Of course, the session for O.D.B. was late in the evening, and after I was swooped up by Tommy and brought back to Sing Sing for the night. I had taken a bath, which had become for me a kind of reverse baptismal ritual by which I transitioned from young global recording artist back to caged Westchester wife. I slipped into a white silk nightgown, tiptoed across the white wool carpeting of the master bedroom, and climbed into our opulent bed, outfitted with 1,000 thread count white Egyptian sheets and what seemed like a hundred white down pillows.
Tommy was already in bed in his white cotton pajamas. His side of the bed seemed a million miles away. The sterility had become routine. Suddenly the phone rang. I answered and started to squeal with excitement. Someone from the studio called to report O.D.B. had completed his session. “Wait, wait,” I said, “let me put you on speaker.” I pressed speakerphone for Tommy to hear:
Yo, New York in the house
Is Brooklyn in the house?
Uptown in the house
Shaolin, are you in the house?
Boogie Down, are you in the house?
Sacramento in the house
Atlanta, Georgia, are you in the house?
West Coast, are you in the house?
Japan, are you in the house?
Everybody, are you in the house?
Baby, baby come on
Baby come on, baby come on!
Wheeeeeeeeeee! I couldn’t contain myself. I may have even started jumping up and down on the bed! Then I heard the next lines: “Me and Mariah go back like babies with pacifiers! Old Dirt Dog no liar. Keeping fantasy hot like fire!”
That was IT! Ol’ Dirty Bastard spit crazy brilliance and scorched our pristine white bedroom with the grime and righteous fun I’d been craving! It kept going, and all his crazy ad-libs sent me into euphoric giggles. I reveled in it. I was just screaming and laughing and whooping. But then I looked over at Tommy. His head was cocked to the side with a look of confusion he couldn’t contain.
“The fuck is that?” he blurted. “I can do that. Get the fuck outta here with that.” There it was. That was what he had to say about one of the most unique, amazing things I had ever heard! I think he was in shock, or maybe he did think he could do it and that all of us were nuts. It was as if the Starship Enterprise had beamed me into another galaxy, far, far away from Tommy. Music was our only true bond, and now we were light-years apart.
Now, I was crazy about “Fantasy Remix.” It was one of the first of my songs that I played over and over before it was out on the radio. I’d play it on the ride back to Bedford (I’m sure Tommy loved that). It felt like all the fun I had missed out on in my childhood. It made me feel happy. O.D.B.’s energy was something everyone could relate to—he was your loving, fun-ass uncle who gets drunk at all the festivities, at Christmas dinner, the cookout, Thanksgiving. O.D.B. and Puff just really helped me create something enduring that all kinds of people connected to. That remix gave us lines and feelings we would use forever. He even brought back Donny and Marie Osmond with “I’m a little bit country, I’m a little bit rock ’n’ roll!” Like what made him bust out and sing that? Genius. And now when I’m singing it onstage and we have his vocals, it sounds like he’s saying “I’m a little bit Roc and Roe”—that always gets me.
Making the “Fantasy” video was really important to me too. I wanted it to feel fun and carefree. In my opinion (which was so rarely considered) almost all of my videos weren’t right. Tommy never allowed me to work with the directors I wanted, the hot ones at the time, like Herb Ritts, or the cool fashion stylists, who would bring an edge to my look; these were creative people he couldn’t completely control. His package for me was so mainstream, but this one, there was no homogenizing this one. Necessity is the mother of invention, right? So, since I couldn’t have a director I wanted to work with, I decided to direct the video myself. It was a simple concept: young, fun, and free. It was shot on location at Westchester’s Playland Park in Rye, New York. Everyone can relate to the joy and abandon of an amusement park, the feeling of throwing your hands up in the air on the roller coaster. That’s the pure fun I wanted to capture. Simple elements, like roller-blading cute kids, bright colors, cutoff shorts, and a clown. There was a night dance sequence with a crew of fresh B-boys and that was pretty much it. That was the pop version. For the remix video, I wanted O.D.B. to do for the video what he had done on the song: bring a zany, grimy element to it.
The day of O.D.B.’s shoot was overcast, and we had one simple setup for him on the boardwalk. I went into his dressing room for our first face-to-face meeting bearing a gift—a silver flask engraved with his initials. We talked over the concept—which, again, was pretty simple, because I didn’t want anything to overshadow his performance (as if it were possible for anything to upstage O.D.B.). I told him about the idea of tying the clown up on the pole and really featuring his grills. He was down with all the action, but he had some kind of problem with his wardrobe and wanted a wig.
“I want a wig,” he kept saying, “like one of them mothafuckas from the sixties. Like Al Green. I’m like this generation’s Al Green.”
“Oooooh, I don’t know about Al Gweeeeen, but you definitely are something incredible,” I respectfully responded.
