From KCRW, this is nocturne.

From KCRW, this is nocturne. We were a tiny little graffiti club with three members, but when we went out to do our damage, we called it hitting.

And each individual work was called your hit.

And there were gradations of style.

There was a simple plain style, which would be pretty much legible to anyone, and that sort of went

in varying degrees up to a fancy style that had so many flourishes and embellishments

that even a lot of other graffiti artists would not be able to read it.

And there's technique involved, you know, you like, you hold the can too close to the wall, it'll drip.

You go too slowly it'll drip.

I could go into all the technology involved.

And then sometime in 1975, the three of us took a trip to New York to see a concert

and discovered New York graffiti and how elaborate it was compared to Philadelphia and how the artists all wrote in big block letters with

hollow centers that they then could fill in with color and design.

So we came back and started doing that and I don't want to take all credit for introducing

that to Philadelphia because I doubt we started that in

Philly but shortly thereafter it became the thing in Philly and we called it

New York style other artists called it blocking and it took everything to a whole new level

and required elaborate measures to do it. We had these gym bags that ordinarily

might be filled with you know tennis shoes and a change of clothes.

And ours were filled with spray cans, first and foremost, and the spray cans were weaponized

with nozzles from Niagara spray starch. We learned about this somehow through the street and just a rumor going around this is how you did it.

Take the nozzle from Niagara spray starch and you create what's called a Bogart nozzle

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