Long Live Ol’ Dirty.
It’s been ten years since the rap world lost one if it’s most unique acts, Ol’ Dirty Bastard. To commemorate the life of O.D.B. his lifelongs friends Buddha Monk and Mickey Hess have put together a new book, The Dirty Version: On Stage, In The Studio, and In The Streets with Ol’ Dirty Bastard, named the “first biography of ODB to be written by someone from within his inner circle.” The book will illustrate the life, and incredibly wild times of Dirt McGirt.
Uproxx received an exclusive excerpt from the book, which you can read below.
Our Jersey connection was the Zu Ninjaz: Irie, Popa Chief, and K-Blunt. Those are my boys. We were staying at the Gate, which is what we called the house where Irie lived with his girl, Lisa Miller. It was Lisa’s house and at first she was cool with letting us stay there and do our thing. Lisa was our scientist. Anything with a computer she’d get done in twenty seconds. She can take a computer apart and put it back together and it’ll work just fine.
Dirty used to love driving in the back of that house, through the field, with his Benz. He didn’t want to park it in front of the house ’cause he didn’t want nobody to know he was there. But we came to see that out in Jersey people didn’t treat Dirty like some kind of superstar. We brought people from the street into our circle, and they looked out for us, pro tected us not because we were rappers but because we could be real with them.
Dirty felt like he could talk about his problems with them. One night he said, “Man, I don’t know if I can do this sh*t no more.”
“What do you mean? This rap sh*t?” I asked him.
Dirty was more depressed than I’d ever seen him. Blunt told him, “Listen, we don’t want to hear that bullsh*t. You ain’t going to quit rap-pin’. You just need to take some time off to remember what you love about music and why you got into this career to begin with.”
“Yo, Blunt, I just feel like the fish in the fishbowl, like I’m by myself in this fishbowl and people coming round staring at me like I’m a goddamn alien or some sh*t.”
It’s hard to be a character all the time. People would see Dirty on the street and they’d expect him to be the same Ol’ Dirty Bastard he was onstage or on TV.
While Dirty was taking some time off in Willingboro, everybody back in New York was calling me to ask where he was. Everybody knew to call Buddha. I was the middleman. But this time around, instead of me trying to convince Dirty to call people back or show up where they wanted him to, I just played dumb. Everybody called me in Willingboro to ask where Dirty was and I’d tell them, “I don’t know.”
“Don’t lie. Don’t f*ckin’ lie. I know you know where he is.”
Elektra would call looking for him. RZA would call. Icelene would call, and I heard Dirty finally call her back and yell at her over the phone: “Don’t be calling me for no f*ckin’ money.” Once you split up they start calling you because they don’t have as much access to it like they did when they was with you.
Dirty hated going home to New York because there was so much love in Jersey. We’d hang out as late as we could, until six or seven in the morning when some of our friends had to head into work. Dirty would stretch and yawn and ask me, “What are we doing today?”
“Getting f*cked up,” I’d tell him. “Same as yesterday. We’re gonna sit here and order some food and get drunk. Maybe play some cards.” At night we’d go to the club. And when we went we went deep. I’m talking about cars following cars following cars. Twenty or thirty people walking into the club. This was beyond family—Dirty and I were separated from our families but in Jersey we found nothing but love.
Plus, it was good for our music. Dirty and I were sick and tired of the music industry, but weren’t trying to quit making music. At the Gate we had a secret room upstairs where we’d shut the door, turn up the music, smoke weed, and write mad rhymes. We wrote notebooks full of rhymes. And we’d try them out on each other before we’d go to the studio. Then we’d get after each other there, too. “No, that’s not the rhyme. That’s not how you did it at the house.”
K-Blunt knew how to come in with some energy. You can hear it on his first verse on the Zu Ninjaz song “Slicer.” He’d stomp into the booth like, “F*ck that. This is how you do it. Yo, turn my sh*t up, Buddha.”
But even with Blunt sometimes, he’d go in there ready to show the world and I’d still be like, “Delete. Do it again. Turn the page, n*gga. Delete.” He’d do it to me too. That’s how we learned to rhyme better and take it to the next level. We battled each other all the time. That’s the way we would improve our craft.
My relationship with Patricia was over, so out in Jersey I had Ruth, Angie, Denise, plus Drea, a light-skinned girl with a big ass. But there was only one Mikki. I had such a crush on her. I was in love with Mikki when Mikki was in love with everybody else. She had so many men chasing her she had to play defense. “Bob and weave,” she’d tell me. “Some n*gga tried to pin me up in the park, but I had to keep it moving.”
Mikki’s a singer. She’s a little thing. Funniest sh*t, though, the smallest ladies are the most dangerous. She kicked Lisa’s ass one time, when Lisa started getting jealous because Mikki was hanging with Dirty and us all the time. “Listen, I’m not supposed to tell you like this, but I done been in the military and everything, so y’all bitches better fall back before I f*ck you up.” Lisa and her are about the same size, but Lisa was a little more diesel. So Lisa kept talking, blah blah blah.
Mikki said, “I ain’t even here for you. I’m here for Dirty and Buddha.”
Lisa said, “Well you don’t have to worry about that, ’cause I got them.”
Blunt and me was on our way back from New York, and we got a phone call that Lisa went in Mikki’s room and took some sh*t out. We was like, “F*ck that bitch up. Kick that bitch ass.”
I told Mikki straight up, I said, “If you don’t kick her ass I’m cuttin’ you off.”
Mikki said, “You know I’m gonna really hurt her if I do this. She’s not gonna win. She’s gonna get hurt.”
“Yeah, whatever, just do what you can.”
Lisa was in the kitchen cooking. Mikki went to try to talk to her woman to woman.
Blunt came in and said, “F*ck that. Y’all talking too much. F*ck all that talking sh*t. Let’s get to it.”
“Why’d you go in my room?”
“This is my house, bitch. I go in any room I please.”
She hit Mikki first, knocked her glasses off, and that was the only hit she got in. Mikki wasn’t lying to me. She f*cked that girl up. She had her on the ground. We had to pull her off. “Get her off of me. Get this bitch!”
After Lisa got her ass whooped, Dirty said, “Yo, y’all were wrong for that, G. You shouldn’t have told Mikki to go up there and beat that girl’s ass like that. She lets us stay here at her house and everything.”
Wasn’t long after that Lisa started talking about us f*cking up her house and not helping pay the electric bills. Mikki told me and Dirty, “You got to move. You got to get up out of here.”
Escape to Willingboro
She was right, but Dirty and I didn’t listen. We kept running up the electric bills and the Brooklyn Zu kept crashing Dirty’s cars. They were some bang-’em-up n*ggas. K-Blunt and 12 O’Clock f*cked up Dirty’s Benz and tried to get it fixed before he found out. Blunt tore off the whole front end of that car.
It was Blunt, Merdoc, and 12. They’d stolen the car from Dirty while he was asleep, and the first thing Dirty did when he woke up was call Blunt and say, “I know you took my car, motherf*cker. I’m a kill all you motherf*ckers.” Blunt hung up but Dirty kept calling him back. “I’m telling you, K-Blunt, if you don’t bring me my car . . .”
“I don’t got your car, man. As for 12 and Merdoc I ain’t even with them.” But really he rode with them all the way to Philly. 12 ran into a pole and tore off the front end of that Benz. Cracked the whole wind shield and everything. 12 was outside the car crying. “He’s gonna kill us,
G. Dirty’s gonna kill all of us.” “No, he’s gonna kill you,” Blunt said. “I didn’t have sh*t to do with it. I ain’t even here. I already told him I ain’t with y’all.”
Blunt called his man who ran a shop at Fifty-fourth and Market in Philly, and the dude came with his tow truck and got the car. He opened up his shop at midnight and had the car fixed by 8 a.m.: repaired, painted, and everything.
When they got back to Willingboro that morning Dirty was waiting on the porch. He took one look at the car and said, “What happened to the car?”
“What you mean?” “Well, the paint’s still wet, G. What happened to the car?”
Buy The Dirty Version: On Stage, In the Studio, and In the Streets with Ol’ Dirty Bastard here.
You can find in your local bar or pizza shop, and on Twitter (@KINGCLARKEIII).
