Raising Hell

by Ronin Ro

  JMJ Records meanwhile had done well with the Afros. “Then Onyx came, went platinum, and brought in some money for Def Jam,” said Jay’s cousin Doc. But Onyx’s second album in 1995 had sold poorly, and JMJ’s relationship with RAL (parent company Def Jam) deteriorated, Doc claimed, because of an unnamed employee. “He did some sheistiness that Def Jam didn’t approve of and they told him not to come back, and Jay caught feelings. Russell and Lyor felt, ‘Well if you’re rolling with that kind of guy, we don’t want it.’” Def Jam believed someone at JMJ had pocketed moneys earmarked for the promotion of Onyx. Onyx then left Def Jam Records. “It wasn’t so much about Jay,” said Doc.

  Jay worked to iron out the relationship with Def Jam, but the RAL labels were on hold, as Russell and Def Jam were on the outs with their parent company, Sony. Sony told Russell he owed them $17 million as compensation for the poor sales of products by RAL. While discussing this matter in his autobiography, Life and Def, Russell never explained why Def Jam would owe Sony money for a failed venture; Russell never explained if the $17 million was repayment of an advance, fees Sony charged Def Jam for manufacturing RAL albums, an amount Sony believed someone at Def Jam had embezzled, or something else. What is known is that Russell objected, telling Sony that if it didn’t charge Def Jam so many fees, it would see that Def Jam actually earned money. Russell also accused Sony of attempting to get L.L. Cool J and Public Enemy to leave Def Jam and sign directly to them. “Sony was preparing to rape me of my company, which is what happens to almost every independent record company,” Russell claimed in Life and Def. As the acrimony between Def Jam and Sony increased, no one knew whether “Def Jam would survive or fall,” said Doctor Dre of the years 1993 to 1995. “Def Jam couldn’t put out one album.”

  Jam Master Jay had discovered acts, sold millions of albums, and delivered projects on time. But JMJ Records was over. “He couldn’t do nothing about it,” said Doc. “It was a business decision.”

  In 1995, Sony wanted to buy Russell out or fire him. Russell convinced multinational Polygram to sign a $35 million joint venture deal with Def Jam. After signing the deal, Russell handed Sony $17 million, took various works in progress (albums by Warren G, L.L. Cool J, and P.E.) with him, and folded most of the RAL labels. “It was a good time to scrap some of their losses and come up with new ideas,” said rapper Chuck D of Public Enemy. But before he could leave, Russell had to battle for his catalog upon hearing one Sony executive say, “We aren’t giving you your catalog.”

  “If you’re selling me the company,” he replied, “you’re selling me the catalog.”

  Sony wanted the master rights to the Beastie Boys’ Licensed to Ill, but eventually let Russell have the album, and the right to continue to press up new copies. “Lucky for us,” Russell later wrote. “It is the most popular album in our catalogue, and one of the most important catalogue albums in the record business.” Until 1995, Licensed to Ill continued to sell 600,000 copies without promotion. And when the Beasties released new albums on Capitol Records, Licensed sold even more.

  While JMJ Records folded, Run started his second label (after the short-lived 1990 venture JDK), Rev Run Records. After noticing many performers in the audience at Zoë Ministries, Run told fellow parishioner Wes Farrell (CEO of a company called Music Entertainment Group) that these individual talents could be pooled to create a compilation album. Farrell, whose company distributed records by Nashville-based Christian label Benson Music Group, negotiated a deal with Run and looked forward to releasing a gospel album that included Run and other church talents.

  D wasn’t part of the deal. Originally, he had enjoyed services at Zoë Ministries, serving as a deacon and an usher, and worshipping alongside old friends like producer Larry Smith and Tony Rome, who wrote “You’re Blind” and was now a pastor at the church. But D.M.C. tired of their new ecclesiastic image once rap fans began asking, “So you’re doing gospel now?” Then after Bishop Jordan declared Run a reverend in 1994, Run started wearing a black suit and clerical collar, and preaching to reporters who really wanted to ask Run-D.M.C. about their rap music. And at Zoë, worshippers kept hinting that D.M.C. should become a minister as well. According to Runny Ray, Run also hinted that they should change their group name. “Run even tried to get D.M.C. down with that,” Ray added. “‘Reverend Run and Deacon D.M.C.’ D didn’t like that.” D.M.C. eventually stopped attending church. At home, he continued to read books about theology—really, other people’s opinions about how God wanted to be served—but people from Zoë kept calling to ask why he wasn’t coming: I am not coming because I am not coming! he thought.

  Said Run: “I looked up and he wasn’t there!” He didn’t know why D had stopped coming, and had no idea D’s religious convictions were changing. “Didn’t know or care. I was too focused on God.” Run was also busy working on the compilation album for his own new label, with Larry Smith coproducing songs for the Zoë Brothers, who sang like Def Jam’s soul singer D’Angelo; the Sin Assassins, a Bronx group that was “talking about how hard it is in their hood”; and Soul Tempo, who recorded Boyz II Men–style a cappella renditions of standards like “The Lord’s Prayer.” But Larry was not happy with Run’s delay—for reasons neither Run nor Larry described—in releasing the music. “If I’m doing music for the church, put the music out,” Larry said. “I walked away.”

  Run and his wife, Justine, kept working. She helped manage the Rev Run label and sang on the Sin Assassins’ song “Things Ain’t What They Used to Be.” The plan was for each group to have three songs on the first compilation, Rev Run Records Presents, for Russell to help with advice, and for Run and his wife to follow the compilation with individual debut albums by the Sin Assassins, the Zoë Brothers, and Soul Tempo.

  In early September 1995, Run told Billboard, “If you want to know what the album will sound like, think of ‘Down with the King.’ That was a gospel record,” he claimed. “With lyrics like ‘only G-O-D be a king to me and if the G-O-D be in me then the king I’ll be.’” Run also talked up the God-fearing compilation in a 1996 interview in People. But when Rev Run Records Presents was released on September 20, 1996, and sold only 330 copies, Run rushed back to Run-D.M.C.

  By summer 1996, three years after the release of Down with the King, Run-D.M.C. had adopted a new vision for their career: that they were like the Rolling Stones, and could tour without a new album.

  In all-black clothing and trademark hats, they played about twenty-five concerts a month. They hadn’t had a hit in three years, but Run kept talking as if they were the biggest things in rap. “The people in the rap community look at us, and they’re like, ‘Wow— Run-D.M.C.’, ” he told one reporter. But in reality, Run-D.M.C. had gone from playing for billions at Live Aid to being happy if eight hundred people bought tickets to a show.

  “It was good for Jay cause he would DJ at the after-parties,” said his cousin Doc, and these gigs brought in much-needed cash to support Terri and their three sons. “D.M.C. would do it because he needed the money. Run’s words were, ‘Oh, I’m doing it to help my boys out.’ He started to ego-trip. He’s ‘Russell Simmons’s brother.’ He ‘don’t really have to do shows.’”

  During these pickup gigs, Run still kept trying to speed-rap, a style from recent albums that fans rejected. He also wore his black suit and clerical collar in public and continued to talk about his religion though only 330 people had bought Rev Run Records Presents. He appeared with Bones-Thugs-n-Harmony in that group’s gangsta-rap-style “World So Cruel,” and tried to sell the Special Olympics on a project called Reverend Run’s Christmas All-Stars that would amass Yuletide greetings by more successful acts such as the Fugees, Foxy Brown, Redman, and Snoop Dogg, among others.

  D.M.C. meanwhile received a phone call from Bad Boy Entertainment. Their charismatic overweight star Biggie Smalls wanted to use an old D.M.C. lyric as the chorus for a new song. D was happy to oblige and reported to the recording studio. While he liked Biggie personally—Biggie had praised Run
-D.M.C. in The Show, and he and D.M.C. got along great in the studio—D also felt Biggie and his rival, the late Tupac Shakur, were somewhat overrated. Rap magazines like Vibe and The Source continued to claim Biggie was the “greatest of all time.” D thought he was talented, and enjoyed many of his raps, but felt neither Biggie nor “co-greatest” Tupac Shakur could really match Chuck D of Public Enemy for delivery, voice, and lyrics. “I felt Chuck was God on the mike and I still think that,” D said.

  But in the studio, tape rolled, and D.M.C. shouted his old lyric for Biggie’s new chorus: “But that’s not all, MCs have the gall. They pray and pray for my downfall.” Despite experiencing a few voice troubles at one or two shows, D.M.C. said, “I did that live. I was going through the thing with the voice, but there were things I could still do.”

  Run, D, and Jay then got back to waiting for the newest situation at Profile to settle. This time Run-D.M.C. had not instigated the situation. Cory Robbins, who had already sold his part of Profile to Profile cofounder Steve Plotnicki in 1994, also wasn’t involved. While Run-D.M.C. had hoped to have an album in stores by October 1996, Plotnicki was trying to sell Profile Records to a major label. “So I don’t know what’s happening there,” Run told a reporter at the time. “If it gets sold to another company and changes its name and all that, I don’t know what we’ll do. I don’t understand any of it.”

  In the interim, Run-D.M.C. kept performing small shows booked by their de facto manager, Erik Blam. (Russell, though not as involved with Run-D.M.C.’s career, still helped the group if they needed advice or needed him to represent their interests in a meeting with Profile.) On both a personal and professional level, it was a good stretch for Run and D. They weren’t arguing, still sounded good together, and eschewed material from their last two albums Back from Hell and Down with the King. Said D.M.C., “We didn’t have no Russell, no record company, no producers controlling: it was us being who we were when we were kids.” And if drunks in the crowd started fighting, Jay grabbed his own mike to yell, “Yo! We ain’t gonna have none of that shit here!”

  But at his turntables onstage, Jay noticed that D’s voice cracked when D performed certain lyrics. And when they recorded a few demos for a seventh album, Jay, Run, and D noticed it even more. D told Run and Jay not to worry, so they didn’t. This had been happening since they first started out, doing two shows a day; after almost forty-five minutes of banter, D’s voice usually began to tail off and Run would call the next day to say, “D, you was losing your voice last night.” Since the next show was usually better, no one thought twice about it.

  On these new demos in autumn 1996, however, D emitted a harsh rasp, and lyrics sounded forced. “I didn’t know what the fuck was going on,” D said, but they kept touring, since he and Run shared most lyrics anyway. Jay also backed D up on his own mike, and if D’s voice cracked, fans wouldn’t notice a thing. Privately, however, D worried. He hadn’t told them how serious he felt this was. Every night he worried about having to perform parts of “It’s Like That” without accompaniment. “I couldn’t do that shit,” D said. “I was up in a high register, which I think was wrong since the early days. Because if you listen to ‘Hard Times’ and ‘It’s Like That’ I’m like high: ‘Just like the flu.’” He’d adopted this tone in 1983 because Russell didn’t like D’s voice and D didn’t want to be left off their first single. And it had worked. People had loved his high-volume rhythmic style, and he’d proudly dubbed himself the “new wave yeller.” “But then it got worse as it went on,” D said. “I was doing that shit night in, night out my entire life.”

  He entered the studio to try recording more songs, but his voice waned even more. Run-D.M.C. didn’t deliver any new music to Profile in 1996; then D heard scuttlebutt about Run telling one or two people, “Me and D ain’t gonna rap no more.” Hurricane remembered, “There were definitely some disagreements. D wanted to do the record. And I don’t think Run thought D could.”

  D.M.C. didn’t know what to do. By now, he and Zuri had a child. He had a family to support, a career as a rapper, and a voice giving him trouble. In bed all day, he lost himself in documentaries about the Beatles’ acrimonious split or in the pages of biographies about the Fab Four, or in the ups, downs, and collapses of newer bands on VH1’s high-rated series Behind the Music. He would lie in bed, asking himself, “Should I keep rapping?”

  D felt even more anxious because, he claimed, Profile’s owner, Steve Plotnicki, wanted to be able to tell potential buyers of the label that a new Run-D.M.C. album was on the way. A new album would add value to Profile and allow Profile’s owner to command a higher asking price, D felt; but months passed, D’s voice kept cracking, and Run-D.M.C. still couldn’t submit any new music to Profile.

  At home in 1996, away from recording albums, D.M.C. kept busy with a newfound hobby, reading books about the careers of legendary rock groups. D had changed since the days when he told Jay and coproducer Davy DMX that he didn’t want to record any rock-rap for Tougher Than Leather. Back then, in 1988, he’d been listening to and enjoying the Beatles’ landmark Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, but felt that including rock music would cause rap fans to view them as sellouts in the age of rappers topping the charts with singles set to break beats and pro-black political singles like Public Enemy’s “Rebel Without a Pause.” Eight years later, he had time on his hands, since Run-D.M.C. was not recording a seventh album. “I was reading about rock-and-roll dudes ’cause I’m a big rock head,” D said. “And I was reading about how a singer with a problem goes to the throat specialist.” So D decided to visit specialists who worked with opera singers. “And the funny shit is they would all just say it was vocal strain: ‘Don’t sing for a couple of days.’”

  Jay was worried and soon told his old friend Hurricane on the telephone, “Yo, my man D’s voice is fucked up.”

  Hurricane—in Los Angeles working on a solo album—asked, “What’s wrong with it?”

  “I don’t know, man. He can’t really yell and stuff like that.”

  Cane was worried. “Shit, he needs to go to the doctor.”

  “He went to the doctor, and the doctor said there ain’t nothing wrong with his voice!”

  While visiting a doctor who examined well-known pop singers like Mariah Carey, D sat in a waiting room, lost in his thoughts and worries.

  In the examining room, the doctor told D, “Your vocal cords aren’t red. They aren’t bruised. There are no abrasions. It’s something else.”

  He referred D.M.C. to Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan. After a month of visits, the doctor there finally called D at his home with a diagnosis. “We don’t know how you’re going to take this,” the doctor began, “but you have an incurable neurological disorder. It’s called spasmodic dystonia.”

  D was puzzled. “What’s that?”

  “Have you ever seen people that twitch and have to keep moving their arms? They move their head and eyes all the time?”

  D said, “Yeah.”

  “Well you have that, and your brain is sending involuntary electric signals to your vocal cords,” the doctor continued.

  D had to sit down.

  “You’re a unique case,” the doctor pointed out. “There are two types: abductor and adductor. You have both.”

  After the doctor hung up, D kept sitting there. Throughout his entire life the odds had always been against him, he felt, but he had always made it through. Now, he sat back and faced the ceiling. “God, not only did You give me this, but You gave me both!” Everyone always thought he had it good, he told himself. No one knew how much he actually had to struggle: “Football, even rapping. Russell hated my— Russell didn’t want me to do it and I did it and became the king. I never thought I would, but I loved it so much!

  “And the doctors were saying, ‘There’s no cure for this,’” D continued. “They gave me Botox injections. What people use for cosmetic surgery: they put that in my throat. And they’d put needles in my neck and numb my shit up. They p
ut this foot-long needle down my throat right into my vocal cords and squeezed the Botox into it. So much pressure in my head it knocked me out.”

  Despite the diagnosis, D wanted to keep performing, to not give up, so he visited a woman who coached singers in Broadway musicals. “She said it could come from abuse of the vocal cords because my brain must have said ‘He’s forcing us to yell “people in the world” every night.’ So my body’s fighting to make that happen all day now.”

  Hearing tapes of his live concerts, the vocal coach added, “D, you hear this part where you try to yell this lyric in a higher key? Don’t do that anymore.” She suggested he rap at a lower register. “As long as you can talk you can make a record and you can make people understand: okay, so what? You have this, you can’t do that, but you can still make a good record.” D was grateful for her kind words of encouragement. “While everybody was saying ‘You can’t, you can’t, you can’t,’” he said, “she focused on what I could do. I believed I could still make records.”

  When he called Profile in late 1996 to issue a progress report, a Profile exec casually mentioned that Run had a new solo deal. D was shocked. “He’s making records with Slick Rick!” the executive added. “Hey, when you come up here tomorrow we’ll let you hear it!”

  The exec was surprised to learn D knew nothing about Run’s deal. Then, D claimed, he learned Run’s solo deal called for him to work on music, receive payment for each submitted track, and allow Profile to tell potential buyers the songs were for a Run-D.M.C. group album. When asked about D’s claim, Run only said, “They didn’t ask me anything. They didn’t have an obligation to ask me. It’s their label.”

  But D continued to believe Run was working on a solo album and allowing Profile to tell potential buyers of the label that it was a Run-D.M.C. work. “On one hand, I was like, ‘Cool,’” D remembered thinking. “On the other, I took it like Run was thinking, ‘Everything’s good with me so fuck D.’ He could have thought instead, ‘Let me see how I can bring my man up,’ you know? So I was fucking hurt.”