In the late '80s D.O.C. was recruited to Southern California by Dr. Dre 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. What the MCs who used his words admired about him was not just his rhymes, but his ability to mold ideas and fragments into memorable songs.
Brandon Showers
An auto accident cut short D.O.C.'s recording career, but his influence on rap runs strong.
Brandon Showers
D.O.C. hopes a medical procedure using stem cells will restore his voice.
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"He showed me how to take the greatness out of the words, and combine that into a verse, a hook, a bridge," Snoop told English radio personality Tim Westwood recently.
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, he fell asleep and slammed into a tree, hitting it with his face.
"I had so much in my system that they couldn't sedate me," he remembers now, over a late dinner in Los Angeles.
He fought the medics when they tried to insert a breathing tube into his trachea, 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 the 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, which has moved more than six million albums.
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 that 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 five million albums combined — he never got his business affairs straight, and thus never received his proper publishing. Content to stay in Dre's posh houses, eat fancy meals with the crew and get blitzed, he didn't grow rich like those around him.
"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 in October 2009, when, while eating dinner together at a steakhouse, the pair had a huge blowup and proceeded to part ways.
This wasn't the first time they'd taken a break from working together, but the nasty argument — which D.O.C. still refuses to discuss — convinced him that their partnership was over.
He's since sought to get his life back together, preparing for highly experimental stem-cell 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 of the singer's home overlooking White Rock Lake, while adding that he remains very much enchanted with her. In fact, he hopes to film a reality show before long about the goings-on in her house, ending with a wedding between him and Badu.
D.O.C. is well-built, 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 a Mexican eatery 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.)
