17 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Sean “Diddy” Combs
Published in
3 min readJan 13, 2015
- He was a combo corner back and running back in high school at Mount Saint Michaels Academy in the Bronx, and thought he’d win the Heisman Trophy and play in the Super Bowl. Until the last day of camp, when he broke his leg. “If you were out for the season,” he said, “the coach just stopped talking to you.”
- During his college years at Howard University, he was a doorman at a Marriott Hotel. “I didn’t have no ego,” he said. “Doormen had to wear crazy hats. I looked like Troy, Roman times. I looked like two weeks after slavery ended. Made good money.” What’s good money? Try $1,000 dollars a week, mostly from tips. He threw parties, too, and those brought in an additional $5,000 a week.
- When he was trying to get a music industry internship, he interviewed with Lyor Cohen. Til’ this very day, Lyor says he doesn’t remember him. He eventually landed an internship with Uptown Records honcho Andre Harrell, whom he was introduced to through Heavy D (R.I.P.), a friend from Mt. Vernon.
- During his internship, he stowed away in the bathrooms on Amtrak trains to travel from Howard, in Washington, D.C., to Uptown Records, in New York.
- Father MC’s “I’ll Do For You” is his first credit on record.
- And the first complete album he worked on was Mary J. Blige’s What’s the 411?
- But his first big real break came from doing the most menial of tasks — just making sure Jodeci got back and forth to studio. When a producer who was supposed to remix “Come and Talk To Me” didn’t show up at the studio, Diddy put the instrumental from EPMD’s “You’re A Customer” underneath their syrupy vocals, inventing the formula for the contemporary R&B remix. The song sold 2 million copies.
- Of all the work Diddy has done, his favorite collaboration is still Method Man and Mary J. Blige’s Grammy Award-winning remix for “All I Need.” But because RZA produced the original, Diddy never got his Grammy award. He still wants it. “I need to call Def Jam,” he says.
- Before the Notorious B.I.G., there was Craig Mack. What attracted Diddy to him was his style and his flow, which was quite unorthodox. Diddy was also a big fan of EPMD, and Craig was down with them.
- How did Diddy discover Biggie? In The Source’s unsigned hype column. It was the early nineties, and pretty boy rappers were en vogue. Source editor Matty C told him about Big. “He didn’t have no six pack,” says Diddy. “I was like, ‘what am I gonna do?’ But I just heard the [demo] and I knew he was gonna be a superstar. I also knew he’d be a sex symbol.”
- Biggie had no musical training. Diddy had to teach him how to count bars and write a proper chorus.
- Puffy and Big butted heads on “Juicy” and “Big Poppa.” Big wanted “Machine Gun Funk” to be a single. “[We] was studying what Dre and them was doing, with Niggaz4Life and The Chronic,” he says. “I wanted to come with the sound of the soul of New York.”
- The unknown edit on “Gimme The Loot” (“I don’t care if your pregnant, gimme baby ring and the number 1 mom pendant”) was made because of Diddy’s religious beliefs.
- Diddy was strongly against Biggie recording the confessional, depressing “Suicidal Thoughts.”
- Ludacris was an artist he passed on signing.
- The idea for Bad Boy Records came from watching the 1975 movie Mahogany. He wanted to model himself after Berry Gordy, because he was inspired by the fact that in addition to music, Motown also had a film division.
- He always saw rock music as the thing hip-hop needed to usurp in order to really win. “My eye was never on competing with other hip-hop artists,” he says. “My eye was on competing with rock artists, [because there’s] no point in being in the game if you’re not being heard.”
