by Bobby Brown
Even though he held the championship for the last time in 1996 before losing it to Evander Holyfield, I can personally attest to the fact that Mike still hits harder than a mule kick. One time we were working out together, doing some sparring. I’ve always been pretty confident that I could do some damage with my hands. I had already sparred with Tommy Hearns. I felt like I knew what I was doing. Mike was letting me hit him, but I slipped up and hit Mike in the face with a right cross. With my bare fist.
Suddenly, all motion stopped. Mike looked at me like I was crazy.
“Bobby, why did you hit me so fuckin’ hard?! What’s wrong with you? I will hurt you, Bobby!”
But I was still delusional, so I didn’t take him that seriously.
“Yeah, whatever,” I said, all cocky. “You just getting slow.”
Yeah, that’s right, I was arrogantly mouthing off to the man many consider the greatest, scariest fighter of all time. Not smart.
Mike crouched down, came toward me, and boom boom boom. He hit my ribs on my left side in rapid succession. I thought I was going to stop breathing. I couldn’t believe how much it hurt. I dropped to the floor and curled into a fetal position.
“See, Bobby, I told you to stop playing!” Mike said.
Now in our middle age, Mike Tyson and I will sometimes sit around and talk about how much of a waste it can be to give hundreds of millions to a kid barely out of his teens, as our society does with athletes and entertainers. We were let loose on the world with no direction, no financial advisers who really cared about us, not enough people watching our backs. To most of the people around us we represented a paycheck—not somebody they should be looking out for. Because if we had people who were really watching our backs, they would have quietly stashed away money in a trust somewhere so that later on, when things got tough again, they could come to us and say, “Hey, man, guess what? You’re not totally fucking broke! I put a hundred million dollars over here in this account just for you, just for this very moment.”
But of course, ultimately it was our responsibility, what we did with our money, how we squandered it and failed to do any long-term planning. I’ll be the first to tell you we were stupid and immature, lacking the type of role models who might have advised us properly.
When you’re young, you want to surround yourself with as many people as possible. I’m not even sure why having an entourage adds to the fun, but it does. I had a whole lot of people out there on the road with me; all my boys were on the payroll. Everybody on the tour would get their weekly checks, plus a certain amount per week for food—I think it was about $300. But we would always have food backstage, so many of them were pocketing most of the per diem too. I know one dude who never even cashed his per diem checks—he was always with me when I went out to eat, and he knew I paid every restaurant bill.
When the tour stopped in Japan, I wound up dining at the emperor’s palace, which is where I developed my lifelong love of sushi. I sat down inside that unbelievable place and stared at a plate of brightly colored food, looking unlike anything I had ever eaten before. I had a smile on my face, but my mind was thinking, What the fuck is this? But I had already learned to allow myself to accept new things, new cultures. When I picked up one of the pieces, it melted in my mouth with an explosion of incredible flavors. Oh my God, it was so damn good. After trying sushi for the first time at the emperor’s palace, one might think it would all be downhill from there. On a few occasions I have had sushi to rival that, but it hasn’t been often—and I’m still on a constant quest. After sampling sushi all over the world, ironically some of the best sushi I eat now is at a less-than-fancy little joint in the San Fernando Valley called Sushi Spot, which is in a strip mall next to the 7-Eleven. They are one of the few places I’ve come across to serve toro, which comes from the fatty belly part of the tuna. That stuff is unbelievable. And though I’ve been looking for more than twenty years, I still haven’t found tempura as good as what I had that night at the emperor’s palace.
The whole tour was mind-boggling, but it brought me immense satisfaction. There was something very gratifying about knowing the whole thing was mine, under my direction, something I created. There was nobody to tell me what to do, when to do it. I had total control of what happened and what I did. I wasn’t heavily into the drugs yet at this point. Mainly we were smoking weed and drinking, and mostly beer. And of course there were lots of girls. Way too many girls.
Some of the encounters could be filed under the category of unexpected. For instance, there was the night with Jessica Hahn. This was a few years after she brought down televangelist Jim Bakker with allegations that he and another preacher had drugged and raped her when she was working as their church secretary at the age of twenty-one. At this point she was ten years older than me, and she was apparently a big fan. She attended one of my shows and came backstage to meet me. And she sure as hell did meet me that night.
There were so many sexual encounters, many of them blur together in my mind. But there are others that I remember as vividly as if they happened yesterday. Sometimes I will turn on the television or go to the movies and I will see one of the women, more than two decades later, and the memories will come flooding back to me.
We also had way too many guns. I’m not talking just regular handguns, I mean like big semiautomatics. I had all this money around and I guess I was paranoid, but luckily some smart thinking by my security detail kept us from getting into real trouble. One night in St. Louis, we had a major beef with these kids who were talking shit to us. When we got back on the bus, all of a sudden we heard gunshots. We realized we were taking fire—those motherfuckers were shooting up our bus! Crouching down to avoid getting hit, we all ran to get our guns and looked for safe spots to shoot from. We found spots where we could safely fire back at them. But instead of gunshots, it was click, click, click. None of the guns had bullets in them. Turns out our head of security had taken all the bullets and hidden them underneath the bus. In retrospect it was a genius move because somebody would have gotten killed that day. But at the time we were pissed as hell. We jumped him and started beating his ass.
Triple B Records
After the enormous success of Don’t Be Cruel, I signed a new contract with MCA that was extremely lucrative. As part of the new contract, I got my own record label, where I could develop and produce my own acts. But I didn’t want to do all of that from Los Angeles, which was feeling too confined and incestuous. I wanted to break away and put down roots in a new place. I also saw that when we looked at our royalty reports, 70 percent of the radio revenue was coming from the South. I realized that our audience was mostly down there. If you wanted to break a new record, you didn’t even have to think about the West or the Northeast. You could do it exclusively by concentrating on the South. So I figured, why not relocate to the hub of the place, Atlanta? This was before Outkast and Jermaine Dupri and the development of the Southern sound. Music-wise, there was nothing in Atlanta when we got there. It was all new, fertile ground. We called our label Triple B Records (my middle name is Barrisford). We also bought a full-fledged recording studio that we called Bosstown Recording, so we could do everything from signing the artists to recording their music to mixing and mastering the final album. It was one-stop packaging.
We put together an impressive collection of artists who we knew were going to make a big splash. We had an incredible vocalist named Dede O’Neal, who eventually wound up being signed by LaFace. My younger sister, Carol, who was a talented rapper by the name of Coop B, was part of our camp. At one point we were working with Usher. We had a vocalist named Harold Travis and a hot rapper by the name of Stylz. One of our most exciting acts was an R & B quartet by the name of Smoothe Sylk—a group that turned out to be the label’s downfall. The guys in Smoothe Sylk kept coming to me asking for money, saying they were broke and needed to make ends meet. We were just a couple of months from the release of their first album and they came back yet again, looking for more cash.
“Dudes, I don’t know what you’re doing with this money, but for the next couple of months you better figure something out. Go get a job at McDonald’s or something, because I’m not advancing you any more money. Y’all need to budget your money or something.”
A few days later, I got a phone call delivering news that I just refused to believe. Two of the guys in Smoothe Sylk had gone out and robbed a bank. They couldn’t wait until the release of their album, which everyone was certain was going to be a big hit. The executives at MCA flipped out. If the Triple B acts were going to be this risky, they had serious doubts about the entire venture. In the end, the label put out just two albums—a compilation album featuring all of the artists called B. Brown Posse and an album of remixes of some of my songs called Remixes in the Key of B.
When I look back on that time now, I feel a certain amount of regret that I didn’t handle things differently. I dropped so many balls and it affected many other lives. I immaturely walked away from the business. There was so much amazing music that we recorded that is just sitting in the vault—actually in my garage. Incredible music that no one has ever heard, that could have made a splash in the industry. In retrospect I didn’t have the right people working in a management capacity with the label and clearly I wasn’t invested enough. Since the whole venture was mine, I’m prepared to take the brunt of the blame. My sister was an extremely talented artist who should have had a long career. The same with the rapper Stylz and the vocalist Dede O’Neal. They were all depending on me and I let them down. I shouldn’t have allowed them to miss out just because I fell in love and was negligent. We made great, timeless music together—it wasn’t bullshit. I had the raw tools to build a real dynasty, but I didn’t have the mind-set. I was the first artist to create a personal label and have it backed by a major. Now every other artist does it.
I had a lot of great times in that Atlanta recording studio. I produced and appeared on two songs from Shaquille O’Neal’s third album, You Can’t Stop the Reign. Shaq’s raps were written by Peter Gunz and we had the best time working on his music. Shaq is a beast. The sessions were so much fun, I can’t help but smile when I look back on them.
I always made sure there were plenty of beautiful, sexy women around the Bosstown studios. And they were eager to make sure the artists coming through there were comfortable and relaxed. They were a hell of a welcoming party.
When I say that my Atlanta mansion was the scene of a three-year-long party, I’m not exaggerating. It was like Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion acquired feet and scurried down from California to Atlanta. One of the first houses we were shown by our Atlanta real estate agent was this incredible place that had previously been owned by Mike Thevis, a prolific pornographer who in the 1970s reportedly controlled 40 percent of the American market. Books, magazines, movies, X-rated theaters, adult bookstores, automated peepshows—Thevis lorded over them all. Known as the “Scarface of Porn,” Thevis eventually branched out into the music business, with several Atlanta-based labels. His annual income at one time was estimated at $100 million. Eventually, though, the government caught up to him, first convicting him of distributing pornography, then in 1980 he was found guilty of murdering two of his former associates.
From the looks of it, he’d had to leave this fourteen-thousand-square-foot Tudor mansion in a hurry because many of his belongings had been left behind. I fell in love with the place right away. It was completed in 1972 and originally called Lions Gate, with eighteen sprawling acres behind a grand wrought iron entrance on top of a hill overlooking the magnificent grounds. There was an entire pool complex. There were even stables, not that I cared about horses.
Outside the home were five thousand square feet of patio and terrace areas accessible from all the rooms on the first floor. Inside was a world-class gourmet kitchen, seven bedrooms, six bathrooms and three powder rooms. This joint was crazy. As a matter of fact, I was told that it was the largest home built in the United States in 1972 when it was completed by Atlanta architect Robert Green.
I quickly went to work to put in my own touches. I had windows installed with portraits of me made out of stained glass. We got rid of the murals of angels and demons Thevis had painted on the walls and ceilings. A taxi driver told my brother that he used to drop people off at the house quite frequently and once saw a bunch of men having sex with young women on the lawn. Well, the taxi driver actually said “raping” women on the lawn.
In my hands, the house took on a younger feel, with my mother in charge of the redecoration. We put in a gold staircase that led to big gold doors outside my bedroom. We installed a giant fish tank that went under the staircase all the way up to the second floor. There were always other people in the house with me—some of my boys actually lived there. Atlanta is a big strip-club town, so many of the local strippers would get off work and come to my house to spend their days. There would be beautiful big-booty strippers walking around all the time, but clothed, because my son and nephews were often there too. One of the house’s most memorable features was the pool—it was all black on the bottom, at one end about twenty feet deep, with a bridge crossing over it, giving it the feel of a deep lagoon. To this day it remains one of the baddest pools I’ve ever seen.
I gave my son Landon a couple of over-the-top birthday parties there in the early 1990s. For one of them, I had the real Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles come. I’m talking the actual dudes from the movies, wearing their actual costumes. I don’t remember at all how much this cost, but it must have been a small fortune. At the time, I certainly wasn’t thinking about the pain of writing a check for something like that. Because MCA owned Universal Studios it was easy for me to get the real Ninja Turtles because it was a Universal franchise. You might ask whether it was necessary to go all out and get the real Ninja Turtles, but my son would have known if they were Turtle impersonators.
A year or so before the Turtles birthday, I dressed up as Batman for his party. He took one look at me and was like, “Uh, you’re not Batman, you’re my dad.”
“No, I’m not your father, I am Batman,” I said, trying to disguise my voice.
I then ran into the house and had my brother come out with the outfit on while I strolled out in regular clothes to stand next to Landon.
“Dad! Now that’s Uncle Tommy!”
I couldn’t fool his ass to save my life, so I figured I needed the real Ninja Turtles.
Despite all the fun we had down in Atlanta, I sensed that a lot of evil shit had gone down in the house while Thevis lived there. To this day I believe that house was haunted. Pretty soon it was a generally accepted fact among my family and friends that there were supernatural presences there. Some of the ghosts were definitely upset. We often would see white women walk down the hallway. People would bust out of their rooms, screaming, “Did you see that?!”
One memorable night, one of the ghosts descended from the ceiling and had sex with me. After you stop laughing, I need you to hear what I’m saying because I’m not making this up. And let me add this: this was before I ever touched any drug besides weed and alcohol. I don’t think anybody can drink enough alcohol to make them think they are actually having sex with a ghost. In my bedroom I had a big round bed with a mirrored ceiling looming above. I always slept in the nude, so one night I woke up to the sensation of a woman on top of me. I looked up and in the mirrors I could actually see a white woman straddling me on the bed. The sensation felt exactly like sex—I could feel my penis inside of her and everything. It was not a dream; I was definitely awake when it was happening. All of a sudden, she was gone—leaving me alone and incredibly excited and terrified at the same time.
The entire time I was in the house, Thevis’s brother kept on us about selling the place back to him. He approached us so often that we became suspicious there was a stash of money hidden somewhere. That feeling was exacerbated by the layout of the basement, where Thevis had constructed a maze of little rooms and compartments separated by cinder b
locks. At one point we had security crawl the entire length of the basement, which was about the size of half a football field, to see if they could find anything. But they never did.
While I lived in that house, I also experienced a scary incident of extreme racism. It was a real welcome to Georgia. One night we heard a great deal of commotion. When we looked out the door we were shocked to see a cross burning in my front yard. A bunch of us went running outside—me, my nephews, our security guys. We saw a couple of pickup trucks screeching away. One of the security guys squeezed off a couple of shots but didn’t hit anything. Then we saw that one of the trucks wasn’t starting. The white guy behind the wheel had a terrified look on his face as we ran toward him. We broke his window and I reached inside to punch him in the face. In the process I gashed my forearm and wrist on the broken glass—I still have the scars from the incident.
We dragged this guy out of the truck and proceeded to beat his ass, punching him and kicking him while he moaned in pain and tried to block the blows. There was no sign of the rest of them; they had left him there. After we were done with him, we put him back in his truck, got it started and parked it right outside my gate. Then we called the police and told them what happened. When they arrived, they asked if we wanted to press charges and make a report.
“No, he got exactly what he deserved,” I said. “He should go back and tell the rest of them.”
CHAPTER 5
BOBBY IN LOVE
As my star was shining bright with the success of Don’t Be Cruel, I began an intoxicating, whirlwind relationship with the beautiful, sexy Janet Jackson. Talk about the benefits of fame. This was a couple of years after Janet shook up the music world with her album Control. The awesome Rhythm Nation album would come a year later, in late 1989. Don’t Be Cruel was the top-selling album in the country in 1989; Rhythm Nation would be the top-selling album of 1990.