The attentions of the police – culminating in the group’s arrest after they predictably ignored an instruction not to perform ‘Fuck Tha Police’ in Detroit – probably helped build a siege mentality within the NWA camp, and may have kept these combustible personalities together for longer than would otherwise have been the case. As the countrywide tour to promote the album attracted more and more publicity, the cogent and largely principled ‘Fuck Tha Police’ became conflated with an album that elsewhere mixed sociopathy, misogyny and misanthropy with a production that took Public Enemy’s scorching sonic template and ran (off) with it. The album’s most focused and political statement became a free-speech issue in the United States, where the right to say what you think is enshrined in the laws of the land. Crazily, there were attempts to ban the group from playing the song, which only fanned the flames. It transpired that the FBI were investigating their lyrics, in particular, ‘Fuck Tha Police’ (or, as the surprisingly coy album sleeve titled it: ‘- Tha Police (Fill In The Blanks)’).
If you sold 10,000 records you got $30,000 dollars, and Jerry Heller went over to cash the cheque because he had the only bank account, and you split it up on the corner and everybody got money.”įollowing the release of attention-grabbing debut album ‘Straight Outta Compton’ in 1988, NWA were quickly dubbed “the world’s most dangerous group”. “It was where the music business should be. “I thought what was happening at Macola was where rock’n’roll was in 1964 and ’65,” Heller told me during our 2006 interview. Heller – who had years of experience in the music industry, promoting gigs on the west coast by ’70s superstars such as Elton John and Van Morrison – became their manager. Jackson and Young became Ice Cube and Dr Dre, and, alongside a former drug dealer called Eric ‘Eazy-E’ Wright, Lorenzo ‘MC Ren’ Patterson, another Wreckin’ Cru member, Antoine ‘DJ Yella’ Carraby (and, for a short while, Kim ‘Arabian Prince’ Nazel), they formed NWA, standing for Niggaz Wit Attitude.Įazy-E set up the label, Ruthless, that went on to release their records, and those by a slew of associated artists. The World Class Wreckin’ Cru’s DJ was Andre Young, while CIA included a teenager called O’Shea Jackson. I go down there, and who’ve you got pressing records, but Ice-T, MC Hammer, JJ Fad, Bobby Jimmy And The Critters, and a little group called the World Class Wreckin’ Cru and their friends, CIA.” For $1,000 you got 500 records and the artwork.
“It’s 1985,” he recalled, “nobody’s making any money, there’s nothing new happening in the world, and I hear about this scene that’s happening at this little pressing plant on Santa Monica Boulevard called Macola. He met NWA right at the start of their career, and did more than anyone outside the group to bring their music to the world. NWA needed their own Russell Simmons, and found him in the unlikely form of Jerry Heller.
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