Interview with the legendary Style Writer Pel

Pel

 

 

Conducted by Sir Norin Rad (The Intruders/Germany) 

SIR NORIN RAD:"From which borough are you originally?"

PEL:"Actually I grew up in Manhattan, New York City. I'm a Puerto Rican guy from East Harlem. That part of Manhattan is very close to the Bronx. I moved to the Bronx when I was about 13 just making 14 and that's when I started Writing."

SIR NORIN RAD:"Where exactly in the Bronx did you live when you started Writing?"

PEL:"Okay, well the 4 train line runs on Jerome Avenue which goes down to 149th Street which would be considered South Bronx. I lived on 176th Street, I would say that's the Southwest Bronx."

SIR NORIN RAD:"What inspired you to pick up Writing and how old were you then?"

PEL:"Well actually, I started noticing it when I was like.....early 13. I went to Brooklyn..I jumped on a train in the Bronx that goes through Manhattan and then goes to Brooklyn. So the first piece that I noticed was on a train, a F train that had Pistol on it, a Pistol 3D. That blew my mind. I was like, "Wow!" I was blown away."

SIR NORIN RAD:"Pistol 1 was a famous Brooklyn Writer, correct?"

PEL:"Yes, he was. I was amazed at the 3D that Pistol did and then I saw Flint 707 (another famous Brooklyn Writer who incorporated the 3D effect into his pieces). The next one I saw was a Flint. It caught my eye when I was looking at trains. I saw the Pistol train when I was going to Brooklyn and I seen the Flint going back home to the Bronx."

SIR NORIN RAD:"When was that? Around 1973/74?"

PEL:"Very close, yeah!" 

SIR NORIN RAD:"What about the Writers from the Bronx? Like Lee 163rd!, Phase 2 and them? Did you notice them as well?"

PEL:"Well at the time back then.... the guys that I noticed more were Super Strut, Hondo One...The pieces weren't from the window down, they were kind of floating basically. They would float in the middle of the train. I can't remember all the guys that I would see back then but Hondo One and Super Strut those were the ones that I noticed. Me when I saw the Pistol piece and that Flint piece they was so much put together I was like, "Wow!" Oh, another guy that I actually saw was Riff 170. I saw a couple of his pieces.....they were Riff and Worm (alias of Riff 170)."

Early Piece by Super Strut

 

SIR NORIN RAD:" Please describe the process which made you pick Style Writing!"

PEL:"Well with me what happened...I try to make it short.....there was a friend of mine his name was Kiki. He had moved out of the neighbourhood about when I had just gotten in. His mom and dad...they moved back to Harlem. He  would come up a couple of times from Harlem and he would say that he was writing on the trains.  I think I was 13 or 14. Kiki was a little younger than me, a year or so younger than me....and he'd say,"Yeah, I hit the trains!!!" I was fascinated, I said "What do you mean you hit the trains? You put your name up on the train?" He was like, "Yeah!" I said, "Wow! That's pretty cool!"  He kinda sparked my interest in doing it 'cause I asked him, I said,"Hey, how does that work?" But anyway we talked a little bit but not much. Then...a turn of event...he went back home and I never did see Kiki again because I found out like a week later he was shot...they shot him in the head. So it was a sad thing. He kinda got me into it. So when I found that out I felt very bad....I was only 14 maybe. What happened one day...there was a group of us.. we were all sitting in front of my building. They were my friends in the building, they were two brothers and one sister and a friend named Berta. We were all good friends and used to hang out in front of my building. We would talk about Kiki and about what he had done and I'd say, "You know what? One of these day I'mma write on the trains!" They didn't know what I was talking about but we actually walked down from 176th to 175th where you stand on the corner and you can look and see the subway trains go by as they pull into the station. I said, "I'm gonna be doing that one day." They didn't believe me of course. That's basically how I started."

SIR NORIN RAD:"What made you choose the name PEL?"

 PEL:"Well, what happened was...the very first name that I actually considered writing was a crazy name but it was Superfly Sly and I actually met another friend that was kinda showing me  how to build markers. In America we had these cans of pepper. They were like one inch by two inches wide and then you'd take a blackboard eraser from school and some ink but we didn't know so we were making a mess of ourselves......trying to put something together like a Uni Wide Marker but crude."

SIR NORIN RAD:"I guess the ink was dripping all over the place?"

PEL:"Yes and it was hard to control the ink and also in the beginning I used the wrong ink. I was learning, didn't use the right ink. Didn't know about Flo-Master Ink then. I actually went tagging alone because it was word of mouth on how it was done. You ride the train to the last stop and wait until it clears and do it or you do it quickly when no one's looking. But I never liked tagging. Didn’t do it much. I was more of an outside guy."

 

Flo-Master Ink

 

SIR NORIN RAD:"But isn't it true that tags are the foundation of Writing? What are your thoughts on that?"

PEL:"Well, yes it is and pretty much that’s how it started on the outside with tags until someone became more creative on the outside. But that was before my time. I realized trying to wrie my name Superfly Sly was excessively too long so I said to myself,"I need to cut it down!" So I wind up cutting it down to Sly 5 and then I also added 176 because there were so many Slys back then. The 176 came from where I lived, that's the street where I lived on. That's how I got the name Sly 5 / 176 but then I also found that to be a little bit too long. I just did a few pieces of the Sly 5 /176. I did a few Sly 5s on the inside with a Uni Wide Marker and I did a few on the outside. I met another guy that told me about it...his name was Lil Flame. He came around bragging about how he did this and that so that encouraged me to now hit on the outsides but before I did that I did a piece in my schoolyard for practice. I can't remember which spraypaint I used...I don't think it was Red Devil or anything like that...I believe it was Krylon. And, you know, my Sly didn't come out bad for my very first time.  After I did that King 2 saw me doing a piece one time and we started talking about it. So he wind up doing a King 2 piece in my schoolyard and I did a Sly 5."

Early Sly 5 Piece by Pel

 

SIR NORIN RAD:"You are talking about King 2 who was down with Tracy 168 and them, right?"

PEL:"Right, before he hung out with Tracy and all those guys me and King 2 were good friends. We used to play baseball, basketball.....King 2 lived right across the street from the schoolyard where we used to play football, baseball...everything and that's how I knew King 2."

SIR NORIN RAD:"What was the name of that school?"

PEL:"That school was called Wade Junior High School. That wasn't my school in particular, that was just a junior school that was in the neighbourhood right across the street from us."

SIR NORIN RAD:"I guess that name Superfly Sly was inspired by that blaxploitation film called Superfly that came out in 1972."

PEL:"Right!"

SIR NORIN RAD:"Curtis Mayfield did the soundtrack of that movie. "Freddie's Dead" and many other great songs are on that album."

PEL:"That's it and I tell you why (laughs)! Believe it or not I couldn't see the movie when it came out because I was too young. Over here you had to be 18 or older. I remember I was 12, 13. I liked the song "Freddie's Dead". I liked to listen to a lot of music and I still do now. I still sing and everything now. My older brother he was a little ladies' man kinda guy and he would bring home the Superfly record and I would listen to it a lot. And then Superfly he was smooth, he was a pimp, he had nice clothes and I was a guy that used to dress up nicely when I used to go paint. Believe it or not, the cops would come and chase after everybody and I would stand right there and they would run right by me 'cause they wouldn't see me dirty or anything. They would see me in decent clothes, so they chased everybody else. That happened several times."

SIR NORIN RAD:"Damn! The late Phase 2 (RIP) also stated in his book Style Writing From The Underground that many of those Writers who had a vicious style in terms of piecing were known as fly dressers as well."

PEL:"Oh yeah. Definitely! To me it was important to dress up nicely. As I said I had an older brother who was a couple of inches taller than me but I still got some of his clothes handed down to me. I had to hem up my pants a little bit cause I could fit into his clothes. You know, we weren't rich by no means, we were so poor it was ridiculous. I got his clothes and I would just wear them. I just didn't like to get dirty like some of these guys. These guys had like two, three day old paint on them. I liked to look decent, I just did. That was just me."

SIR NORIN RAD:"What kind of clothing was considered as fly back then?"

PEL:"Well, what happened was Harlem set the trends because they had A.J. Lester's there. Remember I was from Harlem originally, so you kinda had a certain style. Dressing up back then you know they used to have nice colours....they used to have this thing called the mockneck....it was like a turtleneck but with a shorter collar.  Then you had knit shirts...sometimes they had designs on them. Nice jeans and sneakers to match the shirt depending on whatever colour it was. Some of us wore Matador pants.They are the pants with the wide waste. You get them from AJ Lesters. They have 3 buttons in stead of one to latch the pants. You know Phase 2 was known for going to the 149th Street Writer's Bench on the Grand Concourse and putting on a nice Robin Hood hat. He was dressing fly. So if the cops came to chase everybody he could sit right there and they would look at him like, "Who are you??"  Because you know they looked at the Graffiti guys as vandals and roughnecks and dirty little scoundrels. I saw what he was doing and I was like, "Damn! I like to dress up, too!" So every now and then I had on the plaid pants and a nice shirt and sneakers......my sneakers were clean and everything. Most of the Writers back then they wore jeans and jackets and things that identified them as a menace.  I didn't wanna be caught up in that."

 SIR NORIN RAD:"Is is true that you mainly hit the 4 line?"

PEL:"Yes, most of my beginning was done on the 4 line. There was this kid that I told you about... Lil Flame... he started bragging......he was a few  years older than me, he was about two or three years older than me and he started bragging how he was going to do this, that and the third. So I said to myself,  "Well, first of all this guy got an excessively long name. So if I'm gonna paint the train I don't wanna be with him 'cause he's gonna take twice the length of the time that is gonna take me to do Sly 5. " So I already had my design in my head and I knew what I had to do.  Well, eventually we would hit the trains together at the lay up on 183rd Street but since he lived a few blocks away I didn’t see him much and I started going by myself and I would see other writers there. But mostly toys and that’s what I was at that time and then I saw that others guys were there before me that day, too. So it gave me the courage to hit alone. Lil Flame showed me the lay up on 183rd. Not the yard. I found out about the 4 yard through Fuzz One. So when me and Lil Flame went to hit the trains he taught me certain things and then you know common sense kicked in where you don't step in the third rail, you step on top of it.  So I was a quick learner because first of all I didn't wanna die. I knew it was crazy reckless. You had to keep watching out for trains while you painted and also watch out for cops. So your head was on a swivel all the time. I learnt how to do Sly 5, I learnt how to do the outlines. Once I did the first piece it was almost like a relief for me. I said,"Now I know what I must do next time I go and paint." I only had two cans, just so I could do the outline and the fill-in. And that's what I did."  

SIR NORIN RAD:"What made you change your name from Sly 5 to Pel?"

PEL:"What happened was one day I was drawing my name Sly 5, Sly 5, Sly 5 and I just got bored with it because I didn't see any other style or anything like that. So then I said, "I need to try something different." So then I started writing Pel and I was like,"Ah, okay! This looks more apealing to me and it's an easier name to know!"After I started writing Pel I started going to 183rd and to different other places, sometimes with King 2 and sometimes without him because I had a little more flexibility somehow. So I started doing a bunch of Pels. I went to 183rd Street and I did like four Pels, then I would two Pels.....any few days 'cause what happened at that time they would start buffing (cleaning) the trains. So I happened to go to 183rd Street on a weekday.. at about 9 o' clock..right at dusk, before it got dark because everybody wanted to get home, nobody cared about anything. So what happened was I got a lot of Pels 'cause remember all the trains were being cleaned. Everybody that was a King or had a lot of pieces on the trains....they (the pieces) were gone!!! I was hitting the brand new trains which they weren't gonna redo because I hit them. So I started becoming pretty dominant on the 4 line."

SIR NORIN RAD:"So when did you start writing Pel and when did you begin to write Dime 2?"

 PEL:"Pel was '74 and Dime 2 late '76 because by then I started being more flexible with paint and experience."

 

Pel

 

SIR NORIN RAD:"What was it like the first time you went to the Writer's Bench on 149th Street & Grand Concourse?"

PEL:"One day I went to 149th Street and it was a lot of people there. Phase 2, Riff 170.....a whole bunch of people. I had heard about Phase 2 but I had never really got to meet him. So as I'm there a guy named Hydra who was dominant on the 6 line....he was kinda famous....he was there with Butch 2, Kindo.......this guy was like within five feet of me. We was all standing there and all of a sudden all these clean trains come in .....like I said they were cleaning the trains so a lot of people were losing their names....and my name Pel is on one train, it's on the other, it's here, it's there...and Hydra says real loud, "Who the hell is that guy Peg or Pel or whatever?" I'm looking, right? So I say, "Yo, Hydra! That's you, right?"He said, "Yeah!" I said, "My name is Pel. That's me." He was like, "You're that guy?!?" I said, "Yeah!" so when I said that Phase 2 looked up and then Riff looked up, they both looked at me...They were sitting down on the bench, everybody else was standing around watching the trains, drawing and getting tags in their blackbooks...that kind of stuff. Phase 2 looked at me, he tipped his hat, waved at me and said, "Come on over here!" So I walked over to Phase and he asked me, "Yo, you write Pel?" I said, "Well, yeah. You know I'm still kinda learning how to write. I gotta practice at home." So he said, "You got a blackbook?" I said, "No." He was tagging somebody else's blackbook so he asked that guy, "You mind if I tear out a paper?" He tore out a page and actually did a Pel for me, he did a Pel outline and said to me, "Why don't you try this?" I looked at him and said, "Wow! That's nice! Sure, I'll practice this the best I can. It will take me some time." So he said, "Yeah, give it a shot!" Riff was kinda like, "Yeah!" Phase accepted me, so Riff had to. But anyway how I got into changing my name....once Phase 2 gave me that I practiced real hard and I started to take my time. What happened was I had seen that people were rushing and just putting up stuff on the trains. Well, I didn't want to be one of those guys! I wanted my pieces to look different. I also didn't want to compete with nobody doing Top-to-Bottoms because to do all that you have to get nasty and dirty and that just wasn't me. So when Phase 2 gave me that I kept doing a lot of Pels. Well, at the time Riff was doing a lot of Riffs and I noticed that he changed his name to Worm. He did a couple of other things...Worm and Dove.  So I said to myself , "Let me start doing different names." So I started changing my name to something else.....from Pel to Dime 2. I started to get innovative. What also made me change my name were the cops. I heard them say one time when I was on the train station...I was in the lay-up on 183rd Street and I was inside the train getting ready to paint and I heard the cops' radio because you could hear it from a mile away since it was so loud.......I heard them say, "We're looking for this guy Pel. He's is a lightskin guy with a big afro." I was like, "Wow!" Not too many liked to hit there because I guess it was too inconvenient for them. You had to duck when the trains came and you had to look out, make sure they didn't see you. But me I liked it because it wasn't very far from home, it was very comfortable for me to hit there. I knew the area, I knew the neighbourhood, I knew everything about it. So when I heard what the cops were saying I said to myself, "Wow! These guys are looking for me!" That also made me think about changing my name."  

 

Pel

 

Dime 2 by Pel

 

SIR NORIN RAD:"So how did you feel when the legendary Style Master Phase 2 gave you a Pel outline to work with?"

PEL:"Well, it was total shock and disbelief that he would even give you his time because Phase 2 was already a name established and for him to nod and to call me over, you know? I was thinking, "Hey, I'm a nobody. I'm just starting." Because he didn't do that for many people. He was a nice guy but it was hard to get to Phase. He was very particular. Those guys Phase 2 and Riff 170 were the ones that set the tone. If you ask me."

Phase 2

 

SIR NORIN RAD:"Was there some kind of a pecking order at the Writer's Bench back then?"

PEL:"The pecking order......once you were known and I mean I got known pretty fast because I started doing really nice stuff....you would get a seat on the bench automatically. At about 2 or 3 o' clock (p.m.) that bench was full with Writers. Now only six people fit on the bench.....maybe seven if it was a smaller guy. Well, you got 30, 40 guys at that bench and everybody else would be like, "Uh, that's a gang!" They would avoid us and so it would be like mostly us. So let's say there were toys sitting down on the bench...guys that weren't well known, that were just trying to get up..........and I would walk up to the bench they would be like, "Oh my god, Pel! Sit down, man! Here's my book!" So you would get a seat automatically. They would treat you like the big boys. Then it got to a point where you had those kinda guys that was trying to get up and the new guys behind them and they would demand stuff from them. Like,"Hey man, you wanna get up? You gotta...." That kind of stuff. To me that was scandalous. You don't put nobody down like that. You don't make them go out there and make them risk their life for you. Who the hell do you think you are? But yeah we did have those kind of guys. Eventually it started getting to the point where some of these guys would take stuff from these kids that where just starting out, putting a bad taste in other peoples' mouth. In the 1980s I dont know what they did because in 1978 I decided I am not gonna even do trains anymore. I left and went to Chicago at that time to go on with my life."

SIR NORIN RAD:"Please describe the process through which you came up with new ideas while you were sketching! Did you listen to a certain kind of music when you were developing new letter patterns?"

PEL:"This is what happened.....when I moved to the Bronx I was 14. When  I came home I would eat some food, smoke a joint, relax and start sketching. We had an old coffee table in the living room I would sketch there. Also I smoked weed in the living room. My mother knew I smoked but she also knew I was responsible. My friend upstairs he hit me up to Earth, Wind & Fire which I never knew who they were. I would listen to the Ohio Players, Earth, Wind & Fire, The O'Jays.....all of those guys. Man, I used to sketch all kind of stuff. I would start with a letter, then I started bending letters and doing different things and stuff. And let me tell you something.....a lot of these cats.....one guy in particular.....Noc..."

SIR NORIN RAD:"Noc 167 OTB"

PEL:"Right, Noc 167. He was a friend of mine. The reason why he was a friend of mine was so he could come and bite everything I knew. I was doing some real freaky stuff back then, some real nice styles! I wish I had some of those sketches now because if you saw those sketches you'd see everybody's style! All I would do is sketch continuously. Everywhere I went I would sketch....when I would eat at a restaurant or a donut shop I would sketch something.....you know, lettering, designs to make it look fancy although I didn't want to get too fancy because of the fact that if you get too fancy you can't read it. My thing was to do a nice sketch, a nice design....something that everybody could read. I found out that Noc 167 was hanging out with Dondi and all these other cats.....kinda taking my style away. I said to myself, "This guy ain't doing nothing but bite everything that I got so he can become famous." And he has never given me props ever since. He never mentioned me. 

SIR NORIN RAD:"Would you say that music had an impact on the way you designed letters?"

PEL:"Oh, absolutely. Earth, Wind & Fire, Ohio Players, Parliament....those guys in particular. I used to love me some Parliament. I was seriously into Funk. Even now I listen to Kool & The Gang. There were a lot of influences that did that. Even the weed had some influence on it. It would make you feel so smoothly, you could listen to music and do a sketch,"Oh, I'mma move this over here. I will kick this out this way." (Talking about lettering) I would have all kinds of nice stuff! Then when I was in school I started learning about architectural drawing. Good practice!  My styles were influenced by music, good funky music. The funkier the song, the funkier the letters would come out. It was kinda weird, I didn't know it would have that much of an influence on me but it did."

SIR NORIN RAD:"What about bands such as The Jimmy Castor Bunch, Mandrill, The Blackbyrds? Would you listen to their material as well? The raw funk and then the jazz-funk......"

PEL:"Oh yeah!!!! (excited) Absolutely!!! My man you're bringing back memories!!! Blackbyrds they had that song "Doing It In The Park"......."

SIR NORIN RAD:"Rock Creek Park."

PEL:"Yes. Rock Creek Park."

NORIN RAD:"Damn!!!! What do you know about these joints: "Apache" by The Incredible Bongo Band, "It's Just Begun" by The Jimmy Castor Bunch......"

PEL:"Cats used to breakdance to these songs."

SIR NORIN RAD:"So you also witnessed cats going off to these songs in the 1970s?"

PEL:"You're kidding, right??? Of course I did. To me Solid 1 (TFP) was a very good dancer."

SIR NORIN RAD:"What are your memories of the gangs in the 1970ies?"

PEL:"I do remember them but it's funny because where I lived at it was mostly white. This is the weird thing. When I first got there..... it was during the summer time when we moved because they wanted to get me into high school  and my little sister into school and it was crazy because it was an all white neighbourhood mostly...I would say 90% white...and as we went into the block to look at the apartment there were ladies, older ladies...I wanna say mostly Jewish, some Italian..with those silver things around their neck lying out in the sun on beach chairs trying to get a tan....in the city, in the Bronx!!!!! This was one of the craziest things I had ever seen. It was a nice neighbourhood so I didn't see all the gang stuff. Now had I went to the other side of the Bronx, to the Southeast Side I would have seen more gangs. In my neighbourhood there weren't too many."

SIR NORIN RAD:"How would you define a burner piece?"

PEL:"My thing is this.....first of all to me a burner has to have a nice flow and the letters got to be of the same family. To me if you keep in the same family you can get fancy but don't make it illegible where a person has a hard time to decipher it and the colour blends should be pleasing to the eye and not a mess. There's people out there and I don't wanna mention no names that just go overboard with colours and  I'm like,"Wow! You don't have to do all that!" It's like you put too much ingredients into the soup, it tastes bad. Sometimes it's better to do less than to overdo it."

SIR NORIN RAD:"Thank you. By which criteria were battles between train writers judged back then? Did you ever go against another Writer?"

PEL:"Yeah, for some reason they put me against Riff 170 being that we did this and that but that wasn't even true. Riff was a better Writer than me at the time. He is still very good! Riff is a very good artist. At the time what made him a really outstanding Writer was the fact that he controlled his paint. He had really amazing ideas, he was that one guy that was really different. He was really innovative. I took some of his ideas to get me going and I'm not ashamed to say that because he was really good. Then I sat down and started experimenting with my letters....I went off and I really went into my own. But when two people have a battle I look at simplicity.....be simplistic with style and you'll have something nice! Now you can just be a painter like anybody else. I mean you see all this stuff on the wall and you're like, "What the hell is that??? Is this supposed to be graffiti??? What does it say?" You know graffiti is about letters!!!! Let's put it this way...in a nutshell...when we started Writing we were called Writers, not painters. Now people are artists that's fine but we were Writers on the trains putting up our names to be identfied by other laymen. That was the point of you. I hope that helps."

SIR NORIN RAD:"Were you aware of the park jams that were thrown by DJs such as Afrika Bambaataa, Kool Herc or Grandmaster Flash back then? Did you attend them?"

PEL:"I didn't really attend those too much. I would go to these parties if they were like close to my neighbourhood. I remember attending this Grandmaster Flash party in an empty supermarket and it was raining heavily outside. People were dancing , having a good time! The DJs had these huge soundsystems back then and they would get electricity from a light pole in the parks. It was fun but it got to a point where it became really dangerous to go to these parties,  more guns were around and people got shot randomly so I decided not to go there anymore."

Pel

                                           

Dime 2 by Pel

SIR NORIN RAD:"Please name 5 songs from back then that had a huge impact on you when you were sketching?"

PEL:"The first one is "Reasons" by Earth, Wind & Fire. The second one is "Sweet Sticky Thing". by The Ohio Players. The third one is also by Earth, Wind & Fire........"Brazilian Rhymes"...it used to put me in a good mood. The fourth is one "One Nation Under A Groove" by Funkadelic and the fifth one is "Aqua Boogie" by Parliament."  

SIR NORIN RAD:"Would you like to give shoutouts at the end of this interview?"

PEL:"Yeah, I wanna give shoutout to my man Phase 2....God bless him....Lava 1 & 2.....God bless him, too! Case 2 RIP..... My friends.....Checker 170, Part 1, Chain 3, Ree, King 2 and all the other fellas that I can't remember at the moment. I wish you guys well! Be safe!