This week marked ten years since The Hundreds collaborated with one of the titans of pop art, Ron English. A whole decade. That collaboration was huge, as it saw some of English’s most iconic creations make their debut in the streetwear world on pieces that have become grails to many collectors around the world.

But one of those characters, Smiley, has been given new life recently as part of the 25,000-strong Adam Bomb Squad. Renamed as Grin Adam to align with the new format, this iconic Bomb brought up a lot of memories for longtime The Hundreds and Ron English aficionados and introduced a whole new generation of fans to his eccentric art.

Ron English’s Grin series is expansive and has seen the artist riff on virtually every major pop culture icon of the past century, from Mickey Mouse to Mr. McDonald. There is something so simple yet sinister about the series, turning traditionally cute and innocent characters into something… else. English’s take on our mascot Adam Bomb sits framed on the wall of The Hundreds Homebase and is a centerpiece of every tour we give new visitors to HQ. Last year, when we produced the show Greatest Hits on The Hundreds TV and highlighted vintage The Hundreds gear, all three T-shirts we featured from the Ron English collaboration sold out in mere seconds.

So, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that English’s Grin Adam is one of the most highly coveted Bombs in ABS. There are just 17 Grin Adams in existence, and only seven of them are currently listed for sale, with an average list price of 75 ETH aka $315,000. If you’re racked up like that and want to get into the Grin Adam game, the floor is relatively low at 5 ETH for the time being. But we imagine someone is going to put that tissue paper-handed holder out of his or her misery pretty soon, as the next cheapest Grin is 15 ETH.

This 10-year anniversary was a great opportunity to dig through the archives and relive that monumental drop, where Bobby visited Ron at his studio to shoot him in his element and English pulled up to The Hundreds Santa Monica for a meet-and-greet and signing. There was a line around the block filled with fans hoping to snag pieces from the collection and a signed print from English himself. Ron was extremely gracious with his time that day and was even doing custom drawings for some people in line.

Ten years later, English is bigger than ever, continuing to make art, music, and toys that bring an immense amount of joy to millions worldwide. And tomorrow, he embarks on a new journey into the metaverse, releasing his own 10,000 piece NFT project called Light Cult Crypto Club. All 17 Grin Adam holders were airdropped a free Light Cult Bulb and all 8,000+ ABS holders were granted exclusive whitelist access to mint Bulbs before the general population has access on Thursday, November 18.

I caught up with Ron English to discuss his new NFT project, artist autonomy in the crypto age, and the legacy of Grin Adam.

BREADMAN: When did you get into NFTs and who put you onto them?
RON ENGLISH: The first half of last year, and it was Jordan Bratman. The Bratman brothers. Big Hollywood guys. They called me up and said, “Man, we gotta get you on this Nifty Gateway.” They were gonna give me July. And I said I’d like to do it sooner. And then they gave me March. But you know, I wasn’t ready to do it. I’m not a digital artist. [Laughs] So basically, I had three weeks to launch. But luckily, I’ve created a lot of stuff digitally for the toys, so I called in all of that stuff and then we animated it. I like having an extreme deadline. You know, if you paid attention to it back then, the quicker you got into it, the more money you made. So if you made like 5 million, if you would have done it three weeks earlier, you would have made 10 million. And if you would have done it six weeks earlier, you would have made… you know what I mean, the clock was ticking down very fast on that aspect of it.

What made you want to do an NFT project? What do you like about this space and this technology?
All I think about is art, and it’s hard for me to have any consciousness of anything else. So why would I want to do an NFT? Well, the whole parallel of my art career, I’ve always made music. And it’s been a kind of a side thing, and I’ve never worried that much about it. I think maybe we sold 12,000 of Popaganda and maybe just 7,000 of Revelations Book Two. And, you know, they’re fantastic pieces, we put a lot of effort into them. But because it’s a side thing, it never bothered me that not that very many people actually know about that aspect of it. This was a way to finally bring it all together. And also, I have all of these characters, and people have heard them sing on the records, but they haven’t seen them move or anything so this created a space for me to bring this stuff to life. I’ve been waiting for the metaverse my whole life and now it’s being created so this is the most perfect space for me to be.

You’re still early! And honestly, you were way ahead of your time with this stuff, as many of the weird characters we’re seeing dominate the NFT space remind me of a lot of things you’ve made, things like Delusionville and the Grin series. Do you wish this technology was around earlier?
I don’t know, it’s kind of weird. I’ve ridden a lot of waves. In the late 70s, I caught the fabricated-to-be-photographed wave, kind of by accident. And then I caught the East Village Scene. And then I caught the lowbrow scene. And then I caught the pop surrealism scene. And then I caught the street art scene. And now I’m riding the NFT wave. So I feel like half the waves I was instrumental in creating. But you have to create them. And you also have to ride them. To have a whole six-decade-long career is not easy. If you think about bands who have done it for that long, it’s like The Rolling Stones and who else?

It’s incredibly impressive. And you’ve been able to adapt while also maintaining your voice consistently. When you create these characters, how much backstory do you like to give them, or do you prefer to let fans fill in the blanks somewhat?
I would say 200 of them have intense backstories and personalities. And then after that, they just become relatives of the other ones. So it’s kind of like, you know who I am and you know about me but I have cousins and sisters and brothers and uncles. At some point, I’ll have to start giving some of them more of a story, I guess. But I liked it. The one we’re working on now, you have 10,000 images, which is kind of fun. I just wanted to push my brain until it felt like it was about to fall out the side of my head.

What were some of the most challenging parts of creating this Light Cult Crypto Club project?
Having endless ideas. And that’s always the challenge. That’s kind of my ecstasy. You start off your life with like 10 ideas and they’re precious. And then as soon as you get them out, then they get replaced with 30 ideas. And then once you do the 30 ideas, that gets replaced with 60 ideas, the 60 ideas get replaced with 100 ideas, and it’s exponential, you know, to the point where your brain just churns out ideas all day long. And it was interesting with this because the computer’s kind of doing the same thing you do. I mean, not as well but it’s kind of recombining things into new ideas. How to work with computer energy was a challenge. To think my partner, is a robot, right? The robots can also be pretty mean but I make them work for me.

How important has this NFT movement been for artists as far as taking back ownership of their work?
You see Rosenquist or one of those guys sell at auction for incredible amounts of money. But, you know, they only got 700 bucks for it. And now it’s at $5 million. So whoever bought it from me made way more money than I did, for sure. And I don’t get a taste of that. And one of the huge reasons art is more valuable is because I keep having more and more shows and more and more magazine interviews and I’m the one that’s making this bigger and bigger and bigger. You take the artist out of the equation and nobody would have cared about those paintings. So there was this huge frustration among artists. Everybody’s patting you on the back like, “Oh, you sold a painting for $2 million at auction, dude. Yay!” But I can’t be that happy about it because I didn’t get any of that. But now with NFTs in the equation, if they decide to flip it and take their earnings, you get a little taste of that so it’s more fun for everyone.

You’ve always been an advocate for free speech and decentralization, flipping the messaging of major corporations on their head with billboards and other work. What do you think of companies like Disney and McDonald’s jumping into the NFT arena?
Well, even before it kicked off, at the last Art Basel, Sotheby’s and everybody, people that normally would never stand in front of a crowd, more behind-the-scenes people, from the museums to the auction houses were holding conferences in front of crowds. And so it reminded me very much of the record industry when Napster came out. I used to work with a lot of guys in records, and a lot of my clients were big record executives, they would buy lots of paintings off of me. So I hung around those guys a lot. One of the guys showed me a memo, it’s like 70 pages long in all caps and exclamation points. They were freaking out, and they were about to lose control. Because the only way to get the music before was you had to buy a piece of plastic from them. They were making money hand over fist, and it suddenly looked like they were about to lose their ability to make that money. They were in complete panic mode. And that was the vibe at Art Basel two years back. Everybody knew this was about to happen. And we better figure this stuff out now. And they kind of did, I think about when Beeple used an auction house. He wouldn’t have gotten $69 million on his own. They pulled together a more intensive clientele to back it. Things are always changing. And as soon as they start changing very fast, that’s the most exciting time because you know it is going to be very different six months from now.

Is music the next space to be disrupted by NFT technology?
Yes, music is next. And it’s funny because I started this new music project about six years ago now. And I kind of tend towards being cocky, sometimes I try to keep it in check. But I can be very full of myself and all my friends in the music industry aren’t making any money, you know? People that were really making money before are making zero money now. And even if you sell like 200,000 hits or have 5 million plays on Spotify, you get like 150 cents, you know, it’s not even worth the postage. And I think, somebody’s gotta figure out a way for musicians to make money again. And if there’s gonna be a way, I’ll figure it out. And now, you know, our band is negotiating with different people and we’re gonna get a record deal and make a lot of money. It took a while to figure out, like how it was all gonna come down, but it’s happening. And so I guess I was kind of right. But it’s great because everybody’s been struggling for so long.

Do you see a future for record labels?
Yeah. Spotify figured out how to make all the money after it all went digital. So right now, for the next couple of years, artists will make a lot of money. And then the record labels will hire very smart people to figure out how to get back in the middle of all that. So I’m sure they probably will, but maybe they won’t, I don’t know. But this is the window. The ball’s in our court right now.

How are the metaverse and things like Discord changing how an artist like you engages with their fans?
Well, it’s a lot more intense. We’re trying to build a system now that acknowledges our fans and gives them agency over people who’ve just figured out who we are. It’s a lot of hard work but we want to give a lot to people that were early adaptors and make sure that they always get first play on things we do. We’re trying to build a community of our most loyal fans that will be rewarded in ways other people won’t have access to. You’re gonna be able to hang out with people that are more into what you’re into, and not have to feel like a freak anymore.

You said earlier that you don’t consider yourself a digital artist. How have your recent web3 projects changed your process and how you view your own work?
Yeah, I think at this point I’m a digital artist. [Laughs] But I have to work with other people, which is good. I mean, the music is the same thing. It taught me to work with other people. And the work was really phenomenal, great people. And you can really do great stuff if you have great people on your team. Right now we have our little team and everybody’s killer. Everybody’s a genius. You know, that’s kind of what Banksy did. He put together six people, and every one of them had their part. And every one of them was a genius. Everyone was just stunningly brilliant at what they did. And it became this global phenomenon.

Can you tell me a little bit about Light Cult Crypto Club? You guys are getting ready to mint tomorrow, what should people know about this project and these characters you’ve created?
Well, I came up with a couple of things and it’s kind of funny because you can’t do crypto punks anymore, you can’t even do anything with two words anymore, because everything is taken. So I had kept trying out different things until I could come up with something with four words because then you can make something original and you can copyright. And so I came up with a couple of different things and then my son came down and he’s actually been shepherding this project because he just got out of financial school. And I asked him if his teachers talk a lot about NFTs and cryptocurrency. He said they don’t know anything about it, and I thought that was messed up. This is the biggest exchange of money in the history of the world. They don’t know anything about it? They’re financial guys. So I told him instead of going out into the world, why don’t you just work with us for a year on some of this NFT stuff, and you’ll walk into the world a rich man instead of, you know, having to start at the bottom like everybody else. So he looked at all my different concepts and said, that’s the one. Light Cult Crypto Club. And then it was based around the aura images, a light bulb, which represents having an idea. I came up with 1000 unique ones and then we used a computer to generate the next 9000 by creating puzzle pieces that went together in different ways.

Wow, so what’s it been like working with your son on this project? It’s interesting that you both attack it from different sides, art and finance.
He has a completely different mind than me. He’s absolutely a completely different person than me. He likes finance. He likes sports. He knows everything about Logan Paul. I didn’t know who Logan Paul was. And I find a lot of people my age when I hang out with them are just completely clueless about anything that’s happening right now. You have to have young people on your team, or it’s not gonna happen. So it works really well. It’s kind of interesting to think that, in a weird way, I’m his employee. It’s kind of like he’s running the project. And he’s lucky enough to have signed a famous artist.