from the archives
Puff Daddy: The New King of Hip-Hop
In his first Rolling Stone cover story from 1997, Sean"Puff Daddy" Combs mourns Biggie Smalls, and explains how grief helped him make 'No Way Out'
It was any hour of his day during those terrible days. Sean “Puffy” Combs, one of the most successful men in popular music of the last few years, sat in a dark hotel room, fingering the gold Jesus medallion he wore, thinking about the night his best friend, Biggie Smalls (a.k.a The Notorious B.I.G.), was shot to death on the streets of Los-Angeles. Several months earlier, in a horribly similar event, Biggie’s rival Tupac Shakur had been gunned down on another night street in America’s West. Some people thought maybe Combs or Smalls had something to do with that incident, but Combs knew better. In fact, he grew sick at the memory. Still, somebody had killed Tupac and somebody had killed Biggie, and with that last shooting, Puffy felt something go out of his will and his purpose.
“I want out of this,” Combs told himself and a few others. “I never planned on this.”
And then a friend told Puffy he couldn’t leave Biggie alone like that. It wouldn’t be right. So there it was: Puffy had to stay in. There was no way out from where his dreams had brought him.
Some three months later, Puffy Combs stands in the darkened sound booth at Daddy’s House, the recording studio that he owns in midtown Manhattan. This is where, in the last few years, Combs has recorded and produced several of the singers and rappers — including Faith Evans, Craig Mack and the Notorious B.I.G. — who helped establish Bad Boy Entertainment as one of the most successful and controversial new labels of the decade. Since its inception only four years ago, the company has sold nearly $100 million worth of records.
In addition to the acts he has recorded at Daddy’s House, Combs has produced a slew of successful records for artists including New Edition, Method Man, Babyface and Mariah Carey. In the last six months alone, Combs has had three songs in Billboard’s Hot 100 Singles go to No. 1, which have sold an astonishing 5 million copies combined.
The first was “Can’t Nobody Hold Me Down,” Combs’ collaboration with rapper Mase. Then came the Notorious B.I.G.’s “Hypnotize,” a song Biggie and Puffy co-wrote. Most recently, Combs and Faith Evans topped the charts with a tribute to B.I.G. (based, ironically, on a loop taken from the Police’s 1983 hit “Every Breath You Take”) called “I’ll Be Missing You.”
Today, Combs is working on tracks for his own debut album as a rap artist, No Way Out, which is expected to enter the charts at No. 1 upon its release on July 22. The project has been in the works for many months now, but it was put on hold in the wake of the Notorious B.I.G.’s murder in March. As a result, the meanings and gambles surrounding No Way Out (which Combs will release under his stage name, Puff Daddy) have changed dramatically. For reasons he never anticipated, Combs is now his label’s highest-profile hip-hop artist, and he realizes that he cannot finish this album until he comments on some of the tragedy that has recently transfigured both his life and the hip-hop community at large.
When I first meet Combs, he is working on “Pain,” a rap about some of the losses that he has felt in his 26 years, including the murder of Biggie Smalls. The track has a delicate musical undertow — a repeating piano motif, almost like a Chopin phrase — but the words that Combs intones convey horror, injury and a sad determination:
“I can still hear the shots that left my man B.I.G. layin’/ On my knees cryin’ and prayin’/ Then I said, ‘God, why?’/ Gotta know how hard we try/ Don’t let him die/ Please don’t let my n-gga be dead… Gone now, hard to move on now/ Fuck making songs now/ I wish I could die/I could fly/ If they don’t give a fuck/ Fuck it, why should I?”
In many ways, the track that Combs works on next — “Is This the End” — proves even more powerful. At the end of “Pain,” Combs decides to carry on making music in B.I.G.’s memory and as his heir. In “Is This the End,” Combs faces squarely the knowledge of what might accompany such a succession: namely, mortal risk. It is not uncommon, of course, for some young rap artists to imagine their own violent ends; both Shakur and Smalls did so in several of their recordings. Few, though, have contemplated the event with a sense of pain and fear as palpable as Combs’, “Folks think I’ma gonna die,” he raps in a fast cadence at one point in the song. “I be concealed up in my room, knowing that it could happen.”
In line after line, Combs is asking terrible questions that he can’t afford not to ask: Why must I fear for my life? Must I die because of the success of my music or because of the words in my songs? Why is this stranger, or this fate, bearing down on my back, determined to kill me?
The music on “The End” is brisk and elastic sounding, and Combs’ rap is amazingly fluid. But the song’s heart is filled with a real sense of dread, and it is not hard to imagine its source. As Puff Daddy, Sean “Puffy” Combs may be about to become the most famous rap artist in America — and, as he knows better than most, that accomplishment is hardly risk-free.
Later, in the early evening, Combs leaves Daddy’s House for Queens, NY, where he will make a guest appearance at a video session for Biggie Smalls’ single “Mo’ Money Mo’ Problems.” I ride along with him in his maxivan. Ordinarily, this ride would be a kick. The van has five video monitors (four located above the back seats, one angled beneath the dashboard), all playing an advance copy of the then-newly released film Con Air. But the car also holds three imposing-looking bodyguards; the van ahead of us and the one following us also carry guards (though if anybody around Combs is armed, I never see a sign of it). When we arrive at the Queens warehouse where the video session is taking place, several other security personnel are already holding back traffic for Combs to leave his van. Other guards track him as he moves first into a trailer and then into the warehouse.
A half-hour later, Combs sits in a barber’s chair in his dressing room as a hairdresser works on his hair and runs a razor around the contours of his goatee. Puffy is ready to begin our first taped conversation. I ask him if he usually travels under such tight security.
“No,” he says. “It’s for this video shoot. I don’t really believe in all that stuff. My feeling is like, if somebody want to do something to you, they going to be able to do it to you. There’s evil all over the world. When we was in L.A., we had eight security guards with us that night. Even that wasn’t enough.”
“But do you ever feel in danger?” I ask.
Combs leans forward and shows me a tattoo on the inner side of his lower right arm. It is the 23rd Psalm: “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for thou art with me.”
“I believe in God,” he says. “He’s my best friend. If I truly believe and truly have faith, why would I be afraid to meet God? I mean, what would I fear? If something happens to me, he’s just calling me to leave,” Combs studies the text on his arm for a moment and then continues: “But, still, I haven’t got over trying to understand how people could be so cold, so fucked up. Biggie didn’t do nothing to nobody. I can officially say, B.I.G. didn’t do nothing to nobody. There are some people that, you know, reap what they sow or get what they deserve. He didn’t do nothing to nobody. Yeah, he had a temper. He got into fights. But nothing he should be killed for. It’s crazy to me still. Nobody can tell me that just ’cause you a rapper, at the end of the day you get killed because you the flyest rapper? Motherfuckers are so jealous just ’cause you the best?”
Puffy signals away the hairdresser, then continues his questions. “How did all this become a reality?” he asks. “When I came into this, I never thought about any of this shit even being a possibility. How is my reality today a possibility? When you’re a young man, just thinking about making records, making people dance? I can’t fathom it. All I know is, some people were really playing with fire.”
He turns and looks at me, and then asks: “How could this be my reality?” It’s like he really wants somebody to tell him the answer to his question.
The next day, I find myself walking through the lower part of New York’s Central Park with Puffy Combs. Originally, we were to ride out to his home in Long Island, N.Y., but he decides the weather is too nice for such a long trek. As we make our way through the park, several people recognize Puffy and call hello to him. He returns the greetings. He has no security of any sort with him today. He clearly feels safe and at home on these streets.
Puffy escorts us to a kiosk, where we sit on a bench and begin the day’s interview. He tells me that he grew up only a few miles from here, in one of the better-off parts of Harlem. Sean Combs was born in 1970, the first child of Janice and Melvin Combs. “My mom was modeling,” he says. “She was always like the fly girl of the neighborhood, and my pops was the fly guy of the neighborhood. That’s what attracted them. That’s how they got together.”
When Puffy was three, just after his mother had another child, Melvin died. For years, the young Sean heard that his father had been killed in a car wreck. “I didn’t know how my father really died until I was like around 14,” he says. “But as I got older, I knew about street life, so I knew who was hustlers. I would hear that my father died in a car accident, but also at the same time, I would constantly hear how good everybody was living back in those days — furs, and we was the only people in Harlem to have a Mercedes-Benz, and all that. And I also started hearing other stuff from other people. When I started putting two and two together, I was like, ‘Come on, man, my pops was hustling or something?’ And then I went to the library and researched and found out that he was the biggest of his time when he was here. There was big stories in the paper when he died. He was shot. He was on Central Park West, uptown, and he was shot in his head.
“It was just a transition,” Combs says. “He was the ruler. It was time for a new ruler. That’s the life that he led. All the stories I heard about him, he was a good man and all that, he was just hustling. He was running numbers or selling some drugs or whatever. He wasn’t known as a gangsta.”
I ask Combs if he remembers his father at all.
“Yeah a little bit,” he says. “I remember, like, my birthday party when I was three years old, faded images of him from that. I remember him throwing me up and down in the air.”
Although Combs’ mother also owned a home in Mount Vernon, N.Y., she wanted the family to remain in Harlem for a time. “She didn’t want to raise me in the suburbs,” he says. “She wanted me to get the strength from Harlem, the strength from growing up in the city.”
It turned out to be a great time to be a young, savvy kid on the streets of New York. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the New York area was burgeoning with a new musical style. This style began on the streets of the Bronx, with disc jockeys mixing music from two or more turntables, making new aural constructions and walloping rhythms from the results, and chanting over it all. Soon this music was spreading all over New York and began to appear on such records as the Sugar Hill Gang’s 1979 single “Rapper’s Delight” and later works like Grandmaster Flash’s 1982 “The Message.”
Rap (which is what the style soon would be called) and hip-hop (the backing music and surrounding culture) turned out to be be one of the most creative adventures in black urban culture of the past two decades and also one of the most important — and controversial — movements in American popular culture.
Combs still recalls the style’s rise with an early fan’s delight. “I grew up in the prime-time of hip-hop,” he says, “when it was just getting off the ground. From RUN-DMC to KRS-One to the Beastie Boys to LL Cool J. I was there. I seen that. I would be 12 years-old, and sometimes I’d be out until 3, 4 in the morning, seeing the music. I had to sneak out to do it, but I was doing it.”
A young man on a bicycle pedals by. “Hey, Puff!” he calls. Puff waves back and continues: “Harlem, the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens — New York is the Mecca of hip-hop. It’s where it started. But it was mostly underground. It was word-of-mouth. If Run-DMC was going to be at the Roxy, it was like some fliers were printed up, everybody knew it. You just knew. It was like you had to be a hip-hop fan. You had to go get your tapes from the shows and buy the records, and shit like that. That’s all you talked about every day was hip hop.
“See, there was gangs in New York during the time,” he adds. “Our gang problem wasn’t a big as L.A., but we had some gangs. And hip-hop, break dancing, all that was a way for the gangs to battle without violence. There wasn’t that violence in the early stages of hip-hop. It was a bunch of fun, people hanging out in the park, plugging their system in the light post and having a block party right there. Killing somebody was unheard of back then. Kids didn’t even have that on their mind. Punching somebody in the eye, maybe. But killing somebody? No.”
When he was 12, Combs’ family relocated to its Mount Vernon home. He attended an all-boys school, Mount St. Michael’s Academy, where he did well in his studies and where, it is rumored, as a football player he earned the nickname Puffy, for his habit of puffing out his chest to make his skinny frame look a little more daunting. In the late 1980s, Combs moved on to Howard University, where he excelled at ambition: He sold tickets to rap and dance parties that he hosted, and he also sold term papers. “I was serious about my studies in the beginning,” he says, “but my mind was moving too fast for it. My dreams were bigger. I was like, ‘Four years? That’s holding me back. I can’t wait that. I got to get my hustle on now.'”
In 1990, Combs talked Andre Harrell, the head of Uptown Records, into hiring him as an intern. “Andre became like my big brother,” Combs says. “He bought a mansion, gave me a room… Not a mansion, a big house. It was a mansion to me, though, and he had gave me a room in the house.” Within a year or so, Combs rose to Uptown’s vice presidency. But his career almost capsized when a riot occurred at a 1991 celebrity basketball event that he promoted in New York — nine people were killed in a stampede. Combs found himself on the ground, trying to revive dead bodies. In the months ahead, he suffered bouts of severe depression. It was only his faith in God, he says, that allowed him to move past that tragedy.
Eventually, Combs returned to Uptown — in good form. He had achieved multiplatinum hits with Mary J. Blige and Jodeci, and he was quickly developing a wide-ranging style as a producer who mixed a taste for hard-edged, radical rhythms with strong melodies and familiar pop samples. In the process, he helped formulate a highly successful sound that became known as hip-hop soul.
But Combs’ ambitions were also getting the better of him. “I had to hold big dreams for myself,” he says, “and I had to go in knowing I’m going to be the greatest. I still have to say that to myself, and I have to believe that at the end of the day: I’m going to be the greatest. At first I was shy. Then one day I realized that shy shit ain’t going to get me nowhere in this life right here, in this world.” So he made himself gain some confidence. “Sometimes people say I’m cocky and arrogant, but that comes with it.”
One of those people who thought he had grown too cocky was Andre Harrell, who fired Combs in 1993. “At first, Andre was just there for me with everything,” says Combs. “He put his faith in me, and we had a great time. What started to happen is, I started to have other dreams. At the same time, Uptown was growing and getting bigger, and Andre was having to deal with corporate concerns. I couldn’t understand that from the creative side, so I started getting on his nerves and bugging out and being real rebellious. It became a situation where it was two kings in one castle, and it was his castle, so I found myself in the moat.
“I was scared to death. Even though I had every label calling me, I was scared to death, because that’s like getting a divorce, like when you’re used to being with that person every day. It’s just so crazy.”
Harrell went on to become president of Motown Records, and the two men have remained friends; in fact, Harrell became godfather to Combs’ son, Justin, who was born in 1993. Based on his success at Uptown, in ’93 Combs signed a $15 million distribution deal with Arista Records for his Bad Boy Entertainment label and has since bolstered the deal even more. (According to the Los Angeles Times, his lush new pact includes an estimated $5- million credit line for Bad Boy, a $6 million cash advance and a $700,000 annual salary for Combs, the $2 million Daddy’s House studio and the right to buy Bad Boy outright after the turn of the century.) His current fortune notwithstanding, Combs says moving beyond his life at Uptown was difficult at first.
“I was an entrepreneur and a businessman,” he says, “but at the same sense, I was young, and I was just speeding. I wasn’t looking that far in the future. I knew I wanted to get to a point of Berry Gordy and Quincy Jones, but I wasn’t thinking about how they got at that point. I was thinking about what did they do when they was younger. But then, when I saw the contracts and I made those other moves, that’s what made me start looking at the big picture. It was like I was forced to handle a situation, and then I had to grow up real quick. And as I got bigger, I thought, ‘Yeah, I got the power to bring a lot of us together through music.’ And that’s one of those things I have to credit Andre for: He taught me that my music could be a movement, it could be a lifestyle.”
Abruptly, Puffy is on his feet, moving around the kiosk. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m a hyperactive person, so when I sit down, it’s weird. We may have to walk soon, because my body doesn’t understand sitting.”
In a matter of minutes we are back in Combs’ limousine, heading downtown. He gets on his cellular and discovers meetings he must attend and work he has to do. I decide to put the conversation on hold for a day or so. There is no way we can rush through what I have to ask him next.
It is an early evening, two days later. Combs is seated behind a desk at Daddy’s House, ready to resume the story where we left off. It was 1993. Combs was firing up Bad Boy Entertainment and had a handful of artists he was eager to record. In particular, there was a young rapper named Christopher Wallace for whom Combs had high hopes. Wallace was a street hustler from Brooklyn. He had dealt crack, he had seen hard realities go down on the streets, and he possessed a remarkable gift for constructing rhymes and narratives that described the world he lived in. Wallace was also a mountainlike man — over 6 feet tall and about 300 pounds. As a result, he went by the rap handle Biggie Smalls and recorded as the Notorious B.I.G.
Combs first heard Smalls on a demo tape given him by a friend at The Source magazine and soon decided that Smalls would become his first major artist. “He had so much melody in his voice,” Combs says. “It was like he was rapping, but it was so catchy, it was almost like he was singing. And he was such a clever poet, the way he put his words together, the way he saw things. He saw things so vivid. If you sat and listened to a Biggie Smalls record in the dark, you see a whole movie in front of you. And the amazing thing is, Biggie never wrote down his lyrics. He’d sit and compose them in his head. Beyond that, he had a mysterious side to him. If you was in a room with him, you couldn’t stop staring at him. He was just different — the way he looked, the way he moved, the way he walked, the way he talked — the way he rapped.”
Biggie Smalls came along at a propitious time for Combs and the Bad Boy label — and at a tricky time for hip-hop. In the late 1980s, under the sway of such Los Angeles-based artists as N.W.A and Ice-T, hip-hop’s thematic and geographic focus shifted. Several of the new rappers were telling tougher tales in their music — stories about drug dealing, sexual rapacity, gang rivalry, street violence and hatred of the police. In contrast to the early New York hip-hop scene, it appeared that some of the new West Coast rappers weren’t so much transcending their backgrounds but rather making them both a defining core and context of their art.
This development, which soon would become known as gangsta rap, effectively transformed the public face of hip-hop, making it seem more frightening to some and more appealing to others — and also making it a bit riskier for some of the artists involved, because to some it meant that rapping tough also meant living tough. Many social critics found this new style loathsome and terrifying, and pressure came from many quarters – including police associations and government officials – to circumscribe the music’s reach and influence. Consequently, some major labels distanced themselves from rap’s hardcore element. At the same time, the music enjoyed enormous commercial success. Hardcore rap was telling stories and making sounds that many people wanted or needed to hear, and no simple moralist outrage was about to temper it.
Brooklyn’s Biggie Smalls tapped into some of the same hard-boiled sensibility as the West Coast rappers had, but he did so within the context of his own East Coast experience. The tales he told on his 1994 debut album, Ready to Die, were sometimes grotesque, sometimes hilarious, but what set them apart from much of the rest of hard rap was Smalls’ startling sense of mortality and heartbreak. At the album’s end, the narrator takes stock of what his life has become, what a pain-filled and violent waste it is, and during a phone conversation with a friend, shoots himself. Smalls was as willing as the next rapper to serve up hard boasts and bloody yarns, but he also knew that the acts and conditions he was describing amounted to a horror that could not be transcended and that the more death and ruin that one witnessed or left behind, the more one lost.
Combs recognized that Smalls was a person who would likely excel at either street crime or rap artistry — and so Combs arranged to provide the young artist with a quick advance, as a means of escaping his drug-dealing life. “I want to try to uplift as many people as I can out of that life,” he says. “And with B.I.G., I wanted to do it in a way so that he doesn’t have to go back — and even more than that, he doesn’t want to go back — and understands that there’s a lot of things that are wrong out there. That’s why it was so important [for me] to show him how to become a businessman. This was a big dream for him. He wanted to get out of the street life, and rapping was his way out. In the end, he had become an enterprise — a kid from the streets who didn’t even have his diploma. It felt good to see him make something out of himself.”
Around the time of B.I.G.’s first album, Combs and Smalls became friendly with a couple of other pivotal figures in the hardcore hip-hop world: Marion “Suge” Knight, one of the founders of the leading West Coast rap label, Death Row, and Tupac Shakur, a gifted rapper who would eventually become Death Row’s biggest star. “When we were in our beginning stages,” says Combs, “Death Row was established. Bad Boy was kind of modeled after Death Row because Death Row had became a movement. We wanted to model ourselves behind the record companies that were movements, like Motown, Def Jam, Death Row. These were record companies that were the sound of the culture, and we wanted to become another sound of the culture.
“Whenever Suge would come in town,” Combs continues, “he would come by the office. Whenever I was in town, he would come pick me up, and we’d hang out. There was maybe two times I went over to Snoop’s house. It was all cool. No way in the world I could foresee any problems. And Tupac… he was mostly friends with Biggie. That’s really how I got to know him. Biggie loved him to death, and Tupac helped Biggie out when we were just getting off the ground. He would let us come open his shows.”
Like Smalls, Tupac Shakur was smart and complex, and he also had seen some of the life that he was describing on record. He had been involved in shooting incidents (one with the police and one that left a young boy dead), was prone to getting into heated arguments and was given to other bad choices as well. For instance, in November 1994, Shakur and a cohort were tried for sexually molesting a 19-year-old woman in New York. A little after midnight on the jury’s first day of deliberation, Shakur and some friends headed out for a recording session at Times Square’s Quad Studios, to do a track with a one-time Uptown Records artist. In the lobby of the building, Shakur and the group were followed by some young men with guns and ordered to lie on the floor and surrender their valuables. Shakur railed at the men and was shot five times and robbed of $40,000 worth of jewelry. Shakur’s friends dragged him into an elevator and ended up in a room upstairs, where they found Biggie Smalls, Puffy Combs and Andre Harrell. It became a crucial moment in the lives of most of the men who were assembled in that room.
“Tupac was shot,” says Combs. “I mean, that’s Tupac! I immediately went to him, sat him down, calmed him, had people call the ambulance. It’s like if you were shot: I’m over you, holding you. The phone is here. We calling the ambulance, calling your mom. That’s what happened. That was the last time I saw Tupac. But not Biggie. He saw him the next day.”
Ironically, it was the next day that Shakur was found guilty on the sexual-abuse charge and sentenced to prison.
Following the shooting and robbery of Shakur, the relationship between these East and West Coast rap principals grew strained. A short time after his imprisonment, Shakur told Vibe magazine that he suspected that Smalls and Combs had been involved in his shooting. Then, at August 1995’s The Source music-awards ceremony in New York, Knight publicly insulted Bad Boy Entertainment and Combs. The following month, Knight’s close friend Jake Robles was shot and killed at a party in Atlanta, and Knight blamed Combs and his associates. (Combs’ reply: “That’s insane. Why would I have anybody killed? I have too much to lose. I fear God too much.”) There were other incidents as well, including one that resulted in Knight being accused of the beating and torture of a man who said that Knight wanted to learn the address of Combs’ mother.
Looking back at this array of horrible and bizarre events, Combs still seems shocked. “It was just like night and day from where it had been before,” he says. “And then Tupac’s Vibe interview… I was like, ‘Where the fuck is this coming from? I’m not going to rob nobody!’ The only reason why I was at the studio was because Biggie had a session there, just like Tupac. So I wrote Tupac in jail. I said, ‘I want to come see you. I don’t know if what the writer was saying in Vibe was true, that you really felt any of this. But whatever the situation is, I know me and Biggie want to just get it clear with you. We got nothing but love for you.’ He wrote back and said, ‘Well, Puff, everything’s cool. It ain’t no problem like that. I don’t really want us to have no meeting about it like that.’ So we take it like he didn’t want to blow it out of proportion. We were just waiting around until he got out of jail, thinking everything would be all right.” Combs and his crew were dead wrong. “Through different agitations or whatever the case may be,” he says, “things just got worse. People started making records, and things got more on a rivalry note.”
In October 1995, Shakur was released from prison and soon put out a remarkable two-CD set, All Eyez on Me. But perhaps the most notable song of his life was a single, “Hit ‘Em Up.” It was a venomous and scathing recording in which Shakur maligned Bad Boy, accused Combs and Smalls with the assault, called Biggie a “fat motherfucker,” claimed that he’d had sex with Smalls’ estranged wife, Faith Evans, and seemed to imply various threats. There is probably no more hate-filled song in popular music’s history. It is impossible to hear it and not feel dismayed or terrified.
The sun is now starting to set in Manhattan. Combs glances out the window for a long moment, then turns back to me. “Tupac,” he says. “Tupac was the biggest star hip-hop has ever seen. Hands down. His charisma, his personality, his whole shit. He was loved. But when it came to a situation when you in a war with somebody and you don’t want to fight the war? Then he was the worst. I was like, ‘Why do I got to be in a war with this motherfucker right here? This motherfucker is crazy,’ There was too many followers to be in a war with him, and we had no time to be in a war. We came in this to make music. Then you find yourself in the middle of a battlefield, and you ain’t got no helmet, no gun, and you don’t even want to be there. You think, ‘Shit, I hope when the smoke clears I’m still ahead.’ It was unfair. We ain’t doing shit, and we getting accused of all this shit. We got motherfuckers making records about us, dissing us.”
On Sept. 7, 1996, following a brawl that took place after the Mike Tyson-Bruce Seldon fight, Tupac Shakur was shot four times on the streets of Las Vegas while seated in a BMW 750 driven by Suge Knight. Shakur died six days later, sending waves of grief and fear through the hip-hop world. “We was shocked at first,” says Combs. “And we was hurt. It was like, ‘Damn, why’d that have to happen?’ Then we became scared, because we know how the media is. The news reports in the early couple of days, all in L.A. and Las Vegas, had our pictures. We were the ones they were pointing their fingers to. Kept on talking about it. I didn’t have nothing to do with Tupac getting killed.
“Tupac, he had his problems,” Combs continues. “But he was a great rapper, and he was young. Believe me, if he would have made it to age 35, he wouldn’t have been acting the way he was acting at the age twenty-something. He had so much more living to do. I don’t think nobody deserve that. We prayed for his soul to be rested the right way.”
Shakur’s death was just the beginning of a long, difficult season for the hardcore-rap community. In the days following his murder, more than a dozen other young men were shot or killed on the streets of Los Angeles and in other communities, in actions that police described as related to Shakur’s killing and to the bloody rivalry between West Coast Bloods and Crips. In October 1996, acting on information supplied by Compton, Calif., police officers who asserted that Death Row and perhaps Bad Boy had affiliations with known gang members (Death Row denies the charge, as does Combs on Bad Boy’s behalf), the LAPD arrested 23 of the city’s gang members, putting an end to the short-lived war. (Federal officials also announced an investigation into Death Row’s and Bad Boy’s practices, to see whether either label had been associated with street gangs in criminal activities — a charge both labels deny.) Then, earlier this year, Suge Knight was ordered to prison by a Los Angeles judge, in part as a result of his role during the altercation after the Tyson fight on the night of Shakur’s shooting. Finally, Combs decided it was time for both the East Coast and West Coast hardcore-rap factions to end any signs of public enmity. He and Snoop Doggy Dogg appeared on a TV program and shook hands in a gesture of friendship and truce.
Meantime, Combs and Smalls were putting the final touches on the Notorious B.I.G.’s long-awaited second album, Life After Death. Like Shakur’s highly successful All Eyez on Me, B.I.G.’s album aimed to be fierce and beguiling in the same motion, to tell raw, indelible tales of malice, love, sex and hope — and to sell millions. But it was also to be a record that would not prolong the grief or antagonism of the perceived East-West contention. “Biggie didn’t want to make no record that was going to make matters worse,” says Combs. “He wanted to make shit better, man. How tough is that? You got somebody saying they fucked your wife, and you don’t say nothing.
“Yeah, Big was a big, tough guy,” Combs adds mockingly. “He was tough, though, in order to handle that shit. That’s some real tough shit. But tough in the right way. Ain’t that stupid tough shit. Disrespected, called a fat motherfucker on all those records — he handled it like a man. He turned the other cheek and just made the records he wanted to make. Didn’t let it get to him. We were so ready for that record.”
Both Puffy Combs and Biggie Smalls knew it: Life After Death was going to be the biggest event of their young lives.
In March of this year, Combs and B.I.G. were in Los Angeles. Biggie was having a high time hanging out, enjoying the weather and presenting a Soul Train Award to Toni Braxton on nationwide television. The following night, Vibe, Qwest Records and Tanqueray were hosting a party at the Peterson Automotive Museum in L.A.’s mid-Wilshire District.
I ask Combs how security-minded he had been about the L.A. appearances. “Oh,” he says,”there was definitely extra security for L.A. That was based on that whole vibe that had been in the media.”
I start to ask him whether there had been any threats prior to the events, but he shakes his head and looks down at his hands folded in his lap. “I’ll tell you about the whole night,” he says softly.
“Biggie was supposed to go to the studio that day. He didn’t want to go to the studio. He was like, ‘I finished my album. I just want to celebrate with you. I just want to have a good time. Let’s go to this Vibe joint. I want to go there. Hopefully I can meet some people, let them know I want to do some acting.’ That made me proud. He was thinking like a businessman. He wanted to pursue his acting stuff. So, we at the party. He had a broken leg; he couldn’t walk or dance, so we sitting down. I’m real hyper, so I usually get up and walk around the party. He’s like, ‘Yo, Puff, tonight could you just sit here with me all night?’ And I thought, ‘Cool. We just gonna sit here and kick it.’ I sat there. We kicked it. We had a good time. We was drinking and listening to records, sitting at the table the whole night. And he was just being nice. He was nice naturally, but he was being extra nice. He was… chipper. He’s proud of himself, talking about how stuff’s going to be when the album comes out, and how it’s going to be better. He’s like, ‘I’m gonna make them love me.’ He was talking about the West Coast. He was like, ‘I can’t wait till they hear that track “Going Back to Cali,” so they know I ain’t got nothing but love for them.’
“So the party’s over, and he’s still talking, saying, ‘Yo, Puff. It’s gonna be so big this time. I just can’t wait. We gonna really do it.’ And I’m like, ‘All right, we need to get up out of here.’ So we going out to the parking lot, and my car’s in front of his car. I make a right — he’s right behind us. But not right right behind us. We get to a light, and we waiting there for him. And then the car pulls up. Then we cross the light. As we crossing the light, I hear shots ring out. I ducked down. I’m thinking somebody’s shooting, and I’ve been at parties before where people do that, shoot into the air. And then somebody in my car looked back, said Biggie’s car had been hit. I jump out the car while the car’s moving. I know if his car was hit, he’s still in the car — because he can’t walk. So I run toward the car. And it’s just him and his best friend. Everybody else had jumped out the car and ran. His best friend, Damien, is there. And I’m there, and Biggie’s slouched over the seat. And I’m trying to push him, ’cause he’s real big, and he’s caught underneath the steering wheel.
“So me and Damien are trying to push him off. I’m yelling, ‘Where’s the hospital?’ They say it’s a couple blocks away. We kind of push him off, and we driving then. I’m talking to him, touching him. I’m not feeling nothing. And due to the fact that I’ve seen people actually die, seen that happen, I could kind of feel like he was dead. It’s like a feeling that you get that I can’t really describe to you. It’s not a gift that I’m proud of having. I was like, ‘Damn, I think he’s dead.’ I’m saying it inside myself. So we get to the hospital, running lights, everything, and we carry him inside. And we there for maybe like half an hour. Then doctors come and tell us the news. I was on my knees praying the whole time. I was just stuck. I couldn’t understand. It was moving so fast. I just could not believe it was real. It gets worse, though. I had Damien call Biggie’s mother. Then in the middle of telling her, Damien breaks down. So I had to tell her. I had to calm her down, try to get somebody over to the house.
“That’s when it was starting to hit me, but I’m still in shock. Everything’s over. They take me back to the hotel. I just wanted to go to sleep so bad. I just want to wake up and it’d be a dream. And then I woke up, and everybody was panicking, telling me to get out of L.A. And I just could not move. I was stuck. I just did not want to leave him. I still didn’t really cry yet, ’cause I didn’t really want to accept it.
So then I’m about to get on a plane. And as I’m seeing the plane pull up, that’s when I just break down. I’m about to leave L.A. without my man, you know what I’m saying? He’s getting left here — he’s at the morgue, just laying there. That shit was just so fucked up to me. I’m getting on a plane. My man is in a morgue, all fucked up. I just wanted him to be with me, sitting right there with me, going back to New York. I would just sleep a lot. I just wanted to wake up. I just knew it was a dream.
“That’s what happened that night. We didn’t have no arguments with nobody. Wasn’t nobody with dirty looks. We didn’t bump into nobody. We didn’t have a crew of people that was starting trouble or anything like that. He didn’t have no threats. He wasn’t around nobody to get no threats, ’cause he wasn’t hanging out like that. None of that shit.”
Puffy raises his eyes from his folded hands and looks at me. I venture a question: How did he get beyond all that? “Oh, I was down,” he says. “I was so ready to die. It’s not like suicidal shit. It just be like wishing you was dead instead of him. But I kept praying. And I saw the strength of Biggie’s mother. If she ain’t going to give up, if she ain’t jumping off no bridges — she’s having to get up and go to work still, take care of the kids — I’ve got to get myself together.
“Still, in order to keep my sanity, it’s like I don’t be living in a reality that he’s gone. I be trying to block that out. Maybe I need a psychologist or something. I mean, I’ve cried a lot, and I deal with it, but it’s like the pain don’t get less. So that’s why I be running from the reality. ‘Cause if I sit there and look at the thing, it feels like the same time when the doctor came in and said that he was dead. That’s why you’ve been seeing me moving around here faster than usual, ’cause it’s hard to really deal with. It was like, you know, if I didn’t speak to him, it was like something was wrong with the day. I would think something happened to him if I didn’t speak to him.
“It was like he just treated you like we in our own little world. They ain’t nobody else. It’s just me and you, treating each other good.”
The hardest questions remain: Who killed Biggie Smalls? Who killed Tupac Shakur? And why? The answer is: Whoever knows isn’t saying.
But there has been no dearth of speculation. An early LAPD report, following Smalls’ murder, indicated that Smalls might have been killed because of a financial dispute of some sort with a gang member. (Combs denies the report: “Biggie didn’t owe money to nobody.”) Almost all rumors and reports, though, surmise some level of gang involvement in each death. Police documents in Los Angeles have asserted that Death Row and Bad Boy may have played a deadly game by hiring bodyguards from rival gangs: the Bloods in Death Row’s case, the Crips in Bad Boy’s. Combs denies gang ties as well: “Bad Boy never hired gang members. We hired only off-duty police officers or ex-policemen.”
If, however, either record label attracted or associated with gang members, then any number of scenarios might have resulted — almost all of them bad. Sometimes gang members take out principals of the other side as a major strategic blow — and even though neither Shakur nor Smalls was a gang member, they still might have been seen as prize enemies. (In Shakur’s case, the police have considered that the brawl a few hours before his death — which appears to be gang related — may have precipitated his murder.)
According to some observers, even though Combs sought peace on a few occasions, these actions could have been seen as an affront by some parties. It was as if, they say, he saw himself and Bad Boy above the fray, above the West Coast mentality. Or as if he thought that with Suge Knight now jailed, everything would now be fine.
Combs has little patience for any of these theories and isn’t willing to engage in speculation about who or what brought about Biggie Smalls’ death. “You know, I’m in it,” he says, “and I’m telling you the truth: I don’t have a theory. I’m not an outside person. I’m as close to it as anybody could be. But we can say that the energy that was created by the rivalry, or the East-West so-called situation, no matter who created it — whether it was the record ‘Hit ‘Em Up’ or anything that was said in interviews — could have definitely had something to do with both their deaths. Just the energy, you know? But I don’t think that somebody from Death Row killed Biggie. I can go on record: I don’t think that’s a reality, you understand? And I know for a fact nobody from Bad Boy killed Tupac.”
Combs was never prepared for what would happen. “It just shows you how crazy times are,” he says. “Shit is fucked up. I don’t give a fuck what they say, man, they wasn’t that gangsterish on the motherfucking records to deserve to die. It’s a tragedy. And I’m telling you, any rivalry we all had, man, it wasn’t that severe. Even at the Soul Train Awards, there was words thrown back and forth, but not a punch was thrown.”
Combs pauses for a moment, shakes his head in disgust. “I was angry,” he says.” ‘Cause what I strive for, I strive to be known as a mogul entrepreneur. That was fucking on my plan. My plan was fucked up. My plan is fucked up right now, too. Like, this is what you want to talk to me about. When I was doing my Rolling Stone cover, I wanted to talk about the success that I had, the moves I made for black culture, things like that — how I’ve had an impact on the pop culture. But no matter what, this is what you all want to talk about. I’m not mad at you for talking about it; this is what the readers want to hear. But it’s fucked up. I’ve gotten my fame through tragedies. My successes have been over-looked. You think that’s pleasant for me? That’s not pleasant for me. I’m even more popular now because of the tragedy of Biggie. Not popular in a good way.
“I’m more hurt than mad now,” he continues, “because I never wanted to be perceived as ignorant. Like: ‘These motherfuckers, they just got all this money, and they warring with each other?’ I’m not warring with nobody. I got all this money, and I want to reinvest the money in the communities. I want to do the best I can. I’m trying to do the best I can. I’m trying to make history. Right now, at the end of the year, I want to be the producer that had, in one year, six No. 1 singles. Cause that’s what I got in this shit for. All this other shit we talking about, I know we got to talk about it, but that’s what hurts you.
“I mean, this shit ain’t right. To white people, I’m that guy who’s in that East-West thing. I’m not that motherfucking guy! I’m the guy that every record I produced went platinum. I’m the guy that makes you dance. I’m the guy that just wants to make good music. That’s the only guy I am. And I’m the guy that wants to make history for my race and wants to be a leader of my race.”
Combs looks suddenly depleted. “I ain’t trying to whine,” he says in a soft voice. “I’m still blessed right now, even though shit is fucked up. I’m going on for B.I.G. and everybody else. I’m going to put it down so hard. I’m going to make so many records that make you feel good. I just want it to also be known at the end of the day, [B.I.G.] was instrumental in changing the vibe in the cornmunity — not in hip-hop, but in the community. I’m going to try for that.”
In the time I spent with Puffy Combs, there came a moment that stands out above the others: One afternoon he took me to see the restaurant he is opening in lower Manhattan — a place called Justin’s, named after his 3-year-old son (Combs and the boy’s mother, Misa Hylton, are separated but remain close friends). It is an elegant and comfortable-looking room outfitted with a lovely, curving mahogany bar, and Combs’ pride in the place is apparent. On this afternoon, he wants to see how the TV and sound installations are coming along, and he is checking to see whether some fabric he has picked for curtains will be available in time for the restaurant’s scheduled opening. This is perhaps the most buoyant I have seen him.
I realize it is fitting that the restaurant should bear the name of his son. It is not only an expression of love but it is also something that — like one’s child or one’s work — bears a testament to the life of the person who created it or made it possible. More proof that this man has accomplished so much in such a short time. These proofs matter a great deal to Combs, and I hope we will see many more of them in the years ahead.
We shake hands and say goodbye on the sidewalk outside, and before I even turn around to leave, he is back on his cellular. There is pressing work to do. I turn to look back at him, and I am struck by how heartsick his eyes can look, even as he continues to build his empire. It is the look of somebody who, for whatever he has gained, has lost something and will never have it close to him again.
Additional reporting by Tobias Perse