VIDEO: Usher Details the ‘Wild’ Times He Had Living With Puff Daddy at Just 14

“I went there to see the lifestyle…and I saw it,” the R&B superstar recalls

August 22, 2016

From a very young age, Usher was tapped to become an R&B superstar. On Monday morning, he told Howard that he truly learned what it meant to be famous after living with Puff Daddy for a year at the age of fourteen.

“I got a chance to see some things. I went there to see the lifestyle, and I saw it,” Usher said during his first Stern Show interview.

His unique education — dubbed “Puffy Flavor Camp” — came about after a teenage Usher impressed music executive L.A. Reid with his musical abilities. He was then flown to New York to live with Puffy during the heyday of Bad Boy Records in order to experience what it meant to really make it big in music.

“It was pretty wild. It was crazy,” Usher said, while rattling off some of the biggest names in hip hop who were a constant presence at Puffy’s house, including Notorious B.I.G., Lil’ Kim, Faith Evans, Mary J. Blige, and Craig Mack.

“I was like the little brother – they called me Baby Boo,” Usher said. But Howard wondered if he was given any rules while living with Puffy. After all, he was just a kid.

“He wasn’t disciplinary. He was letting me be a young man,” Usher told Howard. While he wasn’t in school, he did have a tutor. He also had a per diem, though Usher said he was given just enough money to not get him in to too much trouble.

When the time came to put out Usher’s first album, Puff Daddy acted as his producer. But after the debut didn’t do as well commercially as expected, Puffy passed on being a part of Usher’s second album, “My Way,” which went 6x platinum in the late ’90s.

“He was always a family member from afar, so I never felt a disconnection,” Usher said of Diddy when asked if there was any bad blood between the two. “I will always look at him like a brother.”

Now that Usher has kids of his own, though, Howard was curious if he’d ever send them to Puffy Flavor Camp.

“Hell no!” Usher said.

Watch the clip (above).

See Usher in “Hands of Stone,” in theaters Friday, Aug. 26.