Rollin With Dre

Rollin' with Dre

An Unauthorized Account

©2012 by Bruce Williams and Donnell Alexander

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2012 by Bruce Williams and Donnell Alexander

Alexander / Swift Productions

All rights reserved.

Williams, Bruce.

Rollin' with Dre : the unauthorized account

Bruce Williams, with Donnell Alexander

ISBN 978-0-9854143-7-5 (digital edition)

Contents

Dedications

Publisher’s Note:

Introduction

Forward

Funk Family Feud

Chapter One

Straight Outta Bunkie

Chapter two

Military Stuntin'

Chapter Three

the Freak Who Rocked My World

Chapter Four

Black Hollywood

Chapter Five

In tha Lab with tha Doctor

Chapter Six

California Love

Chapter Seven

4-H to Death Row

Chapter Eight

Un-Easy Lessons

Chapter Nine

The Birth of Beef

Chapter Ten

Darling Nikki

Chapter Eleven

Giving Suge His Due

Chapter Twelve

Beyond Beef at Benihana

Chapter Thirteen

Vivian

Chapter Fourteen

G'd Up Enough

Chapter Fifteen

More Money, More Problems

Chapter sixteen

Detox

Chapter Seventeen

The Rebirth of West Coast Hip Hop

Chapter Eighteen

Givin' Props

Dedications

I dedicate this book to:

My outstanding wife, Vivian.

My sons, Sir B Williams, Mister Williams,

and Prince Bo Williams. My mother, Esther,

and my grandparents, Dock (R.I.P.), and Lucille Voorhies,

and Foressiah Collins

-Bruce Williams

Publisher’s Note:

In the early-morning hours of April 13, 2008, a fatal shooting occurred at the after-party for a book signing held on behalf of Rollin’ with Dre’s hardcover release. The event was held at Gordon’s on the Green, in Tukwila, Washington. Lovelychild James Manuel shot Devon T. Guidry and Paul Dervin, both 24. Guidry died as a result of the shooting. Gervin survived his injuries. Manuel was convicted of second-degree murder and second-degree assault.

Eric Wright, 27, tells the manager, whoseOn behalf of Bruce Williams, I offer sincere condolences to the family of Mr. Guidry, Mr. Dervin, and everyone who witnessed the horrific event. We had only hoped to bring an evening of fun and literature to the area.

—Donnell Alexander

FORWORD

Before there was a Death Row Records, there was a label called Ruthless. And before Ruthless, there was a small vinyl manufacturer called Macola. In Macola’s non-descript, East Hollywood setting, the unstoppable force called gangsta rap was truly born. The year was 1987.

Industrial Santa Monica Boulevard, near Vine. Not up on Sunset. The only hair bands setting up are setting up side hustles, any kind of day job the players can get. Here is a run-down stretch of Hollywood where ladies and trannies of the evening pedal their wares. Not a terrible scene, just the kind of locale L.A. Law might use to show the city's gritty side. The Reagan Era is losing its luster as Ronald loses his memory. Chief Darryl Gates runs LAPD, combating crime with a literal battering ram.

A world away—or seven miles or so to the south—and a few degrees more dreary, neighborhoods resembling blood-drained suburbs are gripped in the collateral damage of rock cocaine: Stray bullets, lost children. South L.A. is not a world away, but the blind-eye ignorance built into local freeway systems make these rough ’hoods feel so.

Far. From up on Sunset, whole black neighborhoods seemed forever away, almost like when the Negroes rioted in ’65.

Beverly Hills still doesn’t get the battering ram as it thinks it might.

Gates’s post-medival crime-stopping juggernaut will knock down homes there whether suspected crack dealers are rocking up white stuff at he kitchen table or your granny’s peeling russets, posted innocently on a stool. For the batter ram’s initial ride-along, the President’s wife is onboard. Nancy came across as thinking, Just Say: Yo. I’ll co-sign on anything that keeps the animals under control

Drugs get moved all over L.A., including Santa Monica Boulevard. Up here, it’s a lot harder to get killed or jailed for buying or selling the stuff.

Music on vinyl should be dead. Regardless, here in gray work-a-day Hollywood—behind three yoked-together storefronts—lay a black platter pressing plant called Macola. It’s a vintage shop whose best clients aren’t even familiar with the term. Dance club deejays know Macola, an enterprise free of glamour or airs, One couldn’t dream up a more low-key local business to work as the delivery system for a miracle.

Millions of American consumers are switching over from vinyl and cassettes to a shiny little innovation called the compact disc. Macola doesn’t do CDs. Stored in a dank room sequestered from the city’s famously optimistic light are brown boxes full of music. These are stacked in cases of 25 units per container. Only in the office is anything reflective of a disc tray. There is no downloading or sticky P.R. Nothing in Macola calls to mind disc trays or downloads. The distributor is a messy, musty 15,000-square-foot museum in the making. Or so it would seem; pouring out of Macola are sounds that sell itself on the content of its character, a miracle product possibly more popular than crack.

These boxes go from stacks in storage to hot trunk cargo. Most often the auto booty are beats that the major labels—Capitol, Warner’s, Columbia, etc. — considers cheap fad music, regional songs that in the best of circumstances land on the R&B charts. Others will throb along as secretive club hits. The next George Michael won’t be coming out of Macola, instead it’s narrow cast titles that insist you be teenaged or in nightclubs to know.

L.A. Dream Team’s Dream Team is in the House, J.J. Fad’s Supersonic, and a gang of hits from Too $hort are Ghetto Gold, that harbinger of an crossover hit, a unit-mover that’s utterly unknown to Casey Kasem. The more established of these ride the wave of unlikely electro influence: Germany’s Kraftwerk, for one. $hort Dog is about to explode into rap’s mainstream, but as a rule the West Coast anthems dispensed from Macola sound about as far away from the stripped-down sensibility of Queens hip-hop royalty Run-D.M.C. as one can get without obtaining a passport.

A pimp rapper from the East Bay, Too $hort is slow and filthy, he is the sound of Oakland, an ethnomusicologist’s dream case. The aura of black Oklahomans from the World War II migration west sparks to life when he rhymes. This rapper is poised to take the Macola ethos to a level where no urban music pusher has ventured, graduating from cassette tapes that circulate literally from hand to hand to shiny Macola platters that move from up on I-5 to mom and pop stores in the Midwest and South.

Fellow Oaktown MC Hammer is positioning himself to do a clean version of $hort Dog’s hip-hop end run and become the world’s largest pop star on the near side of two years.

There’s zero record label promotion coming out of Macola, just slabs o’ wax.

Unlike the rap coming out of NYC — LL, P.E., EPMD, whatever — the West Coast stuff isn’t made to be played on Walkman speakers. The sounds arranged to be heard while driving on the open road, not riding the iron horse. Too $hort and MC Hammer songs aren’t so busy on the top. They are loaded on the subterranean side, rolling, pornographically detailed bass and 808 drums that swell and envelope listeners when pumped from the speakers of car stereos.

There’s dough here, but don’t hold your breath waiting for Macola to be bought out. Ghetto Gold won’t get that big house overlooking The Hills. It might not get a meeting with the exec who has that house in The Hills. Macola money is more than enough though for the small ’hood operations that are the heart of West Coast rap. Amps of nightclubs are throbbing with the sounds of the 12-inch single’s low-end revolution.

Up is down, right is wrong and music moves forward by reaching back. Platters of vinyl, 12-inches and LPs alike, are selling underground like contraband at swap meets in Compton and indie record shops in Kansas City, MO, on consignment. Overseas deejays order the music by mail, spin it for tiny, sweat-soaked crowds of aficionado dancers.

Here is piecemeal genius, a sub-economy of cheaply made, high yield boogie. Local artists pass Macola’s owner a grand — less than the catering cost of a Whitesnake listening party— often in fives and 10s, and he directs them around back for their five hundred albums. If the deal works out? More orders, more dollars.

The city often looks all the same, when taken from a distance. On an unremarkable day in this unremarkable neighborhood, a manager of artists on the Macola, a 47-year-old Jew from Cleveland, meets a 5-5 crack dealer, recently retired, who looks 16. The kid from Compton climbs down from a Suzuki Samurai, looking barely old enough to drive it. He tells the talent manager that he’s looking to go legit — maybe start a record store.

The talent manager is skeptical. He’s a has-been on his second go-round in the record game. Going back to the 1960s, this man has encountered more wannabe moguls than he can shake a remainder bin at. Besides, he wasn’t entirely sold on this trend called hip-hop.

That’s not to say that someone with, say, $25,000 couldn’t do real well in this world of Macola.

The prospective investor Eric Eazy-E Wright, 27, tells the manager, who is called Jerry Heller, explains that he’s not just nigger rich. My money, Eric insists, is as long as this car is fresh. And, suddenly there’s something about the kid, a clean and focused spark. It hurts not a bit that Eric comes well recommended by Lonzo, the man behind half the dance records that sell anything from this neck of the woods. The men talk a little business. With a bit more sincerity than they have in the past, the Eric and Jerry shake hands on a deal.

And as the relentlessly gold-tinged light of L.A. falls on the industrial crossroads of Santa Monica and Vine, gangsta rap gets born. The new sound will move untold millions across the coming decades. It will provide mainstream America and — and every continent on the planet — with a necessary lesson useful things one can find in the trash.

—Donnell Alexander

Introduction

Funk Family Feud

"You are about to witness

the strength of street knowledge…"

-Dr. Dre

…and its weakness

-Bruce Williams

Yo, Bruce, Suge Knight said with a flinch of that trademark tic in his neck. His raspy, Compton drawl was inimitable. Let's go around here so I can talk to you, blood.

It was the late middle of the decade of fallen MCs and we were standing outside the Westwood offices of Interscope Records, in broad daylight. My main nigga Andre Young, aka Dr. Dre, had just escaped the roaring grease fire that was his and Suge's Death Row label to build his own independent joint called Aftermath. Well, not entirely independent, but that's another story.

Together the Death Row family had sold more than thirty million albums in less than five years, unheard of numbers for an upstart outfit. Nothing like our run would ever again grace the music biz. The bottom line hardly registered it yet, but times were starting to get lean over at Suge's Wilshire Boulevard building—the Death Row headquarters—with those blood-red address numbers standing so high: Dre was gone. Tupac was dead. Snoop Dogg, Death Row's third and final meal ticket, had left to go into business with New Orleans’ rote record maker Master P. Not even Tha Dogg Pound, which was poised to be the next great hip-hop duo, was together. All around him, the empire Suge had built so fast was showing more than cracks and fissures. The half-dozen lawsuits and criminal court cases he was involved in were fuckin' with his high. But the bodyguard-turned-mogal was early enough in the downslide that he was still very much feeling himself.

The Chronic, Doggystyle, Dog Phood, All Eyez on Me. More shows and videos than I could keep track of. And all of it happened so fast, in maybe six years. Tumultuous doesn't tell the half of it. Shit got ugly

Yet because of our history each, Dre and I were bound to share space with Suge, this cat who kept it real through the most gangsta of tactics. In 1997, if Suge wasn't satisfied, niggas tended to get hurt. He had money and power and demanded satisfaction.

And at this dusky moment, one of Planet Earth's top-ranked Bloods was trying to nudge me toward the most covert location he could scope out in crispy-clean Westside Los Angeles.

Suge, no disrespect, but I'm no dummy, man.

***

Thing is, though my years of being the man next to Dr. Dre, Suge Knight had treated me with more respect than he gave most in our inner circle. But, now we were into something new, O. G. Hollywood rap beef: Uncut family feud. What was once the greatest black business since Motown was now in post-detonation mode. And somehow Suge couldn't hear that Death Row was over.

I'd left my car with the Interscope valet just moments before to run errands connected with Dre's initial post-Death Row offering, Dr. Dre Presents . . . The Aftermath. The circumstances had a nigga in Rockwell mode. I always felt like someone was watchin' me. But I wasn't really trippin': The front-row seats I'd been afforded to hard-core rap's signature moments hipped me to the bag of tricks lugged around by this wily, dangerous gangster. Even more than the sex and drugs and blingy-est of bling, I'd seen violence that would curl a lesser brotha's toes. Muthafuckas will go too far -if they're allowed to go as far as they want. That's anybody.

And at the end of the day, I sorta respected Suge. Without him there couldn't have been a Death Row. No doubt, there wouldn't have been an Aftermath, either.

You wanna talk to me, I told Suge, we talk right here. I'm not going around no corner where you got fifty niggas with baseball bats. I've been around the system too long, dog. I'm not dumb. And I'm not going down like that.

***

How the fuck did I get here?

How did I, Bruce Williams from Palm Springs by way of rural Louisiana—former 4-H Club winner, former Jehovah's Witness, former army sergeant—get inside this crazy space? I couldn't say at the time. Probably just chocked my situation up to the toll that hip hop just seems to take. As much hip hop can give it might take. Exactin' tolls like a motherfucker. In the record industry, at least, everyone get fucked.

Chapter One

Straight Outta Bunkie

I wasn't the first or five hundredth young cat to come out to L.A. looking for something my family couldn't ever give me and end up staring at a special brand of trouble.

Two towns east of Los Angeles, Palm Springs and Indio, are where I was raised. In these sleepy towns—one a rich folks' tourist haven and the other a two-percent black farm town—my mom, Esther Lee Roberts, and step-dad, HQ, brought up me and my two brothers and sister. Intermittently, I lived with my grandmother in a minute Louisiana town called Bunkie.

I'm the only one of my siblings who had a different father. No one in my family tried to make me feel like an oddball, but it was simply my birthright to always feel designated as a man apart.

In grade school, most kids my age were smaller than me. Workouts weren't necessary for me to be ripped with muscles. And unlike my mother's children with my stepdad, I was on my way to easily eclipsing the six-foot mark. I never felt like I belonged with my age group, so by elementary school I was hanging out with older people.

My mom was the kind of person who cared about every little thing. Say she was out standing in the yard and some stranger walked up and said he needed help? She'd be worried if she couldn't do something about his trouble at that very moment. She would just marinate in minute shit like that. She cared too much––about other people. Herself? Well, that was something else altogether. She trapped herself in the world of caring about everybody, not having any fun. And when things didn't go her way, there would be a shitstorm.

Ma got real sick when I was about five years old. I went to live at my grandmother's house in Louisiana while my sister, my only sibling at that point, moved to an aunt's house in Las Vegas. At Grandma's house, all of her kids were grown and gone. My grandmother was tickled to death just having me around.

Mom stayed sick for about a year and a