Early Zephyr Walls

To best express my history of doing pieces on walls I’m going to divide my walls into three time periods. I’m going to call them “Early Walls”, “Later Walls” and “Walls: 1993 — today”. Pretty clever, huh? I know. In my earliest “Zephyr” years I was always looking for places to put my tags, and everything seemed like fair game. Subway painting was the main event but walls were a good option too. I was getting my name onto the streets a lot in the form of tags, and the RTW Boys and I were stoked to be branching out beyond Manhattan at a decent rate. If my eye caught a great spot somewhere that seemed to cry out for something bigger than a tag, I would do what it took to get at least a simple “ZEPH” up on it. Of course the time it took to do a piece—even a simple one—was greater than the time it took to do a tag, so the risk was always bigger. Sometimes the risks turned out to be extreme, like when someone started shooting at me while doing a rooftop in the Bronx (lucky for me their aim wasn’t very good). Here are some of the walls I did in my earliest days, beginning in the mid to late 1970’s. Thank goodness for photos or you’d be stuck with my questionable memory and dubious accounts.

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