It's Hammer Time, all right, though the venue isn't Madison Square Garden but the Jubilee Christian Center in San Jose, Calif. And the congregants—not concertgoers—have gathered for a two-hour celebration of prayer, gospel singing, testimonials of faith and evangelical preaching. "Praise the Lord, everybody!" cried Hammer, greeting the crowd. "Amen! God bless everybody! We are alive! We are breathing! We have hope!"
After declaring bankruptcy in 1996 and retreating from the music world, Hammer, now 38, has found solace—and a new start—in the ministry. "He is natural and down-to-earth and so unpreachy while he is preaching," says friend Smokey Robinson. Every Sunday, Hammer, unpaid, leads the Christian Center's Gospel Hip Hop Night for 3,500 of the faithful. He also hosts a Christian talk show on the Trinity Broadcasting Network. "He's seen it all and been through a lot of what I have," declares Bruno Belda, 19, a former gang member from Hay-ward, Calif., who regularly attends Hammer's services. "He understands what it's like to be at the bottom, feeling hopeless."
No question about that. After topping the charts with "U Can't Touch This" and earning an estimated $33 million in 1990, Hammer bottomed out in '96, $13.7 million in debt. Even touring and recording full-time, he could no longer afford his extravagant lifestyle—including a $12 million mansion in Fremont, Calif., with 17 luxury cars—and the $1 million monthly payroll doled out to 250 employees, mostly childhood friends. "Instead of God being first, family being second, community being third and business being fourth," says Hammer, "it was business first. And more business second. My priorities were out of order."
It wasn't always that way. One of eight kids of Betty Burrell, an Oakland police department secretary, and her husband, Lewis, the manager of a legalized gambling club, who divorced in 1967, Hammer spent much of his childhood in church. Raised by his mother and grandmother, the former Stanley Kirk Burrell sang in the choir and met wife Stephanie, now 33 and a real estate broker, at a spiritual revival in 1984.
It was a 1996 surgery to repair a leg injury he'd suffered playing basketball, he says, that showed him just how far offtrack he had wandered. "I remember God speaking to me and saying that the breaking of my leg was symbolic of the breaking of all the old ties, old habits—all the things that had stopped me from focusing on the man he made me to be," he says. The murder of his friend, rapper Tupac Shakur, that same year also shook him. "I had an ability to speak of life and death from a spiritual aspect," he says. "But I wasn't able to be as much help to Tupac as I would have liked to have been. I thought it was time to get back to being a man of God."
Now living in a four-bedroom home in the Northern California farming town of Tracy, Hammer still performs his music occasionally and will be releasing a CD on his own label this summer, but he says his focus is his ministry and family. (He and Stephanie have four children: Akeiba, 12, Sarah, 6, Stanley, 4, and Jeremiah, 2.) With good reason. "I'm lucky to be alive," he says. "You are seeing a guy who is grateful to God that he is here."
Julie K.L. Dam
Ken Baker in Tracy
- Contributors:
- Ken Baker.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
