30 Years Ago, Run-D.M.C. and Aerosmith Tore Down Walls With 'Walk This Way'

Aerosmith and Run-D.M.C. onstage together in 2002 (Photo by Kevin Mazur/WireImage)

Thirty years ago, when Run-D.M.C.’s collaboration with Aerosmith on a rap-rock remake of the latter’s 1974 hit “Walk This Way” came out on July 4, 1986, listeners might have thought they were hearing the original at first. But as soon as eight rapid turntable scratches cut through the mix, it was clear that this version was something completely new.

And then, at the 26-second mark – when Run-D.M.C.’s Joseph “Run” Simmons started brashly rapping a slightly modified version of Steven Tyler’s lyrics, while Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry played the funk-inflected blues line that first endeared rockers to the Toys in the Attic hit single – music history was sharply and tangibly made.

When “Walk This Way” hit MTV, viewers were enthralled, and the dam between rock and rap effectively broke. In the early to mid-‘80s, Michael and Janet Jackson and Prince had been among the few black artists familiar to the station’s viewers; Blondie’s “Rapture” was actually the first rap song played on MTV. But “Walk This Way” made it into MTV’s high rotation, thanks to a clever video concept that mirrored the intent of the song – to break down walls. Soon there was such strong demand for hip-hop on the station that in 1988 MTV launched the regular program Yo! MTV Raps.

In the years that followed “Walk This Way,” other prominent rock-rap collaborations surfaced. Anthrax and Public Enemy remade the latter’s track “Bring the Noise,” in 1991, and the next year numerous rockers and rappers united for the Judgment Night soundtrack, including Helmet with House of Pain (“Just Another Victim”), Pearl Jam with Cypress Hill (“Real Thing”), and Mudhoney with Sir Mix-A-Lot (“Freak Momma”). In addition, rock and metal bands like Rage Against the Machine and Faith No More, and later Biohazard, Limp Bizkit, and Linkin Park, merged the two styles to create rap-rock and nu-metal.

“To me, that’s one of the proudest things I had in my scrapbook,” Joe Perry told Yahoo Music in 2014. “I think we got maybe one or two fan letters that said, ‘How could you guys do this, you’re a rock band, what are you doing playing with those guys?’ But that was it. We got so much more positive out of it. And it didn’t matter; to us, it was about the music.”

In retrospect, it seems only natural that the remake of “Walk This Way” would be the first major introduction to rap for many listeners of mainstream rock. Yet at the time, when producer Rick Rubin came up with the idea of uniting Aerosmith and Run-D.M.C., it seemed like a long shot that it would actually happen. Aerosmith’s Tyler and Perry were battling major drug problems, and their most recent album, 1985’s Done With Mirrors, had flopped. Getting them to agree on anything besides snorting lines was a challenge. Meanwhile, Run-D.M.C., who had previously blurred the boundaries of rock and rap with songs like “Rock Box” and “King of Rock,” were content to have guitarist Eddie Martinez play their distorted guitar parts.

But Rubin was persistent. Realizing the heavy elements of Run-D.M.C.’s music could be marketed to a rock audience more easily if listeners had something instantly recognizable to grasp onto, he was determined to include a popular rock cover on the group’s upcoming third album, Raising Hell.

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“To people who were not already fans of [rap music], the gap [between hip-hop and rock] was so far that not only did they not understand it, but they did not understand it to be music,” Rubin told The Washington Post. “I was looking for a way to bridge that gap in the story of finding a piece of music that was familiar and already hip-hop-friendly so that on the hip-hop side it would make sense and on the non-hip-hop side you’d see it wasn’t so far away.”

Rubin considered using AC/DC’s “Back in Black,” then discovered that another one of his acts, the Beastie Boys, had just recorded a version. So he opted for “Walk This Way.” The producer gave a Run-D.M.C. tape to a journalist friend who was traveling to Boston to interview Aerosmith, and asked her to hand the recording to the band to show them what rap was all about. As it turned out, Tyler and Perry were already familiar with the medium.

“I loved rap,” Tyler said. “[Whenever I was in New York] I used to go looking for drugs on 9th Avenue and I would go over to midtown or downtown and there would be guys on the corner selling cassettes of their music. I’d give them a buck, two bucks, and that was the beginning of me noticing what was going on.”

Perry’s introduction to hip-hop was less seedy. His 13-year-old stepson Aaron was a fan of Run-D.M.C. and other early rappers, including Sugarhill Gang and Doug E. Fresh, and Perry and the teenager sometimes listened to the music together. So when Perry received the invitation from Rubin to redo “Walk This Way” with Run-D.M.C., he was up for the challenge.

“They were new to me and I liked it – the sound was like a freight train,” Perry told The Wall Street Journal. “Rick said our original version was ‘proto-rap’ – since Steven’s lyrics were half-spoken, half-sung, and we had this solid beat. Rick asked if I’d be willing to put some guitar on it and if Steven would sing new vocals. We said, yeah, why not. They were sampling our kick-drum beat anyway. It was going to be radical, since up until then most rappers had avoided electric guitars.”

With Aerosmith on board, Rubin still had to sell the collaboration to Run-D.M.C. The group’s DJ, the late Jam Master Jay, had actually used the song for scratching before, though at the time he didn’t know the name of the tune. (“Our thing was, “Go get [Aerosmith’s album] Toys in the Attic and play number four,” Darryl “D.M.C.” McDaniels told The Washington Post. “We had no idea that there was singing or what the song was, but we knew the beat. It was a hard breakbeat.”) Jay immediately saw the benefits of Rubin’s proposal; D.M.C. and Run did not.

“Rick gives us this yellow notebook pad. He tells us, ‘Go down to D’s basement, put the needle on the record,’” D.M.C. told The Washington Post. “We go down to my basement and put on the record and then you hear ‘Backstroke lover always hidin’ ’neath the covers’ and immediately [we] get on the phone and [I] say, ‘Hell no, this ain’t going to happen. This is hillbilly gibberish, country-bumpkin bulls—.’”

After Rubin explained to D.M.C. and Run how important a collaboration with Aerosmith could be to their already-blossoming career, the rappers reluctantly agreed to give it a shot. On March 9, 1986, Aerosmith flew to New York and went into Record Plant studio with Run-D.M.C. to track the song. When the band arrived, they received a lukewarm greeting from the rappers.

“They were very ambivalent about this whole thing,” Perry told the Post. “Steven was upset because they didn’t know the lyrics.”

They also didn’t appreciate the flow of the words. The first vocal track Run-D.M.C. recorded was half-hearted, largely because they couldn’t relate to it. Then Jam Master Jay convinced Run and D.M.C. to try to feel the words and reinterpret them when necessary. With a far more convincing vocal take tracked that included Run, D.M.C., and Tyler, Perry recorded the guitars. Rubin liked what he heard, but felt the song needed a bassline, and Aerosmith bassist Tom Hamilton hadn’t made the trip to New York. So one of the Beastie Boys, who had been hanging out on a couch for the session, told Rubin he had a bass back in his apartment and volunteered to get it. When he returned, Perry tracked the bass and the song was finished.

At the time, the awkward studio atmosphere and the lack of enthusiasm from the rappers involved prevented anyone from immediately realizing how good this new version of “Walk This Way” truly was. When they left New York at the end of the day, Perry and Tyler didn’t even know if the song was going to be come out. However, after Rubin and the rest of the Def Jam team listened back to the mixed track, they knew they had something.

Raising Hell came out on May 15, 1986; “Walk This Way” was released as the album’s second single seven weeks later. The marketing of the collaboration was almost as important as recording itself. The goal at the time was to get the song on the above-mentioned, all-important MTV. Director John Small wrote a treatment depicting the band and rappers performing in adjacent rooms, with the video’s climax coming when Tyler smashed a hole through the wall with his mic stand and joined the rappers – literally symbolizing the smashing of the barriers between the two musical genres.

“I loved the video’s metaphor – that the wall between rock and rap was coming down and that the two music styles actually worked well together,” Perry told The Wall Street Journal. “It was glitter meets gold. Everyone who watched MTV then – rock and rap fans – got the message.”

Run-D.M.C.’s management flew Aerosmith in for a shoot, which went smoothly, except for one thing. “The set guys were supposed to make a phony hole in the wall so breaking it would be easy,” Tyler told WSJ. “But when I hit it with everything I had, nothing happened, and I pulled every muscle in my back. I finally bashed it in.”

In addition to going into regular rotation at MTV, “Walk This Way” became the first rap song influential Boston rock radio station WBCN ever aired. Boston was Aerosmith’s hometown, so the nepotism made sense – but programmers in other cities followed suit, and the song eventually climbed to #4 on the Billboard singles chart.

Run-D.M.C.’s Raising Hell eventually peaked at #1 on Billboard’s Top R&B Albums chart – the first hip hop/rap album to do so – and at #6 on the album chart. But Aerosmith received an even bigger career boost from the collaboration. When Aerosmith’s ninth album, Permanent Vacation, came out a year after “Walk This Way’s” breakthrough, it became the band’s most successful release in more than a decade, selling 5 million copies in the U.S. alone. Aerosmith are now the best-selling American hard rock band of all time.

Run-D.M.C.’s success as a recording act was not as lasting as Aerosmith’s, but they are one of only five hip-hop acts inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and they received a Lifetime Achievement Grammy this year. Public Enemy’s Chuck D credits Run-D.M.C. not only for opening the door for rap-rock collaborations, but for getting rappers celebrity recognition. “Run-D.M.C. made it possible for all the majors to see that rap music and hip-hop was album-oriented music and rap artists were rock stars, really,” he told The Washington Post. “Run-D.M.C. was the complete sacrifice for anything that was successful after 1986. This is why we need to acknowledge and always take care of them.”