On August 18, 1990, Public Enemy's Fear Of a Black Planet tour rolled into the Myriad Convention Center in Oklahoma City. Joining the New York rappers on the tour were Ice Cube, Heavy D, Queen Latifah and Oakland's Digital Underground, who then featured a young Tupac Shakur as a back-up dancer. For the teenage Tupac, touring with Public Enemy was a dream come true: a couple of years earlier, he'd bunked off school in order to catch Flavor Flav at a local radio station, hoping to get a photo with the rapper, and now he was on tour with his heroes.
In Oklahoma, Tupac proved his loyalty to Public Enemy by helping apprehend a man who'd broken into the band's dressing room, and stolen some of their personal effects, including Chuck D's jacket and plastic Uzi machine guns belonging to PE's Security Of The First World dancers. He also saved Flavor Flav from getting carried away when exacting vengeance upon the thief, as Flav recalls in a new interview with Rolling Stone.
“We found one of the guys,” Flav tells writer Jason Newman, “took him into the dressing room, and the group is interrogating this guy. 'Hey, where’s our stuff at? Where’s our stuff at?' Next thing you know, my group start punching on the guy. Tupac was like, 'Man, y’all step back, man. Let me show y’all how this is done.' Tupac took off his belt and started beating the guy with his belt.
“The guy was on the floor,” Flav continues. “I grabbed a fire extinguisher on the wall and was just waiting for that clearance because I was going to hit this guy in the fucking head with this fucking fire extinguisher. But Tupac pushed me up against the wall real hard, and I dropped the fire extinguisher. 'What the hell is wrong with you, man? You’re gonna fucking kill a guy.' Tupac stopped me from committing a murder by accident.
“If it was not for Tupac stopping me from hitting that guy with that fire extinguisher, I would not be sitting here with you. So thank you, Tupac, for saving my freedom and my life.”
Five years on, with Tupac now a star in his own right, he wrote to Chuck D while imprisoned in New York, to thank him for mentoring him on that tour.
“Back in the dayz, on tour with u, I learned so much from what u did and how u did it,” he wrote. “It may be hard 2 C but u have alwayz played a major role in what it is I do 2day.”
