Title: To Live And Get High In LA
Source: Select
Date: July 1994
Author: Adam Higginbotham]

From cripple-dissing geeks to yogis of nerd cool… from the taco stand to the studio with en suite basketball… and around their Los Angeles empire of slob suavity in a herbal haze… thank God for The Beastie Boys.

1.25pm Farmers Market Mall car park, Los Angeles Two ten-year-old boys amble across the carpark in the wan LA sunlight. Caps pulled down over their eyes, absorbed in conversation, they are unaware of the glossy black bulk of the Volvo estate idling quietly towards them. Behind its darkened windows sits Michael Diamond; 28-year-old entrepreneur, husband, owner of two dogs and a swimming pool, resident of Silverlake, California. He hunkers down over the steering wheel and turns to the unshaven man in the passenger seat. He narrows his eyes. “You see those kids over there?” he whispers. To his right, there is a barely perceptible nod. “Cops. Both of ‘em. You can smell it.” He waggles his finger in the direction of a passing shopper, only inches from the car. “See this guy here? He’s a cop.” He cranes his head through the window. “Good day officer.” The character in the back seat wearing the dark glasses snickers unnervingly. Mike D stamps on the accelerator and the heavy product of decades of safety-conscious Scandinavian automotive know-how leaps across the tarmac at two blue-rinsed out-of-towners wobbling across the road in front of us. “See those two women?” he hisses. Cops? “Damn right.” Together, the three men cackle with demented laughter. MCA gazes distantly out of the window. Ad-Rock prepares to roll another joint. So much for the respectable old age of the Beastie Boys

Spending a day in Los Angeles with the Beastie Boys as tour-guides is not quite the experience you might expect. For a start, it may be seven years since they last took to the stage as the shrilly howling cripple-dissing (allegedly, but still wrongly) trio of dorks of ‘Licensed To Ill’ infamy. They may have another inspired collision of hip-hop and thrash-punk out in the form of the ‘Ill Communication’ LP. MCA (Adam Yauch) might be a practising Buddhist, Mike D and Ad-Rock (Adam Horowitz) might both be happily married, but they’re far from responsible adults. Mike D and Ad-Rock in particular exhibit an odd blend of maturity and recklessness. Constantly, almost painfully polite, they are equally relentlessly stoned. So conversation, like driving, is punctured by interminable and inexplicable diversions and digressions. Touring LA with them is complicated further by the fact that, sadly, they spend almost all their time in their studio and know almost nothing about the place.

2pm Kiddyland, Los Angeles A bafflingly unnecessary ten-minute drive from Farmers Market. It’s a plastic fiasco of electric pinks and pastel blues, a pleasure palace for the under-fives with a child-sized dining area where the chairs and tables are fashion from wild-eyed anthropomorphic psychedelic tree trunks. It is what the entire planet would look like if The Banana Splits had ever achieved world domination. Ad-Rock leads us in. “They’ve got Skee Ball!” he crows as he changes his money into tokens. We look around. The regulars eye us suspiciously. We are the only customers here old enough to recognise Santa Claus as a mythical figure. Skee Ball proves to be a kind of scaled-up hands-on pinball which calls upon the enthusiastic Beasties to throw rubber balls into a selection of numbered holes. It is impossible to tell if anyone is any good at it.

In 1987, the Beastie Boys completed nine solid months of touring. They were sick to death of spraying beer at people. They were sick to death of women in cages. They were sick to death of one another. In short, they were sick to death of being the Beastie Boys. On their return to New York, Def Jam’s joint-head Russell Simmons told them to get into the studio and make a second album. “That,” says Mike D succinctly, “was a really terrible idea.”

They refused point blank. For their part, Def Jam suggested that if their biggest cash cows didn’t start recording immediately, they would be in breach of contract and wouldn’t get any of the royalties from the four million-ish sales of ‘Licensed To Ill’. The Beasties, it seems, felt that if they were in breach of contract for that, they might as well go the whole hog. They left the label, went to Los Angeles and moved into a huge house together in the Hollywood Hills. They secured a new deal with Capitol Records, and began living in the manner they felt appropriate for denizens of Hollywood. Falling on the wardrobes full of the previous tenants’ ‘70s vintage womens clothing, the Beasties embraced their new-found lifestyle dressed in flared, white polyester suits and platform shoes. “I don’t want to sound, like, weird or anything,” drawls Mike hazily. “But to me that was all a fairly beautiful thing. All of a sudden we turn around and move out here, and we’re all together in this total Dolomite fantasy world (Dolomite being a blaxploitation movie spoof). We just did not give a fuck. We just made the record we wanted to make.” Ah, yes. The record. Divorced from Def Jam, and metal-fixated producer Rick Rubin, they hooked up with The Dust Brothers (not the British ones, but the US hip hop trail-blazers who produced Tone Loc and Young MC’s best work) and started a second LP, ‘Paul’s Boutique’. “For the first time, we had complete creative and financial freedom. When we made ‘Licensed To Ill’, we’d be like going into this bummy studio at two in the morning. And then all of a sudden we were here, going into these fancy studios where you pay like $15,000 a day. And we’d just go in there and play ping-pong. Seriously. We’d play ping-pong, we’d order up air-hockey tables.” “Pool tables,” adds Ad-Rock distantly. “We’d get pool tables. We were retarded.” “We were,” reiterates Mike in amazement, “completely retarded. I mean, it was really ridiculous… (He pauses, the memories of past excesses returning) And in a lot of ways, a lot of fun. We had people delivering all this stuff to the studio.” Horowitz is suddenly awake, wildly animated. Shouting, in fact. “I think it’s great! I think that’s the best shit. And then with the artwork on the album and everything, we pushed them to the limit. We made them do a four-way-fold-out-vinyl, colour everything. We just pushed them to the absolute limit you could possibly push a record label. And all of this with them having the expectation that they were going to sell a lot of records!” Mike (shouting down Ad-Rock): “And then, and then - the best fuckin’ part, after we’d spent all this money playing ping-pong, the record did not even sell anything!” Indeed it didn’t. The album that surfaced two years after the Beasties arrived in LA was a commercial disaster. Pundits’ praise couldn’t prevent ‘Paul’s Boutique’, an incredible fiesta of found sounds, sketches, multi-layered samples and, amusingly, miked-up ping-pong tables, from disappearing almost without a trace. The suburban kids who’d invested so heavily in ‘Licensed To Ill’ simply weren’t interested in the new, clever Beasties.

4.35pm Sunset Boulevard Ad-Rock demands we make our way to Del Taco. No other drive-thru emporium of low-rent Mexican food will do. We take a huge, looping detour until, finally, we secure two chicken burritos and a chocolate shake. “Mmm,” he says appreciatively, as Mike’s car rolls smoothly towards another mysterious location. “Want some?” Chicken Burrito, you say? OK. Adam passes the lukewarm, paper-wrapped tube. He watches carefully as you take a bite. “Now,” he says, behind his shades adopting an ecstatic expression and gazing heavenward like the wine women on Food And Drink, “wait a moment. Wait a moment…savour the taste.” It is disgusting. “Some people,” he explains patiently, “get up, go to work, go out, get something to eat, then get fucked up. I get up, get something to eat, get fucked up, go into the studio, do some work. It’s…it’s just different. You know what I mean?” He spends a while considering this statement. “Different. You know? I have a good time, though.”

Capitol, sadly, were not prepared for the abject failure of ‘Paul’s Boutique’. The largesse inspired by signing what they believed to be America’s hottest rap property had not ended at furnishing the band with any indoor games they felt were necessary to the recording of the LP. Not at all. This was America. So they staged a launch party on the record company’s landmark LA offices, replete with a Dixieland jazz band and sky-writing planes leaving goodwill messages in the ether. The Beasties also insisted that the company place advertising billboards in locations of their twisted choice and, best of all, that they should build a special mast on the roof of the building from which to fly - but of course - a 30-foot Beastie Boys flag. “People,” says Mike incredulously, “just don’t understand how fucking beautiful something like that is. They just don’t understand…” Capitol certainly didn’t. When the album stiffed, the Beasties found that they had few friends at their record company. The bloke who’d signed them went on holiday the week before the release and then decided not to come back. The company halted any further expenditure on promoting the record. Ad-Rock: “They had two videos and they wouldn’t put them out. Finally, after a long time we got a meeting with the president guy and we’re saying, Come on, man give us a break, we did a lot of work on this. He said, Well, you know guys, there’s so much work on at the moment, we’ve got a new Donny Osmond record coming out. Next time.” And what did “next time” mean? “That’s what we said, What does next time mean? He just said, Well, you know…next time.”

12.35am G-Son Studios, Atwater Village LA The sound of an ancient Spoonie G 12-inch pounds out from the depths of the building, home to the Beastie Boys recording studios, and the offices of their Grand Royal label and affiliated magazine. Wandering past the wraparound mural representing ‘Planet Herb’, a moonscape where the sole form of vegetation is huge marijuana bushes, you can hear the squelch of sneakers and the bounce of a ball on wood. Once inside the studio live room, you understand why. One half of the studio is a stage, furnished with instruments, framed on either side by two giant skate ramps. The other half of the room is a fully-fitted basketball court. The Beastie Boys are in the middle of a game.

In the wake of the ‘Paul’s Boutique’ farrago, the Beastie Boys had, corporately at least, become such thoroughgoing unpersons that no one ever really expected to see them again. The Beasties themselves had long since given up caring. They withdrew to regroup, built their own studio, set about executing another startling volte-face. In 1989 they began recording what became ‘Check Your Head.’ Ad-Rock explains that it involved “playing a lot of basketball”. Using the live instruments they’d played when they used to be in hardcore punk bands, they started again from scratch. They were, by their own admission, unspeakably bad. They started off with a version of Bob Marley’s ‘Mr Brown’ (“Terrible,” snaps MCA) and things hardly got any better from there on in. They recorded some 400 hours worth of material. The DAT’s are still racked up on the studio wall. Underneath them is a set of 5 C90’s, “Best Of Rehearsal” written on the spines in magic marker’ “These are the Best Of, volumes five, four, three, two, one,” says Mike, tapping the rack. “Maybe one track out of every ten is halfway decent. Most of the shit on the Best Ofs sucks.” But after two years’ recording, they took a double album of smoky funk jams, fuzzbox raps and punk thrashes to Capitol, with its hilariously anti-commercial sleeve: little more than a black and white photograph and some scrawled handwriting. “You should see the original cover we wanted to use,” smirks Ad-Rock, ferreting through a pile of records and producing the sleeve with a flourish. It’s a battered LP of cheesy coctailmusic credited to one Eddie Canto. Canto’s name has been crudely scratched out and the words “BEASTIE BOYS” written over the top. Eddie himself sits behind a piano, sporting a tuxedo and a lurid ruffled shirt. Beneath him is scrawled “CHECK YOU HEAD”. And on Eddie’s forehead? A large tick, obviously. For some reason, Capitol didn’t go for this. But the rest of the LP went to the Beasties plan. “We really didn’t give a shit,” says Mike, “but it was quite a good time. There really wasn’t much expected of us. The record company was…kind of conciliatory. Like, Oh, ‘Check your Head’? Sure, whatever you want! It was your last wish. ‘Check Your Head’ was going to be our last cigarette.” It was, therefore, a shock when it turned into a tearaway success and made the Beasties a hit on MTV, US college radio and rehabilitated them as an “alternative” act. The two years that have passed since ‘Check Your Head’ have seen them endorsed by Beavis And Butthead and bestowed with Lollapalooza status. But Mike D, for one, is not a little disappointed by their return from the cult outlands where they could do what they wanted, happy that only a handful of people would care. “Now the president of the company actually listens to Beastie Boys records”, he says. “Now people actually have expectations. Just when we thought we had it perfect…”

8.am Somewhere in downtown LA The Beastie Boys are filming the video for the forthcoming single, ‘Sabotage’. Themed around the title sequence of a senselessly violent mock 70s cop show, it stars ‘Vic Colfire as Bobby “The Rookie”, Nath Wind as Cochise and Fred Kelly as Bunny.’ It also involves Adam Yauch doing all his own car stunts. As the car again mounts the pavement at speed, tires squealing, hubcaps clattering off, a women comes out of her apartment. She demands to know what’s going on. Yauch, clad in an ill-fitting sharkskin suit, aviator shades and a preposterous glossy bowl-cut wig, gets out of the car. “Alright!” he shouts, “Just patrolling the neighbourhood’ ma’am! Everything’s OK!” The woman goes back into her house, apparently satisfied. Yauch guns the car into life again.