Parental Discretion Is Advised

by Gerrick D. Kennedy

  It was during these early days for Death Row when Dre was recruiting and auditioning artists to join the fold, acts that would soon help him craft his debut, The Chronic. D.O.C., despite getting shafted by Suge, stuck around. “Even when me and Dre were beefing and fighting and I thought this motherfucker was doing me wrong, I still took my ass to work every day to make that record as good as I could because it represented me just as much as anybody else,” he said. “One of the things that made the music so great is we all loved and cared for each other. We were a family. [But] none of those monies ever came to me, none of those accolades ever came to me.”

  Snoop Dogg was pegged as a banner act along with Dre. Snoop’s fellow 213 members, Nate Dogg and Warren G, were heavy in the mix when it came to the new music being created at Death Row, even though Dre never signed his stepbrother Warren to a deal. “My brother told me, ‘You need to go on and be your own man,’ ” Warren said. “So that’s what I did!” Also brought on board was Jewell, who sang alongside Eazy on N.W.A’s raunchy “I’d Rather Fuck You.” Snoop met Kurupt, a rail-thin rapper who moved to South Central from Philadelphia as a teenager, at the famed Roxy on the Sunset Strip where emcees would battle-rap. Impressed with his skills, Snoop took him to meet Dre and Suge, who signed him on the spot. Snoop also brought his cousins, Delmar Arnaud known as Dat Nigga Daz, or Daz for short, and Eric Collins, who rapped for fun as RBX (or “Reality Born Unknown”) and actually played football with Suge at the University of Nevada. Dre discovered a fiery female rapper from Virginia named the Lady of Rage, after LA Posse, a local production team, let him listen to their album They Come in All Colors, which featured Rage. He flew her out to LA not long afterward.

  Around Dre was a stable of hungry, raw talent. And it pushed him further. In the course of a day maybe fifty people would drop by, mostly hangers-on. The sessions at the studio became parties. People only stopped drinking and smoking long enough to get in the booth. The goal was “all hits and no bullshit” as D.O.C. recalled. Dre would throw whoever was closest into the booth to record a vocal. D.O.C. coached the newcomers, who were tested to some degree, but eventually Snoop broke out as the most valuable player, popping up on song after song. “It was fun, no different from when it was me, Dre, Ren, and Cube,” D.O.C. said of the first days of Death Row. “It was a change in style, the music, but it was still just us having fun.”

  But the party atmosphere was often ruined by Suge’s unpredictable, violent behavior. D.O.C. and others have said things were always tense at the studio, but nights would get especially crazy if Suge didn’t like someone who was there—or if he just felt like flexing his power, which was routine. One night he saw George and Lynwood Stanley, two brothers he’d known for years, among the crowd in the studio at Dre’s invitation. Dre gave them permission to make a call on a phone in the studio, which angered Suge. “I don’t give a fuck what Dre says, Dre ain’t payin’ no bills,” Suge huffed. An argument erupted and Suge beat the shit out of the men. He grabbed a gun and fired a bullet through the wall to scare them. Suge didn’t stop there. He then humiliated the men, forcing them to strip to their underwear—just one instance of the sadistic things he did to intimidate people, behavior that became commonplace in the studio. “It was great working with Dre, but the elements that surrounded him? Interesting,” CPO Boss Hogg said of the environment around Suge. “There was always something in the air. Always this underflowing tension. There was this Blood and Crip element that was going on, which we didn’t have at Ruthless. Ruthless was much more of a family, whereas Death Row felt like a set. It was an eggshell situation, you knew it was going to crack at some point. I never wanted to do anything huge there because I didn’t want to be, literally, standing on Death Row.”

  It was all too much for D.O.C. He could only show up to the studio if he was drunk or high on weed or dope. “I was in hell at that moment. Just going to SOLAR [where Death Row was based], most of the time was like going to the yard in the penitentiary,” he said. “For a nigga that’s not of that world, that shit was murder. But when I was high or loaded as fuck I was just one of the niggas and when they wanted to do crazy shit like whoop some nigga’s ass or slap a muthafucka or spit or piss or whatever the fuck they was doing, I was with it.”

  Trouble also followed Dre while he worked on The Chronic in 1992. In mid-July he joined some friends at a party in South Central when he got into a spat with a guy, who shot him four times in the leg. Dre rebuffed the claim he was shot, downplaying the event the way he did after allegedly assaulting music producer Damon Thomas, striking a police officer in New Orleans, or his house catching fire during a wild pool party.

  “Shot at,” Dre said incredulously during one interview. “I got shot at a whole bunch of times. They never reported it before, though.” Dre’s account was that he and his friends were outside a hotel, calling one guy’s girl ugly. “So we came downstairs to talk about her, right? Shots rang out. We ran back into the hotel. I don’t even know where they came from.”

  Reporters from Spin, Rolling Stone, and the Los Angeles Times inquired about the incident. He wasn’t budging from his story. “I ain’t got nothing to tell y’all,” he said. But he was honest with one reporter, flat out telling him that “1992 was not my year.” There was a hotel lobby brawl, an incident where he allegedly hired thugs to threaten a former associate, and as his debut album was arriving in stores, Dre had to face a judge for assaulting Thomas with a single jawbreaking punch. Eazy was vocal about Dre’s troubles, pushing the blame on his association with Suge. “He had the Dee Barnes thing, breaking that kid’s jaw, driving his car off the cliff, getting shot, New Orleans. None of that ever happened when he was down with us,” he offered.

  Interscope Records couldn’t have been a better home for Death Row, given the pedigree of its head, Jimmy Iovine. Introduced to music production as a teenager while growing up in Brooklyn, Iovine started his career as a recording engineer. He worked with John Lennon on his experimental Mind Games, Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run, Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell, Patti Smith’s Easter, U2’s Rattle and Hum, and Stevie Nicks’s stellar solo debut, Bella Donna. After a term at A&M Records, he teamed with businessman Tim Field in 1991 to launch the $30 million start-up Interscope records. Iovine was given Dre’s Chronic album and publicity materials—including Death Row’s grim logo of a man being executed by electric chair. Iovine was initially hesitant to play the music. He didn’t know hip-hop, but as an accomplished producer himself, Iovine felt much of the rap he heard sounded cheaply produced. But he was astounded by Dre’s project, which sounded more polished than a great deal of rock records. “I knew nothin’ about hip-hop. The only thing I was familiar with was my speakers. I had heard every producer who came in during the first year of Interscope, and the hip-hop sounded terrible. I couldn’t take it. I was such a sound fanatic,” Iovine said. “When Dre came in with that fuckin’ thing, I said, ‘Who produced this?’ ”

  Dre and Iovine hit it off immediately. Iovine was impressed by Dre’s prowess behind the boards. Dre, in turn, was wowed at Iovine’s cred and his passion for music. As Death Row and Interscope mapped out its partnership, Eazy filed his federal lawsuit, claiming Dre sent goons to intimidate him into releasing him, the D.O.C., and Michel’le from their contracts.

  In response, Dre wrote a statement claiming he and Eazy started Ruthless in 1985 as a joint venture and had a verbal agreement to split all profits. “I could have gone after half of Ruthless ’cause me and Eazy was equal partners from the jump street,” Dre told a reporter. Ruthless denied the claim.

  In a controversial interview with the Source for its November 1992 cover, Dre denied almost every single incident embroiling him—hitting Damon Thomas, beating Dee Barnes, getting shot four times, totaling his car, burning down his home accidentally, and Eazy’s claim that Dre was the reason he got shook down to sign over contracts. Dre even posed with a .44 Smith & Wesson pointed at his own temple. “That’s how I felt at the time,” he said
.

  Iovine had a solution. With Eazy refusing to release Dre from his contract, asserting that Dre still owed the label four albums, Iovine decided to offer payment to Eazy, and also Death Row, for the right to release The Chronic. The deal, which was solidified in early December, a few weeks before the album’s release, recognized Dre’s contracts with Ruthless by giving Ruthless a percentage of royalties from whatever Dre produced. In exchange, Ruthless gave Interscope the rights to Dre as an exclusive producer and artist. Eazy was said to make 25–50 cents off every copy of The Chronic and bragged that he was earning more from Dre’s albums than Dre did, and that Dre would have been better off staying at Ruthless.

  In light of his mounting troubles, The Chronic unfolded as a semiautobiographical look into the genius producer. From a production point of view, the album is a slam dunk, as Dre relied deeply on his beloved Parliament-Funkadelic samples to create the album’s hallmark sound, incorporating those high-pitched “funky worm” Moog synths to get the warm, lush throwback groove that became known as Gangsta funk, or G-funk for short.

  Revenge is the dominant theme in the intro, and “Fuck wit Dre Day (And Everybody’s Celebratin’)” takes some potent shots at Eazy. The violent streets of South Central inspired “Let Me Ride,” a record in which he makes it quite clear that the album will stray far away from the problack messaging Cube was bringing into Gangsta rap: “No medallions, dreadlocks, or black fists,” he rapped. “The Day the Niggaz Took Over” is a mediation on the destructive, deadly LA riots from earlier in the year. “Nuthin’ but a ‘G’ Thang” is a funky anthem for gangster posturing that was originally recorded over a Boz Scaggs track while Snoop was in jail on a drug charge. “He called in, and I taped the receiver of the phone to the mic. You can hear jail sounds in the back and everything,” Dre said. The final version of the record is built over a sample of Leon Haywood’s “I Want’a Do Something Freaky to You,” a record he found in his mom’s collection—he knew it was special after he played it at a house party and people kept asking him to rewind it. Black-on-black crime is dissected in “Lil’ Ghetto Boy” in a tale of a drug dealing gangster shot after trying to rob a younger gangbanger. And the album’s concluding track, “Bitches Ain’t Shit,” contained Dre’s most scathing lines toward Eazy. “I used to know a bitch named Eric Wright . . . now she’s suing cause the shit she be doing ain’t shit,” he raps.

  While work on The Chronic was under way, Death Row moved its headquarters from the SOLAR building into a suite near Interscope at a Westwood office tower. Suge hired new staff, including his wife, Sharitha, to manage acts. The office was also rife with thuggish guys like Buntry, Jake the Violator, Heron, and Hen Dogg (he was responsible for designing the label’s grim logo)—all men who would be killed by gunfire in separate incidents. Suge moved away from the boots and jeans he typically favored and began incorporating red into his wardrobe to play up his affiliation with the Mob Piru Bloods. The omnipresence of thugs made the air thick the second you arrived. Interscope employees, terrified, started evading the elevator since it dumped you directly into Death Row’s lair.

  For all its hard-core ways, Death Row still wasn’t immune to the corporate censorship of Gangsta rap happening across the industry in the wake of protests and lyric controversies. Interscope wanted “Mr. Officer” off The Chronic—a song in which Dre had a chorus chant of “Mister Officer, Mister Officer, I wanna see you lying in a coffin, sir.” It was as rancid and brash as N.W.A work, but Interscope’s parent company, Time Warner, wanted no part. It had already spent a chunk of the year catching heat over Ice-T’s inflammatory “Cop Killer,” released with his metal side act Body Count. Dre wasn’t interested in a battle. Thinking as a businessman, he yanked the offending record from the album and kept it moving.

  To further show how much control he had over his project, Dre stepped into the director’s chair for “Fuck Wit Dre Day (And Everybody’s Celebratin’).” In the video he wore a heavy Carhartt jacket, black jeans, and a black baseball cap—drinking had him a bit heavier than normal—and filmed himself driving around in a lowrider, standing near Snoop, waving a gun, and rapping in front of a dancing crowd. The video is most remembered for its cruel, comedic assault on Eazy. Dre casted actor A. J. Johnson to play a Jheri-curled parody of Eazy named Sleazy-E. In a skit opening the video, Sleazy gets a new contract from a white, money-grubbing record producer of “Useless Records” (an obvious dig toward Jerry Heller and Ruthless), played by executive producer from Interscope Records, Steve Berman. It’s an exchange that presents Sleazy as an Uncle Tom of sorts, happily serving his fat-cat master.

  “You know, the problem with this business, people just don’t trust each other. I’m glad you and I trust each other. You trust me, don’t you?” Berman asks, doing his greatest Jerry Heller impression.

  “Yeah, boss,” Sleazy assures him.

  “Oh, no, no, I work for you. I work for Sleazy-E—I wouldn’t have it any other way,” the Heller character stresses before giving him orders to find some rappers to sign. “Go, boy! Go, boy!”

  Dre lays on the humiliation thick in the clip, as we see Sleazy shuck and jive with rappers he’s trying to recruit, get chased by armed men, and finally, standing on the Pasadena Freeway with a sign: “Will Rap for Food.” Eazy was then savvy enough to place the same character in the video for his single, “Real Muthaphuckkin G’s,” from his It’s On (Dr. Dre) 187um Killa EP—released the following year in response to The Chronic—in which he brags about playing Dre and profiting off his records, and makes digs at his pre-N.W.A stint with electro group the World Class Wreckin’ Cru. “But Dre Day only meant Eazy’s payday . . . so nigga please, nigga please, don’t step to deez,” he gloated.

  To promote The Chronic, Interscope purchased minute-long ads featuring music from the album that aired on dozens of stations. Label executives worked the phones to convince MTV to air Dre’s videos, since they couldn’t get radio to touch the record. “They think it’s a bunch of black guys cursing who want to kill everybody,” Iovine said his radio guys were told. “I said, ‘Okay, make a commercial—nothing in front or back of it, just a minute of the song. Don’t say who it is, and buy it on fifty stations, drive time. I want the program directors to hear it in their cars.’ What I didn’t know would happen was kids heard it and started calling for it. That’s how that got on the radio.”

  Released in December 1992, The Chronic hit number three on the Billboard 200 and would sell three million copies in a year. MTV aired “Dre Day” on repeat, but for some reason blurred out Dre’s directing credit, with “Nuthin’ But a ‘G’ Thang” and “Let Me Ride”—the video of which Cube appeared in after they reconciled—also dominating airplay. Reviews for the album were exceptional. Rolling Stone called it “A hip-hop masterwork,” as the Source, Entertainment Weekly, and other publications lobbied it with praise. The Chronic became a pop phenomenon that yielded Dre radio hits and catapulted him and Snoop to superstardom. Dre helped establish Gangsta rap with N.W.A and Straight Outta Compton, but it was The Chronic that revolutionized the genre, as it would define hip-hop and inspire generations to come. “The Chronic is the only album that rivals Niggaz4Life . . . and I don’t think of them as rivals, I see them as some of the best works of hip-hop that has ever come out,” CPO Boss Hogg said. “The attention to detail. The mixing. The mastering. Everything.”

  IT’S ON

  Ruthless looked to move beyond Dre and Cube. Eazy and Jerry Heller juggled a staggering twenty-nine simultaneous projects, one of which was Eazy’s EP 5150: Home 4 tha Sick released just days before Dre’s The Chronic. The EP was his first solo material since Eazy-Duz-It, which dropped four years earlier. Eazy needed to show that he still had it, but how could he do that when much of his formula relied on Dre’s studio wizardry and Cube, Ren, and the D.O.C.’s pens?

  Gleaning its name from the California code allowing involuntary confinement of someone suspected of being a danger to themselves or others, 5150 is a mostly forgettable
collection of serviceable tunes—though it did include a collaboration with Naughty by Nature and the debut of will.i.am, then a young rapper signed to Ruthless as Will 1X. He was signed to the label with his group Atban Klann or A Tribe Beyond a Nation, a jazzy conscious outfit that fit nicely with the trend of emcees embracing their blackness and snubbing Gangsta rap’s hard-core imagery in exchange for enlightened rhymes. Will 1X was one of a handful of acts drafted to ghostwrite for Eazy and other acts on the label. The Atban Klann’s debut album, Grass Roots, would end up shelved and they were eventually dropped from Ruthless before rebranding as the Black Eyed Peas and going on to massive pop stardom. Jewish rap group Blood of Abraham was also apart of the new crop of Ruthless recruits, as were trio of dirty rapping vixens dubbed H.W.A or “Hoez with Attitude.” Above the Law’s sophomore album, Black Mafia Life, was the first record Ruthless issued in 1993, despite being recorded two years prior as N.W.A worked on Efil4zaggin. Dre and Above the Law’s Cold 187um often fed off each other in the studio, and there are great similarities between the way both albums married the psychedelic rock and soul of Parliament-Funkadelic and classic 1970s soul with hard-core lyrics. Black Mafia Life didn’t take off the way The Chronic had, but it’s impossible to think the latter could have existed if it wasn’t for what Cold 187um did on Black Mafia Life—just listen to “Never Missin’ a Beat” and “Nuthin’ But a ‘G’ Thang” back-to-back, for starters. While many have accused Dre of jacking the G-funk sound, Cold 187um doesn’t see it that way. “Coming up under Dre’s tutelage, I wanted to be different then what we were doing at Ruthless. In order for my crew to get an identity I wanted us to have a sound. I didn’t want us to sound like spin-offs of N.W.A. I wanted to actually try a lot of different fusions of music: Funk, soul, blues, jazz, and hard-core hip-hop—a gumbo of sounds,” he said. “A combination of all that funky soulful seventies stuff, with the boom and the bap of the eighties and the slap of the nineties. Melodies and chords and all these different things on top of hard drums and synthesizers, and filling it with breakbeats. Those were things people weren’t doing. It’s crazy because the template and the blueprint of the theory became the same one that The Chronic has. A lot of people get it wrong and say Dre bit it, but no he was just influenced by me being a young producer with a fusion of music that he tried it on The Chronic. It was great to see the idea that I thought of really work, but it was disheartening because I never got any credit for it.”