The Book of Luke

by Luther Campbell

  While Liberty City had turned into a bloody battlefield in the war on drugs, Miami Beach had turned into a drug-fueled paradise. South Beach was turning into the jet-set playground we know it as today. Money was flooding in. All the old art deco hotels were being restored. Models were up and down Ocean Drive wearing next to nothing. Celebrities were buying mansions on Star Island and Fisher Island: Madonna, Sylvester Stallone, Gianni Versace, all of them. Me and a lot of pro athletes and other rappers were hanging out there more, too. There was this one club we used to go to, Fatback Pussycat. Cocaine would be everywhere, just laid out in lines on the tables, people snorting it right out in the open. There were a ton of new clubs opening up—Liquid, Hell, Risk, Club Z, Club 1235—and the scene was crazy. These rich motherfuckers were flying in from the Bahamas just to party at the clubs and enjoy the five-star treatment.

  South Beach was returning to its former glory as America’s Riviera. As a businessman, I wanted to be a part of it. Opening a nightclub there was the next natural step for where my company was going. And as a black Miamian, I didn’t think we should be left out of the part of Miami that was booming. Why should we be stuck in the ghetto while everyone else is getting rich and having a party? I started making plans to build the best club in town: Luke’s Miami Beach. If everything went right, it’d be the first in a string of clubs in tourist spots around the country.

  There was a strip club that had just gone out of business at 1045 Fifth Street, the Gold Club, right at the last intersection before the MacArthur Causeway that takes you back into the city. It had gone under because the city of Miami Beach had actually passed an anti-nudity ordinance to try and stop the city from turning into another Las Vegas. I spent hundreds of thousands of dollars gutting and renovating the space and turning it into Luke’s Miami Beach. Everything was top of the line. I outfitted it with the best lights and sound system money could buy. My brother Brannard put together a killer menu. It had a VIP balcony, several members-only rooms for private partying, and a pimped-out DJ booth where I would occasionally spin.

  From the start I wanted it to be both exclusive and inclusive. I wanted the high-end clientele. I made it twenty-five-and-over and had a fifteen-dollar cover, which was pretty steep back then. I didn’t want it to be seen as a “black” club. Back then all the clubs were de facto segregated. Whites went here, blacks went there, Hispanics went someplace else. I always believed in one Miami. I wanted everyone to come to Luke’s. For the opening-night bash, I put together my own personal guest list. It had 150 black people on it, 150 white people on it, and 150 Hispanic people on it. It sent the message that anybody was welcome at my club. I met every single one of them at the front door in a tux and red bow tie.

  Luke’s was an instant hit because there was no place like it on the Beach.

  If you watch the video for my single “I Wanna Rock (Doo Doo Brown),” that’s what Luke’s Miami Beach was like all the time, one big party. We had celebrities in there all the time. Robert De Niro was in the club all the time when he was down here shooting Cape Fear. Eddie Murphy came in every time he came to town. Jamie Foxx, who at the time was only known for In Living Color, would get up and perform stand-up and do characters.

  Everybody went to Luke’s. We had all the professional athletes, too. After every Miami Heat game, all the players would be at Luke’s. It was almost like their living room. The players even started a little tradition that rookies who signed to the Heat had to come to Luke’s and take more shots than the rookie the year before. Keith Askins, Bimbo Coles, and I would sit up there and they would bring the new rookie in, and we’d be like, “Gotta take them shots.” They would always pass out, but I made sure they were all right.

  We had VIP sky boxes that all the NBA and NFL players would use. Lawrence Taylor would get on a flight after his Giants games in New York and be in the club for Sunday night. The Chicago Bulls loved to party down here, too. And of course I was still close with all the guys on the Miami Hurricanes. They’d come by every Saturday after their games to collect the money they’d earned on the field that day. We had a blowout party there when the Hurricanes won the national championship again in 1991. I remember one time, when they were playing Florida State at Doak Campbell Stadium, I told them, “Y’all go and get the fucking Indian out of the middle of the field. Take the grass out the middle of the field, put it in a bag, and we gonna put it up on top of the club!” They went and beat the shit out of the Seminoles and all these guys came with bags of the actual Indian painted on strips of turf. We put it on top of the club like a scalp. It was a nonstop party in that place. Miami Beach was the hottest place in the country back then, and Luke’s was the hottest place on Miami Beach.

  Being a rock star was keeping me busy. If I wasn’t at the club I was out on tour. In the summer of 1991, 2 Live Crew put out Sports Weekend, the follow-up album to As Nasty as They Wanna Be. The lead single and video was “Pop That Pussy.” I came up with that one the same way I’d come up with songs like “Ghetto Jump” and “Throw the D.” It’s a dance song. I just put a name to a dance that everybody was doing. “Doo Doo Brown” was the name of the dance. It was girls popping their coochies and slapping their ass cheeks together. Now everybody is calling it “twerking.” Sports Weekend hit No. 22 on the Billboard Albums chart and No. 19 on the R&B chart and was certified gold.

  Since I was in the band and also ran the label, I had to be in Miami most of the time and we couldn’t go on tour like a regular band. So during the week I’d run the club and the label, and on weekends we’d fly out and play shows. We were still selling out every night, and life on the road was insane. Since the first days I started my business, I made a vow that I’d never have a drink before six P.M. I’ve never broken it. But after six, it was anything goes. We had bottles and bottles of Hennessy backstage at every show, and the band, the crew, we’d drink it like it was water.

  Ever since Nasty, girls had been jumping up onstage out of the audience and taking their shirts off, dancing around topless. It had reached the point where it didn’t even surprise anyone. After what happened in Japan, I started to see just how far I could take it. A girl would hop up and take off her shirt, and I’d tell her to take off her panties and finger herself . . . and she’d do it! If two girls got onstage I’d say, “Eat each other out.” And they’d do it. These were just normal girls from the crowd. I couldn’t believe they were actually doing this shit onstage in front of thousands of people. But it was like they wanted to. It was like they were using our shows as an excuse to let their natural freak out.

  What happened onstage was nothing compared to the groupies backstage. 2 Live Crew had the craziest, nastiest groupies you could possibly imagine. I’d been knocking down groupies going all the way back to the Ghetto Style days. At that point, I’d seen so many different vaginas I couldn’t even keep track of them. I had to start being creative just to stay interested. I was doing whatever I could with pussy just to see what was possible. I’d do this with the pussy, I’d do that with the pussy. If I could have put some pussy in a skillet and fried it up, I would have tried that, too.

  The girls, they’d do whatever you told them to do. If you told a groupie to jump off the balcony, they’d jump off the fucking balcony. Fame is a strange thing. When we’d get to the venue, there would be groupies lined up at the backstage door. After the show there would be even more. We would just pick the ones we wanted to take back to the hotel. The ones we didn’t pick, they’d follow the limo back to the hotel anyhow, just to try and get in. Some nights we’d drive right past them, go in, and put on a college football game. Other nights, we’d have thirty of them come up to the suite and it’d be an orgy until dawn.

  We had what we called Sacrifice Weekends, where we’d push things to the absolute limit. It was called Sacrifice Weekend because it was to see what a woman was willing to sacrifice to get with the band. If we wanted you to fuck five guys, that’s what you had to do. If we wanted you to lie on a table and let guys piss
on you, that’s what you had to do. For these women, it was their chance to get close to fame and fortune.

  Sometimes we’d just make up crazy shit to see if they’d go along. We’d be in Detroit or Chicago or Atlanta. We’d have girls in the back of the van, and we’d tell them, “You want to be with us? Okay, now here’s what you gotta do. You gotta take off all your clothes except for this mink coat. Then you’re gonna walk up to the front desk and ask for Luke’s room.” And this lady would walk in with her mink coat and nothing on underneath. She’d walk up to the counter. People would all stare. She’d go up, and we’d all be standing there laughing at the man at the front desk, because his eyes were as big as grapefruits. He’d give her Luke’s room number, then she’d let the mink coat drop and walk to the elevator naked. She would be eating it up. She was all about it, and the front-desk guy would be racing to call security.

  We were crazy. We were living like black rock stars. There was this one show in Daytona Beach. We were running through this hotel and fucking everything that moved. I decided I wanted to see how many women I could fuck in one night. It wasn’t how many I could have long sex with. It was how many women I could stick my dick in. I lined up ten or twelve girls, three in each room. I’d fuck for a few seconds, boom, boom, boom! Jump on another one, fuck another one. Jump on another one, fuck another one. Go to the next room and fuck another one. All these girls thought this was the best. They thought it was kinky and real cool to be fucking this rap star and all that.

  I remember that night as being the point where I decided this groupie shit was just too easy. I only like doing something if it’s a challenge. Seducing a woman is a challenge, but with the groupies it just got tired after a while. The crew and the rest of the group and the entourage, they kept knocking down as much pussy as they could. Me, after shows I started sitting down and talking to groupies. I used to have conversations with them, where they were in life, were they in college. That was way more interesting. You can only have so much sex before it starts to get old.

  Pretty soon after Sports Weekend came out, life with 2 Live Crew was getting old, too. Brother Marquis and Mr. Mixx filed a lawsuit against Luke Records and called a press conference where they stood up with their attorney, claiming that they were broke and that I’d screwed them out of over a million dollars in royalties.

  They were broke. That much was true. The lawyer said in the press conference that both guys were living with their mothers, Mixx in California and Marquis in Atlanta. But the reason they were broke is because they spent their money on bullshit like cars and women. I wasn’t responsible for the fact that they couldn’t handle their own money like adults. As for me not paying them, that was ridiculous.

  2 Live Crew never had a contract. There was no written agreement between the group and the label. We’d just started putting out singles and everything blew up so quickly that we never stopped to paper everything. It was only after Banned in the U.S.A. came out and went gold that those guys started getting worried that they’d get left behind. They came to me before Sports Weekend and said, “We want a contract.” A short while later we drew one up and signed it. Eight months later, Mixx and Marquis turned around and sued. Fresh Kid Ice wasn’t a part of any of it. He stayed out there, promoting Sports Weekend. He signed with me as a solo artist and we put out his first album, The Chinaman.

  It was the same thing that always breaks bands up: jealousy. One guy in the group starts getting a lot of attention. Everybody starts getting different crews, the hangers-on that come with success, the entourage, the girlfriend. Marquis had his own group of guys. Fresh Kid Ice had his own group of people. Mr. Mixx got his own group of people. Their friends and girlfriends were in their ears, saying, “You need to be doing this, you need to be doing that. You should be in charge. You shouldn’t let Luke be in charge.” On and on like that. Everybody gets egos. Everything falls apart.

  Those guys were jealous, but if anyone had a reason to complain it was me, going all the way back to the start of the Nasty controversy. The trial was the thing that sent the album through the roof and made us all a lot of money, but they hadn’t done one thing to help out on the legal front. They would show up to the studio, but never to the courtroom. I was always in there with Rogow by myself. They hadn’t wanted to fight. They never put any money, not one fucking dime, toward the legal fees for the case. It blew my mind that they didn’t want to fight when their own personal freedom was on the line.

  Normally, if you’re an artist and your work gets caught up in a legal problem, the label pays to fight it, but the expenses come off the top of the revenues from the album. It’s a cost of doing business, no different from marketing and promotion. I never held the legal fees against their royalties. I just paid them out of the Luke Records general account. It was hundreds of thousands of dollars, fighting all these lawsuits, and they didn’t get charged any of it. But they sued me anyway.

  There was a bit of unpleasantness going on at the time, but if I’m being completely honest, the breakup of 2 Live Crew disappointed me simply because I don’t like it when things don’t work out—but it wasn’t the end of the world. 2 Live Crew wasn’t like other groups. We weren’t best friends who came up in the hood together, spitting rhymes in Mom’s basement, dreaming of the big time. It was always more of a business relationship. If the business wasn’t working, we didn’t need to have a relationship.

  Because the Nasty controversy had pushed me into the spotlight as this spokesman, the media always portrayed it like I was the front man for 2 Live Crew. But it was never like that. From my point of view, I was always a businessman and a record label owner first, and I also played onstage with one of my bands because it was fun to be a rock star. 2 Live Crew was just one of the things I was doing, and it wasn’t even the most important thing I was doing.

  When I moved Luke Records from the office on Biscayne Boulevard into the office/warehouse complex on Second Avenue, we were the single largest business to move back to Miami’s black neighborhoods since the riots. I had sixty employees working for me. I had about eight salespeople on the phone at all times, calling every record store in the country, pushing the product. I had marketing people dialing every radio station in the United States, talking up the artists. I had people pressing the product, people shipping the product, guys working the warehouse. What had started as me hustling LPs out of an old Honda had turned into a multimillion-dollar operation. I’d gotten so big, and the potential in southern hip-hop was so huge, that Atlantic Records came and offered me a pressing and distribution deal, similar to the one that Russell Simmons could have had with Columbia. I’d keep my own masters and my own autonomy, and they’d handle moving the albums.

  It was a $5 million deal. I took it. I thought it would be my final step to the big time, a chance to be a part of the big machine, to jockey with the major players. But then I backed out of it. There was a woman at Atlantic named Sylvia Rhone. She wasn’t directly involved in my deal, but she was the top African-American executive at the company. She didn’t like me. She didn’t care for 2 Live Crew and the kind of music we did, but she was going to play a major role in the marketing and promotion of our records. I wanted her to be okay with the deal and I wanted to show her that I respected her position at the company, so I went to her before I signed the deal and I asked her, “Are you okay with this?”

  She said, “Yes, I am. It’s not a problem. I’m willing to support the albums.”

  At the time I felt she was just being diplomatic, just saying it to say it. I signed the deal anyway. But then almost immediately I started to regret it. I didn’t feel good about the marketing and promotion, didn’t think the label was really, fully behind me. I didn’t like working for other people. I started to get paranoid about it. The South was just on the brink of becoming a huge market for hip-hop, and I felt maybe the only reason Atlantic signed me up was to keep me from being their competition down here. I gave the money back and bought my way out of the deal; it was a
mutual parting. After that I went back to being completely independent, answering to no one, which was the way I liked it.

  Being the only black-owned label in the country was important to me. I was able to do things that no corporate label would do. After Public Enemy kicked Professor Griff out of the group for his anti-Semitic comments, I signed him. No corporate label in the country would have done that. I was willing to give Griff a second chance because I understood what his problem was. He didn’t hate Jewish people. He was just a kid from the ghetto who didn’t know anything about the world. Griff was like Mark Caesar, the Hurricanes player I mentored; he was a young guy, angry, who needed help.

  I signed him and brought him down to Miami. He met with Jewish students who reached out to him with questions about his comments. He went with them to the Holocaust Memorial on Miami Beach. He educated himself and learned what he’d done wrong. Luke Records gave Griff the money and the studio time he needed, and he made a great album, Pawns in the Game. It sold well despite all the negative media about him; he moved around a hundred thousand copies. Without an independent black-owned label, somebody like Griff never would have had that chance.

  I kept finding new and interesting performers, and together we put out big hits. I went and found JT Money & Poison Clan, signed them, and put out “Shake Whatcha Mama Gave Ya.” That was a big hit, right up there with 2 Live Crew in record sales. Even to this day they play it on the radio, in the clubs. I kept my own music career going, too. I hooked up with a new producer, Fresh McCray, and called in a few friends like Jiggie Gee and JT Money to MC. Together we recorded my first true solo record: I Got Shit on My Mind. We had fun making it. The rapping was tighter and I was able to explore the Luke character more and do some spoken word. I was able to have my say about Kid ’N Play and all the other rappers who’d dissed us during the Broward trial. It had party songs, mellow songs, diss songs, and some good, raunchy adult comedy. I was proud of it. It went to No. 52 on the Billboard Albums chart and No. 20 on the R&B/Hip-Hop chart. I didn’t need 2 Live Crew. I was a rock star all on my own.