Notorious B.I.G.: The Wonder Years

He was a straight-A student and a drug dealer, a romantic and a player, an “ugly sex symbol,” a jokester who was often depressed. He counseled kids to stay in school, then dropped out himself. He listened to country music and tore apart stages with his freestyles.

When Christopher Wallace became the Notorious B.I.G., he channeled all of his contradictions into rhymes of unparalleled depth and emotion. But before his debut CD Ready to Die catapulted him to fame in 1994, his experiences on the streets of Brooklyn forged him into a complicated young man.

The only child of a single immigrant mother, Biggie came of age in hip-hop’s golden era. But as Biggie grew up, though, there were two things Voletta Wallace didn’t know about her son. First, he had fallen for the lure of the streets and was selling crack. And second, he had aspirations for his music beyond just being a hobby.

“People don’t know that he spent four or five years working on musical ideas to get to the level that he was on,” says his former neighbor and mentor, jazz trumpeter Donald Harrison. Blender spoke to dozens of Biggie’s friends, lovers and collaborators, who told the story of his early years — and the dreams and disappointments, the joy and pain, that helped create the greatest MC of them all.

+ + +

Christopher Wallace grew up in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, a borderline neighborhood — striving and working-class on one side, urban wasteland on the other. His father, George Latore Wallace, abandoned the family when Chris was 2 years old, leaving him to be raised by his Jamaican-born mom, Voletta. School came easy to him, so from a young age he put his efforts into something that interested and challenged him: hip-hop.

Voletta Wallace (mother): Christopher was a sweet, loving, friendly little boy. He started to write at 2, 2 1/2. I walked into his classroom once and the teacher said, “This little boy is going to be something great.” I wasn’t the only one who thought that anything he touched would turn to gold.

Sam Hubert (childhood friend): Me and Chris linked up in kindergarten. We both had single, West Indian mothers, so they kind of clicked. Our mothers were very protective. I think that’s why the streets were so attractive to us, because we were so sheltered.

Chico Delvec (childhood friend; member of Junior M.A.F.I.A.): Chris’s mom was really strict with him. She bought him a bike for Christmas, and she told him not to ride around the corner — that was where I used to live, and it just looked hood-ified. So he rode around the block, and a friend of mine took the bike from him, and the guy let me get a ride. I guess Chris seen me on his bike, so when I came back around his momma came with him and, you know, she screamed on me.

Wallace: I did what any loving mother would do. I wanted my son to be safe, to be a decent human, to be morally sound, and I wanted to shelter him from the filth of the world. I don’t call that overprotective. I call it being a mother.

Hubert: Chris was really smart. He was always on the honor roll. Every week or so, they would post everyone’s grades to help motivate us, and it got to the point where he didn’t even have to look, he knew his name was in the top percentage. It came effortlessly to him, so he wouldn’t brag. He’d just knock out his schoolwork and have the rest of the day to be Chris.

Sean “Diddy” Combs (recording artist, producer; CEO, Bad Boy Entertainment): In his rhymes, he always sounded like a straight-A student, like someone who read a lot. Funny thing was that he hadn’t actually read that much, but he used words that I had to look up in the dictionary.

Donald Harrison (jazz musician, neighbor): Christopher was always on his front stoop because his mom wouldn’t let him leave the block. I was around, so he would strike up conversations with me. He was precocious, very intelligent. He said he wanted to get into music. I initially thought he would be a jazz musician. One of the things I do is to have young people who want to play music learn a song and sing it. I had him learn a Cannonball Adderley song. And he did. He could sing it — on pitch!

Hubert: We were writing stuff together since he was little, 10 years old, already doing routines in the house. If you could hear those tapes, he really had a lot already.

Abraham Widdi (friend; former coworker, Met Foods supermarket): I met Chris when we were working in the store together. He was about 10 or 11, and I was 17. He used to rhyme while he was packing bags, just rhyming to himself. Nobody took him seriously.

Delvec: I used to come to his house and eat dinner and play his games — he had Coleco Vision and Atari. He would charge us money to come in his house to play his games, a dollar to play 10 games.

Michael Bynum (childhood friend): Most of the time me and Chris would be indoors, just mixing on the turntables, rapping, trying to make up songs. When we were about 13, we formed the Technique Crew. Big was the leader, and I used to do the music. The Techniques was me, Big Chris, Hubert, a guy named Sal, a guy named Tyrone, and another guy named Jase. We made two songs. One was “We Don’t Care,” based on this beef between KRS-One and Queensbridge, going back and forth about where hip-hop started. So we made up a song: “We don’t care where hip-hop started.”

Harrison: I recorded those guys on my little eight-track deck. I have the tapes somewhere. I have some old things Chris wrote; one rhyme started, “Savor the flavor/’Cause I’m your brand-new neighbor.” I actually took his tapes up to Def Jam, and they couldn’t hear it at the time. They said he was young to be speaking on those topics — what life was like on the rough edge of our neighborhood.

Hubert: Chris would listen to the white radio stations and know all types of songs. One time he came to my house and he was like, Yo, I’m having trouble sleeping, put on some country music mad low. It was something he probably did at his house. He was … eclectic.

+ + +

As Christopher reached his teens, his interests broadened beyond music and school. He entered his first serious relationship, and — seeing other neighborhood kids starting to reap the riches of crack slinging — took to the streets himself.

Jan Jackson (former girlfriend; mother of Biggie’s daughter, T’Yanna Wallace): I met Chris when I was coming home from work. I didn’t know him, but we had common friends. I was on a bank of pay phones and he brought his big ass in the booth with me and started making jokes and asking me why I was serious all the time. He was a wonderful artist — he drew me a picture of a ghetto Bart Simpson holding a gun in kind of a street pose, and he put my name underneath it in graffiti.

Robert Izzo (teacher, Westinghouse High School): Chris was naturally outgoing. I ran a Big Brother and Sister program. Biggie was one of our original Big Brothers. He may not have graduated, but a lot of kids stayed in school because of him. He could sit down and talk to kids. He would just tell them to stay in school and struggle through — he gave advice that he hadn’t even followed.

Bynum: Westinghouse was a vocational school. We had a Bunsen burner, we would burn pennies and throw ‘em at people. We would smoke weed in class. We acted stupid, so they kicked us out.

Delvec: When I was 13, I got into my little hustling thing on the block. I used to tell Chris, “Why don’t you come and hang with me?” And he was like, “Naw, naw, you know my moms, she be wilding if she found out I be outside with you on the block.” After a while, he was like “Yo, fuck that, I’ma come hang with you on the block and see what’s up.” And with the pimps hustling, the ho’s and all that — he was kind of nervous because he had never been in that environment before. But he started seeing me with different sneakers everyday, different coats, bikes, all of that. He was like, “Damn, son, I wanna get weed; I wanna do what you do.” So after a while, we hooked him up. And he started getting his own money.

Widdi: He just dealt drugs for entertainment; he never was really a drug dealer.

Hubert: I went to high school in East New York. I’d come back down here and see that raw hustler that he turned into. I was like, Whoa, what the fuck is he doing? I knew Chris, and he could’ve done anything he wanted, but this is what he chose.

Wallace: I never knew. As far as I knew he was packing at the supermarket. Whatever he was doing, he hid it well. And whenever I asked, he denied it. After he died, I read in a magazine that I once took a dish out of his room and it was full of crack — that it was, excuse my words, what he called “his shit.” But I never knew — to this day I don’t know what crack looks like.

+ + +

Despite his extracurricular activities, Christopher hadn’t lost sight of the music. A chance connection to Big Daddy Kane’s DJ led him to a young hip-hop executive with a funny nickname — it turned out to be the break that would jump-start his career.

Delvec: I hooked Chris up with a friend of mine called D-Roc. That’s when he really started getting on the mic and rocking. A guy named 50 Grand was one of the old timers we used to hang out with down there. Big used to come to his house, and Grand always had turntables. Biggie used to get on the mic at parties, baby showers, shit like that.

Easy Mo Bee (producer): He was trying to make the transition from selling drugs to music. He wasn’t happy selling drugs. He used to say, ‘Mo, I gotta get out of this shit.’”

Mister Cee (producer): At the time, I was DJ-ing for Big Daddy Kane. And DJ 50 Grand said, I got this kid from around the way and he’s nice. I was getting ready to go on tour with Kane, so I said I’d listen to him when I got back. And the night I came back, I didn’t even unpack — 50 Grand brought me the cassette and I played it and it was incredible. So Big and 50 Grand came by the house, and I got the idea to redo the demo. They had only a few tracks and one was [built on the Emotions song] “Blind Alley.” I thought we should re-record it with the beat from Kane’s “Ain’t No Half Stepping” and send it to The Source for their Unsigned Hype contest.

Matty C (former journalist; A&R executive): I received Big’s demo from DJ Mister Cee. I was blown away — to me, this was the second coming of Big Daddy Kane. Especially because he was rhyming over the original break from “Ain’t No Half Stepping.” There were a few other songs on the demo that were freestyles over instrumentals. They were tight, but you didn’t need to go past the first one to be like, This dude needs a deal. And that’s all I needed to play for Puff.

Combs: I was putting feelers out because I had some budget to sign a couple of acts. I called up The Source. L.L. Cool J was big then, that sex-symbol R&B rap — so I was looking for a sex symbol, somebody that would drive the girls crazy. Matty C told me about Biggie, so I said send me a picture. He said, No, no, let me just send you the demo.

Matty C: After hearing the first bars of that first song, Puff wanted to know more about him — what does he look like? That was the comical part of the conversation — me trying to tell him that Big’s not exactly an image-driven artist, that he was heavy. And Puff’s trying to figure how heavy: “Is he Heavy D heavy? Or is he Fat Boys heavy?”

Mister Cee: Puffy paged me and said he wanted to set up a meeting. I played Puffy some other demos we had and he said to Big, who didn’t do much talking, “I want you to rhyme for me, right here.” As soon as Biggie kicked a rhyme, Puffy said, “I can have a record out by the summer, how would you like that?”

Combs: When he first walked in, he was so big, so dark — like Liberian, Ethiopian, African dark. I didn’t care, though — his energy overrode that. He was so charismatic. This big guy who looked like a security guard, you wanted to know what was behind these lyrics he was writing.

Faith Evans (recording artist; former wife): Puff said to me, “I’m gonna make him the first ugly sex symbol.”

Hubert: Everything was going wrong for Chris until that Bad Boy business card popped up. He carried that card around — not like it was an idol or anything, but it was just that something could come out of this and change everything.

Jackson: Right around when I was pregnant, he met Puffy. He thought he was a dedicated businessman, that he had his head on straight.

Wallace: I resented Puffy because I’m very education-minded and I wanted Puffy to encourage my son to go to school, not to make this noise and dream of being a millionaire.

+ + +

As Biggie found out, it’s a long road from getting a deal to getting an album out. His frustration with the delays, though, was tempered by the addition of a new family member.

Ed Lover (radio personality): I left the soundtrack to my movie Who’s the Man? in the hands of Andre Harrell and Uptown Records, and Puff, who was doing A&R for Uptown, made sure he got his own artists on the soundtrack. Biggie’s “Party and Bullshit” really represented Brooklyn — nobody had that street cred that Biggie had.

Easy Mo Bee: We got to the part in “Party and Bullshit” where Biggie says, “…and a fucking fight broke out,” and he said, “Yo, Mo, this is what I want. We’re all gonna pile into the booth, and we’re gonna take some chairs, some tables, and just kinda throw shit around, make it sound like a fight in a club.” If you listen really hard in the background you can hear me say, “Yo, what happened to the music?!’”

Dream Hampton (journalist, filmmaker): There were a lot of stops and starts to Biggie’s career. There was a complete album he gave to Andre, and Andre waffled on the project. Uptown was an R&B label, and this wasn’t like anything Andre had put out before. He wanted Puff to recut the original version. Shortly thereafter, Andre fired Puff anyway. Puff said, I’m taking Big with me, and Andre said, Whatever. Biggie was discouraged, though. He was broke, and he really believed his record was never going to come out. And he had a baby on the way.

Jackson: When we had the baby, he said, I’m not doing the diaper thing. He maybe changed T’Yanna’s diapers three times. The first time he was alone with her, she started crying. He called his mother, and she came home from work. When I got home, T’Yanna was sitting there with a bag of Cheese Doodles. He said that’s the only way she wouldn’t cry.

Wallace: Chris became a different person when T’Yanna was born. He said he had a princess now. He loved being a father. I never saw him so happy.

Hampton: People told him he was ugly his entire life, and he knew it was true, so when he showed me his baby, he said, “She cute, right?” He used to sleep with the bassinet right next to his bed — not in the bed, ’cause he thought he was gonna roll over.

Jackson: We broke up when T’Yanna was 6 months old. He came to me one day and said, “This relationship is not where I want to be right now.” I was hurt, but I respected that he didn’t lead me on.

Evans: The first time we met was at a photo shoot of the new Bad Boy artists — myself, Big, and Craig Mack were the only ones who showed up. At lunch break, we started conversating. He asked me to take him and his boys home, and I said OK, because I had room in my truck. About two weeks later, Puff had a Father’s Day party at this club on the Upper East Side. Big and I talked, and he performed that night — and then he went home with me. And from then on we were a couple. It was two months from the time we met until we got married.

Wallace: As a mother, I had questions about that. Who meets someone — and a few weeks later they get married? That must be the love of the century! But I never said I told you so, never said he wasn’t ready. And I liked Faith, and later, I adored my grandson.

+ + +

Now that Biggie had daughter to support, Puffy needed to keep him busy with one-offs and guest spot, so he didn’t lose him to the hustle. But from those one-verse gems and a growing reputation as a live performer, the Notorious B.I.G. soon found himself with one of the most-anticipated debut albums ever.

Eddie F (recording artist, producer): My production company had done about half of Mary J. Blige’s What's the 411?album. Around that time, Puff was staying with me, and Big started coming around the office. Puff was doing remixes on the songs, and if he had a hot rapper or someone who he thought was promising, he’d put them on the remix.

Mary J. Blige (recording artist): Big performed on the “Real Love” remix, but I hadn’t met him or even seen him yet. I became a fan the first time I heard his voice. The things he said, just in his pocket — “Look up in the sky, it’s a bird, it’s a plane!/Nope, it’s Mary J/Ain’t a damn thing changed” … I lost my mind like the rest of the world. When we did the “What’s the 411” remix, he was just leaning on the wall, listening to the music, writing the rhyme in his head, I guess, since I never saw him write anything down. He went into the booth and killed it. It was like watching something supernatural.

Da Brat (recording artist): Jermaine Dupri told me Big wanted do a song [“Da B Side”] with me. JD did the beat, and we went to his little basement studio. Big didn’t use pen and paper. He said he was almost done, and I had my paper, like, halfway done with my lyrics. I’m like, OK, how is this dude almost done? And he just went in the booth and did it. No paper, no anything. Mind you, this dude smoked like Bob Marley. I was just impressed that his memory was so great.

Nas (recording artist): I saw him perform before I knew him. He came into this club, and guys were like, Who does this guy think he is? They kinda chuckled. ’Cause any new guy had to be brave to step onstage with established artists. And all of a sudden, he takes the stage and he rocks some fucking freestyle and just grabbed people’s attention, and then left without a smile and walked out of the club.

Combs: Biggie was such an incredible performer, which is especially hard if you don’t dance. It was like his eyes rolled to the back of his head — not a lot of movement but captivating and intense, like watching Miles Davis or Billie Holiday. If he moved a little bit, just moved his head, people would go crazy.

Hubert: I saw Big write “Juicy” [from Ready to Die] up in his mom’s crib. There was, like, 50 people in that little room. He’d be on the bed, weed smoke all around. And just thinking, thinking, thinking.

Mister Cee: People heard a lot of Ready to Die before the CD officially came out. There was a huge frenzy around it. DJ Clue put five or six songs from it on a mix tape, and Biggie and Puffy were ready to beat his ass. Everybody was buying that tape. It was a gift and a curse — nothing like that had ever happened to a debut artist.

Craig Mack (former Bad Boy recording artist): When Arista Records sent us on the Bad Boy promotional tour, Big and them didn't have any luggage. We were leaving for, like, seven days, and Big showed up at the airport with a hundred little Pathmark plastic bags tied up as their luggage.

Matty C: The richness of Ready to Die came from Big’s willingness to trust himself musically and creatively. Puff did a lot, but a lot was Big’s visions — tracks he picked and said, I’ma rhyme to this. It just showed his confidence, his intelligence to really see his vision through.

Nas: When Ready to Die came out, you could feel it — a big change was about to happen.