Whatever You Say I Am_ The Life and Times of Eminem - Anthony Bozza [11]
“This guy named Other-Wize beat him [at the 1997 Rap Olympics],” Rosenberg says. “I’d have to see a tape of it to see how he actually won. I think Eminem won. But it doesn’t matter. He really wanted to win, he could have used the money. But I knew that even though he didn’t, it was great for us—it was exposure we could turn into something.” Rosenberg was right; Eminem didn’t win that battle, but he did win the war. Two Interscope assistants, Dean Geistlinger and Evan Bogart, son of deceased disco kingpin and Casablanca Records founder Neil, approached Rosenberg and Eminem after the Rap Olympics. They felt strongly about Eminem but were careful about pushing his music across the boss’s desk. “We stayed in touch with them,” Rosenberg says. At the time he still worked as a personal-injury lawyer and stayed after hours at his firm to call labels on the West Coast on Eminem’s behalf. “At some point I called the guys we knew at Interscope and was like, ‘OK, we’re coming to town; I’m bringing Em out and I want to set up a meeting because he’s starting to get really discouraged.’ There were a whole slew of labels flirting with it, but nobody was biting because he was white. Aside from the moderate success of 3rd Bass, there really hadn’t been a successful, credible white rapper. They thought he was talented, but they were scared of it.” This time Rosenberg’s push worked: The tape made it to Jimmy Iovine, the Interscope Records president, then to Dr. Dre.
There have been many versions told of how Dr. Dre came to hear Eminem. In one Dre heard him rap on the nationally syndicated Friday night hip-hop showcase The Wake Up Show, with King Tech and DJ-rapper-turned-MTV News correspondent Sway Calloway, and phoned the studio. Other variations of the story of Eminem’s discovery state that either Dr. Dre, Iovine, or both approached the rapper at the end of the ’97 Olympics. A third says that Dr. Dre happened upon a tape of Eminem’s Slim Shady EP on the floor of Iovine’s gym. The truth is that the night after taking second place in the Rap Olympics, Eminem freestyled on The Wake Up Show along with a group of rappers who had also competed. Dr. Dre did, in fact, hear him, and remembered Eminem’s voice when Iovine handed him a tape sometime afterward.
“I was at Jimmy’s house and he played the tape for me,” Dre says about hearing the Slim Shady EP for the first time. “He asked me what I thought of it and I said, ‘Find him. Now.’ I thought the tape was incredible, know what I’m sayin’? In my entire career in the music industry, I’ve never found anything from a demo tape. Usually somebody knew somebody or someone was brought up to the studio. When I heard it, I didn’t even know he was white. The content turned me on more than anything, and the way he was flipping it. Dark comedy is what I call it. It was incredible, I had to meet him right away.”
The Bass Brothers and Paul Rosenberg pooled some money to fund their trip to L.A. to meet Dr. Dre; the accommodations were as luxurious as Eminem’s back home. “We were in some shitty-ass motel with a hard-ass cement floor,” the rapper says. “When Paul told me that Dre called I was like, ‘Get the fuck out of here, man.’ I thought he was lying. We had gotten jerked around by so many labels by that point.”
Soon after, the contracts were signed. It wasn’t long before Dr. Dre introduced Eminem to the world as he’d done with Snoop Dogg about half a decade earlier (Snoop’s 1993 debut, Doggystyle, became the first debut album to enter the national charts at number one.) Though FBT would work on Eminem’s debut, furnishing their services to Interscope Records, Dr. Dre would be the influential face man and public mentor, bestowing upon Eminem a flawless hip-hop credibility to silence naysayers from the start. After they broke the ice, Dr. Dre was eager to begin recording with his new apprentice. “When I met Dre I was nervous, man,” Eminem says. “I was just like, ‘what’s up,’ and looked away. I didn’t know what to say to him. I didn