LA GOTA DE LECHE

CHAPTER 3

what the rap scene really was.” Rubin explained the failing of those records to the AV Club: “My favorite group at the time was Treacherous Three, and I met with one of the guys in the band. I didn’t know any-thing about the record business, but I recognized that the hip hop records that were coming out that I would buy as a fan, and the music I would hear when I’d go to the club, were two different things. The music in the club was much more breakbeat, scratching, raw, kind of rock-based. The hip hop records that were coming out at the time were really like disco or r&b, but with a person rapping on it instead of a girl singing on it. I guess what I set out to do as a fan was to make records that sounded like what I liked about going to a hip hop club, and trying to document that scene.” Buying all the new hip hop records each week (around three to five singles), Rubin thought the problem with them was in the attempt to try and sound like a record, rather than record what the actual music was like in the club atmosphere.

Straddling the worlds of rock/punk (touring with his band Hose) and hip hop/rap, Rubin quickly found that hip hop wasn’t so far off from his other musical interest. “I used to go to the rap clubs in New York . . . and they’d be playing rock ’n’ roll records with guys rapping over them. Like ‘Walk This Way’ was an original record that every rap dj would have and use. Billy Squier’s ‘Big Beat’ was another one. . . . I saw this void and starting making those records, just because I was a fan and wanted them to exist,” he told Shark magazine.

By October 1983, Rubin was djing for the Beastie Boys under the name DJ Double R and met his first producer-mentor, DJ Jazzy Jay — a dj in Afrika Bambaataa’s Soulsonic Force group — who “just had the best taste.” A few months later, in December, the pair set about to produce a single together. The song was “It’s Yours,” written by T La Rock and his brother Special K of the Treacherous Three. As T La Rock recalled, “Originally Special K was supposed to do that record and Louie Lou was supposed to do the scratching. My brother kept telling me, ‘Man you need to do this record.’ I didn’t even want to make records, I had a job at a pharmacy making good money. K hooked me up with Rick Rubin and that was it.” Rubin, the Beastie Boys’ Ad-Rock, T La Rock, and Jazzy Jay gathered to record the track at Jazzy’s house in

Queens, using Rubin’s Roland 808 drum machine. Rubin approached the production of “It’s Yours” “just from a fan’s point of view.”

Rubin borrowed $5,000 from his parents to press the single, imprinting “Def Jam Records” on it; it’s the first hip hop record to bear the logo of the future company. “The way it started was, the first record I made, I was planning on putting it out myself strictly for the purpose of breaking even — making back my costs, that was always the plan — and I sold it to Streetwise Records, who offered me more than I thought I was going to make if I’d sold as many as I wanted to,”

Rubin explained. “Then, as it turned out, it was a hit; it sold, I don’t know, 100,000 12-inches in the New York area, which was a big deal.”

Released in 1984 on independent label Streetwise/Party Time Records, the single’s sleeve listed Rubin’s nyu address and launched an

Rick Rubin (second from left) with his college band Hose in the early ’80s.

(© Monica Dee/Retna Ltd.)

onslaught of demos being mailed to him, which helped to fuel the fires of Def Jam. “It’s Yours” was featured in the Harry Belafonte–produced film Beat Street, but despite the song’s success, Rubin never made a dime on the record.

Enter Russell Simmons. On the recommendation of Tuff City Records owner Aaron Fuchs who said of Simmons, “No one promotes rap records better,” Rubin first met him in the hopes of moving “It’s Yours.” Familiar with Simmons’ work with groups like , Davy dmx, simple meeting. “We met at a party . . . a few months after [‘It’s Yours’]

came out, and he said it was his favorite record, and he was so excited to meet me, and couldn’t believe that I was white. There was nobody white doing anything in hip hop, and here was his favorite hip hop record made by a white guy. I was really excited to meet him, because his name was on all these great records, like Kurtis Blow. He was already a mogul of rap music, even though there was no business. It was just a small, underground scene. He was already kind of the focal point,” Rubin explained to AV Club. The two crossed paths again on a local New York hip hop television show, Graffiti Rock, promoting sin-gles. After hearing a series of unfinished beats Rubin had produced, which awaited a new crop of rappers to flow overtop, Simmons called the beats “hit records in the making.” The two became fast friends, with Simmons saying of the early days, “We did everything together.

We’d be at the studio every night; if it wasn’t the studio, we were in Danceteria. I used to take him to Disco Fever in the South Bronx. I took him everywhere.”

Rubin and Simmons shared a love for hip hop, a vision of where they felt it should head both musically and commercially, and one other thing — both had hit records under their belts but no profit to show for it. As Rubin recalled, Simmons “had made about 20 hit records that sold a lot, and he was broke. He never got paid either. So

I said, ‘This is dumb. [The independent record labels are] not really doing much for us, and they’re not paying us, so let’s do it ourselves.

At least we can make sure we get paid and our artists get paid.’” The formation of Def Jam as a record company proper grew out of the knowledge that Rubin and Simmons could take care of their artists and get the job done. Rubin explained to Shark that Def Jam was a better setup to overcome business obstacles: “Instead of going to somebody and asking them to do the things that needed to get done, and not getting them done, it was easier to just take on the responsi-bility. It was just not going to get done unless [we] did it.” A senior at nyu by this time, Rubin asked Simmons to be his partner in Def Jam in 1984. “Russell was five years older, and he was established,” the pro-ducer explained to the New York Times. “By myself, I was just a kid making records. He gave me credibility.”

And Rubin had just the right artist to launch the new formalized partnership, a young rapper whose demo was one of hundreds that had been sent to his dorm room. A&R houseguest Adam “Ad-Rock” Horovitz sorted through Rubin’s bins and boxes of demo tapes and discovered the first artist Def Jam would sign. While the tapes were mostly “horrible,”

Ad-Rock came across LL Cool J’s demo, which Rubin admitted he wouldn’t describe as “great, but it was different, and I liked it. There was something about it that just struck us as funny, and we wanted to hear it over and over again.” Rubin brought the demo to the attention of partner Russell Simmons, and LL was the first person Rubin ever called based on a demo tape and became “the foundation of the company.” Taking a chance on signing an unknown as Def Jam’s first act seems like more of a risk from today’s perspective than it was at the time. As Rubin explained, “There were no stars in rap music. It was really just a work of passion. Everyone who was doing it was doing it because they loved it, not because anyone thought it was a career. We didn’t even think about having a hit single. We just tried to do something we liked. There were no expectations whatsoever. The only hope was that we’d sell enough records to make enough money to make another record. If it didn’t cost us money to have Def Jam, we’d be happy. If it supported itself, and we could keep doing it, we’d be doing it.”

With LL Cool J on board, Rubin set out to record his first single, “I Need a Beat.” The approach Rubin took on producing this single was perhaps the secret to Def Jam’s commercial success and became the blueprint for hip hop’s first commercial explosion. “Before Def Jam, hip hop records were typically really long, and they rarely had a hook.

Those songs didn’t deliver in the way the Beatles did. By making our rap records sound more like pop songs, we changed the form,”

explained Rubin to the New York Times. Using a classic song structure and applying his philosophy — “the less going on in a record, and the clearer and more in-your-face it is, the better” — Rubin and LL Cool J cooked up a demo version of “I Need a Beat,” the strength of which convinced Simmons they had made the right choice. Even today it’s held dear by Rubin who described the song as “a really sparse record, pretty much all one drum machine, vocals, and a couple of little musical nuances here and there, a little bit of scratching.” Rubin put together the track for LL striving to “make music that suited the artist and reflected the signature of that artist, and was very representative of who they were.” Recorded on a nominal budget of $7,000 at Chung King Studios and pressed at Soundworks in New Jersey, LL Cool J’s first single, “I Need a Beat,” was released in November 1984. For Rubin, that single was “the real birth of Def Jam.”

Rubin then passed the baton to Simmons, whose promotional expertise pushed the fresh new sound of the single onto the airwaves of local New York hip hop stations and into the city’s hip hop clubs. With Simmons’ talent in old-school hustling and based on his reputation and past successes, “I Need a Beat” moved enough units to catch the atten-tion of execs at cbs Records, who were looking to jump on the hip hop bandwagon, which had been steadily gaining mainstream attention. cbs offered what amounted to a development deal with a $600,000 advance, and Simmons and Rubin seized the opportunity to expose their new brand of hip hop to a national audience. Time would prove this deal to be merely a foot in the door they would kick open a year later, but for 20-year-old Rick Rubin, it was a major milestone: “I sent a Xerox of the check to my parents. That’s when this stopped being a hobby.” Just as Def Jam started to take off on the success of LL’s single, Rick Rubin was

slated to graduate from New York University, but according to produc-tion partner and college buddy George Drakoulias, “We were still in the dorms and Rick didn’t want to leave. He got college credits for running the record company. He stayed until he graduated.” Rubin continued working with LL Cool J on his full-length studio lp and had a new project on the go: the soundtrack to the movie Krush Groove.

Krush Groove was a marketing vehicle Russell Simmons dreamed up — before securing a deal for financing or release — to introduce their label and its artist roster (which included the Fat Boys, LL Cool J, the Beastie Boys, and Simmons’ brother’s group, Run-DMC) to main-stream America. The soundtrack featured these newcomers bolstered by a who’s who of New York hip hop and r&b — Kurtis Blow, Sheila E., and New Edition. The buzz on Def Jam was already so hot that these relative upstart producers were able to pull big names already. Directed by Michael Schultz, the film drew inspiration from Harry Belafonte’s Beat Street and was essentially a semi-autobiograph-ical story about the struggles of an nyc hip hop producer and his bur-geoning label. L.A. Law’s Blair Underwood played the Russell Simmons character, and Rubin played the fictionalized version of himself. “Russell really cared about finding new ways to expose the music to a bigger audience,” explained Rubin. Krush Groove was cer-tainly innovative if not 100 percent factual. “It’s maybe 50 percent accurate. . . . That was definitely a Hollywood version. But the basic story is similar,” said Rubin.

The success of LL Cool J’s “I Need a Beat” was pivotal to convincing movie executives, including Warner Bros. Pictures President Marc Canton, to finance the $3 million film budget. The picture’s green light coupled with the buzz created by LL’s single led cbs to change the terms of their original development deal with Def Jam, signing the label to a $2 million distribution deal in September 1985, in what Simmons described as “the greatest opportunity in the whole world.”

The spring and summer of 1985 Rubin spent juggling the filming of Krush Groove at Silvercup Studios in Long Island City, production duties on the soundtrack, and LL’s debut lp. George Drakoulias recalled what it was like working with Rubin in those early days: “I

didn’t know what I was doing and Rick didn’t know much more, I don’t think. He was just paying for the studio time and kind of had a vision. He would write these beats, and the studio was totally manual, so you had four or five people on the board holding things down, waiting for something to come up. ‘Is that coming? Okay, next one.’

You might accidentally put the kick drum on half a beat early, but it would be okay. You always broke it down to the high-hat at one point.

There were certain things you just automatically followed. There would be a guy yelling in one room and a drum machine and a lot of reverb. You never knew what was gonna happen.”

When fall arrived, Rubin hadn’t had time to find an apartment but was finally forced to move out of his dorm room at Weinstein Hall.

The producer wound up moving into a loft between Houston Street and Brice, at 594 Broadway, and Def Jam’s offices officially relocated to 40 East 19th Street, sharing space with Russell Simmons’ Rush Management offices.

With his office and home settled, Rubin just needed to find the right studio to record in. LL Cool J’s album had been recorded at Chung King Studios. The studio was originally called Secret Society Records, but as it was housed in a former Chinese restaurant, Rubin took to calling it the Chung King House of Metal and the name stuck. Rubin remembers the studio as “such a dump, it was like an embarrassing place to record. . . . So we made up this fictional name.” Blender de -scribed Chung King as “the home away from home for many of the artists signed to Def Jam. . . . Owned by John King, a musician and friend of Rubin’s since the two first met at the New York club Danceteria, Chung King was a single-room sixth-floor studio meas-uring about 13 feet by 18 feet, with fresh graffiti on the walls.” It may have been a dump but it came to be known as the Abbey Road of Rap.

Rubin felt the studio was “rock ’n’ roll. . . . It was like stepping back in time, something in a film noir. . . . The studio had a really free vibe.”

All of LL Cool J’s Radio lp and much of the material for the Beastie Boys’ and Run-DMC’s lps were recorded at Chung King, but when Def Jam spent part of their $600,000 cbs advance on a four-story

building at 298 Elizabeth Street in June 1986, the producer was excited to turn the building’s basement into a state-of-the-art recording studio. Aside from producing platinum albums, Rubin’s goal was to never go “to Chung King again.” But with that studio still just a dream, Rubin was forced to complete these seminal projects there.

Krush Groove hit theaters in October 1985, grossing $11 million, three times its production budget, and making overnight stars of Def Jam’s artist roster and its management. Riding high on the success of the film, Def Jam released LL Cool J’s Radio on November 18. The album sold 900,000 copies upon its release (and was eventually certi-fied platinum), earning back the $7,000 recording costs and bumping up the label’s reputation with cbs, the hip hop community, and bol-stering Rubin’s and Simmons’ confidence.

On a promotional trip to London, Rubin and Simmons caught a show by British rapper Slick Rick, and the producer declared afterward that he should be the next Def Jam artist, no matter what efforts were required to sign him. Simmons focused on the business of signing Slick Rick and promoting Def Jam’s artists and the brand itself, while Rubin returned to his domain of mastery — the studio. Thanks to the trust he and Simmons had placed in one another, Rubin retained com-plete autonomy as in-house producer for Def Jam.

Rubin’s goal was for the music Def Jam released “to be as cutting-edge and radical as it could be, but we weren’t elitist about it. We didn’t want people not to be able to have it. We would focus on making music, and [cbs would] focus on selling it and getting [it] into stores, exposing and advertising it.” Rubin and Simmons were the eyes and ears on the street for what everyone else in the industry heard on record and saw on mtv. “There was a synergy, where anything that was going on in hip hop was coming out of our office, one way or another,”

Rubin said of the time. In addition to LL Cool J’s album, Def Jam’s first year of releases was scheduled to include the debut lp from the newly signed Beastie Boys. As Rubin began work on demos for the Beastie Boys, he also started work on Run-DMC’s third lp.

Run-DMC was signed to Profile Records with Russell Simmons managing the group, but with Rubin’s stock as the hottest hip hop

producer on the East Coast fast on the rise, it was a foregone conclu-sion he would produce the rap group’s next album. Rubin’s desire to work with Run-DMC dated back to the early ’80s, when Rubin, upon hearing the group’s first single, “It’s Like That”/“Sucker mcs,” had boldly commented, “This is the real shit. [But] I could do this better.”

With Raising Hell, he would have his opportunity.

Run-DMC