They just might be the most dysfunctional group in hip-hop history. Young’ns recognize: The real Geto Boys have reunited. Scarface, Willie D and Bushwick Bill—still crazy after all these years.

Words Peter Relic
Individual Portraits Kenneth Cappello

It has been a long, drawn-out process to meet up with Bushwick Bill, involving scores of tactical phone calls over a period of weeks. The diminutive dreadlocked rapper has been AWOL somewhere in Tennessee on a mission to purchase a vintage trailer-home that he will henceforth use to travel cross-country like some sort of madman John Madden. But at last Bill has appeared in Los Angeles, and is seated with his beautiful wife (Chuckie really did get lucky), their sleepy one-year-old daughter  and a coterie of hungry handlers around an impeccably arranged dining room table in the swanky Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Marina del Rey.

I’ve been assigned to interview Bill—along with fellow Geto Boys Willie D and Scarface—to see what’s up with one of the greatest groups in hip-hop history as they prepare to release their fourth album together, War & Peace.

Having grown up separately (Bill in Bushwick, Brooklyn, Willie and ’Face in rival sections of Houston’s notorious 5th Ward), the Geto Boys don’t hang out a lot outside the studio, and interviews are to be conducted individually. With the words of Willie D and Scarface previously recorded and transcribed, tonight’s the Mr. Bill Show.

The instant a basket of dinner rolls is placed on the table, Bill attacks it, spraying breadcrumbs like sawdust from a woodchipper. He motions to an anxious waitress for a bottle of white wine and enthuses about his newest acquisition: “Can’t nobody tell from outside the camper what’s happening on the inside!”

You bought the camper because you prefer driving to flying?

“Right,” Bill says, rotating his head like a periscope—the better to stare at me with his one good eye. “See, driving is like stabbing somebody, it’s very personal. Whereas flying is like shooting somebody, it’s more distant.”

Welcome to the mind of a lunatic. This sort of gory metaphor is a Bushwick Bill specialty, and this haughty dining room will shortly be transformed into a place not unlike the sulfurous shore of the River Styx. But before all hell breaks loose, I will have the great pleasure of conversing with one of the most intelligent, verbose, historically experienced hip-hop performers of all time—and the owner of what ego trip’s Book Of Rap Lists deemed the “Longest rap alias ever”: Dr. Wolfgang von Bushwickin the Barbarian Mother-Funky Stay High Dollar Billster.

The good Doctor will recall being a nine-year-old member of the Linden Crash Crew in the Brooklyn neighborhood that gave him his name. “Hanging out between Knickerbocker and Irving, the first record I ever breakdanced to was Baby Huey.” He will praise the teenage season he spent in an outreach program with Redemption Ministries in Minnesota. “Otherwise I would’ve never seen deer in the snow, or been to Gooseberry Falls in Duluth and experienced the coldest water in the world.” He will explain the difference between hanging with Tupac and Biggie. “With ’Pac, I could talk everything from aphrodisiacs to Egyptology. With Big it was strictly blunts and the block.” And he will squash the supposition that he doesn’t write his own rhymes. “Willie D was calling me for weeks on the phone while writing the new album, like, ‘What would you say here, Bill?’ And asking me to repeat myself while he wrote it down.” It’ll all be so engrossing that I will fail to notice that, while devouring his broth-boiled tuna strips, Bill will be steadily rubbing a pair of chopsticks together with such fervor that their tips become sharp as shanks. No, that fact I will fail to notice until it is too late.

One week earlier, November 3, 2004. As I deplane at George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston, the first sight I see is an overhead television monitor on which Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry is delivering his concession speech, effectively ending the hope that anyone other than dry-drunk smirker George W. Bush will be commander-in-chief of the United States of America for the next four years.

In my rental car, I pass a billboard advertising a talk-radio station with the slogan: We Talk, God Listens. I snap on my radio in time to hear a female radio jock gloating, “He did it, he did it! A mandate from God for George W. Bush.” Great.

With a rusted gate and plain stucco facade, Rap-A-Lot Records headquarters doesn’t look like much from the outside. As I pull into the underground garage, though, I spy dozens of collectible cars, everything from a stainless-steel DeLorean to a Hummer more stretch than Armstrong. These autos are the property of James Smith, a.k.a. Lil’ J, a.k.a. J Prince, Rap-A-Lot CEO.

In 1987, Lil’ J released “Car Freaks,” a single by an unknown group, the Geto Boys—Johnny C, Juke Box, Raheem, Ready Red  and dancer/hypeman Bushwick Bill. It would be another two years until the GB’s sophomore LP, Grip It! On That Other Level, when a lineup shuffle would solidify the group around the core of DJ Ready Red and Bushwick, plus new members DJ Akshun (a.k.a. Scarface) and a headstrong boxer named Willie Dennis.

Ushered into the offices by an attendant, I’m taken into a black-marble boardroom where Willie D sits at a chrome conference table. His frame is still graced with the musculature of a pugilist, but with his shaved head and plaid shirt, he looks otherwise innocuous. He speaks in measured, sober tones, without the guttural intimidation instantly recognizable on the Geto Boys’ comeback single “Yes, Yes, Y’all”: “Some of y’all make me hotter than Tabasco/Mess with my money, I’ma kick you in the asshole.”

“I was 19 years old, living in the Bloody Nickel, selling newspaper subscriptions door-to-door,” Willie says. “Me and Lil’ J were both going to Harvey’s Barbershop, yet we’d never spoken with each other. Harvey had a tracheotomy and was like [puts his finger on his throat and rasps], ‘Lil’ J got the record company and you got the raps, blow this thing up and put 5th Ward on the map!’ I left my number, Lil’ J gave me a call a week later and I went up to Rap-A-Lot, auditioned in person. I was real raw, real edgy, real street—wasn’t shit on Rap-A-Lot sounded like what I was doing.”