Supertalented award-winning entertainer, Method Man has remembered his first time meeting the late rap legend 2Pac, and it’s a pretty wild story that involves cameos from Diddy, Suge Knight and Queen Latifah, as well as a copious amount of mushrooms.
The Wu-Tang Clan member communicated the story during his interview on Drink Champs over the weekend, where he recalled catching a flight to Los Angeles to attend the 1996 Soul Train Awards, where he was nominated for Best Rap Album (Tical) and R&B/Soul or Rap Song of the Year (“I’ll Be There for You/You’re All I Need to Get By” with Mary J. Blige).
The Power series actor uttered that the night he had taken shrooms, which didn’t kick in until he was at the awards show’s afterparty at the House of Blues.
“I’m on mushrooms like a muthafucka,” he said. “It didn’t hit me while I was in the club ’til I saw Puff. I see Puffy with like six bodyguards — and then it hit me. It was like, ‘Wait a minute.’
“Mind you, Puff don’t speak to me. No, he speaks to me, but he never speaks to me like this. Embraces me, ‘Meth, wassup n-gga?!’”
“So now it’s like, ‘Oh shit.’ I’m looking around to see if anyone saw me speak to this muthafucka,” he proceeded, owing his paranoia to the East Coast vs. West Coast feud that was hissing at the period. “I just don’t wanna be on anybody’s fucking radar at this point — the shrooms.”
Affectionately called Johnny Blaze mentioned that he then folded himself away in one of the venue’s booths until he was spotted by another familiar face from New York.
“I’m in my head like crazy like, ‘Did that just happen?’ ‘Cause Puff’s never that nice to me,” he thought back to. “I mean, he’s nice, but never that nice to me […] I’m fucked up off these shrooms. Now I’m at the peak of shroom high.
“And I hear, ‘Meth!’ I look and it’s [Queen] Latifah. She was like, ‘What the fuck are you doing up in that corner?! Come here!’ And I snapped out of that shit. I was good the rest of the night after that! Shout out to you, Dana, I love you.”
Method Man then thought back to bumping into 2Pac and Suge Knight at the end of the party as he was departing the venue, and ‘Pac reassuring him that he had nothing but love for Wu-Tang despite the tension between their respective coasts at the time.
“He’s telling me about some incident that happened with RZA in Vegas and if he was there it definitely wouldn’t have happened, blah blah blah,” he said, referencing the Wu-Tang leader allegedly getting his chain snatched in Sin City.
“Basically, he was saying if there was anybody we would fuck with on the East Coast, it’d be Wu-Tang. This is letting us know — and anybody that was in the know — that it wasn’t an East Coast-West Coast thing; it was a Bad Boy-Death Row thing.”
Mef proceeded and added: “He started saying something else but I’m not really listening because I’m looking at the Death Row piece on his chain. This my first time meeting ‘Pac so I’m like, ‘Oh shit, this is fucking 2Pac! Look at that fucking chain!’
“I remember looking at Suge and he got the cigar like this and he’s like [silently mean mugs]… nothing. No expression, just stoic. Cameras are on, n-gga! He is in Suge mode.
“So I’m like, ‘Yeah…’ Walk out, [my crew and I] get out front, and no lie, I remember being in the back of Pink Dot in that alleyway, and we sat there and we discussing that whole night of how that shit was so fucking weird […] It was definitely the mushrooms.”
The ‘All I Need’ hitmaker also disclosed that he and 2Pac never actually discussed their All Eyez On Me collaboration “Got My Mind Made Up” as the song was originally for Tha Dogg Pound (who featured on it alongside Redman).
That tune was released soon after Method Man featured on The Notorious B.I.G.‘s “The What,” making him one of the few Hip Hop artists to work with both Biggie and ‘Pac when they were both still alive.
As the Staten Island native elucidated in his Drink Champs interview, though, “I never got any flak, nobody said shit to me about that shit […] Me and Big were still cool. Big never looked at it in any kind of weird way.”
“Let me tell you something about Wu-Tang,” he added. “For one, you know it’s nine, 10 members. They don’t know that 10 members have family members and we are from everywhere. So if somebody did feel a certain kind of way, it was rectified really fast.”
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