Jimmy Iovine Talks About His Close Relationship With Dr. Dre

Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre have one of the Hip Hop's most lucrative and endearing partnerships. Iovine, the former Interscope chairman, has just been named GQ's 'Icon of the Year,' and in the accompanying article he talks about how he struck up his unlikely relationship with the former NWA member.

"Him and Suge [Knight, then CEO of Death Row Records] came in, and they brought The Chronic," he told the magazine. "I'd just come out of Rattle and Hum with U2. I knew hip-hop was going around, but I had no idea what it was. And then Dre walked in, and I said, "I don't know hip-hop, but I know my speakers. Who engineered it?" Dre said, "I did." When they told me the story of how they made the record, you might as well make a record falling out of a building. They were sneaking into studios; the government was after them; there were lawsuits, one RICO case, all on a bunch of guys who had no money and were making an album. I said, "Wow. If you can do it under those circumstances, let's go." "We trust each other implicitly," he said of Dre. "It's the closest to a band as I was ever in. We know what each other does, and we trust each other's instincts so much, that when he's moving somewhere and I go, ‘No,’ he goes, ‘Okay, let's not do that.’ We've been through a lot. This is a guy—I always say, ‘You may know a lot of people who have gotten shot, but you don't know a lot of people who have shot back.'"