by Gucci Mane
But we still had a murder charge to deal with. My attorneys met with the DeKalb County assistant district attorney to review my case. They left that meeting with the understanding that my murder charge was soon going to be dismissed. They didn’t have anything on me because of course they didn’t. There was nothing to have.
The thing was the DA’s office had a bunch of high-profile cases and investigations going on at the time, and because they saw loose connections to mine they didn’t want to drop my charges publicly yet. But off the record, we were told, I’d beaten the murder. This was months before that news became public.
It was relief more than it was happiness. A weight had been lifted off my shoulders, one that I’d forgotten I was carrying because it’d been there so long.
In October I pleaded no contest to my aggravated assault case. I was given a six-month sentence with six and a half years’ probation. I’d already spent three months in Fulton County, so by the top of 2006, I was home.
XII
* * *
THE TRAP
The good news was I was free. The bad news was I’d spent a hell of a lot of money to get free. Fighting my two cases had drained my resources. Hiring and firing lawyers and the whole legal process had cost me over two hundred thousand dollars. I was damn near starting over.
Despite my absence, Trap House had been a huge success. My debut album had sold more than 150,000 copies independently. But somehow I wasn’t seeing any of that money. Big Cat and Jacob told me of all these expenses they covered while I was away, but those expenses sounded more like excuses. Lame ones. The numbers weren’t adding up.
As I was coming home Cat was readying to go in for a year. He’d had a strap on him the night we all got picked up in Miami and caught a charge being a convicted felon in possession of a firearm. He was going to have to do fourteen months in the feds.
Because he would be locked down for over a year, Cat wanted to get the ball rolling on my next album, which was ready to go. I’d recorded it prior to getting locked up and Jacob had come up with the title Hard to Kill. As soon as I got home there were interviews and phoners lined up to promote the album. But before I could do that, Cat and I needed to settle up.
I’d learned a lot in my time working with Cat. About what it took to put out a successful independent album. About publishing sheets. About accounting. Cat is someone I credit for making me a better businessman, but all the shit he taught me was about to bite him in the ass. I wanted to see the QuickBooks spreadsheets. I wanted to see the receipts. I needed a detailed explanation of the financials.
In addition to the album royalties I was owed, I’d also given him some money to hold on to before I went in. Now I needed that money back. I was broke.
Cat didn’t have my money. He told me he needed a few days to get the money out of the bank and he offered me his credit card to use in the meantime. That was not what I wanted to hear.
“What the fuck do I want your credit card for?” I barked. “Where is my money?!”
I stormed out of the office and hit up one of my homeboys for a grand to hold me over. Later that night I had a performance lined up that would pay me seventy-five hundred, so I knew I wouldn’t be broke for long. I was just pissed that Cat had set up all this shit but couldn’t have my money for me. I’d asked him about it repeatedly. But like every other time I brought up money, it seemed, Cat had an excuse.
I came back to the Big Cat office a few days after the argument to meet with Jacob about my probation. Part of my plea deal was I had all these community service hours I needed to fulfill. Even before I’d taken the plea I’d been thinking about how I wanted to give back after I got out. This was something I’d made a promise to myself to do if I beat my murder case. So I was all for it when Jacob told me he’d brought someone on board to help me get this nonprofit idea off the ground. This was the day I got introduced to Deborah Antney. Like Cat and Jacob, Deb was a transplant from New York. She’d been living in Georgia for the last decade but still had a thick Queens accent. Her background was in social services but she’d recently worked with a few well-known recording artists on setting up their foundations and different charity ventures.
Deb and I discussed what I was looking to do. I explained I wanted to organize a back-to-school giveaway of sorts, where we’d hand out new book bags full of school supplies to kids in Zone 6. The conversation went well, but before we parted ways she pulled me aside.
“Listen, these people don’t have your best interests at heart,” she told me. “That’s what they brought me in for. I don’t want any part of it but I just thought I should let you know.”
What Deb was telling me was what I was already suspicious of. And while I still wasn’t quite sure of what to make of this lady, I did know I was about finished dealing with Big Cat and Jacob.
Later that week I was on the set of a video shoot for “Go Head,” one of the songs off Trap House that had blown up while I was locked up. Deb was there and so was Jacob. But I wasn’t interested in speaking with either of them. The only thing on my mind was the money I was owed and the things Deb had told me the other day. I left the set and decided that I was done doing business with these people. “Go Head” never did get a music video.
•
My departure from Big Cat would trigger my return to the streets. It wasn’t long before I was knee-deep in it again, running with my old partners. Time had healed old wounds and everyone was still doing what they’d been doing. It was back to trappin’ like we had been.
My homeboys had a new spot they were operating out of and it soon became mine as well. There were a couple of niggas who actually lived there but mostly this was a trap house to juug out of. The type of place where the lights would go out and we’d have no power but we still wouldn’t leave the house. Or the refrigerator would stop working and we’d send one of the young boys to the store to get us drinks. Or the stove went out and we’d get someone to turn the gas back on illegally. It was a hangout too. Smoking, gambling, and girls. But when the pack came in it was down to business.
Given the success I’d had in the music game, it was crazy how quick I was back to the same shit. It was like I never stopped. But my attitude had become “Fuck Music.” Big Cat had put out this song “My Chain” as the first single to Hard to Kill and the response to it was lukewarm. People weren’t really feeling it. “My Chain” is a cool song but looking back on it now, Zay and I may have been trying too hard to re-create the magic of “So Icy” with another song about jewelry.
Paired with the fact that I was at odds with my label, I was feeling like the rap game had brought me more problems than the streets ever had. People were telling me that I needed to get back to the music but I wasn’t into it. Hard to Kill was finished. Let Big Cat put it out and we’d go from there.
This would become a trend throughout the course of my career. Whenever the music wasn’t going right I would fall back into the streets. Maybe it was a coping mechanism. Going back to something I knew I’d find success in when I wasn’t experiencing it elsewhere. Whatever it was, it was a habit that went on for much longer than you’d think.
•
The trap house was boomin’ one day when my buddy ran inside and grabbed me. His urgency caught me off guard.
“Man, you ain’t gonna believe who’s outside,” he told me.
“Who?” I asked.
“Your momma.”
He was right. This was unbelievable.
For one, Mother Dearest and I had not been on good terms for a while. We’d had a rocky relationship ever since she kicked me out of the house in ’01. But that’s not even what was fucking me up. I just couldn’t believe she was actually here, at my trap. My momma didn’t do shit like that. She wouldn’t be caught dead in a place like that. This house had been shot up days earlier. Junkies were coming in and out as the hours passed.
Standing next to my momma was Deb Antney. She’d been on a mission to get in touch with me ever since the f
ailed “Go Head” video shoot. Somehow she found my mother, who had caught wind of what I was up to.
“What are you doing here?!” I asked them. I was in shock.
“We want to talk to you,” Deb explained. “You’re throwing your life away. You have a real chance to make it. Why would you be back here doing this?”
At first I couldn’t get past the fact that my momma was actually standing outside. But after they left, Deb’s words took root. I’d just gotten out of jail. Maybe I shouldn’t be doing this. At the very least I should get back to working on my music too. But I wasn’t going back to Big Cat.
•
One of the people who helped me get back to working on music was Shawty Lo. I was walking through the South DeKalb Mall one day when I saw a dude who had on as much jewelry as I did. The nigga stood out. When I peeped his chain I realized he was in the rap group D4L.
D4L was a rap crew out of the Bowen Homes projects in Bankhead, a neighborhood on the Westside of Atlanta. Zone 1. They were the pioneers of snap music and at the top of 2006 snap music had taken over the country. “White Tee,” the Dem Franchize Boyz song that inspired “Black Tee,” had been the beginning of snap, but D4L had brought it to the masses. Their song “Laffy Taffy” hit Number 1 on the Billboard charts the month I came home from prison.
But I wasn’t familiar with Shawty Lo. I’d been locked up during D4L’s rise and Lo wasn’t even on “Laffy Taffy” or “Betcha Can’t Do It Like Me,” their other big song. Lo wasn’t on most of the songs on their album. This guy was what I’d originally set out to be: a hustler turned financier who hopped on a track every now and then. Like me, Lo had just come home from a year in prison. He was a real street nigga and we hit it off.
Lo had his own studio in Bankhead, and as our friendship developed he told me I could record there for free. Since I was no longer recording at Big Cat’s studio and now had to foot the bill myself for studio time, I took him up on his offer. I started going there a lot. He had a whole roster of in-house producers who hooked me up with beats too.
That meant something to me. Lo didn’t need anything from me. He extended his hand, asking for nothing in return. He had character, he was a genuine person. Ever since then we were close friends. I was there for Lo for anything. A cameo in a video, a feature, whatever it was. I could never charge him a dollar.
Then there was this white kid, DJ Burn One, who had been trying to get me to do a mixtape with him ever since “Black Tee.” Burn One was still in high school but he was serious about the mixtape game. When I met him he’d been putting together compilation tapes of songs from artists he liked, but now he wanted to do tapes exclusively with one artist, like how DJ Drama was doing with Gangsta Grillz.
I ran into Burn One not long after my stint in Fulton County but had brushed him off. Trap House had been a big success and Hard to Kill was going to be a bigger one. What did I need to do a mixtape for?
But things had changed. I didn’t know what the situation was with Hard to Kill and “My Chain” hadn’t taken off. I was back to selling dope and the more I thought about it, maybe I was back to square one. Maybe doing a mixtape wasn’t such a step backward.
I hit up Burn One and met him at Zay’s, where I was knocking out a verse for some niggas I’d met at a club called Blue Flame. It was four in the morning by the time Burn One showed up, but I’d taken two X pills and was wide awake. I was geekin’ that night.
With some convincing, Zay let us all in his basement. Middle-of-the-night surprise sessions were not his thing, but these guys were going to pay him for a beat, so he obliged. Zay played a few cuts and after these dudes found one that was to their liking, I laid down my verse. Then it was time for the other guy to do his.
This nigga rapped the worst shit I’d ever heard in my life. It was terrible. And when he walked out I told him so.
“That sucked,” I told him straight up. “I can’t be next to you on that. Burn One, you want my verse? You can have it.”
Burn One didn’t say a word. He could see these guys were pissed.
“What are you talking about?” the other one asked. “We just paid you five thousand dollars for that verse.”
“Nah, the five thousand was for Zay’s beat,” I told them. “I can’t give you my verse.”
I switched the script. As lame as these dudes were with music, they weren’t soft. I’d seen guns in their car. Even as things got tense I wouldn’t budge. I was all over the place. Zaytoven saw where this was going, so he decided to cut his losses and wipe his hands of the situation. We were told to leave.
The arguing continued outside and the way shit was going this would end one of two ways. Either the cops were getting called or someone was getting shot. Burn One, who hadn’t spoken since I offered him the verse for free, butted in, sensing I wasn’t going to be the one to deescalate the situation.
“Let’s just all go to the strip club and we’ll sort this out there.”
Somehow that worked. I got into Burn One’s little red pickup truck and we took off.
“Man, I ain’t goin’ back to Blue Flame,” I told him.
He already knew that and he hit the gas and we dipped, leaving those fellas high and dry and out of five grand.
During that drive Burn One put me up on game about the mixtape circuit. It was a whole different ecosystem with a lot less rules and red tape when compared to putting out an album. He told me about all this money that artists were making from their mixtapes. To me, it seemed, this could be the route to get my career back on track.
The sun was starting to come up by the time Burn One dropped me off at my place. I put a couple of hundred dollars in his hand before we parted ways.
“Thanks for that shit back there,” I told him. “We’ll start doing the mixtape tomorrow.”
Over the next few weeks me and Burn One cooked up Chicken Talk, my first mixtape. It was a wild period of time. I kept my little run with the X pills going and you can hear it in those songs. It made for great music. More than any other release of mine Chicken Talk captured my state of mind during the time I was making it. I dissed every single Big Cat artist on that shit. It’s a perfect time capsule and my favorite of all my mixtapes.
After we got Chicken Talk pressed up, me and Burn One went to the Old National Flea Market to sell some copies. The guy there wasn’t having it.
“Ain’t nobody gonna buy that,” he told Burn One. “I heard Gucci Mane over with.”
Meanwhile I was outside in the parking lot with my new tape booming out of Burn One’s truck. A small crowd had gathered around me and I was selling copies hand over fist. The guy inside, the same one who’d just told Burn One my career was finished, saw what was happening and ran out a couple of minutes later.
“Let me get forty of those,” he said.
Chicken Talk got my buzz going again. Not only in Atlanta but through the South all the way up to the Midwest, where I developed a loyal following. Its success started getting me booked for shows in Detroit, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and every big city in Ohio. It gave me a needed boost, pushing me back on track.
Now I needed to find replacements for Cat and Jacob. Ever since that day at the trap house, Deb had begun loosely handling my business affairs and over time we became very close. She went from being Deb Antney to Auntie Deb. She had a nurturing way about her and she was protective of me during a time when I was still dealing with the aftermath of what happened in ’05.
I knew Deb didn’t know shit about the music business. I probably knew more than she did just from my dealings with Cat. But she had convinced me that she had my best interests at heart. At the time that’s what I was looking for. Someone I could trust.
We both wanted to get me out of my deal with Big Cat, and Deb claimed to know someone who could make that happen. We took a trip to New York City to meet him.
James Rosemond, better known as Jimmy Henchman, was the CEO of the artist management company Czar Entertainment. His client list included the Game,
Akon, Brandy, and Salt-N-Pepa. A couple of years back he’d negotiated the terms of Mike Tyson’s fight against Lennox Lewis, one of the highest-grossing events in boxing pay-per-view history. Years later Jimmy was convicted of running a multimillion-dollar drug ring. He’s now serving life. But at the time of our business I didn’t know about any of that. I just knew his name held weight in the music business.
For a finder’s fee, Jimmy could get me a new deal with one of the major labels and figure out a way to end my obligations to Cat. To oversee that he set me up with a new lawyer, Doug Davis, the son of the legendary music executive Clive Davis.
Meanwhile Big Cat had just released Hard to Kill, which was doing well despite its CEO being locked up and my lack of promotion. But “Go Head” was killing it in the clubs, and “Stupid,” a song from Chicken Talk, was making noise too.
Two months after Hard to Kill dropped, Atlantic Records reached an agreement with Big Cat to buy out my contract. There’s a lot more to that story, but the truth is it belongs more to the people who were heavily involved in the negotiations behind the scenes. All I knew was that I would be a major-label artist on Asylum Records, a subsidiary of Atlantic. And I’d have my own imprint, So Icey Entertainment, of which I’d own 66 percent and Deb would own 33 percent. Todd Moscowitz had finally gotten the artist he’d wanted and all ties were severed with my former label. At least I thought they were.
Part of going through Jimmy to get the deal at Asylum was that I’d work with a group of producers whom Czar Entertainment set me up with for my major label debut. These producers included Reefa, the guy who did the Game’s “One Blood,” Polow da Don, and a bunch of others I was unfamiliar with. They weren’t my go-to producers. I wasn’t thrilled about the arrangement, but I viewed it as a necessary sacrifice to get the new deal done.