In the 1970s, New York City was a town of reinvention — perhaps even more so than when F. Scott Fitzgerald had written The Great Gatsby, the ultimate reinvention story. The city had nearly gone bankrupt, and services were at a minimum. A phenomenon called “white flight” sent the white middle class packing up and moving to the suburbs, taking the industrial jobs with them. The few jobs left rarely went to blacks and hispanics, and the welfare rolls started climbing. The city streets were strewn with garbage, and graffiti appeared on the sides of its subways, giving the city a look of complete lawlessness.

With all of this dysfunction, New York was still the center of the art world, and a place where anyone could get a studio apartment for $50 bucks a month to make their bid for immortality. And two young kids from Brooklyn did that.

Their names were Al Diaz and Jean-Michel Basquiat. While the latter has been immortalized in history, Diaz's story isn't as prevalent.

Al Diaz originally hailed from the Lower East Side where he grew up in the projects. His family was tight knit, and as a young boy he was sent to private school. The neighborhood still caught up to him, as he said in a recent interview:

The young boy’s cousin lived in Washington Heights and he visited him by subway in the early 1970s. Washington Heights was known as the Mecca of graffiti, and the artistic side of Al Diaz had been piqued. He learned everything he could about the writing culture and began writing in his own neighborhood where there was little competition.

Diaz was a writer’s writer — starting his career as the lowliest toy — before moving on to hitting the insides of trains, and finally, doing the pieces on the outside as Bomb 1.

In 1973, he attended the High School of Art and Design, where he hung out with other writers; including: SJK 171, FLINT, and TRACY 168. The next year the family had had it with the Lower East Side, so they moved to the Kensington neighborhood in Brooklyn where he continued to write.

In the 1970s, Brooklyn was very territorial, with some neighborhoods completely defined by race. It was also cheap. In Boerum Hill, you could still buy a brownstone with a middle-class salary, which is what Gerard Basquiat did when his son was a teenager.

Jean-Michel Basquiat had his own traumatic event as a kid. Aat the age of eight he was hit by a car, and his spleen had to be operated on. To pass the time away his mother bought him a copy of Gray’s Anatomy, a book that became a must-read for surgeons, which he studied voraciously.

Unlike Al Diaz, who grew up in a supportive environment, Basquiat rarely had anything good to say about his home life. He has described his father as abusive, and would point to a scar on his right buttock where he claimed the elder Basquiat had stabbed him. His mother suffered from mental illness and would eventually be put in a sanitarium. As a teenager Jean Michel roamed the streets, looking for the next party.

Both boys flunked out of their respective schools, and found themselves in a new alternative high school called City As School. CAS, as it was known, gave credit to teenagers who utilized the city as a learning environment. A student could intern at the Planetarium and get science credits, or get gym credits from studying with a renowned dance troupe — all leading to a high school diploma. It was very easy going, and most CSA students in the 1970s were all ready promiscuous, and had done their share of drugs. Diaz and Basquiat fit in nicely.

The two budding artists/musicians met at City As School in the Fall of 1976 as they entered the 11 grade. They started hanging out together, smoking weed, and going to parties — particularly art openings where they hijacked all of the booze. Diaz and Basquiat were quietly feeling each other out. They had the same sense of humor. When they handed each other a joint, one would ask; "How is it?" The other would respond, "Samo, Samo," an antiquated expression that meant "Same Old Shit." The response became a ritual and always elicited a giggle from the two.

“It started as a private joke, and then grew.” Basquiat said in an interview.

The two artists began kicking around the idea of SAMO as an alternative religion. CAS was a school without a newspaper. Basquiat and Diaz, with the help of friends, and support from the school created one. The paper featured a comic by Basquiat about a religion called SAMO that would cure whatever spiritually ailed you. This was the first appearance of SAMO, followed by a printed pamphlet that described the religion's philosophy, which they handed out to random people on the street.

In May of 1978, Basquiat and Diaz started to write the name in straight letter graffiti tags on the streets around their school. Diaz, who had gone to Art and Design with subway graffiti writer FLINT, began adding dots after the name, as well as the ubiquitous copyright logo. While they knew they were building buzz, they still didn’t know what for. The two started to write SAMO IS COMING…in a blizzard of tags winding its way towards the Hoyt Schermerhorn train station - the heart of downtown Brooklyn.

The tags that followed stated that SAMO IS HERE….But what was SAMO? SAMO would turn out to be a series of aphorisms written throughout lower Manhattan thatmocked the upper-class, and basically anything that came out of the “man in the grey flannel suit” structure of today’s society.

Diaz once quoted it as “teenage angst,” a way of hitting back at everything the two deemed as the status quo. The artists works really took off in June of 1978 as Al Diaz graduated from CAS, and Basquiat dropped out. Diaz lived with his girlfriend, while Basquiat crashed at various friends apartments. The two walked through lower Manhattan, most notably the Lower East Side, and SOHO, leaving messages everywhere they went. Some of them could be two stories high, written quickly in spray paint.

Some of the newer messages were: 

SAMO AS AN ALTERNATIVE TO GOD 

SAMO 4 MASS MEDIA MINDWASH 

There were larger messages that posed questions like: 

WHICH OF THE FOLLOWING IS OMNIPRESENT?

[ ] LEE HARVEY OSWALD

[ ] COCA-COLA LOGO

[ ] GENERAL MELONRY

[ ] SAMO……

By late 1978, SAMO had become a barometer of cool to those that knew about it. It was seemingly everywhere, yet few people knew who the young artists were. Al Diaz, with his old school graffiti instincts, didn’t want people to know. It could bring trouble from the law, as well as context behind the sayings, which he felt should stand on their own. Basquiat craved the possibility of new found fame, and it should come as no surprise that many of his best tags were found in SOHO, the art capital of the world.

For graffiti writers in the New York City subway movement, one way to get fame was to have a picture of your work accidentally pop up in the newspaper. Writers would cut the photo out and stick it into their piece books. It was probably no different for Diaz and Basquiat, when the Soho Weekly News published pictures of their work, and then asked the general public who they were. At this point, the press wanted to meet them, and once again Diaz was reticent. He finally gave in when the pair were approached by the Village Voice, and offered a small amount of money for their story. The article appeared on December 11, 1978, and made Basquiat and Diaz even bigger celebrities.

For Diaz, the jig was up. There was a beginning, middle, and ending to the SAMO story, and the Voice signified the end. Basquiat wanted to use it to make inroads into the art world, he would go on to have three small shows under the name SAMO. SAMO could never be one person, it was created by the pair and held the DNA of both artists, for Diaz it was insulting that Basquiat would use the name without him. The two friends fought about it constantly, eventually drifting apart.

Basquiat, perhaps sensing the friction he had created, or, more cynically, cleaning himself up for the art world, he killed off SAMO in a series of highly visible tags that read: SAMO IS DEAD. In less than two years the duo had generated more buzz - more importantly “cool buzz” - than any Madison Avenue ad agency could’ve dreamed of. They were two teenagers coming of age in a city that was merciless, and they conquered it. 

Al Diaz went on to become a musician during the 1980s, while Jean Michel Basquiat went on to legendary heights in the art world. In 2015, Diaz resurrected the name SAMO, and began a series of new works that continue to this day.