attended one of my shows and came backstage to meet me. And she sure as hell did meet me that night.
There were so many sexual encounters, many of them blur together in my mind. But there are others that I remember as vividly as if they happened yesterday. Sometimes I will turn on the television or go to the movies and I will see one of the women, more than two decades later, and the memories will come flooding back to me.
We also had way too many guns. I’m not talking justregular handguns, I mean like big semiautomatics. I had all this money around and I guess I was paranoid, but luckily some smart thinking by my security detail kept us from getting into real trouble. One night in St. Louis, we had a major beef with these kids who were talking shit to us. When we got back on the bus, all of a sudden we heard gunshots. We realized we were taking fire—those motherfuckers were shooting up our bus! Crouching down to avoid getting hit, we all ran to get our guns and looked for safe spots to shoot from. We found spots where we could safely fire back at them. But instead of gunshots, it was click, click, click . None of the guns had bullets in them. Turns out our head of security had taken all the bullets and hidden them underneath the bus. In retrospect it was a genius move because somebody would have gotten killed that day. But at the time we were pissed as hell. We jumped him and started beating his ass.
Triple B Records
After the enormous success of Don’t Be Cruel, I signed a new contract with MCA that was extremely lucrative. As part of the new contract, I got my own record label, where I could develop and produce my own acts. But I didn’t want to do all of that from Los Angeles, which was feeling too confined and incestuous. I wanted to break away and put down roots in a new place. I also saw that when we looked at our royalty reports, 70 percent of the radio revenue was coming from theSouth. I realized that our audience was mostly down there. If you wanted to break a new record, you didn’t even have to think about the West or the Northeast. You could do it exclusively by concentrating on the South. So I figured, why not relocate to the hub of the place, Atlanta? This was before Outkast and Jermaine Dupri and the development of the Southern sound. Music-wise, there was nothing in Atlanta when we got there. It was all new, fertile ground. We called our label Triple B Records (my middle name is Barrisford). We also bought a full-fledged recording studio that we called Bosstown Recording, so we could do everything from signing the artists to recording their music to mixing and mastering the final album. It was one-stop packaging.
We put together an impressive collection of artists who we knew were going to make a big splash. We had an incredible vocalist named Dede O’Neal, who eventually wound up being signed by LaFace. My younger sister, Carol, who was a talented rapper by the name of Coop B, was part of our camp. At one point we were working with Usher. We had a vocalist named Harold Travis and a hot rapper by the name of Stylz. One of our most exciting acts was an R & B quartet by the name of Smoothe Sylk—a group that turned out to be the label’s downfall. The guys in Smoothe Sylk kept coming to me asking for money, saying they were broke and needed to make ends meet. We were just a couple of months from the release of their first album and they came back yet again, looking for more cash.
“Dudes, I don’t know what you’re doing with this money, but for the next couple of months you better figure something out. Go get a job at McDonald’s or something, because I’m not advancing you any more money. Y’all need to budget your money or something.”
A few days later, I got a phone call delivering news that I just refused to believe. Two of the guys in Smoothe Sylk had gone out and robbed a bank. They couldn’t wait until the release of their album, which everyone was certain was going to be a big
There were so many sexual encounters, many of them blur together in my mind. But there are others that I remember as vividly as if they happened yesterday. Sometimes I will turn on the television or go to the movies and I will see one of the women, more than two decades later, and the memories will come flooding back to me.
We also had way too many guns. I’m not talking justregular handguns, I mean like big semiautomatics. I had all this money around and I guess I was paranoid, but luckily some smart thinking by my security detail kept us from getting into real trouble. One night in St. Louis, we had a major beef with these kids who were talking shit to us. When we got back on the bus, all of a sudden we heard gunshots. We realized we were taking fire—those motherfuckers were shooting up our bus! Crouching down to avoid getting hit, we all ran to get our guns and looked for safe spots to shoot from. We found spots where we could safely fire back at them. But instead of gunshots, it was click, click, click . None of the guns had bullets in them. Turns out our head of security had taken all the bullets and hidden them underneath the bus. In retrospect it was a genius move because somebody would have gotten killed that day. But at the time we were pissed as hell. We jumped him and started beating his ass.
Triple B Records
After the enormous success of Don’t Be Cruel, I signed a new contract with MCA that was extremely lucrative. As part of the new contract, I got my own record label, where I could develop and produce my own acts. But I didn’t want to do all of that from Los Angeles, which was feeling too confined and incestuous. I wanted to break away and put down roots in a new place. I also saw that when we looked at our royalty reports, 70 percent of the radio revenue was coming from theSouth. I realized that our audience was mostly down there. If you wanted to break a new record, you didn’t even have to think about the West or the Northeast. You could do it exclusively by concentrating on the South. So I figured, why not relocate to the hub of the place, Atlanta? This was before Outkast and Jermaine Dupri and the development of the Southern sound. Music-wise, there was nothing in Atlanta when we got there. It was all new, fertile ground. We called our label Triple B Records (my middle name is Barrisford). We also bought a full-fledged recording studio that we called Bosstown Recording, so we could do everything from signing the artists to recording their music to mixing and mastering the final album. It was one-stop packaging.
We put together an impressive collection of artists who we knew were going to make a big splash. We had an incredible vocalist named Dede O’Neal, who eventually wound up being signed by LaFace. My younger sister, Carol, who was a talented rapper by the name of Coop B, was part of our camp. At one point we were working with Usher. We had a vocalist named Harold Travis and a hot rapper by the name of Stylz. One of our most exciting acts was an R & B quartet by the name of Smoothe Sylk—a group that turned out to be the label’s downfall. The guys in Smoothe Sylk kept coming to me asking for money, saying they were broke and needed to make ends meet. We were just a couple of months from the release of their first album and they came back yet again, looking for more cash.
“Dudes, I don’t know what you’re doing with this money, but for the next couple of months you better figure something out. Go get a job at McDonald’s or something, because I’m not advancing you any more money. Y’all need to budget your money or something.”
A few days later, I got a phone call delivering news that I just refused to believe. Two of the guys in Smoothe Sylk had gone out and robbed a bank. They couldn’t wait until the release of their album, which everyone was certain was going to be a big
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