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Death Row in Toronto
BY Marc Weisblott January 22, 2009 11:01
Today on the Scroll: NAFTA gone gangsta as the self-described Jewish soccer mom fronting the local bid that won hip-hop’s most infamous bankruptcy auction explains what she plans to do next.
When news broke last week that Toronto company WIDEawake Entertainment Group prevailed in the bankruptcy auction for the catalogue of Death Row Records with an $18 million bid, locally published reports explained little beyond identifying the woman running the operation, Lara Lavi.
The masters and publishing of many of the biggest hits of 1990s gangsta-rap can’t lack for long-term dividends given the success of the Biggie Smalls biopic Notorious — but the past efforts of B.I.G.’s west coast counterparts have mostly been out of play in the years since the death of Tupac Shakur, compounded with the difficulties of Death Row’s beleaguered curator, Suge Knight.
The initial tabloid-style interest stirred up by the purchase, however, made Lavi apprehensive about saying too much: “I’ve been fielding questions like, ‘Is Suge in Jail?’ Am I secretly doing this on his behalf? Am I really just his publicist?”
None of the above, it turns out, as Lavi is glad to clarify after returning to work at WIDEawake’s office in Liberty Village. But the three-year-old company isn’t seeking to dump circa 1993 Dr. Dre and Snoop Doggy Dogg compilations into Wal-Mart bargain bins, or simply banking on last-ditch dollar downloads of Warren G’s “Regulate” for retro dorm parties.
Rather, the company issued a press release Monday emphasizing how Death Row’s new owners are also grooming a homegrown artist, Sean Jones, whose “soul over rock” sound represents 48-year-old Lavi’s attempt at the new-breed approach to the music industry. WIDEawake’s backers recruited her to realize these ideas based on three decades of experience all over the USA.
“They understood the need for someone aggressive who could run cross-collaborative properties,” she explains. “To start a company like this you can make stuff, or acquire stuff, and they decided to do both.”
WIDEawake has been funded by a Mississauga-based firm, New Solutions Capital. But the players behind the investment are being kept a secret — fueling the suspicion surrounding the details of the bargain-priced Death Row deal. Lavi does say the company has some link to a now-defunct early-2000s EMI Canada-distributed independent label, Sextant Records, whose projects included the debut album by Nickelback, rapper Choclair, and Robin Black and the Intergalactic Rock Stars.
Bids of $25 million for the Death Row catalogue submitted by the Warner Music Group and Koch Entertainment following Knight’s 2006 bankruptcy declaration ended up being withdrawn amid questions surrounding the real value, given the scattered paper trail. Then a $24 million deal approved by the bankruptcy court with a company called Global Music collapsed last summer. Much has been made of the fact that the $18 million paid by WIDEawake leaves nothing for the unsecured creditors once the Internal Revenue Service collects their $11 million settlement — and the drawn-out proceedings helped incur a $6.8 million legal bill. (“The representation of the Trustee in this case has been particularly complex,” read the court application, “due to the individuals involved in the company's operations and intentionally illicit, 'gangster-style' business operations of the debtor.”)
Lavi describes a process that was perfectly legit, though, having enlisted the help of well-known Toronto music industry lawyer Chris Taylor to get due diligence done starting in mid-December, and submit the $1.25 million auction deposit. Also in WIDEawake’s corner was original Death Row studio engineer, John Payne.
“Frankly, I didn’t think we were going to get it,” says Lavi of the winning bid. “But there is also a cost involved in cleaning up the mess.
“It’s going to take us at least eight months to assess and coordinate what we’ve bought — making sure that the tracks are stored properly, and digitized, with all rights negotiated. And tons of new content was discovered that had been stolen and hidden in Michigan.
“Plus, we want to develop the kind of media relations program that puts people at ease. This music is personal to people who are going to be apprehensive about me. Just who is this Jewish soccer mom? What kind of plan does she have?”
Naturally, there are profits to be reaped. Lavi estimates the Death Row catalogue has continued to bring in $3-to-5 million in recent annual revenue from various sources, even with minimal sales through digital platforms or foreign markets.
But she also regards the project as the ideal extension of her own journey. “Death Row artists have a legacy just like the Motown artists did,” she says. “The lifeblood of the company is their body of work — and I want to get down to the task of honouring it.”
Lavi started out playing piano as a three-year-old in Seattle, and was a child prodigy studying in Pittsburgh, before switching to pop music concurrent with earning a law degree. The two areas frequently intersected, like when her representation of the Muckleshoot Indian Tribe in Auburn, Washington led to being part of negotiations to build the White River Ampitheatre on their reservation. Working behind the scenes with the Neville Brothers led to her collaborating musically on Charles Neville’s side project, Songcatchers.
“Working both sides of my brain comes naturally,” she says. “This may seem confusing to the outside world, but those who know me know exactly where I’m coming from.
“I understand the artistic process and what’s involved in winning. And lawyers are always looking for something else they can do instead of practicing law.”
Their personal tastes, however, would not usually tend to gangstaploitation smashes like the soundtrack of Murder Was the Case, or Dogg Food by the Dogg Pound — the kind of controversy-stirring Parental Advisory-stickered CDs that sold by the millions to North American teenagers hungry for anything that resembled a sequel to Dr. Dre’s template of G-Funk vérité collected on The Chronic.
“I never had Oprah’s issues with the messaging,” concedes Lavi. “I understood the Ebonics, the vernacular, and the culture. Of course there were a few bad apples in the bunch. I’m not in support of beatings, or even drugs, let alone misogyny.
“But if you strip those elements away this is the oral history of an important part in the history of black music, hip-hop and pop culture. The semantics were brought on by anger and fear. I’ve never been fazed by the surrounding realities.”
A helicopter hovering right above her car in Compton, where she was dropping off a client one day in the aftermath of the Rodney King verdict riots, was nonetheless an atypical experience in Lavi’s past LA life. But, by 1993, no shortage of suburban white kids were dreaming that they could witness it first-hand.
“I can tell you that it didn’t look like an amusement park,” says Lavi. “It wasn’t a scene out of a musical with people rapping the N-word on the streets. Just the police doing their patrols in the sky every single day.”
And, the bigger the mythology got, the more divisive the musical business of reporting on the experience became. Following the departure of Dr. Dre to start up his own label, Suge Knight’s company entered its second phase in 1996 with 2Pac’s double disc, All Eyez on Me — seven months before Shakur was murdered. But he was a prolific enough rhymer by age 25 for some kind of posthumous 2Pac album to be released every year since. Lavi notes about 40 tracks still remain publicly unheard.
“The last four years have shown there is a real Kurt Cobain mystique surrounding him,” she says. “There will always be a market for Tupac, but we want to be careful about how that is fed to the consumer, and make sure future releases are responsible to everyone.” WIDEawake now intends to work with his mother, Afeni Shakur, and honouring other settlements previously reached with members of the Death Row stable.
Dr. Dre tracks from a slew of aborted projects were also part of the bankruptcy sale lot: “Some of them are finished masters,” says Lavi. “It’s a treasure trove that can be used to produce new songs, even if it means having to scrub some of the samples off.”
The support of Sean Jones, a former member of R&B quintet In Essence, is therefore part of Lavi’s plot to prove that her company is not only about gangsta-rap entrails: “The music is like a conversation between John Legend and Lenny Kravitz with a bit of Seal thrown in there,” she enthuses, also dropping comparisons to Ben Harper and John Mayer. Her husband, Maurice Jones, is serving as the producer on forthcoming album by Sean (no relation). Plans are to expand company headquarters in Liberty Village to incorporate production facilities designed for a “360” deal, allowing artists to build a global fanbase.
Does this mean Death Row Records, of all things, will be the brand that gets the Canadian black music industry its long-sought footing? Lavi sloughs off any such discussion, eager instead to make border-crossing stars for an era of post-racial politics.
Death Row’s famed logo of a hooded figure strapped to an electric chair will even be getting a less malevolent makeover for the marketplace.
“The label is no longer destined for death,” she quips. “We have given it a full pardon.”
BY Marc Weisblott January 22, 2009 11:01
Today on the Scroll: NAFTA gone gangsta as the self-described Jewish soccer mom fronting the local bid that won hip-hop’s most infamous bankruptcy auction explains what she plans to do next.
When news broke last week that Toronto company WIDEawake Entertainment Group prevailed in the bankruptcy auction for the catalogue of Death Row Records with an $18 million bid, locally published reports explained little beyond identifying the woman running the operation, Lara Lavi.
The masters and publishing of many of the biggest hits of 1990s gangsta-rap can’t lack for long-term dividends given the success of the Biggie Smalls biopic Notorious — but the past efforts of B.I.G.’s west coast counterparts have mostly been out of play in the years since the death of Tupac Shakur, compounded with the difficulties of Death Row’s beleaguered curator, Suge Knight.
The initial tabloid-style interest stirred up by the purchase, however, made Lavi apprehensive about saying too much: “I’ve been fielding questions like, ‘Is Suge in Jail?’ Am I secretly doing this on his behalf? Am I really just his publicist?”
None of the above, it turns out, as Lavi is glad to clarify after returning to work at WIDEawake’s office in Liberty Village. But the three-year-old company isn’t seeking to dump circa 1993 Dr. Dre and Snoop Doggy Dogg compilations into Wal-Mart bargain bins, or simply banking on last-ditch dollar downloads of Warren G’s “Regulate” for retro dorm parties.
Rather, the company issued a press release Monday emphasizing how Death Row’s new owners are also grooming a homegrown artist, Sean Jones, whose “soul over rock” sound represents 48-year-old Lavi’s attempt at the new-breed approach to the music industry. WIDEawake’s backers recruited her to realize these ideas based on three decades of experience all over the USA.
“They understood the need for someone aggressive who could run cross-collaborative properties,” she explains. “To start a company like this you can make stuff, or acquire stuff, and they decided to do both.”
WIDEawake has been funded by a Mississauga-based firm, New Solutions Capital. But the players behind the investment are being kept a secret — fueling the suspicion surrounding the details of the bargain-priced Death Row deal. Lavi does say the company has some link to a now-defunct early-2000s EMI Canada-distributed independent label, Sextant Records, whose projects included the debut album by Nickelback, rapper Choclair, and Robin Black and the Intergalactic Rock Stars.
Bids of $25 million for the Death Row catalogue submitted by the Warner Music Group and Koch Entertainment following Knight’s 2006 bankruptcy declaration ended up being withdrawn amid questions surrounding the real value, given the scattered paper trail. Then a $24 million deal approved by the bankruptcy court with a company called Global Music collapsed last summer. Much has been made of the fact that the $18 million paid by WIDEawake leaves nothing for the unsecured creditors once the Internal Revenue Service collects their $11 million settlement — and the drawn-out proceedings helped incur a $6.8 million legal bill. (“The representation of the Trustee in this case has been particularly complex,” read the court application, “due to the individuals involved in the company's operations and intentionally illicit, 'gangster-style' business operations of the debtor.”)
Lavi describes a process that was perfectly legit, though, having enlisted the help of well-known Toronto music industry lawyer Chris Taylor to get due diligence done starting in mid-December, and submit the $1.25 million auction deposit. Also in WIDEawake’s corner was original Death Row studio engineer, John Payne.
“Frankly, I didn’t think we were going to get it,” says Lavi of the winning bid. “But there is also a cost involved in cleaning up the mess.
“It’s going to take us at least eight months to assess and coordinate what we’ve bought — making sure that the tracks are stored properly, and digitized, with all rights negotiated. And tons of new content was discovered that had been stolen and hidden in Michigan.
“Plus, we want to develop the kind of media relations program that puts people at ease. This music is personal to people who are going to be apprehensive about me. Just who is this Jewish soccer mom? What kind of plan does she have?”
Naturally, there are profits to be reaped. Lavi estimates the Death Row catalogue has continued to bring in $3-to-5 million in recent annual revenue from various sources, even with minimal sales through digital platforms or foreign markets.
But she also regards the project as the ideal extension of her own journey. “Death Row artists have a legacy just like the Motown artists did,” she says. “The lifeblood of the company is their body of work — and I want to get down to the task of honouring it.”
Lavi started out playing piano as a three-year-old in Seattle, and was a child prodigy studying in Pittsburgh, before switching to pop music concurrent with earning a law degree. The two areas frequently intersected, like when her representation of the Muckleshoot Indian Tribe in Auburn, Washington led to being part of negotiations to build the White River Ampitheatre on their reservation. Working behind the scenes with the Neville Brothers led to her collaborating musically on Charles Neville’s side project, Songcatchers.
“Working both sides of my brain comes naturally,” she says. “This may seem confusing to the outside world, but those who know me know exactly where I’m coming from.
“I understand the artistic process and what’s involved in winning. And lawyers are always looking for something else they can do instead of practicing law.”
Their personal tastes, however, would not usually tend to gangstaploitation smashes like the soundtrack of Murder Was the Case, or Dogg Food by the Dogg Pound — the kind of controversy-stirring Parental Advisory-stickered CDs that sold by the millions to North American teenagers hungry for anything that resembled a sequel to Dr. Dre’s template of G-Funk vérité collected on The Chronic.
“I never had Oprah’s issues with the messaging,” concedes Lavi. “I understood the Ebonics, the vernacular, and the culture. Of course there were a few bad apples in the bunch. I’m not in support of beatings, or even drugs, let alone misogyny.
“But if you strip those elements away this is the oral history of an important part in the history of black music, hip-hop and pop culture. The semantics were brought on by anger and fear. I’ve never been fazed by the surrounding realities.”
A helicopter hovering right above her car in Compton, where she was dropping off a client one day in the aftermath of the Rodney King verdict riots, was nonetheless an atypical experience in Lavi’s past LA life. But, by 1993, no shortage of suburban white kids were dreaming that they could witness it first-hand.
“I can tell you that it didn’t look like an amusement park,” says Lavi. “It wasn’t a scene out of a musical with people rapping the N-word on the streets. Just the police doing their patrols in the sky every single day.”
And, the bigger the mythology got, the more divisive the musical business of reporting on the experience became. Following the departure of Dr. Dre to start up his own label, Suge Knight’s company entered its second phase in 1996 with 2Pac’s double disc, All Eyez on Me — seven months before Shakur was murdered. But he was a prolific enough rhymer by age 25 for some kind of posthumous 2Pac album to be released every year since. Lavi notes about 40 tracks still remain publicly unheard.
“The last four years have shown there is a real Kurt Cobain mystique surrounding him,” she says. “There will always be a market for Tupac, but we want to be careful about how that is fed to the consumer, and make sure future releases are responsible to everyone.” WIDEawake now intends to work with his mother, Afeni Shakur, and honouring other settlements previously reached with members of the Death Row stable.
Dr. Dre tracks from a slew of aborted projects were also part of the bankruptcy sale lot: “Some of them are finished masters,” says Lavi. “It’s a treasure trove that can be used to produce new songs, even if it means having to scrub some of the samples off.”
The support of Sean Jones, a former member of R&B quintet In Essence, is therefore part of Lavi’s plot to prove that her company is not only about gangsta-rap entrails: “The music is like a conversation between John Legend and Lenny Kravitz with a bit of Seal thrown in there,” she enthuses, also dropping comparisons to Ben Harper and John Mayer. Her husband, Maurice Jones, is serving as the producer on forthcoming album by Sean (no relation). Plans are to expand company headquarters in Liberty Village to incorporate production facilities designed for a “360” deal, allowing artists to build a global fanbase.
Does this mean Death Row Records, of all things, will be the brand that gets the Canadian black music industry its long-sought footing? Lavi sloughs off any such discussion, eager instead to make border-crossing stars for an era of post-racial politics.
Death Row’s famed logo of a hooded figure strapped to an electric chair will even be getting a less malevolent makeover for the marketplace.
“The label is no longer destined for death,” she quips. “We have given it a full pardon.”
