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From GQ.com:

The Ad-Rock Retirement Plan

Well, not "retirement" exactly—the former Beastie Boy has a role in Noah Baumbach's new film and a memoir somewhere off on the horizon. But, as he explains over the course of one semi-drunken afternoon, Adam Horovitz is still figuring out what comes next

By Zach Baron
September 18, 2015

Adam Horovitz sits in a corner booth at Bemelmans Bar on the Upper East Side, squinting at the giant font on his phone. "I have that shit as big as possible," he says sadly. "I can't see. It happens quick." Bemelmans is dark the way it usually is: reassuringly dark, in fact, given that it's 1 p.m. in the afternoon, and our second round of Bloody Marys is on the way, and there is no daylight—no other people, either—to make us feel self-conscious.

Yesterday, when I called him to make plans, Horovitz had no idea what day of the week it was. You get the sense that's not abnormal for him, being slightly abstracted from day-to-day life. At 16, after adopting the name Ad-Rock, he joined the Beastie Boys. He was 20 when "Licensed to Ill," the band's debut, became the first-ever rap record to go No. 1. Almost three years ago, Horovitz's best friend and bandmate, Adam Yauch, died of cancer. Most of the life Horovitz knew died with him.

Now he's 48 and...well, it's hard to say, really. I ask what he's been doing these past couple of years.

His hair is gray and sticking up in patches, and there are creases seemingly rubbed into his forehead, but he otherwise looks the same—particularly around the eyes, which are skeptical and mischievous in equal measure. In their prime, the Beastie Boys—Ad-Rock in particular—tended to treat interviews like this one: primarily as opportunities for further mayhem. (From one of their first national features, the writer's first sentence: "At 32 minutes past two the morning of 16 January 1987, two Beastie Boys broke into my West Hollywood hotel room and dumped a wastebasket of extremely wet water on my head, my bed, the carpeting and my Converse All-Stars.") Even when they grew up and ostensibly reformed themselves, they couldn't help it, their urge to puncture the increasing reverence with which reporters approached them. In lieu of talking about themselves, they'd talk in great detail about the ostensible marine research they'd been doing, or the "goth people" with whom they hoped to open "a dialogue"; once, not all that long ago, Ad-Rock prompted Charlie Rose to use the phrase "jerk my chain," not without anger.

He's never given a straight interview, exactly. And now, with no band to speak of, it's hard to say what we're even doing here. ("So what is this?" he asks as we sit down, a hint of optimism in his voice, like maybe we're just going to talk about our fantasy teams for the next few hours.) He's got a role in the new Noah Baumbach movie, While We're Young, playing a baby-toting Brooklyn dad who amiably encourages Ben Stiller's character to grow up, an irony that he's not that interested in reflecting on, and a memoir that he's gradually piecing together, and...well, that's kind of it. He's a regular guy who also happens to have been enormously famous for most of his life, and conversations with him reflect this fact—he is elusive when he cares to be, and careful to put certain things (domestic things, mostly, like where he lives) off-limits, or at least off the record. But he's also now free to be sincere in ways that would've made no sense when the Beastie Boys still existed. Which is the first thing we end up talking about—the band, and whether it still exists. People paying close attention could maybe guess that it didn't. But though Horovitz and Mike D, the two surviving Beastie Boys, have occasionally indicated in interviews that the band was definitively over, neither has said all that much more about it. Until now, anyway.

It's worth noting, before we go any further, that the guy across the table from me is relatively cheerful—if the below reads unrelentingly sad, and it might, that's mostly my fault, not his. Horovitz's affect these days might be a little more muted, but he's happy enough, he says. He's just being forced to answer a bunch of questions about a very sad thing.

Are the Beastie Boys done?
"We're done. Oh yeah. Adam Yauch started the band. It's not like a thing where we could continue without him.”

Never contemplated it?
"No.”

Does that require a psychological adjustment? The band that you were in your entire life no longer exists.
"It's a huge deal. And so, you know, it's probably just taken me time to sit and think and try to figure out what I do next or who I am now or, you know, all of that stuff. Because since high school, I was in this band. And you know, it's one thing when you're in a band in high school, but then to have it last for so long—that's who I am and what I did forever. And so now I'm just trying to figure it out.

Is it, like, a fun challenge?
"No. The scale of it—the scale tips way more to the very sad and depressed. And the fun thinking about it, you know, happens sometimes. But Adam was one of my best friends; I saw him more than I saw my whole family. You know, me, Adam, and Mike were together every day, recording, touring, as friends. And so: huge hole. The other part of it is the being able to afford to just sit around and think, because I think it's good that I can have time to sort of figure out how to get through it all. But you know, if I had to go work a job, I'd work a job and just, you know, not be able to think about it.”

Instead you've got a ton of time.
"I have a ton of time. Which is fucking depressing. But I think bigger picture—you know, like, my mom died when I was a kid. I was in a band, and I was recording and hangin' out and doing all this stuff, so I didn't have time to process it, which is good. But bigger picture, it's better to sort of, you know, work through these things.”

Did you have time to get right with Adam's death in advance?
"You can never prepare yourself for this. I feel like, maybe when you're an old person, you can. I don't know how that comes off, but I feel like, when you're old, you know it's happening. You know what I mean? Your brother or your sister's gonna go. Your best friends are probably already gone. All of this—you're wrapping it up, so it all makes sense. But when you're, you know, fortysomething, you never really—you don't expect it to actually happen.”

Maybe this is morbid on my part to say, but you're seeing one of your best friends get eulogized everywhere. It's some weird, horrific preview of what people will say about you or say about Mike, right?
"Well, you know, all of that stuff made me really happy, that people cared about Adam so much. And there was graffiti all over the world, and it meant a lot. He meant a lot to a lot of people. That's really nice. That's rare that that happens: that one of your best friends dies and, internationally, people are freaking out.”

But it's a glimpse of, frankly, what's coming for you.
"Well, he was a better person than me. I have a feeling I'll have some, but not quite as much. You know?”

Do you think people know that?
"What, that he was a better person than me?”

Yes.
"Yeah.”

How so?
"He did things for people. And I don't really actually care. So that's probably a difference.”

He's working on a memoir with Mike. Originally, he says, the plan was not to write it all: "My big idea was to have our friends tell the story. And just, you know, we would sort of interject. My best friends have been my best friends since I was a little kid, so they've seen everything. And then we started reading it back, and it was really bad. So I was just like, 'Me and Mike need to write it, because, you know—no offense to Morrissey's friends, but you'd rather read what Morrissey is saying than what Morrissey's friends are saying.’”

Is it weird to be at the point where, say, you're working on this book—or the Def Jam thirtieth-anniversary book, in which the Beastie Boys are heavily featured—and it's like: your childhood's a coffee-table book?
"I mean, it's weird, but in the spectrum of all the weird shit that's happened, it's not that weird. I mean, there's books in the bookstore that are about Beastie Boys. So you know, that's weird, that somebody's writing a whole book about my band. There's plenty of 'em. There's tons of so many weird things. And that's the stuff that I'm thinking about when writing this book: like, all the weird shit that happens. Like, so much weird shit happens when you're, like, a celebrity. It's kind of—it's awesome.”

Such as?
"I first went to L.A. in '88 to be in a movie, and I met this guy, Donovan, who turned out to be one of my best friends, lifelong friends. And one of the first nights I got there, he was like, 'Oh, there's this crazy Hollywood party; I want you to come.' So a bunch of us went to this crazy Hollywood party, and all these—like, the most random celebrities. It was the best way you could be introduced into, like, a Hollywood party. And you know, we're drinkin'—it's this huge house up in the hills somewhere—and everybody's there, and I'm gettin' drunk, and it's like, next thing I know, I turn, I'm on the dance floor, and George Michael's just standing next to me. I'm like,'This is awesome.' And then Axl Rose came—like, stepped to me at the party and told me to stop ripping off Led Zeppelin. I'm like, 'How am I even—how is this even happening?' You know, this thing happens to all of us, I would assume: Like, there's a moment in your life—and I would assume it happens for a lot of different reasons in a lot of different ways, like how you dress and your state of mind or whatever—but there's this fun time in your life that you're at, and you kind of always picture yourself that age. So like, I'm 48, but I still kind of think that I'm 22.”

He says it's weird what comes back, writing the book. Sometimes the person he's writing about feels like a stranger: "Being a straight white guy in his, like, early twenties—there's some sort of thing about it. A sort of privilege, a sort of anger or something. You just say some really stupid things." And sometimes, he says, those stupid things endure.

I ask what comes back the most.

"Oh, fucking backwards baseball caps," Horovitz answers quickly, laughing. "Jesus Christ. I'm not saying that, you know, I'm responsible for the baseball-hat thing, but I kind of am. And then, I used to wear it backwards, so the backwards-baseball-hat thing... It's like, we need to do something about the backwards-baseball-hat guys. I don't know what it is, but it turned into a lifestyle, which is not my favorite.”

Though it hasn't aged well, the backwards-hattedness of it all was part of the group's charm, in their early days, back when they sprayed audiences with beer and toured with a giant inflatable penis and gave out copies of the Kama Sutra as gifts; they asked for no one's affection. And though they've been living down that version of themselves for far longer than they actually were those people, they've still got that instinct to deflect the appearance of good intentions—they'd rather just be funny. Certainly Horovitz would be. Later, in a cab, he tells me sincerely that should society break down and New York descend into chaos, he'd kill with zero hesitation. He also probably wouldn't want to live, he says, on account of the absence of Chinese-food delivery. That's Horovitz.

But though he'd never ask to be thought of this way, those who've stayed acquainted with his life over the past decade know that it's been remarkably strange and difficult in ways that have nothing to do with the Beastie Boys. Watch, if you haven't, 2013's "The Punk Singer," the Sini Anderson–directed documentary about Kathleen Hanna, the former Bikini Kill and Le Tigre frontwoman who also happens to be Horovitz's partner of almost 20 years, and wife since 2006. The film is an overdue portrait of a feminist and musical icon; it's also, incidentally, a portrait of Horovitz as a patient and loving husband who has taken care of Hanna over the past decade or so as she's battled a particularly vicious form of Lyme disease. "The past few years have kind of sucked," Horovitz says levelly.

The documentary is surprisingly romantic—Horovitz talks with glee about the first time he saw Hanna, which was while she was being interviewed "wearing a ski mask in, like, a stairwell somewhere"; Hanna, for her part, jokes about the perils of being a feminist and dating the guy "who wrote like, 'Girls girls girls do my laundry' in the '80s." But there's also a scene where Horovitz takes the camera himself and films a sick Hanna in their home as she breaks down in tears—a moment so intimate and so awful that you wonder how Horovitz feels having it out in the world.

"She asked me to do a bunch of that stuff," he says. "I mean, the whole thing is so surreal." He pauses and then likens the situation with Kathleen to September 11, of all things: "I ran into my friend on the street the day after, and he was like, 'Shit is so crazy that if a dog started talking to me, it would make sense.' And so yeah, of course. You're filming your wife with an IV in her arm having seizures. It makes sense. Yeah, why not?”

Have you ever experienced anything like what you're experiencing now with Adam and Kathleen?
"No. No, the double whammy of Adam passing away and Kathleen being so sick is a lot. More than I've had to deal with. I mean, my mother dying when I was a kid... But I was still so young and just so, kind of, drunk that I didn't really grasp it. And I spent a lot of time just stoned.”

Is there a light at the end of the tunnel that you can see or sense?
"I believe there is, yeah. There fuckin' better be. Yeah, I believe Kathleen's gonna recover and be better, and all sorts of fun, happy things are in front of us.”

He's lived his life to a large extent in the public eye, and there are things he was a part of that he can no longer bear to watch—the Beastie Boys' "Fight for Your Right" video, say, in which the three band members crash a party and pelt nerds with rancid whipped cream. In 1989, near the peak of his band's popularity, Horovitz decided he wanted to become an actor. The result was "Lost Angels": Horovitz plays Tim, a juvenile delinquent who is Robin Williams-d back to health and well-being by Donald Sutherland. The words "You're not my father!" are uttered. Horovitz says he hasn't watched the film since Cannes 1989 and has no intention of remedying that. (He feels warmer about 1992's motorcycle comedy "Roadside Prophets.") Lately he's been acting again, though, this time opposite Ben Stiller in "While We're Young."

In the film, Stiller and Naomi Watts play a couple who drift into a panic about their age, about the kids they didn't have, about the work they haven't done yet—a panic that leads them to Bushwick, ayahuasca, and the sycophantic friendship of a younger, ambitious couple (Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried) with all the things in front of them that are behind their older counterparts. Horovitz plays a chill dad; he tells Stiller to stop wearing silly hats.

It is fun, in that Baumbach kind of way, to watch Ad-Rock from the Beastie Boys tell another man to act his age, even if Horovitz is less interested in the irony than audiences probably will be.

There's a pretty obvious joke there, right?
"There must be. I didn't get it.”

Something along the lines of: paragon of a certain kind of downtown cool playing a square Brooklyn dad, right?
"Yeah. With the Wilco CD.”

Does that joke resonate with you? It's funny to cast a guy from the Beastie Boys as the square one in your film. Especially opposite Ben Stiller.
"Right. Well, that's what I mean: Like, I know that I'm the guy from the Beastie Boys, but I'm not really the guy from the Beastie Boys. But I see what you're saying. Yeah, sure, why not? Still, there's plenty of other people that could've done that.”

He grins now. "Did you ever think that maybe Noah saw Lost Angels and was a huge fan?”

"While We're Young" is about its main characters coming to terms with the fact that they cannot get back time they've already spent; that they are who they are, that the past is the past. I wonder aloud if Horovitz read the script and related—if it was daunting to try to think of moving forward in a life with so much behind him already—and he says yeah, a little bit.

The Beastie Boys could've gone on forever; that was the plan, to appear on Letterman or wherever every four or five years, progressively enfeebled, still improbably cool. "There's no reason to stop doing it. Unless something that you would prefer to do more... And so, you know, like, I was in a couple movies, you know, Mike did some projects, and Yauch was into film, and so, you know, other things come up. But there's no reason to quit your day job.”

He pauses. "It's not that I am not happy where I'm at. I just feel like something else has to happen next, because I was this person for so long, and I'm still that person, but, like, the thing is gone. So I need a thing.”

He's been trying out potential replacement things. Taking care of Kathleen; she got better, played some shows, planned a tour, and then got sick again. She's doing well now, Horovitz says, but they've learned to be wary of drawing too many conclusions from that. He plays in a band with Bridget Everett, burlesque performer and Amy Schumer pal, and they play softball together, too, along with other downtown-cabaret royalty, guys like Neal Medlyn and Murray Hill. If you'd told Horovitz that twenty years ago he'd be deep in the cabaret scene, he probably wouldn't have believed you, but here he is.

He and Kathleen play Scrabble. Spend a lot of time "watching judge shows and eating pizza," he says. Back in the '90s, he missed out on a ton of popular culture—was too busy touring, making music, being pop culture. "I didn't watch Seinfeld, Simpsons; I didn't watch any of that shit when it was out." So he's been catching up. Smoking weed, smoking ribs, watching the Knicks.

Recently he scored a couple of movies—one about the LSD-enchanted baseball pitcher Dock Ellis, called "No No," and one that he can't talk about yet. He'd act more if he could take the hours, he says, but he can't really take the hours. The days start too early, and they go too long. Still, "I would love to be in an action movie," Horovitz says. "I've always wanted to play the hacker guy, like the Jewy hacker guy who just gets yelled at.”

The future is still hazy, but he's got an idea or two. "Definitely making music in some sort of capacity, because that's kind of what I know how to do and what I love doing"—that's a guarantee, he says. "And there's this place in Italy that I've wanted to go to for a really long time that I saw in a magazine, that's in the hills somewhere, and it's, like, where these truffle dogs go to get truffles. And I used to have a dog named Freddy, and the picture of the dog looked like my dog Freddy. And so there's this hotel that's the same as it's been in the '50s, and it's like—the restaurant has truffles. And so I see that in my future. I want to go to Italy and eat spaghetti and hang out with dogs.”

There's a ton of music the Beastie Boys still have in the vault, and he'd like to figure out a way to get that out in the world. Perhaps true to the prankster, expectations-defying spirit of the band, most of this music, he says, is instrumental—"like, hours and hours of, like, really bad jamming. Which is awful to think about, but some of it's really funny." He's smiling, talking about it—one last inside joke that he and Mike may or may not get around to unleashing upon the world. "And then there's a lot of stuff of us talking in the middle of it, which is priceless. We were just really stoned, talking about, like, where we should get food, or Cirque du Soleil or some shit.”

He's figuring it out, basically. Trying to quit the New York Knicks—because why subject yourself to that, especially this year?—and to finish the Beastie Boys book. "We're still in early stages, even though we're supposed to turn it in in a couple of months," Horovitz says. "It's not gonna be out for a while.”

It's late afternoon, and we've been drinking steadily. So I ask one last maudlin question.

Do you miss rapping?
"No. Well, yeah, sure, I guess so. Or I don't necessarily—it's not rapping, it's more—like, I know this sounds kind of shallow, but it's the attention. I mean, we played for, you know, 40,000 people that love you. You know, it's hard to sort of be at the fuckin' hardware store and be like,'Can I return this clamp because I didn't end up using it? I don't have the receipt.' So yeah. I miss that. It's definitely different from the Reading Festival, with 80,000 people that are like, 'That's my fuckin' jam!'“

Eighty thousand people!
"'Play Sabotage!' But you know, I've had a lot of that. You know what I mean? It's definitely enough to last me a while.”