The Strombo Show welcomed hip-hop legend Darryl “DMC” McDaniels (Run-DMC, Generation Kill, Fragile Mortals) for an intimate and explorative conversation about everything from discovering that he wasn't from Hollis, Queens to his obsession with comic books. He revealed stories behind his battle with alcoholism, overcoming depression, suicide and his internal struggles within Run-DMC, including the religious tones. He also remembers the time he was working with Sebastian Bach and received a phone call from Axl Rose.

On Sebastian Bach + Axl Rose:

"This is how I met Sebastian. We was doing this MTV event and I had sampled “Oh black Betty! Blam, a lam a lam!” And the guy that was producing me was this hip hop God but he sat back and listened to it. He said, ‘you need to do Black Betty, live. Like a rock record, you got to take up to “Tricky”, “Walk This Way” level’, so now the search is on to get this in there. So, I’m at this MTV event and we said, ‘yeah we need somebody to sing Ram Jam’s “oh black betty!” over’.

“So I’m at this MTV thing and every time, it was like a three day shoot… every time I would leave the green room, and come back and people was coming out of the green room, they would go, ‘Yeah he’s crazy, but he could sing’. So that was going on for three days, so finally when I would look in the room, ‘HEY DUDE!’, it would be Sebastian so I said, tomorrow I’m going to break the ice.

“So I’ll walk over, we knew each other but never had conversations, so I walk over to Sebastian and people said, ‘ask him what time it is’. So I asked him, ‘Yo Sebastian, what time is it?’. ‘DUDE! ITS TWO O’CLOCK DUDE, USUALLY AT TWO O’CLOCK DO YOU KNOW WHAT I LIKE TO DO?’ So for twenty minutes, he told me what he liked to do at two o’clock.

“So now, I guess we good now, so I say, ‘yo, I’m doing this record, and I want you to come sing’. We get to the studio, Sebastian shows up on time, sets the whole board up, all the wires and plugs in, sets the mics up in the sound-proof things in there, goes in there and sings the best vocals I’ve ever heard, comes back out and sits with the engineer intently, move this knob sit in there. ‘Hold up, I gotta go back in there and do it all over, somethings wrong’. So me and the engineer just look at each other, the long story short, he did Phantom Of The Opera! People sleep on this, he’s phenomenal. Sebastian Bach is incredible.

“So he comes out and he sits down, and he’s happy. ‘Man I can’t believe I’m making a record with you!’ This was overwhelming for me, you know what I’m saying? He’s talking about, ‘man, when I first heard you dudes this and that, my metal kids and you brought white people and black people together like y’all changed things’. And he went ‘Ooh, I’m calling my best friends’. So he gets on the phone and says, ‘Yo dude! You’ll never guess man, I’m in the studio with DMC and we makin’…’ and then he said, ‘I’m in the studio’, then he gets real sad. ‘No, really, I’m in the studio with DMC. I’ll let you talk to him’. so he gives me the phone.

“So I take Sebastian’s phone and heard a voice go, ‘YO! Who the FUCK is this?’, and I go, ‘Um, its me, DMC’. ‘Oh dude I’m sorry man this is Axl Rose! I thought Sebastian was pulling my leg!’, and Axl starts asking me, ‘Do you know who you are?’ Um ya I’m Dar.. ‘No, do you know who you are? You guys were ____’. And I’m like wow! And that’s how the album started to come together."

The complete conversation can be heard here.

(Photo - Vanessa Heins, 2017)