Be alone, that is the secret of invention; be alone, that is when ideas are born.
—NIKOLA TESLA
Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves. Here’s Tom with the weather.
—BILL HICKS
In some Native American cultures, male members of the community, upon reaching the cusp of manhood, would take part in an important tradition known as a vision quest. This rite of passage involved venturing out alone into the wilderness, often to a sacred site, and fasting for several days to induce dreams or visions that would help that individual discover his life’s purpose or determine his role within the community. By stripping away everything he was familiar with; withholding food and sleep, vital for normal functioning; and convening with nature, the idea was that the initiate would turn deep inside himself, and in this way acquire the kind of inner wisdom potentially accessible to all but drowned out by the distracting din of daily life. Prophets of antiquity such as Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed followed a similar shamanic path on their way to receiving the mystic revelations on which the world’s major religions were founded. Undergoing suffering, isolation, and deprivation of a different kind, DOOM was involuntarily thrust into something like a vision quest that lasted not days, but years.
The period between 1994 and ’98, when he retreated from the public eye and practically fell off the map, is often considered his “missing years,” which found him broke, near homeless, and traumatized by grief. But this time on his own, below the radar, also provided a crucial opportunity to begin the healing process, while establishing the foundation for his return. Lost and vulnerable as he may have been during his “dark night of the soul,” it was all a necessary part of the process of finding himself. While self-medicating with alcohol and drugs to deal with his emotional pain, DOOM never abandoned what he felt deeply to be his true calling—writing lyrics and making beats—doubling down on the only activities that gave him a sense of purpose. It was this dedication to his craft that eventually served not only to sharpen his skills, but to revive his confidence after experiencing so great a fall.
At twenty-three, the conscious rhymer, who had never held a real job in his life, was suddenly forced to support himself. He ended up turning to what anyone in his situation might have done—selling drugs—not with Scarface ambitions, but rather, simply to sustain a basic level of survival. Though New York had always been the center of his universe, DOOM kept it moving during these interim years, bouncing around the East Coast from Boston to DC and Virginia and, finally, all the way down to Georgia, where he would eventually settle in the new millennium. Effectively starting from scratch, he battled serious odds, as the music industry was not known for offering second chances. But thanks to his prodigious work ethic and strength of will that he developed during his years-long vision quest, DOOM was able to pull off one of the greatest comebacks in history—not only in rap but in the annals of music.
Using the severance allotted by Elektra, he was able to get an apartment in Manhattan after losing his record deal. Unfortunately, Sub had been in sole possession of the key (and whereabouts) of a storage unit that contained most of their equipment, crates of vinyl, and a gold-record plaque for “The Gas Face,” so all of that was effectively lost. But DOOM managed to hold onto his MPC60, and he borrowed a Casio FZ-10 rack-mount sampler from engineer Rich Keller that allowed him to continue making beats.
His initial place in Midtown, off Eighth Avenue, he shared with another rapper, Shelly B, whom he was producing and dating. Ray Davis (aka Web D), a deejay and producer from Long Beach, who knew DOOM years before he was signed, worked in Manhattan at the time and often visited. “He was in a bad place,” Davis recalls of the post-Elektra era, “so, I would see him and me and him was like drinking buddies. We would sit around and get high and drink forties of OE [Olde English 800 malt liquor] all the time. And I told him, I was like, ‘Yo, you ain’t got [all] your equipment, man. If you need to use my shit, you can use my shit, my records, do whatever the fuck you need to do, da, da da. I’ll help you.’ You know?” DOOM would eventually take him up on the offer, but for the time being he improvised, making the most of what he had.
Kevin Hutchinson (aka Chicken Lover), a member of the CM Fam and Jungle Brothers’ Bush Camp clique, recalls visiting DOOM in midtown as well. “I see what he did now—he was making an arsenal of beats,” he says, laughing. “He didn’t want people to say, ‘Oh, well, that’s KMD.’ He wanted to be known for a different style that he had. I mean he had catalog. I went there with Kae-Nit [another member of CM], and he was letting us hear tons of stuff.” DOOM was obviously keeping himself well occupied. Hutchinson adds, “As I remember him, I could always say that dude is dangerous. ’Cause I seen him, I heard it. We were sitting there for hours, like ’shroomed out for like ten hours—sometimes all night—just listening to music he had made.”
While DOOM also spent a lot of time at Kurious’s place on Ninety-Seventh Street, working on music or writing lyrics, he leaned on his youngest brother for support as well. “He didn’t really function without me at that time,” says Dimbaza Dumile, who was only nineteen when he joined DOOM further uptown at an apartment at 157th and Amsterdam. “We started taking acid more after Sub passed going to ’94, ’95, listening to [the] Raekwon album [Only Built 4 Cuban Linx] and just listening to shit,” he says. “We were tripping every day at that Manhattan apartment. I mean I used to go pick up 250 mescaline tabs in Central Park.” At the time, a certain section within the park was known as the spot to procure LSD or mescaline. “I would go pick it up ’cause I was innocent enough looking,” says Dimbaza. “DOOM would try to hustle ’em to make money, but we were eating most of them. We would sell just enough to re-up and the rest we were just taking for the head. We were trippin’ like fuck. Sub would have been impressed.”
Prior to his brother’s death, DOOM hadn’t messed with anything stronger than alcohol and weed, both depressants. But psychedelics offered the opposite of a sedative effect—not to mention a real escape. Certainly, such powerful psychoactive substances as LSD and mescaline, the active ingredient of the peyote cactus, which some Native American tribes considered a sacrament, were nothing to be taken lightly. Depending on a multitude of factors—including setting, dosage, and the current mood or disposition of the user—such substances affected one’s brain chemistry, tearing the mask off our perceived reality to deliver a heavenly, transcendent experience, or, just as easily, hell. Often misunderstood, and miscategorized as Schedule I drugs, along with the infinitely more lethal and addictive heroin and cocaine, the efficacy of psychedelics in treating such disorders as PTSD has been acknowledged by mainstream medicine today. Though such substances were not physically addictive, whatever DOOM was experiencing under the influence kept him coming back for more. Perhaps they served as a form of therapy as the psychedelic state lifted the veil into other dimensions, where he might have felt closer to his departed brother.
When they weren’t navigating this realm beyond the senses, DOOM and Dimbaza sometimes visited Grimm, who had spent many months in rehab following the New Year’s Day 1994 shooting that left him paralyzed from the waist down. Now confined to a wheelchair, he was just regaining the breath control indispensable to any MC and longed to get back into rap. Over games of chess, Grimm and DOOM dreamed and schemed together about a comeback, plotting future collaborations, and generally leaning on each other in their combined hour of need. When the Dumile brothers needed a break from the city, they went to hang out with homeboys in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston. But eventually, when the money ran out, DOOM had no choice but to go back to where he started.
“So, 1995, I guess we’re in Freeport again,” says Dimbaza, “My father bought a crappy house—a piece of work—but it was a house, and we can always be there, right? So, he’s basically living back at his dad’s house.” The younger Dumile refers to this period as his brother’s “John Coltrane phase,” as he was spending a lot of time around the house, doing little else besides reading and a lot of thinking, accompanied by daytime drinking to the tune of Trane, Pharaoh Sanders, and Ornette Coleman courtesy of an AM jazz station. “We drinking liquor that we stole from my uncle,” says Dimbaza. “We seen those bottles of liquor sitting there at my uncle’s fuckin’ bar since we little as hell, and you know he ain’t drinking that shit.” So, the brothers helped themselves, switching up from psychedelics to scotch.
While it may have seemed like DOOM was tuned out, he was always, at least subconsciously, affected by his environment—especially whatever information or stimuli he was receiving. Later on, he would observe, “People like Ornette Coleman or John Coltrane chose to go in a direction that people couldn’t accept. But now, their stuff’s seen as classic. That helped to show me that even if people don’t get what I’m doin’ now, they’ll get it eventually.”1
Despite having his basic studio setup intact, he was still not inspired to create. “DOOM was in a low right now musically,” according to Dimbaza. “He wasn’t making music.” Knowing his brother only too well, he felt an obligation to remedy the situation. One day while messing around on the turntables looking for samples, Dimbaza cued up a copy of the Spinners’ Mighty Love album (Atlantic, 1974). Dropping the needle on the second song on side one, “Ain’t No Price on Happiness,” made his ears instantly perk up since its opening bars sounded like a dope loop. When he tried to get DOOM’s attention, however, his brother initially brushed him off.
“I was like talking to DOOM, and he sounded down and during this down conversation—’cause it was a very bluesy time, you know, for both of us—he is trying to talk like he ain’t, you know, he don’t got no music,” says Dimbaza, who pressed him to listen to what he had found. “I got him out of that bluesy conversation to come over to the record player and listen to the sample,” he says. “And thank fuckin’ God he heard what I heard and immediately started working on it. He didn’t let his Debbie Downer attitude be like, ‘It’s dope, but I’m gonna work on it in the morning.’ He started working on it and he made ‘Go with the Flow.’ ”
DOOM paired the Spinners loop with the staccato drum track of Kool G Rap & DJ Polo’s “Truly Yours” from the album Road to the Riches (Cold Chillin’, 1989). In the song’s opening ad-lib, G Rap says, “Go with the flow,” which DOOM also samples, thus explaining the track title as well. Though songs like “Dead Bent” and “Gas Drawls” were subsequently credited as being the first official MF DOOM recordings, both were originally made in 1994 during the Black Bastards sessions, according to Dimbaza. “ ‘Go with the Flow,’ ” he says, “kind of came after that and that’s when he started accumulating songs.” It marked a definite breakthrough for his brother, and the first time in a while that he approached music with renewed zeal and energy.
But if there was an even more important eureka moment for DOOM during that summer of 1995 back in Freeport, he revealed it to journalist and label owner Peter Agoston many years later. “Summertime, it was a beautiful day out, and I’m trying to think of shit,” he said. “It just hit me one day. If I was to come back, it would have to be as DOOM. It just popped in my head, like if I ever get a chance to really do it again, that’s how I would do it—on the surface level, on the public level.”2
He further elaborated, “You know in a lot of ways it prevents a lot of bullshit from happening. Like a lot of bullshit associated with this particular genre of music, you know what I mean—paparazzi, the haters, whatever fuckin’ bullshit. In any other writing job, you don’t get this shit, but this rap shit, it’s almost like people expect you to be the dude you writin’. Like, I’m a writer, yo, I write for different characters, know what I’m sayin’?”3 As if a switch had flipped in his mind, he acknowledged the important distinction between himself, the person known as Daniel Dumile, and the character he was portraying.
DOOM had arrived at this conclusion by really digging deep to analyze the essence of rap’s appeal. “So, I’m like, I take a look back at that shit and I say, ‘OK, what is it that people like about what we do?’ It’s rhyming, the way we fuck with the words on the beat. None of that other shit in between matters at all,”4 he said, citing trivialities like where you’re from or what you’re wearing. “So, I’m like, if people want to hear raw rhymes—and the iller the rhymes [the better]—you could come with anything and get the light, catch the wreck. So, I’ma test that theory. Let me change my name, all that, come out as a totally different motherfucker, totally new style, not ride the coattails of KMD—I mean there was good stuff that we did, but I wanted to just go in another direction. So, all right, boom, you do the DOOM and see how the public takes it.”5 This realization proved to be transformative. Of course, he was still broke and without the means to put out his music, but, at least, he had found a way forward. “I’m totally designing the character from scratch, but to me, I was having fun,”6 he said. He probably hadn’t admitted as much in years.