Interview with Seger from GAZM

After years of being involved in graffiti and seeing / playin in hardcore bands I ask myself “how’d I get here?”

As much as I have a multitude of experiences, friends and inspiration, among them there are more defining eras, points or moments. For my two biggest passions I can track the drive to explore them seriously back to my friend Seger.

In fall 2017 I saw GAZM for the first time and most music I had known was pretty lame to me after that. After a year we were hangin, shortly after that we were spraying.

He sent me on the right track. Showing me all kinds cool stuff I didn’t get till years later.

Slim: Who are some of your stylistic influences that’ve brought you to where you are now?

Seger: I have it boiled down to my favorite 3 of all time: Brite BKF THR, Causr, and Jade THR BTM.

They ooze style and they never labor over anything they do. They could all do a hollow and it’s not perfect but there’s so much confidence and originality, it’s the connecting fibre.

I think that comes from them all being really talented drawers outside of graffiti and you’re also a very talented drawer as well.

I like them all for different reasons. For tags, it’s Brite and Jade, and it’s really Causr’s piecing.

What’s your favorite Causr era?

Dude the one we’re in! The last five years everything I’ve seen him do I really like. There’s some of it that’s a little hit or miss, but I like that he doesn’t care. I like that he just does it and I don’t know if he’s happy with it, like anyone else who cares about their craft. It’s fearless which is something I really like.

All those guys have this rough and ready thing you can tell they’ve practiced. Some guys you can tell can only do one tag and their alphabets are bad. But these guys could do anyone’s name and it’ll be stylish.

You can tell when someone has spent a lot of time thinking about tagging.

I see a parallel to punk and hardcore. You need to learn all the different aspects. Like certain breakdowns and drum beats. The more informed you become the better choices you can make stylistically.

For example with graff some of my favorite stuff is early subway stuff. But I’m not going to do a tag that looks like it’s from 1970. It’s more about taking the energy from that stuff and the more you take in the more you can inform your own thing.

Instead of mimicking the 70s.

It’s LARP-y and it makes it seem like cool stuff isn’t happening now, like nothing that’s going on now is worth your time

The way I think about graff or any creative pursuit is how I think about life. I like country music but I hate when I see a guy dressed like a cowboy from the 70s. I saw a guy like that the other day and there was no soul in it. What bothers me about that line of thinking is you look up to these guys and they didn’t think like that. Some country guy in the 70s wasn’t trying to dress like a guy from 1930. They were doing their own thing and that’s what made that era special. Every era has that thing that makes it cool.

That’s why I don’t think all trends are bad. Trends are how an era gets marked.

I remember coming up in 2019, the cool thing was to conform to the popular style and it’s only been in the most recent generation that it’s returned to the best or most revered writers being those who have personal style.

It got really tight in the years you got active, the getnlooseofficial thing happened, it had an impact on me too I’m not exempt from it either but it became the standard.

People get reactionary and the laymen could go from tight to loose and reject the whole 5-10 year generation before them. It’s been bothering me. The pendulum swings right back the other way. The stuff that came before had good parts and bad parts. We had the dum dum 80s hardcore worship and the pendulum swung and now everyone has a beat down band, like that sucks dude.

I don’t wanna make out like I’m on my own shit or I’m some kind of a savant, it’s very hard to live your truth, in general and especially in these subcultures.

All these subcultures I love are in the pursuit or freedom and you’re tryna get out form under the thumb of the man and then someone else becomes the man on a micro level.

The GAZM logo. Do you have any feelings or insight about GAZM’s rise in punk and hardcore and also the cultural rise of graffiti and hardcore in the main stream. When I moved to Montreal there was hella people wearing the GAZM throw up.

I moved to Montreal to do two things. Be in a good band and write graffiti.

The graffiti slowly became less and less important as the time went on. It was amazing to see a city completely crushed in graff. I moved there in the fall of 2014. All the TOTR guys went nuts in 2015. I ended up meeting them in school that year. Hardcore and graffiti were the two biggest things on my mind.

So of course I’m gonna write songs about graff and make my band look like it’s graff related. And there’s a history of it but at the time it was a little less popular as it is now. Every other band has a graff style logo now. Something was happening in the hive mind.

I had the luxury of having Tumblr and Flickr in high school and all the people who have graff logos for their bands are around my age or a little younger. I didn’t even think about it that much, I did graff so I figured I’d do the letters.

And that logo is just your regular style, you didn’t put on a style for the logo.

It was straight up how I was doing my strait letter throw at the time, I thought I’d add some spider webs to make it more punk.

Like you said all the graffiti stuff blew up not long later. Graff got enormous while we were a band probably because of Instagram and hardcore got humongous right as GAZM was fizzling out.

Which is a crazy shame.

We talk about it as a band jokingly, damn bro if we had just held on for a few more years.

You probably coulda had some house down payments.

Yeh but I also don’t want that. I’ve always believed hardcore and punk is not the genre to make a living off of, you know what I mean?

I do, because you trained me.

Laughs

There are other genres to sell out in. But what people do – and I get this because I’ve experienced this – is you invest so much time in this thing that you feel owed and you have no fall back plan and you think you’ll get something from this thing you’ve invested so much into.

You can only push these things for yourself.

I’ve never done anything I’ve done creatively for the money, even tattooing I do it because I love it. I just like making them and I’m trying to get back to that and keep it as a precious thing because I don’t want to hate it because I depend on money.

Like man what’s your exit strategy bro, like maybe TURNSTILE will be able to retire off their money, maaayyyybe. You wanna know why MADBALL still tours all the time, cause they don’t have money. It’s not BLINK 182 money bro. You’ll make a bag for a couple years and you’ll be in the same spot you were and you’ll be standing there stuck in a record contract and you’ll have to make the worst record ever because you don’t have an exit strategy.

It’s the same with graff, they are so similar. Some OG selling canvases with his throw on it because he has nothing because he put all his time into graff.

I come from a place of privilege to some degree and I have the space in my life to ask myself is this what I want. I realized the MADBALL guys are working class guys and that’s their job, like being a plumber, that’s what they do.

I’m lucky to have that space in my life.

I’ve had that conversation with myself, like at what point will I be satisfied, how long does it go on.

I’m a beer league writer, I look at pros and I’m not sure I need that.

I’m not tryna have my self worth wrapped up in that. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still out here doing it, I just can’t have who I am totally wrapped in one thing.

Life is like painting a spot, you want an exit strategy. I’m tryna always have one in my back pocket.

Some people come from money and get caught constantly and that’s cheating.

What would you say we’re your worst moments in graff and what we’re your best moments.

Worst moment. Anytime I have to deal with an officer of the law, I hate it every time I don’t want to do it.

It was probably recently, I’ll spill the beans on this. I was found in the liquor store parking lot with spray paint in my bag. To the police it smelled like paint had just been sprayed and they got all aggressive with us, they said “ we just caught you doing graffiti” and I said “no you didn’t!”

To anyone reading this don’t say anything but me I just have to run my mouth.

I told em they didn’t see anything, they called in reinforcement and detained us in the parking lot. I was like bro I am a 30 year old man maybe getting arrest for allegedly doing graffiti on a dumpster in a liquor store parking lot.

This isn’t worth it for the city I live in now. Anyone out here knows me and I’m not worried about clout. That was the worst not because the worst stuff happened but I realized it wasn’t cute for me anymore. In a bigger city maybe it’d be worth it but not where I’m at.

The best moment I have ever had writing graffiti was when me, you, Sam and Lloyd were in Clark yard and we were doodling on trains, it was a beautiful sunny day and we were laughing and joking, I was like this has NO right being illegal. What was happening there in that moment, it was such pure fun.

The other best time was when you, me and Evan stayed up all night after Another Cool Move [Fest] high on mushrooms and watched the sunrise, just endless graffiti for a whole night, we went ape shit that night.

It was so pure, friendship and mischief.

Cause you know what, that’s what it is too this stuff, it’s about mischief to me. It’s not about being a gangster and I think that’s where people get it twisted.

I’m not talking about fools growing up LA or Tomber in infamy growing up in a place you can get shot. I’m mean the average white graffiti writer in Canada. There’s a lot of posturing and I’m not with that. It’s like the fountain of youth for me, every time I do a tag I feel like I’m 14 and it’s the first time again.

2019 GAZM toured the US and although we were already looking at graffiti online, I felt when you came back you brought back us back a new knowledge of the American landscape and its writers.

Tour is such a funny thing, you only see every city for 24 hours or less, usually less. Normally you get in, eat, play the show, go to where you’re staying, wake up and maybe get a little time in the morning to see the city. It’s a hard way to see a city. But it’s a good way to get a snapshot of a country.

I remember Savie was the most up writer in America. I saw more Savie on my trip than anyone else, he had heaven spots all along the highway, you’d see tags too!

Was that the era where Wombat was first putting in work in NYC ?

She was up but she wasn’t where she’s at now. The only fill I ever did in New York was with her! Now she does crazy G street spots!

I saw a lot of Mind Detergent RIP on the tour too.

Being in Oakland in 2019 was unreal, seeing everything I’d see online for real. Seeing Zig Zag and Dirt Nap. Legends like BKF and THR. Seeing spree painting Jery.

Punk graff really got repopularized then too.

It really was taking off again.

I don’t know what happened to Dead Head but I saw a bunch of his stuff too. SF Zoo too! Orfn had passed away and I saw the tribute wall in SF.

New Orleans seeing Beach TCK RIP. TCK was huge for me right as I moved to Montreal. That stuff blew my mind. Some of the single most important things I learned about from graffiti.

You told me you met Roscoe at a show because you shouted out graffiti on stage.

Yeh I met him in Philly, at that show I remember mid set I said “Philly you have one of the best scenes in the whole world!!” It’s still one of my favourite scenes of all time, a place strictly devoted to tagging, how cool! That scene can just spot it if you’re not the real thing.

Philly is sick cause the dominant culture is to know your history.

I wanna shout out a tag that stuck with me forever, you and me have talked about it many times. I don’t know who he is and I’ve never really seen it. In San Francisco in a bathroom this guy who wrote Skae one had tagged the bathroom and I took pictures of every tag.

For me it’s all about style, I am blind to boring graffiti. It falls into the landscape.
This Skae guy I could see one of those tags and it’d be lightning to the brain.

The only spot that counts is your memory!

People get it twisted they come up with the most half-assed throw and they think if they do it 10 million times they’ll be respected but it’s not the case for me.

What are the best/most crushed bathrooms or green rooms you’ve seen?

Massive shoutout to my favourite bar I’ve ever been to in the entire world it’s called Gooski’s in the Polish village in Pittsburg. It was a total dive, you could smoke inside, buy cheap beer and you could get pierogies, it was absolutely crushed in tags and not in some kinda put on way. I saw so many tags, I remember there were Nekst tags in there! That bar is closed now which is quite a shame.

924 Gilman in Berkeley. I saw Orfn tags for the first time, it was crushed there too.

What was the city you were most surprised had an active scene?

St. John's Newfoundland man. I wasn’t even there on tour. I was there on vacation and I was like this is the best city that has existed any where. I couldn’t believe how up people were.