DJ Quik almost lost his life over a leaked 2Pac CD.
The veteran West Coast rapper/producer shared the revelation during a recent appearance on Talib Kweli’s People’s Party podcast, saying he ended up with a gun in his face after a bootleg of ‘Pac’s 1996 All Eyez On Me LP fell into the wrong hands.
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Quik, who mixed the diamond-certified album and produced the song “Heartz of Men,” explained his security guard took the CD from his car and began sharing it with friends. Soon enough, unauthorized copies spread throughout Los Angeles.
“I almost got killed over a 2Pac bootleg! I had a machine gun put in my face!” Quik said at the 48:20 mark. “But I was still defending him, I was like, ‘Fuck it, do what you gotta do.’ I can’t run! This muthafucka got 30 shots in it, so I’ma just man up and take this shit.
“It was in my car and my security at the time used my car. He took the CD out and let his homeboys hear it. ‘Man, let me get a copy of that!’ ‘Cool’ So I’m in the studio, proofreading and listening to these mixes, making sure that they sound good. And I would give Suge a CD or ‘Pac a CD.”
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News of the leak eventually landed on Death Row CEO Suge Knight’s radar.
“The CD ended up in the neighborhood at Earthquake Sounds, a car shop or whatever,” DJ Quik continued. “And dudes up there called Suge and was like, ‘Aye man, you know n-ggas up here playing the new 2Pac shit y’all working on?’ He’s like, ‘What?!’
“So I get a call, ‘Hey man, come up to the office.’ And I already know what them Death Row meetings, when they call you randomly at like 4:20. ‘Aye, fight traffic, get up here.’ I’m like, ‘Aww, this finna be some bullshit.'”
He added: “We get up there and we confront it, and then a fight started in the fucking Death Row [office]. It was scrapping and shit. After the fight was done, my dumb-ass, I’m like, ‘Man, we just got accused of something we didn’t do!’ I’m like, ‘What did you do? Who did you give the CD to?’ [He’s like], ‘This guy.'”
DJ Quik and his security confronted the culprit at his home, where another fight broke out. This time, however, there was more than just fists involved.
“So we go over to this guy’s house,” he said. “He’s talking to us. He didn’t do it, yada yada, somebody else did it. So me, in my infinite wisdom, I take off on him … I’m fighting the dude and he dropped his Hennessy, and I think he was more mad [about that] than me actually swinging on him.
“He told his homeboy, ‘Man, blast this muthafucka!’ And my man just pulled out a TEC [gun noises]. I’m just… cold. Like, ‘I’m dead over this dumb-ass 2Pac tape.'”
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Luckily for Quik, his security guard snatched the gun before any serious damage could be done. That didn’t stop the Compton native from suffering a beatdown, though.
“So I’m fighting with this guy, then I end up fighting with the other guy, and the other guy kicked me all in the head and shit, I’m on the ground getting stomped and shit,” he remembered. “I get up and I’m still fighting this guy. It’s like, ‘Man, I can’t fight both! Help me fight these muthafuckas!’
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“And then we had to go to a party that night still, a Whispers party that Death Row was throwing, so we end up at the Whispers party. N-ggas was like, ‘You alright?! Y’all need to go the hospital!’ ‘Nah, we cool, fuck it. Charge it to the game.'”
He added: “The guy that supposedly did it, I ended up making amends with him. I went and hung out with him a couple of years ago and apologized because I shouldn’t have did that. You know, Death Row was the single most dangerous record company in the world, but if you had on the chain, nothing ever happened to you.”
Later in the interview, DJ Quik revealed 2Pac learned about the fight and it only made their bond stronger.
“2Pac found out that I fought these n-ggas over his shit getting leaked and he loved me infinitely,” he said. “We was two peas in a pod. We did so much shit together, we used to hang out and film — I just took it for granted like, ‘He gonna be here always. He out of jail now and he gonna stay out.'”
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That doesn’t mean Quik and ‘Pac didn’t butt heads from time to time, though.
“[After All Eyez On Me], we did a short little tour. We was in Louisiana, New Orleans Arena killing that shit,” he added. “And then he got mad at me and wanted to fight me because I jumped on the speakers and he told Suge, ‘He stealing my fucking show!’ I’m like, ‘Bro, we been jumping on speakers. And I got that from Bobby Brown!’
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“Instead of us fighting, what Suge would have us do is — or he wouldn’t have us do it, but he wasn’t opposed to it — we’d just go in the weight room and lift it out … I beat him. I got like three more in. We had like 100-something pounds. And then [a fight] never happened, it was back cool.”
He added: “God, I miss him. He should so be here — him and [Eazy-E]. He would be doing movies right now. He would’ve been the Black Quentin Tarantino, he would’ve been Sam Jackson. He’d be doing the same shit Ice Cube did with all the Fridays.”
