Parental Discretion Is Advised

by Gerrick D. Kennedy

  D.O.C. introduced Suge to the N.W.A crew and he made himself a peripheral player in their circle. Through Suge, Eazy met his longtime girlfriend, Tracy Jernagin. Tracy and Suge were close to the point that she considered him like a brother. Suge would get Tracy tickets to the Forum shows he worked security for and she met Eazy at an afterparty for New Edition.

  “He was the invisible man,” Snoop Dogg has said of Suge’s early days.

  After D.O.C.’s car accident in November 1989, Suge was by his bedside daily, doting on him and shuttling his mom to and from the hospital. He slid into a managerial role, using his experience as a promoter to arrange autograph-signing sessions and paid appearances for the D.O.C., who was pinched for money and unable to perform. “Me and Suge developed a real kind of bond from there,” D.O.C. said. “He was the first one to tell me, ‘Dude, they are doing you so bad. You should be doing your own thing.’ ”

  D.O.C.’s royalties, or the lack thereof, became a topic of conversation between the two. Suge took an interest in how things worked behind the scenes—who wrote what, how they got paid, etc.—and D.O.C. felt played for signing over publishing in exchange for jewelry, which he told Suge about. “Jerry had the words ‘watch and chain’ right there in the contract,” Suge told the Source. “I ain’t never seen no shit like that in my life.”

  Linking up to do their own thing actually made sense. Suge was also working for Tom Kline, a sports agent who was itching to get into the music industry—this was his chance, Suge convinced him. The three of them launched Funky Enough Records, its name taken from D.O.C.’s hit. Suge started auditioning rappers out of Kline’s Beverly Hills office, recruiting rising rapper-producer DJ Quik, 2nd II None, and Penthouse Players Clique to the Funky Enough team.

  Suge’s greatest asset was his power of persuasion. “By any means necessary,” Dre once said of him.

  Though his nickname, a derivative of “sugar bear,” denotes sweetness, Suge’s behavior over the years has been anything but. The image of the burly, cigar-puffing gangster who got what he wanted, from whoever he wanted, whenever he wanted it, became his lore. And Suge amassed a lengthy rap sheet filled with nefarious behavior to solidify his status as one of rap’s most notorious thugs. He’s been tied to dozens of savage beatings and was at the center of multiple shoot-outs, and was accused of breaking a guy’s jaw with a loaded pistol and forcing another man to drink a glass of urine. In early 2018 Suge will stand trial for the most serious of his crimes after he allegedly mowed down two men with his Ford F-150 Raptor truck, leaving one dead.

  That “by any means necessary” approach to business dealings was famously put to action for the first time, while Suge was managing Mario Johnson, a rapper who went by the name “Chocolate.” Johnson told Suge he contributed greatly to Vanilla Ice’s debut, To the Extreme. Chocolate claimed to have written a number of records for the album, including “Ice Ice Baby.”

  To the Extreme catapulted Vanilla Ice to pop stardom when “Ice Ice Baby,” which incorporated samples from Queen and David Bowie, became the first rap record to hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100, the album selling an astounding seven million copies. Chocolate said he never got paid, and Ice’s label, EMI, wouldn’t return phone calls. As hip-hop legend would tell it, the next thing that happened was Suge and some cronies pulled up on Vanilla Ice at his hotel, dangling him by the ankles over the balcony.

  It’s a story that’s been passed around for decades, and what really happened is just as harrowing. Actually, Suge reached out to Dick Griffey, an older friend of his, to seek counsel on the matter. Griffey was an industry legend in his own right. He founded SOLAR Records (Sound of Los Angeles) to much success in the seventies by signing acts like the Whispers, Shalamar, Klymaxx, Midnight Star, and the Deele. The label had amassed enough hits that the Los Angeles Times pegged him as “the most promising new black music executive” in 1980.

  Griffey gave Suge the contact information for an attorney in New York, and Chocolate produced handwritten lyrics for records including “Ice Ice Baby,” explaining that he and Vanilla Ice had worked together at a Texas club, and that a girlfriend of his was present when he wrote them. Ice’s label didn’t budge, telling Suge, “ ‘Look, we’ll give you a couple of dollars if you’ll let bygones be bygones.’ I wouldn’t go for it,” Suge said. One night Suge and his crew crashed Ice’s dinner at West Hollywood steakhouse the Palm and tried to put pressure on him by physically intimidating him. When that didn’t move the needle, Suge tracked Ice down to his Beverly Hills hotel with a half dozen goons. Everyone came strapped.

  “When we went to the hotel that day, it was strictly for conversation,” Chocolate said. “Nobody got pushed—nobody argued, no shoving—nothing.”

  Ice said Suge’s entourage roughed up his security guys and then led him onto the balcony of the fifteenth-floor suite he was staying in, demanding he sign away a percentage of royalties to his biggest hit, “Ice Ice Baby.”

  “He had me look over the edge, showing me how high I was up there,” Ice said. “I needed to wear a diaper on that day. I was very scared.”

  Ice conceded and signed over $4 million worth of royalties, though he insists Chocolate had nothing to do with the record. “He had us out powered and outnumbered. I signed . . . and walked away alive.”

  It was Suge’s first substantial payout. And his propensity for doing things his way, as unsavory of methods they may be, earned him a wealth of credibility (and fear) within the industry. This was how Suge got down, and he never changed—no matter how much trouble it brought him.

  “You’re talking about many, many years of how [he] dealt with things,” said Nina Bhadreshwar, who worked as Suge’s assistant. “It’s where he’s from. It’s his history. He’s not someone who makes himself vulnerable to people. He’s gotta be the protector and provider of people, when actually he needed some mentoring . . . but nobody did because everybody feared him.”

  The settlement lined Suge’s pockets nicely, and he took care of D.O.C., particularly to ease the burden left by his unwise decision to sell his publishing rights to Eazy.

  Meanwhile, Dre was now growing frustrated with the dealings at Ruthless. He was feeling treated as an employee for a company he helped establish. And after Cube left, Dre thought more about money, and his share of it. He definitely didn’t feel he was being paid as someone whose music built the hottest rap label since Def Jam, with his name on a handful of platinum records.

  Dre became distant. A studio rat by nature—it’s his favorite place to be—he wanted more control creatively. Jerry Heller said he and Eazy were working on establishing an imprint for Dre, claiming it was one of the rare times they shook hands about something. But the producer was already reconsidering his allegiance to Ruthless and Eazy, especially after figuring out he wasn’t fifty-fifty partners with Eazy as he had believed. Learning that D.O.C. was having Suge look into his Ruthless contract, Dre put in a request that would soon unleash a stunning chain of events.

  “While you checkin’ the D.O.C.’s shit,” Dre said, “check on my shit too.”

  And Suge did, showing up to Ruthless lawyer’s office unannounced and snatching all the documents he could get a hold of, including Dre’s contract—which, he claimed, Ruthless wouldn’t produce when Dre asked for it. “I got a hold of one on my own. We found out that Cube was right. Ruthless was taking Dre for a ride. And not just Dre—every other artist on the roster too.”

  Suge never copped to how he obtained the documents, but he informed Dre, Michel’le, and D.O.C. that they had deals that paid them significantly less than the industry-standard royalty rate. With Dre’s permission, Suge acted on his behalf as a manger, bypassing Jerry. He went to Ruthless’s distributor, Priority Records, to negotiate a deal that upgraded Dre’s terms with Priority—delivering a quarter of a million dollars for back payments and a new album—and left Ruthless in the dark, which angered Jerry and Eazy, who believed the offer of the sublabel would have been enough to placate D
re if not for Suge being in his ear.

  “They had the worst contracts I had ever seen in the history of the record business,” Dick Griffey admitted. “The contracts that Ruthless and Jerry Heller had with N.W.A and Dre . . . if I said draconian, that would be a kind word.”

  Dre was honest with Eazy. Before the fame and platinum records, they were boys from the same hood. Dre went to him and was straight up with his grievance. “Look, man, I’m not dealing with Jerry Heller anymore,” he told him. “If I’m gonna stay, he has to go. Which one of the two?”

  Eazy told him, the same way he told Cube earlier, that he had no plans of ditching Jerry. “He played the divide-and-conquer game,” Dre said of Jerry. “He picked one nigga to take care of, instead of taking care of everybody, and that was Eazy. And Eazy was just, like, ‘Well, shit, I’m taken care of, so fuck it.’ ”

  Dre agreed to join D.O.C., Griffey, and Suge as a partner in a new venture born in the ashes of Funky Enough, which Kline had decided to back away from. The new label was originally called Future Shock, after an old Curtis Mayfield single, before they came to its permanent moniker: Death Row Records.

  The plan was for Griffey to deal with the major labels. D.O.C. would pen lyrics and help groom artists. Suge would be the point man for day-to-day business. And Dre would focus on being a studio wizard, producing the types of records he wanted with full autonomy. The company would be split four ways, with Dre and D.O.C. each receiving a 35 percent cut and Suge and Griffey both taking 15 percent.

  But there was a major crack in Dre’s exit plan: he was still under contract with Ruthless.

  On a late Tuesday night in April of 1991, Eazy got a call from Dre asking to meet up and discuss their business differences.

  “Hey, yo, you know we got to work this shit out,” Dre told him.

  They planned to meet at Galaxy, the upstairs studio at SOLAR’s Hollywood headquarters. But when Eazy arrived, there was no Dre in sight.

  Suge, however, was there as Eazy got off the elevator. Alongside him were a couple of guys, and, depending on who’s telling the story, they were brandishing baseball bats or lead pipes and may or may not have been carrying firearms.

  Eazy was about to find out what Vanilla Ice now knew: Suge gets what he wants, and does so by any means necessary.

  “Where Dre at?” Eazy asks.

  “I heard you was trying to get me killed, Blood,” Suge says. Eazy plays it cool, knowing he’s outnumbered.

  Suge presented him with paperwork, documents that would release Dre, D.O.C., and Michel’le from Ruthless. Eazy wasn’t easily intimidated, so Suge raised the stakes.

  “You see a white van parked down there on the street?” Suge asks him. “We got Jerry Heller tied up in back of that van, gun to his head.”

  He then tells Eazy he would bring his mother into the situation if he didn’t sign.

  “I figured he did know where my mother lived,” Eazy concluded. “I figured either I’d sign the papers, get my ass kicked, or fight them. So I signed the papers.”

  “It was like The Godfather,” noted Ruthless Records’s lawyer Michael Bourbeau, who said that immediately after Eazy signed the documents Suge faxed them over to Hank Caldwell and David Glew, executives at Sony’s Epic subsidiary, with a notice that Dre was “available for all production work.” The notice also asked for $125,000 in advance.

  Because Eazy had signed under duress, the releases weren’t considered valid. He sent letters to all the major record companies to warn them about Suge, who continued to intimidate Ruthless brass.

  Eazy and Jerry would have Ruthless lawyers file suit against Suge, Dre, and others, claiming they had violated the Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), a federal law designed to combat organized crime. The multimillion-dollar lawsuit charged various incidents of racketeering, extortion, and money laundering.

  “[It’s] a simple dispute between an artist and his label. Dre became unhappy with Ruthless—it’s that simple. Dre decided he didn’t want to work for Eazy-E,” a lawyer for Sony said.

  Furthermore, Dre’s contract with Ruthless, Sony argued, allowed him to write, sell, and publish music separate and apart from Ruthless, which only held the rights to the music he does for that label.

  The RICO lawsuit was eventually dismissed, as was another suit the following year. But the mood at Ruthless had already been decimated, especially given the weight of Suge’s tactics to frighten his Ruthless adversaries throughout 1991. He’d made himself an unwelcome presence during the recording of Efil4Zaggin, popped up at Eazy’s crib once with a squad of thugs demanding the master recordings of Dre’s Ruthless work, and Jerry claimed his house was burgled—“Payback’s a motherfucker, Jerry” scrawled in Magic Marker across the bedroom mirror and his Corvette missing. It spooked Jerry to the point where he started taking different routes home, stashed loaded guns all over the house (a .380 Beretta rested under his pillow) and installed a $75,000 security system.

  “[People] like Suge Knight are just takers,” Jerry said. “They make no legitimate contribution to the music business. They just extort people out of the fruits of their labor.”

  Security at Ruthless was beefed up too, with Jerry hiring an acquaintance, Israeli-born Mike Klein as security director. Klein had ties to both the Jewish Defense League—a group the FBI classified as a “right-wing extremist group”—and the Nation of Islam. He tapped the group to provide security, and soon armed bodyguards populated the halls of Ruthless. Klein also helped to ease the situation between Suge and Ruthless, and assisted with negotiating Dre’s exit. He was later named Ruthless’s head of business affairs (a deal that wasn’t put on paper) after he invested money into the label. “That Mike Klein deal brought a lot of confusion to Ruthless. Everybody in the business knows you don’t want to tick off Mike. He’s the kindest, sweetest, most unassuming guy—but you know it’s like don’t [cross him],” Greg Mack said.

  Jerry was desperate to try to salvage the label’s relationship with Dre. He claimed he brokered a $20 million deal with Irving Azoff, his former protégé, at Warner. The deal would have paid Dre a $2 million advance. But, Jerry said, the label was wary of the national outcry against hip-hop not having quieted and dropped negotiations.

  It didn’t matter, though. There was no persuading Dre to stick around. Efil4Zaggin and an album from experimental rock-funk musician Jimmy Z released in late 1991 were Dre’s last projects for Ruthless. The terms of his departure, like everything else with this label, has become hip-hop legend. After Jimmy Iovine’s nascent Interscope agreed to distribute Death Row in 1992, lawyers for Eazy, Heller, Dre, and Suge, along with Klein, gathered to strike a deal. Ruthless would receive publishing royalties from Dre’s Death Row projects, either as a producer or performer, with Interscope paying Eazy’s company 10 percent of all monies he gained from producing, 15 percent from his solo records, and a “huge” cash payout. “Eric felt bad for Dre, feeling like he’d done him wrong,” Cold 187um said. “He would say, ‘He got me wrong. I didn’t do this shit. I didn’t do Dre wrong.’ But he wasn’t busted and disgusted over it. He stood on what he believed in as far as trusting Jerry Heller to the fullest that it meant he thought everybody was against him because he was out in front. Ruthless Records was never sued. The contracts weren’t friendly to an artist early in the days, but who knew it was gonna blow up like that? After it blows up they should have renegotiated but that’s not what they wanted to do. No one got fucked—you signed what you agreed to sign for. Was it right? Probably not. Was it in your favor? Probably not.”

  ALWAYZ INTO SOMETHIN’

  While the creation of Efil4Zaggin was marred by constant tension, it’s hard to sense that from a production standpoint. The D.O.C. stepped up considerably in Cube’s absence. After the car accident ravaged his voice he was urged to retire, and once again became a key utility player, penning lyrics for a quarter of the record, including “Appetite for Destruction” and “Alwayz into Somethin’.” In the studio,
Dre decided to venture away from his trusty drum loops and drum machines (sampling—a common practice with somewhat murky guidelines—was now at the center of multimillion-dollar lawsuits). Instead, he gathered musicians to replicate the grooves and licks from old funk and R & B records he listened to for hours growing up.

  The album is Dre at his most ambitious, and a vast sonic departure from Straight Outta Compton. Where N.W.A’s debut was a pastiche of sounds, Efil4Zaggin was a tightly focused effort. The recordings were dark, with Dre crafting macabre beats built around the eerie, high-pitched whine of the Moog synthesizer he loved.

  “The motherfucking saga continues,” Dre declares on album intro, “Prelude.”

  The 1990s saw a heavy emergence of politically and socially conscious hip-hop that was Afrocentric and sonically eclectic and inventive. The same year Efil4Zaggin was released, Public Enemy issued Apocalypse 91. . . The Enemy Strikes Black, another radical collection from hip-hop’s “prophets of rage.” De La Soul and Black Sheep brilliantly sniped at Gangsta rap on their records, while A Tribe Called Quest dropped their jazz-informed debut, People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm. Poor Righteous Teachers added to the growing movement of emcees looking to only spread positive messages and images with their music.