Twenty-five years later and eight
albums in, the BEASTIE BOYS are still checkin’ heads
Somehow, I just knew this was gonna
happen. I mean, it had to. Of course it was going to.
After waiting for more than an hour for
the Beastie Boys to amble into a spare dressing room backstage at New
York’s Hammerstein Ballroom, the 20 minutes allotted for the first
interview for this cover story have been reduced to ten, and after
Mike D and MCA spend the first few minutes going over the night’s
setlist—and with label execs waiting to speak with the band before
they take the stage in roughly 35 minutes, or so we’re told—the
three wiseacres that comprise the Beastie Boys are pretty much
impossible to reign in.
They’re in the middle of their
trademark interview schtick: One riffs, while the others think up
witty retorts. Meanwhile, the interviewing journalist—me—struggles
to glean a usable quote from the stream-of-consciousness babbling,
and of course there aren’t many. Well, that’s not true. It’s
just that most of it has nothing to do with music, the group or its
new album, The Mix-Up. And to some degree, that’s okay.
Somehow, that tag-team wisecracking—an
almost identical version of which you could have easily caught on MTV
News in the mid-‘80s—has landed them on the topic of
communication. Adam “MCA” Yauch dryly explains that the Beasties
are exploring primitive means of communication of late—you know,
semaphore, smoke signals—before Mike D (originally Michael Diamond)
notes that he’s thinking about building a system of pneumatic tubes
under Manhattan through which he, MCA and Adam “Ad Rock” Horovitz
could send notes to one another.
MCA: I’ve actually been
tunneling. Did I not tell you about that? I’m doing a bigger tunnel
so we can climb in.
MIKE D: That’s a great idea.
So, to go to O-Scope [the band’s New York studio], instead of me
having to walk, I could just pneumatic tube?
MCA: Yeah, your wife will put
you in the tube and drop you in.
MIKE D: Why do I need Tamra to
do it?
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