Take the Money and Rev. Run

One night in 1986, Joey "Run" Simmons, the 21-year-old front man for pioneering rappers Run-DMC, was enjoying watching the Madison Square Garden crowd bop wildly to his hip-hop ditties. Their dedication, and their money, had supplied the Rolex on his wrist, the gold chains adorning his neck, the $100,000 he'd get for the two-hour performance.

But he wanted more. Commanding the crowd to take off their shoes and hold them up in the air, he was greeted nearly instantaneously with a wave of shell-top sneakers. And even that moment's inspiration brought a profit: An Adidas representative was in the house that night, and the following week Run-DMC signed an endorsement deal with the sneaker company that brought the three childhood friends from the poor neighborhood of Hollis, Queens, $2 million.

It's no wonder that Run-DMC fashioned their astounding prosperity into a religion for a generation of rappers and their fans--or that when he turned to God after hard times, Simmons, who at age 35 now calls himself "Rev. Run," would come to champion a religious stance that cites prosperity as a sign of God's grace.

Both seemed to desert Run for a time. The first rap group with a multiplatinum album, the first to appear on MTV or the cover of Rolling Stone, Run-DMC invented not only mainstream rap, but the image of rappers as gaudily turned-out ghetto boys living the lush life. Their bragging about their Mercedes and gold chains became the theme for rap songs from Run-DMC's rise until the early 1990s, when a harder sound, called "gangsta rap," took over the scene and the charts.

Run-DMC's playful style fell quickly out of favor. The trio drove themselves to bankruptcy into 1991 trying to revitalize their status, self-financing a rap movie that went bust and an album that did poorly.

Meanwhile, all hell was breaking loose for Run personally. After battling a rape charge brought by a woman at an Ohio show for nearly two years, his finances and marriage were severely strained, and he collapsed into a deep depression that prevented the group from performing and making records. "Intoxicated by the illusions of power I had created, for the first time in my life I felt as if I were failing," Run wrote in his self-help memoir, "It's Like That." "I had no--absolutely no--thoughts of going forward with life.... People said, 'Get up and fight, Run,' but I didn't want to get up and fight. I was hurt. I wanted to lie down and die!"

"It's Like That," published last year, narrates Simmons' comeback from depressed rapper to his ordination in the Pentecostal church as "Reverend Run." Though it's subtitled "A Spiritual Memoir," the book combines a fairly run-of-the-mill tell-all with advice on how to become spiritually empowered (conveniently crossing the two hottest marketing publishing trends: spiritual self-help and memoir madness). Run boils spiritual revival down to 12 simple steps: "Run's House Rules." These essentially translate the basic clichés of the self-help industry into the hip-hop vernacular.

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