Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (33 1/3) (8 page)

When Chuck returned from tour in September,
Public Enemy recorded “Bring the Noise” so Rick Rubin would have something for the
Less Than Zero
soundtrack to fill the place of the then scrapped “Don’t Believe the Hype.” The crew showed up at Sabella Studios in Long Island to record — Keith and Hank laying down the drums, Chuck bringing in the samples — presumably including sounds from Funkadelic’s
Let’s Take It to the Stage
. Chuck had penned lyrics while driving in his car alongside the ocean in Long Island, playing the track in his tape deck and taking notes. He later said he hit a creative wall, faced with pages of lyrics but no idea of which ones to use. Hank suggested that Chuck tackle each verse with a different style. The crew stayed in the studio until early morning, Terminator X laying down the final scratches around 5 a.m.

Chuck wasn’t originally sold on the song when Harry Allen brought him a tape of the mix in Atlanta. Frustrated that they had made an innovative track that wasn’t a potential hit, he threw the tape across the room and “damn near out the window.”
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He would be surprised in November when Public Enemy toured Europe. Chuck had Terminator throw on the acetate, and the crowd went nuts — the track would become one of their signatures. Just like “Rebel without a Pause,” “Bring The Noise” proved that the “B-side wins again.” Upon its release in November 1987 as the B-side to a split 12-inch, it would immediately steal the spotlight from the Black Flames, the R&B
group leading with a stiff, robotic, un-fun cover of the Chi-Lites’ triumphant “Are You My Woman? (Tell Me So).” Russell Simmons had picked the Black Flames for the soundtrack, much to Rubin’s dismay, who would rather have been in L.A. recording with Slayer. The split single was a living symbol that the Def Jam co-conspirators were headed in two disparate directions: Simmons looking to diversify with R&B, Rubin looking to destroy speakers with heavy records.

* * *

Immediately after
Let’s Take It to the Stage
, P-Funk would blow up both financially (due to the success of the
Mothership Connection
album and tour) and internally (original funkateers Calvin Simon, Grady Thomas, Fuzzy Haskins and Ray Davis called it quits). Using records from this same era, Public Enemy would construct “Party for Your Right to Fight” from some guitars and synths on
Tales of Kidd Funkadelic
— an album in which the Undisco Kidd would, in fact, declare himself “Public Enemy No. 1 to the undisco scene.”

After making its wheedly appearance on “Bring the Noise,” chunks of Funkadelic’s “Get Off Your Ass and Jam” would appear on countless rap records. “Get Off Your Ass and Jam” actually became the center of a landmark sampling lawsuit in 2004, after three guitar notes were used — with permission, no less — in
N.W.A.’s chaotic, Shocklee-jacking 1990 single “100 Miles and Runnin’.” Bridgeport Music, the owners of George Clinton’s publishing, heard the N.W.A track in Master P’s movie
I Got the Hook Up
and realized that sync rights for movie use were never given. N.W.A.’s actual use of Funkadelic was negligible — the sound was a mere sliver (only three notes), it was manipulated into oblivion (producer Dr. Dre pitch-shifted it down to fit the key of the song), making it almost unrecognizable under his mix. But still, after the smoke cleared, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that any use of a sound recording constitutes copyright infringement.

Despite the actions of his publishers, Clinton enjoyed a great symbiotic relationship with hip-hop, appreciating the re-energizing of his tracks as a way to keep his music from becoming nostalgia fodder. He even experimented with samplers and hip-hop on 1989’s
The Cinderella Theory
, inviting Chuck and Flav along for the party. “I like Public Enemy especially because they’re using the philosophy,” Clinton told
Rolling Stone
in 1990. “Like,
America Eats Its Young
sounds just like what they’re saying today . . . They, to me, are like Bob Dylan.”
⁵⁷

American critics had responded to
Yo! Bum Rush the Show
with barbs (see John Leland’s
Village Voice
takedown), ambivalence (
The New York Times
loved the message, but hated the “adolescent macho”
⁵⁸
) and complete indifference (
Rolling Stone
didn’t review it until year’s end). But in the U.K., early adopter critics in magazines like
Melody Maker
and
NME
were already crowning Public Enemy as kings. While many rappers were treating the U.K. as a secondary market, Chuck was knee-deep in his strategy of doing as many interviews as possible, priming the pump for their visit in November. Chuck wanted Public Enemy to be the first rap group to conquer the international market. Said Chuck in his autobiography: “Other artists had a negative attitude about going overseas. They would complain about the lack of good food, the lack of what they felt was fine females, and the cold weather. We went overseas with an attitude like we were going to boot camp.”
⁵⁹

The first stop of the Def Jam Europe tour was the Hammersmith Odeon on November 1, 1987. Although Public Enemy went on first, opening for LL Cool J and Eric B and Rakim, they received a hero’s welcome — complete with the rowdy whistle-blowing, air-horn-tooting and singing along that British hip-hop audiences would later be known for. P.E. spent the summer months watching American girls swoon over Cool J, but the U.K. market wasn’t having it. Public Enemy were greeted with bedlam, LL with a hailstorm of coins. The audience was assuredly not loving Cool James when LL mounted the couch he had onstage for his hit ballad “I Need Love.” “London wasn’t into soft music,” said Chuck. “They wanted their music rock-hard.”
⁶⁰
Chuck had been voraciously reading the British press, so the response didn’t shock him, but Flavor Flav, who had never been to another country, was a bit taken aback.

The show on November 3, the third triumphant night at the Odeon, was recorded, videotaped and broadcast by the BBC. When they brought the tapes home, Public Enemy decided to use pieces of them on
Nation of Millions
to make it clear to everyone in America who had slept on
Yo! Bum Rush the Show
that they needed to, in the words of Professor Griff, “get a late pass.” Said Chuck in a London interview at the time: “There’s a certain situation over here that’s ready for us. In the States, they’re just about rockin’ boots, but over here, it’s some kind of awareness that they
don’t have in the States . . . as of yet. But they will.”
⁶¹

The voice at the beginning of
Nation of Millions
is British DJ Dave Pearce, host of BBC Radio’s pioneering show “Fresh Start to the Week,” one of the first shows to bring hip-hop to the U.K. “Hammersmith Odeon, are you ready for the Def Jam Tour? Let me hear you make some noise!” The crowd obliged. If you listen to tapes of the concert, the audio for “Rebel without a Pause” is mostly whistles. Chuck and Flav stalked the stage, both wearing white for ultimate visibility. Back then, both Chuck and Flav wore big bathroom clocks that they had copped from Long Island retailer Fortunoff, a style they borrowed from high school kids. Flav made his look timeless, eventually bringing it to prime time. Chuck abandoned his clock after it kept hitting him in the chest.

Segments from the high-energy, 35-minute set would be peppered throughout
Nation of Millions
— from Flav calling out for a “Hoooooo” to Chuck D giving props to Terminator X, to Professor Griff counting down “Armageddon.” With this glue eventually binding the album’s 16 tracks, the samples would give
Nation of Millions
a cohesion that, for the first time, established hip-hop as an
album
genre. American rock critics and rap fans would take note: Unlike any rap album that came before, this was a 57:51 statement, not a collection of singles.

After the initial three singles and the riotous Hammersmith Odeon interludes, the bulk of
Nation of Millions
was recorded within the first eight weeks of hip-hop’s golden year: 1988. Using the working title
Countdown to Armageddon
, the Bomb Squad toiled in January and February as the world continued to burn. Every day, the newspapers were peppered with incidents of racial discrimination. An all-white village board of a Chicago suburb was petitioning against a black church that was moving into its neighborhood. A 50-year-old African-American mother of five was attacked and rubbed with feces by two white assailants in the predominantly white city of Newton, New Jersey. A Texas court ruled that three police officers were guilty of beating an African-American Louisiana truck driver to death in a Texas jail. New York newspapers had shocking daily updates on the slowly unfolding case of Tawana Brawley, a 15-year-old
who claimed that a gang of white men abducted her, sexually assaulted her and scrawled racial slurs on her body. Brawley would later make a cameo in Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” video. It was clear that a fiery response was overdue.

With a $52,000 budget, the gang once again did pre-production at 510 South Franklin and finished up at Def Jam home base Chung King. Sometime in the middle of the sessions, operations were moved to Greene Street, where Salt-N-Pepa producer Hurby Luv Bug had set up shop. Unlike the three-minute Rick Rubin-curated riff-rap that was falling off the end of the Def Jam assembly line, it was very important to Hank Shocklee that Public Enemy were awarded full creative control. “Executive producer” Rubin thankfully had the trust and foresight to grant it to them, but Hank wasn’t taking any chances. He wouldn’t allow Russell Simmons, Rubin or anyone not directly involved with the creative process near the studio. His motto: They can hear it when it’s done. After
Nation of Millions
blew up and the Bomb Squad were commissioned to do remixes for Janet Jackson and Madonna, Hank wouldn’t even let the superstars gaze at his console. Creative freedom was imperative because, as they would be the first to tell you, Public Enemy were out to make history, not please an A&R rep. According to Hank, Simmons didn’t even
like
Public Enemy records until they started selling.

With Rubin’s blessing, Public Enemy were able
to work outside the time-tested model of the record label. Their defiance would cement hip-hop as an album genre, just like what Marvin Gaye helped do for soul when he threatened the Motown pop factory with defection if they didn’t support
What’s Going On
, or Stevie Wonder when he used the independently produced
Music of My Mind
as a bargaining chip in his contract. But in 1969, one album in particular cleared a slow, smooth, string-soaked path to autonomy.

* * *

When Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, the black-consciousness movement lost its voice and — about two miles away from where it happened — so did Isaac Hayes. “I went blank,” said Hayes. “I couldn’t write for about a year — I was filled with so much bitterness and anguish, till I couldn’t deal with it.”
⁶²
Just the day before, Hayes had marched with King in support of Memphis’ striking sanitation workers. For their troubles, they were hit with mace and attack dogs. Sometime after 6:01 p.m. on April 4, 1968, King was shot by a rifleman’s bullet on the second-floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel. Hayes was only a stone’s throw away, in a taxicab headed to the Stax recording studio. When he got the news, Hayes and songwriting partner David Porter drove over to the Lorraine and saw the pandemonium first-hand. On some streets there was
looting; others had an eerie stillness. Hayes took to the radio that night to plead for peace.

More than 125 cities reported racial violence, and many of them took advantage of the 24,000 National Guards that President Lyndon B. Johnson had dispatched. The National Guard in Memphis enforced a curfew, which Stax — in consideration of the studio’s importance to the community — was given permission to ignore. The Stax team set out to record throughout the night. Staffers moved some of the master tapes out of the studio as a precautionary measure, in case they were victims of rioting. The grocery store across the street was burned to the ground, but rioters would not touch the Stax studio, a revered community institution.

The National Guard set up camp on the corner outside the studio. A guardsman almost shot Hayes’ friend Benny Mabone when he poked his head outside the studio door. The morning after, MGs bassist Duck Dunn was sitting in his car when Hayes walked over to have a chat — a conversation that was immediately broken up by a swarm of police cars, with officers pointing shotguns at Hayes. As white-owned businesses around the studio burned to the ground, new tensions would be created in the Stax family, a crew that was made up of white and black musicians who had collaborated for years to make hit records.

Since first playing piano and co-writing Floyd Newman’s “Frog Stomp” in 1964, Hayes had been an integral player in what the bottom of the Stax letterhead
asserted was “The Memphis Sound — The soul label for your swinging turntable.” With records cut live in the back of a converted movie theater, Stax was the sound of
soul
— as in human soul. It allowed house drummer Al Jackson, Jr.’s snare cracks to lag behind the beat; it released takes in which the energy and feel were more important than things like tempo and pitch; its studio never really had the best equipment — all in sharp contrast to the comparatively clinical music coming out of Detroit, the Public Enemy to Motown’s Marley Marl. Stax owner Jim Stewart, a white bank teller and country fiddler who had formed the label out of his Satellite Records upstart in 1958, always asserted that it made “black music,” unlike Motown, which made hits geared for maximum crossover appeal.

In 1964, Hayes would begin a fruitful partnership with co-writer David Porter that would produce more than 200 songs for Carla and Rufus Thomas, Johnny Taylor and Sam & Dave — many of them written while Hayes was still supporting himself by working in a slaughterhouse. To get a physical element in Sam & Dave tracks like “You Don’t Know Like I Know,” Hayes and Porter would raise the key of the track until Sam Moore would be forced to sing uncomfortably out of his range. Hayes was responsible for bringing a funkier edge to Stax, co-writing the deadly “Hold On! I’m Coming” as well as “Soul Man,” a track that was overtly inspired by the black-consciousness movement and recorded a year before James Brown said it loud.
Having seen “soul” scrawled on buildings in Detroit and hearing the phrase “soul brother” become more popular every day, Hayes wrote the song to be a proud, pro-black anthem.