The story of Run-DMC

Three kids from Hollis

The story of Run-DMC begins in Hollis, a quiet, mostly middle class corner of Queens in New York City. Joseph Simmons was born there on the fourteenth of November 1964, the youngest brother of Russell Simmons, who was busy turning himself into a hip-hop promoter and manager. Russell's biggest client was the rapper Kurtis Blow, and as a young teenager Joey got to spin records for him on stage. He was billed as DJ Run, the Son of Kurtis Blow, and before long he was rapping as well. Russell even helped him cut a first single called Street Kid. Nobody noticed it, but Run had caught the bug for good.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Darryl McDaniels was born on the thirty first of May 1964 and grew up a few blocks away. He was a quiet Catholic school kid who loved Marvel comics, basketball and, surprisingly, rock and folk records. In 1978 he and his older brother Alford raised money with a comic book sale and bought turntables and a mixer, and Darryl taught himself to DJ in his parents' basement under the name Grandmaster Get High. When Run got his own decks, Darryl sold his and started writing rhymes instead. He called himself Easy D at first, then signed his school work DMcD, which became D.M.C. He was so shy that for a long time he would not rap in public.[1] [2]

The third member came from Brooklyn. Jason Mizell was born on the twenty first of January 1965 and started playing trumpet at three. He went on to bass, guitar and drums, and played in church and in garage bands. His family moved to Hollis in 1975, when he was ten, and a few years later he found the turntables. As a teenager he ran with a crowd that burgled houses, until a frightening run in with an armed security guard scared him straight. As an adult he became known for steering friends away from crime. He said later that he became a DJ simply because he wanted to be part of the band.[1] [2] [3]

By the late seventies Jason was calling himself Jazzy Jase and playing park jams around Hollis, including at Two-Fifths Park, where Run and D would go hoping to rap for the local DJs. He was flashy, confident and the most popular DJ around, and eventually the two rappers performed in front of him and the three became friends. Run wanted to make a record with D, but Russell said no, because he did not like D's rhyming style. After Run and D finished high school in 1982 and started college, they finally wore him down. They asked Jason, now calling himself Jam Master Jay, to be their DJ, and the trio was born.[1] [2] [3]

It's Like That changes everything

In 1983 Russell agreed to find his little brother's group a record deal. He sent a demo of a song called It's Like That to Cory Robbins, who ran a small New York dance label called Profile Records, and Robbins signed them. Russell also gave the trio its name, Run-D.M.C., and they hated it. D later said they had wanted something grand like the Dynamic Two, and were sure the new name would ruin them. Over time the letters picked up extra meanings, including Devastating Mic Control and Darryl Mac, his childhood nickname. The single came out in 1983 with Sucker M.C.'s on the flip side, and a local station, WBAU, was the first to play them.[1] [2] [3] [4]

That record sounded like nothing else in rap. Early hits leaned on disco and live funk bands, but It's Like That and Sucker M.C.'s were built almost entirely on a pounding Oberheim DMX drum machine with a few scratches. The producer Larry Smith, a trained bass player who had worked with Kurtis Blow, chose to strip everything back, and Sucker M.C.'s ended up as little more than a beat and two voices trading lines. Run and D did not take turns with whole verses. They finished each other's sentences and shouted together. The single reached number fifteen on the R and B chart, and critics later said it made everything before it sound old school overnight.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Profile wanted an album, which was a gamble, because rap albums had barely sold. The label gave them an advance of twenty five thousand dollars. At the studio the group had to wait for a heavy metal band called Riot to finish, and hearing those loud guitars gave them an idea. Larry Smith brought in his friend Eddie Martinez to play guitar over a drum machine beat, and the result was Rock Box. Run and D were not keen at first, and Profile's boss called it weird. But the self titled debut came out on the twenty seventh of March 1984, and it became the first rap album certified gold.[1] [2] [3]

The Rock Box video, made for about twenty seven thousand dollars at the downtown club Danceteria, became the first rap video to get regular play on MTV. The group admitted they barely knew what MTV was. Just as important was the look. Earlier rappers dressed like glam rockers, in leather, spikes and rhinestones. Run-DMC wore what kids in Hollis wore: black hats, black jeans, leather jackets, gold chains and white Adidas with no laces. That style came from Jam Master Jay, and when Russell saw it he told the whole group to follow suit. Jay put it simply years later. How he dressed in high school was how they dressed.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Kings of rock

The second album, King of Rock, came out on the twenty first of January 1985 and pushed the rock idea further, with Eddie Martinez's guitar crashing through the title track. It was the first rap album released on CD, and it eventually went platinum. The video had Run and D barging into a fake museum of rock and roll past a guard played by Larry Bud Melman from David Letterman's show, then mocking the exhibits. The album also held Roots, Rap, Reggae with the dancehall star Yellowman, and Can You Rock It Like This, a song written by a sixteen year old from Queens called LL Cool J.[1] [2] [3]

In the summer of 1985 Run-DMC played Live Aid, the only rap act on the bill. By then they were touring hard. Promoters at club gigs would often ask where the band was, and Run and D would point at Jay behind his turntables. That picture of two rappers out front and one DJ at the back became the classic hip-hop stage setup. One young fan of the group was a Los Angeles party promoter named Lyor Cohen, who booked them in 1984 and soon moved east to become their road manager. He would later run Def Jam and much of the music business.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Later in 1985 the trio starred in Krush Groove, a Warner Brothers film loosely based on Russell's struggle to launch his label, Def Jam, which he had just founded with a young producer named Rick Rubin. Blair Underwood played Russell, and the cast included Kurtis Blow, the Fat Boys, the Beastie Boys, New Edition and Sheila E. The film invented a romance between Russell and Sheila E that left Run jealous. In reality Run said he would never cross his brother like that. Krush Groove opened on the twenty fifth of October 1985, and screenings on Long Island were marred by crowds of teenagers rushing theaters.[1] [2] [3]

Raising Hell and Walk This Way

After months on the road the group locked themselves into Chung King studios in Manhattan in late 1985. This time the producer was Rick Rubin, a rock loving New York University student, working alongside Russell. D insisted later that the band did most of the real work, since the rhymes had been written and polished on tour. Rubin, though, had one more idea. Jay had been cutting up the drum opening of Aerosmith's 1975 song Walk This Way for years, and Run had rapped over it since he was a kid. Neither Run nor D had any idea who Aerosmith were. Rubin suggested they remake the whole song.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Run and D hated the idea and called the lyrics hillbilly gibberish, but Jay was open to it. Aerosmith were in a slump at the time, fighting addictions and struggling for hits, and their manager's first question to Rubin was simply, what's rap? On the ninth of March 1986 Steven Tyler and Joe Perry came to a Manhattan studio for a fee of eight thousand dollars a day, and one day was all it took. Jay persuaded Run and D to rap their parts naturally instead of copying Tyler's delivery. Perry even played bass on the track, on an instrument a Beastie Boy fetched from home because the studio had none.[1] [2] [3]

Raising Hell came out on the fifteenth of May 1986, and Walk This Way followed as a single on the fourth of July. The video showed the two bands in rooms next door drowning each other out, until Tyler smashed through the wall between them. It was a simple image, and it worked. The song reached number four on the Billboard Hot 100, higher than Aerosmith's original, and it was the first rap single in the top five. Raising Hell went triple platinum, reached number three on the album chart and topped the black albums chart. Aerosmith's career was revived too, and some writers argue they gained even more than Run-DMC did.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Another single from the album, My Adidas, was written partly as a reply to people who judged b-boys by their clothes. On the nineteenth of July 1986, at Madison Square Garden, the group's co-manager Lyor Cohen invited an Adidas executive, Angelo Anastasio, to watch. During the song Run told the crowd to hold up their Adidas, and thousands of sneakers went into the air. The result was the first endorsement deal between a music act and an athletic brand, reported at about one point six million dollars. DMC recalled that on tour they would look out of the bus and see whole crowds dressed head to toe in Adidas, and it made them nervous about their influence.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Raising Hell tour had a dark side. On the seventeenth of August 1986, at the Long Beach Arena in California, fights broke out between rival Crips gangs in the crowd during the show, and forty two people were reported hurt. Other dates saw trouble too, and parts of the media blamed rap and Run-DMC. The group pointed out that their songs condemned crime and drugs, and they called for a day of peace between Los Angeles gangs. Simmons told Rolling Stone that kids were fighting long before he was born, and that the group were role models. Around this time they also became the first rap act on the cover of Rolling Stone.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Tougher times

In 1987 Run-DMC toured with the Beastie Boys on the Together Forever tour and recorded Christmas in Hollis for A Very Special Christmas, a charity album for the Special Olympics. They first turned the offer down, until their publicist Bill Adler gave them the idea for the song. The video, shot by two New York University film students, featured D's mother Bannah and beat Michael Jackson's Bad for Rolling Stone's video of the year. The song went on to appear in Die Hard. There was also bad news that holiday season. In the early hours of the twenty sixth of December 1987, Jay survived a serious car crash in Manhattan's West Village.[1] [2] [3]

Tougher Than Leather arrived on the seventeenth of May 1988. Rap had moved fast, with Rakim, Public Enemy and Boogie Down Productions raising the bar, and Jay answered with a busier, sample heavy sound while Run and D sharpened their rhymes. The album reached number nine and went platinum, but it felt like a letdown after Raising Hell, though Chuck D later called it a spectacular performance against the odds. A crime film of the same name, directed by Rick Rubin, who also played its villain, opened in September 1988 and bombed. Around this time the group was also tied up in a legal fight with its label, Profile.[1] [2] [3] [4]

By 1990 the trouble was personal. Before recording Back from Hell, Jay owed the tax authorities close to three hundred thousand dollars, Run was sinking into depression, and D was leaning on alcohol to get past crippling stage fright. He later described drinking up to eight large bottles of malt liquor a day, and he was arrested for public drunkenness and drunk driving. Back from Hell came out on the sixteenth of October 1990. It tried new jack swing and tougher, cursing street tales, and even had Jay rapping for the first time. Critics were harsh, and it became the first Run-DMC album not to go gold.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Jay, meanwhile, was shot in the leg, a year after his car crash, and survived. In 1991 Run was charged with raping a college student in Ohio. The charges were later dropped, but the case took a heavy toll on his finances. Looking back, Run said he had been out of control during the peak years. He found a new mentor in Bishop E. Bernard Jordan of Zoe Ministries, a preacher of prosperity who, Run said, rejuvenated his life. Both Run and D turned to the church. Run became an ordained minister, and D became a deacon in his own congregation.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Down with the King

After a three year gap, Run-DMC came back in 1993 with a new look, all black Walker Wear, Timberland boots and shaved heads, with D wearing a large wooden cross. The album Down with the King came out on the fourth of May 1993, with help from younger admirers like Pete Rock and CL Smooth, Q-Tip, EPMD and Naughty by Nature's KayGee, plus guitar from Tom Morello. The title track became their second biggest hit, and its video was packed with cameos from Eazy-E, Salt-N-Pepa, KRS-One, A Tribe Called Quest and De La Soul. The album entered the R and B chart at number one and went gold within two months.[1] [2] [3]

Jay was building a second career. In 1989 he had started his own label, JMJ Records, and he discovered the Queens group Onyx, whose hit Slam went platinum in 1993. Around 1996 a young rapper named Curtis Jackson was introduced to him. Jay taught him to count bars, write choruses and structure songs, and produced his first album, which was never released. That rapper became 50 Cent, who always credited Jay for his hooks. Jay loved scouting local talent, listening to demo tapes by fourteen and fifteen year olds, and he never moved away from the neighborhood he grew up in.[1] [2] [3] [4]

For D, the late nineties were the darkest stretch of his life. On a European tour in 1997 he fell into a deep depression, missing his wife and newborn son, and he relied on pills and alcohol. His voice started to fail, and doctors diagnosed spasmodic dysphonia, which makes the muscles of the larynx spasm. He thought about suicide. Then he heard Sarah McLachlan's song Angel on the radio, and he later credited it with saving his life. Oddly, the group's biggest chart success of the decade came without them. In 1998 the producer Jason Nevins remixed It's Like That, and it went to number one in Britain and across Europe.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The last album was a painful one. Run wanted to go back to the hard rap rock sound that bands like Korn and Limp Bizkit were selling by the million. D wanted something softer and more reflective, closer to Harry Chapin and Sarah McLachlan. D sat out most of the sessions in protest, and Crown Royal, delayed again and again, finally came out on the third of April 2001 with D on only three songs and guests like Kid Rock, Fred Durst, Nas and Method Man on nearly every track. Critics were unkind. Then came a triumphant tour with Aerosmith and Kid Rock, until Run, tired of the road, suddenly said he was quitting.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Murder in Jamaica, Queens

On the evening of Wednesday the thirtieth of October 2002, Jam Master Jay was at his 24/7 Studio on Merrick Boulevard in Jamaica, Queens, playing a football video game on an Xbox with his friend Uriel Rincon. At about half past seven, armed men came up to the second floor studio. Jay greeted one of them. Then he was shot in the head at close range and died almost instantly. He was thirty seven. Rincon was shot in the leg and survived. Jay died wearing a pair of white Adidas shell toes. Within hours fans gathered outside in the rain, and Chuck D of Public Enemy rushed to the scene when he saw the news.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The shock ran through the whole of hip-hop. Radio stations played Run-DMC songs all night, fans left sneakers, albums and flowers outside the studio, and people compared it to losing a Beatle. About a week later, at a Manhattan hotel, Run announced that Run-DMC was officially retired. He said he could not perform without all three members. P. Diddy, Busta Rhymes, Chuck D and the Beastie Boys came to support a fund for Jay's widow, Terri, and their children. Run insisted the killing had nothing to do with rap feuds. Jay was laid to rest after a service at Allen Cathedral in Queens, and buried at Ferncliff Cemetery.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The investigation stalled almost from the start. Witnesses gave shifting accounts, and some who were in the building that night refused to cooperate. Detectives chased several theories. One was that the killing was aimed at 50 Cent, whose song about the Queens drug figure Kenneth McGriff had angered powerful people. Another, published by the journalist Frank Owen in 2003, said Jay had fallen into debt and turned to dealing cocaine. Jay's widow praised the police, saying vengeance was for God and that she did not want a war in Hollis. The case went cold, and for years people in Hollis said everyone knew who did it but nobody would talk.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The long road to a verdict

In 2007 federal prosecutors first named Ronald Washington, one of Jay's childhood friends, as taking part in the killing, while he was being sentenced for a string of robberies. Nothing more came of it for years. On the seventeenth of August 2020, federal authorities in Brooklyn announced that Washington and Karl Jordan Jr., Jay's own godson, had been charged with murder. Prosecutors said Jay had received about ten kilos of cocaine on consignment in 2002, planned to move it through a dealer in Baltimore, and cut Washington out after the dealer refused to work with him. They alleged the killing was revenge. Both men pleaded not guilty.[1] [2] [3]

The trial began in Brooklyn in late January 2024. Uriel Rincon, the friend shot in the leg that night, testified that Jordan fired the fatal shot. Jay's employee Lydia High said Washington forced her to the ground at gunpoint. Other witnesses said both men had bragged about the killing. On the twenty seventh of February 2024 the jury found them guilty. Jay's family had waited more than twenty one years. His cousin Carlis Thompson wept, thinking of Jay's mother, brother and sister, who all died before seeing the verdict. Run and D said Jay was the heart and soul of Run-DMC, and that they would miss him forever.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The case took two more turns. On the nineteenth of December 2025, Judge LaShann DeArcy Hall overturned Karl Jordan's conviction and acquitted him, ruling that prosecutors had not proved a drug related motive for him to kill Jay. She upheld Washington's conviction. Then on the twenty seventh of April 2026 a third man, Jay Bryant, pleaded guilty in federal court. He admitted slipping into the building and opening a back door so the gunmen could catch Jay off guard, and said he knew a gun would be used. His DNA had been found on a hat left at the scene. He faced fifteen to twenty years in prison.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Life after Run-DMC

Run, now Reverend Run, found a new audience on television. From 2005 to 2009 MTV's Run's House followed him, his wife Justine and their children in their New Jersey home, a gentler kind of reality show with no cursing allowed. In 2006 the cameras also captured the family's heartbreak. Their daughter Victoria was born with a rare condition called omphalocele and died shortly after birth, and the couple chose to let viewers see how they coped. They later adopted a baby girl. Run released a solo album, Distortion, wrote books with Justine, and went on to host shows about cooking, travel and home renovation.[1] [2]

D's journey took an unexpected turn. While researching his autobiography, he learned from his mother that he had been adopted as a baby, and that he was born in Harlem, not Hollis. He tracked down his birth mother, and a VH1 documentary, DMC: My Adoption Journey, showed their reunion in 2006. He co-founded the Felix Organization, which runs summer camps for children in foster care, and pushed New Jersey to let adopted adults see their original birth certificates. He also launched a comic book imprint, Darryl Makes Comics, and wrote frankly about addiction and depression in his memoir Ten Ways Not to Commit Suicide.[1] [2]

In April 2009 Run-DMC became the second hip-hop act, after Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, to enter the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Eminem inducted them, calling them the first movie stars of rap and saying they were the Beatles. It was a nice irony, since their King of Rock video had mocked a rock museum. In September 2012 Run and D reunited at Jay-Z's Made in America festival, with Jay's sons Jason Jr. and TJ on the turntables. In 2016 the group received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, and in 2020 they joined Aerosmith for Walk This Way at the Grammys.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

On the eleventh of August 2023, at a concert for hip-hop's fiftieth birthday at Yankee Stadium, Run and D gave what they said would be their final performance as Run-DMC. As of 2026 they have kept to that. Their legacy runs everywhere. They took rap from disco toward hard drum machine beats, opened MTV and rock radio to hip-hop, turned street clothes into fashion and made the first sneaker deal. Rap rock, from the Beastie Boys to Rage Against the Machine, follows their path. And Jay's Scratch DJ Academy, founded in 2002, still teaches people the art he loved. As Chuck D said when Jay died, these were hip-hop's Beatles.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The people around Run-DMC

Run and DMC. Joseph Simmons and Darryl McDaniels were childhood friends in Hollis, and Run pushed the shy D to start rapping. Their trademark was finishing each other's lines. By the late nineties the friendship had turned into a strained business partnership, with D saying he avoided Run like a virus and sitting out most of Crown Royal. After Jay's death they reunited on stage from 2012, and said goodbye together at Yankee Stadium in 2023.[1] [2] [3]

Run and Russell Simmons. Russell is Run's older brother. He put Joey on stage with Kurtis Blow, at first refused to record him with D, then named, managed and co-produced Run-DMC while building Def Jam with Rick Rubin. He later wrote a book with Run. In 2017 Russell was accused of sexual assault and rape by multiple women. He denied the allegations and stepped away from his businesses.[1] [2] [3]

Run-DMC and Aerosmith. In March 1986 Steven Tyler and Joe Perry spent one day recording Walk This Way with a group that had never heard of them. The single made Run-DMC crossover stars and revived Aerosmith, whose next album sold millions. The two bands toured together in 2002, and DMC later appeared in the video game Guitar Hero: Aerosmith. They performed the song together again at the Grammys in 2020.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Run-DMC and Rick Rubin. Rubin, Russell's partner in Def Jam, produced Raising Hell and part of Tougher Than Leather, and pushed for the Walk This Way remake. He also directed the 1988 film Tougher Than Leather and played its villain. The group was never actually signed to Def Jam, a common misconception, but Rubin's production and their shared tours made them look like part of the family.[1] [2] [3]

Run-DMC and Larry Smith. Larry Smith, a bass player from nearby St. Albans, Queens, co-produced the first two albums with Russell Simmons. He chose bare drum machine beats over live bands and brought in guitarist Eddie Martinez for Rock Box. DMC compared his musical arsenal to Dr. Dre's. Smith suffered a stroke in 2007 that left him unable to speak, and he died on the nineteenth of December 2014.[1] [2]

Run-DMC and Beastie Boys. The Beastie Boys were Def Jam labelmates and younger admirers who said Rock Box and King of Rock inspired their own rap rock. They supported the Raising Hell tour, co-headlined the Together Forever tour in 1987, and even recorded Slow and Low, a demo Run-DMC had left off King of Rock. They paid tribute to the group at VH1's Hip Hop Honors in 2004.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Jam Master Jay and 50 Cent. Jay met a young Curtis Jackson in 1996 and taught him how to count bars, write hooks and build a song, then produced his first, unreleased album on JMJ Records. The rapper left for Columbia in 1999 and became 50 Cent. After Jay's murder, police briefly looked at whether the killing was aimed at 50 Cent, a theory later discounted. In 2008 he announced plans for a documentary about his mentor.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Jam Master Jay and Terri Mizell. Jay met Terri Corley at an airport gate in the mid eighties, when he introduced himself as Jam Master Jay from Run-DMC. They married in 1991. After his murder she raised their sons TJ and Jesse in Virginia, praised the police and said vengeance was for God. In 2007 she joined Run and D in launching the J.A.M. Awards in his memory.[1] [2] [3]

Jam Master Jay and Ronald Washington. Washington grew up with Jay in Hollis and was one of his childhood best friends. Prosecutors said the two were partners in a cocaine deal until Jay cut him out, and that Washington then held a witness at gunpoint while Jay was shot. He was convicted in 2024, and in December 2025 a judge upheld his conviction.[1] [2] [3]

DMC and Sarah McLachlan. At his lowest point in the late nineties, depressed and thinking about suicide, D heard McLachlan's Angel on the radio and credits her album Surfacing with saving his life. She later sang on his 2006 single Just Like Me, and during the session she told him that she too had been adopted.[1]

Run and E. Bernard Jordan. Run met Bishop Jordan of Zoe Ministries around 1991, at a low point, and credited him with rejuvenating his life. Jordan ordained him and named him protege of the year in 2004, and Run thanked him with a Rolls-Royce Phantom worth three hundred twenty five thousand dollars. DMC later said he felt hustled by the pastor.[1] [2] [3]

Rare facts about Run-DMC

• King of Rock was the first rap album ever released on compact disc. Run-DMC's second album, released in January 1985, broke that format barrier. It was also the third rap album certified platinum.[1]
• Can You Rock It Like This, on King of Rock, was written by a sixteen year old LL Cool J. Before his own career took off at Def Jam, the teenage LL Cool J wrote the song for Run-DMC. He later made a small appearance in Krush Groove.[1] [2]
• The Beastie Boys' Slow and Low was originally a Run-DMC demo. Run-DMC recorded it during the King of Rock sessions but left it off. The Beastie Boys, who had the demo on tape, recorded their own version for Licensed to Ill. Run-DMC's take only came out in 2005.[1]
• Rock Box was born because Run-DMC had to wait for a heavy metal band called Riot to finish in the studio. Hearing Riot's loud guitars inspired the group to try a guitar track. Larry Smith brought in Eddie Martinez, whose solo helped make it the first rap rock hit.[1] [2]
• The Rock Box video cost about twenty seven thousand dollars and opens with the comedian Professor Irwin Corey. Corey, billed as the world's foremost authority, compares hip-hop to other music before the group arrives by limousine at the club Danceteria. The director added a young boy following the group to show their appeal to kids.[1]
• Only Steven Tyler and Joe Perry of Aerosmith appear in the Walk This Way video. The other rock musicians were members of an obscure hair metal band called Smashed Gladys. The video, filmed at the Park Theater in Union City, New Jersey, cost about sixty seven thousand dollars.[1]
• Joe Perry played bass on Walk This Way using an instrument borrowed from a Beastie Boy. The studio had no bass, so one of the Beastie Boys, who happened to be hanging around, went home and brought his own for Perry to use.[1]
• Aerosmith's manager answered Rick Rubin's pitch with a question: what's rap? When Rubin called Tim Collins in early 1986 about remaking Walk This Way, Collins had to ask what rap was before the conversation could go any further.[1]
• The Walk This Way session was rushed partly because Run-DMC's rental car was overdue. Tyler and Perry were paid eight thousand dollars a day, and the song was finished in a single day on the ninth of March 1986.[1]
• Christmas in Hollis beat Michael Jackson's Bad for Rolling Stone's best video of 1987. The video was shot by two New York University film students, Michael Holman and Mark Richardson, and features DMC's adoptive mother Bannah in a cameo.[1]
• Christmas in Hollis plays in the film Die Hard. The 1987 charity song has appeared in many films and shows, from Die Hard to The Office and Ted Lasso, and only reached a Billboard chart in 2000, thirteen years after release.[1]
• Penn and Teller star in the video for It's Tricky. The magicians hustle people with three card monte, get beaten by Run-DMC, then end up impersonating the group at a gig in Japan.[1]
• The Knack sued Run-DMC two decades later over It's Tricky. The song borrowed the guitar riff of My Sharona. The band sued, and the case was settled out of court.[1]
• Jam Master Jay was related to the Mizell Brothers, a jazz funk production team. The Mizell Brothers produced records for artists such as Gary Bartz and Johnny Hammond Smith in the seventies.[1]
• Jam Master Jay started playing trumpet at the age of three. He went on to bass, guitar and drums, and on Raising Hell he played keyboards, bass and live drums as well as turntables.[1]
• DMC's first DJ name was Grandmaster Get High. In 1978 he taught himself to DJ in his parents' basement, on equipment bought with his brother after a comic book sale in the neighborhood.[1]
• As a teenager, Run was billed as DJ Run, the Son of Kurtis Blow. His older brother Russell managed Kurtis Blow, and Joey started out spinning records for the rapper on stage before he began rapping himself.[1] [2]
• Run-DMC's debut album was dedicated to the memory of DJ June Bug. June Bug was a DJ at the Bronx club Disco Fever, a key early hip-hop venue.[1]
• Profile Records gave Run-DMC an advance of twenty five thousand dollars for their first album. Fifteen thousand went on recording and the rest was split between Larry Smith, DMC, Run and Russell Simmons. Whether Jam Master Jay was paid for the record is unknown.[1]
• Jason Nevins' remix of It's Like That stopped the Spice Girls from scoring a seventh straight UK number one. The 1998 remix held their single Stop at number two and became the third best selling single of the year in Britain, behind Cher and Celine Dion.[1]
• Bob Dylan played My Adidas on his radio show and said the twelve inch single blew his mind. On the shoes episode of Theme Time Radio Hour in 2007, Dylan said he bought it at St. Mark's Records and compared Run-DMC to Chuck Berry.[1]
• For the song's twenty fifth anniversary, Adidas made exactly one thousand nine hundred eighty six pairs of a special My Adidas shoe. The limited Superstar carried a JMJ logo on the heel and a gold lace lock styled like a rope chain.[1]
• Krush Groove's filming led to the famous Disco Fever club being shut down. The attention brought inspectors, who closed the Bronx club for good on the last day of shooting over missing licenses.[1]
• Slayer's members make an uncredited cameo in the film Tougher Than Leather. Rick Rubin, who directed the film and played its villain, produced Slayer at the time. Glenn Danzig and the Beastie Boys also appear.[1] [2]
• On Back from Hell in 1990, Jam Master Jay rapped on record for the first time. He can be heard on Faces, Not Just Another Groove and Pause, as the group tried new jack swing and a harder street attitude.[1]
• The hit Down with the King samples the Broadway musical Hair. Produced by Pete Rock, it uses Where Do I Go from the original Hair cast recording. It became Run-DMC's second biggest hit.[1]
• Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello plays on Down with the King. The 1993 album also featured reggae star Mad Cobra, Q-Tip, EPMD and Onyx.[1]
• Crown Royal was delayed partly because other artists' managers would not release their tracks as singles. Managers for Kid Rock, Sugar Ray, Everlast and Fred Durst refused, and the album slipped from 1999 to April 2001.[1]
• Lyor Cohen said booking Run-DMC for his first Los Angeles party cost three hundred fifty dollars and a little cocaine. In 1984 Cohen borrowed seven hundred dollars from his mother for a show with Run-DMC, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Ice-T, and says he made thirty five thousand in one night.[1]
• Jam Master Jay co-founded the Scratch DJ Academy, which opened in May 2002. The New York school was pitched to him backstage at David Letterman's show. By 2012 it taught about fifty thousand people a year, and his son TJ became a teacher there.[1]
• A Dutch TV documentary filmed Run-DMC just as Walk This Way was taking off. Big Fun in the Big Town, shot in New York in 1986, inspired a whole generation of Dutch rappers.[1]
• DMC helped change New Jersey law for adopted adults. He testified in support of letting adoptees see their original birth certificates, and the law took effect on the first of January 2017.[1]
• In a 2016 Saturday Night Live sketch, Chance the Rapper played DMC in a parody of Christmas in Hollis. The sketch, Jingle Barack, had DMC himself make a cameo, and its song was nominated for an Emmy.[1] [2]
• Jam Master Jay's scratching is the main sample on a Kanye West song. His son Jesse noted that Kanye's Back to Me is built on his father's scratches, and that It's Tricky went viral on TikTok during the pandemic.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.