Rock Although Smith was a trained musician, he chose not to employ live studio musicians to provide the music for Run-D.M.C. Aiming to reproduce on record the super-spare sound of hip hop music as it was then being made in the city's parks and clubs, he relied instead on drum machines. The revolutionary result—embodied in Run-DMC's first single, "It's Like That" b/w "Sucker MCs"—was little more than beats and rhymes. "With its lack of bass and emphasis on drum claps, 'Sucker MCs' provided the template for most [hip hop] records from '83 until '86-'87," according to critic Jesse Serwer. When Run-D.M.C.'s eponymous first album was released in the spring of 1984, it was hailed by Robert Christgau ("the dean of American rock critics") as "easily the canniest and most formally sustained [hip hop] album ever." One of the album's standout tracks was "Rock Box," a pioneering hybrid of hip hop and rock. According to Bill Adler in Tougher Than Leather: The Rise of Run-D.M.C., the record came together when the group overheard a rock band named Riot recording in New York's Greene Street Studios. "They saw these loud guitars," remembers Russell Simmons, "and they started screaming, 'We can do that! What the fuck—we're going to make loud shit, too!'" Steve Loeb, Greene Street's owner, was frankly skeptical of the viability of a rock-hip hop crossover. "You're out of your mind," he told Smith. "Niggas play rock 'n' roll, too," Smith replied. He then recruited his old Hollis, Queens, friend Eddie Martinez—known to his friends as the Manic Hispanic—to lay in the guitar part for "Rock Box." Named by The Source magazine in 1998 as one of the 100 Best Rap Albums Ever and by Rolling Stone as one of the 100 Greatest Albums of the 1980s, Run-D.M.C. is "the LP that forever tore rap away from disco and made it its own thing," according to critic Tom Breihan in 2005. Smith and Simmons's second album for Run-D.M.C. was King of Rock. The title track, which again featured Eddie Martinez on guitar, let the group "crunch and pop like some sort of hip-hop Black Sabbath," in the words of Rolling Stone's J.D. Considine. In recent years, it was featured on the soundtrack of the video games "Guitar Hero: Aerosmith" and "Thrasher: Skate and Destroy." The album was certified for Platinum-level sales in 1987. Making Escape In the wake of the success