Tim Patterson

speaker

75 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard May 2025 last heard May 2025

Tim Patterson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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The Trial: USA · He Was So Interesting To The Hilfigers, The Trumps, The Winfreys · 1 May 2025 podcast

He's got Andre Harrell here. He's got everybody else in the industry saying, who's this little young gunner? He's the youngest executive in the music business as a Black man. That's the position he was in at 17.

Sean was just like he told you. He was the little bad boy. He was the industry's little brother that was the pest. You know, Sean told me one time before he was 20 years old, he's like, yo, I need to speak to Michael Jackson. Now, mind you, I'm Sean's intern at this time. I'm working for him.

And I don't know the first thing about finding Michael Jackson, but if you know anything about Sean or Uptown Records or Andre, you have to figure it out on your own. You just have to figure it out. Come to me with the results. Don't come to me with complaints. So yeah, he was a mess in the office. He didn't come to the meetings on time. He'd come late.

He'd come with his pants hanging off his butt, his shoes untied. He'd have a turkey sandwich in his hand, an orange and cranberry juice, come into office, make noise, disrupt everything in the meeting. But he was the little pest. He was the little brother. And people just tolerated him. That's just Sean. That's just Puff. Even Andre tolerated it to an extent.

Andre got to a point at the company where we had a genre called hip hop and R&B. That was kind of a genre Andre and Buff sliced out and it was our own for a minute. And it was unknown to other executives what hip hop R&B was. We were bringing something new into the game, into the business. So Uptown was a subsidiary of MCA Records at the time.

MCA Records wasn't putting out sounds like Uptown, artists like Uptown. So they didn't understand when Andre would say, hey, I need a million dollars for a Mary J. Blige video. They would say, are you kidding me? They wouldn't understand when they said, I need to get a half a million dollars for Devante Swing's court case because he crashed a car.

They didn't understand these issues and problems that came with these young black artists. So Andre was protecting a brand. He was protecting Uptown Records from the executives, from the suits. He had a deal he had to live up to. So in order to keep his deal intact, in order to keep his money coming, he had to please the mother company.

And the mother company suggested to him that this kid Sean Combs is expensive. He's costing us a lot of money. He's shooting videos for this amount of money. He's producing records for this amount of money. And this is all new to the MCA people. Andre understood what it was, but he has to explain that to corporate and corporate doesn't want to hear that.

So to the point where corporate told Andre, they said, listen, man, um, You got to get rid of him. And we also suggest that you put kind of a cop patroller, a money person in the company. John was like, yo, the white man's trying to take your shit. It's a black company. They trying to put another white man in here to oversee you. And they did.

They put another white guy in there and it was a general manager of Uptown. And Sean and him never really got along. They always bumped heads. And Andre stuck in the middle of all of that. So he's got corporate now telling him to bring the money down. I know you guys are making tons of money, but we're spending tons of money.

And on the other hand, he got Sean in his ear like, yo, why are you letting the white man take your shit? So it got to a point where it was two kings in the castle. And one had to go. And it had to be Sean. Andre had to let Sean go. Sean took it very hard. Because Sean didn't look at it as if corporate told him to do it. Sean looked at it as, you're abandoning me. You're my pops.

That was the way Sean looked at Andre. You're my dad. What are you talking about? So it really didn't stick. It didn't kick in with Sean for a while. I mean, he would do some things to try to get his job back. But Andre had to keep a brand going. Andre also looked at Sean as his son, but he also looked at his brand as his baby. So he had to make the decision.

That's where Sean had to be let go from Uptown.

I can't even put it into words because it was just like euphoric. It was almost like you pinch yourself. Am I really here? He was introducing this real loose fitted, this real avant-garde, this real different type of hip hop to corporate America, to the world. He's 17, 18 years old. And all these artists you just mentioned are basically shadows of him.

If you really look at all the artists on Uptown back in the day, They were basically shadows of Sean from the way they dress to the way they act to the way they talk. You know, he was that infective on you. He just had that much flavor. He became Uptown. Andre would just sit there. This is Andre's thing. He'd just sit there and let Sean go crazy. You know, he allowed it. The staff had to listen.

They had to do it. You know, it was amazing. Big amount of cursing and mother effer. That's what it was. But the end result was always platinum. The end result was always millions of sales. The end result was always radio, radio, radio. The end result was never second. It was always first and then some.

That type of behavior doesn't stick today. Back then, there were no examples, no blueprints, no references of Puffy's. He was the first 17, 18, 19-year-old kid hanging with Russell Simmons, Andre Harrell, Brett Ratner, Clive Davis. He was the exception because there was no reference to him. So he was so interesting to people. He was so interesting to the Hill figures.

He was so interesting to the Trumps. He was so interesting to the Winfreys that this kid's got a magnetism about him. And he's the one behind these people? There was no other people like Puffy, like Michael Jackson. There was no, he's a one of one. Prince, a one of one. Rembrandt, a one of one. We're really watching some biblical shit go on here. It's way bigger than just man.

Sean's story is way more biblical than anything.

I'm going to tell you, it's bittersweet. And what I mean by that is for years, like you said, since I've been his friend forever, There are certain people that know that. And there are certain people that tell you things over the years. And you try to defend because this isn't the person you know. And for years, people were bringing me information and bringing me news.

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