Lord Pawn balances his graffiti writing roots with his current life as a professional artist

I must have been about 9 years old when I practically shat my pants from my first real world run-in with street graffiti, or at least what my young mind imagined street graffiti to be at the time.

My brother and I were walking home from school in our cozy Elk Grove-bordering neighborhood when we turned a corner and instantly saw five big distorted letters plastered on the adjacent fence next to us.

Dripping in what seemed like only hours-old red spray paint, the looming letters looked something like this:

To this day, I’m still not sure if that sloppily written message was saying Fuck U, or simply telling me to beware of FuckO, the newest graffiti boy on the block.

Frankly, it didn’t really matter; what I saw bothered me. Images of older, meaner kids roaming around my neighborhood with spray cans ran through my head as I pictured myself having to deal with one or all of them somewhere in the near future.

My childhood got a good gut check that day over what turned out to be nothing more than a one-time amateur tag job. What I witnessed was most likely done by a first-timer who might have just gotten a hold of his first can of spray paint and wanted to let loose on the nozzle for a thrill that, for some, only a canister of color and aerosol can offer.

Twenty-eight-year-old Sacramento graffiti artist Ryan Kroger, who officially paints under the name Lord Pawn, knows that feeling all too well.

Growing up all over Northern California and eventually settling in Sacramento, Pawn says he’s been painting for as long as he can remember.

“It’s something that I loved to do and I just figured it out on my own,” he says. “And honestly, I don’t paint the way you’re really supposed to because I don’t really follow the rules that I was taught in school… I feel like with art, you can kind of break the rules sometimes.”

Pawn says he remembers the days when he too was just a punk kid running around with a skateboard in one hand and a marker pen in the other. It wasn’t long, though, before he discovered spray paint and began writing his graffiti name on any surface he could get his can on.

As he grew older, Pawn ran with a few different graffiti crews in town, going where he wanted and tagging what he wanted. But it wasn’t until he got with Ain’t Life Beautiful (ALB) and, eventually, accepted into the world renowned Legends of Rare Designs (LORDS) that he started to slow down a bit.

“I feel like it’s something I did in the past, and sort of something everyone has to go through at one point,” he says. “So I mean, like, I do miss it, ‘cause there’s nothing more fun than running out on the freeway and bombing stuff. But, I guess I just can’t really do that anymore.”

It’s true. Not only is Pawn well beyond his juvenile years, but he is also a professional artist now—in spray paint and acrylics—with a reputation to maintain and commissions to lock down.

“At least in this town, I’m getting murals and stuff like that,” he says of his recent work flow. “And I don’t want to be someone the cops are after or anything.”

Pawn says he’s been fortunate enough to secure work consistently over the past few years, painting mostly character murals for companies like Red Bull, Technine, Tropicana, Sacramento Mustang and even the Sacramento Kings.

He also does residential and commercial murals for smaller businesses, like a close-up piece he did of a girl’s face for Dabstix—a smoke shop in Roseville—about a year-and-a-half ago.

Ironically, sometimes even graffiti abatement programs will hire him to spray paint over an entire wall in hopes of deterring other taggers from constantly ruining it. Apparently, the backwards strategy works.

“So they’ll pay for me to put a mural on [a wall], and the kids will respect it—they won’t go and tag it anymore,” Pawn says. “Then the business doesn’t have to pay to paint over it every week. So it’s like a good thing for everybody.”

As focused as Pawn has been on his successful painting career lately, he says he still gets the itch to the hit the streets every now and then when his days get to be a little too mundane.

“Sometimes it’s good to be in a grimy place,” he says. “I’ve seen some crazy stuff just going and painting… You get stories out of it all; you’re going on adventures.”

Pawn says some of the best graffiti is done under the radar, usually in the cuts of any given city. Even now, he doesn’t take issue with painting in these remote areas, so long as it’s out of the way and not hurting anyone.

“You’re sort of out where nobody else goes. You explore a little bit, find a spot you can paint and you don’t have to be clean necessarily,” he explains. “You can just go and do it. And then you leave something beautiful behind that’s pretty. And people have to find it for themselves.”

At this point in his life, Pawn has struck a good balance between grime and convention.

While he says he’s mainly interested in traveling the world to pursue a legitimate art profession from here on out, he’ll still find himself at rail yards at times painting massive concept projects on train cars with at least one other fellow writer—what he and other graffiti artists call themselves.

Pawn says he knows the consequences of painting over trains, which can become a federal offense if they go over state lines.
“If you get caught, you can get in a lot of trouble,” he says. “But I don’t know. It’s like, to me, it’s sort of something that I’m willing to risk because it’s not like… you’re not a real criminal. You know? You’re not stealing, you’re not hurting anyone. It’s artwork.”

Pawn’s personal time isn’t always spent out painting the town red, however. He’ll actually stay home pretty often to work on more detailed pieces that he eventually puts up for sale.

In fact, his very first art show was held this past Saturday, Nov. 8, at The Bench Art Supply and Gallery on 12th Street, where more than 20 original pieces—some acrylic, some spray paint—were on display and up for grabs to the public.

Prices went as low as $25 for prints to $5,000 for original works. His $5,000 piece—a 72-by-24-inch acrylic painting he spent a whole year working on—had already sold before the night’s end.

Pawn says he wants to do more art shows—not just for himself, but for the Sacramento art scene as a whole, which he thinks has potential to flourish.

“I think that there’s a lot to offer in Sacramento, but there’s just not that much of an art scene here, and there could be,” he says. “It’d be cool to start having some bigger artists coming through this city.”

Whether he stays in Sacramento to turn the art culture around or heads overseas to further his career, Pawn is sure to bring something new and exciting to the table in whatever scene he becomes a part of.

It’s funny how someone who produces such gigantic, surreal works of art can sport such a small name. But Pawn thinks it suits him.

“For me, it’s more of like a humble thing, you know? Because everybody wants to be a king, and really, we’re all just kind of like pawns—we’re the peasants,” he says. “There’s a saying that goes like, ‘The pawn is the most powerful chess player on the board,’ or something like that. Just because there’s many of you.”

Lord Pawn’s show at The Bench Art Supply and Gallery, located at 906 12th Street in Sacramento, runs now through Nov. 22, so if you haven’t gotten there to see it, we urge you to hurry it up! While you’re at it, follow Lord Porn on Instagram @PawnPaint. That’s what the cool kids are doing.

Sacramento’s Ideateam puts their spin on influences new and old

Anyone ever asked to step up to a classroom-style white board to write down some answer they didn’t know probably had an abridged Hail Mary prayer running through their head, hoping that a light bulb would go off and save them from the painfully drawn-out scene soon to follow. Even without the pressure of a time limit and a group of judging eyes upon him, 26-year-old guitar player Justin Butler still found himself at the mercy of an empty white board late one night after returning to the studio from an explosive two live sets he had just finished playing with his newly formed Sacramento funk band, Ideateam.

Luckily for him, though, the light bulb he needed went off at just the right time.

“I remember wiping it all the way clean, and it was just a blank board,” he says of the band’s rehearsal set list at the time. “And for whatever reason that concept came to me at that point. And it was fitting.”

Butler is referring to three symbols he thought of in that moment of reflection, which, coupled with the then-million-dollar question facing Ideateam, ultimately became the name of their debut album: And What Now (&!?).

Nearly two years later and after some key new additions to the group (mainly in the horn and percussion sections), the nine-man ensemble has finally picked a release date for their long-awaited project, to be held on Oct. 31, 2014, at Harlow’s, an album premiere party and live performance alongside local acts ZuhG and James Cavern and the Council.

While this would be their official inaugural show for the album, the upcoming Harlow’s gig is far from Ideateam’s first rodeo.

Even before completing And What Now (&!?), Butler and fellow guitar player/bandmate Tim Snoke say they’ve been playing live fairly consistently for the past year. Whereas they used to think two gigs a month was busy enough, now they say they’re having to turn down offers because of how booked they are already.

“It’s one of those things where you don’t want to sound full of yourself or anything, but people continually say things that blow me away more and more,” Butler says. “When you have a good friend of yours who also happens to be a musician, and they tell you you’re their favorite band in town, that does something to me. That’s a really humbling thing to be told.”

The reason behind their bubbling reputation could lie in the unique sound Ideateam brings to the table, says Tim Snoke.

“There’s like a groove-based music [here], but there’s kind of a flavor that we retain that I don’t see a lot of other groups doing around town,” he says. Snoke also believes groove and dance-based music is making a “turnaround in this area” and that people are starting to embrace funk as a comeback genre again.

Drawing inspiration from artists new and old from Mandrill and the Meters to more contemporary bands like Orgone and Lettuce, Ideateam’s music resonates like a nice mashup of classic funk and soul with sprinkles of Latin jazz and even nuances of reggae thrown into the mix.

“I’ve heard it described before as a pretty powerful sound,” Butler says. “I mean, it’s heavy.”

While both guitarists agree that much of their success thus far is of their own doing, they also say their friends in the Sacramento music scene—which is pretty tight-knit, according to Butler—have been a huge help by letting them open for different bands in the area and build a name for themselves.

“I would just like to say for the record, we have really awesome friends who have been super generous that we’ve just known in the music community here,” Snoke says.

“We definitely had some people champion for us,” Butler adds.

As polished as Ideateam sounds on their studio record—where each instrument was tracked individually and layered as opposed to recording one group take at a time—Butler and Snoke say seeing the band live is truly an experience to behold in its own right.

“It’s different,” they both say simultaneously.

“[Us] live, there’s a different energy happening for sure that’s a little more… I wouldn’t say more, but there’s a different sauce on there,” Snoke says.

“There’s some more hot sauce,” Butler adds with a smirk, finishing his bandmate’s thought.

On stage, Ideateam’s lineup consists of a three-man rhythm section, two on percussion and three on horns with one extra member, Garrett Wildgust, contributing vocals every now and then.

Butler and Snoke are on the guitars, Kyle Pulskamp plays bass, Joe Carusi handles the drums, Mark Miller and Chris Ryan manage the saxophones while Josh Cambridge toots the trombone, and Mike Ruiz—the madman of auxiliary percussion—taps on and shakes up an array of instruments to fill in the pockets of any given song.

The band has performed as far north as Chico and as far south as San Francisco at the Boom Boom Room blues club on Fillmore Street.

A typical Ideateam set will feature a couple songs from their album (which are practically ancient to the team nowadays), a few new songs they’re prepping for their upcoming project and then some even newer material that they’re just starting to refine now. They’ll also play some B-side covers for all the crate diggers who are wise to the hidden gems of those funk and soul classics.

“I kind of like that there’s going to be those few people out there that when we do play those more deep cuts that they’re like, ‘Oh yeah!’ ‘Cause I’m that guy at a concert,” Snoke says.

Although Ideateam has only played regionally as of late, Snoke and Butler say they’d love to take the band on a West Coast tour starting up in Washington and going down to Southern California. Realistically, however, Butler says an effort like that will take some thorough planning for a band of this size.

“Truth be told, our real restrictions are our day jobs,” he says. “Otherwise we probably would have gotten out of town already and just done it.”

Their jobs range from Farm to Fork restaurant chef to delicatessen worker to professional musicians. Butler and Snoke work together at an E-commerce company mediating online transactions for vendors in the hardware and lighting fixture industry. It figures that at least a couple of Ideateam members would be dealing a lot with light bulbs on a day-to-day basis.

Still, even with their daily life limitations, Butler and Snoke are trying to stay optimistic about their musical futures.

Being grounded in the now and looking further down the road is a balance Ideateam constantly has to wrestle with. Making that leap into full-time musicianship is something they’re open to but also cautious about at the same time.

Snoke says he would love to see that happen one day but that mainly he’s focused on the dynamic of the band right now and evolving their music.

Butler says he agrees with Snoke in that regard. Yet, he also says a decision on Ideateam’s future will have to be made eventually.

“I foresee us approaching a fork in the road at some point next year where we’re going to kind of have to look around us and be like, ‘OK, we’re investing an incredible amount of energy times eight, times nine. What are we doing?” he asks.

Alas, the crucial question still stands for Ideateam: And what now?

As a young and up-and-coming band with so much momentum behind them, it’ll be interesting to see where they take it from here. So long as they stick to their funky jams and keep the feel-good music coming, I have a feeling they’ll always have a place here in Sacramento. Or wherever they end up going, for that matter.

It’s not just a CD release party, it’s Halloween at Harlow’s Oct. 31, 2014! To quote ZuhG’s facebook invite, “It’s time for Sacramento to get a freaky dose of spookygroove, so pop those eyeballs out and get your skull prepared to be electrified.” Doors for this 21-and-over show are at 8 p.m., with a $12 cover. Celebrate Ideateam’s CD release along with ZuhG and James Cavern and the Council, and stick around for the costume contest. For more info, visit Facebook.com/ideateamband.

Andy Allo
Concerts in the Park, Cesar Chavez Plaza, Sacramento
Friday, June 20, 2014

In this era of music when so many genres are constantly being mixed and mashed, and then remixed and re-mashed, it’s refreshing to hear a throwback artist every now and then who embodies a pure, timeless sound without all the distracting fluff and noise prevalent in today’s mainstream.

Sacramento fortunately has such an artist to call its own: the afro-rocking Prince protégé Andy Allo who is one-part funk, one-part acoustic, but all soul.

Raised in Citrus Heights and attending college-prep schools near the Arden-Arcade area through her teenage years, Allo got her start by forming a band in town called Andy Allo and the Traffic Jam and eventually played a solo gig at an open mic at Fox and Goose on R Street.

Since then her career has been spiraling upward after putting out two independent albums, making appearances on talk shows like Jimmy Kimmel Live! and Good Day Sacramento, and touring with Prince’s band, The New Power Generation, as one of his singers and guitarists. Allo collaborated on a few songs with the pop icon as well, some of which appear on her second album Superconductor, released in 2012.

The co-produced album by Prince, prompted a European tour with an extra stop in Japan—a trip Allo just got back from the day before her recent arrival to Sacramento.

Allo came home Friday, June 20, 2014, to headline a live show as part of Downtown Sacramento Partnership’s Concerts in the Park 2014 season—a series of free weekly concerts of local bands and musicians held annually from early May to late July at Cesar Chavez Plaza.

Three bands opened for Allo with DJ Sam I Jam spinning records in between performances.

The other bands included the Delta City Ramblers, the Harbor and Contra, who each brought eclectic elements to the table—and subsequently to the show as a whole—according to Play Big Sacramento booking committee member Danny Secretion.

Allo said she tries to come back to Sacramento as often as she can for her hometown fans, having just been in the area in November for an acoustic show at Assembly Music Hall on K Street.

“I’ve been traveling a lot,” she says. “But yeah when I have downtime, I try to get shows like this and come back and show some love. This is where it all started.”

After about five or six songs in, Contra’s set came to an end with a respectful applause from the audience who were dispersed throughout the plaza. Once Allo was announced to come on next, however, a modest wave of people migrated to the front, making the area a bit more congested than it had been for Contra.

While the three opening acts were comprised of four to six members at a time, Allo pieced a smaller band together—one drummer playing bongos and a bass drum, and one electric guitarist—for a much more scaled-down, intimate show.

She took center stage with her acoustic guitar in one hand and gripped the microphone with the other, receiving a warm welcome from the crowd as she introduced herself in a brief prologue to her set.

Then, she dove head-first right into the music.

Opening with the short but catchy interlude “Sometimes” from her first album UnFresh, Allo immediately had the crowd’s attention as she glided on the bouncy rhythm with her sweet, gentle voice.

She followed up with “When Stars Collide,” a song similar in tone and energy, but coming off her second album Superconductor. During the bridge, Allo weaved in the hook from Drakes’ “Hold on We’re Going Home” perfectly to fit her melody and then transitioned right back into her original lyrics without missing a beat.

The rest of the show pretty much followed that format the rest of the way, jumping from album to album with a couple of Bob Marley and Doobie Brothers covers in between. Her set consisted of tracks such as “I Want Love,” “If I Was King,”“Hooked,” “People Pleaser” and perhaps her biggest hit, “Yellow Gold.”

Allo consistently demonstrated her showmanship onstage with callbacks, clap-alongs, and even some prewritten/freestyle bars sprinkled into some of the more boom-bap songs, like “I Want Love” and “Hooked.”

Although Allo’s set was super up-close-and personal, which I loved, I couldn’t help but feel she didn’t do some of her bigger songs justice with such a small band.

The album versions of “Yellow Gold” and “People Pleaser” sound rich in production with a variety of instruments bringing these tracks completely to life. The live versions that night, while still good, were lacking the extra punch from the album—almost like they were stripped of their full musical power.

At the end of the day though, her performances made for a solid, all-around feel good show, and you could tell the audience was vibing with the ever-graceful Allo every step of the way.

Ms. Allo left the stage around a quarter to 9 p.m. to a very pleased crowd who sent her off with a long round of applause.

People began to disperse from Cesar Chavez Plaza shortly after and seemed glad to have caught a free glimpse of the soulful Sacramento native right before her career truly takes off to a whole new level.

YG, DJ Mustard
Ace of Spades, Sacramento • Tuesday, May 20, 2014

If the name YG doesn’t perfectly ring a bell and summon the image of a tall, skinny completely-tatted-from-the-torso-up MC from Compton, California, I don’t really blame you.

Unless you’re a regular hip-hop head or a longtime fan, it probably just sounds like another rapper confusable with other big names in the game—Tyga, Ty Dolla Sign, Yo Gotti, etc.—who might have had a club song you heard at one time which somehow became your go-to banger on your iPod one summer.

In case you need a refresher, YG is the “Toot It and Boot It” guy, but boy has he come a long way since then.

Whether you’ve realized it or not, YG the Young Gangsta has been putting out hits ever since his fame skyrocketed back in 2010. Most recently, he’s been getting a lot of airplay from his two newer singles “My Nigga” and “Who Do You Love?” off of his first studio album My Krazy Life, released March 18 of this year.

Following the release of the album, the Compton native has been on the road for his nationwide My Krazy Life Tour, having stopped by the capital city this past Tuesday, May 20, to pay his Sacramento fans a visit. Ace of Spades hosted two shows for Mr. G, both of which sold out long before the day of. Fans showed up by the hundreds (or should I say hunnids?) to see the West Coast icon perform.

I attended the second show that night, and I’m happy to say the experience—or at least YG’s set—was about the most fun I’ve had at a concert in a while.

It all started as I turned onto R Street at around 6:30 p.m. and noticed an already long line forming across the street from Ace of Spades, slowly creeping its way over to 14th.

By 6:45 p.m., the crowd from the first show was escorted out and security steadily ushered in the newcomers in waves.

Soon enough, everyone had flocked inside and gotten themselves settled, with people starting to squirm left and right in the sardine-like packed room. It wasn’t until about 8 p.m.—an hour after the show was scheduled to start—that the first of five openers took the stage and officially kicked things off.

With none of the openers being formally announced ahead of time, it seemed like they were just some unknowns filling in slots until DJ Mustard—YG’s beat partner in crime—could make an entrance and really spark some excitement.

Mustard shuffled through his playlist that featured songs such as Tyga’s “Rack City,” French Montana’s “Ain’t Worried About Nothin’” and Kendrick Lamar’s “M.A.A.d City,” at which point his goons came out and unloaded on the audience with Super Soakers. The crowd absolutely loved the gesture, desperately needing a boost from having to wait through so many uninspired opening acts.

After the water gun hijinx, a set piece was unveiled onstage resembling the facade of a suburban-looking house straight out of a hood in Compton—tagged up and all.

As the lights came down, the music for YG’s opening track “BPT” started to play. Everybody’s camera was raised high in anticipation ready to record, until finally YG stormed the stage through the house’s front door barking the lines, “Nigga I’m from BPT!” as everyone chanted with him and cheered.

The tone for the show was pretty much set after that. YG rifled through his set with a medley of songs from the album including, “I Just Wanna Party,” “Bicken Back Being Bool,” “Bompton” and “Really Be (Smokin N Drinkin),” not once losing an ounce of energy along the way.

He even touched on some older material from his mixtapes with songs like “B I T C H,” “Bitches Ain’t Shit,” “You Broke” and, of course, his hits “Up” and “Toot It and Boot It,” getting the entire room to dance and sing along.

Though his set was mostly wired with up-tempo dance beats, YG also had some surprisingly slower moments with songs such as “1AM,” “Me and My Bitch,” and a very intimate performance of “Sorry Momma.” These songs were a nice change of pace in the rotation, and very much appreciated by the crowd while they clapped out some of the beats and listened closely as he went a cappella a few times.

But in true YG fashion, the Young Gangsta couldn’t stay quiet for too long. Some of the show’s most notable moments were when he was at his most hyped: calling girls on stage, heading down into the front row, getting two girls to flash him and perhaps best of all, taking an Instagram picture with us as a final send-off.

YG finished his set with his two hottest singles, starting with “My Nigga” and closing with his verse from “Who Do You Love?” The echo of the crowd reciting that final verse with him could still be heard ringing even after everyone made their way out of Ace of Spades’ doors.