Emory Douglas & buZ blurr connect at my old store/gallery back in 2008. Photo by the homie Shaun Roberts
And, for those who care about such things, here’s an interview that I did with buZ around that same time:
I hired out in ‘62 and didn’t start marking the cars until November ‘71. So that nine-year interim I was working various night jobs, and I had given up my idea on any kind of art, and had started reading novels like Vonnegut’s; all his greatest novels featuring his Kilgore Trout character—a writer that didn’t have readers, but he continued writing compulsively. I was also reading ‘Understanding Media’ by McLuhan, RD Laing’s ‘Politics of Experience,’ and those other heavy thinkers like Skinner and the conditioned response of his experiments and all that. So during all this time I had been in an afternoon job—it was one of the first times I’d had a regular daylight job—and most times I was working at night on switch engines and locals. So on this job I was working what they call the long field position, and I was down in the yard—the rail yard was downhill—and I had to keep the tracks from rolling out the north end so I had to keep the head brakes tied down on all the rails. So after I had that done, I was just laying down in amongst the cars to make certain they didn’t roll out. I had some free time so I decided to be a vandal myself, you know?
