What Woodie’s Brutally Honest Rap Meant for Antioch

Editor’s note: This story is part of That’s My Word, an ongoing KQED series about Bay Area hip-hop history.

A-Wax had just gotten out of jail when he decided to hit up a hotel party in Concord.

The year was 2001, and the aspiring lyricist from Pittsburg, California found himself talking to a local rapper from Antioch who’d just been released from prison. The pair made plans to record together that night, and connected in the studio shortly afterward.

Over two decades later, that interaction with Ryan Mitchell Wood, better known as Woodie — one of the most influential rappers from East Contra Costa County — remains a core memory for A-Wax.

“He was a white guy in a Mexican gang and I was a white guy in a Black gang,” A-Wax recalls of Woodie, who died in 2007. “He just told me to come through to the studio. I was thrown aback. We didn’t know each other. Most people would want money for that, but he just genuinely wanted to link up and make good music.”

The resulting track, “Journey,” which Woodie produced, is a sempiternal Bay Area mobb banger with slow-dripping bells, sinister synths and cryptic tales of East Bay street life and scandal. The lead single on A-Wax’s debut album Savage Timez, it represents a different era of Bay Area sound, one nearly alien to the modern general public. It also stands as proof of the non-fungible influence Woodie had on Antioch’s rap world and its surrounding communities as both a storyteller and production maestro.

Yet when discussing the Bay Area’s extensive rap canon — a colorful spectrum of voices and personalities born on early-’80s handmade cassette tapes that eventually reached a crescendo with hyphy, which spread throughout the Bay Area like a constantly permutating remix of a remix — the city of Antioch rarely comes to mind.

With just over 115,000 residents, Antioch is tucked away on the Bay Area’s northeastern outskirts, a remote outpost nearer to Stockton than San Francisco. Founded as Smith’s Landing in 1849 as a gateway settlement into the San Francisco Bay, the historically agricultural community sits along the slow-moving San Joaquin River, offering the promise of a quieter life outside of the region’s larger, more industrialized epicenters.

So it’s all the more impressive and confounding that of all the Bay Area’s zip codes and bustling populations, Antioch in the late ’90s (rather than, say, East Side San Jose or the Mission District) became ground zero for Northern California’s Latino rap zeitgeist — and all thanks to a white dude. Though largely unrecognized by today’s listener, Woodie’s contributions to Antioch cannot be overlooked. Indeed, very few contemporary rappers could do for their city what Woodie did for his in an era of independent street hustlership.

Living the Yoc Life

Woodie moved from San Leandro to Antioch at age 10. As an only child, he had a strong connection to his single mother, who later would frequently be mentioned in Woodie’s songs. By 14, Woodie had bounced around Antioch High School, Prospects High Alternative School and Live Oak Continuation School without ever graduating. That’s when he became steeped in Latino culture, making friends with those who would initiate him into gang life. After meeting Carlos “Blackbird” Ramirez, Woodie’s involvement with the West Twompster Norteños deepened.

As a teenager, Woodie dabbled in breakdancing and rapping. He showed an aptitude for the creative aspects that hip-hop offered. But he was also drawn to other temptations and lifestyles. He appears to have spent time at Folsom State Prison for assault with a deadly weapon; multiple online sources reference his prison sentence, though no public documentation of it exists, and the timeline of Woodie’s imprisonment is unclear.

In 1994, Woodie and Ramirez’s close friend Gabriel “Snoop” Roberson was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in a gang-related quintuple shooting. Four years later, Ramirez was caught in a two-day standoff with the Antioch Police Department that tragically resulted in an apparent murder-suicide, leaving he and his two daughters dead. Conflicting accounts persist about the incident, with internet sleuths maintaining that Ramirez was a target of police misconduct. Woodie felt the same way, and the influence of both Ramirez and Roberson cast a lasting shadow over Woodie’s life and lyrics, even as the details of both circumstances grew muddied.

One thing is clear: Woodie’s life as a white Norteño rapper came with severe complications — and consequences. Woodie died in 2007 at the age of 31, reportedly from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head while living in Florence, Oregon. A quick YouTube search will yield various conspiracy theories about Woodie’s death, and for many fans, it’s become a sensitive subject without conclusive answers. To make matters worse, in 2018 — more than a decade after his death — Woodie’s memorial marker was stolen from Holy Cross Cemetery in Antioch.

After the theft, Storm Wolf, who coordinated the memorial’s installation, told the East Bay Times that as loved as Woodie was, “there were people who hated him that much too.”

Posthumously, however, there are countless stories of Woodie’s stature as a beloved community figure, particularly among Latinos. “Being a Mexican from East San Jose, Woodie helped me get through some hard lonely times as a teen. RIP to one of the realest there ever was,” wrote one viewer on a History of the Bay video dedicated to Woodie’s life and career. Every comment section regarding Woodie’s music is populated with similar testimonies.

And regardless of people’s personal opinions of him, everyone seems to agree that Woodie succeeded in doing what no one else had up to that point: putting Antioch on the map with fiercely studious, generational artistry.

Megan Calderon met Woodie at the Contra Costa County Fair in Antioch when they were both teenagers in the ’90s, and the two maintained a lifelong friendship. While Calderon pursued classes at Los Medanos College, Woodie enrolled at nearby Heald College to take a course in sound engineering.

“I bought a recording arts book for him back then for one dollar,” Calderon says. “I remember he told me how helpful that book was. He became self-taught. There was no older homie or brother or cousin that showed him how to get into the rap game and do music. He just played on the keyboard, messed around and learned how to do the recordings himself. His work ethic was respectable; he literally worked from the ground up. It was super cool to see.”

‘2 Sides of the Game’

It wasn’t until after Woodie was released from prison that he asserted himself as one of the Bay Area’s most operose rap voices, particularly among Chicano listeners. It’s because of Woodie — the slick-haired, 49ers jersey-adorned emcee and producer who represented Antioch with the same to-the-grave vigor as Compton’s Eazy-E or Brooklyn’s Notorious B.I.G. — that “the Yoc” even existed in the greater Bay Area lexicon.

Prior to Woodie, Latino rap in the Bay Area had ​just started to gain recognition. In 1988, the Latin Poets (featuring Don Cisco from San Francisco’s Excelsior District) released “Viva La Musica,” understood to be the first Spanish-imbued hip-hop song from the Bay. In 1992, N2DEEP from Vallejo released “Back to the Hotel,” which became a massive hit not only on local airwaves, but on MTV.

Another key figure during that period was Gary Baca, also known as G-Spot, a DJ and cable access TV host. His program featured Vallejo’s Funky Aztecs, who peaked with the 2Pac-assisted single “Slippin’ Into Darkness” (the song’s video features vatos, lowriders and cholas, and describes lascivious pursuits while encouraging Black and Latino unity over West Coast funk). Other Latin hip-hop figures who would call the Bay Area home include Chuy Gomez, Darkroom Familia, Equipto, Deuce Eclipse, Krudas Cubensi and Los Rakas.

Still, Woodie stood apart from his contemporaries. Aside from being a white man with heavy Norteño gang affiliations — an uncommon archetype for a Bay Area rapper, then and now — he was a prolific producer, and the owner of his own record label, East Co. Co. Records, founded in 1997. To fund the label, Woodie put up his Buick Skylark as collateral for a loan; the vehicle would later be featured on his first album cover.

In 1998, Woodie dropped his magnum-opus debut, Yoc Influenced. The project quickly garnered recognition, and Woodie became one of the Bay’s most promising unsigned talents. He would eventually get picked up by Koch Records in 2001 and enjoy national distribution for his second album, Demonz N My Sleep.

But Woodie built his reputation largely on local, independent success — a trademark of many Bay Area greats.

“It was a lot more hands-on,” says A-Wax. “We had to paint the town with promotional items on stop signs, liquor store windows, high traffic areas. It was all hand-to-hand, word of mouth: CDs on deck in the trunks of our cars. It was one brick at a time to lay the foundation, without any way to mass promote [on social media]. It was a different beast.”

Along with self-delivering CDs to Tower Records, as well as Under Records in Pittsburg and Rock Bottom in Antioch, Woodie and his cohort relied on community hubs to host shows, sell merch and record promotional commercials. It eventually paid off.

Northern Expozure

At his apex, Woodie rapped as if he were trapped in an eternal cypher with his inner demons — his songs often referenced sin, Catholicism, suicide and forgiveness. He grappled with the moral dilemmas and emotional vulnerabilities of being involved in crime in ways that most gang-affiliated, shoot-’em-all rappers from the ’90s rarely, if ever, vocalized.

“My mother prays that I quit the life I lead / Damn, I try to change my ways, but these streets are callin’ me/ And I love her to death, but at the same time I’m a soldier / I gotta put in work, let rivals know they can’t get over” he says on “The Streets Are Callin’ Me.” The song underscores a conflicted duality: Woodie’s internal search for right and wrong, approval and survival.

Woodie wasn’t just bragging about drive-bys in his music; he was self-analyzing and healing, scanning his past for scars and revealing them publicly. Rather than mindless glorification, his depiction of a predominantly Latino gang experience came through the eyes of a tormented outcast, a poet giving insight into a violent subculture that traditionally lacked dimension beyond sensational news headlines and Hollywood gang flicks.

In “The Clock Is Tickin’,” the Antioch philosopher reflects on religious teachings with a tone that’s skeptical, if not harrowingly pragmatic: “The Bible says I live my life rough, statistics say I’ll die young / I can’t disagree ’cause I’m a fucking walking time bomb.”

Just as with the work of 2Pac, Mac Dre, The Jacka and Nipsey Hussle — other great California rappers lost too soon to violence — a gloom of brooding mystery and enigma hangs over Woodie’s subversive storytelling. His words are clouded with a swirling sense of guilt, while confidently projecting clairvoyance about his time coming to an end. Yoc Influenced is filled with what-ifs (“damn, I tried to change my ways but the streets are calling me”), how-comes (“We used to be homies / You flipped the script and now we rivals”) and fuck-its (“If I fail I’ll rot in jail / and if I succeed I’ll burn in hell / So either way I’m fucked in these streets”).

Woodie’s own trademark production — eerie, otherworldly — underpinned his every word, providing a funky iciness. Though overlooked, his career as a producer was arguably more important than his rapping in creating Antioch’s soundscape. Big Tone, one of Woodie’s former protégés and a fellow Antiochian, describes Woodie’s beats as sounding “like the intro theme song of X-Files,” the cult television show about unsolved paranormal and extraterrestrial incidents.

Like A-Wax, Big Tone (a formerly gang-related Chicano rapper) made his rap debut with Woodie’s assistance; he eventually launched his own label, Sav It Out Records. Tone is one of many in Antioch who praise Woodie not just for his mentorship, but his enduring sonic imprint: creeping synthesizers haunted by dark thumps of bass, accompanied by razor-sharp ruminations on life, prison, loyalty and death.

“Before I knew him personally, I was just a fan of his music,” says Big Tone, who recently shared footage of Bay Area icon Mac Dre partying with Woodie in a tribute song about Antioch, titled “Rivertown.” “Then he found out about me, put me on one of his albums and gave me exposure. He would give you the shirt off his back if you needed it.”

Woodie built a niche, regional empire from vacuous air, shouting “Much pride north side of the Golden Gate / it’s Woodie Wood from the A-N-T-I-O-C-H” and documenting his own community with the sociological lens of a gang historian. On his regionally authoritative hit “Norte Sidin’” — a blapper which put Woodie on the radar of most listeners — he chronologically lays out Antioch’s rising turf wars like no one had before, all over a sample of Bananarama’s “Cruel Summer”: “Back in ’92 only a few of us was ridin’ / ’93 who are these fools South Sidin’ / ’94 we kept the pistol chamber smoking / ’95 they realized the Yoc ain’t joking.”

Woodie followed up the biggest solo success of his career with a group effort: Northern Expozure, a compilation highlighting other rappers and producers from East Contra Costa County, with an emphasis on Norteño gang members. The compilation would eventually spawn eight volumes. Just as beloved as his own solo albums, the Northern Expozure series might be Woodie’s biggest contribution to future generations of Antioch rappers, showcasing previously undiscovered talents like Lil Shadow and the aforementioned Big Tone and A-Wax.

According to A-Wax, who released “East Co Co” in 2022 as a heartfelt tribute to his fallen mentor, Woodie loosely modeled his vision after independent San Francisco rap legend JT the Bigga Figga and his homegrown enterprise Get Low Recordz.

“Own the label, sign the artists, make your own beats,” A-Wax explains. “JT was the one we looked up to who did everything on his own … He was kicking up noise. I wasn’t around JT to learn the ins and outs hands-on, but I seen it from a distance, and I know [Woodie] was running the same game plan.”

The progenitor of Antioch’s rap culture, Woodie turned “Yoc Life” and “Mob Livin’” into phrases that continue to ring out from lowriders, customized pickups and tinted-window coupes to this day. Woodie never reached the same commercial success as revered Bay rappers like E-40, but then again, who has? Woodie’s legacy is certainly layered, one of a transcendent underground artist loved by his fans and tarnished by his foes. Nonetheless, he remains one of the most gifted and altruistic California gang rappers of all time.

“This music thing, I’m doing it for my family and my homies,” he says on “Take My Soul,” a bonus track on Yoc Influenced. “I’m trying to leave some cash in their pockets before I go. The clock is ticking. It’s just a matter of time.”

The clock eventually ran out for Woodie. But before he left, he gave us all — homies, fans, the Yay — a burning soundtrack that lives on.