Far from Over

The Music and Life of Drake, the Unofficial Story

By Dalton Higgins

ECW PRESS

Copyright © 2012 Dalton Higgins
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-77041-001-5
CHAPTER 1

GROWING UP DRAKE: GRAHAM FAMILY VALUES

Aubrey Drake Graham was born on October 24, 1986, the only child to an African-American musician father, Dennis Graham, who lives in Memphis, Tennessee, and a spirited white Jewish educator mother, Sandi Graham, who raised him in Toronto's predominantly Jewish Forest Hill neighborhood. She said that though he "was very fussy," he was a unique toddler who seemed very comfortable in the spotlight and loved to entertain. "We always thought there was something very different about this kid," Sandi admitted to Degrassi Unscripted. "When we had a piano at home and I would come home with my nursery rhymes, Aubrey at three years old swould take the lyrics and he would change them.... I realized then that other kids just didn't do that."

The Graham household proudly displays photos of Drake's earliest playful forays into music. Included in this collection were pictures of Drake as a young child holding his first microphone and guitar (of the prescient picture, Sandi noted, "He was probably practicing for me"). There were also pictures from his dad's side of the family lying around, including one great picture of Drake sitting on his dad's lap, and another of his iconic musician uncle Larry Graham Jr.

Drake's parents split up when he was only five years old, and because he was raised as an only child by his single mother, Sandi tried to keep him busy to mimic familial support. "Being an only child I always had him in a lot of activities," she said. "Whether it was day camp, group activities, hockey, a lot of things where he'd have to learn to be a team player." Looking back as a young adult, Drake reflected on his mother's successful strategy to keep him feeling engaged, focused and productive as an only child: "My mom signed me up for dance classes, piano lessons. She was trying to do anything to keep me occupied. Her main objective was keeping me from being aimless, just wandering the streets. She signed me up for hockey, basketball, music, dancing. I tried piano, I tried guitar and I couldn't stick with anything — until acting became my main focus."

Encouraged by his good looks as a child and preternatural preschool charm, Sandi got a young Aubrey involved in TV and theater early on. "When Aubrey was about five years old I took him to this agent, and she really liked Aubrey, so he did print work, and a catalog, and a couple of commercials." Sandi also enrolled him in programs at Toronto's Young People's Theatre. While Drake downplays the influence of these early experiences on his present-day acting skills, observing, "It was really just a bunch of young kids acting really hyper, and then we'd throw on masks and call it a play," there's reason to believe it played a role in laying out a blueprint for success in the acting world.

Drake does remember a shift between costumed playtime and his first really successful play, the theater's production of Les Misérables. He believed the audience enjoyed the production beyond the novelty of seeing a bunch of kids performing their hearts out. "Les Mis was the first thing that people actually liked, and came to see, and clapped for a good reason, not like, 'Yay, it's over, good let's go home,'" he said.

Early theatrical aspirations aside, Drake genuinely enjoyed music as a child too, and growing up with strong musical bloodlines certainly didn't hurt. Drake had some heavily decorated music and entertainment influences in his life, especially on his African-American side. His dad, Dennis, who called the great boxer Muhammad Ali a friend, was a drummer for Jerry Lee Lewis. "My dad is very musically gifted, a lot of soul," Drake told MTV. While his father is not as visible on the music scene these days, he can be seen in a guest cameo in a rap video by Drake's cousin Chris "Royalty" Graham. These musical connections meant that Drake was around high-level musicians from the time he was a child. His father takes some credit for his musical awareness at a very young age. "I used to hold him in my lap and I used to hold him in my office while I played the piano," he told Memphis's Action News 5. "This is how it got started." Dennis also thinks there's a correlation between his son's lyrical abilities and hanging around in Memphis, a city that's birthed such great songwriters as Isaac Hayes.

This artistic integrity and musical pedigree went even further: Drake is also the nephew of two musical greats who had a hand in helping to shape the soul and R&B canon that Drake's generation now sample in their hip hop. One uncle, Larry Graham Jr., was the bassist in Sly and the Family Stone and played with Prince. And in the '70s another uncle, guitarist Mabon "Teenie" Hodges, added his silky rhythm-and-blues-based guitar lines to help develop what is known as the Memphis Sound. Hodges, who might be better known to his nephew's generation as having played on Cat Power's brilliant The Greatest, is actually responsible for co-writing more than a few timeless, monster soul hits like "Love and Happiness" and "Take Me to the River" with the incomparable Al Green. Drake has also said in interviews that his grandmother babysat Louis Armstrong. Given that his family tree was filled with rock 'n' soul royalty, there's no question that some musical skill would trickle down.

Though he spent summers with his dad's side of the family in Memphis, family rituals might include bonding on Appleville, at Shelby Drive and Neely. He hung out with his dad while the elder Graham was gigging, exposing Drake to new music and making him privy to the inner workings of Memphis's Royal Studios, where seminal soul producers and vocalists like Willie Mitchell and Al Green created musical magic. Certainly his exposure to what was going on in Memphis musically helped trigger some of his early inspiration to start performing.

His dad had instilled in him the rigors of living the musician's lifestyle as a child. "My dad was always a musician," he told a NARAS (National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences) gathering in Nashville about some of his earliest experiences and memories as an entertainer. "My first time performing I was really young, probably like eight or nine, and he had taken me out when he wasn't supposed to (because he had a gig and he was looking after me), and he thought it would be interesting to bring me up onstage to sing the one song that I knew, which was 'Ride, Sally, Ride.' So I ended up onstage performing with my dad, and everyone in the place thought it was the cutest thing in the world. I don't remember much about my childhood, but I remember that night."

As an adult, Drake is aware how that regional music influenced his sound. "I was there at a very great time, a very influential time," he told Urb of his years spent taking in the Memphis rap sounds that informed his early art, and of being exposed to low-income neighborhoods like Orange Mile and the Peppertree Apartments. "Around the ages of like 12, 13, 14, 15 ... I was there sort of just soaking it all in. It was around the time when Memphis actually had a dope movement, before Kia Shine had that 'Krispy' song, they were actually hailing Yo Gotti, Kink and Skinny Pimp ... you know, 8 Ball and G, Three 6 Mafia was doing their thing. It was great." Dennis noted the soul music songwriting influence on his son, suggesting that Drake's "metaphors are so phenomenal now, because he's been in Memphis."

While his father's side played a key role in his early musical development, Drake had inherited some musical chops from the maternal side of his family as well. He told JVibe, a bimonthly magazine for Jewish teens, that his cousins on his Jewish side were "very skilled in piano and graduated from arts and music schools." Drake also believed that his mom may have unconsciously influenced his songwriting process and vocal delivery. "My mom used to force me to say things as colorfully as possible," he said. "She would never let me get by with saying, 'Well, that food was good.' No, I had to say, 'That food was delicious,' or something extravagant. My mom was responsible for a lot of the way I write, the way I choose to say things. That's where the music comes in on my mom's side."

His mother said that by the time he was 10 years old, he began writing his own music material — and it was original. "He brought to my attention that what makes his work different is that he writes his own lyrics; that's an incredible gift."

Drake's grandma, or bubbe, also played a role in Drake's understanding of language and words — a key part of any rapper's songwriting arsenal. "We went to visit his grandmother in a nursing home," explained celebrity photographer Jonathan Mannion, of his experience snapping some pictures of Drake and his grandmother for MTV. "It was really a conversation between them and they were talking about how they used to do crossword puzzles and learn-words together.... And she was like, 'It's really paying off now.'"

Even with the love and support of his mother and her family, Drake felt an imbalance because his father wasn't around as much as Drake would have liked. "I remember for a lot of my life, being ashamed of who I was, or not confident in who I was, sort of, just different things, like the fact that I was more emotional than other kids," admitted Drake on MTV's Better Than Good Enough documentary on his life. "I used to cry a lot in school. I used to fall for girls so hard. And be so reluctant to embrace those emotions." At times growing up Drake also had to deal with the tension of being biracial in a homogenous white Jewish school environment. In Forest Hill, sometimes the only black and Filipino people one might see routinely were women working as nannies carting around Jewish kids. Drake felt that kids didn't really accept him fully as a biracial kid with black roots. He told Heeb magazine that kids would call him a schvartze, which is an anti-black Yiddish slur.

Because Drake attended school with the sons and daughters of millionaires in Forest Hill, his mother says the perception of his wealthy childhood upbringing actually clashed with the reality. Drake's mom suffered from rheumatoid arthritis, a condition that prevented her from working as much as she would have liked. "People have this perception that he came from a privileged background. Certainly he had a lot of support, but when other kids had computers we were going to the library. The reality is he worked very, very hard. Nothing is magic," she told IndustryMag.com. "There was something very old school about Drake," she recalled, in that everything he got he earned through good old-fashioned hard work.

Maintaining a relationship with a geographically distant father, who wasn't readily available for significant male guidance, forced Drake to grow up fast. In an interview with ABC News, he spoke about the struggles of his childhood. "I was actually hurt by a lot of the things that happened throughout the course of my life," Drake told ABC's Darius Brown. "I had to become a man very quickly and be the backbone for a woman who I love with all my heart, my mother."

For Drake, family has always come first, and his preoccupation with keeping his loved ones close to him at all times all seems to begin and end with his mom. "Everything good in life I get from my mom, you know," Drake told MTV. "The desire to be intelligent, kind, caring ... it's like a constant thing on my mind, because of my mom, you know, and the fact that she's such a great woman and I don't think she was ever loved properly." He added, "She's been the most supportive person I've ever had in my life — the only person that loves me unconditionally, really. I know a lot of people love me and I love a lot of people. But to love somebody unconditionally is different."

Drake recorded a song on his sophomore Take Care release titled "Look What You've Done" as a heartfelt lyrical homage to his mom and bubbe's contribution to his life. He punctuates the hook of the catchy piano-laden song by repeating "I got you," which hip hop listeners know means, "I will protect you and take care of you from here on in."

Things with his father were more complicated. "I saw my dad get arrested by a SWAT team at the border for trying to cross over," he told ABC News about a visit gone awry when his father couldn't enter Canada due to his criminal charges in the United States. He added, "I've seen things that didn't make me happy. They were character building. That's why I think people in the 'hood can still connect with what I'm saying even though I'm not saying, 'Yeah I got crack in my pocket,' 'cause that wasn't my struggle necessarily, [but] I speak from a place that's just human emotion."

Noted for his ability to write profound, heartfelt, accessible rhymes at a time when drug-addled, expletive-filled bluster is now considered potent song writing, Drake has spent many years perfecting his songwriting craft based on his own life experiences. "I've been writing since I was really young," he told Scene and Heard. "I wrote about how I viewed the world, like not having my dad around or being biracial. I would never write about things I don't know about, like the 'hard' street of Toronto. It's always relative to my life and other people can relate." Drake's art has always closely mirrored his reality, and the personal details that make it into the songs are what give Drake's smooth lyrics their depth. For example, his dad's financial woes show up in songs like "Look What You've Done" and "The Calm," where he admits to having to send money to his father via Western Union. It's that honesty, that realism that made Master Gee, one-half of the legendary Sugarhill Gang, mark Drake as "one of the brightest lights in contemporary rap music right now." Gee explained, "As far as people telling stories, he tells stories. You can listen to his stuff and tell that there is some sort of telling of an experience, painting a picture. I appreciate a lot of the younger rappers, but unfortunately, I see the lyrical content going another way, if you will ... you have a floor when you're a rapper, an emcee, and you want to take people on a journey like Drake."

Part of his family's narrative of struggle provided some of the grist for his early songwriting forays. Arguably, by him witnessing firsthand some of the harsher aspects of life from his dad, it opened up a part of his brain that might not have otherwise been tapped into. When his dad had hit rock bottom and landed in jail for "an assault charge or a drug charge or something," Drake began scribing some potent rhymes as an artistic outlet during visitations. "My dad was in jail for two years and he shared a cell with this dude who didn't really have anyone to speak to," he told Complex magazine. "So, he used to share his phone time with this dude and at the time I was probably 16 or 17, this dude was like 20 or 22, and he would always rap to me over the phone — it was Poverty, that was his rap name."

Poverty might have been an unusual mentor, but he inspired Drake to process his emotions and experiences in a new way. "I started to get into it and I started to write my own shit down," he said of the prison visitation aftereffects. "[Poverty] would call me and we would just rap to each other. And after my dad got out I kept in touch with the dude and eventually ... I accepted the fact that I wanted to be in music."

Back home in Toronto, far away from the struggles of his dad's life, Drake attended Forest Hill Junior and Senior Public School for his elementary schooling and Forest Hill Collegiate Institute, a public high school just northwest of downtown Toronto. He might be an A-list celebrity now, but in high school he was just another teen who felt like he didn't fit in. "It was very awkward," he commented to the Toronto Star about being considered a racial minority at school. "I never had a girlfriend. Not one of those girls would bring me home. It would be too risky."

(Continues...)Excerpted from Far from Over by Dalton Higgins. Copyright © 2012 Dalton Higgins. Excerpted by permission of ECW PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.