Solar's Child's Mother Speaks Friendship w/ Guru

The mother of Solar’s child, Tasha Denham, who was also a close friend to Guru speaks w/ Hip Hop DX, and provides some exclusive info that has yet been told about the friendship between Guru and Solar. Peep a few excerpts here: HipHopDX: Thank you for speaking to us. To start, could you describe your relationship and the context of your relationship to the man the Hip Hop community knows as Solar, as well as Guru?
Tasha Denham: I met Guru and Solar in 2006. I actually met them out in Denver, [Colorado]. I was moving back to New York. I started a personal relationship with Solar and subsequently became pregnant by him, and had a child by him.

In the middle of 2006, a situation happened on tour. They needed some help with some business things – they were in Europe, and needed some things done in the States, and I happened to be able to help them out at that time.

By the end of 2006, I decided that I was going to leave and come back to Denver, due to issues that I was having with Solar in our personal relationship. At that time, because we weren’t going to have a personal relationship, I wasn’t able to help [7 Grand Records] anymore. After our daughter was born, I started talking to them again, and had just a personal relationship at that time with both Solar and Guru. I considered Guru a close friend of mine. Solar is obviously the father of my child.

In 2007, once again, they were over in Europe, and had some complications on tour. Their tour manager had to quit in the middle of the tour. So they had me do some stuff for them. It ended up working out well, and at that point in time, they decided to bring me on as an assistant for [7 Grand Records] and I was both of their personal-slash executive assistants, at the same time, it was a small record label, so I did whatever needed to be done to try and make the record label run smoothly. So I worked on a  day-to-day basis with both Guru and Solar till about July, 2008.

DX: It’s a weird question to ask, but I know that what you’re telling me a lot on pre-2006 is based entirely on what you’ve heard, but it’s an important question to the Hip Hop community, in the wake of last Tuesday’s letter – do you know the context from that Ownerz Tour of the relationship that Solar and DJ Premier may have had with each other? A lot of people believe that Premo has been [attacked by these words Solar may have written in the letter]. A lot of people are curious to know if Solar would have any motive.
Tasha Denham: Um…I do know that there were at least some tensions. I wasn’t there, obviously, so I can’t say to what extent. But I do know that there was some tensions. I can’t say that anything Solar had against Premier had to be one specific incident. Just watching, over the time that I spent with them, Solar had such a twisted sense of how important [his own role] was to the music game. I think there was an extensive amount of jealousy towards what Premier had already created in the music industry. I can’t speak that there was one specific incident that created that animosity between them.
DX: I interviewed Premier in December 2005 in New York shortly after the break-up was implied. Premier expressed that the group was simply on glorified hiatus. I interviewed Guru and Solar in spring of 2006, and Guru was very resistant to even my question to whether Big Shug’s “Counterpunch,” which featured Guru, would be the last time fans would hear his voice on a DJ Premier beat. In interviews to come, for various outlets, Guru said some harsh things. You’re one of the few people he seemed to speak a lot to in recent years. In your private conversations with Guru, was that [sentiment] really there?
Tasha Denham: There was definitely some distaste. I don’t want to go as far as “bitterness.” I think of it had been put into his head. I don’t know if he truly felt some of the things he said in his heart. He was convinced, by Solar, that back in maybe 2003, 2004, Guru was held up and mugged in Queens, [New York]. Solar convinced Guru, at that point in time, that Premier had put the hit out on him, and Premier wanted him dead.
DX: For the record, you and I spoke privately before this interview. There’s a reason why it’s not the first question, and that largely comes from respect for Guru and his legacy and distaste for some of the unfounded rumors running right now. However, I have to ask, as MTV’s Sway Calloway so effectively worded last week to Solar, from your respective, were Guru and Solar engaged in a relationship of “a romantic nature?”
Tasha Denham: I spent extreme amounts of time with both Guru and Solar, both individually and altogether. I traveled with them. At one point in time, I stayed in Guru’s house for several weeks. I, myself, never saw any indication of it being a romantic or sexual relationship. I do have a child with [Solar]. I know that there’s many men out there that are homosexuals that have children, so that does not say that he’s not. I, however, do not believe he is. I never saw any indication of that. I never saw any type of affection in that way, if you want. I saw Guru interested in women. Obviously when I was around, Solar was with me at that point in time, but at the same time, I have my feelings that there were probably other women as well. I never got the feeling that it was homosexual. It angers me, the rumors that I hear out there – not from people like Sway. The way he asked, it was absolutely appropriate. He asked as a journalist. But I have read things, on the Internet of course, that have really disgusted me, because they’re being spoken by people that don’t have facts.

I think the way Solar is, he needed it to be that way, because that’s the way of control. You get somebody, and you distance them from everyone else. They see you on a daily basis. You’re their man day in and day out, the first person you talk to in the morning, the last person you talk to before you go to bed, that’s gonna be the person you’re gonna turn to for everything. That’s the way to best control someone. I don’t ever believe it was sexual.

DX: As a close associate, an employee, all these things. When was the first time you started to notice that things were not normal or healthy?
Tasha Denham: [Pauses] I think it came pretty early on, really. One of the defining moments to me when I knew something was…it was the way Solar spoke to Guru. It was always down to him. He really belittled him, and would do it in front of other people. This wasn’t something he just did in private. He is a member of The [Five Percent] Nation of Gods and Earths, as is Guru. He would use that against him, to bring him down. It was important to both of them, very important. I believe Guru’s a pleaser; he liked to make people happy. [Solar] would tell him that the Nation of Gods and Earths are ashamed of him, they’re disappointed in him. That he doesn’t live up to their teachings. I can’t think of the word that they used. There was a lot of times they’d get into arguments over it. He’d sit, and Guru would try to defend himself, and Solar would just get more and more irate over it.

There was one night we were at Guru’s house. I was about three months pregnant at the time. Guru kept defending himself. Guru actually stood up and kind of got in Solar’s face about it. Next thing I know, Solar punched him in the face. From that point in time, he just started kicking him and hitting him. Guru was fighting back, he wasn’t just sitting there being a punk, but at the same time, Guru had severe asthma. He didn’t have his inhaler. He started really hyper-ventalating and really having a hard time, and Solar kept beating him. It wasn’t a fight anymore, it was beating him. I felt that it was so bad that I got in between the two of them and broke it up, because I knew he wouldn’t hit me of course. At that point in time, I was pregnant with his child.

Instead of stopping and making sure his partner, friend, “brother” – as he calls him was okay, Guru was sitting there saying, “I’m having an asthma attack. I need to go to the hospital. I think I’m gonna have a heart attack.” He’s bleeding, really shaking. Instead of stopping and calming himself down, [Solar] told me, “We’re leaving,” and goes and gets in the car and drives me back to the city. [He] didn’t call and check on Guru, didn’t make sure he was alright. That’s probably one of the first times I was like, “Wow, this relationship is really unhealthy. It’s a really sick relationship.” After that, if I didn’t physically see it myself…I saw [Guru] punched in the face numerous times with no provocation. It [would just be] that he’d get upset with something Guru would say and punch him in the face. I know he knocked a tooth out of Guru’s. I know he gave him a black eye [so Guru would] have to wear glasses for photo-shoots and concerts. To listen to [Solar] talk to [Guru], you’d think he was talking to a child sometimes. Guru would tell me how bad that hurt him. He’d say, “Back when we were just friends, he never would have spoken to me this way. He always treated me with respect. Now that we’re doing this record label, he has no respect. He treats me this way.” There was a fear in him. Solar had distanced him from everything in his life: his family, his ex-partner, the whole Gang Starr Foundation and the music industry, really, as a whole. Guru spent a lot of time alone. A lot of time, if he wasn’t with Solar, he was by himself. It was his son or Solar.

He would tell me that since the label wasn’t as successful as they originally thought, he just wanted to go away. He just wanted to disappear. He wanted to go to Europe, or go to L.A. and do voice-over work and quit the whole music industry as a whole. He wanted to go back to being a regular guy, like a mailman. It got worse and worse.

Unfortunately, in about July of 2008 is when I was banished from the circle because I wouldn’t follow orders that were given to me. At that time, Guru was instructed that he was to have no more contact with me. Without Solar’s knowledge, we stayed in contact throughout 2008, till the end of 2008. I had a lot of business information that they didn’t have access to, and Guru would need it for different things. He couldn’t ask Solar to ask me, ’cause we didn’t speak. He couldn’t ask Solar [for permission] to speak to me, ’cause Solar would be angry that Guru didn’t have [the information]. So he’d contact me. I knew that things weren’t getting any better. He’d tell me that Solar was checking his emails. I was also informed that, the longer and longer it went, that Solar even took Guru’s phone away for days at a time. Guru wasn’t allowed to have a personal life at all. Even when they were on tour, he took Guru’s inhaler from him and told him that he wasn’t allowed to use it, because it was a crutch, and that he didn’t really need it…It just breaks my heart that [Guru] was suffering that way.
Here for the full interview.