Speaker 1: Hey, everybody, Welcome back to the Shirley You Can't Be
Serious podcast this week as we dive into run DMC
in our two part hip hop episode, d you okay?
Speaker 2: I don't know, man.
Speaker 3: I'm feeling pretty bad, but not bad meaning bad, bad
meaning good.
Speaker 4: It's so tricky.
Speaker 3: Welcome back, everybody. We are in the second album of
our two album Comparison from nineteen eighty six, the two
albums that brought the New School of hip hop to
the forefront of mainstream.
Speaker 4: These are the trend centers.
Speaker 5: These are the trailblazing albums for hip hop.
Speaker 3: And we've got with us today our friend mister David Wright,
otherwise known as Deaf Dave. How you doing, Dave?
Speaker 2: Do it great? David? Right, Deaf Dave.
Speaker 6: My pronouns are the Lord of lyrics, the Duke of
the discussion in the Son of Byford.
Speaker 5: That's awesome, Davin. We're so glad to have you back.
You are a hip hop expert, and that's why we
invited you here. The lyrics and the rhymes are just
going to start falling out of your mouth as soon
as we get going here.
Speaker 6: I will say I'm an expert on wrap from the
eighties for sure, and I'm fascinated by the history of
how it all got started in the seventies, so I'm
excited to be able to talk.
Speaker 2: About it with you.
Speaker 5: Okay, So in this episode, we're going to do a
little bit on the history of rap. We'll do a
little bit about the beginnings and the origins of Run
DMC and where they got started and how they got going.
And then in our next episode we'll go track my
track through the Raising Hell album.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we're midway through this series of episodes. If you
have not caught our Beastie Boys episode, go back two
episodes and hear the story of the Beastie Boys from
way back in history, and then listen to our epic
track by track coverage of Licensed to Ill.
Speaker 5: That's right, And at the end of the track by
track and Raising Hell, all three of us are going
to give our final judgment on which album we feel
is the superior album of nineteen eighty six. It's gonna
be amazing, all right. Well, Dave get us started on
the history of rap and what we need to know
before we can make our final judgment.
Speaker 3: Here.
Speaker 6: Well, I'm gonna pick up the story in the twentieth century.
This time, I'm not going to take you back to
the eighteen hundreds.
Speaker 4: Okay good.
Speaker 6: The birth of hip hop and the story we're telling
today is a tale of two Jamaicas. On April sixteenth,
nineteen fifty five, in Kingston, Jamaica, Keith and Neddie Campbell
gave birth to the first of their six children, a
little boy named Clive. A little over two years later,
in October of nineteen fifty seven, in Jamaica, Queen's, Daniel
and Evelyn Simmons gave birth to their second son, Us. Now,
Daniel and Evelyn each held a pair of degrees from
Howard University, and they had moved to Queens when Daniel
had gotten a job as a public school administrator, and
just a few years later, in nineteen sixty four, they
moved to the slightly better neighborhood neighboring neighborhood of Hollis, Queens,
and just a couple of weeks later, in November of
nineteen sixty four, they gave birth to their third son,
Joseph Simmons. So that's where the tale of two Jamaica's begins.
But the Simmons family doesn't really come into play for
another ten years or so. But in nineteen sixty seven,
the Campbell family moved from Kingston, Jamaica to the Bronx
and they moved into a tenement building called Sedgwick Towers.
Speaker 5: So, just for the record, in nineteen sixty four, that
was Joseph's first Christmas in Hollis.
Speaker 4: Is that what you're.
Speaker 2: Saying, that is exactly right? Okay? Okay, good, good, okay.
But if you go back to.
Speaker 6: The Campbell family, in nineteen sixty seven, the Campbell's moved
from Kingston, Jamaica to the Bronx, to a tenement building
called Sedgwick Towers. And this is when young Clive, the
first of their children, was twelve years old. When Clive
was in high school, he'd only grown up to be
about five foot eight, but he had turned into real
sturdy guys. He was buff, he was strong, and he
was physically dominant on the basketball court. And because of
his physical strength, his basketball teammates gave him the nickname
of Hercules. A couple of years later, one of his sisters,
named Cindy, she needed some extra money for clothes, so
they tried to figure out a way to raise a
little bit of money, and Clive remembered when he was
living in Jamaica, they have dance halls in Jamaica. I
don't know if it's traditional to Jamaica or if it's
just kind of traditional to maybe like the equivalent of
their party scene. And so he borrowed his dad's sound system,
set it up in the community room of this tenement building,
and they decided to throw a party to raise money
so Cindy can get some clothes.
Speaker 2: And with you so far, spoiler Lord.
Speaker 6: It was a huge success, but it was enough fun
that they kept doing it and kept doing it, and
the reputation of these parties began to grow, and the
crowd started to get bigger. And so the nickname that
his basketball teammates had given him and started calling himself
DJ Cool Hirk Okay. So that is probably right there.
Why we have the tradition of rappers and DJs.
Speaker 2: Giving themselves nicknames. And in nineteen seventy.
Speaker 6: Two he discovered this is what I love about the
history of hip hop is that the origins are very
specific and they're very known. In nineteen seventy two, he
came up with the idea of setting up two turntables
at the same time so that he can cut quickly
between two records. This had never really been done before,
and what he had learned from studying the crowd was
that the favorite part of any song they played was
when it broke down into like a percussion break in
the middle of the song. So he decided, what if
I only played the percussion breaks, only played the beats
from these breaks. And what he did was what he
would cue up the percussion breaks, the break beats on
each turntable and when it would and when the break
would come to an end on one, he'd play the
other turntable. Okay, by doing this he could extend the
good part. What he discovered was have two copies of
the same record, and by chewing the beginning of the
breakup and have it ready to go by the time
it's ending on the other record, he can go back
and forth. He could extend that break beat as they
called it, indefinitely. This is what DJ cool Hirk was
famous for. He came up with a routine that would
cut between three different records, and the very first Merry
Go Round routine he came up with included turn it
up and Set it Loose by James Brown, Bongo Rock
by the Incredible Bongo Band, and the Mexican by Babe Ruth.
These all three had these percussion breaks in them, and
he would just rotate between the three of them and
keep them going for a long time, and the crowd
would just go nuts and go nuts and go nuts.
This was the very beginning of what became hip hop.
Speaker 3: Awesome, awesome Okay.
Speaker 6: So by playing these extended breakbeats, the crowd would jump
in and start dancing. And the longer that he kept
this thing going, the more they would dance and the
crazier their dance moves would get. And so these people
that were dancing during these breaks, these were the breakdancers.
Speaker 2: This is how you get the term breakdancing.
Speaker 4: The break okay, Yeah, I get it, I get it. Okay,
I love it.
Speaker 6: He had a regular group of guys who were like
particularly acrobatic and inventive on the dance floor. He called
them his break boys, which became bee boys. So that's
why any hip hopper is now known as a bee boy.
So now you're coming between twin records, between two turntables,
you've got breakdancers and you've got bee boys. Wow.
Speaker 3: So in nineteen seventy four, there was a movie that
came out called Earthquake. Are you familiar with it?
Speaker 2: No? I don't know this, okay.
Speaker 3: So the movie amount called Earthquake in nineteen seventy four,
which is for that movie, they created something called the
sin surround sound. It was specifically to give the audience
an enhanced experience so they could actually feel the earthquake,
and they had to use special speakers. They designed and
created special speakers for this, and all of the DJs
who were now playing in not just the gymnasium or whatever,
but also playing in the park, said, if we can
recreate these speakers, we can have the loudest speakers around.
And so they reverse engineered it, figured out how to
make the earthquake speakers, and that's how they got the
name earthquake speakers.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 3: And then they would have dancers who were like dancing
on top of the speakers, and I've seen it. They
will stop the music and say, hey, get off the speakers.
Speaker 6: So in Jamaica, there's this tradition called dance toasting, which
is very similar to what we would know is rapping,
where someone is taking a microphone and speaking over some
music that's playing back with the purpose of exciting the
crowd and entertaining them. And so something cool Hirk added
to his routine with all this break dancing going on
with the B Boys is he started encouraging the crowd
and hyping them up by grabbing a mic and starting
to give real simple rhymes that was on.
Speaker 2: Beat with the with the braakelop that he was playing.
Speaker 6: But what he soon found out, because you know, keep
in mind, all he had was two turntables. He didn't
have a modern system with a with a fade, a crossfader,
or a switch or mix or anything. He was kind
of doing all this manually and trying to stay on
time with it all, and it was a little too
much to try to.
Speaker 2: Add the toasting.
Speaker 6: So what he did is he delegated that to a
friend of his, and that is how Coke LaRock became
history's first MC. And so in the Jamaican toasting halls,
they were known as Master of Ceremonies. So Coke LaRock
is the name of the first MC in hip hop.
Now we mentioned scottlar Rock in the BC Boys episodes,
and fans of eighties rap may recognize the name Scottlarock
from Boogie Down productions. Both those guys know their history
because both of those names are an homage to Cochlarock,
the very first rapper. This is all happening at Sedgwick Towers.
This is right there at Hirk's home, and all this
innovation is happening within seventy two and seventy three. As
a matter of fact, according to the PBS documentary series
History Detectives, they were able to pinpoint the exact birth
of Rap. It was on August eleventh, nineteen seventy three,
in the community room of Sedgwick Towers at fifteen twenty
Sedgwick Avenue. Right there in the community room, two turntables,
extending the break, dancing with wrapping on the microphone. August eleventh,
nineteen seventy three, rap is born, and it's all from
DJ cool hurt.
Speaker 4: God to say that, dush.
Speaker 5: Hey, every time, every time you say two turntables, I'm
like and a microphone.
Speaker 4: He wanted to say two turntables and a microphone.
Speaker 6: As it turns out, Cool Heart would not keep up
with all the innovations that would quickly come in the
following decade, but he is known as the originator. As
a matter of fact, he never put out any recorded
material until twenty nineteen he did his.
Speaker 2: First album, Really Yes Wow.
Speaker 6: But he's always been known and recognized and respected as
the originator of rap. As a matter of fact, in
the year two thousand and seven, the State of New
York officially decplared the Sedgewick Building to be the birthplace
of hip hop, and it has since been nominated for
inclusion on the National Registry of Historic Places. That's fantastic, man,
So I'd mentioned that he did not he did not
really keep up with the innovators that come. But what
happened was here we are seventy three going into seventy four,
and his parties were growing. They were growing in size,
and they were growing in reputation. He began to gain
status just through like his name being whispered on the streets.
And you had to understand that in the seventies, especially
the first half of the seventies, the Bronx was a
scary place. In nineteen seventy three, there was a member
of the Black Spades gang whose name was Lance Taylor,
and he went to his first Cool Hirk party and
while there he had this vision of what he could
do to make the Bronx a safer place. Now, it
would be a couple of years before he was able
to realize this vision. In the meantime, there was this
kid named Joseph Sadler who had been born in Barbados
but had moved to the Bronx and he had become
a regular attendee at Hirk's parties, and as a matter
of fact, Hurk had kind of taken him under his
wing as sort of an acolyte. And Joseph Sadler had
been to a vocational high school and he was able
to take some of his mechanical electric engineering skills that
he had learned there, and he built the very first
Q monitor, which you could add to the system of
the two turntables as a way to preview the entrance
point of your next record, so he could be more
precise with that. That was an innovation that allowed for
more precision in the DJ's routine. So this innovation gave
him the edge over cool Herd with this with this
Q monitor added to the system, so he went out
and began throwing his own parties under the name of
Grandmaster Flash.
Speaker 5: Oh wow, that's awesome.
Speaker 6: So this is a period of intense creation and innovation.
This is all brand new, so a lot of people
are jumping on board with this idea and they're trying
new themes. Grandmaster Flash had his own disciple, his own apprentice,
whose name was Theodore Livingston. So Theodore was just trying
to learn how to do all this stuff. He was
learning it from Grandmaster Flash. And one day he was
up in his bedroom working with two turntables, just practicing,
trying to figure it out, and his mom busted in
and said, what's that noise? And so it kind of
scared him. He kind of jumped in. He put his
hand down on the record to stop it because he
had talked to his mom, and when he put his
hand down on it, it kind of slipped under the
needle and then made this cool little zipping sound, and
he goes, WHOA, what was that? And he did it again,
and he went back and forth a few more times,
and then he started doing it in rhythm.
Speaker 2: And that is how scratching.
Speaker 6: The technique of scratching was invented by accident because Theodore
Livingstone's mother scared him.
Speaker 4: You're bringing him strong tonight, man, you really are.
Speaker 6: And Theodore Livingstone is now better known as Grand Wizard Theodore.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 6: So he's one of the big names from the seventies
and he's credited with inventing scratching.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 6: So nineteen seventy five, Coolhirk is still throwing his parties
and Lance Taylor, if you remember Lance Taylor, he had
had that vision in nineteen seventy three of how to
make the Bronx a safer place. He had been running
with the Black Space, which is one of the more
violent gangs in the Bronx, But by nineteen seventy five
Lance had begun djaying and he quickly earned the reputation
for playing ultra rare break beats. Okay, so that's what
they called these percussion breaks that they were always looking
for because that's just the part they wanted. They wanted
that part, nothing else. They could just play that.
Speaker 2: Well.
Speaker 6: It quickly got to the point where everybody was familiar
with the common ones, and so he was looking for
more obscure records to reveal beats that no one had
heard before. And so he specialized in finding the most
obscure songs, primarily from funk and soul, but from a
wider ray.
Speaker 2: So with his.
Speaker 6: Heightened influence that he had from running these parties, Lance
Taylor was able to successfully realize his vision of how
to make the Bronx a safer place, and he basically
co opted the Black Spades and turned them into He
renamed them the Zulu Nation, and he began to call
himself Africa Bambada.
Speaker 2: And he used hip hop and wrap.
Speaker 6: And creative expression as a way to channel the kids
on the street, channel their energy in a positive way
in order to move them away from crime and away
from violence and just steer them into these creative outlets.
Africa Bambada he created basically that DJ virtue of crate digging,
where you just go looking for the most obscure record
that's going to have a cool beat that no one's
heard before.
Speaker 3: Which is how he happened to be able to hear
Cookie Puss.
Speaker 4: Is that right? It has to be right? Probably?
Speaker 3: So I mean talk about an obscure album. Yeah, three
white kids from Brooklyn, Yeah yo, I want.
Speaker 4: To talk to Cookie Puss Man Cookie Bus.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 6: So those are the three giants cool Her, Grandmaster Flash
and Africa Bambada. They are the giants of hip hop.
If you're gonna have a mount Rushmore. Those are three
of the faces right there. Okay, what this created in
the seventies was this breakbeat culture, this DJ party culture.
Speaker 2: There was something new.
Speaker 6: It was just kind of had risen, kind of grassroots,
and people were sneaking recorders into these parties and making
these bootleg mixtapes and they were selling them on the
street and the DJs usually they didn't know anything about it,
but they were selling these mixtapes on the street and
these served to kind of spread the gospel, and so
kids outside of Manhattan, outside the Brons and the other Burroughs,
these mixtapes kind of made their way out to the suburbs,
and so this idea was catching on and it was
all just organic. And I just find all of that
very cool that there was this new way of playing
records that basically turned the DJ into the star into
the entertainer, where it was all based on taking pre
existing material and remixing it in a new way. So
it's basically editing for entertainment. It's live looping, live editing
for entertainment. I've always found that extremely fascinating, and I
have to say it impacted me professionally, impacted my career
because I'm a professional video producer, I'm a video editor,
and that charge I get from taking different material, raw
material and crafting something new out of it is the
same thing that interested me about hip hop and about
these early days in the Bronx in the seventies with
so much innovation and creativity going on all at the
same time. Okay, so these were still largely house parties
or block parties, but the scene was getting too big.
This was something new and something different, and so what
was happening is in the cold months, they were actually
starting to book venues. They would rent out clubs or
rent out these venues to throw their parties, which now
these were becoming events that needed to be promoted.
Speaker 2: In the summertime, they would.
Speaker 6: Just go out to the park and they could They
could plug their turntables up to the telephone pole and
just start doing their thing.
Speaker 2: The crowd would gather and.
Speaker 6: So these it created as a snowball effect of so
many people trying to learn the secrets of this of
this new trade, and so you had all these DJs
coming up. One of the more prominent DJs of the
seventies from this new breed of DJ was someone.
Speaker 2: On as DJ Hollywood.
Speaker 6: And so you have to understand that at this time
rapping right MC's were they were strictly in a supporting role.
That the DJ was the clear star and the MC
was really more like a hype man. He wasn't really
trying to perform a song. He was just trying to
get the crowd going. So it was very simplistic party rhymes,
you know, like throw your hands in the air, wave
them like you just don't care, and it was nothing
more complicated than that, like on and on until the
break of dawn. Well that was this DJ named DJ Hollywood,
in the vein of rapping like that, he came up
with the rhyme he was in winter.
Speaker 4: Wait wait wait rapping like this and like this and
like that.
Speaker 2: Like this is like that is like this ya.
Speaker 3: Please do that lots and lots Okay, I got you
keep going okay.
Speaker 6: So so it was DJ Hollywood who, in the vein
of doing these type of simplistic improvised rhymes, he came
up with the rhyme hip hop hip to the hippity
hip hip hopping you don't stop rocking to Baine Bain
boogie s hit up, jump the bullget to the rhythm
of the boogety beat, and that caught on, so that hip.
Speaker 2: Hop hippie to the hippity hip hop.
Speaker 6: Finally, this movement, this new culture had a name and
it was called hip hop and it came from DJ
Hollywood's improvised rhyme that.
Speaker 5: Night, nice, nice, great, dude, you're hitting grand slam after
grand slam.
Speaker 4: Keep going.
Speaker 6: So this initial period from nineteen seventy three at Sedgwick
Towers up through about seventy eight, nineteen seventy eight, this era.
Speaker 2: Was hip hop one point zero. This was the original scene.
Speaker 6: This was the grassroots, organic creation of something new.
Speaker 2: And it all started in the Bronx.
Speaker 3: Well, you talked about DJ Hollywood and it was around
this time he talked about seventy eight. Is around seventy seven.
He had a close friend named Eddie Chiba, And this
is this is kind of where your two Jamaica's meet
because Eddie Chiba DJ Hollywood. They would influence each other's styles,
grow from each other. And one night, a guy who
you had mentioned earlier, who was born in Jamaica Queen's,
happened to have dropped out of college and be trying
to look for something to do and he came across
Eddie Chiba and he said, this is what I want
to do for the rest of my life.
Speaker 2: That was Russell Simmons.
Speaker 6: That's like the Blues Brothers having that moment in the
church where the light hits them and they started doing
part will.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 6: So what had happened was in nineteen seventy five, Russell
Simmons was out of high school and he had got
busted for smoking pot and his dad said, nope, you're
going to college, and he kicked him out and he
went over to Harlem and he enrolled at City College
of New York. While there, he met a friend named
He made friends with a guy named Rudy Toppin, and
Rudy was into party promotion. He was plugged into this
new breed, a DJ type of party scene, and he
was one of these guys that was going around promoting
these club events that had started growing out of these
house parties. And so he brought Russell along to help
him out. And so this was Russell's first hustle. He
was into party promoting. By the way, it was during
this time Rudy observed Russell's high energy work ethic and
gave him the nickname of Rush. So Russ has the
nickname of Rush. And so there was this one night
in nineteen seventy seven at Charles where they walk in
and Eddie Chiba is wrapping over a looped brake or
looped intro to flashlight by Parliament.
Speaker 4: Just keep down, We're gonna do a little like a eel.
Speaker 2: We continue you all with the news.
Speaker 6: How for you to be?
Speaker 2: This was the I see the light moment. And in
that moment.
Speaker 6: Russ had he got hit up beside the head and
he said, this is the future. This is my future.
This is something real. And his first instinct was how
am I going.
Speaker 2: To make money off of it?
Speaker 6: Yeah, he recognized before anybody else. He recognized that this
was marketable and that people could get paid.
Speaker 3: Uh huh.
Speaker 6: The people that were there in the one point oh stage,
they were just there. It was a new way to party,
you know. It was just the DJ playing records at
a club. He was just putting a twist on it.
But Russell was the first person to see that this
could be monetized and that this could be marketing. He
was the first businessman, the visionary that could turn this
all into something viable.
Speaker 2: He decided he was going to get into his own promoter.
Speaker 6: He quit working with Rudy and he started promoting his
own He was friends with the program director at the
college radio station the college.
Speaker 2: Where he was attending.
Speaker 6: The program director's name was Curtis Walker, and so they
began promoting their own events.
Speaker 2: So you have to understand that Russell was the visionary.
Speaker 6: Who took hip hop from these ad hoc parties to
like organized concerts and ticketed events and that kind of thing.
He was kind of the trailblazer in kind of finding
places that would take these acts, and then a circuit
developed where you could just kind of make you could
just make the rounds booking your act. And one of
these other promoters during this same time, one of his
competing promoters was a guy by the name of Junior Rames.
Now you probably haven't heard of Junior Rames, but you've
heard of his brother, actor being Rams.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 4: Nice, that is a nice nugget right there.
Speaker 6: So they were booking all these events, and they were
developing this circuit and they were promoting parties. Russell was
the businessman, but Curtis Walker was the star. He was
the rapper on stage that people were coming to see
and he went by the name of Curtis Blow.
Speaker 2: You know where he got blow from? Cocaine?
Speaker 3: Right, wait a minute, what edie eddie? Chiba? Chiba is
another name for marijuana. And they're like, well, Curtis Walker,
that's no good. What do we got a drug that's
better than marijuana? About Curtis Blow?
Speaker 2: Wait, keeping on.
Speaker 6: The first MC ever was coke LaRock, So this was
working the first party. The first party that Russell threw
on his own was eight hundred people showed up for
it and it only held six hundred people.
Speaker 2: He was flushed with cash.
Speaker 6: He made the money. He was happy. He was thrilled
to death. So he and Curtis were in business and
he would go home. Russell would go him.
Speaker 2: Home to Queens.
Speaker 6: He'd come in with stacks of cash late at night,
which made a huge impression on his little brother, Joseph.
Speaker 2: Little Joey was about thirteen years.
Speaker 6: Old, and he was amazed that big bro was coming
in with stacks of cash and all these stories about
working in the clubs with these rappers and DJs that
Joey was listening to on mixtapes that people were passing
around at school.
Speaker 2: So By nineteen seventy.
Speaker 6: Eight, Curtis Blow needed a DJ and Russ knew exactly
who to come to for the job because his little
brother Joey, who was just thirteen, had been chomping into
bed for months to be able to join him, and
he was learning and practicing at home, but how to
work the turntables, and so finally they tapped him to
be the DJ for Curtis Blow. So with Run DMC.
Whenever you hear him refer to as DJ Run, you
might wonder what.
Speaker 2: He's not the DJ. So was his name DJ Run?
Speaker 6: It's because he started out as Curtis Blow's DJ in
nineteen seventy eight as.
Speaker 4: A thirteen year old.
Speaker 6: As a thirteen year old, his first night on stage
ever in his life. He's thirteen years old and he's
on stage with Curtis Blow and Grand Master Flash.
Speaker 3: That's incredible man, son of Curtis Blow, son of Curtis Blow.
Speaker 5: I heard that he got the name Run because he
was a fast worker.
Speaker 4: Is that is that?
Speaker 2: It was just like his big brother Rush.
Speaker 6: Run had a high energy personality and work rate, and
they say he was always running off at the mouth.
Speaker 4: There you go, Yeah, she's about right.
Speaker 2: So he was a DJ.
Speaker 6: Run He was billed as the son of Curtis Blow,
and they spent several years doing this act and Run
would rap, he would take his turn on the microphone.
And so he was still a kid who's in junior
high and he was spending his weekends at the clubs performing.
So here we are in nineteen seventy nine, and there
was a writer by the name of Rocky Ford who
had just written a piece.
Speaker 4: For Billboard, Rocky Ford. That's the one where Rocky Gates
on the Russian.
Speaker 3: Killed Apollo.
Speaker 5: I must break you, Rocky Ford.
Speaker 6: Okay, Rocky Ford had just written a story for Billboard
on this new breakbeat culture that had taken over, taken
root in the Bronx. And he was taking the train
through New York when a flyer for a Rush Promotions
party caught his eye.
Speaker 2: It just caught his eye. He just noticed it when
he got off the train.
Speaker 6: He saw a little kid hustling around, running around putting
up flyers for parties.
Speaker 2: And it also had the Rush name on it, and
so this inspired him.
Speaker 6: He's always looking for his next story to write, so
he decided he would write a story about who this
promoter was because he appeared to be a big deal.
First of all, the little kid he saw tacking up
posters in a hurry, that was Joseph Simmons putting up
flyers for his big brother. But he was able to
track him down at his offices and met with him,
and he was inspired to write story because Russia Entertainment
appeared to be the biggest mover and shaker, you know,
on on the scene. And so they met and there
was an exchange of ideas. So Rocky got his interview
with Russell. But in exchange, he taught Russell about the
music business and how the music industry works and how
the record business works, and so that became That was
obviously a very important step in Russell's life. But Russell
had a vision for his life and for his future.
He believed in it and he had he was at
a point where he had to prove it to his dad.
He had to prove that I'm not making a mistake
and this this is something legit and viable. And so
he went all out promoting this one big party in Harlem.
This was going to be the show that proved it
all to his dad. And guess how many people showed up.
Speaker 2: Nobody.
Speaker 6: Nobody his worst failure as a promoter, literally zero people
showed up.
Speaker 4: Oh my gosh, that's terrible.
Speaker 6: He had rented the venue, he had paid for the advertising,
and nobody showed up.
Speaker 2: It broke him.
Speaker 6: Russell's career was dead. He didn't know what he was
going to tell his dad, right because it was the
end of the line. He had a great idea. It
lasted a couple of years with Curtis Blow, but it
was over. He didn't know what to tell his dad.
So he called his mom, and his mom, who who
had also had a good job high up in New
York City parks and rec gave him two thousand dollars.
And it's only because of that two thousand dollars that
he was able to continue. And so with that money,
he decided he was no longer going to go into
party promotion and that instead he would move into artist management. Okay,
And so with this decision made, he went back to
Rocky Ford, the Billboard writer who had told him about
the music business and told him what he.
Speaker 2: Wanted to do.
Speaker 6: And Rocky had already been talking with an ad executive
Billboard Magazine named JB. Moore, and they had decided they
were going to do something that had never been done before.
Speaker 2: They were going to produce a wrap record.
Speaker 6: And then and they looked at russ and they're like, well,
maybe maybe Russe's our guy. Nobody in hip hop was
thinking about making their own record. They were taking other
people's records and playing them and dancing to them, and
that's all it was. But Russell and Rocky and JB.
Moore decided they were gonna make a record, and this
is kind of cool. The rapper they had in mind
for their record.
Speaker 2: Was Eddie Chiba.
Speaker 6: Well, Russell has Curtis Blow as his one and only client.
Speaker 2: Well, Russell wants in on that, but they want Eddie Cheeba.
Speaker 6: So Russell takes them to a show where both Eddie
Chiba and Curtis Blow are performing on the bills and
it's all on Curtis Blow's shoulders. It's like, this is
on you, buddy, this is your chance put on the
performance of your life. These guys want to make a record,
You've got to blow Eddie Chiba off the stage, step up,
make it happen.
Speaker 2: So like some kind of movie moment with everything on
the line.
Speaker 6: Curtis Blow takes the stage that night, and you can
hear the theme music playing in the background, and he
blows Eddie Chiba out of the sky. And that is
why today most people have probably heard of Curtis Blow,
but most people have probably not heard of Eddie Chiba.
They still haven't made their money, right, Russ is still broke.
He's living on this He's squeezing by on this money
that his mom gave him. But he's already pioneered organizing
hip hop into organized shows. He's already pioneered a circuit
of venues for performers. And he maybe he didn't realize
it yet, but he had already pioneered the idea of
managing a representing rappers, and now he was ready to
pioneer the producing of actual rap records. Now, their idea,
Rocky Ford and JB. Moore's idea was to do a
novelty song. They decided they would do a song about
Santa Claus and they wanted to make it a rap record.
Now that's a million miles away from all this vital, energetic, creative,
awesome stuff happening in the clubs.
Speaker 2: But they're trying to find a way to present it
to the public.
Speaker 6: So it's this nice little novelty comedy record about Santa Claus.
But then something went wrong on the way to the studio.
Somebody beat into the punch hit.
Speaker 4: You don't stop the record to the band man rhythm.
Speaker 6: So Rapper's Delight was a massive hit for a group
called the sugar Hill Gang. This record blew up, and
it's considered the first rap record in history. It was massive.
Everybody had this record. It sold fourteen million units this
one song.
Speaker 3: Wow yeah.
Speaker 2: Here's the problem.
Speaker 6: Guess how many people had heard of the sugar Hill
Gang before that record came out?
Speaker 2: See nobody, right, nobody. Guess how many gigs they had
performed in the clubs?
Speaker 4: Zero?
Speaker 2: Zero? Had they even existed before?
Speaker 6: No, They were purely a creation of the record label.
They were a studio act. They were absolutely fake. They
were not authentic. They didn't come from the scene. They
didn't come from the clubs. As a matter of fact,
they stole well known routines from other people and put
it into their song.
Speaker 3: They were a boy band. They were new kids on
the block.
Speaker 4: Wow wow.
Speaker 6: So everybody in America right is loving this song.
Speaker 2: It blew up.
Speaker 6: But everybody in the Bronx, everybody around the New York
area that knew what real hip hop was like.
Speaker 2: They hated these guys. They hated them. They were posers,
they were fake.
Speaker 6: Russell hated them not because they were fake, He hated
them because they beat him to the punch. And they
got their record out first, so they pushed forward. Russell,
Ford and more pushed forward with their plan, and in
time for Christmas in nineteen seventy nine, they released Curtis
Blow's Christmas Rapping Hey, the second ever rap record. Now
that music was performed by a couple of session players
named Larry Smith who was playing bass. Trevor Gale was
a was the man on the drums, and the guitarist
was a guy named Eddie Martinez.
Speaker 3: Larry Smith is the name I recognize. Isn't Larry the
one that produced the first two run DMC albums?
Speaker 2: Yes? Okay, okay, So now they have their record.
Speaker 6: Okay, they have Christmas Rapping, But how do they get
it out?
Speaker 2: They need a label.
Speaker 6: So Russ pulls off this ingenious scam. First of all,
he sends copies out to these key influential DJs around
the city. Uh huh, then he writes up a bunch
of fake orders for Christmas Rapping and sends it to PolyGram,
Like he has a PolyGram Records order sheet to fill out,
and he just fills it out, though he's fake names.
Everybody requesting Christmas rapping from PolyGram.
Speaker 2: They get all these and they don't. They're like, number one,
we don't have it. Number two, what is it? We
don't know what this record is.
Speaker 6: But they they fell exactly into Russell's plans. It made
them curious and they're like, well, clearly there's demand for
this record. Look how many people want it? Brilliant and
so they tracked down the producer and said, hey, we
need to sign you want to we want to distribute
this record, And that's how they got the record deal
for Christmas Wrapping.
Speaker 3: That is the fadeaway Swish if there was.
Speaker 5: That's genius, man. This guy is a marketing genius.
Speaker 6: He combined street hustle with college education and a visionary
business sense and trick. He's tricky, and he tricked PolyGram
Records into signing Curtis Blue. Now Curtis Blow becomes the
first rapper in history signed to a major record label.
Speaker 2: Quickly follow that up.
Speaker 6: In January of nineteen eighty with his second song, The Breaks. Now,
The Breaks is a record that anticipated what Grandmaster Flash
would do a few years later with the Message, which
is basically rapping about how hard life can be in
the city. But with these two records that were both
hit records, and so Curtis Blow at this point seventy
nine eighty, he becomes rap's first official star.
Speaker 2: Hey it's everybody if you've got.
Speaker 6: And with these hit songs, he has to hit the road,
and so he hits the road with DJ Run. What
they learned here was that rapp was very economical, right.
All you needed was a record player and a microphone.
There's a very little overhead. These shows cost basically nothing
to put on, so they were making a lot of money.
Speaker 2: It was very profitable.
Speaker 6: But with every show, Joseph Simmons he would take his
turn on the microphone. So he was fourteen, fifteen years
old and he was rapping every night in front of
Curtis Blow's crowds. So it was during this time of
Curtis Blow's success, early on his PolyGram's career, and he's
on the road a lot with Joseph Simmons as his
DJ Russ is growing his client list.
Speaker 2: He's got more than just Curtis Blow.
Speaker 6: Now he's signing up several acts, one of which is
Doctor Jekyl and Mister Hyde. And in nineteen eighty one
they had a song called Genius Rap. This proved to
be their biggest hit, and Doctor Mister Hyde, even though
they appear and crush groove the movie, they never really
had a big rapping career, although Doctor Jekyl also known
as Andre Harrel, would go on to be a huge
record executive and eventually end up being the CEO of
Motown in the nineties.
Speaker 2: Okay, nice started.
Speaker 6: Off nineteen eighty one with Genius Rap that they had
landed with a small indie label that had just opened
in eighty one but had lost all their money and
nothing had to hit.
Speaker 2: It was called Profile Records, and they took.
Speaker 6: Genius Rap and they got a hit out of it,
and Genius Rap saved Profile Records.
Speaker 2: And that'll prove important in a few minutes.
Speaker 3: So while all this stuff is going on, while you know,
Run is being introduced as the son of Curtis Blow,
kids around the Bronx are just I mean, each of
those Burroughs is kind of a world in and of itself, right,
and so they're they're getting they're getting these mixtapes in.
But everybody's all in love with this new style of music.
And there's this kid named Darryl who is a big
comic book fan, Like he obsesses over comic book huge, yes,
like that's all he does. He's he's an introvert. He's
got big, thick glasses. He kind of gets picked on
at school, and so all he wants to do is
go home and read his comic books until he starts
hearing this music. And he and his older brother really
fall in love with this music. And they say, man,
can we where can we get some money so that
we can get our own turntables? And his brother's like,
why don't we sell your comic books. He's like, but
I like my comic books. And he's like, well, yeah,
we'll sell the old ones that you've read already. He's like, okay,
I'll keep the good ones. Well we'll sell my old
comic books. And they sell it. They buy the turntable,
and then big brother says, now don't you touch this
when I'm not, so he tries to emulate the guys
and you know, before he was trying to emulate the superheroes,
he would have his you know, he'd have his playtime
emulating the superheroes. Now he is trying to write poetry,
trying to write raps so he can emulate those guys
from the other boroughs who are now doing this music
that is brand new and on the scene.
Speaker 6: So Daryl and Joseph had been going to the same
elementary school since kindergarten, but because Daryl's birthday was in May,
he was actually one grade ahead of Joseph, so they
were never in the same grade or same class in
elementary school. So although they had gone to school there together,
they weren't really friends. But at this point at high
school age, as it happens with Ron on the road
with Curtis blow a lot, they both end up joining
a local basketball league. They ended up on the same
team and they renew their acquaintance. They recognize each other
from elementary school, and so this is where they really
became friends, was playing basketball together.
Speaker 2: So, yes, Daryl was an introvert.
Speaker 6: He liked to stay at home, but he had discovered
this music and he discovered that his friend Joe was
a part of the scene was actually in Manhattan and
in the Bronx playing to these clubs, and he's on
some of these mixtapes that he's listening to me and
it blew him away.
Speaker 3: Both Darryl and Joe liked to play basketball, right, and
in these burrows there's really just especially in the Bronx,
there's one basketball goal that you can go and play on.
And a friend of theirs decides, Hey, I'm going to
slam dunk on this goal and he breaks the goal,
and so now they're without a goal to play on,
and Darryl and Joe are like, well, what are we
going to do? And Darryl says, hey, why don't you
come over to my house. I've got a basketball goal
at my house. We'll play over there, right, And so
they go over to Darryl's house and they play basketball,
they work up a sweat. Joe's thirsty. He's like, hey, man,
can we get a drink water? And Daryl's like, man,
I'm not really supposed to have people in the house.
No company, no company when the parents aren't here. He's like, man,
I'm dying a thirst here. Like all right, come on,
he can come in. And when he comes in, Joe
sees the turntables that the comic book Money had bought
and he's like, whoa, what have you got going here?
And he's like, oh, you know, yeah, I'm my brother
and I got these and I do this a little bit.
So you just do the turntables, you just do the
DJ and Darrel's like, oh, yeah, yeah, I do it.
That's all I do. But sure enough, Joe finds his
notebook and he starts reading through. He's like, did you
write this? Did you write these rhymes? And Daryl's like yeah,
and he's like, listen, listen, my brother when I graduate,
is gonna let me record a record. When that happens,
I want you to record with me. I want you
to be the guy who records with me on that record.
And Daryl's like, yeah, okay, whatever, your brother, Yeah whatever.
It's only later that he finds out who Darryl's It's
only later that he finds out who Joe's brother really is.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So Darryl was a homebody.
Speaker 6: He was an introvert, he was probably a nerd, and
he was his parents were in particularly his mother were
overly protective of them. So here he is being a
Hollis Queen's and he's going to a private school for
high school, so he's wearing a uniform and he's wearing
these big, thick glasses, so he's prime target for bullies.
And he's got to walk the city blocks to get
to his house, and so he's used to hiding his glasses.
Like when he's coming up on people on the street,
he takes his glasses off, puts him in his pocket,
and tries to get by them without any trouble. And
when he's in the house, he's he's he's content to
just stay there and read and look out the window.
So after this happens and Joe's like, hey, you've got
some good rhymes.
Speaker 2: You need to come with us. You know, I'm going
to these shows.
Speaker 6: Joseph was always trying to get Daryl to come with them,
and Daryl would wanted to go, but his his his
his mom wouldn't let him leave Queens. So it's like
he asked his mom please, but she still said no.
So he was all upset in Paludy looking out of
the window while his friend Joe's off in the Bronx
somewhere rapping on stage, and he's sitting there just reading
his comic books. So here's the thing about Daryl. He
was really shot and he would never imagine himself rapping
in public. And what would happen is they had set
up their turntables in the attic, and so they called
their attic space the lab, and Daryl and Joe would
spend all their time every day in the lab just
messing around, scratching on records, writing rhymes, rapping back and forth.
Speaker 2: And they just did this every day for a long time.
Speaker 6: And this is where they developed their rapid fire exchange,
switching between lines, switching words within a line, that kind
of thing. This is where they developed that real tight
ability to perform together. And it was during this time
that Daryl came up with his first name for himself,
which was Grandmaster Get High, and then later he would
soon change his name to Easy Deep. But what was amazing,
what blew Joe out of the water and made him
a big believer in Darryl, was that this meek, mild
mannered Clark Kent, who didn't want to get picked on,
would go up in the lab and come up with
the most vicious, tough guy rhymes that could just blow
anybody off the street. When he was rapping, he transformed
into the Superman version of himself. But Joe couldn't get
him to perform anywhere, so across the street or nearby
you had too what they called it two fifths part
It was on two hundred and fifth Street, and this
was the park that was the scene for all the
parties in the Hollis that were going on. So these
DJ these kids that were figuring out how to be
a DJ by listening to these mixtapes or maybe going
to a club show in the Bronx, they'd come back
and they'd try these things. They were hooking up their
turntables in Two Fists Park and throwing their own parties,
And so there was a competition among DJs to see
who could draw the biggest crowd and who can keep
the party going the best. And at this time the
best DJ in Hollis playing at Two Fist Park was
a guy named Jazzy Jace who was a member of
the Two Fists Down Crew. And so every once in
a while Joe could get Daryl out of his house
and he wasn't allowed to leave Queen's but they'd go
down to the park when the parties were going on.
Especially when Jazzy Jase was on the turntables, and all
these kids were just eager to get on the mic
and wrap. They wanted to wrap, they wanted to wrap.
Joe was bringing his own microphone. He's like, just just
plug it in, just let me wrap. He would, he'd
blow everybody away. But this is the scene that kind
of created that competition among rappers. You were no longer
just praising the DJ, but you were also trying to
convince people how good you were and that you were
and you were the best person on the microphone. And
it was this scene where DJ Run really honed his skills.
But there's his friend Darryl hanging in the back of
the crowd, not saying a word. Now, Joe knows what
Daryl's got inside him, but nobody else knows.
Speaker 2: So Jazz Jas, whose real name is Jason Mizel, he
was like the tough guy. He was a street guy, Okay.
Speaker 6: Darryl and Joe were both stable, loving homes, comfortable middle
class existence, good normal, safe lives, and they were considered
by the guys in the park to be soft, right,
and Jason was somebody who was hard. He was a
tough guy. He was from the streets. He was the
kind of guy that was friends with everybody. He was
friends with the straight A students and the nerds, but
he's also friends with the guys on the corner dealing drugs,
the tough guys that you wanted to stay away from.
Speaker 2: He got to be friends with them too.
Speaker 6: So Jason had cred and so, and he knew Joe
from school.
Speaker 2: They were the same grade together at school.
Speaker 6: So when Daryl and Joe would come over to the park,
Jason was the guy looking out for him.
Speaker 2: Nobody messed with Daryl and Joe because Jason said so.
Speaker 6: And if jed he Jace doesn't want you messing with
those guys, then you know they must be cool. During
this time in the early eighties that Joseph is continuing
to bug Russell to make a record. He wants to
make a record, he wants to make a record, and
Russell keeps putting them off. But in nineteen eighty two,
Larry Smith and Trevor Gale and Eddie Martinez, the three
guys who had helped perform the music the session players
who had performed on Christmas rapping, they formed their own
band called Orange Crush and that's crush spelled with a K,
and they were signed by Rush Management and the biggest
song they put out was called Action. It was sung
by Alison Williams, who was also a Rush client. But
what's significant about it is that it had a beat
that Russ particularly really liked. So in eighty two, sugar
Hill Records run at the top of the business was
collapsing because they had signed a bunch of acts after
the success of Rappers Delight, such as Grandmaster Flash and
the Furious Five and Mellie Mail and all these kind
of guys, and so during this time CBS Right Columbia
Records approached sugar Hill for.
Speaker 2: A like to be their partner for distribution.
Speaker 6: There's a major label coming around wanting to sign them up,
but then Columbia ended up backing.
Speaker 2: Out of that.
Speaker 6: They were kind of scared off by some shady business
practices they were seeing and this would later be a
factor in them wanting to sign Deaf Jam because they
were still looking for a wrap label, but they didn't
want to be in.
Speaker 2: Business with sugar Hill, but they did.
Speaker 6: Sugar Hill did sign a major distribution deal with MCA Records.
The problem was that deal was brokered by a guy
from the and very quickly that relationship with MCA Records
started to fall apart and they were in legal trouble
and they were find themselves in litigation in court. And
this is why sugar Hill kind of fell off the map.
It created a space in the market for somebody else
to step up, and so this is the landscape er Inn.
When Trevor Gale, the drummer for Orange Crush, comes to
Russ and says, I've written a rap song. I want
to make a record out of it. Well, Russ didn't
care about. He didn't care about this guy's a little okay, great,
you wrote some rhymes whatever. He's like, okay, sure, you
know what. Joey has been bugging me to record a record,
So I'm gonna go talk to Joey. He can wrap
this for you. But Joey's like, cool, I want to
do it. Let me bring my friend Daryl. Russell says, no,
I don't like Daryl, so what are you talking about.
Russ saw nothing in Daryl they gave him any confidence
that he could be a recording star. Like he didn't
like his style, he didn't like his voice, he didn't
like his mannerism, his personality. It was too withdrawn. We're
not using Darryl. You can get over it. So Joseph
doesn't like that, but they record anyway. They do a
demo of a song called street Kid, and it is
a solo DJ run song that they record, and they
proceed to then shop around to record labels to find
somebody who will take care of for him, and nobody
buys it, nobody wants it, so they're dead in the
water and Joseph is dejected and he feels like that's it.
Speaker 2: I had my shot. Now I'm not gonna be a rapper.
Speaker 6: I'm not gonna I'm not gonna be making record, so
I gotta find something else to do.
Speaker 3: Meanwhile, Daryl has enrolled at Saint John's University.
Speaker 6: So by this time it's the fall of nineteen eighty two.
They seemed like they had a good run. It was fun,
but you gotta get on with life, and so Daryl
and Joe and Jason all end up enrolling at different
colleges in the fall of eighty two. Darryl is at
Saint John's University studying to be a business major, and
Joe he is enrolled at LaGuardia Community College to study
mortuary science.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 6: Wow, I guess he decided that if he was going
to slay all suckers who perpetrate, so he's going to
class to be a mortician. Okay, bummed out about his
record falling flat. At this time, there's a hit song
by Grandmaster of Flash and the Furious Five called The Message.
Speaker 2: It's like a jungle Sometimes it makes me wonder how
I keep them going.
Speaker 6: So this song was a huge hit, and it painted
a bleak story of life in New York City, and
Run was inspired to do something similar. So he came
up with the idea of a song called It's Like That,
which just tells the story of how times can be tough.
And so he calls up his friend Darryl and says,
I want to I have this idea for a song
like kind of like the Message.
Speaker 2: It's going to be called It's Like That. Let's see
what we can do with this, Okay, And.
Speaker 6: So Darryl, daydreaming in English class at Saint John's University,
writes the lyrics to It's Like That. It shows it
to Joe, Joe loves it. They take it to Russ.
Russ looks at it and says, this is great. I
want to record this right away. Considering that they had
tried this solo song street Kid with Joe and it
had gone nowhere. He finally relents and says, okay, fine,
Darryl can be on the record with you. And so
they recruit Larry Smith from Orange Crush to be the
producer on the session, and they go into the studio
and Daryl and Joe record.
Speaker 2: It's like that.
Speaker 6: They record the song, and now they need to find
a record label that'll carry it, and they shop it
around again, no biers. They shop it around to majors,
nobody's interested. They can't find anybody that will buy it.
And Russell's desperate at this point. You know, He's trying
to place this record for his brother. He remembers that
Genius Wrap by Doctor Jekyl and mister Hyde had saved
Profile Records.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 6: So he calls them up and this is a struggling, small, tiny,
little independent record label and said that he had this
record for him, and he said, I want this much
money for it, and Profile Records said no, we'll take
it for half that much money, and Russell, with no
other choices, said fine, we'll take the deal. And so
that cut rate deal, Profile Records released It's like that,
and so that original twelve inch immediately took off boom.
It ended up selling like twenty thousand copies of just
this twelve inch. Now they needed it very quickly. They
needed a B side for this single, so they had
to come up with something fast. So what they did
is they turned to the rhymes that they had had
for a long time. These were rhymes they had come
up with in the park and in the attic in
their lab that they had had for a while. They
just dug through their notebook, found some old words, and
then for the track went back to Larry Smith and
Russell said, hey, you know that beat from Action that
I like so much, I want to reuse that. Let's
use the groove that Orange Crush.
Speaker 2: Had on Action.
Speaker 6: And so Sucker MC's used the Orange Crush groove, and
so they subtitled the song Crush Groove Won because it's
the same beat that Orange Crush had used on Action,
which is.
Speaker 3: Where you get the name for the movie later.
Speaker 2: On, exactly.
Speaker 6: And so this song was called Sucker MC's and this
song where It's like that was the.
Speaker 2: A side and blew up and was a hit on
the radio.
Speaker 6: It was the B side that blew up on the
clubs of the club scene because this was something brand new,
This was something that nobody else was doing.
Speaker 2: It was nothing but beat, scratch and rhymes.
Speaker 6: These were those battle rhymes that Ron had to come
up with in the park in order to stay on
the mic and not let anybody else have it.
Speaker 2: And he put it all on this record at a time.
Speaker 6: When other people are putting in softer sounds and trying
to be more musical. They're just coming straight from the street,
just the beat, just the rhymes, and this record single
handedly took rap from this original breakbeat culture and introduced
the drum machine as the sound of choice and define
the sound.
Speaker 2: Of rap for the rest of the decade.
Speaker 6: So they put out It's like that with the B
side of Sucker MC's and it's huge.
Speaker 2: They now have a reason to go on the road
and perform.
Speaker 6: This song would end up cracking the top twenty of
the Black Singles Chart and peak at number fifteen. So
it was in April of nineteen eighty three that Joseph
Simmons had his moment where he's walking down the hallways
at LaGuardia Community College, I guess getting ready to go
work on a cadaver or something, and he hears it's
like that coming out of the radio that somebody else
has in the hallway there, and he has that moment
where he just goes nuts.
Speaker 2: That's my song, that's my song, that's my song.
Speaker 4: That's awesome.
Speaker 6: Over at Saint John's University, Daryl turned in his official
notice for leave of absence, and he proudly says that
he's been absent ever since. So here we are in
the spring of eighty three and it's time for run
DMC to perform for the first time.
Speaker 2: Now, imagine Daryl McDaniels.
Speaker 6: He's only performed in the attic when he's drunk, and
he's supposed to get out on stage in front of everybody.
Speaker 2: But here's the thing.
Speaker 6: Joe had been telling Jazzy Jase, Hey man, when my
brother's gonna make a record for me, when I do,
you're gonna be my DJ.
Speaker 2: You're gonna be my DJ. And Jason's like, yeah, whatever, whatever.
Speaker 6: Finally they have a record and they've got a gig
and he's like, hey, be ready, we're gonna come get
you and so. So Jason's had nothing to do with
creation of these songs, but he's gonna be the guy
that's on stage with them as the DJ. Just like
the BC Boys had to bring in DJ Double Lor,
they needed to bring in somebody to be their DJ.
Speaker 2: Jazzy Jase was gonna be their guy.
Speaker 3: He's not like super complex in what he does with
the turntables. He's not, you know, flamboyant or anything, but
he is like clockwork precision on what he does. He
is simple, but he does not make mistakes. He is
a metronome of timing and he's reliable.
Speaker 2: That's exactly right.
Speaker 6: I've seen them in concert three different times, and what
strikes me about Jason Mizel is that he is controlling
the show.
Speaker 2: It might not be obvious.
Speaker 6: From the crowd what he's doing, but he's running the
stage shows. He's controlling the flow of everything that's going
on in their act. And so this is the guy
they wanted for their very first gig. As it turns out,
they forgot to pick him up. They left from Manhattan
without him. Russ had found a second gig from earlier
in the same day, and they had to hurry up
and get over there, and they left Jason behind, and
so Run and Deep go for their first day ever
of gigs and they've.
Speaker 2: Got two in one day.
Speaker 6: And Jason's back at the park and Queen like that
was my shot.
Speaker 2: You know, he's in tears. He's like, I can't believe
I messed up.
Speaker 6: He's probably glad that he did not go, because those
gigs were a complete disaster. The first gig proved to
be an office party with a bunch of stiff suits.
I have absolutely no idea what rap was. It was
like under fluorescent lights, you know, in the middle of
the afternoon, right, And to make matters worse, Daryl and
Joe had to share a single microphone.
Speaker 2: When you think about.
Speaker 6: What they do where they're switching lines back and forth
real quickly, they had to like huddle like cheek the cheek,
real close to each other, awkwardly around this one mic
to a bunch of people that had no idea what
they were doing. And it was it fell completely flat.
It was it was dumb, and it was terrible. That night,
they went to the legendary disco Fever, one of the
top clubs for this whole scene, to perform it's like
that and Sucker MC's the only two songs they have
and they've been on the radio and they it out
there and they don't have their look figured out yet.
They're wearing their daddy's suits, suit.
Speaker 3: Jackets, plaid like imagine Bob Bucker and his plaid sports jacket.
That's what these guys were wearing at their first show.
They were not cool men in black. They were out
of this world crazy.
Speaker 6: So the club and this is a hardcore you know,
this is a club in the Bronx and they're laughing
at them and they find out they're from Queens. Oh
forget it, get these Queens people out of here.
Speaker 2: And they're laughing at these guys. Well, what is this like?
Where your daddy's clothes day? It was his career day.
What are you doing? So it was humiliating.
Speaker 6: It was a complete disaster, and Darryl in particular just
wanted to crawl under a rock. He was like, I quit,
I'm done, I can't do this, you know, there's no way. Well,
luckily for all of us, they were able to talk
him into persisting.
Speaker 2: But that first day of gigs was a complete disaster.
Speaker 4: Wow.
Speaker 2: But they did go.
Speaker 6: On the road, and they again hustling every day planned
they began driving outside of New York City and they
were they were lining up more and more gigs, and
they had Jason with them. And it was at these shows,
in a moment of an improvised rhyme, that d renamed
him instead of Jazzy Jase, he was known as jam
Master J jam Master J. And by this time, Daryl McDaniels,
who had been going by Easy D, had come up
with the name DMC. By playing with his last name
of Daryl Mack Daryl McDaniels, he came up with DMC.
He decided that it would stand for Devastating Mike Controller YEP,
and Russell agreed to it because his favorite car was
from the DeLorean Motor Company.
Speaker 4: Yes, are you telling me.
Speaker 2: You built a time machine kind of a delaureate.
Speaker 6: It was during the It's Like That recording sessions that
Russell informed them that their name was going to be
run DMC.
Speaker 2: Okay, that's your name.
Speaker 5: Okay, So I've got a story about how they got
their name. So you talked about how he was playing
with the letters from their last name, and of course
run gets his name from way back from DJ Run
and so Russell says, you guys are going to be
called Run DMC and they're like, no.
Speaker 4: That's terrible, No, we're ruined. This is horrible.
Speaker 5: They wanted to be called like the the Treacherous Tussome
or the Dynamic Duo or the Gruesome Tussom. They had
all this uh you know the people that.
Speaker 2: They looked at for Yeah, numbers in their names.
Speaker 4: Yeah, well you had.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 5: All the guys before them had these long, elaborate, cool names.
Speaker 2: The Furious five four, the Treacher's three Cold Crush Brothers.
Speaker 4: Yes, and Russell's like, nope, you guys are run DMC.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 6: They hated it because it broke from the naming conventions
of the time. They thought it sounded stupid, like what
is that. It served them well, though, because they had
such a new sound and a new look that that
new type of name just only further served to really
establish them as something new.
Speaker 4: That's a really cool name.
Speaker 5: And in fact, just to go along with that, their
logo is phenomenal. You showed me a shirt this week
where you were out shopping and found that shirt and
like hipsters wear it. Now they have it as onesies
and stuff, like that and it's really cool, and he
actually said I heard Daryl McDaniel say that somebody told
him that the three most effective logos out.
Speaker 4: There were Coca Cola, McDonald's, and run DMC.
Speaker 2: I believe it.
Speaker 6: By the fall of eighty three, Run DMC had found
themselves as the opening act for a variety of headliners,
including Cameo, Midnight Star, and The Gap.
Speaker 5: Band Okay Wait Wait Wait, wait wait wait Cameo, famous
for the song word Up. Yes, the Gap Band and
I know it's from Oklahoma City and their song is.
Speaker 4: You Dropped a Bomb on Me? Yes, okay? And what
was the other one?
Speaker 2: Midnight Star?
Speaker 4: Midnight Star, I got nothing.
Speaker 6: No parking on the dance floor, Oh okay, okay, and
uh freakazoid.
Speaker 5: There it is there it is okay, yeah, okay, cool okay.
Speaker 6: Also, and this is weird enough, Run DMC only had
one single out of this time. As far as anybody
knew they were, they could have just been a one
hit wonder right here. In the fall of eighty three,
there was actually an episode of The Jeffersons that featured
run DMC's one and only song, It's Like That, and
it was performed on that episode by all people, by
Sister Sledge.
Speaker 4: Wow, so wonderful.
Speaker 3: I am confident. I think I probably watched every episode
of the Jeffersons. I think I probably saw that. That's interesting.
I was break dancing at the time, so I probably
I bet I was wise enough to go, why is
this girl group singing my rap song right now?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 3: But they didn't do after that job.
Speaker 6: So as eighty three is rolling into eighty four, Run
DMC is staying on the road playing shows, and Russell
and Larry Smith go back into the studio to work
on more material. The first thing they do is come
out with another two sided single that follows the same
pattern as it's like that in Sucker eam C's which
is a song called hard Times, which again follows that
the message template of talking about how tough things can
be right.
Speaker 2: And on the b side was a song called jam
Master Jam.
Speaker 5: That's the jay Ron D I heard about this, So
Darryl McDaniels talks about this too. He said they had
to write a song called jam Master J. They had
to have some way of introducing him as part of
the band.
Speaker 4: Okay, it's a three part band.
Speaker 5: You have Ron, you have DMC, and everybody in the
crowd is going, Okay, I get it.
Speaker 4: He's Ron, He's DMC. Who in the hell is that?
Speaker 5: And so they had to use that song as a
way to introduce him and sort of unite him as
that third member of the band.
Speaker 2: Not only did they do that with the song, but
they would go on.
Speaker 6: To sample this song throughout the rest of their careers
because this is the part where he goes run DMC
and jam Master J and he's cutting on RUNT and
all his future records, and in their live shows, jam
Master J is the first one on stage and he's
he's cutting on these.
Speaker 2: Names that are mentioned on this song.
Speaker 6: It's jam Master J record on the turntable that he's
using to bring the act out on stage and the
hype the crowd.
Speaker 2: So that song is significant for that reason.
Speaker 6: As a matter of fact, there's a lyric in that
song that goes, we're five, not four.
Speaker 2: Not three, just two two. MC's with the claim to fame.
Speaker 6: Okay, When Darryl says we're not five, we're not four
or not three, just two, he's calling.
Speaker 2: Out his competition.
Speaker 6: He is specifically referencing the Furious five, the Funky four,
the Treacherous three, and so this is another example of
just these battle rhymes as confrontational aggressive nature that Run
DMC was bringing to the records. The A side record,
hard Times was actually a Curtis Blow song. He had
recorded a version earlier. So this came out and it
also did well, but it began to create a split
between Russell and Larry.
Speaker 2: So Russell was all about beat.
Speaker 6: Only, just give me the beat, nothing but the beat,
and Larry Smith, who had a long career as a
session player, he was trying to bring more musicality to
these records, and whenever he would introduce musical or melodic elements,
Russell would get mad and say, you're just trying to
soften the sound. I don't want to soften. So then
one day they're in the studio. Now you have to understand,
Larry is somebody that been playing bands for years, including
rock music, and they take run In Daryl to the
studio to record a song that they've got ready, but
they have to wait for the recording booths to come
open because inside is the hard rock group called Riot
and Ryot is busy recording a song and they're banging
away and wailing a way on their guitars, and the
guys sitting out in the lobby can't help, but hear
it right, and Larry's grooven to it, and Russ is like,
you know what, we can be loud to run, And
so after Daryl and Joe recorded their parts that day,
Russ said, why don't we try to add some guitar.
Speaker 2: The way Riot was doing this.
Speaker 6: Was after the Run Indeed recorded their raps, and so
Larry calls up his friend Eddie Martinez, who had played
guitar on Christmas wrapping and had been an orange crush
with him. They said, can you come over here and
lay down some guitar tracks for us? So Eddie Martinez
did that, and this became the first.
Speaker 2: Rock rap fusion known as rock box Boy.
Speaker 4: Something is drinking, Run.
Speaker 6: Wow, Lawn Troll, the kind of guy back, Darling, I'm
drop the guy you fixed the fawn my name, we
talked the simith on my middle names one and when
I'm rocking it all.
Speaker 4: Then we got a funny billy and.
Speaker 5: I mean everybody's credits walked this way as being the
first rock rap combination.
Speaker 4: It's not. It's right here.
Speaker 3: This is rock box Yeah and it's this is the
first one that's on MTV. This is the first rap
song on MTV.
Speaker 6: That's right, so it Run DMC were the group that
pioneered introducing rock and roll sounds to rap, but it
was not well this way, it was rock Box.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 6: Eddie Martinez is a name that you've mentioned before on
your show because he would.
Speaker 2: He was a career session player.
Speaker 6: He played for a lot of big guys like David
Lee Roth and Mick Jagger and all these people. But
he's perhaps most famously known for playing the guitar part
in Robert Palmer's Addicted to Love.
Speaker 3: Wow Wow, You that mentioned that I love Addicted to Love.
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 6: Yeah, So the guitar player on Addicted to Love is
the same guy wailing away on run DMC's rock Box.
Speaker 3: That is awesome.
Speaker 4: That was a great nugget, right there, man.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Another great nugget is one of the three of us
is actually dressed up as Robert Palmer on Halloween with
his wife, one of the dancing guitarists.
Speaker 5: My wife and I dressed up as the Addicted to
Love video. So I had a black tie and a
white suit or white shirt, and she had her hair
slipped back and all the makeup on it was awesome.
Speaker 2: Yep.
Speaker 6: And this was coming at a time when like the
Furious Five and Mellie mel and Zulu Nation, they were
all wearing these elaborate costumes, almost like the Village People, right,
a lot of studded leather and headdresses and just kind
of just crazy disco flamboyant costumes. And run DMC are
just wearing their street clothes. Right, They're in leather suits,
so they're in Adidas track suits, and they've got they've
got their their stetson hats whatever you call those fedoras.
This came straight from Jason Mizell's personal fashion sense. This
is how he dressed, and they just kind of adopted
that look and they said, look, we're just gonna be real.
Speaker 2: This is coming from Russell, just be real.
Speaker 6: And so this new look and this new sound, this
new aggressive sound, this firmly established the new school of
hip hop. This was hip hop three point zero with
run DMC.
Speaker 2: And with this.
Speaker 6: Album, we now moved into a different era. We kind
of leave the seventies and the early eighties behind. We're
moving into the mid eighties where run DMC is going
to Reign Supreme. Suddenly with this album, everybody that came
before them looks old and corny and obsolete, and that includes.
Speaker 2: Sugar Hill Records.
Speaker 6: So there's a space in the marketplace for a new
label to step up. Well, this is the summer of
nineteen eighty four, and we've already talked about it. At
this point, Russell has already met Rick Rubin, and that
summer they established deaf Jam Records as their label. And
immediately Russ wants to get run DMC signed to deaf
Jam and he can't do it. Profile Records realize they
just had a winning lottery ticket land in their lap
and they are not letting go of run DMC.
Speaker 2: Uh huh so.
Speaker 6: And so ironically, Russell, who ended up leading the biggest
rap label in history, whose brother was in the biggest
rap act in history, he never had his brother.
Speaker 2: On his own on his label. Wow. Wow, run DMC
never recorded for def Jam.
Speaker 4: That's insane. I did not know that. I just figured
that was a lock.
Speaker 2: What happened though.
Speaker 6: In the fall of eighty four, there was a concert
promoter down in Florida.
Speaker 2: His name was Ricky Walker.
Speaker 6: He was somebody that had managed tours before for the
Commodores and.
Speaker 2: For the Jacksons.
Speaker 6: He just had this idea that he can get a
bunch of rap acts together and some of these break
dancers that were in the movies that were coming out
and put together a packaged tour. So he went to
sugar Hill Records, but they were having tough times and
they couldn't come to terms.
Speaker 2: So because sugar Hill.
Speaker 6: He couldn't come to agreement with them, he approached Rush Entertainment,
Rush Management, who then agreed to provide all of the talent,
and so they put together a tour that was called
the Fresh Fest. It had Curtis blow Houdini run DMC,
and the Fat Boys were a group not managed by Rush,
but were being produced by Curtis.
Speaker 5: Okay, so just a minute ago you were mentioning jam
Master j being sort of in charge of their fashion,
and they dressed in their street clothes, and it was
the jogging suits and this and that I believe, correct
me if I'm wrong. But the non shoelace bearing Adidas
was part of that fashion.
Speaker 3: Is that correct?
Speaker 2: Yes?
Speaker 5: And the reason why those shoes didn't have shoelaces is
because when you went to jail, they took your shoelaces away.
Speaker 4: It's kind of similar to the modern day guys who
don't wear belts and they wear.
Speaker 5: Their pants down low because they take your belt away
when you go to jail.
Speaker 3: We run DMC was non fellon shoes.
Speaker 5: Well, and that's that's the thing is they said, my
Adidas only brings good news.
Speaker 2: Right, excellent, that's good stuff.
Speaker 4: Okay.
Speaker 6: So the Fresh Past was hugely successful. It toured in
at the end of eighty four. It made three point
five million dollars in just twenty seven dates, and it
succeeded in taking wrap out of the Bronx and taking
it across the country. Okay, But and this was during
a time when Russ was trying to get run DMC
to Deaf Jam. They had Deft Jam had just signed
their big deal with Columbia Records, got their six hundred
thousand dollars that we talked about, and he wanted to
bring run DMC over and he couldn't do it and
Profile wouldn't let him go, and run DMC needed cash,
so they ended up rushing their next studio album. They
got back together with Larry Smith and they went back
in the studio without really having a clear vision of
what they wanted to do, and they didn't have all
their material ready, but they had to get an album
out because they needed money. What we ended up with
was the album King of Rock, which they will say
that is their weakest of their early albums, and the
reason why is that they just didn't have a clear
centered vision. And so you see a little bit of
Ruben's influence on the King of Rock album.
Speaker 2: There's a song called Ken You.
Speaker 6: Rocket Like This that was actually written by ll cool
J that was due to Ruben's influence. There's a single
off the album called jam Master Jammin that Ruben actually
played guitar on for the single version, and their title
track was called King of Rock, and that was definitely
under the influence of Rick Rubin and it was their
second attempt to mail rock and roll with rap. It
was kind of the thematic sequel to rock Box. It's
called King of Rock. It is awesome. It's one of
their best songs. I absolutely love King of Rock.
Speaker 2: I'm the King, Oh Rock, hiom to call me Sia
to pock King, you must sue Sia.
Speaker 4: I'll don't stop rock and tell I retire.
Speaker 3: Have you seen the King of Rock video.
Speaker 5: Yes, if you watched if you watched MTV in nineteen
eighty five, you saw the King of Rock video.
Speaker 6: So run DMC was the first rap group to have
a video played on MTV. It was Rock Box. They
were back the very next year with King of Rock.
And I remember seeing this video very clearly. It's got
the uh, it's got Bud Melman in it.
Speaker 5: That the old guy, yes guy, he was hilarious from
the David Letterman Show.
Speaker 6: So nineteen eighty five, you know, that's also the year
of We Are the World by USA for Africa, and
it became this massive, massive pro to fight starvation in Africa.
Speaker 2: And in Ethiopia.
Speaker 6: Yes, this led Bob Geldoff to the idea of organizing
Live Aid. Live A took place in July of nineteen
eighty five that probably deserves its own episode from you,
as this enormous project, two simultaneous concerts in London and
Philadelphia on the same day.
Speaker 2: It was like the Woodstock of the eighties.
Speaker 6: Yes, place on July thirteenth, and they were booking all
these guys at the press conference in the weeks leading
up to this massive event that people could hardly get
their brains around how big this was gonna be. It
began to dawn on people that they hardly had any
black artists at all anywhere in the lineup, and they
didn't have any rappers, And they started catching a little
bit of pr heat, and they were trying to say
that they were reaching out to black artists and that
nobody was accepting them. That turned out that wasn't true.
They were just kind of trying to cover for themselves.
Russell Rush management reached out to Live Aid and said, Hey,
what about my guys. I've got two albums and on
the top two highst I've got five singles and the
and the top twenty the black singles, I've got videos
and heavy rotation on MTV. How about you booked my
guys on your show? They said, sorry, we don't have
any room. We're booked up solid. Well that was a
problem because they found out later that after run DMC
had been told that, only then did The Beach Boys,
Madonna and Tina Turner get offered spots.
Speaker 2: On the bill.
Speaker 4: The Beach Boys.
Speaker 2: Okay, okay, don't don't don't.
Speaker 4: I know that's your thing, right.
Speaker 2: Don't distract me on the Beach Boys we'll be here tomorrow.
Speaker 4: I'm sorry.
Speaker 5: In nineteen eighty five, Madonna makes sense, Tina Turner makes sense,
run DMC makes sense.
Speaker 2: And the Beach Boys Okay, all right, okay boys always
makes sense.
Speaker 5: Okay, okay, okay.
Speaker 6: So with increasing negative publicity they really started backtracking, and
finally they went to run DMC and offered them a
spot on the bill.
Speaker 2: So we want you to play at live A. So
did run DMC play live? Aid? Yes, they did. Did
anybody see them? Essentially?
Speaker 1: No.
Speaker 6: They came on at ten fifteen in the morning on
the Philadelphia stage and they played about a twelve minute set.
They played two songs, they played King of Rock and
they played jam Master Jamming. So the way this, if
it worked, they would alternate between London and Philadelphia, Okay.
So it started with a on the Philadelphia stage. Just
before run DMC went on was a reunion performance by
Black Sabbath at ten o'clock in the morning.
Speaker 5: Okay, the only might be sot them early.
Speaker 6: So when that was over, they cut to char Day
playing on the London stage. And so while she's playing
the stage getting set back up for Philadelphia, h okay,
keep going, okay, so he goes from Black Sabbath in
Philly straight to Charday and London.
Speaker 2: They come back to Philly and.
Speaker 6: It's run dmcy Okay, Run DMC gets part of one
song out and then they cut away from them and
the rest of their performance is not televised. And the
reason why is they're doing this big introduction in London
for STEM and so Sting gets all the airtime and
run DMC basically gets cut out of the broadcast. But
they did step on stage at Live Aid and the
poor got paid.
Speaker 4: There You go, hey, that's that's better than a kick
in the vans.
Speaker 6: Just a couple of weeks after Live Aid they appeared
on Dick Clark's American Bandstand and that was followed shortly
thereafter by Freshfest eighty five, where they restaged the concert
tour from the year before with the same talent lineup,
this time twice as many cities and they made twice
as much money. It was hugely successful in getting hip
hop out to the masses, but this time among the
breakdancers it included the twelve year old son of the
tour manager, little boy by the name of Jermaine dupri
that you may have heard of.
Speaker 2: So speeding through nineteen eighty five.
Speaker 6: The Crush Groove movie comes out in October, and during
this time, Russ is trying to capitalize on run DMC's popularity,
and he actually approaches The Cosby Show to try to
get run DMC booked on an episode of The Cosby Show,
and Bill Cosby said, you can have a coke and
the smile and.
Speaker 2: Get out of here.
Speaker 6: We don't want that kind of music on my show,
and so they were turned down.
Speaker 5: For those who don't remember, The Cosby Show was a
humongous thing. If they could have landed The Cosby Show,
that would have been they would have been handed the
keys to the kingdom. I mean, that was a hugely
popular show.
Speaker 6: Well, as it turns out, Malcolm Jamal Warner was a
huge run DMC fan.
Speaker 4: Is that right? Okay?
Speaker 6: Phil?
Speaker 2: And the guy playing Theo Huxable on The Cosby Show.
Speaker 6: And at the same time, NBC was running a program
called Friday Night Videos. Yes, and so even though Bill
Cosby didn't want that kind of music on his show,
they at the time that the Crush Groove movie came out,
Malcolm Jamal Warner and Lisa Bonnet reprised their Cosby Show.
Characters from the set of The Cosby Show recorded a
segment in character for Friday Night Videos where they introduced
run DMC's next music video.
Speaker 2: And they played the King of Rock clip.
Speaker 6: Not there, not their video that had been all over MTV,
but the clip from the Crush Groove movie which was.
Speaker 2: Coming out at the same time.
Speaker 6: Okay, so they got they ran it in the round
around uh around Bill Cosby there.
Speaker 2: So basically as soon as.
Speaker 6: The fresh Fest was over, there was another opportunity to
work on a couple of other charity songs. This was
at a time when apartheid in South Africa was kind
of at its worst and there was a growing sentiment
among entertainers for a boycott for for playing their sun
City was this huge resort for the white people in
South Africa where they would pay enormous amounts of money
for entertainers to come play. But it was getting to
the point where like you could not in good conscience
do that because of the apartheid that was going on,
the racial discrimination that was in South Africa. And so
a musician you may have heard of by the name
of Stephen van Zandt decided to record a record to
bring attention to this situation.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he had a pretty big part in an album
in nineteen eighty four.
Speaker 2: He's from Bruce Bringsteen's East Street band, Yep, Yep, yep.
Speaker 6: He's very political and he was able to rally all
these artists together to make this record.
Speaker 2: He got like fifty of them, more than fifty of them, but.
Speaker 6: First among them was run DMC and so they put
this song out and it was a huge success, and
it was a huge success that did a lot to
bring attention to what was going on in South Africa.
At the time that they were approached, Daryl and Joe
knew nothing about any of it, and so they learned
all about it and they so of course they supported
this project and the song was called sun City, and
New York Times ended up naming it the Single of.
Speaker 2: The Year for nineteen eighty five. Wow.
Speaker 6: At the same time, January of eighty six is just
around the corner and it's going to be the first
ever MLK holiday and Martin Luther King's son Dexter King,
decided he wanted to produce a rap record to teach
kids about his father and the work he had done,
and so he approached Run DMC and Curtis Blow and
New Edition Lebarge Lisa Lisa. All these artists collaborated on
a song called King Holiday Fellow Creation, and they wanted
to get it out in time for the middle of
January for the first first iteration of this Holiday That's Coming.
Speaker 2: But the record label would not give them the money
for a music video.
Speaker 6: So guess who came to the rescue and provided his
own money to make sure the music video happened.
Speaker 2: Prince Whoa.
Speaker 6: He'd been unable to participate in the record because he
was busy filming Under the Cherry Moon, but he came
back and provided the money and allowed.
Speaker 2: This music video to be made.
Speaker 3: That's awesome.
Speaker 4: Let me just make a comment.
Speaker 5: I can't let that go without saying Under the Cherry
Moon is one of the worst movies of the nineteen eighties.
Purple Rain awesome, Under the Cherry Moon not awesome.
Speaker 2: Keep going, okay.
Speaker 6: So that gets us to nineteen eighty six, and it
is these early months of nineteen eighty six where they
begin working on their next album that will be Raising Hell.
At this point, Larry Smith is out of the picture,
and Rick Rubin, who had worked on King of Rock,
and Ken You Rocket like This and jam Master Jammin.
He took over as the producer for this new project.
The table was set for Run DMC. This was their
career making moment. They knew that everything had lined up
for this to be the album to put them over
the top. Okay, because they had unprecedented visibility. They had
live a, they had an American bandstand. They had been on
these charity songs that had gotten a lot of play.
They had appeared on TV shows, they were in a movie. Okay,
everybody knew who they were. At the same time, llll
cool Jay's first album had come out, so that's that.
Speaker 2: Ellen Cooley's first album is called Radio.
Speaker 6: It was also produced by Rick Rubin, so there's actually
a hip hop trilogy by.
Speaker 2: Ruben and Radio was the first one to be released. Wow,
and it came out. It was huge. There were several
hits from it.
Speaker 6: And this created an immense competition between Ron and LL
cool J. They really had this contentious relationship that was
very combative and they are trying to out wrap each other.
They would have these freestyle rins battles backstage and Run
would get mad at ll thinking he was trying to
cop his style and all this kind of stuff. The
album had come out and was huge, and so Run
was like, I gotta be better than ll.
Speaker 2: This was the moment all eyes were on Run DMC.
Speaker 6: They were never gonna have the table set for them,
and the competition was fierce, so they had to come
with a grand slam. They didn't like the way King
of Rock had turned out, and so they were determined
to make sure that the next album would be the
best it could possibly be. And with that attitude, they
went into the studios with Rick Rubin and started laying
down tracks for what would prove to be their greatest
album in their career and one of the greatest ever
in the history of rap.
Speaker 3: So are we ready to jump in track by track?
Speaker 4: Next week?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 4: Next week? What we're gonna go? Track by track?
Speaker 5: We'll go through each of these songs from Raising Hell
well and we will talk again with Deaf Dave.
Speaker 3: Dear listeners, if you have been with us this long,
please don't forget to hit that follow button in the face.
Make sure to check us out on Facebook and Twitter,
and if you want to send us an email, you
can hit us at Shirleypodcast at gmail dot com. Thank
you so much for listening, Dave. It has been awesome
to hear these stories. Thank you so much.
Speaker 2: Thanks for having me on. I love talking about this stuff.
Speaker 3: We will be back with Deaf Dave next week and
go through Raisin Hell track by track.
Speaker 4: See you then, Peter, Pip, Pig pappas time exact me
nimble what nimble?
Speaker 6: Any what?
Speaker 4: Quick but jam