Not that hip-hop had always been an easy sell. A new generation was turning instead towards exactly the hip-hop sounds that Rubin and Def Jam co-founder Russell Simmons were selling them.
The suburban white kids who had once been the Boston band’s faithful constituency had matured and moved on. Before Rubin could go into any further detail, Collins cut him off to request a little clarification: “What’s rap?”Ī more valid question, for most people in the mid-80s, might have been “What’s an Aerosmith?”. Rubin, a rock kid who’d grown up – or, rather, who hadn’t – on the gonzo kicks of AC/DC, Ted Nugent and Aerosmith themselves, wanted to talk to Collins about the idea of remaking his charges’ 1975 single Walk This Way with a rap group on his roster, Run-DMC. The voice on the other end belonged to Rick Rubin, the 22-year-old hip-hop producer and entrepreneur behind Def Jam, the fast-rising record label he had founded while still a film student at New York University.
W hen Aerosmith manager Tim Collins answered his phone one day in early 1986, he was, at first, confused.
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