WENDY DAY He had signed there more to protect him from the drama, and what it did was it showed that there was new drama. It got him out of one highly explosive situation into other, smaller explosive situations. It was a three-album deal. And I know for a fact that he believed he could just deliver three albums and leave. And that’s not the way it works. You have to deliver three albums when you sign to a three-album deal, but there are specifications in the contract of a timeline. There were a lot of intricacies within that he just didn’t really understand. When he signed it, I don’t know if he really believed or just wanted to believe that he could deliver three albums and just bounce. He ended up recording something like thirty albums. A ton of bootleg albums came out after he passed, so I knew he delivered more than three. He and I hadn’t spoken, but I did notice that in pictures and in videos he had stopped wearing the Death Row chain. I don’t know when he stopped, but I noticed it in the summer right before he died. He started wearing an angel pendant. That was when I reached out to him to make sure everything was okay. And that’s when he just fell back in step with me like we had never not spoken.
He’s like, “Okay, it’s time to start putting together my label. I’m going to be leaving Death Row. I’ve been talking to the lawyer about leaving, and I want to start shopping a deal for my company. Since I helped the East Coast and the West Coast go to war, my first project I want to put out is called One Nation.” He had already started recording it. That was going to be the first album. I started putting the business plan together for the company. It was called Euthanasia. It had a community center program. It was sort of up in the air, but wherever it was going to be based, he wanted to make sure that we had a day care in the office. It was very foresightful, very caring. The plan was kind of amazing. He outlined it to me and then he said, “Here, you put it in writing.” So I had a project, and that’s what I was working on when he was shot.
KENDRICK WELLS He talked about that a little bit because when he wanted me to help run the label, he said, “Are you still in the record business?” I’m like, “Hell yeah.” So I was doing my own records and stuff like that. I put my stuff on hiatus to go work with real major-label stuff or whatever. And Tupac had some ideas he wanted to work out. He knew he was doing movies, he knew he had to rap a certain way, and the way he was going to make it right was to help the young and the disenfranchised. He felt like his alternative label, Euthanasia, would fulfill something that was necessary. He was going to work with real talent. But the goal of that was to give back. It never came to fruition. So I can’t say exactly what it was, but we talked about the structure of it and we talked about setting up the office and bringing Yaasmyn Fula,IX and started bringing people in to set up the office and doing things to get that going, but I never saw it realized.
ALEX ROBERTS The rumors of Pac leaving Death Row were true. He talked about it. He wanted to marry Quincy Jones’s daughter.X
Quincy said to Pac, “Are you going to be able to get out clean without any trouble?” We had a meeting in New York. He said to me, “You think you’ll be okay?”
I said, “We’ll be okay.”
Quincy asked Pac, “What do you have in your bank account?”
He said, “I don’t know.”
I said, “It’s not what it should be and that’s all I’m saying.” I didn’t bring it up in front of them to embarrass him. I told Pac, “I know Suge’s been good to you. But by the same token, do you have anything in your name? Do you know how much money you have made?” Pac started thinking about it. He had all the watches, the gold jewelry, drove whatever he wanted. But nothing was in his name.
That hurt me because I was really close to Suge and I’d brought it up before. Nobody else would bring it up. I did it one day when we went to Fatburger.
I said, “Look, I understand business.”
He’d go, “Alex, I’m doing it because we grew up differently. They’re gonna take that money—whether it’s one hundred grand or two hundred grand or five hundred grand—get it on a Friday, and we wouldn’t see them for a week. And then they’d be calling, saying, ‘Hey, I’m in Vegas and I’m broke.’ ”
That was his excuse for why everything was in his name. I knew better because of the look on his face.
I said, “You’re doing it the wrong way. This is only going to bring more heat on you.”
I told him [Suge] that Pac was no dummy. I recommended we set up a trust for each artist, so they couldn’t lose anything. He told me to let him think about it. There was nothing to think about.
“I can take it and get it done this afternoon, and these guys will have a whole different level of respect for you.”
His response was: “They don’t respect me now?”
C’mon, man. We’ve made you a multimillionaire. You are untouchable and you’re still playing with fire. And you’re jeopardizing their careers.
COLIN WOLFE Once he hooked up with Suge and his whole camp, it was like signing a deal with the devil. I guess his ego got in the way, being that he wanted to be thug life. But I think he found after a while that, yeah, this whole thing ain’t right. That’s why everybody left. All of those cars and houses. None of that was in their names.
ALEX ROBERTS We owned a car dealership, West Coast Exotics, because everybody we were signing we were giving cars to. Suge said, “Never, ever register the title in their names.”
COLIN WOLFE That’s why I left. Because I saw how crazy it was getting, and this was right before the money started coming. Producers getting beaten up in the Red Room and all this stuff? Engineers getting beat up because they were rolling the tape back too far? Threatening your life just because you won’t sign a contract? That doesn’t sound like a creative environment. I had been with Dre prior to that for, what, three or four years. Through all of the N.W.A sessions, I never faced any of that. I never felt threatened.
ALEX ROBERTS Having Rampart division moonlight for usXI—I mean, they were the most corrupt PD at the time, the LAPD—there were no favors done. It hurt us more than it helped.
COLIN WOLFE Tupac and Death Row felt like a great marriage at first. Until I think the business kind of got twisted. That was kind of the thing with the Chronic album, too. It’s great at first because nobody has money. Once the money starts coming in, and then all these other people start coming in, and you’re not getting your due, that starts to get to you eventually. But before that, it was great—him getting with Snoop and the Dogg Pound. They’re making some great fucking records. And with the things he was personifying, he couldn’t have come to a better place for production. Great place to go to get that Cali gangsta shit.
GOBI RAHIMI I directed the “Made Niggaz” video. That was one of those situations where Pac had the concept and I kind of fleshed it out for him.
Tracy and I fought on that one. She would overpromise the artists, and since I was sort of logistics, I knew we needed more money and more time for that video. We needed a minimum of three days. I was like, “We need four days for the video because he wants to do a short film. They want guns and scripts and explosions. We need to do this properly.” She came back to me and she’s like, “It has to be in two days.” And so my back was up against a wall to try to make that happen.
Unfortunately, or fortunately, a fight broke out on set. And that sort of saved us. One of the stuntmen got into a fight with one of the Outlawz, and then Pac and the rest of the Outlawz jumped on top of him. I was kind of doing my best to protect the stuntman. And he was like this hard-core South Side Chicago ex-marine. He was like, “I don’t give a fuck about these guys.” And then when the fight broke up, he went to his car and he got a gun. And by the time he got back, they put the Outlawz and Pac in a limo and they got carted off because the video got shut down.
WENDY DAY He was always very up-front with who he was and what he did. And while he always hung around with a lot of killers, he was not a killer. He just wasn’t with the rah-rah shit. And the thing about Death Row was it was entwined
in rah-rah shit. He did what he had to do to feel protected. He didn’t realize what he was getting into in order to be protected.
ALEX ROBERTS I knew there was some friction in the air between Dre and Pac. And I know Dre kinda had the limelight swept from underneath him. When Dre stepped away, Kurupt stepped in. Nobody really knows how good he was as a producer.
VIRGIL ROBERTS It got to the point where Dre didn’t want to come around because of the people who were there. He just stopped working, stopped producing. Jimmy Iovine recognized the talent in Dre, and Dre really became sort of like the A & R guy. Eventually what Iovine did was he bought out Dre’s interest in Death Row. Dre’s name went on a lot of stuff that he didn’t produce.
ALEX ROBERTS Those were violent, stupid days at Death Row, and every man has his cutoff point. With Dre, it was when guys started getting released from the pen. Suge’s a nice guy; he’s gonna want to help out his homeboys. It was a lot of, “Hey, I’ve got a job for you. I need a Death Row assistant.” That was the thing. What does a Death Row assistant do? Hang out. Prevent whatever bullshit that could happen—but never does happen—from happening, and collect a pretty nice paycheck every two weeks. I’ll never forget when too much shit went down at the studios and Dre just said, “I’m done here.” Suge said, “You’ll leave with nothing.” He didn’t care.
MOE Z MD Me and Shock G and Tupac’s manager Atron were trying to get a record deal happening for all of us as a label, and they ended up giving the money to Dr. Dre to start Aftermath.XII We had the paper on the table, sitting in the Interscope offices, and they came into the room and said, “Sorry, guys. We gave the money to Dre.”
GOBI RAHIMI I remember Tupac was once going off on Suge about how a $700,000 Gridlock’d check went to Suge instead of him. The money conversations were happening all of the time. It felt like they were happening exponentially before Tupac died.
Suge had kept a couple of big checks from us. He had a $225,000 check, if I’m not mistaken, that was owed to us that he just wasn’t paying us. And I think it was because we were Pac’s production crew. And I actually went through the paperwork and realized that our contracts were with Death Row but the checks were coming from Interscope. I called up the head of legal at Interscope at the time; his name was David Cohen. “David, I think we have a little problem. I need a check.” Within twenty-four hours, they sent us a check for the 225 or whatever it was.
At that point, I suggested to Tracy that it would make sense for us to own a production company with Pac because, one, he would get a piece of his own pie, but most importantly, I think Suge would have had a harder time putting the squeeze on Pac and his production company as opposed to us.
I had a DBA called 24/7 Productions. I suggested the name to Pac because he worked 24/7. Within a week, we had started the paperwork for 24/7 Productions. I think he was supposed to give us a little money for the incorporation. We were just so busy. It didn’t happen. We did one video. But he literally came to us one day, and he said, “Y’all, we’re gonna have a three-picture deal. Paramount, New Line, both want to fuck with me now that I’m bondable.” So there were a couple of companies that wanted to mess with him. He was very comfortable with us as business partners. He ran 60 percent of the company, me and Tracy owned 40 percent of the company, and the intention was to start doing films and everything else. And he had three films that he wanted to do, and we were like, “Our lives are gonna be changed forever in the coming months.”
MARK ANTHONY NEAL I knew that he was someone that was a little highly combustible. It struck me that there were other forces at play with him that impacted the way he was playing himself out publicly, whether it was the real fear on his part that there were people in his camp that he couldn’t trust. Hence the whole thing that played out with him and Biggie—the East Coast–West Coast thing. We now know there were also some tensions around him and Suge Knight, what Tupac saw for himself in the future, and what Suge needed from him then. I think all that stuff kind of manifested itself out in some of the behaviors that we saw close to his death.
NAHSHON ANDERSON He did get reckless toward the end of his life, and that’s understandable. That’s what being shot at multiple times and convicted of certain things will do. He was angry about all of the hypocrisy, and that stuff will really just turn you into a vicious asshole.
KENDRICK WELLS When we leave the studio, the stress comes. Tupac seemed like he was always stressed out. The closer we came to the release date, the more stressed out he was. I’d never seen him smoke so much weed. And he was angry. What I realized later was he had signed his way out of prison based on what this album was going to do. So you always have doubts. You think, Oh shit. What if this doesn’t sell? What if I’m not that? Then like one hour into it coming out you find out it’s fucking double platinum. So I saw that. I saw him go from, like, being on edge to being the baddest motherfucker on the planet because he did it.
GOBI RAHIMI The House of Blues showXIII was on the Fourth of July and Pac was on one. He was not in a good mood. All twelve cylinders were going at the same time. He had a lot of rage. Fatal HusseinXIV actually walked in and, as if he was going into the OK Corral, pulled the gun out of his waistband and handed it to one of the security guards. Within two minutes, LAPD was there. They arrested him and took him away. So I think that was probably the first thing that got under Pac’s skin. Then the audio guy was messing up. While Pac was getting ready to perform the song, the lineup for the songs was all off. So [the audio guy] went through five or six before he finally got to the right one, and that happened a few times during the performance. Pac was livid during that performance. There wasn’t any sort of sensitivity. He was talking about Biggie and Puffy and Lil’ Kim and East Coast–West Coast, and all the drama. It was just off. He was really off that day.
KENDRICK WELLS We used to have a thing called player’s court, and if Tupac was your attorney, you’re going to win because he’s gonna say or do whatever it takes to win. He knows how people think, and he knows how to flip the script and how to make people laugh or cry.
So in the case when it comes to Death Row, they were playing games with money. I think they were doing some divide-and-conquer shit—I didn’t see it that way at the time, but now I do—and he kind of backed their play. I wasn’t offended by it. I realized, Oh shit, he can’t do nothing about it. Once I saw that he couldn’t have my back, I could no longer have his back. I wrote him a letter about it.
I remember the last conversation I had with him. It was right in the middle between the time I left Death Row and the time he died. We had a silent conversation. In the thickness of the silence I felt like I heard him saying, I gotta do what I gotta do, bro. He wasn’t ashamed of me for leaving, and I wasn’t ashamed of him for staying. Both acts are unvirtuous. Him staying to his end: there’s no honor in that. That’s not a great thing. But he did it because he felt he was honoring something. And I left because I was honoring something, because I felt like—I’m not doing your purpose. You asked me to be here for advice. You asked me to be here to steer you right. But you’re not listening.
LESLIE GERARD Right before he went to Vegas, I was in the studio with him, chitchatting. “You know, I think I’m going to focus more on my acting career more than my music career.” He said, “Suge told me that I’m worth more to him dead than alive.” He mentioned something to the effect of, “I just feel like the crab trying to get out of the pot and everybody is pulling me down.” There were a lot of people that started hanging around him in the studio that weren’t probably the best, the right, influences. You know, that happens with a lot of people if they’re not well protected.
GOBI RAHIMI Since I kind of got to be a fly on the wall and observe him, one thing that stood out for me is I think he had a tremendous amount of sadness. I would find a lot of the pictures that I took him in, he would sort of be looking down at his rings and contemplating, or in some of the footage, he sort of propped himself on a speaker with his arm, and you could ju
st see that he was a million miles away.
CHUCK WALKER The rebellion continued for two years. It moved south toward what is now Bolivia and got really violent. And that’s when they became really close to victory. He was dead, but in 1782 to 1783 they had the Spanish on the run. The original troops from Lima are just wiped out, exhausted. They don’t have any supplies. They lack basic medicine. They’re suffering a great deal.
The uprising ended with the execution of Diego Cristobal in 1783. Túpac Amaru II really tried to moderate violence. He wouldn’t let them touch churches; neutral people or intermediaries were allowed to leave towns. In the second phase, it becomes almost like a caste war. Indigenous people said wearing buttons was a sign of being a European. The term that they used was actually Quechua for “redneck.”
Whereas for the Spaniards, there were no more indigenous people who weren’t rebels. (Despite the fact that there were, actually; the Royalists had indigenous people fighting for their sectors.) But it got really, really brutal at the end with all these horror stories, like the whole towns being executed—but also the rebels, like, burning down churches and raping nuns. A lot of this is probably exaggerated, but there’s some truth to it. But afterward, the Spanish didn’t go in and commit ethnic genocide. Because they couldn’t. They knew that they were really close to losing. They also knew that another rebellion could happen. So there’s this really tense silence afterward. If you look at the historical record, like a decade later, you almost wouldn’t know it existed.
IX
GOBI RAHIMI I convinced Tracy [that we should] go to Vegas for her birthday because I knew that Pac was going,I and in my gut I felt like something was going to go wrong. She was like, “Hell no, I’m not going to Vegas,” and, “Hell no, I don’t want to be around Suge and Death Row for my birthday.” But I convinced her. We took our production staff—that included my sister and her husband, and a few others—and we went out there.
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