The Dark Story of Eminem (13 page)

Dr. Dre was in a crisis of his own when Eminem entered his life, a tailspin he might not have pulled out of. Born in 1965 in Compton, one of three children of his single mother, who christened him Andre Young, Dre had been a basically amiable youth, secure inside his lone parent’s family in a way Marshall never was. One of his earliest memories was of DJing for his party-loving mother aged four, flipping from one seven-inch single to the next, learning how music flowed. He would sleep with headphones on. And, though he moved between Blood and Crip neighbourhoods in the years when their rivalry turned to mass slaughter, gangsta-rap’s future king steered clear of trouble, and stuck to his musical ambitions. Even when he helped create the sound of Niggaz With Attitude in his early twenties, putting Compton’s gang culture on the global map, Dre (who had by then awarded himself his doctorate, in homage to basketball great Julius “Dr. J” Erving) was a peaceable young man.

But as N.W.A.’s 1988 LP
Straight Outta Compton
and its successors showered sudden wealth on its makers, along with adoration from young fans like Marshall, the lifelong division in Dre’s head between records and reality blurred. He was encouraged in this by the brutal man who became his employer, Marion “Suge” Knight. The most feared and destructive individual in hip-hop, whose throttling hand was only removed from the genre by a 1997 jail-term, the mountainous Knight was an associate of real Compton Bloods. He latched onto Dre as his way into hip-hop’s vast market, using protection racket threats to release the Doctor from his old label, Ruthless. Knight then made Dre the production powerhouse behind his Death Row Records. For Dre’s solo début,
The Chronic
(1992), Death Row went into partnership with Jimmy Iovine’s Time-Warner affiliated Interscope, and over the next few years, all these future players in the Eminem story would be soiled by rumoured association with violence, intimidation, gangsterism or greed.

Dre’s own record in this period was brainless and despicable, a far cry from the cuddly figure familiar from later Eminem videos. Most notoriously, in December 1990, while still with N.W.A., he coldly battered the MTV presenter Dee Barnes, at an industry party. He felt Barnes, a friend of his, had disrespected his group and so, in Barnes’ own account in Ronin Ro’s book
Have Gun Will Travel
, let Knight punch the man she was with, while he took care of the girl. Apparently drunk, Dre, a tall, burly man, grabbed Barnes by her neck and hair, and started smashing her face into a brick wall. As she stumbled to a stairway, he tried to throw her down it. Then he chased her into the Ladies’ toilets, grabbed her hair and punched her in the face, beating her till associates hustled him away. Dre denied her charges, in lazily unconvincing terms, but later settled with Barnes out of court. “There’s a lot of women that he beat up,” Barnes told Ro, “a lot that he smacked around. But I’m the one that fucking pressed charges.” Dre eventually admitted to
Rolling Stone
, with something short of remorse: “I was in the wrong, but it’s not like I broke the bitch’s arm.”

For the next few years, Dre’s production style, meticulously refitting Seventies funk for the slow-rolling tempo and swirling paranoia of Nineties LA, made him hip-hop’s man with the golden touch;
The Chronic
and his protégé Snoop Doggy Dogg’s 1993
Doggystyle
alone made Death Row $113 million. But the criminal company he kept at the label – exactly the people he had so carefully avoided growing up – made his life stagger out of control. In Death Row’s bunker-like headquarters, and their offices at Interscope, Knight orchestrated terrifying beatings and, it was even rumoured, rapes of black male underlings and associates. White Interscope executives like Iovine, Ro suggests, turned deaf ears to the screams under their roof, so long as the profits rolled in. And, in his new millionaire’s mansion, Dre too partied with Knight’s tame Bloods, becoming vacant on spliff and drink while they trashed, set fire to, fought in, fucked in, and turned the stereo up in his exclusive home.

Dre sank further into criminal ways himself. In 1992, he was put under house arrest for breaking record producer Damon Thomas’ jaw, after Thomas caught Dre fucking his girlfriend. In 1994, a drunken high-speed car chase with the LAPD ended with Dre – in a symbol of his life – driving over a cliff, and being sentenced to 180 nights at a halfway house, one step away from real jail-time.

Looking back in 2000 for
NME
, Dre was asked if, meeting him now, he would like the wild man he’d been then. “I would like the person but I would hate his ways,” he said, taken aback. “The immaturity, the fucking, um, because I was wild, I was a wild kid, man. Obnoxious, wild, careless – I was really obnoxious. You got to realise that when I was 20 years old, I had a house, a Mercedes, a Corvette and a million dollars in the bank. And taking a guy who grew up the way I did, out of Compton and put him in this fucking mansion, you couldn’t tell me shit at that time. It was pretty bad, actually, now I think about it. But I got through it. I grew up.”

Dre’s time in the halfway house helped arrest his self-destructive spiral. So, in 1996, he acrimoniously left Death Row to strike his own deal with Interscope, with his own label, Aftermath. The same year, as Knight faced nine years in jail for leading Tupac and others in beating a man in Vegas the night Tupac was shot dead, and federal agents investigated a drug dealer’s investment in Death Row, Iovine’s Interscope, too, severed their ties with Knight’s label.

Knight’s incarceration in 1997 seemed to close this dirty chapter in hip-hop history. But for Dre, a second decline was just beginning. For gangsta-rap’s largely voyeuristic, white audiences, after all, beating up women, crashing cars and associating with thugs were positive traits for a performer. Dre was just keeping it “real”. So when the previously failure-proof Doctor’s next two records,
Dr. Dre Presents The Aftermath
and
The Firm
, revealed his new, positive attitude, they were derided, and flopped. In 1998, Dre had saved his soul, but as a result seemed set to lose his career.

If Marshall’s tape had found its way to Interscope and Dre a year earlier in this sordid narrative, things might have been very different. As it was, the menacing influence of Knight, who had corrupted several artists, including Dre, Tupac and even Vanilla Ice, had been removed. Iovine, though still courting controversy with the goth-rock shock tactics of Marilyn Manson, no longer let gun-toting Bloods into his building. And Dre, almost as much as Marshall, was focused on finding a hit. When he heard that white boy’s tape, he knew what to do.

The story of just how Dre found his star, when it was first told, had all the supernatural luck and judgement of a Hollywood fable. It was said Dre had been driving through LA, surveying his kingdom, when he happened to hear Marshall’s performance on the
Sway & Tech
radio show, the morning after his Rap Olympics failure. Before Marshall could vanish to Detroit, Dre tracked down his hotel room, and phoned him up. In another version, the demo Marshall had handed to Dan Geistlinger in LA fell to the floor of Iovine’s garage, where it lay till Dre saw it, and somehow knew he should place it in a tape deck.

The reality was more prosaic, of course. It was Geistlinger’s attendance at the Rap Olympics, doing the spadework the likes of Dre and Iovine had no time for, which made a fortune for all concerned.
The Slim Shady EP
demo made its way from him to Iovine, who played it to Dre. Even when telling this true tale, Dre couldn’t resist the grand gesture. “In my entire career in the music industry,” he reminisced to
Rolling Stone
, “I have never found anything from a demo tape of a CD. When Jimmy played this, I said, ‘Find him. Now.’” As the Bass Brothers’ phone number was on the cassette, it didn’t take Sherlock Holmes.

One other factor may explain the gap between Geistlinger getting the tape in October 1997, and Jeff Bass telling Marshall to pack his bags to meet Dre in LA, four months later. “When we went to Interscope, we worked him as the Marilyn Manson of rap,” Marky Bass confided to the
Sydney Sun-Herald
, as he explained how the Basses “came up with the idea of shock rap”, and encouraged Marshall’s Shady side, because of its commercial appeal.

No doubt such considerations were discussed at length inside the Interscope building, while back in Detroit the object of their calculations contemplated poverty and suicide. The Presley-like potential of a white rapper of such filthy skill was lost on no one, and when Interscope did reveal Eminem to the world, nothing in their campaign would be left to chance. But when Marshall was summoned to LA, his first taste of his dreams was still clean.

“When I met Dre in the Interscope offices, I was awestruck,” he told
NME
. “I was such a big fan. He thought I didn’t like him! I was like, ‘Dog, you’re a living legend, how am I supposed to act?’ “

The suddenness of it all was remembered by Bizarre. “He was missing from Detroit for three weeks. Nowhere to be found. Then he just up and called out of the blue: ‘Yo, man, I just signed with DR. DRE! He’s got this fresh condo out here, you got to see it …!’ “

Marshall was signed to Dre’s Interscope subsidiary, Aftermath, soon after his arrival. In rap circles, the question of exactly who was helping whom was soon being asked. “I wouldn’t say I was bringing Dre back,” Marshall would protest to the
Launch
website, once their work together was a success. “I don’t think he ever left. ‘Phone Tap’, on the last album,
The Firm
, was dope to me. Dre basically saved my life; my shit was going nowhere. I was reaching a boiling point, doing a lot of drugs and fucked up shit because I was so depressed. So when I say Dre saved my life, I mean he
literally
saved my life, and I feel like I owe him a lot. Dre took me in and taught me a lot, not just rap-wise, but business-wise. Whatever I can do to return the favour, I’m here.”

“I felt I brought something out of Dre that he always had in him,” he added to
The Source
. “I just helped bring it out again, and he did the same for me. I learned to do things with my voice that I never thought possible. Before I used to just rap; I was good at rhymin’ words. Now, I’m able to rhyme a word with a certain attitude that I didn’t have before.”

To
icast.com
, he explained their creative relationship this way: “It’s like this – I’m a lyricist and a writer. He makes beats and produces. He has a vision. He can make that come to life. Damn near every Dre beat that I hear, I wanna rap over it. It makes me instantly think of things. We just get together, and in one studio session, we can knock out one or two songs right there. It’s like when him and Snoop Dogg first got together. There’s a chemistry.”

The most crucial thing the former Nigga With Attitude gave Marshall, though, was what he had struggled for since his first public performance, but could never have gained alone: the respect of black rap listeners. “It’s some very awkward shit,” Dre considered to
Rolling Stone
. “It’s like seeing a black guy doing country and western, know what I’m saying? I got a couple of questions from people around me. You know, ‘He’s got blue eyes, he’s a white kid.’ But I don’t give a fuck if you’re purple; if you can kick it, I’m working with you.”
The Source
‘s Robert Rosario put it plainly: “When I first heard Em, I knew he could hang. The guy keeps getting more respect. But if it wasn’t for Dre, there wouldn’t be any Eminem – and vice versa.”

It was Marshall who was eager to impress, anyway, when the two quickly went to work. “We clicked,” he told
NME
. “First day in the studio, we knocked off three songs in six hours. He said he’d never done that but I was anxious to show him what I could do. I loved hip-hop so much, knew and appreciated the history of hip-hop, and I always wanted to have a voice in hip-hop. This is the goal I’d worked towards all my life.”

“I was writing like crazy when I got out to Cali,” he recalled in
Angry Blonde
. “Especially after I got my deal, so I wasn’t tryin’ to let it slip.” With the work ethic of someone who had toiled at rapping in the night hours between dishwashing jobs, he scribbled lyrics, went to Dre’s home studio to record them, then wrote more, junking songs midway when new inspirations came, thriving under the pressure of his one chance to make his hopes come true.

To
Launch
, he revealed how the writing happened: “I collect ideas throughout the week. It might take a while, but I write on a sheet of paper, scattered ideas, words and metaphors. When I have enough ideas, I’ll piece the shit together. I do it purposely so that if a rhyme sheet is lost, whoever finds it won’t know what it means. Half a sentence will be here … a word over here. I start at the corner of the paper. I write in slants.” In the studio, he explained, he and Dre guzzled down Es, heating up their energy and emotions, of love and hate. “We get in there, get bugged out, stay in the studio for fuckin’ two days,” Dre confirmed to
Rolling Stone
. “Then you’re dead for three days. Then you wake up, pop the tape in, like, ‘Let me see what I’ve done.’” In this environment, what became
The Slim Shady LP
took 12 days to finish.

The three songs Dre and Marshall completed in their first session included two which went unreleased: ‘When Hell Freezes Over’, Marshall’s first attack on Detroit rivals Insane Clown Posse, and ‘Ghost Stories’, a gory haunted house tale. ‘Role Model’, though, was much more important. Its creation started the intuitive, open-minded studio collaborations between whoever was at hand which would become the hallmark of every Eminem album. Dre began it by playing Marshall one of his stockpiled backing tracks, this one with a slow, circular beat, to see what it triggered. Marshall recalled a rhyme that would be right for it which he’d started the night before, finishing two verses and a hook on the spot. Dre associate Mel-Man then rapped,
“Don’t you want to grow up to be just like me?”
, the line which became the track’s ranted chorus, and gave Marshall the thematic focus to finish it.