I recognized that performance was the key. Putting on a show, giving people a spectacle. That was a big deal. You had to have great music, but most importantly your shows needed to pop. You had to get the crowd going. Every group I brought through had a different style, but the good ones were the ones who were really competitive about putting on the best performance. It’s part of the reason I didn’t think the conscious music was the way to go. We needed to make party music, music to give people a good time. Mixx and Fresh Kid Ice, they liked the idea. Yuri Vielot didn’t want to go in that direction, so he left the group. Mixx reached out to a friend of his from Riverside, another MC named Mark Ross, Brother Marquis. Marquis was down for it. Those guys did one more single for Macola, this song called “What I Like,” and then they were done with that mess.
Around this same time, Mixx and Ice were getting out of the service. They’d been coming down to Miami on their weekend leave, doing gigs, and going right back. When you get out of the service it’s like getting out of college, not knowing what direction to take. But I was there making them this offer and they figured, Okay, let’s move down to Miami and put this record out and see what happens. I got them an apartment and we started looking to make something happen. Without any planning on my part, my career as a music entrepreneur was about to take off.
There was no rap in Miami when I set out to do this. There was no rap group in the South before 2 Live Crew, period. We were the first. I was trying to do something that had never been done. I first took 2 Live Crew to this company called Music Specialist, run by a guy from the Party Down DJs. I thought we could do a deal with him, but he wasn’t interested. He didn’t want to do rap, just dance music. I went to some other people at the radio station; they weren’t interested, either. People weren’t interested in rap. People kept telling me the music sucked. I kept saying, “No, this music is hot!” Everywhere I went with these guys, doors kept closing.
At that time I wasn’t in the group, and I wasn’t even considering being a part of it. I didn’t want to be a rapper. I didn’t want to be in a rap group. After starting off being a DJ, I’d realized that my real talent was not just spinning records but in putting these shows together. What I wanted was to be a concert promoter. I wanted to be like Bill Graham. I wanted to be the greatest concert promoter in the world. That’s what I was grooming myself to be. I didn’t want to get into the music business as far as owning a record company, either. But I did it anyway because I was really upset that nobody would give these guys a shot. That was just my stubborn, bullheaded personality, the same part of me that started a riot by telling the cops in the park to go fuck themselves. I said, “Okay, fuck all these small-time labels. I’ll put the record out and do it myself.” I told the guys, “Look, I don’t know nothing about the record business, but I believe in this, so let’s go make some music.”
I started my own label: Luke Records. Suddenly, I really was an A&R guy. Now I just had to find the right single for these guys. One of the things I did with the Ghetto Style DJs was make up dances, really get the crowd whipped up. I’d mess with the tempo of the record, speed it up or slow it down and get everybody on the dance floor moving together, doing the same call-and-response. It was always a lot of fun and everybody knew it as one of my signature moves. We had one dance called Ghetto Jump. I’d play the opening to the theme from the TV show The Wild Wild West and then say, “Jump! Jump! Everybody Ghetto Jump!” The whole place would jump, just like that, everybody jumping up in the air.
I figured since these dances were popular, I could make some extra money selling singles to feed local dance crazes. This was right before I met the guys from 2 Live Crew. I went to this local group, these two guys, and said, “Hey, I wanna make a song called ‘Ghetto Jump.’ I’ll give you the idea. You write it, you record it, we’ll break it, the song will get hot, and you can give me a free show to promote and we’ll sell the fuck out of some records.”
They did the song and brought it to me. At the time, I didn’t know nothing about being a producer, publishing rights, credits, none of that. I just put it out there. The shit got hot and I went to those guys and said, “Okay, let’s do this free show.” The guys did not want to do a show. They didn’t hold up their end.
I was pissed off. By that time I was talking to the guys from 2 Live Crew and they were coming down here and they were getting screwed by their label and so I was like, fuck these other dudes. The Ghetto Style DJs, we had lots of dances. Me, I was making that shit up every day. I created that one, I’ll create another one. One of the other popular dances we did was called Throw the D. It was a funny dance that all the kids would do. So I said, “I’ll just do that with these California guys and that’ll be their next single. I’ll use that to start Luke Records and I’ll make a hit out of that.”
So I went to Mixx and the other guys and I said, “I’m gonna lay this shit out for you. I want y’all to do a song. We do this dance down here called Throw the D. That’s gonna be your next single.”
They said, “How’s the dance go?”
I said, “Just come to the club and check it out.”
So Fresh Kid Ice, he came in and checked it out and went home and wrote it up and we laid it down in the studio: “There’s a brand-new dance and it’s coming your way, it was started in Miami by the Ghetto Style DJs!”
I was like, “Okay, shit’s hot. We got us a damn song. Let’s break this motherfucker.”
I went to those guys who did “Ghetto Jump” for me and I told them to go fuck themselves. Then I took “Throw the D” and I blew it out all over Miami. And that’s when the shit just took off.
2 LIVE
When I signed 2 Live Crew and started Luke Records and put out “Throw the D,” I had no idea how the record industry worked. None. It was all on-the-job learning. I jumped in with both feet and told myself I was smart enough to figure it out as I went along.
When I started, I was literally putting copies of “Throw the D” in the trunk of my old Honda and driving them to the local record stores and flea markets. I did that for months. After a while, I realized it was too slow. I was not working smart. I had to learn how the professionals did it. I talked to record-store owners and asked how they got their records.
“I get them from a distributor.”
“What’s a distributor?” I asked.
He said, “Talk to Fred Hill. He can help you.”
I called up Fred, a local distributor. I went to meet him in person. He explained it to me. “You sell your record to a distributor in bulk at wholesale, and then we turn around and sell it directly to the store. We take our cut and pay the rest back to you.”
That made sense. Immediately I started selling to Fred. Quickly I noticed that I was only in certain stores in certain regions. I discovered that different distributors had different accounts and worked in different regions. I wanted to be in the big chain stores, so I went and made another deal with the guy who had those accounts.
“Are there other people like you around the country?” I asked Fred.
He introduced me to the distributors who handled the Southeast and California and New York. I started making deals with them.
That’s how it went the whole time, me asking questions, learning on the fly. I had to learn fast because “Throw the D” was blowing up. It was all word of mouth. No advertising, no radio play. The shit just started spreading. For six months after that song came out, in south Florida you couldn’t walk into a club or a house party or a college dorm without hearing it. The word kept going north, into Georgia and Alabama. We sold a lot of records.
Since I was moving all this product, I went in to my distributors and asked for my money.
They told me I couldn’t have my money. They said, “Oh! You don’t know? You don’t get paid for that record until you do another record. You gotta make another record.”
That’s the industry. In order to get paid for the last record, artists had to give them another one. Distributors he
ld back earnings until they received more product to sell. All the distributors operate this way. What the fuck? I have to make another record?
Back then, rappers always did response records. One of the biggest came after UTFO released “Roxanne, Roxanne.” There were something like two dozen response records: “The Real Roxanne,” “Roxanne’s Mother,” “Roxanne’s Revenge,” which was done by this thirteen-year-old girl Roxanne Shanté. It gave me the idea for the next album. For the response record to “Throw the D” we’d do “Throw the P.” I went to my cousin who’d just finished high school and some of her girlfriends and asked them to do “Throw the P.”
We wrote it up, laid out the music, and took them to the studio. They had no idea what the hell they were doing, had never rapped before. We made them into a female rap group called Anquette, put out the song, and it was another hit.
At that point I started getting my money out of the distributors. I think the first check I got was for something like $20,000. After that, more checks kept coming. A lot of these distributors were pretty creative with their accounting. They’d take inventory off the books and pay in cash. I’d go into places with some boxes of records and come out with five, ten thousand dollars in cash on me. Fuck, it’s Christmas! I liked it. It beat the hell out of taking five dollars at the door to put on a dance. I realized I could keep doing dances to break records, but I could also put records out and make the real money there. That’s when I decided to build Luke Records into a real company.
Those early years were crazy. Everything was moving all at once. “Throw the D” came out of nowhere and became a hit so fast that I was just working to keep up, driving my little Honda all over south Florida, hitting up record stores and radio stations, going from the pressing plant to the distributor and back again the next day. Plus I was still DJing and bringing down these New York guys on the weekends. It was nonstop.
I don’t know exactly how many copies “Throw the D” sold. I was doing these cash deals with distributors on the side, hustling it myself at gigs and flea markets. I know it sold enough to be certified a gold record. I didn’t even know what a gold record was at that time.
I didn’t know the industry very well when I started, but the one thing I did have was common sense. Everything I did was about what made sense. If it don’t make sense, it don’t make dollars.
I decided that 2 Live Crew needed to do an album. That may seem obvious now, but back then it wasn’t. At first hip-hop was about selling singles. “Rapper’s Delight,” “The Breaks,” “The Message,” those were all singles. By the end of ’85, Run-D.M.C. and Whodini had put out their debut albums, and LL Cool J had just dropped Radio, but there weren’t many. A lot of people in the industry didn’t think interest in hip-hop was big enough to carry a whole album and get people in stores to buy them.
Fuck that. I planned to do an album and then cut the singles off. My thinking was if the song was hot enough, people would buy the album when they couldn’t get the single anymore. I could do the math. I may have struggled in school, but I’d been a businessman since I was ten years old. I could do money and numbers in my head on the fly. I could look at anything and see it on a balance sheet: the cost per unit, the up-front capital I’d need, projected revenues and expenses. It came natural. It was instinctual. I started out doing it with mowing lawns and selling weed and putting a Pac-Man machine in my mamma’s wash house to get kids to come over and buy lemonade at an 80 percent markup. Selling records was no different.
As soon as I started moving product, I could see that the cost of pressing and shipping an album versus the cost of pressing and shipping a single is marginal, but I could charge four times as much for the album as a single. You can make more money selling a hundred thousand albums than you can selling a quarter million singles. If the album really took off, you could quadruple your money.
My industry contacts all said, “Don’t do it. You’re never going to be able to make it work.” We put out our first album in July of 1986, The 2 Live Crew Is What We Are. I pulled the single of “Throw the D” out of stores. I was selling a shitload of singles, and I just cut it off. It was no longer available for purchase. It forced people to buy the album, and we made more money.
I decided to get serious and educate myself about how the business worked from top to bottom. I researched manufacturers and learned about manufacturing hubs around the country: in New York and Philadelphia, who made product for the Northeast; others in California for the West Coast; a few in the Midwest. I learned how manufacturers in Miami pressed for lower fees because they had to sell records for cheaper in the Bahamas and Jamaica and the Dominican Republic. I located these guys and made some deals. Since they were already making their money on their Caribbean accounts, the work I brought in was gravy, so they sold their services to me dirt cheap. I was getting my records manufactured for less than any of the New York or LA guys. Out the gate I was making more per album.
There was one manufacturer down here who was so small that I basically took over his whole operation. I became his only client, but he still couldn’t keep up as I got bigger. He couldn’t handle the fulfillment. That’s when I learned about shipping. You can make a record for seventy cents, but then you have to ship the thing, and the shipping ends up costing you three times manufacturing costs. Shipping is always what kills you. So again, I was looking at the math and using common sense. Word of mouth was spreading and we were selling records everywhere, so it started making sense for me to use a pressing plant in California to service the West Coast, one in New Jersey for the Northeast, and one in Detroit for the Midwest. I paid more for pressing the albums, but my cost per unit went down on the shipping.
My focus completely shifted away from wanting to be a DJ or a concert promoter. Now it was more about being a great record guy. After putting the album out, I was thinking, I like this shit. I’m making money. I began going to all the industry conventions. I went to the New Music Seminar in New York. I went to Jack the Rapper in Atlanta. I went to these things and sat in on any kind of panel I could learn something from. I listened to all these people talk about the business: radio DJs, program directors, industry execs. I would go to these different panels and listen to people talk about how records are sold, how to promote a record, what you were expected to do in the industry.
I’d grab some of the older guys outside these panels and ask them a million questions, getting their advice, especially at Jack the Rapper. It’s the black music convention started by Jack Gibson, who’d been an early DJ at the first-ever black-owned radio station in Atlanta, WERD, back when it opened in 1949. The old-school DJs and program directors at Jack the Rapper, the black guys who’d spent the last thirty years in the business shut out of the mainstream, fighting to establish themselves, getting paid half what guys at white radio stations were making, watching Elvis Presley and the Beatles come along and steal their shit right out from under them—I’d sit and listen to those guys talk for hours, the way I used to sit and listen to my uncle Ricky, learning everything I could about the history of black folks getting fucked and how we fought back.
This one old guy at Jack the Rapper, he was one of the first black music promoters in the business, and he taught me the importance of marketing and promotion. You can have the best record in the world, but you got nothing if you can’t promote it. He told me, “All these people running around this convention, they couldn’t sell a fucking dog. Most of em, ninety percent of em, they got records but they can’t sell shit. And you ain’t in this business unless you’re selling records. When a window of opportunity opens up, you better go and take advantage of it.”
Talking with guys like him, I realized that marketing and promotion was where I really needed to concentrate my efforts. I became all about marketing. Common sense was: okay, what makes a hit in Miami? I had to get to the mobile DJs on the street, the DJs breaking records in the clubs. Where do guys like me find new records? In the record pools. I reached out to find all the gu
ys like me around the country. I was in the Jerry Jarvis record pool. I asked him, “What are the other record pools around the country?” He broke it down for me: there’s always a pool director in every city. I’d call that guy up and say, “Hey, man, what’s up? This is Luke. I got this record that’s hot down here in Miami. Check it out for me.” I printed up extra promotional copies and sent them to record pools.
Marketing was a real challenge. All that promotional space you used to see in the front of record stores, the racks by the registers and the tables by the window? All that space is bought up by the major labels. They pay to get their albums up there. I didn’t have that kind of money. I didn’t have $60,000 to work a region. I had to find new ways of doing things. I noticed how political figures ran their campaigns with the fliers and the yard signs and all that. It would be an inexpensive way for me to promote a song. I made fliers and yard signs. It was cheap advertising.
One of the other things I did was I still had my old van, the van we used to haul our DJ equipment. I took the van, put a sound system in it, painted it with our logos and girls and shit, and we traveled around the state. We would go to record stores in Jacksonville and Gainesville, all the way up to Georgia. We’d park the van out front, fire up, and play the music. It was our real live in-store promotion. We created this whole club atmosphere outside of a record store. People heard us and went into the store to check out our album. We generated sales that way. Back then, people didn’t have these massive, state-of-the-art sound systems in cars. So anytime we would leave south Florida, people thought our van was fascinating. I was one of the first rappers to do that kind of guerrilla street marketing to promote a record.
The Book of Luke Page 8