Have Gun Will Travel

Andrew Leonard

Never mind Suge Knight's eight convictions, or the time he forced a record promoter to drink his urine, or his close ties to assorted drug dealers and felons. When the walls finally caved in on the CEO of Death Row Records -- when the premier "gangsta rap" company was being simultaneously investigated by the FBI, IRS, DEA and ATF and Knight himself was about to be sentenced to nine years in prison -- Suge Knight never lost his confidence. "I'm the fall guy," he said. The fall of Death Row, he claimed, was nothing more than another case of the white establishment busting some black ass.

Ronin Ro, a hip-hop beat reporter who establishes undeniable investigative reporting street cred in Have Gun Will Travel, makes Knight's claims of racist persecution seem, at best, laughable. The gory details of Knight's reign of terror -- the contract negotiations with a baseball bat, the back room torture, the in-house gang battles -- are impossible to dismiss. Indeed, if only half of what Ro reports is true, he can be excused for nervously looking over his shoulder. Someday, the 6-foot-3, 300-pound Knight will be back on the street, and he's not likely to think kindly of the author of Have Gun Will Travel.

Ro did his legwork. Reviewers are already rushing to laud Have Gun Will Travel as the "definitive" account of the rise and fall of gangsta rap, as seen through the prism of Death Row. Other reporters can only shake their heads in awe at Ro's success in penetrating a scene where reporters are generally considered about as welcome as plague-bearing rats. But legwork alone isn't enough. The book reads as if written in a hurry, and could have benefited from a careful edit. More time for reflection might have addressed the one major flaw of Have Gun Will Travel: its failure to provide perspective.

Ro almost gets there when he details how Sony, Interscope and the rest of the white-run record biz looked the other way at Knight's behavior while the cash came rolling in. But he doesn't draw the consequences. Sure, Knight was a murderous brute, and Death Row Records exemplified the gangsta rap lifestyle with more flair than most real gang bangers. But that just made the record label the most egregious flag bearer for a fundamentally corrupt industry. So what if Knight ripped off his own artists and physically abused them to boot? Treating artists like shit is standard practice in the music business. All Knight did was translate the same sorry old tactics of extortion, abuse and exploitation into flying fists and kicks.

The story of Death Row exerts lurid fascination because the details are so extravagant: They map all too closely to the lyrics of a Snoop Doggy Dog track. But none of it could have happened without the willing cooperation of big-name corporate accounting firms, lawyers and entertainment mega-corporations. Suge Knight is a symptom, not the disease. And in that respect, he is, indeed, the fall guy. -- Salon

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

This story of the West Coast rap label Death Row Records and its head, Marion ("Suge") Knight, who brought the techniques of his violent L.A. gang, the Bloods, to his boardroom and terrified the industry, is pitiful and horrifying. Ro (Gangsta) reports the shocking tale of a man who began as a football player, doing a stint with the L.A. Rams, then became a bodyguard and, finally, with an infusion of drug money, according to Ro, in 1993 founded the record label that earned almost $400 million in four years and assembled a stable of stars like Dr. Dre and Snoop Doggy Dogg. Said to be run by gang members, Death Row pirated top performers from other labels, often substituting expensive gifts for royalty payments, and at length clashed with East Coast rappers. Ro also ventures into the unsolved murders of rappers Tupac Shakur and The Notorious B.I.G., with several conjectures. He makes a significant contribution to the history of pop music. (Mar.)

Library Journal

Music journalist and former rapper Ro provides an in-depth history of Death Row Records, one of the premier gangsta rap labels, with a spotlight on label mastermind Marion "Suge" Knight. He begins with the transformation of Knight from an introspective college football star, born into a stable lower-middle-class home, to a brash record-industry hopeful willing to gamble anything on success. In brief, sometimes gripping chapters, the author describes Knight's initial partnership with rap star Andre "Dr. Dre" Young, the formation of Death Row Records in 1991, Death Row's first mega-hit with Dr. Dre's "Chronic," and continued success with million-selling records by Snoop Doggy Dogg and Tupac Shakur. Throughout, he highlights the violent, intimidating, gang-influenced tactics of the label, which eventually led to an F.B.I. investigation, Knight's imprisonment, the murder of Tupac Shakur, and the demise of Death Row Records. This well-written, provocative account casts Death Row Records as a street-based outgrowth of a corrupt, hit-a-minute record industry and illuminates the dark side of the materialistic, get-what-you-can culture of the 1990s. Highly recommended for general readers and music fans.David P. Szatmary, Univ. of Washington, Seattle

Kirkus Reviews

A sloppy but repellently gripping history of the once eminent, now moribund Death Row record label. Hip-hop journalist Ro (Gangsta: Merchandising the Rhymes of Violence, 1996) charts CEO Marion "Suge" Knight's progress from an impoverished childhood in L.A.þs Compton ghetto through his tenure as hooligan-in-chief of gangster-ridden Death Row and his ultimate imprisonment on charges of violating probation after an assault conviction. Having started Death Row with money provided by an incarcerated L.A. drug kingpin, Knight, according to Ro, used threats and intimidation to extract Dr. Dre, of the bestselling gangsta-rap group N.W.A, from his contract with Ruthless Records in 1991. Dre, rapþs most influential producer, enlisted the unknown Snoop Doggy Dogg to rap on his The Chronic, which became one of the biggest-selling rap albums ever. While Snoop's solo album continued Death Row's winning streak, the enormous Knight and his entourage of Bloods routinely handled perceived business problems with physical attacks, at least one of which, Ro reports, resulted in death: "Death Row employees went about their filing and faxing as blood-curdling shrieks filled the office. They saw the doorknob jerking, knowing that people were desperately trying to escape a beating." Ro lets various Crips, Bloods, and other observers testify to the pattern of violent retaliation that usually kept Knight's victims from seeking legal redress. Knight did his best to foment the East Coast/West Coast hip-hop feud that, according to Ro, is possibly to blame for the murders of stars Tupac Shakur (who was shot while riding in Knight's car) and the Notorious B.I.G. Artists with platinumrecords routinely went unpaid, and by 1997, when Knight received his nine-year prison sentence, lawsuits and government investigations aimed at Death Row had virtually halted the label's activities. Unfortunately, Ro's writing is infuriatingly haphazard: In some places crucial information is scrambled or omitted, but elsewhere he feels the need to identify "pop singer Madonna Ciccone." Still, a surrealistic tale of high-stakes thuggery.