For more than a decade Tony Davis has been the willing silent partner in the vast, horizontally diversified enterprise known as Nelly. But now he’s ready to talk … sort of. Or at least he should want to—his career depends on it. No pressure or anything.
By Matthew Halverson
Photograph by Brian Kuhlmann
At the risk of sounding like some skeevy celebrity stalker, I know the streets outside the gated community where Tony Davis lives so well that I could probably navigate them in my sleep. I mean it. I’ve traced and retraced the route from the highway so many times now, driving in circles to kill time until Davis gets home for an interview he agreed to, that I could draw you a map—a left, then a right, then another left, past the open field on the right, but don’t go too far or you’ll end up in the park—but honestly, it wouldn’t do you much good, because he isn’t here very often anyway.
Seriously, where is he?
It’s OK if you don’t recognize the name—he hasn’t exactly gone out of his way to make himself known to just anyone. But it’s worth making note: Davis, 34, manages the St. Lunatics and Nelly, who, thanks to mainstream success that cuts across almost every segment of the listening public, is arguably the most recognizable name in hip-hop and without a doubt one of its five most bankable living artists. The rapper and St. Louis native has sold more than 20 million records in the United States, owns a line of women’s clothing, is a part owner of the NBA’s Charlotte Bobcats and, as Davis himself has told me, has a propensity for thinking up “off-the-wall [business] ideas at 3 in the morning.” On paper, it’s Davis’ job to make sure that each of those projects is profitable. In reality, his job is to make sure that Nelly is happy.
“In this business, it’s hard to find somebody who’s got your back,” Nelly tells me one night over the phone from a recording studio somewhere in St. Louis. “I’ve been in this for 10 years now, and I’m pretty sure that people have come to him on the slip-and-slide, trying to work into my inner circle, but I know he won’t let that happen.”
Under other circumstances, a job description like Davis’ would be a perfectly legitimate excuse for his not showing up on time for something like an interview with a writer from St. Louis Magazine, but it’s not Nelly who’s standing between me and my final sit-down with Davis (and the first without his publicist). It’s Davis’ son T.J., who turned 6 today and has been celebrating at SkyZone with friends.
Davis and I have spoken twice before tonight—once in his strangely nondescript downtown office and once while sitting on some steps in a hallway at Fanning Middle School—but both times we stuck to surface stuff, like the origins of Nelly and the St. Lunatics and the evolution of the Tony Davis Entertainment Group. He was cordial and friendly but spoke quietly, his voice rarely rising above a mumble. I almost got the sense that after nearly a decade of talking publicly about someone else, he was a little uncomfortable talking about himself.
“Tony is a smart guy who likes to think before he speaks,” Pete LaMothe, Davis’ director of A&R, has told me. “If you think you’re going to get extra information out of him, you’re crazy.”
And that’s exactly why it’s so important that he get home and let me through the gate. I need to get under that ultra–laid-back façade that could too easily be written off as hip-hop posturing and understand why, after years of running away from the limelight while the managers of much lesser stars have demanded it, he’s suddenly ready to talk. But most of all I want to ask him what happens to a guy like Tony Davis if a guy like Nelly ceases to be Nelly.
Before I go any further, it’s only fair to make a slight clarification. Davis hasn’t been completely unemotional from the start. The first time we met, at his office, across from the Eagleton Courthouse, he did crack a smile while reminiscing about a trip he took to Cancún more than a decade earlier.
Davis flew to Mexico in the spring of 1995 with his girlfriend (now his wife), Gabrielle, and a few of her friends to promote the then–unheard-of St. Lunatics at a series of parties hosted by music-industry types, hoping that someone would listen long enough to give the group a chance at a record deal. He wore his Lunatics T-shirts the whole weekend, he played Lunatics tapes on the bus from the airport to the hotel, he even managed to get into the DJ booth at one party and tried—unsuccessfully—for45 minutes to get a Lunatics record played. He eventually ran into Sean (then “Puffy”) Combs and gave him a tape, but Combs never followed up.
Later that weekend, Davis, Gabrielle and her friends were on the dance floor at a party when the rapper Foxy Brown grabbed the mic and started pumping up the crowd with shout-outs to a handful of U.S. cities. She went through the ones you’d expect—New York, L.A., Chicago—getting cheers each time. Proud of her hometown and not about to be left out, Gabrielle piped up at the end of the list, shouting, “St. Louis!” You could almost hear the needle scratch across the record in the booth. “What?” Brown asked. “St. Louis? Where’s that at? Arkansas?”
I can’t be entirely sure, but judging from the descriptions Davis’ friends have given me, the look on his face as he gets to the end of the story seems to most resemble happiness. “People still make they little jokes now,” he says, “but it’s funny, because I get to tell all these stories to all these same people. I get to see Foxy and say, ‘Remember when we was in Cancún and you was talking about St. Louis in Arkansas?’ And I get to see Puff and say, ‘I gave you the tape, Puff, in your hand.’”
Adrena Buchanan gave birth to Anthony Demetrius Davis at 16. Still in high school and eager to finish, she passed on marrying his father and decided to raise Tony in her mother and father’s house, near the corner of Page and Ferguson in University City. While Adrena was at school, her parents watched Tony in shifts—Mary worked nights in the nursery at Barnes-Jewish Hospital and tended to her grandchild during the day, while Walter worked at a dry cleaner in U. City—and soon they started to think of him as their own. So when Tony was 7 and his mother married and moved out, he asked to stay. “We just sort of stole Tony and kept him all his life,” Mary says, laughing. “He had got attached to us, and we had got attached to him.”
The Buchanans doted on their grandchild, spoiling him whenever they could. Mary remembers Tony as a quiet, well-behaved boy who loved baseball, the kind of kid who shared what he had with the neighborhood kids, even if it meant having to sit by and watch them have all the fun. “He would get off his bike and let the other kids use it,” she says. “He was just a sweet child.”
Time’s tendency to soften the edges of family history—and, no doubt, a grandmotherly tendency toward forgiving all trespasses—may have colored Mary’s recollection of the truth. Tony remembers being on the business end of once-weekly butt whuppings when he was 11, the punishment for crossing Olive Boulevard and walking to the Loop to break dance with the older boys from the neighborhood. Every Friday, they’d haul their cardboard and their boombox the dozen or so blocks to Delmar and set up shop. And every Friday he’d get branded when he got home. No way was he going to be left out.
The petty indiscretions continued once he got to high school. Looking back now, he describes himself as the quiet one who “ran with the in crowd” and then stops and thinks about it some more. “I don’t want to say I was quiet,” he backtracks. “I want to say I was sneaky.” And then he starts telling stories about releasing greased pigs in the lunchroom and starting egg fights in the halls.
“I didn’t get caught for the egg thing, but when they started calling people down to the office, I went and told on myself,” he says, offering up the slightest sliver of a grin and revealing the gap between his front teeth. “They were suspending everybody, and I wanted some days off, too.” (Given what LaMothe has told me about Davis’ preference for revealing only what’s absolutely necessary, I’m left to wonder whether he’s being uncharacteristically open or just not sharing the rest of his misdeeds.)
By now, Davis had started to make a name for himself in the neighborhood as the guy who threw the best parties; the other kids called him “the Organizer.” (Today, it’s “T-Luv.”) First it was backyard birthday bashes. Then he was charging a cover for his basement parties. And eventually it progressed to hotels. “If one of my friends wanted to have a party, they’d have me do it,” Davis says. “I was always one of those people who liked to see people have a good time.”
Davis’ girlfriend at the time lived in North City. He was one of the few kids in the neighborhood who had any interest in venturing outside U. City, but he paid for his curiosity when he ran into Ali Jones on Riverview Road.
It was just a territory thing, one of those “Who do you think you are, coming on our block?” confrontations, but when Jones and his friends saw Davis walking on one of their streets, they had to make it clear that he was too far from home, and they took his hat to make sure that he remembered. He came back anyway—he wasn’t being defiant; he just wanted to see his girl—and Jones and his friends warned him again, driving the point home with fists. Davis came back again, and when he ran into Jones, the posturing was gone. “You got a lot of heart to keep coming on our block,”he told Davis, and they got to talking. The next time Davis came to North City, Jones had his hat waiting for him.
The two became inseparable. Jones would later go to Atlanta for a year atMorris Brown College and return with the idea of forming a rap group, but it was Davis who brought him to U. City and introduced him to his younger cousins Kyjuan and Murphy Lee, who hung with a kid from the block by the name of Cornell Haynes Jr., whom everyone called Nelly. Davis and Jones held auditions for their group, but it was those three who showed the most promise. And with Jones to take the creative lead and Davis to find studio time and book early appearances at car shows and roller rinks, the group from the hip-hop no man’s land of St. Louis began the grind. It’s hard to help but wonder what might have happened if Davis hadn’t been willing to take his licks.
“You know what, the fact that Tony never seems to get mad frustrates me. I’m, like, ‘I can’t believe I never seen this guy mad,’” Party Tee tells me one morning at a coffee shop in Brentwood. Party Tee (or Tyrone Wilson, as his wife would prefer he be called) used to recruit college athletes for the sports agent Rocky Arceneaux, who had partnered with Davis several years earlier for a sports/music-management company. (The partnership dissolved amicably two years later.) Wilson and Davis struck up a friendship that extended outside work. Party Tee says, “I would love to see Tony get mad, because I could say, ‘All right, finally.’”
Without exception, the first phrase everyone I speak to uses to describe Davis is “laid-back”—to the point that I start to suspect that they’ve all gotten together to draw up a list of talking points. But you only have to spend a couple of minutes with him to realize that it’s an apt description. When he walks—“ambles” is probably a better word—he practically leans back. It’s hard to look him in the eye when he talks, because most of the time you literally have to turn an ear toward him to hear what he’s saying.
Incidentally, this whole “laid-back” thing does not seem to be a personality trait conducive to success in an industry as shady as the music business. It seems more of a liability, the kind of thing that could cause you to miss an opportunity or let someone fast-talk you.
“Just because he’s quiet and unassuming, that doesn’t mean he’s not paying attention,” his director of operations, Dana Randolph, tells me. “He observes people, probably more than they realize—like, when he’s on the phone and distracted by other things, you’ll be shocked by what he notices that you think he didn’t notice. He doesn’t miss anything.”
Randolph smiles a little when I ask for an example: In the summer of 2002, Nelly was in the Loop, at the now-shuttered Streetside Records, signing copies of his new album, Nellyville, and Davis was there, talking on his cellphone. He was, by all accounts, oblivious to what was going on around him, but when a kid much larger than Davis started to sneak toward the front of the line, he calmly—slowly—walked up, took the kid by the arm and escorted him from the store, all without interrupting his conversation or really even looking up.
So what does it take to get this guy to show a little emotion? Better yet, what does it take to set him off? In the halls of Fanning Middle School, where Davis had shown up to introduce the Tony Davis Entertainment Group Fund and its partnership with a nonprofit organization for inner-city schoolkids, I ask him what I’d have to do to get him to hit me. He grins. “Probably hit me,” he says. “There’s just no middle with me.”
A week later I ask his wife, Gabrielle, the same thing: What do you have to do to set Tony off? She grins, too: “Get out of line with his woman.”
The typical guy will talk a good game about defending his girl’s honor—he’ll stick his chest out, throw around idle threats to keep his rep and then back down—but not this guy. Davis, Gabrielle and some friends were leaving a popular club downtown when someone called Gabrielle a bitch. The comment was precipitated by one of those inadvertent no-fault collisions in the club that have a way of being interpreted as character attacks, and it escalated quickly. Davis asked the man to repeat himself—in other words, giving him a chance to rethink the comment—but he said it again, and Davis dropped him. But he didn’t just hit him; he capital-H hammered the guy’s face with a shot so hard that he broke his hand. Today Davis has a plate just above his wrist, a permanent reminder of the potential for rare but shocking disruptions to his normally placid demeanor.
“My grandmother says I hold so much in,” he tells me after recounting the story, “and then, when somebody really does something to me, I pay that person back for everything everybody has done to me that I didn’t say anything about.”
Hip-hop detractors will read that story and say, “Well, sure he’s violent—he’s one of those rap guys.” But without any prodding—we’re actually talking about Halle Berry going to the bathroom, of all things—he up and admits that he’ll sometimes be so overcome by emotion at Nelly’s concerts that he’ll well up. “There’s 20,000 people just screaming to the top of they lungs, crying and freaking out,” he says, “and then you think that it came from being a notion or a thought, and it grew all the way into this. It’s wild.
“Well, come on, man. Don’t park all the way down there. Bring your car up to the house.”
It’s about 9:30 p.m., and Davis has buzzed me through the gate, having finally made it home with T.J. and a handful of T.J.’s friends. He’s more voice than man when he yells that invitation from his front porch, his 5-foot-8 oil drum of a frame backlit by a single light above his front door. I’ve parked my car in a little cul-de-sac 50 yards away, at the base of Davis’ driveway, and the slightly off-putting guy-silhouetted-in-doorway thing notwithstanding, his insistence that I move my car closer sounds like a good idea.
Inside the three-story house, it’s quiet on the main floor, now that T.J. and his friends have descended to the basement to continue the party—20 years after earning his first nickname, the Organizer is still winning over his customers—and Davis settles into a chair at the kitchen table. He’s dressed casually, in an oversized white T-shirt, a gray camo-looking Christian Audigier hoodie and a necklace with a diamond-encrusted logo for Derrty Entertainment (Nelly’s record label), which is the only real piece of bling I’ve ever seen him wear. In an enormous armoire in the two-story living room, a made-for-TV biopic about Jimi Hendrix is playing on a television that to anyone who’s ever watched MTV’s Cribs would seem disappointingly small. Davis loves movies about the music business (Dreamgirls recently replaced The Five Heartbeats as his all-time favorite), and he says that, artistic license aside, the filmmakers generally get the story right—especially when it comes to the drugs. “You go out to L.A., you see a lot of shit,” he says. “Sometimes you step back and feel like you in a movie. There were times, in the beginning, where people was doing stuff around us that we weren’t used to. There’ll be a tap—” he mimes catching a friend’s attention and raising an eyebrow—“and then we’ll talk about it afterward.”
There were a lot of things that took some getting used to once things took off for Nelly, the Lunatics and Davis in 1999, not the least of which was the way in which Davis and Nelly’s relationship changed. It wasn’t a conscious thing, but it was inevitable. “He’s not that person no more,” Davis says of Nelly. “I’m not that person no more. So we had to learn each other all over again.”
Davis had to learn a lot about the business in a short amount of time, too, and even he can’t really explain how he did it. “I’m from the streets,” he says. “Ain’t no business different from another.”
We talk about hip-hop from the late ’80s and early ’90s—back when LL Cool J was actually cool, when Ice-T was a rapper instead of an actor, when just being filed under “rap” made an album hot and a “Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics” sticker caused it to sell out. And for the first time since I meet Tony Davis, he becomes animated. His voice finally rises above a mumble, and the memories start flowing like verses from songs he memorized 15 years ago but can recall without a second thought. “I liked Kool Moe Dee, ‘Wild Wild West.’ The Beastie Boys. I remember, Run-DMC was the first record I ever bought. I remember N.W.A.; you had to be 18 to buy it. I sat outside the record store and had somebody buy it for me.” I mention that I asked a neighbor to buy Tupac Shakur’s first album for me, just because I thought it had a cool cover, and Davis’ eyebrows arch and he lunges forward in his chair. “I was one of the first to buy that. Then, when that Tupac album came out, you was just buying records. It wasn’t like, ‘I got to go get the new whatever.’ It was, ‘It’s rap. Give it to me, give it to me. Who’s the new rapper?’”
The conversation naturally drifts back to Nelly—as just about any conversation with Davis generally will, through no fault of his own—but it’s not about the music. It’s about the pressure that comes from being the support system for a multiplatinum superstar. The more he talks, the clearer it becomes that this manager-client relationship is like a marriage: It helps to be friends first. Who else but someone who’s known you since before you were a star is really going to want to look out for you once you are one? “It’s hard, living for somebody else, but you try your best,” he says. “Nelly goes through different moods, just like everybody else, but it’s hard for him to get on the phone and be like, ‘I like bananas in my cereal now.’ You have to think like him, and you’re not always right.”
So when are you happiest?
“I think the good days are when I think the most about the bad days,” he says, “like, sometimes, I just think, ‘Man, it’s been three months since Nelly and me had an argument. When is it coming?’ And it’s going to come—there’s going to be a day when I’m going to do something that he don’t agree with, or there’s going to be something that I do that he misunderstands and I feel unappreciated for.”
That can’t be a very fun way to live.
“Eh, it’s part of the business.”
But if the best days are the days you worry most about the bad days, how can you ever be comfortable?
“You never really comfortable. I don’t think no one is comfortable until it’s over. The wheel is still spinning and still spinning, and it never stops. I think you ain’t really got peace of mind until it’s over, till it’s done, till you really feel like you did all you can do for this situation—and for me, I’m not going to feel that way until Nelly feels that way.”
Sitting here in his house, at the kitchen table, I ask Davis why a guy who’s always taken pleasure in watching others have fun, a guy who’s always avoided attention—even more so in the last decade, just to erase any doubt that he would try to upstage his artists—would choose now to court the spotlight.
There’s the easy answer: Four of his clients are releasing albums this year—Nelly, Ali, Murphy Lee and the R&B singer Avery Storm—and the cumulative effect that these releases could have on his career, just in terms of exposure, isn’t lost on him. “This is a big year for me,” he says.
Then he goes back into “quiet Tony” mode and looks contemplative for a couple of seconds as he thinks about it some more. “I look back at a lot of the things that have changed, a lot of the people that have come and gone, and it’s kind of like the dust is settling,” he says. “You look around at the horizon, and you’re, like, ‘OK, I got a chance to shine and take my game to the next level,’—so you want to take advantage of it and make smart decisions even though it might not be something that you normally do.”
There’s the hint of even another layer there that demonstrates Davis’ sharp business sense, though, and I’m reminded of a comment Party Tee made when we spoke: “Everything is fine and dandy now, but one day it’s going to be a time when Nelly isn’t doing the same volume that he’s doing now. Tony needs to kind of venture out to do some things and find the next step.”
With artists even as big as Jay-Z struggling to sell half as many records today as they did just a couple of years ago, it’s a nerve-wracking time to rely on the music industry to feed you, if you’re anyone other than an artist. Nelly’s set. Even if his new album, set to drop in late August, flops, he’ll be OK. But Davis’ situation is different. He’s noncommittal when I ask him if he wants to try other things, but when he talks about some of his contemporaries who still have “one foot in the street and one foot in the studio,” it’s hard to miss the fact that he’s thinking pretty hard about how long this ride can last.
“I wouldn’t want him if he didn’t want to branch out,” Nelly tells me later, when I ask about Tony’s looking toward the future. “Eventually everything grows to a point. I’m sure he doesn’t always want to be Nelly’s manager. I expect him to not want to. One thing I hate is people who don’t take advantage of their opportunities, because I took advantage of mine.”
It’s close to midnight, and Davis needs to go down to the basement and hang out with his son before getting on a plane to Atlanta tomorrow at 11 a.m. to meet Nelly in the studio. Just as I’m about to turn off my tape recorder, it occurs to me that for a guy with a reputation for choosing his words carefully, Davis has shown a surprising amount of candor. I ask him whether doing these interviews has been difficult.
“Not really. I like it. I’ve never really had this conversation with nobody—Nelly, my wife, nobody,” he says. “These are things I think to myself, and I just keep it to myself.”
It’s been almost 15 years since everything with Nelly and the Lunatics began, and all along Tony’s been carrying the pressure, the anxiety, the insecurities of holding it all together. It’s a lot of weight to bear, even for a guy who handled the dizzying ascent with such poise.
Maybe he really is that private and, being the shrewd businessman he is, he just recognized some benefit in finally putting himself out there.
Or maybe nobody ever asked.
