How RZA saved Method Man from a drive-by shooting
The streets of New York during the early 1990s could be dangerous, and, if you got caught up in the wrong place at the wrong time, that could mean the end. Method Man almost learned that firsthand, but his future bandmate and leader, RZA, intervened just in time. He saved him.
The story, as RZA recalled in his 2009 book The Tao of Wu, has it that Meth was standing around on a street in Staten Island, when he decided to cross the road. On the other side were some guys that he could get some weed off. But as Meth was making his way towards this group, he stopped in his tracks. RZA was calling out after him, “Come over here, yo!”
Meth took notice. “He stopped and came running over,” Rza recalled in his book. “A few seconds later—pow-pow-pow-pow-pow!—a guy started shooting up the front of 160.” By “160,” RZA was referring to the address of the building that the group was standing outside, 160 Park Hill Avenue, which, incidentally, featured in the video for the Wu song ‘Protect Ya Neck.’
RZA’s intervention saved Method Man’s life, but, sadly, it didn’t save everyone. One of their friends got hit. “A buddy of ours, Poppy, an innocent, school-going, nice guy—he was shot and killed right there,” RZA wrote.
Had Method Man been killed that day, the Wu-Tang Clan never would have happened. But that wasn’t the only event that could have stemmed the development of the group, as RZA spoke about in an interview with CNN around the time his book was hitting the shelves.
About a year before the group formed in ’93, RZA had been facing accusations of attempted murder. He was ultimately acquitted, but if the verdict had gone another way, he would have faced eight years in jail. That, too, would have meant that the Clan couldn’t have gotten together.
“Either one of those incidents could definitely have derailed it,” RZA told CNN, referring to both Meth’s lucky escape and the prospect of his own incarceration. “Of course, myself being the abbot, the one who came with the idea, if I wouldn’t have made it out of that tumultuous time—it seemed like I wasn’t going to make it out of it; there was a lot of odds against me—but we stood strong, and self-defense made sense to the jury. We beat that.”
RZA said that “it was the victory over that incident that made me change my whole direction” and “really get serious about Wu-Tang.” But had Meth died that day of the shooting, everything else would have been in vain, too. A lot needed to work out for Wu to rise.
“Same thing with Meth, he always brings it up,” RZA said, “that that day saved his life. He actually said, if it was anybody else calling him, he wouldn’t have came.”