"Doing the same thing is boring"

From The Detroit News:

Beastie Boys suit up
They have matured, and so has their look

By Adam Graham and Ursula Watson, The Detroit News

There once was a time when it was unthinkable to bring your fashion A-game when going to see the Beastie Boys.

But the Boys -- Mike Diamond, Adam Yauch, Adam Horovitz -- have grown a lot since their ribald early days.

Now, as the trio prepares to commandeer the Fillmore Detroit on Monday and Tuesday, they're asking their audience to step it up a notch along with them.

"Don't dress like a bum," says Yauch, on the phone from New York Tuesday. "Can you put that in your article as a pull-quote?"

He's referring to the dress code the Boys are enacting for Tuesday's "Gala Event-Exclusive Instrumental Show," when he's asking fans to "suit up," as "How I Met Your Mother's" Barney (Neil Patrick Harris) might say.

Monday, the band will perform from their two-decade catalog of hits in familiar Beasties style, and crowds are free to come as they are.

But Tuesday, "it's not that kind of party," Yauch says.

"We're trying to have an event, and it just kind of ruins it when someone shows up in flip-flops, cargo shorts, a tank top and a visor," he says of the show, which despite its billing won't be entirely instrumental. "If you're bringing your dog to the beach, that's fine, but we're trying to throw an event."

Says Horovitz, on the phone from New York last week, "If you are going to spend money to see a band and you are probably on a date, why wear cargo pants and Tevas? We are just trying to help."

The outside-the-box thinking that greets the "Gala" show is the same the Beasties utilize on "The Mix-Up," the all-instrumental CD the band issued in June. It is the band's second no-vocals effort, following 1996's "The In Sound from the Way Out!" compilation.

Horovitz says the largely funk-based CD is more than a stopgap between proper Beastie's projects and is another example of the Boys striving to be ahead of the pack by taking a musical risk.

"That is basically our bread and butter. People who like the Beastie Boys expect that we are going to do something that is not Top 40, that is on some different (stuff)," Horovitz says. "Doing the same thing is boring, and I don't want to be boring or bored."

Once the Beasties wrap up their current tour -- which Yauch calls one of the most fun tours the band has ever embarked upon -- they will begin working on new material for their eighth album and are tentatively planning on a 2009 release.

And though the one-time frat-rockers are now comfortably in their 40s -- Horovitz, the youngest Beastie, turns 41 on Halloween -- they don't see themselves slowing down anytime soon.

"I don't see it," Horovitz says of retirement. "This is what I do, and I want to do it for a long time."