Long before Eminem, the Beastie Boys turned hip-hop on its head with the hooligan escapades that followed their first album Licensed to Ill. In this excerpt from a classic Creem piece, Chuck Eddy gets a taste of Beastie mania in L.A.--Barney Hoskyns, Editorial Director, Rock's Backpages
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. (I'd stupidly left the chain-lock unsecured, and I suppose they bribed the night clerk into giving them a key.)
Earlier that evening, after Pee-Wee Herman had visited their dressing room and before they appeared on Joan Rivers' show, the Beasties were tossing parsley at me, dropping ice cubes in my hair, and "dissin'" (graffiti-artist lingo for "saying bad things about") my brown socks and flannel shirt. I interpreted all of this to mean that they did not like me.
But I don't feel alone. Just days before, they'd been evicted from the Sunset Marquis for throwing chairs out their window into the swimming pool. And that week, they'd also become the first group ever to be censored on American Bandstand - Dick Clark, who'd put up with Johnnies Rotten and Lydon in past episodes, apparently determined Adrock's mid-song crotch-grab was just too much. The Beasties had previously been banned from the Holiday Inn chain after they'd cut a hole in the floor of one suite to serve as a passageway to the one directly below; they'd been banned from CBS Records headquarters after allegedly ripping off a camera at a label party. And MCA brags that he punched a Bay Area Music interviewer in the face not too long ago. These guys are total jerks, and they've got the fastest-selling debut album in CBS history.
MCA, real name Adam Yauch, says he's skimmed through Stephen Davis' Hammer of the Gods, a book that depicts Led Zeppelin's early career as one massive, Satanic orgy, complete with fishing for sharks out hotel windows and sicking the prize catches on baked-bean marinated groupies.
"It happens that we are living up to that reputation, but it's not intentional," MCA tells me. "We respect what they did. They were the only band that never buckled under to their label, and they sold more records than anybody."
Beastie Mike D, whose stage handle is shortened from Michael Diamond, is wearing a Houses of the Holy T-shirt. The first noises you hear on the Boys' Licensed To Ill album are John Bonham's drums, lifted from Zep's mega-swing classic "When The Levee Breaks." I ask Mike D what his favourite LP of 1986 was, and he answers Led Zeppelin IV.
Upon arriving in Los Angles to meet the most famous Caucasian rap trio in the history of Western Civilization, I found that their record company has sent a limousine to the airport to pick me up. I'm taking one of those huge black ones where the celebrities can look out but the peons can't look in, and of course I've never even touched one before, and I thought it was obscene. The driver gave me the scenic route down to Sunset Boulevard, and he pointed out Engelbert Humperdink's abodes, and we passed UCLA. The driver showed me this monument made of four white columns at the top of a small hill. He said Al Jolson was buried there.
Like Gigolo Al, and like Bob Wills and Elvis Presley and the Rolling Stones and the disco Bee Gees as well, the Beastie Boys are white people making what is supposed to be black music. Like Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, who wrote all of the Coasters' hits and whose "Girls, Girls, Girls" MCA claims did not influence the groups very similar "Girls," and like the Dictators, whose Go Girl Crazy anticipated punk and whose White Castle infatuation MCA claims had no effect on his crew's own sliders-by-the-bag fetish, the Beasties are young middle-class Jewish males chronicling the dilemma of urban-American teen hooliganism. Or rather, in the Beastie Boys' case, half-Jewish.
"Purely coincidentally, we each have one Jewish parent," explains MCA. Adrock and Mike D, now 17 and 19 old respectively, grew up in Manhattan; MCA, 20 comes from Brooklyn Heights. MCA and Mike D "have been friends forever and were boys together," MCA says; Adrock, a.k.a. Adam Horvitz, met the other two in junior high school. Noted playwright Israel Horvitz, Adrock's dad, left home when the Beastie was a baby. MCA's first criminal act was setting a print shop on fire.
"All the kids from our high school listened to Deep Purple, crap like that," Mike D says. "When you see that shit it doesn't make you want to go out and play it." Yauch, Horvitz and Diamond opted for the (then) unpopular alternative, dying their hair orange or shaving it off, checking out the Stimulators and Sham 69 at New York clubs, and eventually starting their own hardcore squads.
"Everyone we knew was in a band," Mike D says. "That's what was cool about punk." The original Beastie Boys comprised Yauch, Diamond and two more; Horowitz's band, The Young & The Useless, would open shows. Eventually, the combos merged. After releasing the 7-inch Polly Wog Stew EP on the Rat Cage label in 1982, lured by a Gotham rap subculture that seemed to parallel punk in the do-it-yourself-music department, the Beasties decided to expand their horizons.
"We went into the studio and recorded 10 songs, and we did the song 'Cookie Puss' as a joke," MCA remembers. "We were making fun of Malcolm McLaren and the whole downtown art scene that was exploiting hip-hop." A poor mix caused eight tunes to be shelved, but "Cookie Puss" came out as a 12-inch single, backed with a rasta-toasting/ Musical Youth parody called "Beastie Revolution." The A-side was a seemingly sexist and racist stylus-scratch rendering of a pornographic phone call to an ice cream sandwich store, and it turned out to be 1983's funniest novelty record. Rick Rubin, a club jockey whose band, Hose, did grunge-metal versions of Ohio Players and Rick James numbers, heard the disc and liked it. Beastie gigs gradually evolved from "a lot of new wave Wild-Style Burner Style music with the turntable next to the drum riser" (sez MCA) to all-the-way-live rap, and Rubin produced 1985s awesome "Rock Hard"/"Party's Gettin' Rough"/"Beastie Groove" EP. The record kidnapped sections outright from AC/DC's "Back in Black" and Zep's "Black Dog." The Beasties chanted, "I'm a man who needs no introduction/Got a big tool of reproduction."
Furthering their ironman-funk synthesis on the soundtrack from the video "She's On It" single, and helped along by a distribution deal Rubin's Def Jam Records had established with CBS, the trio burst onto MTV in late '85. A year later, after a summer of opening for the suddenly huge Rubin-produced Run D.M.C., the Beasties were bona fide stars; within six weeks of its release, Licensed To Ill had already sold over a million copies, and was kicking its way up to the Top 20. If you go to high school or live in a college dorm, you most likely know the thing forwards and backwards by now. Licensed To Ill has pushed rap into the whitest corridors of America's heartland, and (along with D.M.C., Metallica and the Rubin-produced Slayer) had made the future safe for dangerous teenage music, a form that seemed to have died. CBS, concentrating on Bruce S. and Michael J., has an unexpected blockbuster on its hands.
And the Beastie Boys are playing their fifteen minutes of fame to the hilt. "Five years from now I might be selling used cars on the lot," MCA says. "I really don't give a f---, 'cause I'm having so much fun now..."
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