Parental Discretion Is Advised

by Gerrick D. Kennedy

  Seeing the rising popularity in electro dance music, the Yanos started hosting weekly disco parties at their house. Steve is likely the last person you’d take for being in the know about the latest jams, but he quit college to focus on his business full-time. His booth, located near the Roadium’s entrance, was a hit. Always cramped with music fans, Steve was flush with the hottest vinyl, some of which was procured with the help of Lonzo Williams. Steve had old school R & B, East Coast rap like Grandmaster Flash, Kurtis Blow, and Run-D.M.C., and the dance records percolating throughout the city. He had records no one else had, some of which weren’t even officially released and had no labels or packaging.

  “Pretty soon Lonzo is coming to me with stuff and I’m carrying one hundred titles. I’m selling one hundred a week of some of them. The DJ craze hits. Now everybody and their mother is a DJ and they all want the latest [music]. So they all come to me. I was selling a lot of twelve-inch vinyl. I mean, a lot,” Steve once said. “Pretty soon other dealers are coming to me. I’m meeting these guys outside bowling alleys in parking lots at midnight. It was like we were dealing drugs.”

  During a visit to Eve’s After Dark, Steve caught a practice session between World Class Wreckin’ Cru’s Dr. Dre and DJ Yella for their KDAY Traffic Jam mix. He watched in awe as Dre scratched over a beat Yella programmed on a drum machine.

  “Is that how you do it?” Steve inquired.

  “You want us to make you a tape?” Yella offered.

  Steve took the tape Yella and Dr. Dre cut for him to the Roadium the following weekend and the kids around the booth went wild, asking how they could buy it. The Yanos begun selling Dre’s homemade mixtapes Dre crafted in exchange for records. “He’d tell Steve, ‘This one is gonna be a hit,’ ” Susan Yano said. “And he was usually right.” Indeed the mixtapes were a sensation, with titles like ’85 Live! and ’86 in the Mix featuring hundreds of songs chopped into a sixty-minute mix with Dre’s scratching. Steve sold the records for ten dollars a pop—even though it was quite illegal for them to peddle music they didn’t own the rights to.

  Dre’s mixes piqued the interest of Eric Wright, who frequented the Yanos’ stall to sift through the piles of twelve-inch records and stock up on what he liked. Eric was fixated by the special mixes Steve blasted at his stall. After learning the tape was produced by a kid he knew from two streets over, Eric scooped up all the titles Steve had of Dre—taking out the money from his sock to pay. “Tell Dre Eric says, ‘Whassup,’ ” he told Steve. A week later, Eric came back to the stall to drop more money on records—and to snag Dre’s number from Steve, who wouldn’t budge on giving out the producer’s information. Same thing the next weekend. It became enough for Steve to ask Dre if he’d heard of a short fellow with a stoic swagger by the name of Eric. Of course Dre knew of Eric. His candy-painted Suzuki Samurai announced his arrival—flashiness that brought him extra attention wherever he traveled. Most people around the neighborhood knew of Eric. Steve agreed to set up a meeting over the phone. “Next thing I know,” he said, “those guys are on a three-way call with me at two in the morning. Eric wants to open a record store. I tell him, ‘Don’t do it. It’s a bad business. I can show you how, but don’t do it.’ ”

  What Steve suggested instead was they consider starting a label.

  Shortly after Dre and Eric connected, they began recording tapes in a piecemeal studio in Wright’s garage. From there a mobile DJ crew was launched. They called it High-Powered Productions (later the name Dre produced N.W.A’s music under, alongside DJ Yella) and played house parties and proms all over South LA. Dre was desperate to do music that wasn’t the romantic Prince knockoffs Lonzo required of the Wreckin’ Cru. Teaming with Eric gave him the opportunity to explore the music that moved him. Eric and Dre couldn’t have been more different. Eric was gruff with his mind laser-focused on hustling, and Dre, though he grew up seeing the harsh realities of street life, was the furthest thing from it. Yet both of them wanted the same outcome, something better for themselves. Rap, they realized, was a way out.

  I AIN’T THA 1

  The World Class Wreckin’ Cru was making noise around Los Angeles, and Dre was growing more creatively fulfilled through his side projects with Eric. At the same time, O’Shea Jackson was a high schooler being shuttled from South Central to the San Fernando Valley for class. The youngest of four, O’Shea was raised in an unincorporated portion of LA County wedged between South Central and Inglewood. Both his parents worked at UCLA, his mother, Doris, a custodian and his father, Hosea, a groundskeeper. The Jackson household was a strict one, with a close-knit family structure playing a key role in keeping O’Shea from falling in with the neighborhood Crips ruling his block—besides, his brother Clyde, nine years his senior, had already ventured down that path and cautioned him against it.

  Short and well-built from years playing basketball and Pop Warner League football, O’Shea was far more obsessed with rap than any sport. Sugarhill Gang’s lightening bolt “Rapper’s Delight” captured a then-ten-year-old O’Shea. Nicknamed Ice Cube by his brother, ribbing him for thinking he was “too cool” for his age, O’Shea’s infatuation with hip-hop continued through his early teenage years, as acts like Run-D.M.C. and the Beastie Boys started dropping records. “I remember seeing Run-D.M.C. and Public Enemy for the first time,” Cube said. “Every time I can see them onstage after that I cherish it because I know its only a moment in time.”

  “Yo, you ever write a rap before?” O’Shea’s classmate Terry “Kiddo” Hayward asked him one day in class. They were bored freshmen in a typing class they got stuck with since neither made it to their counselor in enough time to pick a more intriguing elective course. O’Shea thought Kiddo was one of the coolest kids in school, and their friendship flourished over a shared affinity for rap music.

  O’Shea obsessed over rap records—Run-D.M.C.’s landmark song “Sucker M.C.’s” was perhaps his favorite. Writing raps wasn’t something he’d yet done and Kiddo insisted they give it a shot.

  “You write one and I’ll write one, and we’ll see which one comes out the best.”

  O’Shea mulled it over, coming up with a few bars: “My name is Ice Cube / I want you to know / I’m not Run-D.M.C. / I’m not Kurtis Blow.” He was just fourteen.

  Inspiration took over from there. O’Shea started filling his notebook with rhymes. Pages and pages were covered with lyrics and O’Shea—a great student who got As and Bs and particularly excelled in English classes—would use what was going on around him as source material. And for a teenager growing up in South Central during the early eighties, there was an abundance of inspiration. His neighborhood was infested with gangbanging, crack dealers, and addicts everywhere. “And then you had hip-hop, which was something new, other than what we were doing, which was sports, playing football, basketball, baseball. And I was excited,” Cube remembered.

  Life in South Central and the Jackson’s one-story, midcentury home on Van Wick Street was a far departure from the affluent Valley community of Woodland Hills, with its multimillion-dollar homes and celebrity residents. O’Shea and his homies from the neighborhood were shipped to attend William Howard Taft Charter High School in the Valley as part of a busing program that started in the seventies after the Los Angeles Unified School District had been found guilty of intentionally segregating city schools.

  For O’Shea, daily trips to the Valley offered him “a chance to see that the world was bigger than Compton,” and he became angered by the bleak circumstances surrounding him. And soon he channeled that rage into lyrics. “Think about how you felt at that age,” Cube says. “I was mad at everything. When I went to the schools in the Valley, going through those neighborhoods, seeing how different they were from mine, that angered me. The injustice of it, that’s what always got me—the injustice.”

  When O’Shea would get home from school, he would walk two doors over to his homeboy Anthony Wheaton’s house. Wheaton was a break-dancer and an aspiring producer who called hims
elf “Sir Jinx.” It was dancing that got him into hip-hop, with “The Return of Captain Rock” being the first rap song he fell in love with. “That cadence, I was drawn to it,” he said. Since Jinx’s mother didn’t tolerate loud music in the house, the garage was converted into a makeshift studio. The two spent hours working, Jinx on a beat machine he acquired from a drug-dealing friend and O’Shea trying to get his skills together as an emcee. “We’d be in there smelling dog shit, stepping over dog shit, rapping in the garage,” he recalled of the space they shared with its main tenant, Jinx’s dog. Along with their friends Darrell Johnson, who went by K-Dee (aka Kid Disaster), and Barry “Master B” Severe, they formed a group called the Stereo Crew.

  The Stereo Crew cut several unpolished demos in ramshackle studio setups, but what the group dreamed of was a shot to work with Dr. Dre, who was making a name for himself in World Class Wreckin’ Cru—and who also happened to be Sir Jinx’s older cousin.

  O’Shea, who briefly rapped under the name Purple Ice, finally got a chance to meet the local hero when Dre moved into Jinx’s house. Frustrated her son wasn’t in school or working beyond sporadic, low-paying DJ gigs around town, his mother, Verna, put him out.

  Initially Dre didn’t want to be bothered. He had to promote the Cru’s single “Surgery,” which had picked up a bit of steam locally. But he relented, agreeing to check out the Stereo Crew in the garage where they worked. O’Shea was eager to impress Dre. He never went anywhere without his notebook—writing in his bedroom, during the long ride to school and in class. O’Shea felt more than ready. And right in that stinky garage, he broke out into a routine. The kid is good, Dre thought.

  Dre and O’Shea immediately clicked, despite their four-year difference in age. “Next thing I know I’m ditching school to go hang out with Dre. Trying to come up with concepts and songs,” he said. They hung out often, picking up girls, cruising around South Central. Dre would also take him to clubs and Lonzo’s garage where he worked on tracks in the primitive studio there.

  One night Dre bumped into O’Shea at a show at Skateland, the Compton roller rink with an audience more notorious than the Apollo with its penchant for hurling insults, or worse, if you were wack. “The place was rowdy as a motherfucker,” Dre recalled. “You had to get up there and get busy.” Dre suggested O’Shea get on the mic. He’d never rapped publicly before but he was cocksure and ready to go.

  At the time, parody raps were insanely popular. South Central native Weird Al Yankovic had become a sensation for his irreverent dressings of pop and rock hits, and radio jocks routinely transformed popular songs into silly tunes. Lewd, X-rated comedy albums from Richard Pryor and Rudy Ray Moore were tawdry adult fun. O’Shea had discovered the records in his parents’ collection next to soul and R & B records. “We used to sneak and listen to that,” Sir Jinx said. “It was a secret pleasure. Listening to the curse words and feeling grown. We ran to that.”

  The craze carried over to hip-hop, and soon enough O’Shea was writing his own filthy parodies. Brooklyn crew UTFO’s hit “Roxanne, Roxanne” sparked a flame among emcees looking to one-up each other with their own answer to the insult record about a woman who wouldn’t respond to advances—and O’Shea had a version he wanted to do. Dre put on an instrumental of the record and began cutting it up on two turntables. O’Shea unleashed his own raunchy version, which he called “Dianne, Dianne.” It was gloriously profane, sending the crowd wild. Ice Cube had officially been born.

  Intent to find success outside of the World Class Wreckin’ Cru, Dre started working more closely with the Stereo Crew. The Crew had become acquainted with Lonzo, who came on to manage them and scored them a one-song deal with Epic Records. Lonzo and Dre coproduced the group’s 1986 single, “She’s a Skag.” The nearly seven-minute recording was clunky, stuffed with cowbells and synths ringing over a throbbing breakbeat. On the record Cube bashes a “freak” for refusing his advances, labeling her as a skag—a hilarious, albeit sophomoric, amalgam of skank and hag:

  I said “I’m Ice Cube from the Stereo Crew”

  She looked at her friend, and they both said “Who?”

  The record was mostly forgettable, but the Stereo Crew was shocked to hear it in Michael Jackson’s music video for 1987’s “Bad,” a short film directed by Martin Scorsese and partly inspired by West Side Story. Lonzo never told them about the placement, nor did they ever receive any payment. “He robbed us. We don’t know what happened. To hear your shit on TV, and we didn’t know how it got there. Lonzo could have been the Russell Simmons of the West Coast if he wasn’t so fucking greedy. Look at all the people that came from Dr. Dre, Lonzo could have had those people. So it all went downhill from there. We were just making music and didn’t even know we were supposed to get paid.” Although it wasn’t ideal, the experience gave Cube a taste of working in the record business. “We didn’t like the label situation with the Stereo Crew. But everything else to us was positive,” Cube later said. “We was getting a chance to hang out with Dr. Dre, and we learned with him. We were all trying to figure out what was gonna work.”

  After “She’s a Skag,” both Dre and Cube’s groups would see personnel changes. Cli-N-Tel dipped out of the Wreckin’ Cru to pursue a solo career ahead of Rapped in Romance. He would be replaced by Barry Severe, who would go by “Shakespeare, the Poet of Love” in place of his more street moniker, Master B. With Barry out of the Stereo Crew, the remaining members rechristened themselves C.I.A.—Criminals in Action, until they decided to soften it to Cru in Action. Cube and C.I.A. doubled down on the parody raps. Run-D.M.C.’s “My Adidas” flipped to “My Penis.” Salt-N-Pepa’s “I’ll Take Your Man” was “I’ll Fuck Your Friend” and Joeski Love’s “Pee-Wee’s Dance” became “VD Sermon.” “With C.I.A., it was the same guys, but our content changed,” Jinx said. “We were starting to do harder music, finding our niche.”

  C.I.A. signed to Lonzo’s Kru-Cut label and recorded tracks that tapped into the braggadocio style of their idols, Run-D.M.C. and LL Cool J. Dre produced tracks mimicking the work New York producer Rick Rubin did on the Beastie Boy’s disruptive, groundbreaking debut License to Ill. The beats were big, the scratching frantic, the samples varied, and the lyrics as irreverent as they were profane. “My Posse,” “Ill-Legal,” and “Just 4 the Cash” were hard, brimming with arrogant swagger and profoundly inspired by the Beastie Boys, a trio of Jewish boys from New York City. In 1987, Kru-Cut Records issued Cru’ in Action!, a three-song EP that made some waves locally. At Dre’s suggestion, the group opened for Wreckin’ Cru during shows at Eve’s After Dark and Skateland.

  Skateland USA was one of two roller rinks pivotal to hip-hop flourishing in LA during the 1980s. The other, World on Wheels, was anchored in Mid-City. Skateland, like World on Wheels, started its life as a bowling alley. In 1962, Woodley Carl Lewis Jr., one of the first black players in the NFL, invested in a 36-lane alley with an attached restaurant and cocktail lounge. The Compton native used money he earned as a defensive back for the Los Angeles Rams and opened the Woodley Lewis Sportsman Bowl. Next door to the alley was Dooto Music Center, an entertainment complex. Dooto’s, which boasted a recording studio, production facility, and small auditorium, was opened by Walter “Dootsie” Williams, a record producer who crafted the doo-wop classic “Earth Angel” by the Penguins and released comedy albums by Redd Foxx and Rudy Ray Moore through his Dooto label.

  Before Lewis and Williams founded their establishments, black businesses owners in Compton were nonexistent. “It is unlikely that any Negro-owned center of this kind is to be found anywhere else in America,” the Los Angeles Sentinel wrote of Williams’s complex in 1963. Neither business, however, would hold up for long after the 1965 Watts riots decimated parts of South Central, both physically and psychologically. After Lewis was arrested for bookmaking in 1970, a suspicious fire scorched the inside of the Sportsman Bowl. Dootsie cut town, leaving World Class Wreckin’ Cru frontman Lonzo Williams (they weren’t related) to take over Dooto�
�s, which he turned into a nightclub. Before Craig Schweisinger and his father, Fred, purchased the Sportsman Bowl for dirt cheap, the forty-thousand-square-foot property sat vacant for more than a decade. Craig convinced his father they should turn the place into a roller rink since it would be fairly simple to transform the space. The Sportsman Bowl needed serious rehabbing when the Schweisingers purchased it. The building was stripped of its copper wiring and plumbing by thieves and had holes in the ceiling and a warped floor due to flooding. First Schweisinger had to persuade the neighborhood to embrace the idea of opening an establishment catering to teens and young adults, and likely to attract a mixed crowd. “Majority of them said, ‘Fuck no.’ They didn’t want a skating rink there because the gangbangers would be all over it.” After guaranteeing residents that their kids would be safe, and shelling out for extra security as required by the city, the neighborhood eased on its resistance—especially after he pointed out how Skateland, with its enclosed lot, would be a much safer destination than World on Wheels.

  Skateland opened its doors on November 16, 1984, a Saturday night. Its North Central Avenue location was a block over from West Piru Street, the nucleus of Blood territory. Although a sign reading “NO CAPS—NO COLORS” was posted at the door, the crowd typically featured a sea of red pants and hats. Security wasn’t lax, as Schweisinger hired his own enforcement composed of neutral guys from the neighborhood, and everyone passed through a pair of airport-style metal detectors. Guns, box cutters, surgical scissors, and nail files often landed in collection. A giant safe that would barely budge with the help of a forklift protected the money and was kept behind a bulletproof wall. And Schweisinger had a room sealed off with an exit directly outside that he used to bring in performers—when it wasn’t used as a green room, the space doubled for an aerobics class taught during the day. Because it was deep within Blood territory, Skateland wasn’t as subjected to turf wars the way World of Wheels was, given its proximity to three rival Crip sets. Still, that didn’t make filing into Skateland on a Saturday night any less jarring, considering there were 212 gang-related murders in Los Angeles County the year it opened.