Michel Delsol/Hulton Archive/Getty Imagesīeastie Boys became tour mates with the Queen of Pop after her manager contacted Def Jam Records looking for Run-D.M.C. Beastie Boys opened for Madonna during 1985's 'The Virgin Tour.'īeastie Boys at the West 42nd Street subway station in Times Square in 1986. (A single featuring “I’m Down” and “ Drum Machine,” a track credited to “MCA & Burzootie,” was unofficially released in 2007.) 6. (More on this later.) But during the same period, they recorded the song “I’m Down,” which featured a Beatles sample, but given Michael Jackson’s ownership of the Fab Four’s catalog, they were similarly rebuffed. “Rock Hard” marked the first-but certainly not the last-time Beastie Boys ran into trouble with sampling. Beastie Boys got into trouble on more than one occasion with their music sampling. Decades later, the Beasties appealed directly to Angus Young for the rights to sample the song to add to their 1999 compilation The Sounds Of Science, but Young again refused.

In addition to dropping Schellenbach as their drummer-an insensitive decision the band later regretted-the guys yielded to Rubin’s expertise as a producer with just one other single (T La Rock’s “It’s Yours”) under his belt.įor “Rock Hard,” Rubin sampled AC/DC’s “Back in Black,” which was subsequently withdrawn because they hadn’t sought permission. There’s a good chance you’ve never heard 'Rock Hard,' Beastie Boys’s first single as a full-fledged rap group.Īfter hiring NYU student and future Def Jam Records co-founder Rick Rubin as their DJ-based purely on his dorm room speaker set-up, which included a bubble machine-Beastie Boys began recording rap music in earnest, inspired by early genre luminaries like the Funky 4 + 1. A lawyer successfully sued the airline for $40,000, which was enough for the band to rent an apartment together in Manhattan's Chinatown, which they used as both living and recording space. “Beastie Revolution” the B-side of 'Cooky Puss,' earned Beastie Boys their first real income as a group when British Airways sampled the song in a television ad without the band's permission.

A lawsuit earned Beastie Boys their first real money as musicians. The single became an underground hit in New York City clubs, earning them minor renown and establishing a path incorporating hip-hop into their sets. Released in 1983, “Cooky Puss” marked the first appearance of Adam Horovitz on a Beastie Boys recording. Beastie Boys’s first hip-hop single was basically a prank call set to music. (They subsequently admitted that the acronym was invented after coming up with the name.) It also was immediately inaccurate, since the founding members included Adam Yauch, Michael Diamond, John Berry, and their female drummer Kate Schellenbach. The name stood for “Boys Entering Anarchistic States Towards Inner Excellence,” which made no sense with a second “Boys” tacked on at the end. Beastie Boys originally wasn’t just a name, it was an acronym.īeastie Boys formed in New York City in 1981 as a hardcore punk band. Between those two projects, they offered some intimate and unprecedented insights into the journey the three of them went on to become one of the most important and influential hip-hop bands in the history of the genre. (“Intergalactic” will always and forever leave a smoldering crater on any dance floor.) But after disbanding in 2012 following the untimely death of Adam 'MCA' Yauch from parotid cancer, remaining members Adam 'Ad-Rock' Horovitz and Michael 'Mike D' Diamond have spent the past few years reflecting on their experiences as a group-first with the exceptional Beastie Boys Book, and then with the Spike Jonze-directed Beastie Boys Story, a kinda-sorta live recitation/performance of key moments from their career. Of course, they also had bars and absolute bangers. By the time mom and dad started fretting over the trio’s infrequent, and innocuous, f-bombs, I had already become a diehard fan, infected (like so many others) by their uniquely intoxicating combination of rap, funk, and punk that wasn’t just fun and exciting to listen to but self-referential, self-reflective, and actively inspiring. I wasn’t a huge fan of Licensed To Ill (1986) as a kid and missed the Paul’s Boutique (1989) heyday by just a few years, so my first strong memory of them was navigating Check Your Head while my parents succumbed to Parental Advisory paranoia and confiscated the CD to “protect me” from the band's corrupting influence. When a group has been around as long as Beastie Boys-particularly a band that has made such an indelible impact on popular music-every person’s connection to them is likely to be very different, and very specific.

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