The Book of Luke

by Luther Campbell

  After the show we left the club, climbed into our limo, and rolled out of the parking lot. We were followed by a dozen cruisers. They tailed us for a few miles before they hit the lights and pulled us over. All these cars were passing by, fresh out of the show, honking their support for us. I liked that. I stepped out of the limo and some deputy threw me down on the hood and started patting me down. Then they threw us in the back of the police van. And, of course, Navarro had orchestrated the whole event with the media so the television camera crews were conveniently waiting right where they pulled us over—just like an episode of Cops.

  The whole ride down to the precinct, I kept telling them, “I’m not staying in this motherfucker over two hours, bitch! As soon as you get me downtown. I’m bonding out. The bondsman is waiting with the money.” They booked me around three in the morning. It was a total clown show. The deputies in the station were all smiling and high-fiving each other and slapping each other on the back. Because catching a white limousine going thirty-five miles an hour is really something to be proud of, I guess. Then they threw me in a cell and left me there until the sun came up. All night the cops kept coming back and poking their heads in the window just to look at me, like I was the first black man in handcuffs they’d ever seen. Later, I walked out of there with a big smile and a show lined up that same night in Phoenix. Life goes on. See you assholes in court. The next day, somebody hacked the Broward County police-radio band and played “Me So Horny” on it, over and over again, which was hilarious.

  Before I had to face a jury, I had to face the nation on daytime TV and the nightly news. The media shitstorm over Nasty had been simmering for a while. Now it erupted. Our arrest for performing at Club Futura was the moment the shit really hit the fan. When I walked out of that jail, I was public enemy number one. Luther Campbell, the hip-hop pornographer. The man in the black hat. The next day, 2 Live Crew was the lead story on Nightline, with Bruce Rogow debating the First Amendment with the barking lunatic Jack Thompson. I went on MTV, Geraldo, Donahue. USA Today, the New York Times, Newsweek, Time magazine—all of them put us on the front page. We were even front-page news in Norway.

  As an artist and as a record-label owner, I knew you couldn’t buy publicity like this. For every store that pulled Nasty from its shelves, another store doubled its orders. I was printing money with the albums we already had, but I knew we needed to put out a new release to capitalize on and capture the moment. Our current situation called for an anthem.

  Every song I hear, I automatically change it around in my head. That’s how I listen to music. I’ll remix it in my head, break it into pieces, looking for the break or a good bit to sample. I’ll think up a good parody. I was listening to a rock and roll station that summer and Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” came on. Given the situation I was in at the time, in my mind I heard it as “Banned in the U.S.A.” It was obvious.

  I needed to get the song cleared. At that period of time, everybody was getting sued. Hip-hop had built itself on sampling other records, which was fine at a block party, but then people went out and started making commercial recordings with it before standards were ever set for fair use. I had to be careful. I didn’t need any more legal problems. I called up Springsteen’s manager, who called up Springsteen and got him on the phone. I talked to him for maybe five minutes. He said, “It’s no problem, man. I understand the struggle. You can use the song.” Basically, I used it with his blessing for free.

  After getting so much opposition from all sides, including from my fellow rappers, it felt good to get sympathy and support from a fellow artist, especially somebody as big as Springsteen. We wrote the song, quickly cut it in my studio in Liberty City, shot a video in a fake courtroom, and rush-released it for the Fourth of July. It was a challenge getting it to the radio stations on time, and we wanted every radio station to play it at the same time on the Fourth. If we found a new way to get it out there.

  “Banned in the U.S.A.” was actually the first single ever digitally distributed to radio stations. We beamed it to everyone via satellite. MP3s and Napster and iTunes and all that was still a decade away. I was actually the first person ever to use digital-distribution technology for music, only four years after selling albums out of the trunk of my old Honda. Every station in the country played “Banned” on the Fourth of July. That was amazing to me because all of my success to date had largely come without mainstream radio or TV attention. Now we were too hot to ignore. As Nasty as They Wanna Be had shipped gold. Banned in the U.S.A. shipped platinum.

  That summer we went on tour to support the new album, and that was the craziest three months of my life. I was the most dangerous black man in America. Hands down. After Broward and all the media, law enforcement had this huge hard-on for 2 Live Crew. “Lock these motherfuckers up” was the mission. Every two-bit Nick Navarro wannabe from Jacksonville to Baton Rouge was lining up to be the next guy to bust Luther Campbell. The cops never wanted Brother Marquis or Fresh Kid Ice, the guys who sang most of the lyrics. Nobody wanted to lock them up. They wanted me. I was the leader. I was the guy on the Phil Donahue show talking shit. I was the big prize. Before each show, these cops would be like, “Hey, you sing that shit and we’ll lock your ass up.” I’d just smile and act all innocent and say, “Oh, you’re going to lock me up? What you gonna lock me up for?”

  To lock me up they’d have to arrest me first. In order for them to say I was evading arrest, they’d have to tell me, “You’re under arrest!” I didn’t even give them the opportunity to say that. After every show, I escaped. I was like fucking Houdini onstage. There was a thing we used to do back when I had the original Pac Jam disco. We were famous for “dropping the bomb.” I would take a bunch of gunpowder, put it in a pipe, take two electrical wires, twist em together, put one end in the powder and the other end in a socket and Boom! It’d blow up. They were Jamaican pipe bombs, basically. Big explosion and a bright, bright light that would blind you for a second. It was a big flash but it was over real quick. Used to scare the shit out of everybody.

  Detroit was where I first started dropping the bomb. The cops were all over the place at that show, and just as we went on somebody told me the cops were waiting outside by my limo as well. It was all planned. “We’re gonna get this guy.” The Detroit show was crazy. It happened right in the wake of Broward, and that was when we really started amping things up. We brought guys onstage to get lap dances from the girls and some of the guys would eat the girls out. Sometimes the girls would do backflips and give the guys head onstage. We got this one girl from Chicago, she, like, sucked dick backward. Like, she’d flip over and be sucking the guy’s dick onstage. It was some acrobatic shit. It was like a fucking freak show. All those naked women onstage, and the cops were glaring at me, just watching and waiting for their chance to nab me.

  I was like a symphony conductor up there, a ringmaster, whipping the crowd and all these people onstage up into a frenzy. Then, right at the climax, right at the end of the last song, I’d grab the mic and yell, “Yeah! I want all these police, the mayor, the governor, and everybody to know one thing: they can suck my motherfucking dick and kiss my ass! Yo! Thank you! We are 2 motherfucking Live in yo ass, and we don’t give a fuck about no fucking cops!”

  They cut the house lights. Pitch-black. Now drop the motherfucking bomb. Boom! Bright flash. Everybody blinded. Next I hopped down into the crowd and took my shit off. I always had two shirts on. Ditch the Luke Gear, just a plain T-shirt on, hoodie up, and I was out the door. Gone. Lost in the crowd. No security, no nothing. Just another young black dude in a hoodie. Cops never bother to tell the difference between us anyway.

  I made my way outside, flagged down this random group of chicks in a car, going, “Yo, yo, I need a ride, I need a ride.” They saw who I was and were like, “Oh my God! Oh my God!” They were all excited and shit. I hopped in the back of their Toyota, ducked down, and sped away. I watched all the fucking cops standing around my limo, looking for my ass
. We cruised back by my hotel, and cops were looking for me there, too. So we just drove past, went to this other hotel I knew on the riverfront, checked in, and I spent the rest of the evening laughing my ass off at all those cops wasting their fucking time.

  I did that shit probably twenty, thirty times. Some cities were worse than others. Cincinnati was wild. Those people were scared to fucking death. The police chief actually came and met us at the airport and gave us the usual warning. “Don’t play those songs. Don’t do fucking nothing in my town.” Blah, blah, blah. It was always the same shit.

  Outside the club it was like the cops were waiting for a full-blown riot, like this was going to turn into Watts or Newark or something. They had the whole street cordoned off. Rows of cops on horseback. Batons. Tear-gas cannons. Helicopters flying overhead. Snipers on the roof. Motherfuckers had that shit surrounded. The police presence intimidated a lot of the people who’d come to see us. They stayed away. The show was sold-out, but by the time we were about to go on, the place was only about half full. There wasn’t enough of a crowd to do my Houdini act; I couldn’t disappear if there weren’t enough people.

  I was still ready to go ahead. Fuck it. Arrest me. I’ll beat this one, too. But the other guys wanted to back off. There had been a divide growing between me and them since the early days, when they just wanted to be rap stars and didn’t want to be part of the business. With the trial and the controversy, that divide was becoming a rift. A lot of people were confused when Banned in the U.S.A. came out and it was subtitled The Luke LP, featuring 2 Live Crew. But that was just a reflection of where the group was at that time.

  That trial was all my initiative. Those guys just didn’t want to fight, period. With Mr. Mixx, because the trial was all about the explicit lyrics, he was never really implicated in it the way the rest of us were. It wasn’t really his fight. Brother Marquis and Fresh Kid Ice, for the Gonzalez trial, they did what they had to do. They showed up in court and testified on the days they were called to testify, but that was about it. Beyond that, they didn’t want to have anything to do with it. They felt like I was dragging them into it. They just wanted to be rap stars and live that lifestyle.

  They didn’t see what we were going through as part of an important struggle. They weren’t putting any money into the trial. They weren’t footing any of Rogow’s billable hours or the cost for the expert witnesses, even though it was their asses on the line, too. I paid for the lawsuits and the trial, everything. Also, I kept paying their royalties while this was going on. I could have held the royalties against legal expenses—but I never did. To me, this wasn’t about the money. It was about the principle.

  When we were on tour, whenever a promoter or police chief got in our face, half the time the group wanted to back down. Whenever the police started knocking down our door, I was the one that had to step forth as the spokesman. I had to step out front and take all the heat and answer all the questions and make all the public comments. So when we were facing arrest in Cincinnati that summer, they were like, “Yo man, we don’t want to go to jail.” They said, “We should take a vote.” They voted me down. They wanted to do a clean show. We performed the clean versions, like we were doing a kids’ show.

  The audience was pissed. I was pissed, too. At that point, I knew that when people came to our shows they weren’t just coming to see a show. They were coming to be a part of the spectacle, part of this movement, a part of saying “fuck you” to the establishment. We let them down. I regretted that we backed down. That was really the beginning of the end of 2 Live Crew.

  A few weeks later we did a show in Texas, and by that point I was like, “Fuck everybody. I’m doing this shit my way.” This promoter booked us to do a show at the Longhorn Ballroom in Dallas, and the local authorities came down on him, said they would sanction and fine the club if we were allowed to do an explicit show. We were backstage in the dressing room, and the promoter said he wasn’t going to pay us if we did an explicit show. We’d only get our money for a clean show. Place was sold-out. Promoter already had the money, our money, but he was telling us we wouldn’t get paid if we did the thing he brought us out there to do. I told him, “You’re going to pay us, and then I’ll decide what kind of show I want to do.” He said no. We kept going back and forth like that. Hours passed.

  In the meantime, the crowd showed up. They filled in the seats and were just sitting out there, waiting and waiting and getting drunk and pissed off. Me, I’m always thinking on the spot. I’m always improvising, making adjustments. “Okay, okay. We’re gonna perform. We’ll do it clean. Give me the mic and let’s do this.”

  Promoter gave me the cordless mic. We were still in the dressing room. I turned that shit on, and my voice was booming to the audience out front. I said, “Hey, look here. Y’all paid money to see 2 Live Crew. The way it goes is you pay the promoter, the promoter pays us. But this promoter ain’t paid us our fucking money. So we out. Y’all can tear this motherfucker the fuck up and get y’all money back the best way y’all can!”

  Promoter’s jaw hit the floor. We grabbed our gear and before we were even in the car, that shit was blowing up. We watched the whole thing on the local news that night at the hotel: “The Longhorn Ballroom is on fire!” Those motherfuckers had a riot! They tore that place up, smashed tables, smashed chairs. We were laughing our asses off. Apparently, the crowd inflicted $100,000 in damages. Promoter should have just shut up and paid us.

  That whole summer was madness from start to finish. It was the same thing wherever we played: sold-out shows, armies of cops in the streets, crazed fans, groupies. We were surfing this incredibly powerful wave. The Gonzalez ruling and our arrest in Broward had fired up the conservative Christian morality police. They thought they were winning, and that’s how the media was spinning it, too. So everything I did had to be bolder and brasher.

  In public, I played the man in the black hat, played it to the hilt, always had a big smile and the right quip for reporters, whipping the crowds into a frenzy every night. But behind the scenes it was incredibly stressful. Here I was, going all over the South and the Midwest with a target on my back. I had all kinds of angry letters and death threats, thousands of them, pouring into my office. “We’ll kill you if you come to our town.” “You’re a nigger.” “You’re an un-American piece of shit.” We were only twenty years out from the time when I’d have been lynched for doing what we were doing. On one of the talk shows I did, they had guys from the Ku Klux Klan sitting right next to me, spouting off about how my degenerate nigger music was destroying the country. I had to have security guards surrounding me 24/7. I never would have admitted it then, but looking back I can say there were times I was actually afraid of what I’d unleashed.

  Still, despite those moments of fear, I never wavered from my goal: to have my day in court. Our first trial back in May, in federal court, had been a civil trial. No jury, just Judge Gonzalez. The trial for our arrest at Club Futura would be a criminal one, which meant facing a jury. The same was true for Charles Freeman, the Broward record-store owner arrested for selling Nasty. He went on trial before we did. I’d told him back in June, “Look, man, you don’t need to do this. It’s not gonna help anything.” But he did it anyway. He basically had the same attitude as me. He said, “I sell everything from N.W.A to Dice Clay, you name it. All these different types of records, and y’all going to single this man out? Fuck that.” I respected him for standing up, and told him I’d do anything I could to help. I paid Bruce Rogow to handle his defense. Freeman was facing a thousand-dollar fine and jail time for selling a dirty record. Despite Rogow’s best efforts, Freeman was up against an all-white, suburban jury, six wealthy white women all over the age of forty, women who didn’t understand anything about our music and who, like Gonzalez, couldn’t see past their own prejudices about our music to fairly apply the Miller v. California test. Freeman didn’t stand a chance. He lost.

  I got worried. The weird thing about obscenity is this: every o
ther crime, you know it’s a crime when it’s committed. You break a window, you steal a car, you put a gun at somebody’s head. Those are criminal actions. With obscenity, you don’t know if an actual crime has been committed until the jury comes back and tells you, yes, that was obscene. Which means the whole thing comes down to what the jury thinks, and in the American justice system, as you may have noticed recently, blacks and juries haven’t traditionally done well together.

  In Florida, the all-white jury had been condemning innocent black men and absolving guilty white men for decades. When we went to trial, it had been exactly ten years since an all-white jury had acquitted the men who murdered Arthur McDuffie, and the city of Miami burned. After the riots, the state had actually tried to improve the jury selection process, had made it harder to purge black jurors through peremptory challenge, but in Broward it almost didn’t matter. Most of the black folks in Miami lived in Dade County. Broward was built by white flight; its black population was small to begin with, and the percentage of blacks on its voting rolls, which is where jury pools are drawn from, is even smaller. We’d be looking at at least a majority white jury no matter what we did. If they agreed with Gonzalez, my ass was going to jail.

  Given the nature of an obscenity trial, the most important part of the trial wasn’t going to be the trial itself but the jury selection, voir dire. Who do you choose to sit in judgment of you? Your money, your career, your freedom, and maybe your life hangs in the balance. It’s a nerve-racking process. You need to know a lot about people to pick a jury. Fortunately, that’s exactly how I built my business and worked my way up from the ghetto, by using common sense and reading people and building relationships, with black folks and with whites.

  There were times when Bruce and I disagreed. One potential juror was this little old white lady. She was a principal at an integrated school. Bruce was hell-bent to get her out. He was like, “No, this lady is gone.” And I was like, “Nah, she’s a schoolteacher! She meets and deals with people of all different nationalities, all different races of people. She’ll see through all this racial nonsense.” We picked her. There was also an older white guy who was a plumber. Bruce thought he was too old and too conservative. I said, “That man works in shit. He works in shit all day. None of this will faze him.” Another one of the jurors was an older white woman who had taught sociology years before at Howard University. The two prosecutors had no idea what Howard is, that it’s the most important historically black college in the country. But I knew. I told Bruce, “This lady knows what’s going on.”