The numbers on Beastie Boys Book feel like a farce. How can this seemingly endless collection of stories, art, playlists, interviews, outsider opinions, liner notes and what feels like everything in between clock in at under 600 pages? The damn thing is thicker than the King James Bible in a Super 8 Motel nightstand and probably twice as heavy. Oh, and how the hell is it only $50? This is the streaming era, where well-endowed analog enthusiasts will pay buku dollars for intricately designed special collector’s editions of vinyl anything. Walking out of a store with this thing for the price of a Friday night bar tab is hilariously criminal. But maybe that’s the point.
From its inception, the Beastie Boys never felt like an act fans were supposed to wring their hands over, and the group’s mantra seemed to always revolve around having fun with each other at almost any expense. The book feels similar at times, but it ends up being something completely different. Surviving members Michael Diamond (Mike D) and Adam Horovitz (Ad-Rock) worked on this memoir over the course of four years, and the pair seems to have crammed nearly everything about Beastie Boys’ nearly 40-year career inside. Even Kate Schellenbach makes an appearance.
The 52-year-old drummer for New York rock band Luscious Jackson was a founding member of the Beasties who played in one of Mike D’s pre-Beasties bands, Young Aborigines. In a chapter called “Become What You Hate,” Ad-Rock details how the group’s circle of friends was made up of boys and girls with a mutual respect for each other and a hate for the stereotypical behavior of sell-out rock stars and frat-house types.
“We thought it was so ridiculous, we made fun of it,” he wrote before explaining how the group fell into the trappings of those stereotypes. Schellenbach got kicked out of the band because she didn’t fit into the Beasties’ tough-rapper-guy identity. It was embarrassing to let friends down like that, but Ad-Rock thought Kate may have eventually quit the band on account of them acting like creeps anyway.
“How fucked-up is that!?!,” he wrote “It was just shitty the way it happened. And I am so sorry about it. Friends don't do shit like that.”
Similar admissions and wholehearted apologies come out of nowhere as you flip through Beastie Boys Book, and they’re the best parts of this one-of-a-kind unorthodox catalog of thoughts and artifacts from one of pop culture’s most interesting, sometimes endearing, bands. Even the deepest fans will learn something new within the pages of each impeccably skinny chapter; the simple, inside back cover is a map that pinpoints all of the apartments, studios, clubs, bars, restaurants, schools and landmarks from the Boys’ lives. The playlists and track details are wormholes that might take years to fully explore.
Some of the stories in first-person accounts from friends of the band seem incredulous in their absurdity; just read the busted-up pseudo-oral history of “Cooky Puss” written by Pulitzer-winning author Colson Whitehead. The band even details the low points, like its fallout with producer Rick Rubin, and not once during the journey are you allowed to forget about the late Adam Yauch (aka MCA), who died in 2012, at age 47, after battling cancer.
Yauch, by Ad-Rock and Mike D’s accounts, was the only Beastie Boy really worth his salt. From the opening pages to the very end of the book, tales about Yauch’s effortless wisdom and insatiable thirst for more knowledge, love and understanding are interwoven within the countless instances of silliness, drama and candor displayed by the Boys and everyone who knew them. MCA’s section of Beastie Boys Book’s impressive index takes up almost an entire page on its own, and you definitely get the feeling that his bandmates might’ve found answers to a lot of the questions they unearth and attempt to explore if he were still around.
In a chapter called “The Last Gig,” Horovitz explained how nonchalant the day of the Beastie Boys’ 2009 Bonnaroo set was. In the moments before the performance, he could hear Al Green wrapping his set somewhere off in the distance. It was comforting to hear the singer’s voice wafting over as they readied to go under the lights.
“Just like how it was in high school. In my bedroom waiting for my friends to come cover,” Horovitz wrote. But that moment from his youth was such a long distance away. Horovitz doesn’t describe the path to that split-second in time as a full circle; the road to get where you’re going is almost always misshapen, according to him. He thought of Schellenbach and every other friend who’d been in the Beasties circle.
He, Yauch and Mike D were still together, about to headline one of the largest festivals in the world and make another album. There was no way to tell — the same as it is for anyone ever affected by a cancer diagnosis — that it would be the last time they would all stand on a stage together like that. Horovitz, in fact, can’t even fully detail the months after the release of the band’s unintentional last album, 2009’s Hot Sauce Committee Part Two. The Beastie Boys — in spite of everything that could’ve derailed the band — wasn’t breaking up because of creative differences or solo projects; it was actually on a creative high that felt like 1992 all over again.
“This was our last record because Adam got cancer and died. If that hadn’t happened, we would probably be making a new record as you read this. Sadly, it didn’t turn out that way. Sadly. Sadly,” Horovitz put it, bluntly.
“Too fucking sad to write about.”
He and Mike D did try to write about it, however, and the results are better and more transparent than anything else we’ll probably ever read about Beastie Boys. There’s definitely some buffoonery in there, but the whole of it is tragically good, too.
This article appears in Dec 13-20, 2018.