I created my own rulebook, just working on a shoestring budget and using my community. We created a street-team mentality, what they call guerrilla or viral marketing today.
The record pools were a great way to spread word of mouth. The promotional guys have the local relationships and physically take the record to radio stations and clubs to get them in the rotation. I did that for myself in Miami, but I couldn’t do it in Atlanta, in Charlotte, in Houston. You could hire an independent promoter, but back then independent promoters got paid something like sixty to a hundred thousand dollars a year. I couldn’t afford that, didn’t have a budget for that. I decided to use colleges.
One of the things that made “Throw the D” such a hit was spring break in Fort Lauderdale and Daytona and Miami. There are ten cities in the country that are considered breakout markets. Miami has always been considered one of them. Any kind of tourist destination is a breakout market. People go there, party, and then go back home and say, “Man, I heard this shit in Miami. Shit is dope.” College kids from all over the country came for spring break, heard the new single, and took it home with them.
Young people were getting turned on to rap quicker than the established radio stations and clubs anyway. I called up the DJs at the college radio stations. I sent them promotional records, and they played them. Next thing I’d do is say, “Hey, college DJ. You got somebody there wants a job? I need a promotion guy to take my record to the club. I’ll send him a couple of dollars and some free albums to keep and give away.”
As an extra incentive, I came up with the idea for Luke Gear: T-shirts, jackets, bandannas, all branded with my logo. I got all these college kids working for me, and I’d send them a Luke Records jacket to make them look official. I’d tell them that with this jacket they could go around getting in the clubs for free as a representative of the label. They thought that was pretty cool. So I would send two jackets to every college radio station in every college town in the Southeast, and those would be my independent promoters. They would take the albums and bring them into the dorms, the frat parties, and the clubs where all the college students hang.
We were growing so fast and getting so many orders that I could barely keep up. For the first year or two, I had no corporation or anything, didn’t know what a corporation was or how to form one. I just had cash coming in, checks being written to me personally. Suddenly I was bringing in tens of thousands of dollars a month and had to learn how to manage it. I got myself incorporated. I started adding all of these people to my business. I had some real smart, brilliant brothers working for me. I knew people could lose money through tax evasion, and I didn’t want to get caught up like that. I found an accountant.
For a long time I was picking the inventory up from the pressing plant in my old Honda. Now I couldn’t even fit all the records in my car. I had to start using a truck to deliver to the distributors. We started out storing the excess inventory in the apartments I’d rented for the other guys in the group. Then we were pressing so many records that the boxes took over the damn apartments. There were walls of boxes about to fall over. Dudes were sitting on boxes in the living room like it was fucking furniture. They were like, “Man, you got to get these records out our apartments. We got our girlfriends over.”
The thing about 2 Live Crew was we weren’t like a lot of these other groups, like Run-D.M.C. We weren’t a couple of kids from the neighborhood who came up together and started a rap group because we were pals. I joined the group because they needed me to get them a deal. Marquis came on to replace this Yuri Vielot guy who’d left. We liked each other, but it was always more of a business arrangement. Me and Mixx were friends outside of work, even from the beginning. We were probably the closest. We pretty much did all the business and everything together. Mixx was the one I always talked to when things came up. Chris was actually very shy, much more reserved, laid-back, and quiet. Marquis was the wild guy of the group. He had the drugs and the girls and the booze, a real rock and roller. He was the only one who really came close to the public image we put out there in the music. Me, I never did drugs or partied as much, so I was never that close with him.
I wore a lot of hats in the group. I owned the label. I was the manager. I helped write a lot of the songs. During shows, Mark and David did most of the MCing while I was more of the hype man. I had to get out there because onstage those guys had the personalities of fucking turnips, no idea how to work a crowd. I brought in this persona I’d created with the Ghetto Style DJs, this wild man: Luke Skyywalker. I’d get the crowd going, start the call-and-response. Basically, I would be in between all those guys and I just did whatever the hell I wanted to do.
Originally, the business side was supposed to be all of us together as partners. But the guys started distancing themselves from that part of things. They were like, “Nah, man, we’re artists. We don’t talk to record distributors and shit like that.” They didn’t want to be businessmen. They wanted to be rock stars. They wanted to live that life. They wanted to get money, go hang out with the girls. They wanted to smoke dope. They wanted to snort dope, all that wild shit. Not Mixx so much. Mixx just wanted to stay in the studio. Since they just wanted to be the talent, I handled the business aspect.
I removed the records from their apartments, rented an office for myself in a high-rise on Biscayne Boulevard, and moved all the inventory to the wash house out behind my mother’s house, the shack where I used to hook up the Pac-Man machine in high school. I had boxes of records packed into that place and a ten-foot fence with razor wire put up around it to keep the neighborhood punks from stealing my shit. Next thing you know I had eighteen-wheelers backing into my mom’s backyard to get the product and take it to the distributors to get it out across the country.
The 2 Live Crew Is What We Are went gold, and I owned a big piece of it. As soon as I started making money I bought my parents a house, a real nice ranch in Miami Lakes with a pool and a big yard and safe streets where kids can play. That was the whole goal. Grow up, make some money, buy your mom a house. My mamma didn’t want to leave. She kept saying, “I’ve got all my friends here.” But Liberty City had changed and wasn’t safe anymore, and I just wanted her to be safe.
I got myself a nice car, some big jewelry. Of course, the cops assumed I was selling drugs and started hassling me more than ever. Jerry Rushin, the manager of the radio station where I interned, called for a sit-down with the head of the local precinct and we showed him something like a million dollars’ worth of record-sale receipts. The same cop motherfuckers who set off a riot when they kicked me out of African Square Park for playing my music too loud, and now they couldn’t fucking touch me.
ALL IN
Down in Miami, I was rolling in more money than I’d ever imagined possible, but that wasn’t true anywhere else. All these rappers in New York and LA were throwing off gold records, and they were fucking broke. They were all getting fucked by the industry.
At the time, there were six major players in the record business, the “Big Six”: Warner, Polygram, CBS, EMI, RCA, and MCA. Those were the corporate labels, and all of them had subsidiaries that dealt with specific genres of music, like Atlantic Records, owned by Warner, which did a lot of big album rock and a lot of classic R&B. In the early years, the only rapper to land a deal with a major label was Kurtis Blow, who signed with Mercury to do “Christmas Rappin’” and “The Breaks.”
“Christmas Rappin’” sold four hundred thousand singles. “The Breaks” went gold, selling over five hundred thousand. But the major labels still wanted nothing to do with rap. The white executives didn’t get us, or just didn’t want us. But it was really the black executives, the ones who’d been brought up to run the R&B imprints, who tried to kill hip-hop at the start. To them, rap was too black, too ghetto. It reminded them of life in the streets, the world they’d spent their whole lives running away from. They were caught up playing that respectability politics game for these white-owned companies. They wanted to make
R&B into upscale, sophisticated music, show how far blacks had come, show how we were becoming high class. It was the same in the black media. Black radio stations didn’t call themselves black anymore. They were “Urban Contemporary.” They barely gave rap any airplay at all, or if they did it was only in special shows on the weekends. Ebony didn’t put a hip-hop artist on its cover until 1991, twelve years after “Rapper’s Delight” sold eight million copies. The white folks over at Rolling Stone had Run-D.M.C. on their cover in 1986, five years ahead of Ebony.
Since the major labels and black execs didn’t want us, most of the early rap singles were put out by these little mom-and-pop labels, like Enjoy and Sugarhill Records, or by little shoestring vanity labels. They’d pay these New York guys a couple hundred dollars to do a single. It looked like a lot of money to a couple kids from the ghetto, but it was actually a total rip-off. They’d rush out some single, sell fifty, sixty, maybe a couple hundred thousand copies, mostly around New York, and that would be it. The artist would never see a penny of it. These little vanity labels, they weren’t interested in building up these guys’ long-term careers or in seeing hip-hop take off as serious music. They were just trying to cash in on what they felt was a fad.
The only real A&R guys who took hip-hop seriously were the white and Jewish guys who ran some of the independent labels. A lot of these guys had a couple of big hits with disco, and ever since that died out they were looking around for the next big thing. These guys had their ear to the streets. They were going up to the clubs they’d heard about in the Bronx, to rap battles they’d heard about in Harlem. They were usually the only white guys in the room, but they got it.
A real A&R man knows a hit when he hears it, and these guys heard it. They saw the potential. Unlike all the black A&R guys, they didn’t have any resistance to the rawness of it. They liked the rawness. There was Tom Silverman, who started Tommy Boy Records and signed Afrika Bambaataa to put out “Planet Rock.” You had Clive Calder at Jive Records. He signed Whodini. You had Cory Robbins and Steve Plotnicki, who started Profile Records and picked up Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde as their very first act.
Even though these guys genuinely believed in hip-hop, they still ran their labels like old-school record companies. They paid the artists shit and kept all the ownership for themselves. They were offering these rappers terrible deals. The first single that Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde put out for Profile, “Genius Rap,” sold 150,000 copies. After that came out, Profile offered to sign Andre Harrell and Alonzo Brown to a long-term deal, giving them $2,000 for the publishing rights to everything they recorded under contract. Two lousy fucking thousand dollars to give up every penny on the intellectual property of everything they did. But they took it. They didn’t know any better. Shitty deals like that were everywhere. All those guys were being taken advantage of. They didn’t have any choice—or at least they thought they didn’t.
At that time Russell Simmons was the guy at the center of New York hip-hop, as a promoter, as a manager. He had a hand in just about every major artist coming up, from Kurtis Blow to Whodini to his own brother’s group, Run-D.M.C. With Russell as their manager, Run-D.M.C. signed with Profile Records in 1983, and they got a $2,000 advance for their first single “It’s Like That”/“Sucker M.C.s.” The single sold 250,000 copies. The next year, their first album, Run-D.M.C., went gold. But they still weren’t making any real money.
Even before the video with Aerosmith for “Walk This Way” made them a crossover hit and Raising Hell went platinum, Run-D.M.C. were already a big success. Their deal with Profile only paid a 10 percent royalty, which was shit. They were making maybe seventy cents an album. And Profile could hold back those royalty payments for all kinds of reasons, which they did, basically keeping Run-D.M.C. on a short leash. The label wants you to put out a new album but you don’t have an album you want to put out? They can stop payment on the royalties from your last album—the money you’ve already earned—until you deliver what they want. They own you.
Russell was starting to realize what a bullshit deal his guys had with Profile. He was looking to find something better. That’s when he hooked up with Rick Rubin, this Jewish kid who was running his own label, Def Jam, with his parents’ money out of a dorm room at NYU. He’d put out “It’s Yours” by T La Rock and Jazzy Jay, had put out the first Beastie Boys single, and had just signed LL Cool J. Russell and Rick Rubin teamed up to make Def Jam into a serious player.
LL Cool J’s first single, “I Need a Beat,” was a huge hit. Hip-hop was looking more and more like a business the major labels wanted to be in. Columbia Records made Def Jam an offer. Now Russell and Rubin had to make a choice. They could have taken what’s called a production deal, which would essentially make Def Jam a front for the bigger label. Columbia would put up the advance money to sign new artists, pay the production, distribution, and marketing costs, and split the revenues with Def Jam. That would offer Def Jam cash up front, but it also meant less long-term profit and less ownership. Columbia would own the masters.
Or Def Jam could have taken a pressing and distribution deal. In that deal, Def Jam would have remained more of its own business, with Columbia just acting as a partner giving the albums a bigger push, lower production costs, and wider distribution. Def Jam would have had to use its own cash in signing artists and would have had more exposure for any acts that flopped, but Russell and Rubin would have owned their own masters and kept a much bigger share of the back end. Bigger risk, better reward.
The mid-eighties was a big turning point in the history of rap. The old-school guys like Kool Herc and Grandmaster Flash, their time was done. There were many guys coming up to replace them, guys like Run-D.M.C., Schoolly D, Too $hort, Doug E. Fresh. There was also Hollywood trying to cash in, treating hip-hop like a teenage fad, putting out these ridiculous, blaxploitation-style rap movies like Breakin’ and Beat Street. They were selling “breakdancing mats” at toy stores at the mall. Hip-hop had to decide what it was going to be. Was rap some fad that was going to disappear, like disco? Or was it a musical revolution that was going to change the whole culture of America? Everybody in the entertainment business was deciding where to place their bets.
Me, I went all in. Nobody was offering me the chance to sell myself out, but it wouldn’t have mattered if they did. I believed in black ownership. I’d seen what happened in Overtown when they put the expressway through and we didn’t own our own land to protect what was ours. I’d seen what happened after the riots, when all the white-owned businesses took their insurance money and bailed on us because they didn’t care about investing in the community. I’d learned a lot from all of these guys coming through doing shows at the Pac Jam II, who had fucked-up contracts and were starving. I put all my chips on 2 Live Crew and Luke Records and into building the biggest black-owned hip-hop label in the South.
In October 1985, Def Jam took the production deal from Columbia. They got $2 million in operating capital, including a $600,000 advance for Russell and Rubin. Low risk, low reward. Nobody believed in hip-hop more than Russell, but he underestimated himself. He underestimated what black artists and entrepreneurs were capable of. Just a couple months after Def Jam signed with Columbia, the label put out its first full album, LL Cool J’s Radio. LL Cool J was hip-hop’s first teen idol, the first rapper to go on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand—the perfect crossover. Radio blew up. It went gold in less than six months, eventually selling over a million copies. That $600,000 advance that Def Jam got, Columbia made it all back just from the sales of Radio alone.
All the money that came from gold- and platinum-selling Def Jam artists flowed up to the boardroom at Columbia Records instead of out to the streets to the people who actually created the music. Def Jam could have set the standard. Hip-hop could have been owned by black entrepreneurs alongside white and Jewish allies who were sincere about forming a partnership, not just exploiting us. If Russell Simmons had done with Def Jam what I did with Luke Records, today he’d be a
billionaire. But Russell Simmons hedged his bet.
Luke Records started with nothing, came from nothing, just a twenty-five-year-old DJ a few months out of cooking in a hospital kitchen, out hustling gigs in one of the most fucked-up, riot-torn ghettos in America. I always had to do everything on my own because I was an outsider. Being from Miami I was considered a nobody, an outcast by the music industry. I didn’t have Tommy Mottola or Jimmy Iovine to be my mentor. There was no road map for a rapper to build his own record company. Nobody in New York was doing it. Nobody in LA was doing it.
I sold over 750,000 records in my first year. I had a beeper and all of a sudden I was returning calls from Europe on pay phones. European distributors wanted the album. I carried a sack of quarters on me for all the long-distance phone calls. But I was expanding and adding other artists, too. I signed the first rapper out of Atlanta. In the late eighties in Atlanta, hip-hop barely even existed. On the radio, all they were playing was New York singles. There was no hip-hop scene in Atlanta at all in terms of labels and record companies and industry. It was all underground, small-time.
We were doing shows up there at this club, Sharon Showcase, and this guy Peter Jones, MC Shy D, would always open up for us. He was a hot kid around the area and already had a following in Atlanta, so it was a no-brainer. He also brought the Miami Bass sound with him. The first rapper out of ATL was on Luke Records. That’s how the whole Atlanta scene started: I started it. It was a satellite of Miami.
The Book of Luke Page 9