"Regulate"

Warren Griffin III grew up in Long Beach, and in 1982 moved in with his father and a stepmother whose son was Andre Young — Dr. Dre. By 1990 he had formed the trio 213, named for the local area code, with two friends, Nate Dogg and Snoop Dogg, and it was Warren who got their tape in front of Dre. Not wanting a career in his stepbrother's shadow, he signed with Def Jam.

The record was made in an unfurnished North Long Beach apartment. Warren had bought a $250 stack of vinyl from a man outside a Roscoe's in Hollywood; in it was McDonald's "I Keep Forgettin'," and he looped four bars of it. Watching Young Guns, he heard the line "Regulators: We regulate any stealing of this property, and we're damn good, too," rented the tape, and sampled it. When Nate Dogg dropped by and heard the beat, the two wrote and recorded the song in a single session, modeled on the Dre-and-Snoop duet "Nuthin' but a 'G' Thang," and decided it needed only verses. "We just told the story," Warren told NME, "and then on the hook we just let everybody's imagination flow."

A cassette played in Warren's 1985 Buick Regal reached Dre and then Jimmy Iovine, who pushed it as the single from Death Row's Above the Rim soundtrack in April 1994, label dispute and all — Nate was signed to Death Row, Warren to Def Jam. It spent three weeks at number two in May and went platinum by August. The video, cut with Above the Rim footage and a Tupac cameo, sat at number one on MTV for much of the summer without Nate Dogg, kept out of it by the feud between Suge Knight and Def Jam. Warren missed most of the shoot himself: he drove off from a gas station with the pump hose still attached, got pulled over, and spent the day in jail on outstanding warrants.

Regulate... G Funk Era debuted at number two that June and went triple platinum, and both "Regulate" and the follow-up single "This D.J." earned Grammy nominations. Into the 21st century "Regulate" remained Def Jam's biggest hit single. Nate Dogg died in 2011 after a pair of strokes; in 2015 Warren released a Regulate... G Funk Era, Part II EP built on archived recordings of his partner's voice.