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Run DMC and Aerosmith and Bill Adler (rear) (courtesy of Rizzoli)

I first spoke with Bill Adler in the 80′s when I was just a kid trying to get insight into the entertainment industry. I would call the label that he worked at, and he’d take time to talk. Decades later, in this interview, Bill continues to generously share. What’s changed since those early days, is that the nascent genre of music that he worked on building awareness for so long ago has since become one of the most popular in the world, and immensely important economically to the whole of the music industry. Culturally, the label Adler helped build awareness for so many years ago, has become one of the most powerful and important due to its roster of iconic artists that are known to millions. As Head of Publicity, first for Russell Simmons’ Rush Productions, and then, upon its inception, for Def Jam, Adler’s role was vital in helping to get the word out to the universe about up and coming superstars such as Run DMC, LL Cool J, The Beastie Boys, Public Enemy, Slick Rick, and countless others. Although the man who also served as Vice President of Media Relations for Island Records is quite humble when asked about his great undertakings, it’s clear that proper presentation to media outlets about the story of each of these (at the time) new artists, in a genre that wasn’t quite accepted as a legitimate music, was an immensely important part in the launching of their careers.

Def Jam Recordings: The First 25 Years of the Last Great Record Label, a book that Adler co-authored to help tell the oral and visual story of Hip Hop’s most prominent record label, provides amazing insight from a who’s who of important players. From founding partners Russell Simmons and Rick Rubin, to many of the company’s key executives, and even the legendary artists themselves, this book provides a wealth of first hand accounts of those early days of Def Jam, and, in many ways, the genre itself. Visually, the book is comprised of some of the most amazing photographs of Def Jam’s vital players, truly giving an inside historical perspective of the label that helped shape and introduce Hip Hop to the mainstream.

Chuck D on megaphone from the classic video for "Fight The Power" from Public Enemy (courtesy of Rizzoli)

Legendary in his own right, in this in-depth and candid interview, Adler discusses this impressive new book, while openly providing a distinct glimpse into the early days at the label. He shares his great wealth of knowledge about music, media, and his experiences working with Hip Hop’s most celebrated record label from its infancy to dominance of pop culture globally. Let’s begin:

I: If we could go back toward the beginning and talk a little bit about your first encounter with Russell and Rick.

BA: I met Russell first. Really, I was an employee of…Rush Productions before I was an employee of Def Jam, and that’s only because I started working with Rush just a few months before the establishment of Def Jam. The first Def Jam records came in the fall of ’84 and I was working with Russell at Rush Productions in late June of ’84. I met Russ because I was a freelance writer in New York in the early ‘80’s…in the fall of 1980, I did a story for the Daily News about Kurtis Blow who had a national hit called “The Breaks” and I started to hear at the time about Kurt’s manager, a young man named Russell Simmons. In early ’83 I did a story for People Magazine about Disco Fever in the Bronx, and it was Russ who put me on to Disco Fever. That wasn’t supposed to be the crux of the story. It wasn’t supposed to be the subject of the story. I was going to do something more broad, more general, but that place was so compelling I said well I’ll tell the story about Hip Hop by concentrating on this one venue and this one kind of energy center.

In any case, Russell then was, not unlike the way he is now, it’s just that he knew less people. You know, Russell is a world-beatingly charming. He’s got blazing charisma, blazing intelligence, a great sense of humor, and was animated by the sense of mission which was to do work on behalf of this emerging culture called Hip Hop. So he made a big impression on me in ’83 and I stayed in touch with him. Then in ’84, it was going to be a presidential election and Ronald Reagan was up for reelection, and I was not a fan of Reagan, and my idea was well you know I’m trying to think of my own little way, what can I do to derail his presidency or forestall his getting reelected. What I did was I wrote a rap. An anti-Reagan rap and I wrote it with Kurtis Blow in mind because Kurt didn’t write all of his own rhymes. So I thought well I’ll write it and Kurt can rap it, and I brought it to his manager namely Russ. The two of us get to talking and I don’t think he thought much of my rhymes, but he liked me well enough and the two of us got to talking. He kind of flattered me into a job, and so I started working with him.

[Sound clip of Bill Adler answering a question about the making and significance of "Walk This Way."]

I: Awesome.

BA: Then it was after that that I met Rick; very shortly after I started working with Russ, I met Rick.

I: Please talk to me a little bit about possibly your first encounter with Rick, and what was your first impression of Rick?

BA: Rick Rubin-I don’t remember my first encounter per se. The thing about Rick is that even then he was relatively reclusive. When I first met him, he was still a student at NYU and living in a dorm there. Not long after, within a year, he moved out and he took a place in Lower Manhattan. He never had an office, and he never kept office hours. He was basically a studio rat; then and now. That’s really kind of how and where he spent his life, in recording studios. It sort of the same now, he shuttles between his lovely house in Malibu and various studios, and of course he’s got studios built into his place in Malibu. I will say this in terms of his demeanor, he was much-as the book says. [In the book] Adam Horowitz talks about Rick’s demeanor then. Rick’s basic style was kind of very much taken or inspired by professional wrestling, and characters like Captain Lou Albano, which is to say that he was a screamer and he was loud and aggressive in a kind of comical way. That’s how he was then. He’s not that way now. Now he’s gone 180 degrees in the other direction. He’s very soft spoken… But that’s the way he was then.

I: Right. Let’s talk a little bit about Hip Hop. You mentioned Kurtis Blow; obviously one of the forefathers of Hip Hop and definitely one of the first artists to make a significant name for himself and professionally recordings in the Hip Hop genre. What attracted you to the genre at the time and what were you listening to before you got involved in Hip Hop?

BA: I can’t be coy about this. I’m about to turn 60 years old. In December I’m going to be 60, and by the time I started working with all these Hip Hopers, I was already in the summer of 1984 I’m already 32 years old. So I’m six years older than Russell, I’m whatever it would be, nine years older than Rick. When I started working in ’84, Run DMC those guys are 19 and 20 years old, LLCool J signs up he’s 16. I’m much older than everybody that I’m working with. It’s not surprising to understand that I’ve got a history that pre-dates Hip Hop. I was a music lover. I started playing trombone as a ten year old in a band, and then I was magnetized by the Beatles when they hit in ’64. I was swept up by the music of the day like anybody else. I think probably I felt a little more passionately because really music has been my life ever since. I’m a ‘60’s guy. By the early ‘70’s, when I’m in my early 20’s, I had worked on the radio… Almost every job I ever had was kind of music related.

I worked as a clerk and then a manager at a record store. I worked as a DJ for college radio and then professionally. I started writing about music and that seemed to gain me a little traction. So I worked for an underground newspaper in Ann Arbor, and then I took a job full-time at the Boston Herald in Boston as the pop music critic. I was writing about whatever struck my fancy. In effect, I was my own editor. My tastes were very broad. Broad enough to do that job, so I was going to pay attention to what was happening pop-wise, but I was also going to write about the jazz of the day or stuff that wasn’t current necessarily, or stuff that was left field that struck my fancy. During that time, so 1979 and I’m in Boston and I’m paying attention to what’s going on, and “Rapper’s Delight” comes out that fall and it was phenomenal. It was a great, great record but also it seemed to mean more than the record itself because it was a little bit different…in other words in terms of genre because nobody was singing. You know they were rapping, and also the thing was fifteen minutes long.

There was a three minute edit but nobody bothered to play it on the radio. Every single time you heard it on the radio, the entire fifteen minute song was played which was completely remarkable. I dug it, and I bought it and I started listening to it. I moved to New York July 1, 1980. And by that fall I was freelancing and because I’d dug Sugar Hill Gang, I noticed when Kurt had his hit. Actually what happened was I was still in Boston when he put out a “Christmas Rappin’”. “Christmas Rappin’” was a remarkable record because you didn’t hear it until ten minutes before Christmas. Somehow it just entered the market kind of late and they were still playing it in March; a Christmas song. Just because it was so magnetic. This stuff was so intrinsically sexy. A year later I’m in New York and Kurt has the Breaks, and I went to the Daily News and persuaded them to do a story about Kurtis and so it went on from there.

I: What do you think it is the kinship between those Hip Hop and Punk music? People like [Malcolm] McLaren and the Clash and Blondie. That has dissipated. There was somewhat of a bond, if nothing else, in the spirit of the music that I don’t see today. Can you address that?

BA: What happened was the two scenes were very small, and they were kind of sub-cultural. It seems to me on both sides that divide, the Punk Rock and Hip Hop side there were a very few forward thinking individuals who were able to bridge the divide. On the Hip Hop side somebody like Fab 5 Freddie who had the social range to hang out at CBGB’s as well as uptown and downtown at the Hip Hop spots. He was going to imagine similarities between two cultures and make friends on both sides of that divide. On the Punk Rock side, it seems to me it was mostly English people who were able to make a kind of connection. So you had McLaren, and McLaren was put on to it by Cool Lady Blue and maybe Michael Holman somehow. My friend Janette Beckman is an English photographer who moved to New York in ’83 or so, and she’d documented the Punk Rock scene and then kind of emerging New Wave scene in London up until that time when she came to New York, and kind of began to become exposed to this new Hip Hop scene, she thought that the similarities were a kind of rebelliousness. I guess a kind of like a “fuck you” attitude in both cultures that tied them together in her mind.

I: Obviously the Beastie Boys seemed to have seamlessly moved from one genre to the other, almost effortlessly.

BA: Well that’s because, Horowitz talks about that. Just that in the downtown clubs at that time the DJs-there was no kind of strict respecting of genre. Radio was so corny at the time. It was so straight-laced. Each format was, I called it box but it was more like a coffin. But if you were in downtown New York at the time, you could hear Punk Rock and you’d also hear the rap records that were being played then. The jocks had that kind of range. They could program that kind of music, side by side. It wasn’t discomforting, it wasn’t disconcerting, it wasn’t disjunctive, it made sense. And Horowitz was just a little teenager going to the parties, underage, and listening to it and absorbing it all. It certainly didn’t seem remarkable to him because it was just part of the mix. Along these lines, let me say something about [Afrika] Bambaataa. He is the archetypal Hip Hop DJ, which is to say he has gigantic ears, and he was also somebody who was no respecter of genre. He was a guy who looked for danceable funk in all kinds of music, and he would find it everywhere. Notably “Planet Rock” is built out of Kraftwork’s “Trans Europe Express.”

He made that work for himself. By 1981, he was a solidifying Hip Hop’s affection for rock, or Hip Hop cannibalizing of rock. In any case, he was no snob and he was no square. He was a guy who could hear…he was just somebody who liked all kinds of music which was basically the way musicians listen to the music anyway. The average consumer, I suppose somebody who’s dull, figures well I’m White and I’m going to like rock music or whatever these dark-skinned people do, that doesn’t speak to me. It’s a retarded kind of attitude, and likewise there are Black folks who think if it’s rock-n-roll, these crazy white kids with their guitars and I don’t know what the hell they’re talking about, and fuck them. Mostly, if you’re a music lover, you’re going to find connections between all kinds of music. You’re going to follow those connections and you’re going to follow those leads, and your life is going to be enriched. How about that?

The Beastie Boys and Rick Rubin (courtesy of Rizzoli)

I: Indeed.

BA: Bambaataa had that attitude in spades and he really created the blueprint for every other Hip Hop DJ and hip hop producer in history. All of them come out of Bambaataa.

I: Obviously, Def Jam’s initial artists and first roster was definitely diverse, distinct, and unique, and tapped into so many different sounds. Do you think that we’ve kind of gone backwards as a genre in regards to it now being very stereotypical? Do you feel that we’re back in that coffin? You’re not going to listen to urban radio and hear a punk record, yet back then, you might hear someone on WKTU mix something like Queen with a Grand Master Flash record. Do you think we’ve gone backwards? [click to continue…]

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Dread Child of the infamous Jersey crew known as The Knotz is fresh out of the studio with a new song featuring soulful diva Erika David. Listen to the new track.

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