by Ronin Ro
They returned to Los Angeles the second week of October 1986. Raising Hell had sold well over 2 million copies. Major rock music magazines credited “Walk This Way” with bringing rap to the mainstream. And Rolling Stone was doing a cover story. Rolling Stone’s freelance writer Ed Kiersh accompanied them to an appearance at a radio station, where the group spoke out against gangs and defended themselves against charges that they were to blame for the Long Beach riot. Run was happy to have the cover— an honor reserved for rock bands—but also resented the fact that the magazine chose this particular moment to give them the cover. “The only reason I got the cover of Rolling Stone was because of the fight in Long Beach,” he felt.
Things were still going well for Run-D.M.C. They remained the top-selling group in rap. Technics turntables wanted them to sign an endorsement deal. Adidas was creating a clothing line. Jay and D had diamond rings on every finger and partied in every town. But Run was weary of touring: He liked the money (it bought him a 1966 Oldsmobile and a new Riviera) but he needed a break. He wanted to spend more time with his now three-year-old daughter, Vanessa; he wanted to sit down and write rhymes, to wax his car like a normal guy, to drive wife Valerie to the doctor’s office where she worked, to call Jay and work on the next album. Instead, in his swanky $750-a-night penthouse suite at the Stouffer airport hotel on October 9, 1986, he told the writer from Rolling Stone they were positive role models with a clean image.
Outside the hotel, preparing to go for a head-clearing drive, Run looked uneasy. While he was telling the reporter Kiersh that Run-D.M.C. were there to urge gangs to form a truce, a black cop cut across a throng of businesswomen and extended his hand. “Boy, is my son a fan of yours! All because of you he wants to be a DJ. I just bought him a mixer.”
Eyeing his gun and badge, Run said that’s how he had started. “DJing and playing basketball. Give your son the word: DJing is good, it’s def. Tell your son you were hanging out with me.”
“I will, I will! My son will go wild about this.”
The valet arrived with Run’s rented black Corvette. Behind the wheel, Run reached for the phone to call Valerie. For ten minutes they talked; then he promised he’d call later that night. “I have to go for a ride to clear the bees out of my head,” he told the writer. “Later I’ll get in the Jacuzzi. That way I can get my brain together. I have to decide if I want to hang out with Michael. I just don’t know, I…” He stomped on the gas, tires squealed, and he left the writer behind at around noon.
He saw the writer again at the press conference at all-rap radio station KDAY later that same afternoon, but turned away from Kiersh while shaking his hand. “What type of article is this gonna be anyway?” he asked.
After the conference, Run said he didn’t want the writer to join them at McDonald’s, where he, D, Jay, and their entourage would eat lunch, and perhaps discuss their true feelings and worries about the media and articles about Long Beach, or enjoy a respite from the controversy. They met again in his penthouse suite, but Run fixed him with a “long, hard stare,” sat in a chair by a window, rolled his hat around in his hands, and stared at the city outside. Asked about Kurtis Blow’s recent comments to Newsday, Run said, “Kurt tried to ruin us. He’s so jealous. He never had a Gold album in his life. He’s disgusting.”
Kiersh continued to question Run exclusively while D and Jay watched the interview from the sidelines. Within minutes, Kiersh then asked Run about “Walk This Way.” Run voiced his frustration with people “nagging” him about the song. “Everyone’s talking about crossovers. ‘Hey, son, didn’t you do this to get more radio play?’ I hope nobody wants to talk to me next year. I’m ready for a flop.”
Jay and D watched him talk. “You know why?” Run added. “If everybody is nagging me about ‘Walk This Way,’ they can get my dick head.” He banged his fist on a table. “You know why? I made that record because I used to rap over it when I was twelve.” He warned black rappers not to record rock-rap. “You have to do what’s real,” he said.
That night, Russell joined Run and D at the studio where they’d meet Michael Jackson. Jay and Hurricane arrived late. Everyone was excited. “We were like, oh shit, Michael Jackson coming, that’s dope!” said Hurricane. Mike entered the room wearing a surgeon’s mask. “I don’t know why he came like that,” said Ray. “Like we got germs.” He also had a pet chimpanzee named Bubbles with him. He shook everyone’s hand. “How y’all doing?” Then he made Russell shake Bubbles’s hand.
Run got along with Michael Jackson better than D.M.C. did. Jackson stared at Run’s chest and said, “Oh those gold chains are so beautiful. Right, Mary?” (“Or whoever,” D quipped: Mary was a cook preparing plates of fried chicken and rice in the background.) “Can I try it on?” Jackson added.
Run removed the chain and handed it over.
“Wow,” Michael said while slipping it on.
“He was amazed,” D remembered. “Like a little kid.”
While Mary prepared their meals, Michael told them he loved “King of Rock,” “Peter Piper,” and “Sucker MCs.” They discussed collaborating on a project but had different ideas about what to do: Run wanted him to record the song they’d submitted; Jackson preferred that they costar in a Martin Scorsese–directed video for “I’m Bad.”
While they talked, Ray said, “the monkey was jumping around the table, grabbing things. It was crazy.” And Run began to look a little annoyed, said Runny Ray. “At first it looked like he liked [Michael] but after a while, he didn’t want to hear what he was saying anymore.”
Mary served plates of chicken and rice. They were eating, said Hurricane, when “the monkey kind of, like jumped on Jay, caught Jay off guard. So Jay damn near threw the monkey to the ground, like, Yo!”
Michael cried, “Bubbles!” Then, according to Ray, Michael added, “Money, you can’t do that here.”
Jay answered, “Well, your monkey tried to bite the shit out of me. What you want me to do?”
Michael cooed, “Come on, Bubbles, come on, baby.” He still wanted to work with them.
When Run saw the Rolling Stone writer again, he couldn’t stop praising Michael. “He’s the best man in the world,” Run said. He described the meeting and said Run-D.M.C. would appear on Michael Jackson’s new anticrack song, and in his video. “The whole thing was just great. Michael kept asking me about rap. I asked him about record sales. And when the fried chicken came, I knew he was cool.”
Back in New York, Rolling Stone called them in for a photo shoot. “And everybody was making a big deal of it,” D.M.C. remembered. They posed for the photo. “And we were like ‘Could you hurry up, man? We want to go.’ We didn’t know when we came in how big it was.” But once they saw a few framed covers on each wall—including some with the Beatles—D thought, “Whoa, this is large.”
Chapter 19
It’s the New Style
The Long Beach controversy subsided, and Run-D.M.C. was able to breathe a little easier. Promoters kept booking them for concerts. Their Adidas line was about to arrive in stores. Raising Hell continued to sell. Other rappers were releasing records, but Run-D.M.C. was still the genre’s most successful and best-loved group. On a personal level, they had money to spend on new cars, fur coats, and jewelry, and—for Jay and Run—to support their families. (Jay and his live-in girlfriend, Lee, were expecting their first child.)
While touring in 1986 Run agreed to write a song for the Beastie Boys album. “It was a family thing,” Run explained. He asked D to help: “D, I need you there to help me write this record for the Beasties. I’m producing it.” Since D had forgotten about Run’s claim that the Beasties had insulted D’s lyrics, and since D liked seeing the Beasties perform intricate routines, he said no problem.
For a year now, Rick Rubin (with longer hair and a thicker beard) had spent many of his nights in Chung King Studios in downtown Manhattan, creating the Beasties’ debut. “We just tried to make music that we loved, for ourselves,” said Rick. They were ta
king their time, to ensure the album had diversity. They’d write and record a song, then return six weeks later to create another. “By taking so long, it really gave it a breadth and depth that’s different from a typical album, where an artist has six weeks to write their songs for a record.”
The Beasties’ influences included rappers like Run-D.M.C., the Furious Five, and the Funky Four; punk rock groups like the Ramones and the Sex Pistols; and reggae artists Bob Marley and the group Big Youth. Another influence was rapper Schooly D, and he and the Beasties would popularize a new style called gangsta rap. A former shoe salesman from Philadelphia, Schooly D (J. B. Weaver) filled his self-released singles “Gucci Time” and “P.S.K.” with violent and preposterous descriptions of gunplay and lyrics about Philadelphia’s infamous Park Side Killers gang. After hearing Schooly’s music, the Beasties decided to rap like Schooly on a few songs. The Beasties described how one person shot another in the face on “Scenario,” threatened to smash someone’s glasses on “It’s the New Style,” and promised to kill MCs with a “big shotgun” on “Rhyming and Stealing.” “We were definitely trying to get that sound on a couple of songs,” Ad Rock recalled, so when rapper Chuck D of WBAU offered a lyric called “Too Much Posse,” about a Schooly-like gang, Ad remembered, “We recorded it. But our version was terrible.”
Sessions usually started with Rick and engineer Steve Ett setting up the beats. While the Beasties wrote rhymes, Rick would program the drum tracks before trying different guitar sounds and samples. “It was a lot of trial and error,” said Rubin’s friend Adam Dubin. After the Beasties recorded vocals, Rick then suggested changes. “You know how on the Beastie Boys records, each guy has his part?” Dubin asked. “How they trade off vocals and each guy does his part? Rick would actually instruct them. Not all the time. They also knew what to do. But Rick would tell Ad Rock for instance, ‘Okay, now do the higher, more Jerry Lewis–sounding voice on this word.’ He’d tell rapper MCA, ‘Okay, you do this part.’” Said Ad Rock: “We all just did it together. He was like the fourth member of the group.” And where Run and D had producers sometimes micromanaging their sessions, “Not that much thought went into like what songs meant,” said Ad Rock.
The Beasties’ song “Time to Get Ill” presented a sample-heavy wall of sound that included the guitar chord from “Rock the Bells,” Schooly D’s voice (“Looking at my Gucci it’s about that time”), TV talking horse Mr. Ed singing his name, and someone scratching the theme from Green Acres. “That was just like a routine record,” Ad explained. “Posse in Effect” used slow drums, the horn from “Catch a Groove,” and the beat from rapper Joe Ski Luv’s popular “Pee-Wee Herman” single. And for its finale, Rick threw in an entirely different track and a crowd chanting, as crowds in rap clubs did, “Brooklyn, ho!” For this one, they wanted to “make some real b-boy records with some 808.” Their song “Brass Monkey” used horns from an obscure break beat and discussed “getting fucked up. That’s a summertime jam,” Ad continued. “Girls” was a sprightly ditty about women who would cook and clean for them, set to marimba vibes. Def Jam wanted “Slow Ride,” and its samples from War’s bongo-heavy “Low Rider,” to be the single. Then Run and D heard “It’s the New Style,” a disjointed beat, a guitar chord, a swelling synthesizer flourish (almost like a siren), then Run and D’s chant “There it is” (from “Peter Piper”), the Beasties yelling “Kick it,” and a funky beat from the B-Boys’ lesser-known rap single “2, 3, Break.” “We wanted to do a rap song that had two different tempos,” said Ad. “Nobody had done that before.”
Then they had rock-rap that made “Walk This Way” sound tame. “We had definitely been inspired by Run-D.M.C.,” Ad recalled. “A lot of the idea of doing rock and rap came from ‘Rock Box’ and ‘King of Rock.’”
“Rhyming and Stealing” found them rapping about being the most illin’est b-boys over a thunderous AC/DC guitar and slowed-down Led Zeppelin beat. “She’s Crafty” was about a larcenous one-night stand and included a Zeppelin guitar. “No Sleep Till Brooklyn” was their “road song,” a rap equivalent of Motorhead’s No Sleep Till Hammersmith that had them yell over the drum solo from Queen’s classic “We Will Rock You,” and roaring guitar by Rick’s new Def Jam signing, Slayer.
But “Fight for Your Right” was their strongest, most commercial rock number. They wrote the song on a napkin, in five minutes, while drinking vodka and grapefruit juice in the Mike Todd Room at the Palladium nightclub. A spoof of metal hits like “Smoking in the Boys Room” and “I Want to Rock,” “Fight for Your Right” featured Rick’s droning metal riff over crashing rock drums.
“I was amazed,” D.M.C. said of hearing the Beasties’ then-unreleased album. “It was so much fun. I was like ‘Oh wow’ at everything they were doing. I liked a lot of the beats, too. I was kind of jealous. I’m a real rock fan, and wanted some of that rock shit they did, like ‘No Sleep Till Brooklyn’ and the shit where they sampled ‘Back in Black.’ I was jealous. I ain’t gonna lie.”
Run had mixed emotions about the Beastie Boys’ album in progress. During the Raising Hell tour, he had handed them a few lyrics, like “From an apple to a peach to a cherry to a plum.” Now, many of the Beasties’ songs seemed to evoke their record-breaking Raising Hell: sharing sentences, b-boy themes, certain drum sounds, the Cerrone “Rock it” chant, even their voices from “Peter Piper.” “A lot of stuff was inspired by us, period,” said Run.
There were similarities between the two Rubin-produced works, but, D.M.C. noted, “The Beasties also knew about old school. The Beasties knew about Treacherous Three and Bambaataa and what they did on the tapes. They knew about break beats. It wasn’t anything new to them. We just showed them how to utilize it.”
In late October 1986, Run and D arranged to meet the Beasties at what Beastie member Ad Rock called “this weird studio on Twenty-something Street.” The Beasties were on time, waiting out front on a stoop and excited about actually writing a song with Run-D.M.C. But three hours later, they were still on the stoop “waiting for these fucking guys to show up,” said Ad. “We’re just talking and sitting there drinking beers. Then we hear somebody screaming. We turn the corner and it’s Run at like midnight running down the street toward us, screaming, ‘Here’s a little story I got to tell, about three bad brothers you know so well; started way back in history: Ad Rock, MCA, and me, Mike D.’”
Run and D shook the Beasties’ hands (Jay wasn’t with them), and then they all entered the building that housed the recording studio they’d work in this night. Run claimed to have handed the Beasties a new idea. “They don’t claim this but I for a fact turned the beat backward on ‘Paul Revere,’” he said. He did it, he continued, because he used to turn Kurtis Blow’s old record “Do the Do” backward on his turntable and enjoy the unearthly sound reversing the record produced. “So I used to turn that around backward and it sounded so fly and I did that for Rick and the Beasties.”
Ad Rock, however, disputed this. “It was definitely not Run’s idea,” he said. “It was MCA’s idea.” And when MCA did it, “Run and everybody in the room” looked at MCA “like he had just invented the wheel,” Ad Rock added.
Once the beat was ready, they added scratches that evoked the hectic sound Jam Master Jay had produced for Run-D.M.C.’s 1983 single “Jam Master Jay.” But in this case, they added a horn blast with the “Yeah” scratched on T La Rock’s “It’s Yours.” Said Run, “I scratched it with my hand.” He probably did, said Ad Rock, but then Rick Rubin replaced it with other scratches. “Me and Rick did all the scratching on Licensed to Ill,” he added. Whether these later scratches included ideas created by Run is not clear.
The song was finished, and Ad Rock decided to call it “Paul Revere.” The title, he said, came “from that Guys and Dolls movie. Like ‘I got a horse right here, his name is Paul Revere.’”
Run didn’t mind helping the Beasties with their album. For Run-D.M.C., helping the Beasties was akin to helping Def Jam, which they had d
one during the two years that Russell and Rick Rubin’s label had been in existence. They had let L.L. tour with them and write a song; let Rick Rubin produce their albums; let Russell try to get them off Profile and onto his label; written two songs for the Beasties; recorded another Def Jam act’s pro-black song; brought the label the Hollis Crew and “It’s the Beat”; steered Rick Rubin to Chuck D’s demo tape “Public Enemy No. 1”; and even worn Def Jam jackets to public appearances. Now Rick and Russell wanted Run-D.M.C. to help get another new company off the ground.
Chapter 20
Def Pictures
It started in the fall of 1986 with Rick and Russell telling Run-D.M.C. they’d be making another movie. “I was probably so drunk I didn’t know what was going on,” D.M.C. admitted. “I just remember all of a sudden ‘we’re making a movie.’”
Though the all-star movie Krush Groove was based on their lives and included many of their artists and songs, Rick and Russell had received a small percentage of profits from the 1985 box-office hit ($15,000 each for acting in the film). They felt that producer George Jackson, who died in 2001, had made minimal contributions to the film but had received the lion’s share of the profits. “So Rick and Russell said, ‘Well, this is bullshit! Somebody else is making all the money from rap. We should make a movie, put our artists and music in it, make the money, and control everything,’” said Rick’s friend Adam Dubin, who worked with Rick during this period. Rick and Russell had also been unhappy with Jackson so expanding the Fat Boys’ subplot that the obese trio’s comic antics threatened to dominate Krush Groove, something Jackson did after negotiating a deal with Warner Brothers, midway through filming of Run-D.M.C.’s first movie, for a Fat Boys vehicle called Disorderlies. Rubin convinced Russell they should start their own film studio, Def Pictures, then told an old pal, NYU film student Ric Menello, “You should write this script.”