Parental Discretion Is Advised

by Gerrick D. Kennedy

  Incidents like what happened in Long Beach and at other Run-D.M.C. shows that summer—such as the shooting death of a fourteen-year-old boy at a Bedford-Stuyvesant rap concert called Monster Jam ’86 and fighting during screenings of Krush Groove, a seminal hip-hop film based on the early days of Def Jam Records released the year prior—pushed mainstream publications to vilify and associate rap music almost exclusively with violence. The music had drawn the ire of Parents Music Resource Center cochair Tipper Gore, who suggested that hip-hop influenced the youth that “it’s all right to beat people up.”

  Inspiration struck the Wreckin’ Cru when Lonzo booked Run-D.M.C. at Eve’s in 1983. It was the group’s first LA appearance, and their biting debut singles, “It’s Like That” and “Sucker M.C.’s,” were firebombs. The Hollis, Queens, trio, decked out in leather pants, leather hats, jackets, and tennis shoes, had a much harder street edge than the baggy pants and skinny ties the Wreckin Cru’ rocked. Run-D.M.C. were fresh, no doubt, and Jam Master Jay even gave them advice on how to have a stronger, more commanding presence on stage. Yella and Dre were amazed—and the way the two saw it, they could do it too.

  “This is it? It’s not even a ten-minute show. We can do this,” Yella said of that early Run-D.M.C. show at Eve’s. “That’s exactly how it started. ‘We can do this.’ ”

  During downtime, Yella and Dre hung out at the club and wrote their own material. Yella taught Dre how to master scratching, just as Davy DMX once taught him. The pair listened to records and experimented with an old four-track recording deck in Lonzo’s back room. It was, Dre says, how he learned record production, as he would listen to records and think, “I would have done this different.” Dre suggested they record for real, an idea that Lonzo initially thought was crazy, but he agreed, thinking the music could possibly blow up like Run-D.M.C.

  In 1984, the group went to Audio Achievements, a Torrance recording studio run by engineer Donovan Smith. For a hundred bucks, they were able to record “Slice,” which Yella spearheaded, and “Kru Groove.” The records were deeply indebted to “Planet Rock” and the fast, synthesizer-driven music of Kraftwerk, and were jammed with Yella’s basic drum beats, Dre’s scratching, and rapping from Wreckin’ Cru member Cli-N-Tel. It took them forty-five minutes to record “Slice” and Lonzo drove down to Macola, a small pressing plant in Hollywood that pressed small batches of vinyl for a few hundred dollars. Macola allowed artists to retain the publishing rights to their music, and the plant let acts place their own imprint labels on the recordings. Lonzo created a two-sided, twelve-inch single of the dance singles they cut, had it credited as Kru-Cut Records, and sold the records out of the trunk of his Mazda RX-7.

  “We sold five thousand of them,” Lonzo said. “Five thousand! That’s like ghetto gold.”

  It was the push they all were looking for, and they continued to make the transition from club DJs to recording artists. They followed their first release with the lusty “Surgery,” which was written and produced by Dre and marked his debut as a rapper. Dre fashioned a beat with a crawling bass, a synth line that beeped like a heart monitor, and some hard snares. He also dropped in a sample of a voice saying “Fresh” and built it into a scratch solo that featured a robotic voice simply repeating his name “Dr. Dre.”

  “Dr. Dre,” Yella began.

  “Yo,” Dre responded in a deep husk. “I’m Dr. Dre, gorgeous hunk of a man / Doing tricks on the mix like no others can / The nurses say I’m cute, they say I’m fine / But you betta beware cuz’ I’ll blow your mind.”

  “Surgery” was a smash, selling fifty thousand records—ten times as much as their debut single.

  Wreckin’ Cru found further success with “Juice,” a high-energy dance record inspired by Afrika Bambaataa’s seminal “Planet Rock,” which the track sampled. In 1985 the group decided to put out an album. World Class was packed with electronic funk, fast drum beats, and lots of turntable scratching. “Planet” also gleaned its inspiration from “Planet Rock” and its futuristic-sounding synths. Another song, the erotically titled “(Horney) Computer” was a glitchy romp filled with a woman’s moans, and “Lovers” found its inspiration in LL Cool J’s smooth “I Need Love,” with its moody keyboard riffs that recalled Prince. They came with a topical message on “Gang Bang You’re Dead,” which Cli-N-Tel thought of after a friend was killed by gang violence:

  ’Cause gang bangin’, dope slangin’, bad for the head

  If you do it too long, you’ll end up dead

  Dre was really feeling the harder, edgier sounds coming out of New York, but Alonzo scoffed at doing anything with much grit. Instead, he wanted lighter fare that was more romantic. Dre thought it all sounded wack—dated and soft. Even though he had a great deal of control in the studio, it was Lonzo’s group and what he said went.

  For the cover Lonzo had them in flashy outfits as if they were the Temptations or Soulsonic Force. They were created and designed by Verna and a tailor friend of Alonzo’s. Lonzo sported a black-sequined jacket and earrings in the shape of diamonds. Lonzo and Cli-N-Tel donned shiny, purple satin suits. Yella was outfitted with a white lace glove in the vein of Prince, while Cli-N-Tel wore a jacket with black sequins on the lapel, his dress shirt unbuttoned almost to his navel. Dre, with his handsome baby face and thin athletic frame, was dressed in a tailored white-sequined body suit fashioned out of a medical supply store smock, and he had a stethoscope around his neck. Continuing the Prince influence, their faces were touched with powder and eyeliner for the shot in which they were washed in purple light and wafting smoke.

  Wreckin’ Cru’s first show was opening for New Edition at Freemont High School. They made the rounds, playing Dooto’s, a Compton club Lonzo started promoting in 1985 after he was forced to close Eve’s, as well as the skating rink that opened next door called Skateland. The crowds grew as Macola sold the Cru’s records to its network of independent distributors around the country and the group’s manager Jerry Heller got them booked.

  The Cru toured with Rick James, the Bar-Kays, and Oran “Juice” Jones, and went as far as London’s Wembley Arena, playing a hip-hop event called Fresh Fest. “We wanted to put on a show. We didn’t want to just come up and DJ,” Dre remembered. “I would put on like a shiny doctor’s outfit with the stethoscope . . . the whole thing. It haunted me later, but that’s what we did then.”

  While the Cru were on the rise, disharmony was brewing among some its members. Dre and Yella became vocal about their frustrations over money, telling people they went uncompensated for their work and never saw money from the records flying out of Macola. Heller, however, recalled that he deposited numerous checks for Lonzo (since he didn’t have a checking account) and had met him near Macola on Santa Monica and Vine in Hollywood when the checks cleared to divvy up the profits. “We’d split up the money right there on the corner, usually $20,000 or $30,000. A few times we had a $100,000 check to split,” Heller said. The growing dissension was enough to send Cli-N-Tel packing to pursue a solo career. He was replaced by the group’s dancer Barry “Shakespeare” Severe. And then CBS Records came calling. Larkin Arnold, an executive at CBS subsidiary Epic, wanted a meeting. “Larkin was like the black godfather of music. If he said there was a meeting, there was a meeting,” Lonzo recalled.

  The call from CBS put the strain Yella and Dre were feeling on the back burner. Although he felt the Cru material was dated, Dre and the group went to the meeting—waiting alongside the Dream Team and Bobby Jimmy and the Critters, the same crews they often competed with for nightclub space. The meeting went well. Very well. CBS offered them a record deal with a $100,000 advance. Lonzo would take most of the advance, he said, to put toward operating costs like advertising, recording costs, travel, and equipment, much to the chagrin of Dre and Yella.

  “From that point on, we had nothing but dissension over money,” Lonzo said.

  Epic was a vast improvement from their days of pressing at Macola. The label handled recording costs. There was infr
astructure to handle publicity and distribution that meant not hustling out of trunks. In January 1986, Epic told the Wreckin’ Cru how much they should spend to make the album and gave them complete creative control. Dre and Yella were done with the electro-dance vibe. What they wanted to do was something harder and edgier. Lonzo wasn’t having it, though, and he steered them deeper into R & B balladry.

  Maybe to sate Dre’s rising profile, or to increase it, Lonzo pushed the young talent to be more central on the record. “He’s Bionic” was a bombastic tribute to the rising producer and his prowess behind the boards. The record was filled with snares and computerized chants, and the lyrics described how Dre had two nurses by his side that he kept satisfied, how he was in control sexually, and how was better than all the sucker DJs. “He’s bionic! Yes!” the chorus chanted in the song that closely imitated Run-D.M.C.’s blistering “It’s Like That.” “Love Letter” was another uninspired rap ballad with corny spoken-word lyrics about writing to someone to say “I miss you” on top of subdued synths and gentle drums, while “Mission Possible” continued the album’s mission to push Dre to the forefront by letting his voice dominate more tracks. “Your mission, if you decide to accept it, is to take rap music into a new dimension,” Dre tells his group members in his best attempt at channeling Mr. Phelps from the Mission: Impossible television series.

  Wreckin Cru delivered Rapped in Romance to Epic in two weeks. Lonzo was handed a $75,000 check and a lashing from Epic executives, pissed the group had recorded on the cheap with drum machines, synthesizers, turntables, and old records—and not with a real band, as they’d hoped. Instructed to record something close to Minneapolis funk guitarist Jesse Johnson’s “Free World,” the group rushed to produce a recording called “The Fly,” which sated the label with its bouncy keyboard riffs, chunky bass, and cowbells. It was enough to get the group the rest of its advance. After Lonzo recouped expenses he handed each member $5,000.

  The cover of Rapped in Romance took the group’s appropriation of Prince even further. Dre stood in the center, with slick Jheri curls, a shiny red suit with padded shoulders, and his white shirt unbuttoned to show off a gold chain. On either side stood Lonzo with his flowing mane of curls falling down a shiny white jacket and Yella with a satiny, patterned gray suit. Shakespeare was perched on a leather couch in front of them, his gold jacket and black pants just as shimmery as his bandmates’. An unidentified woman’s hands could be seen in the corner of the portrait caressing a bow.

  Rapped in Romance was a flop, and the group was dropped from CBS. The label wasn’t about to give the guys another shot, not after Lonzo tried gaming them with skimming on the recording. Dre and Yella were unfazed. After being denied a shot at doing the type of songs they were itching to explore, both men had soured on the Cru.

  LA IS THE PLACE

  That South Central became a flash point for the explosion of West Coast hip-hop should come as no surprise. In New York as hip-hop was just beginning to crawl, South Central was in peril. Hip-hop, at its core, has always been reactionary. Emcees use their surroundings as the source for their content. The earliest rap music coming out of the West Coast was largely driven by what was happening in the streets. When President Reagan intensified the War on Drugs, the Los Angeles Police Department responded with the militarization of its force. LAPD chief Daryl F. Gates, who once said casual drug users deserved to be “taken out and shot,” pioneered the first SWAT teams with the use of the V-100 Commando, an armored vehicle that resembled a tank, and was once used during the Vietnam War. The Commando was outfitted with a fourteen-foot battering ram instead of a gun, which was designed to smash through suspected crack houses in a matter of seconds. The ram crumbled even the most fortified door. But as the ram gutted the homes of the innocent in search of dealers, the tank became a symbol of oppression for those living in South Central.

  Compton DJ Toddy Tee, a disciple of local rap hero Mixmaster Spade, used news footage of a ram bursting through a house to write “Batterram,” a tale about the roaming paramilitary vehicle, which he recorded in his bedroom in 1985. Toddy Tee’s thing was spinning popular East Coast records into rhymes inspired by the streets. UTFO’s “Roxanne, Roxanne” became “Rockman, Rockman” and Whodini’s “Freaks Come Out at Night” became “The Clucks Come Out at Night” (a cluck is another term for a crackhead). But it was taking Rappin’ Duke’s “Rappin’ Duke” and flipping it into “Batterram” that catapulted a nineteen-year-old Toddy Tee. His Batterram mixtape—recorded to a cassette tape and duplicated on a cheap dubbing deck—was a local sensation, and received heavy rotation on KDAY after Greg Mack discovered the record through promotional events he’d do in area high schools. By the end of the year Toddy rerecorded the song in a legitimate studio over a track produced by funk musician Leon Haywood (his 1975 hit “I Want’a Do Something Freaky to You” was sampled on Dr. Dre’s “Nuthin’ But a ‘G’ Thang”).

  Around this time, Tracy Marrow, a New Jersey native who moved to South Central after the death of his parents when he was younger, took up dancing with the West Coast Locksmiths and later the Radio Crew. He also ran with Crip members he met through his girlfriend, though he never formally joined.

  Marrow devoured the work of noir street literature novelists Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines, taking on the name Ice-T as an abbreviation of Iceberg and his own first name. While spitting rhymes to impress the ladies at a beauty parlor called Good Fred—he’d get his hair permed there—Marrow was discovered by producer Willy Strong, who persuaded him to record a single. “The Coldest Rap” was a bubbly, synth-heavy jam where Ice-T detailed the litany of sexual positions he could perform. Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis played on the record. Released on the short-lived Saturn Records, it became a hit around town, particularly at Radiotron, a youth center in MacArthur Park that served as a safe haven for local break-dancers, graffiti artists, and DJs. Ice-T became a staple at Radiotron. In 1983, he was featured in the documentary about the LA dance scene called Breakin’ ’n’ Enterin’ directed by Topper Carew (who went on to cocreate classic ninties sitcom Martin). He would also star in the seminal 1984 hip-hop film Breakin’, which was inspired by the documentary.

  Toddy Tee and Philadelphia rapper Schoolly D influenced the direction Ice would go next with his music. Schoolly D, born Jesse Bonds Weaver Jr., independently financed the release of his self-titled EP in 1985. The six tracks on the record serve as a brash manifesto of rough street life with his witty, profane lyrics, which garnered him far more attention than previous work that wasn’t as aggressive. “P.S.K. What Does It Mean?” stood out on the EP. It was dark and menacing with an ominous beat and a title shouting out Schoolly’s neighborhood gang, Parkside Killers. “Put my pistol up against his head and said, ‘You sucker-ass nigga I should shoot you dead,’ ” he rapped. The record introduced a new form of hip-hop, one that pulled from the grim realities of those caught up in gangster life. Schoolly D’s work was a catalyst for Ice-T, who, as a teenager, wrote poetic rhymes, which he’d later perform. He wanted to capture the strife he was seeing on the streets of South Central and crafted a ghetto noir titled “6 ’n the Mornin’ ” that offered a peek into the life of “a self-made monster of the city streets.”

  Like “Batterram” before it, “6 ’n the Mornin’ ” is mind-blowing in its vividness. Produced by the Unknown DJ, the record is focused on an antihero on the run from the cops. After police raid his home early in the morning, our protagonist escapes out of the back window of his bathroom and takes to the streets of Los Angeles.

  Six in the morning, police at my door

  Fresh Adidas squeak across the bathroom floor

  Upon its release, “6 ’n the Mornin’ ”—released on the Unknown DJ’s Macola-distributed Techno Hop imprint—jolted listeners on both the West and East Coasts. “It shocked people when he said: ‘We beat the bitch down in the goddamn street.’ Back then, people didn’t associate Los Angeles with ‘hood stories,’ ” said collaborator Afrika Isl
am. “We thought it was all Hollywood and Malibu Beach.”

  During the first years of hip-hop’s infancy, albums from the Sugarhill Gang, Kurtis Blow, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Run-D.M.C., Beastie Boys, Whodini, and Salt-N-Pepa helped establish the genre. However, for all of its growing success, hip-hop was mostly dismissed as a passing fad and seen as a novelty that major labels, radio stations, critics, and music television barely wanted to touch. This was before hip-hop had even spun out into its many subgenres that would solidify it as a driving force in pop music for decades to come. A handful of hits, however, managed to burst through and chipped away at the glass ceiling that was keeping hip-hop from reaching pop status.

  Run-D.M.C.’s banging 1986 collaboration with Aerosmith, “Walk This Way,” was one of them. Before its release the trio scored airplay on MTV with its 1984 single “Rock Box,” which featured Eddie Martinez on the guitar and the group performing amid black and white dancers at popular nightclub Danceteria, but “Walk This Way,” a remake of Aerosmith’s 1975 hit, was the song that propelled the group to ubiquity on the network. The video for the single showed Steven Tyler literally smashing through a wall that separated the hard-rock band from the hip-hop group. This melding of different worlds hardly appears innovative by today’s genre-blurring standards, but back then it was unparalleled. Run-D.M.C.’s version of “Walk This Way” charted higher on the Billboard Hot 100 than the original, peaked at number four, and was one of the first major hip-hop singles to land among the top ten in the UK. The success of Run-D.M.C. brought with it more rotation for hip-hop videos on MTV.