In the latest segment released from an interview with VladTV, Tray Deee of Tha Eastsidaz explained his experience navigating gang-life in prison and recalled his first time meeting Tupac.
When asked if he knew the All Eyez On Me star, Tray Deee detailed their collaboration on the soundtrack to the 1997 movie Gridlock’d in which ‘Pac starred.
“I did a song with Tupac on the Gridlock’d soundtrack,” he said. “We were cool. He respected my artistry and I most definitely respected his. He heard my demo and he had told C-Style and Snoop, like, ‘What’s that?’ ‘Oh, that’s the homie right there.’ ‘Y’all better put him on. He on.’ I kinda liked it that when I finally met him we all piled into the studio about 15, 16 deep and he was sitting there with a blunt. None of us had weed because we had all gotten together and hurried up to get to the studio. I said, ‘What you gon’ do with that blunt?’ He said, ‘Give me a light.’ We lit the blunt and passed it back and forth and didn’t pass it to nobody else. I said, ‘Yeah, this is my guy right here.’”
Addressing his most recent, decade-long stint in prison, Tray Deee also touched on the realities of gang-life behind bars.
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“I had to let a couple people see that it was not a myth, my credentials were actually official,” he said. “Apart from that it was mostly love from everybody, besides the police and the sheriffs. Even some of them on the low, they be like, ‘Yo, I bump your shit.’”
“It’s very serious,” he added. “You have to operate under the structure that your city or your gang falls under unless you’re a part of the non-affiliate card and then they’re the one’s who if anything happens to them they get no support because it’s like, ‘C’mon, who we gon’ go against?’ We gon’ go against a gang and we have no power. They got knives, and strategy and all that. When you a part of the gang though, it’s no, ‘I’ma do my thing and y’all do y’all thing.’ Being that I have so much seniority from my gang, if I was there with someone of my status, that was my homie, that was my dog. So it was like, ‘Look bro, you know they on me, I can’t do this. Don’t really wanna do it because I believe in everybody growing into it on their own. But it’s like, homie, if you wanna drive the card then go ahead. If I’m driving it, y’all do what y’all do, if y’all need me come holler. Other than that, let me walk this off.’”
During the conversation Tray Deee also admitted to recording new music while in prison but only hinted at how he was able to accomplish the feat.
“It was high-risk,” he said. “It was done with a HTC Thunderbolt on a Tap Ramen box underneath a blanket on top of a mattress…I’ll put the pieces together when I document the story.”
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Tray Deee served just over ten years in prison, short of his original sentence but including an additional several months earned inside for a marijuana charge, he explained.
“There was a glitch in the matrix,” he said, alluding to his straying from the straight-and-narrow path. “I caught a marijuana case a couple of years before I was coming home. I had to plea in court for a couple of years. But, it ran into the sentence I was doing so I was only given like an extra four or five months to do.”
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