Nate Dogg Charged With Stalking, Adding to His Fun Year

Los Angeles prosecutors have filed felony stalking charges against Nate Dogg after the "ghetto preacher" allegedly pursued his wife's car in a high-speed chase and threatened her with "terrorist threats" in an incident last month. Now, Nate Dogg hasn't released an album in five years, but judging by the amount of street cred he's accumulated in 2008, we'd recommend he get into the studio fast. Things kicked off solemnly, with Nate suffering a stroke that nearly paralyzed him and almost ruined his singing career. That incident did produce what may be the most relaxed 911 call ever, as Nate's then-girlfriend tells the operator, with the urgency of ordering at a drive-thru, that Nate had suffered a supposed-"heart attack." Even though Nate survived and recovered, that didn't stop the internet from taking it upon itself and pronouncing that Nate Dogg was dead in May, which turned out to be false. To prove he was very much alive, Nate went ahead and got himself arrested. Nate is due in court for an arraignment on July 16.

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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