Split decision, p.11
Split Decision, page 11
I drive him onto the block in the G-ride with Clint. Justin looks sharp in that brown UPS uniform with his clipboard and box, but he’s nervous. “Look, just don’t make eye contact with anyone,” I said. “Don’t trip off the security at the door; you look the part. No one’s going to hassle you.”
Justin gets past security, rides up to the fourth floor on the elevator, gets buzzed inside, and just liked I trained him, he takes the Indonesian jeweler by surprise and has him handcuffed in seconds. But before he can get duct tape on his feet, the jeweler gets up and runs to the double-door safe, rams his body into it, and slams it shut. Justin’s got to improvise now. He manages to grab $120,000 in cash, which was sitting there in the drawers, throw the money in a Hefty bag, and run out. But even with handcuffs on, the jeweler manages to trip the alarm.
Me and Clint are outside the office building in the G-ride, monitoring everything like a couple of eagles. There’s suddenly whoop-whooping and four LAPD cruisers pull up. All these cops jump out, guns drawn, clearing the entrance and the floor.
Justin comes to the entrance with the Hefty bag full of money but these cops don’t see a robber; all they can see is this young fresh-faced white guy in a UPS uniform doing his job. They shoo him past: “Come on, sir, get out of the area immediately—there’s a robbery in progress.”
Justin’s smart enough not to come find us in the G-ride directly. He keeps walking around the corner, then doubles back. We pull up in the G, he gets inside, and we drive away smoothly.
The lick didn’t go according to script—we only got $120,000 instead of the half-a-mil of diamonds in the safe, but it let me know that the fake UPS strategy would work to get past heavy security in broad daylight. I was confident I could use the same trick to get inside these appointment-only estate jewelry stores on Rodeo Drive that we’d always considered impossible to breach.
ICE
When we started shooting New Jack City in April of 1990, I wasn’t nervous anymore; I was fucking scared. Chris Rock was, too. We had a lot of heavy, dramatic scenes to pull off and we were both feeling the pressure. It got worse once we were around these serious actors like Wesley Snipes and Judd Nelson and Allen Payne. I always felt like if I messed up a line, somebody would get pissed and shout: “Can we get some real fucking actors in here?”
Mario and the producers had faith in us. They made it clear to me and Chris that even though we weren’t trained actors, we were bringing a lot to the project—Chris was a super-hot comic on the rise, and I’d sold millions of rap records, so they were counting on us bringing our existing fan bases onboard.
The first thing I had to do on the set was lose my ego. Erase it entirely. I think that’s been the key to my success overall; at various stages of my career, I’ve had to completely humble myself. What made New Jack City work is that I showed up with zero attitude. I was a wide-eyed rookie, a sponge, trying to soak it up and willing to learn from everybody. I didn’t know shit about hitting marks or character motivation—all this acting terminology was brand-new to me. Over and over, I said, “I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing in this scene—can you give me some advice?”
Judd Nelson really helped by taking me under his wing; he was an actor with established credibility, and if I flubbed my lines, he’d say, “Ice, everybody fucks up. Stop thinking about it so much—if you’re worrying about fucking up, you’re not gonna be able to do the scene. Just be yourself. Trust yourself. You got this.” Judd really relaxed guys like me and Chris who hadn’t been in films before.
One thing I learned on New Jack City is that when you’re making a movie, the trick is to make it feel real but not be real. The art of filmmaking is being able to eliminate all the bullshit and repetitiveness of real life for the sake of telling a smooth, clear story.
Another thing I learned is that authenticity is achieved through some of the smallest details. And many times, those details aren’t in the script.
Chris Rock often says I was an uncredited codirector on New Jack City. It wasn’t really codirecting, but when we were shooting, I sometimes wore the hat of technical advisor for those little street details. We’re making a movie about gangsters and hustlers, dope dealers and crackheads, and none of these filmmakers or actors are really from that world. A lot of times I’d step out of my own zone as Scotty Appleton and tell Wesley or Chris or Judd how shit really would get said in the game. Subtle little things like gestures and looks. Things I lived firsthand, things I witnessed, I was able to add that into the performances.
For example, that famous line I said to Wesley: “I wanna shoot you so bad my dick is hard!” Long after the movie came out, I saw cats wearing that on T-shirts, like it’s an actual slogan. The line wasn’t in the script; it was just something I ad-libbed in the moment. It sounded cool and crazy and believable for a street motherfucker who’s fueled by vengeance.
People still stop me in the street and ask me to say that line. Just like they still walk up to Wesley and talk to him about how cold-blooded and badass Nino Brown was, or start hollering out “Pookie!” whenever they see Chris. For a relatively small movie, New Jack City left a big footprint—especially in the hip-hop world. Of course, we didn’t think about that while we were making the film. Nobody ever thinks that their very first movie will have any longevity, let alone hold water some forty years later.
Honestly, while we were filming New Jack City, I never once felt like I pulled it off. I never felt at ease. When you’re shooting, you start seeing yourself in the daily rushes, and the images are so raw—no music, no editing effects, scenes shot out of sequence—that you’ve got to imagine the potential of how this will all play out in the finished film with the magic of postproduction. A lot of times it was hard for me to watch myself in those daily rushes. I really felt I was fucking my scenes up.
After we wrapped, I thought the people I cared about the most—my homies and my hard-core fans—would say I’d made a big mistake by taking on the role of Scotty Appleton.
My feelings only changed once I got back to L.A. The first week the film was out, I went alone one night to Grauman’s Chinese Theater, across from where we had our United Nations club. Bought a ticket, some popcorn, and a soda like everyone else. Lay back in the cut, incognito, in the rear of the theater behind some dudes who looked like street motherfuckers.
My first moment on-screen, sure enough, they started heckling me.
“Look at Ice in that big-ass fuckin’ hat.”
“He looks stupid in them dreads.”
But about ten or fifteen minutes into the movie, these same dudes were shouting out:
“Don’t do it, Scotty!”
“What the fuck, Scotty?”
Under my breath I started laughing. They’d stopped dissing “Ice” and were yelling at “Scotty.”
That’s the first time I thought, Yo, I’m actually pulling this shit off.
SPIKE
It was around 10 a.m. on a sunny Tuesday when we crossed over Wilshire Boulevard into the heart of Beverly Hills. For this lick, me and Clint had two different G-rides. Justin’s dressed in the UPS uniform with the clipboard, and the plan is for him to run up to the entrance of this estate jewelry store on Rodeo Drive, buzz the intercom, and say that some Black dudes roughed him up and stole his UPS truck.
I’d been through this fifty times with Justin, he had his lines down pat, but he needed to look believable, so when we pulled up to the lick, I told him, “Sorry, dude, you’re gonna have to take one for the team.” I didn’t tell him about this wrinkle in the plan until we got there. He closed his eyes and I gave him a good sock in the mouth.
With a fresh fat lip, blood streaming through his front teeth, Justin runs up to the jewelry store and presses the intercom, saying, “These two Black guys just stole my truck!”
I know exactly how these rent-a-cops think. More than anything, they’re hardwired to want to play the hero. If someone comes to them in distress, they’ll almost always leave their posts to help. They’re more gung-ho than actual cops.
After they see him bleeding in their video monitor, they open the door and Justin says, “Down around the corner, they’re in my truck now!”
The security guys have their walkie-talkies out and they’re running down the block, chasing after the supposed robbers. Back then it would take the Beverly Hills cops two or three minutes to get to the scene of a robbery. I only need twenty seconds inside the store, but I want those security guards a little farther away from the front door.
On the corner, I’ve got my second stage prop—she’s a female member of the team—playing the part of a civilian, waving them toward her.
“They took his truck! They just went that way!”
The two security guards go sprinting down the block, round the corner, trying to get a glimpse.
Now the real robbers—me and my partner Clint—enter the scene. We don’t even run. We just stroll in. Justin’s left the door open a crack. We’re wearing ski masks and gloves. We pull out the sledgehammer, bash the glass, grab the Rolexes and diamonds, throw them in the pillowcases, and we’re out.
We jump in our first G-ride, a banana-yellow Dodge, drive two blocks, pull into an alleyway, and switch to a second G-ride, a white Impala. We don’t give a fuck if any witnesses see us jumping into the yellow Dodge because by the time the cops start looking for us, we’ll be long gone in the second G.
We rip off the ski masks and gloves. Not only do we have a switcheroo G-ride, we also have two sets of clothes on, so me and Clint strip off the outer layer. It’s like a complete costume change. In that alley we ditch our outer clothes and masks and leave that banana-yellow Dodge. We make a smooth getaway in that white Impala.
A few blocks further, we rendezvous with Justin and the chick who played the innocent bystander. Everything went off like clockwork. A perfect score. I went down to one of my fences and cashed in for about $400,000 from that lick. Of course, that had to be split up between everybody on the team.
I took my entire cut and invested it in studio equipment—samplers, mixing board, reel-to-reels—so I could devote myself to my music in Bakersfield. My girlfriend’s cousin was a DJ named Phresh Cutz—he’d had a local hit called “Suzuki Samurai”—and we teamed up and started to record a bunch of brand-new tracks.
I still had a magic number in my head—$1 million—and I wasn’t quite there yet.
If I could get that $1 million socked away, I was ready to follow in Ice’s footsteps and leave the game forever.
CHAPTER 7 BODY COUNT
Goddamn, what a brother gotta do
To get a message through
To the red, white, and blue?
—ICE, “BODY COUNT”
ICE
When we were making the O.G.: Original Gangster album in 1991, I decided to include the song “Body Count” by my new heavy metal band. Technically that self-titled song is our debut recording, but the origins go back a long way—back to the mid-1970s at Crenshaw High.
My interest in rock started when I first came to L.A. and was sharing a bedroom at my aunt’s place in View Park with my cousin Earl. He’d already graduated from Dorsey High and thought he was Jimi Hendrix. Wore a scarf around his head, played air guitar, and only listened to KMET and KLOS—the two rock stations in L.A. He was a Black hippie. He controlled the music in the room, so at age fourteen, my mind was saturated with Hendrix, Black Sabbath, Leon Russell, Mott the Hoople, Blue Öyster Cult, Deep Purple. I started to pick out the songs I liked. I gravitated toward the heavier stuff: Edgar Winter, Zeppelin, and Black Sabbath.
When I got to Crenshaw High, I met Ernie Cunnigan, a super-talented brother who grew up in the V.N.G. hood—and everyone called him Ernie C. Ernie was a dedicated musician; he’d walk around almost every day with his electric guitar strapped over his shoulder. He did this one concert at Crenshaw, had these homemade flash pots, played Peter Frampton licks. The audience was about a hundred and fifty kids, most of them Crips, and even if they weren’t into rock, they all respected Ernie C. for his showmanship and skills.
Another of my close friends at Crenshaw was Vic Wilson—Beatmaster V—and he could play the hell out of the drums. When I first got my deal with Sire in 1986, anybody with any musical aptitude gravitated toward me. Ernie and Vic would constantly ask me about coming into the studio for my recording sessions.
“Nah, this is hip-hop,” I said. “It’s all based on samples and my DJ scratching. I mean, I don’t really need no band.”
But if you go back and check my early recordings, there’s always been a hard-rock element. The opening cut on Rhyme Pays is built around a classic-rock riff, and I had Beatmaster V playing live drums over the sample. In 1989, on my third album, Iceberg/Freedom of Speech… Just Watch What You Say!, we did this track, “The Girl Tried to Kill Me,” that rocks as hard as anything I ever did before—Ernie C. and Vic killed it in the studio. It’s an Ice-T rap record, but the seeds of Body Count are already there.
Like a lot of the best things you do artistically, Body Count wasn’t planned—it just happened spontaneously. We were working on the Original Gangster album at Sound Castle studio in Hollywood and there’d always be a ton of people dropping by my sessions. Ernie C. comes down with his guitar and Beatmaster V’s already there. Once again, they’re asking me about playing live on the album.
Instead of them just backing me up, I said, “Why don’t we form a band? An actual metal band?”
It was just going to be a side project for Ernie C. to have a creative outlet. The rest of that original lineup was Mooseman on bass and D-Roc on rhythm guitar. Moose went to Crenshaw with us and was a beast on the bass. D-Roc was one of Ernie’s young guitar students.
Our sound just fell into place: we fused the metal intensity of Black Sabbath and Slayer with some of the L.A. punk attitude of Suicidal Tendencies, and lyrically, I’m singing about the same stuff I do in my hip-hop. That blend made us unique.
We did that first song, “Body Count,” and we liked the name for the band too, because it had a bunch of meanings to us. On the actual song I say, “Last weekend thirty-seven kids killed in gang warfare in my backyard,” referring to the fucked-up level of violence in the hood—but another reason we went by “B.C.” was the initials included both Bloods and Crips.
We went out there, playing little bars and pizza joints, not making any money, just testing out the concept. The first official Body Count show was at the Coconut Teaszer on Sunset Boulevard on April 1, 1991. We linked up with these guys Dirty Rotten Imbeciles, or D.R.I., a hardcore thrash band, and headed up to Northern California to do some gigs with them. Some skinheads in the crowd started booing us, wondering what a bunch of Black street dudes were doing gigging at a thrash-punk show. Five minutes into the set we had them slam dancing.
Right from the jump, I started to get all kinds of questions about why a bunch of Black dudes from South Central would be playing heavy metal, and I’d always say, “Look, rock ’n’ roll was created by Black people—Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Little Richard.” They took the blues, electrified it, sped it up. Even the name—rock ’n’ roll—was just the old-time Black slang for fucking—straight up!
Rock to me is just straight-up aggression. In hip-hop, we always say, “We gonna rock the house!” or, “I’m gonna rock this mic!” You’ll never hear a motherfucker say, “I’m gonna R&B this mic!”
On the O.G. album you hear me doing a little interlude where I say, “I feel sorry for anyone who only listens to one form of music.”
As we were gigging, Ernie C. connected us with Perry Farrell from Jane’s Addiction. Perry pitched me this idea of doing a cover of the Sly Stone song “Don’t Call Me Nigger, Whitey” for a video they were shooting. We’re staring at each other across the stage, wearing shades, going back and forth:
“Don’t call me nigger, whitey.”
“Don’t call me whitey, nigger.”
The shit was pretty out there for 1991. Then Perry started telling us about this concept he had called Lollapalooza, a traveling festival mashing together alternative, punk, heavy metal, and hip-hop acts.
It sounded fucking crazy to me, but I dig most shit that sounds fucking crazy. “Man, listen, I’m down—put Ice-T on the bill.” I didn’t even tell Perry my plan to introduce Body Count to the world on the tour.
The first Lollapalooza show was at the Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre on July 23, 1991. They told me, “Ice, you’re going to go on third, after Butthole Surfers and the Rollins Band.” An Ice-T set is normally an hour, but I decided to split it right down the middle, do thirty minutes of Ice-T material, then thirty minutes of Body Count. After I did my hip-hop set, I paused and looked out at about twenty thousand people.
“Now I’m about to prove to you that rock ’n’ roll has nothing to do with color. Rock ’n’ roll is a state of mind.”
Then Body Count emerges. We hit them with “Cop Killer,” “KKK Bitch,” “Voodoo.” All our hardest shit. I remember Henry Rollins standing to the side of the stage, just vibing off our aggressive energy.
When we finished that first show, I looked at Ernie, Vic, Moose, and D-Roc backstage. Every one of us looked like we’d just run ten miles, drenched in sweat. This was all so loose, without any long-range planning, without any business agenda; it was the exact opposite of what I felt while filming New Jack City. When I was onstage with Body Count, I didn’t have any fear.
We didn’t know if we’d be accepted by white rock audiences. We didn’t give a fuck. We didn’t know if we’d ever make an album together. We didn’t give a fuck.
In the summer of 1991, Body Count was just a bunch of friends who wanted to get together, have a great time, and kick some fucking ass onstage.
SPIKE
I was at those early Body Count shows and I remember how the crowds were wilding out—that energy was on a different level. That was the first time I saw all these white kids going crazy in a mosh pit.
