midzi
03-30-2006, 01:55 AM
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from http://www.lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=3509&IssueNum=147#
Beasts to Men!
Two decades after their alarming debut, the ex-jerks of the Beastie Boys have survived to create a new concert film, a lot of smart music, and some really dumb jokes
~ By STEVE APPLEFORD ~
(L-R) Ad-Rock (a.k.a. Adam Horovitz), Mike D (a.k.a. Michael Diamond), MCA (a.k.a. Adam Yauch)
The good people crave enlightenment. They seek answers to the eternal questions. Things like: Do you guys smoke pot? Will you come to Lima, Peru? What about the Knicks? Will you play my house party next weekend? Why do every one of your songs make me want to dance my ass off? Aren’t you supposed to be Buddhist or something? Any regrets? The brotherhood of Beastie is here to help, ready to solve these confounding mysteries at last.
And what about Three 6 Mafia winning the damn Oscar? “Dolly Parton was robbed,” says the Beastie known as Ad-Rock, a.k.a. Adam Horovitz, now squinting and chewing gum on stage with a face as rubbery and cartoon-elastic as Popeye’s. The Beastie Boy called Mike D, a.k.a. Michael Diamond, concurs: “Someone was clearly the victim there.” The bearded longshoreman dude in the down jacket to their right says nothing. Adam Yauch sits back and smiles. He knows nothing serious will transpire here. And that is their rare charm, coming off at once stupid and brilliant, three urban knuckleheads now cracking 40 who have survived the decades as hardcore, hip-hop, jazzbo, underground, overground pop sensations. They have grown into Beastie men, a trio of musical visionaries and accidental comics, even as the time between albums seems to grow longer and longer.
It has brought them now to this small stage deep in George Bush country at the South by Southwest music fest in Austin, Texas, prepared to explain themselves in a panel discussion timed to the coming release of a new concert film directed by Yauch himself, under the farcical nom de plume Nathaniel Hörnblowér.
So someone asks: “Tell us about your movie …”
Yauch starts off: “It’s about a guy returning from Vietnam …”
“Now?” says Ad-Rock. “He’s just returning now?”
None of this is true. Awesome; I Fuckin’ Shot That! is high-concept and lo-fi, a Beastie Boys concert at Madison Square Garden documented on video cameras handed out to nearly 50 fans and about a dozen crew members. That amounts to 90 minutes of squealing, grooving, thumping, rhyming sounds and pictures as seen from right up front and way out in the cheap seats. It opens with an overhead shot of nighttime Manhattan through a fisheye lens, gliding right over the Statue of Liberty before landing backstage with the Beasties in a huddle, wearing their matching green tracksuits before marching to the stage as DJ Mixmaster Mike rocks Hendrix on the turntables.
What follows is a sound true to the Beasties’ roots as lovers of original-recipe hip-hop, but still vivid, raw, and fresh, with funky, loungy, spacy interludes that play something like Isaac Hayes sharing a bong with Esquivel. The images are a mix of hi-def and low-budget, blown up on the big screen as crisp, pixilated, and grainy, zooming in on an oblivious Ben Stiller in the stands shouting along to the rhymes. The cameras follow not just the guys on stage, but fans on a beer run, stepping into the bathroom, sneaking backstage. And one amateur cameraman can be heard yelling at a quiet, disbelieving corner of the crowd: “We’re doing a DVD! Get real excited!”
Most of the fans already seemed to be. In New York City, Beastie history runs deep. They began as teenage wiseguys thrashing out hardcore punk, then witnessed the birth of hip-hop. They toured as rappers with Run-D.M.C. and helped discover Public Enemy. And their 1986 debut album, the brilliantly offensive Licensed to Ill, sold millions, fueled by the ridiculously overflowing testosterone of the single “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party!).” Few expected an encore. But what followed revealed a range the Beasties themselves couldn’t have predicted, moving to Los Angeles to piece together the maximum mixing of Paul’s Boutique, followed by albums (1992’s Check Your Head, 1994’s Ill Communication, etc.) that found the dazzling nexus between rap and hardcore ? and lounge and deep, fuzzy funk.
None of it sold quite so much as Licensed to Ill, and some fans actually lost contact with the Beastie Boys, now that their livid party anthems were behind them. “There’s a lot of people that are into that first record that are like, ‘What are you guys doing? You guys still put out tapes?’” says Ad-Rock later. “Well, yeah, actually.”
Making Awesome documented the connection with the fans that remained, and the many forward-looking musical connoisseurs who followed. Not that the band felt the need to make a concert movie. It was inspired by an image from a Beasties show captured on a fan’s camera-phone. Yauch found it online. He had always dabbled in film, worked in developing the band’s music videos, always as the mysterious Hörnblowér. He’d built his own darkroom in junior high school, and he even made an animated, stop-motion film with a friend’s Super 8 camera. And now there was something special to be done with the fans.
Many of them were different people than the crowds who were drawn to their earliest shows, back when the Beasties sprayed beer over listeners, spewed obscenities, and pumped up a giant inflatable dick onstage. Those fan-dudes had freaked out a delicate Kurt Cobain when they began showing up at Nirvana concerts after “Smells Like Teen Spirit” erupted all over the airwaves. They were the same guys who used to beat him up back in Aberdeen.
The Beasties didn’t know who they were, either.
“In a way, we were goofing on frat boys or imitating frat boys or whatever it was,” Yauch says now. “And it was definitely surprising that it shifted. We were coming out of, first, being in a hardcore scene and then going on and opening for Run-D.M.C. – basically playing to rooms where there was almost no white people in them. And then all of the sudden, when Licensed to Ill exploded and we had frat dudes – that was definitely a weird turn. We were kinda like, ouch.” He laughs. “Who are these guys? How did we get here? But I guess we kind of knew how we got there.”
Egg Men
The Beasties are nowhere. It is 1989, and I am standing outside Ad-Rock’s apartment in Hollywood, and I am alone. The new Beastie Boys album has been on the streets for a week, and a Village Voice headline has already declared: “Three Jerks Make a Masterpiece.” But they are not home.
Mike D finally rolls up in his blue-gray BMW, and soon we’re cruising anxiously down Sunset Boulevard, maneuvering through late-afternoon traffic toward Tower Records in West Hollywood. Paul’s Boutique is the hip-hop trio’s first release in three years, and Diamond is ready to check how things are going, pulling up to this supermarket of music and unplugging the cell phone from a cigarette lighter. As his front wheels roll up onto the driveway, beneath a blow-dried Neil Diamond grinning down from a billboard, he sees it, incredibly: a Batman insignia the size of a flattened Volkswagen Bug painted onto the asphalt.
“Whoa! This is heavy,” Diamond says, passing slowly over the ominous black and yellow bat symbol. “That’s intense. Batman has a lot of juice. We had our flag in the back of the parking lot, but they took that down.”
Inside, Diamond finds Paul’s Boutique displayed prominently in the front of the store, right above an Allman Brothers boxed set. But as he stands admiring the two albums, the Beastie Boy whose Licensed to Ill took rap to the very top of the pop album charts for the first time, goes unnoticed. Dressed in jeans, basketball shoes, and a Knicks T-shirt, he looks like any other kid searching for the new record by his favorite band.
“You know, maybe we sold a bunch of records, but people aren’t into treating us like we’re Sting or something,” he says. “They still kind of look at it like it’s an underground thing, I guess.”
Paul’s Boutique comes after a long period of musical inactivity and continuing legal battles with the band’s former record label, Def Jam, that involve millions in unpaid royalties. It was recorded in Los Angeles, with local street people and prostitutes brought into the studio for wild inspiration. Mike D, Ad-Rock, and Yauch coproduced the hour-long recording with the Dust Brothers (John King, Mike Simpson, and, for this album, Matt Dike of Delicious Vinyl).
Together they mixed bits and shards from the Beatles, James Brown, the Sweet, movie soundtracks, and other lost and obscure tracks from 99-cent used records with the rappers’ improvised words of raw comedy, streetwise delinquency, and hip-hop bravado. It is a more complex work than the Rick Rubin-produced Licensed to Ill.
Ad-Rock is now standing excitedly over a DJ’s console in his second-floor apartment, working the two turntables and twisting, jerking, scratching an old R&B disc into a scattered collection of beats. “Did you hear the new Beastie Boys song?” Ad-Rock says. “I know you haven’t heard it in a while.”
“That’s true,’” Diamond says, wilting slightly in the summer heat.
“It starts out like this … .” And Ad-Rock works an old record by the Crusaders, spinning it with quick reverses before finally letting it turn casually into a warm, soulful groove, accented with sparks from a slow, sparse guitar lead. “All right, everybody,” Ad-Rock shouts, swinging his hips to the music, “it’s time to do this, it’s time to sooo-umph – speech at the beginning! – a-chuka-chuka, chuka-chuka, chuka-chuka. That’s def, right? Man, I got the whole song written.”
The interview is already an hour behind schedule, and Yauch still hasn’t shown. Another local writer, Shredder from the L.A. Weekly, has now arrived and waits on a nearby balcony. He will be there for another hour at least, after making the mistake of arriving on time.
Aside from the same reckless humor of the band at its beastiest, Paul’s Boutique offers some unexpected moments of ? social commentary among the beats. “Egg Man,” an otherwise brutal, comical document of egg attacks and drive-by eggings that draws to a close under a mix of the shrieking themes from Psycho and Jaws, concludes: “You made the mistake, you judge a man by his race/You go through life with egg on your face.”
And on the track “Johnny Ryall,” named for a fallen rockabilly star now reduced to homelessness and living outside Diamond’s apartment in New York, the Beastie Boys chant, “Living on borrowed time and borrowed money/Sleeping on the street, there ain’t a damn thing funny.”
“It’s just a document of time, and that’s where we’re at,” says Diamond. “One of the cool things about our work is that we get to do narratives. A lot of times you’re just telling a story, but it’s stuff that comes to mind and stuff that’s around you. You walk outside every day, and somebody is sitting on your stoop, someday you’re going to do something about it.”
The band is newly signed to Capitol Records, but the Beasties’ relationship with Def Jam continues in the courtroom. The dispute stems from the company stopping its royalty payments to the band at $100,000 for the four-million-selling Licensed to Ill. This, says Def Jam owner Russell Simmons, is because the band broke its contract by refusing to deliver a followup record. “We didn’t get paid for our albums,” Ad-Rock says simply, fast becoming bored with the subject and returning to his turntables.
Yauch finally shuffles into Ad-Rock’s apartment, a shaggy beard hanging from the end of his chin, completely uninterested in the bad vibes being discussed. More important to him is the removal of the Beastie Boys flag, and its vertical red and white stripes, from the top of the Capitol Records building.
“The president of the company, Joe What’s-his-face, walked up, had seen the flag, and decided that he wanted to put up a real American flag instead,” Yauch grumbles. “And I don’t really know what’s going on here –”
“And not only that, they’re also making excuses for taking it down,” Diamond jumps in. “Like, they said some people called up, and they were complaining that the word beast was written across the American flag.”
“I think we all can relate to what appears to be a welsher here, okay? We’ve been welshed on. It was supposed to be up for a year. They took it down already.”
There will be no live instruments on the coming tour. Not yet. “I hate tuning guitars and taking them out and having amps and all that,” Ad-Rock says, leaning back on a leather couch. “We’re not really that type of thing. It means we’re freer and get to do more. But I’m not good enough to really play in front of people. Maybe if I practiced a while.”
The New Style
“Ooh, wow, my apologies.” Mike D doesn’t actually remember our earlier interview, but still feels kinda bad about it. So does Ad-Rock: “I’m sorry.” They know how they were in those days. But if they were being difficult, I didn’t know any better at the time. No eggs were tossed in my direction. A bucket of water was not poured over my head.
It does go back to a question asked more than once by fans in Austin: Any regrets? Few acts survive long enough to answer those kinds of questions, at least in public. Amazingly, the Beastie Boys date back to the days of Huey Lewis and David Lee Roth and Bananarama. They were still teenagers when the world discovered them, and there is plenty of evidence to remind them how things were.
“It’s an honest question. I guess just because the lyrical content on the first record compared to, like, the last one are very different,” says Ad-Rock, nodding.
“But that’s also part of our process,” adds Mike D. “A lot of people are in college when they’re 19 years old. We happened to be on a world tour and with an album selling millions of copies. So our life is a lot more well-documented.”
It began in the early ’80s as a new generation of lexicon devils turned to hardcore punk. Yauch and Diamond were in the initial hardcore incarnation of the Beastie Boys, and Adam Horovitz was in the Young and the Useless.
“It’s an amazing period of time, looking back,” says Yauch. “It’s when we met each other. There was still some bands like the Ramones or Johnny Thunders or Dead Boys, sort of the remnants of junkie-type punk rock. But there was this small scene that was forming of kids that were too young to really be a part of that scene. I mean, we’d go to a club, and there would be all 30-year-old junkie dudes in the corner. So all these bands formed that turned into the New York hardcore scene. That’s a really cool time for us to look back on, because it was just a handful of friends, maybe like 30 kids who used to hang out, and we were all in bands. That’s what Beastie Boys was formed out of.”
At that time, hip-hop was just another corner of the underground, a small scene of devotees and a few crossover hits. And the Beasties would hear new tracks by the Sugerhill Gang, Spoonie Gee, and other early hip-hop voices spinning at the Mudd Club. “We were really into it, and I used to listen to that stuff. Even though I was, like, into punk and dressed punk, I would be listening to hip-hop records and learning the rhymes off them.”
After Licensed to Ill, the Beaties ended up in L.A., where they found crucial collaborators, from the Dust Brothers to Money Mark, the organist whose endless funk jones played a big role in the instrumentals that emerged in the ’90s. The Beasties set up their Grand Royal label, with a studio in Atwater custom-built with a skate-ramp and an elegant velvet painting of a Great Dane on the wall. “I don’t know about you, but I loved it,” Ad-Rock says to the others. “I thought it was hilarious. I thought all the people were hilarious. I thought the whole thing was just weird. All these Hollywood kids that we hooked up with, it didn’t seem like anybody worked.”
Mike D still keeps a place in L.A., but the band now is essentially based in New York, which seemed inevitable after they sampled a weary homesick vocal by Bob Dylan (“I’m going back to New York City/I do believe I’ve had enough”) on Check Your Head.
“When we went back to New York, we probably were like, ‘Oh, man, what were we thinking going to L.A.?’” says Mike D. “But, that being said, the L.A. time, for Paul’s Boutique it was important for us to geographically get away from New York and be somewhere else. Hooking up with the Dust Brothers was a particularly positive experience, and Check Your Head was like another step further.”
Yauch adds: “I kind of missed New York. The first couple years, it was definitely interesting, but then I started to miss it. I started to miss walking around, and most of the people that I grew up with, like family. I kind of wanted to be back in the city as much as possible. Then I think Adam started feeling the same way.”
Sure Shot
“Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God!” The woman behind me is a little excited. The Beastie Boys have just stepped onstage, as Mixmaster Mike somehow blends Rush’s squealing prog epic “Tom Sawyer” into the squeals and beats of “Brass Monkey.” It’s a song from the old days, and a hundred glowing cell-phone cameras are aimed at Yauch, Mike D, and Ad-Rock.
This is a surprise gig at Stubb’s in Austin, and the set is strictly hip-hop, so the band digs deep, everything from Licensed to Ill and Ill Communication to Hello Nasty and To the Five Boroughs. During “Eggman,” Mike D adds an impromptu “Eek-awk-oh-ah-ah!” over the sampled Psycho theme riff. And Ad-Rock has a message: “Hey, kids, stop all the downloadin’!”
It’s another joke, a wink to the fans who already know the Beasties have put up some a cappella vocals for free downloading and wild experimentation. Ad-Rock has been obsessed with loops and scratching ever since hearing his mom’s dusty copy of the Rolling Stones’ Some Girls get stuck in one groove, repeating the same guitar and sax pattern looping on forever. It’s been his life ever since, and fans are free to join him there. The Beasties have never been much afraid of the future. No reason to start now.
http://www.lacitybeat.com/media/147/14cover_story.gif
from http://www.lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=3509&IssueNum=147#
Beasts to Men!
Two decades after their alarming debut, the ex-jerks of the Beastie Boys have survived to create a new concert film, a lot of smart music, and some really dumb jokes
~ By STEVE APPLEFORD ~
(L-R) Ad-Rock (a.k.a. Adam Horovitz), Mike D (a.k.a. Michael Diamond), MCA (a.k.a. Adam Yauch)
The good people crave enlightenment. They seek answers to the eternal questions. Things like: Do you guys smoke pot? Will you come to Lima, Peru? What about the Knicks? Will you play my house party next weekend? Why do every one of your songs make me want to dance my ass off? Aren’t you supposed to be Buddhist or something? Any regrets? The brotherhood of Beastie is here to help, ready to solve these confounding mysteries at last.
And what about Three 6 Mafia winning the damn Oscar? “Dolly Parton was robbed,” says the Beastie known as Ad-Rock, a.k.a. Adam Horovitz, now squinting and chewing gum on stage with a face as rubbery and cartoon-elastic as Popeye’s. The Beastie Boy called Mike D, a.k.a. Michael Diamond, concurs: “Someone was clearly the victim there.” The bearded longshoreman dude in the down jacket to their right says nothing. Adam Yauch sits back and smiles. He knows nothing serious will transpire here. And that is their rare charm, coming off at once stupid and brilliant, three urban knuckleheads now cracking 40 who have survived the decades as hardcore, hip-hop, jazzbo, underground, overground pop sensations. They have grown into Beastie men, a trio of musical visionaries and accidental comics, even as the time between albums seems to grow longer and longer.
It has brought them now to this small stage deep in George Bush country at the South by Southwest music fest in Austin, Texas, prepared to explain themselves in a panel discussion timed to the coming release of a new concert film directed by Yauch himself, under the farcical nom de plume Nathaniel Hörnblowér.
So someone asks: “Tell us about your movie …”
Yauch starts off: “It’s about a guy returning from Vietnam …”
“Now?” says Ad-Rock. “He’s just returning now?”
None of this is true. Awesome; I Fuckin’ Shot That! is high-concept and lo-fi, a Beastie Boys concert at Madison Square Garden documented on video cameras handed out to nearly 50 fans and about a dozen crew members. That amounts to 90 minutes of squealing, grooving, thumping, rhyming sounds and pictures as seen from right up front and way out in the cheap seats. It opens with an overhead shot of nighttime Manhattan through a fisheye lens, gliding right over the Statue of Liberty before landing backstage with the Beasties in a huddle, wearing their matching green tracksuits before marching to the stage as DJ Mixmaster Mike rocks Hendrix on the turntables.
What follows is a sound true to the Beasties’ roots as lovers of original-recipe hip-hop, but still vivid, raw, and fresh, with funky, loungy, spacy interludes that play something like Isaac Hayes sharing a bong with Esquivel. The images are a mix of hi-def and low-budget, blown up on the big screen as crisp, pixilated, and grainy, zooming in on an oblivious Ben Stiller in the stands shouting along to the rhymes. The cameras follow not just the guys on stage, but fans on a beer run, stepping into the bathroom, sneaking backstage. And one amateur cameraman can be heard yelling at a quiet, disbelieving corner of the crowd: “We’re doing a DVD! Get real excited!”
Most of the fans already seemed to be. In New York City, Beastie history runs deep. They began as teenage wiseguys thrashing out hardcore punk, then witnessed the birth of hip-hop. They toured as rappers with Run-D.M.C. and helped discover Public Enemy. And their 1986 debut album, the brilliantly offensive Licensed to Ill, sold millions, fueled by the ridiculously overflowing testosterone of the single “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party!).” Few expected an encore. But what followed revealed a range the Beasties themselves couldn’t have predicted, moving to Los Angeles to piece together the maximum mixing of Paul’s Boutique, followed by albums (1992’s Check Your Head, 1994’s Ill Communication, etc.) that found the dazzling nexus between rap and hardcore ? and lounge and deep, fuzzy funk.
None of it sold quite so much as Licensed to Ill, and some fans actually lost contact with the Beastie Boys, now that their livid party anthems were behind them. “There’s a lot of people that are into that first record that are like, ‘What are you guys doing? You guys still put out tapes?’” says Ad-Rock later. “Well, yeah, actually.”
Making Awesome documented the connection with the fans that remained, and the many forward-looking musical connoisseurs who followed. Not that the band felt the need to make a concert movie. It was inspired by an image from a Beasties show captured on a fan’s camera-phone. Yauch found it online. He had always dabbled in film, worked in developing the band’s music videos, always as the mysterious Hörnblowér. He’d built his own darkroom in junior high school, and he even made an animated, stop-motion film with a friend’s Super 8 camera. And now there was something special to be done with the fans.
Many of them were different people than the crowds who were drawn to their earliest shows, back when the Beasties sprayed beer over listeners, spewed obscenities, and pumped up a giant inflatable dick onstage. Those fan-dudes had freaked out a delicate Kurt Cobain when they began showing up at Nirvana concerts after “Smells Like Teen Spirit” erupted all over the airwaves. They were the same guys who used to beat him up back in Aberdeen.
The Beasties didn’t know who they were, either.
“In a way, we were goofing on frat boys or imitating frat boys or whatever it was,” Yauch says now. “And it was definitely surprising that it shifted. We were coming out of, first, being in a hardcore scene and then going on and opening for Run-D.M.C. – basically playing to rooms where there was almost no white people in them. And then all of the sudden, when Licensed to Ill exploded and we had frat dudes – that was definitely a weird turn. We were kinda like, ouch.” He laughs. “Who are these guys? How did we get here? But I guess we kind of knew how we got there.”
Egg Men
The Beasties are nowhere. It is 1989, and I am standing outside Ad-Rock’s apartment in Hollywood, and I am alone. The new Beastie Boys album has been on the streets for a week, and a Village Voice headline has already declared: “Three Jerks Make a Masterpiece.” But they are not home.
Mike D finally rolls up in his blue-gray BMW, and soon we’re cruising anxiously down Sunset Boulevard, maneuvering through late-afternoon traffic toward Tower Records in West Hollywood. Paul’s Boutique is the hip-hop trio’s first release in three years, and Diamond is ready to check how things are going, pulling up to this supermarket of music and unplugging the cell phone from a cigarette lighter. As his front wheels roll up onto the driveway, beneath a blow-dried Neil Diamond grinning down from a billboard, he sees it, incredibly: a Batman insignia the size of a flattened Volkswagen Bug painted onto the asphalt.
“Whoa! This is heavy,” Diamond says, passing slowly over the ominous black and yellow bat symbol. “That’s intense. Batman has a lot of juice. We had our flag in the back of the parking lot, but they took that down.”
Inside, Diamond finds Paul’s Boutique displayed prominently in the front of the store, right above an Allman Brothers boxed set. But as he stands admiring the two albums, the Beastie Boy whose Licensed to Ill took rap to the very top of the pop album charts for the first time, goes unnoticed. Dressed in jeans, basketball shoes, and a Knicks T-shirt, he looks like any other kid searching for the new record by his favorite band.
“You know, maybe we sold a bunch of records, but people aren’t into treating us like we’re Sting or something,” he says. “They still kind of look at it like it’s an underground thing, I guess.”
Paul’s Boutique comes after a long period of musical inactivity and continuing legal battles with the band’s former record label, Def Jam, that involve millions in unpaid royalties. It was recorded in Los Angeles, with local street people and prostitutes brought into the studio for wild inspiration. Mike D, Ad-Rock, and Yauch coproduced the hour-long recording with the Dust Brothers (John King, Mike Simpson, and, for this album, Matt Dike of Delicious Vinyl).
Together they mixed bits and shards from the Beatles, James Brown, the Sweet, movie soundtracks, and other lost and obscure tracks from 99-cent used records with the rappers’ improvised words of raw comedy, streetwise delinquency, and hip-hop bravado. It is a more complex work than the Rick Rubin-produced Licensed to Ill.
Ad-Rock is now standing excitedly over a DJ’s console in his second-floor apartment, working the two turntables and twisting, jerking, scratching an old R&B disc into a scattered collection of beats. “Did you hear the new Beastie Boys song?” Ad-Rock says. “I know you haven’t heard it in a while.”
“That’s true,’” Diamond says, wilting slightly in the summer heat.
“It starts out like this … .” And Ad-Rock works an old record by the Crusaders, spinning it with quick reverses before finally letting it turn casually into a warm, soulful groove, accented with sparks from a slow, sparse guitar lead. “All right, everybody,” Ad-Rock shouts, swinging his hips to the music, “it’s time to do this, it’s time to sooo-umph – speech at the beginning! – a-chuka-chuka, chuka-chuka, chuka-chuka. That’s def, right? Man, I got the whole song written.”
The interview is already an hour behind schedule, and Yauch still hasn’t shown. Another local writer, Shredder from the L.A. Weekly, has now arrived and waits on a nearby balcony. He will be there for another hour at least, after making the mistake of arriving on time.
Aside from the same reckless humor of the band at its beastiest, Paul’s Boutique offers some unexpected moments of ? social commentary among the beats. “Egg Man,” an otherwise brutal, comical document of egg attacks and drive-by eggings that draws to a close under a mix of the shrieking themes from Psycho and Jaws, concludes: “You made the mistake, you judge a man by his race/You go through life with egg on your face.”
And on the track “Johnny Ryall,” named for a fallen rockabilly star now reduced to homelessness and living outside Diamond’s apartment in New York, the Beastie Boys chant, “Living on borrowed time and borrowed money/Sleeping on the street, there ain’t a damn thing funny.”
“It’s just a document of time, and that’s where we’re at,” says Diamond. “One of the cool things about our work is that we get to do narratives. A lot of times you’re just telling a story, but it’s stuff that comes to mind and stuff that’s around you. You walk outside every day, and somebody is sitting on your stoop, someday you’re going to do something about it.”
The band is newly signed to Capitol Records, but the Beasties’ relationship with Def Jam continues in the courtroom. The dispute stems from the company stopping its royalty payments to the band at $100,000 for the four-million-selling Licensed to Ill. This, says Def Jam owner Russell Simmons, is because the band broke its contract by refusing to deliver a followup record. “We didn’t get paid for our albums,” Ad-Rock says simply, fast becoming bored with the subject and returning to his turntables.
Yauch finally shuffles into Ad-Rock’s apartment, a shaggy beard hanging from the end of his chin, completely uninterested in the bad vibes being discussed. More important to him is the removal of the Beastie Boys flag, and its vertical red and white stripes, from the top of the Capitol Records building.
“The president of the company, Joe What’s-his-face, walked up, had seen the flag, and decided that he wanted to put up a real American flag instead,” Yauch grumbles. “And I don’t really know what’s going on here –”
“And not only that, they’re also making excuses for taking it down,” Diamond jumps in. “Like, they said some people called up, and they were complaining that the word beast was written across the American flag.”
“I think we all can relate to what appears to be a welsher here, okay? We’ve been welshed on. It was supposed to be up for a year. They took it down already.”
There will be no live instruments on the coming tour. Not yet. “I hate tuning guitars and taking them out and having amps and all that,” Ad-Rock says, leaning back on a leather couch. “We’re not really that type of thing. It means we’re freer and get to do more. But I’m not good enough to really play in front of people. Maybe if I practiced a while.”
The New Style
“Ooh, wow, my apologies.” Mike D doesn’t actually remember our earlier interview, but still feels kinda bad about it. So does Ad-Rock: “I’m sorry.” They know how they were in those days. But if they were being difficult, I didn’t know any better at the time. No eggs were tossed in my direction. A bucket of water was not poured over my head.
It does go back to a question asked more than once by fans in Austin: Any regrets? Few acts survive long enough to answer those kinds of questions, at least in public. Amazingly, the Beastie Boys date back to the days of Huey Lewis and David Lee Roth and Bananarama. They were still teenagers when the world discovered them, and there is plenty of evidence to remind them how things were.
“It’s an honest question. I guess just because the lyrical content on the first record compared to, like, the last one are very different,” says Ad-Rock, nodding.
“But that’s also part of our process,” adds Mike D. “A lot of people are in college when they’re 19 years old. We happened to be on a world tour and with an album selling millions of copies. So our life is a lot more well-documented.”
It began in the early ’80s as a new generation of lexicon devils turned to hardcore punk. Yauch and Diamond were in the initial hardcore incarnation of the Beastie Boys, and Adam Horovitz was in the Young and the Useless.
“It’s an amazing period of time, looking back,” says Yauch. “It’s when we met each other. There was still some bands like the Ramones or Johnny Thunders or Dead Boys, sort of the remnants of junkie-type punk rock. But there was this small scene that was forming of kids that were too young to really be a part of that scene. I mean, we’d go to a club, and there would be all 30-year-old junkie dudes in the corner. So all these bands formed that turned into the New York hardcore scene. That’s a really cool time for us to look back on, because it was just a handful of friends, maybe like 30 kids who used to hang out, and we were all in bands. That’s what Beastie Boys was formed out of.”
At that time, hip-hop was just another corner of the underground, a small scene of devotees and a few crossover hits. And the Beasties would hear new tracks by the Sugerhill Gang, Spoonie Gee, and other early hip-hop voices spinning at the Mudd Club. “We were really into it, and I used to listen to that stuff. Even though I was, like, into punk and dressed punk, I would be listening to hip-hop records and learning the rhymes off them.”
After Licensed to Ill, the Beaties ended up in L.A., where they found crucial collaborators, from the Dust Brothers to Money Mark, the organist whose endless funk jones played a big role in the instrumentals that emerged in the ’90s. The Beasties set up their Grand Royal label, with a studio in Atwater custom-built with a skate-ramp and an elegant velvet painting of a Great Dane on the wall. “I don’t know about you, but I loved it,” Ad-Rock says to the others. “I thought it was hilarious. I thought all the people were hilarious. I thought the whole thing was just weird. All these Hollywood kids that we hooked up with, it didn’t seem like anybody worked.”
Mike D still keeps a place in L.A., but the band now is essentially based in New York, which seemed inevitable after they sampled a weary homesick vocal by Bob Dylan (“I’m going back to New York City/I do believe I’ve had enough”) on Check Your Head.
“When we went back to New York, we probably were like, ‘Oh, man, what were we thinking going to L.A.?’” says Mike D. “But, that being said, the L.A. time, for Paul’s Boutique it was important for us to geographically get away from New York and be somewhere else. Hooking up with the Dust Brothers was a particularly positive experience, and Check Your Head was like another step further.”
Yauch adds: “I kind of missed New York. The first couple years, it was definitely interesting, but then I started to miss it. I started to miss walking around, and most of the people that I grew up with, like family. I kind of wanted to be back in the city as much as possible. Then I think Adam started feeling the same way.”
Sure Shot
“Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God!” The woman behind me is a little excited. The Beastie Boys have just stepped onstage, as Mixmaster Mike somehow blends Rush’s squealing prog epic “Tom Sawyer” into the squeals and beats of “Brass Monkey.” It’s a song from the old days, and a hundred glowing cell-phone cameras are aimed at Yauch, Mike D, and Ad-Rock.
This is a surprise gig at Stubb’s in Austin, and the set is strictly hip-hop, so the band digs deep, everything from Licensed to Ill and Ill Communication to Hello Nasty and To the Five Boroughs. During “Eggman,” Mike D adds an impromptu “Eek-awk-oh-ah-ah!” over the sampled Psycho theme riff. And Ad-Rock has a message: “Hey, kids, stop all the downloadin’!”
It’s another joke, a wink to the fans who already know the Beasties have put up some a cappella vocals for free downloading and wild experimentation. Ad-Rock has been obsessed with loops and scratching ever since hearing his mom’s dusty copy of the Rolling Stones’ Some Girls get stuck in one groove, repeating the same guitar and sax pattern looping on forever. It’s been his life ever since, and fans are free to join him there. The Beasties have never been much afraid of the future. No reason to start now.