Raising Hell

by Ronin Ro

  “Jay put his foot down with D more than with Run because D was out in the street driving around drunk with a case of forties in his trunk,” said Jay’s cousin Doc. “The normal person goes to the store to buy one beer. D would wake up and get a case of forties. And that whole day was definitely for forties in the back of the trunk.”

  Jay told D.M.C., “D, you got to stop this drinking, man, going to the store early in the morning, drinking all day.” But D ignored him. He’d have friends load cases of frozen beer into the trunk of his black Chevy Blazer. “And then when that ran out he’d go back and get another case of frozen forty ounces,” said Ray. “D was crazy, man.”

  In the studio, D.M.C. soon rapped about his drinking on the reggae song “P upon a Tree.” “I got to take a piss, man,” he said; then, over reggae music, “I got to pee I got to pee upon a tree, right?”

  One night in the studio, after smoking marijuana together, Run and Jam Master Jay decided to include Chuck D of Public Enemy and popular gangsta rapper Ice Cube (formerly of NWA) on a remix of “Back from Hell” that would appear on the flip side of their single “Faces.” They told D.M.C. that including them as guests would guarantee its success on rap radio, but D objected to the very idea of a remix. It was another step down for the group, he felt; their singles and album were supposed to be hot, not new versions of old songs. Chuck D should join them on a real song, not a remix. But Jay said, “Come on, D, this is how things are now. This is how they do it today.”

  Jay told D.M.C. to be at the studio at a certain time. D left his home in Long Island (where he’d moved in 1987) but instead of going to the studio, he went and got drunk. He finally arrived at midnight, hours late, and reluctantly recorded his verse. Whether D saw Chuck D or Ice Cube at this session is not known.

  Run’s new lyrics offered more descriptions of life in jail: Ice Cube rapped that he was “raising hell with Run.” Chuck D offered a rare profanity. D quoted a recent NWA lyric: “Word to the ’90s, rebels still rebelling. Cube, Run, and Chuck! Yo, what the fuck are they yelling?”

  During the playback, however, Jay shook his head. “Yo, D, you could have did it better!” he yelled. “You sound pissy drunk on it. Yo, you’re trying to fuck shit up!”

  D yelled back, “I didn’t want to do it! You made me come out here and do this remix!”

  “Yo, I’m’a punch you in your face, man.”

  Run shouted, “No you ain’t! You ain’t doing nothing!”

  With Back from Hell completed, Profile and Rush discussed releasing “Don’t Stop,” with Aaron Hall, as the first single. “And here’s Run talking about, ‘Oh, I ain’t trying to revive nobody’s career,’” Doc recalled.

  Profile instead released “What’s It All About,” and shipped Back from Hell to stores, but knew something was wrong. “It didn’t have the same kind of excitement as the previous albums,” said Cory Robbins. When Profile employees called record stores and distributors to see what reorders were like, they learned that “they weren’t good.”

  Rolling Stone’s review panned the album. In November 1990, sales stalled below the 500,000 mark. “I was like, ‘Cool, can we make another record?’” D.M.C. said. Profile said no. “We had to wait.”

  Cory Robbins felt these sales figures were horrendous. “Back from Hell, that album really didn’t even go Gold.” Then the star-studded remix flopped, and in fury Jay told Run, “You made me waste my money on that fake-ass remix!”

  “You were with the idea too!” Run answered.

  Chapter 25

  Ohio

  In late 1990, with hip-hop records streaming forth from so many companies, including Russell’s grandiose but low-selling RAL imprints, Run also decided to start a label. He had discovered a rapper named Smooth Ice, who was as melodious as Rakim, wore an Applejack Kangol hat, hailed from Queens, and inspired MCA Records to back Run’s new label.

  Run was working with Jam Master Jay on music for Smooth Ice, D.M.C. recalled, when he said, “D, you ain’t doing nothing now. You want to get down?”

  D agreed, paid $10,000 for a share in the new label, JDK Records, then created a track for Smooth’s lyric, “Smooth but Def.”

  D also worked with Jam Master Jay on Smooth’s song “Do It Again.”

  Smooth’s music, however, imitated the Bomb Squad sound on Public Enemy albums. And with so many other rappers already using “Funky Drummer” and “The Grunt,” the samples didn’t sound as fresh on Smooth’s “I’m Coming” or “Without a Pause.”

  Yet JDK’s distributor, MCA, saw the value of having Run-D.M.C.’s brand name in production credits, and felt “Smooth but Def,” was commercial enough to appear on Smooth Ice’s first single, so Run-D.M.C. optimistically chatted about the label in Billboard magazine. “Run and I had been thinking about this for some time,” D, then twenty-seven years old, told Billboard in January 1991. “People kept asking us to produce them, and we saw the success of companies like Profile. We decided to do it now while we’re young.”

  But Smooth Ice’s two singles flopped, and MCA dropped the JDK label deal. Even worse, according to D.M.C., Rush Management was leading Run-D.M.C. into another round of disputes with Profile Records.

  Run-D.M.C. had wanted to follow Back from Hell with another, hopefully better, album, and could desperately use the cash advance another album would bring. But when Russell asked Profile to revise a few undisclosed terms in their contract, Profile refused to renegotiate the contract, and Russell advised Run-D.M.C. to withhold their services until he worked this out. “In all honesty there were always these maneuvers going on to try to get them onto Russell’s label,” Tracy Miller said with a laugh. But these episodes affected their career. “I always thought, ‘This is stupid. If management would stop playing games, if everybody would just knock it off and let these guys knock out their albums, they could have been off the damn label by now.’”

  Their original commitment had been for seven albums. “So you could have knocked one out every year and been off by 1990,” Miller continued. “But they were always dragging it out, lawsuits that cost the group money. Management would file a lawsuit, and D.M.C. says the group would have to pay those fees. It wasn’t like management was paying out of their pocket; it came out of the guys’ money. So at the end of the day the band got screwed.”

  D wanted to record again. “I basically had a good relationship with them cats,” D said of Profile. “It wasn’t me: the relationship between Russell and Profile was volatile. It wasn’t necessarily us.”

  Run was at the end of his rope. He told the others, “We don’t need Russell for our management. We can find somebody else.” People thought he was venting, but he was serious. “He got vexed at his own brother and said, ‘I don’t want Russell to manage me no more,’” said Doc. “I heard him say that personally. He was fed up with Russell.” Jay paid little heed to this latest contract dispute and focused on working with groups at JMJ Records. Then Profile planned to release a greatest hits collection instead of a sixth original Run-D.M.C. album. Since a greatest hits album would bring no advance, Run-D.M.C. booked a few concerts to earn much-needed cash. “There was no Back from Hell tour,” Run explained. “We were in a van. We did shows for five, six, seven grand, ten grand here, five grand there, ten grand, oh, snap a twelve-grand gig; just doing it. A little van…It didn’t matter. I would drive anywhere, do anything. I’d play for free. I loved winning. Even if I didn’t have a big album when I got onstage, if I was overweight, anything: ‘I’m gonna win tonight.’”

  D wasn’t as content. Though Back from Hell had been in stores for about eight months, he said, “The biggest crowd we had might be five hundred people.” More R & B on the album translated into fewer white audiences and much smaller venues. Now D—like Run during the Run’s House tour for Tougher Than Leather—was halfhearted about performing with the group in concert. Run meanwhile was still a little depressed but determined to earn money to support his family. “I wanted to do a solo record but out of
loyalty I didn’t,” D added. “There was so much other shit out there I liked and we weren’t doing it. We were bugging out.”

  Russell suggested they record solo albums. By doing so, they could possibly sign to labels other than Profile—since they would officially be soloists and not Run-D.M.C., and since a new deal would bring them money. Run was open to calling himself “Fat Joe.” D was reluctant until he learned Jay would produce. But nothing came of this idea, either, so D started living on his savings and what little he earned from shows that paid the group less and less. “And because Russell had to protect his brother, I was just in the middle of the bullshit.”

  Run’s eighteen-month depression was lightening, Ray said, but Run kept “smoking his weed, blazing as usual.” After a show one night in Amsterdam, Run barged onstage during a concert by C + C Music Factory, a chart-topping dance rap group with a ponytailed shirtless rapper, house music beats (“house” being a faster, stripped-down form of disco), and fat ladies singing “Come on, let’s work.” Inebriated, Run kept running onstage to dance with them. “And everyone was looking at him,” D remarked. “But he was having a good time. Didn’t think about whether it went over well or not.” Though the plan for solo albums was shelved, for reasons unknown, D kept wondering if he shouldn’t strike out on his own. Run-D.M.C. was going downhill. He realized his situation. Run would continue to act like he was “leader of the group.” Jay would blindly do his bidding. Their manager, Russell, was Run’s brother. D had no say in any decisions. But then he remembered how tight he and Run had been before their first record, and decided to stay. “Okay, you can’t beat them, join them,” he explained. “That’s what happened when I stayed with Run.”

  Their friends were sad to see once-mighty Run-D.M.C. reduced to playing small venues. One of Jay’s friends in the Hollis Crew, Big D Jordan, was acting as their road manager, and they couldn’t get anything better. “Nigga, we doing a damn club that only hold about fifty people!” Ray remembered one group member saying (Ray didn’t specify who). Some observers began to agree with Run, and felt Run-D.M.C. needed new management. “At that point of their career, they should have gotten away from Russell, and hooked up with a better, bigger, more established manager that does rock venues,” said producer Hank Shocklee. But they never did change management.

  In early August 1991, Run-D.M.C. and Jam Master Jay traveled to Ohio to perform another small show. Loyal fans were still nostalgic enough, and willing to pay to see them perform “Peter Piper,” “Walk This Way,” and other old hits.

  After the show they returned to their hotel. In the hallways, groupies waited, hoping the group would pick them from the crowd. “Run met the girl the usual way,” D later wrote in his autobiography, King of Rock. She was a woman who had attended their show, stood in the front row, learned where they were staying, then arrived at the hotel with friends. By this point, a member of L.L. Cool J’s entourage was already serving a ten-year prison sentence after partying with a supposedly willing groupie following a concert. D went straight to his hotel room, thinking he’d see Run back home, since “Run was flying home the next day.” D did not see Run for the rest of the evening.

  That night at 2:00 a.m., someone—possibly road manager Big D Jordan—barged into Runny Ray’s room and woke Ray up. “Yo, we going!”

  Ray suspected something had gone wrong, but didn’t want to know anything about whatever it was. Instead of “Why?” or “What’s going on?” he said he asked, “When are we leaving?”

  This person, Ray recalled, blurted out, “Some girl just came out the room and said Run raped her!”

  They told D.M.C. they were leaving. Bewildered, D went downstairs, got in the van alongside Jam Master Jay, and settled in for the ride back to New York. While describing this evening in King of Rock, D’s official position was that he did not know about the unidentified woman’s accusation about being raped. D also did not detail whether he asked anyone in the van why they had to leave town that night. Runny Ray meanwhile stayed behind in the hotel. “I didn’t do a damn thing,” he said.

  The next day, D.M.C. wrote in his book, he was driving in Hollis when his car phone rang. It was Big D Jordan: “Yo, D. What’s up with this girl in Cleveland that said Run raped her?”

  D’s hands jerked on the wheel and he nearly drove off the road. “What?” A woman said Run had taken her to his room and forced her to perform oral sex. D was stunned. He had known Run since kindergarten, and Run was no rapist. Still, would a jury in Cleveland believe this? Suddenly he felt very afraid for Run. “What if he’s got to do years?” he thought.

  When D.M.C. reached Run by telephone a day later, his bandmate was at Taco Bell with his children. This was so crazy, Run told him: unbelievable. He complained about having to find a lawyer, having to fly back to Cleveland and surrender to the police. And Run told Runny Ray, in a weepy tone, “Yo, man, I’m telling you, man. I didn’t rape this girl.”

  Tracy Miller “thought it was insane, that it was crazy, there’s no way that it’s true.” Still, reporters wanted to speak with Run.

  As Run’s book, It’s Like That: A Spiritual Memoir, told it, after the show he returned to the hotel, and saw groupies crowding the hallway. “Like we did after every show if we didn’t have to perform the next day, we went home,” he claimed. So he went home that very night, he wrote. Then while he was sitting down to dinner in his home in Queens, Big D called his cell phone: “Yo, some girl in Cleveland said you raped her.” His appetite was ruined. Next, he learned cops in Ohio had found condoms, weed, and rolling papers in the hotel room. “It just didn’t look good,” Run wrote.

  Russell helped Run find a good lawyer. Run’s wife, Valerie, was upset. She believed he had slept with groupies and cheated on her. He said he didn’t know his accuser; he’d never seen her before. “She wasn’t in my room.” Ebony and Jet wrote about it, and Tracy Miller told Russell: “We’ve got to get a statement out there because it needs to be met head-on.”

  People in the entourage gossiped. Run asked Runny Ray to accompany him to Ohio for moral support. They arrived and met with Run’s lawyer before going to the courthouse. The lawyer, Ray recalled, assured Run he’d be fine. “We got there, he got locked up,” Ray continued. “They locked him up when he went in front of the judge.” Police handcuffed Run and led him out of the room. His lawyer got him released on $10,000 bond that very day, but in the first-class section of the flight back home, Run saw his face on a huge television screen: part of a news report telling fellow passengers he’d been arrested and charged with rape.

  While Run awaited his court date, Run-D.M.C. returned to performing small shows here and there, for money. The group was still withholding services from Profile Records, as Russell had suggested, so Run’s mood darkened, D drank more, and Jay watched Russell beef with Sony over the RAL deal; Russell was having trouble getting RAL albums out on time.

  For these small shows, instead of Big D Jordan, D.M.C.’s friend Erik Blamoville served as road manager. In previous years, Erik had accompanied D.M.C. on tour and to other shows, just as a friend. He always made sure D showed up on time and “had everything I’d need waiting in the dressing room,” D explained. He was reliable, so Run and Jay sat Erik down and told him, “Erik, we want you to be the group’s manager.” Erik agreed and became responsible for setting up shows.

  Instead of huge arenas and large fees, they played oldies like “Rock Box” and “King of Rock” in tiny clubs for $2,500 to $3,000, and backstage, Run told entourage and road-crew members, “No girls in the dressing room or near it.” Said D.M.C.: “He said he ain’t fucking nothing ’cause he don’t want to get in trouble,” and that the accusation “scared the shit out of him.” But the crew ignored him.

  When home, Run could see that Valerie continued to believe he’d slept with other women, so a marriage already made rocky by an eighteen-month depression deteriorated even more. “He came home off the road one day,” said Ray. “She was gone. The kids were gone. All the
ir clothes were gone.” When she left, Ray added, “It seemed like he just gave everything up. He wasn’t doing shit.” His life seemed to stop.

  “I don’t want to get into all that,” Run said coldly.

  Valerie would bring the kids over every so often, Ray said. “And I used to watch them. ’Cause he used to go out and see if he could get her back, but it wasn’t happening.”

  Friends sympathized with Run’s plight. “She was his high school sweetheart,” Larry Smith said of Valerie, and “out of all of them, Joe was the best father. Joe was one of the best fathers a child could ever have. Joe was home for that dinner. If he felt he’d be gone too long, he’d pack the family up and ‘here they go around Europe!’”

  Run himself had loved being a family man. He never hung out with the others. He’d go home. He liked to watch his kids sleep, to wake up early and help Val with the chores, to take out the trash and wash the car. “It’s a real organized life,” he once told biographer Bill Adler.

  But Valerie’s friends encouraged her belief that he had been with another woman. She kept asking whether he had cheated on her, and according to Ray, Run said he “didn’t do anything,” even though “there were condoms on the floor and shit like that.”

  They had been so happy. “I was at his first wedding,” Glen Friedman said wistfully. “I remember Val, and the two girls when they were little, the old house in Queens.”

  While Run’s life was falling apart, D.M.C. was facing his own personal problems. One day in summer 1991 he woke up with an acute pain in his side. He’d dealt with this intermittently for six months, and decided it was caused by jumping around onstage. But on this particular morning, it really hurt. He tried to ignore the pain, as usual, thinking it would subside. He showered, dressed, and went out to get his morning beer. He hung with a road-crew employee, known as “Garfield,” then early in the afternoon went home to put some food in his stomach. He ate rice, steak, and vegetables, but felt the pain return, worse than ever. He was staying with his parents— whether he lived with them is unclear (he’s never mentioned it)— and when his mother, Bannah, arrived from her nursing job at 4:00 D.M.C. met her at the door, doubled over in pain. “Mom, don’t come in,” he said. “Turn around. I got to go to the hospital.”