How Not to Be a Rap Star

Mussan's flashiness was starting to make Stelo nervous. He was worried about someone robbing Mussan. Mussan admits that Stelo warned him to be less accessible to his fans, to cultivate more of a mystique.

The two often drove together to the Lawrence club Last Call. Mussan's friend Hobo Tone would spin Mussan's tracks there. And though they both had girlfriends in KC, Stelo and Mussan had a second motive for going to Lawrence: a pair of female roommates they'd met one night at Last Call.

"We both dead wrong goin' over here," Mussan says now.

Mussan considered his woman friend in Lawrence to be a "little groupie chick," but Stelo fell hard for his — a "real beautiful-ass Italian girl," Stelo calls her. "I was serious about wifing her up," he adds.

Early one morning, Stelo showed up unannounced at her house, planning to take her out to breakfast. But he found Mussan and one of Mussan's friends there. Mussan's friend had been sleeping with Stelo's Lawrence girlfriend.

Stelo was irate and blamed Mussan. But Mussan says it wasn't his fault. "You can't control what anybody does," he says. "They're grown."

It was January 2007, and the NBA All-Star Weekend in Las Vegas was fast approaching. Mussan had bought plane tickets for himself and Stelo to go to Las Vegas to hand out fliers, mix CDs and singles. But Stelo was nowhere to be found and wouldn't answer his phone when Mussan called. "And I paid $800 for his ticket alone," Mussan says.

Mussan asked Milk to join him instead. He says the two tore up the town.

When Mussan returned, he had to track down Stelo through McGill. The two patched things up, or so Mussan thought, and traveled to East St. Louis for a show they'd lined up with the Derrty DJs.

Mussan was doing the show for free, but the Derrty DJs tried to make him feel special by making him the headliner.

"Everybody knows the headliner goes on last," Mussan says. "But at this venue, after every person that performed got offstage and left, they took a little piece of the crowd with them." By the time Mussan was set to go on, he says there were only eight people left in the room — and they were mostly staff.

Mussan refused to perform. Stelo felt that Mussan's decision was unprofessional.

Their next stop was Houston, where Stelo, Milk and Mussan had a date with hip-hop history.

Scarface, the iconic rapper whose career began with the Geto Boys, had performed at Last Call months earlier, and Mussan was his opening act. After that show, Scarface told Mussan to call him the next time he was in Houston so they could record a track together. Scarface named a price that was incredibly cheap for a rapper of his status.

Mussan had spent more on shopping sprees.

Once in Houston, Mussan called Scarface and set up a time to meet at the studio. Then Mussan and Milk started spending money.

"We was in this big-ass club. Everybody was in there," Mussan recalls. "I'm sitting at the bar, and I order, like, 15 motherfuckers' drinks. Like, What you want? What you want? What you doing? What you want? You want something? Just the look on their faces was priceless. It's like, Damn, how come I ain't never heard of you before?"

It was fun. But it wasn't smart.

"We spent too much cash," Mussan says. "And when it came time [to record], we were trying to scramble and get money out the ATM, out of my account, out of his [Milk's] account, out the Final Track account, and for some strange fucking reason, our limit was reached."

Losing the track with Scarface hit Stelo hard. Mussan says Stelo was more upset than he and Milk were.

"Now how come Mr. Big Shot Manager didn't have a G to just pull out his pocket and be, like, here?" Mussan asks. "It wasn't no ridiculous shit why we couldn't do it. It was just bad timing. We just fucked up. We miscalculated."

Later, the Kansas City contingent met up with McGill for dinner at Timmy Chan's, a well-known after-hours spot frequented by a who's who of the Houston music scene.

"He [Mussan] was so drunk and thizzing ... he embarrassed me and Terry [McGill] at the restaurant in front of a shitload of people," Stelo says.

The way Mussan remembers it, McGill was partying with him, pouring everyone drinks, and Mussan was making jokes at Stelo's expense, teasing him the way that the entourage usually made fun of one another on the road. But in front of McGill, who'd been Stelo's mentor, Mussan figures it hurt Stelo's feelings.

Back in Kansas City, Stelo again stopped answering Mussan's calls. Mussan's connection to McGill fizzled away.

Regrets started catching up with him.

"I mean, it's like, when you run through $100,000 in less than six months, you gotta kinda step back and figure shit out, get yourself together. Like, what the fuck are we doing?" Mussan says.

He decided it was time to take a break.

Two months ago, Stelo says, Mussan showed up at his house selling bootleg DVDs and apologizing for the women, the alcohol, the pills.