The Book of Luke

by Luther Campbell

  Unlike the Broward case, this fight started out going in our favor. The federal district court in Nashville ruled that our song was fair use under the Copyright Act of 1976 and did no harm to the market for the original song. Nobody who was thinking about buying the Roy Orbison single would ever turn around and say, “No, I’d rather listen to ‘Big Hairy Woman’ instead.” But Acuff-Rose appealed the decision and we moved up to the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta. The judges on that bench were very conservative and had a very different point of view. They said that it was copyright infringement. We had borrowed too much from the original material, and the commercial nature of our parody had in fact damaged the market value of the original.

  I was pissed when we lost, but Rogow calmed me down. He said we should appeal to the Supreme Court. He said it was a long shot and it would cost a lot of money, and they might not even agree to hear the case, but if we went all the way and won it could be not just a victory for me, but a landmark case in the history of intellectual property law. Rogow explained to me that there are two kinds of parody. The first is where you take a song and use it to make fun of something else totally unrelated. That’s what “Weird Al” Yankovic does, like when he takes Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” and makes it about food. The other kind of parody is where you take a song and rewrite it and use your version to mock the original work, which is what we’d done with “Oh, Pretty Woman.” That’s the more controversial kind of parody, and there was no major Supreme Court precedent addressing it. When he told me that, I said, “Let’s go. We’re not stopping this fight. Let’s fight again. They’re going to have to knock me out cold before I stop getting up off of the mat. I’ve gone too far to stop now.” Months went by as Bruce filed all the papers and petitions, and then in the spring of 1993 the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case.

  Arguments for the case of Campbell v. Acuff-Rose went before the Supreme Court on November 9, 1993. Bruce Rogow and I got up early that morning and headed over to the court building. Our limousine pulled up to a mob of spectators and journalists who had lined up around the courthouse waiting to see Luther Campbell have his day in court, but the day was really all about Bruce. It was his turn in the spotlight. Arguing before the Supreme Court, for guys like him this is the big show: it’s the Super Bowl. My only job that day was to sit in the gallery as a spectator and look good—and I looked good. I had a custom-tailored Armani suit, Armani sunglasses. Everybody was expecting this crazy rapper to get out of the car, but I played it totally conservative and classy and respectful.

  We climbed up the steps to the court with this throng of reporters following us. When we got inside, the security was insane. They search us, damn near made us get naked, gave us a locker to hold everything, can’t take nothing in with you. The clerk of the court was this no-nonsense guy, a former major general of the army in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps. He drilled me on all the court rules and etiquette. Nobody is allowed to say anything in the chambers besides the lawyers and the justices. When Larry Flynt had been before the court over a case with Hustler magazine, as the justices entered—the eight men and Sandra Day O’Connor—Flynt yelled out, “Eight assholes and a cunt!” The federal marshals had to come and drag him out. I think they were worried about the dirty rapper making some kind of outburst like that. But I was a gentlemen and I told him he didn’t need to worry. He warmed up to me a bit and gave me a great seat in the front row.

  The place is intimidating. I’d been in plenty of courtrooms—no windows, shitty fluorescent lights, bureaucratic and depressing—but nothing prepared me for this. Cameras are forbidden in the room, so it’s very secretive until you get there. I just sat in awe, looking around at all of the polished mahogany and big white columns and American flags. Before that case, I didn’t know that much about the Supreme Court. Mostly because never in my life had I imagined that a black kid from Liberty City would find himself sitting in that room, making an argument about free speech and liberty, with a chance to make a real impact on how the law is applied in this country. Growing up in the ghetto like I did, seeing Arthur McDuffie’s killers go free and watching friends get locked up every day, you just assume that the law will never be fair, that justice doesn’t exist for people like you. But here I was in the same room where nine white men decided that Jim Crow was the constitutional law of the land, where Thurgood Marshall had argued the case of Brown v. Board to end the unjust segregation of schools, and my name was on the docket. I had a seat in the front row. Unlike the Broward case, I wasn’t even angry this time. I was actually proud that my life and my struggle were going to be a part of something this important.

  The justices made their entrance, which was dramatic, all of them stepping out from behind these dark red curtains like they were in some kind of Broadway play. I knew who they all were because I had bios written up on all of them that I’d studied. Of course I knew all about Clarence Thomas. I’d followed all his drama with the porno videos and the pubic hair on the Coke can. I watched him closely, wondering how he was going to treat a brother. But he just leaned back in his chair and glowered at everybody and didn’t say shit the whole time.

  The first thing they did was announce the briefs that had been filed on behalf of both sides, and that right there really reinforced to me just how big of a deal this was. All these major songwriters and copyright holders had filed on behalf of Acuff-Rose: Dolly Parton, the Songwriters Guild of America, the estates of George and Ira Gershwin, Michael Jackson. (It hurt a little bit that Michael came out against me, I have to admit.) There was big money at stake for these people if the case went my way. Filing briefs on my side were all the biggest comedy shows and satirists in the country: Saturday Night Live, In Living Color, Mad magazine, the Harvard Lampoon. If Acuff-Rose won the case, those places would practically have to shut their doors for fear of getting sued every time they did a parody, whether it was for a song or a TV show or whatever.

  To this day, people always confuse the Broward case with the Acuff-Rose case. They think I went to the Supreme Court to defend dirty lyrics, but that was never the case. This was about parody and copyright and fair use and what kind of satire is protected by the First Amendment. The court’s decision would have the biggest impact on comedians, but it had implications for hip-hop, too. Hip-hop is an art form built on taking existing material and breaking it down, reusing it, and commenting on it. Any ruling that limits free speech has a chilling effect on artists working in every kind of business.

  As the petitioner, we got to go first. Bruce stood up in his little bow tie and walked up to the podium to face off against the nine justices for the oral arguments. That’s when the shit really got going. For the next half hour, the justices all took turns grilling him. It was a nine-person firing squad. They would ask questions from all sides, and each question would be on a totally different issue than the question before it. Nobody was piggybacking off the last guy’s question, so Bruce had to shift and pivot and tackle complete new trains of thought and call up all this new information each and every time. It was like watching someone have nine different simultaneous conversations that are all loosely about the same thing. Me, I would have been lost up there, but Bruce, the whole time they were coming at him he was firing back. Boom, boom, boom, boom! I was like, Damn, Bruce. You are a fucking beast. Win, lose, or draw, you handled that shit.

  Then it was time for the lawyer for Acuff-Rose to take his turn, and he just melted under the pressure. He cracked. He choked. He was stumbling through his answers, turning red. The justices were merciless, same as they’d been with Bruce, and this guy looked like he wanted to crawl under the table and die. His arguments were weak to begin with, and then he just blew it trying to defend them. Watching him choke made me realize just how much of a badass Rogow really is. To go into that high-pressure situation, with so much on the line and one chance and one chance only to get it right? I was glad I’d picked the right lawyer, and as soon as the oral arguments were over, I had all
the confidence in the world that we were going to come out on top. I wasn’t even sweating it.

  It takes months for Supreme Court decisions to come down, so after the hearing we went back to Miami and I went back to work and waited. In March of ’94 the ruling was announced: Nine to zero in our favor. A commercial parody can be considered fair use. Justice Souter wrote the opinion. What makes something a parody, the court said, and not just a rip-off, is that it has to be transformative: You’ve taken the original source material and said something new and different with it. That’s what we’d done with “Oh, Pretty Woman.” We didn’t realize we were doing it at the time; we were just riffing in the studio and having fun. But we’d take this song that was all innocent and naïve about attractive women, and we’d brought it down to the street and made it about the negative and dirty ways men really talk about women walking down the street, and by doing that we were mocking the naïveté of the original lyrics.

  It was thrilling to win. I was overjoyed, exhilarated. I’d like to be able to say that winning at the Supreme Court was my victory lap, that I dropped the mic and walked off on top, never to be bothered again, but of course that wasn’t what happened. I had exactly two months to enjoy my success before I was back in the headlines with another controversy to endure, another battle to fight. The world wouldn’t leave me alone.

  The administration at the University of Miami had been trying to get rid of me for years. The players and the fans loved me, loved partying at my clubs, loved all the free Luke Gear I gave out. But as my notoriety as the King of Dirty Rap got bigger and the school kept getting pestered by the Jack Thompsons of the world for being associated with me, they kept trying to distance themselves. They banned me from the sidelines. At one point Sam Jankovich, the athletic director, talked about banning the players from coming to my clubs, because they didn’t want the school associated with my image, but he realized that legally he couldn’t stop the players from coming—at least the players still had some kind of freedom.

  Then on May 20, 1994, the Miami Herald put out a huge front-page story from sportswriters Ken Rodriguez and Dan Le Batard: EX-CANES: WE PLAYED FOR PAY. It was a big bombshell, blowing the lid off the “scandal” of Miami players getting money from me and some other former teammates who’d gone on to the NFL and had come home to spread around a little of their good fortune. I knew the article was coming: Le Batard had been hounding me for weeks, running up alongside me at the golf course, yelling questions. “Did you pay them?” “How much did you pay them?” They got some of the facts right, like how I’d pay each player for a touchdown or a tackle. They also talked about a pool of money people had put together to reward the most violent hits, hits to take opposing players out of the game, and the article made it seem like I was a part of that, which was completely wrong. The biggest problem was the tone of the piece and the tone of the coverage it got (and it got a lot). All the outrage was directed at me and at the players, as if we were the ones in the wrong, and not the NCAA, which was getting rich by making all these rules that denied those kids a chance to earn a living or even pay for the food they needed. Everybody made it out that Luther Campbell had done something unethical.

  I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong. I took care of those players. I mentored them, looked out for them, and kept a little food money in their pockets when they were hungry. The NCAA carried out this big investigation and sent a couple of lawyer types to my house to question me. I didn’t take it seriously for one second. When they arrived at my condo downtown, I opened the door and, to fuck with them, I had about a half dozen naked women there in the apartment. Just hot, naked women, walking around, hanging out on the couch, reading the newspaper.

  I asked the guys to come in, sat them down. Every time one of them went to ask me a question, another naked woman would walk by. These guys couldn’t focus on anything. Finally one of them said, “Uh, could you do something about that?”

  “What do you mean? Do something about what? Aren’t you here to talk about football? Let’s talk about football.”

  I was having a ball. The whole thing was a big joke to me. They hit me with all their questions: Did you pay anybody? Did you pay for play? How much did you pay for the Notre Dame game in 1991? What’s your affiliation with the school? Why were you on the sidelines? One thing I can proudly say is that I didn’t tell them one single lie. They’d ask me, “Did you pay anybody?” And I’d just reply, “Huh? Pay a college football player an honest wage for an honest day’s work, why would I do something like that?” I just answered every question with another question, showing them how ridiculous the whole thing was.

  They never proved that I’d committed any NCAA violations, but the investigation dug so deep it did turn up a whole bunch of other problems at the school, the biggest of which was the abuse of federal Pell Grants: the school took in a quarter million dollars for the team through bogus applications. The Luther Campbell “pay for play” scandal always get lumped in with the Pell Grant violations as a part of the whole “culture of corruption” of the school, because it happened around the same time. But I had nothing to do with that. I had nothing to do with bounties encouraging kids to be violent on the field or anything else. The real scandal is players not being compensated for their labor.

  College sports have grown into a huge industry, in large part because of the swagger and popularity of teams like the Miami Hurricanes. In basketball, the NCAA has a fourteen-year, $11 billion contract with CBS and Turner Sports just for the March Madness playoff alone. That’s one tournament. We’re talking billions and billions of dollars a year, all of it coming in on the unpaid labor of young, mostly poor, mostly black athletes who have no leverage to change the situation or demand fair treatment. The schools say the kids are getting scholarships, but we all know with the amount of time they have to dedicate to playing, they’re not getting an equal education. The kids are getting nothing. And if they don’t make it in pro sports, they’re done.

  It’s taken a while, but the public consensus is finally coming around to where I was when I first sat those Miami players down in my office and listened to their stories nearly thirty years ago. Every season we get more articles and editorials calling for students to be better compensated, and the tone is completely different than the Herald article from 1994. All the outrage points in the other direction, at the NCAA. Football players at Northwestern University are voting to unionize. Federal courts have ruled that college players can be paid for the use of their own likenesses. The tide is turning, and pretty soon people won’t look back on the “Luther Campbell pay for play” story as a scandal or a scheme or another chapter in the crazy life of Uncle Luke. They’ll see it for what it really was: the beginning of a very long struggle for the fair treatment and compensation these students deserve.

  We think it’s bad for young black men on the streets, and it is, but the higher up you go, the more racism you encounter. Whether you’re upsetting some city councilman in Hialeah or Miami Beach with your nightclub, or you’re threatening a multibillion-dollar athletic industry with the truth, if you’re a black person who challenges the status quo, they’ll come after you with everything they’ve got. Ever since Nasty took off and went platinum, I’d been rolling. Nearly every business I touched turned to gold, and I won nearly every fight that came my way. But I was so consumed with fighting off all the attacks, I took my eye off the one area that I should have been focused on. Soldiers in combat say you never hear the shot that gets you.

  BANKRUPT

  If there was one thing I was constantly vigilant about—even paranoid about—it was getting screwed. I’d heard all the stories about black artists getting fucked by the industry: all the old blues and R&B songwriters who had their work stolen with no compensation; all the rappers who signed terrible deals in the early days of hip-hop, who went out and had one hit single and then ended up back in the South Bronx projects without a dime.

  When you run a successful entertainment company, there
’s vultures everywhere, guys on the make, guys trying to get in your spot. I’d hire somebody to handle a legal case and all he’d want to do is hang with the talent, go to strip clubs, and drink champagne. Next thing you know, that guy’s trying to be a producer or some shit. I’d dealt with a dozen of those types of guys, and I’d always protected myself from them. Allen Jacobi, the lawyer who recommended Bruce Rogow to me, was one of the first entertainment lawyers I worked with. Allen was actually a stand-up guy, but he looked like one of these sharks who’d bend you over and fuck you sideways. I didn’t trust Allen from here to the other side of the street. I didn’t trust anybody.

  But as Luke Records got bigger, I couldn’t do everything myself. I was running a label, running a club, launching my solo career. I had to find somebody I could trust to watch the operation and keep everything running. I had a lot of legal shit going on, issues related to the business, on top of the First Amendment battles I was already fighting. Like every record company, I had distributors who owed me money; distributors are always late in paying, holding back your money for some bullshit reason or other, and you have to keep lawyers on retainer just to harass them and get what you’re owed. There were also a lot of legal issues related to sampling; hip-hop DJs had built this whole new art form based on sampling other artists, but it had all been done on the fly, not thinking about how to make it work with existing copyright law. So the courts were now catching up, developing new legal standards for fair compensation to the original artists, and at that point in time every major hip-hop label had a lot of ongoing cases to settle what was owed for the songs our acts had sampled over the years. Plus the record business is one of the most corrupt, crooked industries on the planet; if you’re not being sued, you’re suing somebody else. It’s constant.