ORIGIN

       In the summer of 1993 my friend Robert told me he wanted to start writing Graffiti and asked me if I wanted to start with him. I said “ok so what do we do?” He said first you have to get yourself a tag name. I was listening to a lot of Lords of the Underground (LOTU) and Brand Nubian (Lord Jamal) at the time so I chose to write LORD-J. Yes with the dash. I wasn’t feeling the dash plus Robert’s older sister kept calling me LARD-J. Even though I was a toothpick it offended me and I figured that was a sign it was a corny name. Nevertheless me and Robert went out that night and I hit my first tag on a mailbox by his house. I was instantly addicted. The “Chief Rocka” video by LOTU had just come out and I thought CHIEF, there it is. I would go upstairs to where my brother CRANE, who was one of the most prolific writers from Paterson, would make me a letter every day for me to practice with. So I started to construct the name CHIEF but again I wasn’t feeling it. The “F” wasn’t a good fit as the last letter and usually you could add an “ER “ to your name to change it up sometimes so “ CHIEFER” wasn’t cutting it either. So I look in my Thesaurus because I still liked what CHIEF stood for. The first synonym that was listed was PREMIER. It immediately felt right. It had the “ER” and the end, it was perfectly symmetrical with the “M” as the middle letter, and the definition meant “The First or Best” so what could be better. Totally geeked that I had found my tag name, I showed my brother and he immediately said “It’s too long, the cops will catch you before you even finish the the last R.”