After, we got in my car, and I rolled up the bag of weed. I had the Souls of Mischief’s “Never No More” on cassette because I liked that beat, and I rapped every lyric I had. Big said, “Take my number, let’s connect tomorrow.”
From that day forward, me and Big, we would be like the Dynamic Duo going on through New York. When he rapped “Q45 by my side,” he was talking about mine. He just stuck to me because I had the style and swag. He had the lyrics and the presence. We used to go pick up Nas in Queens. This is when they were all coming up. They really had no money yet. I was taking bread—hence the name Klept.
ETHAN BROWN Gatien’s clubs were at their peak.II And that’s when Pac was there.
WENDY DAY I remember being on line at a club called the Palladium on Fourteenth Street, and I remember him being behind me and he was there with his entourage and they were very loud and shouting at passersby. They were catcalling females as they walked by and being obnoxious. I remember going to the back of the line, just so I wouldn’t have to be standing next to them. It was my first introduction to the world of Tupac.
KARL KANI My conversations with Tupac after he got super famous were very different. He was a different person at the time. It was strange.
PUDGEE THA PHAT BASTARD I’ve always felt like hangers—we call them the strays—but the hangers-on will come out of nowhere. Makeup artists, DJs, other rappers—everybody wants to become your best friend when you’re high-profile.
RICHARD PILCHER What happened to him in terms of his being commercialized, and the persona he adopted, still boggles my mind. I understand what happens to someone in that situation. But I… You know, he came back to school a couple of times when he was starting to get famous. And at least the second time he came back, he was sort of with his posse and it was like, they were defending him. I remember he said to me at one point, “It is so weird that I walk in a room and all these middle-aged white men in suits run over to me and ask me what I need.”
The things that were all of a sudden available to this young man who’d been raised in poverty, and what that does to your brain, I don’t know. Because I’ve never been anywhere close to that. But it has to be really tough to deal with. So what happened to him—the kind of persona that he adopted, or maybe had to adopt, or was encouraged to adopt—being a tough thug and no one to mess with and all of that sort of thing, it just didn’t jibe with the kid I knew.
D-SHOT If he would have stayed away from the gangbangers and stayed connected with his real cats from the Bay, he wouldn’t have gotten caught up in all that.
KENDRICK WELLS I was a fan of Tupac, the dude, the cool motherfucker who’d party with me. We messed with girls together and had fun together. I was happy with his career rising. But I wasn’t a friend because of his music. Music was second to me. Him reaching his potential was very important to me, but the music was second. I wasn’t a fan yet. I wasn’t a fan until the Me Against the World album.
MOE Z MD That was one of the weirdest records I ever worked on—Me Against the World. I’ve never done a record like that. That was so weird.
Dre was still on Ruthless [Records] when I was hanging out with him. He was trying to get me to be a part of N.W.A because Ice Cube had left. I couldn’t really move the way that they moved. I just… I had a different thing. I wasn’t a gangster. I didn’t want to be around that atmosphere, which made it hard because I grew up with Snoop and Warren G and all those guys. And they were wanting to do music with me, but I knew that they did street stuff that I wasn’t really into. By this time, I had gotten signed, got a publishing deal and a manager, and now I’m doing pop songs. I’m doing songs for kids on Capitol Records, A&M, but under another producer. He was supposed to be grooming us, but after about six years doing that pop music, I was kind of getting fed up, because this guy was getting all the credit. One of the songs that I wrote myself, he ended up being the producer of it, and they cut me out of the deal. So I needed to do something else.
I was doing stuff at Interscope for Radio and being up there all the time. They started to lose interest in Radio, not giving him as much attention. I was just sitting at the crib and still playing at church, you know, every Sunday, and then all of a sudden, Tupac called Radio’s manager and was hyped about me and wanted me to do some remixes for him to see how I would work with him. He said to send him some tracks, too.
I made a cassette with some tracks on it, and they mailed it to him. It was on a Wednesday. They mailed it to him. He got it on Friday. He loved it. I think I went to the studio on that Thursday and did “Cradle to the Grave,” “Runnin’ [from the Police]” with Biggie, and “Lord Knows.” So he heard those and was like, “Oh my god,” and flew me to New York on that Monday to work on another song with him. It was “Outlaw,” and we worked out of Quad Studios.
Interscope was notorious for reworking songs. He would do a song to one track. And then they would get another producer in to get what they called a remix. If they liked that better, they used that version. He wanted to try to get the best stuff with the music that he chose. I was one of the ones that could give him that. With the energy that we had together, we created a different kind of vibe. It was kind of a mixture of The Chronic and what Ice Cube did on his first album with hip-hoppish beats with samples but also keeping it funky. I added my little twists and turns but that’s the energy that we’re trying to have. I think the label was trying to steer it a different way. They had other producers using my elements and the vibe that I had going on with my thing.
I sat in on some of the other sessions and they were cool because I was getting to meet some of the other producers. I met the two white guys that did “Me Against the World.” I just sat in for a while and listened. And they asked if I could offer anything, and I didn’t really have anything; they kind of seemed like they had it together. I sat in on “If I Die 2Nite” after it was done. My engineer was mixing it. And I came in there just to sit around, to hang out. Pac sampled me saying, “Tonight’s the night I get in some shit.”
It still was a tough road for me. Some of my stuff got changed. In fact, “Lord Knows” is a mixture of three different versions: the original guy, Brian G; some elements from my remix; and some elements from Tony Pizarro’s remix. And the label had my engineer piece it together.
Creating it with him was great and fun, but all of the records I did on there, they went back and did an extra mix that I wasn’t there for. And some of them I’m not happy with. But it still turned out to be a great album.
EZI CUT Soulshock, Jay-B, and meIII had a few sessions spaced out in the Valley. They rented a house in Encino. We basically just had a few late-night sessions [with] an old sampler, some old-school equipment. We were just vibing and cooking up, the three of us. And I remember we probably came out with two demos. One of them was the “Old School” demo track. We kind of left it alone. Didn’t give it much thought. A month or two later, Jay-B and I had gotten our asses back to Europe, to Copenhagen. I remember Soulshock called me one night and said this new upcoming rapper was interested in cutting the track. We knew who Tupac was, but he wasn’t nearly as iconic as he is today. So we were just hyped that we were going to have a real, like, U.S. cut on Interscope. That was even more so the hype for the three of us. We knew that Tupac was clearly an incredible artist. We knew that already.
The story goes that this A & R guy up on Interscope was playing our demo for “Old School,” which already had the hook; we had to sample the, like, some vocals from Brand Nubian. The way you hear the song on the record is actually how he was presented for the demo. And allegedly, Tupac walks the hallway and passes the A & R’s office, who is in there bumping our song. And he kind of passes the office and then kind of stops and backs his way into the office and goes, “What is that?” So his inspiration was telling us the story about how he came up and those who came before him.
Initially, having an Interscope cut made me move to the States. I was there for seven years. But before that we were traveling
back and forth. I’d be stationed over there and staying in the Valley for a month and then going back to Europe. We had a clear definition of Tupac. He was definitely an artist that was going to evolve and become somebody. The streets were already buzzing over there. He’d gained some radio play. So everybody’s eye was on him, and it was clear to everyone involved this was something special. Not necessarily that he was going to become this iconic rapper decades later, but everybody in the game or trying to get into the game definitely knew who he was. And we especially knew that he was a storyteller.
ERIC ALTENBURGER After I did the Pac album [Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z…], that’s when I sort of became the Rap Guy. To put it in perspective, when I ended up buying my first house, I called it the House That Tupac Built. Everything I got, all the work that came after that, was based on having done that album. It just didn’t even matter what it looked like. It’s like, “If you’re good for Tupac, you’re good for us.”
With most rappers, you set a call time for ten a.m., you’re lucky to get them in by two p.m. They’ll come in so deep they need five SUVs. If we have five setups, we’ll be lucky to get through two. But with Tupac, I set the shoot for Me Against the World at nine a.m., I showed up about a half an hour early, and he was there already. He was by himself just waiting. He understood. It was business. He understood what this meant. This is for me. I’m promoting myself. I’m working for myself. If I fuck this up, I’m fucking up my own business. Total professional, super sweetheart. I’m like, Wow, okay, awesome.
Then, getting ready for the shoot, doing some setups, I had a stack of CDs. I’m like, “What music should I put on? Public Enemy? Ice-T? Eric B?” He’s like, “No, no, no, I brought my own music.” Dude puts in the soundtrack to The Lion King. All day, on repeat. He just sang it all day. And he was a happy dude. He was being lighthearted. There was lots of smiling. He just had a great personality. Then when it came time for the shoot, boom, street persona. He didn’t fake that shit. He lived it. But then he had this sweet, kind side, too.
We did some of that shoot in the studio and went up to the roof to do the rest. When we were up there, he pulled out all these little nickel bags to roll one up with. I was like, “I have some weed over here if you want to try that, instead of who knows what you’re smoking there.” He was happy about that, and he pulled out $500 and he’s like, “Can you get me some of this?” He came by my apartment to pick it up. I had, like, an elevator guy, because it was a prewar building. It was just funny when he came up because he was looking over Tupac’s shoulder, looking at me, confused. My wife—who was my girlfriend at the time—was living with me. She’s always like, “I just remember him being so clean.” He was wearing a Blackhawks jersey. Unmistakable. That was, like, a really classic day for me: hooking up Tupac with my weed guy.
ROB MARRIOTT The feeling of the time was that if you were into hip-hop, if you’re part of the culture, you had a very antagonistic relationship with the world. Tupac fully embraced that. He was such a student of the culture that he literally embodied that.
MOE Z MD He wanted to name the album Fuck the World. That was his energy. He was thinking about death a lot and it messed us up. A lot of his conversations, talking with me and my sister, he visualized somebody sneaking in on him and shooting him or just getting caught out somewhere. He felt like he had a lot of enemies.
ETHAN BROWN There’s a mix of Brooklyn and Queens guys that Pac starts hanging with—Haitian Jack, Freddie Moore, Jimmy Henchman, and Stretch. That relationship kind of starts in the Above the Rim era. He’s hanging with those guys in ’93-ish, and hip-hop is much, much smaller back then. It’s tiny. And then the number of guys who would be in hip-hop who had formerly been in the streets in any kind of serious capacity is even smaller. That’s how he ends up with those guys.
And in the late eighties and early nineties there’s really a decimation of Brooklyn and Queens street guys. Supreme gets indicted and locked up.IV The major figures in Brooklyn and Queens—Fat CatV included—all go down. What’s left are folks who are like, I should get out of this, and there was a sense that hip-hop was on the up. Mostly because of The Chronic in ’92.
ALEX ROBERTS I liked Suge and I liked Dre and I loved the music because I knew they were telling the truth. I also knew that the bitches and hoes were bitches and hoes and not somebody’s wife or girlfriend. And the end user of this music was mostly Caucasians from the age of thirteen to thirty-five. I knew it would blow up. Dre those first few years—I’d never seen anything like that in my life. I was banging The Chronic in demo form, and I grew up in Malibu. Driving in an SL on the PCH, with the top down, cranking it and getting the most dirty looks ever from people that I’d known most of my life.
ETHAN BROWN I talk about The Chronic as the Jaws of hip-hop. Jaws creates basically an entirely new paradigm for movies. Hip-hop is not making a lot of money yet, but the sense is that it could soon be. Guys like Jimmy and Jack are coming into the business, especially because street stuff is in terrible shape.
JUSTIN TINSLEY Think about where Tupac was in the summer of 1993. He’s becoming this household name. Juice was a cult classic. Pac was already known by the federal government, not just because of his last name, but because former vice president Dan Quayle wanted 2Pacalypse Now taken off the shelves. Poetic Justice is set to hit theaters later that year.
JAKI BROWN Interestingly enough, John Singleton did a movie called Poetic Justice. He hired Robi Reed to cast it. I found seventy people for Boyz n the Hood, and he didn’t hire me to do Poetic Justice. At that time, he became a mentee of Spike Lee. Robi Reed had been his casting director for all his films. I think he told John, “You should use Robi because she’s my casting director and she’s the best.” So John never even called me. And they ended up using Tupac, of course.
BARBARA OWENS When I saw Poetic Justice, I didn’t see anybody or anything else in that film except him.
JUSTIN TINSLEY That role even came with some controversy when you talk about the whole AIDS-test thing.VI
SHARONDA DAVILA-IRVING I remember when he first started working on Poetic Justice. He was so excited to be working with Janet Jackson. I remember how hurt he was because she was married and her husband came to the set every day. He came to New York and we were celebrating. I was like, “This shit is real. You’re really about to be working with Janet Jackson!” He could not wait to get on set with her. Actors always say it’s not really romantic. I remember thinking while watching it, I wonder when he was trying to kick it with her. I guess he never got the chance.
JUSTIN TINSLEY Now he’s in New York filming what will be his third major role, Above the Rim, and spending time with these movers and shakers.
CHARISSE JONES On the one hand, you’re seeing him in Above the Rim, and he’s got this amazing career that is taking off, and taking off in a direction that was unprecedented. At that time, you didn’t have a lot of rappers who were kind of crossing those boundaries. It was such a surprising thing to see at that time that it was like, God, I hope he can keep this going. I hope he doesn’t shatter that. I was also starting to worry a little bit that this guy’s got the world in his hands, but he’s juggling it. What’s going to happen?
JUSTIN TINSLEY If you were in New York in the nineties and you were in the know, you knew Haitian Jack. Jack knew all of the party promoters. Jack knew all of the DJs. Jack was fly. Jack was flashy. But also, Ice Cube made it a song, but Jack made it a lifestyle: he was the wrong nigga to fuck with. Jack had no problem putting holes in people. He’d clear out a whole block. Jack’s rep was super heavy, but he was charismatic, and Tupac was charismatic. But for all of Tupac’s leadership qualities, you could impress him with a lifestyle he wasn’t privy to.
ETHAN BROWN Jack was very smooth, very personable, and could ease into different social situations—whether it’s the music industry or the downtown New York club scene, which was a big deal. I think he’s, like, the most magnetic of all those characters by far. Jimmy [Henchman] is total
ly different. He is not an amiable person who eases between worlds. He was a super-tough guy—both physically tough and difficult to get to know. So out of that group, I think it’s not even close, who you would be drawn to; it’s Jack, no question.
If you’re Tupac and you’re doing Above the Rim, these guys are obviously incredible characters to study. I think it’s kind of too easy to say he just copies this tough-guy character in Juice. It makes much more sense that if your social circle is these guys—whether it’s Jack, Jimmy, etc.—that’s going to leave a much bigger impression than a fictional character that you’re playing. He and Haitian Jack are going around beating up guys together and there’s this wild nightclub streak they both have. There are photos of the two of them together with Madonna.
JUSTIN TINSLEY In the 1995 Vibe prison interview,VII he talked about it: I was wearing baggy jeans and sneakers and they put me onto designer clothes. I got my first Rolex with them. And he said that the role of Birdie in Above the Rim was inspired by Jack. Hanging around Jack, he picked up the mannerisms Jack had; he was charismatic, but he also instilled fear in a lot of people. He has people in his ear, people like Mike Tyson and Biggie, saying, Yo, Pac. Jack is cool, but be careful. You might be out of your league with this one. He’s in the major leagues when it comes to street dudes. This ain’t some type of dude who is just going to be in awe of you because you’re in a movie with Janet Jackson.
It was great, until it wasn’t. Pac picked up a lot of game from Jack, and Jack says he really enjoyed hanging out with Tupac. Pac became really embedded in that New York underworld, and once you open Pandora’s box, you can’t put shit back in there. Eventually, some real street shit is gonna happen, and lines will be drawn in the sand.
The night of the sexual assault incident was November 18, 1993. Literally three weeks before that, Pac is in Atlanta and he shoots two off-duty police officers because he sees them, like, accosting a Black driver. At that point in time, you would think that him shooting two off-duty police officers would be the biggest legal hurdle. But that November, he’s introduced to Ayanna Jackson at Nell’s [a nightclub in New York].
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