxy Roller Disco from 1980 to '85, when they had a hip hop night. It was there/around that time that I saw the hip hop culture morph with the art culture and the graffiti culture. The same way skating morphed with graffiti. Skateboarding was always an underground culture, like graffiti. So the two of them had a lot in common, but nothing in common at the same time. They were just underground cultures.
What I am really proud of in 2023, is that I was there in the beginning of the skating/graffiti/hip hop movement. I saw it all firsthand, and all of my friends either created it or were it. I would say because of me and my friends, as time went on (this is before 1980) skating became a little more popular here in the city. Back then it wasn't in the culture, but it started to arise, and you see what it is now. It's like how graffiti has morphed, skateboarding has morphed.
Last question: will you hit my book?
Of course I'll hit your book.
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