The Dark Story of Eminem

by Hasted, Nick

  It was at another Detroit venue that the tide at last turned for Marshall, and racist contempt changed to respect. The Hip-Hop Shop, on 7 Mile, was the rap record-selling property of hip-hop clothing entrepreneur Maurice Malone. Proof would become an account executive for the company’s fashion wing, before D12 claimed all his time. But on the Saturday afternoon which let Marshall know his dreams of rap success might yet succeed, Proof was in charge of the Shop’s first open-mic session. Another future D12 member, Head, was the house DJ. He remembered how Marshall rose to the challenge of a full-scale rap battle – a gruelling baptism with no rock equivalent, in which contestants duelled vicious rhymes about each other till one fell, with the crowd’s roar as judge and jury; an artistic adaptation of the street’s rough logic. “I seen Em take this motherfucker out in like five, six lines,” Head told Spin. “It was an open-mic battle, the first one we did. Three hundred people, lines out the door. It was a ruthless, cut-throat battle. And he won it.”

  Marshall told his version of events to msn.com. “The first time I ever got respect was when I grabbed the mic at The Hip-Hop Shop. I had said some shit and people was quiet at first, then cheers and applause, and it got louder and louder. That was the spot I started going to every Saturday. They would have official announcement battles every couple of months, and I kept winning them.” Of his change in fortune, he considered: “I think it was something a little different about me. I started growing up, and I just got better. At 15 or 16, I was wack. But at 18, 19, I started learning, this is how I should sound on the mic. Learning how to battle, practising freestyle. That was what I was known for in Detroit, in the underground, for a couple of years.”

  Of his Detroit contemporaries, Kid Rock, the white, rap-influenced, porn-minded, long-haired rocker who was the first to gain national success, was his only significant idol. Marshall would haunt his record signings, and beg him to battle. “I was 15 at the time, and he was a couple years older,” he told Spin. “He used to always kind of laugh it off and say, ‘Battle me in record sales.’ He saw a little bit more about the record industry than I did. That’s probably what I would have told somebody.” He paused, and considered. “No, I don’t think that’s what I would have told somebody. Back then, I was all about battling.”

  The Hip-Hop Shop’s hothouse forged bonds with Detroit rappers closer to home anyway. It was Proof’s idea for himself, Marshall, DJ Head, Kon Artis, Kuniva, Bizarre and Bugs, all regulars at the Shop and like-minded friends, to join forces in 1995, in a rap super-group of local unknowns. Proof gave them their name, D12, for Dirty Dozen – each of the six who rapped would have two aliases. It would be a little while before Slim Shady made himself known to Marshall/Eminem, making the concept concrete. But the group were soon working on rhymes. “We was gonna do this Western song where we were all outlaws, like the Dirty Dozen,” Marshall recalled for Spin. He squinted to remember its lyrics. “I said something like, ‘I ride rails to cover wide trails/ Slide nails to a killer inside jail, denied bail/ Tell him I’m-a break him out tonight/ And we gonna unite/ So be ready for a gunfight.’ Some shit like that.”

  This fascinating attempt at 19th-century frontier rap, written in the heart of the inner city, was only scuppered when a trip to the video shop revealed The Dirty Dozen was a war movie. Peckinpah’s weirdly moral The Wild Bunch might have been closer to their intentions. But their style, at least, stayed constant from the start. “It was to be disgusting,” Proof explained. “To piss people off, raise eyebrows,” Marshall added, to make “raw, ridiculous shit for the underground kids who like it vulgar.” D12 would perform regularly around Detroit, before anyone else had heard of Eminem. They would all keep each other’s hopes up, and remain loyal in ways neither failure nor success spoiled.

  Marshall’s Hip-Hop Shop battles also attracted another admirer who would be invaluable to his future career. “I heard him in a battle with 50 other MCs,” said Paul Rosenberg. “He took them all by himself.” Rosenberg was another white kid obsessed with rap, the same age as Marshall. But, visiting from deep in the suburbs, he had no wish to perform. He just wanted to enter the music business. He went on to law school, and a law firm in New York. But he kept in touch with Marshall. When the time came, he would become his lawyer and manager, another part of the band that helped take him to the top.

  Two more men completed Marshall’s rap education. The pair have stayed in the shadows on almost every occasion his story has been told, while Dre and the rest have been analysed and applauded. There is good reason for this. If anyone in his life fits the profile of record business Svengalis, it is Jeff and Marky Bass. They are the uncomfortable complication in the idea that Eminem and Slim Shady were wholly made by Marshall Mathers’ driven genius.

  “I got with this little production company in Detroit, Web Entertainment [the Bass Brothers’ business],” was how Marshall remembered it to elamentz.com. “They were like, um … they were like these guys … well, I was rapping on a local radio station when I was like 15 years old, and I used to rap on the air and shit every Friday night with this thing called open mic. These guys with Web Entertainment, I guess they heard me in their car rhyming on the radio. They called in to the station one night, and we were talking to them and shit like that and they was like, you know, why don’t you come through, blah, blah, blah. We got together, we got down, and then we been working together ever since. Since I was like 16 years old, we been working. But I didn’t have what it took until I was 20, 21.”

  The Bass Brothers were local successes, producing national stars including George Clinton, The Red Hot Chilli Peppers, and Detroit girl Madonna. But by 1987, they were looking to break into the burgeoning rap scene. Marky Bass recalled to the Detroit News what happened after he heard Marshall rapping on the radio, as he drove through Detroit, this way. “He was doing an open mic, and I called over to the radio station. I think the DJ was Lisa Lisa, and I said, ‘Lisa, have this kid call me.’ He called me up and we talked for a minute. Then, at 4 o’clock in the morning, he showed up at my studio. And that was the start of grooming him for about three or four years. He had incredible skills, lyrically and rhythmically. He had focus, he knew exactly what he wanted to do. And with our experience as producers and his as a hip-hop head, we kinda put it together and created a project. Actually, we raised him since he was, like, 15.”

  The Bass Brothers signed him to Web Entertainment right then. As The Rolling Stones were to their first, moulding manager Andrew Loog Oldham, and as Elvis Presley was to his label boss/father-figure, Sam Phillips, so Marshall Mathers was just the white raw material the Brothers had been searching for. It was the same year Marshall left school, and the same year his mother threatened to turn him out for good if he didn’t get a job. So, as his obsession with rap and the pressures of home cost him his conventional schooling, and he started a series of hopeless jobs, his contract with Web, signed so young, must have seemed a promise to cling to. He was not a nobody. He had signed on the dotted line, to be an artist. While the teenage Marshall struggled in the daytime, the Brothers would “raise” Eminem at night.

  “He was amazing at that age,” Marky sighed to the Sydney Sun-Herald. “He combined a lot of triple-tongue stuff with some of the best rhyming I’d ever heard. We stayed in the studio every day for five years. We worked hard on getting him to the point where he is now. There was a lot of grooming and technique. We didn’t want to throw Em out as just another rapper.”

  Marky’s comments in the press about Marshall being in the studio “every day” may have been exaggerated. No one else remembers his teenage years that way, and all parties had other, paying jobs to attend. Nor did Marshall ever credit the Brothers with “raising” him. But the seriousness of their joint venture was clear in that contract, and the slow care with which it was realised. And Marky Bass told the truth about one other thing. Marshall Mathers was not ready to become Eminem in his teens. The vicious goblin of Slim Shady, after all, had not yet visited him even once. He had some
living to do before the venom and vengeance which would make him special really soiled his insides. He had to get through his early twenties. That was when his already gruelling life crashed to rock bottom.

  4

  CRACKING UP

  Marshall and Kim still lived in his mother’s home, on and off. Though the love between Mathers-Briggs and her son had been shattered by brutal words and acts when he was 20, and she and Kim loathed each other, Marshall still depended on her. “Right up until he was 26 I took care of his finances – he didn’t have a bank account – and his car insurance,” she told the Mail On Sunday. “When he got a job as a chef, who taught him to cook? Me. When he fell out with his friends, who resolved it? Me.” The inability of the three to survive separately, the resented holds and conditional favours of such lives must have drained them all.

  That job, meanwhile, was as short-order cook at Gilbert’s Lodge. His ability to stick at it for years while, in his co-worker and sometime lover Jennifer Yezvack’s memory, changing clothes the moment each shift was over, to go to friends’ homes or clubs to rap, shows a quietly serious ambition at odds with his later “don’t give a fuck” image. He wasn’t afraid of work, whenever he saw it was needed. No rap star-approved ghetto short-cuts, no drug-dealing or gunplay, would shake his life. Instead, he cooked meatloaf and burgers, out of sight in a family diner, saying little, seeming likeable, and unexceptional, like at school, as he plotted his escape. “He was a good worker,” his manager Pete Karagiaouris told Rolling Stone. “But he’d be in the back rapping all the orders, and sometimes I had to tell him to tone it down. Music was always the most important thing to him.” Yezvack thinks he enjoyed his time there. “Well, he kept coming back. He got fired, quit, came back. Over a period of – God – five years? He must have liked it a little bit. The people are pretty good here, the owner works with them. I think that’s why we’re all here. So I think he liked it. And once Hailie was born, Kim wasn’t working much at all. So he had to work for that.”

  Kim’s pregnancy in 1996, with the baby they’d name Hailie Jade Mathers, was perhaps the most crucial event in Marshall’s life. It threw more pressure on his shoulders to earn money, to make something of himself. It gave him the chance to explore the paternal instincts he’d shown with his half-brother Nathan, to do better than his own vanished father and hated mother. And it heated up his always combative relationship with Kim, until love here, as with his mother, seemed to melt into mutual loathing.

  Some around her felt that way already. “When she got pregnant, she went back home to her mother and wouldn’t let Marshall see her or the baby,” Betty Kresin said to the Sydney Sun-Herald. “Finally her step-father met him with a gun and said, ‘If you ever come round here again, I’ll shoot you.’ Two years later, they got married. Kim only did it for the money. I tried to tell him.”

  “I’m the wrong person to ask about Kim,” Yezvack reflects, about the girl she sometimes rivalled for Marshall’s affections. “Her and I do not get along. She was just vengeful towards him. She got pregnant at a young age, hardly worked, was dependent, didn’t want to be with him, then she did, then she didn’t. She’d call here for him, and there’d be drama all the time. He couldn’t keep his head straight, because she was always messing with it. And once the baby was born, she used the baby against him all the time. You know, ‘You’re not going to see your daughter,’ and then she’d want money, and then she lived with him for a while. Ooh. Yeah. She’s a treat. She did plenty in the past for him to talk about her the way he does on the records, trust me. She’s not stable.”

  When things had soured for good between them, after he and Kim had briefly married, and were about to bitterly divorce, Marshall would find little to like in their time together, either. Asked by the Detroit Free Press if Kim had supported him as he struggled to be a rapper, he replied: “Want me to be honest? It was off and on. When we were younger, she supported everything I did. The older we got, the more reality started to set in. She’s one of those people that’s down-to-earth, like, ‘Hello! You’re living in fantasy. These things don’t happen with people like us.’ I was always the optimist, like, ‘Yo, I’m gonna make this happen.’ And I just kept busting my ass. To be honest, I really didn’t have much support. Nobody in my family, in her family. Just a few friends. And just myself.”

  The Kim of his records was treated still less sympathetically, immortalised in 1997’s ‘Bonnie & Clyde’ and ‘Kim’ only as a lyrical punching bag, the helpless victim of a fantasised screaming jag, slashed throat and strangulation, before her warm corpse was dragged to the lake and dumped. ‘Bonnie & Clyde’ was written when she was keeping Hailie from him, and he felt homicidal towards her, an indication of how the baby intensified their feelings. He even put Hailie on the record, to show who he truly loved then.

  Marshall’s songs made Kim infamous. But she said almost nothing to counter them. There is little to go on about her and what she meant to him, apart from others’ hostile opinions. Inspect one of the few published photos of them together, and she’s a slightly chubby-faced, blonde girl, as tall as Marshall, with lurid, glossy lipstick, and a smile for the camera that doesn’t reach her eyes. Marshall’s eyes, by contrast, look passionately intense and, as the media circle, he is holding her arm, unobtrusively but firmly. It’s reminiscent of famous photos of John Lennon protecting Yoko Ono from a baying paparazzi pack in 1969. Clearly, something in Kim inspired much more than hate, in the dozen years they sparred and screamed at each other. Others who she attacked verbally, or who she made Marshall turn against, may have felt she was bad for him. But Marshall kept coming back for more. Someone who was “good” for him cannot have been to his taste. In his resentful, raging relationship with the world, perhaps he needed someone to fight with, and for. Before he placed Hailie beside him for ‘Bonnie & Clyde’, he and the uncontrollable children’s home refugee Kim had been the inseparable outlaws. Even after he’d written that song, he and others agreed she was the love of his life.

  “This is what I love about Em,” Proof, who’d known them from the beginning, told Rolling Stone. “One time we came home and Kim had thrown all his clothes on the lawn – which was, like, two pairs of pants and some gym shoes. So we stayed at my grandmother’s, and Em’s like, ‘I’m leaving her; I’m never going back.’ Next day, he’s back with her. The love they got is so genuine, it’s ridiculous. He’s gonna end up marrying her. But there’s always gonna be conflict there.”

  “Me and Kim been through our dramas and shit,” Marshall confessed to Q. “But I’d be bald-faced lying if I said I don’t love her, or I’m with her because of my daughter. I’m with her because I wanna be with her.”

  His first, all but forgotten recordings showed that love unashamedly, in a way Slim Shady would hide. His début album Infinite was released in 1996, during Kim’s pregnancy. It was largely produced by the Bass Brothers, and released by their own Web Entertainment, after a potential deal with a major label subsidiary, Jive Records, evaporated. A subset of D12, The 5 Elementz – Proof and Kon Artis, who co-produced, plus Thyme and Eye-Kyu – shared some rapping duties, on a record which sold less than its 1,000 pressings, and never escaped its makers’ Detroit backyard.

  In later interviews, Infinite was routinely dismissed, as if it wasn’t really an album at all, and Eminem had appeared full-blown three years later, with The Slim Shady LP. “Infinite was me trying to figure out how I wanted my rap style to be,” he told Rolling Stone, “how I wanted to sound on the mic and present myself. It was a growing stage. I felt like Infinite was like a demo that got pressed up.”

  “That first album was very different from what he’s doing now,” his future manager Paul Rosenberg, who Marshall reminded of his existence by sending a copy to his New York law firm, told Newsweek. “He was just starting out and he was trying to get airplay, so he made a record that he thought would fit in with what was happening at the time in rap. The songs were a little more upbeat.”

  “It was rig
ht before my daughter was born,” Marshall added to Rolling Stone, “so having a future for her was all I talked about. It was way hip-hopped out, like Naz or AZ – that rhyme style was real in at the time. I’ve always been a smartass comedian, and that’s why it wasn’t a good album.”

  The Bass Brothers have been careful never to reissue this rare, inferior early work by their protégé. It exists now only as bootlegs ordered and burnt over the Internet, or as fan-transcribed lyrics. But, with most of the same producers and co-rappers as his later, celebrated work, this is certainly Eminem’s début album, not a “demo”. And it expresses his life back then with the uncensored honesty which would make his name, but without the cynical, snarling filter of Slim. This is a record by the loving, uncertain, ambitious Marshall Mathers his friends, family, teachers and co-workers all remember, in the face of his public image.

  Most of Infinite is taken up by bragging and battle rhymes, hip-hop standard fare, and Marshall’s strongest suit on Detroit’s circuit. The title track, the only one thought worthy of inclusion in his hardback book of lyrics, Angry Blonde, was actually started at a Hip-Hop Shop open mic. “That was ‘96,” Marshall reminisced, introducing it, “the era of just rhyming for the hell of it. People at one point actually said I sounded like Nas, ‘cos I used all these big words. This is show-your-skill type shit.” The innocent rolling in vocabulary for its own sake in ‘Infinite’, like stream-of-consciousness from the dictionary Marshall devoured in his teens, was typical of him then. “My thesis will smash a stereo to pieces,” he rapped. “My a cappella releases plastic masterpieces through telekinesis/ And eases you mentally, gently, sentimentally, instrumentally/ With entity, dementedly meant to be Infinite.” ‘313’ (Detroit’s area phone code), ‘Tonight’ and ‘Open Mic’ continued Marshall’s defining of himself by dissing rap rivals, sometimes in the supernatural terms which always hovered when he discussed hip-hop, his sacred salvation (“Invisible like magicians with mystical mic traditions/ … So feel the force of my spiritual images”). But ‘Infinite’ concluded with more modest, nervous thoughts: “I never packed a tool or acted cool, it wasn’t practi-cal/ … This is for my family …/ Plus the man who never had a Plan B/ Be all you can be, ‘cos once you make an instant hit/ I’m tense to be tempted when I see the sins my friends commit.” Then the weight of the album became lost in Marshall’s hopes and deep fears.