Raising Hell Read online

  RONIN RO

  Raising

  Hell

  The Reign, Ruin, and Redemption

  of Run–D.M.C. and

  Jam Master Jay

  For the Ramones: Joey, Johnny, and Dee Dee

  “I Remember You”

  And my daughter,

  Rachel, because

  “She’s the One”

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1 Grandmaster Get High

  Chapter 2 Son of Kurt

  Chapter 3 Disco Sucks

  Chapter 4 Party Time

  Chapter 5 The Broken Arm

  Chapter 6 Jason Mizell

  Chapter 7 Krush Groove

  Chapter 8 Disco Fever

  Chapter 9 Rock Box

  Chapter 10 Taking the Throne

  Chapter 11 Russell and Rick

  Chapter 12 Kings of Rock

  Chapter 13 The Silver Screen

  Chapter 14 The Kid with the Hat

  Chapter 15 Proud to Be Black

  Chapter 16 The Mainstreaming of Hip-hop

  Chapter 17 War and Peace

  Chapter 18 The Long Beach Episode

  Chapter 19 It’s the New Style

  Chapter 20 Def Pictures

  Chapter 21 Rhyming and Stealing

  Chapter 22 Suing Profile

  Chapter 23 It’s Called Survival

  Chapter 24 Leaving Hell

  Chapter 25 Ohio

  Chapter 26 You Talk Too Much

  Chapter 27 Run Ruins Everything

  Chapter 28 Endgame

  Chapter 29 The Party’s Over

  Chapter 30 Loss and Remembrance

  Epilogue

  Searchable Terms

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Ronin Ro

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Friends: How many of us have them?

  —WHODINI

  Prologue

  On October 30, 2002, Jam Master Jay (JMJ) was in Jamaica, Queens, back from touring with Run-D.M.C. Behind the wheel of his black sport-utility vehicle, he rolled through rain-slick streets, heading to the recording studio he owned and operated with his old friend Randy Allen. Jay (born Jason Mizell in 1965) was a father of three, a husband, a legend in the rap music genre, and reportedly strapped for cash. Jay’s old friend Wendell “Hurricane” Fite, who had joined Run-D.M.C. on many a tour as a bodyguard and then as part of co-headlining acts, would later claim Jay was also worried over stolen funds from a studio account. “Jay and I asked Randy about missing money and he denied it. They were definitely on the outs by the end.”

  Allegedly, Jay also worried about a business deal gone bad with Curtis Scoon. Six feet four inches tall and 250 pounds, and having spent time in jail, Scoon had reportedly been calling Jay’s studio to demand repayment of $15,000. According to a report in Playboy Jay had responded to career woes and rising tax debts (the thirty-seven-year-old performer owed the IRS over $400,000) by arranging drug deals, and in one, Jay’s friends later claimed, he had asked Scoon to put up $15,000. Jay had put up the same amount. Supposedly they used the combined $30,000 to buy cocaine in California, then had the drugs shipped to another dealer in Baltimore, who was then to sell the drugs, giving the duo a return on their outlay; but the guy in Baltimore ran off with the drugs. Allegedly Scoon blamed Jay for the robbery, but he has denied any involvement in any drug deal, and has never been charged or convicted of any wrongdoing in this matter.

  With tax debts rising, a business associate rumored to be embezzling funds, his wife taking a job at the Banana Republic clothing store (to pitch in), and a bandmate in Run-D.M.C. leaving the group, effectively ending it, Jay hoped to leave music behind and transition into producing films. “Now we can start fucking with these movies,” he had told his friend Shake. “I’m through with the rap shit.”

  Despite tensions between Jay and Randy Allen, Jay had continued to work alongside him on an album for Rusty Waters, a southern-style rap duo that included Randy, and Jay’s teenage nephew Boe. The group rapped about “Cornbread” and hoped to release a debut album on major label Virgin Records. However, friends recall that after finishing the Rusty Waters album, Jay planned to close the studio. “I’m glad that Rusty Waters is signed to Virgin,” Jay reportedly told Shake during this period. “I’m happy that Randy is finally out of my pocket.”

  Night was falling when Jay parked his SUV in front of the two-story building that housed his studio offices. In addition to finishing the Rusty Waters album, Jay had to perform a show with Run-D.M.C. the next day. Though Run—the outspoken lead rapper—had recently told Jay and rapper D.M.C. that he no longer wanted to stay with the group, he had decided to join them in Washington, D.C., for a halftime show at a Washington Wizards basketball game. Jay figured he’d help Randy finish the Rusty Waters album and then head home to his wife to pack for the next day’s trip to the nation’s capital.

  After entering the building’s front door and walking up a flight of stairs, past a video camera, Jay reached the locked door to his studio. Someone opened the door and let him in. He entered, and saw the two couches in the lounge, walls that were bare save for one or two picture frames holding Run-D.M.C.’s gold and platinum records, the wide-screen TV complete with an Xbox game system hooked up to it, and Lydia High acting as friendly as ever. Then Jay faced the huge window that overlooked the recording room. The curtains were open, so he saw Randy standing over the controls of the huge mixing board, working on the song “Cornbread.” Randy nodded a greeting. Jay returned it. Jay then walked to one of the two couches. Randy’s friends Mike B—reportedly homeless and sleeping on a couch in the studio each night—and Pretty Tone slid over so Jay could sit, and before Jay knew it he was playing video games with them.

  In the past, Jay would have hung out with people like Hurricane, or Run-D.M.C.’s road crew employee Runny Ray, or Jay’s good friend Darnell Smith. But over the years, members of his circle of friends had started families, moved to other states, or found ways outside of Run-D.M.C. to earn income and support their families. Jay would have hung with Run and D.M.C.—his partners in the group—but since the problems associated with the making of their last album, 2001’s Crown Royal, they hardly spoke to each other anymore. “All of those people toward the end that ran with Jay were all Randy’s people,” one JMJ confidant explained. “None of them were people Jay grew up with. Everybody was from Randy.”

  Instead of heading into the recording room, Jay settled into playing video games and kept his eyes glued to the TV. He figured Randy, also a producer, was more than capable of completing work on the Rusty Waters’ song.

  A young woman entered the studio lounge then, claiming she wanted to play Jay a demo. It was strange because someone had to have opened the door to the studio, if not the building, to let her in; friends knew that Jay, though an avid talent scout, preferred that aspiring artists leave demo tapes with employees. Jay and Randy were on a tight deadline to get the completed Rusty Waters album to Virgin Records, but Randy emerged from the recording room to tell the unexpected visitor he would take the time to listen to her tape, and returned to the recording room with the young woman in tow.

  Around Jay, Randy’s friends began to light marijuana cigarettes. Jay relaxed and smoked a little himself. Someone had shut the curtains in the window overlooking the recording room. Jay, mellowed by the marijuana, sat unaware on the couch with a video game handset in both hands. Lydia headed toward the front door, and opened it. Then the guy was there, the people in the studio claimed, and yelling, “Look at the ground!” The guy supposedly knocked Lydia to the floor, out of harm’s way, and approached Jay with the .40-caliber pistol in hand.

  Jay, sitting near Rand
y’s friend Pretty Tone, reportedly yelled: “Oh, shit. Grab the gun!”

  Then the visitor yelled, “What about this? What about this?”

  And raised the gun up to Jay’s face and…

  Chapter 1

  Grandmaster Get High

  During the spring of 1978, thirteen-year-old Darryl McDaniels was finishing eighth grade at St. Pascal–Baylon Elementary, a Catholic school that required students to wear blue and yellow uniforms each day. The short, stocky black kid with the close-cut Afro and earnest expression was also taking care to avoid being robbed by larger, poorer bullies waiting outside the school each day to run up on kids, tap pockets, steal hats, loot, and shoes, chase them in packs, or send them home naked on the bus.

  Hollis was working class, but these ruffians acted as if the neighborhoods south of the Grand Central Parkway, west of Francis Lewis Boulevard, north of Hollis Avenue, and east of 184th Street were the drug- and crime-infested South Bronx. So he’d literally cross streets to avoid someone coming his way while he was in uniform. Only after rushing past the group standing by the store on his block, getting home, and changing into streetwise jeans and sneakers would he go back out to buy whatever he needed.

  He’d lived here since at least age five, among aluminum-sided one- and two-family houses, tiny patches of lawn, concrete driveways, and teens trying to live down the fact that their parents— many from down south—owned real estate and provided middle-class comfort. And because other boroughs were battling to determine which was toughest, and didn’t consider Queens anything but a good place to come rob a wealthy soft kid, D’s young neighbors and friends were acting even worse.

  Unlike other neighborhoods, Hollis was filled with private houses, not apartment buildings, with black working-class neighbors, and bustling main streets with stores and movie theaters. It had a small-town feel, with everyone inevitably running into everyone else. If D and his friends weren’t hanging out in an alley behind the only high-rise building in Hollis, a place they referred to as “the building,” they were playing basketball in 205th Street Park near where the Hollis Crew, a group of somewhat older, tougher teenage neighborhood residents, spent their days and nights. Or D and his young neighbors passed each other while crossing the street at the corner near the park, where local dealers ran their drug supermarket. It was a small, remote enclave for the black working class and the children these hardworking adult parents hoped would have easier lives.

  A typical weekday for Darryl involved going to school, then drifting over to “the building” after dinner to get high with his friends Butter, Ray, and Cool T; during weekends, he went to one of three local parks to shoot basketball, get a little high after the game, and escape his parents’ strict rules. He didn’t really fit in with the neighborhood tough guys, the drug dealers, the stickup kids, the older college students, the athletes, or the neighborhood DJs.

  One afternoon in the spring of 1978, he reached his modest home and saw his brother Alford—three years older, bookish, into sci-fi and comics—playing new tapes he’d bought on the street. Alford liked this new street music kids in other boroughs created with turntables and microphones in city parks, house parties, or rented halls and community centers. Darryl had heard it before, in concrete school yards in the neighborhood and on portable radios in Hollis, but had never paid much attention to it. But Al’s new tape by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five was different.

  Amid the usual calls for zodiac signs, a teen named Melle Mel (Melvin Glover) rapped about a high school dropout turned stickup kid who gets locked up and raped in Rikers Island. Darryl wanted to hear Mel’s unsettling story-rap again.

  The verse was cinematic, cautionary, and reflective of D’s private fears about his own lifestyle of the past two years. Until 1976, D had been a quiet, meek, acquiescent A student, the sort neighborhood toughs would point at and call brainiac. Leaving St. Pascal’s back then, he’d come straight home and stay in the house. His father usually left at four to work as a station agent for the Metropolitan Transit Authority. His mother arrived from her job as a nursing coordinator at a nearby hospital at about five. After cooking dinner she usually went to bed by seven so as to be up early enough the next day to cook everyone breakfast before heading to work again.

  After a certain hour, D found himself alone and unsupervised. For a while he’d been content to sit in his mother’s neat living room with some of the thousand comic books he and Al owned, or at a table in front of a window, spending hours drawing pin-ups and comics. And if that got boring, he’d pull out his collection of G.I. Joe dolls or little green plastic army men and engage them in epic battles. But this too got boring, so at age twelve he gravitated to football, and spent a year lifting weights, feeling good about his broadening shoulders and the attention he received from girls, and seeing his reputation in the neighborhood change. With eighth-grade graduation coming up, he learned his parents planned to send him to a high school in Harlem that didn’t have a football field. He then gave football up and fell into the habit of sneaking out of the house after dinner. With his mom sleeping, he’d walk to “the building” and join his friends to share joints, crack jokes, and drink quart bottles of Olde English 800 malt liquor.

  The Flash tape ended. Darryl felt this new music offered a new, safer way to escape his boredom. He carried his mom’s turntable down into the wood-paneled basement and tried to scratch a record. In the background, Alford stood, offering moral support and encouragement.

  Days later, Darryl arrived from school with plans to spend the afternoon playing basketball at the new hoop their father had installed in the backyard. But Al led him into the basement instead. Darryl’s eyes widened with silent amazement. He saw that Al had purchased a second turntable and a $50 mixer, and had set DJ equipment up on a table. “I didn’t really have to struggle,” Darryl recalled. “It was all set up, prepared for me.” The equipment became a major part of his daily routine. He kept smoking weed and drinking quarts when his parents were at work or asleep, but spent more time at home, where he couldn’t get into serious trouble. Quickly dubbing himself Grandmaster Get High, he also collected beats he heard on tapes, wore headphones while cutting and mixing records, and fantasized about competing with Grandmaster Flash. Behind his turntables, Darryl played two copies of James Brown’s “Funky Drummer.” He would let one copy of the record play until its short percussion break was ending. He would then use a mixer to switch over to a second turntable playing the beginning of the drum solo. In this manner, he was able to keep his favorite part of the record going for an eternity.

  Shortly after D became Grandmaster Get High, his best friend, Doug Hayes, who called himself Butter, introduced him to a thin cat named Joseph Simmons. They were about to play ball in the school gym. D recognized Joe from the neighborhood. He had been seeing this skinny, long-haired kid in school since first grade, in the same blue-and-yellow uniform that he wore, but since they were always in different classes, they never hung out.

  Joe looked repressed, angry, and a bit pampered. He was shorter, with smaller shoulders, lighter skin, and an arsenal of frowns and smirks. Joe also had a reputation in Hollis. He was supposedly a shrill and sarcastic mama’s boy. During basketball games in 205th Street Park with Butter and members of Butter’s Hollis Crew, Darryl saw opponents stop the game because Joe was scurrying past, usually heading to the store for a loaf of bread. The players hurled insults: “Yo, DJ Bum! Your brother’s a homo!” Within minutes, Joe would emerge from the store and rush back toward his two-story house (with a driveway so narrow his dad’s secondhand green Mercedes couldn’t get into the garage). Joe ignored the insults, headed into his house, and shut his door. “Hollis was too hard for him,” one later member of Run-D.M.C. recalled. “On his block he got picked on.”

  Darryl also knew that the Hollis Crew’s disdain extended to Joe’s older brother Russell. Seven years older than Joe, Russell had once run with a local street gang, used drugs, and sold marijuana. He’d then reinven
ted himself as a party promoter. In many ways, Russell was a success story. He’d changed his life for the better— but all some of these kids in the Hollis Crew remembered was that Russell had allegedly worn leg warmers one day. They put that together with the fact that he sometimes spoke with a lisp, and spread unsubstantiated rumors about Russell.

  But in the gym, Butter said Joe would join the game. Darryl had no objection. Joe had never done or said anything to offend him, and Darryl had no reason to think anything negative about Joe or Russell. In fact, Darryl enjoyed Joe’s jokes and comments during the game so much that he didn’t object when he saw Joe with Butter in his backyard later that day.

  For Darryl, Joseph Simmons was cool, ambitious, and quick-witted. And as the school year continued, when he left St. Pascal at 2:20 p.m. every afternoon, Joe was usually by his side, chattering away on bustling Hollis Avenue. They’d shoot hoops in Darryl’s backyard until about 4:30 or 5:00, then smoke weed and drink Olde English in Darryl’s basement. Darryl then started taking Joe to his hangout, “the building,” where he and friends Butter, Ray White, and Cool T got high. They also hung out in school, in the school gym, on the basketball court in a church basement that hosted Police Athletic League sports programs, in Darryl’s backyard, and in the park during weekend afternoons and evenings.