On Sunday (June 30), HipHopDX ran an exclusive story about actor/comedian Guy Torry purposely avoiding a night out with Tupac Shakur at the height of the highly publicized East Coast/West Coast feud.
But that wasn’t the only potential Death Row Records trouble the venerable comic avoided. In the early days of the controversial label, Suge Knight ran the imprint as more of a notorious shadow figure than the recognizable face and beard we would all come to know.
Guy, like many, would not have been able to pick the now incarcerated music mogul out of a lineup before Tupac’s brief-yet-impactful tenure there and just happened to torch him during a stand-up routine.
“One time, two weeks after Tupac got out of jail, he came to The Comedy Store and had like 20 people with him and security said ‘Hey man, Pac is out here with like 20 people. What do you wanna do?’ I said ‘let me holler at him.’ I said ‘what’s up Pac?’ He was like, ‘I just got out. I wanna laugh. I know this is your hustle. I’ll pay for everybody.’ I said ‘I’ll comp you and this big salad bowl head dude (Suge), but everybody else gotta pay.’” Guy told HipHopDX. “So they get into the showroom, they’re sitting down, the whole Death Row. There was a big dude with a plaid shirt on. I’m goin’ in on him,” he added.
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One of the reasons Guy, who is currently on The Tom Joyner Morning Show from Monday-Friday and has his own shows, Third Degree Radio and 31 Cents Radio both on DASH Radio, garnered so much success as a comic was his fearlessness.
So when he saw the plaid shirt he did what he does best.
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“I have no fear so I’m like ‘you big picnic table shirt wearing dude. Why don’t you lay down so we can have a picnic on your back?’” said Guy. “So after the show security came up to me and said ‘you guys from St. Louis got some balls.’ I said ‘what do you mean?’ He said ‘the way you was talking about Suge Knight.’ I said ‘Suge Knight was here?’ He said, ‘yeah, dude in the plaid shirt.’ I had no idea cause this was ’95. We didn’t have internet really. I knew the name Suge Knight but I didn’t grow up in L.A. I didn’t know what he looked like. To this day, Suge just thought I had cajones but I didn’t know what he looked like,” he added.
Guy ran into Suge frequently over the years and the infamous exec always showed him love, but that would not be the last time the American History X actor would fear for his safety when crossing Suge’s Path.
“I had a friend who was locked up near Sacramento and Suge was in the same prison. So [I was visiting my friend] and I saw Suge getting a visit from Michel’le and my boy took too long to come out. I was scared Suge was gonna see me, cause I was doing jokes about Suge and I know it got back to him. So then when my boy came out Suge saw him walk over to me and saw me. He was like ‘Guy, come here!’”
Even while he was locked up, Suge was calculating his next move and according to Guy, Suge’s interest was strictly business.
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“I went over to him and he offered me a production. I was thinking ‘man, I’m dead, I’m dead.’ Suge said ‘I’m about to do the Death Row movie.’ Now this will lead to what happened on the set of Straight Outta Compton. He said, ‘I want Jamie Foxx to play Dre, I want you to play Kurupt, and I want A.J. Johnson to play Eazy-E.’ I was like ‘yeah,’ but in my mind I was like, ‘I ain’t working for Suge,’” Guy exclaimed.
“The funny thing about it is when the whole Straight Outta Compton thing happened, the dispute was allegedly that [Suge thought Ice Cube and Dr. Dre] stole that movie from him.”
On September 20, 2018, Knight was sentenced to 28 years in prison for killing Terry Carter on the aforementioned Straight Outta Compton set. He will be eligible for parole come 2037.
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