Darryl “DMC” McDaniels of iconic Hip-Hop group Run-DMC has many layers to his life and he’s revealing more of them in his new book Ten Ways Not to Commit Suicide.
DMC has been very open about his life post-rap. In 2004 he allowed VH1’s cameras to follow him as he sought to meet his biological mother for the first time. Ironically, he discovered that he was adopted when he began talking to his parents while writing a first draft of his memoir. Fast-forward to now DMC has picked up the pen again to finish what he started. The final result is his memoir Ten Ways Not To Commit Suicide.
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He sat down with PEOPLE Magazine to talk about some of the events discussed in the book. He reveals that he was a shy kid and started drinking young to boost his confidence and that the drinking accelerated as he became famous from being in Run-DMC.
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He tells PEOPLE:
“I started from drinking a 40[-ounce bottle Olde English 800] throughout the day, right before I would go on stage…But I had more money, so I didn’t have to go buy bottles of beer. I could just buy a case. So that’s when it got obsessive. It got to the point where it was five 40s before I went onstage, but it still didn’t take effect.”
As Run-DMC’s fame grew, so did McDaniels’ struggles. Though he’d written much of the trio’s early tracks, he says Simmons and Mizell didn’t respect his creative input shortly after they broke out.
“When I look back, it all started when I was looking for my confidence,” he says. “I didn’t need alcohol when I was 12 years old, sitting in my bedroom writing just rhymes in my notebooks: it was fun; there was no pressure of, ‘Man, I gotta write this rhyme. I hope it’ll sell.’ When you have expectations, that destroys.”
McDaniels said pressure from his band-mates, label and himself pushed him to drink more and more, and by 1991, he was drinking a case of Olde English 40s a day. Until he ended up in the hospital with acute pancreatitis.
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