“Christmas in Hollis” almost didn’t happen. According to Darryl “DMC” McDaniels, when Bill Adler, Def Jam Recordings’ first publicist, presented him, Jason “Jam Master Jay” Mizell, and Joseph “Run” Simmons with the opportunity to participate in the 1987 charity album, A Very Special Christmas, they were skeptical.
The project featured some of the most influential artists of that era, including Madonna, U2, Whitney Houston, and Bruce Springsteen, and had a goal of raising millions for the Special Olympics. Certainly, there were no other rappers involved; rap was still relatively new. There was also a sense DMC was slightly intimidated by the sheer talent of superstars contributing to the cause.
But Run-DMC, who by this time had already released three classic albums and were superstars in their own right, were ultimately convinced by Adler to move forward with the record only because he and Jam Master Jay had stumbled across the perfect sample: 1968’s “Back Door Santa” by Clarence Carter.
Bobby Shriver, son of Special Olympics founder Eunice Kennedy Shriver, served as A Very Special Christmas’ producer alongside Interscope Records co-founder Jimmy Iovine and then-wife Vicki Iovine. Shriver, like DMC, credits Adler for igniting the spark that led to “Christmas in Hollis.”
Recorded at Chung King Studios in New York City, the song came together quickly, with Run and DMC writing their respective verses in a matter of hours. It, along with A Very Special Christmas, was wildly successful. The video, directed by NYU film student Michael Holman, was in heavy rotation on MTV—despite a budget of just $800.
“The record itself did very well because the whole god damn world picked up that album because of the artists on it,” Adler says. “Run-DMC was exposed to folks who’d never heard of them before. Profile Records decided they’d pay for the video. Run-DMC made a cute video and that video blew the fuck up on MTV, and I’m sure helped to further open the door at MTV they’d started to open in 1984 with their first album.”
A Very Special Christmas went on to be certified 4x-platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America and raised more than $16 million for the Special Olympics in its first year alone. A Very Special Christmas 2 arrived in 1992 and a third volume was released in 1997, and each included Run-DMC.
Here, we talk to DMC, Adler, and Shriver about the making of “Christmas in Hollis,” its impact, and how it all came together—elves and all.
A Very Special Connection
Bill Adler: Russell [Simmons] was going out to nightclubs everywhere, and he became friends with Bobby Shriver, a member of the Kennedy family. Basically, his mom founded the Special Olympics. He said he’d been working on what would become the first of a series of Special Olympics Christmas albums. So this opportunity for Run-DMC comes up and I don’t even know if Russ was thinking about it, but it meant a little more than usual to me because I was paying attention to Christmas music and not the typical shit.
Jimmy Iovine had already been recording a bunch of the top superstars of the era, making Christmas tracks with them. It turned out that all of them just did a cover version of a Christmas standard, so I said to Run-DMC, “Why don’t you guys do something unique, something original?” And what I suggested as a concept for him, I said, “Call it ‘Christmas in Hollis,’ and that resonated with the two of them.
Bobby Shriver: I met Jimmy and he assigned to me the duty of all the New York artists, one of whom was Run-DMC. So I’m like, “How am I going to meet these guys? There’s no way.” But a guy who I knew in New York called them. I don’t know how he got ahold of Bill. Then I went down to see Jay and Run—not Russell. And then when Russell realized, “Oh this is going to happen,” he called me up and then we started running around. He was a very entertaining person and obviously was always very plugged into the record business. Because I had no idea what the record business was or how to get anything done in the record business, I latched on to him very quickly because I figured that he would know how to do things.
DMC: At first we thought it was a corny idea. They didn’t believe in hip-hop, right? So then it gets popular. Now everybody wants you to do a rap. They want the cereal rap, they want the auto company rapping, and a minute ago you didn’t think it was worthy of anything. So when they came to us with the idea to do a Christmas rap song, we was like, “No, that’s corny.” We was at a point, we only making “Rock Box,” “Sucka MCs,” “King of Rock,” and “It’s Like That.” Even though Bill said it was for the Special Olympics, we didn’t think we could fit in there, because it was Whitney Houston, Bruce Springsteen, and a bunch of others, but we was like, “No, that ain’t our vibe. It’s good, but it’s not for us.” It sounded more like “We Are the World” or something. There was nothing wrong with that, but we were too busy. We wanted to do beats, rhymes, and scratch, and do what we do. We didn’t feel that sonically it fit in with Whitney and Bruce and all of that, doing what those type of artists do.
Diggin’ in the Crates
BA: They’re in the studio so I met them there and brought with me a cantaloupe crate of some of the Christmas records that I’d been picking for my Christmas Jollies [personal compilation]. I went to meet with Jay because he’s the guy that’s going to make a decision about the music. Run fucked off and went to another room to smoke a joint. I showed Jay the records and he started to puddle his way through them. Pretty early on in the process, he pulled out this album and it was a various artist collection issued by Atlantic Records in 1968. But one of the first cuts on the album is Clarence Carter’s “Back Door Santa.” He puts the needle on the record and he’s looking for beats. Typically, he’d put the needle down, listen for five seconds, reject it, and move on to the next track. But in this case, he puts the needle down and listens for five seconds then picks it up and puts it back at the beginning of the track, and he listens again. Then he picks it up after 15 seconds or so and puts it down a third time. All of a sudden, here comes Run and D from the next room. Nobody had even said anything to them. They’d been listening and vibing to it. That’s how it became the backing track.
DMC: We didn’t want to do nothing corny, so Bill Adler brought the sample. Bill and Jay found a sample of “Back Door Santa” by Clarence Carter. Him and Jay did some crate digging, found that sample and said, “You’re not going to do no corny ‘Jingle Bells,’ sleigh ride stuff. Y’all going to rap over this.” It wasn’t a Christmas song, it was a break beat, so Run and I immediately wrote our rhymes. That kind of changed everything in an instant.
For the emcees, the beat says everything, so when Bill Adler said, “This is what we’re going to use,” it was easy to do. Run wrote his rhyme, I wrote my rhyme. Seven or eight years ago, somebody said to me, “D, would you believe Christmas used to be only Nat King Cole with “chestnuts roasting on an open fire” and Bing Crosby “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas?” He said, “Now Christmas is Bing Crosby, Nat King Cole, and Run-DMC with hip-hop.” The little thing was, “Oh, this is nice for the Special Olympics.” The cause was good and everything.
On the Road Again
DMC: In 1987, we was always on the road. I went from high school to the road. I was 23 in ’87. This was in the midst of Raising Hell, the adidas deal, and “Walk This Way.” And it was crazy when they said, “Y’all want to listen to the album with Bruce?” We was already three albums in. “Walk This Way” was changing the world. The adidas deal was unheard of at the time. How could you get more superstardom? Now you’re qualified to do a Christmas song like Perry Como and on a record with Whitney Houston and all the other giant pop and rock artists. It’s crazy. I got a sneaker deal just like all the athletes, and I don’t play no sports. You just look cool. It was insane.
Christmas in Hollis
DMC: It took me two minutes to write my vocals. Because with my vocals, I just focused on what it was really like in my household every Christmas since I was a kid, like Mom’s cooking chicken and collard greens. It was just me telling you what Christmas really is like for me in Hollis, Queens. That’s all that I knew. In my household, my mother and father was like, “Honey, me and your father are Santa Claus.” They just told me. It was beautiful, though. I would go to the store and pick out my own toys. I understood what Santa Claus meant, but my mom, she was like hip-hop—she was keeping it real with me. I remember when Bill Adler contacted us, we pretty much went straight to the studio. We had the rhymes written in an hour, and we was laying the verses that night, and that was only because the beat was so dope.
The “Ill Badler” Effect
DMC: I’ll give it to Bill, but Bill will always give it to Jay because Jay did the crate digging. But Bill was right. Bill was the encouragement for Jay to go that deep into it. Then when he reached out to me, he said, “This is what we found.” As soon as I heard that beat drop, I was like, it’s Christmas time in the house! The beat was the motivating factor to get us to the record. And then you know what’s cool about that? After we laid it, we learned Jimmy Iovine was the one that mixed it. He was the engineer.
BS: Bill really made the thing happen. With all love to Russell, he didn’t make it happen. Bill did all the work.
Santa’s Workshop
DMC: We didn’t know we had a hit until the video. Even though Run-DMC, LL COOL J, and other rappers were out there, rap was still fairly new. They didn’t believe it was going to be around. They still thought it was a fad. So we thought it was just going to be a rap song people would find on the Very Special Christmas album. You could go back to the ’80s and pick something up and say, ‘What? They put a little rap on it? That might not be that good.” But we knew what we did was dope for us. And it was an honor to be on the album, but we never thought it was going to do anything. Once it started getting popular and getting played by DJs like Red Alert, Mr. Magic, Awesome 2, whatever DJs was in L.A., and whatever DJs was in Cleveland, I guess the producers of the record and the record company saw it was popular, so then they said, “We got to make a video for this one.” Once the video was done, it was iconic. That was another step up.
Reindeer Games
DMC: We had to fly into New York for one day, do the video, and fly back out the next morning to be on the road. I was tired as hell. They put all the Christmas feeling in there, but they let us be our hip-hop selves, so it made the day go good. We didn’t have to dress up. We got our adidas suits on. All we had to do was be ourselves. We did put on some Christmas hats and threw up some confetti and all of that, but we didn’t have to do nothing out of character.
Family Ties
DMC: Many people might not know the lady cooking the meal in the kitchen scene is really my mother. That’s my real mother, right, the lady chasing the elf, and the lady that Jam Master Jay takes the mistletoe and gives a kiss to. That’s my mom. We came off the road, and they had my mother there. I was surprised she did it. But I guess it was easy for her, because she really cooked.
Christmas Today
Around the holidays, I can’t go to the mall or to the store or walk through the airport without 50,000 people yelling my lyrics at me every year since it came out. It don’t matter whether it’s Muslim people, Asian people, Italian people, everyone could relate to it. It does what music is supposed to do—bring people together. We made Christmas cool for everybody without it being a Catholic or Christian thing. It put us up there with Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, and Nat King Cole. It’s one of the most famous Christmas songs ever written. Put it like this, it made Run-DMC just as popular as Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer for Christmas. Every year for the rest of the existence of this universe, I got a hit record, and it’s called “Christmas in Hollis.”
