Fabolous Expected a Party the First Time He Recorded With Lil Wayne — Wayne Was Gone in 30 Minutes and Took the Cristal

Fabolous Expected a Party the First Time He Recorded With Lil Wayne — Wayne Was Gone in 30 Minutes and Took the Cristal

Everybody who came up in the mixtape era has a Lil Wayne story. Fabolous just told two of the best ones — and one of them ends with Weezy walking out of the studio with all the champagne.

Fab sat down with Vince Carter and Tracy McGrady and took it back to his early days, when he was newly signed and Cash Money was the biggest thing moving. The stories say everything about why Wayne became Wayne.

Story: Fabolous on Cousins with Vince Carter & Tracy McGrady. Clip via @VinceAndTmac.

Here’s how Fab tells it. He was fresh off signing, and his team and label set up a session for him with Wayne — back when Cash Money was running the game. The label paid up front, and they had the studio stocked like it was an occasion: champagne, Cristal, the works. Young Fab walked in expecting a celebration. A party. The kind of night you tell stories about forever.

That’s not the night he got.

Wayne pulled up, got straight to business, and knocked his verse out in about 20 minutes — one or two takes, plus a third just for safety. And that was that. Wayne’s entourage picked up the Cristal bottles, and the whole crew was gone inside of about half an hour. Fab says when the smoke cleared, he had gotten about “one swig” of the Cristal. There was no party. There was barely a session. Just Wayne, in and out, verse done.

And according to Fab, that’s just who Wayne was. Most of the records they made together weren’t even done in the same room — verses got sent back and forth. Wayne worked like a machine, running through long lists of songs, sometimes working right off a dry-erase board, knocking records down one by one. No wasted motion, no hanging around. The stories sound funny now, but that’s the work ethic that turned a teenage Hot Boy into the most relentless recording artist of his generation.

The second story is even wilder. Fab had recorded a verse for The Alchemist — a verse that sat around for about two years. Somehow that verse traveled, ended up in Wayne’s hands, and got released on Tha Carter III — the song is “You Ain’t Got Nuthin,” featuring Fab and Juelz Santana over Alchemist production. Fab admits he was alarmed when he found out: the verse was old, and it was never recorded to be a Wayne feature in the first place. But when he heard it in place, it held up. Two years on the shelf, and it still stood next to Wayne and Juelz on one of the biggest albums of the era.

The conversation closes where any real Wayne conversation has to close: the mixtape run. The Squad Up tapes. The “Bling Bling” era. Fab and the cousins kicked around the question of whether those mixtapes were the true foundation of everything Wayne became — the run that built the fanbase, sharpened the pen, and made the albums undeniable when they landed.

So let’s argue about it properly: is Fabolous’ Cristal story the greatest Lil Wayne studio story ever told — or have you heard a better one?