Changes

by Sheldon Pearce

  ALEX ROBERTS Tupac was one of the kindest gentlemen I’ve ever met in my life. He was a kid when I first met him. I met him at the China Club just off Broadway. It was on the same side of the street as MTV and across the street from Sony BMG. I took my suit jacket off and I’ve got a black panther on my upper left arm. Tupac comes right over and goes, “Oh, that’s a nice one. What do you know about the Panthers?” I go, “Probably not as much as you.” And it started a conversation. He asked if I wanted a drink, I told him I was fine, and I went about my way.

  The in-house lawyer for Sony BMG and I, we’re sitting down speaking. He goes, “What do you think of Tupac?” I said, “I can’t give you an answer. I’ve heard some of his earlier music. There’s definitely something about him.” Next thing I know, I look up and Pac’s standing there with two drinks and he goes, “Oh, sorry, I didn’t know you’re with somebody. Sir, what are you drinking?” Sir, what are you drinking? To this in-house lawyer. So polite. I could tell immediately he was a very good person. Pac wore so many hats and he wore each one so naturally and to the best of his ability. I started to listen to some of 2Pacalypse Now, and I wasn’t a fan. But I liked his voice, and I knew it could be insane with the right producer.

  SHARONDA DAVILA-IRVING I bought the first one—2Pacalypse Now. I was like, This is so dope. It was on a cassette tape and it was so super cool. Like, Tupac can rap. And it made sense to me that this is the kind of record it would be. I was really, really, really proud of him. But I was really scared for him. He’s a Gemini. If a situation is getting hyped and escalated, a Gemini is right with it. And in my mind, at some point, we’ll have the conversation.

  The whole time, I felt like it was all of the things that he had shown me in that kitchen. The only thing that could potentially be shocking is the odds of people getting discovered. Was he going to be prepared to rock it out? Of course.

  I think the political commentary, keeping the message of the people always within the midst of his conversation, is consistent with who he was raised to be. There’s no separation between who I am and how I carry the people with me. That’s just part of the DNA. Intelligence and political awareness, and leadership and service, were our pillars.

  LESLIE GERARD Tupac was talking about writing about his life. One of the first songs that I heard from him was “Brenda’s Got a Baby” and he wanted to go more down that road.

  KENDRICK WELLS I saw him go into the bathroom with a cigarette and come out with “Brenda’s Got a Baby.” That wasn’t rare. I think Tupac wrote a song every time he took a shit. Can’t waste that time. But I remember this time he came running: “Check this out.” And he was in it. The same nuances, the same rhythm that you eventually heard on the song. He was fitted. He had most of it finished but not all of it. He hadn’t written the last verse yet. To me, it was just another Tupac song.

  MARK ANTHONY NEAL My introduction to him was in his work with Digital Underground, as a dancer, and I very much remember the release of the first album, which was in part marketed as the solo album of a family member of Digital Underground; that was my initial context for him. At that time, I didn’t have any real knowledge of his political lineage. I’m a New York guy. I had a real East Coast bias in terms of my taste in hip-hop. It was a moment where I was still very much invested in some of the work that was coming from folks like Public Enemy and KRS-One. The music didn’t resonate with me initially. The song that did catch my ear of his early songs was “Brenda’s Got a Baby.” That struck me as something that was disruptive from what we were typically hearing from rappers at the time, especially male rappers.

  PUDGEE THA PHAT BASTARD Not a lot of rappers were talking about socioeconomic things. But I did not like “Brenda’s Got a Baby,” and he knew it. I loved the message. I hated his rap style and how sad it was. “Trapped” was when I said, “Okay, you lit.” But “Brenda” was not for me. I’m from New York. We’re not like this. We’re in the club. I loved “Same Song.” He was killing it. That’s part of why “Brenda” pissed me off. You do “Same Song” and you’re rhyming with this ill, almost New York flow, and then come back with “Brenda’s Got a Baby”? It was a disconnect for me.

  KEVIN HOSMANN Victor Hall, who did a lot of photography up there for Digital Underground, was the guy who took those photographs for 2Pacalypse Now. I didn’t go up to the photo shoot, it was just done that way. Tupac came up with the hoods. I got back three images. I had nothing to work with. I have to step on this again—make it raw, dirty, more authentic or street. So this other guy named David Provost, he’s credited on the cover for “photographic prints.” He’s actually a photographer that does really great black-and-white prints. I said, Here’s this image that I just hate, there’s nothing to it. It’s not working for me. He basically just printed them oddly, so it’s all that peppering and the color and all the weird sepia tone. Originally, that was a very clean image. The coloration and all of that is there because of that guy making it look a little bit more raw.

  There’s two no-nos on that cover. Tupac Shakur—his name is not on that cover. He was a brand-new artist. You don’t hide a brand-new artist by not having any knowledge of who the guy is. And then you never put a label or a title below the top third. If you’re flipping through the bin, you need a quick read, so that the cover name and artist’s name always had to be at the top third. But because of the time period—this was a time of the spaghetti box and CDs—I was able to put his name at the very bottom of it. And also the PMRC logo. Because what Bryan Turner told me is, that sells records. Put it big and bold. That logo sells more records than the guy’s name.

  KENDRICK WELLS I was a promoter. I would have these parties and all the kids in Marin would show up—like, thousands of kids. Some got in, some didn’t. I rented this place on Howard Street. We tried to have a party there, and some chicks fought and the doors got kicked in. They shut down on us. But Tupac really liked the place because I was showing videos there, and he wanted to debut his video at his record release party for his first album, 2Pacalypse Now. I believe it was “Trapped.”

  So Atron rented the place, but they told him that I couldn’t come in there because their place had been trashed the last time I threw a party there. I believe Atron should have said, “Screw you. Do you want to rent it to me or not? Kendrick told us about this place.” But basically everybody who was there when the fight broke out two months before was allowed to get in except for me.

  Tupac told me to show up anyway. I get there and Atron throws me out. I’m outside for a little bit before Tupac snatches me up and brings me back in. When it’s time to leave, me, Ryan D, Tupac, and a couple of guys get in this limo. He wants to go record over at this studio in Oakland. All of a sudden we hear gunfire—pop, pop, pop—we think people are shooting in the air, so we’re, like, getting down. When we finally pull over at a gas station, there’s bullet holes all on the side of the limo. We didn’t know who that was or what that was about. I’m sure the limo driver had to explain what the fuck happened in his limo, but Pac was just like, “Pass the Hennessy,” and we continued to the studio. It was never brought up again.

  LESLIE GERARD He was always in the studio. It was always something new.

  PUDGEE THA PHAT BASTARD When he was in New York City, he couldn’t do much, right? Couldn’t do many restaurants. So it was studios.

  GOBI RAHIMI It was sort of like he let his hair down. He was really in his own space.

  TIM NITZ I started getting interested in engineering, like back in my early twenties. Took a couple of classes and decided, You know, I want to go ahead and try to make that a career. I was a pretty good piano player, but then I just kept running into people that were better than me. I’m like, What else can I do that is still related to the music industry? So I went ahead and went to a recording school, and I just kept applying to studios in LA, all around town. There were way more big studios back then in, like, the late eighties. There was actually this thing called the Studio Menu. I would just go through th
at and I would just send out my résumé to like sixty studios.

  I eventually got interviewed at Larrabee Studios and got hired as a runner. I worked for a couple years as a runner in a couple different studios around LA and I kind of got a lucky break. I started working at this place called Studio 56 as a runner and I kept sending my résumé out, and I sent one to this studio called Cherokee Studios. And they gave me an opportunity to become an assistant. A runner doesn’t really go in the rooms, like not during sessions. Assistant engineers are, you know, now you’re in the room; now you’re in there working with the head engineer.

  We were doing a lot of live recording, some mixing there. Then I kind of hopped around LA, working as an assistant at a couple different studios. When you’re an assistant engineer, every once in a while you might get a little opportunity to engineer, if some client’s got a really small budget; every once in a while you get thrown in the fire, but it was nothing ever really very permanent.

  Then I started working in this studio called Sound Castle in Silver Lake. Most of the big studios in LA usually were two-room facilities with large SSL consoles, or in some cases, like a large Neve VR or something.V Sound Castle had two SSL rooms. It was kind of a more open studio.

  A client came in for Capitol Records and the studio manager asked if I wanted to engineer for this client. So it’s supposed to be a one-day thing. And then at the end of that day, the producer says, “Okay, well, we need a month here.” I asked if they needed to get another engineer and he said, “We’ll just use you.”

  The album was 19th Street LBC Compilation. It was like a bunch of the guys from the Snoop Dogg clan. From there, I kept engineering mostly out of Sound Castle studios. Once you kind of become an independent engineer, you tend to go to a lot of studios. I worked with Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, LL Cool J, Snoop Dogg and Ice Cube and Dr. Dre.

  This was kind of early for rap. This is the early nineties that we’re talking about, and rap music wasn’t quite pop music yet. It was still pretty much very genre specific. It didn’t cross over to that degree yet. And it was just a lot of gangsta rap. So it didn’t have the mass appeal.

  A lot of the time, I was working with people, and I didn’t know if they were—I mean, you knew who was a big artist, but I wasn’t starstruck by any means working with any other rappers. There was a very similar vibe to all the sessions. Coming up as an engineer, there’s a lot of, like, technical stuff that you learn—things about recording. Once I started working on rap sessions, that stuff got simplified dramatically. A lot of times they walk in with a drum machine, we plug in the drum machine, and that would be the song coming out of the drum machine, as opposed to there really being a lot of musicians in the room. We didn’t use microphones that much. To me, it became sort of singular, sort of consistent—almost could have been the same artist every day for me. I’m really grateful because I got to make that transition.

  Some Tupac stuff started coming in. I knew, Okay, well, he’s one of the bigger guys, kind of like Snoop, but there was no differentiating factor. Obviously, he was still alive, so he didn’t get the James Dean vibe to him yet.

  The several times that I interacted with him, he was quiet. A producer would play a track and then play another track. Like, a producer would have to write a bunch of different tracks, right? And then the artists would go, Yeah, let’s do that one. So then, whatever track we settled on, we’d literally just loop the track.

  In this one particular situation that I remember, it only took him about an hour to write the lyrics. He asked for a notepad and it seemed like he was starting from scratch to me.

  COLIN WOLFE Tupac and I met at this studio in the Valley—I think the Valley Sound. I want to say ’91, because I had just finished up the Chronic album. It hadn’t come out yet, but we had just finished the production. I was working with MC Breed and he was there with intent to be a part of the project. We were together for about a week.

  He had crazy, crazy energy, and he was mad cool. There wasn’t a whole gang of people in the studio at the time. So there’s nobody to impress, I guess. I think people are more themselves in situations like that. But he was always just a boisterous person—just loud, and just fun. He and MC Breed were great buddies. They were smoking a gang of weed and just having a good time. There was no threatening energy from him.

  He would say, “Hit record,” and you would keep that first take. There weren’t any punchesVI or anything like that. Anything he laid down for the MC Breed album, all that stuff was his first take. Then he went back and doubled and tripled some stuff.

  On “Gotta Get Mine,” Pac and Breed are going back and forth because that was kind of like the concept song. But you can hear it because they’re mixing up the lyrics. We kept that kind of stuff in because it was all in fun. Breed would have a title or concept for a song and then Tupac would riff off of that.

  On all the songs Tupac worked on, I came up with those tracks on the spot. I was staying at this house in Malibu that Dre was renting at the time because the house in Calabasas had caught fire. So insurance had rented this house in Malibu. So I was like, “Shit, I’m bored.” So I asked Dre if I could go get the board that we had in the studio at the house and bring it to the beach house.

  I went and got the board, wired it together, and was out there working on stuff. Warren G brought Tupac and DOC out there with him. DOC and MC Breed were really good friends. Warren G had a drum loop and this one guitar sample. I can’t remember if they told me the concept already, but I just listened to what G had already and came up with that bass line, and then put the keyboards on there. It just came out of nowhere. It was the first thing I thought of. They say the first take is god’s take.

  PUDGEE THA PHAT BASTARD We got to the point where I understood that he does what he does. I was like, “Do you hear these ad libs? These doubles are off.” He’d be like, “This sounds good to me. It don’t gotta be perfect. I’m not perfect.”

  I’m somebody who wants clean vocals. I want everything to match. I want the double to be precision. For like three weeks after that, he didn’t play me any songs. It went on forever. There are a couple of songs that I think Dre did, and I was like, Thank god, somebody else was in the room. But he loved to keep things natural and organic, which I didn’t think was even a thing.

  COLIN WOLFE We’re back in Atlanta and I’m mixing The New Breed. Coming from N.W.A and being with Dre and all that, we mix our vocals a certain way. We did one single vocal and maybe one double track. We didn’t even do a stereo double track. We did one and we’d either pan it to the right or to the left. So to me Pac sounded good, but from what Breed told me after the fact, he was upset that I didn’t triple it.

  I thought that with “Gotta Get Mine” it worked because Breed’s vocals weren’t tripled and doubled. I think it gave it continuity—them somewhat sounding the same, especially within going back and forth. I didn’t even consider tripling it. Had I known it was part of his sound, maybe I would’ve. But you’ve got to understand that he wasn’t even really Tupac yet. His first album had just come out. He was more with Digital Underground. So he was starting to get up there. But I wasn’t even listening to a lot of other shit. We were working on the Chronic album. So I didn’t know his sound per se.

  TIM NITZ He definitely did, like, the double and triple thing. He would double and triple certain words for emphasis. Another rapper that would do that is Daz. But Pac definitely had it dialed in to kind of an art. It was very on point when he did it. He had a very good sense of timing and all that when he did it.

  As far as what happened on the engineering side, he didn’t seem to have either knowledge or interest about it. It was more, You do your job, so I’m going to do my job And if that happens, everything’s good. I kind of think it probably was something that someone introduced to him early on, and he was like, Hey, this works. I like this; this works for me. I’m gonna keep doing it.

  Because of the nature of how music got produced in the rap genre—since it
was all mostly produced by drum machine—I remember, the first couple years I was working on it the sound quality was not good. It was like twelve-bit Linn 9000 or SP-12 drum machines. Especially with the East Coast stuff—they would use samples, and it didn’t sound like they sampled it very well. By the time I got to working on the Tupac stuff, it was more clean and clear. And people had spent a couple years honing sounds—kick drum sounds and snare drum sounds. From a mixing standpoint, it wasn’t hard to get it to sound good quickly, if you’re an engineer that had decent ears. It wasn’t a very long process. I don’t remember the number of tracks in his songs being extensive at all.

  In his sessions, he was never a “there to party” guy.

  RYAN D ROLLINS Pac was always professional. When he got to the studio, he was usually ready to get in the booth. We always had fun going to the studio with Pac because it would be over quick.

  MOE Z MD Pac was pleasant and high energy. He wanted to move and get stuff done fast. I noticed that from the first session because when we did “Outlaw,” from Me Against the World, we did that in three hours. It was from me making the track to him dropping the lyrics, and doing a rough mix of it. That was unusual for me. I’m used to working with artists where it’s like five in the morning and we got one song. If I left at five in the morning with Pac, he had done three songs with me, but also he would have two other studios in the complex booked with other producers in there and go back and forth. So he was gonna get him nine songs that night.

  TIM NITZ I think I was working with a little side project he was trying to help promote, the Outlawz. He was in there for a little while, but he wasn’t going to do a vocal or anything. He smoked and drank and ate some food. It was kind of like he was like, Okay, here, I’m gonna bring the goods to have an enjoyable session with alcohol and weed and everything. But I don’t remember him being there the whole time.