As for the division of labor in the sessions, there are many sides to the story. The one indisputable fact is that the Bomb Squad couldn’t have been busier at the time. They were halfway done with recording Public Enemy’s third album, Fear Of A Black Planet; they were working on Cube’s debut; and also putting in production, mixing and remixing work on Bell Biv Devoe’s smash debut Poison [MCA Records, 1990].

Additionally, as Sadler recalls, “There was also some turmoil within the Bomb Squad at that time. Not everyone was talking to one another, although I was talking to everyone. It wasn’t the best time for us. But we always made sure that the work we had on our plate got done.”

“Vietnam would do the bottom beats, the rhythm,” Cube explains. “Keith and Hank would add onto that, like the salt and pepper, to season it. And Chuck would come in with the dessert, saying where we should scratch things in or put samples in different places. Chuck was the master of that. But everyone had their role and no one took credit that they didn’t deserve. I came in-between a lot of things they were doing and I think all the Bomb Squad guys contributed as much to my record as they would have for any Public Enemy record.”

Jinx claims that he and Sadler, along with Cube, did the yeoman’s work on the album, with Hank, Keith and Chuck there, but not as often. “I’m definitely not saying that Hank and them did nothin’,” he states. “But me and Eric put the foundation in. The other guys put in the windows of the house. I was at Greene Street all day, every day. Chuck was in the studio a lot, when he wasn’t on tour.”

Keith and Hank Shocklee of hip-hop production team The Bomb Squad in Chicago, November 1990

“Eric’s job at the time was to be the nuts-and-bolts guy,” Shocklee explains. “He’s not the conceptual guy, he makes sure that the timing is right and those types of things. My thing is to zoom out and see what kind of picture I’m getting. If it wasn’t for Eric and Jinx executing, we would never have gotten that record done so quickly.”

Sadler adds to Hank’s assessment: “I was the chef, giving ingredients and saying what would and wouldn’t work, from a musical perspective. It always has to make musical sense, even if it’s dissonant. Otherwise, it’s just noise.”

“One thing I definitely remember is that I thought the music they picked from the original ideas I gave them, and also from 510 South Franklin, was some very strange shit,” Sadler says. “It wasn’t stuff that I thought was hot. So I was curious to see how we were going to make it all work.”

He adds, “When operations headed to Greene Street, which we locked down for four weeks, we had about 15 songs that we were thinking about.”

As a result of Hank and Chuck not being in the studio all the time, Jinx took advantage of some down-time and was able to spread his wings as a front-line producer for the first time. “Eric and Keith definitely listened to me with production ideas, and that’s something that Dre would never do,” he says. “Eric was kind of like me, he didn’t care about the fame. He cared about making things sound the best that they could. He made a lot of different sounds work.”

“I didn’t know that Jinx was there to enforce the West Coast sound aspect,” Hank says. “When Jinx arrived, it seemed like he was new to being in a studio environment. I knew he was Ice Cube’s guy and Cube was part of our family now, so it was great to have him with us there either way. Jinx was talented.”

“We couldn’t have done AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted without the Bomb Squad, but the record couldn’t have been finished without me,” Jinx adds. “Without me it would have been a much more East Coast record.” Hank disagrees slightly, explaining, “I wasn’t going to let that album go out if it didn’t sound like it could have come from the West Coast. That was in my mind from day one. To me, the artist’s viewpoint is always front-and-center. And that record would have been inauthentic if it sounded like it came from the streets of Queens or the Bronx.”

“We knew that Jinx and the Lench Mob were there to keep the West Coast feel, and we knew that the album couldn’t be straight New York,” Sadler adds. “It had to have LA in there, too. Jinx’s work was especially helpful to keep the Cali sound there. I loved working with him.”

And regarding J. Dee and T-Bone from Cube’s Lench Mob, who Sadler says were in New York for several weeks during pre-production and recording, he recalls: “Those motherfuckers were definitely pretty rough. They were the real deal, real gang-bangers. They’d sleep on the concrete floor, when there was an empty couch right next to them. I had never seen shit like that [laughs].”

Ice Cube “900 Number” ad, November 1990

“The Bomb Squad would generally only work from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m., so sometimes you’d go to sleep, wake up and they’d just be there, still working on shit,” Cube says. “Like, ‘Who did all that? This is dope!’ All of those dudes was mad scientists to me. No one has ever been able to put samples together better than they did back then. It was just all these people around the album like bees, working on one thing. Living, breathing and growing.”

Sadler does remember one moment of conflict during the Greene Street sessions: “As we usually did, me and Keith would lay down the tracks and basic vocals, before Hank and Chuck would come in to deconstruct and re-assemble everything. And we worked pretty fast when we first got to Greene Street. We probably had 14 songs laid down in the first week. Then we were just waiting for Chuck and Hank to come in and do their thing.”

He continues, “But then Cube started to get mad. He wanted us to start finishing stuff. He really wanted to get his shit out as soon as possible, to beat Dre and them [N.W.A]. And he was yelling and cursing at us, even though we were just waiting for the next stage. So me and Keith and Jinx started finalizing more tracks than we usually would. Chuck and Hank started coming in more after that, so Cube stopped yelling at us [laughs].”

With all recordings completed in just over a month’s time, AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted was a true triumph in bringing two coasts and six imaginative artists together for one purpose—to let Ice Cube express himself in his own words, with his own voice. It is interesting to note that despite understandable animosity between Cube and his old bandmates, there is not one anti-N.W.A dis on the album. Jinx says, “Me and Cube looked each other in the eye when we did the album and we said that it wasn’t going to have no reflection of N.W.A. We chose not to do a track like ‘No Vaseline’ [the harsh dis track from Cube’s 1991 Death Certificate], and that was beautiful. There was no dissin’. That would be almost impossible now.”

“I didn’t have ‘No Vaseline’ when we was recording the first album,” Cube says. “I never planned on dissin’ N.W.A, there’s no mention of them on the whole first record. I never even talked about dissing them, because I was happy. I had money, I was solo, and I just didn’t care.”

“That was the foundation of the record, for us at least,” Chuck recalls. “When things first started, we said that we wouldn’t have any of that [dissing other members of N.W.A]. We wanted to give Cube an open door to go back to N.W.A if he wanted. We just had all of that chaos with Griff, so I was very experienced with group beefs. After that album, Cube still could have come back to record with them. Even though, behind the scenes, that situation in 1990 was hotter than people knew.”

After the New York recording, mixing and mastering sessions were finalized in late winter—Shocklee says that everything was mixed before the LA crew departed—Cube and Jinx left to go out on tour. “We didn’t even go back to LA,” Jinx says. “Nobody in LA knew what that record was going to do. We were out on tour when it was released.”

AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted hit stores in May of 1990, and was certified gold in three months’ time. A year later, it would officially pass platinum status. Credit for most productions were shared by all six parties involved, with Jinx and Cube sharing co-production on tracks that were led by Bomb Squad, and vice-versa.

“Once I heard the album all finished, I was very confident about how it would do,” says Cube. “We had learned from Dre, who is the master, and we learned from the Bomb Squad. Chuck taught us how to put a record together from start to finish, how to keep it flowing. I knew we had a record that flowed all the way through and stayed interesting. The rhymes was right, and the beats was cutting edge. It was West Coast enough and it was East Coast enough. We just knew we had it.”

“As for East and West, I just wanted to make a great album,” Sadler explains. “I didn’t care about geography, I cared about textures, tempos and sequencing. After working on that album, I learned that Cube and Chuck were the exact same type of person, even though they were different in other ways. But their writing notebooks looked so similar. And they were both so professional. That especially shocked me about Cube, how ‘down to business’ he was. That’s how we were, but I figured he’d be coming into the studio with women and drinking 40s. It wasn’t like that at all. Plus, of course, I learned that he was a lyrical genius.”

“It was actually one of the last times that The Bomb Squad ever came together as a team,” Chuck says, looking back. “That record was all six of us, together. And the important thing was that in the end, Cube was the one who took it into the end zone. We were the foundation, but he built on that and finished it. It was the first step in the rest of his career.”

“SOUL — Sound Of Urban Listeners” Newsletter, Page 1, May 1990, via Bill Stephney and Harry Allen | Courtesy of the Adler Hip-Hop Archives / Cornell University Hip-Hop Collection

“I don’t think the East Coast and West Coast have ever been as glued [together] as they were on that album,” Chuck adds. “It tied us together. I really think that record also gave Dre the energy to go into that second or third gear as a producer, leading to [his 1992 solo debut] The Chronic.”

Eric Sadler states, “AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted is one of the works that I’m proudest of. You always want something to turn out a certain way, but it rarely does. Cube’s record was about 98% of what I hoped it would be. It couldn’t have gotten much better. It was a joy to be part of it.”

“If Ice Cube didn’t have the material and the vision, I wouldn’t have done the record in the first place,” says Hank Shocklee. “But it was just a pleasure to work with someone who could hold his own. Cube didn’t have any confidence issues going in, but afterwards he knew he could now make a whole record, on his own. And Jinx now knew everything he needed to do to complete an entire product, too. To me, Cube was the underdog, and I always fight for the underdog. That was a challenge, and the fact that we were fighting for him helped form our bond, even though we were only there together for a short time. At that time, everybody was rapping, but only a select few were doing it at a higher level. Cube was young, but he was already there.”

Album press release from Priority Records, Page 1. 1990. Courtesy of the Adler Hip-Hop Archives / Cornell University Hip-Hop Collection.

When asked to rank the album against others in his catalog, Cube does not hesitate. “To me, AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted, that’s the best,” he says. “I woke up one day and that record was a phenomenon that you couldn’t get away from. It’s better than Straight Outta Compton, because that was a shock record. AmeriKKKa’s had more good songs than Compton did.”

Cube continues, “Puffy once told me that he studied AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted before doing Biggie’s first album, and to me that’s a major statement. It shows that AmeriKKKa’s was the blueprint for how records were put together for a long time after that, with the skits and the whole record being one thing. It all sounds like it was made on the same day. It set the tone for a lot of records to come, for probably 10 years after that.”