In an appearance on Drink Champs, Method Man recalled meeting Diddy and 2Pac at the 1996 Soul Train Awards during the height of hip-hop's West Coast-East Coast tension.
"So, this shit going on with the East Coast-West Coast shit, I fly out to Cali that day for Soul Train," he said around the 18-minute mark, as seen above. Method Man said that he noticed Suge Knight getting on the same plane as him from New York City, which he found "interesting" considering the issues between Death Row Records and Bad Boy Records at the time. "He ain't say shit to me either. No, he did when he got off the plane though, he did the head nod that Suge did," he continued. "I ain't even say shit back, though."
Later that day, Meth attended the Soul Train party at the House of Blues. "I'm on mushrooms like a motherfucker," he said while imitating the stiff body language he had while on shrooms at the party. "It didn’t hit me while I’m in the club, in the House of Blues, ’til I saw Puff. ... I see Puffy, and I see Puffy with like six bodyguards—and then it hit me. It was like, ‘Wait a minute.' The whole everything, the situation, everything. Ignorance is bliss like a motherfucker."
Meth then suggested that Puff wasn't really one to interact with him, but this time around he was friendly during their brief interaction. "He speaks to me, but he never speaks to me like this. Embraced me, ‘Meth, wassup n***a?!'” he said. "So now it’s like, ‘Oh shit.’ I slide my ass now I’m looking around to see if anyone saw me speak to this motherfucker. Don't ask me why, I'm thinking it. I just don’t wanna be on anybody’s fucking radar at this point—the shrooms."
After they ran into each other, Meth decided to hide out in a booth, where he started to question if that interaction actually happened. "'Cause Puff's never that nice to me," he said. "I mean, he's nice, but never that nice to me." At this point, he started to reach the peak of his shroom high, but thankfully he ran into Queen Latifah who managed to bring him out of his introspective high. "I was good the rest of the night after that," he added.
As Meth was leaving, he then bumped into 2Pac and Knight. “He’s telling me about some incident that happened with RZA in Vegas and if he was there it definitely wouldn’t have happened, blah blah blah," he said of Pac, who he indirectly worked with on "Got My Mind Made Up" from All Eyez On Me. "Basically, he was saying if there was anybody we would fuck with on the East Coast, it would be Wu-Tang. This is letting us know—and anybody that was in the know—that it wasn’t an East Coast-West Coast thing; it was a Bad Boy-Death Row thing."
During the conversation, Meth was distracted by the Death Row piece on Pac's chain. "This my first time meeting ‘Pac so I’m like, ‘Oh shit, this fucking 2Pac. Look at that fucking chain!’" he said. "Walk out, [my crew and I] get out front, and no lie, I remember being in the back of Pink Dot in that alleyway, and we sat there and we discussing that whole night of how that shit was so fucking weird. … It was definitely the mushrooms."
Meth never saw Pac again after that night, which prompted N.O.R.E. to ask if he cleared "Got My Mind Made Up," which he confirmed was originally for Tha Dogg Pound. Earlier in the interview, Meth said that he recorded his verse for the song while Pac was still in prison. When he got out, the entire Death Row crew offered him a number of tracks that were unreleased.
"Was the East Coast mad at you at this time?" asked N.O.R.E. of the collab at the 17-minute mark. "No, I ain't never got any flack," Meth replied. "You know it’s nine, 10 members. They don’t know that 10 members got family members and we from everywhere. ... So if somebody did feel a certain kind of way, it was rectified really fast."
Meth also collaborated with Biggie, but neither Pac or Biggie ever took any slight in regards to him working with both rappers.
Watch the full interview up top.
