The Autobiography of Gucci Mane
Page 13
Fatboi and Plies were right. “Wasted” was something special. It was obvious this song was destined for bigger things than my mixtape. I had a lot of songs going in the clubs then, but “Wasted” was kind of like “Freaky Gurl” in how the masses took to it. What Fatboi and I talked about in the first five minutes of working on “Wasted,” the concept of the song and what it would do, was exactly what had happened.
This had to be the lead single for my next album. Except I wasn’t on great terms with my label and there weren’t really plans for a next album. Ever since the dismal release of Back to the Trap House, I’d withdrawn from dealing with them. I’d just gone hard with the mixtapes. So I wasn’t too hot on Asylum and I know a lot of people there weren’t big on me either. Back to the Trap House was no moneymaker for them and the other thing was that at some point I’d dissed T.I., the biggest artist on Atlantic’s roster. The label wasn’t happy about that.
But “Wasted” required immediate attention. Plies and I had originally agreed to swap songs, but now that the record was booming he was asking for like forty thousand dollars for his verse. Negotiations between him and Deb went nowhere and a decision was made to remake “Wasted” without Plies and put Waka and OJ on it.
Waka and OJ both did hard verses but it just wasn’t the same. I hadn’t realized it at first but there was something about Plies’s presence on the song . . .
I don’t wear tight jeans like the white boys
But I do get wasted like the white boys
Something about that opening line too. Originally Plies’s verse had started differently, with the backend part Walked in the club, pocket full of big faces. But Fatboi had moved the white-boys line to the beginning. It captured the essence of the song. Plies needed to be on this record.
The solution to that problem, as well as my issues at the label, came by way of my guy Todd Moscowitz. Todd had been promoted from president and CEO of Asylum to executive vice president of Warner Bros., a sister label of Atlantic. Todd had fought for me since day one and he was still fighting for me. He brought me over to Warner Bros. with him. Right away I started getting the support from the label I’d always wanted.
I now had my own imprint, 1017 Brick Squad, which I named after my childhood home in Bessemer. The formation of 1017 meant the dissolution of So Icey Entertainment, which meant the end of Deb’s stake in my label. I was still rolling with Deb, but I was pleased she no longer owned a part of my label after the whole situation with OJ.
I made Waka my first sign to 1017 Brick Squad. Deb wasn’t happy, but she couldn’t do shit about it. She had to accept that one. Waka and I were inseparable and he was fiercely loyal. Even though it involved his momma, Waka knew what Deb and Juice did was a suspect move. He told me he would never do something like that. I knew he meant it. There was no way at that moment in time that Waka was signing to anyone but me. It just wasn’t going to happen.
“Wasted” wasn’t the only song I had making noise. Shortly after I came home I’d spent some time working with Sean Garrett, the songwriter and producer known for Usher’s hit “Yeah!” Sean had this song he’d written for Mario, another R & B singer, called “Break Up” and he asked me to get on there. I did and after Greg Street from V-103 premiered the record on the radio a few weeks later, “Break Up” was outta here. Gone. I’d had hit records, but “Break Up” ended up being a pivotal crossover moment in my career.
Ever since what happened with “So Icy,” I had a bad taste in my mouth when it came to collaborating with other artists. It wasn’t something I did a lot of. Hard to Kill had some features from La Chat and Gangsta Boo, but those were exceptions to the rule. I’d just always been such a fan of Memphis rappers that it was special for me to get to work with them. The features on Back to the Trap House had been collaborations set up by the label.
And other artists weren’t lining up to work with me either. I’d been blackballed in the industry. A year or so back I was supposed to be on Usher’s song “Love in This Club,” and then when I heard it on the radio I wasn’t on there and Jeezy was. Incidents like that had kept me away from collaborating for a long time.
After “Break Up” the floodgates opened. There was Trey Songz’s “LOL :),” Omarion’s “I Get It In,” Jamie Foxx’s “Speak French,” and a lot of others. Suddenly I was the go-to guy to get a verse from. Every song I touched was hitting the Billboard charts.
I knew I was something serious when I got the call that Mariah Carey wanted me on the remix to her song “Obsessed.” This was beyond rap. This was pop.
I flew out to New York City to meet her, but when I got to the studio, Mariah wasn’t there.
I was thinking that this was a waste of time. I could have easily done this from Atlanta. I was readying to leave after I finished my verse when the studio engineer told me to wait because Mariah wanted to hear the finished product. Then, out of nowhere she magically appeared, like she’d been there the whole time waiting for me to finish. I couldn’t make sense of that, but the good news was she loved my verse. Not only that, she wanted my advice on some of the other songs she had for her upcoming album. She played me this Jermaine Dupri rework of an old hit out of Atlanta called “Swing My Way,” which was originally by K.P. and Envyi.
“Who do you think I should get on this?” she asked me.
I told her put Juice on there. Mariah wasn’t familiar with OJ but she valued my opinion and off my cosign he ended up on a Mariah Carey album. I got on it too, and then Jermaine Dupri got Big Boi from OutKast to do a verse for it. Coming all the way up to New York hadn’t been a waste of time after all.
With “Wasted” on the rise and all these features on the airwaves, it was the perfect time to get an album out for Warner Bros. I’d decided to title it The State vs. Radric Davis.
This was when I reconnected with a former acquaintance, Coach K. Coach was working with a girl he brought to Deb with the hope that she could help get her career off the ground. Nicki Minaj had just put out Beam Me Up Scotty and Deb was getting a lot of credit for her success, so a lot of girls at the time were going to Deb thinking she could do something for them.
When I first saw Coach over at Deb’s office, my attitude was Fuck this guy. He’d been on the other side of my war in 2005.
But Coach wasn’t riding with that dude anymore. Something had gone down and they’d fallen out. Deb thought Coach could be an asset and he proved himself to be one when he lined up a batch of high-paying features for me. I was always down to make some money, so I dropped the grudge. More than that, Coach knew his shit when it came to the music game, much more so than Deb, who had always been more of a motherly figure to me than an experienced manager. The stakes had never been higher going into the making of The State vs. Radric Davis. I realized I needed the expertise of someone like Coach, so he and I began working together.
•
I was spending a lot of time in Las Vegas that summer. I’d always been a gambler. My father had been letting me in on his dice games since I was ten. Now that I had big money coming in, I was getting out to Vegas as often as possible. My game was craps and my spot was the Palms, where I stayed in the twenty-five-thousand-dollar-a-night Hugh Hefner Sky Villa, a two-story, nine-thousand-square-foot suite with an elevator and a glass-wall jacuzzi that overlooked the Las Vegas Strip. Downstairs was an eight-thousand-square-foot recording studio, so the place was like Disneyland to me.
During one of these trips Coach told me the producer Bangladesh was in town for UFC 100, which was supposedly the biggest UFC event ever. Bangladesh loved the UFC fights. He always talked about that shit. Bang was a year removed from the success of Lil Wayne’s “A Milli.” I wanted a crazy beat like that.
I was high as hell when I got up with Bang at the Palms’ studio. It was one of those nights and I was only halfway into it. I was feeling super cocky, I told Bang to play me the beat that every other rapper had passed on. Something nobody else could handle. That would be a worthy challenge for me. Bang said
he had something for me.
This beat was retarded and I went in right away, freestyling about lemonade and canary diamonds and a yellow Aston Martin. Lemonade-complexion east Australian girls. Everything yellow. The initial idea came from me running out of Sprite to pour my lean into that night and instead using lemonade.
Like with so many of my big records, I didn’t know how big “Lemonade” would be when I made it. Picking the winners was never easy considering how much I was recording. Truthfully, I was kind of distracted. I was in Vegas mode. My mind was on girls and gambling. I had a party going on in my room and was eager to get back to it. After I freestyled the verse and came up with a hook, I did just that.
When I popped back into the studio a few hours later, Bang had cooked up another beat for me to jump on: “Stupid Wild.” Lil Wayne and Cam’ron eventually ended up on that one too.
I love the songs that came out of that session because they were made in the middle of one of my wild Vegas nights. Not before the party started. Not in the aftermath. During. You hear it in me. The energy of Sin City.
A week or two after I got back to Atlanta I got a call from Bang. We’d never gotten around to finishing “Lemonade.” I’d actually forgotten about it. That whole weekend was a blur.
Bang hadn’t. He’d been working on it.
“Look, I changed it around a little, but I think you’re going to like it.”
Bangladesh had swapped my hook for one that featured his daughter and little nieces singing.
Lemons on the chain with the V-Cuts
Lemons on the chain with the V-Cuts
Lemonade and shade with my feet up
Lemonade and shade with my feet up
Lemon pepper wings and a freeze cup
Lemon pepper wings and a freeze cup
Lemons in their face, watch ’em freeze up
Lemons in their face, watch ’em freeze up
Bangladesh had delivered. This new hook was better than what I’d done, and the finished beat for “Lemonade” was harder than what he had played me at the Palms.
•
Halfway into the making of The State vs. Radric Davis I violated my probation. I’d pissed dirty and left town without a permit. Those were the technicalities that triggered the violation, but really I was behaving badly all around. Of course at the time I didn’t think I was doing anything wrong. I was just having a lot of fun spending this money. You ever see that movie Get Him to the Greek? It was something like that.
Once again the violation couldn’t have happened at a worse time. Todd, Coach, and my lawyers sprung into action and hatched a plan to check me in to rehab. Their thinking was that the judge wouldn’t pull me out of rehab and send me to jail if I was seeking treatment. I’d still have a court date when I got out for a probation violation hearing, but the chances of me not getting sent back to jail would be a whole lot better if I was fresh off a ninety-day drug treatment program. As far as contingency plans go, this one wasn’t bad. But I didn’t go easy.
Treatment was going to cost around fifty thousand dollars. While that wasn’t breaking the bank, it was enough of an excuse for me to refuse. Plus ninety days of rehab meant ninety days of not doing shows or features, so there was real money at stake.
“Look, Todd, I got bills to pay,” I told him.
“We’ll cover the bills, Gucci,” he told me. “Please, just go.”
Todd talked me into it but when he met with Tom Whalley, the chairman and CEO of Warner Bros., he wouldn’t put the money up. He said he’d only cut a check for two months of the three-month program. It had taken so much for Todd to get me to agree to go to rehab in the first place. He knew that if he came to me and said I’d have to pay out of my own pocket, it would be the last conversation he and I would have about rehab. But Todd did tell me about his meeting with Tom, and then he told me he was going to write me a personal check to cover the last month.
“So . . .” he said as he wrote out the check. “You know you’ve got to get this back to me at some point?”
I had always liked Todd. He had become a confidant and trusted adviser. Even when I met him 2004 and he had the Mohawk and I thought the dude was crazy, I liked the guy. But when he wrote me that personal check, that really meant something. That moment solidified us as friends on a deeper level.
I was still in complete denial about my drug problem. To me a drug addict was like the J’s I’d served growing up in East Atlanta. Broke. Desperate. Missing teeth. That wasn’t me. I was just enjoying an exciting lifestyle and it wasn’t affecting my pockets. But I didn’t want to let Todd and everyone else invested in my career down. So I went to rehab.
•
My time at the Talbott Recovery addiction treatment center was not unlike my time at Georgia Perimeter College. I was there but I wasn’t really there. I didn’t know what to expect when I checked in, but the place wasn’t so bad. The folks there were mostly good people. But I was so bored. I’d been out having the time of my life, traveling from city to city, selling out shows, and now I had to sit in a circle with strangers and talk about problems I didn’t believe I had. I had committed to staying sober throughout rehab, but I couldn’t wait to get it over with.
There was still a possibility I’d be sent to jail even after I completed rehab, so The State vs. Radric Davis needed to be ready to go. That meant I had to bend the rules. With the help of this cool white dude who worked at the center I began sneaking out in the middle of the night to record. He’d kindly cover me. At the time, the big thing in the industry was live-streaming studio sessions on Ustream, but I had to let producers I was working with know that I couldn’t be on camera because I was supposed to be sound asleep at rehab.
Sober and with a hard deadline in front of me, I was more focused and determined than ever, and it resulted in some of my best music. I’d always thought I needed to be high to record, but I discovered I was making some of my best songs clean. I even put the freestyling on hold and got back to writing. Not just writing verses but writing full songs. Records like “Heavy,” “Worst Enemy,” even “Wasted,” which was done before the rehab. I made all those songs sober.
Speaking of “Worst Enemy,” I ran into him during my time at Talbott.
I’d been granted a two-day break to go home and see my family and friends. The idea was for me to get acquainted with living a sober life outside of rehab.
I was out to lunch at Houston’s in the Lennox Mall. It was me, Coach, Polow, and the rapper Chubbie Baby. Jeezy and one of his boys happened to be there too, but I didn’t see them until I left the restaurant. They were standing outside waiting for us.
This was a very, very weird situation. Jeezy had just dissed me and OJ on “24-23” after I sent a few shots his way on a track called “Hurry” off Writing on the Wall.
Jeezy and I hadn’t looked each other in the eye in over four years. The only reason nothing popped off in the years since everything went down was that we hadn’t seen each other.
For years people had kept us separate. We’d recently been booked on back-to-back shows—102 JAMZ’s SuperJam in North Carolina and Hot 107.9’s Birthday Bash in Atlanta—but the radio folks had me perform and then leave before Jeezy got there, and vice versa. No club would dare have us appear the same night. They knew some shit would go down. We were always positioned so that we weren’t around each other. Now here we were. Face-to-face, standing outside of Houston’s.
“What’s up?” he asked.
“What’s happening?” I responded.
Jeezy and Coach had unresolved issues of their own so they took a stroll, leaving me standing with Jeezy’s boy. This nigga had a stupid look on his face like he was getting ready to do something. Polow told me he had my back and I laughed, assuring him I had my own back. Even though I was laughing, mentally I was bracing myself for an altercation.
A couple of minutes later Jeezy and Coach came back. Jeezy asked if he and I could talk. I agreed. We took a walk and then something strange happe
ned—the tension wasn’t there. There wasn’t even a bad vibe between us.
“I wanted to chop it up,” he told me. “Those young boys you’re running with are causing trouble out here.”
Here was the situation. Waka and his best friend, Slim Dunkin, had been getting into it with niggas in Jeezy’s crew. This would all become public a year later when Waka and Jeezy’s boy Slick Pulla got to fighting at Walters Clothing and Dunk knocked out some other CTE guy at a flea market, but all of that had been brewing for a while. None of this had anything to do with me. This was Waka and Dunk being young and crazy.
“I think we should get the young boys to chill,” Jeezy suggested. “Ain’t nobody gonna get hurt but one of them.”
He had a point. I was in rehab and Jeezy wasn’t in the streets anymore. If anyone was going to get hurt, it was going to be one of them and I didn’t want anything happening to Waka or Dunk.
“You’re right,” I told him. “I can talk to them.”
I realized in that moment that Jeezy knew he had blood on his hands from everything that had happened. Now he was trying to prevent another bad situation from happening. I couldn’t argue with that. I agreed with it. Jeezy didn’t know this but I’d just made “My Worst Enemy.” On that track I more or less said I was ready to move on from all my beefs. So it was a crazy coincidence that we were sitting here looking to do what I’d written about in that unreleased song.
We met again the next day. We sat down, agreed to a truce, and said we’d put our history behind us. We even agreed to work on music. Jeezy had just done a song with Zay called “Trap or Die 2.” That was a problem for me when I heard about it. I didn’t like Zay working with Jeezy but the song was so hard. After we established the truce, Jeezy told me to hop on the remix. At the same time I’d just made “Heavy,” which was produced by Shawty Redd, and I told Jeezy he should get on there with me. We both had these songs with each other’s go-to producers and now we were going to swap. This would be a moment people would care about. Our beef had affected so many more people than just us over the years. This would unite the city.