For today’s “Remembering Nate Dogg” piece, we caught up with one of Nate’s close friends, Long Beach’s Frank Nitty. A lot of you might not be aware of their relationship, but Nitty is the man behind most of Nate Dogg’s collaboration with latin artists and they had been homeboys for a minute.
Frank Nitty gives us a human approach of the type of person Nate Dogg was and the positive vibe that surrounded him. Read th piece below and see the positive influence Nate had as a big homie to somebody like Nitty:
Frank Nitty: “A lot of people don’t know how close me and Nate Dogg were, but he’s the one who schooled me about being positive, staying positive and representing positive. We didn’t have too many positive people representing and that man meant a lot to me. He was so legendary in the game and I kinda looked up to that, because at the time there wasn’t nobody legendary that was actually riding for the positive side.
He always encouraged me to go to church. I looked up to him, because on top of the business he schooled me that being negative sucks you in. That’s what kept me riding. I just want people to know that he was a real real positive person and a lot of people don’t know how positive he was. That’s why me and him bonded so much and we did a lot of work together.
One of my favorite memories with him was when we were at club Incahoots together and his baby moms tried to file child support on him and came up there with some papers and I had to throw her out the club and shit *laughs* He was like “Nitty go handle that.” She came in the club to serve him some papers and I had to grab her and throw her out the club, that shit was funny. That’s one of the funnier memories.
Other than that, Nate Dogg just understood the game and he understood the value of music. He used to always tell me “Nitty, I think I got a frequency that’s ahead of time. We need to do some positive music.” We always wanted to do a project called “Operation Save The West Coast” and that was something I started up a long time ago but it just never really happened because he was always moving. But he was into pushing this positive movement to where it’s supposed to be.
That motivated me because I never saw anybody from his generation that was so heavy on pushing this movement. He used to tell me a lot of stories about negative stuff and tried to tell me that all these people in the industry ain’t really what it is. He taught me a lot of stuff about the game and it opened my eyes about not caring about this Hollywood shit.
He actually kind of saved me because there were times where I was getting involved heavily in this rap shit and once he told me these stories and stuff, it just made me look at the rap game on a whole other level. Everybody is out for themselves homie. Don’t nobody care about no unity. All they care about is worship, getting females and living that sodom and gomorrah lifestyle.
We always talked about how the rap game was sodom and gomorrah and we needed somebody to stand up. Still to this day, nobody ever really got up on that. Nate Dogg was different on that level. It’s just sad and I’m still tripping out on this shit.. It’s crazy. It feels like it ain’t even happenﾅ like damn my nigga is gone, I can never hear that nigga’s authority again.. He always had authority when he talked, he was real serious. He didn’t hang out a lot, he was serious, a lot of people didn’t really know how to talk to him.
If you wasn’t close to him or immediate family, people didn’t know how to talk to him because he didn’t give you that vibe. It was crazy how he looked at a lot of people. To him, either you were positive or you were negative. You had to show him that you were positive for him to open up to you, because if he didn’t know you, he’d just be quiet and put his locs on and stare at you or try to figure you out. He definitely had a beautiful soul and he was big to me. He was bigger than Tupac to me, shitﾅ That’s how I look at it.“
The next “Remembering Nate Dogg” piece is dropping tomorrow, we hope you’re enjoying the series. Let us know on Facebook or Twitter.
