History of Rap and Run DMC 1973-1986 (feat. Def Dave)

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