Shocked and confused, Warren frantically began searching for another record to play…

Long before DJ Warren Peace was sharing the stage with deadmau5 or headlining himself at upscale nightclubs like Drai’s rooftop mega-venue, he was a local Las Vegas hip-hop DJ. A man of many hats, in 1996 Warren was balancing two radio shows, co-creating HipHopSite.Com (with me), and doing hip-hop parties at popular spots like Club RA at The Luxor.

Warren was also a member of the Death Row Records street team. The job description was simply to visit all of the local record stores and make sure Death Row products were visible and in stock, as well as to pass out snippet tapes, posters and stickers at various local events. He wasn’t exclusive to Death Row, as he handled accounts for other labels such as Interscope, Loud, Priority and even EA Sports.

Warren treated Death Row as he would any other label, this being a time when Suge Knight and his label’s infamous reputation were not widely known. The beef between Bad Boy and Death Row was just beginning to bear fruit, as only a few months earlier Suge had made the following declaration at The Source Awards in New York City, on August 3rd, 1995:

“Anyone out there who wanna be a recording artist and wanna stay a star, but don’t have to worry about the executive producer trying to be all in the videos, all on the records, dancing, come to Death Row.”

It was a thinly veiled diss at Sean “Puffy” Combs that a few picked up on. The internet was a new, evolving concept at that time. There were no trending Twitter topics and few rap websites for news like this to spread, so the beef between Death Row and Bad Boy was still generally a private matter. Some people knew, but they didn’t speak too openly about it.

Warren recalls an early roundtable meeting with some other street team members at 662 during its early planning stages, inserting his opinion about Suge’s plans, a man he knew of from Suge’s football days at UNLV.

“We’re just sitting there waiting and hanging out, and Suge comes walking in with this hot Asian chick, and everyone got really quiet,” said Warren. “He started to lay down plans for the club, saying ‘I’m redoing this, I’m redoing that. I’m going to bring down Snoop, Tupac, etc., etc.’ And then he asked, ‘What do you think?’

“Everyone was like ‘Oh, sounds good! Yes suh! Sounds awesome! Hooah! Hooah!’ Warren continues. “And I said, ‘Suge, I don’t think it’s going to work with just hip-hop. You can’t do just hip-hop in this town. We need to do soul nights, reggae nights. We need to do different types of things here for it to be successful.’

“I remember he looked over at me – not in disgust – but sort of like ‘Who the fuck are you?’ Nobody else said anything. Everyone else looked at me like, ‘What the fuck are you doing, talking?’ And I remember thinking, ‘If someone asks me what I think, I’m going to tell them.’”