DJ Premier had gotten into his favorite workshop, D&D studios' "B" room, and had been working the whole thing out since 5:30 in the afternoon. Wallace showed up a few hours later, entourage in tow.
"It's a smash," Wallace said when he first heard it. He offered Premier a suggestion about using another rhythm to counter the main, to give the track a jittery feel. Primo nodded and got back to work,
Wallace mostly sat in the back of the rooom, saying nothing, writing nothing down, just nodding his head and mumbling to himself, over and over again. Then he disappeared into the lounge.
Premier felt a tap on his shoulder. It was Dave Lotwin, one of the two D's who co-owned the studio. "Do you know what he's doing back there?" Lotwin asked, his eyebrows raised.
Lotwin leaned close and whispered in his ear, "Go check it out."
Primo got up and opened the door in the middle of Studio B. He walked down a short corridor. The vocal booth was just off to his right, and a little farther back was the Studio B private lounge, a little place that at one time was probably a storage room.
He opened the door. Wallace was there, leaning back on the couch. His pants were opene. Two attractive women had their heads between his legs.
"Yo, Preme," Wallace said. "You want some of this?"
"Nah, I'm good," Primo said as he closed the door and chuckled.
Wallace eventually came out and sat in the room. It was getting late and they still hadn't even tracked his vocals. He sat around listening to the track over and over again, saying nothing.
"We had been in the studio for the longest time doing nothing but listening to the track," Premier says. "I was getting worried. We still smoking and drinking and he ain't writing nothing."
Wallace looked up. "I'm ready."
No notepad, no notes, nothing. Premiere watched him step into the booth, the same booth where he had watched Nas a few months earlier do the exact same thing for "New York State of Mind." Just step up to the mike and do it.
Premier hit the button on the board. And Wallace closed his eyes, nodding his head for a few seconds, letting the rhythm play for a few beats. Then he started rapping: "Live from Bedford-Stuyvesant, the livest one / Representing BK to the fullest, Gats I pull it / Bastards duckin' when Big be buckin' / Chickenheads be cluckin' in the back room fuckin'..."
Premier sat there amazed. Even what had just happened in the back room of the studio had made its way into his lyrics. It was like he picked the rhyme out of thin air and assembled the pieces in real time. In less than an hour, the whole song was recorded, three perfect verses.
They didn't have a song title, but Wallace had an idea for the chorus, based on the last line of each verse, where Wallace says, "unbelievable." They could scratch in the vocal hook from R. Kelly's single "Your Body's Callin'."
"You sure that's gonna fit?" Premier asked.
"Yeah, it's gonna sound just right. Don't worry about it."
Much to his surprise, when he scratched it and looped it, the hook did fit perfectly. The bigger surprise came a few days after the final mix-down: Premier and his brother were driving back to Brooklyn late after a recording session when they heard another car booming the track. Premier caught up with the car at a stoplight, irate that the song had already been bootlegged.
"How'd you get a copy of that!?" he yelled, rolling down his window. "It's on the radio," said the driver, who rolled up his window and sped off.
Premier idled at the curb, shocked. The song wasn't even a week old, and it was already getting radio play. That had never happened to him before. Within a year, he'd also have his first gold single RIAA plaque.
― loggedout, Tuesday, 9 March 2004 17:45 (twenty-one years ago)
"We used to have this rule that was, 'We ain't serving to no pregnant ladies," Wallace said. "And there was a pregnant lady who used to come see us every day from Jersey that used to want, like, 90 capsules. I'm like, Fuck it. I mean, if I don't give it to her someone else will.
"It ain't like she gonna go home and be like, 'Well, Biggie didn't give it to me, I'm going to sleep.' She's gonna get high. So I'm going to handle my business. And niggas was like, 'Yo, you foul.'"
But Wallace remained unapologetic. "I didn't get in this game to feel sympathy for nobody. I got in this game because I can't do nothing else. So I can't pass up no muthafucka. That's bread and butter, y'knowwhatumsayin'? If I don't do that, I don't eat."
So he stayed out there, chasing the dollar and trying not to get caught. Hurbert Sams, a neighborhood friend, recalls visiting Wallace on Fulton late one evening when the police almost got his friend. They had gone into the bodega to get the hustler's staple-a turkey hero with cheese. "We weren't on the Ace., so we didn't see them roll up," Sam says-"them" being the cops, of course. "Chris is a well-known figure. So when they hit the block, they know they're looking for the big guy. Usually he stashed his stuff. He didn't have it on him. And they'd talk to him like, 'You know you got it.'"
This time was different. "They walked in the store right behind us, and we at the counter," Sams recalls. "He had a few jacks in his hand. As soon as they came in, he threw them in his mouth. They might have seen him. But it was kinda smooth. He was on point. You had to be."
The police officers patted both young men down.
"Open your mouth," one of the cops said to Wallace.
"What?" Wallace said, eyes wide.
That's when the cops grabbed him-and Wallace switched to plan B. "He just fell down and started screaming," Sams remembers. "So now they trying to wrestle with him." People in the store began crowding around to see the cause of the commotion, and the cops got distracted.
"They're looking up and away-one's got his knee in Big's back," Sams says. "So he looks up at me, and he's whispering, 'Take the jacks! Take the jack!' Like he wants me to bend down and take them out of his mouth. But the cops is standing right there."
The look on Sams's face told Wallace that it wouldn't work. "So he just keeps screaming," Sams says. "Yo, he could have won an Oscar. He was acting like they were killing him. And then he started crying."
At this point, the cops stood him up. "Get out of here, man," they said. Frustrated, they turned and left.
"After they started getting in the car, he just turned around and started screamin'!" Sams says, laughing almost as loud as Wallace did. "When he started laughing at 'em, I was like, Yo, I wouldn't have did that. 'Cause I wouldn't have wanted them to come back with a hard-on for me. But that was his attitude, man. He felt like he was almost untouchable. Almost."
― William Wiggins, Tuesday, 9 March 2004 19:01 (twenty-one years ago)