Anthony Bozza Remembers The First Terrifying Night Of Working With Eminem

Music journalist and author Anthony Bozza penned a Rolling Stone cover story and two books about Eminem. He shared his memories about meeting Marshall for the first time and thinking that his career was over.

Podcast host Tom Prather talked with Anthony about his work with hip hop stars and the author delved into details of how “the Eminem thing” happened.

I was just really into him. I was into, you know, backpacker mid-90s hip hop and he was doing features on people’s albums in 1996-1997. And I was just like, “Who the hell is this guy?”. I followed him and told my editor, you know in a very green and very enthusiastic assistant way, like, “He’s gonna be famous! I wanna write about him”. And te editor was like, “Well, this is Rolling Stone, we barely write about hip hop and we don’t write about unsigned rappers”. And I was like, “But this one’s different!” Two years later when he got signed my editor said, “Listen, write 300 words article about him, about “My Name Is” video”, – which back when you had to sell physical CDs MTV was a marketing tool still: you put out a single, get it onto rotation and it would boost the sales for the record. That was going crazy with “My Name Is”. So he said, “Write about this cookie video”. By the time we sort of got it together Interscope had the numbers for the orders of what was going to be the first release of the record. It was a much bigger thing. So he basically said, “Hey, here is your chance, don’t mess it up, you’re going to Detroit to write a cover story”. That’s how it happened. In that same issue I actually covered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction for the first time in my life, I wrote like for 80 per cent of one issue, stayed at home for three days, I’d never done that much and it ended up being the greatest week of my life.

In the interview with ePro Anthony said that Marshall is very private and guarded and it is more and more difficult to steer him towards an open conversation with a journalist. But that was not the case in 1999:

That was a long time ago, he is very different now. That was a guy who did not even realise what was happening, neither did his team. They didn’t really have it together. And it was all in the cover story, I put every single thing in there because it seemed like what you should do. He was taking ecstasy and throwing up, and didn’t talk to me for the first 24 hours and just stared at me and I was like, “What the?.. I’m gonna fail! These guys aren’t even talking to me”. He was just kind of glaring at me across the room. I followed him to do three little club gigs where he did like three songs in each one. That was Sweet 16 on Staten Island for some total mobster’s daughter, that was amazing. I knew I had a bunch of more days and we had a plane trip, and we were going to Detroit. He had done a David LaChapelle photoshoot that day and David LaChapelle is a very colourful character, there’s tons of trannies… He had never been around gay and bisexual culture like that so he’d got completely drunk as he was nervous. He was supposed to be on the cover naked, holding a dynamite stick over his crotch. We had some very conservative advertisers who objected and they had to move it to the inside page, but that’s how he spent his day.

He’d drunk like a fifth of Bacardi because he was so nervous and he didn’t eat, and when I got to the office I wanted to say hello and I walked in the bathroom, and he was puking. So the day went from there and then he did a bunch of ecstasy and then he did his club gigs and never messed up. That’s the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen. But he was just in a zone and he was sizing me up. The next morning we were in the airport that he was cool, we kind of bounded on this plane ride. He actually made his manager move so I could sit next to him. So we sat together, in coach, and talked about life and stuff and somewhere in there he leaned over to his manager and said, “He’s gonna be the one who ever meets my mom. That’s the only one”. And I was the only person that got permission to do that. You know, there were tabloids interviews, but I had permission. Then he was pretty open and it was awesome. But the first night was like, “Ehh, and here’s where the writing career ends”.

Watch the video below: