This Man Desperately Needs Help

Hunched over, dressed in a prison-issue green shirt, inmate Russell Tyrone Jones shuffles hesitantly across the room, looking much older than a 33-year-old should.

Right now he doesn’t remotely resemble the Ol’ Dirty Bastard who hijacked the stage at the Grammys in 1998 to protest the fact that his group, the Wu-Tang Clan, had lost an award to Puff Daddy. That ODB made a merry fool of himself, famously declaring on national TV that “Wu-Tang are for the children.” This ODB just looks sad, defeated and nervous.

The first thing he says, with a puzzled expression on his face, is “Who are you?”

Ol’ Dirty Bastard has a new CD out. Appropriately, it’s called The Trials and Tribulations of Russell Jones, the product of a man seriously down on his luck. The album was released on D3 Entertainment, a little-known Los Angeles label whose bizarre catalog includes repackages of hits by Patsy Cline and Mel Torme. Gone are the major-label promotion budget and the big-name producers, such as the Neptunes, who helped Ol’ Dirty Bastard in the past.

“Ah . . . my album?” he says, confused. He looks at the floor. When he glances up, his eyes dart around. He has acquired the habit of the prison underdog: Avoid eye contact at all costs.

ODB’s new label attempted to contact him through his attorney to let him know about our interview, but he looks perplexed.

Yes. Your album . . .

“When’s it coming out?” he asks, suddenly curious. He clearly knows little about the new CD. He sits down across a long table that separates inmates from visitors. “So,” he says, “um, what do you want to know?”

Well, for a start, how are things going in here?

He sighs and rubs the left side of his head. “Not too good,” he says sorrowfully. “Not too good.”

The Trials and Tribulations of Russell Jones is ODB’s third solo record. His first, 1995’s Return to the 36 Chambers: The Dirty Version, was released at the peak of his talent, when the Wu-Tang clique was busy rewriting the hip-hop rulebook. When every other MC was affecting moody gangsta cool, ODB was out-and-out psychotic. His growling, quavering, blustering delivery was instantly recognizable, as was his outrageous, scatological wordplay.

He became hip-hop’s clown prince, lending his stamp of ghetto crazy to such pop hits as Mariah Carey’s “Fantasy” and Pras’s “Ghetto Supastar.” But it took four years to record his sophomore CD, Nigga Please, a fact easily explained by lyrics like “I’m immune to all viruses/I get the cocaine/It cleans out my sinuses.” ODB, a.k.a. Osirus, a.k.a. Big Baby Jesus, a.k.a. Dirt Dog, is a man who loved his drugs — a romance that in large part shows why, aside from a few brief weeks on the lam, he has not been a free man since July 1999.

A noose of legal problems was already tightening around Ol’ Dirty Bastard when he accosted a security guard at the House of Blues in Los Angeles in September 1998 and was charged with making “terrorist threats.” In February 1999, he won the dubious distinction of being the first citizen arrested under a new California law that made wearing a bulletproof vest illegal for convicted felons. Two months later, ODB was picked up by the NYPD in Queens after running a red light. Police found 20 bags of crack in his 1994 Mercedes-Benz. For those offenses, Dirty was sentenced to three years’ probation and one year in Impact House, a residential drug-rehab facility in Pasadena, California.

In mid-October 2000, just two months short of completing his treatment, Dirty walked out of Impact House after a disagreement with the staff. Fans roared a month later when ODB, now a fugitive, appeared onstage with Wu-Tang Clan at Manhattan’s Hammerstein Ballroom. A few days later, he was arrested in the parking lot of a McDonald’s in Philadelphia. Dirty’s probation violation, coupled with his previous 1999 drug arrest, left Judge Joseph Grosso little choice but to sentence the rap star to two to four years in prison. In a life lousy with rotten judgment, running out on rehab may have been the dumbest move ODB ever made.

The Clinton Correctional Facility is a bleak, ugly place set on a remote New York hillside near the Canadian border. Its nickname is “Little Siberia.” Locals say there are two seasons here: winter and July. Built in 1845 to hold some of the state’s toughest prisoners, its thick red stone buildings abruptly rise from the snow around them. Paint peels from the high concrete perimeter walls.

In the fall of 2001, authorities shipped ODB from Arthur Kill Correctional Facility in downstate New York up here to Clinton, in the town of Dannemora. Home to just under 3,000 prisoners, Clinton still has a reputation as an especially hard place to do time. Tupac Shakur was incarcerated here before Suge Knight bailed him out — an experience that shook Shakur badly.

Getting to Clinton is a 320-mile journey from New York City. ODB’s mother, Cherry Jones, and his wife, Icelene, visited regularly when he was in Arthur Kill. Now they say it’s almost impossible to make the trip. “Do I get visitors?” says ODB. “Seldomly. I do get visitors seldomly.”

Inmate 01 A 4392 listens with vague interest to the news about his album. He’s never seen artwork for it. “Have you got it?” he asks. “I want to see that.” But visitors aren’t allowed to bring anything in.

Elektra, his former label, dropped ODB when his legal problems became too great. “I think they just felt it was too difficult to deal with an artist who is incarcerated,” says D3’s founder, Aldy Damian.

After Suge Knight was jailed, Damian won the right to distribute Death Row’s catalog. When ODB’s manager, Bo Glasper, told Damian about Elektra’s decision, Damian put together a deal. In return for an undisclosed advance paid to Icelene, Glasper and Wu-Tang leader RZA supplied D3 with previous ODB recordings — many just snippets or half-recorded tracks. Damian also paid to use the Wu-Tang logo on the CD’s sleeve.

One hopes Damian got his money’s worth. Hip-hop does have a history of artists making albums in absentia. But ODB is no 2Pac, with reams of unheard recordings to plunder. Much of this material has been gathering dust for a while. Often, producers have stitched new tracks under old rhymes. ODB’s verse on “Dog Shit,” from 1997’s Wu-Tang Forever, for instance, has become a track called “Dogged Out.” The “new” single “Dirty & Stinkin’ ” is actually “Last Call,” a song he recorded for a shelved solo project, now rebuilt by Damian with Insane Clown Posse.

ODB listens blankly to the list of guest artists the label has cobbled together: Mack 10, Too Short, C-Murder and E-40. “E-40 is on there?” says ODB, brightening briefly. “He has the same birthday as me.”

“That was some of the reason I signed him,” says Dante Ross of ODB’s troubled personal life. Ross was the A&R man who brought ODB to Elektra. “His dysfunction was the attraction, to an extent. You don’t come across a character like that too often. He was a calamity waiting to happen. That’s kind of the beauty of it.”

The Wu-Tang Clan sold themselves as nine cartoonlike superheroes fighting their way out of the ghetto with mystical powers of rhyme and rhythm. If Method Man was the cool one and RZA was the deranged genius scientist, ODB was the fall-on-his-face, drunken monk — the lascivious, welfare-grabbing, coke-snorting ghetto star who still got to guest on Mariah Carey’s records.

“He goes against the grain,” says the Neptunes’ Pharrell Williams. “But those are the people who are remembered in history. Jesus was a rebel.”

For most of the Wu-Tang Clan, success meant escaping the disastrous poverty of their roots. ODB had as hard an upbringing as anyone. Raised on public assistance by his mother in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene neighborhood, he spent some time in a group home and was a teenage father.

He hung out with his cousins, Wu-Tang’s RZA and GZA, on Staten Island, and often rode the subway to 42nd Street with them to watch kung-fu movies. The three began assembling the imagery and rhymes that provided the foundation for the Wu-Tang phenomenon.

How much have you changed since the days when you, GZA and RZA first started performing together?

“I was a lot sharper then. I’m not so sharp now,” ODB says sadly. “It’s like somebody’s put the kitchen implement up on the shelf, if you know what I mean.”

Early in his career, his obviously unique talent shone. But with success came an increasing appetite for drugs. “At the time I was working with him, I didn’t see any hard drugs,” says Beth Jacobson, a vice president at Elektra when ODB recorded his first solo album. “Only weed. And he liked to drink. Crack and dust: These are things I found out later he was dabbling in.”

ODB’s chaotic offstage life quickly became better known than his music. In November 1997, he was arrested for failing to pay child support for three of his 13 children. The following June, he was shot in the back during what he said was a robbery of his Brooklyn home. That same month, he was accused of shoplifting a pair of sneakers. The incident at the House of Blues in L.A. occurred that September.

In 1999, things got worse. In January, NYPD officers accused him of firing a gun at them (the charge was later dismissed). In March, he was arrested for having drugs in his car; then in July came the arrest that led to his removal from the streets.

He was ODB. The man who didn’t give a fuck.

Now, sitting here like Randle McMurphy after Nurse Ratched has finally crushed him in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, a chastened ODB talks quietly in terms that occasionally verge on the surreal.

“It’s not easy for me,” he says miserably. “I feel like I’m in a spaceship that has just landed here. And when you get out, you realize there’s nothin’ there at all. I don’t know.” Pause. “This is a corrupt facility,” he says, glancing nervously to his left, where two guards watch. “In here. There’s people in here that are corrupt.”

He looks scared. Who wouldn’t in a place like this?

Last year, ODB was assaulted by fellow prisoners in a New York holding facility and suffered a broken leg. “What happened?” he says. “I was in a fight.” He refuses to disclose more.

Now his routine is simple. Every morning, he attends a drug-rehabilitation class. He spends the rest of his time in his cell. It’s small, but he doesn’t have to share it with anyone.

Have you made any friends in here?

“Friends?” he says, as if that’s a dumb question. “Oh, no. I don’t have any friends in here.”

You keep to yourself?

“Yes — oh, yes,” he says emphatically. “I don’t mix with other people.”

So what do you do here?

“Watch TV.”

Are you learning anything from the rehab class?

He sighs. “Not really.”

You turned 33 two weeks ago. What did you do?

“I didn’t do much. Watch TV.”

Not your favorite birthday.

“No,” he says with a wry smile. “Not the best. There ain’t much good on TV.”

When ODB was in court in July 2001 for sentencing, some reporters saw bandages he was wearing on his left wrist as evidence of a suicide attempt. His attorney, Peter Frankel, insists that reports of ODB’s mental instability are exaggerations: “[The bandages were] in a location that would not be consistent with the suggestion that there was a suicide attempt.”

When you were imprisoned last summer, people were concerned about your mental health. You were reportedly kept on suicide watch.

Dirty gazes at the table in front of him. “I think things are a lot worse with me now,” he says.

Your state of mind is worse?

“Yes.”

Do you take any medication?

“No.” He shakes his head. “I don’t. You have to keep your eyes open here, so you can’t take anything. This isn’t a place where you would want to not know what was going on. This place,” he says, “it’s full of convicts.”

“He got a raw deal,” says RZA. “If you’re a drug abuser, you need help. And jail is definitely no help for a drug addict. And he’s in jail with murderers, killers, rapists — and he’s none of those. The only person he ever hurt was himself.”

All of which raises the question: Why didn’t anyone put a stop to ODB’s downward spiral?

Beth Jacobson remembers one music-industry event at which Dirty approached her at a packed Miami nightclub. To her horror, she realized he wanted her to watch another woman perform oral sex on him. “It was dark, but when I realized what I was seeing, I was mortified,” Jacobson says.

Later that night, ODB came back and put his arm around her. “What the fuck was that?” the Elektra executive asked him. “You thought I would like that?”

“Ah, baby,” he replied, “I just wanted you to see how I could get my dick sucked, Elektra-style.”

Jacobson was outraged — both that he had done it, and that he could get away with such behavior. “At that point,” she says, “somebody should have stopped him and said, ‘Listen. This shit is not going to fly.’ ”

Jacobson feels that nobody wanted to — because everyone was enjoying the show too much. Dante Ross witheringly underscores the point: “To a lot of people who deem themselves politically correct — collegiate types — I think Dirty became their minstrel show. He was as close as they could get to the ghetto and watch someone totally dissolve as a human, while sitting far enough back to laugh.”

“It was the drugs,” ODB says heavily. “It was the drugs.”

He now wears the look of a damaged man. If things go right, ODB could be back on the streets in a matter of weeks. He seems not to realize this, but as Tupac Shakur remarked after he’d been released from Clinton, “When you’re in jail, you don’t think you’re ever coming back.”

Buddy Arnold, who runs the Musicians Assistance Program (MAP), a charity for drug-addicted musicians, is skeptical about ODB’s chances on the outside. “Do many people make it out of that cycle?” Arnold asks. “No. It’s always been easier for musicians to get loaded, because people want to hang with them. And if they know you like a certain thing, they’ll bring it.”

Ross is also pessimistic. “No one was ever able to get the message through to him, the same as with Tupac: ‘Dude, you’re going to die if you keep this shit up.’ ”

ODB chats idly for a couple of hours. His face lights up only when talk turns to cities the Wu-Tang Clan played while on tour, places like Paris and Tokyo, places far away from here.

“London. I wish I was there,” he says sadly. “Tell me about London. What’s it like now?”

Afterward, we shake hands and agree to meet the next day. ODB seems pleased to have had the chance to talk — especially about the world outside his cell. He wants to see the artwork for his album, and I’ve promised to bring him someone’s phone number.

I return in the morning and wait for ODB to reappear. He doesn’t. “Sorry,” says the guard. “He’s refusing the visit.”

The next day, the same thing happens. He stays in his cell, as if he feels sure of himself nowhere else right now.

I remember something he told me two days earlier in a tone half puzzled, half mournful: “You know, I don’t know whether Ol’ Dirty Bastard is even here anymore,” he said. “I think he’s gone.”

Stars and Bars
Ol’ Dirty Bastard is but the latest music star to swap a big house for the big house

BACH ON THE CHAIN GANG
One of music’s earliest inmates, composer Johann Sebastian Bach incurred the wrath of his employer, Duke Wilhelm Ernst of Weimar, in 1717, by announcing he was taking another job. So displeased was Ernst that he sent Bach to das grosse haus for four weeks before deciding to release him.

LIVE AT SAN QUENTIN
In 1957, 20-year-old Merle Haggard was sentenced to five years in San Quentin for a drunken, bumbling attempt to break into a restaurant. While in jail, Haggard headed a gambling ring and brewed beer in his cell. The country great would later draw on his experiences for the classics “Mama Tried” and “Branded Man.”

JOHNNY BE BAD
“The only real bother about prison,” Chuck Berry once said, “is the loss of love.” Yet it was love that put him there in 1962, when he was charged with transporting a teenage girl across a state line for immoral purposes. During his 20 months up the river, Berry wrote some of his most memorable songs, including “Nadine” and “No Particular Place to Go.”

HELP!
Denied entry into Japan for many years thanks to a history of pot-related legal scrapes, Paul McCartney finally landed at Tokyo’s Narita airport in January 1980, when officials found more than seven ounces of cheeba in his luggage. Macca spent 10 days in jail before being deported.

THE MAN WHO SNORTED A BOAT
In 1983, Boomer icon/drug abuser David Crosby was sentenced to five years in the pokey on narcotics and weapons charges. “One day David said that if he had the money, he would sail away on his boat and make himself quit drugs,” said one friend of the then-free-on-appeal singer. “We had to point out that he no longer had a boat.”

SUPERFREAKOUT
In the mid-’90s, superfreak Rick James served two years of a five-year sentence after a brace of violent attacks on women. “I thank God for bringing me here,” declared James midway through his jail stint. “Where else can you learn how to make bombs out of toothpaste?”

RESIDENT CLINTON
In 1994, gangsta-rap avatar Tupac Shakur was found guilty of sexual assault and sentenced to four and a half years in jail. Just eight months in, Shakur was sprung from New York’s Clinton Correctional Facility by Death Row Records CEO Suge Knight, who secured a $1.4 million bond so Shakur could begin work on his Death Row debut, All Eyez on Me.
Clark Collis