FEATURE:
Groovelines
PHOTO CREDIT: Danny Sanchez
Run-D.M.C. (ft. Aerosmith) – Walk This Way
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I am starting this feature…
with a bit of an issue! I am talking about Run-D.M.C.’s collaboration with Aerosmith on their track, Walk This Way. I have seen the Hip-Hop group’s name written as ‘Run-D.M.C.’, ‘Run DMC’ and ‘Run-DMC’. I am sticking with the former. In any case, Walk This Way was originally released as the second single from Aerosmith’s 1975 album, Toys in the Attic. It peaked at number ten on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1977. Run-D.M.C. covered it on their 1986 album, Raising Hell. At that point, Aerosmith’s career was waning. Although 1985’s Done with Mirrors was not a bad album, it did not do that well commercially. Run-D.M.C., conversely, were doing fantastically and were not struggling for acclaim or commercial success. The was one of the first Rap-Rock crossovers. Although the Aerosmith original is fine, I think that the force and cool that Run-D.M.C. put into the song is a reason why it was such a commercial success! I have just missed the thirty-fifth anniversary of its release – the Run D.M.C. and Aerosmith hook-up was put out on 4th July, 1986 as the second single from Raising Hell. Walk This Way is one of the greatest collaborations ever and one of the finest tracks from the 1980s. I feel the newer version eclipses the Aerosmith original. The story behind the coming together is interesting. The Atlantic wrote a feature about Walk This Way in 2019. It was written around the release of the book, Walk This Way: Run-DMC, Aerosmith, and the Song That Changed American Music Forever:
“It was, like many great breakthroughs, both a brilliant idea and the worst idea you’ve ever heard: Get Run-DMC and Aerosmith in the studio together, force them to perform a hybrid, rap-boosted, ebony-and-ivory version of an Aerosmith hit from the ’70s, and then make a video about walls coming down, etc. Genius, right? Let’s go! Aerosmith, corroded rock behemoths in a slump, were sort of dazedly into it; Run-DMC, coming into their power as hip-hop’s first superstars, were sullen and wary. But it happened—in retrospect it had to happen—and with 1986’s goofy, clankingly enjoyable “Walk This Way,” rap music was big-banged into being as mainstream entertainment.
So at least argues the Washington Post staffer Geoff Edgers in his new book, Walk This Way: Run-DMC, Aerosmith, and the Song That Changed American Music Forever. “Before ‘Walk’ struck in 1986,” writes Edgers, “hip-hop was a small underground community of independent labels and scrappy promoters. After ‘Walk,’ it became a nation, a genre that would soak itself into virtually every element of culture, from music and film to fashion and politics.”
A grand claim, Geoff Edgers. A mighty pitch. And the question with a book like this—a book that zeroes in on a particular happening or art moment and then extrapolates boomingly outward—is always: Is there enough there? Enough action at the core, that is, and enough concentrically moving energy to prevent the narrative from collapsing in on itself as it stretches to book length? The answer in this case, I am happy to report, is yes”.
Not only did Walk This Way help introduce me to the music of Aerosmith – who I was not that aware of when I heard the song for the first time in the 1990s -; it also introduced me to a wider Hip-Hop world. I discovered Run-D.M.C. and their magic! Thirty-five years after its release, and the meeting of two disparate groups still seems remarkable. It could have been a flop. As it was, the public and critics reacted positively to the song!
Whilst Aerosmith were getting a leg-up from Run-D.M.C. and reigniting their flagging popularity, I don’t think that the Hip-Hop band would have made the song such a success and interesting proposition if they covered the song on their own. I guess the iconic video for the song also helped its appeal – at a time when MTV was so important when it came to promoting artists and their work. I want to end with a feature from The Guardian. They wrote about Walk This Way in 2016 on its thirtieth anniversary. We learn about the fortunes of Run-D.M.C. and Aerosmith, in addition to how the song came together:
“Not that hip-hop had always been an easy sell. The rap records that reached radio listeners in the early years had a tendency, ever since the Sugarhill Gang’s breakthrough, Rapper’s Delight, to exude a novelty flavour, while turntablism, in real life the beating heart of the culture, tended to manifest itself only as a cheesy wikki-wikki add-on. And then there were the clothes. Oh dear God, the clothes. Seek out the extraordinary footage of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five on Channel 4’s The Tube performing The Message, its pioneering gritty street-level content undermined by their superfly sci-fi costumes, which looked like they’d been raided from George Clinton’s tour bus seven years earlier.
The reputation of the entire genre was rescued by Run-DMC who, in the words of British writer Neil Kulkarni in The Periodic Table of Hip Hop, “made everything that had happened before them sound old-fashioned, too slick and smarmy”. The trio had roots in that clunky prehistory: Run (Joseph Simmons), the teenage brother of Russell Simmons, had previously DJed for Kurtis Blow, before forming his own band, originally called Orange Crush, with DMC (Darryl McDaniels) and DJ Jam Master Jay (Jason Mizell). But everything changed in 1983 when the trio, renamed Run-DMC and still in their teens, released their debut single, It’s Like That, on Profile. That track – brutally blunt by the standards of the time – and its rival-dissing flipside, Sucker MCs, blew up on rap radio and changed the game for good. “Ultimately it took Run-DMC, with their black leather, sweats, homburgs and in-your-face attitude, to crystallise the image of toughness into rap chic,” wrote SH Fernando Jr in hip-hop history The New Beats. “Their attitude, like their beats, was hard. Their dress, unlike the extravagant leather, sequin and feather outfits of most rap acts at the time, reflected a street aesthetic to which the average b-boy on the corner could relate.”
Aerosmith, meanwhile, were in a slump. Album sales had steadily declined since their 70s peak, the band’s key members were ravaged by various addictions, and they hadn’t had a Billboard top 10 single since the original Walk This Way, a decade earlier. The song had first been recorded for the band’s Toys in the Attic album, and was born on tour when singer Steven Tyler, who had been listening to the Meters and James Brown, asked drummer Joey Kramer to lay down something with a little funk to it. (Run-DMC, therefore, were not so much appropriating Aerosmith’s groove for black culture as reclaiming it.) Guitarist Joe Perry added a simple but effective hook, and Tyler came up with a lewd loss-of-innocence lyric about a schoolboy getting caught masturbating by his father, who instructs him in the ways of seduction.
When it was time to record the track at New York’s Record Plant studio, it still needed a title and a chorus. Inspiration finally came to them when they took a break to walk a few blocks to Times Square to catch a movie. The film was Mel Brooks’s comedy Young Frankenstein, in which Marty Feldman’s Igor lurches and limps down some stone steps, then instructs Gene Wilder, playing the title role, to “walk this way”. In a classic sight gag, Wilder does exactly that.
By the time the Run-DMC/Aerosmith collaboration was mooted, Jam Master Jay had already been cutting Walk This Way back and forth between his decks for years, and Run had been rapping over it since he was 12. They weren’t the first act, though, to attempt a rap-rock hybrid. The Beastie Boys’ AC/DC-sampling Rock Hard and LL Cool J’s Rock the Bells – both Rick Rubin productions – had already walked that way, and Run-DMC themselves had released several trial runs, notably the Russell Simmons-produced Rock Box and the provocatively titled King of Rock, both featuring chunky riffing from session guitarist Eddie Martinez.
When Collins relayed Rubin’s offer to Tyler and Perry, they were initially sceptical, but went along to Magic Ventures studio in Manhattan on 9 March 1986 for the rate of $8,000 a day. And a day is all it took: Run-DMC had a rental car that was overdue for return, and needed to work fast. As Tyler recalled in Walk This Way: The Autobiography of Aerosmith, “Run and D and Jay were huddled in a corner, really intent on something. I go, ‘Joe, what are they doing?’ He says, ‘Probably smoking crack.’ Later we went over to the corner. They’d been eating lunch from McDonald’s.”
What Rick Rubin created with that day’s work still stands as an immortal party anthem, as liable to spark outbreaks of air-scratching as air-guitar among drunks unable to decide whether they want to be Jay or Joe as they lurched around (an ability to dance was optional for the enjoyment of Walk This Way). Tyler’s rapid-fire vocal was too slang-packed to be completely decipherable to British ears, but the bits about “feet flying up in the air”, a “kitty in the middle” and being “down on the muffin” left little doubt that it was thinly veiled filth”.
Thirty-five years after its release and Walk This Way still sounds phenomenally fresh and exciting! It put Aerosmith back on the map and, to an extent, heralded the Rap-Rock crossover. I first heard the song as a child, and I was thrilled from the moment I heard it. The catchiness of the chorus, the great guitar riff and Run-D.M.C. adding this authority and power…that combination was too hard to resist! I am trying to think about other genre crossover hits that are as important as Walk This Way. In 1987, Aerosmith released Permanent Vacation. It was the first album of theirs to get heavy video rotation on MTV. I think it is the band’s true comeback album after the band reunited in 1984. It is a shame that the two acts cannot get together to perform the song again. Tragically, Run-D.M.C.’s Jam Master Jay was killed in 2002. Even though that is sad, we have the original track and that magnificent video! Walk This Way is not only one of the best collaborations ever. I think it might also be among…
THE most important songs ever.