STELLA NAIR It was actually very much a multiethnic group that followed him, at the same time when there’s clear rhetoric about ethnicity and nationhood. For Túpac Amaru II, anybody could follow him with the understanding that they’re going to kick out the Spanish and the Incas are going to take back over.
CHUCK WALKER His name means that he had ties to the Incas—that is, the leaders of the Incas—who were the very developed civilization that were there when the Spanish came and conquered in the sixteenth century. He had Inca bloodlines, which are really important because it gave him a lot of prestige. The people in Peru, then and even today, still venerate the Incas.
He was a very well-educated guy, bilingual in Spanish and Quechua, the indigenous Inca language, which is the most spoken indigenous language today in the Americas. He was a really interesting guy because he could fit anywhere in society. He went out in the countryside chewing coca leaves, speaking Quechua with the indigenous people, but he was invited into the houses of the elite in Cusco. They would have talked to him about the news. He apparently knew Latin pretty well. So the context was growing taxes, growing tensions, exploitation, but then also his own ability to sort of put together a project, saying, We’re going to bring back the Incas, but we’re also going to keep the Catholic Church. Crazy stuff that who knows how it would have worked out in the end.
III
KENDRICK WELLS Back in the late eighties, early nineties, there were basically two or three pockets of Black communities in Marin County. The biggest pocket was Marin City, which was predominantly Black, and they had, like, these tall buildings, which were housing projects, and then they had these lower-level buildings with more typical projects. These were all built for the shipyard workers of the sixties. Marin City was basically the stronghold. Then you also had the San Rafael area, which was about four miles north, where they had more housing for the influx of Asian and Mexican immigrants that came in during that whole late-eighties era. Then there were parts of Novato, the outskirts of the richer areas. Those were your Black communities. When people saw you in any of the outskirts areas—like Sausalito or Mill Valley or San Rafael or Corte Madera—they would assume you were from Marin City.
I was from Sausalito, but all my friends were in Marin City. My father was rich, and because of me being in Sausalito, I was always picked on by the cops. I was pretty popular for going against the grain; they said I couldn’t go to San Rafael or Mill Valley, but that’s where I was because that’s where the cute girls were that liked guys like me. And I had a car, and I was doing it. I was used to being harassed by the police, who were trying to keep me out, but they couldn’t because I was learning things to say; they were actually teaching me how to deal with them.
Tupac and his mom arrived in Marin City. Tupac was this guy who only wanted to do music. So he would get out because he and his crew would go do shows in the suburbs. They would go to house parties, block parties, wherever, and they would get out of Marin City. Not that we were trying to escape Marin City, but there was more to see. Our names kept crossing each other’s path. I was this guy known for just being a ladies’ man, and he was known for being the baddest rapper kid coming up. We kept hearing about each other.
RYAN D ROLLINS I’m a military brat. My dad was in the air force and we moved to Marin County. There’s an air force base up there—Hamilton Air Force Base. I lived in Novato, which is like ten to fifteen minutes up the highway from Marin City. It was a whole different thing back then; it was still more segregated. The Marin City people had been there for generations from the war, with the shipyards. That’s where they all kind of migrated from Louisiana and Texas and whatnot. Even though I lived in Novato on the air force base, I always had a connection because we all kind of went to the same churches. My mom was involved with the Concerned Parents of Marin, which was a Black organization. Everyone was always involved in the community.
I was all things hip-hop my whole life. Being a creative-and-outspoken-type person, whatever came out, I wanted to do—from break dancing to rapping. So I can remember I was writing raps in seventh grade. I remember first hearing [Afrika Bambaataa’s] “Planet Rock.” In high school, I dressed exactly like Run-DMC.
I got into some trouble. So I had left and moved to Florida for a while. I was always talking to my friends on the phone, and they was like, “There’s a new guy in town named Tupac. You need to rap against him. Y’all should battle.” I was the best rapper, supposedly. Every time I would talk to them, they were talking about Tupac.
About a year later, I’m on my way back. I’m at the bus stop in Marin City, and it’s funny, I’m with my partner who was a beatboxer, and here comes Tupac walking down the hill with somebody else. We meet at the bus stop. “This Tupac. This Ryan D. Y’all need to rap against each other.” He rapped a prewritten; I cut a freestyle. He busted out “The Case of the Misplaced Mic.”I It was one of those things where once we finished rapping against each other, from then on we were partners, we were in a group.
KENDRICK WELLS I had this friend who kept telling me about this kid she was doing theater with and how great he was but how annoying he was at the same time. I had heard little flashes about him in the streets, but the first I’d heard was from her, about theater.
I started in the same theater program as him in Marin. I had always done theater, since I was in high school at Abraham Lincoln High School in San Francisco. I went to this high school in Mill Valley after we moved to Sausalito and I joined the Tamalpais High School theater company, which was called the Ensemble Theater Company, and a few years later, she was in it, and then she’s telling me about this new kid, Tupac. She said he would just do these shows, and he would never go to rehearsal. He was always late, but then he’d walk to the stage and just kill it. Being a theater buff, I was interested. And then, I would hear about him on the streets; there’s this rapper, and it’s the same guy.
Finally, we met at a party in Novato. When we first saw each other, even before speaking, we hugged, like we knew each other. He had been hearing all kinds of things about me. I was the ex–drug dealer that was kind and had lots of ladies and did things a different way. There was no violence in my thing—and we were like two refreshing characters. After we met that night, it was just on.
BARBARA OWENS I’ve been in teaching since ’68, but by the time I got to Tam it was 1978. I was establishing myself as an English teacher then. The community then was very intellectually and creatively vibrant. Very fresh. There were so many artists that trickled into our community, good and bad. We had our drug issues. No lie. But I don’t want that to characterize the culture. The issues around equity and Black Lives Matter were very fresh then, sadly. Yeah. So we were a community that was in that conversation and was in that struggle. Marin City has a tremendous history, tremendous community, tremendous sense of a generational culture that were always present in our school.
For us professionally, we were always working with their thinking to help them develop their writing and reading and critical thinking skills organically. We were young then. The pedagogy was new. We were breaking ground with pedagogy. And Tupac was just ripe for it. Discussion was a major feature of our classes. We graded on oral expression—listening and speaking. That was as important as the reading and writing.
Now, mind you, I was a bitch about it. I mean, I pushed. I was there for my whole soul. But I didn’t have to with that group. His class was in the afternoon. You don’t know what kind of energy you’re going to get, especially after lunch at Tam at that time. God only knows what they were smoking. Herding cats kind of comes to mind. But he had that ability to get people to think with him. He created that kind of vortex that every teacher hopes like hell is going to happen. You have one student with that kind of a light on, it’s catchy. It’s contagious. It’s wonderful in a classroom year. Everybody’s thinking goes up.
In that particular class, he was the only African American student I had. Then look at that face. If he was going to look at y
ou, he was going to look at you. You knew what he was thinking or doing. He carried himself in a way that was unignorable. He posed questions. If you communicate anything about his intellect, know that he fed it.
Now, did I see all of his life? Noooo. I’m over here in white land. I didn’t have much of his backstory.
RYAN D ROLLINS He was totally different from us because we’re from California and he came from New York and Baltimore. When he first came, he called himself MC New York. Quiet as it’s kept, I tell people a thousand times, I’m the one who told him to start using the name Tupac: “Just go by your name.” I used to tell him that all the time. He wanted to be MC New York forever. He finally agreed to go by his name, but he had to use the 2 instead of spelling it out. I said, “Whatever. That’s a good compromise.”
He was obviously more talented than everybody else. People who were into rapping could see it. Otherwise, you wouldn’t know because he was dirt-poor. He was poor poor. He only had like one outfit, and he only had like one pair of shoes and they stunk. Whenever he would come over to my partner Demetrius’s house we would tell him to leave his shoes outside. But his talent was incredible. I wasn’t as committed as he was; Tupac made me step my rap game up. I instantly thought he was better than whoever was the dopest rapper out at the time. I’m like, Pac could beat Rakim up.
He gradually started coming around to the California style of things, but his talent was always obvious. He was in drama. He’d write poetry. Stuff nobody I’d ever met was doing. But me and him clicked because I grew up in a Black Power household. First books I read were [Eldridge Cleaver’s] Soul on Ice and [Elijah Muhammad’s] Message to the Blackman in America. I had been up on all this stuff since elementary school. So cats used to call me the militant one. “Ryan D is super Black.”
So when Pac came, we used to sit around and Afeni would talk and tell us stuff. She was going through things, obviously, but she was just so smart. So Pac and I connected on that level. That’s why our rap group was the One Nation MCs and we had songs like “Panther Power.”
KENDRICK WELLS He was true hip-hop, meaning he was battle raps, he was a metaphor-first, East Coast–first rapper, and then the cherry on top was him teaching you your history—even though you don’t want to hear it. I think back and I’m like, Man, what if we all had listened and unified and took the message at that point somewhere else? We were like, Shut the fuck up. Let’s go chase these bitches. Fuck these police. Just stupid kids.
Ryan D was his rap buddy and they had clashed many times, but they actually got one of the early battle raps on tape. That’s pretty much what rap was back then: before they would write songs about a topic, we’d have these groups of people together and they would go heads up, crew against crew, same crew against crew and sometimes different crews, but it was all love. You were sharpening your skills. You were seeing who was the hottest. And Tupac was on the highest level. There were a couple people who would hit him every once in a while, like Ryan D or a few others, but he would hit back.
He came to Marin City and he woke everybody up. Everybody was rapping but everybody was still trying to make their money, still trying to do their side things, still trying to exist. He was like, It’s rap. It’s all rap or nothing. We get up, we rehearse, we do this. He got in with One Nation MCs and they brought him in like family.
RYAN D ROLLINS The group was me, Tupac, Demetrius, Gable, and Cousin Jay. That was the One Nation MCs. Cousin Jay because he had a car. Gable because he was a DJ and we liked his beats, but Demetrius had the equipment. We came up with the name listening to [Funkadelic’s] “One Nation Under a Groove.” I had rap books just like he had rap books. That’s another way we connected: I looked at his rap books, and he looked at mine. But then when I’m looking at his rap books, he has poems in between his raps and shit. The way he wrote was different from the way I wrote: I wrote, like, full paragraphs with commas, and he just wrote line-for-line on the page. I was really fascinated by that, the way he wrote. It was so easy to read to rap it. He was way ahead of his time as a writer. Pac used to tell me, “You gotta write. The more you write, the better rapper you are.”
Initially, it was just me, Gable, and Tupac at my house in Novato. I had an 808. I had a four-track. Gable had the two 1200s.II “Fantasy” was our first song. It was about a dream. Then we did “Never Be Beat.” We did them on the 808 with Gable scratching. We were way better than everybody else around already. Just being able to record on the four-track like that. We really became a group after those two songs. Then we started hooking up with Demetrius at his house, because he just had all the records to mix. That’s how we did “Panther Power,” because that’s like a Malcolm X speech and a James Brown drum scratch. We had a song called “One Nation MCs.” That was our battle song. When we did that one at a party, the whole crowd had us feeling like superstars. I’ll come in first, and I’m good. And then Tupac comes in, and he’s mesmerizing. He’s got a New York accent and sounds a little different. So we were unstoppable.
We did house parties. We did some shows, too. We opened for Def Jef. They were hating on us. They hated Tupac so bad. They wouldn’t want to listen to our demos. We did shows with Mac Dre at the San Jose fairgrounds. We were at Oakland at the Festival at the Lake and we rapped against Oakland’s Most Wanted, and they were a whole crew of gangsta gangstas. We did “One Nation MCs” and they gave us dap. We walked away holding our breath because they were like one hundred deep.
KENDRICK WELLS They were all living together in an apartment—Ryan D, Gable, all those guys.
RYAN D ROLLINS At one point, we all kind of stayed in the same apartment together. It was me, Demetrius, Tupac, and my partner Terry T from Louisiana.
KENDRICK WELLS Tupac was the greatest rapper on the planet, but he was a better cook than he was a rapper. I had Hamburger Helper on my shelf, butter and ketchup to make my own barbecue sauce, and some chicken breast in the fridge. So he was like, “Man, take me to the store.” I take him, and I buy all of this shit he’s telling me to buy. I’ve seen my mom cook this shit before, but he had all these techniques. He was so good you could tell he cooked for his mom and his sister. He put love into it. He taught me how to fry chicken. People love my chicken now because of him.
After he got famous, we’d be at his house and he had the Outlawz, so he’d cook whole meals. He’d cook gumbo. He’d cook soft-shell crab. He loved seafood. His mom would be sitting there—where his mom could get up and cook, too, she would sit down and say, “No, let the master do it.”
RYAN D ROLLINS One time when we were living together, Tupac had cooked. And Terry had his new girlfriend. He said, “Tupac, man, clean all the fucking dishes you left in the kitchen.” Tupac was lazy. Terry said, “You better have all those dishes cleaned by the time I get back,” because he was going to cook that night. He left and we ended up playing fucking Tecmo Super Bowl and Nintendo all day long.
Hours passed, and here comes Terry: “Nigga, you didn’t clean that kitchen yet!” Tupac said, “Fuck Terry, I ain’t cleaning that kitchen.” We were like, Aw, shit, this is gonna be good. Terry was a really aggressive person. Tupac wasn’t a punk, but he couldn’t fight at the time.
Tupac jumped up and ran over there. The rest of us were sitting by the couch. Tupac did the right thing and swung first. But he missed it. He swung hella hard. He swung from fucking Kentucky. He missed with his haymaker and hit the corner of the washing machine with his fist. We knew his hand was fucked up instantly because of the sound it made. Terry picked him up, slammed him on his back, and got to whooping on him. We had to break it up.
The funny thing about that story is we always said that Tupac hit that washing machine so hard that if he would’ve hit Terry he would’ve had a chance. His fist swole up. It was fucked up for a year—probably broken. We didn’t have medical coverage. But he jumped out and he was ready to fight. He wasn’t scared.
KENDRICK WELLS At some point, he wanted more. There was a lot of jealousy issues that came up wh
ere people wanted to fight and he just wanted to rap. So that’s when he moved on, and he met up with Leila.III
RYAN D ROLLINS A lot of people saw the potential in Tupac; that’s how he ended up in Santa Rosa with Leila.
KENDRICK WELLS As kids from Marin, we snuck out and jumped to Santa Rosa and Petaluma every chance we could because the girls out there treated us better than anyone in Marin City did. They knew where we were coming from. Even the parents of the kids were like, “You can stay here.” It was just a different vibe.
RYAN D ROLLINS That was one of the places that niggas from Marin City used to go to terrorize the parties and tear it up.
KENDRICK WELLS Leila ran the fairgrounds in Petaluma. She was organizing shows. She was the shit. She was a kind person but she was also very businesslike, and she handpicked a bunch of guys who were serious and brought the talent to her county. The labels and managers and production companies knew who she was because they dealt with her personally.
She had heard about Tupac—I guess she’d put her feelers out there—and Tupac had heard about her. He was hell-bent on meeting her. He finally found the connection and she was like, “Come on up.” I think I dropped him off, and once he was up there, he didn’t come back for a while, and they started creating Strictly Dope.IV
RYAN D ROLLINS He lived mostly with Afeni, but once he went out to Santa Rosa, he didn’t really come back. His mom was on drugs and he’d had some fights out there. Pac was kind of torn because me and him was hella tight still. I was doing my own thing. I had money because I was doing other things. I had a nice car and everything. So I wasn’t that serious about rap.
KENDRICK WELLS Leila’s very close friends with Atron Gregory.V Atron told her, “You ever got somebody to take seriously, let me know.” So she’s like, “I got one.”
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