Eminem

Whatever you think of Eminem now, there was a time when the indie crowd went nuts for him. When "Just don't give a fuck" hit college radio there was a huge buzz, and it seemed like just a few weeks later we were hearing he was signed to Interscope. We busted our asses to get the Interscope account when we heard this, because we knew that with our reach in the indie/skate market, plus all the work we were doing for commercial labels at that point, that we were uniquely positioned to help break Eminem in Boston. We knew Em's manager, so when another company dropped the ball, we basically got a call from the manager saying "drop what you are doing and come do an in-store for me right now," and we did. I might be mixing up my timeline, but I'm fairly sure we hijacked Newbury Comics on Newbury Street and turned what was supposed to be a "walk-thru" into a full-on signing event, it was a mob scene, and Newbury was really pissed off at us for awhile.

It was interesting hanging out with Eminem at that stage of his career. He wasn't "untouchable" yet, so we got plenty of chances to grab a beer (or twelve) and drive him around places. He was sort of like a cartoon character ... very animated, and loosely sketched.

We worked with Lyricist Lounge to do their tour in Boston which De La Soul headlined. Eminem was on the bill, and even as a mostly unknown people were going nuts. We did an afterparty for this show, and Eminem was completely plastered, and forced me to do several tequila shots with him. We then went with Interscope up to a show/snowboard event in Vermont (Brooklyn Vermont) where Eminem was opening for Black Star ... which when you think of it is funny in a number of ways.

Eminem also did a posse record on Rawkus for Soundbombing II with Shabaam Sahdeeq which cemented his place as one of the best, and certainly the funniest, lyricists of the time.

Eminem blew up so fast that pretty soon we couldn't get within 50 feet of him, but we kept a good relationship with his manager for a while, and got to some events and such over the years. His original DJ, DJ Head, was a really cool guy who we ran into a bunch of times after that.

Here is the video that started it: