Parental Discretion Is Advised

by Gerrick D. Kennedy

  N.W.A’s collective of talents went to Audio Achievements, where the Wreckin’ Cru recorded its tracks, and got to work on more records that would cement its hard-core image. Dre and Cube came up with “8 Ball,” a laid-back joint with lyrics written by Cube, celebrating Olde English 800—a malt liquor that was especially popular in urban neighborhoods due to its cheapness and potency, despite its horrid taste. Dre produced the track, which built in pieces of Beastie Boys and Marvin Gaye. Eazy slipped into his role as gangster antihero with ease. “Police on my drawers, I have to pause, forty ounce in my lap and it’s freezing my balls,” he rapped.

  Cube penned “Dope Man,” which, like “Boyz,” was a precursor to what was to come from N.W.A in terms of image and sonics. The bouncy jam, which included the first example of Dre’s employment of the Ohio Players’ “Funky Worm” (the high-pitched whine of the Moog synthesizer is a staple of hip-hop sampling), sees Cube starkly detailing the day-to-day hustle of selling crack. The lyrics both celebrate and condemn the dealer. It was a ferocious look at a life that had, until then, really only played out in the scope of late-night news footage:

  It was once said by a man who couldn’t quit

  “Dopeman, please can I have another hit?”

  It was Arabian Prince who drafted “Panic Zone,” an electro-groove number that felt like a Wreckin’ Cru outtake, save for its lyrics, which spoke of the grimness of their hood. “It’s called the panic zone . . . Some people call it torture, but it’s what we call home,” the lyrics went. Cowritten by Arabian Prince, Dre, and Mexican-American rapper Krazy Dee, a friend of Eazy’s who became a dope dealer, “Panic Zone” was N.W.A’s first single, despite only including a tiny fraction of the group, and was a minor hit locally.

  As the group worked on material at Audio Achievements, Eazy asked Lonzo Williams to introduce him to the Cru’s manager, Jerry Heller. Prior to the request, Eazy had known about Heller from conversations he’d had with Dre. Eazy owed Lonzo $500 for studio time from sessions with Dre and offered an extra $250 when he settled his bill if Lonzo agreed to expedite the meeting.

  Jerry and Lonzo have detailed the arrangement in their respective memoirs, and while neither seem to agree on much about it, they both acknowledge it took Lonzo quite some time to convince Jerry to take the meeting. Jerry eventually caved after much pressure and agreed. On the morning of March 3, 1987, Eazy and MC Ren rolled up to Macola in Eazy’s Suzuki Samurai.

  “Hey, Jerry, this is Eric Wright,” Lonzo said, introducing both Eazy and Ren to Jerry.

  Eazy didn’t say anything at first, instead reaching down to retrieve a wad of money from his striped white crew sock and peeling off what he owed Lonzo. Right there on the spot. Jerry was equally amused and intrigued.

  “The music business and I were made for each other,” Jerry wrote in his 2006 memoir, Ruthless. A bombastic statement, yes, but Jerry had already made and lost a fortune in the industry before he even met Eazy-E.

  Jerry Heller grew up in a Jewish household in Shaker Heights, a well-to-do suburb of Cleveland. His father owned a scrap-metal business and a young Jerry would hang out with the Jewish mob, he says, and gamble on sports. After high school, he headed west to study business at the University of Southern California. Jerry went on to business school and soon after found employment as an agent and promoter in the early sixties, working stints at Coast Artists, Associated Booking, and Chartwell before branching out on his own. His Beverly Hills–based Heller-Fischel Agency booked tours for the Who, Grand Funk Railroad, Black Sabbath, Humble Pie, Black Oak Arkansas, Carly Simon, Van Morrison, and Cat Stevens. Jerry’s agency grossed nearly $2 million during its first year of operation—and by year four it had done $7 million in business.

  In the sixties and seventies, Jerry was considered one of the most influential managers in the business. Marvin Gaye and Creedence Clearwater Revival were clients, and he mentored legendary manager Irving Azoff. He promoted Kraftwerk’s first US tour and booked Elton John’s first shows in America at the tiny Troubadour nightclub in West Hollywood. Jerry hit the skids, though, falling deep into cocaine and alcohol. His vices, plus a nasty divorce, devastated him, and by 1985, a forty-five-year-old Jerry was sleeping on his parents’ couch in Encino.

  As luck would have it, Jerry was tight with Morey Alexander, a manager who learned about the boon of dance and hip-hop artists doing business with Macola. The two friends formed an alliance and Jerry met with Macola’s owner Don MacMillan. The idea was they could cherry-pick Macola’s best acts, using their respective connections to get them deals at reputable labels and sharing the commission. For example: Jerry begins managing Macola act LA Dream Team; Alexander reaches out to Jheryl Busby, head of black music for MCA Records, and he signs the group; Busby cuts the advance check and Alexander passes half the commission to Jerry and pays a small tribute to MacMillan on the condition he relinquishes the right to release future records by them. Alexander and Heller then scoop up Egyptian Lover, Bobby Jimmy and the Critters’ Russ Parr, and Lonzo’s Wreckin’ Cru.

  And now Jerry, a washed-up rock manager, was face to face with Eazy-E, a former dope dealer. The men didn’t have much in common except that they were opportunists looking to catch a break.

  Jerry says Eazy later told him of their early encounters that he was the first white guy he had ever really talked to who wasn’t trying to collect rent—or arrest him.

  Eazy made his pitch: He wanted to start a label.

  Jerry, an admittedly arrogant, puff-out-your-chest kinda guy, suppressed the desire to tell Eazy he was just one of many knocking at his door trying to do business with him.

  “You want to play me something?” he asked instead.

  Eazy fished out a tape from his jacket and put it into the conference-room deck and pressed play: “Cruisin’ down the street in my six-four, Jockin the freaks clocking the dough.” Jerry was blown away. “This was the Rolling Stones, the Black Panthers, Gil Scott-Heron; this was music that would change everything,” he wrote in his memoir. “No apologies, no excuses, just the straight undistilled street telling me things I had never heard before, yet that I understood instantly.”

  “Who is that?” Jerry asked. “Was that you?”

  Eazy didn’t answer, but he played the record again after Jerry asked him to. He then played “8 Ball.” And then “Dope Man.”

  “The label you want to start—it have a name?”

  “Ruthless Records,” Eazy told him.

  “And the group? What do you call them?”

  “N.W.A,” he said.

  “N.W.A?” Jerry pried. “What’s that mean, ‘No Whites Allowed’?”

  It made Eazy laugh. “Close enough.”

  Their first meeting lasted three hours. Jerry pressed Eazy on whether or not he was the “dope man” as depicted in the record, something Eazy shrugged off. He was mysterious. Jerry was intrigued. According to his account of their business agreement, which was hastily agreed upon the same day, Eazy told Jerry he wanted to do a fifty-fifty partnership because it would make the math simple. Jerry rebuffed the idea, insisting he only take a 20 percent fee.

  “Every dollar comes into Ruthless, I take twenty cents. That’s industry standard for a manager of my caliber. I take twenty, you take eighty percent,” Jerry told him. “I am responsible for my expenses, and you’re responsible for yours. You own the company. I work for you.”

  “Total black ownership, one hundred percent,” Jerry assured. “It doesn’t make any sense any other way.” The deal was sealed with a handshake.

  The next afternoon, Jerry, accompanied by Eazy, met in the back room of Hollywood Italian eatery Martoni’s, a favorite haunt of music industry types. Jerry’s partner Morey Alexander and the Macola artists they were working with were also there: Rudy Pardee, Rodney-O & Joe Cooley, Arabian Prince, Egyptian Lover, Lonzo Williams, and the Unknown DJ (who Jerry wasn’t even working with). There’s conflict about what happened in the room. Jerry says he announced to everyone that he’d signe
d on as general manager of Eazy’s nascent Ruthless Records. Anyone who didn’t want to sign with Ruthless would need to secure other representation, he informed them. The other version of the story is that the Macola acts gave Jerry an ultimatum—it was either them or Eazy.

  Either way, Jerry and his clients split ways and he switched his focus to Eazy and Ruthless.

  Their bond confounded those who were around Jerry and Eazy at the time. What did a guy from the hood, who made his own from peddling drugs and evading jail, want with someone who had already fried his career on booze and blow? What could they possibly have in common? But their relationship was one that went far beyond the professional to what some might consider a father-and-son bond. Jerry was of great influence to Eazy. He helped him set up his first bank account and taught him how to manage his money, but they also spent time having heart-to-heart conversations about anything and everything. “My uncle told us, Jerry loved your dad like his son, and your dad loved Jerry like a second father,” Eazy’s daughter Erica said.

  “They had a great dynamic,” said Tracy Jernagin, an ex-girlfriend of Eazy’s. “Jerry was stern, but him and Eric—with his jokester ways—they had a playful and quirky relationship.”

  Still, it ruffled those around Eazy, almost immediately, to see him running with Jerry.

  The concern was understandable, considering Jerry was managing artists and the label to which they were signed—a dizzying conflict no matter how you cut it. And there too was the matter of race. Business dealings between black and white men in the music industry has historically been cause for great debate. For many, the image of a black artist being managed by a white executive conjures negative thoughts of control and duplicity that stem from the systematic oppression of blacks in this country in the centuries after slavery. The chatter bothered Eazy tremendously. “People callin’ me, askin’ me, ‘Why you got a white man as your manager?’ ” he said. “It’s like, when I was lookin’ for a manager, I closed my fuckin’ eyes and I said, ‘I want the best.’ Jerry happened to be the best.”

  . . . AND THE POSSE

  As “Boyz-n-the-Hood” and their other recordings, “Dope Man” and “8 Ball,” continued to pick up steam around Los Angeles, Eazy decided to issue a five-song EP anchored by his all-star collective.

  Dre and Cube teamed together on “A Bitch Iz a Bitch.” It’s a brutal indictment against women where Cube explains what it takes to be called a “bitch.” Between narrations by a man speaking in a straitlaced tone, Cube details the infractions worthy of branding a woman with the five-letter word: Conniving women, those who use men for money, those who gossip, those who wear scandalous clothes. “Now the title bitch don’t apply to all women, but all women have a little bitch in ’em. It’s like a disease that plagues their character, taking the women of America,” Cube raps between shrill retorts from a female voice. It’s an early glimpse at the vicious misogyny that would come to define their music. Eazy recorded “Fat Girl,” and there was the dancey Arabian Prince–produced number, “Panic Zone.”

  Eazy assembled the group and its network of affiliates for a portrait on a graffiti-covered alleyway near Macola’s Hollywood headquarters. Dre was in the center, rocking a badass black jacket. Ice Cube hoisted a forty ounce bottle of Olde English. Eazy and Ren are in plain, white T-shirts, Eazy wearing a blue Dodgers cap, Ren in a black cap, both in blue khakis. Sir Jinx is in all black wearing a Flavor Flav–style clock, and Arabian Prince’s curly, shoulder length locks wins for best hair of them all. C.I.A. member Kid Disaster is in the picture, so is DJ Train, Candyman, Krazy Dee, MC Chip, and DJ Scratch. The portrait would become rap legend after Macola used it for an album called N.W.A and the Posse, a collection of cobbled-together tracks produced by Dre featuring the earliest, still-developing N.W.A roster and recordings from other acts.

  Around the same time, Dre also found another recruit to bring into the Ruthless fold. During a trip to Texas for a DJ gig, Dre linked up with Dr. Rock, an early member of the Wreckin’ Cru who’d gained local fame as the only pop-locking DJ in LA. Rock was spinning records for a local Dallas radio station and had an amateur group called the Fila Fresh Crew. Rock wanted to get the Crew some studio time with Dre, who was happy to help. During the sessions, Dre couldn’t help but be drawn to member Doc-T. He hadn’t heard many people rap like him before. Agile and quick-witted, Doc’s flow was one of the best Dre had heard.

  Growing up in Dallas, Doc-T, born Tracy Curry, was inspired by East Coast staples Run-D.M.C., Fat Boys, LL Cool J, Rakim, and Slick Rick. Like Cube, Doc was a ferocious wordsmith—inheriting a love of words from reading to his grandmother. Dre saw a potential solo star in the making, but also saw a formidable songwriter who could beef up their records, something they’d need when Cube would leave LA to study architectural drafting at the Phoenix Institute of Technology.

  Dre’s pitch to Doc was straightforward: “Nigga, you the shit. If you come out to the West Coast, I guarantee you we will be rich.” The timing worked out perfectly for Doc. His mother was pressuring him to enlist in the army and he was looking “to get the fuck away,” so he reached out to his friend Andre “LA Dre” Bolton. LA Dre connected Doc to his brother who let him crash in his spot behind Centennial High School in Compton. When Dr. Dre pulled together enough money to get a spot with DJ Yella in Paramount, a city just east of Compton, Doc crashed on their floor.

  As soon as Doc had arrived in California, Dre recruited him to the Ruthless team to become a sort of unofficial member of N.W.A—Doc actually thought Dre was going to be his DJ since they had discussed it. At Audio Achievements, Doc met MC Ren, DJ Yella, and Eazy. Doc still didn’t quite understand why he wasn’t being made a member, considering how much he contributed. “They just didn’t want me in the group, I guess. I don’t know. Maybe because I wasn’t from California,” he said. Doc’s first task was writing lyrics for a solo number for Eazy—and in fifteen minutes he banged out “We Want Eazy” with help from Ren. Doc, who later started calling himself the D.O.C. (adding the periods to connect himself to the group he was working for), wanted to write lyrics for Eazy that were more palatable for radio, rhymes where every other word wasn’t “bitch” or “motherfucker.” “I’ve always known how to talk to white people. I knew if you made it funny and clever, it would be less threatening,” Doc said. “You could say whatever you wanted as long as you let ’em know it’s a joke. ‘Don’t take it to heart; I’m not really going to cut your heart out.’ But I might.”

  Before Dre could completely focus on Eazy’s project, he reluctantly agreed to join the Wreckin’ Cru in the studio in August 1987 to record R & B ballad “Turn Off the Lights.” Lonzo had written the song in the parking lot at the Compton Swap Meet one afternoon, and it took persuading to get the guys on board. Neither Dre nor Yella was feeling the song, but agreed to do it because they wanted to make some cash. Dre wanted to show off his improving production skills, so he crafted a harder beat more in tune with the music he was most passionate about. It wasn’t a complete departure, though, as Dre incorporated some of the piano lines from the Cru’s ballad “Lovers” and the Prince-like synths that were the Cru’s hallmark.

  For the lead vocal, Lonzo tapped an R & B singer from South Central named Michel’le Toussaint. Like so many R & B singers before her, Toussaint grew up singing in a Baptist church. She’d often sing during her shift at May Company at the Fox Hills Mall, where she met an aspiring rapper who persuaded her to come to an audition he had with Lonzo. Toussaint blew everyone away with her powerful, throaty vocal, which, given her unusually high-pitched speaking voice—she naturally talks over her larynx—came as a surprise to those who heard her. “[Lonzo] called me back the next day and asked if I wanted to do some songs and I thought, ‘Oh, yeah, okay.’ The next thing I knew I was there, and we were writing and trying to put together some songs,” she recalled. Since the Cru’s regular female vocalist, Monalisa Young, was in Connecticut working with star R & B producer Kashif, Lonzo asked Toussaint to re
cord the track in her absence. Though the song is a sensual tête-à-tête between her and Dre, she says the two “didn’t say anything other than hello” on their first encounter. Afterward, however, he started pursuing her, and in late 1987 the two began dating.

  “Turn Off the Lights,” however, would turn out to be the final straw for Dre and Yella’s involvement with the Cru. Both felt like Lonzo was swindling them. When the men saw Lonzo receive a $1,000 check from Macola, they inquired about royalties, to which he told them the money was a refund for money he spent on recording expenses—not a royalty payment. They felt played, again. And it was no longer worth it for them. With the Wreckin’ Cru, Dre and Yella felt stuck creatively and continuously cheated. By the time “Turn Off the Lights” became a hit on urban and pop charts in 1988, the World Class Wreckin’ Cru was finished. “I wanted to get up outta that shit. Money wasn’t right . . . I just felt like I wanted to be in control of my shit,” Dre admitted. “I was just sitting in the studio knowing what I can do. I didn’t have no input on a lot of that shit that came out.”

  RADIO

  One of the first moves Eazy made for Ruthless was to sign J. J. Fad. He got hip to the Inland Empire–based female rap group, as Arabian Prince and Dre were both dating members.

  Originally a quintet, J. J. Fad was an acronym of the group members’ given names: Juana “MC J. B.” Burns, Juanita “Crazy J.” Lee, Fatima “O. G. Rocker” Shaheed, Anna “Lady Anna” Cash, and Dania “Baby-D” Birks. The ladies wanted to make a record with Dre, but the lighter, dance-heavy side of hip-hop was a sound he was desperate to escape. In 1987, Arabian produced a single for the group, the cheekily titled “Anotha Ho” along with its deliciously infectious B-side, “Supersonic,” which J. J. Fad released through Dream Team Records. The single was distributed by West Coast Records, which was established by Egyptian Lover, Lonzo Williams, Rudy Pardee, and Unknown DJ, and became a hit around LA after KDAY started spinning it. J. J. Fad’s first single sold four hundred thousand copies. But after a beef over management and money sent Cash, Shaheed, and Lee packing, the group then became a trio when Michelle “Sassy C.” Franklin joined. The group then changed its acronym to now mean Just, Jammin’, Fresh, and Def.