Smif N Wessun
Steele: He was like I can’t get no bitches fucking with ya’ll. We really were just sitting in the crib. The nigga had the old big ass laserdisc and we was like put that Scarface shit on and he was like nah I don’t know how to work that shit. He was such a person. From a distance, you would think that he’s this guy you can’t sit next to or talk to and be real with but it was totally the opposite. We really had a connection. Like my PNC was talking about when he came from the movie shoot we were just getting up in the morning. So normally we get up in the morning and we do our push ups, so we doing our reps and Buckshot’s brother Thor is cooking breakfast for an army, flapjacks, eggs and all kinds of crazy shit. Pac comes in the crib with his white tuxedo shirt and his white hush puppies on and he’s like ‘Yeah!’ He see niggas doing push ups and he gets crazy amped drops down and starts doing push ups with us. It was some real shit, even seeing him and Tek when Thor yell breakfast is ready. Them niggas run down the stairs like two mischievous kids, go in the kitchen and get they shit first and put hot sauce on they turkey bacon. They was eating the same. We was all eating together. That right there was wild because you’re in that and a lot of times when you’re going through some shit you don’t really understand the intensity of what you’re dealing with until after the fact. So watching Pac, Tek, and Buckshot getting the super soakers and having a water fight it wasn’t the video scene. There were no video hoes but there was a lot of weed in the studio though. You know how we like to keep it a lot of weed, a lot of Hennessey and Thug Passion going on except for the last day.
This last day might have been the wildest shit. Up until this day, everything was cool. Suge was calling Pac all day and all day Pac had a sullen ass vibe. Every time he would get on the phone with this dude, he would put his head down, talk low and when he get off the phone with him he was somewhere else. At that point, we couldn’t really speak to him because we didn’t know what was going on. He’s like this motherfucker Suge is having a party in Vegas. I think it was a party for Pac because his birthday was coming up soon. Suge was having a party for him in Vegas and Pac didn’t want to go. He knew he had to go. Long-short, he kept getting on the phone back and forth and finally Suge sent some tickets. So the whole time we quiet and we heading to the airport to go to Vegas. He gets his ticket and he’s on a different plane than us. It was him and two other people on one plane and it was like five of us on another plane. We in the airport and he’s looking at these tickets and he’s like I told this nigga! Then he was just like fuck it. He took them tickets and threw them shits on the floor, BONG!, and we broke out from the airport. After we broke out, we went to the studio cuz we was like let’s take this vibe and turn it around. So we went to the studio and that was the hardest song we did while we were out there. It was so uncomfortable. He had a vibe like he did something that he was gonna have to answer to later on. I felt like I wanted to stay out there with him because he just rode for me and my team real hard right there. Plane tickets is a lot of money and you got eight motherfuckers flying out and to be just like I’m not going that’s kinda gangsta. We were working on a song called “I Never Call You Bitch Again.” Buckshot was in there, he was taking long to do his verse, and Pac was like c’mon man it shouldn’t take you this long. He was crazy different. Other than that, the overall vibe was he was a brother we ain’t seen in a long time. A lot of people ask us when those songs are coming out and I think that was just a spiritual encounter for us to grow off of and pass it on to other comrades. That’s where Buck got his name B.D.I. Thug. Pac was the first to call him that.
Speaking of different names when I look back it sucks that you guys had to drop the name Smif n Wessun because forever that’s how I’m gonna remember you. I had heard you guys were trying to license the name, is there still a possibility for that?
Steele: For the record right now because we ain’t signed to no labels and shit like that we running with that name. We figure it’s like this, catch us if you can. The problem with it before was we were going through problems with Nervous. We were going up to the label about getting some bread and these motherfuckers showed us this transcript on how these niggas were gonna try and sue us. We knew at that time we was basically in that shit by ourselves. They wasn’t gonna help us fight. If they would have helped us fight, we probably wouldn’t have won it but we felt enemies coming from different sides. We already had the name Cocoa Brovas cuz we was the niggas who supplied Black Moon with the weed. We were just like fuck it, [and went with that] instead of going with Steele and Tek because we always said we not gonna sign to no label under those names because once we do that that’s giving them everything that we have. So we flipped it with the Cocoa Brovaz shit and rocked under that. I think really in our hearts we were never comfortable with that and that kinda messed us up with consumers. There was confusion, marketing had to be different, the whole approach was crazy. We took it out as far as we can take it and we realized we Smif n Wessun. That’s it. If they want to sue us, sue us. But right now we got a CD about to come out next week. We did like thirty songs when we was with Rawkus. Them motherfuckers was looking for singles, they were trying to make us do songs with Jah Rule.
Haha!
Steele: We was like yo ya’ll motherfuckers is crazy. For two years we have been trying to get off of that label because we found out them dudes really wasn’t the ones we need to be fucking with. The best guys we got on our team is us. These cats write the checks and all that but their state of mind is not really conducive to what we need to be doing. When we first came in the game, we were unaware of dealing with the ins and outs of the business so it allowed us to create freely from our hearts and our minds from the true experience we just finished going through. So now, when you see the next CD it will be Smif N Wessun, when the album come out you’ll see Smif N Wess. Politically we might drop the UN but we gonna do it both ways and fuck with they head. We not gonna allow them no chance to put they hands on us. We just gonna rock with it.
So the mix CD is gonna be all of the joints from the Rawkus project?
Tek: It’s not really all of them. It’s a nice handful, a couple of freestyles and a couple of lost songs niggas did that heads couldn’t get they hands on. It’s some shit up there.
Do you think if you guys were able to rock with the name that your second album would have been more successful than the first?
Tek: I think so. Just the name alone shied a lot of people away from buying the album. That confused consumers more than Smif N Wessun the name itself. They like who is Cocoa Brovaz? I’m not familiar with this. To this day when you find a lot of people who bought the Cocoa Brovaz album they like that’s a hot ass album. Not saying that because we did it but there’s some shit up on that album. But yea with the name Smif n Wessun it would have did much better than what it did.
(Tek’s attention is diverted for a second)
Voice in background: You like that?
Tek: That ain’t what I was looking for but I’ll fuck with it.
Voice: What you want to give me? That’s the only time I could find good man.
Tek: What happened to the round shit man?
Voice: Which one?
Tek: I wanted a big face round shit, something like this?
Tek: Hello?
Marcus: Yea we was just letting you do your thing. We thought you was buying weed or something.
Tek: Haha Nah, I’m buying a watch from my nigga I can hear ya’ll.
