Raising Hell

by Ronin Ro

  Chapter 21

  Rhyming and Stealing

  Filming began on Thursday, November 13, 1986, in front of the aircraft carrier Intrepid in Manhattan. But when Run-D.M.C. arrived on the set they saw that the $200,000 they had put up wouldn’t get them much. Even Krush Groove, which cost $3 million, was considered low budget. But at least with that film they’d been the stars. They had real sets. There were trailers, wardrobe people handing them gear, food lying out. “In comparison to this it was plush,” said Dubin. “There were literally no trailers on Tougher Than Leather. There was no money for that stuff. The holding area was wherever they could keep them, in their cars.”

  Still, Run-D.M.C. was delighted to be filming another movie, and even more excited when they heard people talk of a sequel called The Posse, which “would’ve been even more of a spaghetti or B western,” said Menello.

  But the first day was a complete disaster. The scene called for Rick’s character and his father to meet outdoors, since the father’s phones were tapped. It rained like crazy. There wasn’t enough light. The crew moved impossibly slowly. The director of photography wanted arty shots when they could afford only quick setups and getting it done. Rick casting himself as an actor in the movie turned out to be another disaster. “Either you’re the director or the actor,” said Dubin, “but to do both on a low-budget film is nearly impossible.”

  They didn’t get the day’s work done, and what they shot looked terrible. “Day two wasn’t a whole lot better,” Dubin said. On Austin Street in Forest Hills, Rick wanted to shoot Runny Ray meeting a chauffeur whose limo isn’t working. The driver’s moneyed employer is threatening to fire him until Ray fixes the car. They hoped to finish by midday, but Rick wasted time trying to get an elaborate tracking shot past the front of the car. They were still out there when schools let out at three o’clock and young fans bombarded the set. Rick got his shot, but spent all day on something he should have finished by noon.

  “I just thought the whole thing looked rinky-dink from day one, just the way it was being shot and the way things were going,” said photographer Glen Friedman. “But Joey [Run] seemed really impressed with his acting skills at the time. Really, everyone [at Def Jam and Rush Management] thought he was a fucking actor after Krush Groove.”

  They filmed a homecoming party in D.M.C.’s house in Hollis. The entire neighborhood came out to watch, and D spent more time partying than shooting his scenes. Neighborhood pals wanting to be in the movie kept coming by the set, distracting Run, D, and Jay. Then Run-D.M.C. became impatient with filming and started asking Rick, “How long until you need us?”

  Rick would say, “I don’t know. We’re setting up the shot. It’ll be like an hour.”

  Since they had completed their new album, Run-D.M.C. would pile into their cars with friends and disappear to McDonald’s and other hangouts. They’d never return on time. Everyone had to wait and money was wasted. “They were all just partying,” said Adam Dubin, who worked on the set. “I just remember forties of Olde E all the time all over the place.”

  To keep Run-D.M.C. in line, Rick had young production assistants accompany them, but to no avail. “Here’s a kid with a walkie-talkie and a bunch of their friends and everybody’s smoking pot and drinking in these cars and we’re radioing to them: ‘Okay, we need Run-D.M.C. back on the set,’” Adam Dubin recalled. “And they’re like, ‘We’re five miles away and hanging out at so-and-so’s house.’” It happened all the time. The young assistants couldn’t control all three members of Run-D.M.C. More time was wasted.

  D would also often show up on the set already drunk, and Run would show up high on weed. They wouldn’t remember their lines and would improvise, but deleted information crucial to the plot. “We were dazing a lot,” Run said flatly. And since the screenwriter wasn’t around—Menello was working at his day job at NYU or helping to film music videos for the Beastie Boys’ first single—no one said, “Well, if they say that, they got to make sure to say this, too.”

  They started filming in Def Jam’s offices at 298 Elizabeth Street, taking up most available space with cameras, wires, lights, and equipment. Employees were kicked out of their offices. “They had no money,” said Bill Stephney, then working for the label. “It disrupted absolutely everything and sort of took our eyes off the prize, as it were.”

  During a rare visit to the set, Ric Menello asked Rick, “What if this whole thing falls apart? What if Tougher Than Leather falls apart? What if the company falls apart?”

  “I’ll just do it again,” Rick answered. “I’ll just do it all over again.”

  By the third week of filming, the film was over budget and Run-D.M.C. had to pull more money from their pockets to fund production. Rick started filming things quickly. “No elaborate shots,” Dubin said. “No tracking shots; none of that stuff. Just shooting to get it done. And at that point, it started to wear on Rick. He was physically drained.”

  Suddenly, when call time arrived at 6:00 a.m., Rick was nowhere to be found on the set. The crew stood around waiting, since he, as director, was the only one who knew the next shot. They’d call the screenwriter, who’d suggest a shot, but when Rick arrived at 9:00 or 10:00, he wouldn’t like the screenwriter’s suggestion and had the crew waste more time setting up the shot he wanted.

  None of it mattered to D.M.C., who was having a great time— until Rick and Russell asked for a certain scene. Near the finale, D’s character enters a room with guns in both hands. Menello’s script said the character’s grandfather, who had served with the Red Ball Express, owned the guns. “The Red Ball Express was a black unit in World War II that had to prove themselves to white people,” Menello explained. “They were very heroic. They had to bring fuel through the battle lines to the soldiers.” Menello felt mentioning the unit would position Run-D.M.C. as carrying on its tradition of “courage under fire.”

  But D saw these fake guns, and was furious. He knew Russell wanted to protect their image but felt it was a sham. “We had bullshit Lugers,” he said. “We wanted nines and .45s.”

  He reluctantly agreed to carry the fake guns in and even use the guns during the climactic shoot-out but was still very dissatisfied. “Everybody else shooting the automatics, they’re shooting German Lugers,” Ray laughed.

  They finished shooting the ninety-five-minute movie on December 9, 1986, and all concerned were happy it was over. Run-D.M.C. was disappointed and felt that because of collusion on the set, their dream of a movie like Death Wish had become a nightmare. They feared audiences would think they were acting fake. Instead of creating something from the heart, Rick Rubin and Russell Simmons had them “going through the motions hoping for success,” D felt.

  After filming concluded, Run-D.M.C. needed a break. They spent December 18–22 in Japan. At the airport, hundreds of fans in Kangols, sheepskins, velour hats, Adidas, and jeans waited for them. It was the closest thing they’d experienced to Beatlemania. Everyone was polite to them, deferential. Considering the crowded but neat and well-policed streets, D thought, “Whoa! This is paradise.”

  At dates in small halls in Kobe, Tokyo, and Nagoya, they saw Japanese kids loved their music. Everywhere they went, huge crowds mobbed them, wanting autographs. After posing for pictures with a few Japanese b-boys, Run asked Ray, “Damn, we got these kids out here in the street doing our shit?”

  While Run-D.M.C. were overseas, the Beasties’ Licensed to Ill emerged as the biggest-selling debut in CBS Records history, and outdid Raising Hell by becoming the very first rap album to reach number one on the U.S. pop charts. “I watched it grow like Raising Hell,” said Run. Run felt partly responsible for its success. “‘Slow and Low,’ they took my vocals. ‘New Style’ I wrote some of the rhymes. ‘Paul Revere’ I wrote a lot of the rhymes and I produced ‘Paul Revere.’” But now, everyone seemed to want to talk only about the Beasties. “These niggas were like, ‘Huh?’” said Ray. “‘These motherfuckers selling more records than us? Get the fuck out of here.’”<
br />
  Licensed to Ill’s stay at the top of the pop chart started in November 1986 and stretched to fourteen weeks (March 1987), and many reporters who denounced Run-D.M.C. for Long Beach praised the Beastie Boys, who dressed, rapped, and acted like them. “If a fourteen-year-old white girl in, oh, Alabama had brought home a Run-D.M.C. album in those days, you know, looking at these black guys as rock ’n’ roll guys or sex symbols, it would not really have been okay,” said Rick Rubin. “Whereas, as stupid and disgusting as the Beastie Boys might have been, that was okay because they were white.”

  A few Def Jam artists felt overshadowed by the Beasties’ success, said photographer Glen Friedman. One day Friedman saw L.L. “practically depressed. These cranky white boys from down town were taking his spotlight.” L.L. was so dejected he neglected to wear his hat, “and in those days he was never seen without a hat,” Friedman said. L.L., walking aimlessly down Elizabeth Street, called out to Glen, who was heading to Def Jam’s offices. “Yo, Glen.” Glen, who didn’t recognize L.L. without the Kangol, thought, “Who’s that guy with the hamburger on his head?” He squinted and saw it was L.L. “Oh, hey, man,” he said. “How you doing?” L.L. sounded deflated. “Yeah, you know, just workin’ on the new album.”

  The Beasties meanwhile were themselves far from happy. In January 1987, with Licensed to Ill a chart-topping hit and Def Pictures offering MTV a sitcom starring the Beastie Boys, the Beasties enlisted a journalist to help write their own movie. Rick and Russell mentioned to the group that they would have the Beasties star in a film that they would release through Def Pictures. Once they had a screenplay finished that reflected their view of how they should be presented in a movie, the Beasties arrived at Electric Lady Studios in Manhattan, to tell Rick Rubin (producing a rock album for the Cult) their idea for Scared Stupid, which would feature them outrunning ghosts in a haunted house. Rick liked the idea of the Beasties battling ghosts and felt it could make for a great film. “But this is where they found out how bad it is to have your manager also be your record company,” said Rick’s friend Adam Dubin. “ ’Cause nobody’s advocating for or protecting you. They were managed by Rush Management, which is Russell,” Dubin explained, “and Rick and Russell would make their movie and that’s their record company.” If the Beasties had had a separate manager, this manager would have negotiated with Def Pictures—Rick and Russell—to get the Beastie Boys as much money as possible for acting in the movie. But since Rick and Russell were both manager and film studio (as well as the record label that would ostensibly release a Scared Stupid sound track), Rick and Russell would have felt they were free to determine how much the Beasties would receive. The Beasties tried to negotiate a better deal by offering to help pay production costs—as Run-D.M.C. had done with the recently filmed Tougher Than Leather—in exchange for a larger cut of profits, but, Ad Rock said, Rick Rubin told them, “Well, you guys will get a point each on the movie.”

  The group was incredulous. “A point each?” Ad asked Rick. “What are you talking about? We wrote it, we’re starring in it; we’re making it.”

  Rick Rubin reportedly ignored the Beasties’ requests for more money, and they began to resent that their manager—Russell Simmons—wasn’t stepping in to persuade his Def Jam and Def Pictures partner Rick Rubin to let the Beasties receive a higher percentage of profits in exchange for helping to fund production costs.

  The Beastie Boys butted heads with Rubin again while filming a video for their rock-rap hit “No Sleep Till Brooklyn.” The song featured a solo by Kerry King, a member of Def Jam’s new metal band Slayer, and for the video Rick wanted to use special effects to show the Beasties running around a sixty-foot-tall Kerry King. The Beasties hated the idea, said Ric Menello, who with Adam Dubin had directed the group’s first video, “Fight for Your Right.” Instead, the group wanted to start the video at the Central Park Zoo. Their idea was “you see a chimpanzee leave his cage, put on a hat, and hold a guitar case; hail a cab, get in, go to the theater, and when the solo came on, play the guitar,” Menello recalled. The Beasties and Rick Rubin compromised: instead of a trained chimp or a giant guitarist, they presented a man in a gorilla suit playing the solo until Kerry King shoved him aside and finished it.

  In the spring of 1987, the Beasties agreed to join Run-D.M.C. for the Together Forever tour to promote the Beasties’ Licensed to Ill and to keep Run-D.M.C. in the public eye while Profile and Def Jam battled over which label would release the new songs Run-D.M.C. hoped to include in their upcoming movie. A year had passed since Run-D.M.C. released Raising Hell, but fans continued to want to see Run-D.M.C. perform Raising Hell’s many hits, including “Walk This Way,” and the Together Forever tour brought rap music to huge amphitheaters and American suburbs for the first time. “It was probably Russell’s idea,” said Ad Rock. “Russell probably wanted to benefit because he would get paid twice.”

  At first, Run-D.M.C. thought black concertgoers would go buy hot dogs when the Beasties came onstage. “But they stayed,” D.M.C. later recalled, “and liked it, too.” More whites appeared in the audience. “Beastie Boys must have pulled, on average, a three-to-one ratio, white girls to white guys,” Public Enemy’s Hank Shocklee explained. “And at the same time they were pulling the hard-core ghetto!”

  White girls attended concerts in droves and leaped onstage to remove their clothing. Many of their boyfriends viewed rap as synonymous with disco or dance music, which they disliked (they preferred rock bands like Rush, Metallica, and Def Leppard), but agreed to accompany their girlfriends to Together Forever shows. They ended up liking what they saw and heard onstage. “So the female audience came out in droves and drew the guys that were with them into it, along with the hard-core rap fans, mainly black males,” Shocklee recalled. “It all mixed together: white and black kids all going crazy, and white girls losing their minds, and taking off their clothes.”

  Some nights, Run and D had the Beasties join them for an encore. Newspaper articles kept presenting both groups as symbols of racial unity and brotherhood, but backstage, Run was tired of the white trio’s practical jokes and food fights. Run was also coping with mild depression, worrying that their upcoming movie or delays in releasing their next album would cost them their audience. Nevertheless, Run made it onstage every night. D meanwhile continued to drink heavily and to join the Beastie Boys—during Run-D.M.C.’s encores—in spraying beer at the crowd, and dodging beer cans thrown by overzealous audience members. During one show, the Beasties had so much beer onstage that MCA slipped. “He came down hard, and it got real quiet,” said D. “We thought he was dead. Then he gets up with his head busted open, laughing.”

  On the surface, the Together Forever tour was like one long party, Beastie Boy member Ad Rock remembered. “We were just getting fucked up the whole time, and having fun,” he said. “We’d go do interviews with these radio stations and all pile into a van or limo. It’d be all of us hanging out. It was amazing. Like summer camp where you could smoke weed and drink beer.” But when Run-D.M.C. and the Beastie Boys were offstage both groups wondered whether Rush Management was handling their careers properly and whether they both shouldn’t leave their respective record labels.

  During the tour, D.M.C. kept playing Public Enemy’s debut album, Yo! Bum Rush the Show despite sales of 150,000 copies making it what Rick Rubin called “the least successful Def Jam record at the time.” Though rap radio DJs had been playing only instrumental versions of rapper Chuck D’s songs since the album’s release in March 1987—“They felt the beats were good, but he wasn’t,” Rubin said—D.M.C. saw Chuck as the future of rap.

  Public Enemy had decided to sign to Def Jam in June 1986. The deciding factor for Chuck D was hearing Run-D.M.C.’s Raising Hell album. “The Raising Hell record told me this rap thing is growing up,” Chuck explained. For Chuck and his producer, Hank Shocklee, Raising was the greatest hip-hop record ever recorded: the first concept album and, Hank quipped, “a greatest hits record.” Hearing the album and its
variety of styles and themes inspired Chuck to say that he and his group would accept Rick’s offer of a recording contract with Def Jam. “There wouldn’t be a P.E.,” Hank added, “if it weren’t for that album!”

  Photographer Glen Friedman, well versed in punk rock music, remembered telling Rick Rubin, “You know there is already a skinhead group in England called Public Enemy.” According to Friedman, someone answered, “Well, we never heard of them so it doesn’t matter.”

  Russell Simmons predicted that no one would like Public Enemy’s political lyrics, Hank Shocklee recalled. “Matter of fact, if it was left up to him P.E. would not have been signed. Because he ‘disapproved.’” Rick pushed for the group, but Chuck remembered Russell kept saying, “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know about that.” In recording rooms in the studios Chung King and INS, rapper Chuck D looked to Run-D.M.C. and L.L. for inspiration. If his girlfriend, an R & B fan, heard a song and said, “Turn if off,” Chuck felt he was on the right track. Then Chuck D told Def Jam employee (and executive producer) Bill Stephney that, for a song called “Sophisticated Bitch,” he wanted a rock version of a bass line on Heat Wave’s disco classic “Groove Line.” Stephney invited Vernon Reid of the metal band Living Color to play the riff over the beat first heard on Whodini’s hit “Friends.” After spending $17,000 on recording, Public Enemy submitted Yo! Bum Rush the Show to Def Jam, and Rick Rubin excitedly played the LP for Russell, but Russell said, “Rick, I don’t know why you’re wasting your time with this garbage. No one’s ever going to like this. This is like black punk rock.”