The Full Biography
Run-DMC. Rappers. DJ. The Hollis, Queens, trio who dressed hip-hop in street clothes and made MTV play it, then spent the years after a murder as two men keeping a three-man name honest.
This is his story.
The image most people still carry is three men in black fedoras, Adidas without laces, and leather, or a video in which Aerosmith walks into a Queens cipher, or a DJ whose hands made a rock riff into a new American language. The years are 1983, 1986, 2002. What the still cannot show is Joseph Simmons, Darryl McDaniels, and Jason Mizell of Hollis — Run, DMC, and Jam Master Jay — middle-class Black teenagers who treated rap as a job, and a studio on Merrick Boulevard where Jay was shot dead on October 30, 2002, at thirty-seven, after which the group as a living trio ended.
Joseph Ward Simmons was born November 14, 1964. Darryl Matthews McDaniels was born May 31, 1964. Jason William Mizell was born January 21, 1965. Hollis, Queens, was not a myth the press invented after the hits; it was a neighborhood of houses, parents, and Catholic school for D. Joseph’s older brother, Russell Simmons, was already in the music business, managing Kurtis Blow. Joseph became DJ Run, the kid brother who learned to cut on the same circuit. Darryl was a comic-book kid who wrote rhymes in notebooks and took the name DMC from Darryl McDaniels and, he has said, from “Devastating Mic Controller.” Jason was the DJ with the taste and the clothes — hats, sneakers, the visual law the other two would live inside. They were not a crew assembled by a label. They were three Hollis friends who decided the music coming out of the Bronx and Harlem could be stripped down, stood up, and dressed like the block they actually walked.
The door was a 12-inch on Profile Records.
In 1983, with Russell in the room and Larry Smith and Russell producing, they released “It’s Like That” backed with “Sucker M.C.’s.” No disco orchestra. A drum machine, two voices trading, a DJ. “It’s like that, and that’s the way it is” became a sentence people still use when they mean the world will not negotiate. The debut album, Run-D.M.C. (1984), was rap’s first gold album. The cover was black-and-white, hats on, no costumes from another decade. King of Rock (1985) was rap’s first platinum album. The title track walked into rock radio without asking permission and without pretending to be a rock band. They were the first rap act on the cover of Rolling Stone, the first to get serious rotation on MTV, the first to appear on Saturday Night Live as rap. Those firsts are not a press release. They are the reason a generation of suburban kids met hip-hop as three men from Queens and not as a rumor.
Rick Rubin and Russell Simmons, by then building Def Jam, steered 1986. Raising Hell is the album that crossed the country and became the first rap record to go multi-platinum. “My Adidas” was a sneaker song that became a contract: Adidas signed them, one of the first major endorsement deals between an athletic brand and a rap group, built on a record that named the product without sounding like a jingle. They performed the song at Madison Square Garden and held their shoes in the air; the deal followed the night. “It’s Tricky” was a playground chant with a hard drum. “Peter Piper” let Jay work. “You Be Illin’” was a comic scold. And “Walk This Way,” with Steven Tyler and Joe Perry of Aerosmith, took a 1975 riff, a 1986 rhyme, and a video MTV could not stop playing. The single reached No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100. Aerosmith, then cold, got a second life. Hip-hop, then still treated by many program directors as a specialty format, got the daytime slot. Jay is the reason the record exists in the form people remember. Run and D hesitated; Jay told them they would look like chumps if they did not come in and recut it. They came in. The video — two rooms, a wall, then no wall — is a civic object. Forty years on, it is still the clip a news show uses when it needs to explain the year rap became pop without becoming a novelty.
They toured like a rock band because that was the point: arenas, opening slots that became headlining, a live DJ instead of a backing track. Tougher Than Leather (1988) gave them “Run’s House” and “Mary, Mary.” The accompanying film was a mess. The group’s hold on the center of the culture loosened as Public Enemy, N.W.A, and a harder politics took the flag. Back from Hell (1990) was darker and less loved. D was drinking. The trio that had looked invincible on Raising Hell looked, for a stretch, like a brand trying to remember why it had started. They still packed sheds. They still closed with “Walk This Way” because the crowd required the treaty. Down with the King (1993) was the reunion with the culture: Pete Rock and CL Smooth, Q-Tip, EPMD, a title track that put them back on MTV as elder statesmen who were barely thirty. They toured with the hits and the new record. They were, by then, the face a museum would hang when it needed “1980s hip-hop” in a single frame. Crown Royal (2001) was a guest-heavy album — Kid Rock, Fred Durst, Method Man — a late attempt to stand in a rap-rock weather they had invented and no longer owned. D, in those years, was also in a private fight: alcoholism, a depression he has since described with unusual care, and the discovery, as an adult, that he had been adopted — a fact that sent him looking for his birth mother and into a second life as a speaker about adoption and sobriety. Run was becoming a minister. Jay kept a studio in Queens and a generation of younger DJs and producers in his orbit, including men who would go on to make hits that never carried his name. He was the one who still lived the closest to the block that had made them.
It’s like that, and that’s the way it is.Run-DMC, “It’s Like That,” 1983
The turn is “Walk This Way” and what they refused to become in order to make it. They did not put on costumes. They did not leave Hollis in the video. They brought Aerosmith into their room. The crossover was an invitation, not a surrender. That decision — Jay’s insistence, Rubin’s beat, two bands in one frame — is why the trio is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and why every rap-rock handshake since has to live in their shadow.
Six things most people never knew
- They were Hollis neighbors, not a label’s collage. Run, D, and Jay came from the same Queens neighborhood. The look was how they already dressed.
- The debut album was rap’s first gold. King of Rock was the first platinum. Those thresholds changed what a record company would budget for a rap act.
- “My Adidas” became a contract. A song about sneakers produced one of the first major athletic endorsements in hip-hop. The brand followed the record, not the other way around.
- Jay made “Walk This Way” happen. Run and D were unsure. Jay told them not to look like chumps. They recut it. The wall in the video came down.
- DMC learned as an adult that he was adopted. The discovery, and his sobriety, became a second career in public speaking that has nothing to do with a tour bus.
- Joseph Simmons is Reverend Run. The kid brother of Russell Simmons became a minister and, for a time, a reality-television father, without putting the old records in storage.
They left the grind of being only the kings of 1986. Ministry, sobriety, a Queens studio, and then a murder became the remaining chapter.
The later years
Home, after the platinum years, was still Queens for Jay and a wider map for Run and D. Joseph Simmons preached. He would become known as Reverend Run, and Run’s House on MTV would show a father and a church and a brand that had outlived the Adidas commercial. Darryl McDaniels got sober, found his birth mother, wrote about it, and began speaking in schools and to adoptive families. He has been plain about how close the drinking came to ending him, and plain about the comic books and the quiet that fame did not fix. Jason Mizell stayed the DJ. He ran a studio on Merrick Boulevard in Jamaica, Queens. He mentored. He was, to a generation of New York DJs, not a monument but a man in the room who could still cut and still say no.
On October 30, 2002, Jam Master Jay was shot and killed in that studio. He was thirty-seven. The case sat unsolved in public for two decades. In 2020 federal prosecutors charged Ronald Washington and Karl Jordan Jr. In 2024 a Brooklyn jury convicted them of murder. A third man, Jay Bryant, was charged separately. The legal file is still a living thing; the music file is not. Run-DMC as a recording trio ended in that room. Run and D made occasional appearances together, including tribute nights and festival bills that used two microphones and a DJ who was not Jay and did not pretend to be. They did not cut a new studio album with a replacement. In 2009 they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Jay’s family stood in the place where the third man should have been. The speeches were about firsts and about a friend. In 2016 they received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. Documentaries, anniversary tours of the catalog, Adidas reissues, a fortieth-anniversary weather around Raising Hell — the industry kept the name in circulation because the records still work and because the murder made the story unfinished in a way a retirement would not have.
Run continued the ministry and the television life, with the public family chapters that reality television extracts as rent. Run’s House made the Simmons household a weekly set; the old records played under new credits. D continued to record as a solo voice — including work that put his recovery and his adoption in the lyric — to tour the old songs with care, and to talk in gyms and libraries more than about the Billboard chart. He has written a memoir, appeared in schools, and treated the notebook kid from Hollis as the person the famous initials still have to answer to. Both men have said versions of the same sentence: they did not know they were making history; they were making records. The Hollis street sign, the Smithsonian objects, the Hall of Fame — those arrived because three friends from one neighborhood changed the clothes, the drums, and the television. Jay’s children and widow have kept his name on scholarship and community work in Queens, including programs that put turntables in rooms that would otherwise only have the records. The remaining years for the two living members have been a long stewardship: do not let the name become a costume, do not let Jay become only a true-crime headline, do not pretend the trio still walks into a studio at the same time. When they take a stage now it is as two-thirds of a finished group, and they say his name first. The hats are still in the photographs. The third man is not in the wings.
After the spotlight moved
Jay is gone. Run and D are not. The accurate tense is split. The records — Run-D.M.C., King of Rock, Raising Hell, “Walk This Way,” “It’s Tricky,” “My Adidas,” “Run’s House” — still teach a beginner what rap sounded like when it decided it did not need a band or a costume. The Hall of Fame induction is on tape. The murder convictions are on a docket. Adidas still sells the Superstar to kids who have never seen the video. Hollis still has the houses. The useful remaining fact is that a group can be finished as a trio and unfinished as a catalog. If you only remember the hats, you have the still. If you remember Merrick Boulevard and the two men who would not hire a ghost, you have them.
We didn’t know we were making history. We were just making records.Darryl “DMC” McDaniels
The still of the three in leather will last. It should. But the life behind it is a Queens block, a 12-inch on Profile, a sneaker contract, a wall that came down on MTV, a minister, a sober adoptee, and a DJ who died in his own studio. They came out of Hollis, found the one kind of hardness television would play in the afternoon, and then, when the third man was killed, the other two kept the name without counterfeiting the group. That is the arc. That is the story.
Portrait: Jeff Pinilla · CC BY 3.0 · via Wikimedia Commons