There Goes Gravity: A Life in Rock and Roll

by Robinson, Lisa

  *

  Paul said that Proof—who was the hottest MC in Detroit—was the first person to tell him about Eminem. “Proof introduced me to everyone as his lawyer,” Paul said, “even though I was still in law school at the time. One day at Detroit’s Hip Hop Shop, Proof told me, ‘Paul, you haven’t heard this guy; white boy’s better than you and Jake used to be.’ So Em rapped there, and I thought he was cool. A few months later Em was there, selling his Infinite tape hand to hand for six bucks. I bought it, took it home, listened to it, and thought it was really good. Then I saw Em battle at the Hip Hop Shop and the Rhythm Kitchen and he just wiped everybody out.” Eventually, when Paul got tapes from Eminem, “The thing that I really loved and I knew people were going to love about him, was that he would write a song and you would think, I can’t wait to see what he’s going to say next. Like, ‘oh my god, did he just say that?’ I would hang on every word. That, and combined with the amount of syllables he would rhyme in conjunction with each other—it was just crazy. That’s when you really fall in love with him.” Paul told Eminem he wanted to be his lawyer and get him a record deal. He brought Eminem’s tape to every label. They all turned him down. In 1997, Paul and Eminem flew to L.A., where Eminem had been invited to participate in the Rap Olympics. Eminem came in second. He lost to someone named Otherwize (“Who has Otherwize never been heard from again,” Paul told me). “He was totally crushed,” Paul said. However, Paul gave a tape of what would become the “Slim Shady” album to “some kids from Interscope.” The rest has been well documented: the kids from Interscope got it to Jimmy Iovine. Jimmy played it for Dr. Dre, who was one of Eminem’s heroes. And Dre said, “Find him. Yesterday.”

  *

  In 2004, Dre told me, “When Jimmy first played me Eminem’s tape, I didn’t think he was a white cat. It never crossed my mind. I guess at that time I must have thought he was a black guy, because I wasn’t thinking that a white guy could rap that well. And I still haven’t heard anyone come close.” Dre was talking to me in his Los Angeles recording studio. He’s almost always in his studio. That year, he told me that his record for hours logged in there was seventy-nine hours straight. In addition to his various production work for others, he had been working on his own album, tentatively titled Detox, for over ten years. Every time during the past decade, whenever I’ve seen Dre, I ask when it’s going to be finished. He always says, “I’m almost ready.” The last time he told me he was almost ready was at the 2011 Grammy Awards, after he performed “I Need a Doctor” with Eminem. That song was basically Eminem’s plea for Dre to get back into the rap game. Dre’s idea of “getting ready” involved a physical regimen that included a great deal of weight lifting. When he came offstage with Eminem after that Grammy performance, I said, “I think you’re ready.”

  Both Gwen Stefani and Mary J. Blige told me that Dr. Dre is the most perfectionist producer they ever worked with. He demands multiple—multiple—takes. But Dre told me, “Em is more of a perfectionist than I am. I don’t know how we ever get records done.” There’s no question that Dre gave Eminem hip hop credibility. “But he would have been a really big success without me,” Dre said. “I just made it happen sooner. He’s got a real talent for melody. And he’s two people: the comedian in the room one day and then this person who’s pissed off at everybody the next day. He’s a weird individual. But the controversy? I love it. This is the entertainment business. Without it, it would be boring as shit.”

  • • •

  On July 23, 2004, I sat with Proof in a dressing room at 30 Rockefeller Plaza before his group, D12, was about to go on the Conan O’Brien show. Proof, born Deshaun Dupree Holton, was Eminem’s best friend and the model for the Mekhi Phifer character in 8 Mile. Eminem referred to him as his “rock,” and his “ghetto pass.” They met as teenagers when Eminem was passing out flyers for a show. Proof told me that he was impressed when, on the spot, “Em spit out ‘first place’ and ‘birthday’ in the same rhyme.” Proof talked about how he encouraged Eminem to battle in the lunchroom of Osborne High. He said that he, Proof, was still the best MC in Detroit, but that Eminem was the better songwriter. “I never thought about him being white,” Proof said. “It was just incredible to hear that shit happening right in my face, you know what I’m saying?”

  Proof and I talked for several hours that day. He talked about his obsession with the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia. I told him I’d send him some books about the Grateful Dead and an interview I’d done with Jerry Garcia backstage at the Fillmore East in 1970. I told him about Lenny Bruce—whom he’d never heard of—and said I’d send him some CDs. He talked about the similarities between punk rock and hip hop—the struggles involved with both, and how both started as underground movements. We segued into a major discussion about whether Blink-182 and Green Day were the cartoon versions of punk. And whether Slim Shady was the cartoon version of rap (this was years after MC Hammer and Puffy’s Playboy After Dark persona, and years before Nicki Minaj). I asked how much of freestyle battling was really—even secretly—written down in advance. “You can freestyle not knowing what you’re about to say at all,” Proof told me. “That can be done. In battles, people can take from previously written material and throw them about and then go back to freestyle. But there are rules. The adrenaline is intense. You’ve got to stay flow-focused. I mean anyone can rhyme ‘dad/bad/mad’ but you’ve got to get crazy with it. Like if you said ‘backflip/graphic’ and I came back with ‘flipping through gymnastics.’ That’s the skill, you know what I’m saying?” We talked about how Eminem didn’t read. Proof said, “He’s got a big-ass library and I asked him where he got all those books. Em said they came with the house.”

  Proof talked about their friendship. “Being Em’s best friend is like being Tupac’s best friend, Michael Jordan’s best friend or Elvis Presley’s best friend,” he said. “Those are the only people who would understand. I don’t even know how to look at it sometimes. I wish we could just go walk to the store or go play basketball in the park. We can’t do any of that anymore. It’s just crazy. I love the fact that I can go out of my driveway, go to a store at three in the morning, grab shit, put it in my basket, and no one is going to bother me. But he gets swamped. Everywhere. I remember one time he told me he was in the park with his daughter Hailie and she fell and cut her ankle. So he takes her to a fountain and tries to wash it, to keep it clean, make sure there’s no dirt and stuff. And while he’s doing that, people are asking him for autographs. This happens with him all the time. Any fucking where. I mean, most rich people, they can fly to islands, or go to their yachts. They have fun, right? Em can go to places like that because he’s got the money, but everybody still wants to talk to him there, because he’s so famous. He put himself in jail.”

  We talked about how they met and how Proof encouraged him. Together, they decided to quit school, become rappers, and get married to their girlfriends. “And then he goes and gets divorced,” Proof laughed. “I was like man, what shit are you doing to me right now?” Proof talked about his own kids and how he cried when he took his son to school, because he was breaking the dysfunctional cycle of his own family. “For a black man to be there for his kid, it’s just a beautiful thing,” Proof said. “And not even a black man, just a man, to do the right thing. I feel like I beat it. It’s great. And for Em, without Hailie, there is no Eminem. I know that sounds bananas, but the definition of focus is direct attention, and he gives direction attention to Hailie. That’s the thing that matters to him most, you know what I’m saying?” Proof talked about how he and Eminem came together mostly because of their love of, as he put it, compound syllables. “We knew how to structure sentences with compound syllables,” he said. “I couldn’t stop thinking about how he rhymed ‘first place’ with ‘birthday.’ When I first saw him perform, it was like instant recognition. Our color just went right out the window.” (The next time I saw Proof, at the MTV Awards in June 2005, he’d received my Jerry Garcia
and Lenny Bruce package and he thanked me, saying, “It changed my life.” We always meant to get together again and talk some more. We never got the chance.)

  • • •

  Before I went to Detroit to talk to Eminem, I saw Jimmy Iovine again. He compared Eminem to John Lennon, Bruce Springsteen, Kurt Cobain and Bono. I said that, to me, he was like John Lennon, Keith Richards and Joe Strummer. Jimmy told me how, the night that Eminem won the Best Song Oscar for “Lose Yourself,” he and Dre called Eminem in Detroit to congratulate him. His then-wife Kim woke Eminem up. “What’s up?” he said. They told him. “That’s great,” he said, then immediately proceeded to tell Dre about a rap he’d just written about someone who, after it came out, would never be able to leave his house again. Jimmy told me, “To every kid who grew up in the ’80s, rap was their rock and roll. And I’ve always looked for things that would move the culture. Death Row did that, Tupac did that. The Elvis Presley myth was that Colonel Tom Parker said if you could find a white guy who could sing like he was black, you’d make a fortune. But in rap, everyone said a white kid couldn’t make it. Em may have been the only artist I ever worked with who wasn’t motivated by money. He’s still obsessed. He’s still hungry. At first, people in the industry thought I shouldn’t put his record out. I was like, what are you talking about? He’s so gifted and talented. People realize it now. 8 Mile changed everything. He keeps the lights on in our building.”

  *

  On October 1, 2004, I hired a car and driver to take me from New York City to Detroit. It took eleven hours, but I’d rather sit eleven hours in a car than eleven minutes on a plane. Prior to my trip, I went to Paul Rosenberg’s office to hear one of Eminem’s new songs—a “protest” song called “Mosh.” I went berserk. At a time when Bono was posing for photo ops with George W. Bush, Eminem had written an incendiary, compelling, passionate and intense anti-war, anti-racist song. I couldn’t wait to get to Detroit to talk to him.

  I hadn’t been to Detroit in years. I went a few days before I was scheduled to talk to Eminem. I stayed at a hotel in Birmingham, Michigan, but I had a car take me all over Detroit. The driver’s name was Matthew Calhoun, and he told me there was a store that sold $1,000 alligator cowboy boots. “People come from all over the country to buy those boots,” he said. “The two-tone ones are $1,200, and the mink-lined ones cost up to $1,800. I’ve seen preachers and drug dealers side by side buying those boots,” he said.

  Eminem’s Detroit was not the Polish area of Hamtramck with its groovy, alternative rock scene that spawned the White Stripes. A vintage clothing store on Joseph Campau Street in Hamtramck called Detroit Threads had framed photos of the Stooges and the MC5 in the window. The proprietor told me that his landlord’s husband was in the bus scene in 8 Mile. Eminem’s Detroit wasn’t over at West Grand Boulevard either— where Motown Records had brought “The Sound of Young America” to the world in the 1960s. Nor is it the college town of Ann Arbor where the Stooges, the MC5 and the White Panther Party all lived in the late 1960s. It’s not the blue-collar environment of Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels or Bob Seger or Grand Funk Railroad. And it has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with Madonna, wherever she came from, before she fled for Times Square. Eminem’s roots are firmly in the black neighborhood east of 8 Mile Road.

  *

  Marshall Mathers, born in 1972 in St. Louis, moved many times before his mother settled in Detroit. His father abandoned them when Marshall was six months old, then re-surfaced thirty years later on the TV tabloid show Inside Edition—displaying baby pictures of the son he hadn’t seen in three decades. Detroit is a gritty, suffering city. In 2004, downtown appeared evacuated. You could feel the poverty, the frustration, the fury, the desire to just get the hell out by any means necessary. Like other kids of his generation, Marshall fell in love with hip hop. He always had jobs, but rapping was the only thing he thought he could do well. He used to rap the food orders at Gilbert’s Lodge, where he worked as a short-order cook. I went to Gilbert’s, a large diner-type restaurant in St. Clair Shores. It’s on Harper, between 8 and 9 Mile Roads, right in the middle of strip clubs, pregnancy crisis centers and beauty supply stores. Inside the recently renovated restaurant were large TV screens, an open kitchen, and a hunting lodge motif. Specialties were patty melts, french fries and deep-dish pizza. The people who worked there spoke highly of Marshall, even though they weren’t thrilled with the ton of mail still sent to him there. Cindy Giraud, a bartender who’d been working there for seventeen years, said most of the mail was from Germany, and a lot of it was from young girls in “seductive” poses. “He was an average cook who made it big,” Cindy said. “But nobody ever expects anybody to make it that big. He called the other night to say hi.”

  At 19946 Dresden, between Fairmount and State Fair, the brown-shingled house where Marshall used to live was empty. Several houses on the block had “For Sale” signs. I got out of the car and stood across the street. The house was the one that had been on the cover of The Marshall Mathers LP. It felt like I was visiting a historical spot—like the Motown Museum two miles away on West Grand Boulevard. Except that this house was, at the time, not preserved. It was empty, and boarded up. It’s since been sold.

  On October 3, 2004, Eminem and I sat down to talk in his studio. In 2004, in addition to the small studio where we talked, he had one in his house so that he could make beats, or record tracks any time of the day or night. The studio has always been his sanctuary, his safety zone. For Eminem, to even go out to a Taco Bell in Detroit is a production. First, he has to tell his security guards he wants to go. Then, they have to get the car. Then, they have to get in the car, and drive to wherever. Then, a security guard has to scope the place out, to make sure that it appears “cool”—which means there aren’t any obvious nuts loitering about. Or it’s not too crowded, so Eminem can walk in and order something with a minimum of fuss. Once people started having cellphones with cameras, it was impossible to not be photographed. If his daughter was with him, she and his niece and their friends had to go in first, so she wouldn’t be seen with him and wind up with her face in the newspapers. In the end, the whole thing was such a performance that it was always easier to send someone to get whatever it was he wanted.

  *

  When I walked into the studio, I didn’t recognize Eminem. The man standing in front of me was not the vitriolic threat, or the jokester who made all those million-selling records. Nor was he the guy I’d talked to before—backstage at the Grammys, at Doug Morris’ party, or at the 8 Mile premiere. Seeing someone out of context is often a surprise. It’s like seeing Mick Jagger at a dinner party as opposed to backstage getting ready for a Rolling Stones show. He’s a different guy. Without the showbiz aura. And, in “real life,” they always seem shorter. This guy standing in front of me was Marshall Mathers: polite, soft spoken, lucid, direct. Everyone around him called him Marshall. Or Em. He wore a red warm-up suit, gray t-shirt and red, white and black Nike sneakers. A patterned scarf was on his head, covered by a red baseball cap worn backwards. His hair was bleached blonde, and he wore wire-rimmed eyeglasses. (Years later, after he had revealed his addictions to Vicodin, Valium and Ambien, I listened back to the tapes of our talk that day, trying to ascertain if he’d been stoned. I doubt it, but it’s possible that he was on pills, or that he was a really good actor. It certainly wouldn’t have been the first time I was fooled by a musician.)

  I told him that I couldn’t believe how great his song “Mosh” was, as well as its accompanying animated video. I said I considered it one of the most important, intense anti-war (and anti-Bush) songs I’d heard. In fact, it made all these “non-partisan” musicians look like wimps. This was not a time to not take a stand. I said I thought “Mosh” was a hardcore version of Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War”—a song that Eminem had never heard. “I’ve never been one to be all that political,” Eminem said. “Most of it is in the song and I would prefer to leave it at that. But my p
ersonal opinion—and I’m just one person who happens to speak to a lot of people—is that we live in the best country there is, and this guy is fucking it up. There’s people over there [in Iraq] dying and we can’t get a straight answer why. Obviously, I wasn’t around for Vietnam, but it’s almost becoming like Vietnam 2. This is the first year I’ve registered to vote. I want to vote, and I want to get him out of office. But he’s created such a fucking mess over there, I don’t know if it can be fixed.” He added that his personal take was when 9/11 happened, it was an attack on America from Bin Laden, and “we went after someone [Saddam Hussein] who we hadn’t heard about in fucking ten . . . twelve years. It’s like two people are standing here and one punches you in the face. You don’t do anything back to him—you punch the other guy in the face.” We discussed the Republican convention in New York City with its penned-in “free-speech zones.” We discussed how that concept applied to music and lyrics; that the whole country was supposed to be a free-speech zone.