Stars lived up to ‘gangsta’ label
AFTER MORE than a half-dozen books and a hit Hollywood film, what more could be said about N.W.A, the West Coast rap group that put the gangsta into gansta rap? Quite a lot, it turns out. Ben Westhoff spent five years researching his new book, “Original Gangstas: The Untold Story of Dr. Dre, Eazy-E, Ice Cube, Tupac Shakur, and the Birth of West Coast Rap.” His time was well spent. Westhoff manages to knit together all the group’s outsized personalities, feuds, fistfights and drama into a stunning and entertaining read.
There’s Eazy-E, the cool-headed crack dealer who used to walk around with $2,000 stuffed into his socks.
At 5-feet-4, the kid named Eric Wright knew what it took to get respect. He talked tough and amassed flashy cars, clothes and sunglasses.
But Westhoff describes a more complicated figure than most fans know. In his early 20s, Wright would wake up early to read the Los Angeles Times. He didn’t get high and didn’t drink. Later as Eazy-E, the 40-ounce bottle of malt liquor he brandished onstage was actually apple juice.
He only started messing around with rapping after slinging drugs got too stressful.
Problem was, Wright couldn’t rap. Dr. Dre coached him through Ice Cube’s “Boyz-n-the-Hood.” Wright used his drug money to press 10,000 vinyls.
By Westhoff’s telling, Dr. Dre, real name Andre Young, was a brilliant musician but a nasty, nasty man. At 17, he had his first child, Curtis, whom he didn’t acknowledge for decades. By then, Dre was busy seducing 14-year-old Lisa Johnson. Johnson gave birth in 1983, but by the time she was pregnant again, she discovered another women was also carrying Dre’s child.
Dre repeatedly beat Johnson during that pregnancy and again after she became pregnant a third time and was hiding out with an aunt.
Michel’le Toussaint has bravely gone public, often and loudly, with the story of her repeated abuse at the hands of Dre.
Toussaint, who had a son, Marcel, with Dre and later married Suge Knight, says Dre repeatedly beat her and once broke her nose so badly she had to have a nose job. One night he fired a shot that barely missed her.
Then came the public beatings of rapper Tairrie B and television host Dee Barnes.
Tairrie B had signed with Eazy E’s label, Ruthless Records. She and Dre got into a vicious fight at a Grammys after-party in 1990. Dre punched her “hard, really” hard in the eye and followed up with a shot to the mouth that sent her sprawling to the ground. Barnes might have gotten it even worse. She tells a sanitized version of what actually happened the horrific night in 1991 when Dre savagely beat her at a record-release party in a West Hollywood nightclub.
Dre wasn’t happy with a segment about N.W.A that Barnes hosted on her show “Pump It Up.” Instead of a hello, Dre greeted Barnes with a punch to her face so hard that she went down like a sack of potatoes. He then grabbed her by the hair, repeatedly slamming her into a brick wall.
His bodyguard held back the crowd while he kicked her and tried to push her down a flight of stairs. She fled to the bathroom and Dre came after her, beating her more. “I was thinking, ‘He’s trying to kill me,’ ” Barnes recalls. Dre was hustled out before the cops and an ambulance arrived — and the court gave him a a genius in the studio. While Eazy-E wrist-slap sentence of community is widely hailed as the visionary service. and marketing force that drove
While Dre’s long, happy marriage N.W.A, it was Dre who shrewdly to Nicole Threatt has produced focused on producing music that two children, he only grudgingly would also appeal to white youths. supported his out-of-wedlock The white suburban audience children. that embraced N.W.A was a phenomenon
In 2004, Dre, badly shaken by Dre strategized for by an assault he believed Suge Knight white-testing his music. had paid for, showed up at One white Ruthless Record employee Johnson’s home at midnight, told the author that Dre promising $500,000 to the family would bring him out to his Nissan of four. Pathfinder to play the group’s latest The money never materialized. work. Despite his brutal history with “You think white kids will like women, there’s no question Dre is this?” he’d ask.
They called it gangsta rap for a reason. When N.W.A hit the stage, they carried fake guns, but their tour bus was loaded for war with automatic and semiautomatics.
Eazy wanted his guns fitted out with red-eyes and night vision.
One guy who got a look at the arsenal blurted out, “What kind of tour are you guys going on? Vietnam?”
Their manager, Jerry Heller, wisely made sure the guns were on one bus, the ammunition on another.
Heller, vilified in the movie, “Straight Outta Compton,” had a deeply complicated, father-son relationship with Eazy. Sure as shooting, Suge Knight didn’t do well by Dre when he muscled him out of Ruthless.
No question Heller could roll with anything Eazy threw off. Eazy once summoned Heller to his hotel suite to discuss royalty statements. When the manager arrived, his client was being fellated on the toilet.
When Eazy ended it with Heller, not everyone thought it a wise move. Even Eazy’s widow, Tomica Woods Wright, who in the movie, at least, played a major role in convincing Eazy to move on, now says she regrets that Heller wasn’t managing the company when the rapper died.
Westhoff’s exhaustive reporting uncovered several intriguing tidbits that “Straight Outta Compton” glossed over.
In the movie, for instance, Cube is shown busting up Priority’s office with a baseball bat. But Bryan Turner, its head, said he saw Cube carefully selecting his targets, only going for the cheapest objects in any room.
Meanwhile, Knight insinuated himself into Ruthless. No ques-