A Midwesterner under the Influence of Rock and Roll
Album #3: Run-DMC, Raising Hell (Profile/Arista Records, 1986)

by tonydoug wright

If you’ve read my previous articles then you’re aware that while the story remains the same, the names have been changed to protect the innocent.

I was born and raised in Springfield, Ohio, a Midwestern city located twenty miles from Dayton, Ohio. Springfield is known for having largest county fair in the state of Ohio. But Springfield was the place where I exited childhood and entered my teenage years, which can be best described as “my angst ridden years”. Raising Hell, the first album I owned as a teenager, brought controversy to the Wright homestead, and was regularly played on my Walkman during some tough times.

It was the fall of 1986 when the Wright family faced a generational music gap for the first time. My parents, die-hard Motown and disco fans, were introduced to rap music via my third album in the series, Run-D.M.C.’s Raising Hell. Although my parents had no reservations about me listening to Kiss and the Village People, they had some reservations about rap music. In their opinion, “good” music was Sam and Dave or Chicago because those artists had a polished image and they sang songs with a fun message. Rap was a foreign genre and they feared their first-born child would transform into a hooligan due to the influence of rap music, which in their opinion, reflected a drug and violence crazed culture.

Raising Hell was the top album listed on my thirteenth birthday list. Uncle Pepe, my hip uncle, purchased Raising Hell on cassette tape and there was an uneasy reaction from my parents. Maybe they thought listening to rap was my one way ticket to juvenile hall. Uncle Pepe was in the doghouse, so I began a pro-Run-D.M.C. campaign and slowly won over my parents. I recall playing a portion of Run-D.M.C.’s ‘It’s Tricky’ for my mom and she was somewhat relieved when she heard the line: “We are not thugs (we don't use drugs) but you assume (on your own)/They offer coke (and lots of dope) but we just leave it alone.”

Parents and children will always not see eye to eye when it comes to music. However, my parents were able to eventually drop their rap concerns.

My birthday is approximately one week before Halloween and a few days following my thirteenth birthday, I was invited by my sixth grade crew to check out a new haunted house located in downtown Springfield. My school crew consisted of Billy Fruit (the Tycho Brahe of our class), Johnny Pleather (the only kid in sixth grade with a beard), and Sebastian Coronado (the lone Boxcar Willie fan in our class, or perhaps the universe). Fruit’s dad drove us to the event in a big blue station wagon that smelled of graham crackers. Pleather brought along his boom box. Apparently he was unaware that automobiles were equipped with a radio and tape player. I handed him Raising Hell so he played ‘Peter Piper’ along with ‘It’s Tricky’. Fruit and Pleather were really impressed. Coronado seemed impressed but he was not the kind of guy to understand “the struggle”. On a side note, the haunted house really sucked.

The four of us attended St. Antoninus the Beheaded Catholic School. Pleather brought his boom box to school on a regular basis so I decided he needed to play Raising Hell for the rest of our friends at St. Antoninus. The teachers and priests hated Pleather’s boom box, and on top of that, they really disliked rap immensely. We upset the establishment the previous year when we strolled through the cafeteria with Pleather’s boom box blasting ‘Walk Like an Egyptian’ by The Bangles. They powers that be at St. Antoninus lost their minds when Pleather blasted the Run-D.M.C.-Aerosmith collaboration ‘Walk this Way’ in the cafeteria. We felt like rebels and the revolution was led by the sixth grade class at St. Antoninus the Beheaded.

The year I received Raising Hell was the same year we moved from the old neighborhood to a new place out in the nonsense. I preferred life in the old neighborhood because life in the nonsense was boring as hell. The new house was nice, but most importantly, I found the other kids in the neighborhood to be mongoloids. My friends back in the old neighborhood were wild, foul mouthed, uncouth, and downright loyal. I spent many days out in the nonsense listening to Raising Hell on my Walkman and that brought back memories of running wild in the old neighborhood with Timmy the Delinquent, Dan Mantis, Dirt, and his fraternal twin brother, Stone Mountain Georgia.

Timmy the Delinquent and I hung out on a regular basis and our days always ended in some sort of controversy. There were some crabapple trees that overlooked a portion of our neighborhood. Timmy decided to sharpen some sticks, attach a crabapple, and fling them towards the neighbors’ homes. We flung crabapples for hours. They’d hit roofs, windows, sheds, slides, cars, trucks, and some of the other kids in the neighborhood. Our good time crabapple toss ended when Timmy drilled Jamie Hilljack, an obnoxious little brat who wore the same homemade “I love Rick Springfield” t-shirt every day, in the face with a crabapple.

Dirt and Stone Mountain Georgia were the hillbillies of the old neighborhood. You would have thought that God plucked them from Appalachia and dropped them in our lovely Springfield neighborhood. They lived in a home that appeared to be on the verge of collapsing at any minute. Dirt and Stone Mountain Georgia lived with their mother, a loud mound of a woman that yelled at them constantly. Dan Mantis lived three houses down from me and we would always find the time to play war. We had an arsenal of plastic pistols and metal rifles. There was a church located on a hill in our neighborhood so Mantis and I would stage attacks on the church, which in our imaginations was nothing more than the headquarters for Cobra or Nazi Germany. War with two people was lame so we recruited Dirt and Stone Mountain Georgia. Those two were fearless at war. They would serve as grenadiers in our army and their arsenal consisted of rocks, crabapples, and large balls of mud. That poor church was the target of many raids but we were saving the world from evil. The summer before I moved, I noticed that the dilapidated home of those brave grenadiers was empty. Dirt and Stone Mountain Georgia disappeared from the face of the earth.

The wild children of the old neighborhood were replaced with the moron children of the nonsense. They did not play war. Their games were tame and they had no sense of adventure. The children of the nonsense learned I liked Raising Hell and one cold December day they ran onto our yard rapping ‘Walk This Way’ and ‘It’s Tricky’. It was by no means an act of kindness and after that moment I disassociated myself from them.

Raising Hell meant something to me and it really bothered me that people would go out of their way to be that disrespectful. Fortunately, the time I spent in the nonsense was short. We moved into a home near the old neighborhood and all was right in the universe. Dan Mantis was no longer around and there were days I thought about whatever happened to Dirt and Stone Mountain Georgia.

One of the unfortunate events a teenager faces is the four year incarceration known as high school. My time was spent at The Blessed Holy Bingo Catholic High School. It was there where I met Ryan Dellwood, my Irish brother featured in my last article http://www.erasingclouds.com/wk1208td.html. Dellwood and I met during our freshman year but we did not really hang out until our junior year at The Blessed Holy Bingo Catholic High School.

We were in the same homeroom my senior year and one day, Dellwood was rapping ‘It’s Tricky’. We both knew Raising Hell by heart but we stood at different ends of the musical spectrum. Dellwood was a supporter of college rock and I was a staunch supporter of classic rock. I would write down Bad Company and Foreigner lyrics on Dellwood’s notebook and that irritated him because his notebook was apparently a “no classic rock lyric” zone. Despite our musical differences, we always had time to rap Raising Hell from ‘Peter Piper’ to ‘Proud to be Black’.

Raising Hell was a much needed dose of funky beats for my teenage exile into the nonsense. It also brought back memories of the old neighborhood when war was the game and I raided the enemy compound with Dan Mantis, Dirt, and Stone Mountain Georgia. Raising Hell was the album of choice for my senior year homeroom. Run-D.M.C. was the beginning of a long, strange, fascinating, and obsessive teenage musical journey.