Full audio of the podcast interview is located at Teamcoco.com.

Photo: Brad Ogbonna for The New York Times

From The New York Times:

The Beastie Boys Sue Chili’s Over Use of ‘Sabotage’
By Orlando Mayorquín
July 11, 2024

The Beastie Boys sued Chili’s Grill & Bar in federal court on Wednesday, accusing the restaurant chain’s main operator of infringing on their copyright of the 1994 hit “Sabotage” by using it in advertisements without permission.

According to the complaint, Brinker International, which operates more than 1,600 Chili’s and other restaurants worldwide, rolled out promotional videos on social media beginning in November 2022 that used significant portions of the song and parodied its music video, directed by Spike Jonze.

The music video playfully pays homage to 1970s television crime dramas and features a fictitious opening credit scene and the group’s members dressed in fake wigs, mustaches and sunglasses of the era.

In the Chili’s video advertisement, three characters dressed in similar ’70s attire rob ingredients from a Chili’s restaurant scored to the sound of “Sabotage,” said the lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Brinker International did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday night. Rimon, the law firm representing the band, declined to comment. The advertisement, the lawsuit argues, intended to evoke the three Beastie Boys members — Michael Diamond, Adam Horovitz and Adam Yauch — and scenes from the “Sabotage” music video.

Yauch, who died in 2012 and was known as MCA, is represented among the plaintiffs by Dechen Yauch, the executor of his estate.

The suit seeks a jury trial and at least $150,000 in damages for each of its two claims of copyright infringements: one for the music video and the other for the song.

The band has a history of successfully cracking down on the unsanctioned use of its music for commercial purposes. In June 2014, it won a $1.7 million judgment in a copyright infringement case against Monster, the energy drink maker, which had used remixes of the band’s songs in a promotional video.

Earlier that year, it won another settlement against the toymaker GoldieBlox, which used the band’s song “Girls.”

Mike Diamond with Zan Rowe

Zan Rowe of ABC Australia’s Triple J Radio reposted a past audio interview she did with Mike Diamond. The interview was recorded in 2014 when Mike was in Australia to promote Monster Children magazine.

The theme of the show was “Five Songs from the Five Boroughs.” Rowe asked Mike to choose five songs to represent New York City. Mike chose the following songs:

1. Notorious B.I.G. - “Juicy”
2. The Strokes - “12:51”
3. Nas - “N.Y. State of Mind”
4. ESG - “Moody”
5. Wu-Tang Clan - “C.R.E.A.M.”

Mike also gave shout-outs to Liquid Liquid, A$AP Ferg, Run-DMC, A Tribe Called Quest, The Ramones, Big Daddy Kane, and KRS-1, among other New York City–based musicians.

Listen to the show HERE. The interview is 30 minutes long.

You may download the audio link HERE or HERE.

From Vishkhanna.com:

Adam Horovitz reflects upon his time being Ad-Rock in Beastie Boys, the 2023 NBA playoffs, a toaster oven, Beastie Boys Book and Beastie Boys Story and Beastie Boys Audiobook, satire and comedy, embracing new technologies and making things up as you go, memorable late night talk show and Saturday Night Live appearances, encountering Bob Dylan, making new music and the status of Hot Sauce Committee Part One, other future plans, and much more.

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Listen to or download an mp3 of the podcast interview HERE. Alternatively, you can listen to the full podcast on Kreative Kontarol's YouTube channel (see below).

Photo: Robin Marchant/Getty Images

From NME:

Check out Beastie Boys’ Ad-Rock’s trolling contribution to Rolling Stone’s ‘500 Greatest Albums’ poll

Adam Horovitz submitted a list of 50 albums that "set a high bar for taste, erudition, and hilarious bullshit"

By Sam Moore
October 6, 2020

Beastie Boys’ Ad-Rock recently contributed to Rolling Stone‘s ‘500 Greatest Albums’ poll by submitting a list of 50 highly obscure and, in some cases, made-up albums.

The magazine recently published the latest iteration of its retrospective poll, naming Marvin Gaye‘s ‘What’s Going On’ as the greatest album of all time.

Rolling Stone have now shared the list Ad-Rock submitted when they asked him for his 50 favourite albums of all time. The publication notes that his choices “set a high bar for taste, erudition and hilarious bullshit” before specifically highlighting Dr. Funk-A-Dunk’s ‘Out Of Bounds On The Dance Floor’ — a record that they say “could be so fake it’s real, or so real it’s fake”.

“Even the sharpest music scholars on the RS staff weren’t hip to artists like Jan Pfundt and Pops Willard,” Rolling Stone continued. “In fact, a few of them sounded a little too theoretically good to be true, as if perhaps they may have been placed on the list not because of their musical quality but as part of some sort of clever satirical gesture.”

You can see Ad-Rock’s list of albums below.

1. Macka B — Sign Of The Times
2. Grits and Gravy — Nuthin’ But The Good Stuff
3. The Frank Figueora Funk Ensemble — Double Bang Bang
4. Chirp — The City Ain’t Tough Enough
5. Sergeant Crikey — It Mek Dem Bubble
6. Hugo Strasser — TanzHits ’71
7. Ultimate Spinach — Ultimate Spinach
8. The Outta Controls — I Need New Friends
9. The Lover’s 2 — Slip Into Something More Fantastical
10. Merv Gelter — Unlinked Passages And Patterns
11. Danice Wilder — Funk Your Body Down
12. Strategic Orchestrations — My Suzuki Sierra Is Bumpin’
13. Jan Pfundt — Gekreuzte Drähte
14. Pops Willard — Bus Station Situation
15. Janice Montcrieff — Pour Me Another Glass Of Whine, You Baby
16. The Dapper Duo — Your Freaky Touch
17. Urszula Dudziak — Urszula
18. Miss Sally Murdoch — Turn Me On When The The Lights Go Off
19. The Cosmonauts (Featuring Shep Greenley) — Bump That Funky Bump
20. Digitz — Why Is That Again?
21. The Satin Velvettes — Sooth My Mood
22. Ebbet Maynfield — Flutes A Plenty
23. Video Kids — Woodpeckers From Space
24. The Pete Smith Quintet — Dynamism
25. Amy Cranterston — The Strength Of The Willow’s Shadows
26. Ruff-N-Ready — We Rhyme Right
27. Phil Collins — Dance Into The Light
28. Westbeth — Down In The Basement (Where The Funk Grows)
29. The Captain — 22lb Turkey
30. Monotony — Witness The Rampage
31. The Tremont High School Drum Line — Marching Band Favorites
32. Chip Button — Drums Are My Bag
33. Crabby Appleton — Rotten To The Core
34. Dr. Funk-A-Dunk — Out Of Bounds On The Dance Floor
35. Bridget Everett and The Tender Moments — Pound It
36. The Clarence Widley Orchestra — Boxcar Business (Original Soundtrack)
37. Melancholia — Exploration Interflection
38. Al Carlton — Too Smooth
39. Earl Wilson — Jr., Let My People Come (A Sexual Musical)
40. Khia — Thug Misses
41. The Dunes of Distance — Equanimity
42. General Echo — 12″ Of Pleasure
43. Aileen Mccullough — An Oiread Sin Báistí
44. Sweet Lou — Already On It
45. The T-Bones — No Matter What Shape (Your Stomach Is In)
46. Ladies And Lords — The Mod Way
47. Crianças Loucas — é Meu Agora
48. Juan Epstein — Boogaloo In Brooklyn
49. Little Marcy — Happy Day Express
50. Carmine Rittzi — Freak Your Way Out Of This One

We're sure he found some of these gems in the Bill Harper collection.

Public Enemy’s new album What You Gonna Do When the Grid Goes Down dropped today. Mike D and Adrock contributed vocals to the song “Public Enemy Number Won.”

🎵 Listen HERE.

The Beastie Boys's final concert at the Bonnaroo Music Festival on June 12, 2009, was filmed by Roman Coppola. It premiered yesterday (September 24, 2020) on the Bonnaroo official Youtube channel as part of "Bonnaroo Presents Virtual ROO-ALITY."

Update: The video was available on Bonnaroo's official Youtube channel for a short time. The above video is a fan posting of the concert.

From The New Yorker:

Ad-Rock Just Wants to Be Friends
The Beastie Boy on growing up, mellowing out, and the importance of snacks.

By Hua Hsu
May 24, 2020

Illustration by Mike Reddy

Adam Horovitz was born in Manhattan, in 1966, and raised there by his mother, the artist Doris Keefe. His father, the playwright Israel Horovitz, left the family in 1969. New York in the seventies was wild and lawless, which suited a young person searching for a tribe. As a teen-ager, Horovitz played in a New York punk band called the Young and the Useless. There was no imaginable future in music for him. It was just a way to pass the time, an excuse to hang out and meet people who were into the same things as he was. The Young and the Useless would often play shows with another punk band called the Beastie Boys, which consisted at the time of Horovitz’s friends Adam Yauch, Michael Diamond, John Berry, and Kate Schellenbach. In 1982, as the Beastie Boys were moving from punk to hip-hop, Berry left the band, and Horovitz, who was sixteen, replaced him. A couple of years later, they asked Schellenbach to leave, as they pursued, in Horovitz’s words, a new “tough-rapper-guy identity.”

Perhaps they leaned a bit too heavily into this identity. When the Beastie Boys, now managed by the pioneering hip-hop Svengali Russell Simmons, released their début album, “Licensed to Ill,” in 1986, they were designed to be one-hit wonders. At the time, it was unthinkable that white rappers might be anything more than a passing fad. And MCA (Yauch), Mike D (Diamond), and Ad-Rock (Horovitz), as they were known, came across like a cloud of male hormones that had sprung arms and legs. They toured with a twenty-foot-tall inflatable penis and constantly doused one another in beer. They rapped about partying and chasing girls over their producer Rick Rubin’s headbanging, heavy-metal beats. Their reputation was so rowdy and menacing that the British Parliament actually debated whether or not to allow them into the country.

At the same time, they seemed smug and a bit sarcastic, unconvinced of their own act. Diamond, Horovitz, and Yauch would spend the rest of their careers figuring out who they actually were. In 1989, they released “Paul’s Boutique,” a surreal masterpiece of sample-era hip-hop. Three years later, they made “Check Your Head,” an equally captivating album in which the former punk rockers essentially taught themselves to play jazz. By the mid-nineties, the band that was once famous for songs like “Girls” and “Fight for Your Right to Party”—and who narrowly avoided titling their début “Don’t Be a Faggot”—was speaking out against discrimination and abuse. In 1996, they organized the inaugural Tibetan Freedom Concert. They lamented the “disrespect to women” that was rampant in their old tunes. As Horovitz later explained, “I’d rather be a hypocrite to you than a zombie forever.”

What drew people to the Beastie Boys was the feeling that these turns were a natural part of growing up. The band that had once embodied the reckless abandon of youth had now become a model for aging deliberately and thoughtfully. Their music was always chock-full of their latest discoveries, whether it was funk, dub, jazz, electro, or the laid-back vibe of L.A.’s Atwater Village. They collected interesting people into their orbit and gave them their own platforms: the band would start a record label, a magazine, a clothing label, and produce films. The romance of the Beastie Boys wasn’t just that you could make a living by hanging out with your friends. It was that you could stay with those friends for the long haul and grow together.

In 2012, Yauch, often seen as the band’s conscience, died after a three-year battle with cancer. He was forty-seven. The two surviving members agreed to never again make music as the Beastie Boys. In 2018, Horovitz and Diamond published “Beastie Boys Book,” a sprawling memoir with all the jokes, left turns, and cut-and-paste energy of their best songs. The following year, they performed a series of two-man theatre shows, essentially bringing the book to life. Spike Jonze, who first met the band in 1991, directed those shows, as well as “Beastie Boys Story,” which débuted in April, on Apple TV+.

The documentary draws on Horovitz and Diamond’s shows at Brooklyn’s Kings Theatre; one of its most moving moments comes when Horovitz recalls what turned out to be their final performance together as a band, in 2009, right before Yauch’s diagnosis. It’s a rare moment of candor from someone who’s kept a relatively low profile in his post-Beastie Boys life. Horovitz and his wife, the artist and musician Kathleen Hanna, now split their time between New York and California. Recently, I talked to Horovitz over Zoom, as he smoked cigarettes in his back yard, in Pasadena. Despite having never met me, he knew to make fun of the haircut I had tried to give myself. Our conversation has been edited and condensed.

I believe I’m contractually obligated to ask how your quarantine has been.

You know, freaking out. I’ve flattened the curve a bit, of my freak-out, but it’s still there.

You’re back in Southern California now. But you first moved there just after “Licensed to Ill,” in the late eighties. After growing up in Manhattan, was there a sense of culture shock when you touched down?

L.A., when we came out here, seemed very L.A. It seemed very “crystals,” you know what I mean? The super Hollywood thing. And that was funny. That shit was hilarious, ’cause that’s not what our life was like. My brother still asks me, when I talk to him, “You know, so what’s going on with your crystals? Have you started your kombucha farm or whatever the thing is?” I’m, like, “Dude it’s not like that.” Although I did just say “dude.”

Is there any part of you that identifies with being a Californian, other than driving a car?

When we were writing “Beastie Boys Book,” and thinking about L.A. and stuff, I came to the conclusion that I was like Rhoda Morgenstern. Rhoda was this character on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show”—she was the New Yorker who was a fish out of water, living in Minneapolis. When I was here hanging out, when we were young, I always felt like I was dirty. Like I was a New Yorker. Actually, I guess I was kind of dirty. My favorite time in New York is summertime ’cause it’s hot, it’s sticky and gross, and everybody just looks so awful. I love it.

So I don’t really feel at peace or at home here. But it’s fucking nice. I don’t know what else to say. I can have a battle with myself. Then it’s like, you know, it’s going to be eighty-four degrees today.

Have you picked up any quarantine rituals?

We ordered lasagna from this really good Italian place. I realized I’m a terrible cook. Really bad.

Something that “Beastie Boys Story” captures is this desire, when you’re young, to be cool. To a lot of fans, the band came to embody what it meant to be cool—what to listen to, what to wear, how to act. What did it mean to represent that? What made you gravitate toward some people and not others?

Well, when you’re sixteen, you think you’re the coolest person in the world, and, at the same time, you’re thinking you’re the squarest person in the world. You just want to be cool, right? When you think back on when you were a teen-ager, there’s all this elusive stuff that you like. I remember there was a British guy that used to rent a room from me and my mom and he was, like, in his twenties and he was so cool. He was British. He worked at a club. He would get drunk. He smoked cigarettes. He was into music. So he was the coolest. I don’t know. We were just really lucky to be around super cool people in New York in the early eighties.

Did you realize at the time how unique it was—your upbringing, what you were exposed to?

When you’re a teen-ager, whatever’s happening in your home life or whatever, good or bad, that’s normal. I had a weird childhood and that was normal. You don’t think about bigger-picture stuff when you’re a kid.

How about when you went on your first big tour and saw what life was like elsewhere?

Oh, it seemed like, you know, America. Like, we left New York—that was noticeable. That we had left the city. We’d be in, you know, no offense to wherever, but we were in Dallas and we were, like, Whoa, this is not New York City. Everything else seemed quaint and small-town, you know?

Along those lines. When you’re young and creating, you often don’t have the time or desire to think about the past or the future. You’re just in the present. I’ve read that there were things like the Beatles or “Seinfeld” that you only discovered later, long after the fact.

You mean things that I wasn’t allowed to like, that I now like? ’Cause the point is that our band, me and Adam and Mike, and our group of friends, we weren’t allowed to like hippie music. We weren’t allowed to like rock music. We were punks and that was it. Rick Rubin played us certain music and was like, “Oh, but this is why I like it.” That was interesting. I don’t know. I don’t like much. [Laughs.] If you’re trying to just get me to say something about the Lakers, I’m not gonna.

Can you tell me what it was like to meet Rick Rubin back then? Whenever I hear stories, I can’t tell if he was the coolest person ever or just this really absorbing weirdo.

For one, he was a little older, so that was kinda cool. He’s just one of these people who would let you know, like, Oh, I’m really cool and really smart and my opinion is the actual right opinion. And when you’re a kid, you’re, like, Oh, O.K. But, in retrospect, he’s just . . . he’s interesting. You want to believe things when you’re a kid, you know? You want to believe things.

Even though “Licensed to Ill” was the big turning point, in terms of people first hearing the band, it often sounds like the Def Jam years were a little traumatic.

Learning experience, that’s for sure.

What did you learn?

The main thing was that me, Adam, and Mike were friends, and that the band we started as friends was more important than business stuff. If we were going to break up, we were going to break up and still be friends. I mean, that’s an important lesson.

After Def Jam, you begin working with John Silva, who still manages you today. One of the things that draws people to the Beastie Boys is this sense that you’re like this close-knit gang—the band but then also the people around you. Can you talk about what it means, as an artist, to have a good manager?

That’s interesting, because anytime you see those award shows and stuff, and people are, like, “I have to thank my manager, my team,” blah, blah, blah—I always thought that that shit was corny. Right? But this guy is my friend, and we weren’t friends for a long time. He was the manager, you know what I mean? Years ago, we went on vacation to Hawaii, and I saw Silva in a parking lot. And I caught his eye, and he quickly cut left and just tried to run away from me. I was, like, “That’s fucked up . . . but I kinda love that. That’s really good. He’s on vacation. He doesn’t need to deal with me.”

We’ve known him and worked with him for thirty years now. They do all the actual work. Yauch wanted to do these Free Tibet concerts. He doesn’t know how to actually put on a concert. Do you know what I mean? [Silva] helped us not be corny.

Like you’re saying, at the core of the Beastie Boys is this model of friendship—you, Adam, and Mike, the people around you. It’s beautiful to hear you talk about how the friendship is what survived Def Jam. I’m curious how you guys handled disagreements.

Well, Mike and I have talked about it a bunch, because we’re both the youngest of three siblings. Yauch was an only child, so me and Mike would always just be, like, “O.K.” Luckily, Yauch had fucking fantastic ideas, and he was ninety-eight-per-cent right, always. And parenting, right? Yauch’s parents were amazing parents, and they were really supportive, and they helped him do all kinds of things as a kid. So he had a sense of, This is what we’re doing, but not in any negative, bratty, selfish, or entitled way. And Mike and I, when you have older siblings, you’re, like, “No, I don’t want to . . . O.K., O.K.” You never get the good seat in the car. You have to sit in the back, in the fucking trunk or whatever it is, and you’re, like, O.K.

Me, Adam, and Mike were together all the time. We recorded every day. We toured every day. When we weren’t together, when there were breaks after tours and stuff, we would still see each other. We would talk, we would swing by Adam’s house. That . . . that speaks to me. Do you know what I mean? That is something to hold on to. I love them, and they’re my friends, and it’s meaningful to like hanging out with your co-workers when you don’t have to.

You’ve always seemed really at ease with yourself, and with growing older. Can you pinpoint when you started to feel this way, feeling comfortably out of the loop?

When we came out here [to Los Angeles, in the late eighties], we had money. Do you know what I mean? We didn’t come out here trying to find gigs. I was really lucky. I could live in a hotel. It’s just different. Your circumstances, like, the way you see things, it’s different. When I was kid, my aspiration was to have snacks—to be able to have whatever snacks I wanted. That’s not what my house was like. My friend Neil and I talked about success, like, what success really is. And I was, like, “If you have a washer/dryer in your apartment, you’re fucking big time.” And, ’cause we both really liked basketball, he’s, like, “I feel like when I get a personal trainer to just stretch me out wherever I am, that’s when I’ve made it.”

But, now, it’s too late for anything else. You’ve got people telling you you’re cool all the time. What am I supposed to do? It’s like Peter Schjeldahl said, you know, you get attention for something, so you just keep doing that thing. Unless people are calling you a fucking scumbag and then, I don’t know, you either embrace that or you figure out what to do about it. What else am I going to be? I’m fine. I wish I had better hair. I wish I were a little taller. I never thought I’d have a car. I have a car.

Watching the documentary, I was reminded of how you guys always had interesting taste in clothes. I think there are seven or eight incredible shirts in the “Pass the Mic” video alone. The phases always felt organic. Do you still have all the clothes spanning your career?

I think everybody has that, where you see an old picture and you’re, like, “Oh, what did I do with that shirt? I was so happy with that shirt!” I actually have a lot of clothes that I wore then—if it’s comfortable, and it fits, and it’s not full of holes, what’s the problem? People seem to give me some grief about it. My best friend Nadia calls me a walking pile of dirty laundry.

When you were working on “Beasties Boys Book,” I read that you really enjoyed that kind of self-excavation, writing about yourself.

Apparently, the thing about being stoned a lot, it makes you talk a lot. Sometimes I tell the same stories over and over again. So it came natural just to write them down. It was fun for me. I’d never really done it before and I actually liked it. I got, like, half a book I wrote about a kid in Minneapolis. I don’t know what to do with it. Maybe I’ll finish it one day.

From an outside perspective, it seems as though you’ve had an unusually intense past few years, between Yauch passing and your wife being diagnosed with Lyme disease. Have you adopted any new methods of coping or thinking that wouldn’t have made sense to a younger Ad-Rock?

I mean, I just try to stay high.

Being stoned has come up a few times. Do you remember your first time?

I remember the first time I got in trouble for it. This was in fourth grade, in New York City, and my friend Josh’s mom smelled us smoking pot. He got in trouble, and she called my mom, blah, blah, blah. But it was my mom’s pot, so I didn’t get in trouble. She gave me some words of wisdom: if any parents or the school calls her, then it’s a problem. If I managed to not have the school or other parents call her, then things are O.K. I think that was wise.

You’ve spent a lot of time over the past few years talking about Yauch. Do you ever find yourself talking to him?

He’s too busy. What am I gonna say? It’s not my thing. Like, I don’t talk to my mom or whatever. [Horovitz’s mother passed away when he was in his teens.]

You mentioned how when you’re young, you don’t really reflect on what’s going on, you’re just living it. Now that you’re older, do you have a different relationship to the idea of friendship?

You know, I still talk to Mike every other day on the phone. My best friend is my same best friend since junior high. I talk to my brother all the time. Long, lasting friendships are important. But I don’t know about the whole notion of loyalty. It’s weird. You can have a friend and then they can be an asshole and you’re, like, Oh, you don’t have to be friends.

As you get older, hopefully you pay attention to details. We all have milestones in our lives where you need your friends, your chosen family, whatever. And you realize this person is there no matter what. And then this person, Oh, they didn’t show up for that, or, like, Oh, that’s weird, they didn’t call me. You know what I mean? As you get older, you get a focus on what you care about, what’s important to you—and what’s important to your friends and how they treat you, and if they’re there for you. Shit is so hectic, just in general, it’s so easy to say keep your true friends. But I guess each person needs to decide what a true friend is. When bad shit happens, who shows up? You should keep that in mind. You don’t have to. I like to.

You and Mike have made it clear that there will be no new Beastie Boys music without Yauch. You’ve hinted at unreleased stuff in the vaults, but it seems like that’s it. Between the book and the documentary, do you feel like you’ve gotten the definitive story of your band out there?

I guess so. It’s interesting because, writing the book, I didn’t want to get too personal, ’cause it’s about our band, it’s not about me. When we were doing the movie, Spike Jonze kept being, like, “Well, how did you feel about that?” He kept trying to push us to talk about our feelings. I get that. But, like, I don’t know. The book and the movie isn’t, like, the whole story. Maybe I’ll continue writing and talking about all the stupid shit that I’ve done. The whole thing is so weird. That I’m fifty-three is fucking weird. I have money; I can buy whatever I want at the supermarket. I’m very lucky.

Right. That makes sense, given that you once thought that making it meant you could get a lot of snacks.

Like Shane, my friend in junior high. He had fucking Mountain Dews. He had so many snacks.

I get that. I used to think that being an adult would mean that I could drive to Taco Bell whenever I wanted.

I’m gonna give a shout-out to Taco Lita, that’s my spot right now. It’s interesting, when I’m home in New York, I know everything. I still live in the neighborhood I grew up in. So, being in Pasadena, I’m discovering the shit that I really like. I have an old friend Rob from out here. I was talking to him about, “Oh, my God, I just went to this place Philippe’s, you know, the home of the French dip. This place is so good.” And he was, like, “Oh, yeah, I used to go there as a kid.” I was, like, “Why didn’t you fucking take me here when I was living here?” He was, like, “I didn’t really think you would like that sort of thing.” Get to know me, you know what I mean? Tacos. They didn’t have those in New York when I was growing up.

In celebration of their new documentary, Beastie Boys Story, Beastie Boys threw an AMA After Party on Reddit with Spike Jonze and invited their fans and a few special guests.

Jimmy Fallon and Questlove chat with Mike D and Adrock about their Spike Jonze-helmed live documentary, Beastie Boys Story; the genius of Paul's Boutique; and their support for Food Bank for New York City during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The film will be screened in select IMAX theaters on April 2, and air on Apple TV+ beginning on April 24.

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.

Sad news. Rolling Stone reports that John Berry, one of the founding members of Beastie Boys, has passed away. He was only 52 years old.

Berry was the guitarist in the first iteration of the band with Adam Yauch, Mike Diamond, and Kate Schellenbach. Berry played guitar on Polly Wog Stew (1982) and is credited for coming up with the band's name.

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.”