by Wyclef Jean
She went on that trip with Robin Bask, my other best friend growing up, who was, for a while, the fifth Fugee. Robin, as well as Gene Swarrow, were my closest friends and I would have done anything for them. Robin was a talented kid, and we wanted to make this a supergroup, so I brought him in when things got rolling. He could sing, he could dance, and he could play all styles of piano like a pro. He was able to bring a lot to the demos we were working on and he fit in well with us musically and otherwise. Now when he went to California with Lauryn, he made a mistake that cost him his place in the group. Apparently there were a lot of crazy charges on Lauryn’s credit card, and Lauryn’s dad was not happy about that at all. He gave us an ultimatum: either Robin goes or Lauryn goes. Unfortunately that credit card mistake cost Robin his career with us. It was fucked up, because he was my best friend, but I did what I had to do. Robin and I are still cool and we’re still close to this day and he still calls himself the fifth Fugee.
After that Hollywood trip, Lauryn got cast in an off-Broadway play called Club XII that was a hip-hop interpretation of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, with his language translated into modern slang and song. It was produced by Quincy Jones and it was a touchstone for the culture, because the entire cast was made up of stars and stars-to-be from our generation. Everybody with talent from our little scene was cast in this play in some way, either as an actor or a crew member. Lauryn was in it and I was in it. I wrote a good portion of the music for it. MC Lyte was in it, as was Lisa Carson, who became a star on ER. I only tried out because Lauryn was trying out. That’s how we rolled: if either of us was doing something, the other one would be, too. The play wasn’t a huge commercial success, but it got everyone noticed. After that, Lauryn got more roles, including one on As the World Turns.
Like I said, acting, music, dancing—all of it was part of entertainment to us, and we didn’t care which one we used to get ahead. We wanted to do all of them, so if acting came first and was the way to music, that was cool. If we got a job dancing somewhere, that was fine, because it would probably lead to something else. We were on the hustle, individually and together, always looking out and always looking for our next stepping stone. At the time, Lauryn and I were doing it all, so we went for this play, and we got it. Whether the acting or the music came first, it didn’t matter to us. We were just grinding. If she was auditioning, I was auditioning. She got it, I got it, and we were in it together. At the time, I was almost out of high school, heading into the last months of my last year. I threw myself into the play with everything I had. I ended up rewriting all of my lines and for every part where the director didn’t have any music, I wrote some. It really was the first off-Broadway hip-hop musical.
The play was incredible. While I was working on it, I also met Quincy Jones for the first time. He told me something I never forgot. After our first performance, after I’d written half the music for the play, he said this: “I’ve been watching you this whole time, young blood. I will see you again, because you’ve got what it takes.”
THE FUGEES KEPT ON going. We hit the studio, practiced our dance moves, and by then we were under Khalis Bayyan’s umbrella. We were signed to his Le Jam production company for a development deal, which means they were investing in developing us, in hopes of getting a record deal, so we would record with him at House of Music in West Orange. Khalis was a great teacher, but something became clear to me: he did not have his finger on the pulse of the times. He had us focusing on our live show, which was the right thing to do, but he did not realize that what we were putting together was too far outside the sound of the day for us to get anywhere. Khalis was a great mentor artistically, but he had no business savvy when it came to the industry.
We discovered this the moment we started doing showcases for record label executives. We would go to their offices and perform. I played guitar and rapped, Lauryn and Marcy sang soul songs, and Pras hyped everything up like a rock star. It made no sense to them at all and we could see it in their eyes. Absolutely no one was interested in us. They wanted what was already out there, which at the time was hard shit like Onyx, conscious stuff like De La Soul, R&B like New Edition and Boyz II Men. We’d come in and they’d see two girls and two guys: me with a guitar, rapping and singing, Lauryn doing incredible diva-like soul, and Marcy singing with the power and range of Mariah Carey. No wonder they were confused. There was way too much going on for these people.
We also started looking for a manager, and most of them turned us down, too. One of the last meetings we got that showed any kind of promise was with David Sonenberg, a famous manager who had Meat Loaf and a bunch of other people at the time. We went to audition for him in his office in Midtown Manhattan and I’ll never forget that day. We played a few songs and at the end of our show I jumped up on his desk. My pants were too loose, so they fell down. But I wasn’t going to quit rapping, so I just kept on going right there in my boxers with my jeans around my ankles.
“I don’t know what you kids are going to be,” he said when we were done. “But you’re going to be something.”
David signed us and David believed in us, and that is when things started finally moving forward. All those labels had said the same thing—that our formula wouldn’t work, that we had a rapper playing guitar and a soul singer and another rapper who wanted to be a rock star. There was no mold we fit into, so all of those A&R guys had no place to put us. There’s not much of a music industry left to speak of, but what there was, back then, wasn’t willing to take risks. If you were different, like us, you would be passed over. Executives wanted songs that fit on the radio and fit video concepts that BET would like. We were daring, and the labels were not daring. They were taking no chances because everyone wanted to keep their jobs. Something fresh had to break through on its own before the label guys would go out and sign a handful of acts just like it. They’d never be the first to jump.
Lucky for us, once we signed with David, he got our demo to a very small label out of Philadelphia called Ruffhouse Records, who had a joint venture deal with Columbia. Ruffhouse was run by Chris Schwartz and Joe Nicolo and they loved our music. At the time they had groups like Cypress Hill, the Goats, and Kris Kross. While the big labels were doing their thing, these two were doing something else, and it was working. We auditioned for Joe Nicolo and Chris Schwartz in our manager’s office, which wasn’t the typical thing to do. Usually artists auditioned in rehearsal studios on small stages.
We didn’t do our usual songs either; we took a different route. Lauryn sang the Beatles’ “Let It Be,” and then we broke into one of our songs, with me on guitar along with a backing musical track. We did everything without microphones. We got into it, and by the end, there I was on the conference table going for it so hard that my pants ended up around my ankles again.
When the music stopped, Chris Schwartz stared at us like we were crazy. “I don’t like it,” he said.
The room was dead silent, and all I kept thinking was, We’re fucked.
“I don’t like it,” he said again. “I love it!”
That was it. We signed a contract on the spot, and through our production deal with Khalis Bayyan’s Le Jam Productions, we got to work on our first record, Blunted on Reality. During that time, Lauryn and I became much closer and we started to see each other seriously. We were together 24/7, working on our music with this amazing artistic synergy going on. I fell in love not only with her, but also with the art, and everything we were doing, because it was all tied up together. She was so young, so beautiful, and so talented, I felt like she was a being straight from the source, straight from God and all that it is to be creative and beautiful on earth.
I feel like people think of Wyclef and Lauryn when they think of the Fugees, but nobody should underestimate Pras. He was the visionary who saw the talent coming together; he is the one who called me in and thought it would be a good match. People also underestimate his ear. In the studio he added so many small ideas that made the music what it is. He als
o brought a rock element to what we did. He listened to Metallica and Guns N’ Roses and had that swagger to what he wanted to do. One time he made us stop everything to listen to an Eagles song that had a sound or string treatment we were looking for. The Eagles aren’t something you hear pumped from a hip-hop studio regularly, but he was right. He always wanted to make things bigger; he wanted them to sound like Queen. When we were able to control our own production, Pras was a real genius with that—using the engineering to get a bigger, full sound, while keeping it raw.
Blunted didn’t sell very well, but it did get our name out there. And since we were on Columbia through Ruffhouse, we got some tour support and had a team booking gigs for us across the country and in Europe. We played colleges, high schools, wherever, and we’d sell copies of our album out of the trunks of our cars wherever we went.
Blunted is not a bad album, but it had one problem that could not be overlooked: it didn’t sound anything like what we did live. It captured our talent, but it sounded out of touch with who we were as performers. We were taking orders from our production company and couldn’t get the sounds we heard in our heads onto the record. They wanted loud reggae-style choruses, Pras and me to rap hard with a rock-and-roll spirit, and Lauryn to calm things down vocally. She would subdue the energy and then pick it back up. It wasn’t consistent, because I was out there rapping hard like Onyx did, just all rugged street energy. The music on the album sounds smooth, if anything because Khalis’s production style came from that Kool and the Gang kind of vibe. There are twenty-four or so music tracks coming at you on most of the songs on Blunted. We envisioned the whole thing as simple and stripped down, but what we got was the opposite of that.
Lauryn had, in just a few months, become a better rapper than me, Pras, and half the females in the industry at the time put together. She would take a few bars from rhymes I wrote and build off of those. We wrote most of the songs on the album that way. It was our first album, and we were finding our voice as a group. We had so much talent we could have done anything: I have a five-octave-range voice, and Lauryn—forget about it—she can take you into any realm. We voiced our opinion throughout the process, and even though we did it their way for the most part, they did give us each our own songs, which was cool. The only song on that record that was entirely my idea and executed the way I heard it was “Vocab,” which is just me on acoustic guitar with all of us rapping. Lauryn got one of hers on there, too. She had a jazzy beat by a producer named Rashad who worked with Khalis, and she had Khalis arrange something very simple around it. The song ended up being “Some Seek Stardom.” I wrote the hook and she wrote the verses. Pras got one of his on, too, because I think the production company looked at us like teenagers, and for at least those three tracks they let us do what we wanted. His is called “Giggles.” I wrote the hooks on most of the songs and we all envisioned the interludes. The Fugees never had ghostwriters; we really did, from the start, come up with all of the rhymes and song concepts.
When people came to see us live, they could not believe it was the same band. We would blow the headliners off the stage wherever we went, and we started to get a reputation for that. Our live show was so full of energy that it was hard for anyone to follow us. We had no restrictions in the live show. We had a drummer, a bass player, a DJ, a keyboardist, Lauryn on vocals, me, and Pras. For shows, I could create a new arrangement for each song, like Amadeus or any composer would, and that’s just what I did. Nothing sounded the way it did on the album, because we made all of those arrangements harder and more dynamic live. I would jump from guitar to keys, Lauryn would command the stage, and the audience always connected with us. Even if they didn’t know the music, they felt like they were part of what was going on, because they connected with the emotion. So we were the number one hip-hop performers around when it came to playing live, but we had an album that was completely forgettable.
There is no way we could fail live, because we’d been practicing that side of our act for years. I’m a show orchestrator—that is what I do—and when you put me on a stage, it’s like you’ve just wound up a top. I will smash them every time until I die; that’s who I am. Back then when we didn’t have any hits and we were opening for bigger acts, but we had nothing to lose, so you’d better understand that I did everything in my power to make sure no audience forgot our name. I would have lit myself on fire if I had to: they weren’t going to forget the Fugees. Even if they didn’t like the record, audiences were leaving there thinking that even if we brought 5 percent of that live energy into the studio next time around, our album would be bangin’.
I was always thinking of ways to promote us, to get the word around, and to catch people’s attention. One of my ideas none of us will ever forget. In 1994, we released a single called “Boof Baf,” which was on Blunted on Reality, and we started getting all kinds of club gigs for established artists. I was always thinking of ways to command that time, and I became convinced that we needed a visual prop that everyone would remember. I had no idea what it should be. Pras and Lauryn didn’t either; they just thought I was crazy. I’d go on for hours about this mysterious thing that I couldn’t figure out, and how we needed it onstage with us. To me, this element would make us or break us. The Fugees needed a symbol.
By this time I had moved out of my parent’s house completely and moved into the Booga Basement studio. There was a small room upstairs on the landing before the main door to the house, and in there I had a mattress and not much else because that’s about all that would fit. One afternoon I was napping in there and woke up to a Bud Light commercial. It was an old one, when Bud Light had Spuds MacKenzie as their mascot. Spuds wasn’t anything new by then, but he was still the most famous dog on television. He had nothing to do with beer, but this crazy-looking dog that wore Hawaiian shirts and sunglasses was the face of Bud Light. No one outside of dog breeders knew what kind of dog he was before those commercials, but everyone knew Spuds—and they knew Bud Light because of him.
“That is what we need, man!” I said out loud. “We need a Spuds MacKenzie.”
America is an amazing place, I thought. In this country a dog that looks like Spuds can become more famous than most actors in Hollywood and just about every politician other than the president. There had to be some way to make an animal like him work for us. They would remember us if we had a mascot.
Our next gig was opening up for Jodeci, who at that time were the coolest R&B group going, and one of my favorites of all time. We had just gotten ourselves a booking agent and this was the first date they landed for us. We were all excited because Jodeci were like the continuation of the Jackson 5, and were right there in the boy-band tradition on the R&B side. In the early nineties they were as big as the Backstreet Boys, ’N Sync, and the rest of them. This was a big chance for us and an opportunity to be exposed to a well-established audience. I had to find us a mascot.
I started going over the facts. The show was in a big club in Manhattan, so we needed something that everyone would be able to see. A dog like Spuds wasn’t very tall, so that wasn’t going to work. Besides, I couldn’t just take the Bud Light dog and put a Fugees shirt on him. I had to be original.
I got into my hooptie ride, which was a busted-up blue Honda, and drove to a livestock store in the middle of the ’hood in Newark. This place had live animals that you could buy to take with you, or they would butcher them if that’s what you were after. It was definitely an immigrant-run store that was operating outside of the health codes, put it that way. On the drive over I figured out what would be the right size to catch people’s attention and be different enough from the norm.
“Yo, I’m here to buy a cow,” I told the guy.
He looked at me over his glasses. “You need to buy a cow?”
“Yeah.”
In my mind, all cows were like the ones we had in my village growing up. They were small, and whenever someone went off to buy one for their family, they always came back with a young baby c
ow. That is what I expected to take home. It would fit in my car, it would be cute, and between shows we could use it for milk.
“Right this way,” he said.
He took me out back into a barn full of huge cows in stalls. “I can sell you any of these. This one over here …”
“Yo, man, these cows are enormous,” I said. “They’re too big. I need to take this cow home in my car. Don’t you have no baby cows?”
“We don’t. These cows people buy for butchering. We can do that if you want.”
“Oh no, man, let me explain. I’m in a music group and we’re doing a show tonight. We want an animal that will get the crowd’s attention. Something small I can take with me, but something they’ll remember.”
He cocked his head to one side and looked into the distance for a minute.
“A show … I think I have something for you. Come with me.”
He led me past more stalls to the very back of the huge barn. He opened up a door and lead out the craziest looking goat I have ever seen. It was white and shaggy with a long curled horn sticking straight up on each side of its head. It had red eyes, and it looked stoned and pissed off. It kinda had its shoulders up and looked like it was about to rumble. Now that I’m thinking about it, that goat was kinda a thug.
“What the fuck is this shit, man?”
“This is special,” he said. “This is a rare Mexican goat. You have this at your show and your crowd will go nuts.”
I had never seen anything that looked like this thing, so maybe he knew what he was talking about. This goat wasn’t cute like Spuds, but he was scrappy and no one was going to forget that face.
“Alright. How much is the goat, man?”
“Two fifty.”
“What? Come on, man. You gotta help me out. You can’t be hustling me over this ugly fucking goat.”
“You don’t understand. This is a rare breed Mexican goat. You never see goats like this out here. Best I can do is two hundred.”