MO' META Blues Part 7

And so, off we went to Germany to play the jazz-rap festival with Jamaaladeen Tac.u.ma. If we had been more experienced, we would have traveled small, but we traveled large: it was me and Tariq, Malik and Hub, Scott, Rich, and Joe, but that was just the beginning. We took along a rapper named Shortie No Mas, a client of Rich's who was a.s.sociated with De La Soul and was scheduled to release a record that year. We took along a kid named Lord Aaqil, who had just put out a twelve-inch of his own called "Check It Out." And, most importantly, we took along a woman named Miyos.h.i.+, a friend from Rich's jazz radio days who had a credit card and was, as a result, our life preserver. We lived off of Miyos.h.i.+'s credit card for that entire trip.

The trip seems like centuries ago. This was back when you could still smoke on a transatlantic flight, and I remember watching people light up nervously in the smoking section. I watched my first Bollywood film on the screen set into the seat in front of me. When we got there, the show was big-a stadium show where we were on the same bill as the Last Poets, and for some reason we were the headliners. I don't think it reflected our fame, or even Rich's idea of our coming fame. I just think that there was some worldwide cachet at that point to being an American rap group. If you were from the States, and you were a hip-hop act, you were important. We did the show and came back out for one encore, and then a second, and then a third.3 We sold our Organix CD backstage and throughout the festival. Then we came home for the beginning of the label wars.

The Native Tongues bands were the first wave of hip-hop, at least from our perspective: alb.u.ms like De La Soul's 3 Feet High and Rising, Tribe's The Low End Theory, and the Jungle Brothers' Done by the Forces of Nature set a standard for what we wanted to do, and how it could be done. The second wave started in 1992, with Arrested Development and the release of the "Tennessee" single. I had a strange reaction to the song. I wondered if it was really rap. There were samples, but the cadence of the vocals was more like singing than like MCing. I decided, at the time, that they may or may not have been a rap group, but that they were definitely the hippest R&B group around. In fact, I looked at Arrested Development, I'm afraid, the way that people now sometimes look at us, like they were the gay cousin at a Bible Belt family reunion-kinda like "deal with you at arm's length" conditional love back then. The hip-hop journalist Harry Allen later wrote something about us that feeds right back into that question: "Are they simply R&B's hardest group or hip-hop's softest?" Arrested Development was followed closely on their heels by Digable Planets, who put out "Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat)" in 1993; I got a test pressing of it the day we recorded "Pa.s.s the Popcorn." In my mind, and possibly in hip-hop history, we were the third group of that second wave.

Well, we were about to be. We weren't signed yet, but Rich's plan was starting to happen. During high school, whenever I invented band names, record t.i.tles, alb.u.m art, I always put my group on Def Jam Recordings, because they had a mystique about them. They had signed only six acts, including Slick Rick, LL Cool J, and Public Enemy, and they stood pat on that original set. Breaking in at Def Jam was like climbing the mountain.

And just like that, they were the first label to come calling. Russell Simmons and Lyor Cohen, who ran the label, paid for a Roots showcase in New York City. It was across the street from their old offices on Varick Street, and we went to New York in style: Flintstones style. With the "profits" from Organix, Rich bought a station wagon for three hundred bucks. It was great-except for the fact that the backseat had no floor. You had to lift your legs up so they didn't hit the pavement rus.h.i.+ng by beneath. He put a rug down for cosmetics and safety. Even with the rug, I couldn't sit there. I was too big. But we all packed in, three people in front, four of the skinniest in the center, and the rest of us Middle Pa.s.saging it in the back, lying across the top of our equipment.

I wish I could be there for every band's label audition. I wish I could serve as a kind of fairy G.o.dperson. What I'd tell them is that all those tricks you're thinking about using, all the razzle-dazzle-set it aside. Leave your innovations at the door. All a label wants are songs they can sell. Our calling card at the time was a kind of freestyle exercise where Tariq would scat to different topics, and that was a showstopper. And Def Jam loved our musicians.h.i.+p and our vision and our energy. Still, they pa.s.sed. As much as they loved the idea of us, they said, they didn't know how they were going to market that idea.

In a sense, we fell into a crack in the history of hip-hop. Had the showcase occurred in 1991, or early in 1992, we would have been signed instantly. But something had happened in the interim that changed the face of hip-hop, and that was the release of Dr. Dre's alb.u.m The Chronic in December 1992-and, more to the point, the way that The Chronic dominated hip-hop sales and radio play and video play through 1993. The Chronic gave a credible artist a taste of ma.s.sive, multiplatinum success. And while I have nothing bad to say about the Young MCs, Tone Lcs, and MC Hammers of the world, Dr. Dre had an obvious cultural pedigree as a pioneering gangsta rapper and top-flight producer. None of that changed the fact that I felt as mixed about The Chronic as I had about Arrested Development. I was as freethinking as the next man, but I liked my hip-hop a certain way, and this was obviously different. I treat important hip-hop events like they're War of the Worlds, and there have been many times when I have stood there open-mouthed before a turntable or a CD player, asking myself if I can be trusted to believe what I have just heard. Usually, if I have to ask, those alb.u.ms end up being masterpieces, but at the time I never know how to feel. That was definitely the case with The Chronic. That alb.u.m sounded so clean and pristine, so anti-hip-hop. I just wasn't sure if anyone was allowed to do that or not. I was so conflicted. And add to that the fact that I had a strange connection to the record: My father, my mother, and my aunt had recorded an alb.u.m under the name Congress Alley in 1973, and there was a song on that record called "Are You Looking?" that was sampled in The Chronic's first single, "Nuthin' but a 'G' Thang."

Within about six months, I had come around, and I recognized the genius of the record. But it caused a problem for me as an artist, or at least as a potential label signing. Because The Chronic had so much success, labels were focused on getting comparable acts, credible artists who could also sell huge numbers of records. We weren't that act, and Def Jam recognized that, and when they pa.s.sed, that dream vanished.

Then the parade started. We had dealings with Tommy Boy, the home of De La Soul and Digital Underground; with East/West, home of Das EFX and Snow. Ruffhouse, ironically, never gave us an offer-though even if they had, I probably would have pa.s.sed. I felt like I knew them too well, and I didn't want to stay in the neighborhood, so to speak.

Then Mercury Records surfaced. One of their flags.h.i.+p hip-hop bands was Black Sheep, a Queens group that was the unofficial fourth member of Native Tongues. They were the first hip-hop artists to appear on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno after Johnny Carson gave up his host chair, and their debut alb.u.m, A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing, remains a cla.s.sic. (The opening track, "U Mean I'm Not," is a parody of gangsta rap in which one of the Black Sheep rappers, Dres, narrates a killing spree only to wake up and realize that it was all a fantasy.) We met Ed Eckstine, the label president (and son of legendary jazz vocalist Billy Eckstein) who was very interested in us. We met the man who would be our A&R guy, Kenyatta Bell. Yes, another Kenyatta. He seemed extremely excited, too. They took us to the video shoot of "Jingle Jangle," by the Legion, which featured a verse by Dres. We left the Mercury meeting with a strong sense that we had found a home.

The following week, they sent contracts down, and somehow all of our names were misspelled: mine and Tariq's and Malik's. I don't know the technicalities of what contracts require, but I was told that had there been one mistake, we could have just initialed it and corrected it. With three, though, we had to return the doc.u.ments to the label and wait for them to supply new contracts. It was on a Friday, and Kenyatta's a.s.sistant didn't turn the paperwork around quickly enough. Then that Sat.u.r.day, Brad Rubens, our lawyer, called, and asked us what we thought about Geffen. Wendy Goldstein, the woman who signed Snow to East/West, had just left for a head position at Geffen, and she was still interested in us.

We laughed. We were virtually on Mercury, the deal as good as done. But we knew this might be our last chance to be courted by a label, and so we entertained them by letting them entertain us. Wendy took us to dinner, which meant steak and lobster and friends tagging along and ordering extra food to go. We really took advantage. Then Rich and I had a radical idea. Ever since Michael Jackson's Bad came out in August of 1987, I had been obsessively reading Billboard, and in early 1992 I read about this alternative metal band named Helmet that had released a single and an alb.u.m independently and then attracted the attention of Interscope Records. They got caught up in the grunge craze, and it was rumored that when Interscope signed them, each member of the band got more than $1 million.

"Rich," I said, "why don't we pull a Helmet?"

"What?" he said. "What do you mean?"

"You know," I said. "We should ask Geffen for huge money and studio equipment and whatever else. If Wendy says no, we just go to Mercury."

"It's never going to happen," he said.

I conceded. Never going to happen, never going to happen, never going to happen. And then the call came in. It happened. Geffen wanted in. They were prepared to give us everything we asked for. I had thought the parade was over, but it was still going.4 It was November 1993, and all of a sudden Mercury was gone, and we were signed to DGC, a subsidiary of Geffen that was better known for alternative-rock acts like Sonic Youth, Weezer, and Beck.

We entered Geffen's...o...b..t at a strange time in their history, and in fact a strange time in the history of rock and roll. The label was able to give us a gargantuan deal because they were flush with cash from a trio of rock acts: Aerosmith, Guns N' Roses, and Nirvana. Those three bands were selling tens of millions of copies every time they released an alb.u.m, and as a result Geffen could throw money at us without even thinking about it.

We were their guinea pigs. We knew it. They knew it. At least they had the decency to be straightforward about it. They set us up as a semiautonomous unit, without a real A&R person attached to us, and we were one of the last groups to get one of those old-style development deals where a label invests in and brings a group along without paying too much attention to the numbers. Geffen told us that they would put out our first record but urged us not to worry too much about sales, because they would release a second, and a third, and a fourth. "Stay diligent," they told us. "Stay the course. By the fourth record, you guys are going to be monstrous, and by the sixth record, you'll be household names. Look at the Stones." That's what they always said. "The Stones?" I said. I tried to keep the disbelief out of my voice. I told them that seemed like a strange example to me in a world where most rap groups disappear after three records, tops. They shook their heads. "Stop thinking like that," they said. "You guys are beyond that. The only reason why you guys should not make a twentieth record is if you yourself sabotage your progress."

In a way, it made sense. I knew plenty of top-notch rap groups, from De La Soul to Group Home, that were making records for relatively cheap, and I think that Geffen thought we could do the same thing, deliver them a great alb.u.m at an affordable price. But I never felt like a tax write-off. I was slightly concerned with the fact that the label didn't really have a dedicated urban staff, but even that turned out to have a silver lining, because the people who ended up staffing the urban division borrowed from other labels, moonlight labor. So maybe it would be a street team that had experience at Def Jam and a guy from Loud/RCA who would help radio outreach. They were experienced in the genre and very enthusiastic about us and what they thought we might become. (In the wake of signing us, Geffen did start to acquire other hip-hop acts. GZA's Liquid Swords, one of the defining doc.u.ments of the first wave of the Wu-Tang Clan, was released on Geffen just a short while after our debut.)

The Roots were ready to go into the studio, but the Roots were changing again, bringing in new personnel. During the period where we were flirting with Mercury and marrying Geffen, we forged a good relations.h.i.+p with Bobbito Garcia, the writer and DJ who hosted The Stretch Armstrong and Bobbito Show on WKCR in New York. Bobbito let us know about an open mic event called Lyricist Lounge in New York. Rich and Joe went up there a few times; I think I may have joined them once or twice. A little after that, to make some money on the side, Hub and I joined up with a gospel tour; he had a friend who was a gospel singer who was barnstorming the country, and we were invited along to be their rhythm section. It wasn't enjoyable. We spent three weeks packing eight people and their gear into a fifteen-pa.s.senger van, hoping for the best; some nights getting small crowds, some nights getting none at all. The only real highlight of that period, from October through November of 1993, was the Sons of Soul alb.u.m by Tony! Toni! Tone!, which is either the last real R&B record ever made or the first R&B record of the new era. I listened to that record constantly, especially "If I Had No Loot" and "Anniversary."

Meanwhile, the other half of the band-Tariq and Joe-were going to Lyricist Lounge. We'd speak to Rich nightly, and he would fill me in on the things that they were discovering. One night the call came in. I said h.e.l.lo.

"Yo," Rich said. "I found a secret weapon."

Rich and I have always talked this way, always thought in terms of how a band needs something to elevate it above other the fray. The secret weapon was often something we called a Stupid Human Trick, borrowing the idea from David Letterman. We knew that some people came to see us because Tariq was a virtuoso rhymer, and those people liked rhymes but might have been uncertain about the musicians onstage. And we knew that some people came to see us because Hub and I were virtuoso musicians, and some people liked the music but weren't sure about the whole hip-hop angle. But what was the wildcard for the rest of the people, the ones who were afflicted with cultural ADD? The Stupid Human Trick was something that would draw them in, an indisputably entertaining novelty. In this case, it was Rahzel, the great beatboxer. I had immense respect for beatboxing. At CAPA, I had performed the lunchroom version, but to hear Rich tell it, Rahzel took it to a theatrical level that none of us could imagine. Rich realized the appeal immediately. When the gospel tour ended-abruptly, and joyously, as the result of our signing our first record contract-we s.n.a.t.c.hed Rahzel for the band.

Other changes were in store, too. Around that time I took on my new name. Tariq was already Black Thought, but I had something else in mind, a kind of Malcolm X meets Lamont Cranston move, and in those very first years I just used a question mark for my name. It's the ultimate form of ego gratification, anonymity. I wanted it to be a form of mystery, but then people started thinking that was my name, the question mark. On Do You Want More?!!!??! I ended up being credited as "B.R.O. the R.? (Beat Recycler of the Rhythm)," which is possibly the most unwieldy hip-hop name in history. That couldn't stand: I mean that literally, it couldn't stand under its own weight. And so I went to ?uestlove. I think the Q-or the absent Q, depending on your spelling, though I'm fine with either ?uest or Quest-had something to do with Q-Tip and A Tribe Called Quest. (Most of the things that we did were done in the shadow of the Native Tongues.) The rest was a mix of substance and style. I was questioning, I was on a quest, I was looking for approval, I was questioning my need for approval. All of that was tied up in the name. It was a calculated decision but also an arbitrary one, something that seemed fully invented but also something that was the result of a long evolution. I think that's the case with many hip-hop names: they're a combination of nicknames, self-mythologizing self-portraits, and cool artifacts. You need something that looks good in the liner notes.

Not too long after that, I was talking to someone about names and Philadelphia, about how I got mine and everyone else got theirs, and he told me that Philly was, for many years, the home to the man with the longest proper name in America. He was a German immigrant who had settled in Philadelphia named Hubert Blaine Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenbergerdorff, Sr.-or at least that was the short version of his name. His full name ran to something like seven hundred and fifty letters. He became a local celebrity in the late thirties, I think, because he kept getting into trouble with insurance companies and utilities and the voter registration office; they couldn't get his name right, and he kept insisting that they had to. It was his name. He was in the Guinness Book of World Records as the record-holder for longest name until they discontinued the category. I respected his choice, but I was happier with mine.

Quest Loves Records, Part III "When you live your life through records, the records are a record of your life."

1987: Prince, Sign O the Times

This was the most perfect year of music in my adult life. All the stars aligned. Hip-hop was in bloom and so were soul music and eighties funk. I had heard the t.i.tle song when it was released as a single, and that created incredible antic.i.p.ation. But black radio was very different then. They played alb.u.m cuts. I remember when I first heard "Housequake," which was the last time that Prince made my world stop. I was doing the laundry at a local Laundromat, and when the song came on, with that needle-off-the-record sound and Prince's Camille voice saying "Shut up, already... d.a.m.n!," I just freaked out. I went right home to get my hands on a ca.s.sette player so I could tape it. No, I didn't go home. I ran home, two long-a.s.s city blocks, weaving in and out of people like "Flight of the b.u.mblebee" was playing behind me: Hi, Miss Johnson, hi Miss Jones, can't stop now! I made it home right in time to hear Prince say, "A groove this funky is on the run."

1988: Public Enemy, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back

I had my first real job in high school working at Big Al's, a fifties-themed restaurant where I made fries and milk shakes. I remember this ca.s.sette came out the second Tuesday in May, and I got it before I went to work. On my way there, I noticed that I was walking differently. My stroll was instantly and completely transformed. It was like John Travolta in Sat.u.r.day Night Fever, with the Bee Gees playing in the background. Lord Jesus, it was powerful! By the time I got to work, I was up to "Caught, Can We Get a Witness?" and although I wasn't allowed to have my Walkman on when I cooked fries, I kept sneaking to the freezer to hear "Show 'em Whatcha Got." It filled my head. It enlarged me. And then there was a point where I couldn't take it anymore: not the alb.u.m, but everything else. "I'm going on lunch break," I said. I bought eight Duracell batteries at a drugstore and went to the park and sat there listening to the alb.u.m over and over again. I never formally quit, but I knew I was never going back. I couldn't tell my father, though, so every day the rest of the summer I got dressed and left like I was going to work and walked around and listened to music instead.

1989: The Beastie Boys, Paul's Boutique

I was going to pa.s.s on this record. I had heard Licensed to Ill. Who hadn't? But like the rest of fickle hip-hop America, I just knew that their fifteen minutes had run out. When I found out that the Dust Brothers, who had a hand in Young MC's "Bust a Move," were helming the project, I thought this would be at best a mediocre record. Then, the week after I graduated high school, I went to Cherry Hill Mall in New Jersey with my dad. Part of my graduation gift was a leather jacket-in the summer, of course, when it was cheaper. Next to that leather jacket store was a Waldenbooks, and I went to get the new Rolling Stone. Axl Rose was on the cover. I flipped to the Recordings section and saw the lead ill.u.s.tration: a three-headed figure on a skateboard. I read the review without looking at the rating, and the alb.u.m David Handelman described actually sounded decent. Then I checked the rating. Four stars? That seemed impossible. What were the chances of a novelty rap act being taken seriously by Rolling Stone? I bought three copies of the magazine and then I hightailed it and got the record. That got me through the rest of 1989. For starters, Tim Burton's Batman came out that summer, too, and the soundtrack was the first time that a Prince alb.u.m had left me underwhelmed. I liked "The Future" and "Batdance," but I wasn't sure about the rest of it, and I had to come to terms with the fact that he wasn't going to provide the soundtrack for my year. A guy I worked with, Greg, told me the secret of Paul's Boutique-that the Beasties were sampling all this seventies music-and I realized that this was the remaining 30 percent of my father's record collection, the part that I never listened to. I remember having the Beatles' Abbey Road and the Eagles' One of These Nights and Hotel California in the house. I didn't take them so seriously. I didn't think I had to, especially since earlier hip-hop masterpieces, like It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, leaned more heavily on the soul and funk and jazz that my mother and Aunt Karen collected. But here was an alb.u.m making art of my dad's soft rock and yacht rock and my sister's mainstream junior high school soft rock alb.u.ms. That's when I realized I wanted to make records.

1990: Ice Cube, AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted

When I was young, we would often travel to Los Angeles as a family. At first we went via Trailways: three full days on the bus. After our first trip, in 1983, my legs were swollen for the entire trip and I spent half the time not being able to walk because I couldn't fit into my shoes. By 1990, we had graduated to the train, which was awesome. I loved the train. Somewhere along the way, there was a stop, and we had two hours to get off the train and walk around. There happened to be a record shop inside the station, and I bought the ca.s.sette of AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted. I hadn't been with Ice Cube from the very start. At first I wasn't sure about N.W.A. Their Jheri curls and Eight Ball jackets seemed kind of corny, especially since I had already found my flag-bearing fas.h.i.+on and philosophy heroes in De La Soul, who were the ant.i.thesis of N.W.A. It wasn't until Tariq made me listen to "f.u.c.k the Police" that I realized how good they were. Ice Cube's first solo alb.u.m upped the ante even more. It was like watching a movie with no screen; the lyrics were just incredible. Plus, here was a West Coast rapper with the premier East Coast production team, the Bomb Squad: still, to my mind, the most important summit meeting in hip-hop history. The t.i.tle track is my favorite Bomb Squad moment ever, if only for how they used Funky George's hi-hat from Kool and the Gang's "Let the Music Take Your Mind." For starters, they sampled a solo. James Brown would give the drummer some as long as he didn't take a solo; this proved the error in that approach. And then they sampled this Bernard Purdiestyle solo with the hi-hat! The intensity of that song is hard to believe. It's the most violent hi-hat I have ever heard. I have tried so many times to make that sound, and it's impossible.

1991: De La Soul, De La Soul Is Dead

I cut church to hear this in my boy Jason Brown's mother's car. We did Sunday school in the morning and then, after a break, started up real church again. For some reason I didn't have to drum that week, so I went outside to my friend's car. This was in February, and the real record wouldn't come out until May, but a bootleg was circulating. Out there in the car, listening, I believed that I was hearing the most perfectly sequenced alb.u.m in history. It represented everything I loved about hip-hop and far exceeded my expectations. The only thing I can compare that moment to is the first time I heard Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation. Every song knocked me out, one by one: "Pease Porridge," "Let, Let Me In," "Ring Ring Ring (Ha Ha Hey)"... Sitting there at one twenty in the afternoon in a maroon Chrysler, I told myself that I had to cherish that magical moment, because there was no guarantee that I would never again know what it felt like to hear that for the first time. I begged my friend to make a copy. "No," he said. "I promised I wouldn't." I remember calling Tariq and telling him that the record was going to change his life. "No way," he said. "This can't be as good as 3 Feet High and Rising." But it was. To me, that's the greatest year in hip-hop history. There are other candidates: 1988, 1994, 1998. But I vote for this year. Every other record was changing your life.

1992: The Pharcyde, Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde

This was the year I really started to make music, so I started to listen a little differently. At that point it wasn't like other acts were compet.i.tion, of course, but I was in the race. That Pharcyde alb.u.m was a highly unexpected sucker punch. It was one of the greatest surprises I have ever had as a music consumer. I didn't like "Ya Mama," the single that came out before the alb.u.m. But A.J. s.h.i.+ne, our comanager, who was a DJ at Drexel, told me that maybe I should reconsider my position. And I did, tremendously. The record just knocked me flat, especially "4 Better or 4 Worse." Back in the seventies, Parliament had animated commercials for their records, and on the one for Motor Booty Affair, there was a kind of watery effect that happened to the picture when the Fender Rhodes was playing. When I heard the tremolo effect on "4 Better or 4 Worse," that's when I knew that we needed a Fender Rhodes. That's kind of how Scott Storch got into the group. We wanted that sound, that possibility. Later on, when we made The Tipping Point, I tried to pay tribute. It wasn't easy: that was Tariq's record, more or less, and the feeling within the group was that you didn't meddle too much in records when the pendulum swung away from you. And so I tried to make "Star," the first cut on the record, as straight ahead as I could. But it was begging for my patented flip at the end, and that's when I decided to pay tribute to "4 Better or 4 Worse."

1993: A Tribe Called Quest, Midnight Marauders / Wu-Tang Clan, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)

Cla.s.sic hip-hop is a sentence. And if the beginning of the sentence is me purchasing Eric B. and Rakim's Paid in Full at Crazy Eddie's in 1987, then these two records are the end of the sentence. A year before them, Dr. Dre's The Chronic had changed everything. It had forced credible artists to consider commerce, which was then taken to an even higher alt.i.tude when Puffy and Biggie made Ready to Die. And something changed when commerce arrived. Good and bad stopped mattering; only effective and ineffective mattered. Whether a record worked on an audience became the standard, rather than whether or not it was any good. I consider these two alb.u.ms the last pure, unadulterated moments in the genre. That's not to say that hip-hop hasn't offered anything of substance since, of course. There have been plenty of cla.s.sic records. But these two were the end of innocence, and they came at such a great moment. Hub and I were freezing in that fifteen-pa.s.senger van with a gospel group that we didn't particularly like. Our minds were back in Philly and New York, wondering if we were going to ink a record deal or not. We had spent the greater part of 1993 chasing this record deal, which looked increasingly like a carrot on a stick. We did crazy amounts of auditions and showcases. People thought we were cute but they realized at the end of the day that they couldn't sell us. And that's how we found ourselves with that gospel band, in Oberlin, Kansas, staying in the bas.e.m.e.nt of a pastor's house. Everyone was going stir-crazy. It was the whitest part of white America. The gospel guys would sneak out into the fields and smoke weed, the way that terrorists go out into the forest on Homeland. When we got word that the record deal was coming through, we just quit. We left them high and dry, no drummer, no ba.s.s player. I talked to Tariq on the phone, and he told me that the second I got off the plane I had to go to Tower and buy Midnight Marauders and Enter the Wu-Tang. I didn't make it to the store, but when the band picked me up in the van the next day to drive to New York and sign our record contract, they had both ca.s.settes. It was the greatest day ever. We were just absolutely there-it was the last time we had that pure, old style hip-hop energy, the last time we were totally engaged. We had rewind moments trying to figure out whether it was a snare of a gunshot when RZA yells, "Don't do that s.h.i.+t!" We debated every song, a.n.a.lyzed every lyric. We picked through those things like they were academic texts.

CHAPTER TEN

Where were you when Kurt Cobain killed himself?

I was a Nirvana fan from the time they broke out. I understood them, and not just because of the hits. I was a fan of their work and of the critical writing that surrounded them. I knew that Kurt Cobain was a significant songwriter and singer and that the group was turning things around on a big scale for the entire rock and roll genre, which had started to stagnate with the arena rock of the late eighties. But I never expected his death to affect me directly the way it did.

In April of 1994, my father had his second heart attack, and I was sticking close to home, helping my family work through it as he recuperated. It was a Tuesday night, I think, and I was sleeping in my father's bed, watching MTV on cable. I dozed off, and resurfaced to hear the announcer saying that Kurt Cobain was dead, that he had killed himself, shot himself in the head. I was stunned. I called Rich. "Did you hear?" I said.

"Terrible," he said. "Terrible for him, terrible for his fans, and terrible for us."