The time Dr Dre paid $1 million for Nate Dogg to sing on tour
The turn of the new millennium should have been an exciting time for Nate Dogg, who’d just featured on Dr Dre’s now legendary second album, 2001, released in 1999. He should’ve been focused on building upon that album’s success and his association with it, but, during the summer of 2000, he was arrested on some very serious charges—and he needed help to get him out.
Nate Dogg’s arrest that summer was dramatic. He was taken in by a SWAT team, accused of assaulting his ex-girlfriend and setting her mother’s vehicle alight. The charges against him were really serious: kidnapping, domestic violence, terrorist threats, and arson. Dre was touring around this time, and he was bringing along many of the artists who’d featured on 2001 with him—Nate should have been one of them. Obviously his arrest represented something of a spanner in the works.
Xzibit, who featured on several tracks on 2001, was involved in Dre’s tour, and, during a conversation with in HotNewHipHop, he once recalled how crazy that period was. “I think the biggest thing that happened [on tour], that sticks out right away, was when Nate Dogg got arrested when we came to do the LA show,” he said. “Long story short he had like kidnapped somebody and flipped a car, I mean, shit! It was wild shit that he did!”
With Nate in jail, and with bail too expensive to post, Dre needed to find a replacement for him on stage, so he turned to R&B singer and actor Tyrese. But, according to Xzibit, it didn’t exactly work out. “It was like a million dollars to get [Nate] out,” he said. “And I mean, Dre wasn’t doing that shit. We started looking for replacements for him for that show. So I remember Tyrese was on stage and he didn’t know the words to the fucking song ‘The Next Episode’! And it was like the biggest song on the fucking planet! Who doesn’t know, ‘Hold up-waaait, to my n—s’—know what I’m sayin’?”
Tyrese wasn’t a suitable replacement for Nate Dogg, but neither was anybody else. There was a big hole in the performance, and, eventually, Dre decided he needed to bite the bullet if the tour was going to work. He needed to get Nate out. “So they tried a couple different guys and long story short, man, Dre bailed [Nate Dogg] out,” Xzibit recalled. “And he bailed him out just in time for the fucking show. He paid a million dollars to get that n— out of jail.”
Nate was released just in time to make one of the gigs—and the audience had known perfectly well where he’d just come from. “And so [Nate] came into the arena at the last minute, right before that song. The show had just started,” Xzibit remembered. “When he walked out, everybody knew he was in jail, and they knew how much the bail was. When he walked out on that stage, dude, that motherfucking arena just blew up. It just blew up. It was like sounds of people screaming for Nate. And he stood there for a long time without saying nothing. And so when he put that mic up and started singing, dude, it was over. It was over. That was one of the highlights of the whole fucking tour.”
The serious charges against Nate were ultimately dismissed, although he did plead no contest to a gun possession charge, and, consequently, was fined and given three years probation. But, in terms of his career, he went on to guest on some of the biggest albums of the era around this time, including records by Eminem and Xzibit himself. Nate’s reputation as the King of Hooks was cemented.