by Ronin Ro
With Raising Hell, they had created an album’s worth of classic material (humor on “Perfection,” metal on the title track, black history on “Proud to Be Black,” and hard-core on “My Adidas,” “Peter Piper,” and “Hit It Run”); but now, with the song on rock radio, all reporters wanted to ask about was “Walk This Way.” “They didn’t like that,” said Runny Ray. “Reporters were trying to bring back Aerosmith. That’s why.”
Soon, someone from Rush Management called to say, “Y’all at two million,” D recalled. “We had to fly home and do a photo shoot to put in Billboard.” The magazine announced that Raising Hell had become the first multimillion-selling rap album. For a photo that would run with the caption “Two Million,” D and Run stood near each other and each held two fingers up like a wartime sign for victory. But they didn’t really care. They were too busy planning the next album, asking each other, “What are we gonna do? Let’s make some more beats.”
The tour kept going, and on July 18, 1986, they rode the tour bus to Manhattan to play Madison Square Garden—the biggest arena in town—and earn about $100,000 for two hours’ work. Someone from Rush let them know, “Yo, this guy named Angelo Anastasio’s gonna be coming.” Anastasio was a young executive from Adidas who wanted to explore the possibility of making Run-D.M.C. the first nonathletes to endorse the popular footwear brand. An Adidas endorsement deal would be big, but Run-D.M.C. didn’t alter their behavior in any way. On the tour bus after a concert at the Spectrum in Philly, they drank heavily. Run-D.M.C. didn’t think partying before their concert, with the Adidas executive in the audience, would jeopardize an endorsement deal. They weren’t that shrewd or concerned with earning money from side projects. The potential Adidas deal was an idea from Rush Management, and if it went through and they did get money for endorsing sneakers they already enjoyed wearing, they would appreciate the deal and the prestige it brought the group. But Run-D.M.C. were focused primarily on creating music that satisfied their fans. Run-D.M.C. were happy that fans had reacted positively to the hard-core sound Run, D, and Jay had created for many of Raising Hell’s songs, and happy about being able to keep earning money by performing for adoring fans nationwide.
Run-D.M.C.’s tour bus reached Manhattan before dawn. The group checked into a high-end hotel, and opened fresh bottles of Olde English 800. The sun was rising when D told his boys, “Yo, it’s time to go to bed.” He closed his eyes but woke up after only two hours to head to the Garden for a sound check. At the arena, D.M.C. accepted a morning beer from one of his friends and practiced a few songs. Then he returned to his hotel room to drink some Olde E, smoke some weed, then order numerous cheeseburgers, fries, and desserts from room service. Then Run-D.M.C. headed to the Garden. Walking down Eighth Avenue, searching for an entrance to the sprawling complex, they saw lines of teenagers waiting to get in.
With an hour to go before they took the stage, Run left the dressing room and went to look at the crowd. Standing backstage where they couldn’t see him, he was stunned. The place was packed. Hurricane sidled up to him and said, instead of telling the crowd this was Run’s house, as Run always did, why not say, “I beg your pardon, but this is my motherfucking Garden.” Run thought it was a great idea.
Onstage, Run, D, and Jay heard deafening applause and watched a huge light swing over the audience. D saw rows of people stretch all the way to the Garden’s far-off rear wall. Run held the mike. “Tonight I walked in here and they wouldn’t let me in the back door,” he began. He tossed nearby security guards a dirty look. “And I said, ‘I beg your pardon… but this is Run’s motherfucking Garden!’” The crowd roared. They did a few songs and then Run once again started “My Adidas” by demanding, “Hold your Adidas in the air!” This time, twenty thousand people obeyed. Even Run was awed by the sight of so many three-striped sneakers being held aloft, swaying from left to right.
As soon as they left the stage, the affable, Ferrari-driving Angelo Anastasio asked, “You guys want an endorsement deal?”
Later that night Run entered a limo by himself. He would head home to his wife and his two-year-old daughter, Vanessa. He considered how he was only twenty-one and about to have Adidas create a Run-D.M.C. clothing line. “Russell and them pulled it off,” he said. He told the limo driver that he’d have his signature on a sneaker, and about the lines outside the Garden, the nonstop applause during every song, the sneakers waving. Everything was going his way, he said. Like a dream come true. “I was out on the Raising Hell tour. It was crazy. It was a b sneakers. We had our own line before anybody.” The car stopped in Hollis that night. Run thanked the driver and gave him a $100 tip, then went inside. The next morning he visited his father, who held up his copy of the morning newspaper. With silent amazement, Run looked at a photo of himself holding a mike and rocking the Garden.
They signed the deal with Adidas and received gold Adidas-shaped medallions to attach to their chains. Even their bodyguard Hurricane got one, but his was small, so he turned it into a ring. And everyone received piles of Adidas sneakers and athletic wear. The media reported on a seven-figure deal and about how, instead of the usual blue box with white stripes, Adidas would package the new Run-D.M.C. sneaker in black boxes that featured the group’s red and white logo. They were the envy of everyone in the rap music industry. But Run and D knew the deal wasn’t as lucrative for them personally as some media reports claimed. While reporters implied they were swimming in millions, D said, “They basically gave us a little bit of money and put most of the money into the tour.”
Chapter 17
War and Peace
Between concerts during August 1986, D and his Hollis Crew boys hung out on Run-D.M.C.’s bus. Run and Jay partied with the Beastie Boys on the white group’s tour bus. “Run was around a lot, actually,” said Ad Rock. “They were very funny people, those guys.” On their bus, the Beasties held one party after another and listened to demo tapes of the Beasties’ first album in progress.
Run and Jay soon started “giving them a lot of advice about what they need to do for the album,” said Doctor Dre, then DJing for the Beasties. “ ’Cause Run, D, and Jay—Jay a lot more—knew what the Beasties needed to make it go.”
D.M.C. began to feel two of the Beastie Boys didn’t like him much. He didn’t understand why. He always thought the Beasties were cool. He had let them attend King of Rock sessions, let them have the song “Slow and Low,” and let them hang out while Run-D.M.C. recorded parts of Raising Hell.
Ad Rock wasn’t the problem, he felt. It was the other two. D.M.C. wondered if they were angry with him for not partying on their bus, drinking Budweiser with them, playing Nintendo, or rushing to join them in a photograph or homemade video they were filming.
He first began wondering whether they disliked him when Run told him some disturbing news. Run was high, D recalled, and told D that he’d been sitting around smoking weed with the Beasties. “He just out of nowhere said, ‘The Beasties said your fucking rhymes are corny,’” D recalled. D was confused. Then Run added that the Beasties were gonna say this to his face, too. “Then why the fuck they imitating me?” D thought. “They’re fucking clones! I was like, ‘Damn,’” D recalled. “I was hurt. How could they say this? They up in my face every day; we’re fucking showing them the ropes, opening the door for them, putting them on, and they’re gonna say that.”
On Run-D.M.C.’s tour bus, D played some of his own music and told himself, “None of my rhymes are corny.” And when the Beastie Boys tried to say what’s up, he’d only nod. He waited for them to criticize his lyrics to his face, as Run claimed they would. “You know…I love Run but it’s like Run’s nuts,” said Ad Rock. “If he said that, that’s nuts. D.M.C. is not Chuck D; he’s not ‘whoever’; he’s not Nas. But he’s D.M.C. from Run-D.M.C. He’s one of the heroes of all time. We would never say that. There would be no reason to say that. I hope D knows that.”
The Raising Hell tour continued. The Beasties approached Jay one day, anxious because the
ir DJ, Dre, was leaving. “W-what should we do?” one member asked.
Jay calmly replied, “Cane. Hurricane can do it.” Jay, Run, and Russell knew Cane had skills, and asked Dre if it’d be all right if Cane took over. Dre told Hurricane he should do it. “I’m not doing that!” Hurricane yelled. “I’m with fucking Run-D.M.C. You’re not gonna get me out here DJing for these white guys acting crazy! I ain’t doing it.”
But Russell led a choir of people saying, “C’mon, Cane, you can do it, man!” Then Dre came back. “Come on, Cane, be there for me, man…. Do it for them, man. Fuck it, just do it.”
Cane said, “All right, kid. I’ll do it.”
Before his first show, Hurricane covered his bald head with a baseball cap and pulled it down low. He further disguised himself with a pair of shades. “So nobody would even notice me,” he explained. Onstage, he played “Hold It Now,” “She’s on It,” and “Slow and Low.”
After the show, Run, D, and Jay joined the crowd that mobbed him backstage. Everyone said, “Yo, kid, you rocked it,” and Hurricane looked proud. Newspapers reported that they were a united family, that Hurricane joining the Beasties strengthened the bond between groups, and races. But Hurricane was still “Jay’s man,” Ad Rock recalled. He wouldn’t ride with the Beasties. “I’m not sleeping near you guys,” he told them. Instead, he slept on one of the twelve beds on Run-D.M.C.’s bus.
Chapter 18
The Long Beach Episode
They arrived in Long Beach, California, on August 17, 1986, to perform the fifty-sixth of sixty-four concerts. At the Long Beach Arena, they did a sound check, performing a few songs for the sound engineer at his board amid rows of metal chairs in the audience. “I had my forty-dogs on ice, a new suit, and a haircut,” D later remembered. “I was ready to have fun!” When they left the arena, they saw drivers standing near vans and limos outside, and heard one person warn, “Yo, it’s gonna be ill today! I’m telling ya, it’s gon’ be ill.”
That night they returned to the arena and saw nine cops on motorcycles and nine on foot. Inside, Whodini was backstage. The members of Run-D.M.C. slapped them all five and wished them luck. The show began and Run, D, and Jay observed from the side stage, watching L.L. perform a few energetic numbers. While he performed, a few gang members marched down an aisle, stood in front of the stage, and waved their fingers, curled into gang signs. Then gangsters jumped on the stage during L’s set. “Security grabbed them off the stage,” said Runny Ray. “But L.L. was shaking like a leaf.”
And that wasn’t all. During an intermission, a few people in the crowd started fighting each other. Hurricane recalled that backstage “the show’s promoters were debating about whether Whodini should go on. The promoters said let them. It might calm [the crowd]. Whodini did about two records at the most and had to stop.” The entire crowd started fighting, or trying to escape nearby brawls. “People were trying to come up on the stage again to get whoever was up there,” said Ray. “They were beating the soundman in the audience, throwing chairs.”
The houselights came on but the fighting continued. Jalil of Whodini, standing onstage with mike in hand, begged the crowd to stop fighting, but gang members tore legs off chairs and bashed people. Gunshots went off. Eight security guards chased kids in one direction, then ran in the other with eighty kids after them. Someone was thrown off the balcony. Other concertgoers tried to run but were trapped in the crowd with club-wielding attackers approaching. In anguish, D.M.C. yelled, “Oh, shit! Look at that, Ray! Oh, shit! Damn!”
As the riot continued, D.M.C. stood onstage, helpless, while more of his group’s fans were hurt. D.M.C. heard Ray yell, “Oh, shit! You see that? Get the hell out! Yo, homeboy, you better run!” Certain sights stood out. One guy led his girlfriend toward some empty seats; the gang leader saw him do that, ran over, and pummeled him without mercy. Other people were bleeding. They saw someone club a woman in the head. “I felt like crying,” Ray said. “I think I probably did cry. That was the worse show I ever been at.”
After ten minutes, security led Run-D.M.C. backstage and into the dressing room. Former Miss America Vanessa Williams, who was in the audience, arrived in their dressing room, in tears. Her bodyguard and manager followed, saying, “We don’t know what’s going on out there!” Then Lyor Cohen, accompanying Run-D.M.C. as road manager from Rush, entered and slammed the door shut. “It’s crazy out there!” he said. “Oh, my God. They’re killing each other.”
A security guard’s radio said, “We’re losing it! We’re losing it!” Then a guard entered, sweating, wide-eyed with terror. “Yo, don’t lock the door.”
“Why not?” D asked.
“ ’Cause when they come back here, I’m coming in with y’all!”
Jay and D looked at each other before tearing legs off chairs and holding them up like clubs. Security shoved the group Whodini into the room. Rapper Jalil numbly said, “We went out there and they just started fightin’, man. We were in the middle of our song. And I looked up and I seen a guy come off the top of the balcony down to the floor. I know he got to be dead.”
Gangsters tried to get backstage, but guards held them back by erecting a barricade in a narrow doorway. At 11:02 p.m., three hours after the crowd began to fight, police arrived. Sixty cops in riot gear marched through the arena with nightsticks. Within fifteen minutes, the place was empty. A security guard said Run-D.M.C. and the other performers could leave. On the way out, Run-D.M.C. observed the arena floor. It was covered with blood, chair legs, torn chains, jackets, purses, food, sneakers, and chairs torn from bolts.
At the hotel, they watched the news on television. Newscasters kept saying rap music caused the riot; forty-five fans were in hospitals; one was shot; four were arrested; five were stabbed. At 2:00 a.m., their management representatives told Run-D.M.C. that they’d have to go to a radio station in three hours to defend themselves against media reports accusing them of inciting violence at the Long Beach Arena. The radio interview was a hastily arranged appearance that would hopefully prevent reporters from tarnishing the group’s name and scaring promoters in other cities into canceling shows, which would lead to Run-D.M.C. losing income. The group also learned that with controversy brewing about their lyrics, their next scheduled concert, the next night at the local club the Palladium, was canceled.
Their publicist, Tracy Miller, new to Profile’s staff and a Run-D.M.C. fan since 1983, encouraged Russell to have Run-D.M.C. meet with reporters and set the record straight. They organized a press conference, held the day after the concert, and Run told reporters, “Those kids have nothing to do with Run-D.M.C. They’re scumbags and roaches and they would have hit me in the head, too.” He added that gangs were “running” L.A., and he wouldn’t come back “until the local authorities get the problem under control.”
The mood on the Raising Hell tour darkened. “I mean everybody was depressed about how fucked up it was, ’cause it was crazy,” said Ad Rock of the Beastie Boys. “It wasn’t just ‘wilin’ at a show.’ It was some full-scale shit. And it was crazy. So people were depressed. Run and them were banned from places.”
Though they didn’t actually perform the night of the riot, reporters kept blaming Run-D.M.C. for the violence. “They were trying to blame us for something the politicians and the powers that be can’t control,” said D.M.C. They kept touring, and urged reporters to “Go check the album.” None of their lyrics, they explained, were violent.
But without warning, Kurtis Blow told a reporter they did encourage violence.
Since his 1984 album Ego Trip, Kurt’s fans had abandoned him, ignoring his 1985 album America, his 1986 work, Kingdom Blow, and his current single, “I’m Chillin’.” When Long Island, New York, daily newspaper Newsday asked Kurt about Run-D.M.C. and rap music, Kurt said, “Those lyrics are bad. ‘Time to get ill’ means go crazy, time to stomp somebody’s face off. What Run-D.M.C. is doing is perpetrating, acting like they’re tough gangster kids when they’re not. And the kids see Run acting th
at way, so they try to be gangsters.”
Run was furious with his former mentor. And D.M.C. felt, “Kurt was agreeing ’cause we were busting his ass. It was a way to hopefully have reporters write us off so he could move back into the limelight. But we were too powerful for that bullshit.”
Their fans knew the media had it wrong and continued to support them. And Run found distraction from negative coverage in the studio, working on a demo he hoped Michael Jackson would include on his next album. “Run wanted to do it ’cause Michael was the biggest star in the world and Run wanted to be the biggest star,” said Hurricane.
Run and Jam Master Jay created a great track that would have their Thriller idol sounding like Jesse D of Staten Island rap-singing group the Force MDs, a rapper who wore a black suit, a glove, and shades, and, Run recalled, “used to skip around and act like Michael.” With this new song, Run explained, “We were gonna try to put Michael on a fly beat, have him sing over a b-boy beat.”
After Hurricane helped with the demo, Jay told the Beasties’ new bandmate, “Go in there and sing the hook.”
Hurricane said, “Nigga, I can’t sing! Whatchu talking ’bout?”
“Man, just sing it so [Michael] could know what to sing by the time we get there.”
With a sigh, Hurricane entered the booth and sang. “Terrible,” he sighed. “Just something so he could hear the idea. We sent it off to him.” Michael Jackson’s people then invited Run-D.M.C. to L.A.