To call someone a “boy” when they’re over 50 is disrespectful. Except that Mike “Mike D” Diamond and Adam “Ad-rock” Horovitz, the two remaining Beastie Boys, are almost parodically boyish. They don’t look or act middle-aged at all. Diamond, 52, has slightly spiked dark hair and is so skinny, his waistline appears to be the same size as a normal man’s upper thigh. Horovitz, 51, is grey, but his hair sticks up any old how, and he also has a teenager’s habit of yanking his face about, pulling stupid expressions to make himself look ugly (which he is not). Both are dressed in leisure wear – T-shirts, loose-ish trousers, trainers – and both are defiantly, hilariously un-adult. This interview is like having a conversation with my 12-year-old son and his mate. Meaning it’s really fun (I’m often almost crying with laughter), but it’s scattershot, and rarely serious. Everything the Beasties say is true, but most of it is jokes.
We’re in a suite at the Bowery hotel in New York, to talk about Beastie Boys Book, a new memoir of their time in the band. The book opens with a lovely piece from Horovitz about Adam “MCA” Yauch, the third Beastie, who died from salivary gland cancer in 2012, aged 47. Yauch was, writes Horovitz, the kind of friend “that gets you motivated. The one that not only gets themselves going and doing great things but says: ‘We should all get together and do this’… The friend that makes it happen. The friend that inspires you to go big.”
Quick GuideThe best of the Beastie Boys, by Observer pop critic Kitty Empire
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Licensed to Ill (1986)
The former hardcore punk band exchanged one sound of rebellious partying for another – hip-hop – and created a frequently hilarious debut album with producer Rick Rubin. With hits like (You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (To Party), a VW-symbol-nicking but knowing frat-hop was born. It was the first hip-hop album to reach No 1 in the US charts.
Paul’s Boutique (1989)
The band’s second album was guilty only of maturing too quickly for fans who wanted Mike D, MCA and Ad-Rock to keep playing dumb. A lush mesh of samples and crate-digger aural collages courtesy of like-minded helpmeets the Dust Brothers, the eclectic and seminal Boutique remains a high point of Beastie musicality.
Sabotage (1994)
Having expanded their brief to include a label and magazine, the Beasties’ commitment to visual culture hit a lofty peak when director Spike Jonze made the clip for probably their most exciting song. Starring the band as mustachioed 70s cops foiling a drug deal, the Sabotage video inspired, among other things, the opening of Trainspotting.
Bodhisattva Vow (1994)
One of two Buddha-facing tracks on Ill Communication, this Yauch punk-hop tune reintroduced the Beasties not as public nuisances but as spiritual badasses. On the same album, Sure Shot featured a rapped apology for past sexism. In 1996, Yauch organised the Tibetan Freedom Concert; the trio would continue to espouse progressive causes. Yauch practised Buddhism until his death in 2012. Al-Jazeera affectionately called him “Muslim Americans’ hero, and America’s personal Jewish Gandhi”.
Intergalactic (1998)
Another inspired pastiche video for another classic single, this time off the Hello Nasty album, which brought dub reggae and Brazilian tropicália into the band’s palette. Intergalactic, though, was pure dumb Vocoder-assisted electro-pop that borrowed from Stravinsky and went on to win a Grammy, one of three the Beasties accrued. The video marked the directorial debut of Nathaniel Hornblower, Yauch’s visual alias.
To the 5 Boroughs (2008)
This late record was, in part, the Beasties’ homecoming reaction to 9/11 and the gentrifying original capital of hip-hop. It was political, but fun. Right Right Now Now contains perhaps the most Beastie lyric ever: “I’m a funky-ass Jew and I’m on my way,” brags the ever-nasal Ad-Rock, “And yes I got to say ‘fuck the KKK’”. Lean and uncluttered, TT5B was the beginning of the end for the Boys, with just one more album to come: Hot Sauce Committee Pt II - a parting shot delayed by Yauch’s battle with cancer.
Go big is what the Beastie Boys did. Against all expectations, three white middle-class New Yorkers with mixed, mostly Jewish, heritage and a punk-rock sensibility became, for a 1980s moment, the biggest rap band in the world. And after that – this is the really strange bit – they managed to continue making music and create a 30-year-plus career. “Lucky?” says Horovitz. “Yes. Our music is weird. It’s not pop. I don’t know why so many people buy our records.”
The book took them four years to complete and tells the Beasties’ story from pre-1981, when Diamond formed a hardcore band with friends, including Yauch. Packed with photographs, diagrams, maps, cartoons, recipes, lists (some great music ones), as well as some brilliant writing from them both, Beastie Boys Book is a delight. But, God, getting either Diamond or Horovitz to talk about it is nigh-on impossible.
Mostly, the interview goes like this: I mention an anecdote, or a particular time in their career, and then they mess around. So, when I ask about Diamond’s late-1980s habit of wearing a Volkswagen badge as a medallion (as he does on the book’s cover), he and Horovitz have a lengthy debate as to whether either of them actually wrote anything specifically about the VW badge/medallion thing. Then…
Diamond: “It was just one of those things that happened… Adam and Adam showed up at my apartment in the West Village with one and they were like: ‘Here, you’re wearing this.’”
Horovitz: “That’s not really how it happened. Didn’t you steal it? You kind of stole it.”
Diamond: “From you? I stole it from you? Is that what you’re saying?”
Horovitz: “Well, I stole it from… Maybe we should not talk about this.”
Diamond: “Just because there’s a lot of thievery involved.”
Horovitz: “And the down coat…”
Diamond: “I don’t even want to go into the down coat… Really, the VW thing is more about other people’s stories. Everybody, after I wore it, was just like [stupid voice, moving his arms stiffly]: ‘Oh, yes, this guy stole this one from duh-duh-duh.’”
Horovitz: “Who are you describing right now? Who is that?! What happened to your arms?”
Diamond: “This is my character. ‘I’ve got to tell you guys… In 1987, I stole this medallion, for you.’ [Moves arms again] Arms, not convincing, huh? No?”
Horovitz: “No.”
See? They’re like kids avoiding a have-you-done-your-homework question. Especially Diamond. His mind bounces between subjects like a well-flipped pinball. In any other profession, Diamond would be seen as an eccentric.
“Mike is the craziest person,” says Horovitz. “He’s scattered, he’s all over the place. When you hold him down and tell him: ‘This is what you’re doing,’ he’s fantastic. But you have to hold him down. Like when he had to write his verse for Hello Nasty, we had to take his phone away to get him to do it. That’s what he was like about writing this book. We hid his phone.”
Diamond: “I have a short attention span. It’s because I’m used to making records. That gratification. You press play, and you listen back and you’re like: ‘Oh I could dance to this,’ or: ‘God, really? I spent two days doing that?’ Immediate feedback. But when you just sit there on your laptop writing for two days…”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, although the writing is shared pretty equally at the beginning of the book, Diamond’s contributions drop away towards the end. He kept finding excuses. He has two teenage sons (he shares custody with his ex-wife Tamra Davis) and likes to spend time with them. He lives in Malibu and they all do a lot of surfing: “Surfing can actually monopolise all my time,” he says gravely.
“Look, getting my sons out of bed and out of the house every day is such an effort that I feel I’m done by 8.30am,” he says. This makes it seem as though he’s too exhausted to do anything else, but actually, Diamond is really busy. He’s into wine (he curated a wine list for a new LA restaurant), he’s designed expensive “grown man bags” (he shows me a leather wallet from his collection), he’s made music for fashion-house art events and has been a cultural ambassador for Mercedes-Benz. He produces other bands (Slaves and Portugal. The Man), he recently did a DJing tour, he has a weekly Beats 1 radio show, The Echo Chamber. Though he’s a master of distraction (he spends 15 minutes at the start of our interview wondering what to get for breakfast: “Order eggs, Mike,” says Horovitz wearily), Diamond actually enjoys being absorbed, transported by something that moves him creatively. When he’s excited, he’s all in.
In contrast, Horovitz enjoyed the writing (“It was very easy, I really liked it”), and has concentrated on completing a lot of the other legwork: sourcing photographs, tracking people down. Aside from all that, he has a little boy with his wife, Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna, and he and Hanna write screenplays together (they sold a pilot to Comedy Central). He’s played bass in Bridget Everett and the Tender Moments and he acts, much to Diamond’s amusement. “Did you know Adam was in a semi-pornographic movie in 1984?”
When I ask Horovitz how he spends his days, he bristles, a teeny bit. He’s naturally more private than Diamond. “Well, I don’t know about Mike, but I’ve been writing a book for the past three years,” he says. “I’m renting a house in Pasadena with a swimming pool, so take a guess… uh… I’m working on a soundtrack for a friend’s movie, which I don’t think he’s ever going to finish, so, if anybody needs like an hour’s worth of Casio music, I’ve got it.”
Diamond: “Adam makes it sound like he does nothing. But he’s on a caffeine-fuelled rampage at 6.30am with his emails.”
Horovitz: “First thing in the morning, boom. Get it done. Boom, boom, boom. After that, I like to hang out… Hey, you know what? We just got Jarvis Cocker to read for the audio book, the British section.”
Back to the book. Their first idea was to have the whole of it written by friends, but “for so much of our lives it was just us three,” says Horovitz. So he and Diamond thought of all the stories they wanted to tell, “and then we’d look at each other and be like, ‘I don’t remember any of this.’” Because of this, their friends’ takes still feature heavily. Director Spike Jonze gives extended photograph captions. Kate Schellenbach, from Luscious Jackson, a Beastie Boy herself from 81-86, writes a truthful and lovely essay. Fashion guru André Leon Talley analyses their style, very dismissively. It all adds up to what Mike calls “a chunky tome”: a scrapbook of experiences, a multilayered non-definitive history. Not like a usual rock biography.
“No,” says Diamond. “I read Graham Nash’s on holiday. You know, for research. He was embittered for like 7,000 pages… All these books are terribly serious. But when you’re in a band, so much of the time, honestly, it’s an absurd comedy.”
Horovitz: “That, and hanging around waiting for everyone to decide where they want to eat.”
All three of the Beasties grew up in New York, and all went to small liberal schools. (Horovitz’s was so liberal it was called the City-As-School.) Yauch was an only child; Horovitz and Diamond were youngest children. They all had a lot of freedom. “By the time I came along my parents had had enough,” says Diamond. “It was just like, ‘Go do what you’re doing, just don’t get into so much trouble that I hear about it.’” Horovitz: “Nobody said, ‘You need to be home before 3am on a Thursday.’”
New York at that time was rough, and most of the middle class moved out when they had kids. “We were the weirdos that grew up here,” says Diamond, who remembers being taught by his mum what to do when (not if) he got mugged. “She was always like, ‘Remember. Put the money in your sock.’ I was like, ‘Why? Won’t they check there too? Are feet just too gross even for muggers?’” No mobile phones back then, of course, but this, they feel, was key: everyone was more connected with their surroundings and Horovitz, Yauch and Diamond would hear music everywhere, coming out of cars, in shops, from boomboxes.
“The only way that we could have become the band that we became is because New York at that time had everything going on,” says Diamond. “Now, you can get every song that ever influenced us on this phone, but at that time, New York truly was the only place in the world that had this confluence of all this different kind of music. New-wave stuff, no-wave stuff, post-punk, then the beginnings of rap. Dub, jazz, salsa, whatever.”
The young teenage Beasties would go out downtown, meeting at gigs or clubs or a record store, the Rat Cage. “You’d cut school and go to the Rat Cage because you knew someone would be there,” says Horovitz. The next generation after the crowd containing Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and Blondie, they were allowed into nightclubs such as the Mudd Club and Danceteria even though they were underage, just because people liked them. Inspired by hardcore bands such as Bad Brains, Diamond started a punk-noise band when he was just 14 that morphed into the Beastie Boys (Diamond, Yauch, guitarist John Berry, Schellenbach on drums). Horovitz was also in a band, the Young and the Useless, but replaced Berry in the Beasties in 1983. Soon after, hip-hop hit downtown, the Beasties saw Afrika Bambaataa DJ at a club, and, writes Diamond: “All we wanted was to be our own version of the Treacherous Three.”
As they became more enchanted by rap, they realised that they needed a DJ. Through a friend, they became involved with Rick Rubin, a strange, long-haired Long Islander who was a student at New York University. Rubin had turntables, and a big record collection; they all chose breaks and the Beasties began to rap over the top. Gradually, Schellenbach was eased out (Rubin didn’t like female rappers: all the Beasties later acknowledged that this was “shitty”), Rubin became their producer and onstage DJ, and the new Beasties persona began to emerge: a bratty, fratty mickey-take of adolescence, their nasal raps backed by big rhythms and noisy guitar riffs.
Rubin introduced them to Russell Simmons, brother of Rev Run of Run DMC. Simmons and Rubin formed a new label, Def Jam, and brought out the Beastie Boys’ first album, Licensed to Ill, in 1986. With its single (You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (To Party!), the LP was like a call to arms for amped-up teenagers. The jokes became bigger and more stupid. The Beasties’ tour boasted an enormous hydraulic penis and go-go dancers in cages; they were banned from a hotel chain; the British tabloids wrote that they were the “world’s nastiest pop group” and that they made fun of children in wheelchairs (they didn’t). Horovitz was arrested for throwing a beer can at fans (he didn’t). The silly fun turned sour. Horovitz: “All of sudden we were the Sex Pistols.”
They had thought that everyone was in on the joke, but the line between parody and truth is a tricky one to walk. Diamond: “At first, it’s really funny and totally sarcastic. And then it becomes reality and you become part of that. It never dawned on us that it would become our job. To be these guys throwing beers over each other night after night…”
The Licensed to Ill era came to a sticky end in 1987, with all three of the Beasties unhappy and barely speaking to one another. Not only were they sick of being a no-longer-funny punchline, they were skint – whereas Rubin and Simmons had made a lot of money. Simmons tried to use this as a bargaining tool to get the Beasties to make Licensed to Ill Part Two.
“Russell was like, if you don’t go in the studio, then I’m not paying you,” says Diamond. “His calculation was that we would all be like, ‘Oh we want our millions. OK, Russell we’re going to do it.’ But we were all immediately, ‘Fuck you.’”
Now they have no hard feelings towards Rubin and Simmons. “But that’s because it all worked out,” says Horovitz. “Had it not worked out, had we broken up in ’87 – and we never got paid by Rick and Russell and Def Jam – it wouldn’t be fine.”
It was a rough time. Yauch started another band. Diamond did too. And Horovitz went to Los Angeles, to make a film (Lost Angels). While there, he came across some musicians/producers called the Dust Brothers. It was their music that got him excited and brought the others over to the west coast.
The subsequent LA years were crucial ones for the band. Their follow-up album, the immensely expensive and now-much-loved Paul’s Boutique, was a flop, and Capitol, their record label, was no longer bothered. They were left to their own devices. “Paul’s Boutique was a bust, right?” says Horovitz. “That was a bummer. We didn’t pause on it for a long time, we didn’t go through therapy, but it was weird. And because it was a bust, we didn’t go on tour. So we just started making Check Your Head (their third album) at my apartment.”
For a time, all three Beasties lived in a crazy Hollywood mansion, complete with swimming pool and a room full of 1970s clothes, which they wore to celebrity parties. But after a while, they split off: Yauch lived solo in an art deco-style apartment block, Horovitz in the Hollywood hills with his then-girlfriend Ione Skye, and Diamond in the Silver Lake neighbourhood with Davis. They all made music, but they also all skateboarded, and everyone smoked a lot of weed. I was vaguely friendly with Diamond in the mid-90s, and I remember going over to his home one afternoon after lunch. I had two tokes on a joint he rolled and couldn’t use the phone. “Oh yeah, that was the crazy strong pot, the one that we grew in the yard,” says Diamond. “Hippie Steve, our pot dealer, gave me the seeds and I just threw them in the ground.”
Somehow, despite the omnipresence of weed, the Beastie Boys got things done. They wanted to be “entrepreneurial, but not exploitative”, and set up all sorts of side projects. Diamond created a clothing line, X-Large, which offered cargo trousers and logo T-shirts; it had a spin-off for women, X-Girl, designed by Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon. All three Beasties started a record label, Grand Royal, which released albums by Luscious Jackson and Atari Teenage Riot. And they also put out a brilliant, though shortlived magazine, also called Grand Royal, which featured articles on Bruce Lee, Lee Perry and the joy of the mullet haircut. Yauch became involved in the Free Tibet movement and staged several fundraising concerts. All of this creativity was germinated in an old plumbing factory they called G-Son (the “e” and “l” had fallen off the original Gelson sign). It had a big room with a skateboard ramp and half a basketball court, and lots of smaller ones that led off a corridor.
During the LA years, the Beasties became more than just musicians. “We never thought we were musicians,” says Horovitz. “We just thought we were in a band.”
What’s the difference? “Well, everyone in downtown New York was in a band,” says Diamond. “Nobody could play, but everyone was in a band.”
Jean-Michel Basquiat came by when he was in LA, wanting to produce Paul’s Boutique. He wasn’t the only one. You could link the Beasties of that era with Q-Tip, Spike Jonze, Sofia Coppola and more. An interview at the time said: “It appears as though everyone under 35 who is doing anything creative in New York or LA is at some point sucked into the Beasties’ vortex.” During the 90s, the Beasties’ downtown New York creative mix – music, clothes, film, magazines – came to fruition. New York created the Beasties, but LA let them flourish.
And that way of life – working on music, but also other interesting side projects and political causes – became how the Beasties lived. After Check Your Head, there was Ill Communication, which gave the world the hit Sabotage, and then the blockbuster album Hello Nasty. The Beasties were, once more, one of the biggest rap acts in the world. The band became, as Horovitz puts it, “something that we could all come back to when we wanted and needed it”.
Their last album, Hot Sauce Committee Part Two, came out in 2011. A year later, the death of Yauch changed everything, as you’d expect. They don’t write about this much in the book.
Horovitz: “There’s a lot of personal shit that we just don’t talk about. I don’t talk about my mom dying and Mike doesn’t talk about his dad dying, or his brother. Because it’s nobody’s business, except who we choose to make part of that business. Do you know what I mean?”
Diamond: “Also… it’s really hard. It’s a tremendously sad thing. We never anticipated experiencing this incredible loss of our friend and partner dying, and dying the way he did. It’s still sad. What can you possibly write beyond that? What can you write about that period of time? It’s this weird transition. They’re that person but they’re not the person they were... All you can say is, yes, you miss this person.”
Our time is up. The Beasties are due to have their pictures taken. They delay, goof around, pretend to make themselves pretty.
“Hey Mike, I have our whole record planned out for next year,” says Horovitz. “Our battle of the bands record.”
“My people will get back to you,” says Diamond. “You know, there’s a real growing sector for middle-aged cop buddy movies right now. Or maybe a TV show. Fifteen-minute episodes.”
Horovitz: “Do I have a really tiny head? I was walking here and I saw my reflection in a window and it looked like it was oddly small. I think I have a pinhead.”
Diamond: “Maybe you need to wear more form-fitting clothes. To make your head proportionate.”
We all look different as we get older, I say.
“Ah, but you’re wrong there,” says Horovitz firmly. “I’m never going to get old.”
Beastie Boys Book is published on 30 October by Faber Social (£32). To order a copy for £27.52 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
This article was revised on 22 October 2018. Jean-Michel Basquiat had wanted to produce Paul’s Boutique not (as originally stated) Check Your Head