REVOK

In the mid-’90s I was in this crew AM7. One of the guys from AM7, BRACE, was also a member of MSK. He ended up introducing me to SABER. I had been an admirer of what SABER did for quite some time; he was really going hard and making big moves well before I was in LA. It was one of those rare instances where there’s a writer whose work you really admire, and when you meet them, they live up to the expectations that their alter ego has set. We started hanging out quite a bit and painting a lot together.

The first time I went out painting with SABER we went to do this spot on Hollywood and Western. It was just a vacant lot with a big wall along the back. We snuck in the spot, cut a hole through the fence, went up in there, and started getting our paint ready. I pulled out a sketch and he was like, “What the fuck is that?” I was like, “What do you mean? It’s my sketch. Let me see your sketch.” And he was like, “I don’t have a sketch. You bring a sketch every time you paint?”…“Yeah, sure. Doesn’t everybody? I thought that’s what you were supposed to do!” And he’s like, “I haven’t painted a piece based off a sketch in years. Throw that shit away and freestyle your piece.” He pulled my card, so I tossed my sketch and improvised my piece. Right from the beginning it was like playing catch-up with him. He really pushed me. Him, and at the same time my man AYER, even though AYER was much younger than me.


Through my relationship with SABER I became friends with everybody else: GKAE, EKLIPS, ZES, KRUSH, TYKE, FATE, CHUNK, BLES, PUSH, JUST, TOOMER, etcetera. GKAE was already a huge legend at that point, and somebody who I really looked up to and admired tremendously, so meeting him was a big honor.

I hung out with SABER and everybody else from the crew for well over a year before I ended up being invited into the family. One day SABER, GKAE, CHUNK, and EKLIPS all asked me to get in MSK. At that point it totally made sense. We did everything together: we painted together, we partied together, made money together, so it felt natural for me to be in the crew. That was probably early 1997.

Once I became part of the crew I felt a responsibility to uphold a certain standard. Everybody made a major impact in their own way. I made a decision when I was 13…14 years old that graffiti was what I wanted to do. I didn’t really care about anything else. While other kids were thinking about whatever bullshit they were thinking about, I was thinking, I just want to do graffiti. I wanted to do it like guys like RISK. That guy was my idol since the time I was 14 years old.


I don’t see the purpose of doing anything if you’re not doing it with heart and to the best of your ability, or you’re not doing something new, or at the very least I don’t see the point of doing anything if you’re not trying to do it better than everybody else.It’s the ultimate blessing to be able to do exactly what it is you love to do, on your own terms, and somehow get some kind of credit or respect for it, even make a little bit of money and pay your bills doing it. It’s the American dream! And there’s still a whole world out there. There’s so much more to be done. But I’m 33 years old, I got a torn ACL in my knee, I can barely walk, I’m on some fuckin’ crazy probation right now where I can’t fart without going to jail.

I’ve been doing graffiti for 20 years, and I’ve been really lucky. I like to think it’s because I’ve been smart or at least because I run really fast and don’t give up, ’cause there’s plenty of times when my ass should have been caught. It took 20 years of doing graffiti before I caught a real graffiti case. It’s ironic that the real first case I caught was the most bullshit case ever.


It was basically that I got charged with a felony for graffiti in Indio, CA—some little  two-horse town 160 miles away from LA. Every year they have the Coachella Music Festival there, and…well…I guess I can admit to it now. I swore the whole time—lying through my teeth—that I never did it, but now it’s over with, so fuck it.

Everybody goes to Coachella: everybody from LA, Orange County, Inland Empire, the Bay Area, Vegas, Arizona, people from the whole Southwestern United States, and then some. There’s one exit off the freeway you get off to get there. It’s such a killer spot. Traffic will be backed out for half an hour on the freeway off-ramp with everyone trying to go to the festival. I always ended up going out there and partying, drinking a bunch, and never painting it. And then a couple of years ago I went down there with some friends from London to do a little job the night before Coachella. We were there and we were like, “We have to do this spot. Everybody—two million people or whatever—are coming to Coachella this weekend and they’re gonna see it.” So we did it. I was piss drunk when I did it, and it was ugly as shit, but it was there! It’s funny, because, since I first started traveling to Europe—I think the first time was 2006—everybody out there was crazy anal about fingerprints. They never leave cans behind. If they do, they wipe all the cans down or they handle the cans with gloves. I was like, “What the fuck are you guys doing?! They don’t fingerprint for spraypaint!”…“Yeah, they do that shit here.” That was so mental to me, that police would go to those lengths and use those resources, spend that kind of money on forensic evidence for graffiti. I guess in Indio they have the time and money to do it though, ’cause I left a cap—the lid of a Rustoleum can—on the ground, and the next day the police went there and found it, and the motherfuckers fingerprinted the goddamn spraycan cap. However long it took, my prints came up, and these fucking cocksuckers from 160 miles away got a warrant for my arrest and came to my condo in the Hills, surveilling me for like a week. Go fucking figure!


They ended up paying eight or nine cops overtime to come and raid my house, arrest me, and drive me 160 miles back to Indio to book me for something that in all actuality cost probably $30 to paint over. I think my lawyer estimated that it was anywhere from $15,000 to $20,000 they spent on the total investigation, prosecuting me, everything. It’s no wonder the state of California is nearly bankrupt.

The little nerd cop who was the head of the investigation had a real hard-on for me. “I can’t wait to tell all the taggers in Indio that I busted REVOK! Every kid’s house I raid in my city, they got your poster on their wall and your t-shirts!” These guys are in my house, ripping it apart. They were like, “Where’s the guns?” They were so pissed that there were no guns in my house. They couldn’t fathom that I didn’t have guns.

I think that case cost me $20,000 to fight. Thankfully Shepard Fairey came through for me like a champ. He did a print and donated all the profits to my lawyer, $10,000. I wouldn’t have been able to have the legal defense I had if it were not for his help. And that’s where it all started. I could have kept fighting and done trial, but trial would have cost me probably another $30,000, and who can afford that? I’m just a dude who sprays paint on walls. I ended up taking a deal, and the deal was probation. Because I was on probation, that’s how these fuckers got me by the balls. Throughout the whole experience there, my primary concern was that this was gonna lead to an investigation and me having problems in LA. And for well over a year that never happened. But then I went to Australia.

I went out there to organize this big event which would have been a monumental thing for the whole graffiti-art movement. What I was trying to do was really ambitious and it would have gone through had the financial backer not had a complete emotional meltdown and went bankrupt. It was the first time that graffiti artists were going to be treated like real, legitimate professionals and would get some mainstream recognition and respect for this art form. I ended up getting a different kind of mainstream recognition, though. I painted some stuff out in Australia, but I didn’t go crazy. I did like eight or nine things, maybe. There’s graffiti everywhere in Melbourne! But again, because the graffiti cops see me as a figurehead, I’m a trophy for them to go after. When I was leaving Australia I was riding in the car with my buddy Ruedi from Germany. He was driving me to the airport while he was interviewing me for an Australian magazine, Acclaim. We got the recorder going, and while I’m talking I’m Twittering and I write, “on my way to the airport... can’t get on that plane fast enough!!!” I laughed after I did that. I said—totally tongue-in-cheek—“Yo, if these guys wanted to get me out here, I just handed myself to them, didn’t I?” But I’m thinking, Why the fuck would they go to those lengths for some graffiti? I guess I’ve been doing it too long and I’m jaded and I fail to take into consideration how big a deal some people make out of literally a coat of paint.

I’m sitting in the first-class lounge, having a beer, chilling, and they call my name: “Jason Williams, come to the counter.” I don’t think anything of it; they do that shit all the time. As soon as I went to the counter, the dude was being really awkward. He wouldn’t make eye contact with me. I’m thinking maybe I’m tripping and I want to check, so I lean into him like, “Hey, what’s going on? Is everything OK with my ticket? Has the flight been delayed?” He would not make eye contact with me. He was so visibly nervous. And right then it hit me: something’s not right. I start looking around, and sure enough I see across the terminal these three federal police eyeballing me. One guy, I just lock eyes with him. I’m looking at him and he’s obviously watching me. I put my hands up and I’m like, “You gotta be fuckin’ kidding me.” Sure enough, these fools rush me. “Jason Williams, you’re wanted for questioning by the Victorian Police for multiple accounts of criminal damage.” I just start shaking my head like, “This is insane. I cannot believe you guys are doing all this. Whatever, let’s go. I’m not running anywhere. You see I’m being cool and cooperative. Don’t put any fucking handcuffs on me.” But the fuckers did anyway. They handcuffed me and walked me through the damn airport. Everyone was looking at me like I was a terrorist or some shit. And this one fucker, the head detective—if you watch the news footage from Australia, he’s the cop that they interviewed—all the problems I’ve had in the last year are because of him. After what happened there he contacted the London Transit Police and said, “I know this guy has done some stuff there. I arrested him, I’ve identified him, here’s his information. He’s in LA right now. If you want to do something about it, here you go.” So both the Melbourne Transit Police and the London Transit Police started calling the City Attorney here in LA and busting his balls like, “Why are you allowing this to happen?”


A couple weeks after I returned from Melbourne my spraypaint sponsor wanted to do a promotional event at a retailer here in LA. So, in LA we have three main law enforcement agencies: the LAPD, the Sheriff’s Department, and the Highway Patrol. It’s very seldom that they work together. But in honor of yours truly, they did. While we’re doing a demo at the store they created a perimeter around the entire store for like four blocks in each direction. There were something like 60 cops there. I’m in there painting and these kids are coming up to me, “The sheriffs are outside tripping. They’re asking for you.” I’m like, “Aw, great. This is the last thing I fuckin’ need.” Then the manager comes up to me and he’s like, “Yo, I don’t know what to do. The sheriffs are outside and they’re saying if I don’t send you out right now they’re coming in here and they’re shutting this down.” I was like, “Fuck, where can I hide?” I can’t go on the roof, ’cause at this point there’s a helicopter circling around. So I waited for the helicopter to creep far on the outside and I slipped outta there, went through some apartments, and I got a few blocks away. I got by and then one of my homies was calling me, and I’m like, “You need to come scoop me up ASAP.” I thought he was close, so I walked out onto the street. This is a good mile away from the place at this point. I wasn’t on the street for 20 seconds—I guess they had spotters in regular cars who saw me and they surrounded me before my man could get there to pick me up. The gang task force swooped in on me from every side. They came up to me like, “Jason Williams! You’re in violation of your probation!” I responded, “No, I’m not. I know my rights.”—That’s one of the things my lawyer did with my previous case; he negotiated the terms of my probation. Obviously part of the way I make my living is painting...with spraypaint. I was getting paid to be there that day to paint a piece. This one sheriff comes up to me, searches me, and I have a spraycan tip in my pocket. He’s like, “This is a vandalism tool! I’m arresting you for violation of your probation!”…“I know exactly what the terms are on my probation. I’m working and I have every right to have this. You know and I know that you’re harassing me right now on some bullshit.” And he’s like, “Well we’re gonna see what’s at your house.” Because I’m on probation, they can search my house anytime they want. They don’t need a warrant. They go to my house, they’re tearing it apart, and this dickhead is telling me how he hates what I stand for. “We’ve been investigating you. We know that you’re laying low and you’re not doing anything here anymore, but we don’t care. We don’t like what you stand for. You profit off graffiti, and all these kids out here want to be like you, so we’re gonna put you out of business.” It’s like an ethical beef with them.


They ended up arresting me with nine counts: eight counts of possession of stolen property…for milk crates! Then they charged me with impersonating a police officer or something, ’cause I had a plastic LAPD badge. I took a girl home on Halloween a couple years ago—she was dressed as a cop—and she left her badge under my bed and I threw it in the drawer. They tried to charge me with impersonating a cop for that.

My lawyer’s expensive, but he’s very good. He had prepared me like, “Look, you’re probably gonna do time.” Even though I hadn’t done shit in LA for the past couple years, I think they were charging me with so much stuff that he was like, “It doesn’t look good. I don’t think we can win in court.” Trial was gonna cost upwards of $30,000 to fight something that I’m gonna end up getting convicted on multiple felonies and end up going to state prison for anyway, so what’s the fucking point?

The judge calls my case, he looks at my lawyer, nods his head, my lawyer gets up, the two City Attorneys there to prosecute me get up, and they all go into the back room. They’re back there for damn near 40 minutes. Then the door swings open and they come walking back in, all smiling and laughing and giggling with each other. My lawyer motions for me to come up and the judge starts giving me a speech. He said something to the extent of, “Mr. Williams, I’ve taken the time to get acquainted with your case. I actually spent this weekend looking at a lot of your work and I think you’re an immensely talented artist. If these guys”—motioning over to the City Attorneys—“could have it their way, I’d be sending you to prison today. But I don’t want to see that happen. I think you’re an asset to the community. I think there’s a huge divide between the work that you do in the street and the work that I see everyday that pisses me off so much. You’re obviously not some punk tagger. I want to see you hanging out with rich people, getting their money, and improving your quality of life, not sitting in jail with a bunch of criminals.” I nearly shit myself.


I was really surprised that somebody in his position was able to look at what I do and what we’re all so passionate about and see the value in it. He said to me, “I know you take a lot of pride, and it’s very important to you personally, doing your work in the street, but I see this as a perfect opportunity for you. You don’t have anything to prove anymore. You need to focus more now on your professional career and doing art that’s going to benefit you and your quality of life, instead of causing you problems. Consider this a new chapter and an opportunity to focus on your career.” I’m on probation again for three more years with some stiff terms, but he was really reasonable.

The lesson? Don’t get caught. That’s always the lesson. Another lesson to be learned is that if you’re gonna do graffiti and you want to be a bigshot and you’re really going to taunt them by putting your face out there, you better have a lot of paper stacked and keep a lawyer on retainer. You better have a freedom fund.

REVOK Part 1

REVOK Part 2

www.revok1.com