Def Jam, Inc.: Russell Simmons, Rick Rubin, And The Extraordinary Story of the World's Most Influential Hip-Hop Label

Book by Gueraseva Stacy

When New York University freshman Adam Dubin arrived on campus in September of 1982 to move into his new home– Weinstein Hall, at 5 University Place, in Greenwich Village–the view that greeted him inside his tiny dorm room was uncanny. An industrial-size Cerwin-Vega speaker stretched across the top of the dressers; and both of the desks had been pushed together to hold two turntables, a mixer, and a drum machine. The bookcases were stacked with milk crates full of records; old magazines were scattered around the floor. The only light source was a bandanna-draped lamp by his roommate’s bed (he had unscrewed all the other lightbulbs in the room). It would turn out to be the roommate’s second year in room 712, and he made it clear that this was his territory. "I noticed nothing in the room that let you know that there was any schoolwork to be done," Dubin recalled. "No textbooks, notebooks, binders, loose-leafs. Nothing."

"Where am I supposed to do my work?" he asked, a bit surprised.

"Work’s to be done in the library," his new roommate announced in a commanding baritone. "I like to do deejaying."

He introduced himself as Rick Rubin, a sophomore film and video major, who, like Dubin and a large portion of NYU’s student body, came from Long Island. A heavyset kid with shoulder-length brown hair and tinted eyeglasses, Rubin had on black jeans and a black T-shirt, topped with a biker-style leather jacket–his dress code on most days of the week. His friends had nicknamed him Rick Rock because of his passion for music and his rebel persona–similar to the "menacing aura of a character in an urban psycho-killer film," as one reporter wrote, that Rubin would cultivate several years later as one of music’s most eccentric and visionary record producers.

Over the next few weeks, he took the time to show Dubin his world and seemed to enjoy playing the role of teacher. "It was important that I understood why he was gonna dominate the room," Dubin recalled. "He wanted to make sure that he didn’t have some medical student for a roommate who’s like, ‘I can’t study.’ "

"What do you like to listen to?" he asked Dubin during their first conversation. "Led Zeppelin," said Dubin. Rubin frowned. "Rolling Stones," Dubin continued, and Rubin frowned again. He said that he was more excited by current sounds like a hard-core band from San Francisco called Flipper, which specialized in a subgenre of punk known as art-noise and was putting out records on an independent label. Rubin loved Flipper and their 1981 EP Generic Flipper, inspired him. The band had slowed down the superfast pace of hardcore for a few songs, chopping up each note. Their album cover was minimalist with black type on a yellow background, and a bar code that spelled out the name of the band instead of the usual numbers. The tracks on both sides of the record were listed as "Active Ingredients," and also came with quirky instructions like "Caution: If bleeding persists, contact your physician." Generic Flipper was "what Hose was trying to sound like," says Dubin. Hose was Rick’s art-noise band, which he started during his freshman year at NYU.

One day Rubin showed his roommate an EP that he had recorded with Hose that past April of 1982. A fan of anything high-concept and cutting-edge, Rubin wanted Hose to be "more associated with an artistic movement," recalled Mike Espindle, a fellow student who would become the group’s second lead singer. Rubin designed the professional-looking jacket after one of his favorite artists, Piet Mon­drian, and his famous Tableau II painting. Just like the thick black intersecting lines and the red, whites, and yellows that fill the rectangles in Mondrian’s painting, Rubin used bass and drums to create "a framework" for the song and "vocals and guitar to fill it with color," recalled Espindle. Along with original tracks there were covers, including Rick James’s "Super Freak," but slowed down to its barest minimum. In his presentation of the band, Rubin made every attempt to avoid convention, even identifying the band members on the back of the album as Joel Horne, "Bash" (as in bass); Rick Rosen, "Truth" (vocals); and Rick Rubin, "Screech" (guitar). The black-and-yellow sticker on the EP advised, "This LP is to be played loud at 3311/3 RPMs."

The remarkable thing about the group was not its music, but how far Rubin had taken his passion. He didn’t just record a demo and pass it around to friends, like most kids his age did; he actually finagled a distribution deal with the independent label 99 Records, owned by producer Ed Bahlman, who also operated a record store of the same name in the East Village. Rubin had been hanging out there since his senior year in high school and knew Bahlman well. "He kind of walked me through the process of how you go here to press the record, and you go here to have your labels made, and you go here to have your jacket covers made," Rubin recalled. Like a fledgling record executive, Rubin stopped by local record stores to keep track of how well his records were stocked. "I gotta check my inventory," he would say to Dubin, and together they made the rounds. "I had never met such a motivated nineteen-year-old," Dubin recalls of Rick.

Rubin applied the same level of commitment to any new endeavor he picked up. As a young boy, he had become obsessed with magic, practicing tricks for five hours a day in front of the mirror. He would commute into Manhattan from his Lido Beach, Long Island, home for the sole purpose of exploring his favorite magic stores, where he spent hours soaking up their atmospheres, and connecting with fellow magicians, most of whom were adults. "I’m a researcher by nature," he says. When his interest shifted to music in his early teens, Rubin picked up the guitar and became proficient with it within months. He started a punk band of his own, called The Pricks, and although he "wasn’t the greatest [guitarist]," says Mike Espindle, "he did a lot with a little."

Rubin recalls having "mixed feelings" about his hometown, where he lived comfortably in a modern house with his parents, Mickey and Linda. "At the time, I wished that I was in Manhattan," he says. "But in retrospect, I think it very much played a role in who I am and gave me a different perspective." His suburban upbringing lacked the grittiness of city life and provided "a filter on what I got to see and hear," he says, "which probably led me to having more com­mercial taste."

Rick first became interested in hip-hop as a senior at Long Beach High School, a racially mixed school on Long Island, where Rubin was known as a music aficionado. (Next to his senior photo in the yearbook, Ricky, as he was called, had a quote: "I wanna play loud, I wanna be heard, I want all to know, I’m not one of the herd.") Rubin paid attention to the rap music his black classmates were listening to and noticed that their favorite groups changed weekly, depending on who had a new record out. Rubin liked their obsession with the newest and latest.

When he moved to Manhattan to attend NYU–where he origi­nally enrolled as a philosophy major with the intention of going to law school–Rubin used the opportunity to navigate the hip-hop subculture and make important connections with key DJs around the city. He was one of the few white teenagers venturing into up­town hip-hop nightclubs like Harlem World or Disco Fever deep in the Bronx, which was known as a testing ground for new rappers. Negril–on Second Avenue and Tenth Street in Manhattan–had been one of Rubin’s favorite nightspots, and the first club to bring hip-hop downtown. It was a small, dark space in the basement of an East Village restaurant, and Rubin went there for hip-hop night every Tuesday.

Within a few months the scene outgrew Negril, and the weekly party was moved to the Roxy, where Rubin would go to see rap groups like the Furious Five. He loved the immediacy of the contact between performers and the audience there. The Roxy had no proper stage back then, so when acts performed, the organizers would just rope off an area on the dance floor. Rubin observed the action intensely, sometimes dancing ("He was a good dancer," points out Dubin), but mostly just listening. "There was a lot of standing around on the side of the floor at the Roxy, and seeing if the beat worked or not," recalls college friend George Drakoulias. "And [Rubin] was bold," Espindle recalls. "He would go right up to the DJ tables and talk to them about their equipment and find out which records were hot." "Watch, and learn," Rubin would say to his friends, only half-jokingly, as he would introduce himself to an important person at a club.

Rubin also loved the hip-hop slang he heard in the clubs and decided to attach a logo called Def Jam Records–which he also designed himself–on the Hose EP. "To emphasize it’s about the DJ," he explains, Rubin made both of the first letters–the D and the J– bigger, chunkier, so that they stood out. Def jam was a phrase that hip-hoppers often used to describe the ultimate sound, the greatest "jam," or record. "For info, records, or criticism," a label on the back of the Hose record read, "send all mail to: Def Jam Recordings, 5 University Place, #712."It was important for Rubin to create the aura of a real company behind-the-scenes, even if Def Jam was still just an idea.

When he wasn’t experiencing hip-hop live, Rubin was scouring reco...