Beating the Rap

"That's how I started out. DJing and playing basketball," Run coos boyishly, staring at the man's shiny badge and gun. "Give your son the word: DJing is good, it's def. Tell your son you were hanging out with me."

"I will, I will," the marshal says. "My son will go wild about this."

Run's smile broadens once his car arrives. Instead of renting a large silver or gold Mercedes like other members of the Run-D.M.C. entourage, Run prefers the sportier feel of a Corvette. As he dials his wife, Valerie, and his three-year-old daughter, Vanessa, on the car's cellular phone, he says, "I'm a real family man now. I even took them to Europe this summer, and we had a ball. I'm the kind of guy who gets lonely after a show and takes a flight home."

Run chats with Valerie for ten minutes, learning that his daughter spent the day at Belmont Racetrack. He promises to call again later that evening, and that reminds him about Michael Jackson's dinner invitation.

Run knows that it's one thing to scratch, rhyme and scat over Aerosmith's tune, but it's a different move to cross into Jackson's pasteurized pop world. He burrows deeper in the comfy front seat and sighs. "I have to go for a ride to clear the bees out of my head. Later I'll get in the Jacuzzi — that way I can get my brain together. I have to decide if I want to hang out with Michael. I just don't know. I."

Run's last words are lost in a loud vroooom as he puts his foot to the gas and screeches out of the carport.

Run-D.M.C.'s Raps Echo the Sounds of the City, capturing the aggressive boasts and frustrated threats of street-toughened youths. The group's debut album, Run-DM.C. was a bravado-filled jaunt on which Run urgently bragged that he was "the coolest and the baddest." Run-D.M.C. was the first rap album to go gold and the first to have a song featured on MTV. The follow-up LP. King of Rock, was similarly boastful but less stark, as the group drifted into entertaining musicality, adding some reggae riffs and hard-rock guitar.

Raising Hell, the record that's catapulted Run-D.M.C. into the realm of appearances on Saturday Night Live and The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers (they rapped with Rivers), teems with raw messages about the streets, drugs and promiscuity. The huge success of the album — it's the first rap LP to go platinum — and the "Walk This Way" single has caused Run-D.M.C. to soar far beyond hip-hop. With sales of Raising Hell now well over 2 million, Run-D.M.C. has more than mainstream credibility. It is now one of the hottest groups in America.

And although their defiant, socially urgent anthems certainly speak to inner-city youths, Run, D and Jay are hardly products of Watts or Harlem. Friends since childhood, all three grew up in Hollis, a neighborhood of one-family homes and well-tended gardens. Both of Run's parents worked, holding down respectable jobs with the city. So little Joey played basketball, listened to his Stevie Wonder and Barry White records and otherwise led a genteel life.

Still the doting son, Run is quick to pay homage to his father, Daniel Simmons, a New York Board of Education employee who inspired him to write poetry at age ten. "My father is a great person," says Run, sounding like a true product of the middle class. "My mother and my father made sure I was never deprived of anything.

"The worst thing that ever happened to me as a kid was that gym class would run out of time. I couldn't play my basketball game. Oh yeah, I couldn't bring my box to school neither. But that's it. No way was I brainwashed or hurt by being black. ... It's not like I never had any money. I've always had money."

By the time Joey became a teenager, the staccato, thumping beats of rap were beginning to replace disco in black nightclubs nationwide. Acts like Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five made Sugarhill Records the king of the ghetto blaster. Run's brother Russell, whose life story is depicted in Krush Groove, was also starting to make noise. Establishing Rush Productions, he began to book rappers into his college, and it was under his aegis that Curtis Walker became Kurtis Blow, the early rap superstar responsible for the smash hit "The Breaks." Blow would often sleep over at the Simmonses'. "I knew my brother and Kurt were having a great time," says Run. "I wanted to be with them."