Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
LL Cool J Revisits the Time Ol’ Dirty Bastard Broke His Plaques and Pissed on Them
LL Cool J recounts the notorious moment Ol' Dirty Bastard smashed his plaques and urinated on them at Chung King Studios.
By the time hip-hop stories become part of the permanent record, they usually arrive polished into legend. This one has stayed messier than most. On a new episode of Rock The Bells Radio that aired Wednesday, July 8, LL Cool J finally told the story himself about the day he learned Ol’ Dirty Bastard had smashed his plaques and urinated on them at Chung King Studios.
LL said the call came from Chris Lighty, who told him,
“Yo, you got to come down here. You got to come to [Chung King Studios].”
When LL asked what was wrong, Lighty reportedly explained,
“For some reason, Ol’ Dirty Bastard just came in here and broke all your plaques and pissed on them.”
LL said he was left trying to make sense of the whole thing.
“I said, ‘What’d I do?’ I didn’t even understand it. I didn’t even understand it,”
he recalled, laughing.
“I couldn’t understand it! Loved him ever since!”
He closed out the memory with a simple salute: “Shout out to Ol’ Dirty, man!”
The incident had already passed through hip-hop’s grapevine in fragments, with people who were there filling in pieces over the years. In 2006, the late Chris Lighty gave Stuff Magazine more detail about what set ODB off.
“[ODB] came through twisted. He was talking gibberish on his rhyme and then gets mad at us because we weren’t gonna record him like that,”
he said.
According to Lighty, that frustration led to ODB ripping the plaques off the wall and urinating on one of them, an outburst that was serious enough to prompt the studio receptionist to call the police. But even that wasn’t the final note on the scene. As they were leaving the building, Lighty said ODB’s mood flipped at the elevator.
“At the bottom of the elevator, he changes his whole tune He was laughing his a*s off!”
he said.
The plaque itself, meanwhile, apparently survived the chaos. In a 2013 interview with Frank 151, John King, the founder of the now-defunct studio, said the urine-covered plaque still existed and was sitting at his home.
