Schweisinger smartly aligned with two of the area’s most well-known purveyors of local hip-hop: His neighbor at Dooto’s, Lonzo Williams, and KDAY’s Greg Mack. “He was all over me like stink on shit,” Schweisinger said of Lonzo.
Lonzo’s World Class Wreckin’ Cru performed during Skateland’s grand opening. The spot was packed wall to wall. There was a huge line outside, due to promotion on KDAY and posters and fliers Schweisinger had printed up. For opening night, he splurged on bright searchlights he placed out front, and business was so good his dad spent much of the night in the cashier’s room counting piles and piles of single dollar bills. Mack, KDAY’s star on-air personality, paid to install a line so he could broadcast from the rink the way he did at World on Wheels. “They came in with their Wreckin’ Cru attitude,” Schweisinger said of the night’s headliners. “We had a good night, trouble free. The Cru rocked the house.”
It didn’t take long for Skateland, Compton’s first roller rink, to become the hottest hip-hop venue in the city. When Schweisinger wasn’t booking acts, he was beefing up business by hosting dances for Centennial High School, where he kicked back the school’s service clubs a small profit for having their events there. “I wasn’t a hard-core skating rink owner,” Schweisinger laughed. Local celebrities like Mixmaster Spade, Toddy Tee, and Uncle Jamm’s Army performed at Skateland, as did East Coast stars EPMD, Queen Latifah, and the Real Roxanne. An early indicator of Skateland’s popularity came during a January 1987 show for Long Island duo Eric B. & Rakim, where the rink nearly doubled its 1,720 capacity. The fire and police departments were pissed. “When Run-D.M.C. came in they were scared to fucking death. They said, ‘Look at all these fucking gangsters out here.’ I said, ‘Hey I can get you out safe, not to worry,’ ” Schweisinger said.
And soon a group with a ton of attitude would take to Skateland to make its debut, and change everything.
THE BOYZ-N-THE-HOOD
When the Wreckin’ Cru got the last bit of their advance for Rapped in Romance, Lonzo bought himself a house and a BMW—much to the ire of Dre and Yella, whose pockets weren’t as flush with cash despite their work on the album. A consolation of sorts, Lonzo handed Dre the keys to his old Mazda under one condition: Dre would cosign for the car, and Lonzo would handle the payment himself using Dre’s stipend from the CBS payout. The Mazda had seen better days. It was old and beat up. But the problems Dre would face with the car weren’t related to its performance. He racked up numerous tickets, which he ignored. Some crook broke into the car, smashed the back window, and yanked out the radio. With his shattered window, he’d make the hour-long drive to Rialto to see his girlfriend, Anna Cash, who rapped as Lady Anna in a female rap group calling themselves J. J. Fad.
Dre’s crap luck with his car continued when someone stole it. He scraped up the money to get it out of an impound lot, but ignored the moving violations that piled, even though he’d received terse notices in the mail that announced the fines had doubled and tripled. He kept pushing his luck until it simply ran out. When cops pulled him over one day, they saw he owed $500 in tickets, impounded the car, and tossed him in a cell. Lonzo paid to have him freed in the chance the Cru landed a weekend gig.
A few months later Dre found himself in the same predicament, in a cell because of another stack of warrants. The bail was $900. Again, Lonzo got a call. But this time he wasn’t as accommodating. He had his own car to worry about paying.
“You know what? I’m gonna let your butt sit in jail for a while,” Lonzo told Dre. “Maybe you’ll learn something.”
Dre turned to his buddy Eric, realizing that if anyone had the money, it would be him. “Sure, I’ll post your bail,” he told him. “But you got to do something for me.” Eric had warmed to Steve Yano’s idea to launch a record label, and he wanted Dre to help get it off the ground. Dre and Eazy were particularly turned on by the hard, street-centered hip-hop of Ice-T and Schoolly D. “They were saying things that we could relate to,” Dre recalled in the essential hip-hop documentary Rhyme & Reason.
Eager to craft music like that, Dre began to tinker on his own productions at Lonzo’s small home studio. He’d bring along Cube, introducing him to Eric, and the three of them bonded over a shared love for brash raps. One day, Dre played Cube and Eric a beat he’d crafted. It was a monster from the first listen—sparse and menacing with its heavy 808 bass, hard snares, horn blasts, and high-pitched keyboard riffs.
Cube, the scribe of the group, was tasked with writing to Dre’s beat. Cube tapped into the stories he’d heard from around the neighborhood, along with the drama of violent mob films like Scarface and The Godfather he caught at the drive-in, to write a gritty, profane street noir he called “The Boyz-n-the-Hood.”
“Boyz-n-the-Hood” is the story of a young thug’s harrowing day—an afternoon filled with sleazy deeds. Cube weaved the lyrics with visceral details that today still feel like the script for a gangster flick by Francis Ford Coppola. Cube’s hood protagonist cruises around town in his ’64 Cadillac, searches for girls, snuffs a crack addict, catches a friend trying to steal his car stereo, gets drunk off malt liquor, smacks his girlfriend, and beats down her father. He wrote it while bored in English class one day and recorded a demo of himself performing it over Dre’s production.
Eric never had much interest in rapping; he was strictly supposed to be an investor and benefactor to this foray into hip-hop. Dre brought him a group they could launch. Originally from Brooklyn, the group called themselves H.B.O., aka Home Boys Only. H.B.O. were living in Orange County when they met Dre in 1986. It was decided H.B.O. would cut Cube’s “Boyz-n-the-Hood,” and Eric booked time in Lonzo’s studio.
But when Dre played the record for the group, they were confused and turned off by Cube’s lyrics that spoke exclusively to a South Central experience, with the language to boot.
“This ain’t us. We can’t do this. This is West Coast lyrics . . . we don’t even know how to say half this stuff,” Dre remembered the group saying.
“What is a ‘six-four’?” one member asked.
The talk of drive-bys, gats, O.G.s, and slapping bones was enough to send H.B.O. packing. Dre and Eric weren’t sure what to do next. The studio time was paid for already. Dre came up with an idea, suggesting Eric tackle the song. It made sense, he thought, as Cube was locked down with the C.I.A. and Dre was committed to the World Class Wreckin’ Cru. Eric, however, was not a fan of the suggestion.
“Man, I don’t know how to rap,” Eric miffed. “I never did this before. This ain’t what I’m here to do.”
Dre wasn’t having it. He kept nagging Eric until he relented. Of all of them, Eric’s life was closest to the street thug depicted on the record. “Might as well give it a shot,” Dre told him.
“Put your glasses on, cut the lights down,” Dre instructed an understandably timid Eric, embarrassed to be pushed outside of his comfort zone. “Just do it.”
Eric gave it a go, reading Cube’s lyric into the microphone. It was terrible. The man had no type of rhythm in his delivery, and his timing was far off the mark. To ease his nerves, Dre opted to “punch in” every single line of every verse—having Eric rap a tiny bit before piecing together the best take of each line.
“Cruising down the street in my ’64.” Again.
“Jockin the freaks clocking the dough.” Again. And again.
It was a test of both Dre’s patience and genius. After eight or nine hours, there was something worth playing.
Over a beat sounding like an ice-cream-truck jingle on acid, Eric rapped a raw, hard-core tale. It was a celebratory gangster anthem—simultaneously bouncy and jarring—that was especially captivating under Eric’s unique voice, squeaky and laughably high-pitched.
“I was like, damn. I looked at Dre in amazement, like: ‘You turned this dude into a rapper,’ ” said Cube.
And with that, a Gangsta rapper was born.
Eric settled on Eazy-E as his rap name, though no one can agree on how he landed on
the moniker. He quickly took the record down to Macola to get copies pressed, where he used the profits he made from slinging dope. He spent $7,000 to get five thousand twelve-inch singles of “Boyz-n-the-Hood,” crediting the record to an imprint named Ruthless Records and listing his family home on South Muriel Drive as its address. It was packaged with “Fat Girl,” a ribald number where Eazy hurled juvenile insults at a girl’s figure, and “LA Is the Place”—both songs featured Eazy’s homeboy Ron-De-Vu and were written by Cube.
Record in hand, Eazy went down to Steve Yano at the Roadium where he knew the single would be a hot seller. A T-shirt guy at Yano’s booth personalizing T-shirts with spray paint sketched what became Ruthless’s logo. Eric recruited friends, gangbangers, and whoever wanted to make some cash on the side to take the single to record stores and swap meets. Eazy called them “snipers” and the practice, known as “street teams,” would become rap industry standard. Free cassettes of the single were handed out to neighborhood tastemakers: leaders of popular cliques, dudes running gang sets, and kids who flocked to Crenshaw Boulevard on the weekend to show off their lowriders.
One night Dre took Eazy to downtown nightclub Casa Camino Real to meet KDAY’s Greg Mack, who was hosting an event that night. The three went out to Greg’s car where Eazy and Dre played the single. “I wasn’t crazy about it, to be honest,” Greg recalled. “I listened again and I started to like it. But then I said, ‘Here’s what y’all gotta do. You gotta clean it up.’ There was a lot of cussing. The next day they had it, and I put it on. It was our number-one most requested record, right away.”
It’s not entirely clear how many copies of “The Boyz-n-the-Hood” were moved during those first months—Macola did a terrible job at bookkeeping—but some figures have stated more than five hundred thousand copies were sold throughout South Central. What can’t be denied is the song was a certified hit with constant rotation on KDAY.
With “Boyz-n-the-Hood” now an underground sensation, Eazy thought about the next move. What he wanted was a “supergroup,” a gang of dudes everybody rocked with that would put out records together. He already had an alliance with Dre, whose reputation as a producer was unmatched on the local tip, and Cube, a wordsmith who had notebooks bursting with raps just as edgy and raw as “Boyz.” Having become a fixture at the shows the Wreckin’ Cru performed, particularly at Eve’s, DJ Yella also received an invitation from Eric, who like Dre was growing tired of the Cru. “We all was in some weak groups,” Yella once joked. Eazy also tapped his running buddy from the neighborhood, MC Ren, to fill out the ranks.
MC Ren, born Lorenzo Patterson, grew up in Compton with his parents, two brothers, and one sister. He joined a Crip gang and earned pocket change through petty drug sales. During junior high Patterson began calling himself Master Ren. While attending Dominguez High School he and a beatboxing friend named Chip created a group, Awesome Crew 2. The duo even got a shot performing at the Roxy, one of the famed venues on the Sunset Strip. Ren considered enrolling in the army as an option after high school, but Full Metal Jacket scared him out of that dream. Music was his true passion. Ren would let Eazy hear the demos of raps he recorded whenever Eazy, who lived two blocks over, stopped by the house to hang with Ren’s older brother. Eazy also recruited techno-rap writer Kim Nazel, who went by the name Arabian Prince. Raised in Compton and Inglewood, Nazel, who inverted his given name to Mik Lezan, created the same type of electro dance records Dre produced for the Wreckin Cru’ and C.I.A. Eventually the two crossed paths on the area DJ circuit and began hanging together, to scoop records at the Roadium or drive down to Rialto to visit J. J. Fad, as both were dating members of the group. Dre was seeing Lady Anna and Arabian Prince was dating Juana Burns, who rapped under the moniker MC J.B.
As 1987 wore on, the end of World Class Wreckin’ Cru seemed imminent. Having parted ways with Epic Records, they returned to Macola. Dre’s relationship with Lonzo continued to weaken. The Cru booked gigs here and there but they weren’t earning much. Lonzo thought the group could remedy its slump by getting back in the studio. When Lonzo saw that Dre’s side work with Eazy seemed promising, he further loosened the strings and ceded more creative control to Dre when the Cru went into the studio to cut its first post-Epic record.
At Dre’s behest, Ice Cube joined the Wreckin’ Cru in the studio to help pen new material. On “House Calls,” which Cube wrote with Dre and Yella, the Cru ventured away from their typical dance fair. “Hello, this is Dr. Dre, I’m not in right now,” he said in a breathy lilt, mimicking an answering machine. After the sound of a beep, a female voice inquires if Dre could make a “house call” since her man was out. It was another record that leaned heavily on “Planet Rock” but Dre loaded it with samples and old-school breakbeats, much to his pleasure. “Cabbage Patch” also followed a similar sonic arrangement. Written by Cube, Dre, and Lonzo, it was essentially a take on Run-D.M.C.’s “My Adidas.” A sample of Billy Squier’s “The Big Beat” was used along with a horn Jam Master Jay employed on a few D.M.C. songs and a record UTFO had already worn down. It was a hard party record that bit off the growing craze of the Cabbage Patch dance, which became popular after Gucci Crew II’s “Cabbage Patch” took off. The Cru put its own spin on the dance in a bid to create its own signature move: “Move your left shoulder up and the right one down, and if you wanna get ill try to turn it around.” And there was “Must be the Music,” a funky dance number that showcased female vocalist Monalisa Young. Dre, ever the frontman, dropped in at the end for a quick verse.
Whatever optimism Dre and Yella felt after cutting the new records with Lonzo’s Cru were wiped away when Lonzo informed his members that the group owed the Macola plant $65,000, meaning no royalty payments were coming anytime soon. One night, Eazy called a meeting at his house and assembled Dre, Yella, Cube, and Arabian Prince and made his pitch for this supergroup he envisioned. “We were broke, we had no money, and we were getting ripped off by the people we were producing for. We had hit records, but we weren’t making any money at the time. And Eazy had flashy cars and he always said he wanted to rap,” Arabian Prince recalled. “He says, ‘I’ll fund you guys, I don’t want to do the whole drug thing anymore, I want to stop.’ And we were like, ‘Okay, you want to go legitimate, we want to continue making records.’ So we said we’d do the song and just start this new group and go from there.”
The group had a singular vision to represent the streets they were from, the same way New York rappers put on for their boroughs, and Schoolly D repped Philadelphia. They needed a name, though. While brainstorming at Arabian Prince’s house in Inglewood, he suggested From Compton with Love as a play on James Bond—picturing an album cover where they would all be toting guns as if they were spies. It didn’t play well with everyone.
Eazy leaned forward with another suggestion. “How ’bout N.W.A—Niggaz With Attitude?”
NIGGAZ . . . WITH ATTITUDE
Nigger. Is there a word more divisive in the American lexicon than these six letters, traceable to the sixteenth century? Is there a word that’s uglier or filled with more vile or attached to such deep hatred for a group of people? The N-word isn’t the only pejorative term to be hurled at a race, but no other slur has infiltrated the zeitgeist and defined a musical genre the way it has.
When Eazy suggested his “supergroup” call itself Niggaz With Attitude, he knew the name would turn heads. Though the N-word’s colloquial variant, “nigga,” was adopted by blacks as an attempt to snatch back the power of the term, or, as Cube said, “Using it instead of getting abused by it,” its mere utterance was most often met with contempt. There’s not a single black person in this country who has escaped the pain of having the N-word hurled in their face or cringed when they heard it casually dropped by someone—black or white. There are centuries of discourse on our relationship with this six-letter word, and Eazy absolutely knew the use of it would raise eyebrows.
Across the country in hip-hop’s New York epicenter, acts like Public Ene
my and KRS-One used white fear, and the opposition toward the genre born out of that fragility, to fight back with radicalized lyrics driven by black pride. But the men of N.W.A had a different plan. Calling themselves Niggaz With Attitude was a direct exploitation of that fear. The thought was flippant and simple: You think we are niggas, we will be the niggas you fear. “I wanted to go all the way left, everybody trying to do this black power and shit, so I was like let’s give ’em an alternative,” Dre once said. “ ‘Nigger niggernigger, niggernigger fuck this fuck that bitch bitch bitch bitch suck my dick,’ all this kind of shit.”
It was as provoking of a group name as you could get, inciting discomfort in white America and disdain among blacks who abhorred the term. And that was the point.
Most of the hip-hop records coming out of LA at the time were buoyed by the quick turnaround of Macola. With “Boyz-n-the-Hood,” Eazy’s savvy as a dealer proved a worthwhile skillset for getting the record into people’s hands. He would often drop by the plant’s Hollywood headquarters and make small talk with whoever was at the front desk. “Yeah, yeah, how my record doing?” Eazy would ask. He certainly cared, but he was really just biding time before he could slip into the back room, snatch a few boxes, take them out the back door and load them into his jeep to sell them—by any means necessary. “I used to make people buy records,” he gloated to a reporter, who then dared to ask how he did it. “With a gun,” Eazy casually responded, his face straight and scowling.
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