GURU’s Guru
FEATURE: How a mysterious Svengali dominated the final days of the hip-hop and jazz superstar’s tumultuous life
By Chris Faraone
When the Roxbury-born rapper GURU passed away April 19, 2010 in a hospital bed — succumbing to cancer at the age of 48 — the internationally renowned musician had not seen most of his lifelong friends and relatives in seven years. What was particularly painful for those once in GURU’s inner circle was the fact that, in the final days, many of them had tried desperately to visit him, but alleged that John “Super Producer Solar” Mosher, the Svengali-like figure who had come to dominate the rapper’s life, would not allow it.
As the rhyming half of the duo Gang Starr, GURU (born Keith Elam) became hip-hop’s preeminent enlightened auteur in the early ’90s. Along with partner DJ Premier, he honed a mainstream-accessible yet stylistically underground aesthetic that would go on to influence countless hip-hop artists, from hardcore rappers to conscious rhymers.
Separately, the members of Gang Starr also shined. Premier became a highly sought-after beatmaker, producing pivotal tracks for such icons as Jay-Z and Nas, while GURU released several Jazzmatazz albums, in which he worked with such jazz giants as Branford Marsalis and Donald Byrd to wed hip hop with organic grooves.
But following the final Gang Starr collaboration, 2003’s The Ownerz, GURU drifted away from Premier, and started working closely with Solar, a friend and business partner with whom he had established the 7 Grand imprint. From the start, many in the hip-hop community raised questions about the peculiar nature of the Solar-Guru tandem.
I spoke to more than a dozen people in GURU’s universe, and a strong consensus emerged that the relationship between Guru and Solar was at best emotionally oppressive, and at worst physically abusive, with Guru allegedly being tormented by his so-called friend. One former bandmate calls Solar “the closest thing I’ve ever seen to true evil.”
In the first few months following his death, GURU’s friends and family came forward to detail the at times harrowing story of a father, mentor, victim, and hip-hop deity. In the rush to publish, however, there was much confusion and misinformation spread about GURU. By sifting through the speculation — and interviewing key subjects from throughout Guru’s life, some of whom exclusively spoke with the Boston Phoenix (my newspaper at the time) — I attempted to document the rise and demise of Beantown’s griot laureate. Four years later, his legacy continues to thrive, but the facts around Keith Elam’s unfortunate passing remain …
The judge’s son
In a city that has been historically marred by racial injustice, the Elams of Boston are a real-life version of Will Smith’s fictional Fresh Prince Banks family. The son of a struggling mechanic, GURU’s father, Harry Sr., worked two jobs to put himself through law school and eventually became the first African-American municipal court judge in Boston. GURU’s mother, Barbara, was an activist librarian who worked to purge public-school shelves of bigoted literature. His older brother, Harry Jr., one of three siblings, is a professor of drama at Stanford.
Despite familial pressure to pursue upper-class conventions, youngest brother Keith was reluctant to follow prescribed roles. As he would later admit, much of his rebellion was to spite his parents, who sent him to middle school at Noble & Greenough in Dedham, and to high school 20 miles south of Roxbury in Cohasset. In 1994, GURU told The Source that he resented his father for not teaching him how to survive on the street: “Everyday [back in Boston], I had to deal with kids who thought I had more than them,” he told the magazine. “I used to be mad at my pops for not talking to me about all that — ’cause I had to learn that all on my own.”
By the end of high school, GURU had earned some respect, as well as a playboy reputation for hitting Norfolk Street house parties dressed in expensive suits and fedoras, the latter of which he would often “borrow” from his father, aggravating the judge. It was around that time that he also developed a passion for Tanqueray and cranberry juice; Guru’s weakness for alcohol would last long after he matriculated to Morehouse College in 1979, and well into his career.
Though he completed his undergraduate coursework to please his parents, by his junior year at Morehouse, GURU had his ego set on entertainment. Along with his friend from Roxbury, Big Shug, GURU — then calling himself MC Keithy E — won a slew of talent shows at such Atlanta hot spots as the Phoenix night club. Shug, who went by Sugar Bear at the time, ran with a different crowd back home than GURU, and the two hardly knew each other until getting introduced by a mutual friend down South. The two eventually shared a place in Atlanta after Guru graduated from Morehouse, and Shug would go on to write the first Gang Starr lyrics. “He was the judge’s son, and I was hustling,” Shug said. “Down there, he was happy to have a dude like me with street cred right there alongside him.”
After college, GURU took a job as a social worker, and briefly enrolled at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, but as talent-show victories piled up back in Boston, the lure of showbiz became irresistible. After Shug got caught up in the street (in 1987 he would be incarcerated for a litany of drug-related offenses), GURU continued to develop the Gang Starr brand that they had imagined — first with Roxbury artists Damo D-Ski and DJ 12 B-Down Mike Dee (and sometimes Gang Starr Tee, from whom he took the group’s handle), then on his own in the place where hip-hop started.
“If GURU never goes to Atlanta, then he never goes to New York — it built him to be stronger,” said Shug, who was the first of a few surrogate-father figures in GURU’s life before Solar entered the picture. “GURU always needed some sort of guidance, and I dominated him to do something positive. . . . He was about to go become a broker or some shit, but I convinced him that he could do bigger things — that he could become a great rapper.”
Mass appeal
In 1986, GURU made New York his official home. With most of his friends and rhyme affiliates still back in Roxbury, the King of Monotone was on his own, floating between couches in the Bronx, East New York, and Harlem, and shopping demos during breaks from mailroom and construction jobs. The following year, Gang Starr (at the time, Keithy E, Damo, and Mike Dee) scored its first two singles, “Believe That” and “The Lesson,” on the New York-based Wild Pitch Records, but Damo was arrested in New York soon after and forced to return to Boston, while irreconcilable differences began to emerge between Mike and Keith.
With that initial Gang Starr lineup interrupted, Wild Pitch owner Stu Fine thought to hook up GURU with a promising Texas-born beatmaker named Chris Martin who performed as Waxmaster C, and who lost his main MC Top Cat — with whom he formed the group Inner Circle Posse at Prairie View A&M University — to the Navy. In no time, Waxmaster became DJ Premier, and along with GURU formed the second incarnation of Gang Starr, releasing their debut, No More Mr. Nice Guy, in 1989 using several hooks from the ICP demo with Top Cat’s blessing.
In 15 years of on-and-off recording, GURU and Premier dropped six classic albums (plus one two-disc compilation, Full Clip), two of which went gold, and designed the didactic-roughneck aesthetic that still permeates rap music today. At the same time, they bonded as brothers, sharing apartments for five years, including one legendary crib on loan from frequent collaborator Branford Marsalis. In addition to being home base for Gang Starr’s extended recording family (a/k/a Gang Starr Foundation), including such personalities as Lil’ Dap and Big Shug (the latter of whom reunited with Guru in 1990), the downtown Brooklyn brownstone was frequented by everyone from Ice Cube and B-Real to Notorious B.I.G.
Even in successful times, though, Gang Starr struggled as a unit — in part, close observers say, because of GURU’s drinking, but mostly due to petty squabbles. Soon after the duo earned its first gold LP in 1998 with Moment of Truth, the group unofficially dissolved, leaving both men room to pursue other avenues. The breakup was hardly surprising, as the temperamental MC had threatened to desert virtually every Gang Starr tour since 1990. But even though they would somewhat reluctantly reunite to record The Ownerz in 2003, the Gang Starr Foundation was forever shaken.
“GURU saved my life,” said Jeru the Damaja, a renowned solo artist who was mentored by GURU and who thought up the name Jazzmatazz, in an April 2010 interview. “I speak for a lot of people when I say that we would be in jail if he didn’t get us in the studio. But it was always something with him — GURU was always getting mad about something.”
GURU’s guru
After just one tour stop in support of The Ownerz in late 2003, GURU abandoned Gang Starr on the road in Colorado. This time he wasn’t bluffing, though, and Premier and Shug would never see their partner again. Still to this day, Shug is not certain about exactly why GURU left, but suspects it was at the urging of Solar, who GURU had been traveling with since the two met one year earlier through producer Black Jesus.
While the reasons for GURU’s increasingly elusive nature remain somewhat mysterious, in the early 2000s he endured certain hardships that could account for his apparent submission to Solar. His solo projects were not well received; he was facing trial for felony possession of a firearm, which carried a maximum prison sentence of five years; in 2000 he flipped his SUV while drunk driving to his parents’ anniversary party on Cape Cod. On top of all this, his baby boy, KC, was born in 2001.
To GURU, who sobered up in 2003, Solar was a savior (the two would tour together extensively under the Jazzmatazz banner). But outsiders, and even insiders, felt differently. According to Tasha Denham, who mothered Solar’s son and worked as an office assistant for 7 Grand, when GURU wanted to smoke weed, Solar told his partner how high he was allowed to get. In a bombshell April 27 interview with hiphopdx.com, Denham recalled a time when Solar ruthlessly beat an asthmatic GURU, and then deprived him of his inhaler; similar treatment was also observed firsthand by Nick “Brownman” Ali, who took over for Donald Byrd as the Jazzmatazz trumpeter in 2007.
Brownman had been on tour with Jazzmatazz for nearly two years before he witnessed Solar pummeling GURU — in an alleyway behind a club in Europe (it would later come out that Solar was aware of GURU’s cancer at the time he allegedly whaled on his face and head). But from the beginning of his Jazzmatazz gig, the Canadian musician was suspect of the man who seemed to be pulling GURU’s every string. “From day one,” according to Brownman, “[Solar] was controlling, domineering, and egotistical. He spoke of himself as ‘god’ and insisted all those around him refer to him as ‘lord.’ ”
Solar’s public-relations company did not respond to two interview requests. But in a lengthy talk with the UK-produced, Web-based Conspiracy Worldwide Radio, he attempted to discredit Denham as a disgruntled “groupie,” and outspoken ex-bandmates as junkies and “nobodies.” “They wanted to hang with GURU,” claims Solar, “but he wanted no part of it, and I wanted no part of it.” In reality, though, GURU often praised Brownman as one of the top trumpeters in all of jazz, while Jazzmatazz tour DJ Doo Wop, who Solar claims GURU did not want to spend time with, had known the rapper for more than 15 years.
According to several accounts, Solar’s erratic behavior, and jealousy of DJ Premier, escalated in 2007 after the dismal reception to Jazzmatazz Vol. 4, which Solar himself produced. One time, on a tour bus in Belgium, Solar maniacally ripped a 7 Grand bass player’s magazine to shreds because there was a picture of Premier on the cover. Publicists and booking agents severed ties; reporters balked upon being told that GURU would only do interviews with Solar present. By the final Jazzmatazz shows in late 2009, Solar had, in Brownman’s words, “slowly marginalized [the band], while beefing up his own introduction,” and banished soloists to the background.
Brownman and Doo Wop left Jazzmatazz in January 2010. According to sources, by that time, Solar had assumed complete control over the 7 Grand imprint, as well as over GURU’s hospital care and indeed his world. “[Being] GURU’s Jazzmatazz trumpeter was no small thing in my world,” Brownman said. “But finally the cost was too high . . . and when Wop and I left, we knew we’d never hear from him again. . . . Leaving GURU behind broke our hearts.”
They reminisce over you
When news broke on February 28, 2010 that GURU had suffered a heart attack and had been hospitalized in a coma at NYU Medical Center, the public was unaware that he had been diagnosed with cancer nearly a year earlier. Yet before the grief settled, outrage began to brew. On March 3, GURU’s nephew, Justin Nicholas-Elam Ruff, posted a YouTube video accusing Solar of blocking certain Elam family members from visiting the hospital. On March 5, Elam-Ruff flew to New York from California to see his uncle, and, only after hours of cajoling, was allowed by Solar (who was GURU’s legal health proxy) to visit. Other family members were also allowed brief visits, though all old Gang Starr associates were turned away.
Following the onset of a posthumous, very public he-said, they-said back-and-forth between Solar and the Elam family regarding GURU’s care and handling (their most damning allegation: that the rapper’s son, then-nine-year-old KC, learned of his father’s death on the radio), Solar further enraged planet hip-hop when, two days after GURU passed from multiple myeloma on April 19, he issued a press release including what he maintains is GURU’s farewell statement (but which many suspect did not come from GURU at all, but rather from Solar). These final words have GURU fervently praising Solar, while instructing: “I do not wish my ex-DJ [presumably Premier] to have anything to do with my name, likeness, events, tributes, etc.”
I wasn’t able to reach members of the Elam family, which more or less avoided a public joust with Solar, and instead celebrated Keith’s memory with a public memorial at UMass-Boston to coincide with his July 17 birthday. But in a statement of its own, the Elam clan did question the legitimacy of a charity that Solar claimed would carry on GURU’s memory. (That organization, Each One Counts, Inc., was established by Solar’s wife in 2003, but appears not to have filed required nonprofit forms for several years after.)
Still others impugned Solar’s business and morality, particularly since, after his e-mail account was hacked shortly after GURU’s passing, it was revealed that he apparently intended to gain publicity from his death. Such hip-hop outlets as allhiphop.com and birthplacemag.com dug deep into Solar’s past; one fan set up a web site called fucksolar.com to serve as a clearinghouse for stories related to the producer’s ill practices.
In several interviews, Solar denied all allegations leveled against him. Still, his words offered insight into the sort of rhetoric that GURU likely heard on a daily basis: “GURU picked one solid relationship — that was me,” Solar told Conspiracy Worldwide Radio. As for former affiliates, he explained, “When [GURU] was on alcohol . . . that’s when people were taking advantage of him, and that’s when money got lost. . . . They were trying to force him — not pressure, but force him into going back to do another [Gang Starr] record, and he just didn’t want to do that. I agreed with him wholeheartedly.”
No one will ever know for sure if GURU planned to patch things up with DJ Premier, or with others from whom he had been estranged. But regardless of those unanswerable questions, and of who actually wrote the “final letter” found in Solar’s press release, there is no doubt among his friends, fans, family — and perhaps even Solar — that Keith Elam penned more than a few lessons that were worthy of his final encore. “Actions have reactions/Don’t be quick to judge/You might not know the hardships people don’t speak of/It’s best to step back/And observe with couth/For we all must meet our moment of truth.”
Portions of this article first appeared in the Boston Phoenix back in 2010.
