Before joining NWA, Dr Dre wore sequined suits and played dance music with his first group, World Class Wreckin’ Cru. But he wasn’t making much money, so he had side hustles such as deejaying at Los Angeles-area high schools during lunch hours.
In 1986 Matthew McDaniel, then an aspiring film-maker, saw Dre performing at these so-called noon dances. They were hosted by KDAY, the groundbreaking AM hip-hop station where McDaniel was an intern. Dre played the hits of the day – Run-DMC, MC Shy D – for kids in schoolyards as they danced, socialized and ate their sandwiches.
“In all fairness, he was a good DJ, but he didn’t stand out, as far as being the fastest or doing the most tricks,” McDaniel says. “He was dope, but he was a producer.”
News soon broke that Dre had joined a group called NWA, and McDaniel’s colleague told him what the letters stood for. “We thought that was so cool,” says McDaniel, who grew up in Pasadena and Altadena. “We wanted music that was rebellious.”
NWA, of course, launched an entire movement, and McDaniel chronicled it every step of the way (his vintage footage is prominently featured in the Straight Outta Compton biopic, out 14 August).
Over the years McDaniel’s footage has appeared in many award-winning documentaries, but his career started humbly. At KDAY he toiled for five long, unpaid years. But he got great access to his favorite rappers, whom he’d pick up at the airport for station-sponsored shows, popular New York acts such as LL Cool J, Salt ‘N Peppa, and the Juice Crew.
He’d give them their first tastes of LA, buying them 40s and taking them sightseeing to the Playboy mansion. Enchanted by the talents of an 18-year-old Queen Latifah, he introduced her to industry types and helped her land shows at skating rinks. “He basically babysat my ass,” Latifah later said. McDaniel’s camera was rolling the whole time, and his Latifah footage was used in a 2002 Access Hollywood story.
“He’s pretty much the west coast Walter Cronkite,” says Big Daddy Kane, who first met McDaniel in the mid-80s when he came out to LA with Biz Markie. “He was at every single event, but he wasn’t hanging out, drinking and trying to chase girls. He was documenting everything that went down.”
McDaniel’s first NWA interview was in November 1988, near the release of their debut, Straight Outta Compton. He’s borrowed a camera (“the latest technology, a Magnavox Super VHS”) and arrived at their Torrance studio. Ice Cube wasn’t there, but the other members (including ghostwriter DOC) sported their trademark black and silver gear, except for Dre, who wore a thick “dookie chain” and Dodgers cap.
They had a flare for the dramatic even then, such as when McDaniel asked how close their lyrics were to their real lives. “Just as real as this gun,” Eazy-E responded, hoisting a terrifyingly large automatic rifle. MC Ren announced they had a new record coming out soon, called Fuck tha Police, and they aired their gripes with law enforcement, with Dre clarifying that they didn’t hate all police, only “like 90%”.
“That’s the best interview moment of my life,” McDaniel says today, speaking from his brother’s Altadena backyard. To illustrate his stories, he shows clips from his nearly 30 years of shooting on his oversized smartphone.
Now 50, McDaniel has seen everything when it comes to LA gangsta rap. At one point he was roommates in a Hollywood apartment with Cypress Hill producer DJ Muggs – he was making the How I Could Just Kill a Man beat – and lived downstairs from Ice-T. McDaniel’s LA riots footage became an award-winning documentary called Birth of a Nation 4*29*1992, highlighted by a protester ripping off his red undershirt to symbolize peace between the Bloods and Crips.
But McDaniel’s footage of NWA members has become especially valuable. He’s got Ice Cube discoursing in front of his parents’ South Central home, Snoop and Dre shooting the Fuck Wit Dre Day video, and Suge Knight at fabled LA club The Casa. (Dr Dre used some of his audio footage from Birth of a Nation on The Chronic, though McDaniel had to sue for payment.)
Rather than simply dump his video on YouTube, he’s selectively parcelled it out over the years – in documentaries such as Uprising, Henry Louis Gates’ Many Rivers to Cross, various Behind the Music episodes and, most lucratively, Straight Outta Compton. During filming he had his own office at the production lot, and Cube’s son Darrell Jackson, a production assistant, helped him move in.
Cube was always McDaniel’s favorite. “He took the situation we lived in – gangbanging out of control – and made time capsules of it,” he says. In 1989 Cube, still then in NWA, told him he wasn’t too sure about a solo album. But a year later McDaniel talked to him again, after he’d released his acclaimed solo debut Amerikkka’s Most Wanted. “A lot of people told me I made a bad decision leaving NWA. What do you think?” he asked McDaniel, who assured him he hadn’t.
But his relationship with the group members wasn’t always smooth. In 1991 he talked with Eazy-E for the Source, about Dr Dre’s battery of television host Dee Barnes. Eazy insisted Barnes “deserved” her treatment, which led in part to her naming him and other group members in a civil suit. McDaniel felt he’d written a fair story, and was alarmed when he heard Eazy badmouthing his work one day, live on KDAY. And so McDaniel hopped into his car and drove over to the station’s studios. He planted himself in front of their window, drawing Eazy’s attention.
“You didn’t like the story I wrote?” he asked.
Eazy’s response: “Nah, man, I think you got us sued.”
In the end, they smoothed things over. “He threw me under the bus, but it didn’t go any further than that,” McDaniel says. (The suit was dismissed.) Perhaps most impressively, McDaniel wasn’t intimidated by the gangsta impresario. “He went up to here on me,” McDaniel – a quite large guy in contrast to the diminutiverapper – explains with a smile, raising his hand to a level below his chin (he adds that Eazy later attended a fundraiser for one of his documentaries and donated $300).
McDaniel’s current projects include the web series Cars, Wine, and Women – short, dreamy, vignettes which he describes as Fast and Furious meets Twilight Zone. “It will be stuff car guys can relate to,” he says. He’s also preparing a documentary entitled The Kid Stays in Hip-Hop. Referencing film mogul Robert Evans’ memoir, it will include his interviews and outtakes with rap stars including Ice-T, Big Daddy Kane, Heavy D and Roxanne Shante.
As opposed to the glossy Straight Outta Compton, McDaniel’s footage captures the gritty feel of what the classic Los Angeles gangsta rap scene was really like. Through his lens, one is instantly transported back to the NWA era, in all its messy glory. “Every time I caught them it was epic,” McDaniel says. In the process, he managed to become a part of history himself.
