In the late 1980s, D.O.C. was recruited by Dr. Dre to Southern California from his childhood home of Dallas. Shortly thereafter, the Texas-bred wunderkind helped bring gangsta rap to the mainstream, ghostwriting large portions of the biggest West Coast classics, starting with Straight Outta Compton. He gave voice to the volatile yet comedic character of Eazy-E and helped define the personas of Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg. The MCs who used his words admired not just his rhymes but his ability to mold ideas and fragments into memorable songs. "He showed me how to take the greatness out of the words and combine that into a verse, a hook, a bridge," Snoop recently told English radio personality Tim Westwood.
PHOTO BY BRANDON SHOWERS
No one can do it better.
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D.O.C.'s 1989 solo debut, No One Can Do It Better, was expected to make him a star like his collaborators. Featuring his nimble, aggressive yet warm chops, it's considered one of the best rap debuts of all time, and Jay-Z cites it as a profound influence. But while driving home drunk and high from a video shoot for a song from the album, D.O.C. fell asleep and spun out; he was thrown out of the back window before the car slammed into a tree. "I had so much in my system that they couldn't sedate me," he recalls over a late dinner at Sherman Oaks restaurant Senor Fred. He fought the medics when they tried to insert a breathing tube, causing it to scar his larynx. As a result, he speaks in what sounds like a stage whisper, almost like he's talking through a smoker's voice box.
He became utterly demoralized, so much so that when his music came on at a club, he would leave. "I didn't want to hear that voice," he says.
Though his subsequent rap albums wouldn't prove successful — after all, he'd lost his trademark booming baritone — he nonetheless remained tight with his famous friends. He helped Dre and Snoop write The Chronic and Doggystyle, as well as Dre's best-selling 1999 work 2001.
D.O.C., who is 43 and was born Tracy Curry, became relatively content in his position as ghostwriter to the stars, a post he held for two decades. But though he was one of the original owners of Death Row Records and estimates he wrote more than half of each of the first Ruthless Records albums — including Straight Outta Compton and Eazy-Duz-It, which have sold about 5 million albums combined — he never got his business affairs straight, and so never received his proper royalties. Content to stay in Dre's posh houses, eat fancy meals with the crew and get blitzed, D.O.C. didn't grow rich the way those around him did. "I was totally in the grips of the drug lifestyle," he says. "The only thing I was really concerned with was having enough money in my pocket so that I knew I could get high when I wanted to."
Making matters worse, in late 2009 he split with Dre, who'd put him up in a rented house and paid him a $20,000 annual retainer while they worked on Dre's long-awaited album Detox. The situation came to a head that October, when, eating dinner at an Arnie Morton's steak house, the pair had a huge blowup and parted ways. This wasn't the first time they'd taken a break from working together, but the nasty argument — which D.O.C. refuses to discuss — convinced him that their partnership was over.
Since then, he has sought to get his life back together, preparing for highly experimental surgery to restore his voice, mentoring young rappers, going to Alcoholics Anonymous and settling down in his home life.
Still, the split from Dre, combined with the fact that he might never be able to rap like he once did, threatened to embitter him permanently. "I'm probably one of the best motherfuckers to ever pick up a microphone and spit in it," he says, "but you'd never really know that, because I never really got a chance to show you."
Things haven't been all that bad for D.O.C. After falling out with Dre he moved back to Dallas and began living part-time with the stunning and iconic R&B singer Erykah Badu and their 7-year-old daughter, Puma. Also in the house are Puma's well-pedigreed half-siblings: 13-year-old brother Seven, whose father is Outkast's Andre 3000, and 2-year-old sister Mars, whose pops is venerated New Orleans rapper Jay Electronica.
With all of these musical legends coming in and out, it's quite a scene. Badu's Dallas home is a "beautiful house right off of a really nice body of water," D.O.C. says, adding that he remains enchanted with her. In fact, he hopes to film a reality show before long about the goings-on in her house, ending with their wedding.
D.O.C. is well-built and light-skinned, and has a radiant physical presence; upon meeting him it's immediately clear why he was groomed for stardom. He's tremendously charismatic, striding into the Ventura Boulevard Mexican eatery today and chatting up the staff members, many of whom he knows from his days living just across the street. For much of the latter half of the aughts he was ensconced there, just down the street from the Record One studio that Dre liked to use. (That is, when he wasn't randomly flying his collaborators out to places like Hawaii and Reno, where 2001 was largely created.)
