Speaker 1: This is a podcast from Minute Media.
Speaker 2: 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 3: I don't know, man.
Speaker 1: I'm feeling pretty bad, but not bad meaning bad, bad
meaning good.
Speaker 4: It's so tricky. Yeah, welcome back, everybody.
Speaker 1: 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 5: These are the trend centers. These are the trail blazing albums.
Speaker 1: For hip hop, and we've got with us today our
friend mister David Wright, otherwise known as Deaf Dave.
Speaker 4: How you doing, Dave?
Speaker 3: Do it great?
Speaker 4: David?
Speaker 3: Deaf Dave. My pronouns are the Lord of Lyrics, the
Duke of discussion, and 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 3: 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 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 by
track through the Raising Hell album.
Speaker 1: 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 on 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 going
to 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 4: Here.
Speaker 3: Well, I'm going to pick up the story in the
twentieth century. This time, I'm not going to take you
back to the eighteen hundreds, Okay did 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, Queens, Daniel and Evalynn Simmons gave
birth to their second son, Russell. 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 hallis is that what you're saying?
Speaker 3: That is exactly right? Okay? Okay, good, good, okay. But
if you go back to 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 and with you. So far, 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 giving themselves nicknames.
Speaker 4: Okay.
Speaker 3: And in nineteen seventy 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 he what he would queue 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 queuing 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.
Speaker 4: Hop awesome awesome Okay.
Speaker 3: 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.
This is how you get the term breakdancing.
Speaker 5: The break okay, Yeah, I get it, I get it.
Speaker 4: Okay, I love it.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 5: Wow.
Speaker 1: So in nineteen seventy four, there was a movie that
came out called Earthquake.
Speaker 4: Are you familiar with it? No?
Speaker 3: I don't know this, okay.
Speaker 1: So the movie came out 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 that 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 4: Wow.
Speaker 1: 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 3: So in Jamaica, there's this tradition called dance hall 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 Bee Boys is that he started encouraging the
crowd and hyping them up by grabbing a mic and
starting to give real simple rhymes that was on beat
with the with the braakelop that he was playing. 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
switch or a 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 add the toasting. So what he did
is he delegated that to a friend of his and
that is how Coke Larocke became history's first MC. And
so in the Jamaican toasting halls, they were no master
of ceremonies. So Coke LaRock is the name of the
first MC in hip hop. Now we mentioned Scottlarock 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 Coke LaRock, the very first rapper. This
is all happening at Sedgwick Towers. This is right there
at Herk'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 5: Go Tosh, Hey, every time every time you say two turntables,
I'm like and a microphone. He wanted to say two
turntables and a microphone.
Speaker 3: As it turns out, Cool Hurt 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 first album, Really
Yes Wow. 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 decoplared 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.
Speaker 5: That's fantastic.
Speaker 3: So I'd mentioned that he did not really keep up
with the innovators that would 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 have 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, Hrk 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 electrical 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 hert 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 3: So this is a period of intense creation and innovation.
This is all brand new, so a lot of people
are jumping the 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.
Speaker 4: And.
Speaker 3: 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
then he did it again, and he went back and
forth a few more times, and then he started doing
it in rhythm, and that is how scratching. The technique
of scratching was invented by accident because Theodore Livingstone's mother
scared him.
Speaker 5: You're bringing it strong, tonight, man, you are.
Speaker 3: And so Theodore Livingstone is now better known as Grand
Wizard Theodore.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So he's one of the big names from the seventies
and he's credited with inventing scratching.
Speaker 4: Wow.
Speaker 3: So nineteen seventy five, Colhirk 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. Well. 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
so with his heightened influence that he had from running
these parties, Lance Taylor was able to successfully realize his
vision of how to make the bron It's 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. And he used hip
hop and wrap 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 4: Which is how he happened to be able to hear
Cookie Puss. Is that right? It has to be right? Probably?
So I mean talk about an obscure album. Yeah, three
white kids from Brooklyn, Yeah, yo, I.
Speaker 5: Want to talk to Cookie Puss Man Cookie Puss.
Speaker 3: Okay, So those are the three giants Cool Herk, 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, But what this
created in the seventies was this breakbeat culture, this DJ
party culture. There was something new. It was just kind
of had 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 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 venue.
They would rent out clubs or rent out these venues
to throw their parties, which now these were coming events
that needed to be promoted. In the summertime, they would
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 and the crowd would gather
and 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
known as DJ Hollywood. 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 dinner.
Speaker 5: Wait wait wait rapping like this and like this and.
Speaker 4: Like that, like this is like that is like this,
please do that lots and lots.
Speaker 5: Okay, I got you.
Speaker 3: Keep going okay. 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, the
Baine Bain boogie s hit up, jump the bullget to
the rhythm of the boogeity beat, and that caught on,
so that hip hop hippie to the hippity hip hop. 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 night.
Speaker 5: Nice, nice, great dude, you're hitting grand slam after grand slam.
Speaker 4: Keep going.
Speaker 3: So this initial period from nineteen seventy three at Sedgwick
Towers up through about seventy eight, nineteen seventy eight, this
era was hip hop one point zero. This was the
original scene. This was the grassroots, organic creation of something new,
and it all started in the Bronx.
Speaker 1: 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 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 3: That was Russell Simmons. That's like the Blues Brothers having
that moment in the church where the light hits them
in the doing part will Yeah. 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. And
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 Okay.
And so there was this one night in nineteen seventy
seven at the Charles where they walk in and Eddie
Chiba is wrapping over a looped break or looped intro
to flashlight by Parliament. Just keep your bonds down the up.
Speaker 5: We're gonna do a little like an eel.
Speaker 4: We continue you all with the news this time.
Speaker 3: For you to be real. This was the I see
the light moment. And in that moment 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 to
make money off of it? Yeah, he recognized before anybody else.
He recognized that this was marketable and that people could
get paid.
Speaker 5: Uh huh.
Speaker 3: 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 marketed. He
was the first businessman, the visionary that could turn this
all into something viable. He decided he was going to
get into his own promoter. 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
where he was attending. The program director's name was Curtis Walker,
and so they began promoting their own events. So you
have to understand that Russell was the visionary 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 Raimes.
Now you probably haven't heard of Junior Rames, but you've
heard of his brother, actor Ving Raims.
Speaker 4: Wow.
Speaker 5: Nice, that is a nice nugget right there.
Speaker 3: 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 Blows. You
know where he got blow from? Cocaine?
Speaker 1: 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 3: Wait? Keeping on. 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.
He was flushed with cash. 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 home to Queen's. He'd come in with stacks
of cash late at night, which made a huge impression
on his little brother, Joseph. Little Joey was about thirteen
years 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. So by nineteen seventy 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 bit 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 referred to as DJ Run, you might wonder what
he's not the DJ? So what is his name? DJ Run?
It's because he started out as Curtis Blow's DJ in
nineteen seventy eight.
Speaker 5: As a thirteen year old.
Speaker 3: 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 brand Master Flash.
Speaker 4: 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 3: It was just like his big brother Rush. Run had
a high energy personality, and work rate, and they say
he was always running off at the mouth.
Speaker 5: There you go. Yeah, she's about right.
Speaker 3: So he was a DJ. 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 for me. 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 5: For Billboard, Rocky Ford. That's the one where Rocky Gates
on the Russian.
Speaker 4: Killed Apollo.
Speaker 5: I must break you Rocky Ford.
Speaker 3: 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. It just caught his eye. He
just noticed it when he got off the train. He
saw a little kid hustling around, running around putting up
flyers for parties. And it also had the Rush name
on it, and so this inspired him 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 this story because Russia Entertainment appeared to be the
biggest mover and shaker, you know, 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? Nobody? Nobody, his
worst failure as a promoter. Literally zero people showed up.
Speaker 5: Oh my gosh, that's terrible.
Speaker 3: He had rented the venue, he had paid for the advertising,
and nobody showed up. It broke him. 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 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. 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 wanted to do, 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. They were going to
produce a rap record. 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 was Eddie Chiba. Well,
Russell has Curtis Blow as his one and only client. Well,
Russell wants in on that, but they want Eddie Chiba.
So Russell takes them to a show where both Eddie
Chiba and Curtis Blow are performing on the bill and
it's and it's all on Curtis Blow's shoulders. It's like,
this is on you, buddy, this is your chance, Uh,
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, so like
some kind of movie moment with everything on the line.
Kurt 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, but they're trying
to find a way to present it to the public.
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 him to the punch hit.
Speaker 4: You don't stop the record to the band man.
Speaker 5: Rhythm.
Speaker 3: 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 4: Wow.
Speaker 3: Yeah, here's the problem. Guess how many people had heard
of the sugar Hill Gang before that record came out?
Speaker 5: See nobody, right, nobody.
Speaker 3: Guess how many gigs they had performed in the clubs?
Speaker 4: Zero?
Speaker 3: Zero? Had they even existed before? 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 4: They were a boy band. They were new kids on
the block. Wow. Wow.
Speaker 3: So everybody in America right is loving this song. It
blew up. But everybody in the Bronx, everybody around the
New York area that knew what real hip hop was like,
they hated these guys. They hated them. They were posers,
they were fake. 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 wrap 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 1: Larry Smith is the name I recognize. Isn't Larry the
one that produced the first two run DMC albums?
Speaker 3: Yes? Okay, Okay, So now they have their record. Okay,
they have Christmas Rapping, but how do they get it out?
They need a label. So Russ pulls off this ingenious scam.
First of all, he sends copies out to these key
influential DJs around the city.
Speaker 4: Uh huh.
Speaker 3: 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. 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.
But they they fell exactly into Russell's plans. It made
them curious and they're like, well, clearly there's a 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 4: That is the Fadeaway Swish if ever there was.
Speaker 5: That's genius, man. This guy is a marketing genius.
Speaker 3: 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 blow Now Curtis Blow becomes the
first rapper in history signed to a major record label.
It quickly follow that up 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, there were both hit records, and
so Curtis Blow at this point seventy nine eighty, he
becomes rap's first official star. Hey it's everybody if you've
got 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.
It was very profitable. 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.
He's got more than just Curtis Blow. 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 Dericklin Mister Hyde. Even though they appear in
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. Okay,
Nice started 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 hit. It was called Profile Records,
and they took Genius Rap and they got a hit
out of it, and Genius Rap saved Profile Records. And
that'll prove important in a few minutes.
Speaker 1: 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 falling 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,
where can we Where can we get some money so
that we can get our own turntables.
Speaker 4: And his brother's like, well, 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.
Speaker 1: 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.
Speaker 5: So he tries to.
Speaker 4: Emulate the guys.
Speaker 1: 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 3: 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 that this is where they
really became friends, was playing basketball together. So yes, Daryl
was an inter 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 in the Bronx, playing to these clubs, and
he's on some of these mixtapes that he's listening to me,
and it blew them away.
Speaker 1: 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 Daryl'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 thirst here, Like all right, come on, he
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.
Speaker 4: That's all I do.
Speaker 1: 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 3: Yeah, so Darryl was a homebody, he was an introvert.
He's probably a nerd. And he he was his parents
were in particularly his mother were overly protective of them.
So here he is living in 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, you've got some good rhymes. You need
to come with us, you know, I'm going to these shows.
Joseph was always trying to get Daryl to come with them,
and Daryl would wanted to go, but his his his
his mom would 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 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 Darryl. He was
really shy 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 Darryl and Joe would spend all
their time every day in the lab just messing around,
scratching on records, writing rhymes, rapping back and forth. And
they just did this every day for a long time.
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 Darryl 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 two 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 Hollists 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 Darryl out of his house.
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 there 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. So Jazzy Jace, whose real name
is Jason Mizel, he was like the tough guy. He
was a street guy, Okay. 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 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. He got to be friends with them too.
So Jason had cred and so, and he knew Joe
from school. They were in the same grade together at school.
So when Daryl and Joe would come over to the park,
Jason was the guy looking out for him. Nobody messed
with Daryl and Joe because Jason said so. And if
jed he Jason 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
him 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 Rushman 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 Melle Mail and all these kind of guys, and
so during this time CBS Right Columbia Records approached sugar
Hill for a for a like to be their partner
for distribution. There was a major label coming around wanting
to sign them up, but then Columbia ended up backing
out of that. 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 rap label,
but they didn't want to be in business with sugar Hill,
but they did. Sugar Hill did sign a major distribution
deal with m Records. The problem was that deal was
broken by a guy from the mob, and very quickly
that relationship with MCA Records started to fall apart and
they were in legal trouble and they would 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 or 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? Oh?
Nothing in Daryl. They gave him any confidence that he
could be a recording star. He was 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.
I had my shot. Now I'm not gonna be a rapper.
I'm not gonna be I'm not gonna be making a record,
so I gotta find something else to do.
Speaker 4: Meanwhile, Daryl has enrolled at Saint John's University.
Speaker 3: 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
college 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 4: Wow.
Speaker 3: 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.
It's like a jungle Sometimes it makes me mind to
how I keep them going on. 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 Daryl and says, I want
to I have this idea for a song like kind
of like the Message. It's gonna be called It's Like That.
Let's see what we can do with this. Okay, And
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 Darryl and Joe record It's like that. 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
could 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. Yeah,
so he calls them up and this is a struggling, small, tiny,
little independent record label and stead 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 the notebook find some old words, and
then for the track, they 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 had on Action.
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.
Speaker 4: Which is where you get the name for the movie later.
Speaker 3: On, exactly. And so this song was called Sucker MC's
and this song where It's Like That was the A
side and blew up and was a hit on the radio.
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. It was
nothing but beat, scratch and rhymes. 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. And he put it all
in this record at a time 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 of
rap for the rest of the decade. So they put
out It's Like That with the B side of Sucker
MC's and it's huge. They now have a reason to
go on the road and perform. 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 out of
the radio that somebody else has in the hallway there,
and he has that moment where he just goes nuts.
He's like, that's my song. That's my song, that's my song.
Speaker 5: That's awesome.
Speaker 3: Over at Saint John's University, Darryl 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. Now, imagine Daryl McDaniels.
He's only performed in the attic when he's drunk, and
he's supposed to get out on stage in front of everybody.
But here's the thing 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. You're gonna
be my DJ, and Jason's like, yeah, whatever whatever. 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 R, they
needed to bring in somebody to be their DJ. Jaysey,
Jason was going to be their guy.
Speaker 1: He's not like super complex in what he does with
the tune 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 3: That's exactly right. I've seen them in concert three different times,
and what strikes me about Jason Mizel is that he
is controlling the show. It might not be obvious 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 got two in one day. And Jason's back
at the park and Queen's like, that was my shot.
You know, He's in tears. He's like, I can't believe
I messed up. 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. When
you think about 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 get out there and they don't have their
look figured out yet. They're wearing their daddy's suits, suit.
Speaker 1: Jackets, plaid Like imagine Bob Ucker 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 3: 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. And
they're laughing at these guys. Well, what is this like,
wear your daddy's clothes day? It was his career day.
What are you doing? So it was humiliating. 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. But that first day of gigs was
a complete disaster.
Speaker 4: Wow.
Speaker 3: But they did go on the road and they began
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 de renamed him. Instead of Jazzy Jase,
he was known as jam Master J jam Master J.
And by this time Darryl McDaniels, who had been going
by easy D, had come up with the name DMC.
By playing with his last name of Daryl mac 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. Yes,
are you telling.
Speaker 5: Me that you built a time machine of a Delaureate.
Speaker 3: It was during the It's Like That recording session that
Russell informed them that their name was going to be
run DMC. Okay told them, 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, that's terrible, No,
we're ruined. This is horrible. 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 they looked at for Yeah, numbers in
the names. Yeah, well you had.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 5: All the guys before them had these long, elaborate, cool.
Speaker 3: Names, The Furious by four, the Treacher's three Cold Crush Brothers.
Speaker 5: Yes, and Russell's like, nope, you guys are run DMC.
Speaker 3: Yeah. 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.
Speaker 5: New, that's a really cool name. 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 there were Coca Cola, McDonald's, and
Run DMC.
Speaker 3: I believe it. By the fall of the 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.
Speaker 3: Yes.
Speaker 5: The Gap Band I know is from Oklahoma City and
their song is you Dropped a Bomb on Me? Yes, okay?
Speaker 4: And what was the other one?
Speaker 5: Midnight Star Midnight Star, I got nothing.
Speaker 3: No parking on the dance floor, oh okay okay? And
uh freakazoid there it.
Speaker 5: Is there it is okay, yeah, okay cool okay.
Speaker 3: 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. I am confident. I think I probably
watched every episode of The Jeffersons. I think I probably that.
Speaker 5: That's interesting.
Speaker 1: 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? But they didn't do half that job.
Speaker 3: 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 suckerham Ce's which is
a song called hard Times, which again follows that the
message template of talking about how tough things can be right.
And on the b side was a song called jam
Master Jay Dam.
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 Jay. They had
to have some way of introducing him as part of
the band. Okay, it's a three part band. You have Ron,
you have DMC, and everybody in the crowd is going, Okay,
I get it. He's run, he's the MC. Who in
the hell is that? 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 3: Not only did they do that with the song, but
they would go on 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 names that
are mentioned on this song. It's jam Master J record
on the turntable that he's using to bring the act
out on stage and to hype the crowd. So that
song is significant for that reason. As a matter of fact,
there's a lyric in that song that goes, we're five,
not four, not three, just two two MC's with the
claim to fame. Okay, when Daryl says, we're not five,
We're not four, or not three, just two. He's calling
out his competition. He is specifically referencing the Furious five,
the Funky for the treacherous three. And so this was
another example of just these battle rhymes, its 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. So Russell was all
about beat 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
Darryl 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
called Riot. And Riot is busy recording a song and
they're banging away and wailing away on their guitars, and
the guys sitting out in the lobby can't help, but
hear it, and Larry's grooven to it, and Russ is like,
you know what, we can be loud too, And so
after Daryl and Joe recorded their parts that day, Russ said,
why don't we try to add some guitar. The way
Riot was doing this was after the Run Indeed recorded
their raps, and so Larry calls up his friend Eddie Martinez,
who had played guitar on Christmas rapping 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
rock rap fusion known as rock box Boy Something Ron Wow,
lawns drum kind of God back droling, I'm drum got
it you flit to the fawn my name We talked
the Simmons one of my middle days one and when
I'm rocking all.
Speaker 4: We got it one.
Speaker 5: I mean everybody credits Walk This Way as being the
first rock rap combination. It's not. It's right here, this
is rock Box.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it's this is the first one that's on MTV.
This is the first rap song on MTV.
Speaker 3: 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 4: Now.
Speaker 3: Eddie Martinez is a name that you've mentioned before on
your show because he would. He was a career session player.
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 4: Wow Wow. Mentioned that I love Addicted to Love.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, So the guitar player on Addicted to Love
is the same guy wailing away on rock Box.
Speaker 4: That is awesome.
Speaker 5: That is a great nugget, right there, man.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: 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 a white shirt, and she had her
hair slipped back and all the makeup on.
Speaker 4: It was awesome. Yep.
Speaker 3: 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 like 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 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 going
to be real. This was coming from Russell, just be real.
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. And with this 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 sugar Hill Records. 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. So 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 on his own on his label. Wow, Wow,
Run DMC never recorded for deaf Jam.
Speaker 5: That's insane. I did not know that. I just figured
that was a lock.
Speaker 3: What happened though, In the fall of eighty four, there
was a concert promoter down in Florida. His name was
Ricky Walker. He was somebody that had managed tours before
for the Commodores and for the Jacksons. He just had
this idea that he can get a bunch of rap
acts together and some of these breakdancers 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.
So because sugar Hill 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 4: Is that correct?
Speaker 3: 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: Huh.
Speaker 5: It's kind of similar to the modern day guys who
don't wear belts and they wear their pants down low
because they take your belt away when you go to jail.
Speaker 4: We run DMC was non fellon shoes.
Speaker 5: Well, and that's the thing is they said, my Adidas
only brings good news.
Speaker 3: Right, excellent, that's good stuff.
Speaker 5: Okay.
Speaker 3: 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 rap 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 and 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. There's a
song called can You Rocket Like This that was actually
written by ll COOLJ that was due to Ruben's influence.
There's a single the album called jam Master Jammin that
Rubin 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 maild 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.
I'm the King oh Rock, Ohio to call me Sia
to pock King you must sue Sia.
Speaker 5: I'll don't stop rock and tell I retile.
Speaker 4: 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 3: 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. That the
old guy, yes guy, he.
Speaker 5: Was hilarious from the David Letterman Show.
Speaker 3: 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 project to fight starvation in
Africa and in Ethiopia. Yes, this led Bob Geldoff to
the idea of organizing Live AID. Live AI 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. It
was like the Woodstock of the eighties. Yes, place on
July thirteenth, and they were booking all these guys at
the press conference in the week's leading up to this
massive event that people could hardly get their brains around
how big this was going to 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. Muscle Rush
management reached out to Live Aid and said, Hey, what
about my guys. I've got two albums and on the
Top two hundred list, 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 on the bill.
Speaker 4: The Beach Boys, okay, okay, don't, don't don't.
Speaker 5: I know that's your thing, right, don't.
Speaker 3: Distract me on the Beach Boys, We'll be here tomorrow.
Speaker 5: I'm sorry. But in nineteen eighty five, Madonna makes sense,
Tina Turner makes sense, FADMC makes sense.
Speaker 3: And the Beach Boys Okay, all right, okay boys always
makes sense.
Speaker 4: Okay, okay, okay.
Speaker 3: So with increasing negative publicity they really started backtracking, and
finally they went to run DMC and offered them a
spot on the bill. 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 5: No.
Speaker 3: 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 ef
it worked they would alternate between London and Philadelphia.
Speaker 4: Okay.
Speaker 3: 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. Okay, only
might be.
Speaker 5: Got them early.
Speaker 3: So when that was over, they cut to shar Day
playing on the London stage and so while she's playing
the stage getting set back up for.
Speaker 4: Philadelphia, h okay, keep going Okay.
Speaker 3: So it goes from Black Sabbath and Philly straight to
Charde in London. They come back to Philly and it's
run Dmcay, 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
Steam 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 5: There you go, hey, that's that's better than a kick
in the vans.
Speaker 3: 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 messes, but this time among the
breakdancers it included the twelve year old son of the
tour manager little boy by the name of Jermaine Duprie
that you may have heard of. Okay, So speeding through
nineteen eighty five, 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 in the smile and get out of here.
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 3: Well, as it turns out, Malcolm Jamal Warner was a
huge run DMC fan.
Speaker 4: Is that right? Okay?
Speaker 3: Pil the guy playing Theo Huxable on The Cosby Show.
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 and they played the King
of Rock clip. Not there, not their video that had
been all over MTV, but the clip from the Crush
Groove movie which was coming out at the same time. Okay,
so they got they ran in the round around uh
around Bill Cosby there. So basically as soon as 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 playing there at 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 4: He had a pretty big part of an album in
nineteen eighty four.
Speaker 3: He's from Bruce Bringsteen's East Street band, Yep, Yep. He
was very political and he was able to rally all
these artists together to make this record. You got like
fifty of them, more than fifty of them, but 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, Darryl 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 the
Year for nineteen eighty five. Wow. 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 addition, Lebarge Lisa Lisa.
All these artists collaborated on a song called King Holiday.
Fellow creation wasn't and they wanted to get it out
in tom for the middle of January for the first
first iteration of this Holiday That's coming around. But the
record label would not give them the money for a
music video. So guess who came to the rescue and
provided his own money to make sure the music video happened.
Prints WHOA. 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 this
music video to be made.
Speaker 4: That's awesome. 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 3: Keep going, okay. 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 Kenny Rocky 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, Ll cool Jay's first album had come out,
so that's that. Ello Cooljay's first album is called Radio.
It was also produced by Rick Rubin, so there's actually
a hip hop trilogy by Ruben and Radio was the
first one to be released. Wow, and it came out.
It was huge. There were several hits from it, 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 rhyming 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, it was huge, and so Run was like,
I gotta be better than LLL. This was the moment
all eyes were on Run DMC. They were never going
to 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 4: So are we ready to jump in track by track?
Speaker 5: Next week?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 4: Next week?
Speaker 5: What we're gonna go? Track by track? We'll go through
each of these songs from Raising Hell and we will
talk again with Deaf Dave.
Speaker 1: 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.
Speaker 4: Thank you so much.
Speaker 3: Thanks for having me on. I love talking about this stuff.
Speaker 1: We will be back with Deaf Dave next week and
go through Raisin Hell track by track.
Speaker 4: See you then.
Speaker 3: Peter Pi pick Papa rock Me nimble what nimble any
what quick dam