The thing I still find curious is before the event in question even happened, the venue's website and Ticketmaster only had it listed as "Ghostface Killah and the Rhythm Root All-Stars on the (whatever tour) with special guest Tech N9ne," (no mention of Rakim) whereas Tech makes it out as if Rakim was scheduled for the event and suddenly decided that night not to show up despite being advertised to appear. Sure, maybe the sites were wrong or being an artist, Tech had inside information as to what was really going on... but it's still interesting.
Interesting too that Tech has given two different stories as to what Rakim did. First, it was he skipped the date and flew back to New York to see his family, then it became him skipping the date and going to the next venue on the tour.