Method Man has recalled his first time meeting 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 legend shared the anecdote during his interview on Drink Champs over the weekend, where he remembered flying 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).
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During the night, Meth 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’m 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.’
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“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 continued, owing his paranoia to the East Coast vs. West Coast beef that was sizzling at the time. “I just don’t wanna be on anybody’s fucking radar at this point — the shrooms.”
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Method Man said he then tucked 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 recalled. “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.
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“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 remembered bumping into 2Pac and Suge Knight at the end of the party as he was leaving 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.”
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Meth continued: “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 is on, n-gga! He in Suge mode.
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“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 alley way, and we sat there and we discussing that whole night of how that shit was so fucking weird […] It was definitely the mushrooms.”
The Tical MC also revealed 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 track was released shortly after Method Man appeared on The Notorious B.I.G.‘s “The What,” making him one of the few rappers to work with both Biggie and ‘Pac when they were both still alive.
As Meth clarified 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.”
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“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 got family members and we from everywhere. So if somebody did feel a certain kind of way, it was rectified really fast.”
