Ice

by Ice-T

  New Jack City was a surprise hit. The movie was shot for just $8 million, and became the highest grossing independent film of 1992, making over $47 million. My check for the gig? I think I got twenty thousand dollars. The funny part is that it led to my next movie role in Ricochet with Denzel Washington and John Lithgow.

  Second movie—I thought, Okay, now I got a track record, now I’m gonna get paid. I went into the producer Joel Silver’s office with that swagger.

  I didn’t have to do a reading or anything. He just offered me the part. (I’ve been lucky that way: Every movie role I’ve done was offered to me; I never had to audition or read for it.) But when it came to paying me, I figured I could up my quote.

  “Ice,” Joel Silver said, “look, you’ve done exactly one movie.”

  I only got about forty grand, but for much less work—only a handful of scenes. Shooting with Denzel was mad cool. Then, as now, Denzel was the man as far as black actors go. There is nobody more respected. And he was the quietest, most down-to-earth cat on the set. I never once felt like I was some rookie rapper and he was the trained actor who could master every role from Othello to street gangster. With Denzel, there was never a problem if I messed up a line. He’d just smile, give me a pound, and we’d do another take.

  At one point, when he could see I was really tense, Denzel even took time to come into my trailer and break it down for me.

  “Look, Ice,” he said. “I started out in TV. I did TV movies. I did St. Elsewhere. I did local theater. Nobody starts off in the big leagues. People look at me like I’ve made it—but, man, I still have a long way to go. Everybody has to come through a door. You’re in the door, Ice. Do your best.”

  It’s not going to help the scene if the actor working with you is intimidated. Good actors need another actor’s energy to vibe. If all you’re vibing is another person’s fear and tension, how the hell can you make the scene work?

  I couldn’t be cast in a scene with Al Pacino and stand there, staring at him, completely starstruck. My God, it’s Al Pacino. Once the director says “Action!” all that reverence for the big movie star has to fly out the window. If the role says to disrespect him, I have to disrespect him, even though in real life I hold him in high regard. If my role is written that way, then I’m gonna talk to Al Pacino like he’s a real piece of shit. And Al Pacino, in his reactions, is going to be egging me on.

  Today, I try to relate that same lesson Denzel gave me when I’m on the set of Law & Order. We’ll get new kids, young actors, and they’ll sit in the interrogation room, and I’ll see how nervous they are. They’re nervous because they don’t know their lines; they’re nervous that if they fuck up, Dick Wolf will never use them again. I always take them aside and tell them: “Dig, you know what? It’s okay to be nervous. I’m not Ice-T here. I’m Fin. I’m supposed to be police—and we’re fucking with you. So hell yeah, you’re nervous. Use this!”

  I don’t exactly see myself as a mentor or trailblazer, but I’m proud of whatever role I played in kicking open the door for a generation of hip-hop artists to make that transition to the big screen. Will Smith, Queen Latifah, Common, LL Cool J. ’Pac did some fine roles, and probably would have grown a lot with his acting if he’d lived longer. Today, you’ve got guys like my man Lord Jamar from Brand Nubian, my friend Chino XL, Ludacris, Method Man—too many rappers to mention have proven they’ve got the acting chops to make it in feature films.

  But among us all there are only two box office draws: Will and Latifah. That’s real talk. I’m no box office draw. I may have a bit of TV buzz—I know Dick Wolf respects my game—but to be categorized as one of those A-list Hollywood actors who can get a movie green-lit on your name alone, to negotiate your deal so that your name appears above the title, that’s real juice. That’s clout. Of black male actors from the hip-hop generation, only Will Smith has got it like that.

  For the rest of the rappers, yeah, you can be in the movie, get a juicy part, a sizable check, and your own trailer on the set—but don’t get it twisted: You ain’t the reason folks paid ten bucks and sat their asses down in that multiplex theater.

  PART FOUR

  FREEDOM OF SPEECH

  “GODDAMN, WHAT A BROTHER GOTTA DO

  TO GET A MESSAGE THROUGH

  TO THE RED, WHITE, AND BLUE?”

  —“BODY COUNT”

  10.

  MY FRIENDS ALL KNOW one thing about me: I can never sit still. I have a really low threshold for boredom. It’s pretty ironic considering that acting and recording can be such monotonous professions.

  Quiet as it’s kept, I actually hate recording. The only part of rapping that’s fun to me is performing live. To get a crowd going buck-wild. Waving their hands in the air. Shouting along to your lyrics. But when you’re in the studio, doing take after take, punching in little mistakes in your vocals, that’s tedious as fuck.

  I hate the time that’s required to be a perfectionist in the studio. I like coming in and laying my vocals down quick. I’m not one of those artists that likes to sit in there for two or three days just to make one song. Rev Run said once that he wishes he could write the rap, throw it into the air, and it would end up instantly on the radio so he could hit the road and perform it live. All the work that goes into polishing the record, that’s pure tedium. Good producers get off on that. I’m not that dude. I like live performing. There’s nothing like standing in front of an insane crowd of twenty or thirty thousand people when they’re feeling you.

  Back in the day, you had to do shows on a regular basis just to get a record deal. They used to make new artists have a showcase just so all the record executives and “taste-makers” could watch them perform live. Either that, or you’d be an undiscovered artist playing at a little club, and some A&R guy would decide if you could rap live before he even thought about signing you.

  These days, all that shit is backward. In the age of YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and home studios with ProTools, so many artists put their own music out there and start grassroots promotional campaigns before they’ve ever left their bedroom or garage to perform that shit. Their first time performing live is when they’ve already become stars; they’ve got their recording and only later create a live show around themselves.

  I’m not saying our generation was better; it’s just different. People thought MTV changed up the music business, putting the emphasis on the artist’s look rather than how he sounded; but that’s nothing compared to what a forum like YouTube has done. In the documentary I just shot, The Art of Rap, I say, “First we were in the audio age, now we’re in the video age.” You see someone’s YouTube clip—some no-name kid who’s got a million hits before you’ve ever heard of them in the mainstream. The whole music game has become much more visually driven than audio. Back in the day, you’d hear a band’s song a long time—months and months—before you even knew what they looked like.

  I WOULDN’T EXACTLY SAY I was bored with the rap game, but by 1989, I wanted to expand my musical horizons. My love for rock didn’t start with my band, Body Count. My introduction to rock started when I was living in my aunt’s house back in the mid-seventies.

  My first cousin, Earl, had already graduated from Dorsey High, but he was hanging around, thinking he was Jimi Hendrix. He was one of the few rocked-out black guys I’d met; he wore a scarf around his head and only listened to KMET and KLOS in L.A.—the two rock stations. For a while, when I first came to live with my aunt, I had to share a bedroom with him. I was just a kid in junior high, so Earl controlled the radio in the room, playing nonstop classic rock.

  I didn’t hang with Earl, but just being around him, sharing that bedroom radio, I started to pick out the songs I liked. I had no taste for rock before Cousin Earl. He had his well-worn Jimi Hendrix and Black Sabbath albums; and from listening to the radio I learned about Leon Russell, Mott the Hoople, Blue Oyster Cult, Deep Purple. All the heavy rock bands of that era. If you’re saturated with a certain type of music long enough, you’ll sta
rt to pick out the artists you like. If you worked in an area full of Jamaicans, you’re going to listen to reggae so much that eventually you’re going to say, “You know, I like that song by Peter Tosh.”

  So right at the age when my musical taste was forming, thanks to Cousin Earl, I was saturated with the bigger, heavier stuff: Edgar Winter, Led Zeppelin, and Black Sabbath were my favorites. It was kind of cool to know about that shit. Not too many black kids my age knew about the great rock guitarists.

  There was one other black rock head at Crenshaw High. Ernie Cunnigan from South Central. We all called him Ernie C. Ernie was a dedicated guitar player. He was a real different dude. In the midst of the whole gang culture at Crenshaw—everyone wearing the same uniform of pressed khakis, Chuck Taylors, flying blue rags—Ernie C. would walk around with a Fender guitar strapped over his shoulder like he was constantly on his way to a gig. He did this one concert at Crenshaw, right there in the multipurpose room—crazy! He had flash pots he’d made at home; he was rolling around on the stage, playing Peter Frampton songs lick for lick. The audience was all gangbangers, standing around watching him, these Crips who didn’t know shit about rock music. But they all respected Ernie C. because of his showmanship and his sheer balls.

  Vic Wilson, also known as Beatmaster V, could play the drums, but he got caught up in the drug game more and more until he and Sean E. Sean caught that case for the twenty-six pounds in their crib down in Inglewood.

  When I first got my deal with Sire Records, anybody with any musical aptitude gravitated toward me. Ernie and Vic would constantly say, “Ice, you got an album deal. Yo, let’s play!”

  “No, this is hip-hop. I don’t really need a band.”

  If you go back and check my early recordings, I always had a rock influence in my rap records. On my first album, Rhyme Pays, for the title song I used the hook from Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs.” I let Beatmaster V play live drums over the sample. I get a lot of haters who think I somehow jumped on the rock bandwagon, that my rock ’n’ roll band was a marketing gimmick, but if I didn’t really love it, why would I make my title song on my first album a rock track?

  I always liked the hard stuff. Rap to me was a form of rock. When you listen to hip-hop, we never say, “We’re gonna R&B the mic!” We say, “We’re gonna rock the mic!” or “We’re gonna rock the house.”

  To me rocking is just aggression. If you go along with everything, if you sing what everyone wants to hear, you’re doing what’s popular. You’re pop. But if you say, “Fuck that. I don’t understand why—I want to go against the grain.” Then it’s rock.

  Even when I was doing pure hip-hop, I was always laying in guitar licks, just to add to the energy. I didn’t invent that sound. Thanks to Rick Rubin, acts like the Beastie Boys, Run-DMC, and LL Cool J were all using rock hooks. And I loved the edge and power that some loud electric guitar chords brought to the mix. To me it made perfect sense. It made the rap harder.

  By the time I got to my third album, O.G., when I’d go into the studio in L.A., it felt like half the city knew Ice-T’s every move. There’d be a gang of folks dropping by my studio sessions night and day. Vic came home—still on parole—and I immediately hooked him up as the drummer in the band. So we’re recording O.G. and one night I had a whole band sitting in the room. I was working in the Sound Castle studio in Hollywood, and Ernie C. and Beatmaster V were pressuring me to let them play on the record.

  “Why don’t we just make a band?” I said. “We’ll play gigs around L.A. just for the hell of it.”

  The rest of that original lineup was Mooseman on bass and D-Roc on rhythm guitar. We didn’t do some big audition or citywide search. It was just the dudes I’d been tight with for years. Moose went to Crenshaw with us and was a beast on the bass. D-Roc was one of Ernie’s students. So now we had enough people for a band to start doing local gigs. This was in 1990.

  We would play anywhere there were “open band” nights. We played little bars and pizza joints, not making any money, just testing out the Body Count concept. Then the cats from Dirty Rotten Imbeciles, one of the earliest hardcore thrash bands, were going out and they had some spot gigs in Northern California. They asked us if we want to go out with them and put ourselves in front of a real audience.

  So we headed up to Northern Cali, did these gigs with DRI. There were skinheads with tattoos in the audience and they were booing us, wondering what a bunch of black street dudes were doing gigging at a thrash-punk show. Five minutes into the set they’d flipped and they were slamdancing. They were gone.

  We didn’t even know if we would be accepted by rock audiences. We didn’t have some big strategic plan. I mean, Body Count was a garage band in every sense of the word. We just wanted to jam together and have fun. I never thought I could get a record deal where I could be the front man in the band. Since I was already signed to Sire for a few more albums, I didn’t think we could get a separate deal.

  But I said, “Fuck it, let’s figure it out when it happens.”

  We did our first tour and went out with the groups DRI and Exodus. And we did a tour up and down the coast. We were just slamming it. The rock guys were digging us. More important, we had a really good time out there.

  We were steadily gigging. We developed a tighter set. We realized we needed more songs—our set was too short. Ernie hooked us up with Perry Farrell from Jane’s Addiction. Perry pitched me this idea of doing a cover of the Sly Stone song “Nigger/Whitey” for this video they were doing called Gift. I was going to do it as Ice-T instead of as a character. We were playing our parts. “I’m going to sing it at you, then you sing it at me,” Perry told me, “I don’t like you, you don’t like me.” I liked the concept of the remake.

  “Don’t call me ‘nigger,’ whitey!”

  “Don’t call me ‘whitey,’ nigger!”

  We did the track and Perry started telling us about this idea he had to start up a traveling festival called Lollapalooza, kind of a Woodstock for heavy metal, alternative, punk, and hip-hop acts.

  It sounded way too crazy to me—but I like shit that sounds way too crazy. Without hesitation I told Perry, “Look man, I want to be down. Put Ice-T on the bill.” I don’t think Perry even knew I had a rock band called Body Count.

  There wasn’t any expectation for that Lollapalooza show. They told me where to show up, when I was playing on the bill.

  “Ice, you’re going to go on third. It’s going to be Butthole Surfers, then Rollins Band, then you.”

  “Shit,” I said. “I go on after two established artists?”

  “You’re a platinum artist, Ice.”

  They told me I had an hour on the stage. An Ice-T set is normally an hour, but I decided I’d split it right down the middle, do thirty minutes of Ice-T material, thirty minutes of Body Count. They didn’t pay me enough to bring all the guys in the band out, but I figured, Fuck it, this is our chance. I ate any profit from the show by bringing all the band and equipment out—twice as many people as normal—on the road.

  After I did my Ice-T set, I paused and looked out at about twenty-thousand people.

  “Now I’m about to prove to you that rock-n-roll has nothing to do with black and white,” I said. “Rock-n-roll is a state of mind.…”

  While I’m saying that our roadies have transformed the set to the Body Count stage, and then Ernie C. and D-Roc came in hard on the guitars. Boom. We hit them with “Cop Killer,” “KKK Bitch,” “Voodoo.” And we killed it. All the hard shit had everybody’s jaws dropping open. We’d play and Henry Rollins would stand on the side of the stage every night. We just went out there with a fever and nailed it.

  I didn’t have any fear. I looked at Ernie, Vic, Moose, and D-Roc backstage. Every one of us looked like we’d just run a marathon. We were out of breath; all drenched in sweat. But the cats in the band all looked like they’d had the best time of their lives.

  “Look,” I told them. “We can do this. I can scream just as hard as any of these muthafuckas.
And you guys can fucking play.”

  Living Colour was also on the bill, but I saw our bands as polar opposites. Living Colour was the “black” band and we were the “niggers.” Vernon Reid still adopted the rock look, bright colors, tight pants, a rock vibe. We had on khakis and looked like gangbangers. We had a style similar to Suicidal Tendencies; Mike Muir and those cats took that Venice gangster image and ran with it. We give credit to those guys in Suicidal as being the first gangster-based rock band. With Body Count, I wanted to have a Black Sabbath sound and style but my lyrics would be based on our lives. Ozzy and Dio would sing about the Devil; if you look at our debut album cover, when you open it, there’s a guy with a gun pointed at your face. To us that was the devil. We wanted to change the imagery of metal to reality, like what’s more scary than that: some gangster with a gat pointed at you?

  The cover was supposed to be a super-gangbanger, some arch-criminal of the street—maybe based on a guy like Tookie, with COP KILLER tattooed on his chest. That guy on the cover didn’t look like he had a friend in the world; he was dangerous, the last motherfucker you’d want to meet on the street. In other words, he was the gatekeeper of Hell. That was more reality-based for us than the standard heavy-metal artwork of Lucifer with horns and a pitchfork.

  WE WANTED THE NAME Body Count to have a couple of meanings. It meant: How many people would die in the pit? How many other bands would we have to take out? How many nonbelievers could we turn into fans? Between us, we often called the group B.C. which was a play on words, too—that stood for Bloods and Crips. On our third album, Violent Demise, we even used the hand signs of the Bloods and the Crips, side by side, as the cover art.

  Of course, any time you do anything new, people got shit to say. What the fuck is Ice doing? Is he posing? What’s he trying to prove with this rock trip?