33 Things You Should Know About…The Beastie Boys

1 They started off rocking, not rapping.
Well-off, cultured teenagers in early-’80s downtown Manhattan, Adam Yauch and Mike Diamond were devotees of the burgeoning hardcore punk scene there and decided to start a band of their own, the Beastie Boys. They opened for their heroes, Washington D.C.’s Bad Brains, and released the Polly Wog Stew seven-inch EP in 1981 (sample lyric: “Fuck the chickens; I don’t like milk!”). Adam Horovitz joined shortly after. “We were just little kids trying to have fun,” Diamond remembers. “We were shitty!”

2 It was one of the scariest periods in NYC history…
“Angel dust was a lot bigger drug then,” says Horovitz (a.k.a. Adrock). Diamond (Mike D) chips in: “I remember one time coming home on the subway at 4 A.M. after a show — this one dude got on, took off his shirt, wrapped it around his fist and punched out every single window in one car. The subways were hectic.”

3 …but it was an oddly utopian one, too.
Just a few years old, hip-hop was starting to creep from the Bronx into Lower East Side rock dens — punk-rockers and b-boys crashed the same parties. “You had this amazing combination of all this music,” Diamond explains. “I’d go to really punk-type clubs downtown where the DJs would play the Slits, but hip-hop records would get mixed in as well — I was at this club the Rock Lounge and saw the Funky Four Plus One More!”

4 There was originally a Beastie Girl.
Childhood friend Kate Schellenbach, who later founded Luscious Jackson, was part of the initial hardcore lineup. When the Beasties came under the wing of Def Jam cofounder (and soon-to-be-legendary producer) Rick Rubin, Schellenbach claims his sexism, misogyny and homophobia alienated her and transformed her bandmates. She half-quit, was half–edged out. “Kate and Rick were polarized,” says Yauch (MCA). Horovitz nods: “We were turning into knuckleheads.”

5 A bubble machine led to one of the most important team-ups in hip-hop history.
Mesmerized by the sound from uptown, the Beasties began peppering their hardcore sets with raps and decided to enlist a hip-hop DJ. “Our friend Nick told us, ‘I know this dude Rick Rubin — he DJ’s and he’s got a bubble machine,’” Diamond says. “We just went off into Rick Rubin world. But I don’t think we ever used it.”

6 Adrock discovered LL Cool J.
Still a student at New York University, Rubin started Def Jam Records out of his dorm room with Russell Simmons. “He’d put out a record and slap his address on the back. People would send in demo tapes,” Yauch says. Horovitz remembers: “I picked this LL Cool J tape out of a box, and I was like, ‘Yo, this kid’s really good.’ Rick called LL, he came down and we booked studio time. He was, like, 15 at the time — this skinny kid.”

7 As a kid, MCA was obsessed with building bombs.
“When I was about 15, I’d take apart fireworks, reassemble them and blow things up. I had a Wile E. Coyote detonator; I traded this other kid a model pistol for it. It seemed funny at the time — what can I say?”8 It took them a while to work out their “look.”
“Before anyone knew us, Russell booked us at the Encore in Queens with Kurtis Blow. We thought it’d be really fly to roll up in a limo and to wear matching Puma suits and put do-rags on,” Diamond says, laughing. “We were these white assholes. I remember kids yelling at us, ‘Are you guys Menudo?’”

9 Madonna thinks she made out with Adam Yauch.
The Beastie Boys were the opening act on Madonna’s 1985 Virgin tour and were routinely booed by uninterested, largely preteen fans. “I thought [the Beasties] were adorable. I think I made out with Adam Yauch once in their dressing room,” Madonna recalled in a 1998 interview.

10 Nobody cared what color they were.
Diamond: “We played this show in Philly with Just-Ice and Schoolly D at an all-black high school gym. Our single ‘Hold It Now’ was big on the radio, but no one knew what we looked like. But when Doctor Dre dropped the intro to the song, everyone went nuts!”

11 Their first big check came from British Airways.
Forty thousand dollars, to be exact. Yauch: “We had put out this 12-inch single called ‘Cooky Puss,’ and British Airways had hired someone to make music for their commercial — he sampled our music and chopped it up, so we sued.”

12 No one expected the payoff that came next…
When the Beastie Boys’ debut, Licensed to Ill, was released on Def Jam/Columbia in 1986, it became the fastest-selling album in Columbia’s history, going on to nine-times-platinum sales. “I never thought it would be successful on any level,” Diamond says with a laugh. “But when it was finished, I was riding around in Run [of Run-DMC]’s car, and he was like, ‘Yo, your album’s gonna blow up.’”

13 …Except the fat check never came.
“We didn’t get paid on our first record,” Yauch says. Diamond explains: “They said, ‘We’re not gonna pay you.’ They wanted us to go into the studio right away and make another album. We eventually settled.”

14 The working title of Licensed to Ill was Don’t Be a Faggot.
“That was Rick’s type of sense of humor,” Yauch says. “Like, ‘You know what we should call it? Don’t Be a Faggot’!” Diamond shudders: “Thank God we didn’t wind up naming it that.”

15 White Castle was their muse — and drove them to vegetarianism for a spell.
“I remember driving a friend’s monster truck to White Castle before a show, and I had, like, I can’t remember how many burgers,” Horovitz groans. “I just kept eating them and eating them and drinking Olde English.…Ugh. I stopped eating meat for a while because of White Castle.”

16 After the success of Licensed to Ill, Horovitz dated actress Molly Ringwald.
In a 1998 interview, former Beasties road manager Sean Carasov recalled, “On their first date, they drank premixed bottled cocktails and did Whip-Its.”

17 England hated them…
In May 1987, spurred on by a flood of anti-Beasties press surrounding their U.K. tour, Conservative Member of Parliament Geoffrey Dickens announced, “I want these diabolical creatures banned from these shores.” “We had this big inflated dick onstage, and cages with girls in them, and they started having meetings in Parliament about whether they were going to let us into the country,” Yauch says.

18 Tabloids devoured them…
Yauch remembers: “Paparazzi were following us, so we grabbed a car and pretended to turn it over.” Adds Diamond: “The headlines went, POP YOBS TURNING OVER CARS AND RIOTING!”

19 They provoked a near-riot in Liverpool…
“After all the dates on that British tour had been sold out, they added a Liverpool date that attracted all these people who just wanted to riot,” Yauch says. “Beer bottles were flying off the balcony before we came on.” Horovitz: “They were singing football chants that were louder than our songs!”

20 …And Adrock got tossed in two different slammers.
After the disastrous May 30, 1987, Liverpool concert, a girl claimed that Horovitz had batted a flying can at her head. He was arrested. “Talk about a bad gig,” he says. “I was jailed in London; then they took me up to Liverpool for a couple of nights. They had me in a cell with this old, old Irish guy who was cursing out the cops.”

21 Mike D’s iconic Volkswagen-logo necklace sparked a rash of auto vandalism.
“It was international,” he chuckles. “Volkswagen thought it was going to hurt their sales, because people wouldn’t want to buy the car if kids were going to steal the hood ornament.” Adrock adds: “Volkswagen placed an ad that said ‘Don’t steal our medallions; send this ad in as a coupon, and we’ll send you your own VW medallion.’”

22 They got banned from Holiday Inn.…
On tour, hotel hijinks were common. Horovitz and Yauch once dumped a potted plant on Diamond’s bed while he slept; Horovitz drilled a hole into his room’s floor to pour water into Yauch’s room below; and in London, Yauch dived into a swimming pool from his hotel’s third-floor balcony. Diamond explains the Holiday Inn ban cryptically to Blender, saying only that it involved “mopeds,” “a pageant” and Horovitz “trying on a Batgirl costume.”

23 …But they never made fun of crippled children, OK?
After playing a Montreux music festival in 1987, the Beasties declined to be interviewed by a journalist, Gill Pringle. The next day, a story ran accusing them of mocking dying children outside the show. “It was totally fabricated,” Diamond assures. Horovitz deadpans: “See, I make fun of dying children all the time. Just not these particular ones.”

24 With Paul’s Boutique, they went from beer-sozzled tyros to drug-hazed experimentalists.
Split from Def Jam after the royalty dispute, the Beasties moved to L.A. in 1988 and hooked up with producers the Dust Brothers. Says Diamond: “They were ahead of the curve. It was this trippy, dense audio, layered, and we were stoned all the time, so it was hyper-hype.”

25 A 1991 drug overdose hit them especially hard.
Memorialized on “Instant Death,” from their 1998 album Hello Nasty, childhood friend Dave Scilken died in 1991. That made the Beasties reconsider past excesses, and it brought a sobriety to their next album, Check Your Head. Says Diamond: “A lot of people died from the time we grew up in New York.”

26 Yauch is an obsessive snowboarder.
“The biggest trick I’ve ever landed is maybe a 540. That’s where you spin around one and a half times. People can land bigger spins than that. I try to see what I can get away with, but I’m not that great.”

27 With the 1993 formation of their Grand Royal imprint, they went from rappers to tastemakers.
Grand Royal released music by Sean Lennon, Luscious Jackson, Jimmy Eat World and At the Drive-In. It folded in 2001. Diamond, the “businessman” of the trio, lowers his voice: “All the shit you’ve got to do to run a label just makes you want to be back in the studio.”

28 They’ve never met Eminem, but they love “Lose Yourself.”
The only white rappers to sustain careers aside from Eminem, the Beasties have never met him. Yauch shrugs. “I know it sounds kind of cheesy, but my favorite Eminem song is ‘Lose Yourself.’” Diamond interjects: “No one can front on ‘Lose Yourself’!”

29 Dockworkers inspired Mike D’s clothing line, X-Large.
Diamond: “There’s a town called Wilmington on the California coast, and all this Carhartt and Dickies gear was available there for dockworkers. My friends and I were like, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if we had a store that sold this?’” Pimping working-class chic, Diamond started X-Large clothing in 1991 with Adam Silverman and Eli Bonerz.

30 Their videos are mind-blowingly good.
MTV nominated their Spike Jonze–directed “Sabotage” clip for 1994 Video of the Year (it lost to Aerosmith’s “Cryin’”). Shot in L.A. without a permit, the ’70s cop parody “was what the kids today call guerrilla filmmaking — many a camera had an accident,” Diamond says.

31 Rancid were Yauch’s wedding band.
In May 1998, he married Tibetan Dechen Wangdu. It was a traditional Tibetan wedding — except for the music. “I didn’t tell my wife I’d asked Rancid to play, because she’s a big fan and I wanted to surprise her. It was bizarre: My wife’s parents’ friends and all these older people were dancing to Rancid!”

32 They recorded an honest-to-God country album.
While working on Hello Nasty, the Beasties also recorded a straight-on country album. Yauch: “We were messing around with a script with Spike Jonze in which Mike played a country singer, so we wrote a bunch of songs that Mike could perform.” It’s available as a bootleg, under the name Country Mike’s Greatest Hits.

33 Their new album puts the party back in partisan politics.
To the 5 Boroughs is both a celebration of New York City pride and an open hate letter to George W. Bush. Back-and-forth rhymes add a throwback feel to the rabble-rousing: “We have to do everything possible to encourage people to vote Bush out of office,” Diamond exhorts. “Which means voting for John Kerry. I definitely encourage people to do that.”