This beat was retarded and I went in right away, freestyling about lemonade and canary diamonds and a yellow Aston Martin. Lemonade-complexion east Australian girls. Everything yellow. The initial idea came from me running out of Sprite to pour my lean into that night and instead using lemonade.
Like with so many of my big records, I didn’t know how big “Lemonade” would be when I made it. Picking the winners was never easy considering how much I was recording. Truthfully, I was kind of distracted. I was in Vegas mode. My mind was on girls and gambling. I had a party going on in my room and was eager to get back to it. After I freestyled the verse and came up with a hook, I did just that.
When I popped back into the studio a few hours later, Bang had cooked up another beat for me to jump on: “Stupid Wild.” Lil Wayne and Cam’ron eventually ended up on that one too.
I love the songs that came out of that session because they were made in the middle of one of my wild Vegas nights. Not before the party started. Not in the aftermath. During. You hear it in me. The energy of Sin City.
A week or two after I got back to Atlanta I got a call from Bang. We’d never gotten around to finishing “Lemonade.” I’d actually forgotten about it. That whole weekend was a blur.
Bang hadn’t. He’d been working on it.
“Look, I changed it around a little, but I think you’re going to like it.”
Bangladesh had swapped my hook for one that featured his daughter and little nieces singing.
Lemons on the chain with the V-Cuts
Lemons on the chain with the V-Cuts
Lemonade and shade with my feet up
Lemonade and shade with my feet up
Lemon pepper wings and a freeze cup
Lemon pepper wings and a freeze cup
Lemons in their face, watch ’em freeze up
Lemons in their face, watch ’em freeze up
Bangladesh had delivered. This new hook was better than what I’d done, and the finished beat for “Lemonade” was harder than what he had played me at the Palms.
?
Halfway into the making of The State vs. Radric Davis I violated my probation. I’d pissed dirty and left town without a permit. Those were the technicalities that triggered the violation, but really I was behaving badly all around. Of course at the time I didn’t think I was doing anything wrong. I was just having a lot of fun spending this money. You ever see that movie Get Him to the Greek? It was something like that.
Once again the violation couldn’t have happened at a worse time. Todd, Coach, and my lawyers sprung into action and hatched a plan to check me in to rehab. Their thinking was that the judge wouldn’t pull me out of rehab and send me to jail if I was seeking treatment. I’d still have a court date when I got out for a probation violation hearing, but the chances of me not getting sent back to jail would be a whole lot better if I was fresh off a ninety-day drug treatment program. As far as contingency plans go, this one wasn’t bad. But I didn’t go easy.
Treatment was going to cost around fifty thousand dollars. While that wasn’t breaking the bank, it was enough of an excuse for me to refuse. Plus ninety days of rehab meant ninety days of not doing shows or features, so there was real money at stake.
“Look, Todd, I got bills to pay,” I told him.
“We’ll cover the bills, Gucci,” he told me. “Please, just go.”
Todd talked me into it but when he met with Tom Whalley, the chairman and CEO of Warner Bros., he wouldn’t put the money up. He said he’d only cut a check for two months of the three-month program. It had taken so much for Todd to get me to agree to go to rehab in the first place. He knew that if he came to me and said I’d have to pay out of my own pocket, it would be the last conversation he and I would have about rehab. But Todd did tell me about his meeting with Tom, and then he told me he was going to write me a personal check to cover the last month.
“So . . .” he said as he wrote out the check. “You know you’ve got to get this back to me at some point?”
I had always liked Todd. He had become a confidant and trusted adviser. Even when I met him 2004 and he had the Mohawk and I thought the dude was crazy, I liked the guy. But when he wrote me that personal check, that really meant something. That moment solidified us as friends on a deeper level.
I was still in complete denial about my drug problem. To me a drug addict was like the J’s I’d served growing up in East Atlanta. Broke. Desperate. Missing teeth. That wasn’t me. I was just enjoying an exciting lifestyle and it wasn’t affecting my pockets. But I didn’t want to let Todd and everyone else invested in my career down. So I went to rehab.
?
My time at the Talbott Recovery addiction treatment center was not unlike my time at Georgia Perimeter College. I was there but I wasn’t really there. I didn’t know what to expect when I checked in, but the place wasn’t so bad. The folks there were mostly good people. But I was so bored. I’d been out having the time of my life, traveling from city to city, selling out shows, and now I had to sit in a circle with strangers and talk about problems I didn’t believe I had. I had committed to staying sober throughout rehab, but I couldn’t wait to get it over with.
There was still a possibility I’d be sent to jail even after I completed rehab, so The State vs. Radric Davis needed to be ready to go. That meant I had to bend the rules. With the help of this cool white dude who worked at the center I began sneaking out in the middle of the night to record. He’d kindly cover me. At the time, the big thing in the industry was live-streaming studio sessions on Ustream, but I had to let producers I was working with know that I couldn’t be on camera because I was supposed to be sound asleep at rehab.
Sober and with a hard deadline in front of me, I was more focused and determined than ever, and it resulted in some of my best music. I’d always thought I needed to be high to record, but I discovered I was making some of my best songs clean. I even put the freestyling on hold and got back to writing. Not just writing verses but writing full songs. Records like “Heavy,” “Worst Enemy,” even “Wasted,” which was done before the rehab. I made all those songs sober.
Speaking of “Worst Enemy,” I ran into him during my time at Talbott.
I’d been granted a two-day break to go home and see my family and friends. The idea was for me to get acquainted with living a sober life outside of rehab.
I was out to lunch at Houston’s in the Lennox Mall. It was me, Coach, Polow, and the rapper Chubbie Baby. Jeezy and one of his boys happened to be there too, but I didn’t see them until I left the restaurant. They were standing outside waiting for us.
This was a very, very weird situation. Jeezy had just dissed me and OJ on “24-23” after I sent a few shots his way on a track called “Hurry” off Writing on the Wall.