I was putting out an album a year of my solo stuff. In the Nude and Freak for Life were next. But my main goal with Luke Records was I wanted to prove to the industry that 2 Live Crew wasn’t a one-off or a fluke. That I wasn’t only selling dirty rap. I wanted to defy expectations, hit people where they wouldn’t even know where I was hitting them from. People thought all we did was cuss and scream, so I put out a gospel Christmas album, Christmas at Luke’s House. It had a big church choir and featured all the artists from the label. The cover had me in a Santa hat with my kids Lil’ Luther and Lucretia next to me.
I wanted to show the world that I could put out a hit record just as well as Columbia or Epic or anybody else without using dirty lyrics or controversy or any of the rest of it. In 1993, Houston Oilers running back Lorenzo White introduced me and my road manager, Ron May, to this guy Pat Johnson, the manager of this R&B trio who called themselves H-Town. I wasn’t really into R&B, but my road manager listened to the demo and he and JT kept telling me, “These guys are hot. They’re hot. You should give them a listen.”
I had to do a show with JT in Houston, and while I was out there Ron and Pat kept telling me I should stay and check the guys out. I kept saying no. I wanted to get back to Miami. Those guys intentionally took the long way to the airport and got lost so I’d miss my flight and have to go check out the band.
H-Town was twin brothers Keven “Dino” Conner and Solomon “Shazam” Conner and their friend Darryl “G.I.” Jackson. They lived in the projects. I mean, these guys had nothing. They were dirt fucking poor. First thing I noticed when I sat down with them was the holes in the bottom of their shoes. I talked to them for a little while and asked them to show me their stuff. They started singing for me right there in their living room and I was like, “Fuck. These guys are beyond good. They’re incredible.”
When I flew them down to Miami to sign them, they had never been on a plane in their life. When they showed up at my house from the airport, they didn’t have any bags. I asked them why they didn’t have any bags. It was because they didn’t have any clothes to bring. They didn’t own suitcases. Literally all they came with was the shirts on their backs. In that moment I said to myself, “These guys need help, and they deserve to succeed.” I decided I was going to bring them along and make them stars. I took them to the mall right then and bought them each three sets of shoes and some outfits. I took them to get their hair cut, to get a good dinner. I wanted them to stay in Miami and make a killer album, so the next week I bought them a house. I went all-in on these guys. If I never made a dime off them, I figured, I was at least trying to help some young people get out of a desperate situation.
We got those guys in the studio, and once we had an album I went to work using all the talent and expertise and leverage I’d been putting together over the past few years to make it a hit: sales, marketing, radio. All of it. Their first album, Fever for Da Flavor, was released on April 15, 1993. It was Luke Records’ biggest hit since Nasty. It went platinum, sold through the fucking roof. The leadoff single, “Knockin’ Da Boots,” went to No. 1 on the R&B charts and No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100. The next summer I got them booked on the Coca-Cola Summerfest Tour with Shai, SWV, Jade, Naughty by Nature, and LL Cool J.
H-Town proved to everyone that Luke Records was more than just a one-act label and a flash in the pan. It proved that an independent black label could compete with the majors. Between the success of that album and my own solo work, I was living the life of a high-powered executive and a high-flying rock star at the same time. One of the best things about it was that I finally started getting a little bit of the respect that rappers never gave me back in the eighties, when they went on BET and dissed me and said 2 Live Crew wasn’t really hip-hop.
“How Can I Be Down?” was a black music conference that started in Miami in 1993. It raised the city’s profile as a new center of hip-hop, and my position as its OG. The younger generation of guys—Puff Daddy, Jay Z, Biggie, Tupac—they came up listening to my music, seeing me all over TV as the face of hip-hop’s fight for free speech. They’d always thank me for taking that hit for all of them. I got a lot of love from those guys. They were humble. It was Kool DJ Red Alert who first called me Uncle Luke. I was honored by it. Me and Biggie did a song together, “Bust a Nut.” When those guys started making real money, they were coming down here more and more. First thing they’d do when they got off the plane was ring me up: “Yo, Luke. Where I meet you at?” I’d meet them down at my yacht, we’d get some girls, some catering, some booze, have a party.
I couldn’t imagine life being any better than I had it at that point in time. To celebrate H-Town’s Fever going platinum, I decided to throw the biggest party Miami had ever seen. I spared no expense. I rented a huge party boat to take out in the harbor. I invited all the top rappers and musicians in town, hundreds of VIPs, had cases of champagne, prime rib, two huge cakes made in the shape of platinum records. We took the boat out and partied all night. The best part of the evening had nothing to do with H-Town. Since losing reelection as sheriff of Broward County, Nick Navarro had started a company that did protection for private events. As luck would have it, the company I chartered the boat from had hired his company to do security for the night. I was out there in my custom suit drinking the best champagne, on top of the world with one of the biggest R&B acts in America, and Nick Navarro was nothing but a fucking rent-a-cop looking after my party.
STILL AFTER ME
The most frustrating thing about my success was that I wasn’t left alone to enjoy it. The higher I’ve climbed in this country, the more racism I’ve seen. You think it’s bad when you’re a young kid on the corner and the cops are throwing you up against walls and rifling through your pockets to steal your money. But then you work hard and play by the rules and get ahead, and the harassment gets even worse. It’s not as physically threatening, but it grows more intense because once you’re a black person with a little bit of money, a little bit of economic leverage, then you’re even more of a threat to the status quo, and that’s when you really become a target.
When I opened my first nightclub in Hialeah, it was mostly as a side project, a place for my brother Brannard to run and a place for me to break singles. There was a club in a strip mall out there called Strawberries. I bought the owner out and renamed it Strawberries Too. I was still running the Pac Jam II as a teen disco, and wanted a more adult environment to go with the new direction the music was taking. I had problems with the city from day one. Hialeah is a predominantly Cuban area surrounded by black neighborhoods, and Cubans and blacks don’t always mix. Everybody out there was Cuban, and they made it clear that they didn’t want a bunch of black folks coming around every night, especially to a club owned by a notorious rapper.
They said it would attract crime, and of course if you have a hot nightspot, some kind of bad element is always bound to show up. That’s why you have security. I always had off-duty cops at all of my shows. But the city wouldn’t let their off-duty cops work the club. When we did call the police for problems that came up, the cops would take forever to show, or sometimes they wouldn’t show up at all. They deliberately made it an unsafe environment so they’d have an incident they could use as a pretext to get rid of me. Eventually, it happened. In July of 1990, some guy sprayed the parking lot with an AK-47 during a drive-by. A few months later there was another shooting that left one man dead, and they tried to hang the whole thing on me. I realized I’d never be able to run a safe club out there, so that’s when I decided to get out of Strawberries Too and make the move to Luke’s Miami Beach. The harassment I got on Miami Beach made my experience in Hialeah look like a walk in the fucking park.
You wouldn’t think that opening a nightclub counts as a political act, but when you’re a successful black businessman, everything becomes political whether you want it to be or not. When I was growing up, I was down on Miami Beach all the time because of football and the friends I made down there. But most black
people would never go, even though the law gave us every right. Miami Beach is a public beach. But they didn’t feel welcome, didn’t feel comfortable. A lot of blacks still went to Virginia Beach, if they went to the beach at all. By the 1990s, it hadn’t much changed. Black folks I knew were still stuck in this mind-set of “We don’t go there.” I wanted to change that mind-set. I wanted a high-end, upscale establishment on Miami Beach blacks felt comfortable coming to.
The summer before I opened the club, in June of 1990, Nelson Mandela, just months after being released from prison in South Africa, came to speak at the Miami Beach Convention Center. The city’s leaders had refused to issue a proclamation welcoming his visit because of pressure from the Cuban political lobby; Mandela was on friendly terms with Castro, and so a bunch of Cuban politicians had made a bunch of noise about refusing to honor his visit, and black civil rights leaders had responded by calling for blacks to boycott Miami Beach. I didn’t see much point in boycotting a place that didn’t want us there in the first place. The right response was to bring as much black business to Miami Beach as possible. I ignored the boycott and went ahead with my grand opening.
The harassment started right away, because Miami Beach didn’t want blacks on the island, and because I refused to play ball with the powers that be. Miami Beach is a corrupt town. It has been since the days of Al Capone and bootlegging during Prohibition. If you wanted to do business on the Beach, you paid the kickbacks to the right people. The mayor of Miami Beach at the time was Alex Daoud. He eventually went to jail on forty-one counts of bribery. So that tells you something. Even months before I opened I had problems with food inspectors, fire inspectors, you name it—because I wouldn’t pay. They weren’t even subtle about it. I can still remember a guy from one of these boards coming in and telling me what I had to pay him. I told him he could go fuck himself. I said, “We’ve been paying for two hundred years in this country. What the fuck am I going to pay you off for?”
He didn’t flinch. “Well, I’m going to be your worst nightmare.”
The harassment was nonstop. I had every regulatory board and agency imaginable all over me, fucking with me, every week: the fire marshals, the food inspectors, the zoning commission. You’re over capacity. You need a sidewalk variance. This, that, and the other. I’d fix it, they’d come back, ding me for something else. Everything I did in that club was legal and aboveboard, because I knew they were watching me. I kept the underage crowd out. Anybody was caught using drugs, the bouncers tossed them. I ran a legit club, but I was harassed constantly.
It was the same hypocrisy I ran into with my music: Andrew Dice Clay can get away with it, but Luther Campbell can’t. Some of the other clubs on the Beach were upscale like mine, but some of them were like Studio 54 on steroids. All kinds of crazy shit went on. Despite the anti-nudity ordinance, people would be in there dancing on the bar butt naked. Drag queens would be simulating sex on top of pool tables. One club had a four-hundred-pound stripper. There was a gay club with a guy on a trapeze who would blow himself. There was a fetish club where a guy put a saddle on his back and crawled around naked while women rode him and spanked him like a pony. This one club had a naked woman lying on a table with a pool of chocolate in her belly button; you could dip strawberries in the chocolate and eat them—that had to be some kind of major health-code violation right there. And of course drugs were everywhere. Models would be passed out on heroin in the back rooms. Clubs installed showers so their customers could go wild on Ecstasy.
Did any of those clubs get harassed and fined and closed down? Not one. The anti-nudity ordinance? Never enforced. Miami’s nightlife was big business, and the city was happy to have the money. Just not mine. As the months went by, the harassment only got worse. I was actually called down to the city manager’s office, and they said, “You’ve got to cancel this Cuban night.” They didn’t like having these young Cubans on the Beach. They were that blatant about it. I said, “No, fuck that. If I stop the Cuban night, you’re going to turn around and say that I’m racist, that I’m discriminating, that I don’t want Cubans in the club. Besides, those guys are my friends. They listen to my music and buy my music the same as everybody else.”
When they couldn’t get me on code violations, they turned to the old standby complaint about blacks: crime. The cops were all over the club with raids, looking for underage drinking going on, and nothing kills the vibe of a club faster that a bunch of damn cops everywhere. The city even paid to have regular police surveillance of Luke’s, like I was running a dope ring out the back door. You’ll never keep all the drugs out of a nightclub on Miami Beach, but I wasn’t condoning their use out in the open, because I knew they were watching and waiting for any excuse to bust me. I remember one night they had this van parked across the street. They weren’t fooling anybody. You can’t park some raggedy old van on the main drag of South Beach next to Jaguars and Ferraris.
I turned to my bartender. “Y’all do this,” I said. “Go in the kitchen and make some fried chicken and cut up a bunch of watermelon. Take it over there to those motherfuckers in the van. I’m sure they’re pretty tired and hungry.”
My guys come out with piles of chicken and watermelon on a big serving platter and they walked it across the street and banged on the back door of the van. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom! No answer. I yelled across the street, “No, no, they in there. Keep knocking.” Boom, boom, boom! Finally the cops opened the door and busted out laughing. They knew I’d nailed them.
The thing that finally got me was the Nuisance Abatement Board, this board of old ladies who pursued citizen complaints. The thing about where Luke’s was located, right there by the bridge, meant that every single person coming or going from the beach passed within a block of my club to go back to the mainland. It felt like this board started pinning any crime complaint in that area on the club, saying I had inadequate security and I was attracting a bad element, even though the crime had actually nothing to do with me or my patrons.
A year after we opened, there was a fatal shooting around the corner from Luke’s. It didn’t even involve people from our club, but the papers splashed it all over the front page: MURDER AT LUKE’S MIAMI BEACH. I agreed to close the club for a week and add more security, which I did, but even after that the harassment never let up. Finally I decided, Fuck it. I threw in the towel. It was the first time in my life I’d ever given up on a fight. I didn’t like doing it, but I just came to the realization that it wasn’t something worth fighting for. There was no upside. Nightclubs are an unstable business; you can only stay hip for so long, and it was always a side interest for me anyway. People knew I was having trouble. I got an offer on the lease that let me get out with a little bit of profit and wash my hands of the whole mess. I didn’t need to waste my energy fighting over bullshit with the Miami Beach Nuisance Abatement Board anyway. I had a much bigger fight waiting in the wings.
After I beat the conservative, moral-majority wing nuts in a court of law, they pretty much disappeared from the headlines, but they never went away. Jack Thompson and the rest of them, they were like a bunch of yappy dogs that kept nipping at my ankles everywhere I went. They were obsessed. They never stopped writing their outraged letters and faxes. They sent them to everyone I did business with or was associated with: to the Miami Hurricanes, to George Lucas, to concert venues where I played, you name it. If they couldn’t get me on obscenity, they were going to get me on something else.
Finally, after hundreds of these letters had gone out, one of them hit its target, landing on the desk of some litigious asshole at Acuff-Rose, the publishing company that owned the rights to the song catalog of pop crooner Roy Orbison. One of the tracks we’d done on the non-explicit version of Nasty, As Clean as We Wanna Be, was a parody of Orbison’s “Oh, Pretty Woman.” We took the song, cut it up, made the woman trashy and low-down instead of pretty, and just riffed on the different shit men might say to her. “Big hairy woman / You need to shave that stuff. . . .” “T
wo-timin’ woman / You’se out with my boy last night. . . .”
Technically, you don’t need permission to do a parody of something, but it’s nice to have just to make sure you don’t run into any issues later; “Weird Al” Yankovic always gets permission to do his because he wants everything to be friendly with the artists. I’d reached out to Acuff-Rose with a request long before the album even came out, but they never got back to me. We just went ahead and did the song. For a year after the song came out, Acuff-Rose didn’t say a word. It was only when the conservative, wing-nut letter writing started that Acuff-Rose decided their copyright had been violated.
I was about to get another dose of America’s racial hypocrisy. At that exact same time, Orbison’s company had licensed “Oh, Pretty Woman” for a Julia Roberts movie about a prostitute. Nobody at Acuff-Rose seemed to have a problem with that. In 1982, Van Halen covered “Oh, Pretty Woman” for their album Diver Down. The video they made for it was so disturbing and offensive that MTV banned it from the airwaves for years. It featured a woman, tied up to a pole, being groped and fondled by dwarves. (I’m not making this up.) Were there any lawsuits filed there? Nope. But when the nasty black guys down in Miami wrote a parody of it, now the song’s reputation had been damaged, and it was time to sue.
There was nothing malicious about the song. It was just a random thing we did for fun. It was bawdy and racy, but it was on the clean version of the album, so it wasn’t even that explicit. In fact, we put it on the clean version specifically because we didn’t think it should be associated with the nasty stuff. But that didn’t matter. Acuff-Rose sued the band, sued the label, and Luther Campbell was headed back to court to defend the same rights that other musicians take for granted. I called in Bruce Rogow and we got ready to fight.
The Book of Luke Page 19