A FIRESIDE CHAT WITH LAYZIE BONE AND BIZZY BONE OF BONE THUGS-N-HARMONY


Bone Thugs caught the ear of Eazy, to me, the Godfather of gangsta rap. Now Bone Thugs may be from the streets, they may be from the burbs for all I give a shit, because if it were not for Bone Thugs' E 1999 Eternal and the record breaking "Crossroads," it is arguably doubtful that Eminem would be a household name. Bone Thugs helped (along with others, before I start getting death threats) make rap, particularly gangsta rap, mainstream. 60 Minutes can cry the praise of Jay-Z all they want, my vote is Bone Thugs and to that, the Don, Eazy. But then again, I am merely one man and one vote, so don't be doing no drive bys around my way. You'll wake up my neighbors and they're working folk. I went to Ruthless headquarters and sat down with a Bone and a Thug and Layzie and Bizzy talked at length about their rise, the passing of Eazy, and the new NWA, as always, unedited and in their own words.


FRED JUNG: Let's start from the beginning.

LAYZIE BONE: Well, basically, how we got started was, we've been doing music all our lives. I grew up around a musical family. My mother is a singer. She used to listen the old school, all the old school oldies but goodies growing up into the rap generation when rap was really just starting, that is when I was really priming as a kid, getting into it myself. I've just been doing it all my life. It's been around me, playing instruments, drums, all that.


FJ: Cleveland's inner city is not the most picturesque atmosphere to be raised in.

LAYZIE BONE: Hell yeah, Cleveland is basically, especially the inner cities of Cleveland is basically like every other inner city. It's poverty-stricken. Growing up on welfare, with my momma on welfare, scraping to get by just basically all my life.


FJ: Your road to success was not an easy one.

LAYZIE BONE: Basically, I experienced it all as a youngster. It was there for me to get into. I've been locked up. I've been behind bars. I guess I just had enough ambition and was smart enough to decide which road I wanted to take and that was to be a musician because that was my ambition all my life. I never wanted to really be nothing else.


FJ: How did Bone Thugs-N-Harmony come into being?

LAYZIE BONE: Well, basically, me and Flesh-N-Bone, that's my oldest brother, my blood brother. Wish Bone is my first cousin. I met Krayzie Bone in the seventh grade in a home economics class.


FJ: We will keep that home economics class info on the down low.

LAYZIE BONE: (Laughing) Yeah, and Bizzy Bone, I met him in ninth grade.


FJ: So you have been Bone Thugs for life?

LAYZIE BONE: Right, we grew up together.


FJ: So how does Eazy come into the picture?

LAYZIE BONE: We met Eazy in Cleveland, but first we took one way bus tickets out here (Los Angeles) and we called Eazy and called his office like a thousand times and bugged him, worried him to death, and I guess one of his secretaries got the message though like, "These young boys keep calling. Why don't you call them back?" And so he called us back. We found out he was doing a show in Cleveland in a couple of weeks from the time he had called us. So we hustled up money. Got back to Cleveland and then when we got to Cleveland, we knew some people because we had a local tape out called Faces of Death and so they got us on the show. After Eazy-E and them performed, we bombarded backstage and just started rapping. And Eazy-E was like, "Didn't I hear you all on the phone?" We was like, "Yeah, nigga that's us." And he was like, "Come on in." We took one way bus tickets back to LA.


FJ: You took one way bus tickets out here, what if Eazy would have shut you down?

LAYZIE BONE: I guess we would have been some lost out brothers, Fred, but shit, it was just all in our heart. It was something telling us. It was so hectic in the hood that it was either we were going to fuck around and lose everything in the hood or we're going to go and try this new thing. And we tried it, we was homeless here for about three months. But then, shit, after that, it was on and cracking.


FJ: Where did you guys crash while you were out here?

LAYZIE BONE: Well, my brother knew somebody out here from school and so we stayed with my homeboy Don and his girlfriend Dana for a while. They had a shack in the back of their house that we used to shack out in. It was cool.


FJ: Those are humble roots. You guys aren't shacking out anymore.

LAYZIE BONE: Hell, no (laughing). We livin' large!


FJ: It caught us all off guard, Eazy's death.

LAYZIE BONE: Oh, yeah, Fred, that was a hell of an experience. It was just like we were just now getting our foot through the door because it was like once we got with Eazy, we felt like a burden lifted off our shoulders and when E died, it was like, "Damn, what the fuck are we going to do now?" That was our whole mentality. We just started taking the little knowledge that we was able to acquire from E and just start, I put together Mo Thug Records. We started branching out on how we could survive if E wasn't and everything didn't go right with Ruthless because we didn't know what was going to happen at that time.


FJ: It was sudden, did any of you see it coming?

LAYZIE BONE: Hell, no, we ain't see it coming, Fred. I got my own theory about how Eazy-E died and all that stuff.


FJ: I love a good conspiracy theory.

LAYZIE BONE: My whole theory is that the dude was so healthy in the prior months that I don't know, it might be my paranoia, but I think with him dealing with the money he was dealing with and the Jews he was dealing with, when he fired these Jews, it was like the dude went to the doctor probably for a annual checkup and he got injected with that shit because in December, he had a common cold. January, he was HIV positive. February, he had full blown AIDS. And March, he was dead. It don't happen like that homeboy. If he would have just found out that he was just, if he hadn't went to the doctor in ten years and he found out he had full blown AIDS, he probably could have lived longer than that. It was just my theory that he got sick one month, diagnosed with HIV, and then full blown AIDS, and then dead, all in a four month span, that shit is kind of tricky to me.


FJ: What pissed me off about the whole drama is that Eazy started the gangsta tip, but no one gives the man his props.

LAYZIE BONE: Right, but I believe it was because the way he died. See, Fred, when 2 Pac got shot by bullets, he was heroic. If Eazy-E would have gotten shot in the head or something, they would have been like, "Oh, E the man!" But since he died of AIDS, the motherfuckers didn't really want to talk about it because they didn't want to give him his props because motherfuckers was talking about him off the riff. He had started everything, which we all know. People say that he fucked them, but I can't tell because he didn't fuck us. I just see it as he was getting the most money because he was doing the most shit, solo albums, group albums, owning the company, he was entitled to what he was getting. I believe that if he would have died of any other circumstance, then he would have been that hero that everybody was pumping up just like Biggie when Biggie got killed. They get more props than Eazy-E. I love Eazy and Biggie and 2 Pac all the same, but I don't think that they gave him the recognition like that because he had died of AIDS.


FJ: The industry and the media pitted East Coast and West Coast together and that led to some unfortunate and unnecessary things happening.

LAYZIE BONE: I mean because bottom line is competition is money. One coast versus the other coast. This coast started this so everybody over here felt like they should get the most "Ps" and then gansta rappers over here felt that they should get the most "Ps." It was just a whole political thing, really, I felt like to shut the whole rap game down because if we would have all fed into it, then it would have been like West Coast can't go to the East Coast and East Coast can't go to the West Coast and I think it was all a political plot just to shut us down.


FJ: The people that said rap was a fad are eating their words now.

LAYZIE BONE: Yeah, but they said that shit about rock and roll. It is still going.


FJ: Creepin on Ah Come Up, an EP you released sold in excess of three million copies, nice start.

LAYZIE BONE: Fred, we weren't trippin' on no shit like how many units we were selling or nothing because we didn't know none of that. We was guys from Cleveland. All we wanted to do was rap and so when they came to us the first day like, "You all sold 80,000 records just today." We were like, "Shit, nigga, we ain't got nothing to show for it." It wasn't until after we started accumulating things that we really started looking at it like, "OK, this shit here is business." Because we were just rapping for fun in the beginning and we still rap for fun, but we get paid.


FJ: You all have good accountants?

LAYZIE BONE: Of course (laughing), of course, very good.


FJ: Got to count the nickels.

LAYZIE BONE: Got to count those pennies.


FJ: Let's touch on your first new album in three years, BTNHResurrection.

LAYZIE BONE: Our whole thing was really to get into this album was like we all came together and was like, "All right, we ain't did no album since '97." It had been three years or almost two and a half at that time. And we was like, "Shit, we just got to bring it." But we had so much work accumulated between each other that it wasn't shit when we went into the studio to do the album. The whole concept was like everybody doubting us. They don't think we're going to come together. The media is trying to break us down on every little fluke and flimsy that they could find. It was like our whole thing was like, "We back. It's the resurrection of Bone Thugs-N-Harmony."


FJ: How is BTNHResurrection different from The Art of War?

LAYZIE BONE: This album is different because I believe on this album, we was a lot more hungrier to do this album than we was to do The Art of War because we had sat back and witnessed a lot of things and really analyzed how the rap game was trying to tear Bone Thugs-N-Harmony apart and when we went to go do this album, it was just like, shit, we had issues. Everybody had matured. Our writing skills had gotten better and more in detail. This one, we just really grew up on this album.


FJ: So the Bone Thugs had something to prove with BTNHResurrection?

LAYZIE BONE: Hell, yeah. I think it was a must that Bone Thugs-N-Harmony rushed and released the album because everybody was using our style. I mean everybody from rap, pop, to R&B, everybody was using our shit to flip, flow with the harmony. Everybody was adopting our shit, which is cool, but I felt it was necessary we came back because just to claim our shit.


FJ: There was a lot of drama that was played out with the whole is Bizzy going to stay.

LAYZIE BONE: Right, is Flesh ever going to get out of jail. You see, Fred, they gave us negative press like that, but they never talked about that the "Crossroads" beat out the Beatles record, "Can't Buy Me Love." You never heard too much about the Grammy Award winning Bone Thugs-N-Harmony. They tried to keep all that shit under because I felt like they thought that they couldn't contain us. Therefore, they were trying to bury our shit.


FJ: You never hear of a rapper getting rehab or probation, yet white rock stars have to practically instigate a riot to see any time behind bars.

LAYZIE BONE: They don't jail sentences. They get sent straight to rehab and shit like that. This is America, Fred. That is how the shit was built. It is designed to keep the rich people rich and the poor people poor. It is just now coming to the pinnacle in 2000, where it is all of our country.


FJ: Now, that you are established, what are you doing to bring others up?

LAYZIE BONE: See, what I'm doing is basically, we got basketball leagues, the Midnight Basketball Leagues in Cleveland, we sponsor that. That's a program to get the older, like eighteen and twenty-five year olds off the street. They play ball at night instead of standing on the corner. So we've got that. Then I also got a thing I've got called Harmony Housing, which is for like a harmony house for the kids and it has become like a recreation center. And then, Thanksgiving and shit, we do turkey drives. We do all kinds of shit to make things right.


FJ: How come we never get wind of this?

LAYZIE BONE: Cleveland people love what we do, but it never goes farther than that. Our publicist try to push it, but they would rather talk about why we made a song called "Ecstasy."


FJ: Why did you make a song called "Ecstasy?"

LAYZIE BONE: Because it's true and it's flooding our neighborhood and so we talked about it.


FJ: Is that what keeps the Bone Thugs material tight, the reality of it?

LAYZIE BONE: Right, I mean, what keeps our shit real is we talk about things that happen to us as well as can happen to our kinfolk or our kids. That's what I believe keeps us real is that we don't just talk about what we've been through. We talk about the whole experience of what we see and what we see our people go through. (Enters Bizzy Bone)


FJ: Where do you see your music going now?

LAYZIE BONE: Oh, man, straight to heaven.

BIZZY BONE: Damn, that is what I was thinking.

LAYZIE BONE: Straight to heaven, Fred.


FJ: Are you guys working in solo projects?

LAYZIE BONE: All the time. Well, I got a solo album coming out this summer and also, Bizzy got a solo album coming out this summer or fall, right?

BIZZY BONE: Something like that.

LAYZIE BONE: We got solo albums coming out, so they should be looking out for mines, Bizzy's, Wish's, Flesh's, and Krayzie Bone be coming right back at them again.


FJ: Are the projects coming out on Ruthless?

BIZZY BONE: Nope.

LAYZIE BONE: Mine's will be out on Mo Thugs. Bizzy be out on Seventh Sign, his label. Krayzie's will be out on Thug Line, his label. Wish's will be out on Thug Line. We also got a whole movie selection jumpin' off. We got our own individual movies. We got our Bone Thugs-N-Harmony stories and our Bone Thugs-N-Harmony plots for movies we done had for so long. We all about taking our time and making our shit right. It is going to be real, real professional action and actors in our shit.


FJ: Bizzy, what's the deal with all the drama about you leaving? What do you say to all the doubters?

BIZZY BONE: Kiss my ass! Niggas want me to leave. They know that baby be the bomb!


FJ: You just came off shooting your latest video.

LAYZIE BONE: Yeah, we just shot "Can't Give It Up."


FJ: How long was the shoot?

LAYZIE BONE: Two days.


FJ: People think that video shoots are all about relaxing in the trailers and catered food, but it's work.

BIZZY BONE: It's work

LAYZIE BONE: It is work. If you don't love it, you can just like it. You can't want to do it for beans. You've got to really love it.


FJ: You guys still call Cleveland home?

LAYZIE BONE: Cleveland is the house. Ohio is home. We come out here to get the money and take it back up the way.


Fred Jung is the Editor-In-Chief and is preparing for UN weapons inspections. Comments? Email Him