The night the shoes went up
Madison Square Garden, 19 July 1986. The Raising Hell tour had already decided something the industry was slow to print: a rap group could headline an arena on its own name. Joseph Simmons, Darryl McDaniels and Jason Mizell, Run, DMC and Jam Master Jay, came from Hollis, Queens, in black hats and unlaced Adidas. Under them on this night: Whodini, LL Cool J, the Beastie Boys, Timex Social Club. Raising Hell had been out since May. Walk This Way, cut with Aerosmith, was dragging rock radio toward a drum machine whether rock radio liked it or not. The Garden was the New York proof.
The proof had a prop, and the prop was the audience’s own feet. When My Adidas hit, the routine asked the room to hold the shoes up. Twenty thousand people did. Angelo Anastasio, of Adidas, was in the building. The endorsement that followed is now a business-school slide. On the night it was simpler and better: three men from Queens looking at a ceiling of rubber and leather they had not paid for, and a corporation discovering that a chant could be a market. Hip-hop had been a park party, a single, a support slot. This was a headliner telling a sportswear giant what the uniform already was.
Jam Master Jay’s decks were the band. There is no euphemism that improves that sentence. The Garden, built for guitars and a stick of reverb, took a drum machine and two voices and did not fall down. Run’s bark, DMC’s weight under it, the track punched rather than played. If you want the texture, think of a gymnasium multiplied by fame: echo, sneakers, a chorus that is also an order. Hold them up. They held them up.
This is the legendary show where an Adidas executive, Angelo Anastasio, witnessed 20,000 fans wave their shoes in the air when Run-DMC played My Adidas.
(Beastiemania, note on the 19 July 1986 bill)
The tour is the larger fact. Forty-odd cities, rap on top of the poster, Whodini and a young LL Cool J underneath. Before this, rap in a big room had mostly meant warming a crowd that had come for something else. Raising Hell reversed the reason the lights were on. The Garden date is the one the shoe remembers, because a witness from the company happened to be present, and because New York likes a hometown coronation. Other nights were as loud. This one changed a contract.
Do not turn it into a commercial. The commercial came after, when the trefoil learned to knock. On 19 July the sound was still a challenge: unlaced, loud, short on apology. A rock building full of people who had bought tickets to hear rap, and who answered a song by giving it their shoes. That is a concert. The deal is just the footnote the accountants kept.
