It looked like the Battle of the Bulge."Īccording to Straight Outta Compton, plainclothes police gradually made their way to the side of the stage during the performance, where they looked on menacingly. Cops were everywhere, Brooks says, because it was a "'rap show'-put that in quotes-so everybody was looking for marijuana." He ran towards the stage, and soon "every police officer in the building starts rushing the stage out of nowhere. Brooks was working in an office somewhere in the arena when he heard the chant, followed by DJ Yella's familiar opening beat drop. "Turns out it was the cops, and they had lit off some cherry bombs to create chaos."Īnd so on August 6, 1989, many of the 20,000 fans in Detroit started chanting “Fuck Tha Police,” so N.W.A. And, of course, our security guys are fighting the guys who had stormed the stage," recalls Atron Gregory, the group's tour manager at the time. Guys are running, and guys are trying to storm the stage. "All of a sudden you hear bap, bap, bap, bap, bap. And those gunshots from the crowd weren’t really gunshots. In real life, according to people at the show, all it took to start the song was a brief flash of eye contact between Cube and Dre on stage. In the film, Ice Cube gives a stirring speech to introduce the song: "This is N.W.A., we do what the fuck we want to do, we say what the fuck we want to say" and leads the 20,000-some fans in a middle-finger salute before gunshots ring out. All that commotion and we ended up getting a ticket, like $100 or something like that." "'We're all running together and getting caught and getting thrown'-I guess that's done for Hollywood," says N.W.A.'s DJ Yella, who was on stage at the time. It's a dramatic rebellion story that prefigures this era of anti-police-brutality protests, but the way it's told in the group's 2015 biopic Straight Outta Compton isn't exactly true. The group heard the shots and took off, only to run backstage into a line of cops, who threw them to the ground, handcuffed them and hauled them away. Dre, Eazy-E and the rest had played their signature anthem exactly one time on stage- at the Celebrity Theatre in Anaheim the previous spring. made it through some 30 seconds of "Fuck Tha Police" before apparent gunshots went off in the crowd at Joe Louis Arena.
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