Can't Stop Won't Stop (45 page)

Hank was in demand because of a run of number-one singles through his
Bomb Squad production work for Vanessa Williams and Bell Biv Devoe. Bill was consumed by his duties as vice president of Def Jam, which itself was melting down. Rick and Russell were in the process of splitting, the Beastie Boys were suing the label for unpaid royalties (while trying to hire Stephney away) and the label's artists were accusing Stephney of playing favorites with Public Enemy. The solution was for Hank, Bill and Chuck to set up their own label.

When word got out that they were plotting to leave Def Jam a number of offers came in, the most serious a multimillion-dollar proposal from MCA Records, a company that had just purchased Motown—Chuck's personal ideal of Black business. In the late spring of 1989, Bill quit Def Jam, and he and Hank formalized the deal. Then they worked on setting up the new label, called “SOUL: The Sound of Urban Listeners,” and waited for Chuck to return from tour. These new label duties took them further from the daily activities of the group. As Public Enemy fulfilled a heavy schedule of touring and appearances, Chuck had become the
de facto
leader of the crew.

Public Enemy was carefully balanced on a set of dualities, with Chuck at the center of each. Chuck and Hank constituted the musical axis. Chuck and Flav were the focal sonic and visual points of the group. Chuck and Griff confronted the media. In 1988, Chuck had described his role in the group to
New Music Express
:

I'm like the mediator in all this. Flavor is what America would like to see in a Black man—sad to say, but true—whereas Griff is very much what America would not like to see. And there's no acting here—sometimes I can't put Flavor and Griff in the same room.

I'm in the middle. When Griff says something too much, I come to the rescue of white people; when Flavor does something, I come to the defense of Black people. I do constrain them, but not much, because Public Enemy are the only Black group making noises
outside
of their records.
³⁰

In their Hempstead studio, these tensions worked together to create magnifi-cent art. But the day-in, day-out stresses of the road made these same tensions crippling.

The disciplined, temperamental Griff had been given the role as road manager, and he began resenting the elusive, disorganized Flavor for ignoring group rules. Flavor's problems seemed complicated by his addictions. He was prone to disappearing for hours. When Flav showed up late for one show, Griff blew up and kicked him in the chest. Flav quickly got lost.

Griff's abrasiveness had even alienated the S1Ws, jeopardizing his road manager responsibilities. He wanted more involvement with the Bomb Squad, but the production team was already self-contained and Griff was always away on tour. He wanted a larger role as Minister of Information, and resented Chuck's role as chief spokesperson. He was becoming increasingly isolated from the crew.

On the other hand Chuck would ignore the problems until they became unbearable, frozen by loyalty to each of his old friends. In decision-making, he was reluctant to dictate terms. He preferred a democratic process of consensus-making. In any case, he figured, everyone was supposed to play his position. They knew their role. He sighs, “I thought that men could fix their problems amongst themselves, and I kinda like would be the guy in charge. But see, how the fuck can a
man
be in charge of men?”

A crew of old friends had suddenly been thrown into the spotlight of massive success. Amidst incessant touring and fishbowl scrutiny, the personal and the political quickly became intertwined and threatened to blow.

Def Jam/Rush publicist Bill Adler had tutored Chuck in how to become adept at playing a kind of brinksmanship with the media. When reporters tried to pin him down, Chuck flipped the question into a big-picture statement or a personal story. Griff thought Chuck was becoming soft. The more distanced Griff was from the crew, the harder the line he wanted to take.

From the earliest tours, Chuck had included Griff in Public Enemy interviews. After some disastrous early British interviews, Chuck took up the primary press role again.
³¹
But as Public Enemy took off, Chuck's leadership responsibilities, which included handling tour scheduling and details Griff's refusal to continue as road manager, and the extraordinary media demands caused Chuck to delegate some media duties back to Griff. When Public Enemy toured through
Europe and America in the summer of
Nation of Millions
, Griff's rhetoric began to overheat. “No more of this media darling this and darling that,” he told British reporters, “let's turn it up a notch.”
³²

In Switzerland during May to promote the record, Griff led the discussion like a wild goose chase, jumping from apartheid in South Africa to the origins of the diamond and slave trades to the ethics of the
intifada
to whites mating with monkeys. Some of Griff's opinions were confrontational, lots of them were just weird, but none of them would be as explosive as this one reported by
Melody Maker
in its May 28, 1988, issue: “If the Palestinians took up arms, went into Israel and killed all the Jews, it'd be alright.”
³³
To this day, Chuck traces the beginnings of 1989's meltdown to this very moment.

Three weeks after the
Melody Maker
article ran, Chuck showed up at the New Music Seminar in New York City to find the crowd holding flyers that read “Don't Believe the HATE,” and listing some of Griff's more outrageous quotes. John Leland, whom Chuck had threatened in
NME
some months before, sat with Chuck for an interview:

Q: Chuck, what's your reaction to the handbill distributed at the New Music Seminar?

A: They're making a whole lot of shit about nothing. A lot of paranoia going on. People think I got the ability to fucking turn a country around.

Q: Do you back the statements that Griff made?

A: I back Griff. Whatever he says, he can prove.

Q: You mean he can prove that white people mated with monkeys? That it wouldn't be such a bad idea if Palestinians were to kill all Jews in Israel?

A: Now that was taken out of context. I was there. He said, by Western civilization's standards it wouldn't be bad for the Palestinians to come into Palestine and kill all the Jews, because that's what's been done right throughout Western civilization: invasion, conquering and killing. That wasn't mentioned.
³⁴

Bill Adler was concerned. He says, “I had no trouble repeating what Chuck said vis-a-vis the criticism that Public Enemy was anti-white. They'd say, ‘No, we're pro-Black.' Fine. Their racial politics I had no problem with. The problem for me was when Griff began giving anti-Semitic interviews.

“Griff is sober, disciplined, clean and well spoken—soft spoken, too. Not a screamer, not a ranter. He's got every appearance of rationality, sobriety and thoughtfulness and yet, in this very calm voice, he's going to say the goofiest shit in the world about how the Jews are in a conspiracy, and have been in a conspiracy forever, to destroy the Black man.”

Adler confronted Griff about his quotes to
Melody Maker
. He was worried these kinds of statements could become a serious flashpoint for the group. But rather than deny that he'd said them, Adler says, Griff dug in his heels. “I said to him, I said ‘Griff, where did you hear these things?' And he said,
‘The International Jew.'
I said,
‘The International Jew,
the book by Henry Ford, right?' He said ‘Yeah.' I said, ‘Griff, you know about Henry Ford. Henry Ford is a guy who established two cities for his workers on the outskirts of Detroit. One was for white folks only and it was called Dearborn and the other was for his Black workers only and it was called Inkster. Understand, he would as gladly have upholstered the seats of his Model T with your Black hide as with my Jewish hide.' And Griff shrugged. He was absolutely unmoved. He said, ‘I'm sorry, Bill. It's in the book.' ”

When the band came to Washington, D.C., a year later, on May 9, 1989, tensions within the group had only increased. The band had been on the road for months, and the personal issues were taking their toll. “The split in the ranks, I just kind of left alone. Like, oh it will handle itself. And it never did,” Chuck says. When he needed to attend a meeting about tour scheduling, he sent Griff to meet with Black reporter David Mills from the conservative, Reverend Sun Myung Moon-funded
Washington Times
newspaper. By this point, Chuck says, “I guess Griff really felt like, ‘Hey, I'm not getting no love out of this group.' And now Chuck is telling me to do this damn interview.”

Griff had just given a TV interview in which he stated he did not wear gold chains because of Jewish support for apartheid.
³⁵
Mills pressed Griff on this
point and Griff, citing the Nation of Islam's recently published book,
The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews,
became more insistent:

Professor Griff
: . . . Is it a coincidence that the Jews run the jewelry business, and it's named
jew-elry
? No coincidence. Is it a coincidence to you that probably the gold from this ring was brought up out of South Africa, and that the Jews have a tight grip on our brothers in South Africa?

David Mills
: What do you mean “the Jews”? Are the Jews in America responsible for that? Are Jews as a totality responsible for that?

Professor Griff
: No, because there are some Jews that are righteous, that are following the Torah given to them by Moses . . . I'm not saying all of them. The majority of them (laughter), the majority of them, yes.

David Mills
: Are what? Are responsible for—

Professor Griff
: The majority of wickedness that goes on across the globe? Yes. Jews. Yes.

On May 11, in an effort at damage control, the crew invited Mills to meet them in Hempstead. Mills accepted. “We're not hung up on Jews. We've got no time to get hung up on Jewish people,” S1W James Norman told Mills. “We're battling to try to regain a Black consciousness for our people.”
³⁶

But Chuck, despite Hank's pleading, refused to dignify the proceeding by showing up. He eventually spoke to Mills over the phone, trying to dial back Griff's comments. Mills wasn't buying it. The article ran on May 22, included a transcript of parts of the interview with Griff, and closed with this kicker:

Chuck D doesn't know how Def Jam Records will react to this story. “A lot of people are not ready for the truth,” he said. “[Record companies] never dealt with anything like this before in their lives. They're used to dealing with sending groups out there, talking about girls, anything,” he says. “It's all right to even be derogatory to Blacks. Just don't be derogatory to most of the people in the business. Ninety percent of the business is operated by Jews, who started it.
³⁷

The story went unnoticed until Mills began faxing it nationally to newspapers and music magazines like
Rolling Stone
and
SPIN
with the help of the
Washington Times
publicist. It was republished on the front page of the
New York Tribune,
the Moonie paper in New York City, on May 29.

But controversy didn't erupt until
The Village Voice
hit the streets three Tuesdays later, on June 13. In his “Swing Shift” column, R. J. Smith ran excerpts of the Mills-Griff dialogue verbatim. “What I read in that interview made little sense to me and I felt a sense of betrayal,” Smith says. “It was depressing as hell.”

In the column, Smith tried to pin Chuck on Griff's views. “Although I don't agree with everything he said, Griff has a right to speak as an artist,” Chuck answered. Smith countered, “[T]he leaders of 1963 would never quote Henry Ford, believer in
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
.” Chuck called
The International Jew
“bullshit,” but said Griff had done his research and “is looking for someone to debate him.” He called the efforts to have him renounce Griff “divide and conquer.”
³⁸

Up until this point, Bill Stephney says, no one in the crew took Mills, his article and the claims it made very seriously. The charge of anti-Semitism especially, Stephney says, “seemed ridiculous on its face, just by virtue of who Public Enemy was in business with. They had been signed by Rick Rubin. Bill Adler was their publicist. They were managed by Lyor Cohen, Ron Skoler and Ed Chalpin. Their photographer and art director was Glen Friedman. As Bill Adler once put it, they were not anti-Semites, they were philo-Semites.

But behind the scenes, the pressure mounted. Spike Lee was preparing to release
Do the Right Thing
with “Fight the Power” as the lead-in single. But movie distributors were questioning Lee over Public Enemy's involvement with the film. None of the top brass at Columbia moved to formally censure Def Jam, but Russell, Lyor Cohen and Bill Adler all heard earfuls from Jewish industry leaders. Privately, Russell responded that he felt it was a free-speech issue, and Lyor vowed to work with the group. Adler was less sure, and soon removed himself as Public Enemy's publicist.

Before doing so, he, Hank and Bill Stephney met with Chuck to try to sound him out. “Everything was in jeopardy,” Hank later told
Rolling Stone
. “The people
we worked with were receiving lots of threats. My studio, Griff's mother . . . Chuck's mother. It got really nasty.”
³⁹

Chuck listened to Hank and Bill Stephney discuss the impact the incident was having on their deal with MCA, and to Bill Adler remind him his closest working relationships were with Jewish people. The three pressured Chuck to distance himself from Griff. He appeared unmoved.