It was like, “Well, if all of a sudden they’re saying that, okay, you’re not really guilty, and they’re going to let you out, who’s going to compensate you for that fuckery that you just went through deemed incarceration?” And his response was, “I’m just gonna ask the judge for credit.” I found that so funny, because it showed me that, first of all, he knew that at some point, something was going to happen where he would get in trouble again. Not because he was a troublemaker; because he was so honest and outspoken, and because of that he would absolutely get into trouble.
ANGELA ARDIS I think that Tupac was trapped between two worlds. It would be complicated. It was a time when you had to be as real as what you were rapping about. I think eventually he got caught up in that game. Then the people around you are telling you what you need to do and be. On the flip side, you have who you probably really are, and you really just want to take care of your people. And you’re torn. I think jail for him was a time to sit and reflect and figure out what he was trying to do. But society put this hat on him, and he felt he had to wear it when he was being seen by them.
WENDY DAY He was actually very upbeat. He was very aware of his star status. And he was very aware that people treated him differently because of that—in a good way and in a bad way. Other guys would give him extra food or access to their commissary. So he saw the good side of it. But he also saw the bad side of it. When I went to visit him, they sat us at the very first table right near the guard tower. They didn’t do that because he was a bad prisoner; they wanted to sit there and eavesdrop for their own entertainment. And he told me that, as we were sitting right there. He’s like, “I wonder if I should be speaking a little bit louder, so that homeboy can actually hear me.” It was very aware and very funny, but he knew what it was. It surprised me how much of a fame seeker he was. Not to say that was problematic, but he loved the idea of dating Janet Jackson. He loved the idea of Mickey Rourke coming to visit him. When they told him, “Okay, there’s an older white woman here to see you,” he thought it was Madonna.
It took him a minute to come out. I probably sat there for like twenty minutes, waiting for him to come out to the visit. He went and took a shower. When he came out, he was kind of laughing. He’s like, “Man, if I’d known that was you, I wouldn’t have taken a shower. I thought it was Madonna coming to see me.” I’m like, “Hey, I’m worth a shower!” The fact that he could say to a guard, “Hey, let me go just shower real quick, before you bring me out,” tells me what kind of power he had inside of a maximum-security prison.
KENDRICK WELLS While he was free, everybody’s like, “We got your back. We got your back.” But once he went to prison, it was people like Madonna who offered him things, who got things for him. He learned that it wasn’t about race. It was about people who really cared. Some people were very genuine; Madonna was very genuine. He wanted me to know that. He wanted me to know love comes in from places you don’t expect.
ANGELA ARDIS Meeting Tupac in prison was surreal. It was a little challenging for me only because there were other people there. Thug Life showed up and I didn’t know any of those guys. They’re sitting there with me. And then he walks in. I left to go to the vending machine. I hear the gate, and the doors opening and closing and footsteps, and I think I’m about to pass out. He came in. He was a lot smaller than I thought he would be. The bald head wasn’t there, of course—he’s in jail. The picture you have in your head—he’s not coming with the leather vest on and the bald head with the bandanna around it and the earrings. But the calmness of him, his demeanor, his tone, was the same as the letters. The conversations that we had weren’t as exciting as the letters; that’s a little difficult to reenact per se. But then again, the other guys were there and they were having conversations with him, too, so it was kind of like trying to appease two things at one time. You have the situation where we’re soft and cuddly over here and then it’s back over there talking about business.
PUDGEE THA PHAT BASTARD My letters to Pac in jail were—I don’t want to say generic, but they were very “keep your head up.” In fact, in one of them, I used all his songs to write the letter. His songs became my tools to communicate. I knew the things that other people were writing—“Yo, that shit is fucked up.” “How these bitches going to do that to you?” “How you gonna get locked up for rape?” “How are they gonna shoot—?” “What the fuck is the label doing about this?” I’m gonna stay on the fringes until you need something from me. He wrote me back three times, and all of our letters were generic. Our calls were more so on the fun side, because we would talk about people and say things that we wouldn’t normally say—things that I cannot repeat here.
MOE Z MD I sat in on the session he did with Richie Rich and Mike Mosley.III There’s a song where Jasmine GuyIV is singing on the hook. This was after Pac was already in jail, and my sister and I were vocal-coaching her for the record. I remember going to Johnny J’sV house and working on something that was supposed to be Outlawz and Thug Life together.
We tried to get him on one of the songs where it was all of the Outlawz and all of Thug Life. He was going to do his part from jail. We had the phone on speaker in the studio in the vocal booth with a mic on it. We had the other phone to the speaker, so that he could hear the beat. But the music sends that delay to him. And then there’s a delay coming back to us at the same time, and we hear in all of it. So I was like, “Dang, Pac, I don’t think we’re gonna be able to make this work.” He hung up. That was the last time I talked to him.
ANGELA ARDIS The thing that I love about the letters, based off of the responses that I have gotten over the years, is that it allows people an opportunity to see him through his own words. I didn’t tell you anything about Tupac myself. He was telling you; you were learning as I was learning. You got an opportunity to see something else.
KENDRICK WELLS I went to jail in ’92 and then I didn’t talk to him again until like ’94. I had heard he went to jail. Somebody gave me his number and his address. I wrote to him; he was still happy to hear from me. We talked about how we fell off. He told me where he was coming from. I told him where I was coming from. We were excited. It was like he needed a sense of foundation—a sense of reality. By the time I got to him at Death Row, he was already, like, completely floating above reality.
JUSTIN TINSLEY Suge goes to Tupac in jail, basically saying, “We have a common enemy.” I don’t even know how deep Pac’s hatred was. I know he was upset. But Tupac could be manipulated. Like, as iconic as he is, he was still twenty-four years old sitting in a maximum-security penitentiary—in his eyes, for a crime he wasn’t guilty of. So there’s gonna be rage boiling up in there, and then you have the stories about the guards maybe assaulting Tupac, so he’s dealing with that. The dude is a ticking time bomb. He just needed someone to pull the pin out of the grenade and throw him in somebody’s direction. Suge was that dude.
STELLA NAIR The Spanish recognized at the moment of Túpac Amaru II’s uprising how powerful cultural and artistic production is from indigenous people, and that these things are active symbols and a threat to Spanish rule. At the end of this horrific eight-hour public execution, they say you can no longer dress in Inca clothing, you can no longer have portraits of your Inca ancestors, you can no longer speak Quechua. Everything that gives them indigenous identity and shows their continuity to the greatness of the past is illegal.
The Inca believe when you die you just transition physically, but you’re still alive, so your mummy has to survive. Once the Spanish realize the power of these mummies, they go out and try to destroy them. Around that time, indigenous portraits really take off, particularly of rulers, and these are seen as the new way in which those ancestors live and exist. So for indigenous people, those would have been very potent symbols, but from a European perspective, they were just portraits.
Materiality is really important: it doesn’t matter the form something is in; the materials carry the essence of something. There’s this whole dif
ferent way of understanding the power of the visual, material world that was very different from a European perspective.
“Huaca” is the Quechua word for anything sacred. Throughout the colonial period, in the extirpation of idolatry, as the Spanish called it, you see them struggling to figure out what items are huacas. It’s a totally different way of understanding the world around you.
And all those things come to a head around Túpac Amaru II’s execution, where suddenly they’re like: It is all these things. And all these things are a threat to our ability to control the Andes.
VIII
VIRGIL ROBERTS Before I started work at SOLAR,I one of the passions I had was doing civil rights litigation. I represented the NAACP in a Los Angeles school desegregation case. That was my own personal passion for which I didn’t get paid any money. So I did things to make money. One of the things that I started doing was work representing people in the music industry. In the late seventies, there probably were no more than maybe fifteen Black lawyers in the country that did music work. I started to represent a lot of the Black clients in Los Angeles. There were groups like the Sylvers, and Cheryl Lynn, and the Whispers—all of whom I represented. Most of the artists on the SOLAR label were my clients. As a consequence, I got to know Dick Griffey, who was the owner and the founder of SOLAR Records, really well. He was a very Afrocentric man, and so was I.
So as this company became really successful and was getting ready to expand, Dick came to me and said, “Hey, want to be our in-house lawyer?” Initially, I was like, “No.” In 1979, the voters in California passed a proposition that had the impact of doing away with desegregation litigation in California. When the voters passed Prop 1, those of us in the civil rights community, we tried to get that proposition overturned, on the grounds that it was a denial of equal protection. We lost. Then I decided that if I wanted to become involved in doing public school reform, I had to do it in another way. And that meant becoming more involved with nonprofit organizations and other things. The life of a litigator doesn’t allow you to become involved in the community, because the court controls your time. So I talked to my clients like the Whispers and Leon Sylvers. They all thought it was an okay thing for me to work for the record company. They loved the idea that their lawyer would now be at the record company. So I left private practice and started working for SOLAR late 1981, early 1982.
Philosophically, it was a good place to be. I mean, Dick, he wanted to have Black people or people of color do everything for him. And that was consistent with my own personal philosophy. And so I went to work there and stayed for like fourteen years. Dick was a real entrepreneur. So the work that I did was negotiating and drafting contracts, and was also overseeing various business operations. When I started, I was vice president of SOLAR Records and president of Dick Griffey Productions. And Dick Griffey Productions was the largest Black concert promoter in the country. We did literally all the big Black tours. We took Michael Jackson out on tour. We had a whole concert promotion company, we had a personal management company, we had two publishing companies. And all those companies are kind of under the Dick Griffey Productions rubric itself. I was both a lawyer in the sense of doing deals, but also the CEO in terms of managing people in the companies and our relationships with banks.
Dick believed that Black folks should own what they create. There’s actually a video that he did that we used to distribute, and we call it from slave ships to ownership. So lots of young Black folks would come and talk to Griffey about how to start their own company. I would be sitting in on those meetings with him. Suge was a guy who actually had done some security work for some of the concerts that we promoted.
ALEX ROBERTS I made a momentary career change in ’88. It was pro sports and entertainment. An agent I was working under had met Suge because he had many football players on his roster, and when Suge played for the Rams, they hooked up.
First time I met Suge was at a Bobby Brown concert. He approached me from behind and I knew something bigger than me was standing behind me. I turned around and I looked up. He goes, “We need to talk.” I go, “But you’re working right now.” I surprised him. I knew he was Brown’s close-protection bodyguard. I gave him my card and told him to call my office.
The next day, my assistant called freaking out, saying, “Should I call security? I don’t have you down for any appointment and there’s like eight guys headed toward your office.”
VIRGIL ROBERTS Suge transitioned from sort of doing security to becoming a manager of different artists. So he managed Dre. He managed the DOC. And a lot of his management was just keeping these guys out of fights.
ALEX ROBERTS Suge saw an opportunity and boy, did he use that to his advantage. All of a sudden we had N.W.A hanging out in the bullpen. This was the golden triangle of Beverly Hills where Bedford and Wilshire met, and it was on the fifth floor of the Security Pacific Bank building. Just getting in that building alone through the security was tough. You can imagine guys in suits nervously riding up in the elevator with cats from South Central.
VIRGIL ROBERTS He came to the office one day and said, “Look, I’m managing this kid Chocolate. He wrote all these songs on the Vanilla Ice record, and he’s not getting paid. Can you help us get paid?” We met with Chocolate and he talked about how he made these songs for Bobby van Winkle down in Texas. And so we ended up making a publishing deal for Chocolate. He got a big advance—like $400,000, because all the songs were for Vanilla Ice, the first big white rapper. So we were able to establish that, in fact, Chocolate really had written these songs. Because there was a question. I thought maybe he made it up. But we actually got a copy of a record Vanilla Ice’s manager put out independently in Texas, and it gave Chocolate the credit for the songs he wrote, like “Ice Ice Baby.” So there is a $400,000 advance and Suge gets 25 percent of it.II
A couple of weeks later, Suge came back with Dre. And he’s like, “I’ve been working with Dre as his manager. He’s not being paid.” SOLAR didn’t do rap music. I’m taking notes and I’m like, “Tell me what you did.” “I did the N.W.A record that sold about a million copies. I did the JJ Fad record that sold over a million copies. The DOC record that sold a million and a half copies. I did another N.W.A record that sold over a million and a half copies. I did a Michel’le record that sold over a million.” Of all these records, the only one I recognize is Michel’le, because it was an R & B record. I knew it had been a platinum record. So the question was: Was he telling the truth? And my initial reaction was that anyone who produced records is getting paid. I don’t believe it.
Dre told the story about how he and Eazy-E were partners and the idea was that as partners, Eazy was going to run the business and Dre was going to handle the creative. But then Eazy went and partnered with Jerry Heller and next thing Dre knew, he was no longer a partner, he was just working at the company. Nobody’s paying any royalties or any advances. That seemed a little strange to me. There was a lawyer who worked for Ruthless Records named Ira, and I had actually hired Ira to do some work for SOLAR. So I called him and asked him what the deal was with Dre. They had him signed as an artist because he was a member of N.W.A, but they didn’t have him signed to a contract as a producer and they didn’t have him signed to a publishing agreement. So Suge and DOC and Dre came back again and Griffey said, “Dre, look, son, if you can make hit records, you can make hit records. You don’t have to worry about getting paid. You can just have your own company.” That was really the genesis of Death Row.
Dre said anything he did he wanted to be a partner with DOC, because he did a lot of the vocal production and the writing. There was a time when it was always DOC and Dre. So he said, “I’m going to do it with DOC and Suge.” So Griffey said, “Let’s, the four of us, partner. I will be the senior person. You and DOC take half the company, I’ll take half the company, and then we’ll pay Suge as a manager fifteen percent off the top.” That was the initial oral agreement. I’d actually formed a corporation for them and they
said the name wasn’t hard enough. They said they wanted to be Death Row Records. There actually was a trademark for Def Row—a producer named Andre Manuel had trademarked it. So I bought the trademark for, like, $25,000, if I recall.
They didn’t have a lot of money, and we at SOLAR didn’t have a lot of money, but what we did have was a facility. The third floor was the creative floor. That floor had a recording studio, rehearsal hall, and some meeting rooms. We turned that floor over to Death Row. And that’s where The Chronic was recorded.
Before The Chronic was recorded, we had this strategy of introducing the Death Row artists to the world: we did a soundtrack to the movie Deep Cover. There were a bunch of Death Row artists on the soundtrack, but it was a SOLAR record. That’s how I got to know Dre and Suge and DOC and Snoop—because they were in our building.
Griffey gave them that space because he knew what was being created, and he was a partner in the company they were creating. I mean, it is obvious that Dre was actually a creative genius. He had that pulse. Looking in the history of the record business, there are always people who have that sort of touch. Dre was really unique, because he was an R & B producer who could do rap music. He created a sound. That’s not like the East Coast rap sound you would hear, which were just tracks that people can rap to. Dre actually created tracks that were melodies. The difference, of course, is that when you do something like “California Love,” you can actually hum the music.
ALEX ROBERTS Suge approached me in 1990 and said, “Don’t take this wrong, but I need a white guy to open some bigger doors.” He told me, “I don’t know what it is, but I would trust you with my mother.” I said, “I feel the same way. Because if anything happened to me, the same would happen to you. Let’s get that out of the way.” We became really tight after that. He didn’t push me to come work for Death Row. I knew he’d spoken to a few other people and I’d spoken to them, too, and whatever answer they were giving him they were lying, because they were telling me, “There’s no fucking way. This thing is a nightmare waiting to happen. I’m getting married, I’m gonna have kids.” I said, “Yeah, well, somebody’s going to do it. And I’m going to dive in deep and swim.”
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