As evidenced by some of the stories in RZA’s 2005 tell-all The Wu-Tang Manual, the legendary Wu-Tang Clan has experienced some of the wildest live performances in Hip Hop. Now, in a recent interview with Complex, member Ghostface Killah recalls an incident when the Wu was chased out of a live performance by a Houston audience in the early ’90s.
Ghost said that it all started when a heckler threw his drink on RZA, prompting RZA to bust him over the head with a beer bottle. An angry H-Town audience proceeded to chase the Staten Island emcees out of town, with the crew only making it out unscathed because of Ol’ Dirty Bastard. Despite escaping with their necks protected, he said that the Wu still got burned, as the cash they had been paid to perform turned out to be fake.
“I remember [a Southern crowd] chased us out of Texas back in ‘92 or ‘93. If it wasn’t for Ol’ Dirty, we would’ve been fucked up,” he said. “We were in Houston in the Fifth Ward. They had a big mural of Scarface on the wall. So I felt it, I’m a spiritual dude. I told Killah Priest, ‘Yo, listen man, shit don’t feel right in here. Let’s stick together’…we’re on stage and RZA is talking. We got one little knucklehead nigga in the crowd. He’s like, ‘Get the fuck outta here with that shit. Get the fuck out! We don’t want to hear that shit.’ So RZA’s like, ‘What? What you say?’ So RZA gave him the mic. Dude took the mic and was like, ‘I said get the fuck out of here. We don’t want to hear that shit.’ So RZA, he passed the mic back and shit, so RZA up there still doing his shit. So money just took his shit and threw his cup on RZA. But RZA had the Heineken bottle in his other hand and just trashed him [and hit him over the head with the bottle]. And it was on!”
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He continued, “You can carry guns over there. So we was on stage, we ran outside that side door, and these niggas came but we was all in the van. We rushed in, all of us got in the van, but we had nowhere to go. All of a sudden Dirt was like, ‘Yo, make a left this way, go through here.’ Word is bond. Out of nowhere, it was freedom, freedom. Free at last! And we just made it right to the highway nigga. And we got beat. Because that’s when we was getting $100 a show and we’d have to split it $10 a piece. We had the money and it was a fake hundred dollar bill.”
