http://www.dubcnn.com/interviews/jerryheller/
Good Interview. If you have not read his book yet, go get it. Very good read, it has some good stories in it. There are some things left out, but you will find out why in this interview.
JERRY HELLER (September 2006) | Interview By: Inspire
Dubcnn took some time to speak with one of the founders of Gangsta Rap through his work with Eazy E and Ruthless Records; Jerry Heller. Having been cited on countless occasions as the main reason behind N.W.A member feuds and eventually the groups break up we give them man himself chance to respond to his critics. We discuss his new book, talk about his experiences with Eazy and the group, Suge Knight and Death Row, Ruthless Records' rise and fall, Hip-Hop today and much more in this in-depth interview.
As ever you can read or listen to this exclusive Dubcnn interview and we urge you to leave feedback on our forums or email them to Inspire
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Interview was done by phone in September 2006.
Questions Asked By: Inspire
Jerry Heller gave Dubcnn a shoutout! Check That Here
Full Interview in Audio: Here
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Dubcnn: First of all, I’d just like to say that a lot of people are loving your book and feel that it has answered a lot of questions that have to this day been unanswered, however a lot of people are wondering why you didn’t mention anything about Tomica Wright in there?
No comment.
Dubcnn: What’s the deal with Ruthless Records nowadays, because we know that their website has been “under construction” for two years, do you have any idea what might be going on there?
I have no connection with them since December of 1999, when I settled my lawsuit with them, so I have no way of knowing anything that goes on and I have no contact with the people at Ruthless, but it would be a conjecture just to guess on my part, so I don’t know.
Dubcnn: Okay, was there a time before or after Eazy’s death that you could of purchased Ruthless Records?
Uhm, there was never any serious negotiations on anyone’s part as far as I know for me to buy Ruthless Records, no.
Dubcnn: A lot of people are wondering why you didn’t get any ex - N.W.A members to give a second opinion on your book such as DJ Yella to give a different side of the story so that every angle was covered?
All of those people have had ten or eleven years to say what they wanted to say, and I read several books recently like “Laurel Canyon” and “Hotel California”, where its all third person, so I just thought that the people who read this book would rather hear it from me than they would in third person kind of stuff, so I just made it my point of view, my side of the story for the first time.
Dubcnn: There are still a few questions that are to be answered that weren’t covered in the book, tell us about Suge Knight, how did he get hold of the contracts, its believed they were stolen but if this is true, were they not legally void?
Well there are several parts to that question that you just asked; he went up to the Ruthless lawyers office, Ira Selsky and forced Ira to turn over the contracts to him, for him to see, but you know the story in the book about Eazy being invited up to the constellation studio’s at Solar Records and that Eazy been forced under duress to sign away those contracts, for D.O.C, Michel’le and Dr. Dre, now I wasn’t there, all I know is what Eazy told me and our lawyers the next day.
Dubcnn: You mentioned in there that Eazy wanted to put a hit on Suge, do you think he was serious, and why did he not go through with it if he was?
He seemed to be serious when he said it, and it wasn’t something that he would normally joke about, I don’t think he was going to put a hit on him, I think he was seriously considering doing it himself, but I talked him out of it.
Dubcnn: So this was before or after the contract issues?
No, this was before the contract issues, he had anticipated problems from Suge, and Suge was already causing trouble between the Ruthless artists, so Eazy that had said that this guy was going to be a problem and I said with Eazy, look, lets look at this logically, we’ve built a big business and you’ve got a chance of losing everything by doing something like that and it makes no sense to me, and maybe I’m not a war time consigliere, but I would certainly advise against this and literally talked him out of it.
Dubcnn: Okay, we all know about the situation at Death Row, Suge has declared bankruptcy and the company has been seized, do you think ‘What goes around comes around’?
I don’t think anything that has happened to Suge financially can compensate for his bad acts.
Dubcnn: A lot of people actually wonder why Eazy terminated your contract, because this wasn’t mentioned in the book?
Well, you know I was told that towards his death, he signed a bunch of blank pieces of paper and people just filled in what they wanted, you know I never believed that the discharge letter which I got in mid to late January in 1995, while he was in the hospital, I always thought that either they were forged documents, forged isn’t exactly the word that I’m looking for, but they were invalid documents, or that he was just so weak from this terrible illness that he just couldn’t fight anymore, or didn’t know what he was doing, but I didn’t really believe that they were valid documents, but it didn’t matter to me because my friend and business associate was dying in the hospital, and of course he did succumb right after that, so my only purpose after that was to just get what was coming to me.
Dubcnn: Okay. Do you ever plan to write anymore books about N.W.A or Ruthless in the future?
Well, I’m thinking about it, but this book was a very, very long involved process and you know I’m 65 years old now, so there’s lots of things that I would like to do with this as its what I consider the twilight of my career, and writing a second book is pretty far down the list, I’m not excluding or precluding the fact that I might do that, but for me to take another two years or eighteen months out of my life right now to write another book, when this book pretty much tells everything that I wanted to tell, within the bounds of what’s legal and good taste, but I think for the time being I’m just going to leave it as this and work on promoting this book as much as I can.
Dubcnn: How come it has taken so long for the book to come out, because it’s been over ten years since Eazy died, how come so long?
Well it took me five years to settle with the estate, and of course during that period of time I was pretty much retired and just, you know lawsuits can really add up to be your full time business, I mean they take over your whole life. This was an expensive, complicated lawsuit and I know that my legal fees were close to one million dollars and the other side were several times what mine were, I think if I remember correctly that that’s what they were. Just like I ran Ruthless, one good project after another, I would rather work on something full time and make it a quality project, rather than spread myself too thin and work on a number of things and not do any of them as well as I would like.
Dubcnn: Okay, for those who might not have read your book, what percentage of Ruthless Records did you actually own?
At this point theres nothing that I can.. I signed a none-disclosure as part of the settlement, and I really can’t discuss that at all.
Dubcnn: Do you feel saddened about how Ruthless Records has turned out; it doesn’t even put out records anymore?
Well the thing that makes me saddened is that Eazy and I spent eight years of our lives building this company and I’m saddened that I had to write a book to protect his legacy.
Dubcnn: Okay, if Eazy was still alive now, where do you think he and Ruthless would be now, and do you think you would still be affiliated with them?
Oh I think that I certainly would be affiliated with him if he was healthy, I think that Ruthless was probably on its way to being the most successful start-up independent record label in history, and it certainly would of carried on in that same vein, I think that probably, if I had stepped into the background a little, Eazy could have probably put together some N.W.A reunion albums which was his consuming desire at the time that he got sick, that he do atleast one N.W.A reunion album.
Dubcnn: Yeah. Do you think Hip-Hop would be the same if he was still alive?
I think that Eazy was a man who made everything better that he touched, he made me better than I was, he made Ice Cube better than he was and he made Dr. Dre better than he was and he gave lots of people opportunities and he had the ability to believe in people and make more of people than they had made of themselves, and I’ve always said that as much as I like “The Chronic” and as much as I like some of Ice Cube’s earlier albums, and as successful as they were, none of them had the impact of the importance of “Str8 Outta Compton”.
Dubcnn: Definitely. How would you compare Hip-Hop today to the time when N.W.A was together?
Oh it’s a totally different thing. Hip-Hop today is big business and it’s no different today than Rock N Roll was after Sgt. Pepper. I mean a Snoop Dogg album costs as much to make as a Whitney Houston album, the videos cost more to make than Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda spent on Easy-Rider, and the same radio stations that play a Whitney Houston record will play a Snoop Dogg record. So obviously Hip-Hop now has filled that void that used to be Rock N Roll.
Dubcnn: Yeah, ‘cause at the time when N.W.A was coming about, there was still a lot to prove in terms of what Hip-Hop and Gangsta Rap was all about, do you think there is still something to prove in Hip-Hop or is it all about money and cars nowadays?
Well let’s just understand one thing, Hip-Hop isn’t just music, Hip-Hop was a graffiti art movement that started in the Bronx, so Hip-Hop is basically a way of life and rap music is part of that. I think that what’s going to happen is, a new form of Hip-Hop, probably Latino Hip-Hop is now going to take the place of the type of music that Ruthless Records started.
Dubcnn: Okay. Are you aware of any projects that Eazy might have been working on before he passed away?
Well he was working on several things with Julio G and Tony G and he felt that the music was going in sort of a Latino direction also, along with the fact that the economic integrity of the business was still intact in the Latino segment of Hip-Hop, so I think that’s what he was focusing on, and there’s no question in my mind, when I go to movies nowadays and think that Eazy would have been a huge movie star, he would have been an incredible producer and director and probably would have wound up writing some screenplays himself. He was a multi-talented guy and there’s not a day goes by when I don’t think about him and miss him, my wife and I talk about him all the time, as she was a very close friend of his also.
Dubcnn: Okay. Do you have any idea if the album, “Temporary Insanity” was ever finished? Because I heard that Dr. Dre was producing that as a sequel to the first album?
You know I think that when we were doing “Temporary Insanity”, which was towards the late part of ’91, I cant remember exactly when it was released, but I just think it came to the point, if you remember on that record there was a song called “Merry Muthaphukkin’ X-Mas”, with Rudy Ray Moore, Dolemite was on it, so I think it just got the point where Eric said, “You know, we need to put this out; were not going to wait till next Christmas to put this out”. So I think there were some time constraints there and he just put out as an E.P. sort of a work-in-progress and the fact that it came out at Christmas time with “Merry-Muthaphukkin’-X-Mas” on it made it sort of whimsical anyway, and I don’t think he took it that seriously and I think it was sort of a fun projects and you know, he went up against some time limitations and constraints and we put it out right before Christmas of that year.
Dubcnn: Okay, earlier in the year we did an interview with Lil-Eazy-E who said that the next day he was actually in talks with you about getting some unreleased tracks or an unreleased verse that he might be using for his album. Did you ever meet with Eazy?
I met with Eazy once, at Marie Callender's down by Virgin Records, when he was still signed there, basically it was he and I, Pete Farmer and Eazy’s manager, Bruce and I and I think it was myself and Garry Ballen, who was Eazy’s assistant and my assistant at Ruthless, and basically we just talked about his father and him playing some kind of major role in the movie I was working on. I don’t think we discussed any unreleased tracks for his album, although I don’t have any specific memory one way or another.
Dubcnn: Okay, do you actually own any unreleased Eazy-E tracks? ‘Cause I know that us fans would love to hear anything new from Eazy.
Is that a legal question, when you say “own”, or are you just asking out of a point of interest, because when you ask, “own”, you get into a very complicated area of the law as to who owns what, does the artist own the performance or does the person who paid for the record own the performance, and I’m not qualified to make those sorts of legal decisions and I think we should just leave it at that.
Dubcnn: Okay, if you could turn back time, what is one thing that you would actually have done differently at Ruthless?
Well, I obviously underestimated the relationship between Eazy and Dr. Dre, I thought that nobody could ever come between Eazy and Dre, they were as close as any two human beings could have been, and there was genuine brotherly love between them. So I think that, while I had talked to Eazy about Dre being a full-partner and things along that vein, I probably would have insisted that Eazy do whatever he had to do to make sure that Dre stayed because obviously Dr. Dre is the single most important producer of the rap era, I mean the man has made nothing but hits, since 1986, I think the only record he put out that wasn’t a huge hit was that Aftermath Record he put out right after he started Death Row. The man is the most important, creative genius of the entire rap era and obviously he was the most valuable asset of Ruthless Records, and I think that what I would have done is somehow talk to Eazy about making sure that Dr. Dre remained at Ruthless.
Dubcnn: Okay, just a few questions about Lil-Eazy. Do you know anything about the label he is on now? We know he was dropped from Virgin Records.
Well like you, I read the gossip columns *laughs* in “The Source” or whatever, first I heard he was in the mist of making a deal with 50 Cent, I don’t know what happened to that, I hear things but I don’t really have any day-to-day advisory contact with him, so I just hear what you hear and its always that the record is close to being out and he’s making a deal here and there, so I don’t know. I think he’s terrific rapper and his father would be proud of him.
Dubcnn: Yeah, I heard he had another record label or movement that he was putting out called “N.W.A Entertainment”, do you not have any idea about that or have you heard about that?
I have none at all, in fact I think I read that on Eazy-ECPT.com recently, but I really have no knowledge of that.
Dubcnn: Okay, moving onto the N.W.A movie that you mentioned, can you tell us about it, tell us about what you’ve got planned, is this a different type of project that Lil-Eazy was putting out, because we know that he actually wanted to put out a movie about Eazy-E as well.
I have no idea about his project, I obviously have *laughs* a vast knowledge about my own project, which is not an N.W.A movie, it is a relationship movie between a young Compton reported drug dealer and an almost middle-aged Jewish white man from the mid-west, that formed this company in this incredible unlikely relationship, that shouldn’t of worked but did, and as part of that movie there will of course be those years with N.W.A. It’s a part of that movie.
Dubcnn: A lot of people would be disappointed if the movie wasn’t on an epic scale with a big budget and a top quality director, how do you plan to sway the movie producers to actually buy the idea and make the movie be as big as it could possibly be?
Well here’s my thought’s right now, a movie doesn’t have to be a grand to be a quality movie, Clive Davis always said “there’s a difference between the word ‘cheap’ and the word ‘inexpensive’, it has to do with quality”, so just because something didn’t cost a lot of money, doesn’t mean that it isn’t quality, because if you remember your N.W.A history, “Str8 Outta Compton” cost $12,000 to make and “Eazy-Duz-It” cost $8,000, and “Str8 Outta Compton” has been called by the L.A Times “the most important album of the second half of the 20th century”, now myself, I would have to put it behind Sgt. Pepper, but certainly it’s a monumental, groundbreaking record and I’m certainly proud to be associated with it. The movie that I’m talking about making is an independent movie, so that puts it in a little different category than doing a studio movie. You know in a studio movie, $60,000,000 is probably a moderate studio movie, in the independent world, the world of Lions Gate and Crash which won the academy award last year, it was done in somewhere between 3 and $6,000,000, so somewhere between Crash and the average studio movie of $60,000,000 or whatever, is the movie that I’m planning to make, which is a movie that I can make just the way that I want it, I want to make it for say, in the $20,000,000 range, which is an ambitious project, very ambitious for an independent movie.
I know that the new Sharon Stone and Matthew Perry movie was made for $5,000,000, and the new one is being made for $4,000,000 or something, so it all depends on what kind of movie you are making. Now I have talked to George Hickenlooper as the director, and George is right now in post-production on “Factory Girl”, which is the Edie Sedgwick story, and he’s also done “The Mayor of Sunset Strip”, and he has also done a movie recently based in one of the Middle Eastern countries which is supposed to be unbelievable, and he also did “Dogtown”, he’s done a lot of really good movies and I like the sensitivity that he brings to projects, and I do have his permission to now say that he is associated with the project, and were in the final stages of negotiating his contract with his agent who is also the packaging agent for the movie endeavour. We’ve talked to several people about playing in the movie, one of whom is Lil-E, who I would to have be part of this project, my goal has always been to get Larenz Tate, who I think is one of our greatest American actors right now. I look in his eyes and I see Eazy in there, and certainly I would love to have him play Eazy-E. I would like to have Terrance Howard play Dr. Dre and he has been approached, we have no deal with any of those gentlemen, I’ve talked to Michael Clark Duncan and Vin Raynes and The Game about playing Suge Knight. I’m in the process of talking to Jessica Simpson about playing Gayle, my wife and you know the similarities are obvious there. We’ve talked to people as diverse as Bruce Willis and Adam Sandler and Adrian Brody about playing Jerry Heller in this movie.
Dubcnn: Okay and who can we expect to be on the actual soundtrack of the movie?
Well that’s another question that I’m not going to answer right now. I have no comment on that particular question.
Dubcnn: If N.W.A was ever to re-unite for one last album, do you ever think that you could be involved?
Well as far as I’m concerned I could be, and I’ve seen stranger things happen. I mean there’s a reason that the tour was called “When Hell Freezes Over”, because they never thought they would ever speak again, but I would never stand in the way of an N.W.A reunion album, but I don’t know how you can have an N.W.A reunion album without the conceptualiser of N.W.A, Eazy-E, here to be involved in it. So I’ve got to tell you, outside of an obvious financial kind of curiosity that I would have, I have no interest in being involved in any project that the past members of N.W.A might do, and I’m sure they have no plans to have me involved. I mean I still see in the new Fed Magazine, see Ice Cube talking shit about Jerry Heller, bullshit. I’m even considering taking some legal action against him now.
Dubcnn: So do you have any connection with any of the former members of N.W.A, apart from Ice Cube?
I haven’t seen Ren in many years, I obviously haven’t seen Ice Cube since the day that he left Ruthless, I run into Dre – I used to run into him more often because his mother lives just a couple of hundred yards from my house, so I do run into his mom and I see his sisters Shemica who has just had twins on Martin Luther King’s birthday, I think that she named one of the children “King” actually. I run into him at a gas station every once in a while and we just say “Hello”, shake hands and go our separate ways usually. Yella, I’ve had lunch with a couple of times and were as friendly as we always were, you know – your life moves on. When they were associated with me they were young adults, and so we don’t have very much in common and when we don’t have any kind of business in common, it’s not like I go and hang out with Dr. Dre.
Dubcnn: Okay and being Jewish did you ever feel offended by any of Ice Cube’s lyrics?
Well obviously “No Vaseline” is an anti-semitic song. I mean the ?? and the museum of tolerance, Rabbi Cooper and Rabbi Hier said it was an anti-semitic song, they classified it as such. That doesn’t mean that I think O’Shea Jackson is an anti-semitic, it doesn’t mean that I think that O’Shea Jackson is anti-Korean because he wrote “Black Korea”. I took that song very personal and I think that O’Shea Jackson was anti-Jerry Heller and pro-O’Shea Jackson. So I think that he used that to further his interest and I think he just does it to attempt at keep selling records. Obviously he’s not as popular as he used to be as a recording artist.
Dubcnn: Okay. Do you believe that Eazy could have actually of been murdered? Because a lot of people are actually wondering and there is a lot of speculation over it and they think that he could have actually of been injected with the AIDS virus and even Lil-Eazy doesn’t believe that he died of AIDS?
Well I think that there was a Jimmy Kimmel show recently and I’m not going to say that I quoted this, because I haven’t seen it personally, but I understand on Eazy-ECPT.com, they’re running a clip of a Jimmy Kimmel show, where Kimmel comes out in a bullet proof vest and Suge said to him, “you don’t need that Jimmy, we don’t do it that way anymore, we just get some bad blood and put it in a hypodermic, Eazy-E people”. Oh, I think that’s not only in bad taste, but I think that’s a despicable thing to say, but if that’s true – I would hope that the district attorney of the city of Los Angeles would look into it and I’ve always wondered why there was no autopsy after his death, which of course can only be approved by his family.
Dubcnn: Yeah, and none of the people who he was with at the time are believed to have had the AIDS virus either, so that’s why there is a lot of speculation over it.
Well I understand, and you probably know more about this than I do, that none of the women he was with tested positive for the HIV virus, he had a couple of children that were born after he died and none of them had the HIV virus, and I’ve heard that, and I don’t know this first hand, but I’ve heard that there’s some paperwork floating around that states that he wasn’t treated for HIV in the hospital, that he was treated for Bronchitis and was just given anti-biotics. So I think that part of another law-suit that another ex-employee of Ruthless filed, I think that those hospital records because semi-public knowledge, I’ve never seen them.
Dubcnn: Okay, moving on. Before Ruthless, what actually got you into music in the first place?
I think that music is the ultimate communication between people, I think that if you ever go back and look at the old Stax/Volt live at the Amphion Theatre in Paris, the audience reaction, you know? And Otis Redding telling me and saying to me, “Jerry, dig at those people don’t even speak English”. So I think that music is a form of communication and is the ultimate, and if you want to just prove it to yourself, go to a foreign movie without subtitles and see how much you understand. But I love music and I’ve always loved the music business, I’ve never really seriously done anything else. I’ve been in the music business since 1966, which is five decades, and I’ve loved every minute of it.
Dubcnn: Did you ever make any music by yourself, as in produced it?
Well there’s two things that I would draw to your attention, number one: when I was in elementary school and they used to sing the Star - Spangled Banner in class, they had the “Red-birds” which used to sing the words, the “Blue-birds” that used to hum the melody and they had the “Black-birds” that used to lip-sync the words. I was a “Black-bird”. And Elton John once said to me that I was the only man he ever met that couldn’t keep time on a tambourine, so I have no musical abilities at all.
Dubcnn: Okay, just a few random questions – what was the craziest thing, or the most amusing thing you saw when N.W.A went on tour?
Well I thought that the most ludicrous thing, by the end of tours I know brothers that sort of separate for a couple of months, it’s a very gruelling kind of process being on tour, and you know the four hundred mile jaunts on the busses and by the end of the tour everybody just wants to go their own separate way. When we were playing in Phoenix, which was right towards the end of the tour, probably in September of 1989, and we were in Phoenix and Atron Gregory was the tour manager, Atron Gregory was of course Tupac’s manager when he was in Digital Underground, Garry Ballen was the production manager and K.J was the head body-guard. We had two busses and by that time I had talked everybody into keeping the bullets on one bus and the weapons on another.
So K.J came back stage and it’s funny that when the boss is on the road, you know there’s lots of problems and if the boss isn’t there, all the problems seem to work themselves out by themselves. So there I am, and Bryan Turner is there and I’m in the production office going over the box-office statement with the promoter who I think was Nicky Masters or Eddie Haddad or something, and Nick Masters is now of course the president of Live Nation, but K.J came in and said, “were going to have problems tonight”, so I said “what’s the problem K.J?” and he said “Well, during the sound-check there was a gang guy in the audience who threw Ice Cube’s at Ice Cube”, so I said “Yeah, that’s real serious”. So the chain of command was, K.J would go to Garry Ballen, Garry Ballen would go to Atron Gregory, and if it was really serious Atron Gregory would go to me or else Atron would just solve it on its own. But K.J was back there asking for permission to unlock the bullets so they could unload the weapons, so this is at the very end, one of the last days of the tour and everybody was totally fried, and I’m standing there and K.J tells this story to Garry, and then to Atron. Atron turned to me and said “What do you think?”, so I said “I don’t know? Give them the bullets!” *laughs* I mean it was so ludicrous that I mean I had to laugh! *laugh* of course he didn’t give him the bullets but I said “Yeah, give them the bullets...”
Dubcnn: *laughs* Aight cool. What is one word of advice that you would give to anyone who wanted to get involved in the music industry?
The most important thing in being in the music business is your ability to relate to talent, you either have to it, or have to relate to it. I’ve always said, after all my years in the business that the only thing that Van Morrison and I had in common, and I pick out Van Morrison just as an example, is that we both like what he does. So our only basis for us relating to each other was the fact that I was one of the biggest Van Morrison fans in the history of the world, and so was he. You know in my day I never knew a musician who wasn’t on his tenth copy of “Moondance” and “Astral Weeks”, you know? So you know, I say relating to something, or being able to create something is very good. You know most of us, all we have to give is time, either you give your time creating something or you give your time representing something, so you better make sure that what you’re giving, your sixteen waking hours a day to is something that deserves that kind of effort.
Dubcnn: Okay, and last but not least, what is your all-time favourite N.W.A track?
I think that the track that I like the most, although there are lots of tracks that I like, like “No More ?’s”, there’s whimsical songs that I like. I think that I have to go back to the first song that Eazy played me which totally blew me away and that’s “Boyz N Tha Hood”.
Dubcnn: And do you have any last words for the people reading the interview?
Yeah, I think that this book that I’ve written is going to have the same kind of impact and importance as “Str8 Outta Compton”, I think that it’s probably the best book that’s been written about the music business, I think it’s written in a clear cut, objective style that really what I said was, here’s the way it happened – you make your own decision. At this stage in my life, I’m not running for office and I don’t really need my social security checks, so I just want everybody to read it and have fun, and make their own decisions as to say what the truth really was, and I wanted to protect the legacy Eric Wright, “Eazy-E”, who was my close friend and closer than any blood son of mine could of possible been, I just want to make sure his legacy was protected. Chuck Phillips from the L.A Times told me it was the best book he’s ever read.
There are people now that are on my MySpace site that tell my wife Gayle who runs that site, that this is the only book that they’ve ever read straight through, and to some of them it’s the first book they’ve ever really read, and that most of them might wind up finishing it in between a day and a half and three days, and they read it twice and they love it. A lot of people who have been antagonistic towards me in the past now see exactly what went down and see that the only thing that I did wrong was not writing this book in 1995 when Eazy passed away.
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Jerry Heller gave Dubcnn a shoutout! Check That Here
Full Interview in Audio: Here
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Good Interview. If you have not read his book yet, go get it. Very good read, it has some good stories in it. There are some things left out, but you will find out why in this interview.
JERRY HELLER (September 2006) | Interview By: Inspire
Dubcnn took some time to speak with one of the founders of Gangsta Rap through his work with Eazy E and Ruthless Records; Jerry Heller. Having been cited on countless occasions as the main reason behind N.W.A member feuds and eventually the groups break up we give them man himself chance to respond to his critics. We discuss his new book, talk about his experiences with Eazy and the group, Suge Knight and Death Row, Ruthless Records' rise and fall, Hip-Hop today and much more in this in-depth interview.
As ever you can read or listen to this exclusive Dubcnn interview and we urge you to leave feedback on our forums or email them to Inspire
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Interview was done by phone in September 2006.
Questions Asked By: Inspire
Jerry Heller gave Dubcnn a shoutout! Check That Here
Full Interview in Audio: Here
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Dubcnn: First of all, I’d just like to say that a lot of people are loving your book and feel that it has answered a lot of questions that have to this day been unanswered, however a lot of people are wondering why you didn’t mention anything about Tomica Wright in there?
No comment.
Dubcnn: What’s the deal with Ruthless Records nowadays, because we know that their website has been “under construction” for two years, do you have any idea what might be going on there?
I have no connection with them since December of 1999, when I settled my lawsuit with them, so I have no way of knowing anything that goes on and I have no contact with the people at Ruthless, but it would be a conjecture just to guess on my part, so I don’t know.
Dubcnn: Okay, was there a time before or after Eazy’s death that you could of purchased Ruthless Records?
Uhm, there was never any serious negotiations on anyone’s part as far as I know for me to buy Ruthless Records, no.
Dubcnn: A lot of people are wondering why you didn’t get any ex - N.W.A members to give a second opinion on your book such as DJ Yella to give a different side of the story so that every angle was covered?
All of those people have had ten or eleven years to say what they wanted to say, and I read several books recently like “Laurel Canyon” and “Hotel California”, where its all third person, so I just thought that the people who read this book would rather hear it from me than they would in third person kind of stuff, so I just made it my point of view, my side of the story for the first time.
Dubcnn: There are still a few questions that are to be answered that weren’t covered in the book, tell us about Suge Knight, how did he get hold of the contracts, its believed they were stolen but if this is true, were they not legally void?
Well there are several parts to that question that you just asked; he went up to the Ruthless lawyers office, Ira Selsky and forced Ira to turn over the contracts to him, for him to see, but you know the story in the book about Eazy being invited up to the constellation studio’s at Solar Records and that Eazy been forced under duress to sign away those contracts, for D.O.C, Michel’le and Dr. Dre, now I wasn’t there, all I know is what Eazy told me and our lawyers the next day.
Dubcnn: You mentioned in there that Eazy wanted to put a hit on Suge, do you think he was serious, and why did he not go through with it if he was?
He seemed to be serious when he said it, and it wasn’t something that he would normally joke about, I don’t think he was going to put a hit on him, I think he was seriously considering doing it himself, but I talked him out of it.
Dubcnn: So this was before or after the contract issues?
No, this was before the contract issues, he had anticipated problems from Suge, and Suge was already causing trouble between the Ruthless artists, so Eazy that had said that this guy was going to be a problem and I said with Eazy, look, lets look at this logically, we’ve built a big business and you’ve got a chance of losing everything by doing something like that and it makes no sense to me, and maybe I’m not a war time consigliere, but I would certainly advise against this and literally talked him out of it.
Dubcnn: Okay, we all know about the situation at Death Row, Suge has declared bankruptcy and the company has been seized, do you think ‘What goes around comes around’?
I don’t think anything that has happened to Suge financially can compensate for his bad acts.
Dubcnn: A lot of people actually wonder why Eazy terminated your contract, because this wasn’t mentioned in the book?
Well, you know I was told that towards his death, he signed a bunch of blank pieces of paper and people just filled in what they wanted, you know I never believed that the discharge letter which I got in mid to late January in 1995, while he was in the hospital, I always thought that either they were forged documents, forged isn’t exactly the word that I’m looking for, but they were invalid documents, or that he was just so weak from this terrible illness that he just couldn’t fight anymore, or didn’t know what he was doing, but I didn’t really believe that they were valid documents, but it didn’t matter to me because my friend and business associate was dying in the hospital, and of course he did succumb right after that, so my only purpose after that was to just get what was coming to me.
Dubcnn: Okay. Do you ever plan to write anymore books about N.W.A or Ruthless in the future?
Well, I’m thinking about it, but this book was a very, very long involved process and you know I’m 65 years old now, so there’s lots of things that I would like to do with this as its what I consider the twilight of my career, and writing a second book is pretty far down the list, I’m not excluding or precluding the fact that I might do that, but for me to take another two years or eighteen months out of my life right now to write another book, when this book pretty much tells everything that I wanted to tell, within the bounds of what’s legal and good taste, but I think for the time being I’m just going to leave it as this and work on promoting this book as much as I can.
Dubcnn: How come it has taken so long for the book to come out, because it’s been over ten years since Eazy died, how come so long?
Well it took me five years to settle with the estate, and of course during that period of time I was pretty much retired and just, you know lawsuits can really add up to be your full time business, I mean they take over your whole life. This was an expensive, complicated lawsuit and I know that my legal fees were close to one million dollars and the other side were several times what mine were, I think if I remember correctly that that’s what they were. Just like I ran Ruthless, one good project after another, I would rather work on something full time and make it a quality project, rather than spread myself too thin and work on a number of things and not do any of them as well as I would like.
Dubcnn: Okay, for those who might not have read your book, what percentage of Ruthless Records did you actually own?
At this point theres nothing that I can.. I signed a none-disclosure as part of the settlement, and I really can’t discuss that at all.
Dubcnn: Do you feel saddened about how Ruthless Records has turned out; it doesn’t even put out records anymore?
Well the thing that makes me saddened is that Eazy and I spent eight years of our lives building this company and I’m saddened that I had to write a book to protect his legacy.
Dubcnn: Okay, if Eazy was still alive now, where do you think he and Ruthless would be now, and do you think you would still be affiliated with them?
Oh I think that I certainly would be affiliated with him if he was healthy, I think that Ruthless was probably on its way to being the most successful start-up independent record label in history, and it certainly would of carried on in that same vein, I think that probably, if I had stepped into the background a little, Eazy could have probably put together some N.W.A reunion albums which was his consuming desire at the time that he got sick, that he do atleast one N.W.A reunion album.
Dubcnn: Yeah. Do you think Hip-Hop would be the same if he was still alive?
I think that Eazy was a man who made everything better that he touched, he made me better than I was, he made Ice Cube better than he was and he made Dr. Dre better than he was and he gave lots of people opportunities and he had the ability to believe in people and make more of people than they had made of themselves, and I’ve always said that as much as I like “The Chronic” and as much as I like some of Ice Cube’s earlier albums, and as successful as they were, none of them had the impact of the importance of “Str8 Outta Compton”.
Dubcnn: Definitely. How would you compare Hip-Hop today to the time when N.W.A was together?
Oh it’s a totally different thing. Hip-Hop today is big business and it’s no different today than Rock N Roll was after Sgt. Pepper. I mean a Snoop Dogg album costs as much to make as a Whitney Houston album, the videos cost more to make than Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda spent on Easy-Rider, and the same radio stations that play a Whitney Houston record will play a Snoop Dogg record. So obviously Hip-Hop now has filled that void that used to be Rock N Roll.
Dubcnn: Yeah, ‘cause at the time when N.W.A was coming about, there was still a lot to prove in terms of what Hip-Hop and Gangsta Rap was all about, do you think there is still something to prove in Hip-Hop or is it all about money and cars nowadays?
Well let’s just understand one thing, Hip-Hop isn’t just music, Hip-Hop was a graffiti art movement that started in the Bronx, so Hip-Hop is basically a way of life and rap music is part of that. I think that what’s going to happen is, a new form of Hip-Hop, probably Latino Hip-Hop is now going to take the place of the type of music that Ruthless Records started.
Dubcnn: Okay. Are you aware of any projects that Eazy might have been working on before he passed away?
Well he was working on several things with Julio G and Tony G and he felt that the music was going in sort of a Latino direction also, along with the fact that the economic integrity of the business was still intact in the Latino segment of Hip-Hop, so I think that’s what he was focusing on, and there’s no question in my mind, when I go to movies nowadays and think that Eazy would have been a huge movie star, he would have been an incredible producer and director and probably would have wound up writing some screenplays himself. He was a multi-talented guy and there’s not a day goes by when I don’t think about him and miss him, my wife and I talk about him all the time, as she was a very close friend of his also.
Dubcnn: Okay. Do you have any idea if the album, “Temporary Insanity” was ever finished? Because I heard that Dr. Dre was producing that as a sequel to the first album?
You know I think that when we were doing “Temporary Insanity”, which was towards the late part of ’91, I cant remember exactly when it was released, but I just think it came to the point, if you remember on that record there was a song called “Merry Muthaphukkin’ X-Mas”, with Rudy Ray Moore, Dolemite was on it, so I think it just got the point where Eric said, “You know, we need to put this out; were not going to wait till next Christmas to put this out”. So I think there were some time constraints there and he just put out as an E.P. sort of a work-in-progress and the fact that it came out at Christmas time with “Merry-Muthaphukkin’-X-Mas” on it made it sort of whimsical anyway, and I don’t think he took it that seriously and I think it was sort of a fun projects and you know, he went up against some time limitations and constraints and we put it out right before Christmas of that year.
Dubcnn: Okay, earlier in the year we did an interview with Lil-Eazy-E who said that the next day he was actually in talks with you about getting some unreleased tracks or an unreleased verse that he might be using for his album. Did you ever meet with Eazy?
I met with Eazy once, at Marie Callender's down by Virgin Records, when he was still signed there, basically it was he and I, Pete Farmer and Eazy’s manager, Bruce and I and I think it was myself and Garry Ballen, who was Eazy’s assistant and my assistant at Ruthless, and basically we just talked about his father and him playing some kind of major role in the movie I was working on. I don’t think we discussed any unreleased tracks for his album, although I don’t have any specific memory one way or another.
Dubcnn: Okay, do you actually own any unreleased Eazy-E tracks? ‘Cause I know that us fans would love to hear anything new from Eazy.
Is that a legal question, when you say “own”, or are you just asking out of a point of interest, because when you ask, “own”, you get into a very complicated area of the law as to who owns what, does the artist own the performance or does the person who paid for the record own the performance, and I’m not qualified to make those sorts of legal decisions and I think we should just leave it at that.
Dubcnn: Okay, if you could turn back time, what is one thing that you would actually have done differently at Ruthless?
Well, I obviously underestimated the relationship between Eazy and Dr. Dre, I thought that nobody could ever come between Eazy and Dre, they were as close as any two human beings could have been, and there was genuine brotherly love between them. So I think that, while I had talked to Eazy about Dre being a full-partner and things along that vein, I probably would have insisted that Eazy do whatever he had to do to make sure that Dre stayed because obviously Dr. Dre is the single most important producer of the rap era, I mean the man has made nothing but hits, since 1986, I think the only record he put out that wasn’t a huge hit was that Aftermath Record he put out right after he started Death Row. The man is the most important, creative genius of the entire rap era and obviously he was the most valuable asset of Ruthless Records, and I think that what I would have done is somehow talk to Eazy about making sure that Dr. Dre remained at Ruthless.
Dubcnn: Okay, just a few questions about Lil-Eazy. Do you know anything about the label he is on now? We know he was dropped from Virgin Records.
Well like you, I read the gossip columns *laughs* in “The Source” or whatever, first I heard he was in the mist of making a deal with 50 Cent, I don’t know what happened to that, I hear things but I don’t really have any day-to-day advisory contact with him, so I just hear what you hear and its always that the record is close to being out and he’s making a deal here and there, so I don’t know. I think he’s terrific rapper and his father would be proud of him.
Dubcnn: Yeah, I heard he had another record label or movement that he was putting out called “N.W.A Entertainment”, do you not have any idea about that or have you heard about that?
I have none at all, in fact I think I read that on Eazy-ECPT.com recently, but I really have no knowledge of that.
Dubcnn: Okay, moving onto the N.W.A movie that you mentioned, can you tell us about it, tell us about what you’ve got planned, is this a different type of project that Lil-Eazy was putting out, because we know that he actually wanted to put out a movie about Eazy-E as well.
I have no idea about his project, I obviously have *laughs* a vast knowledge about my own project, which is not an N.W.A movie, it is a relationship movie between a young Compton reported drug dealer and an almost middle-aged Jewish white man from the mid-west, that formed this company in this incredible unlikely relationship, that shouldn’t of worked but did, and as part of that movie there will of course be those years with N.W.A. It’s a part of that movie.
Dubcnn: A lot of people would be disappointed if the movie wasn’t on an epic scale with a big budget and a top quality director, how do you plan to sway the movie producers to actually buy the idea and make the movie be as big as it could possibly be?
Well here’s my thought’s right now, a movie doesn’t have to be a grand to be a quality movie, Clive Davis always said “there’s a difference between the word ‘cheap’ and the word ‘inexpensive’, it has to do with quality”, so just because something didn’t cost a lot of money, doesn’t mean that it isn’t quality, because if you remember your N.W.A history, “Str8 Outta Compton” cost $12,000 to make and “Eazy-Duz-It” cost $8,000, and “Str8 Outta Compton” has been called by the L.A Times “the most important album of the second half of the 20th century”, now myself, I would have to put it behind Sgt. Pepper, but certainly it’s a monumental, groundbreaking record and I’m certainly proud to be associated with it. The movie that I’m talking about making is an independent movie, so that puts it in a little different category than doing a studio movie. You know in a studio movie, $60,000,000 is probably a moderate studio movie, in the independent world, the world of Lions Gate and Crash which won the academy award last year, it was done in somewhere between 3 and $6,000,000, so somewhere between Crash and the average studio movie of $60,000,000 or whatever, is the movie that I’m planning to make, which is a movie that I can make just the way that I want it, I want to make it for say, in the $20,000,000 range, which is an ambitious project, very ambitious for an independent movie.
I know that the new Sharon Stone and Matthew Perry movie was made for $5,000,000, and the new one is being made for $4,000,000 or something, so it all depends on what kind of movie you are making. Now I have talked to George Hickenlooper as the director, and George is right now in post-production on “Factory Girl”, which is the Edie Sedgwick story, and he’s also done “The Mayor of Sunset Strip”, and he has also done a movie recently based in one of the Middle Eastern countries which is supposed to be unbelievable, and he also did “Dogtown”, he’s done a lot of really good movies and I like the sensitivity that he brings to projects, and I do have his permission to now say that he is associated with the project, and were in the final stages of negotiating his contract with his agent who is also the packaging agent for the movie endeavour. We’ve talked to several people about playing in the movie, one of whom is Lil-E, who I would to have be part of this project, my goal has always been to get Larenz Tate, who I think is one of our greatest American actors right now. I look in his eyes and I see Eazy in there, and certainly I would love to have him play Eazy-E. I would like to have Terrance Howard play Dr. Dre and he has been approached, we have no deal with any of those gentlemen, I’ve talked to Michael Clark Duncan and Vin Raynes and The Game about playing Suge Knight. I’m in the process of talking to Jessica Simpson about playing Gayle, my wife and you know the similarities are obvious there. We’ve talked to people as diverse as Bruce Willis and Adam Sandler and Adrian Brody about playing Jerry Heller in this movie.
Dubcnn: Okay and who can we expect to be on the actual soundtrack of the movie?
Well that’s another question that I’m not going to answer right now. I have no comment on that particular question.
Dubcnn: If N.W.A was ever to re-unite for one last album, do you ever think that you could be involved?
Well as far as I’m concerned I could be, and I’ve seen stranger things happen. I mean there’s a reason that the tour was called “When Hell Freezes Over”, because they never thought they would ever speak again, but I would never stand in the way of an N.W.A reunion album, but I don’t know how you can have an N.W.A reunion album without the conceptualiser of N.W.A, Eazy-E, here to be involved in it. So I’ve got to tell you, outside of an obvious financial kind of curiosity that I would have, I have no interest in being involved in any project that the past members of N.W.A might do, and I’m sure they have no plans to have me involved. I mean I still see in the new Fed Magazine, see Ice Cube talking shit about Jerry Heller, bullshit. I’m even considering taking some legal action against him now.
Dubcnn: So do you have any connection with any of the former members of N.W.A, apart from Ice Cube?
I haven’t seen Ren in many years, I obviously haven’t seen Ice Cube since the day that he left Ruthless, I run into Dre – I used to run into him more often because his mother lives just a couple of hundred yards from my house, so I do run into his mom and I see his sisters Shemica who has just had twins on Martin Luther King’s birthday, I think that she named one of the children “King” actually. I run into him at a gas station every once in a while and we just say “Hello”, shake hands and go our separate ways usually. Yella, I’ve had lunch with a couple of times and were as friendly as we always were, you know – your life moves on. When they were associated with me they were young adults, and so we don’t have very much in common and when we don’t have any kind of business in common, it’s not like I go and hang out with Dr. Dre.
Dubcnn: Okay and being Jewish did you ever feel offended by any of Ice Cube’s lyrics?
Well obviously “No Vaseline” is an anti-semitic song. I mean the ?? and the museum of tolerance, Rabbi Cooper and Rabbi Hier said it was an anti-semitic song, they classified it as such. That doesn’t mean that I think O’Shea Jackson is an anti-semitic, it doesn’t mean that I think that O’Shea Jackson is anti-Korean because he wrote “Black Korea”. I took that song very personal and I think that O’Shea Jackson was anti-Jerry Heller and pro-O’Shea Jackson. So I think that he used that to further his interest and I think he just does it to attempt at keep selling records. Obviously he’s not as popular as he used to be as a recording artist.
Dubcnn: Okay. Do you believe that Eazy could have actually of been murdered? Because a lot of people are actually wondering and there is a lot of speculation over it and they think that he could have actually of been injected with the AIDS virus and even Lil-Eazy doesn’t believe that he died of AIDS?
Well I think that there was a Jimmy Kimmel show recently and I’m not going to say that I quoted this, because I haven’t seen it personally, but I understand on Eazy-ECPT.com, they’re running a clip of a Jimmy Kimmel show, where Kimmel comes out in a bullet proof vest and Suge said to him, “you don’t need that Jimmy, we don’t do it that way anymore, we just get some bad blood and put it in a hypodermic, Eazy-E people”. Oh, I think that’s not only in bad taste, but I think that’s a despicable thing to say, but if that’s true – I would hope that the district attorney of the city of Los Angeles would look into it and I’ve always wondered why there was no autopsy after his death, which of course can only be approved by his family.
Dubcnn: Yeah, and none of the people who he was with at the time are believed to have had the AIDS virus either, so that’s why there is a lot of speculation over it.
Well I understand, and you probably know more about this than I do, that none of the women he was with tested positive for the HIV virus, he had a couple of children that were born after he died and none of them had the HIV virus, and I’ve heard that, and I don’t know this first hand, but I’ve heard that there’s some paperwork floating around that states that he wasn’t treated for HIV in the hospital, that he was treated for Bronchitis and was just given anti-biotics. So I think that part of another law-suit that another ex-employee of Ruthless filed, I think that those hospital records because semi-public knowledge, I’ve never seen them.
Dubcnn: Okay, moving on. Before Ruthless, what actually got you into music in the first place?
I think that music is the ultimate communication between people, I think that if you ever go back and look at the old Stax/Volt live at the Amphion Theatre in Paris, the audience reaction, you know? And Otis Redding telling me and saying to me, “Jerry, dig at those people don’t even speak English”. So I think that music is a form of communication and is the ultimate, and if you want to just prove it to yourself, go to a foreign movie without subtitles and see how much you understand. But I love music and I’ve always loved the music business, I’ve never really seriously done anything else. I’ve been in the music business since 1966, which is five decades, and I’ve loved every minute of it.
Dubcnn: Did you ever make any music by yourself, as in produced it?
Well there’s two things that I would draw to your attention, number one: when I was in elementary school and they used to sing the Star - Spangled Banner in class, they had the “Red-birds” which used to sing the words, the “Blue-birds” that used to hum the melody and they had the “Black-birds” that used to lip-sync the words. I was a “Black-bird”. And Elton John once said to me that I was the only man he ever met that couldn’t keep time on a tambourine, so I have no musical abilities at all.
Dubcnn: Okay, just a few random questions – what was the craziest thing, or the most amusing thing you saw when N.W.A went on tour?
Well I thought that the most ludicrous thing, by the end of tours I know brothers that sort of separate for a couple of months, it’s a very gruelling kind of process being on tour, and you know the four hundred mile jaunts on the busses and by the end of the tour everybody just wants to go their own separate way. When we were playing in Phoenix, which was right towards the end of the tour, probably in September of 1989, and we were in Phoenix and Atron Gregory was the tour manager, Atron Gregory was of course Tupac’s manager when he was in Digital Underground, Garry Ballen was the production manager and K.J was the head body-guard. We had two busses and by that time I had talked everybody into keeping the bullets on one bus and the weapons on another.
So K.J came back stage and it’s funny that when the boss is on the road, you know there’s lots of problems and if the boss isn’t there, all the problems seem to work themselves out by themselves. So there I am, and Bryan Turner is there and I’m in the production office going over the box-office statement with the promoter who I think was Nicky Masters or Eddie Haddad or something, and Nick Masters is now of course the president of Live Nation, but K.J came in and said, “were going to have problems tonight”, so I said “what’s the problem K.J?” and he said “Well, during the sound-check there was a gang guy in the audience who threw Ice Cube’s at Ice Cube”, so I said “Yeah, that’s real serious”. So the chain of command was, K.J would go to Garry Ballen, Garry Ballen would go to Atron Gregory, and if it was really serious Atron Gregory would go to me or else Atron would just solve it on its own. But K.J was back there asking for permission to unlock the bullets so they could unload the weapons, so this is at the very end, one of the last days of the tour and everybody was totally fried, and I’m standing there and K.J tells this story to Garry, and then to Atron. Atron turned to me and said “What do you think?”, so I said “I don’t know? Give them the bullets!” *laughs* I mean it was so ludicrous that I mean I had to laugh! *laugh* of course he didn’t give him the bullets but I said “Yeah, give them the bullets...”
Dubcnn: *laughs* Aight cool. What is one word of advice that you would give to anyone who wanted to get involved in the music industry?
The most important thing in being in the music business is your ability to relate to talent, you either have to it, or have to relate to it. I’ve always said, after all my years in the business that the only thing that Van Morrison and I had in common, and I pick out Van Morrison just as an example, is that we both like what he does. So our only basis for us relating to each other was the fact that I was one of the biggest Van Morrison fans in the history of the world, and so was he. You know in my day I never knew a musician who wasn’t on his tenth copy of “Moondance” and “Astral Weeks”, you know? So you know, I say relating to something, or being able to create something is very good. You know most of us, all we have to give is time, either you give your time creating something or you give your time representing something, so you better make sure that what you’re giving, your sixteen waking hours a day to is something that deserves that kind of effort.
Dubcnn: Okay, and last but not least, what is your all-time favourite N.W.A track?
I think that the track that I like the most, although there are lots of tracks that I like, like “No More ?’s”, there’s whimsical songs that I like. I think that I have to go back to the first song that Eazy played me which totally blew me away and that’s “Boyz N Tha Hood”.
Dubcnn: And do you have any last words for the people reading the interview?
Yeah, I think that this book that I’ve written is going to have the same kind of impact and importance as “Str8 Outta Compton”, I think that it’s probably the best book that’s been written about the music business, I think it’s written in a clear cut, objective style that really what I said was, here’s the way it happened – you make your own decision. At this stage in my life, I’m not running for office and I don’t really need my social security checks, so I just want everybody to read it and have fun, and make their own decisions as to say what the truth really was, and I wanted to protect the legacy Eric Wright, “Eazy-E”, who was my close friend and closer than any blood son of mine could of possible been, I just want to make sure his legacy was protected. Chuck Phillips from the L.A Times told me it was the best book he’s ever read.
There are people now that are on my MySpace site that tell my wife Gayle who runs that site, that this is the only book that they’ve ever read straight through, and to some of them it’s the first book they’ve ever really read, and that most of them might wind up finishing it in between a day and a half and three days, and they read it twice and they love it. A lot of people who have been antagonistic towards me in the past now see exactly what went down and see that the only thing that I did wrong was not writing this book in 1995 when Eazy passed away.
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Jerry Heller gave Dubcnn a shoutout! Check That Here
Full Interview in Audio: Here
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