How Eminem changed Dr Dre’s life: “He was the missing link”
Eminem’s life changed forever when he was picked up by Dr Dre, who, alongside Jimmy Iovine, helped to release The Slim Shady LP in 1999. But it worked both ways, as Dre’s life, too, was transformed by Eminem.
Iovine came across Eminem before Dre, having heard the Slim Shady EP and realising that Em had potential. Iovine, in turn, played it for Dre, who was immediately taken by it. “In my entire career in the music industry, I have never found anything from a demo tape or a CD,” Dre remarked in a Rolling Stone piece from 1999. “When Jimmy played this, I said, ‘Find him. Now.’”
A meeting was arranged, but Em was nervous about it. He’d been a huge fan of Dre, so this was a dream come true. That was an uncomfortable situation to work through, as he recalled on The Defiant Ones, the TV documentary series about Iovine and Dre.
“I’m looking at Dre like, ‘Dude I see you on TV all the time—you one of my biggest influences in life,’” he recalled.
But despite Eminem’s nerves, Dre was immediately impressed. “Eminem was the missing link,” he once said, as quoted by Ambrosia For Heads in 2019. “Hearing [Eminem’s] demo and how it made me feel, and then meeting him, and how we say eye-to-eye as far as the work goes, and what we wanted to do in the studio—he was hungry, I was hungry, and it was just that spontaneous combustion.”
The chemistry between Eminem and Dre was there right from the start, and Dre knew it. “We just clicked,” he said, “and that just brought everything and everyone together that was happening at the time.”
Dre’s instinct that Eminem was precisely the artist he needed to be working with at that time proved prescient. They were soon in the studio together, with Dre playing Em a few tracks that he had been working on. One of them was based on a sample from ‘I Got The…’ by Labi Siffre, which Em took to right away. He started spitting, and his breakout single ‘My Name Is’ was born.
“That’s what happened,” Dre recalled of that moment on The Defiant Ones. “Our first day, in the first few minutes of us being together in the studio.”
Eminem was soon thrust into superstardom, and Dre’s status within the music industry was given new life. His heyday had seemed to be over by the end of the ’90s, but, with his discovery of Eminem, his own career experienced a massive boost and he returned to the top of the hip-hop scene in his own right.