by Ronin Ro
As Run’s friend Runny Ray told it, Run said, “I can rhyme better than you, L. Whatever you can do I can do better.”
“I’m better than you,” L.L. replied.
“Nigga, you ain’t better than me!”
The two rappers started battling with lyrics.
“They started out with these two-line rhymes and pretty soon one guy would say a line and the other guy would crack back and rhyme his insult to the other guy’s line,” said publicist Bill Adler, who worked in the office.
L.L. wouldn’t let Run finish, so Run interrupted him, and they followed each other from room to room, then out in the hall, then inside again, denouncing each other for twenty minutes. “Since Russell and Run are brothers, everyone thought Run got the special treatment,” said Larry Smith. “L.L. worked a little harder to try to bring Run down.” When someone asked who started this, Run admitted, “I did!”
Though they didn’t always agree with their manager, Run-D.M.C. admitted that by June 1984, all of Russell’s ideas had worked: using the “Action” beat, asking Run to mention the band Orange Krush on “Sucker MCs,” deciding that Jay’s look would be the band’s, adding metal to “Rock Box,” remaking “Hard Times,” and recording “30 Days,” a song Run and D truly disliked. Though their fourth single, “30 Days” (after double-sided efforts “It’s Like That,” “Hard Times,” and “Rock Box”), was in the black singles Top 20, they tried to avoid playing the song in concerts, but crowds down south kept yelling, “Yo, play that ‘30 Days,’ man!” Run and D would whisper, “Come on, that shit is weak,” but crowds kept chanting: “30 Days! 30 Days!” So when Russell said he had a new idea, after his suggestions for songs had helped their debut album, June 1984’s Run-D.M.C., become the very first Gold-certified rap album, Run-D.M.C. and Jam Master Jay listened attentively.
Russell had recently met a young black concert promoter named Ricky Walker, a thirty-one-year-old from Orlando, Florida, who had already worked with the funk group the Commodores, the Jacksons’ 1979 world tour, and the Kool Jazz Fest. Walker wanted to book Run-D.M.C. for his “New York City Fresh Festival” package tour, and Russell said he’d deliver not only Run-D.M.C., but all of the talent.
Russell was by now managing Whodini, a Brooklyn trio with two popular songs on radio (one about WBLS’s Mr. Magic, and “Haunted House of Rock”). Like Run-D.M.C. they wore hats onstage (in this case the big sombrero that rapper Jalil Hutchins wore with his suit jacket and shoes), but London-based Jive Records was promoting Whodini as “the sex symbols of rap.” Now Whodini was about to release their second album, Escape (filled with Larry Smith–produced numbers like “Five Minutes of Funk” and “Freaks Come Out at Night”), and Russell was working to convince radio to play their single “Friends.” Russell traveled to WBLS one night and cornered a DJ in a room. “Russell was cursing some DJ out for not playing a Whodini record, I mean, literally cursing him out,” said Kool Moe Dee, who witnessed this. “‘How the fuck you not gonna play this record?’ He was talking about how hot the group was, how hot the record ‘Friends’ was, and how could they not play this record. ‘It’s got a positive message! You motherfuckers!’ He was literally going berserk.”
Russell then added the Fat Boys to the Fresh Fest lineup. Another Run-styled trio from Brooklyn, the Fat Boys wore black leather blazers, sneakers, chains, glasses, and hats (raccoon fur models with tails) and specialized in crowd-pleasing Kurtis Blow–produced numbers like “Can You Feel It,” “Don’t You Dog Me,” and “Jailhouse Rap.” “They were funny fat greedy guys,” Runny Ray remembered. “But they were cool, though. D.M.C. loved them niggas.”
Russell also asked Brooklyn group Newcleus to warm the crowd up with their Top 10 novelty single “Jam on It,” which featured sped-up Chipmunk voices, and had crews like the Dynamic Breakers, Magnificent Force, and Uptown Express dance on a second stage.
Run-D.M.C. and Jam Master Jay earned $5,000 a night. Whodini, Kurtis Blow, and the Fat Boys received $3,500 each. Russell, managing most acts, earned $1,200 per show.
But Run started introducing their set, near the end of the three-hour concert, by stepping onstage without music, with mike in hand, and yelling: “You’ve seen a whole bunch of great acts out here tonight. But I want y’all to know one goddamn thing. This is my motherfucking house!” As D.M.C. sipped from his forty-ounce bottle of Olde English 800, Run leaned over the front of the stage, tilted his head, cupped one hand near his ear, and yelled, “Whose house?”
Chapter 12
Kings of Rock
During the autumn of 1984, Run-D.M.C. left the Fresh Festival tour during weekends to begin recording their second album. Rick Rubin had asked Russell to let him work with them, and Russell had agreed, as they all wanted something different for their next single. Run and D wanted a harder sound and felt Larry might not be the man for the job. “Larry was a great R & B musician,” Run explained. “Rick was more thugged out. Larry’s a great musical genius and Rick was more rock ’n’ roll.” Rick had also created the b-boy classic “It’s Yours.”
In Rick’s dorm room, Run and D would watch as Rick showed them his favorite movies, new punk rock songs, and ideas on the drum machine. Rick wasn’t like Russell. D.M.C. felt Russell was rebellious because he found it could earn money. Rick was like that because that’s how he felt. Where Russell and Larry drowned their beats in R & B music, Rick listened to D say a rhyme to a beat he pounded on a wall with his fist, and encouraged him to capture that raw feel on their songs. Having Rick onboard, D felt, would make recording a lot more fun. Run meanwhile viewed Rick as “a new guy Russell added to the roster,” someone who could program the ideas Run now had for their music.
Run and D.M.C. brought a new routine to the studio. Jam Master Jay helped them create its drum pattern. Run and D entered the booth and faced the mikes, and Rick Rubin—seated near an engineer at the enormous mixing board—rolled tape. Run yelled, “One two one two, and I say…” Then Jay hit a button on the drum machine and started the beat. D said, “Party people, your dreams have now been fulfilled.” As they rapped, Jay kept pressing buttons, stopping the music, restarting it, adding dramatic pauses, and playing it live. “No punches on the microphone,” Run said. “We weren’t able to the way Jay had set it up. He did it like he was scratching.” They finished recording, and felt they had another hit on their hands. “It was a hard beat,” said Runny Ray. “All the other shit was real commercial. This was real b-boy.”
But their bodyguard Hurricane—who had rapped in Hollis with Davy DMX’s group Solo Sounds and hesitated before letting Run rock at those bygone park jams—thought Run borrowed one of his ideas. “The way Run starts the record, ‘One two one two, and I say…’ That’s how I used to start my [Solo Sounds] parties. When he said that, I said, ‘Wow.’” Hurricane didn’t think it was cool.
D.M.C. disagreed. “That came from every old-school tape there was. ‘And I say…’ That was the b-boy shit.”
Kool Moe Dee of the Treacherous Three also bugged out. “‘Together! Forever! Together! Forever! Run-D.M.C. and we’re tougher than leather!’ When they did that I was like, ‘That’s straight out of ‘At the Party’! ‘Together! Forever! Together! Forever! And this is the way we rock all together! Do it!’ That’s a Treacherous Three routine. What are you doing?”
Back on the Fresh Fest tour, Run-D.M.C. saw the new song “Together Forever (Live at Hollis Park)” become another quick-selling hit.
At this point, said Ray, “Whodini were kind of a problem because they always used to hate.” Once “Friends,” “Freaks,” and “Five Minutes of Funk” entered the black singles Top 5, Whodini wanted to headline over Run-D.M.C. “Jalil was the hater really,” Ray felt. And soon Jalil teamed up with Kurtis Blow to battle Run. “He was funny, though,” Ray felt. “Jealous. Like, ‘Run-D.M.C. sounds def, they’re hot, they’re playing their shit more than mine,’ you know what I’m saying?”
During one backstage battle, Run heard Jalil let loose a few rhymes cal
ling him wack, and then Run let him have it. Kurt went for his, and Run let him have it too. They tried three or four times, but Run used twice as many put-downs to insult them both. “Run got tired of that after a while,” said Ray. “Like, ‘Yeah, you better than me, whatever.’” But Run also noticed Russell’s new artist L.L., along for a few shows, seemed to be waiting in the wings for a chance to battle.
In Miami, most of the acts spent seventy-two hours sniffing coke. Day and night blurred into a nonstop party interrupted only by two shows, and at daybreak one morning D stood on a hotel balcony with a slimy dealer, who pointed toward a nearby body of water and said, “See that building right there? See that boat right there? That’s the feds. And that boat, this is where they bring the stuff in.” D.M.C. didn’t want to hear this. But then he learned some security guards did drugs and fell into the habit of telling them, “Yo! Here’s three hundred dollars. Whatever you get tonight, make sure you get me some and come see me after the show.”
It was fun but sad. In Hollis, he had told a few of the guys who joined him at “the building” that they couldn’t stay high forever. They’d have to get their lives together one day. But during the Fresh Festival tour, the summer of 1984, twenty-year-old D.M.C. saw middle-aged black men—some working as road managers and security for other acts—sniffing, drinking, and trying to pick up young groupies backstage.
In mid-September 1984, Russell had them take a quick flight to Jersey and play a concert for MTV. At the Capitol Theater in Passaic, a film crew waited, and this fit, clean-cut rock singer named Lou Reed, hosting the concert and wearing a black T-shirt with a Harley-Davidson logo, said MTV had asked him to choose his own guests. He really loved “Rock Box,” so he chose Run-D.M.C. Reed was thrilled that they would be on his episode of the network’s series Rock Influences.
Onstage, they saw three thousand white people in the audience, some of whom had never heard rap, never attended schools with black kids, and never heard black music on local stations. They performed “It’s Like That” to polite applause. Then they did “30 Days” and some rock fans booed. They did “Rock Box” and saw some audience members run up and down the aisles, cursing, and saying it sounded terrible. Run—sensitive as he was—held his tongue and kept rapping. Times like these Run and D wondered whether they should really be rapping over rock music. If black kids were not yelling “sellout,” whites felt they had no business using metal.
They returned to the tour, playing twenty-seven shows that would earn a whopping $3.5 million, and kept flying to Manhattan during weekends to work on the second album. In the studio, Russell and Larry (and Rick Rubin suggesting a few ideas to his new pal Russell) were creating the music without them, and were in a big rush. They wanted this done with and in Profile’s hands, so they could be paid royalties for the first album. Russell and Larry also wanted to keep adding rock songs to Run-D.M.C.’s repertoire.
Run and D would usually leave right after recording vocals, but with Larry and Russell micromanaging recording sessions—creating songs without them present and bringing in other songwriters—they wanted to leave even sooner. Run also wanted to get out of there, since he was near Hollis and could see Valerie and Vanessa, hear about how they were doing, play with his kid, read her a bedtime story, and enjoy a rare home-cooked meal. After recording vocals, Run would say, “I’m ready to leave!” But Jay would answer, “Nah, you can’t go nowhere, nigga! We got to finish, you know what I’m saying?” Most times, Run unhappily stayed in the studio and kept following more of Russell and Larry’s orders.
An album began to take shape, but Run and D wished they could have more input into how it sounded, especially since the result would feature their names on the cover. “We didn’t actually do the second one together,” D explained. During one weekend session, they watched from the sidelines while Larry Smith programmed a big beat and Larry’s Puerto Rican friend Eddie Martinez played metal riffs louder than any on “Rock Box.”
“So what raps you got, D?” Russell asked.
D handed Russell his newest composition notebook and watched him flip through pages. Russell’s eyes lingered on a five-page rhyme. “Russell read through it and got all the way to the end,” said D, and seemed to like a lyric that went: “I’m the king of rap! There is none higher! Sucker MCs call me sire!” After suggesting that D change “king of rap” to “king of rock,” Russell had them enter the booth. D rapped nonstop over the entire track, and during the playback Russell listened to the lyric that excited him and said, “We’re gonna put this in the front.” Russell had an engineer hack the tape with a razor blade and paste D’s lyric so that it opened the song. By the time he was done, Russell had requested three hundred edits on this song “Kings of Rock” alone.
While they were recording Kings of Rock, Russell started discussing his new white group, the Beastie Boys, with D.M.C. “Yo, when you meet these guys, they’re gonna bug you out,” he told D. “These white guys are ill.” During one session, Russell led the white trio in. D took one look at their red do-rags and red Adidas warm-up suits and thought, “I must be on Candid Camera.”
Everyone shook hands and then Run and D got back to work. The Beasties watched them record. “Larry Smith was behind the board and we were like, ‘That’s fucking Larry Larr who drove off in his Cadillac?’” said Ad Rock. “And there’s Russell passed out behind the couch.”
Rick Rubin also attended more recording sessions. “We were surprised,” said Runny Ray. “Like ‘Oh shit!’ He’d always try to put his little two cents in. He’d sit at the board talking about ‘No, do it this way.’ Larry wanted them to play it one way, but Rick would want them to do it another way.”
Run accepted that Russell wanted his new friend to help create new Run-D.M.C. songs; D.M.C. initially welcomed Rick, figuring he had a lot of rock records, and great ideas for rock-rap: “We needed him ’cause he knew what to put.” But D’s opinion changed when he saw Rick start trying to tell them how to record their b-boy songs, said Ray. “[Run and D] were like, ‘What is this nigga doing here?’”
But Rick and the Beastie Boys continued to attend recording sessions for the next Run-D.M.C. album, and Jam Master Jay took the Beastie Boys under his wing. Packing them into a car one night, he drove them out to Long Island and introduced them to Chuck D, a college student and rapper who hosted a rap show on Adelphi University’s radio station WBAU. Chuck was skeptical at first but later explained he “couldn’t doubt their legitimacy ’cause they were down with Def Jam and Run-D.M.C., and the beats were right.” Jay asked Chuck to let them say a few raps during an episode of his radio program. Chuck agreed, and liked what he heard. “And the Beastie Boys started playing the radio show as they got the buzz from Jay and then D and then Run,” Chuck said.
During another session, the Beasties watched Run-D.M.C. record “Slow and Low.” Instead of rock or keyboards, they set this to nothing but a Roland 808 drum machine.
Larry added sound effects but Run-D.M.C. felt it sounded too much like “Together Forever,” and decided not to include the song on the album. “They were like, ‘Oh, we’re not gonna use it,’” Ad Rock recalled. At the time, Rick Rubin and the Beasties were working on their first rap album, and, Ad explained, “Our sound right then was desperately trying to sound like Run-D.M.C.”
When the Beasties expressed interest in recording “Slow and Low,” Russell Simmons and Rick Rubin felt it was a great idea. Russell had had little success trying to make the Beasties popular with black audiences. One night he had arranged a show with Kurtis Blow at the Encore in Queens and had a stretch limo take the white trio to the nightclub. But an all-black crowd saw their red Adidas suits and frowned, then jeered when the Beasties took the stage. “They got booed because the black crowd didn’t appreciate that they were some white boys trying to act like Run-D.M.C.,” Profile artist Spyder D remembered. When one Rush Productions employee said, “Yo, this crowd is hostile,” Spyder replied, “You can’t wear an Adidas suit in the Encore. Th
ey would have been better off looking like they were from NYU.”
But Russell hadn’t given up. If anything, he’d worked even harder to break the group, his friend, publicist Leyla Turkkan, explained. “Russell was obsessed with them,” she told a reporter. “This was back in those Danceteria days when everybody was really high on coke. All he could talk about was the Beastie Boys, and I just didn’t believe it was gonna work.” Russell kept having the white trio play Disco Fever “for three people who weren’t watching,” Beastie Boy Ad Rock recalled.
As Run-D.M.C. continued recording a second album during the fall of 1984, Russell told the group, “Yo, we need more ‘songs.’ We don’t need a bunch of ‘Sucker MCs’ records.” Tony Rome—L.L.’s road manager—told them, “I got your socially conscious record that y’all should do.” He handed them his lyric “You’re Blind,” which started out like old Melle Mel, with raps about tenement buildings and skyscrapers. Run thought it was cool enough to use.
Then Russell told them, “Go make a record called ‘You Talk Too Much.’” They envisioned something as hard-hitting as Whodini’s hit “Big Mouth,” but Larry buried Run and D’s scathing insults and chorus (“Shut up!”) in synthesizer riffs and alienated Russell by adding a funk bass without consulting him.
Rick Rubin went from suggesting rock records to sample or replay, to actively contributing ideas to their rock-rap songs. D didn’t mind, but also did not want Rick trying to tell them how to sound b-boy. When he drank, D would tell his friend Ray, “Yo, they bringing this white boy in. He don’t know what the fuck he’s doing.” Ray used to laugh, thinking D would end up punching Rick or something.