N.W.A: The Aftermath (eBook)

photo by Harris Rosen

Jerry Heller’s home, Calabasas, Ca, October 22, 2006

A LOT HAS BEEN SAID and written about Jerry Heller since he first became known as the man behind the grand vision of the late Eazy-E and the Ruthless Records empire. His name and character assailed more than any other single person or entity ever since he first parted ways with Ice Cube, then Dr Dre, and eventually Eazy-E in the final days of his life. If you believe the infamous personal and spiritual diss songs and public comments directed his way, Jerry Heller is the biggest crook of all time. According to them, he and Eazy shaved points – and millions of dollars – off royalties they were owed from the multi-platinum sales of N.W.A.

Relaxing at his home on a sunny afternoon in Calabasas, California, where he lived at the time with his ex-wife and former Baywatch actress, Gayle Steiner, the then 66 year old veteran mogul of the American music industry said he couldn't care less. Maybe that's because he has thick skin, especially when it comes to the often cutthroat business of the music industry.

During the 1960s and 1970s, Heller was one of the top agents in the game. As well as being responsible for bringing Elton John and Pink Floyd to America, his roster of clients read like a who's who of the classic era. War, Average White Band, Marvin Gaye, Otis Redding, Journey, Styx, REO Speedwagon, Boz Scaggs, The Grass Roots, The Standells, The Guess Who, Joan Armatrading, Credence Clearwater Revival, Ike & Tina Turner, Van Morrison. He knows how to work records and the people who record them.

That track record led Eric Wright, aka Eazy-E, to meet him one day in 1987. And the rest, as they say, is history: Ruthless Records was formed; N.W.A blew up Rap like never before; everybody became famous; some struck it rich; there were accusations of financial trickery; Cube left; Dr. Dre left, and the group split up; Cube and Dre recorded diss songs; Eazy-E died of AIDS related complications in 1995; and Heller went on to Hispanic Rap at Hit-a-Lick Records.

Is it history? In Ruthless: A Memoir, the book written with Gil Reavill and published by Simon & Schuster, Jerry Heller finally decided to speak up and out about life and business among Eazy-E, Ice Cube, Dr. Dre and the rest of the Ruthless family in the late 1980s. Not one to put a mic in his hand, it served as his late-response record. 

JERRY HELLER: Let’s go back to Sgt. Pepper and The Beatles. So, the album that I consider one of the two most important albums of the second half of the twentieth century; Sgt. Pepper and Straight Outta Compton. Sgt. Pepper set the bar so impossibly high for everybody else in the world that it because impossible to do an album that was competitive or that people thought was competitive, without spending so much money that people’s jobs depended upon albums being successful. So it took the fact that people should be in the music business because they love music and what it put into it was an element of putting out records and promoting them just because they cost a lot of money rather than because you love music. So I just feel it’s ironic that Sgt. Pepper, this great work of art was responsible for all that. So we now go through the new wave age of the 70s, the funk of the early 80s of which, of course, I was involved in.

The music business is the only win-win business that I have ever seen. It’s the only business where - Normally in a business when you make more somebody else makes less. That’s not true in the music business. In the music business, the more the artist makes, the more everybody makes. And that’s a wonderful thing and I call that the economic integrity of the music business because everybody gets rich off an Alanis Morissette record, not just Alanis Morissette. Everybody does; the Publisher, the writers, the Producer, the record company. I mean, everybody’s career was built on Jagged Little Pill and so obviously, that’s a wonderful thing.

So when we did Straight Out Compton, well, first let me just set the stage here. I heard about a little scene that was happening at a pressing plant in Hollywood called Macola Records and it took me a couple of months to get over there. A friend of mine that I had done business with over the years, he had brought me Hugh Masekela and Miriam Makeba and Charlie Musselwhite. He’s an old Blues guy and I trusted what he said. He said, “Look, there’s a scene happening, I don’t like it, I don’t understand it.” Not necessarily that he didn’t like it, he didn’t understand it, but maybe you’ll like it. So I go over there and for a thousand dollars, you could press up 500 records and this guy would send it out to his friends and if by some freak of nature they played it on the one radio station in the world on this planet that played Rap music, which was a 5,000 watt station at the top of Alvarado Street called KDAY with Julio G and Tony G and Greg Mack; The Mix Masters, the record would start to sell.

I went over there and at this little place were the L.A. Dream Team and J. J. Fad and Ice-T and MC Hammer and the World Class Wreckin’ Cru and the Egyptian Lover and Rodney O & Joe Cooley and the Timex Social Club and Bobby Jimmy & the Critters, and they were all pressing at this little pressing plant. And if you sold 10,000 records, somebody went over to the back and cashed your cheque for 25,000 bucks and everybody split it up and I said, “This is what the music business... This is the basis of the music business. This movement is going to reestablish the economic integrity of the music business and this is what the music business is about.”  

Jerry Heller: So I signed a couple of the acts. The L.A. Dream Team and J.J. Fad, who recorded for Dream Team Records, and then I met Alonzo Williams and signed the World Class Wreckin’ Cru and C.I.A., which was Sir Jinx and Cube, and Alonzo and I became good friends, and he kept telling me about this guy that wanted to meet me named Eric Wright. And at that time, even though I was very disenchanted with the music business, I certainly was a bigger name in the music business than anybody that recorded there.

Jerry Heller: It was a very bad time in my life personally, as well as a bad time in the music business. So Alonzo keeps telling me about this guy that wants to meet me, Eric Wright, and finally I agreed after a couple of months. I agreed to meet him because if I met everybody, every guy that wanted to be in business with me, that’s all I would do is be in the business of meeting guys to be in business. So he gets out of the car; he drives up in a little Suzuki Samurai with MC Ren and he gets out of the car and he was an impressive little dude. He was very impressive, powerful and charismatic. He just had this thing. He was preternaturally clean and he just had an aura about him that got your attention. He was only 5” tall, 5”1, maybe 5”2. And I said to him “You’ve got anything that —." First of all, he reached in his sock and paid Alonzo $750 that he had paid him to meet. So I said, “You got anything to play?”

Now, I found certain things over my years in the music business. See, being around for a long time gives you an advantage, it’s not a disadvantage because there are very few things that are new and if you’ve been there before and you have any brains at all, you know how to get there again. So when guys start telling you about what they’ve got “And I’ve got this guy, and I’ve got this chick, and this is my boy, and this is my group, and this is my girl and I’ve got this” and it’s all bullshit. Let’s just fucking talk. It’s bullshit. In the agency business or in business as in general, when you say to a person, “Look, this is the cost of this,” whether it’s Marvin Gaye or whatever, and they say, “Money’s no problem.” Well, that’s ridiculous. Money is always the problem, Normally, it’s the only problem but it’s always a problem and anyone that tells you that it isn’t a problem is either the Sultan of Brunei’s son or just full of shit; he has no money. I’ve had a million guys driving Mercedes 500 telling me that money is no problem and then asking me for two dollars to pay the valet to get his car when we go outside. So it’s just like in Poker, they call it a tell, to me those are just tells. Anyone says that to you they’re basically full of shit.  

So I said, “You got anything to play to me?” and he just looked at me and he said, “Yeah.” So right then and there, I knew that this was a no-bullshit, no-nonsense kind of guy willing to let the music do the talking, not telling what he’d done or who he has or how he was going to do it, you know. He just said, “Yeah.” So we went inside and while we were in one room Ren was carving his initials into the guy; the owner of Macola’s desk. He just thought he would do that because he was bored. But Eazy played me “Boyz-N-The-Hood” and I think the fact that I was 44 or 45 at the time, and had grown up knowing who Gil Scott-Heron was and The Last Poets and The Rolling Stones and especially The Black Panthers, that I said to myself, “Wow!”

When someone can make me say wow, they’ve...