Boys Keep Swinging

I’M TIRED, wired and I smell bad. The occasion is The Big Day Out, the location is backstage at the Castlegar Sports grounds in Galway. I’m here to interview The Beastie Boys, still reeling from the shock of having my deodorant confiscated by security (“No aerosols,” the gatekeeper grinned, tossing the offending can in a rapidly-filling sack). Hello nasty, indeed.

With no marquee for liggers, there’s a famine of passes and the backstage area’s harder to penetrate than a week-old corpse. However, the few who do manage gain access to the fabled all-areas are remarkably free to jostle with the Jarvises, Shirleys and, er, BP Fallons of this world. Nice work if you can get it, even if you are anxiously awaiting a summons from the three free kings of New York.

Several hours earlier, the Beastie Boys had slayed ’em in the trenches, impervious to insistent Connacht drizzle. Contrary to the opinion of The Irish Times reviewer – who, if his piece the following day was anything to go by, must have attended a different gig to the rest of us – it was The Beasties’ show in all but name.

Coming onstage after a brief intro-segment from Mixmaster Mike, the collective loped into ‘Sure Shot’ and swiftly asserted themselves as one of the few bands under 40 who can justifiably pass themselves off as a festival act. A 360-degree scan of the field confirmed this: the hip-hoppers bobbed for ‘Body Movin’, the hardnuts did the moshed potato down the front during ‘Tough Guy’, ‘Summer Violence’ and ‘Heart Attack Man’, while the fried acid freaks at the back got a sizeable hit off the numerous 6/8 time prog-jazz workouts (replete with the cheesiest voicebox solos since Frampton Comes Alive). An inflammatory ‘Sabotage’, featuring Money Mark knocking seven shades of shit out of his keyboards, put the seal on it. Game, set and match to the daring young men in the tricoloured boiler suits.

Now, at nine in the evening, as Pulp serenade the sodden multitudes outside with ‘A Little Soul’, I’m sitting with Mike Diamond, Adam Horovitz (Ad-Rock to his fiends), and Adam “MCA” Yauch, in their makeshift dressing-room. In the last six hours the band have touched down at Galway Airport, journeyed to the site, gotten into character and costume, played a shit-hot set, had dinner, and completed most of their press duties. They’re leaving for Scotland in half an hour.

You’ll understand, then, if we consider this interview a snapshot encounter of a band on the run, rather than an in-depth probe into the nature of the Beasties. As Lou Reed once growled, there is no time.

Having said that, these three Nasty boys are the essence of grace under pressure. Mike D nurses the Dictaphone in order to facilitate maximum pick-up, Adam retrieves my notes every time I drop them (“Do you know Jerry Lewis tapes all his own interviews in case he’s misquoted?”), and a remark about the Tubeway Army riff on ‘Super Disco Breakin’ earns me a pint of Guinness courtesy of Ad-Rock. They’re making it easy on me (no elaborate routines about giant robots and space-travelling papooses), maybe due to fatigue, maybe ’cos they’re just good eggs.

Ad-Rock however, is an imp, given to weird attacks of face-pulling and gentle bouts of piss-taking. Make no mistake, though, for all their rap-brat credentials, the trio are no Green Day. For a start they’re drop-deadpan funny, and markedly more at home discussing studio wedges rather than student wedgies.

But then, this is a band that have consistently broken new ground in rap and hip-hop over the last ten years, mixing it with organic jazz, risky disco, garage-punk, Brazilian bossa-nova music and synthesised sonic mayhem. The new album Hello Nasty is the fifth in a virtually unbroken run of Grand Royal flushes.

It’s also a phantasmagoric yardsale of the coolest cast-off sounds – disembodied vocoders, retro-sexual blaxploitation textures, and the kind of piped music one might hear in those tiny Japanese hotel-holes. The last few years have seen the Beasties mutate into the ideal house band in Tarantino-land, except they probably wouldn’t tolerate the director’s filthy mouth.

Much of the new album, most markedly tracks like ‘Super Disco Breakin’ and ‘Intergalactic’, finds the Boyos tapping into an early ’80s cultural exchange vibe, the point off the map where New York cut-and-pasters like Afrika Bambaataa first hit on European electro acts like Kraftwerk and PiL for inspiration.

“That was kind of an amazing time for us just to be growing up in New York,” Mike D affirms, remarkably sotto-voce for such a strident rhymer. “Like that whole time when we’d go see bands like The Slits or The Gang Of Four who were coming over and playing, and then also hip-hop had started to come downtown. Next you’d see Funky Four Plus One More, and then you’d have, like you said, Afrika Bambaataa and he’d be DJ-ing, playing Kraftwerk. He’d also play ‘Mickey’ by Toni Basil – he would cut that beat up for like, ten minutes at The Roxy. It was insane.”

One of the subtler sources on the album is old Brit synth-pop, riffs pilfered from the likes of Gary Numan and early Human League (‘And Me’). Between this and the eyelinered elements on the Smashing Pumpkins’ Adore album, it would seem that the A Flock Of Seagulls revival is a foregone conclusion.

“It actually said in a magazine that we had sampled ‘Are Friends Electric’,” Ad Rock snorts. “I like Gary Numan and Tubeway Army a lot, but we didn’t sample it. But that song ‘Films’ and the first two or three of his records were really good.”

On present form, the Beastie Boys would appear to be, like Beck, on a mission to rehabilitate arcane sounds and styles, to beg, steal and borrow elements from the unlikeliest genres and make them cool again, hence the Spanish fly-traps that riddle the group’s live set – not to mention the downright bizarre Latin balladeer intro to ‘Remote Control’ on the new album.

“I think maybe when I was younger it might’ve sounded silly to me too,” Adam muses, “but I dunno, some time about ’89 I guess, I started listening to that stuff in a much more serious way. A lot of the bossa nova, like, if you listen to Georgie Benn or people like that, it’s really serious music. It’s pretty amazing how it comes across, because it’s so calm, but it’s got so much emotion, it’s so real.”

“The connection to Africa is so tight”, Mike D adds, “It’s not like our music, based on the western trap-kit, the military marching-style drums. Brazil is completely from the other side, based on tribal percussion.” On that subject, one of the more intriguing collaborations on the new records is ‘Dr. Lee, PhD’, featuring original voodoo chile Lee “Scratch” Perry, recorded on Hallowe’en night in Sean Lennon’s loft.

“He’s definitely got some intense vibes about him,” Adam nods, “Mario (Caldato Jr., Hello Nasty co-producer) didn’t want to step on his toes at all. Mario’s a huge fan of his, he’s probably got every record he’s done and knows everything inside out, and he was sincere with him, he said, ‘I really like the way you play percussion on the records.’

“So Lee Perry just sat up, walked across the room and grabbed a handful of percussion – there was this big table with a whole bunch of rattles and shakers on it – and he sat down in front of the mike and said, ‘Start the music!’ He started picking things up and banging ’em and breaking stuff . . . like, whack!”

Ad-Rock, after several minutes of expressing himself through a rather amusing, if off-putting series of simian grimaces (great in the flesh but they don’t translate to tape so well), finally enters the discussion.

“If you listen to a couple of those old records that he made, he’s got shakers and clavvies and shit on a couple of songs,” the rapper points out, “but then he must’ve just got bored with that and just turned the faucet on in some songs, using the water as percussion.”

“I was reading that on one song that he just went out and miked a tree out in front of the place,” Adam recounts. “He’s got a four-track, and on the four different tracks it’s like: Bass, Drums, Vocals and Tree! (laughs).”

Hello Nasty is equally prone to environmental extraneousness. Check out arch-scratcher Mixmaster Mike’s phone message to sellotaped onto the intro of ‘Three MCs and One DJ’: “Hey, yo, Adam, whassup? This is Mixmaster Mike calling from Sacramento. I’ve been wanting to hook up with you maybe on some tracks, I got some shit right here . . . (cue insane scratching noises). I hooked my turntable to a wah-wah pedal. It’s called ‘the tweak-scratch’!”

“That was one of like, a series of messages that he had left,” Adam explains. “I had met him somewhere like Rocksteady Park, and gave him my phone number and he kept leaving messages, and that one was so cool that I came in the studio and taped it.”

The chief difference between the synthetic patchwork of Hello Nasty and its equally cool predecessor Ill Communication, is that there was a hell of a lot of real-time playing on that 1994 album, making it as sloppy and swinging as a rap transcription of Exile On Main Street. It was a sprawling celebration of reefer madness in which the Boys got high on old-school funk, flute loops and bull-fiddled bottom end – tracks like ‘Sabrosa’ and ‘Eugene’s Lament’ illustrated that these guys could now play the fuck out of some pretty tricky forms.

The plain people and the pundits alike took the album for a triumph, and the Beastie Boys became unofficially the coolest men on earth, dressing X-large (when not parodying ’70s cop chic in the Spike Jonze video for ‘Sabotage’) and talking hard. But while they made it look easy, those last two albums were born out of decidedly ad-hoc, if not anarchic environments.

We came out of being a punk band,” Adam reasons. “We came out of doing everything with our friends, like playing hardcore, so if we were making artwork for a record, we’d go to a friend who had some way of laying it out, or we’d get a friend of ours to engineer – that’s the way we’ve done it all through the years, so it’d be pretty weird at this point if we all of a sudden turned around and called up some huge producer.”

“I also like the way things aren’t really properly written before we go to the studio,” Mike D continues. “It all comes together out of the three of us actually being together somewhere. For us that’s better than trying to recreate a moment, it’s just like a lot of ongoing moments, and then when we’ve enough decent ones, the record’s finished.”

Speaking of that punk background, Mike D was a 13-year old orange-haired runt when he first met Adam at a Black Flag gig in a New York club called Tier Three (Ad-Rock would come on the scene later, at a Funky Four Plus One More show at Rocklands, and they would first play as a group at Yauch’s 15th birthday party). Given that Henry Rollins is a big jazz buff, do they also feel a gut connection between hardcore and jazz, America’s smelliest and greatest artforms?

“Yeah, I think you’re onto something,” Mike D considers. “I’m not sure what, but . . . it’s a good theory, I like it. It’s probably just the extremity, like Ornette Coleman on ‘Shape Of Things To Come’ or something. That was a pretty punk rock thing at the time.”

It’s hard to credit that these three men are the snotty young punks who authored Licensed To Ill (eight million and still selling) 12 years ago, the first rap album ever to top the US charts. When the B-boys first burst on the scene there was no Snoop, no Ice-T, no Wu-Tang Clan, no NWA, just a handful of precursors like Grandmaster Flash, Run DMC, and the Sugarhill Gang (sampled on the new record). Even now in 1998, Puff Daddy’s alliance with Jimmy Page on their reworking of ‘Kashmir’ for the Godzilla soundtrack recalls Rick Rubin’s original Beasties blueprint of rap attitude married to Led Zep and AC/DC riffs.

However at the height of the tabloid hysteria that greeted the Beastie Boys arrival in Britain, many critics were adamant that the band wouldn’t last the year. But then, even the smartest pundit couldn’t have reckoned on the quantum leap that was their second album, the Californian cheapshot disco of Paul’s Boutique, which would become a cult record and a fan’s favourite. Rolling Stone called it “the Pet Sounds of hip-hop”. It sold diddley-squat. If the band were perturbed at the time, it makes no odds, much less sense, to them now.

“The groove changes on you, that’s all,” Ad Rock says simply.

Paul’s Boutique was the trio’s first collaboration with the Dust Brothers, better known of late for their work with The Rolling Stones, Hanson, and of course, on Beck’s Odelay album, which many contend is the ultimate gene-splicing companion to the Beasties fractured racket. The parallels don’t end there, however: Beck’s father was a renowned string arranger for the Asylum label in the ”70s, and his maternal grandfather was a sculptor. The Beastie Boys come from a similarly liberal, if rather more well-off background (Ad-Rock is the son of dramatist Israel Horowitz). But how did the parents react to reports of their offspring touring the UK in 1986 with giant dicks and caged girls, allegedly beating on crippled kids?

“I think, to be honest, your parents know you a little bit better than, like, the media version might portray you,” Mike D observes. “I remember at that time, it was kinda funny to my Mom. She was definitely compassionate for me at times, but for the most part it was funny to her because she actually knew all three of us.”

“When that tabloid press hit, they called up my Mom, ’cos my parents were listed in the phone book,” Adam recalls, “and I think that was the first she heard of it, getting calls from journalists saying, ‘What do you think of the fact that your son beat up some crippled children?’ And my Mom was just like, ‘He wouldn’t do that, my kid, I don’t know what you’re talking about.’”

“The British press was like a whole different animal that we had no idea about,” Mike D continues. “I think we’ve learned pretty quick, that it’s a different thing than anywhere else in the world: sensationalism is normal.”

If few could have foreseen that the baseball-capped VW insignia-toting brats of ‘No Sleep Til Brooklyn’ would become such cultured vultures, fewer still would have counted on them reviving rock’s conscience at the end of the century. Several years ago, while trekking in the Himalayas, Adam Yauch encountered a group of Tibetan refugees and heard first hand tales of persecution, imprisonment and torture at the hands of the Chinese authorities. So impressed was Yauch (now a Buddhist) by these people’s non-violent resistance to the brutal annihilation of their culture, and so disgusted was he by America’s trade links with China, that he decided to do something about it.

This year saw the second massive annual Tibetan Freedom concert, an event organised with the intention of raising awareness of the ongoing Tibetan plight. The concert has hosted artists such as Radiohead, Pulp, U2, Sonic Youth, and of course, the Beasties themselves. Does Adam believe that such big names, not to mention movies like Seven Years In Tibet, might dilute or distract from the gravity of the situation?

“I think it can go either way,” he considers. “But it’s important, because that’s a form of information that gets out to a whole wider audience. If they didn’t have Brad Pitt in a Hollywood movie, then millions of people would never find out what’s going on in Tibet, so it’s really good. I mean, it’s dangerous if people don’t realise how important it is, or really don’t get the facts of exactly what’s going on there.

“But I think the main thing about the Tibet struggle is that, since it’s based on non-violence, we can learn a tremendous amount about it. That’s one of the main reasons that I’ve been so focussed on it, because Tibet really represents a non-violent resolution of conflict. It’s a lesson that we all desperately need. If the Tibetan situation resolves in a positive way, I think it’s gonna have a positive affect on the entire world.

“This is something that’s really significant to the entire planet, especially now as humanity’s evolving into this one global community. If that succeeds, then it’s gonna bring non-violent resolution to the problems in Ireland and everywhere else in the world, I think it’s gonna set an example.”

Earlier in the day, Adam and band, wearing green, white and orange in the middle of the marching season, dedicated ‘Something’s Got To Give’ to the Dalai Lama, Martin Luther King, Ghandi, and all adherents to non-violent resistance. Interestingly, they were the only band of the day to make even an oblique reference to the Northern situation. The timeliness of the gesture would be rammed home the following morning, when reports of the sectarian murder of Richard, Mark and Jason Quinn began to filter through.

“I was definitely thinking about what’s going on here,” Adam reflects, “but it’s strange ’cos I feel like, ‘Who am I to talk about it out here but this New Yorker?’ First of all, I don’t know enough about the details and I’d just put my foot in my mouth. But to put it in a way that’s important to us, dedicating a song to non-violent resolutions, I dunno, I just thought that was a good way to put it out there.”

As the band make ready to leave the festival site, I try one last question: has it been hard for them to stay tight throughout 12 years of getting rich, ripped off, married, damned and praised?

“Yes, it’s been very difficult,” Ad Rock says, poker-faced. “I’d like them to leave the room so I can tell you as candidly as I can.”

Fuck it, that’s another day’s work.

• Hello Nasty is available now on Capitol/Grand Royal Records.