“Whatever you wanna do.”
“Man, we need to put that on the soundtrack,” Dre told him.
The record turned into a duet, “Natural Born Killaz,” and Dre had the idea of putting Cube on the chorus.
Interscope, however, was excited about the on-wax reunion between the former N.W.A members (Cube previously appeared in the music video for “Let Me Ride”) so Dre was asked to remove Sam and have additional verses from Cube. “They gave me the boot. I was a little salty about that,” Sneed confessed. “But I understood; it was a political move.”
“Natural Born Killaz” was acidic. Dre rapped that his verse was a journey through the mind of a maniac and that he was “doomed to be a killer since I came out the nut sack.” Cube referenced Charles Manson, O. J. Simpson, Jeffrey Dahmer, and the vicious assault on trucker Reginald O. Denny during the LA riots. The duo filmed a cinematic music video playing up the record’s grim lyrics and timed the release to Halloween to further exploit its eerie theme. In it they satirize the stabbings of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman, and the Menendez brothers’ murder of their parents, all the while surrounded by corpses. The idea was to deliver a tongue-in-cheek commentary on the nation’s obsession with high-profile murder mysteries—O. J. Simpson’s murder case was one of the most sensationalized events in American history—and create shock value, as Dre told the Los Angeles Times. “Of course we’re exploiting violence, but there’s nothing unusual about that in America,” Cube said. “This country’s national anthem is full of rockets’ red glare and bombs bursting in air. That’s just the way America is, so why shouldn’t Dre and Cube be able to exploit a little violence every now and then? If people don’t like it, let ’em ban it. Who cares?”
Dre and Cube’s reunion was to extend to more than one record, as they soon plotted to do a joint album called Helter Skelter. They announced the project alongside “Natural Born Killaz.” Death Row and Priority were going to handle its release. “We weren’t trying to bullshit each other,” Cube said of his rekindled friendship with Dre. “He was the same motherfucker I had met, and I was the same motherfucker he had met. We just clicked, started laughing about old shit.”
The album’s theme was the end of the world and Dre put his trusted collaborator D.O.C. to work. He started drafting lyrics, even though he was apprehensive about the likelihood of the project coming to fruition.
“Dre is feeding me these books about the Illuminati and stuff like that and I wrote a couple records,” D.O.C. said. “Of course I knew the shit wasn’t going to work because I know those men.”
Disillusioned with his career progress, resentment consumed D.O.C. He reached out to Dre about how he could get back in the studio and rap, but Dre didn’t want to hear it. Besides, he had already told D.O.C. that with his voice the way it is, writing was the best option. D.O.C. was furious. He believed Dre owed a great debt to him. He stuck around Death Row, the label he helped build and got pushed out of, and helped shape The Chronic and Doggystyle into the rap classics they became. “Nobody is really putting any energy into what D.O.C. is gonna do next,” he said. “We made the Dre album and it’s great, Snoop’s album has been released and it’s on, now what are we gonna do to make sure D.O.C. has something? Nobody was talking about that or gave a fuck about that.”
D.O.C. decided he was done with Death Row—and with Dre. He packed up and went to Atlanta, but not before snatching a track he had written for the album. “I went into his vault and took two beats. The nigga had a zillion beats, I took two and left. That was my glorious departure.” To further spite Dre, he lifted both the title and the concept of the record, which he released in 1996 to middling reviews. The Los Angeles Times wrote that listening to the album, his first since his near-fatal car accident in 1989, was “like seeing Superman trying to fly with Kryptonite shackles on his legs. It’s painful to witness.”
“I suppose that probably wasn’t my most shining moment, stealing that guys music,” D.O.C. admitted, his raspy voice quieting to a pause. “But I was in a really tough spot and I didn’t know how to get out of it.”
Over at Ruthless, Eazy continued his mission to rebuild. He signed a breadth of acts like female rap duo Menajahtwa (pronounced “ménage à trois”); Blood of Abraham, a consciously Jewish duo whose most famous song is called “Niggaz and Jewz (Some Say Kikes)”; raunchy girl group Hoez With Attitudes; and Mexican rapper Kid Frost. It was Eazy’s discovery of Bone Thugs-N-Harmony in 1993 that turned things around at Ruthless.
Originally named the Band Aid Boys when the group formed in junior high school, they changed their name to B.O.N.E. Enterpri$e and recorded an album filled with horrorcore called Faces of Death. Their style was incredibly unique to rap, with its members layering their vocals as stacked harmonies, switching between singing and rapid-fire rhyming, a skill they perfected by learning each other’s verses front to back—hence the “harmony” in their name, which Eazy came up with. The group left their native Cleveland to come out to LA, scrimping together the money for Greyhound tickets, in search of Eazy. When they finally reached Eazy, by phone, he told them he was performing in Cleveland so they returned home and auditioned for Eazy in his dressing room. Bone Thugs-N-Harmony’s Ruthless debut EP Creepin On Ah Come Up dropped in June 1994 and went four times platinum thanks to hits “Thuggish Ruggish Bone” and “Foe tha Love of $”
Eazy also looked to extend his reach outside of music. He started a film company, Broken Chair Flickz, and had plans to star in Smilin’ Facez, a bloody revenge tale set in South Central he helped develop, with screenwriter Preston Whitmore II promising it would make Cube’s Boyz n the Hood look like an afterschool special (a sentiment Eazy once used as a jab toward Cube). “The characters are really N.W.A,” Whitmore said. “So that should give it a lot more edge.” He was also spending lots of time with KDAY programmer Greg Mack. The two had been tight since the N.W.A days and had made plans to purchase radio stations, the first seated in Phoenix. Mack had preached to Eazy that the real growth of hip-hop meant having some control on radio. It was the medium that was the slowest to embrace the genre, and even though Def Jam, Ruthless, Death Row, and Bad Boy were powerhouses with artists enjoying crossover radio success, the radio landscape was still devoid of a rap presence when it came to ownership. “You’ve got rock and rollers, country western singers, even R & B artists, but never has there been one rapper—even today—not one rapper owns a radio station and I attribute that to the fact that some of them think they can’t because of where their money came from or federal [laws they have broken],” Mack said. Before they could get going they were waiting for a big check (Mack doesn’t remember for what), and in the interim Mack suggested Eazy start a radio show. He went down to 92.3 the Beat and pitched the idea of the show. It would cost the station nothing, so long as Eazy was able to play his Ruthless records, and in the summer of 1994 he began hosting the Ruthless Radio Show, a weekly, party-style show where he and his friends Julio G., Tony G., and Jesse Collins interviewed artists, took requests, and talked lots of shit.
On the Ruthless Radio Show, Eazy had no problem playing Death Row records—particularly The Chronic, since he was making money on it—even if it angered Suge (which it absolutely did). One infamous episode featured Eazy attempting to talk with Death Row artists Tha Dogg Pound and the D.O.C., but the conversation exploded into a curse-filled screaming match between Eazy and Daz, who got on the phone and began insulting Eazy. At one point Michel’le jumps in, Kurupt chides them for acting “silly,” and an unidentified woman interrupts to yell at Eazy for how he treated his baby’s mother Tracy Jernagin (the two had a tumultuous history; once Eazy shot at Tracy’s car and another time she wrecked it while arguing with Eazy). “When you can sell a million records you come talk to me,” Daz screamed, sending Eazy over the edge, with him shouting that he bets Daz never got paid for his work at Death Row. “Y’all jumped into something that had nothing to do with y’all. This between me, Dre, Snoop, and whomever [Suge und
oubtedly the ‘whomever’ here].”
“Eric was funny as hell. He had a warped personality,” Mack said. One time they heard screaming and stepped outside to see a guy beating his wife and Mack wanted to intervene. “Nah, fuck that,” said Eric, who began egging the guy on. “Beat that bitch’s ass, beat her fucking ass,” he shouted.
“The very next day he’s taking ten busloads of kids out of South Central to Magic Mountain,” Mack added. “He never wanted anyone to know about that, all the good things he did. He didn’t want people to know that. He wanted to keep that gangster image.”
Everyone remembers Eazy as incredibly generous. He gave to Make-A-Wish and the City of Hope regularly, visited juvenile correctional facilities to talk to kids there, and was extensively involved with mentoring organization Athletes & Entertainers for Kids. He let friends stay in his houses, and if anyone got in trouble they knew he was a call away.
Beyond caring for his friends, Eazy was an exceptionally devoted father. In all he had eleven kids, but he only knew of seven. His daughter, Erica Wright, said he would take the kids to Disneyland often, and holidays were lavish affairs. “No matter what he did in his entertainment life, he was family oriented. Always had time for us period,” Erica said.
“My most memorable time with him was for my birthday, he took me to an amusement park, Bullwinkle’s in Orange County,” younger daughter Ebie remembered. “We rode all the rides.”
But for all Eazy had going on in his life, he remained quite ardent on getting the old crew back together.
There had previously been talks of partial N.W.A reunions, though Eazy’s assertion that the group would reassemble without Dre led to a two-year estrangement between him and Ren, after the latter turned the idea down. Later Ren, along with Cube and Dre, was said to be plotting a project titled N.W.E—Niggaz Without Eazy.
During a trip to New York in early 1995 to help Bone Thugs-N-Harmony promote its Creepin On Ah Come Up album, Eazy ran into Cube. Bone and Eazy had gone out to a nightclub called the Tunnel. When they got to the back of the club they spotted Cube, whom Eazy hadn’t seen or spoken to. “As soon as they saw each other it was all smiles and love,” Krayzie Bone said, remembering the group also met LL Cool J and Notorious B.I.G. that night—the introduction to B.I.G. led to their collaboration, “Notorious Thugs,” from Life After Death, B.I.G.’s landmark second album released a few weeks after his 1997 murder.
Amid the reminiscing between the two men, the conversation steered toward a reunion album. “I told Eazy I was down; I thought it was a good idea,” Cube said. “He was in his feud with Dre at the time. I told him if he could work that out, call me, and I’d be ready to go.” Dre and Eazy eventually started discussing the prospects of a reunion. Dre had gone on record saying the only way he’d entertain it was if it was put out on Death Row, which of course would never happen. The tension between the former friends had softened considerably, and Dre too was on board with a reunion, so long as Jerry Heller wasn’t involved. “I would have gladly done so—well, maybe not gladly. But I would have gotten out of the way,” Jerry wrote in his memoir. Reuniting N.W.A was going to be Eazy’s goal when he returned to Los Angeles.
“We gonna get the whole family back together and we gonna start riding again on this shit,” Eazy excitedly told Cold 187um.
Two weeks later, however, Eazy was in the hospital.
ETERNAL E
It started with a cough. The weather was frigid when Eazy was in New York City with Bone Thugs-N-Harmony and the Southern California boy was poorly dressed for winter on the East Coast. “Before we went out, Eazy had gone and bought us all leather jackets,” Krayzie Bone remembered. “Eazy had one but when he came out the hotel room and went out to the club he ain’t have nothing on but a sweatshirt. Plus his Jheri curl was wet. We were like, ‘Man you’re going to catch pneumonia.’ We’re from Cleveland. We know about having Jheri curls in the wintertime. You got to cover your shit up.”
After a run-in with Cube sparked talks of a real N.W.A reunion album, Eazy intended to make the project his top priority when he returned to Los Angeles, alongside a double album called Temporary Insanity he was already working on. Eazy wanted to get Dre on his solo record, as well as Guns N’ Roses. He also reconciled with Ren and the two recorded together for the project. After the club closed, Eazy walked back to his hotel, unable to catch a cab. There was no way he didn’t shiver the entire way back.
For weeks after his return, Eazy had cold symptoms and difficulty breathing. He wasn’t pressed to get to a doctor, which those close to him didn’t find out of the ordinary considering the bouts of bronchitis he’d had since childhood. “It was never anything serious. He’d go in the hospital every now and then,” said Greg Mack. “Honestly, we thought it was because of all the weed he smoked.”
Many believed Eazy’s affinity for marijuana, a habit he developed in the years after N.W.A split, and which Mack estimated cost tens of thousands of dollars per month, combined with chronic bronchitis was the source of his ailment. Though as Eazy’s coughing fits began to last longer, his friends grew more concerned. “In the studio, I knew something was wrong with him,” MC Ren said. “[H]e would be coughing a lot, for five or ten minutes straight, like he had bronchitis or something. Then he’d stop for a while and start back again with this hard cough. I was just thinking, ‘Man, you need to quit smoking that weed.’ ”
More sick than anyone could have known, including himself, Eazy’s cough grew more violent, and breathing became more and more difficult. In mid-February of 1995, a crushing pain in his chest and a rage of coughs took over. It was decided to take him to Norwalk Community Hospital’s emergency room. “He sounded worse than I’d ever heard him,” said Eazy’s longtime friend Mark “Big Man” Rucker, “but he wouldn’t have gone if it were up to him. We practically had to force him to go.” He was admitted, and a test confirmed it was bronchitis.
The wheezing and coughing continued after Eazy was released from the hospital. Following a short stay at his Topanga Canyon home, he was taken to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Beverly Grove on February 24. He was admitted under an alias, Eric Lollis, and treated for an infection in his lungs with antibiotics. Doctors working to discover his ailment ordered a full panel of tests. The result was startling: he was HIV positive.
Eazy phoned his girlfriend, Tomica Woods, who unbeknownst to anyone but them was pregnant with their second child. “I got a call from him, but he was on the phone crying and couldn’t talk and then the doctor got on the [line], asked me was I sitting down, and then he told me,” Woods said. “I just remember sitting and crying, and I got myself together and went to the hospital.” Woods and their unborn daughter tested negative, though there was still fear, as the virus could take months to show up in tests.
In just a matter of days of his initial diagnosis, doctors informed Eazy that he was in the final stages of full-blown AIDS.
At the time, the American public was still wildly uneducated about human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), or the AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome) disease it could lead to. Since it was first discovered in the early 1980s, the epidemic was largely stigmatized as a gay men’s disease after a 1984 study traced many early HIV infections to Gaëtan Dugas, a Canadian flight attendant.
Dugas, known as patient “O” (for “outside California”), was a gay man with a voracious sexual appetite. By his own estimation, he averaged hundreds of sexual partners per year, and believed he had had more than 2,500 partners across North America since becoming sexually active. Dugas was thought to have contracted the virus in Haiti or Africa and spread it to hundreds of men before his death in 1984, and has long been blamed for starting the AIDS epidemic in America. More than thirty years later, in 2016, researchers determined through newly available genetic evidence that Dugas couldn’t have possibly been the first person in the US to have the virus, instead concluding he was one of thousands infected by the late 1970s, years before it was officially recognized in 1
981.
Because there was little public education about the disease and the belief it only infected gay men, the nation reacted in disbelief when basketball player Earvin “Magic” Johnson announced at a November 1991 press conference that he had contracted the virus and would not return to the Lakers because he was positive. Before him the last major public face of the disease was closeted Hollywood heartthrob Rock Hudson, who died from an AIDS-related illness in 1984. But Johnson, a heterosexual black man, looked nothing like what the public had seen or believed they knew of the disease. He didn’t know who he contracted the disease from because of the volume of women he had slept with during his days as a bachelor star athlete. “I was never at a loss for female companionship. . . . I did my best to accommodate as many women as I could—most of them through unprotected sex,” he wrote in a piece for Sports Illustrated.
Johnson’s public disclosure was heralded by public-health officials and activists, and although his career as a basketball player was over (he played a few more times, including on the Dream Team at the 1992 Olympics), his work in HIV/AIDS prevention has helped dispel the stereotypes of the disease. He became tangible proof that the disease wasn’t a death sentence. But AIDS was ravishing Eazy, and quickly. His mother would bring him home-cooked meals and fresh fruit as he spent most of his time in a cramped hospital room watching television surrounded by a few friends. Woods stayed at his bedside around the clock. He tried keeping his spirits up. To walk was difficult due to shortage of breath. Eventually Eazy required an oxygen mask.
“I was too young to understand that my dad was sick,” said Ebie Wright. She was three at the time and kept busy by playing in the lobby of the hospital.
The mood at Cedars was somber—and tense as Eazy’s health declined, leaving the future of his Ruthless Records empire in jeopardy. “It got chaotic. Everyone was lost,” Tracy Jernagin said. She and the other mothers of Eazy’s children had descended upon the hospital, and, according to Jernagin, things were contentious between the women and Woods. “He had ties to many people, not just one girl. And she didn’t respect that. The fact that you know someone is dying and you do have those last moments they should be utilized very wisely and I think they should have been utilized [differently],” Jernagin said.
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