“Give me a thousand dollars and I’ll get on there too,” Killer Mike added.
This was a hell of a deal. I was about to get Lil’ Scrappy, Bun B, and Killer Mike on my song for forty-five hundred. For them to charge me such a cheap price I knew they must have seen my drive and respected my hustle. I hit up Doo Dirty and he immediately agreed to foot the bill for the features. We all headed back inside the studio, where Bun B and Killer Mike laid down their verses. While Bun was finishing his, I rang up Jody Breeze, another homegrown talent who was signed to renowned producer Jazze Pha’s Sho’ Nuff Records. He and I had gotten cool on a chance encounter at Atlanta’s infamous strip club Magic City. I’d recently had him get on another song of mine for five hundred dollars and a zip of smoke. He said he’d pull up and get on “Black Tee” for free.
The “Black Tee” remix was finished and hard as hell. The next day I printed a few hundred copies to pass out to DJs and get it circulating through the city.
Two days later me and my boys were at Walter’s, a clothing shop downtown, dropping off copies of the remix. While my buddies tried on gear I went next door to another store called What’s Happenin’ to leave a few CDs. While I was inside, a man approached me, introducing himself as Coach K.
Coach K managed Young Jeezy, and he had been looking for me to get us to collaborate. Apparently we’d kept missing each other at Shawty Redd’s, where we’d both been working of late. I remembered then that Shawty Redd had put me on the phone with this dude. Turned out Jeezy was next door at Walter’s, so we convened in the parking lot across the street.
Jeezy was from Macon, about an hour and a half south of Atlanta. He’d moved to the city some years back and was now running with Big Meech and BMF.
Remember when I said me and my boys had never heard of Meech or BMF back when Doo Dirty first told us about them? Well, by the time I met Jeezy everyone in the city knew those names. I swear it felt like it happened overnight. Things in Atlanta had been one way and then BMF happened.
These niggas were hitting all the hot spots—Club Chaos, Compound, the Velvet Room—and shutting shit down, pulling up in foreign sports cars, buying bottles of Cristal by the case and throwing around stupid money. Tens of thousands of dollars in a night like it was nothing. Nobody had ever seen that before. Meech and them invented making it rain. The BMF story isn’t my story to tell, but man, it was something else. They were really putting on.
While I was aware of Meech I still wasn’t familiar with Jeezy beyond our phone call at Shawty Redd’s. But he seemed cool enough and I appreciated that he was fond of my music. We agreed to meet up the next day to see if we could get some songs going.
Before parting ways we swapped CDs. I handed him the “Black Tee” remix and he gave me his new mixtape, Tha Streets Iz Watchin’.
I popped it into the CD player of the truck as we pulled off and the shit was hard. As a group we decided it was a good idea to work with this guy. Two days later we were at Patchwerk.
But Jeezy and I weren’t on the same page when we got in the studio. After we played a few beats and tossed some ideas around it seemed like we might not get anything off the ground. Jeezy was saying he wanted to make something real street and grimy, but I didn’t care for any of the beats he was playing.
“Is it cool if I have my partner Zaytoven come through?” I finally asked. “His beats are really good.”
With a green light I rang up Zay, who was cutting hair at the barbershop. I told him he needed to get down to Patchwerk ASAP and save this session.
Zay had given me a CD of beats recently and there was one on there I was stuck on. I’d first listened to it while heading out of town with the Z6C boys. We were riding to Daytona to get up with Daron “Southboy” Fordham, an ex–football player turned filmmaker. Daron was making a movie, Confessions of a Thug—it was like a hip-hop musical—and he wanted the Zone 6 Clique to make a cameo in it.
I’d come up with a hook for this beat in the car but hadn’t found the chance to get to the studio with it. But the hook was stuck in my head.
Zay loaded the beat and let it play. As it did I kept humming my hook to Zay.
“Okay, forget about everything else you guys have been doing here,” he said. “This is the song you need to do.”
I’d never seen him so adamant and I trusted his instincts. Coach K agreed.
“Yeah, let’s try it,” he said.
I had been humming the melody of this hook more than singing it because I wasn’t much of a singer. But Jeezy had a friend at the session named Lil’ Will from Atlanta’s legendary Dungeon Family, who could sing for real. So I wrote down the lyrics to the hook.
All these girls excited
Ooo ya know they like it
I’m so icy, so icy
Girl, don’t try to fight it
All yo friends invited
I’m so icy, so icy
As soon as Lil’ Will laid down the hook everybody in the studio was on board. Well, almost everyone. Jeezy still didn’t like it. It wasn’t the grimy street sound he was used to. It was melodic with a catchy hook.
“Let’s just do some street shit,” Jeezy insisted. “Something edgier.”
Some kind of way Coach and Jeezy’s crew persuaded him to do it. We did our verses and as soon as we finished copies were pressed. A few days later Jeezy asked if he could get on the “Black Tee” remix too, coming in right after Bun B’s verse. I was all for it. We’d only known each other a few days but everything was coming together nicely.
Collectively we started pushing “So Icy” and the “Black Tee” remix heavy. Doo Dirty and even Meech, whom I still hadn’t met, would be in the clubs tossing bands around to get the strippers and DJs on board with the songs. Before I knew it Hot 107.9 and V-103 had them on heavy rotation. My buzz in Atlanta blew the roof off. Suddenly everyone wanted a piece of Gucci Mane.
?
It wasn’t long before labels came knocking. The first to offer me a deal was T.I.’s Grand Hustle. I had known Clay Evans, the vice president of the label, from before “Icy.” He knew me from the open mic nights at the Libra and he’d taken an interest in my career. The first shows I ever got paid for were through Clay. He took me out to Chattanooga and small towns in Alabama and got me like five hundred dollars to perform, which was nothing, but I was so happy that I was actually getting paid to perform my music. I’ve still got love for Clay because of that. I even shouted him out on a song years later.
T.I. many times encouraged, told me face the game with courage
Clay gave me some great advice and still today I’m thankful for it
—“Worst Enemy” (2009)