WILD WAYNE: I started doing radio in ’91, just as a part-time little hustle in college. After doing it just for a couple of days, answering the phones and doing some show production work at the station, my character kind of was born: Wild Wayne. I was in college — I was a hot boy at that time — so it just blew up from there. It was a night show, and we were breaking all of this new music. Not just New Orleans music, but early Rap-A-Lot and Suave House stuff. That’s when a lot of stuff started happening musically in New Orleans.
The New Orleans rap scene didn’t have much of an identity yet when I first started. Most of the stuff that New Orleans folks were on, in terms of the consumer, was music from outside of the city. There were only a handful of groups at that particular time: New York Incorporated, Sporty T, Warren Mayes, who was one of the first people to get a [record] deal here. Gregory D and Mannie Fresh were a group, and that was Mannie Fresh pre-Cash Money. That was the early days.
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Not long after that, Cash Money started doing their thing. Cash Money already had boots on the ground and were making waves as an independent label. We probably had more labels than anywhere in the country at that time. A lot of them were just overnight successes, one-hit wonders. Cash Money was not the player that they are now with the legendary status, they were one of those labels that was trying to get on. But they had a good formula, and if you know New Orleans music, they were a kind of a fusion: they were gangster and bounce.
When Cash Money first started, their artists were PxMxWx, Kilo G – Kilo G was their very first artist and their first release. I remember having the wax for that record. I don’t remember who serviced me, but it was Kilo G’s Sleepwalker. That was my very first Cash Money memory. Baby put out a project called Need a Bag of Dope, and they also had U.N.L.V. I was actually living Uptown on 6th and Baronne [in New Orleans’s 3rd Ward] at that time. The house where [U.N.L.V] shot the cover for 6th and Baronne was across the street from where I lived.
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After Kilo G got killed, the label kept pushing, and Juvenile became their big deal. I would talk to Baby — they used to have an office at the start of Tulane Avenue — and he would always tell me about this kid that would leave a rap every day on their voicemail message at the office. They were like, “Man, this kid is really nice.” And that was Wayne, but they didn’t call him Wayne at that time. He was known as Baby D. It was him and B.G. — who went by Lil Doogie — and they had a project called True Story as The B.G.’z. It was a bright turquoise-blue cassette. I’ll never forget it. Wayne was just coming off the block then.
Around that time, Cash Money linked up with a guy named Bobby Marchan. He was a star in the ‘50s and ‘60s, but as the sun set on his musical career, he became a promoter and a booking agent. This is a story nobody ever tells, but he was integral in making them into a business versus just some rap guys. That kind of set them apart from all these other neighborhood corner-store record labels. He was the guy that first started booking them in places around the country, after they had started getting some status. He was booking them in Detroit, booking them in Phoenix, booking them in Little Rock, and all of these places.
The Hot Boys were revolutionary for the music game, because nobody had ever seen anything like that before. Four dudes from the hood, some of them 13 and 14 [years old], driving cars, landing on shit in helicopters, nobody had seen nothing like that. To this day, I still meet artists that were influenced by them guys. “The Hot Boys made me want to rap,” I’ve heard that so many times over the years, and I’m talking about artists from around the country. Those projects became synonymous with hood lore: Cabrini-Green, Fort Greene. Magnolia and Calliope had that kind of global recognition, which was crazy, us being the murder capital of the world around that time. The recognition was there, heavy, and sometimes for the wrong reasons.
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