The show had just gotten some bad press a few days prior, when its stop at the San Diego Sports Arena ended with a melee between members of two rival gangs and security guards. Three guards were injured in the fracas, two suffering black eyes and the third a broken wrist. Jerry and the brass at Priority were on edge for Detroit.
Twenty-thousand fans filed into Joe Louis Arena for the show. The evening was part of LL Cool J’s Nitro Tour, which had Eazy and N.W.A billed as special guests alongside Slick Rick, De La Soul, and Big Daddy Kane. N.W.A was the second act to hit the stage. The group “absolutely, categorically, unconditionally guaranteed it would not perform” its controversial police kiss-off, Jerry wrote in his book.
“You down with the way it’s going to go tonight?” Jerry asked Eazy by phone ahead of the show.
“Sure, Jerry,” Eazy answered.
“Skip over it,” Jerry implored.
“I got to go.”
Throughout the day fans who spotted them at their hotel asked them if they planned on performing the insidious recording and they told them no. “Oh man, y’all shouldn’ta come if y’all wasn’t gonna do that,” one fan sniped. Backstage before the show, the group discussed whether or not they would perform it. Granted they agreed not to, but it was the last date on the tour and it had been so long since they last performed in Detroit. The guys couldn’t come to consensus, so Cube assumed it wasn’t going to happen on this night either.
MC Ren, Dre, and Yella hit the stage first. And then Cube emerged. After they performed “Gangsta Gangsta,” the crowd was chanting: “Fuck tha police! Fuck tha police! Fuck tha police!”
They performed “A Bitch Iz a Bitch.” Same thing afterward.
“Fuck tha police! Fuck tha police! Fuck tha police!”
And then “Straight Outta Compton.” Again, the crowd was rapturous in its request.
“Fuck tha police! Fuck tha police! Fuck tha police!”
During “I Ain’t tha 1,” Cube noticed Dre and Ren talking near the turntables. Before Cube unleashed “Dopeman,” Ren moved to the front of the stage.
“Wait a minute,” Ren said, “Everybody say, ‘Fuck the police!’ ”
“Fuck tha police!” the twenty-thousand-strong audience roared back.
Dre, from the turntables, gave Cube an instruction: “Come in on two.”
He counted down, and Cube got down to business: “Fuck the police! Comin’ straight from the underground . . .”
“The place went stupid,” Cube recalled. “Then we see about twenty motherfuckers from the back trying to bum-rush the front. Undercover police. They’re in the back of the arena, but they’re throwing chairs out the way to get to the front of the arena. Nobody knows they’re police, not even me.”
The officers rushed the stage, climbing the barricade and going for the amplifiers, unplugging them quickly. Security guards tussled with the plainclothes officers since they didn’t know they were police.
Jerry was on the phone with N.W.A’s production manager, Gary Ballen, when the surge happened. “The cops are charging us!” Ballen screamed.
“Get ’em outta there!” Jerry ordered.
Pop! Pop! Two loud bangs rang out from the audience. Cube and Ren fled the stage, thinking the cops were shooting at them. In actuality someone had set off M-80 firecrackers.
The cops pushed their way backstage, charging through LL Cool J’s dressing room by mistake. N.W.A’s road manager, Atron Gregory, pushed them into a van and told them to go to the hotel and pack their shit. “The police goin’ crazy . . . We’re going to Canada.”
The group packed and when they popped up in the lobby later in the night, cops were waiting on them. Eazy, Dre, Cube, Ren, and Yella were detained, but not charged with anything. “We just wanted to show the kids that you can’t say ‘fuck the police’ in Detroit,” an officer told the Hollywood Reporter. Cube offered to help the cops produce a diss response called “Fuck N.W.A”; the officers weren’t at all amused.
N.W.A took the next flight back to LA. The tour was over. “It was a trip. Niggas broke the fuck out,” D.O.C. remembered. “The other cities we made it across the county line on the tour buses. In Detroit we didn’t. It was great. The kids loved it. The adults or anybody in a position of power hated it—they didn’t understand it, they didn’t get it.”
AMERIKKKA’S MOST WANTED
N.W.A was the most popular rap group in the country. But the group’s breakout success was complicated by Cube’s frustrations with the group’s finances. The way Cube saw it, Jerry was taking them all for a ride—and coaxing Eazy into making decisions. “It wasn’t like Jerry was all the brains and Eazy was aloof or just a frontman of this label and all this stuff people think,” said Tracy Jernagin, an ex-girlfriend of Eazy’s. “Jerry really did follow Eazy’s lead.”
After failing to convince his group members not to sign the contracts Jerry demanded in order to get paid, Cube felt betrayed that his friends didn’t take his concerns more seriously.
“Man, I ain’t got no money. I ain’t got nothing,” Ren told Cube. “Nigga, I been rappin’ for nothing this long, and nigga fittin’ to give me seventy Gs?”
There was an attempt to squash the financial dispute between Cube, who really wanted to continue with the group, and Ruthless—but his lawyer said it was impossible. “[The] other guys’ positions as far as business was concerned? Ren and Dre were fiercely loyal to Eric,” D.O.C. noted. Their “Straight Outta Compton” video director, Rupert Wainwright, put it more plainly: “Nobody in N.W.A fucking coughed or farted without Eazy’s permission. He’d made a decision and bang, that was it. There was no dispute.”
“We tried to settle this dispute diligently,” his lawyer, Michael Ashburn, told Spin. “We bent over backward to try and make a financial agreement that was acceptable to both sides. I was surprised how indifferent they were when it came to settling this dispute. It was like Jerry Heller didn’t care whether Ice Cube—someone who unarguably had made a major contribution to the group—left or stayed. Ice Cube would still be with N.W.A if our very reasonable financial demands had been met. They gave us a statement showing that Ice Cube had been advanced $32,700. He’s owed at least another $120,000, plus his publishing royalties, which he hasn’t received a cent on so far.”
Cube felt pushed into a corner. He went to Public Enemy’s Chuck D for advice. Cube looked up to him tremendously, and Chuck D was a friend to the group. “Stay with the group, man,” Chuck advised. “The group is the thing.” Eazy was indifferent to Cube’s feelings of strife. He already knew where he stood—Jerry was staying, like it or not. In fact, he suggested D.O.C. as a replacement, a peculiar suggestion considering his voice had yet to return to its former tone and likely never would. “Go out and be a flop like Arabian Prince,” Eazy said, brushing Cube off.
Jerry was the most upset. He saw Cube as an irrational brat. And he didn’t think Cube was operating on his own accord, insisting folks like Priority head Bryan Turner and the group’s label publicist, Pat Charbonnet were in his ear.
In his memoir, Jerry insists Eazy had scheduled a Cube solo project as the label’s next release following N.W.A’s 1989 tour, but Cube was pissed off after Jerry told him the album would have to wait until the debut of Ruthless’s newest signee, a troupe from Pomona who called themselves Above the Law, along with releases from Eazy and N.W.A—both of which Cube would be expected to write for. “We’re putting a lot of trust in you, man,” Jerry told him. “Don’t fuck it up.”
One afternoon Dre convened the group to his home in Calabasas. He had a studio in an upstairs bedroom that was far more sophisticated than Audio Achievements. The crew had a routine, they’d hang out watch TV and maybe crack open a forty ounce before retreating to work. When the guys started heading upstairs, Cube stayed put on the couch. “I was like, ‘Aw, shit.’ I knew something was going on,” Dre said.
Sure enough, Cube called Dre later and broke it down for his homeboy. To Cube, the math simply didn’t add up. If t
hey worked on two albums that sold millions of copies and they played to sold-out arenas across the country, shouldn’t there be more money in their pockets? Royalties. Publishing. Merchandise. Ain’t no way they were getting back everything they should, he told Dre.
Cube tried to level with Dre, friend to friend, during the hours-long chat. “Is your money right for sure?” he inquired.
“Nah, man, my shit is kinda shaky too,” Dre confessed.
A meeting between members without Jerry was proposed by Cube, but it didn’t happen. And with that he was done with N.W.A.
“From the inside looking out, there was this feeling of you shouldn’t have left,” Cold 187um said of Cube’s abrupt departure. “We were all really young, we’re all kinda somewhat becoming successful and now Cube is leaving? Everybody felt it was a selfish thing of him to do. Don’t abandon us. We’re a team. But he was like, ‘If y’all wanna continue to get fucked over, I already know whats up, I’m outta here.’ We were like, ‘You’re just being selfish.’ ”
After Cube left in December 1989, Priority immediately signed him to a solo deal. He reached out to Dre to see if he would work on his solo record. Cube didn’t have any beef with anyone in the group—though he was a bit hurt that Eazy didn’t push back against Jerry. “He was with it,” Cube recalled. “Then we heard that Jerry Heller and Eazy-E vetoed that.”
In January 1990 Cube headed to New York on a one-way ticket, determined to record his album on the East Coast. Cube traveled to Def Jam’s New York headquarters to meet with Sam Sever, a producer he admired for his work with 3rd Bass, but Sever never showed. On his way out of the building Cube bumped into Chuck D, who invited him to a Public Enemy session later that night at Greene Street Studios in Lower Manhattan. Public Enemy was working on their Fear of a Black Planet album and were going in to record a track with Big Daddy Kane. “You wanna jump on there,” Chuck asked him. “That’ll let everybody know you about to come out solo.”
It was an obvious yes for Cube, who was clamoring to work with the Bomb Squad, the production team responsible for Public Enemy’s sound. That session birthed “Burn Hollywood Burn,” and after the recording was cut Cube told the production team that people laughed at him for coming to New York to do his album. An East Coast producer touching a West Coast rapper? “Not ever going to happen,” Cube told the team he repeatedly got as a reaction. The Bomb Squad’s Hank Shocklee took it as a challenge. They were on board, but under one condition—they produce the entire album. “I don’t like to do pieces of records,” Shocklee told Cube. “It wouldn’t be worth bringing the Bomb Squad to the table unless we were doing a full album.”
“I was like, ‘Word? Damn, okay.’ Dre’s a genius, but these dudes are mad scientists when it came to sampling . . . [and] making it sound totally unique and not a sample,” Cube said.
At Chuck D’s behest, Cube grabbed a notebook and started jotting down ideas. “I realized this could be a really good project when Ice Cube showed me six or eight composition books full of rhymes. And they weren’t the ninety-page ones, they were two hundred pages, filled up,” Chuck remembered.
Cube and Sir Jinx, who he brought on to coproduce the project, bunkered down for two weeks at the Bomb Squad’s preproduction lair in Hempstead, New York. The producers told Cube to dig through the crates of records as a starting point for building the sound. “Go find your album,” they instructed. He stayed for days, sleeping on the floor of the studio, thumbing through each and every record. Cube spent all hours of the day setting aside funk records from Slave, Betty Davis, and Con Funk Shun.
“When I went out there I had my ears closed and my mouth open, and they said do it the other way: Close your mouth, open your ears,” Sir Jinx said of working with the Bomb Squad. “I was kind of the mediator, keeping the record West Coast as well as having that East Coast edge. I taught them a lot, and they taught me a lot. We never left the studio. From ten o’clock at night to ten o’clock in the morning we worked—everyday. I slept in the studio.”
Jinx would prove key to connecting Bomb Squad’s pastiche with the West Coast flavor Cube wanted. “Jinx was the gatekeeper, so to speak, to make sure that the sound wasn’t going too far left and that the West Coast flavor was still present on the album,” Cube said. “That’s why the album has a cool balance of East Coast and West Coast production mixed together. The Bomb Squad and Jinx worked great together.”
Cube had full autonomy over the project, something he hadn’t experienced before: “With Dre, it was like, ‘Here’s the sound, I’m gonna do this beat and we’re gonna like it together.’ He’s open to ideas, but he’s gotta like ’em. If he don’t like it, then it’s a bad idea,” Cube said. “But with Bomb Squad, it was like, ‘We can’t go to the real studio until we fill these two crates up with records that you like.’ ”
AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted was recorded in about four weeks at Greene Street Studios. Its title was a nod toward Fox’s hit fugitive series America’s Most Wanted—which, like Cops, capitalized on the nation’s fascination with crime—with the spelling a reference to the Ku Klux Klan. Cube said he was aiming for something “that kinda represents the America we were dealing with [during] Reaganomics” and he didn’t want the album, which was heavily political, to be dismissed as a Gangsta record.
Cube made one hell of a statement on the album, right out of the gate with its gut punching opener “The Nigga Ya Love to Hate.” He originally wrote the track for N.W.A but kept for himself after he left the group (lyrics meant for a new Eazy album were also repurposed for the project). AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted was more violent and angry than the work of N.W.A. But the work was also thick with snarling commentary. He dissected the deaths of young black males on “Endangered Species (Tales from the Darkside)” in a recording that dialed up the intensity of “Fuck tha Police” (which it sampled). Cube confronted systematic racism, addiction, poverty, and inner-city blight, while calling out blacks and unleashing misogynist venom toward women—on one particularly vile number, he ruminates about kicking a woman in the stomach because he got her pregnant, a number critics understandably labeled repugnant.
Despite the tension Cube’s exit from N.W.A created, he doesn’t make any reference to his former group, aside from the sample. It was a conscious decision from Cube and the album’s producers, with Chuck D saying they wanted to give him an open door to return to N.W.A if differences were settled.
AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted was released in May 1990 while Cube and Sir Jinx were out on the road touring. Billed as “the ultimate alliance of East and West,” it went gold in just two weeks and sold a million copies in five weeks, proving he could be a star with and without the group. Critics showered the album with praise, with one calling it “a timeless, riveting exercise in anger, honesty, and the sociopolitical possibilities of hip-hop.” The Source bestowed it a rare Five Mic rating and heralded it as an all-time classic, Spin named it the best album of the year, and the release is ranked among the most defining hip-hop works of the nineties.
100 MILES & RUNNIN’
Business continued as usual for Ruthless Records following Ice Cube’s departure. In just a few short years as the independent imprint’s chief executive officer and president, Eric Wright had gone from dope dealer to platinum-selling rapper, and turned the label into a massive success. Ruthless relocated its headquarters from a dodgy strip mall in Canoga Park to an elegant, two-thousand-square-foot suite inside an office park nearby in the affluent Woodland Hills. Eazy dropped $125,000 to have celebrity interior designer Frank Austin decorate—his office had black Lucite walls, a black plush couch, and a huge projection TV that he blasted music videos on around the clock; Jerry’s was done up in muted pastels; Dre’s had a red oversize leather chair; and at least two dozen platinum and gold records lined the halls. Ruthless was the hottest rap property on the West Coast and success was good to Eazy. So good, in fact, that Jerry said they had to hire a cleaner to come in once a week just to clean up the bodily fluids s
pilled on the couch—and on his $8,600 Italian desk—from his many office romps.
With Cube gone from N.W.A, Ruthless shifted its focus to its newest signees, Above the Law, a rap group fronted by producer Greg Hutchinson, better known as Cold 187um—the number, a reference to the California penal code for murder, and the “um” both the pronunciation cue for the number “7” and an acronym for “untouchable murder”—was a trained jazz musician that played trumpet, bass, guitar, and piano. Go Mack, DJ Total K-Oss, and KMG the Illustrator rounded out its members.
Eazy discovered Above the Law through Ruthless writer/producer Laylaw, who was kin to group member Go Mack. Like Eazy, the members were dope dealers, taking the funds from dealing and funding the recording of demos produced by Cold 187um, which Laylaw brought to Eazy and Dre. Their debut, Livin’ Like Hustlers, was 80 percent complete when Eazy inked Above the Law to Ruthless in 1989. The group completed the album with Dre under Laylaw’s tutelage. “Eazy said he wanted to have two supergroups on the label: N.W.A and Above the Law. We had to be up to that standard,” Cold 187um said. “I love Dre to death, but I wanted to be better than what they were doing. The camaraderie and the healthy competition [within N.W.A] made it like that.” One could even argue that Above the Law possessed a harder image than N.W.A (Jerry even believed the group “would have been N.W.A if N.W.A hadn’t existed”).
Above the Law arrived at Ruthless prior to Cube’s departure. Cold 187um said Cube was the first member they actually befriended. The group’s single “Murder Rap” even sampled a line of Cube’s verse from “Straight Outta Compton.” During completion of the album, the group were working on a track called “The Last Song,” that would feature N.W.A. Cube declined to do the record, citing his issue with Eazy, which bothered the group. “We wanted Cube on it whether he was leaving or not, because we knew him better than anyone,” Cold 187um said. “This being the homie what we were saying was just do it for us.” Frustrated, they took a petty dig at him in an interview.
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