From the “Jump Around” Anthem to “The Outsiders” House Museum: The Story of Danny Boy O’Connor

00:00:10
Speaker 1: And we continue here with Our American Story. Since being released in 1983, Francis Ford Coppola’s film adaptation of S. E. Hinton’s coming-of-age novel, The Outsiders, has found continued popularity and has achieved official cult status. And now, in what is surely one of the most interesting pop culture intersections, hip-hop artist Danny Boy O’Connor, from the rap group House of Pain, best known for the iconic 1992 anthem “Jump Around,” purchased the Tulsa, Oklahoma, home where much of The Outsiders film was shot. Here to tell this story is the man himself. Here’s Danny Boy.

00:00:48
Speaker 2: My story really begins in Los Angeles, California, 1983, when I went unknowingly to a movie that I had never heard of in Woodland Hills, California, called The Outsiders, with my friend Steve Sakolski, who just happened to read the book. I believe I was in seventh grade, and so he was a fan of the book, and he wanted to see the movie. He said, “Danny, you want to go see a movie with me?” And I thought, “Sure.” Steve Sakolski, pretty cool junior high kid that I knew, so I figured, you know, if he likes it, it’s probably something I liked. But I had no idea what we were going to go see. I didn’t have any frame of reference. And on that full Saturday afternoon, we went in and saw the movie, and I came out a changed man. And people ask me all the time what was my fascination with The Outsiders? And the movie kind of hit me at a time where I definitely felt out of place in, you know, the San Fernando Valley in the eighties, being a native New Yorker who was moved to California at the age of six, and kind of always had like a strong connection to the East Coast. So Southern California in the eighties looked a lot different than New York City did. And I don’t know, I just always felt, you know, separate and apart from, and I got that from the movie as well. And I grew up. My father went to prison when I was two months old. We moved in with my grandparents. My mother worked nights at the Chase Manhattan Bank, and so I never really had that foundation or that family, you know, support or love. And, you know, Carrie, that I carried that with me, even though, you know, I’ve had a pretty extraordinary life. You know, that that foundation, from the beginning, it’s always felt unstable. And so when I went to see The Outsiders, the first thing I noticed was that they were a fractured family, a broken family, and that despite that, that they stuck together and had each other’s backs. And I felt, at a thirteen- or fourteen-year-old’s mindset, was that if I could just find that kind of friendship out in the world, that maybe I wouldn’t feel so bad about my home life and the way we grew up. And so that was the original hook for me for that movie. That being said, Matt Dillon was the coolest dude on the planet at that time. The cast was incredible, whether it’s Patrick Swayze, Ralph Macho, Tom Cruise, Darren Dalton, C. Thomas How, Diane Lane. They were all. Actually, Leif Garrett was the big star in my mind looking back, because he was a seventies star and so really was the only notable name that I knew prior to The Outsiders. Then Matt Dylon. But that being said, you know, the movie was the coolest thing I’d ever seen, and it stuck with me. I immediately went home and then dug out a denim jacket that I may have had from the seventies in New York and kind of adapted that Dallas Winston Matt Dylan swagger for the next few years. But as fate would have it, I didn’t really have much of a game plan coming out of high school. I dropped out in ninth grade. I hung out for the next three year years at high school, never really went in too much, got in a little bit of trouble with the law, and during the time where most of my friends were graduating high school and heading off to college or embarking on a career, I had no idea what I was going to do. And so I connected, reconnected with a high school friend who had had a record out prior to me and him reconnecting, and we started a band called House of Pain. And at the time in hip-hop, there wasn’t anything on the landscape like it. We were really, you know, kind of the next wave of hip-hop in the early nineties, but at that time there wasn’t any really, there wasn’t really any hard white boys. We were like Irish-American tough white kids, and that was our stick. And that our deal was is that, you know, we were the kind of like, you know, boombab, punch you in your face type of hip-hop that was missing, you knows, as the eighties turned into the nineties, and grunge was a thing. Hip-hop needed to reinvent. So us in Cyprus Hill were kind of like the next face of that in that moment. And so it was very successful with that, and sold a few million records, and traveled all over the world, and made a million bucks. But, you know, I like to say, “What goes up must come down,” and it was an only, you know, five years later that I was back to where I started, even less because, you know, doing music for a live, especially as a creative director and an artist more than I am a musician, it kind of left me empty-handed when the career was done, or the music career was done in that moment, and I really had no other life skills, and I unfortunately turned to drugs to deal with that pain. So I spent the next, you know, five, six years high on methamphetamines and drinking around the clock. And it wasn’t until about year 2000 then I got sober. I stayed sober for about three and a half years, and, you know, first year was good. Second year, I started getting complacent and a little… My attitude started to come back, and my expectations started to come back. At around three and a half years, I decided to have a drink, and it was pretty much the worst decision I’d ever made. It took me one week to go back on drugs, and took me three years to get make it back to the Twelve Step program. And it wasn’t until 2005 that I was able to druss another sober breath. In 2005 is when I began to put another group together called the Coca and Nostra. And it was on that fateful tour that brought me to Tulsa, Oklahoma. So when we got to Tulsa, Oklahoma, we were stuck here for three days. And when I say stuck, I mean stuck. But day two of the three days that we were here, we began to get extremely bored, and so I called down to the concierge desk in the lobby and asked them to call us a cab. They laughed. There was no such thing as cabs. They were able to wrangle us up a guy in a van that took about an hour and a half to get to the hotel, and then when he got there, we asked him, “Can he take us on a proper tour of Tulsa?” which he proceeded to say yes, and then took us to the Woodland Hills Mall. And I can assure you that didn’t go over so well with a bunch of forty-year-olds going to what was at that point pretty, you know, the mall was kind of shuttered as well. And so we went there for about an hour, and as we were heading back to downtown Tulsa, it occurred to me, “Tulsa, Tulsa, Tulsa.” “Why does Tulsa sound familiar to me?” And it was at that moment I had the epiphany, and I said, “Excuse me, driver.” He said, “Yes.” I said, “Was The Outsiders filmed here?” And he almost like locked up the brakes. He was like, turned around, and said, “Yes, absolutely.” He says, “Why do you know it?” I said, “I not only know it, I love it.” “Do you know where any of the filming locations are?” And he said, “I do know where the driving is.” So we proceeded to drop off the rest of the group. I grabbed my road manager, said, “You’re coming with me.” I grabbed my laptop, and at the time, even in 2009, there wasn’t much on the internet to go on, and it’s not like today. In 2009, I looked up for locations for The Outsiders, and I found a Flicker account or two, and I found a site called Tulsa TV Memories, which had a few of the locations, and the addresses were given up. The address I was most interested in was The Outsiders’ house, which was not given on that website. But they did tell us where the drive in was, and it did tell me where the park in the movie was, the Crutchfield neighborhood. And so we went to the drive in, and I couldn’t imagine that this thing was going to look anything like it did in the movie. But not only was it, it felt like it hadn’t changed a bit. And my mind just started to just melt, really, because it looked exactly like it would have in 1982 when they were filming, and exactly like it did, you know, in the sixties when they were trying to describe it. So it was pretty good stuff, anyway. So, yeah, we got that driver to take us around Tulsa. We were able to find the drive in. We were able to find Crutchfield Park, which was the park that Johnny stabs the Socian, and they have the confrontation with the soshas In. And then by finding the Bark, I was able to find the house. And by finding the house, this is where my life starts to take a different turn.

00:09:34
Speaker 1: And when we come back, we’ll continue with the story of Danny Boy O’Connor, from the rap group House of Pain, his journey back into his life. The movie The Outsiders, filmed in this town, Tulsa, in Oklahoma. The rest of this story continues here on Our American Stories, and we continue here with Our American Stories and the story of Danny Boy O’Connor. And my goodness, what a story it’s been so far. No father, a hole he’s trying to fill because of that. Sees this movie, sees this character in The Outsiders, played by Matt Dillon of all people, and the next thing you know, a little bit later, he’s in a big hit band, House of Pain, and then drugs. And then one day there’s a stop in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where The Outsiders was filmed, and the next thing you know, there he is in front of the house where that movie was filmed.

00:10:44
Speaker 2: Let’s pick up where we last left off. At the time, it was for sale for forty thousand dollars. I can assure you, you can’t buy anything in Los Angeles, California, with the word “real” attached to it for forty thousand dollars. I could not believe that this house, one, would be for sale; two, would be forty thousand dollars; and, three, that nobody understood its true value as an American classic and really a sacred hollow. Grounds. That being said, I knew that I was in no position to buy a house Untilsa, Oklahoma, living in Beverly Hills, California, and that I should just kind of take a photo and soak it all in while I was here and then and keep it keep moving. So that’s exactly what I did. I took a photo out front. We played Cain’s Ballroom the next night, and I also found out that there was a hole in the wall that Sid Vicious had punched in 1978 when the Sex Pistols played Cain’s Ballroom. And I put both of those photos on Facebook, which was pretty much a new thing as well. And the response I got was incredible, and in particular, everybody was fascinated with The Outsiders, and that the house was not only, one, still on Earth, but they couldn’t leave that it was still on the Warner Brothers lot, which I had to correct a lot of people that it is, no, it is not on the Warner Brothers lot in Burbank. It is actually still here in North Tulsa. And I made sure I did not tell anybody that it was for sale because I didn’t want any else buying it, never again thinking that I would end up buying it five years later, but that’s exactly what happened. So after finding the house, we kind of, I realized that there’s, there’s, there’s some really cool stuff across America, and so it really started here for me. But I started to urban explore, and I put a group together called the Delta Bravo Urban Exploration Team. And what that is is, it’s a page I started on Facebook, and I put The Outsiders’ House first, and I put a before-and-after photo, told people the basics, you know, The Outsiders, 1982. Here’s the house that the Curtis brothers lived. Here’s the address: 731 North Saint Louis Avenue. And here’s a before-and-after photo. And I found a lot of support and made a lot of friends through this webpage that we started. And I found that there was a lot of like-minded people all over the world, but here, in particular in the U.S., that were at a certain age where they were like really looking back, finally, on all of the pop culture locations and all of our collective history, which is really pop history. I mean, I was, if I’m honest, I was raised by a television set in the radio. I mean, this is where I got most of the stuff I was after, you know, as a kid. This is where all my information came from. So in 2009, I used the tour bus as my personal, like, pop culture location vehicle. And I figured, if I’m going to be on this tour bus and everybody else is going to be, you know, doing their thing, I’m going to get highly caffeinated, walk around every city we go to, and I’m going to look for culturally relevant, undiscovered locations. And so that was the birth of the Delta Bravo Urban Exploration Team. Again, it just was like a cool hobby that I could do in my sobriety that really cost me nothing. And I was also able to kind of, like, see all the undiscovered locations that I had always wanted to see, like where Mary Tyler Morris’ house was in Minneapolis, where the Son of Sam was arrested in Brooklyn, and stuff like this. And because of the success of that on the internet, I got so much, you know, so many accolades and met so many cool people. We started to do it like, pretty, we took it pretty serious. For a while, we were actually getting courted by a lot of companies in Hollywood. They were trying to turn it into a television show. It never really kind of worked out, television-wise, but the group kept growing and growing, so we started to go on group trips. And meanwhile, I was still touring a lot. So I was going back and forth across the U.S., and year after year, a minimum of twice a year, but sometimes three or four times a year, I would come back, whether on purpose or not, to toss, Oklahoma, and I’d always make a mission or pilgrimage to see The Outsiders’ house and mostly some of the other locations as well. And what I started to notice is that, year after year, this house was starting to deteriorate, and that the neighborhood was starting to fall apart, and that Habitat for Humanity was coming through here and they were clearing out a lot of these streets and these houses, building new houses. I always like to qualify that I am a fan of the Habitat for Humanities and what they do, in particular, making low-income houses, you know, affordable to people who wouldn’t be able to afford those. And that being said, I was worried that nobody recognized this house for really what it was, which was an American classic and a cinematic masterpiece, you know, part of a bigger, you know, picture. And so at year five is when I got here and started to get worried. I started to think, “Well, what if they tear this house down, and what if nobody recognizes that?” What, what, what this thing really represents and what it is. And it’s on the fifth year when I started to ask myself the question, “Well, why don’t you do something about it?” And really, I have no expertise on any of this stuff. I was just a fan who couldn’t imagine the world without The Outsiders’ House. There was really never a plan or a blueprint or any of that. But what I did was meet a couple of people here in Tulsa, Oklahoma. They not only saw the vision that I had that this should be some kind of, like, one, it shouldn’t, it shouldn’t ever be torn down. Two, maybe it could be restored, and it could be somebody’s house, and we could put a little display or some homage to the movie that was filmed here in one of the rooms. And the idea just kept getting bigger and bigger. But what ends up happening is, we end up getting the contact information for the owner, who, her husband, bought the house five years before I got here, and they basically did a quick “fluff and buff” in hopes to use it as a rental property. Unfortunately, her husband died; he gives it to her in the will, and her and her sister moved to Florida because they were not native to Tulsa, and they’ve had no reason to stay here once her husband was gone. I guess they were kind of like absentee landlords. I mean, they were trying their best to collect the rent, but the tenants weren’t paying. They were eight months behind in their rent. The house was in terrible condition, and so by the time I found her in 2009, she was ready to sell. We called her. She told us she wouldn’t take a penny less than twenty thousand dollars. My buddy made the call, so he said he wouldn’t give her a penny more than fifteen thousand dollars, to which she accepted. And at that point, I thought, “Man, we robbed this lady.” I mean, we bought an American treasure for fifteen thousand dollars. I mean, where on Earth can you buy a house for fifteen thousand dollars, much less the house from the movie The Outsiders? So, yeah, so I buy the house for fifteen thousand dollars. I buy it sight unseen. I had never been in the house. I had peeked in it a few times. I’d been on the outside of The Outsiders’ house a few times, but never really knowing that true condition of the house, and also never understanding. I’m, when it comes to remodeling homes or anything that has anything to do with that. I have no idea what I’m doing. So this is not something that I would have been, like, predisposed to do, or something that would have been a likely thing for me to do. I was just a passionate fan who couldn’t imagine if they tore this house down what the world would would be like without it. And so I ended up giving the tenants, little by little, over a month to move them out, because, again, they were eight months behind in rent, and it cost me forty-eight hundred dollars to get them out. When I finally drove here a month later from California to…