Ol’ Dirty Bastard and the car accident that made him a hero
Being deemed as ‘the crazy one’ in the legendary hip-hop group Wu-Tang Clan takes some serious work, but for better or worse, Ol’ Dirty Bastard absolutely earned it.
Let’s start with the better. In a crew composed entirely of generational MCs with incredible wit, creativity and flair, ODB had all of them beat. When the wind was in the right direction, he had traditional skills like speed-rapping, storytelling and flow down, but he could also invoke Jacques Cousteau at the beginning of his verse on ‘Da Mystery of Chessboxing’.
Which brings us to the worse. Ol’ Dirty Bastard was chaos personified. While it made for some of the best hip-hop of the entire 1990s, it also made for a man who, behind the scenes, could be a literal nightmare to live with. Just ask his son, who was made to sit down and watch his own father take the drug overdose that would kill him later that fateful night in 2004.
However, to paint Ol’ Dirty Bastard as your standard “genius musician/bad person” archetype is to do him a dramatic disservice. The point of complicated people is that you can never quite give up on them. Sometimes that’s said with joy and pride, sometimes that’s said with intense exasperation. However, Maati Lovell and her mother, Maxine, saw the best side of the man born Russell Jones on one of the most terrifying days of their lives.
Back in 1998, in their native Brooklyn, Maxine and Maati were walking home with Maati’s older sister when a car came out of nowhere, riding up onto the sidewalk next to them. Suddenly, Maati was nowhere to be found. After screaming for her, Maxine was told the horrible truth: that Maati was trapped under the car. Maati was four years old.
Speaking in an interview given for the documentary Ol’ Dirty Bastard: A Tale of Two Dirtys, Maxine said, “When I bent down, all I saw was her. And she wasn’t crying; she wasn’t screaming, but when she saw me, then she screamed.”
This horrifying event happened outside the recording studio that ODB was working at, and he, along with a number of other people, rushed to their aid. Lifting the car, sliding Maati out and helping her get to a local hospital.
What’s more, he went to check on Maxine as well. “He kept checking [on us] – he didn’t just leave it like that, and I told him, ‘Anytime you need to talk, call me.’ So he would call me and tell me things that were in his head. And he was glad that he was there [when Maati needed help]. I think he was trying to prove that he was a good guy, and I said, ‘I agree with that. You definitely helped my child.’ It shows what type of person he is.”
Clearly, Russell Jones was more than aware of the kind of man he could be, for good and for ill. Constantly struggling against his worst nature to be the best man he could be. He wasn’t always that man, but who amongst us is? It’s the same fight that we all go through; some of us just have to fight harder than others, and while we can’t always win, when we do, there’ll always be people watching. People who can remind us of just how good we can be.