She sent Tupac and Ray Luv up there together. But the powers that be will separate you.
RYAN D ROLLINS I remember going to Leila’s apartment and she was all into the culture. She was really fascinated by Pac. She had other little rappers. She had some kind of program. That’s how I met Ray Luv. He was younger and wanted to be like us.
KENDRICK WELLS They bought Ray Luv out for the price of a song, and he went from being this sweet, happy-go-lucky guy to someone who seemed to be angry. I don’t blame him. He wrote the song that got them on. Tupac was the greatest writer in hip-hop history, but the song that got them on—“Trapped”—was written mostly by Ray Luv. So they had to buy him out, pay him off, and make him disappear. He ended up on Mac Dre’s old label.
RYAN D ROLLINS I was working on an album. This is right before 51.50.VI I was fuckin’ with Kendrick’s studio. Kendrick had a studio. We were in the county jail together. So we kind of hooked up like that. He wanted to produce music and he knew about me and Pac, so he said, “This is what we’re gonna do when we get out.” Kendrick just had money. So Kendrick brought all the stuff for a studio and said he wanted me and Gable to record there. We even took a class at the College of Marin on recording studios. We got an A because we presented our album for our project.
During this time, Tupac was doing his own thing. He was in Santa Rosa fucking with Ray Luv and Strictly Dope. Then, not long after, he was doing his solo album, and that’s when he signed with Atron. We hooked up because I had to go do ninety days. And before that, it was like, I was going to record a song with Pac before I turned myself in.
So I picked him up and I took him to San Francisco to Kendrick’s studio, which was at his grandma’s house at the time. We did a song to “Mary Jane” by Rick James, and in true Tupac fashion, he wrote his rap in fifteen minutes.
We talked about a couple other songs we were going to do, but I know, at one point, Tupac and I walked to the store to go buy whatever—40s and some blunts, or something—and we were talking walking back and, I’ll never forget, he said, “You know, I was just thinking I might let my manager look over this. So, you know, I might have to sign some releases for these songs and sign a contract or something.”
I never thought anything about rap business, but Tupac already was, which was smart.
KENDRICK WELLS My adage had always been once you met Tupac, you knew where he was going, and you were either going to help him get there or get in the way.
RYAN D ROLLINS When he went to Santa Rosa I was still rapping. Me and Gable were still making beats. That’s when we were just about to become 51.50. Leila became 51.50’s first manager. She was gonna manage us full-time, but then a lot of legal stuff went down. So it didn’t happen. But she helped us, put us in a better position.
When Leila hooked Pac up with Atron Gregory, that’s when we started going around Digital Underground. I remember he said, “I have to go audition for dude,” and he went and rapped for Shock.VII That was it. I guess after that, Atron just told Shock to bring him. He ended up going to Japan with those guys not long after.
PUDGEE THA PHAT BASTARD StretchVIII is the reason I know Tupac. Before we met, I was just doing demos and battling people in front of the Skate Key roller rink, and trying to write for other people.
I started writing songs at about thirteen years old. I heard Roxanne Shante’s “Roxanne’s Revenge” because I was a heavy kid, and my mother kind of groomed me to be sarcastic in response to people, you know, making comments about my weight or my glasses at the time. I tell people they don’t pay attention to the steps. That was one of the steps that made me the writer that I am today—witty repartee, quick to respond to anything. Then it turned to barbs and vicious one-liners. And that kind of nurtured the rapper in me.
I worked at a McDonald’s to pay for demos when I was fourteen and Al B. Sure was my manager. I wrote for Ghetto Girlz, who made a response to Geto Boys’ “Mind Playing Tricks on Me” called “My Man’s Playing Tricks on Me.” I don’t really do spoofs, so I didn’t write that song, but I wrote the majority of the album, with the exception of a song written by Diamond D and Stretch from Live Squad, which was a group brought out by [New York City VJ] Doctor Dré.
Then I remember one day, Diamond D said to me, “No one’s ever going to help you get on because you’re better than them.” And that kind of turned into a tic for me. After that, I became this super-duper aggressive emcee because I felt like, Yeah, no one’s given me opportunities.
I knew Gang Starr from the beginning. I’ve been in the room with Latifah her whole career. So people would ask me to ghostwrite, but no one would say, “You go be the rapper.” Once Diamond illuminated that for me, I went on a different path.
Women have always been my heroes; they champion me and they just lift me up, seriously. A friend of mine, her name is Essence. She had a song on the New Jack City soundtrack, called “Lyrics 2 the Rhythm,” and she was signed with Grandmaster Flash. She was like, “Flash has to hear you.” I signed with him, we recorded in his studio in the projects in Harlem, but after a while, I wasn’t feeling the progression that I was looking for. So he got me to write for Roxanne Shante, which was the cathartic full-circle moment. But something went off in my head and said I shouldn’t be working with Grandmaster Flash because I’m not getting money with him. He nurtured my talent. He was dope. He recorded me. But I needed to see things manifest for me if I was going to make this a career.
I went back to writing and getting on mixtapes, and then DJ Clue and I met up and started doing mixtapes together. I’d already gotten with every DJ I could to make sure that the world heard my voice. My cousin Lenny S, who works at Def Jam as VP of A & R now, worked in the mailroom at the time, and he and my cousin Burt stole a whole bunch of adhesive paper and posted my logo all over it—I’m still unsigned at the time—and they plastered New York with it. So being that my logo is a caricature of me with the middle finger, I kind of started picking up. I knew I made it one day when I was standing at the train station and a police officer walked up to me and said, “Is this you?” and he had my sticker on his ticket book.
I started gaining a lot of momentum. My godsister called up Red Hot Lover Tone from the Trackmasters.IX He was like, “I hear you rhyme; let me hear something.” I said, “Are you sitting down?” Three weeks later, after three weeks of demos, we had a deal with Warner Bros.
When I was cutting the demo for “Checkin’ Out the Ave.,” Stretch called me like, “Yo, my boy wants to meet you. He is in love with that song.” I was like, Yeah, whatever, it’s nice to have people appreciate my art. He’s just a dancer. It’s Pac. We meet in Atlanta. He runs up to me and hugs me. I have no idea who this kid is, but he’s hugging me like I just saved his life. He’s like, “Yo! This record!” And that immediately struck me as different. In New York, it’s very hard, if they’re not in your camp, for someone to give you any type of accolades or give you any praise. But here he was losing his mind, yelling and screaming about this record. We became tight.
That was 1991. I’m a Cancer. He’s a Gemini. We’re really close in the summer area. So our spirits were the same, except for the dark moments where you’re pondering change or you’re in crisis. He was exuberant. He was always excited, always overjoyed, always outspoken and convicted in what he thought, and that is what grounded us.
D-SHOT I was in a group called the Click—me, E-40, B-Legit, Suga-T. We were doing the independent thing and dominating the independent world at the time. I was at the forefront of breaking down the barriers for independent rap music, me and my uncle St. Charles.X He was in the music industry in the seventies. I got him to make the move back into the industry. He’s still a reverend to this day.
Meanwhile, as the Click is doing our thing, Tupac is with Digital Underground doing his thing. As we started breaking ground, he started to recognize us. He came down for one of 40’s videos—“Practice Lookin’ Hard.” After that he came back down to hang with us at the studio while we worked
on the Click album.
He was a very, very motivated individual. Very sharp, very hardheaded. Back then, we were young and we kept a strap on everywhere we went because of the way the city was and the way things were happening in the streets back then. You had to keep one with you. When we were in the studio, I said, “Pac, don’t worry about nothing, man. I got you.” I pull out mine, right? This fool pulls out two of ’em! “I got mine, too.”
When you’re on your upswing, and you’re from the city that you from, you got to remember: they tried to throw Jesus Christ off a cliff when he went back to his city.
KENDRICK WELLS A couple of cats would flex up to him, sit him down, he’d come back and smack the shit out of them, and then they’d want to fight, and one, in fact, did. One guy chased him and started whooping him. And he actually got sick of that because that outcome would come a lot when he was independent, until he got a group around him.
He was super uncoordinated, he was terrible. When you see him run, he was awkward as shit. He couldn’t play any sports. He was not physically that dude. He had no skills. I was amazed later on when I moved to Houston and people were telling me how they were on tour with him and he was whipping dudes’ asses. I was amazed.
RYAN D ROLLINS He was touring with Digital Underground and I was driving him around. They were at one of those hotels where it’s one way in and it’s a big U. It was already five hundred people in the parking lot and I had a Delta with a peanut-butter top. I had a loud-ass stereo and you could hang out the sunroof. We pulled into the middle and Pac was hanging out the roof. He wasn’t even famous yet, but everybody just assumed. We were kicking it with Queen Latifah all night. Chuck D and Kid ’N Play were there. The Afros.XI Queen Latifah was telling us a story about how she had to fire one of her dancers because he was telling everybody she was gay. The whole time she’s telling us this story she has a cigarette in her mouth. We’re playing basketball and she’s got a hard dribble and she’s busting threes like it’s nothing. She was way better than us. Cool as shit.
Me and Pac went into a room with a ton of people. We’re at the front door and we just started rapping. We end up battling each other. Heavy D was in there, and it was a dope-ass battle. I ain’t gonna say I won, but a lot of people say I did. We walked over to the Denny’s, which was right outside the hotel. Chuck D and the S1Ws were in a booth. Kid ’N Play were in the next booth. They all loved Pac. I knew he had the potential, all this shit falling into place for him, but that night was when I knew he’d be a superstar.
He had already been on tour, he had come back, even as a backup dancer. While they were gone they did “Same Song.”XII That was his first big song. I remember he was hella juiced about that. But he just had something that people gravitated toward. He just seemed genuine. It didn’t matter what crowd we were around. We used to be around some gangstas, and, you know, they liked Pac. It didn’t ever seem fake.
KENDRICK WELLS I remember this one night. We’d just seen De La Soul and Def Jef perform. Both me and Tupac are starstruck. He’s covering it the best because he’s a badass motherfucker confident about himself. But I’m like, “I just saw Plug One and Plug Two on MTV!” Because of Leila, we got to go hang out with them at the hotel. He starts rapping for them. He does “Panther Power” or one of those One Nation verses. If we had recorded that, you’d be like, “That shit was dope” right now, because you know who he is. But they were basically like, “We see this every day. Is it over yet? Can we smoke some weed now?” They were polite. I don’t have nothing bad to say about them. But I do like to revel in the fact that he became Tupac. What the fuck were they listening for if they couldn’t see it? He would’ve signed with any of ’em. They could’ve had him.
RYAN D ROLLINS I went with Pac everywhere. To Shock’s house in Berkeley—the one that burned down, before it burned down. That’s how I became so close to so many of those guys—because me and Pac would strike out in my car and go everywhere. When he was recording his first album at Starlight,XIII I took him to damn near every session. I was often the one driving Pac. He didn’t have a car. So I was always with him at Starlight in Richmond for his first album.
Shock was there a lot of the time. We have like one song where we did sort of freestyling in the studio to the “What You Won’t Do for Love” beat before it became “Do for Love.”XIV Money B was there. Shock was just sitting playing the piano. I didn’t even know anyone was recording—I didn’t know outtakes existed until I heard them on YouTube. We were just sitting there, rolling blunts and laughing, and Shock just started rapping.
I’ve seen all of Pac’s raps in his rap books before he recorded the songs. He talked about the songs ahead of time. I used to examine his raps, because I liked looking at them. I’d clown him for his poems with hearts and eyeballs drawn around them. I remember when he wrote “The Rose That Grew from Concrete.” He literally showed me that poem. He was proud of it. Even at nineteen, I realized the significance of it.
PUDGEE THA PHAT BASTARD It was more poems in the beginning, so when he rhymed it wasn’t the precision of an MC. I’m from New York. So, you know, Kool G Rap is one of my huge influences. But when I first started hearing him rhyme, I thought, This is why my song was so important to him—because he’s of that spirit.
ROB MARRIOTT Tupac was not the greatest rapper in the beginning. The thing that makes him become a great emcee is that he starts to embody all the principles that hip-hop is presenting at that point. It took some time before Tupac became Tupac. It was in his blood. He was clearly charismatic, he had the training, from going to creative schools, and having the Black Panther background there. He had all the ingredients, but it took a couple of iterations for him to figure out what he was.
RYAN D ROLLINS All his songs during 2Pacalypse Now—I’d seen most of them on paper. If you’re really into rapping, you envision the whole process. Pac was prepared. He wrote more than everyone else. When I’m out in the street hustling, he’s back at the house writing a rap. That was his dream, and, you know, he wanted to get out. Crack was crazy in the early nineties.
JUSTIN TINSLEY He grew up in a family that was very, very well aware of the evils of society and what could happen if you basically piss off the power structure. His mother won her case in May 1971, which is crazy. That was a month before he was born. So he was cultivated in prison in a lot of ways. He understood that struggle. He grew up in the crack era of the eighties, Reaganomics, the economic depression—that, of course, as all these other things do, disproportionately affected Black people.
KENDRICK WELLS Over the years, as I would conflict with law enforcement, I would learn things to say. When I met Tupac, we got pulled over a few times. This motherfucker knew his rights. I used to have to tell everybody else in my car to shut the fuck up because they would be manipulated otherwise. Tupac was not a person you tell to shut up; he was the guy you say, “Get him, Pac!” They weren’t shooting us so much in Marin County but they were punking us. So it became known to the point that the cops stopped pulling me over with him because it went from a place where they could bully us to they’re trying to escape without these mental blows upside their heads. Tupac knew more about the law than they did. He always spoke up, he always said what he knew, and he was well versed on the law. When he jaywalked that day he did not realize that Oakland police are a little bit different.XV They whooped his ass.
RYAN D ROLLINS I remember when he got beat up by the police, because I saw him like a week later. He was fucked up. He had to cut all of his hair off. That’s the only reason he cut his hair off—because they had knotted his head up so bad that he had big bald spots right there. He said he was just crossing the street. But I know Tupac. We had many confrontations with the police. And Tupac goes bad on the police. He would always talk shit. So I know. If he was jaywalking and the police said something to him, he immediately went to one hundred.
KENDRICK WELLS He jaywalked, he said something smart to the police. And what we as young Black men are told
is don’t talk back. Just do what you’re told. His whole aura was No, don’t do what you’re told. Do what any other human has the right to do. You should have that same respect. It went onto a national stage. On a local stage, if I’m at war with a cop, the cop can lie, the DA will back him, the judge will back the DA. On a national stage, there’s a thing called the truth that kind of fucks over everybody. That’s when these police forces cower.
ROB MARRIOTT There’s Digital Underground’s “Same Song,” where we weren’t really aware of his politics so much, he was just a charismatic figure. He wasn’t the best rapper, but he knew his way around a mic and he’s really starting to understand how to be a showman. Then he started having these interactions with the police and we got the straitjacket Tupac. That’s when people really started to notice him. He’s saying things that most people didn’t have the courage to say. Is this guy crazy, or is he telling the truth?
KHALIL KAIN This is what happened to Tupac: There were plenty of folks who did not necessarily disagree with what he was saying. They just didn’t like the way he was saying it. But he’s nineteen. He’s angry. He’s not trying to format a polite conversation. He’s looking at this as dire; you’re looking at it as a political cycle. Nah, I’m not fucking wit’ y’all. When you’re mad, how do you deal with somebody telling you “Fuck you”?
ROB MARRIOTT He was born basically incarcerated and in a courtroom. His mother was defending herself while he was in the womb. This would lead to a lifelong confrontation with the court systems, the police forces, and the government. It’s really, I think, a case of how the trauma that you’re born into lingers. He’s always been harassed by the police since he was a child. Literally, the FBI was trying to find Assata ShakurXVI and harassing his family. His first memories are against the police and against the FBI. So it’s kind of natural that he would get into these confrontations, considering that.
KENDRICK WELLS I think Oakland opened his eyes. When he said something through a camera, then it came out on a TV, then he saw the reaction with people, and it got back to him—there was this big-ass loop that made Tupac, Tupac. I think Tupac was born after that ass-whooping. There’s a hard part of Tupac that was born after the character from the movie Juice. But the guy who knows how to speak to a camera to make that shit ring, I think he was born that night in Oakland.
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