Changes

by Sheldon Pearce

  MOE Z MD It wasn’t like a bunch of females at the studio hanging out. He smoked his weed, but it was him and his brother, as opposed to a room full of people.

  GOBI RAHIMI He was a workaholic. He would film a scene at night, we’d shoot a music video in the day, and if there was any time in between, he’d go to the studio. He was on a crazy schedule—a crazy self-imposed schedule, as if he knew what lay ahead. He was in a hurry to create a body of work that would outlast him.

  TIM NITZ It always seemed like it was Let’s get the work done that we’ve got to get done. The body of work that he has should make that obvious. He had hundreds of reels of tape of music.

  LESLIE GERARD It felt like 2Pacalypse Now was never going to be finished. Okay, we’ve got enough songs for this album, we can make another album. We release two albums in like thirteen months. When we were putting Strictly [4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z…] together, I was working with Eric on the designs.

  ERIC ALTENBURGER My dad grew up at the end of World War II in Austria and was very adamant about what direction I was going to take in life. You can be a dentist, you could be an accountant—basically, jobs that would secure an income—this is what you need to do, whether you like it or not. I went to University of Delaware and made some friends who were taking all these art classes. I found it interesting. My father was like, “No, no, no, I’m not going to have my son be a starving artist.” He didn’t let me take any art classes. I got out of school and I had no interest in any of that other stuff. And I got a job doing board mechanicals at some small ad agency. And I was starving. No skills, no classes, no nothing. I was just sort of like learning on the fly. I was living on the Upper East Side in an apartment and this girl moved in. She happened to work for Atlantic Records. She worked in the art department under the art director. This was a time that was pre-computer, and they sent all of their board mechanicals out to this company, and the company charged astronomical numbers. She asked if I could do them. So she started feeding me mechanicals, and I was charging less than the company was, so I was getting a lot of work that way. Then slowly she started asking if I wanted to design, like, some PR CD that would go to radio stations. It wasn’t for sale, so it’s not like anybody was super worried about how it looked. They just didn’t want to deal with it. Soon I was designing singles for sale and it kept getting a little bit bigger.

  When Interscope came out, they had a distribution deal with Atlantic. They didn’t have their own art department, so basically as part of the deal with Atlantic, whenever they signed an artist, the Atlantic art department would handle their artists. I was in Bob Efron’s office when Tupac showed up in his lap. He was the creative director at Atlantic. He was a huge rock and roll guy. He was just like, “I don’t understand this. I don’t know what this is. I’m not relating to this. We’re busy. You want to do this?” That was the first time I’d ever even heard of Tupac. That was my introduction to a whole other world. Doing comps and going over to this studio on Broadway and it’s just dudes hanging out with milk crates full of albums just rolling blunts left and right. That was the first time I’d even heard of a blunt; that’s how green and out of it I was. But here’s Pac just flipping samples and I’m some white boy just watching it happen.

  I think it was more or less, “Here’s the song. Here’s the cassette, listen to it, pick out some images, put it together.” He wasn’t getting much love, and a sense of, like, Let’s really put a lot of forethought into what we’re putting out there. The imagery we’re throwing out. That was Atlantic. But Interscope was cool. They were pretty much like, “Do what you want.” In our conversations, he wanted a destruction-type thing with burning buildings. He mentioned blue and red cop lights. It was carryover from 2Pacalypse Now.

  BLU The first thing that drew me to Pac was seeing commercials for Juice as a kid. I remember discovering him as an actor before I even knew he was a rapper. Then later, I saw the CD for Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z… at my dad’s house. And I remember putting that CD in when I was, I think, like nine or ten. I really didn’t know what I was expecting. He looked like Superman to me on the album cover. He is hip-hop Superman.

  KARL KANI We thought we were about to blow up, but the story didn’t go that way. Some gangbangers ended up coming in and robbing our store at gunpoint; took all of our samples. We had a choice at that point: Should we stay in Los Angeles or go back to New York with our tail between our legs? We refused to do that.

  Everything that happened to us happened organically. Hip-hop needed a clothing designer and Karl Kani needed the culture for his brand. It was always like a perfect marriage. They loved the fact they could relate to us. They loved the fact that we could fit them the right way. They love the fact that we’re utilizing them in our advertisements. Back then, no other fashion designers even wanted hip-hop artists in their clothing.

  Tupac used to wear my clothes all the time. Every time we open a magazine we see Tupac wearing it. Then we see him wearing it in the “Keep Ya Head Up” video. He has it on in the MC Breed video “Gotta Get Mine.” He was religiously wearing the clothing. I knew I had to meet him.

  AZ handled all the street stuff for us. I told him to get in touch with Tupac for me. Tupac happens to know a guy named Stretch from Queens, one of the guys from Thug Life who, later, got killed. Stretch gave us the number for the record company and they told us Tupac would be at the Hotel Nikko in Beverly Hills at this time and you can meet him there. It was 1993.

  We got to the hotel. We go into the room and he’s sitting at the table on a computer writing a script for a movie. He was talking to us and we had a very intelligent conversation. We’re talking about hip-hop, Black culture, Black Panthers, and Tupac was smoking blunt after blunt. But he was laser focused—multitasking, smoking blunts, typing, and still talking to me A1.

  There was one issue: he never looked up at me. It was weirding me out, like, the guy would not look up and look at us. He’s in a room by himself, no security. And I had something I was planning to ask him, but I don’t want to ask if this guy isn’t looking at me.

  So finally, room service comes to the room and knocks on the door. I remember the room service guy put a towel over his face, there was so much weed smoke in the room. He was choking. I said, “Yo, Pac, how much would you charge me to do an ad?”

  He got really quiet, and that’s when he finally looked up. I thought I’d fucked up until he said, “Man, you Black. I don’t charge my people for nothing.”

  My heart just stops for a second. I mean, this is Tupac we’re talking about. He wasn’t as big as he was going to get yet, but he was going places. This was right before Above the Rim.VII He said, “I want one thing. Can you put Thug Life in some of the ads with me?” That’s when the ice broke and the other Pac came out—the Gemini Pac.

  He was like, “I’ve got this idea for you: I want to be sitting on this basketball rim in Harlem. No shirt on, just your Karl Kani boots on.” He visually directed the whole photo shoot within seconds. He had it all in his mind.

  Everything he said, he did. Two weeks later, we were in New York. We did the shoot. It was one of the most iconic campaigns we’ve ever done. Tupac didn’t even want any free clothing. He said, “I want to pay for my clothing. You’re a Black company. I’m gonna blow your shit up.” No money was ever exchanged between us. Nothing. Pac was just a straight-up G.

  JUSTIN TINSLEY Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z… represents that last moment of complete clarity from Tupac before, obviously, the shooting in AtlantaVIII with the cops and of course the rape case later that year. I think Strictly is the most-Tupac Tupac that we could have ever gotten. It shows the Panther was in him, and you can see where he grew up in the streets with songs like “Holler If Ya Hear Me” and “The Streetz R Deathrow.” But then you had the playboy Tupac, which is “I Get Around,” and then “Keep Ya Head Up,” which is another great example of, like, how, he was a Gemini’s Gemini. He could make a song like “I Get Around,” sexually promiscuous, but then two songs later b
e like, Look, we gotta protect our women. He was a Gemini—good, bad, and indifferent.

  PUDGEE THA PHAT BASTARD Kanye is a Gemini; so is Trump. They’re all the same creature, in a way.

  ROB MARRIOTT I edited a story that dream hampton wrote for The Source. I was getting more details about the Atlanta incident and his mentality. I’d gone down to Atlanta for the cover shoot. He was remarkably on time and easy to work with. We got these great shots. And we went to his house afterward. As we rolled up to the house, we heard a gunshot. We’re like, What the hell is going on? We got to the door and he greeted us with champagne bottles, and he was saying that he had so much pressure on him that he had to shoot the wall, just shoot a gun off because he’s so stressed.

  The first thing I noticed was, like, the level of awareness that he had all the time. He was very much a person in the present moment and he was constantly drawing information. And then not only drawing it, but being able to distill all the information that he had in such a clear way, even though his world was so chaotic. He was able to maintain this clarity of thought and a capacity for reason that was belied by the chaotic nature of his life. We walk through his house, he just shot a gun into the wall but greets us at the door with champagne bottles. And the first thing I noticed is the Nefertiti tattoo on his chest and him being able to articulate why he had this tattoo.

  That was the experience of him: gunshots in the wall, and then really articulate expressions of his love for Black women.

  LESLIE GERARD I went out on the road with Tupac. I was five months pregnant with my son, and it was me, Tupac, and Fade, who was our hip-hop promo guy. We went out on the road for six weeks breaking Strictly. We went into all of these kind of underground radio stations that were in people’s homes and dorms, because hip-hop wasn’t on the radio. It was pirate radio. We were trying to be true to his background and where he came from. We went to the school in Baltimore and he was able to do an assembly in the auditorium. One of the stops that we made was in Harlem, back in like ’92. We’d just done this interview with some MTV hip-hop guy, and Tupac and his buddies couldn’t get a cab. The cabs kept just rolling by. I had to hail the cab for him. That’s how separate the worlds were. It was a lot of shaking hands and kissing babies at that point, and Pac couldn’t have been more charming.

  When Vice President Dan Quayle threatened Time Warner,IX nobody cared. You know, we had Death Row Records on our label. So that didn’t even scan in any meaningful way. That was like, Whatever, dude.

  MARK ANTHONY NEAL When his music gets referenced in a shooting, it’s a moment where the government, and C. Delores Tucker, and Bill Bennett,X and all these folks are going after Time Warner for gangsta rap, and Tupac is engulfed in that. I think for many Americans, Tupac is the guy some guy was listening to when he shot somebody. People realized that gangsta rap is being bought by a significant amount of young white kids. And white parents are losing their minds over this, and Tupac becomes a focal point, even more so than N.W.A, because at least with N.W.A you had a group. Tupac was a singular figure who also was very articulate about his choices—why he did what he did and why he said what he did—who also did have this longer legacy with the Black Panther Party. It was dangerous in a way that N.W.A could never be dangerous.

  ROB MARRIOTT It wasn’t enough to say, “Fuck the police.” He literally got into confrontations with them. All of the elements that Tupac spoke about, he actually lived. That was part of his appeal.

  CHUCK WALKER Túpac Amaru II was captured in 1781 and then executed. Peruvians know the story of the execution the way Americans know the story of Washington crossing the Delaware. It was just terribly brutal. They tried to quarter him—pulling off his four limbs via horses; they actually got eight horses. They wouldn’t come off. It’s really hard to do. So they ended up cutting out his tongue and hanging him. Before that, he’d witnessed the execution of his wife, Micaela Bastidas, who was super important to the rebellion. So he, his wife, his son, and his inner circle get executed in a very bloody fashion.

  VI

  WENDY DAY I started listening to rap in 1980, and I fell in love with the passion and the energy in the music. I was making quite a bit of money in corporate America at the time, which was very attractive to me, because I come from relatively lower-middle-class and humble beginnings. One of my life goals was to make money. The expression back then was “Whoever dies with the most toys wins,” and I was playing to win. Then, in the early 1990s, as the wisdom of age started to set in, I realized that wasn’t necessarily the most important thing in life, and for me, helping others took precedence.

  In 1992, I started Rap Coalition, which is a not-for-profit organization that helps artists get out of bad deals when they’re signed to a major label. For example, a label shelves them, or they’re signed to a management agreement or production agreement with somebody that’s not doing the job that they’re supposed to be doing. That’s the reactive part of what we do. The proactive side is we offer a lot of educational resources to help artists understand the music business as a whole, how the industry works, and also help them choose a team—meaning how to choose an attorney, a manager, an accountant. Basically, how to succeed in music, or how to make money in music.

  From Rap Coalition, I was able to start a for-profit called Power Moves, which is how I was able to fund Rap Coalition and still do to this day. Power Moves is the company that helps artists get into good deals; we negotiate for artists that have leverage. This was right around the time that I met Tupac.

  ETHAN BROWN New York from ’90 to ’94. Giuliani comes in then and everything totally changes. But the nightlife before then is fascinating. There’s such a mix of people. It’s almost impossible to imagine now. You have gangsters, Wall Street guys, LGBT people, everybody kind of mixed into this world. And there’s a lot of underworld stuff running through these clubs. Peter Gatien would have this Sunday-night party with Funkmaster Flex.I It was basically the most important club event in the history of hip-hop.

  TERRENCE “KLEPT” HARDING I grew up in Brooklyn. I was always in the streets. I was a hustler, not a drug dealer. But I used to get a lot of money in the early nineties.

  I met Big in 1994. I always wanted to get on and rap; I was doing demos, and I’d start rapping and I’d stop. The night of the Grammys, I was sick as a dog. I was staying home and all my boys, they were like, “Yo, yo, let’s go to the Tunnel, let’s go to the Tunnel, it’s going to be the Grammy after-party.” Somebody convinced me to go. Nowadays people spend thousands of dollars on weed, but back in those days, people used to buy a dime bag or two and just chill. I didn’t like to smoke when I was sick. We went to the weed spot on Nostrand and Sterling, which was the go-to spot for skunk weed; got a dime bag; and then we all drove to the Tunnel. We all had cars. I told my boys I was smoking the weed with the person that was putting me on that night, because I went there with intentions to get on in rap.

  Everybody was there. Wu-Tang had just had “C.R.E.A.M.” I’m seeing all these different artists. I’m sitting down in the corner like, I gotta figure out who I want to rap to, but I’m beat, like I have a severe flu, like, some fucked-up shit. I did that for so long, the next thing that happened was the lights came on and the party was over. I jumped up and freaked out. I’m like, Oh shit. I’m looking for anybody. I’m ready to rap to the bartender. If you haven’t been in the Tunnel, the bar is long, so I’m walking around the bar to look and see who I can catch because once the lights come on, it’s over. As I’m walking toward the door to lead to the big vestibule area of the Tunnel—people getting their coats or whatever and all that—I see Big standing up. I’m like, Oh shit, there go Biggie Smalls. That’s an ill nigga, thinking I’m going to step to him, in my mind.

  So I walk up to Big and I say, “Yo, you know my man June in Brooklyn. My name is Klept. I’m the nicest nigga that ain’t out.” Looked him right in the face.

  He looked at me and paused for a second, then stuck his hand out and said, “Yo, I believe
you.”

  I don’t think he really believed me when he said it, but he did it in a genuine way. All he had then was “Party and Bullshit” and [guest vocals on Mary J. Blige’s remix album of] What’s the 411? He had a crazy buzz, but he didn’t have anything out yet. Me, as a rapper, I knew he was an ill nigga. I was that fashion dude—I had DKNY jewelry, mad Polo shit—that’s my history in the streets.

  In the midst of him saying, “Yo, I believe you,” he’s standing around with some dudes who turn out to be Bönz Malone, Lil’ Cease, and Chico Del Vec. I didn’t know who Lil’ Cease and Chico Del Vec were. In the interim—remember, this is when Big was just coming up, so he wasn’t in the making-money stages yet—he goes, “Yo, Cease, we gonna go get some breakfast? Yo, let’s go get a taxi.”

  I’m like, “Y’all trying to go somewhere? I got a car.” I told them I’d meet them out front. In my mind, I already knew what time it was: I’m like, This motherfucker don’t know that I just bought a brand-new Q45, fresh out the box. The Tunnel was on Twenty-Seventh Street, so when the party was over, traffic was moving slowly up the block. As I pulled up to the front of the Tunnel, and Big and them looked over and saw what I was in, that spaceship, their eyes looked like kids seeing Santa Claus. They looked like, Oh shit, this motherfucker doing his thing, whoever the fuck he is.

  Now we’re posted up right in the front of the Tunnel when everybody is coming out. So everybody’s seein’ the car, and seein’ Big in the passenger seat. Big was like, “We’re going to go to Chelsea [Square] Diner,” which was the twenty-four-hour after-club spot in Manhattan. He bought everybody breakfast.