Back in 1991, 25-year-old Bushwick Bill, high on PCP and after drinking Everclear grain alcohol, shot himself in the eye with a gun during an argument with his girlfriend.
That is one version of the story of how the rapper – a member of the influential group the Geto Boys – and who died of pancreatic cancer over the weekend, aged 52, lost his eye.
Another version, from a Vice interview with him in 2016, suggests it was his mother who shot him after Bill came up with a plan, while under the influence of drink and drugs, to make money from an insurance scam.
“What if I go wake my mom up, provoke her, hand her a gun, and have her shoot me? I’ll be able to get to heaven, my mom gets the life insurance, everybody is happy!” he said three years ago.
“So she grabbed the gun, and I put my face right in front of it. She pulled the trigger, but she closed her eyes and turned her head first, so it didn’t work out that way.”
Whatever lead to the incident, the 3ft 8in-tall rapper famously claimed he “died and came back to life”, as he was being treated in hospital.
The grisly aftermath of his wounded face in the hours after doctors operated on him to save his life, was captured on camera and used by the Geto Boys, on their album We Can’t be Stopped, released just one month later.
The photograph shows the injured rapper being pushed along in a hospital stretcher by bandmates Scarface and Willie D, while Bill is posing with an enormous early '90s mobile telephone. His face is swollen and his eye-dressing pulled down to reveal the damage.
The other two Geto Boys members along with the band’s management team reportedly took Bill out of the ward he was in to take the picture, and removed his eyepatch and intravenous drip in the process.
The album featured the hit single “Mind Playing Tricks on Me”, featuring a sample from the 1974 single “Hung Up On My Baby” by Isaac Hayes. It was one of the Geto Boys’ most successful records and went platinum the following year.
Bill later expressed regret over the decision to stage the photoshoot and use it as the album cover.
According to an interview with music journalist Brian Coleman for his 2007 book Check the Technique, Bill said: “It still hurts me to look at that cover because that was a personal thing I went through... I still feel the pain from the fact I’ve got a bullet in my brain... I think it was pretty wrong to do it, even though I went along with the program at first.”
He addressed the incident in his music. In his song “Ever So Clear”, from his 1992 solo album Little Big Man, he sang: “I ran and got the gun and came back to her / Loaded it up and handed the gat to her / I grabbed her hand and placed the gun to my eye muscle / She screamed stop and then we broke into another tussle / Yo, during the fight, the gun went off quick / Damn / Aw shit, I’m hit.”
Speaking to TMZ earlier this year, after he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer he had said: “I’m not really afraid of dying because if anyone knows anything about me from “Ever So Clear”, I died and came back already in June 1991, so I know what it’s like on the other side.”
