Yelawolf, a rapper from Gadsden, Ala., has toured three times with his Pittsburgh contemporary Wiz Khalifa, beginning in 2010.
Each time, the crowd took him apart. “I mean, some of his fans are cool, but about 70 percent of the time, it was just people f—— booing and throwing s—, and it was really for no good reason. They just hated my style,” he says. “It got to the point where I would just take off my shirt and stand there. Like, ‘F— the world, man.’ … I had to stop caring, really.”
Sounds scary. “Maybe for you,” says the rapper born Michael Wayne Atha, in a half-hour phone interview from somewhere near Springfield, Miss. “For me, it was motivation.”
On this cold Monday afternoon in the Midwest, Yelawolf is grumpier than usual — something about the heat on his tour bus not working properly. “This interview would not be probably going this way if I was comfortable, warm and chilling on my bus,” he says. But the discomfort makes him chatty, and after railing for 10 minutes about his unfortunate Khalifa-tour experience, he goes deeper into the issue of hostile fans.
“I’m a white rapper,” says Yelawolf, who is scrawny and conspicuously tattooed, including his catchphrase “SLUMERICAN” across the top of his forehead. “I grew up in Alabama. I was the first in the hip-hop scene that looked like me and thought the s— that I thought. Nobody wanted to hear a country boy talk about the s— I talk about, with tattoos and a mohawk. You gotta have thick skin to do what I do, man.”
Yelawolf, 34, grew up with an alcoholic mother who was 15 when he was born, and a father who had four girls “from all different moms,” he says. In interviews, he has cataloged his drug history — huffing freon from trash bags and sniffing glue in the Alabama woods at 11; smoking PCP and “puttin’ cocaine on weed” at 13; enduring a bad trip involving mescaline and peyote at 15, as he told London’s The Guardian. (He has long since given up the drugs, preferring alcohol, like his mother, who’s “still wild.”)
The rapper’s debut album, 2005’s “CreekWater,” shares with Eminem the quality of cramming as many words as possible into every autobiographical verse — he introduces himself with “my name is Yelawolf/ I’m a Southern head/ fed white bread” before going to darker places, dealing with extreme poverty and Alabama cops wearing white hoods. Initially he signed with Sony BMG and put out a single called “Kickin’,” then split with the major record label to promote his career with free mixtapes and MySpace marketing.
After that, Eminem himself signed Yelawolf as the first fellow white rapper on his Shady record label; 2011’s “Radioactive” is crammed with big-name guests, from Kid Rock to Killer Mike to T.I. Yelawolf calls the follow-up “Love Story,” due in early 2015, a “polished version” of his more reflective, minor-key 2008 EP “Arena Rap.” The first two singles, “Till It’s Gone” and the more upbeat “Box Chevy V,” have a whispered, bluesy ambience.
“It took us five months to get the first song after 40 ideas, before we were like, ‘All right, this is the sound,'” Yelawolf says. “Nothing I’ve ever done has ever presented such a challenge, because I was searching for the next thing. I could’ve easily done an album in a couple months, the way I do mixtapes, but searching for that sound — that was the next step. It wasn’t too far and wasn’t too close to what I’d put out before.”
The night he found the sound, at a Nashville studio, involves an elaborate story: “We’d record, get ideas, party. So we had recorded all day and partied that night,” he begins.
Yelawolf and a friend were out “wild in the streets.” They fought a dude in a bar. Then the friend drove drunk and the cops pulled them over. Both went to jail — it was the rapper’s car, after all. “The next day, I caught a cab from the jail to the studio, walked into the studio, turned the light down, packed in six hours and turned the lights on,” he says.
Afterward, the rapper cued up the beat he’d just created, declared “holy s—, what is this,” then instructed the studio engineer to burn the new wordless beats to a CD. He got in his truck, queued up the disc and wrote the rest of the track: “Outer Space.”
Fortunately for Yelawolf, for every hostile fan who booed him on earlier tours he has a loyal one who relates to the no-hope Southern experience he’s rapping about. “I lived that life, I dug the ditches, I laid the roof, I cut the grass. Those things reflect in my music,” he says. “People who really listen and pay attention can connect to that.”
Some of those people give him “gifts” after every show. “I got a case of moonshine on the bus right now,” he says with a cackle. “How many jars I get a night from the crowd?” Does he drink it all? “Hell naw. I’d be dead,” he adds. “It sits on my bus. It’ll get drank.”
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When: 9 p.m. Friday
Where: Bottom Lounge 1375 W. Lake St.
Tickets: $20-$75; 312-666-6775 or bottomlounge.com
