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By Root 646 0

that night, Eminem was a different kind of tour guide. Riding a high that would floor most people, he was a lyrical Tasmanian devil, spitting couplets at all of us—his manager (Paul Rosenberg), DJ Stretch Armstrong, collaborator Royce Da 5′9″, and a few others—that caused combustive laughter, jaw-gaping awe, or, often, red-faced embarrassment for the subject of his well-aimed darts. He was a living, breathing, drinking, falling, and reeling Slim Shady that night. His energy was almost tangible, as if you could see his synapses firing. The bits of stimuli before him flooded into his dilated pupils, coursed over his brain, and were spit back out at us, redefined in rhymes, jibes, and insults impossible to rebut. He commanded the room, the limo, the afterparty, wherever we were, not because we, his entourage, were a doting audience—in fact, there were many wits in the bunch—it was because no one could touch him.

At that time, “My Name Is” got more airtime on MTV than Carson Daly, but Eminem was still fairly strapped for cash. His New York appearances had been booked months before, when the rapper was still a broke, underground phenom—the White Shadow of the vinyl and mixtape world. That’s where I’d first heard him on “Five Star Generals” the B-Side to Shabaam Sahdeeq’s twelve-inch “Sound Clash,” and I was far more impressed than I’d been when I heard his debut LP, 1996’s Infinite. He was an able rhymer in ’96, but he wasn’t angry, fed up, or at wit’s end. He was just trying to fit in; just rhyming intricate words because he could. The recordings of his freestyles on Sway and Tech’s Wake Up Show (where he was named freestyler of the year in 1997), as well as the first version of “Just Don’t Give a Fuck,” made their way around—so far around as to reach me at Rolling Stone—and were something else. Eminem sounded like a drug-fiending Clive Barker–creation covering the Beastie Boys’ Licensed to Ill.

That night in New York, Eminem played an all-ages show on Staten Island, won over a black hip-hop crowd in Manhattan, and at four in the morning entertained a club of models, wannabe models, and all those they attract. Eminem was as fucked up as anyone I’ve seen with a microphone outside of a wedding, and he killed ’em across the board.

That New York trip was scenes from a life not quite his; it was still like a life on TV, the life Eminem was about to own. He’d soon be under the scrutiny of the music industry, America, and the world; but back home in Detroit, it was business as usual, which meant that Eminem didn’t even have a home. He’d been staying with his friends, or his mother, until she moved away temporarily. When he signed his record deal, he’d bought his mother’s trailer from her, out in what he called “hickville bumfuck,” because his daughter, Hailie Jade, liked it. His mother left Detroit for her native St. Joseph, Missouri, because of some trouble with the state of Michigan. Apparently she’d allowed Eminem’s half brother, Nathan, then about ten years old, to skip too many days of school (the legal limit in Michigan is one hundred). She’d lost custody of him but, after months of appeals and fighting through red tape, had won him back and promptly left town.

After the night of shows and after we’d missed a few planes, I spent the flight talking to Eminem while everyone around us slept. We broke down his broken home, his mother, his grandmother, and the family history that is now the stuff of lyrics. He was very different during that quiet time, as he was on the driving tour of his hometown and as he always is one-on-one. He expressed himself thoughtfully, without boasts or poses. He’s nothing if not kinetic, but it’s a quick, often subtle switch from Shady to Eminem, from Eminem to Marshall, and back again. It seems to happen as soon as you (or he, maybe), think he’s settled into one of them too long. The real Marshall Mathers, the one I met before the fame and have seen less of since, is the most interesting side of him—he’s angry and sensitive, shy and curious. The real Marshall is who America is really consumed with.