Ol' Dirty Bastard

Russell Tyrone Jones entered the world in Brooklyn during 1969 and spent his early years as a welfare recipient in the Fort Green section. There he forged close bonds with cousins Robert Diggs and Gary Grice, all three drawn to rap music and martial-arts films. From those shared passions the three launched the Wu-Tang Clan, adopting the respective aliases Ol’ Dirty Bastard (a nod to the absence of precedent for his approach), the RZA, and the Genius. The collective was conceived as an expandable unit meant to conquer the charts and then spin off individual careers. Powered by the RZA’s beats and an array of vivid personas, the group’s debut Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) arrived late in 1993 and quickly ranked among the decade’s most pivotal rap releases. Earlier that same year Jones had already been found guilty of second-degree assault in New York—the sole violent conviction ever secured against him—yet misfortune persisted when he took a bullet to the abdomen in a 1994 street dispute in Bedford-Stuyvesant.

The wound proved non-fatal, allowing him to become the second Clan member (after Method Man) to issue a solo project. Elektra issued the RZA-helmed Return to the 36 Chambers: The Dirty Version early in 1995; its lead tracks “Brooklyn Zoo” and “Shimmy Shimmy Ya” both charted, pushing the album to gold status. Around the same period his cameo on a remix of Mariah Carey’s “Fantasy” created one of the year’s more improbable pairings. Momentum from those successes and parallel Wu-Tang side ventures raised expectations for the crew’s follow-up, so the double album Wu-Tang Forever debuted in summer 1997 and moved more than 600,000 copies in its opening week. The second disc contained “Dog Shit,” a two-and-a-half-minute burst of ODB’s most unfiltered, scatological ranting to date, after which his personal saga accelerated.

In November 1997 authorities detained him for nearly $35,000 in unpaid child support owed to wife Icelene Jones for their three children; by then he had already fathered thirteen offspring in total, beginning in adolescence. February 1998 brought the debut of his My Dirty Wear clothing line and an impromptu rescue effort: alongside protégés he dashed from a New York studio to free a four-year-old girl pinned beneath a car. The next evening, during Shawn Colvin’s Song of the Year acceptance at the Grammys (where the Wu-Tang Clan had been nominated for Best Rap Album), Jones bounded onstage in a vivid red suit, seized the microphone, and launched into an unscripted complaint that he had purchased an expensive outfit only to lose to Puff Daddy, adding that the latter was “good” but inferior to his own collective because “Wu-Tang is for the children.” Security removed him, yet the outburst dominated subsequent coverage and forced many mainstream outlets to navigate around the word “bastard” in his stage name. By April he declared he was abandoning the Ol’ Dirty Bastard moniker—along with a roster that included Osirus, Joe Bannanas, Dirt McGirt, Dirt Dog, and Unique Ason—in favor of Big Baby Jesus, though the rebranding never gained traction and soon faded from discussion.

The remainder of 1998 traced a steady decline. April saw him plead guilty to attempted assault against Icelene Jones, prompting a protection order; May brought a bench warrant after missed court dates regarding support payments, which he later honored by signing a repayment agreement. Late June delivered another shooting during a Brownsville robbery in which two assailants stole cash and jewelry from his girlfriend’s apartment and left a bullet that passed through his back and arm; the injuries were minor, and he discharged himself hours later against medical advice. One week afterward he faced shoplifting charges in Virginia Beach for departing a store in $50 sneakers. Shortly thereafter his SUV vanished outside a Manhattan studio. Undeterred, he scheduled a tour, established Osirus Entertainment, and recorded with protégés D.R.U.G. (Dirty Rotten Underground Grimies), though repeated missed appearances in Virginia Beach produced another arrest order.

September brought a felony terrorist-threat arrest in Los Angeles after he refused to leave a Des’ree concert at the House of Blues and later returned to threaten staff. Within two weeks of posting bail he was ejected from a Berlin hotel for appearing nude on a balcony. Back in California he faced fresh terrorist-threat charges in November, accused of vowing to kill an ex-girlfriend. He denied both sets of allegations. January 1999 found him returned to New York, where a traffic stop escalated when officers alleged he fired at them; no matching firearm, ammunition, or casings were recovered, accounts of the episode diverged, and a grand jury dismissed the attempted-murder case in February. Jones subsequently sued the officers. Weeks later California authorities cited him for double-parking, discovered he lacked a license, and found him wearing a bulletproof vest—an offense under a new statute because of his 1993 assault conviction. March produced yet another New York traffic stop, this time for missing plates and yielding a small quantity of crack cocaine. Five days later he was stopped again for plates and a suspended license. April finally dismissed the ex-girlfriend threat case for insufficient evidence, and high-profile attorney Robert Shapiro agreed to represent him.

July nevertheless brought rearrest in California for unpaid bail from the House of Blues incident. Released after posting funds, he was taken into custody days later in New York for running a red light while still unlicensed; officers also recovered marijuana and twenty vials of crack. He posted bail but failed to appear in Los Angeles for the body-armor hearing, triggering another warrant. Mid-August saw him enter rehab upstate New York before transferring to a California facility. Amid the legal turbulence he completed another album with contributions from the RZA and the Neptunes; Elektra released Nigga Please in September 1999, which debuted at number ten and yielded the modest hit “Got Your Money.” November’s sentencing consolidated the two California matters into one year of rehabilitation plus three years’ probation. At the hearing he voiced frustration over perceived over-policing. A January 2000 New York appearance turned chaotic when he ignored the judge, made crude remarks to a female prosecutor (reportedly calling her a “sperm donor”), and dozed off, eliminating any chance of leniency. He subsequently violated probation by drinking, leading to expulsion from rehab and transfer to jail; ultimately he received six months of treatment rather than prison.

By October 2000, with two months of rehab remaining, he absconded. During the ensuing month as a fugitive he recorded new material with the RZA and resurfaced dramatically at the November release party for the Wu-Tang album The W—dedicated to him and featuring his vocals on “Conditioner.” Standing before hundreds of fans inside the Hammerstein Ballroom, he exited the venue without arrest despite an extensive police presence outside. Captured days later in a Philadelphia McDonald’s parking lot while signing autographs for a crowd so large that the manager summoned officers, Jones was extradited to New York. There he faced prior drug counts, traffic infractions, and violation of the 1998 protection order. After postponements he accepted a plea in April 2001 that cleared the other New York charges in exchange for admitting cocaine possession; the minimum sentence was two to four years, credited with eight months already served and allowed to run concurrently with California time. July found him placed on suicide watch following an assault that reportedly broke his leg.

Elektra issued the compilation The Dirty Story: The Best of Ol’ Dirty Bastard in late 2001 even though he had released only two proper albums. Early the next year the small D-3 imprint surfaced fugitive-era recordings as The Trials and Tribulations of Russell Jones, an album padded with guest verses and overseen by lesser-known producers (the RZA declined involvement). Jones himself claimed scant knowledge of the project, and critics uniformly condemned it as exploitative. Released from prison in 2003, he signed with Roc-a-Fella Records and began work on a new album that ended abruptly when he collapsed inside a studio and died soon afterward.