Too $hort - Steve-O's Wild Ride! Ep #81

hey everybody and welcome to a revealing wild ride with stevo not only are we gonna learn some crazy stuff about a legend of hip hop which too short is we're also going to perhaps reveal me to be getting pretty good at interviewing people i think i did a good job on this one man but let me tell you what does a great job the tushy ace from hellotushy.com i'm telling you man i've always said this is my favorite sponsor of the wild ride podcast and that is not changing man this new product comes with a remote that just sticks to my wall when i get ready to take a dump boom i hit seat temperature so that just warms up the seat so i'm nice and comfy i take my dump and then when i get done boom i blast the the bum blaster oh my gosh it's just the most luxurious bidet that you could possibly get and it's got a front blaster for the ladies too so when i get done blasting my butt then i hit dry boom and a little butt dryer comes out it's so comfy it's so luxurious the holidays are coming up and you cannot get a more luxurious gift for the person person that you love yeah so go to hellotischee.com stevo to get 10 off your order and be among the very first people to ever try the tushy ace man it is so awesome one more time hellotushy.com stevo for 10 off your order and so you can be one of the very first people to get a chance to try the tushy ace now let's get into it ladies and gentlemen too short yeah dude what's up what's up what's up this is my co-host scott randolph what's going on and up at the front we have the gorgeous paul briskey nice to meet you man how are you got to tell on myself man i'm [ __ ] later than [ __ ] dude how late are you it's so uncomfortable for me to be going somewhere where i'm late and it's just like all over my body it was physically just uncomfortable i was filming a surf show for kook of the day and i did catch five waves but we were supposed to start 50 minutes ago this is an awful embarrassment it's so unprofessional of me and i'm so you're the cook of the day yeah i am the coop you're too late i'm on a carefree day today so it's cool good epic yeah that's good thank you okay so yeah dude i mean where to begin dude like you got a career that's gone for [ __ ] ever yeah i don't i don't know where you begin you just kind of you just kind of exist you just yeah there was no beginning there was no ending i i was checking it out dude like uh did is it's your career really began in earnest in 1983 around that time i started i first started rapping in the year 1980 i first heard rap in 79 yeah so a year later i'm like i can do this and i just it was just a little high school hobby and right near the end of high school it started like really growing at that time like when did like the fat boys come out at the same time 82 83 same time one dmc run dmc was uh were they even that early they were there um you know crush groove the movie was a big deal that was like 1984 right you know at that time curtis blow was the big guy in the movie and run dmc was you know the next upcoming stars and llq emerged as but that's still way later yeah but you know but he he appeared in that movie okay he was like a new guy kicked in the door of his radio but during that time all this is taking place i'm famous in the bay area yeah like i'm i'm not making records i'm not assigned to a label but i'm famous i'm doing parties i'm making money i'm in high school and i'm just like you know i don't i'm not really getting the opportunity of being on a major label which i'm glad i wasn't because i had a lot of time to be mediocre and learn you know sure by the time i got to a major label i was a seasoned veteran what was the label that your first label was called 75 75 girls records that was a local label and the guy who owned his name was dean hodges and he had somewhere along in life he got the formula of how to be an independent label so 75 girls is a pimping reference i would imagine it is a reference that he got from a johnny guitar watson song i don't know the name of the song i know we used to listen to it and dean hodges really loved this one line in the song johnny guitar watson sings like he was on a horse or a motorcycle or something i don't i can't remember a long time ago but he rides up and all in one motion he kisses 75 girls at the same time and dean liked that so much he named his label 75 girls records nice pretty good wow it's that's an independent label yeah now you you recorded three albums on that label they released three albums i recorded two the third one the third album was a homemade tape that i used to just sit around making these little homemade tapes with a mixer and a turntable and turn some records over the instrumental side and just record songs that i wrote and they found after i did the two albums and you know we moved on it was like a family environment the next venture that we did i did it with dean hodges little brother and his first cousin you know it was just oh that was the dangerous dangerous music yeah so we're just off to the next it was still still in the family but but you know um i mean man you know i could tell you things about those years like things sure so the albums that you were that you put out with 75 girls are those the tapes that you're selling in the park two of them were literally in the studio working in a really nice studio the one is titled don't stop rapping sure recorded out of stuff that's the very first one yeah recorded a studio in san francisco different fur and the next one after that was called players same thing we went in the studio and you know i'm working with professional engineers and professional musicians and i'm learning i'm really learning how to do all these things that are going to come in play later on and then the third one like i said they found a little homemade tape i made and they manufactured it later on after i got signed to jive oh damn okay we got a little secret weapon but you know i never had a problem with 75 girls because for one we never we never had an agreement we never had a written agreement two dean hodges taught me detail how to run a independent label every step from a to z and then third you know you taught me how to be a player so not only was i you know working with these professional musicians in a professional studio you know we had endless weed it was like [ __ ] like like like cocaine was free everything was just free just make music and be in the environment and i learned a lot so right i never had any problem with 75 girls because when i look back it was i was like earning a master's degree sure being a [ __ ] player and a rapper and whatever what i think is really interesting too is that uh you know coming out of la there there was like like the hip-hop was like heavily influenced by gang culture but they didn't really have gang culture in oakland so much as just hustlers and pimps let me tell you something that every single hustler and every single pimp knows 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supporting good people yeah dude now let's talk about hustlers and pimps and even the gang gangs that are that are in the bay they don't they don't gang bang because of blue and red and territory and it's not some some of it could be neighborhood others could be uh we're we're born bound together by money and the hustle or like-minded things but it's not it's not open and shut rules of you're blue and red we're enemies it was it was never like that yeah different kind of gang bang up there it's just different gang if you had to analyze it and you were like law enforcement you go it's no different but in the streets it's a lot it's different than walking around going oh my god let's get to doing red you know right right a lot different that's a lot different yeah and and so like you were basically like the first mixtape cat right like there was no name for it yeah there's no name for it and you had just audio cassettes and and what was like the first time that you went out to sell them you sold them like to a drug dealer the very first tape we ever sold i had a rap partner his name was freddie b he was rapping in his world you know he had been like you know juvenile correctional facilities and getting in trouble and stuff and he knew lots of people all over the city from you know he grew up in west oakland lived in east oakland he just knew a lot of people and i was really popular from like 1981 82 like from being around the city riding on the buses and um having my big radio and letting people hear my raps what we got here with some burritos man i'm super popular right but now i got these guys coming like yeah man you know my boy freddy b he raps he's better than you he's you know so what they were really doing was in the spirit of hip hop early 80s they're like let's get a battle rap going with the only two rappers we know so they they put us to rap against each other and we did and as i hear a lot of rappers who became really good friends say they first battled and they became friends we became friends okay so we recorded some stuff at his house and it was cool and i was like dude you should come by my house because i had like this quality equipment where you could record and you'd sound really good because i knew how to set the levels and i had the right microphones and little effects machines and when he heard what we sounded like after recording in my house he said we should sell this or we could sell this something like that and i'm like sell it to who he's like [ __ ] some drug dealers right down the street right like [ __ ] let's go so so that was the first tape you sold was to the drug dealers you just walked up to him and popped it in one guy had a car with a nice little sound system and we said hey you guys want to buy rap tape and they were like what the [ __ ] for like why and you know freddie b's like just listen to it so they listen and we're just sitting there kicking it listening one tape and a guy walks up to the radio he leans in the car and presses eject and says i'll buy it so when he said that like how much five dollars somebody else said let me get one we're like we only got one but we'll be back tomorrow dude that's epic and then and so check this out i don't know if you guys know this but too short selling like a tape before it was called a mixtape for five bucks but then and he's selling to drug dealers so like people who are like kind of like bosses and and players and hustlers like you know people within money guys yeah money people in oakland they start making like requests hey man you're selling these tapes i want you to custom make me a tape where you shout me up like like work me into a rap song so he starts custom making rap songs for like bosses in oakland and he's selling those tapes for 20 bucks it's like the original cameo almost i did it that was an accident too that wasn't on purpose we kind of were trying to win over this one guy we were we were we were working with one of his drug dealer workers one of his lower level guys and he was bringing us over there because he had some really good equipment he wanted to be a rapper and he's like bringing us to his spot but at his spot there's this [ __ ] drugs being sold yeah and one of the big boss guys the actual big boss guy is walking around with this mean face and you know just not saying anything to us so we you know this kind of guy you like hey what's up man he just don't say [ __ ] back to you that kind of [ __ ] so we asked him one day we like hey you won't want our tapes we're gonna give it to him for free and he just like lit into us with a he's like i don't give a [ __ ] about rap music [ __ ] that rap [ __ ] like why would i leave like why would i listen to rap if it's about somebody else if it was about me i listened to it like ah okay so we like [ __ ] like we got cussed the [ __ ] out by the boss man like some scary [ __ ] we like we leave and go man we gotta make a tape about him like yeah like it's mandatory so we bring him back to check we just go here and walk away just hear it just give it to him just don't ask nothing ever it's absolutely [ __ ] genius because that gets you in with the most influential people so look at this he never says thank you he never says i liked it he never said i listened to it he never said [ __ ] and this other guy comes walking up to us out the blue one day we're on the streets walking down the street and this guy's like like yelling he's like do you know where the [ __ ] you at and do you know who the [ __ ] i am he's like if you [ __ ] don't get me a tape like you made him i better not ever see you out here ever again later day later we're like here you go he was the one who when we handed him the tape he just gave us 20 bucks like here okay he's like y'all cool y'all cool so we so then people that's two people that had custom-made tapes now the request started coming in which is why we named them the special request because we started getting like summons like so when so when you make a special request are you like like writing an entire song from scratch are you just re-recording styling so i end up with this little pad like you know this size little little pocket pad i got a pin on me or something and i'm i'm like taking notes uh the guys on 84th one five tapes like you know and just keep it like come back and get the money and so somebody pull up on us we like sitting on the bus stop and like a little nice little car pull up and go hey you guys are too short freddie b you're like yeah like get in the car like okay and we go drive to some little exclusive neighborhood where you can't get past the goons unless you they let you pass and then we go back and we meet the boss he's like yeah i want to get one of those tapes like okay what you want your tape to say he's like yeah talk about my car and my block and you know name a couple of my homies and i'm taking notes i'm like oh my god it's amazing all this is going in the tape and we come back and it turned into a really popular thing that like just the only the bosses wanted to spend the 20 bucks i could spend the 20 bucks it's so [ __ ] funny and i've never heard none of that none of the little guys really wanted it that's like like right [ __ ] dude but this is in the 80s right i mean 20 bucks 82 83 right how many bosses did you make it for the whole city everybody got their own legit original track you people were riding around listening a song about themselves sick yeah i mean i've never heard that like you've got to be the only guy who came up that way and then and then presumably because these people are big bosses then now like when they've got they've got you doing live gigs and so we did we also dj the the the hood parties the parties that you know it'd be like in somebody's living room uh you know just just whatever like in a [ __ ] apartment little tiny ass apartment crammed with people whatever it may be and at those parties we did a lot of personal stuff too like we'd really be naming people in the crowd saying you know we kind of like that was what they were doing in new york in the bronx we like let's do our version of it so you walk in the party you somebody you get your name said you know we might put you put you in like some rhyming words or something and everybody just loved us so who's putting on these parties uh we were on this i guess like house party circuit where um i guess you could relate them to like what people might call like a rent party in the projects where you know one family's trying to raise some money in the night just to you know so it could just be some kids or some young people trying to make some money so it's a really low investment you buy a few bottles of liquor you um you pass out some little index cards with invites and [ __ ] you only need a few hundred people and basically the formula was um you pass out these little flyers and go come to house party on 92nd avenue here's the address is from 11 p.m to 3 a.m and it's a dollar to get in the door and a dollar for a drink something like that all right and it's affordable for the party going person they pay me about 100 bucks 50 bucks whatever 75 bucks and we do take your party we rap at the [ __ ] and i found out all these things that i was doing were forms of marketing that you would want young artists to do so the first time they ever asked me to stand in front of a crowd of thousands of people a friend of mine lionel b he worked for bill graham uh you know bill graham did all the big concerts uh the grateful dead all this stuff yeah legendary promoter yeah bill graham had a a side company called barrier productions that he did a lot of a lot of urban concerts with so they asked me if i wanted to be the opening act on one of the shows it was when that song um it was utfo roxanne roxanne okay oh [ __ ] 1985 and um they asked me to open the show i never had made a record never been in the studio just tapes only and i went out there in front of 5 000 6 000 people and everybody in the crowd knew every word everything i was saying yeah that's that's i get off stage i didn't even know it was gonna happen i get off stage and come back and people were like who the [ __ ] are you like right how the [ __ ] do they know your [ __ ] you never made a record like i don't know man and then there's another like people like pretty notable thing is that rap music in the early 80s was just so clean you know i mean i i what comes to mind for me is the song white lines where it's just like it's say no to drugs like kind of thing you know the fat boys run dmc like they didn't they didn't have like gangsters explicit lyrics right explicit lyrics and then here you come along 1982 19 that [ __ ] [ __ ] yeah straight up and uh and you just were unapologetic about just being like so you really were like the first like hardcore like explicit rapper talking about [ __ ] and and yeah when you get like uh you know the late 80s and you got groups like nwa emerging i'm right there with them but i had a like a head start on the genre already sure when ice t made six in the morning i mean that was like the floodgates opening to to you know graphic rhyming rhymes that come from the west coast and you know with the west you know it's graphic like the message what's the six in the morning from ice tea was that something he did on his own that was his rendition of um schooly diesel uh parkside killers whatever it was and it's um it's just a it's just a tale of like a day in a gangbanger's life right no i asked that because i'm i'm just wondering if that's like you know after he left nwa no iced tea not ice cream iced tea before ice tea oh [ __ ] makes this movie shows up in the movie breaking yeah you're right you're right right and he's making records before us like dr dre was in it kind of early as a world-class record crew but um i was on the explicit [ __ ] when they were all doing that egyptian lover is you know being sure he's doing these hyper sex songs but they're not really explicit lyrics they're just explicit content but i'm in oakland and i'm like [ __ ] suck my dick like literally right and when they finally when they finally got me on the stage which i come at the same time as eric being rock kim and public enemy you know at 87 88 89 but i'm already like seasoned i've already been in front of hundreds of crowds i've done so many house parties with the most ruthless gangsters that like basically you better be good or you might get beat up type [ __ ] so so you go from 75 girls and then you got your own thing is uh is dangerous dangerous music is just a carbon copy of what 75 girls except it's your [ __ ] except we own it now right we don't we don't just work for the big brother and how long does the the dangerous thing go it gets us all the way to uh jive records and everybody who started dangerous music with me i think it was around we started it in like um 87. okay so 75 girls is like 85 86 87. somewhere in the middle of 87 we switch over and we go down and we start our own company we call it dangerous music and we put our freaky tails and we get the money now right and then now like 1989 now you're doing a little strange [ __ ] big deal everything's big arena tour with nwa yeah that [ __ ] an arena tour with nwa is a very big deal and you know i made a very big deal out of something recently which was to try to set a world record for doing the highest belly flop ever done into pure pee you know what happened when we collected over 190 gallons of prp it just turned out that that p was way too dark you know why because i was dehydrated man it turns out like two out of three americans experience dehydration on a regular basis some crazy statistics man and i'm one of them so i've been taking hydration super seriously and i finally found the ticket man it's called liquid iv and this stuff is absolutely delicious has less sugar than one apple and by pouring one of your little stick packets into 16 ounces of water and pounding it you get way more hydrated than if you had just drank that water alone these people are on top of the science man and honestly i just like it because it's so darn delicious but i'm also very concerned about staying hydrated so it's one stop shopping with liquid iv and speaking of shopping if you go to liquidive.com and use the promo code stevo they're giving 25 off the orders people from the wild ride podcast man i love this company i love this product and i love taking care of myself and being a healthy guy so join me okay get on over to liquidive.com use the promo code stevo to enjoy 25 off your order plus waiting to get a load of all the flavors passion fruit lemon lime like guava i'm telling you stay hydrated with me and let's talk about nwa arena tours so that was in arenas yeah that's the first time i went out it was the straight out of the compton tour first time straight out of secure the opening act for nwa actually i was the guy easy easy he called me he's the leader of enjoy he called me and said hey you want to go on tour like hell yeah and i was the act that went on right before nwa sure so it was a lot of opening nights oh got you okay we merged tours with ellen you're the the co-main event we merged tours with ll cool j for about two weeks so they were like co-headlining and that's not a match and that tour came along with like salt and pepper and daylight song and kid and play and and you know these guys everybody's got hot records but if i get you like somewhere deep down south or somewhere in some little town in in michigan somewhere you ain't [ __ ] with me and i'm a lot i was i was out there murdering groups like murdering like i dare you to come on stage after me because if you if even to this day if you come on after me you have to be of that cloth of the crowd loves me they love my music i'm good like like i know a lot of groups i can go on before and after me and we give them like the one two three and the crowd's having the best night of their life but if you dare like don't do what i do to a crowd and you come on after me it really shows what you can't do like you're going before me they love you i come on it turns up and they don't notice it but if you come out after me you better be one of those guys yeah so the nwa did pretty good after you oh of course i mean they had this they had all the [ __ ] you know crowd participation they had all the drama in the show they brought the stage set yeah they had the [ __ ] crazy explicit [ __ ] no they could go from like like they used to come on like uh ren and dre would do a little get everybody hyped and do a couple songs then ice cube would come out and do about 10 15 minutes by yourself and then they build up to this whole thing where you finally get to see easy and they all see all these [ __ ] songs it was it was amazing like fun after parties they did a pretty good rendition of what that show was like in the movie straight out of the car oh cool man it was a lot of people a lot of us who were watching the movie like you know people you know people who are tough people who are close to stories like that how it happened right it was tough to get right i was standing there that day i know it really happened so it was it was that type of situation and and i heard that when you were on tour with nwa in 1989 that they had like protests outside the arena like like that actually succeeded in shutting shows down yeah it was a lot of threats if you sing those explicit songs you're going to jail it was um i remember one show i wanted i feel like i don't even want to say where we were but we were somewhere it could be like northwest somewhere and it was so serious the show was sold out and it was so serious with the parents yeah the parents were protesting and it was one of those towns where you can't go against your parents you can't you just you can't and literally the tickets were sold out and the crowd was empty because on the day of the show the community protested the venue they they came out and picketed the venue and the kids couldn't cross the picket lines with their own show was actually cancelled no it wouldn't cancel we performed to an empty crowd to a light crowd you got all the money yeah i remember doing shows back then like [ __ ] like tulsa oklahoma and the crowd being given strict instructions that no one stands up no one uh like you can't like get all into the show like emotion when the song ends you could clap so it was very strange but you know for the most part we were out there walling now it was damn did you ever have like any sort of a legal case for like a free speech thing or did anything like that ever come out i've ran from the cops a couple times after a show i've um i've been arrested a couple times like columbus georgia arrested everybody they arrested here what was it um like two live crew the uh felony obscenity yeah yeah you just you know i got that charge i beat it too yeah they tell you at least it's a little fine or whatever you can fight whatever but they tell you before you go on they posted on the dressing room they tell you you cannot say these words you can't do this illegal in this city to say these words in front of a crowd yeah and as soon as you say they always let me do the whole show and then get arrested right on the side of the stage i did like there's it's it's american heroes who have caught that obscenity charge you got jim morrison two live crew lenny bruce prince prince too short ll cool j stevo yeah and dude i i respect the coming up on selling the cassette tapes man because like you know i came up way later but still i came up at a time where for me to make my noise and get my recognition like i had to record video cassettes you know i hit play on one vcr and record on the other and i'm duplicating my tapes i'm taking them to the post office and so yeah i was kind of in the mix mixtape game too man exactly i mean you gotta you have to adapt to your environment to become popular like you're really good at what you do because you do it a lot whole the other 10 000 hour theory to become an expert at something but you know you're really good but you know we know people who are better than us who never make it as far as we do sure they were missing that that drive of right the hustle the self the self marketing and stuff like that right i've been thinking about this a lot lately and what i've arrived at is that to become successful it's helpful to be intelligent it's not not mandatory it's helpful to have discipline but nothing is more important than enthusiasm enthusiasm is the driver of all things that [ __ ] matter you know when people ask me how do i do this man i want to get into this like think of the advice i say the same thing i don't give a [ __ ] what it is you want to do the only thing that matters is how bad you want to do it and it's like when you when you're [ __ ] you've got your mind made up and you're enthusiastic and you're just [ __ ] driven that's when [ __ ] happens too yeah i remember i was um i was truly in love with a woman who i thought was the most beautiful woman on the planet i was in love and one day she said with the most serious face this was probably i have like 20 plus albums this was probably when i was on like album number four or five and she's like well you know now that we're in love and we're together you know you can't sing those explicit songs anymore i was like we had to break up we had to break up because of my love for what i did and i i think back on that when you think back and go damn what if i'd stopped the too short style at album yeah dude what would my life have been if i turned the corner if you got [ __ ] whipped that's rule number one how to be a player right that's that's that's like you know some 99 problems [ __ ] dude yeah when you're in this business i mean things like that like you got to go just shy of [ __ ] whipping like you right when you notice the whipping you got to run that whip comes out dude i'm i'm you gotta run i'm dead i mean where's she it comes in like you can't hang around your friends anymore like things that are making you you that she got you for right she's right [ __ ] no more so she so when you're uh your easy e reaches out to you and brings you on tour and that's just [ __ ] that's massive man i mean right that's where like it's no longer an oakland thing yeah that's where i'm like selling 300 000 records and i go on tour and the tour ends and i'm at 800 000. and then you know shortly after that it goes to 1.3 million it's like selling 500 000 in chunks just because of that height of of what we did you know right your parents were both accountants right my parents were college graduate accountants and they wanted nothing to do with their child being a rapper and like you said it takes a certain amount of intelligence it helps yeah and it really does it's like you know your parents say [ __ ] like you're not wasting that brain like i'm not i just adjusted it to do this other new thing that you don't really know about yet you'll catch on but how much did their career like stick in your head about like money consciousness when the money started rolling in uh were you good at it like keeping track or were you just like i just had the smarts to never let anyone else be in charge of the business or the money so i was like you could be my partner and we can look at these things together but you can't be the one who looks at the numbers and brings it in and then tell me where my right nobody could ever be that and i saw a lot of my peers have that person in their life and that was their downfall but you were like looking at the reports and like you were good at that [ __ ] thing everything had to go through my name had to be on everything like you could work for me but i couldn't work for you and then you know there's times where you're switching camps and then once you switch the camp the old camp that they got some kind of problem they feel like all the money you're making now is their money so even if you're in charge and you're looking at all the numbers that you're still smart enough at a young age though to like at the end of those those partnerships and just like i'll buy everybody out yeah like how much you want to go away here you go and instead of the fight for life so when you buy them out you can still be friends you know so you want the snoop route instead of the dre route well drake is something that i don't think anybody would do he just walked away he walked away and then he didn't take anything with him he started over from scratch he literally legally was like what 25 percent owner of what he walked away from right and it was worth 400 million right and all that and how many how many of those hundreds of millions were just disappeared with everybody in jail or dead it was it was like it appears to be like some kind of bad money or something like it was it's crazy how much money just it's crazy how many people ran away from it yeah and they walked away ran away then just like just go like they just left yeah walked away but then master p bought snoops it's his exit when you talk to him he says that um that exit from death row and that time he had on no limit with master p saved his life absolutely he didn't have a way out he didn't really have the the business sense to get out showed him this is what you're worth this is what you can do and the master p brought him to atlanta right like and and he master p i i feel like he was doing a lot out of new orleans yeah i think louisiana okay yeah all right and i think snoop says he wouldn't got a house in new orleans or houston right right right i think it was louisiana somewhere down there and he just kind of got him out of his element and they bought out the contract and a lot of what snoop and the dog pound were doing when they became death row artists was what things they picked up on that journey down south through masterpiece it was it was um it was um no let me get it right they were down south before death row and then they did their death row thing and went back oh [ __ ] okay they went down south in houston and messing around you know before they signed the difference right that makes sense yeah let me get it right yeah i remember that's just so i mean it's still the same idea you know you're gonna you're gonna like end a partnership you buy them out and when you do that is it like you got lawyers like with contracts to make it like tight or is it just like hey man be cool here's some money it's a little bit of both okay you gotta like you gotta have some kind of man-to-man and then you gotta have some kind of legal yeah contract to dissolve it but yeah like uh and then i guess some people don't really give too much of a [ __ ] you know i just i just try to avoid the fallout that turns into a war right because you know it that's that's a waste of time man so it's a waste of time and then looking back i saw a lot of careers end through those little in inner circle fields feuds like you just picked a few people over at the assigned to a major label and one album doesn't go right and you hate three people over there and you go to war with and you're just [ __ ] in your career dude i i brought this up with be real how i watched this uh hulu documentary about tekashi69 and like that's a prime example of where like he and it wasn't even with the label or anything it was just like he's got five like like hits on the billboard 100 all at the same time he's got money coming in but he just decides to switch his loyalty from like one crew to another crew and they're like watching all this money come in he's like like that's asking for trouble and somehow he's still doing good you know he's he's actually probably killing it right now yeah it really is yeah i don't know man like i don't have an opinion either way you know like it's not my place to have an opinion but i was fascinated by that documentary man i thought i thought it was [ __ ] truly interesting yeah he um he played with fire yeah too he did yeah and then i think that he's still like probably playing with it but um back to the nwa tour like easy reaches out to did you ever lay down a track with easy rappers didn't make songs together back then different crews didn't you didn't mix the crew like your crew had your djs your crew had your rappers you had your beat makers and that's you guys did that for yourself and then and then run dmc changed the [ __ ] by doing the walk this way with aerosmith yeah but that was also a collab that was clearly different it was rick rubin right it was in rick rubin's mind and he always wanted to infuse rock and roll ahead of sounding rock with rap and he did it and it was big and he knew he was right what he was hearing but it's still what they were doing back then if you weren't under russell rush management or assigned to dev jam you weren't really getting right rick rubin russell simmons influence yeah and it's probably a pretty big deal too just the fact that easy e reaches out to you to bring you on tour like that's probably another thing that you know he just knew that he was looking at the numbers he knew how popular i was in the cities that we were going to and he's like you know we had to at one point before i dropped the alamo toured on his life was too short and they were touring on straight out of compton right before that he had boys in the hood the song out which was like yeah easy does it yeah like a super giant record of like summer like 87 88 like the songs that just don't go away i had freaky chills out those two records freaky tails and boys in the hood were like they're like the best two records you could listen to in your car if you had woofers and um i mean we just had that neck and neck thing we were doing where we did smaller shows together and he saw the reaction to the crowd and he just was like i guess he had the opportunity to headline a tour and he's like i'm gonna take this guy to show with me we didn't really know know each other we just knew each other from backstage and what's up and you know and what was your label at that time you said drive records i was on dangerous music but i just signed a job i owned dangerous music and i just signed a job so what's the motivation for that like if you own the label that you're on like what can drive drive can offer you distribution distribution distribution worldwide distribution we were limited to we were making a lot of money but we were limited to how fast we could manufacture the product oh wow and then get it to the streets and then right keep it in stores we we kept selling out we could never manufacture enough that's a good problem to have and when you do negotiate that deal with jive presumably because you've got your own label and you're in pretty good shape owning your own [ __ ] that gives you leverage to negotiate a better deal with jive to a certain extent yeah the labels are masters of you know just right pimping exactly because it's catchy how tough you get you still turn around five years later and go this [ __ ] shitty ass deal right especially because like you know we're talking about a time when it was impossible to really break out as a mainstream star with like with like global success without a record deal but it was impossible to really make money without owning your own music so it's like chicken like you know you don't think of it when you're 20 21 years old but like logically like what does it why does it take 50 pages of a artist contract and 50 pages of a publishing contract to make a deal with you why what does 50 [ __ ] pages do and i mean literally in these contracts literally you could have the best deal from page one to twelve and [ __ ] page 36 in one paragraph says everything we agreed to on one through twelve yeah ain't true that's right and they're like well you should've told them to take out this paragraph i [ __ ] i knew it just says where to wherefore whereas in one sentence right right yeah you need a lawyer to look over the contract to sign your own lawyer exactly so i don't know about that but uh but did you did you have uh you really you really learned that i needed i need a lawyer right now i need a lawyer to lawyer on my lawyer well yeah it's like if you sign a lawyer on they're like okay cool like just sign this contract with us you're like that's what i'm hiring you for right yeah what the [ __ ] when you signed a drive in uh like what like 89 or before it was 88 88 okay and at that point do you have a lawyer negotiating your deal with jive we had we had lawyers and everything but at the same time we were we were at a point where we couldn't really we didn't we didn't want to become that company that like we should have like if you think about what it could have been how it could have been a million dollars we could have been that that's a lot of [ __ ] work sure and you know i'm a music guy i didn't i didn't want to get tied up with the being a manufacturer in the adventures where was the jive deal it was a seven seven album deal yeah probably seven hours the first that's a lot that's a lot of albums probably six because we came in with one okay but and then we gave him the second one really fast so it wasn't really yeah right like i heard that you delivered all your albums before you even received the budget yeah just turn the albums in and you know we got through the contract pretty quick and then we renegotiated for like like a really decent look but and how many how many albums on the renegotiation deal probably another handful i ended up at jive with like 12 13 albums somewhere over there right but um how many did you think that dangerous uh before drive yeah we dangerous we just did the one out i'm born in the mac okay so three on seven we signed a lot of groups through jive and a couple other labels oh so you did the the whole like uh interscope and and shady it's kind of exactly you kind of like the sub label whatever they call it right so you gotta put the [ __ ] in context though because i'm doing good i'm regional very strong west coast right you know little tentacles out beyond the west coast but i'm making most of my money from san diego to seattle and just it's west coast and this it's the distribution people that i'm using out of the bay they don't they can't really give you a new yorker anywhere unless they partner with another distribution so we we know we knew our limitations and then we looking at jive records who approached us and at the time they had the hottest rapper kumo d they had they just signed a boogie down productions krs-1 just signed jazzy jeff and the fresh prince will smith and they hadn't got tribe called quest yet but they had um houdini houdini was next to run dmc you had me at cairo yeah but i'm saying they had houdini this is before krs yeah this houdini is huge they're the group that comes on the show with run dmc and everybody and they steal the show that's those guys and their own job they have [ __ ] billy ocean caribbean queen wow and it's like they're doing big things but they to me i'm looking at um kumodi and i'm looking at um uh houdini and i'm like well [ __ ] that's big right okay and and you're right like they're gonna give you all the the promotion all they're gonna they're gonna blow you up it's kind of like me being stand-up comedy like i do i do comedy and my uh my last comedy special i put it out on my own website did great with it but that's like independently putting it out now like what's what's going to be the effect on my future career if i put my next special out on netflix that's probably pretty similar so yeah man it's just um it was just a matter of distribution and then on the other end you probably the percentages in the deal don't allow you to get what you get when you're independent but then that's a trade-off for traveling around the world and getting paid a lot of money to perform in arenas and then you get i don't get this career i don't think i get the career that i have i've had if i stay independent right i get sort of like you know who stayed independent as far as cash 20 millionaires they ended up with um they ended up with universal cash money early on they got this one remember the 5 million deal and they got the five million and it was okay you know it was juvenile back that ass up and all that they they went big um i'm talking about more like a guy like sir mix a lot okay who did really good in like real estate and he you know he did really good with his independent label and he decided to be his own mogul up in seattle without becoming what the rest of us did which was you know trading your independent hustle for how about master p did he ever signed her a label i really feel like he went to priority which was like not a major major but he went to priority and hooked up a deal where he hooked up a deal where he could make a lot of money would major distribution but independent type of so it kind of split the numbers yeah exactly and that's what um a lot of people did that over at priority yeah i think um you know master p he really i think the smartest thing he did was to the body about a movie and he did the movie the same way he did the independent distribution of the music so these really cheesy ass movies made a lot of profit yeah so from there you couldn't really hold him back anymore and you know everybody makes a little chest move that gets you to the next level sure so so people didn't collab on tracks um together back in the day it really didn't unless you were claiming to be this you know uh affiliated crews or something it was i could hang around rappers all day we would never say let's do a song together it would never come up right okay that'd be like let's get in the hot tub together this is like weird um but uh but boy did you like end up doing tracks with a bunch of people man you made one with tupac the reason why i started doing a lot of collaborations is because in 1996 i turned 30 years old at that time there was a myth that 30 year old rappers were old as [ __ ] right and when i turned 30 i released my 10th album and 10 albums was like who's got 10 albums like that like out of rappers in 1996 nobody had 10 albums so when i announced that i was 30 years old i released my 10th album and i'm stepping away from the rap game i retired they were like oh [ __ ] and then they checked the track record and of those 10 albums it was like six platinum and like four gold some [ __ ] like that some some some crazy number and then the rumor went out too short i got ten platinum albums and it's like all good for pr but the numbers i always play on the numbers being the accountant's child yeah and i'm like okay the 30 the 10 nice round numbers you know i retired and when i retired i got all this free press it's the most free press i ever got that was positive and because you know negative press is free as [ __ ] yeah and that [ __ ] goes far but you know this best free press i ever got that was you know in in my favor and it was like two short retired two show retires ten platinum house blah blah blah and it just went everywhere i just held one little press conference and i threw a retirement party at the century club in uh beverly hills in central city whatever and it was just it just the work my phone went crazy and people were like well if you're gonna retire let me get a verse let's get on my album do this now so i did a song with jay-z yeah prior to the retirement i've worked with um you know some key figures uh i saw tupac yeah tupac came and got on one of my albums and i did some stuff with tupac with aunt banks who's my guy um i did this song with biggie yeah the world is filled so now i already got the jay-z thing happen happening i did a song with eric sermon uh me and him did a duet called buy you some and you know he was huge in new york so these records come out by you some i did a song with little kim call me on the booty call movie soundtrack i do the biggie song the world is filled and then i had the jay-z song real [ __ ] do real things whatever so this is my little retirement party that's here so i retire and then because it's biggie jay-z you know they everybody start constantly man let me get a two-shirt first two shirt first so i really went on like a from that point on i just did like a million features and you know it just turned into kevin bacon seven degrees of separation you know yeah like [ __ ] bacon that's i rap with everybody in it and you know the east coast west coast thing broke out and i was so wedged into loyal friendship with everybody that was supposed to be enemies in the war that when they they they came to me and they said pick a side and i was like it ain't my war like i'm i'm from oakland that's great man i do what do you see say about it like uh when you know i've brought up how eminem and snoop are going after each other he says hey man i'm switzerland diplomatic yeah yeah so do we have to cut this short i don't mean to be rude do we because we pushed your thing back and do you have a premiere at six oh yeah i hate to be that guy but i see a lot of people huddling around the car looking in so i'm not sure if those points got randolph i'm playing livestock i mean i hate to be the the web blanket we can yeah two guys just showed up yeah they're getting the mic from the surfing thing and yeah i think we're getting ready with you because there's another dude looking in to see what we got the light all right man what dude what what a pleasure man sorry to cut everybody off this has been going fantastic we can edit around we can edit around it i gotta tell you man i i like have had my struggles with like not shutting the [ __ ] up with not with like talking over people and uh and and i think that this one i think this one went really well dude yeah you know if i still [ __ ] up a little bit but not as much as usual if steve brings back his rap career would you ever sing a verse on one of his albums depends on the song okay yeah i'm making a song about uh it's called i love my girl but that's right i'm too short to alley right i'm already on that um i did a song with uh one of those guys the lonely island and lonely yeah oh my god [Music] i love my girl but except it's about that one week a month man she the [ __ ] the demon shows up man i can't [ __ ] with the demon i'm like i love my girl but i love my other girl too yeah oh hey man dude it's been a pleasure dude really thank you so much sorry i was late too man that that was a bad look and and thank you for being cool about it dope what can we shout out for you uh just make sure you let the world know about mount westmore mount westmore is too short e40 ice cube and snoop dogg we just started a group we just released wow we released a single called big sub woofer and the album's coming out and you and you think okay those guys got together and made an album no we actually got together and recorded 50 songs and we put an album together and it was really difficult to figure out which songs could make the first album that's a power group mount westmore yeah i guarantee not westmore too short ice cube e40 and snoop yeah look it up right now it's everywhere i'll say that in the intro to the podcast so that's the first piece of info they get all right man hey man yeah dude how sweet was that now you know i love you you guys who stick around at the very end and i want to tell you something um i've been resistant to playing back the podcasts and studying them even though i know that that's gonna make me better at it but now i've stumbled on a new uh practice yeah dude we set the youtube version of the podcast to premiere and then when it premieres i go in the live chat which forces me to review the podcast so i can study it and get better and it allows me to interact with you guys in real time because i'm seeing every single one of your comments and i'm responding to you guys so yeah dude it's a lot of fun man now it's a big deal it's the premiere of the wild ride podcast on the youtube version so i'm excited excited about that [ __ ] man [Laughter] thanks dudes [Music]

Channel: Steve-O's Wild Ride! - Podcast

Views: 77,067

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Id: -42tkA7hHIg

Length: 57min 46sec (3466 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 04 2021