When Chris “Daze” Ellis was growing up on Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, he saw a subway car parked in the Utica Avenue station that made him stop and stare. A buxom blonde had been painted on it, her hair cascading onto the car’s roof, along with the lettering “Blade TC5.” The year was 1975. Ellis was 13-years-old.
“Seeing that really inspired me,” says Ellis, now 54. “When I saw that train, I knew it wasn’t really a random act. It was planned out.”
By the time Ellis was a student at New York’s High School of Art and Design, he would meet other teenage boys whose imaginations were fired up by the faces and words spray-painted onto the battleship-gray subway cars of the 1970s. Everyday they gathered at the East 149 Street subway station to watch the trains, sketch the graffiti by older writers and develop ideas.
It was there, on the bridge connecting the uptown and downtown sides, that Ellis would meet fellow artist and future business partner John “Crash” Matos, a student at Murry Bergtraum High School for Business Administration who grew up in the South Bronx.
“You had to get your name around and you had to document your work, which meant spending hours on the elevated platform photographing your work [as the trains went by],” Ellis says.
The pair would go on to become two of the most prolific graffiti writers of the time, working their way into the alternative New York art scene of the 1980s and then international acclaim.
Those days on the bridge are fondly recalled in the new Netflix series “The Get Down,” which premieres its first six episodes Friday (a second set of six will debut in 2017). Created by Australian film director Baz Luhrmann (“Moulin Rouge”), it is a wildly ambitious recreation of a lost world — the burnt-out yet culturally vibrant New York City of the late 1970s.
In the show’s first episode, Marcus “Dizzee” Kipling (Jaden Smith) hangs out with Crash (Mikey D’Astoli) on the bridge sketching in their notebooks. “When we see our names on the trains, if only for a fleeting moment, we can say, ‘I was here,’ ” Kipling says.
Armed with cans of Red Devil or Rustoleum spray paint, the teenaged Ellis and Matos would explore train yards and tunnels all over the Bronx. A talent for observation and stealth allowed them to memorize when certain trains were at their disposal. They worked in pairs or in groups of no more than six or eight guys.
Ellis chose “Daze” as his graffiti “tag” — or signature — on the visual merits of its letters; Matos, on the other hand, had already earned the nickname “Crash” due to his bad luck with the computers at school.
When he was 14, Ellis did his first subway car in the 215th St. train yard, where the CC trains (now the C train) were stored. “It was wintertime, in the middle of the day,” says Ellis, who cut class to get there. “I didn’t realize that paint freezes, like anything else. I had four cans and I’m painting and it’s becoming really drippy because it’s frozen. I couldn’t really do much. I ended up getting chased out.”
Matos preferred to work in “lay-ups,” the sidetracks where trains are taken out of service for maintenance and cleaning. “I liked those because access, to me, to get in and out, was paramount,” says Matos, now 54.
In their illegal heyday, the duo painted “hundreds” of subway cars, and there were plenty of close calls. Ellis tore up a bubble parka trying to drag himself through a hole in the fence at the 215th St. train yard, but Matos had a really hairy time the day his friend Kel 139 rang his bell at the Betances housing projects the day after Christmas 1979.
“He said, ‘Let’s go paint because the lay-up is in,’ ” Matos says.
Underdressed for the 20-degree weather in a sweater and thermal jacket, Matos, along with Kel and two other boys, headed north to the Baychester Avenue train yard, near the terminus of the No. 5 line. It was worth the long ride from the South Bronx.
“The trains were brand-spanking new,” Matos says. “You could smell the motor oil.”
Possessed of a skeleton key that had been stolen years before, copied and handed down from one artist to another, the boys accessed the train. They flipped open the seats where the heaters were to keep their cans of paint warm while they worked outside in the cold.
But it wasn’t long before another train pulled in — carrying the transit police.
“They were coming to arrest us,” Matos says. One cop tried to open a train door, but the group locked it from the inside before escaping to a different car, pulling an emergency latch and jumping out.
The chase was on, with police cars patrolling the neighborhood on the hunt for them. An all-points bulletin was issued, but Matos eventually made it home on foot.
Other painting parties were a relative cinch. Ellis and Matos accessed the 145th Street tunnel to the No. 1 train through a grate in the street, climbing down a ladder. They could take breaks from painting, climb up to the sidewalk and have lunch at the nearby McDonald’s before returning to their steel canvases.
“What was cool about that line was they didn’t really clean those trains as often, so you could see the older [graffiti],” says Ellis. “You could see the history of what was happening. You’re painting and you hear these sounds — the compressors going on and off. A train would go by in the express lane and blow garbage around. You’re painting in this solitary environment and it felt real cinematic.”
Subway graffiti was an inspiration for Ellis and Matos but it was reviled as nothing more than pure vandalism by many New Yorkers. Photographer and former Post staffer Martha Cooper wanted to document the phenomenon for precisely that reason.
“People felt threatened by the tags that covered the inside of the subways,” says Cooper, whose 1984 book, “Subway Art,” co-produced with Henry Chalfant, is considered the bible of street art. “Everybody wanted to be rid of it. I was drawn to document the culture because it was underground and misunderstood. I felt I had gained entree into a secret art world.”
As they got older, Crash and Daze understood their work literally rubbed people the wrong way. “When the ink was fresh and you sat down, you got ink on your clothes,” Matos says.
By the time they graduated from high school, in 1980, they were moving on from subway art, finding ways to exhibit their canvases in alternative art spaces like Fashion Moda in the Bronx and Franklin Furnace in Manhattan.
“Keith Haring put together a show called ‘Beyond Words’ and asked us to be part of it,” Ellis says. A completely unknown Madonna asked Matos to create a mural for a very early video for what turned out to be her 1982 debut single “Everybody.”
‘You’re painting and you hear these sounds — the compressors going on and off. A train would go by in the express lane and blow garbage around. You’re painting in this solitary environment and it felt real cinematic’
- Chris “Daze” Ellis
Eventually, their days of sneaking into tunnels were over as the world of public murals beckoned. They each just finished one at Coney Island, on walls behind Nathan’s. Ellis riffs on the amusement park’s “thrills, while Matos painted a superhero send-up.
“I realized I still want to paint in the public, but I don’t want to get chased,” Ellis says.
Today, the duo have a studio in the South Bronx and work on commissions that range anywhere from $5,000 to $20,000 a pop.
Last year, the production team for “The Get Down” reached out to Matos to see if he could teach the actors how to draw with a can of spray paint. He turned them down.
“Teach them how to spray paint in a weekend? It doesn’t work that way,” he says. “It takes years to make a straight line.”
Instead, as graffiti consultants for the show, they created some murals. One, on North 10th Street and Wythe Avenue in Williamsburg, says: “Seek those who fan your flame.” Another, on West 25th St. and Sixth Avenue in Manhattan, reads: “Forget safety. Be notorious.” For both, scenic artists from the series executed the duo’s sketches.
Each artist makes a six-figure income, though Ellis notes some years are better than others. Still, it’s more than a pretty good life. Ellis is married to April, a photographer, and they live with their two young sons, Indigo, 6, and Hudson, 3, in Hamilton Heights. Matos lives in the Westchester Square neighborhood of the Bronx, with his wife, Margie. Their daughters, Anna, 27, and Kristen, 23, are all grown-up, and Anna is following in her dad’s pioneering footsteps, running a South Bronx gallery, WallworksNY, with him.
“We’ve been showing artists in the neighborhood,” Matos says proudly.
And this time, it’s all strictly legal.