When everyone hates your best work

Run-DMC's road manager used to leave the arena when they played Walk This Way. Walked out, every night, while the record was climbing the charts.

The group weren't much keener. When Rick Rubin played them the Aerosmith track in 1986 and suggested a hip-hop act might pivot to stadium rock, one of them called the lyrics “hillbilly gibberish”. They couldn't work out what the man was singing.

They recorded it against their own judgment. Aerosmith turned up, two of them deep in addiction, and the groups spent the session in opposite corners of the studio.

Then it broke on rock radio and urban radio at the same time, which hadn't happened before.

They still didn't want to play it.

The song birthed rap-rock, resurrected Aerosmith, made Run-DMC superstars, and got Black artists other than Michael Jackson onto MTV.

The people who made it thought it was rubbish - right up until the world disagreed, and for a while afterwards. The road manager held out longest.

Rubin heard something they couldn't. He booked the session anyway, put both groups behind the same glass, and kept going while every one of them wanted to stop.

That's the job. Not playing, not singing, not on the poster. Knowing how it will sound before it exists, and getting people to make it while they still think you're wrong.

Someone (probably you) will point out that this is survivorship bias. For every Rubin who was right there's a producer who was just as certain and simply wrong, and nobody writes that one up.

And you're right. We only tell this one because it worked.

Either way - we're going to need many more of those people, and outside music I'm not sure the role has a name.

I wonder what that road manager thought, out in the corridor, listening through the doors.