#JerryHeller #NWA – Jerry Heller, Former N.W.A Manager, Dead at 75 : Jerry Heller, the longtime music manager that helped launch the career of N.W.A. and the gangsta-rap movement, died Friday. He was 75. Heller’s cousin confirmed Heller’s death to Billboard.
According to TMZ, Heller died after suffering a medical emergency while driving that resulted in him sustaining serious injuries after crashing his minivan in California. It’s still unclear whether Heller died from the medical emergency or the injuries from the crash.
Heller started his career in the music industry as an agent and promoter, working with artists like Creedence Clearwater Revival, Marvin Gaye, the Who and Black Sabbath in the Sixties and Seventies.
By the mid-Eighties, as hip-hop swelled in popularity, Heller co-founded Ruthless Records with Eazy-E; the Compton rapper reportedly paid Alonzo Williams of the World Class Wreckin’ Cru, another Heller-signed act that featured Dr. Dre, for an introduction to the manager.
N.W.A. formed in 1986 with Eazy-E and Dre linking up with C.I.A.’s Ice Cube and Arabian Prince; a year later, in 1987, Ruthless released the supergroup’s first single “Panic Zone. By the release of 1988’s Straight Outta Compton, MC Ren and DJ Yella would join N.W.A, which was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2015.
“From God we come and to God we return,” MC Ren told Rolling Stone following Heller’s death. In addition to N.W.A, Ruthless also became the one-time home of acts like J.J. Fad, Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, the D.O.C., Michel’le, Jimmy Z and more.
Heller served as the N.W.A’s manager for four years, although the group began to disintegrate in 1989 after Ice Cube quit over royalty disputes with Heller, resulting in the rapper’s scathing diss track “No Vaseline.”
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