PIMP JUICE....

[themovie]

He left his old profession behind 17 years ago but Bishop Don Magic Juan is still one of hip-hop’s most revered figures. Sorry B.I.G. but there’s only one true player president.

Words Michael A. Gonzales



Fairview, a quiet Los Angeles suburb comprised of small, brick townhouses and neatly-kept green lawns, is a long way from the boisterous boulevards of windy Chicago. Outside the windows of a certain second story apartment, soccer moms bring bags of groceries in from the minivan, and small children ride bicycles past a customized Caddie parked in the street. You wouldn’t know it from the surroundings, but you’re in the presence of royalty: Bishop Don “Magic” Juan lives here.

Since moving to LA permanently four years ago, the legendary 51-year-old pimp-turned-preacher has made a comfortable home for himself (decorating it with more kitschy dandyisms than a chocolate Liberace), and fostered friendship and professional collaborations with Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre and other killa Cali rap luminaries. “But I’m not into no east side, no west side, no colors,” he explains. “For me, its just player business. I’m not into black on black crime, I’m into black on black love.”

A week later, speaking from Bishop’s apartment, his unofficial manager Snoop adds, “Everything I do for Magic has nothing to do with paperwork. I’m kind of his liaison in the Hollywood game. When people see that he’s down with me, there’s no bullshit.”

“When I first came to California,” Bishop says, “all I wanted to see was South Central and Watts. But if any of my Chicago friends come to me today wanting to go to Compton, I’m like, Man, I was born and raised in the ghetto. I’m from the concrete. If they want to go somewhere, I take them to Beverly Hills. I can see the ghetto on the news. All I want to do is rest, finesse and dress.”

Although he hasn’t had a whore on the streets since 1985 (the year of his enrollment in Chicago’s Moody Bible Academy), Don Juan keeps the pimp funk alive. The transition from Hookersville to Hollywood has been a smooth one. Selling himself as a character for hire, Don Juan’s outrageous persona has been seen on Pamela Anderson’s V.I.P. series and Bill Mahr’s Politically Incorrect talk show, and in Snoop and Dre’s movie The Wash. “My real desire is to catch one of these chicks who is already filthy rich. You know, somebody I can say, ‘Baby, get me a million dollars from the bank I’m going shopping.’ Maybe somebody like Roseanne Barr.”



With a homemade mix-tape of silky soul (Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On,” Eddie Kendricks’ “Skipping Work” and Olivia Newton John’s “Hopelessly Devoted to You”) blaring from the hi-fi, Don Juan leads a tour of his personal Graceland. Anyone who has seen his appearances in documentaries like HBO’s Pimps Up, Hoes Down or the Hughes brothers’ American Pimp knows Bishop’s colors of choice: “Green is for the money and gold is for the honey.”

Pimp poetics aside, the man is true to his trademark hues. The décor is pure post-modern player. In the living room, a green ceiling fan rotates over a green floral couch. A gaudy gold mirror/ clock combination hangs on the wall, while a pot of fake flowers have been crafted from bona fide dollar bills. On the dark green coffee table, next to a small statue of a green toilet filled with the greenest ganja you’ve ever seen, lies a copy of his autobiography From Pimp Stick to Pulpit. “I’m the real bling-blinger,” says Juan, who dyed his pubic hair gold in ‘70s, “the original collar popper. When the player flag was leaning, I was down on both knees trying to hold it.”

Even before he possessed the multihued vines, ostentatious cars and glimmering jewelry, a young brother named Donald Campbell wanted nothing more than to be a straight-up pimp. Standing on a crate, counting change in his father’s soul food restaurant, young Donald had the perfect view of Chicago’s glitzy, glamorous, Black urban underworld.

“The joint my father ran was a hang-out spot for gamblers and gangsters, pimps and players,” remembers Don Juan, sipping from a goblet of Moet clinkling with ice cubes. His broad smile reveals a jade chip on a bottom tooth. An ornate golden cross, created by his personal jeweler Tom Valentine, dangles from his neck. “These were the dudes with the beautiful girls and the slick suits, wearing the finest diamonds on their fingers. Those were the type of things that inspired me. I never saw no doctors or lawyers in my neighborhood, so these were the dudes who were role models for me.”

Having been snatched by his mean-streaked father, Bud, after his mother had threatened to leave town, Don became a fixture at the rowdy restaurant. As the corner jukebox blared the blues, young Don munched on hamburgers (part of his daily diet to this day.) His pops spoiled him rotten, but after a few short years, those good times came to a screeching halt. “That was when my father died,” recalls Don, his bare feet perched on the coffee table (a few toenails are painted in his trademark colors.) “I was seven years old at the time and had to go back and live with mama. Lord knows she was very poor. Although I was the baby of the family, I still had seven older brothers and sisters, so things were tight.”

While his father had blown the boy away with colorful gifts and pockets full of change, mama barely had enough loot to put food on the table. “Sometimes I would stare at the ceiling and cry,” he says, “because I just didn’t know what to do.”

As a greasy-haired teenager, when Don went to dance the night away in juke joints like the Stingray or the Safari Room, the boy was forced to wear borrowed clothes. “I would get a pair of black pants from one friend and a pair of black shoes from another,” he says. “Every week I would take those pants to Farley’s Cleaner’s. I played those pants so much they started looking like silk and wood from being pressed and cleaned so much.”  

Still, even at his most broke, Don always had a way with women. “It was in school that I had started learning how to manipulate girls. Man, I had got my first piece of trim when I was five years old from the babysitter,” he laughs. “I’ll always remember that experience of her putting me on top of her. She was 16 or 17 and she told me not to tell anybody. By the time I was ten, I was off and running jack.” At sixteen, Don was making the scene with a bunch of neighborhood cuties. “Whenever those broads got their little money, they would ask my mother for permission to take me shopping. It was wild.”

Although he was steadily boning a few neighborhood cuties, Bishop married a girl named Louise in 1970. And while she would bear him two children, the Magic Juan was never one for monogamy.

Drafted into the army when he was eighteen, Don was at his lowest ebb since his pop’s had passed. “Man, after two weeks I was through with it,” he says. Leaning over the table, he crumbles a few buds of primo cheeba and begins rolling the weed in chocolate flavored papers. “The most fun I had was writing letters for my barrack mates. If their girl sent them a Dear John letter, I would sit down and write something slick to send back. Those letters were so smooth, next thing you know the girls were coming out to the base to visit their man.”

Stationed in Missouri at Fort Leonard, it only took four weeks before this nocturnal Negro rebelled against a square system that forced him to bed down early and wake-up by five a.m.

“I’m a leader, not a follower,” he says, lighting the freshly rolled blunt with a green Bic. “So I went AWOL for a few weeks.” When he returned, Don bribed the other cats in the barrack to swear that he was violent. After being examined by the base psychiatrist, Donald was discharged three-and-a-half months later.

[themovie]

Back on the sweet streets of Chi-Town, still coping with poverty and an acute allergy for physical labor of any kind, Don had to make a choice. “I knew I didn’t want to be no drug dealer or a stick-up man, “ he says. Sticking the blunt near his nose, he cocks his head back and inhales the potent weed through a wide nostril. “I don’t see how those guys continually kept going back to jail. I had spent a few days in a county jail and that was enough to convince me being in a cage was no place for a player.”

Don traded any semblance of square society in for the street life. “I loved my family, but I had to go do the pimp thing,” he says. “I have a son and a daughter who I’m always there for. I gave them American Way kind of advice: go to school, have a dog and a few kids. I couldn’t live that kind of life, because I’m a roamer, jack.”

A local legend known simply as Pimp God became Don’s mentor. “That dude had more knowledge in his left finger than some dudes had in their whole body,” he says. In 1972—the same year Max Julian starred in the seminal pimp flick, The Mack—Bishop Don Juan put his first two hoes on the stroll. With Gwen Slim and Pumpkin Health turning tricks out of a local love shack, Don was learning his business on the block. “Like the song says, ‘There’s a thin line between love and hate.’ Well, there’s a much thinner line between the real and the fake. What I’m saying is, people don’t seem to know what goes on in this life of a player. People don’t understand how you can tell a female to do this for you, and she will. Everybody can’t play this level of game.”

One of Bishop’s boys from back in the day, O.G. rapper Ice-T says, “The alpha male is one that can control, because to be a true mack you need to have confidence in yourself. I was the one who got him to elevate his game to start pimping Hollywood. It takes real charisma to be able to start getting millions instead of thousands.”

It wasn’t until he acquired a superfine freak named Angel, though, that Don Juan mastered his craft, began making mucho dinero. He opened a front record store called Don Juan’s Music World, and ran gambling and hookers out the back. “I never made a dime off selling any records,” he says with a sly grin.

“My girls was running with movie stars and congressmen,” he continues. “Nothing was ever considered too freaky, because it was all for the money. Some dudes wanted to just see girls in black stockings, others might have wanted to watch them pee. One guy might want to watch two girls together, while another wanted the girl to make love to his wife. If they paid, the girls played.”

“When I was in the pimp game,” he continues. “I didn’t allow my girls to date black guys. With black guys there was always some problems. They either want more for their money or they give the girl less money than promised or they want to work the girl too hard. All that mess was just too time consuming.”



Anyone who thinks that a pimp’s life is all wine and roses, needs to reflect again. As they say, Pimping ain’t easy, and it ain’t always pretty. Out in the driveway, showing-off his emerald Rolls-Royce in the afternoon light, Don Juan’s tone becomes serious. “Some people are better off getting a nine-to-five, because this pimp game can blow your mind. I know dudes who have gone crazy,” he says, sadly. “One of my best friends, a dude named the Notorious Cadillac was smoking PCP and just freaked out. He fed his three year old son a bowl of Fruit Loops, then killed the baby with a .45 and shot his wife in the head.”

Indeed, it was Don’s own excessive use of PCP, a potent drug created from animal tranquilizer, that almost destroyed him. Smoking a laced joint in Cali in 1985 with his homeboy Godfather, this player president bugged out and called his church-going mother back in Chicago.

“I felt the presence of the Lord,” says Don. “It was then I knew if I kept-up with the same lifestyle I would be dead in two years. You’re talking to a person who once told his girls, ‘If I catch you reading the bible, I’ll kill you.’ Now, I was accepting the Lord into my own life.”

Aside from his graduating Moody Bible Academy, details vague about the Bishop’s ministry affiliation. He claims to have preached in Chicago for three years, and Snoop refers to him as a “spiritual advisor,” but these days, all of his natural charisma is directed towards Hollywood’s cameras.  

Seventeen years after retiring from the pimp game, Don Juan has no regrets. “All the years I was pimping I never had a gal say I treated her wrong in the game,” explains Juan. “I played the game fair and I used my style. That’s what I tell these new players. Get in where you fit in. Don’t try to be like Don Juan. Like the bible says, ‘Start at the back.’ If you’re good, then your game will bring you to the front.”


XXL MAGAZINE


 
 
 

[Nosak]

dawm , you have so much time to loose , writting all the interview  , thanks anyways

[PLANT]

thanks, that was a good read homie

[themovie]

dawm , you have so much time to loose , writting all the interview  , thanks anyways

copy and paste

[Trauma-san]

Interesting read, now I understand more of why snoop's changin' a little bit.  

[themovie]

Interesting read, now I understand more of why snoop's changin' a little bit.  

WHY?

[bez]

think I got to the 3rd sentance and gave up.

[King Tech Quadafi]

that was a good read , that and the SPM article

[Trauma-san]

WHY?

Well, you got a lot of influence from Don Juan on snoop dogg, surely you see that.  A LOT of stuff.. as in, Don lives LIKE a pimp, but doesn't pimp, he's like a religious pimp, or something.  He keeps all the mannerisms and respect things that pimps feed off of, but doesn't actually pimp, or do anything negative like that.  

Recently, snoop's been doing the same things.  acting like a pimp, but respecting his wife, and letting the positive self-control aspects that pimps appreciate run through his business, personal, and social life.  Like I posted in another thread, he's becoming more introspective, personal, and spiritual in a lot of his songs (not all), which he's always done.. .but he's really kicked it into high gear lately, and we were all speculating on the other thread that it was Don Juan's influence.  

[Trauma-san]

Another thing that they both have in common is, they realize that they aren't perfect, and maybe they aren't the perfect role model, but considering where they WERE, as opposed to where they are now, they've really come a long way (getting off the street, having respect for people, leaving negativity and unlawfulness behind them), so even though you can see things about them you don't like, if you take the whole picture in, they're an inspiration, particularly to people who are where they were 10-15 years ago.  

[S.G.V.]

that was a good read , that and the SPM article

[themovie]

Well, you got a lot of influence from Don Juan on snoop dogg, surely you see that.  A LOT of stuff.. as in, Don lives LIKE a pimp, but doesn't pimp, he's like a religious pimp, or something.  He keeps all the mannerisms and respect things that pimps feed off of, but doesn't actually pimp, or do anything negative like that.  

Recently, snoop's been doing the same things.  acting like a pimp, but respecting his wife, and letting the positive self-control aspects that pimps appreciate run through his business, personal, and social life.  Like I posted in another thread, he's becoming more introspective, personal, and spiritual in a lot of his songs (not all), which he's always done.. .but he's really kicked it into high gear lately, and we were all speculating on the other thread that it was Don Juan's influence.  

U wrong Trauma,cuz BISHOP don juan was a real pimp,theres even a book about him (tight).
Snoop never was/is a pimp,this is the difference between them...

take a look:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/053310873X/qid=1024504733/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/104-3215222-2318301

at From Pimp Stick to Pulpit-It's Magic : The Life Story of Don 'Magic' Juan book

[BossPlaya]

think I got to the 3rd sentance and gave up.

[Nosak]

U wrong Trauma,cuz BISHOP don juan was a real pimp,theres even a book about him (tight).
Snoop never was/is a pimp,this is the difference between them...

take a look:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/053310873X/qid=1024504733/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/104-3215222-2318301

at From Pimp Stick to Pulpit-It's Magic : The Life Story of Don 'Magic' Juan book

i don'T take for any part, but i think that this doesn't prove shit, he may just wrote about the same shit he be writing in XXL