(Digital Underground)
Apart from the “Humpty Dance,” Digital Underground was also famous for introducing the world to a young Tupac Shakur, who came into the group as a roadie. You’ll love the story about Pac’s fake gold chain.
Dig this. The 1990 Houston Summit jumbotron incident with Public Enemy on the Fear of a Black Planet Tour. The stage guys warn you about what to do and what not to do when you hit the stage. It was my first time being onstage in an arena with a jumbotron. They tell you not to watch yourself on the jumbotron because you’ll fuck up and trip or something. I’m like, “Shit, OK, OK.” We’re onstage, I’m rocking, and we’re doing “Doowutchyalike” from the Underground record Sex Packets. When the chorus comes in on that song, I would jump off my riser where I was doing my samples and percussion. I jump down and grab the champagne, which I start masturbating into the crowd. I’m also throwing popcorn and confetti, yelling, “Do What Cha Like! Do What Cha Like” and running around this big-ass stage.
I look up at the jumbotron, thinking, “Oh wow, this is really incredible!” For the second verse, I went back to my position on the riser doing my thing. Then the chorus comes back, and I jump off again. This time, I’m watching myself run on the jumbotron. Problem is, when you’re watching yourself on that thing, you’re not watching the stage. I flew right off the motherfucking stage with a bucket of popcorn in my arms. It was so embarrassing. I fell off because I got caught up in my own vanity and hype. Guilty as charged. I landed down in the pit. You would have thought the crowd would have caught me, but that shit opened up like I was Moses, and I just went splat, right on my back off an arena-size stage. That shit hurt, man!
I sprung back up and scrambled onstage like it didn’t hurt. All my bandmates were cracking up, and they couldn’t even do the chorus. It was probably the most humiliating moment in my career. No one ever let me get over that. Do you know what it’s like to get teased by Flavor Flav? You don’t wanna know. Tupac was there for that too.
One time, we were on the Big Daddy Kane tour in the spring of 1990 with Pac. He was only eighteen and wasn’t a rapper yet. He was more of a sound guy and stage manager at the time. It was the first time that we gave him a mic, basically so he could be a backup MC. During the “Humpty Dance” he’d co-sign on shit, like yelling “Humpty!” and “Wave your hands in the air!” He held the mic down into the monitor, which he didn’t know creates a feedback response. He kept doing that, and he was swearing up and down that the sound guy was trying to sabotage him. That’s what Pac would do—he’d get all agitated and start making shit up in his head. He’d swear by it, then want to fight about it. He would never take the blame for anything. His response was to attack. I’d really have to check him hard and make him accountable to help him pick his fights. He was lovable, but he was wild.
He was eighteen and had just left the projects. He was on an arena tour with some of the biggest acts in hip-hop. He believed in provoking then befriending you. For example, we were at the Joe Louis arena in Detroit in 1990. If you look up into the rafters to the side of the stage, there’s always people hanging out. Pac looks up, and there’s some Detroit locals razzing him about his jewelry being fake because he used to wear all these chains and stuff. Pac gets into a shouting match with these dudes hanging in the wings. He’s yelling crazy shit, and they’re yelling, “Punk ass, that’s why your jewelry is fake!” Pac was getting so heated that he gets into it with us. He’s like, “Those motherfuckers are yelling shit! If you don’t help me, y’all ain’t shit!”
I said to him calmly, “But Pac, that shit around your neck is fake.” He wasn’t Tupac yet; he was roadie Tupac at that point. He’s still going crazy, and it’s like, why get into a shouting match with the audience that paid to come see us? It didn’t make sense. What, you gonna beat somebody up that called your fake jewelry fake? If I hadn’t talked him down, he would have hunted those dudes down after the show. He was the guy that would challenge the old, white waitress at the Waffle House in Oklahoma about his fork being dirty. It’s three in the morning and Pac’s accusing her of being racist and giving him a dirty fork.
That’s the kinda shit when I’d tell him, “Man, you gonna get us killed.” It was 1990 and we were in Oklahoma. You couldn’t do that shit. The police were protesting our tour because they had confused Public Enemy with N.W.A. and thought they were the ones that did “Fuck tha Police.” The white folks in Oklahoma didn’t give a shit. They just didn’t like us anyway. Pac was always putting us in precarious positions like that. Flav was kinda like that too. I don’t know if he got really into crack a bit later—like when crack would fall out of his pocket onstage. But he was smoking during our time with him, and sometimes he would stay in the town that we had just left. If we were in Phoenix, he would have been hooked up with some chick doing his thing, and we’d just leave him.
Sometimes Public Enemy wouldn’t even know he was gone. Chuck would hit the stage, and when they’d yell for Flav to come out, he wasn’t there. The whole thing was they’d come onstage at different times and then yell for the other to come out. There were a few nights where it was just Chuck out there, because Flav was late or stuck in some other city. Flav was a wild dude, but he also plays classical piano and speaks four different languages. Anyway, I’m about to go to sleep now. I ate a bunch of them edible Tootsie Roll things with the THC in them.