by Ronin Ro
D could have performed also. Jay liked him and knew he wrote rhymes as Easy D. Jay also knew D carried his book around and often opened it to read Hollis Crew members his newest rhymes about rum and coke, the Q2 bus that ran down Hollis Avenue, smoking angel dust, his Puma sneakers, gold chains, Olde English 800 malt liquor, and his ode to Hollis: “H is for Hollis, it’s for Hollis town, O is for only Homeboys that are down.” Someone offered D the mike; “Take the mike, D.”
But before he could accept it, Run stepped forward. “Nah. D don’t take the mike,” he said. Then a few feet away, to D: “Nah, you just rhyme with me.” D later felt that perhaps Run told him this because Run did not want to risk losing a potential rhyming partner to another group.
Run and D kept attending Jay’s parties even though at about two in the morning someone always pulled a gun and fired shots that sent the crowd stampeding for every available exit. The next day, people gossiped about how someone had started shooting again and had people climbing fences to escape, but when Saturday arrived, everyone reconvened in the park to watch Jay throw another jam.
Feeling Russell would inevitably let him create a record, Run wanted Jason Mizell to be his group’s DJ. For him, the bearded, broad-shouldered tough was the perfect candidate. In addition to talent, Run felt, Jason had the fearsome Hollis Crew to protect them at shows and in Hollis. Jason, however, kept telling Run he was busy with Two-Fifth Down, so Run tried to invite Jason’s assistant, Nellie D, to spin for them even though D still refused to perform in public.
Once “The Breaks” took off, Russell began coming home with tapes of the album Kurtis Blow was creating for Mercury Records. Russell saw Run and D practicing their own routines in the attic and invited them to hear the new songs and give their opinions. They wanted to like them, but felt that Kurt’s music was overproduced, and that his lyrics—“Rappin’ Blow,” “Way Out West,” “Throughout Your Years,” his ballad “All I Want in This World (Is to Find That Girl),” and an unexpected cover of Bachman Turner Overdrive’s rock song “Takin’ Care of Business”—were tame compared to other rap singles. They liked what Russell did with “Hard Times” (a song that began with Kurt telling someone who asked if he had money, “Yo, my brother, I ain’t really got it like that…What we got here is hard times”); but for the most part, they felt Kurtis Blow featured too many Chic-like grooves, party raps, and cries of “Everybody say ho.” And on his album cover, instead of cool b-boy wear, Kurt posed without a shirt, with a gold chain on his chest, trying to look tough. Despite their rejection of his sound and image—D repeatedly opined that Kurt was corny—Run and D saw 1980’s Kurtis Blow enter the R & B Top 10 sales chart.
Since Run kept saying they’d be in a group together, D told him they should sound like a tape he heard in between classes at Rice High School in 1981. The tape featured unsigned Bronx rap group the Cold Crush Brothers battling the Fantastic Five at the Super Showdown party in the nightclub Harlem World. Instead of backing tracks that mimicked disco records, the Cold Crush rapped on the beat from Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way.” Other groups offered crowd-pleasing boasts and call-and-response routines, but the Cold Crush insulted rivals and chanted lyrics to the melody from Harry Chapin’s “Cat’s in the Cradle.” While members of groups rapped separately, one after another, the Cold Crush shared sentences. “Oh my God,” D thought when he first heard the now legendary tape. “What’s going on here?”
After saving $9, he bought the tape, and seemed to be inspired by Cold Crush member J.D.L. when he changed his nickname from Easy D to DMcD—the way he signed his work in typing class— and then to the less awkward D.M.C. “I can’t even describe what happened,” D later said of the tape. “It changed my life.”
He coaxed Run—who liked rapper Spoonie Gee’s smooth single “Love Rap” and “verses by Reggie Reg of the Crash Crew”— into creating routines in which they shared sentences. And whenever they hung out, D kept playing his Cold Crush tape.
They prepared a few routines, and practiced them for friends at their old familiar hangout, “the building.” Emboldened by Olde English 800 malt liquor, D yelled lyrics until neighbors opened windows and the super came out to yell, “Y’all got to stop that noise! Take that someplace else!”
D and the others ignored his complaints, so the super would return with a stick to chase them off. Even while running away, though, D would turn and yell: “Don’t tell me to be quiet! Don’t you try it! You know my rhymes are def! You can’t deny it!”
Their sound came together (D’s powerful lyrics, inspired by the Funky Four’s echo chamber, Run’s smooth Spoonie Gee–style delivery, and a Cold Crush–like tag-team approach), but Russell ignored them. In late 1981, Russell was busy helping Kurt create his second album, Deuce, and playing Run and D early versions of his songs. D, who now dressed like a b-boy (baggy hooded sweatshirts and dark jeans), agreed to hear the songs, though his friend Ray from “the building” said, “He wasn’t feeling them.”
With hood over head, facing Russell’s radio, D heard more of the funk grooves, call-and-response routines, and soulless raps that had made Kurt’s debut album one of his least favorite rap products. Joe liked Kurt’s number “Do the Do,” but D felt that it, and Kurt’s other new works—“Deuce,” “It’s Gettin’ Hot,” “Getaway,” “Rockin’,” even “Take It to the Bridge,” his attempt to create a tape-styled routine—all sounded stilted and bland. Songs played, but D didn’t move. When they ended, he told Russell the songs were corny. Indignant, Russell told him this sound made money. D said Kurt needed to sound more like Cold Crush or Funky Four, and recited a few of his own rhymes to show what was cool—but Russell said, “It’s too hard. It’s too aggressive. It’s not commercial.”
“You dummy!” Run yelled. “D’s the best rapper in the world!”
But Russell wasn’t convinced, and in private told Run, “D will never be a rapper. If he nods his head to a beat or a record, it’s def.” D didn’t like Kurt, but Russell still paid attention to D; Russell felt his views might reflect those of a younger audience that wanted far less music on the rap singles they bought, and wanted rap artists to dress in clothing they—the younger audience—could actually afford and wore every day.
Even though D kept saying Kurt was corny, Russell kept playing him new Kurtis Blow songs. He respected D’s honesty and wondered if D wasn’t right, after all, about this live music sound not being as exciting for teenage listeners as break beats, scratches, and tougher lyrics. In Run’s house another night, with Kurt present, Russell played D “Starlite,” a song that included tinkling piano, gentle guitar, and women singing the title. D sat motionless as it played, causing Russell and Kurt to face each other, and Russell to think, “Oh, shit! We’re not gonna sell any records!”
When it ended, D said calmly, “Uh-uh, y’all are finished.”
Run agreed with D’s appraisal of Kurtis’s music, and decided that when Russell let him make a record, he wouldn’t rap over “Good Times” and sound like a sucker. But the more he told his brother “You should let me make a record,” the less Russell seemed to listen. If anything, Russell’s mind was somewhere else. By now singer Deborah Harry, a white woman who fronted the new wave band Blondie, had included a few raps on her song “Rapture” and seen it become a major pop hit. “Russell was talking about getting a white rap group together very, very early on,” said Kurtis Blow songwriter J. B. Moore. “He could smell how big that was going to be and he was actively looking.”
Run kept saying they’d make a record, but D told himself, “Yeah, right. I have my life. I’m going to school; I’ll be in St. John’s.”
Run was counting on Russell’s help. By 1981, Russell was booking Kurt, who had two gold-selling singles to his credit, on major tours. And with no other company (besides Sugar Hill Records) actively managing rap acts, Russell was working with other artists. Russell was also busy trying to learn how to actually operate as a manager; he didn’t know what he was doing, but told himself he’
d take meetings, make calls, produce records, join Kurtis on tour, book shows, and somehow get the hang of it. Instead of working on a DJ Run single, Russell teamed with musician Larry Smith and concentrated on recording other musicians, and managing their careers from an office at 1133 Broadway in Manhattan. Then Russell received his first royalty check for his work with Kurtis and moved out of the Simmons home.
Just as Russell left, friends recalled, Run was coping with the fact that his parents were heading for a divorce. “It was crazy in Hollis, and crazy at home,” one of Joe’s friends said, under condition of anonymity (for fear of angering Joe by discussing this barely reported period of Joe’s life).
Even if Russell had been around and wanted to work with him, Run knew his father was opposed to the idea. He wanted Run to focus on improving his grades, which had slipped to the point where Run had to attend night school to make up for lost credits. To keep the peace, Russell agreed to put Run off until Run received his diploma. Run kept saying, “Russell, let me make a record,” but Russell kept ignoring him.
Run kept DJing in his attic and expanded his dream to include his friend Ray. Ray, who hung out with Joe in the neighborhood, was usually near the turntables, handing Run whatever record he needed from his crates. And because Ray literally ran to get some of these records, Run nicknamed him “Runny Ray,” and wrote a rap for him to perform.
In Ray’s living room, on days they all played hooky from high school, after hearing tapes by Grandmaster Flash, Bronx DJ Afrika Bambaataa, rapper Melle Mel, and the Cold Crush Four, Run and D practiced their tag-team routines while Ray made beats by banging on a radiator. Then Ray would say the lyric Run gave him: “Toot the horn, ring the bell / I am the man with the clientele / Ring the bell and toot the horn and then you know that Runny Ray is on.” But Ray soon told them he’d rather stick to making beats.
Around his neighborhood, Run saw crews refuse to let him perform at their jams. Then he heard records on the radio by acts on Sugar Hill and thought, “If I could be down, I’d be a lot better. Imagine a young rapper making a record, this young, with this voice.” The more people rejected him, pushed him aside, the more determined he became to make it in music. “When he became DJ Run,” one of Joe’s bandmates later said, “it was for revenge.”
Meanwhile, D.M.C. was beginning to lose hope. D was drifting further into street life (stealing forties of beer from Dolly’s Deli, suckering a white man out of $5 by claiming he’d buy drugs for the guy, stealing from his mother’s purse, going on a three-week angel dust binge, and messing up in school). Run did what he could to keep D focused and feeling confident about himself and his music.
One afternoon, while playing hooky again, both rhymed at the top of their lungs while walking to a porno theater on Jamaica Avenue. D wore his b-boy Kangol hat without fear of stickup kids or hard rocks; Run swaggered a bit. “Something jumped in me around seventeen where I thought I was the baddest little hoodlum that ever did anything,” Run explained. Both carried bottles of Olde English malt liquor.
After sneaking into the theater, they headed for the men’s room. It was out of service, so they made a detour into the empty ladies’ room. There, D opened his schoolbag for some reason. “He pulled out these glasses and put them on to see something,” Run remembered.
Run asked, “What are those?”
D, who had recently failed an eye examination, explained, “My mother bought them yesterday. She told me to wear these glasses.” D didn’t want people calling him “four eyes” or “goggles,” so he’d worn them to one class, then hidden them in his bag. “They look doofy,” he added.
Run asked, “What? What do you mean? I would trade my life for those big dumb glasses! You’re like Preach from Cooley High! What do you mean you look corny? We’ll win because of these big dumb black glasses! They’re not Cazals! They’re retarded incredible! Put them on and never take them off!”
D looked like he wanted to cry. “But they look funny,” he repeated. “What do you mean?”
“Do you know how cool those glasses are?” Run said. “Your mother did you a good justice. Wear these glasses every day.”
After that D not only wore them, he did so with pride. But he still wouldn’t perform in public, so Run was alone when he made his way over to a block party Russell’s production partner, Larry Smith, threw in nearby St. Albans one summer day in 1981.
A thin, sharp-featured bassist with a mustache, Smith (a former schoolmate of Run’s oldest sibling, Danny junior) was a well-traveled veteran of bands that played blues, R & B, funk, and disco, and numbers from Your Arms Too Short to Box with God for a production in far-off Canada. Larry liked Run, and felt he showed promise. “But that was Russell’s little brother, so Russell always used to push him to the side,” Larry felt.
Run grabbed the mike that day in 1981 and “put Kurtis Blow to shame,” Larry continued. “He put a lot of rappers to shame. And they wanted to beat him up after the party.” Another afternoon, Run showed up midway through a jam in nearby Jamaica Park, cut across the throng of rappers waiting for the mike, and, said Ray, “was busting them on their ass.” On another occasion, Run persuaded D finally to stop being shy and rock the mike at a crowded block party. That day, D surprised Run by facing a friendly audience and segueing from amiable call-and-response chants to yelling insults in people’s faces.
Run soon became known in Hollis for humiliating any opponent trying to battle him at a jam. “His brother, who was a hip-hop promoter, didn’t want to give him a chance, so he had to blast everybody out,” Larry Smith explained. “He did it everywhere he went.” And though he had long since stopped performing with Kurtis, he kept lining up shows in local clubs, on his own, as the “Son of Kurtis Blow.” Since he liked how D rocked the mike at the block party, Run decided to use these shows he booked to introduce D.M.C. to his small but loyal core audience.
One Friday afternoon he called D unexpectedly to say he’d be doing a show in a few hours with rapper Sweet G., whose single “Feel the Heartbeat” mimicked Tanya Gardner’s recent “Heartbeat” and was a big hit on local radio. “Yo, D, I got a show at the Le Chalet,” he said. “You know where that’s at, right?”
D said he knew about the venue on Hillside Avenue.
“I want you to come and be down with me,” Run said. “I got DJ Kippy-O.”
D was surprised by the invitation but accepted: “All right. All right. Cool.” He ended the call and sat there for a minute. Then he went to his basement, opened a bottle of Southern Comfort, and drank half the bottle in an effort to steady his nerves. By 6:00 p.m. his mom, Bannah, was asleep, and his pop, Byford, was at work; but instead of meeting Joe, he drank some more. Hours passed quickly, but he finally left his home. It was a ten-to fifteen-minute walk to Joe’s block, 205th, and along the way D wondered if he’d remember his rhymes, if he’d say the right ones, if anyone would like them, if the DJ would play break beats that fit his lyrics (each designed for a certain one). He thought up reasons to go home, even telling himself, “Man, I am drunk,” and on Run’s block he actually stopped in the middle of the street to change direction. But he reconsidered, marched up to Run’s house, and knocked on the door.
Run opened it. “You want something to drink?” he asked.
D said, “Cool. Yeah, give me a lot.”
By the time they reached the club Le Chalet, D was smashed. He didn’t know how he had got there. It was early, so the club was half empty, but before he could fully take in his surroundings, Run started his fifteen-minute set. D stumbled over to the side of the stage and stood behind a speaker while Kippy-O mixed the bass-heavy record “Seven Minutes of Funk” on two turntables. Then Run yelled, “Easy D, my man! Get on the mike with the master plan.”
D couldn’t make it to center stage. For a millisecond he wondered why he had come. “I was drunk and sat down and rhymed with my back to the crowd,” he recalled. The rest of the night was a blur, but bright and early the next morning Run called him on the phone. �
�You were drunk last night.”
D felt embarrassed.
“You don’t know what you did?” Run asked.
“What’d I do?” he answered.
“Yo, you were good,” Run said. “Your rhyme was dope. But, motherfucker: next time, stand up and look at the crowd. And if you gotta sit down, sit on the front of the stage, have your hood over your head, and rhyme at the crowd!”
Chapter 7
Krush Groove 1
Run kept asking Russell to let him make a record, and finally, in early 1982, Russell told him, “Okay, Trevor got something.”
Trevor was Trevor Gale, drummer for Larry Smith’s band, Orange Krush. Together, Russell and Larry had produced a record called “Action” for the group, found them a deal with Mercury Records, and seen Sugar Hill Records use its drum track as the basis for their group the Treacherous Three’s single “Action.” Gale had recently asked Russell to find a rapper for a new lyric, “Street Kid,” and Russ told him, “No problem. I’ve got just the person for you. Joey will be perfect.”
But despite suggesting seventeen-year-old Run for the single, Russell continued to avoid working with him. “I didn’t have enough belief in my own brother,” Russell wrote in his autobiography, Life and Def. “I knew how good he was, but it just didn’t occur to me that he could be a star.”
Though he’d told D.M.C. they’d form a group, Run agreed to record as a soloist. But his dream soured when he saw the lyrics Gale had cowritten with his wife. Like “Christmas Rappin’” and “The Breaks,” the lyric had a theme—a young b-boy asking old people not to dismiss him as a hoodlum simply because he wears his hat backward and his trousers with one leg rolled up—but Joe thought it was hackneyed.