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You might think you know Jerry Heller, but he begs to differ. Since co-founding Ruthless Records with Eazy-E and piloting N.W.A. straight into mainstream America, this 65-year-old Jewish man has had nothing but dirt thrown on his name. “You let a Jew break up my crew,” Ice Cube famously said to Eazy on 1991's “No Vaseline.” If you judged Jerry by the songs and videos where Dr. Dre and Cube have taken aim at him throughout the years, you would think he was nothing but a lying, thieving White devil. And while many hip-hop fans continue to judge Jerry by those accounts, his new book paints a clear picture that could make many question their assumptions.

Hoping to finally tell his side of the story and solidify Eazy’s legacy as the true visionary behind gangsta rap, Jerry recently released his first book, Ruthless, a personal memoir. It tells the amazing story of a seasoned music business veteran who helps nurture underground West Coast hip-hop, transforming it from a local swap meet attraction into a worldwide force. Today, Jerry is no longer affiliated with Ruthless, the company he built from the ground up, but he lives in California with his wife Gayle, where he’s planning his full-time return to the music business. He hopes to put a cap on his career by helping to give Latino hip-hop as big of a voice as he once gave to the “Boyz-N-The-Hood.” You can quote him, boy, ’cause he’s about to say some shit.

Why did you wait so long to respond to criticisms from Dre and Cube?

I’ve always felt that it wasn’t my place to speak on it. Also, I don’t know if it was naiveté on my part, or arrogance, or a combination of both, but I said, “People can’t really believe what Ice Cube is saying.” I mean, it’s so ridiculous, that nobody could believe that. What Dre said was a little more believable, but once again incorrect and Eazy’s not there to fight back. It’s not like I can go write a diss song and publish it and fight back, so this was just the opportunity to rehabilitate my reputation for what can be considered the twilight of my career, I guess. Also, [I wanted] to clear Eazy’s legacy. I felt a great responsibility to do that.

In the book, you make a point to describe everybody in N.W.A. as you saw them, which was more or less just regular kids, not some crazy career criminals. You also debunked the whole myth about Ruthless being started with drug money. What do you want people to take away from these descriptions?
When I wrote this book, here was my philosophy: I’m just going to tell it like it is, and let everybody make their own decision. And it is objective. I stand by what I say in that book, the fact that Ice Cube grew up in Los Angeles in a very good family—both his parents were intelligent, bright, working people—and the fact that he went to an upper-middle class white, Jewish high school. I mean, sorry, man—that’s what he did. Dre is what he is. Ren is what he is. I just talk about what they are.

Eazy was a street guy. And he was a tough, tough little dude. And he was very Machiavellian. He was one of the brightest guys I ever met, and I think part of that awareness and brightness came from the fact that he either was a drug dealer when barely into his teens or he was around them. One or the other. To be honest with you, from the day I met him, March the 3rd of 1987, I never saw him do anything suspect, as far as dealing drugs. I certainly saw him smoke pot. I saw him give away pot. I never saw him do anything that could even remotely be considered being a drug deal. When he saw the enormous potential of N.W.A and the possibilities of the record business, which I brought into play, I think he might have said, “Whatever I used to do before is ridiculous, man.” I explained to him about RICO: “Do you want to buy your mom a beautiful house and have some federal guy come there one day and take it away because you did something wrong?” I explained things to him, as I explain to all my other clients. Some take the advice, some don’t take it, some listen, some laugh, whatever. But this guy was an exceptionally bright guy and he always said, which I agreed with, that he conceptualized, Dre musicalized, Cube verbalized and Jerry financialized. And that was Ruthless Records.

Another interesting thing in the book was you seemed skeptical that Eazy’s supposed “final words,” which his lawyer Ron Sweeney read at a press conference, were really written by Eazy. How do you think he would have preferred to be remembered?
Well if you remember, Eazy always said, “I’m not a fuckin’ role model.” And he certainly wouldn’t have misquoted the number of children and baby’s mothers that he had. I’m not saying Ron Sweeney wrote this, but I know that Ron Sweeney read it. But when I heard it, I said, “Eazy didn’t write that,” because it was corny. It wasn’t like Eazy. He was a straight-ahead, hardcore, enormously successful young man. I know at the time of his death, he had to be thinking, Why the fuck me? Why me, man? This isn’t right. I can’t see himself all of the sudden putting himself up as a role model. He was very philanthropic, but he was a very private, personal kind of guy. Every year he took 500 kids to the Black rodeo. He just did great things. He did great things and he did them quietly and inauspiciously. He did them because they were good things to do, not because he wanted some kind of fucking acclaim from people in the industry or people outside the industry.

Is the Eazy biopic movie still in the works?
It is, and I’ve moved along quite significantly to the point now where the financing is basically in place. We’re starting to talk to actors and actresses. We have a director who’s committed to it, although we haven’t finalized our deal with him. His name is George Hickenlooper and he just finished Factory Girl and he did Mayor of the Sunset Strip and Dogtown. He’s a good director and even though he’s not extremely knowledgeable regarding rap, he has the sensitivity to deal with Eazy’s persona. We’re talking about starting filming on January 1st.

Who have you been looking at to play Eazy?
We’re talking to Larenz [Tate], who I think is magnificent. I just look in his eyes and I see Eazy-E in there. This guy is a magnificent actor and he’s underrated, I think. We’ve sort of reached out to Terrance Howard about playing Dr. Dre. We want either The Game or Ving Rhames or Michael Clarke Duncan to play Suge.

How did The Game’s name come into the discussion?
I met him by accident probably six months ago. We had a several hour-long conversation at the Starbucks in the Galleria in Sherman Oaks.

You met him at a Starbucks?

He was walking by and he sort of recognized me and walked back.

Did you ask him about the line “So if a nigga every try to Jerry Heller me/Tell Dre put up a mill', cause that's what my bail'll be” from “No More Fun and Games”?
Absolutely. I didn’t ask him about it immediately, but I asked him about it. I said, “Look, we’re sitting here having this very cordial conversation, obviously we feel the same about Compton, N.W.A, and Ruthless Records and Eazy-E.” I mean, the guy has a picture of [Eazy] tattooed on his forearm. So he said, “Oh, I thought it was a compliment.” I just let it go at that.

How could that be a compliment?
Yeah, you know, whatever…Obviously, to me, it didn’t seem like a compliment, but he’s so pro-Compton, N.W.A, Eazy-E, Ruthless. I weigh all the good things he’s done for Eazy’s legacy against this one thing that maybe is or maybe isn’t a compliment. And I like him.

How do you feel about him as an actor?
I saw him in Waist Deep, and even though he had a small part, he was very powerful. I thought he was very good. I didn’t love the movie, but I liked the acting. Larenz was great. That lady Meagan Good was terrific. I thought that Game, for the small scope of his part, was very believable. He’s a big guy, 6’5”, probably 240, so if he goes up to 270 or whatever, I could see him overpowering the screen with the force of his intensity.

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So who would you cast to play yourself?
Myself? You know, when we talk about the movie business, it’s a business of financing. So the people who are putting up the money sort of tell you who’s acceptable to them by what they mean in foreign markets. They wanted Bruce Willis. There were discussions with Bruce Willis or his agents. I sort of felt that I would like someone more like Tim Robbins or Sean Penn, somebody who had a little different kind of edge and maybe was a little more Jewish.

In Dre and Snoop’s video for “Dre Day,” the character that was supposed to be based on you was played by Steve Berman, an executive from Interscope. How did you feel about that casting choice?
How embarrassing for me to be portrayed by Steve Berman? It’s funny. The guy is 2 foot 4, I’m sure he didn’t want to do it. I’m sure he got coerced into that. I’m sure they made him feel like he would be a pussy if he didn’t do it. So, I don’t have real good feelings toward Steve Berman for playing that, but then I accept that for what it is. I’m sure that wasn’t his first choice. They didn’t say, “Oh, we’ll give you $100,000 and a piece of the gross.” I’m sure they said, “You gotta do this.” I wouldn’t go up and spit on him because he did it. I might give him some shit about it.

I read that you were talking with Eazy’s son about him maybe trying to put out an album of unreleased tracks with his father. Is there any truth to that?
No. I talked to him, but not about that. I don’t have any unreleased tracks.

That’s interesting. Do you think there will every be a posthumous Eazy album?
I have to tell you this: I have no comment on anything that has to do with Ruthless after 1999, when I worked out my disagreement with them. I have no part of what goes on over there, I’m not in the mix, the loop or anything else, and I don’t know what they have planned. I hope they have something big planned for Eazy, but I have no way of knowing, I don’t speak to any of those people. I’d go out and buy it though, just to support it.

If you were Black rather than White, do you feel like Cube and Dre would’ve felt that need to break away from you as strongly? Obviously there are lots of racial overtones to the whole situation.
Well, I think that it’s traditional way to get out of your contract. The White guy fucked us; he stole our money or whatever. Obviously it’s not true, because it would seem to me if we did what they said we did, they would’ve sued us or somebody would’ve sued us. It goes back to the days when the old gangsters in the music business had Jackie Wilson and Little Richard and Bo Diddley and they took their publishing. All those kinds of stories that we’ve all heard.

How did the African-American community react to your involvement in N.W.A.’s success?
I think that when I got started, all the important African-Americans like Clarence Avant and Jesse Jackson said, “Oh, wow, you’re doing this great thing,” because they just thought I was out of my mind, to be involved with a group called N.W.A. But then when we started to make money at Ruthless, it seems like everybody wanted to be on the bandwagon. Like, I ran into Clarence Avant one day at Neiman-Marcus. I said, “Hey, Clarence, how you doing?” He says, “I’m fine, how’re you doing, Jerry?,” because I’d known him for a long time, when I used to work at Associated Booking. I said, “Great.” He said, “I know you’re doing great, you’ve made a lot of money off of my people.” So right then and there, I knew that the days of Jerry Heller being a good guy were coming to a rapid close and now that gangsta rap was going to be big business, everybody wanted to be on the bandwagon. I’m not saying Clarence did, I think he could give a fuck less. But I think that he was making a third person observation. I think he had no aspirations to be involved with gangsta rap, he was the Chairman of the Board at Motown at the time. But I think he made an astute observation, and after that, people like Don King and everybody else just came after Jerry Heller.

In the book, you talk about your last ditch effort to get Dre involved in a new Ruthless deal with Warner, just before he left to start Death Row with Suge. Why didn’t that ever happen?
I had talked to Eazy many times about making Dre a partner. It just wasn’t in the cards with Eazy’s mindset. Eazy’s mindset was that he started the company, and that’s the way it was gonna be. Doug Young [former promotions executive for Ruthless] said to me, “You can’t just let this guy just slip away like this.” We had a lot of records that we wanted to put out and we were getting to the point where our distributors really couldn’t accommodate the plans we had for the future. I had lunch with [Giant Records founder] Irving Azoff and we worked out a deal for, I think, $20 million, of which Dre was going to get $12 million upfront.

Now, Eazy and I were going to own no part of that company and we were going to commission 20 percent of the company, of which Eazy and I were going to split at 10 percent apiece, and Dre was going to own his own company called “Def Row.” I was going to file papers and everything for him, but a guy named the Unknown DJ owned that name. Irving kept saying, “Yeah we’re gonna do it,” but by then, not only did the “Cop Killer” [controversy] happen at Warner Bros, but that whole upheaval of [the company]. All of those things seemed to be coming down at once, and Irving told me [former Warner President] Mo Ostin refused to fund the deal. It sort of fell by the wayside at a very inopportune time, because now it’s the end of ’91, and it just gave our detractors more ammunition to entice Dre away.

How do you think things may have played out differently if Warner had done that deal with Ruthless and Def Row?

Certainly that would have undermined whatever efforts Suge had to circumvent us. Dre would’ve continued to produce Eazy and N.W.A, remained a member of N.W.A and still had his own company and do his own solo stuff on. I think it probably would’ve worked out at least for a couple more N.W.A albums, which was very important to Eazy.

In the late ’90s, there was a lot of talk about an N.W.A. reunion without Eazy. How did you feel about that?
I didn’t care. Eazy’s dead, and there’s no N.W.A without Eazy. So it meant nothing to me. They can go play their little games.

Why did you wait until now to write this book?
I don’t like to get involved with things unless I think they’re going to be important. And I’m so used to seeing books on the back table in the music section about the music business that I wasn’t interested in writing one of those kind of books.

What made you think this could be different?
One day I walked into Barnes & Noble and I saw this book on the front table called Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop, which is Jeffrey Chang’s book. Not only was it a really good book, but it was significant to me that it was on the front table. He was doing a book signing in L.A. that night and went out and sort of caught up with him there and it was just packed, this little eclectic bookstore. It was just packed. I said to him, “Look, I think that your book is probably the best book I’ve read on the music business, but as usual, you East Coast guys trivialize the contribution of West Coast rap.” And I’m 65 years old. I’ve got gray hair, I don’t look like a kid. So for me to be talking about rap, usually is off-putting to most people. So he said, “I don’t know, I had nine chapters [on West Coast rap],” or whatever it was. I said, “Yeah, but that’s bullshit.” And then I asked him a couple more questions and he said, “By the way, I’m from San Francisco, not New York.” I asked him a couple more questions, and then someone said to him, “I think that’s Jerry Heller.” And then the word sort of got around in this book thing and it wound up that he stopped the thing and signed my book, “To the guy that’s been instrumental in all the important music in my life,” or something like that. And we’ve gotten to be very close. I teach at UCLA and he came and spoke in my class.

So even though people have been telling me that I should write a book for years, because I have such great stories, all of the sudden I said, “Well, maybe the time is right now.” And it’s been like, 11 years since Eazy died. Nothing has really happened to establish him as the important force I feel he’s been in the music business.

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