The Beastie Boys’ Michael Diamond (Mike D), left, and Adam Horovitz (Ad-Rock) took a shot at defining their own legacy in their “Beastie Boys Book.” Photo credit: Brad Ogbonna for The New York Times.

From The New York Times:

The Beastie Boys Put Down the Mic and Pick Up the Pen

After the death of Adam Yauch, Michael Diamond and Adam Horovitz worked to capture the groundbreaking group’s aesthetic and legacy on the page. Here’s how they did it.

By A.O. Scott
October 24, 2018

The story begins — or maybe ends — with three guys in their early 50s hanging out on a beautiful late summer afternoon, drinking iced coffee and talking about how much they love the Clash, and how weird it is that the celebrity-clogged hotel where they’re sitting is just up the block from where CBGB was way back when. Dad stuff. Two of the dads, though, are the surviving members of the Beastie Boys: Adam Horovitz, with upswept gray hair and a white T-shirt with a faint graffito on the front; and Michael Diamond, wearing a bright red button-up, his hair still dark, his face creased and tan from years living in Southern California. Ad-Rock and Mike D, in other words.

The third Beastie, Adam Yauch — MCA, the conscience, shaman and intellectual backbone of the group — died in 2012 after a three-year battle with salivary gland cancer. His absence, six years later, is a palpable fact in the room. His name comes up a lot in the conversation, as it does in the new book Horovitz and Diamond have written. Called “Beastie Boys Book” (though the front cover might lead you to believe that the actual title is “PIZZA”), it’s a 571-page doorstop and a tombstone, a compendium of anecdotes, recipes, impish riffs and shaggy-dog stories and a heartfelt elegy to a much-missed friend.

The volume, full of old photographs and comics, with a riot of fonts and layouts, is a nonmusical summa of Beastie aesthetics. Personal history, tour bus folklore, studio geekery and a generational drama that summons an impressive roster of witnesses, including the writers Jonathan Lethem, Ada Calhoun and Colson Whitehead, the comedian/actress Amy Poehler and assorted fellow musicians. Some scores are settled, some beef is squashed, and no doubt some ugly business gets airbrushed or skipped over. Bad behavior is acknowledged; feminist-ally bona fides are upheld. Since there won’t be any more new Beastie Boys music, this scrapbook will help to consolidate a sprawling and complicated legacy.

Monument building isn’t something you necessarily expect from the Beasties, who built their career out of irreverence, slyness and low-key cool. In the beginning, in the early 1980s, the name was an acronym for Boys Entering Anarchistic States Toward Internal Excellence, Diamond writes, and the lineup included a girl, Kate Schellenbach. The group migrated from hardcore to hip-hop when rap looked more like a fad than like a dominant force in pop culture. They were puerile and profane and then somehow, by the ’90s, serious musicians with something to say and startling innovations to contribute. Yauch was a Buddhist and an outspoken feminist. Their 1994 “Sabotage” video, directed by Spike Jonze, was a goofy retro throwaway that helped transform the genre.

The Beasties practiced cross-platform brand extension before those awful words became cultural currency. They were fashion conscious, food conscious, and into graphic design, found art and weird old “physical media” just as the digital kind began to sweep it away. “I’m listening to wax/I’m not using the CD,” Mike D boasted in “Sure Shot” in 1994, anticipating the millennial reclamation of vinyl supremacy by a solid decade or more.

Around the same time, they started a magazine called Grand Royal that was also sort of a record label and also sort of a lifestyle consumer emporium and also sort of a clubhouse where you could feel simultaneously like a noob and a savant. It was like a website, but on paper. Silly and do-it-yourself, it had the disarming, off-the-cuff, look-what-I-found sense of artistic integrity that is central to the Beastie legacy.

That legacy between hard covers doesn’t much resemble a standard rock star memoir. In apt Gen X fashion it’s funnier and more modest than the best-sellers by the musical heroes of the baby boomers. The three of us talked about that, and about a lot of other things. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

Diamond and Adam Yauch (MCA) in a 1983 photo. Photo by Robin Moore, via Beastie Boys

So how did the book come about?

MICHAEL DIAMOND It’s better than having us attempt a Broadway musical, I think.

ADAM HOROVITZ Whoa.

DIAMOND Yauch, when we were kids growing up, he loved “The Kids Are Alright,” the Who documentary. It was like an obsession. And so he was interested, when we were working on “Hot Sauce Committee” or even a little before that, on gathering up archival material into a documentary-type project. Then there was talk of somebody doing a book on the band so we were sort of like, we should get our act together and do it. Then Yauch died and we were too sad and it was definitely not the time for us to touch it. And then we got back into it and it went through different manifestations. We started with the idea of getting people who were around the band and our friends and people who were involved at different points telling the story.

What did you most want it not to be?

DIAMOND We definitely most did not want it to be like a typical rock autobiography. “I got on the bus one day and there was a boy playing guitar and it turned out to be John Lennon.”

HOROVITZ Although that would be great — in a story about the Beastie Boys. We didn’t want to do the thing where these autobiographies are just like a bunch of stuff, and then a few pictures, and more stuff, and more pictures.

DIAMOND Here’s 20 pages of us when we were growing up. Here’s 20 pages when we’re getting famous. Here’s 20 pages when we’re famous and here’s 20 pages after we couldn’t stand each other and now I’ve written all this libelous stuff about the guys I used to be in the band with.

HOROVITZ In 2018, you can just Google all that stuff and write your own book. We also didn’t want to have stories about really personal things, or outrageous stuff or [expletive] that’s nobody’s business.

Were there places where you remembered things differently?

HOROVITZ No. It was more like: Do either of us remember?

DIAMOND We were both amazed at how little we remember.

Well it’s a long time.

DIAMOND Especially because it felt like it was important to get the crazy time of our adolescence. Because it was so formative and because of when it was in New York City.

Yauch, Diamond and Horovitz shooting their video for the “Hello Nasty” track “Intergalactic” in 1998. Photo via Beastie Boys

How do you remember that now — the music you listened to, and what gave you the idea that it was something you could do?

HOROVITZ We were like 15 years old, and we’d go see bands, and a lot of the bands were like hard-core punk bands. I had a guitar, and I knew a couple chords, and you realized you could play that Ramones song, and it’s like, Jesus, every Ramones song is just that? I could do that. The only accessible music that we could possibly do would be hard-core. Even punk seemed sophisticated.

DIAMOND The point of entry was there. Prior to that, big rock bands were on the stage and that was unattainable. But if you went to a club like A7, the whole club was maybe the size of this hotel room, and there was literally a couch like this couch on the side of the stage. The barrier between audience and band didn’t really exist, and most people in the audience were in bands. Another interesting thing that was happening when we started going out to clubs as teenagers — whether it was Mudd Club, or Danceteria or wherever — was this culture of everybody doing something. If they weren’t in a band they were trying to sell you their little fanzine of poetry or trying to be the next visual artist. Everybody had some creative hustle.

Horovitz in the studio in 1991. Photo via Beastie Boys

Yauch in the studio in 1991. Photo via Beastie Boys

Diamond in the studio in 1991. Photo via Beastie Boys

Did that put pressure on you to do something different?

DIAMOND At first we were a hard-core band like everyone else. Except maybe we had a sense of humor about it.

HOROVITZ And then we started rapping. We were like the downtown rappers. There was no one else rapping downtown. Right? The bridge was that we met Rick Rubin. We were all going to the same clubs but he was a little bit older and he had a drum machine.

DIAMOND And we kind of reached a burnout moment with hardcore. Rap 12-inches started coming out, and that seemed like a really exciting thing to jump to. “Sucker M.C.’s” [by Run-D.M.C.] was really the record that smashed it all apart, it was this stripped-down, minimal … this is what rap was going to be.

HOROVITZ That era of rap felt really punk for some reason. Something was connectable as far as us wanting to make rap records, besides just loving rap records.

DIAMOND Or maybe we were just so naïve and we didn’t have any responsible adult around to say, “What are you guys thinking?”

A selection of Horovitz’s mixtapes. Photo via Beastie Boys

Were you at all self-conscious about being white kids working in the rap idiom?

HOROVITZ Well, we were from downtown, so we were rapping in Danceteria, in these white downtown clubs, really. Nobody downtown was rapping. Nobody we knew was rapping. So we were like, we should do it. We weren’t making fun of it, we loved it and we wanted to be part of it. After a minute we got matching Puma suits, and we were wearing do-rags, and we played at this club in Queens called the Encore, and everyone’s making fun of us. They turned the fluorescent lights on when we came on doing our two songs opening for Kurtis Blow, and we were like, man, we look stupid.

DIAMOND We all felt like such [expletive] after that gig. But we were still determined to make rap music because that’s what we loved doing. We somehow realized we had to be our own version.

A lot of kids are growing up now in a Beastie-created world, where music, sneakers, clothes, food, so much of what they consume is connected and cross-branded. And you were pioneers in that kind of thing. How did that grow out of the music?

DIAMOND That was the great lesson of punk and hardcore. That you could self-publish anything. To play gigs you were stealing access to a Xerox machine and making fliers.

HOROVITZ Punks don’t hire people to make their record cover. Punks do it all themselves. That’s what real punk is about — doing it yourself and building a community where people share ideas and share creativity. I feel like we always tried to get back to that. Grand Royal started because we were on the Lollapalooza tour and we wanted to send this message to people that the mosh pit is corny. Stop doing that. MTV has ruined it, and it’s dangerous, and girls are getting hurt. So Mike had designed this whole thing and we passed it out at Lollapalooza and then we’re like, let’s just make a fanzine and put it out. And then it just went to the next level. We got lucky that we had the money.

DIAMOND And that we had the audience. The fact that we actually had a larger audience for these things we made is still a minor miracle to me.

When I think of you guys, I think of two moments. The first one, the early and mid-80s, we were talking about. But then there’s also the early and mid-90s, a decade later, when there’s a creative flowering in hip-hop and the indie-rock moment. Somehow you were in both of those places. How do you think you got there?

HOROVITZ Well, it probably just goes back to loving the Clash. They had punk-rock songs, and reggae songs, and melodic songs, and they just followed what they wanted to make, right?

Yauch in Los Angeles in 1988. The group recorded its acclaimed 1989 album, “Paul’s Boutique,” in California. Photo via Beastie Boys

DIAMOND It never dawned on us to not make music that was inclusive of whatever influence came to us. Thankfully we got to make records over a good period of time, because you’re not going to discover everything at any one time. The reality that we could be played on “Yo! MTV Raps” next to “120 Minutes” — I guess that’s where MTV was at the time. Even though they were presenting rap music and alternative music, they were presenting them in a segregated way. We were trying to throw everything together, and somehow we were the weird child whose videos could play on both.

One thing that was definitely true of the early Beastie Boys was the playful, obnoxious persona. There was the inflatable penis onstage at your shows.

HOROVITZ Hydraulic. It was a hydraulic penis.

And already, probably 20 years ago, you distanced yourself from some of the most offensive parts of that. At the moment, across the culture, there’s a lot of reckoning going on about misogyny and homophobia, past and present, and I wonder if that came up again working on the book?

DIAMOND All of us, growing up, either had the experience of behaving badly, or doing a bad job of how we treated others in any kind of relationship. For us of course a lot of that was within the public persona that we created. That was something inspiring about the book, it was this opportunity to open up and delve into it and be able to say, “We were [expletive]. We really could have handled this better. But maybe we had to be [expletive] to learn our lesson.”

HOROVITZ I mean you can’t not bring that up. It’s a big part of our story to us. Because for a long time we didn’t play “Fight for Your Right to Party,” we didn’t play any of those songs. “Licensed to Ill” was like a cold, and we took so much vitamin C that we’d never get that cold again. But then we realized that you can separate good from bad, that it’s not all, what’s the expression, cut and dried?

DIAMOND It didn’t seem as binary anymore.

HOROVITZ Oh now we’re using fancy words.

DIAMOND What opened the door was Yauch’s lyric in the late ’90s on “Sure Shot” about “the disrespect of women has got to be through.” As we evolved into having that voice, we could be comfortable going back and playing one of those songs, saying now we’re clearly established enough as something else that we can play that music without becoming that.

There’s something bittersweet about this book, because of Yauch’s death.

HOROVITZ It’s [expletive] sad. There’s no way to get around it. How are you supposed to end this book? Me and Mike sitting here? Me and Mike going to the movies? There are so many Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson movies we haven’t seen yet.

DIAMOND What was sweet about it was to be able to go back and to mine these stories that he was beyond integral to. That was a gratifying thing, something we miss every single day. I don’t know how we could do this with any degree of honesty without having that sadness and that loss.

HOROVITZ There’s no way around it. He started the band.

Photograph by Benedict Evans for Vulture

From Vulture:

In Conversation: Mike D
The former Beastie Boy on his new life, NYC versus L.A., and how rap has changed.

By David Marchese

When the Beastie Boys’ career came to a tragic halt in 2012 after the death of Adam “MCA” Yauch, the remaining band members, Adam Horovitz and Mike Diamond (known as Ad-Rock and Mike D respectively), were faced with the difficult task of creating futures for themselves that weren’t mired in the past. “For three decades I was totally consumed with being in the band,” says Mike D, rail-thin in a leather jacket, sipping tea in the lobby of the Bowery Hotel. “Identifying what else I was comfortable doing with my life was a very gradual process.”

What he’s settled on has been both comparatively low-key and deeply enviable. Mike, 52, hosts the Beats 1 radio show The Echo Chamber, takes occasional production work and DJ gigs, globetrots with his kids, and has written an eagerly anticipated memoir with Ad-Rock. Thirty-seven years after forming the band, Mike can say, with a smile, “I learned a lot of things in the Beastie Boys — including how to appreciate a good time.”

Has working on the book affected your thinking about the Beastie Boys’ career? The conventional narrative, as I see it, is that there were three defining milestones for you guys: Licensed to Ill, Paul’s Boutique, and “Sabotage.” Does that jibe with your understanding of the band’s trajectory?
No.

How do you see it?
What you described is an easy way to look at a timeline and pick out a few blips.

But it’s not based on nothing. Licensed to Ill was your biggest-selling album, Paul’s Boutique is considered, pretty much by consensus, to be your best album, and the “Sabotage” video gave you a new audience. What’s missing there?
It isn’t based on nothing — it’s just based on a simple timeline. There are a million moments that lead up to those moments you picked out. With Paul’s Boutique, for example, we were three fools trying to make something we loved. We didn’t realize it was going to flop. But its flopping gave the album room to be embraced by people that didn’t or couldn’t connect to Licensed to Ill. There was also a big void for us after Paul’s Boutique. That album put a stink on the band because it sold so poorly. Nobody wanted to work with us, and that gave us the creative freedom to make Check Your Head. Then the process of finding a new audience and building new music culminated with Ill Communication and “Sabotage.” Out of all that came the commercial success of Hello Nasty. So there’s the timeline, but with a bit more breadth or width.

I know I’m putting you on the spot with another career-spanning question, but what’s the weirdest or funniest reference the Beastie Boys ever snuck into song? “I’ve got more hits than Sadaharu Oh” is the one that kills me.
So you like that one? Was Sadaharu Oh a more obscure reference than, say, Rod Carew?

Rod Carew was an American League MVP!
But Sadaharu Oh was the Japanese baseball player that Americans could name. Let me think … George Drakoulias is a reference that was probably hard for people to get. Now you have me thinking about Paul’s Boutique. I’m happy that we have a lot of New York references on there, whether it’s Drakoulias or Ed Koch.

Let’s talk about New York for a bit. You’ve lived primarily in L.A. for a while but I’ll always think of the Beastie Boys as being quintessential New York characters. Do you still feel connected to the city?
Well, my mom lives on the Upper West Side where she’s always lived. But this is something I talk about with friends: It’s ironic that we had so much autonomy growing up here in the city in the ’70s and ’80s and now kids are so connected to their parents through their phones, even though the city is far safer. New York is infinitely different now than it was when I grew up. It was far more dangerous for us in every way. You wouldn’t have a car radio because you knew it’d only get stolen. Riding the subway could be nerve-racking on a number of levels. The city felt so much more lawless. And yet the families that did stay here instead of move to the suburbs had a commitment to being here and letting their kids explore. As an individual and a band we couldn’t have become who we became without that freedom and that exposure.

Given how important freedom and exposure were to who you became, do you worry about your kids missing out on those kinds of experiences? They’re growing up in a radically different environment than you did.
Obviously issues come up. There are teen-angst issues that are real. I have to constantly remind myself of how much anger I had at 15 years old for relatively little reason. I find myself interested in the different phases of music my kids have been into, from commercial rap like Kanye and Drake to the hard core that I grew up on like Black Flag and Bad Brains. And then there’s getting into Slayer, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin — the emergent testosterone classics.

What’s interesting about those phases?

I kept asking myself why that music hasn’t been totally replaced. It was weird to me that I wasn’t hearing things that my kids related to that I couldn’t embrace. When they did hit on something, I was like, Finally!

What did it?
When they started listening to $uicideboy$ I was like, “That’s it. That checks the boxes.” It’s really loud, I can’t really relate, I don’t really want to listen to it. I understand exactly why it’s good and I see exactly the music it’s combining, but I don’t need to participate and I’m good with that.

There was a period in the ’80s when the Beastie Boys were considered a band that parents could have problems with. Do your kids have any sense at all of what you represented?
That’s a tricky question. Obviously they know who I am but relating that to the music or the persona of the Beastie Boys is an abstract thing. I guess the only way they’d relate to it is if some friends were listening to our records. I think then my kids would be like, “Why would you do that?” They have to listen to me all the time. Listening to my music wouldn’t be fun for them — at all.

But my question about upbringing: I was trying to get at whether or not you think your kids are missing anything formative by being raised so differently than you were, and not just in a musical sense. I mean in deeper ways.
A huge amount is lost. It’s very sad to me, honestly. But I don’t know, I’m hopeful that there’s some unbelievable cool shit going down in the city — what Bushwick would’ve been five years ago. Wherever that is now I don’t know about it. This city is just so fucking expensive and for so long there was a way for culture to exist in its own, perverse, self-governed way. That’s largely gone now. You can’t have a studio here, the cost is so great. And the cost of that has been to box out culture. I still feel innately comfortable in New York — I beyond enjoy it — but at this point in my life I’m nomadic. I was just living in Bali for four months with my kids.

What appeals to you about being nomadic?
Having lived that way on tour since I was 18. It’s what feels natural to me. Also, I’ve realized that— this is maybe too heavy for this interview.

Heavy is okay.

After what happened with Adam [Yauch], I realized that life can be short. Especially being a parent, the moments I appreciate most are when I’m with my kids and we’re all experiencing something together. It’s very difficult to do. Your kids get older and become more autonomous, and when you’re in that cave of Brooklyn or L.A. you’re going to default to a certain mundanity of existence. That’s not what I’m in the market for.

What are you in the market for?
I think our lives are much more meaningful when where we’re moving around and experiencing things together. This is making me think about New York. I’m just playing with this in my head with you right now: When I grew up in New York, the city was unique in that you could get music from all over the world here. Now you can get any music you want on your phone and New York, or Manhattan anyway, seems a lot less diverse.

So your moving around is about trying to avoid cultural homogeneity?
It’s that I want my kids to experience diversity. I think it’s important to travel the world with them. And it’s also about breaking open the myth that the United States is this leading majority. We’re not. Indonesia, where we’ve been living, is going to overtake the U.S. in population within my kids’ lifetime. I want to my kids to have the opportunity to see themselves as a citizen of the world and not only America — whatever the hell America means today. At this point, in the world of Trump’s politics, there’s so much upside to be had by breaking down the whole idea of nationalism. My kids’ peers at school are from all around the world, not just the Upper West Side or Brooklyn. I really think that helps them think differently about the world in a positive way.

Photograph by Benedict Evans for Vulture

Not to play armchair psychologist, but don’t you think your desire to avoid mundanities, as you put it, is about filling the empty space where the Beastie Boys used to be?
I wouldn’t disagree with that. Like I said, uprooting myself or challenging myself was my normal for decades.

Did uprooting from New York to L.A. change the band?
It’s funny because Paul’s Boutique, which is still a very New York record, was made in L.A. So you could take us out of New York but you couldn’t take the New York out of the band. But there’s a flip side to that, which is that the experimentation that we went through from Paul’s Boutique onwards, and certainly with Check Your Head and Ill Communication, came from the luxury of having our own studio in L.A. — this big space with skateboard ramps. We had that space for a long time, we called it G-Son, and we’d just fuck around there for hours on end. That’s what our recording process was, and that’s a space-and-time luxury we had in L.A. that we wouldn’t have had in New York.

This is slightly random, but I’ve always been curious: What happened to the country album you guys recorded?
I probably shouldn’t even bring attention to the fact it exists.

Can you remember what one of the songs was called?
“Sloppy Drunks.” Even talking about this — it makes me think that it’s hard to convey how truly Monty Python–esque it was to live in the Beastie Boys’ world.

What’s another example of that absurdity? Is there a story that comes to mind?
Yeah. After we started working with Russell Simmons as our manager, one of the first hip-hop shows we played was at this club called Encore in Queens — Jamaica, Queens, I believe. We were so fucking stupid. We were like, “Oh, we have a real gig. We’re going to rent a limousine to get us there and get us back. We’re going to go out.” We’d take all the money we were going get, all $125 or whatever it was, and hire that limousine. So we got the limo and because Run-D.M.C. was wearing Adidas suits at the time, we wore matching Puma suits — that’s where it was at. We were opening for Kurtis Blow, I think, so it was a big deal. So we get there and we, this bunch of white kids from Manhattan dressed in Puma suits, step out of the limo. The first comment we heard was, “Who the fuck are you guys, Menudo?”

That instance aside, in terms of racial and cultural dynamics, the Beastie Boys never pretended to be anything you weren’t. But subjects like cultural appropriation are hot button in a way they weren’t in the ’80s. From your perspective, how has the cultural position of the white rapper changed?
I’ll say that when we pulled up in that limo wearing our Puma suits — that was the first and last time we did it. We realized we looked like fucking clowns and we felt like fucking clowns. We had to learn to be ourselves, and we made it work culturally and were accepted as rappers because were able to be ourselves and not anybody else.

But is what listeners are willing to accept from white rappers today different than it was 30 years ago?
That’s a tricky question to answer. I don’t know what people are willing to accept. It’s an interesting time because theoretically everything’s been done already and everything is culturally available. Ideally that means there are fewer cultural barriers. In theory whatever someone is influenced by should be inclusive and available to them. In practice, I don’t know if that ends up being the case.

Licensed to Ill was the first rap album to go No. 1 on the Billboard Top 200. Did hip-hop’s becoming the basis of pop, like it is now, feel inevitable to you?
I always felt like rap would become popular but I didn’t foresee it becoming as mainstream as it is. With current rap, there’s nothing that makes it not pop. Obviously certain rappers are going to make poppier records and certain rappers are going to be more esoteric, but I never would’ve thought that rappers could be the Lionel Richies of their day.

You mean as far as being beloved pop figures?
Yeah, that Jay-Z or Migos would be in that same position — not in terms of music but in terms of universal acceptance. I did foresee that we’d get something like an OutKast — rap that could sell millions and still feel not pop. But now we’re in a stage where rap isn’t separate from pop, which is amazing.

Are you seeing the Beastie Boys’ influence anywhere in the culture these days?
It’s interesting, because there are so many things that I appreciate musically, but I don’t ever think of them as Oh wow, that’s like what we did. I just don’t see things through that lens. Something that always makes me cringe is when somebody says, “You gotta hear this. They’re like you guys.” That usually doesn’t end well.

Can you remember something you’ve been played that was supposed to sound like the Beastie Boys?
This is an old thing, but I remember seeing Dee Barnes at a club and she said, “You’ve gotta hear this new group, Cypress Hill. There’s something about their voices that reminds me of you.” That’s kind of the best-case scenario.

What’s the worst-case scenario?
Not that it’s ever happened, but my fear would be that someone would be like, “311. You love those guys, right?” I’m sure they’re nice people — [their music] isn’t my cup of tea.

For obvious, tragic reasons the Beastie Boys had a definitive ending. Did having such a sharp break between your past and future make it harder to reorient your life moving forward?

It took a while. Yauch dying was so tragic, on so many levels, that it took a profound period of grieving to then be able to start figuring out what I wanted to do.

What’d you arrive at?
I don’t know — it’s all different things. I like doing the radio show because it replaces the process we had as a band of generating ideas by playing music for each other. Now I do that with guests on the show. Actually, when I produce other people’s records, asking “What have you been listening to?” is always my starting point. So those are things that would take place in the band that still take place now. I guess what I’ve also realized is that I like it when people approach me about something that feels outside my comfort zone. Whether it’s curating a music-and-visual art show with Jeffrey Deitch or working on a wine list for a restaurant. I’m interested in trying to do things that I feel like I have no business doing. Because that was part of what we did as a band. We weren’t afraid to try shit.

You mentioned how important sharing music with each other was to the Beastie Boys. I think it’s fair to say that you guys used to perform a similar curatorial function for your fans. I remember so vividly learning about cool music from Grand Royal or by figuring out the references in your lyrics or what samples you’d used. Technology has obviously made that kind of digging so much easier. Has that change — that ease of access — had an affect on how listeners feel about music?
The filters are still there, though. They’re just different. When I was 15, getting into the Clash exposed me to reggae. I’d see that they covered a song by Junior Murvin or that they had a single produced by Lee Perry and dig from there. My younger son does the same thing but in newer ways. He comes home from school in Bali and starts to make a song using his laptop, and he’s looking up what samples Kanye used and that opens the door for him to dig. The tools he has are immediate. He’s not having to go out. It’s so different from how I did it. I used to have this ritual when I was going to school in Brooklyn Heights and living on the Upper West Side. I’d always get off the subway in downtown New York to go to record stores. It was so exciting going to St. Mark’s Sounds to find reggae records or to 99 Records and sheepishly asking Ed Bahlman, “What’s cool?” That was the way. Now my son, Skyler, can do all the equivalent searching online. Proximity to the culture is no longer an issue for learning about it.

Does that matter?
I don’t know. Discussing curated filters is very three years ago.

Say, have you heard that the future of music is “streaming”?

[Laughs] I just think that people have already succumbed to the idea that they’re constantly overwhelmed with digital information. They don’t expect to be able to rise above it intelligently anymore.

Just to go back to the band a little more specifically: Did your relationships with the two Adams change over time? From what I’ve read, in the very early days of the Beastie Boys they occasionally gave you the business — almost in a young-male hazing way.
Really? I don’t remember that.

There’s that story in an oral history of the band where the other guys dumped dirt in your hotel bed.
Yeah, but we were a band. We’d fuck with each other constantly. I strongly disagree with the hazing [characterization]. We would all fuck with each other. That was just part of it. Hazing sounds like some kind of frat thing. The only fraternal aspect of it was that Yauch and Horovitz and me became like brothers.

A couple years ago, there was a good GQ article about Horovitz that suggested that he was struggling a little to find his Next Big Thing after the Beastie Boys. Has that been your sense of his experience?
With Adam, it’s so hard for me to say because I love him so much and think he’s so supremely talented and funny. The band was an incredible outlet for all of that and if you have an outlet like that, it’d be unreasonable to think there’d be an immediate transference of that outlet to a new one. It’s going to take trial and error; you have to be okay with failing in the process of finding those new outlets. Adam also has a young child. My kids are much older. Young kids are a hands-on-deck experience. For what it’s worth, I will say that his writing for our book has been so great — dude is very, very funny. I would even nominate him to be in the category of classic New York funny person à la Woody Allen, Chris Rock, Noah Baumbach. Adam belongs in that group.

Did the three of you have an inkling of what the band’s next big move might be after Hot Sauce Committee Part Two?
Full disclosure, the plan was always to put out Hot Sauce Committee Part One.

Good title.
You can file it under the category of “funny to us.”

What’s something in your life today that gives you same the thrill as the one you get from music?
I’d put surfing in that category. It truly is intoxicating — it’s probably the endorphins that does it. One of the most profound things about it for me is that in this era when we are all connected all the time, [surfing] is time out of the day where not only are you not connected to any device, you are connected to the ocean, a power far, far greater than you. You become this little speck, and if you are not present and don’t respect the ocean, you will be demolished by a wave.

Are there emotions common to surfing and making music?
Yeah. I think musicians can become addicted to surfing very quickly because there’s overlap. Musicians are always chasing this fleeting transcendental feeling in the writing or playing of music where the rest of the world ceases to exist. Surfing is a simile for that experience. You’re getting the same sort of energy in a totally different form. Do I sound like a West Coast douche?

Because you’re describing the cosmic qualities of surfing?
[Laughs] “Wow, I helmed this wave and I was just going and I was connected to it and there were three dolphins swimming face to the wave. And then I turned into a moon maiden …”

Did the transcendent feeling you were talking about — with music, not surfing — get more or less common as the Beastie Boys’ career went on?
I think what happened is that as I got older, I become able to recognize that feeling and appreciate it in the moment that you’re feeling it. Whereas when you’re 18 or 19 years old, you’re on lizard-brain autopilot. If something feels good, you’re just trying to make it happen again.

We’re kind of joking around here, but the idea of a New Yorker moving to California and becoming a laid-back surfer-guy is almost a cliché you could imagine the Beastie Boys having fun with in their younger days.
Yeah, I can see that. Although I could have grown up my whole life surfing in Rockaway. There are really good waves in New York. I feel sort of like an idiot that I didn’t take advantage. But L.A. hasn’t totally changed me. I’m still neurotic.

About what?
I’m pretty phobic about being an adult, even downright scared.

What would the 25-year-old Mike D think of the 52-year-old Mike D?
That’s a very good question. Let me say one thing and then I’ll answer it more directly. Adam Horovitz, Adam Yauch, and myself used to have this joke on tour: You’d go to gate-check a bag at an airport, and there’d be a guy there who was 40 years old and who’d listened to Licensed to Ill in high school. And he’d be like, “Oh hey, Beastie Boys! You guys are still doing it, huh?” There were obviously fans that followed us throughout the band’s livelihood, but then there were people like the guy at the gate-check who’d had their time listening to Licensed to Ill or whatever and that time in their life had passed. And they’d be like, “Still doing it, huh?” Anyway, my point is that I’m very grateful at my age that I’m able to do stuff that I love. I guess I can say it like this: Adulthood is overrated; maturity is underrated.

So the young Mike D would be happy with where he wound up?
The 25-year-old me? I remember around that age, when we were working on Paul’s Boutique, we went to this crazy, star-studded party and I met Bob Dylan. I guess I hope that I come off as eccentric as Bob Dylan came off to me back then.

That’d be hard to do. He’s a pretty weird guy.
I didn’t say I was achieving it.

Right now, though, in this moment, when I ask you to think of the Beastie Boys, what’s the first thing that pops into your head?
It’s not one event. It’s the process of Adam, Adam, and myself collaborating on every level: making records, making videos, making record covers — all of it. I think about the longevity and the closeness that the three of us had. It’s really — what is the correct adjective to express family?

Familial.
That’s what it was, and that’s what it is.