By Aidin Vaziri
There's a gunshot in the dark, a screeching of tires and a set of flashing red and blue lights in hot pursuit. This is Kojak's terrain, rocketing through the mean streets of the city on a high speed car chase circa 1974. Straight past the hustlers, the pimps and punks at a billion miles per hour, rounding the corners through shady alleys, ethnic districts and high rises. Imagine the soundtrack from the driver's seat. One second there's a mad rush of rhymes, the next a whirlpool of thrashing guitars, and then suddenly everything drifts off into some Eastern mysticism. To fully experience the frantic source of all thls unruly undulation you can flip the script back to the day or you can tum to the Beastie Boys.
The whole thing with being a fan of music and buying records is that you're constantly coming across grooves or records that are gonna change your life," asserts Mike Diamond. Like pirates in the high seas. the Beastie Boys are constantly picking up new tricks, morphing and experimenting with their sound, and affording the ultimate luxury of existing in a netherworld between flowing hip hop and a sunny horizon where anything goes "That's the cool thing about music, I'm never going to run out of discovering those records and those records are never going to stop coming out. There's always going to be some group that comes out that changes everything, or there's going to be some group or some group of records that I discover that I didn't know about before that's going to ge everything for me also. So it's two-fold, it's like that's going to change my life and it's going to change what I do. I'm going to find little things within that that's going to alter the kind of music that I make."
Seems like the natural thing to do for a band that has since day-one ignored classification, realizing its first major hit with a trailblazing hybrid of hip hop and hard rock called "Fight For Your Right." Since then, the Beastie Boys' career has skyrocketed under a blur of old school beats, full-on disco rave-ups, some hardcore dabbling, microphone matches with Biz Markie and a wild gamut of other sonic ingredients that have gone into making the trio one of the most endeared musical units of the day. "The thing is, I think we're fortunate ate to be able to do the kind of inside, very personal stuff that we do and then people understand it," Mike relates. "The fact that it ends up somewhat with mass appeal, in a way there's really no explanation to it. That's what's so beautiful about it, it's genuinely inexplicable."
"We always do a lot of kinds of music," Adam Yauch adds. "It's not like one of us likes a certain kind of music and another one likes a different kind of music. It's not like Mike listens to hardcore and I listen to rap and Adam listens to instrumentals. We all listen to different music and when we play, that's what we like to play." Meandering around the Grand Royal office with a bohemian grubbiness and aloof indifference, the Beastie Boys look more like a couple of kids who wandered in off the street with their skateboards than the next viable icons for the Lollapalooza tribe. One would never guess them qualified for the ballistic fury that goes on in songs like ~Sure Shot", "Root Down" or "Heart Attack Man."
However, there's a slight hint of that slumbering mischief within the unassuming Adam Horovitz. "Coke spoons are coming back now," he announces. "You know, a little spoon to put coke on." It's hard to tell whether he's serious or not. Afler all, this is the man who poses in a full Joey Buttafuco fashion pictorial in the latest issue of the official . t~ I Beastie Boys magazine, Grand Royal. This is also the band that has over the years (re)introduced the public at large to such essential fashion cornerstones as VW emblems and beepers as accessories (License to Ill), funky ass flares and fedoras (Paul's Boutique) and suede top Pumas and Adidas track suits (Check Your Head). Consistently, their music has reflected the threesome's frivolous public persona with a steady blend of humor and conviction, ele- ments that have earned them one of the most loyal following of clones out there.
"That side of it is pretty scary, that's why I'm constantly on the move," Mike says. "One day I got the visor, next day I got the blond hair, next day I got the green hair. Always changing. Got to keep people on their toes. I figure, eventually, we'll get to the stage where the audience will get into defining their own individuality along with us, as opposed to by us. We've always been trying to get it like that, I don't know what's going on. There's plenty of room to do your own thing."
The Beastie Boys fourth phenomenal excursion, Ill Communication has been released on Capitol, and once again uproots everything people have come to expect of modern music. Taking the best elements of the group's past and pummeling them into the future, it comes up with an intriguing set of passages which once again redefine the ever elusive Beastie Boys sound.
"In a lot of ways we did a lot of stuff with lll Communication we wouldn't have been capable of doing before," Mike says. "At the same time, with Check Your Head, there was a lot that we learned about making a record that we applied to Ill Communication. This album was a lot about applying everything that we had learned on those records to this record. Already we wanna start working on our next record, and I'm working on full-on unplugged distortion and lots of new shit. Acoustic, but fully distorted."
In the time since Check Your Head the Beastie Boys also branched out in other ways, starting the magazine, a record label (called Grand Royal as well) responsible for launching Luscious Jackson and setting new fashion standards with their involvement in the X-Large clothing line.
The next step for the Beastie Boys is the fantastically warped Lollapalooza tour where they will share the stage with Nirvana, the Breeders, Smashing Pumpkins, L7, George Clinton and A Tribe Called Quest. Are they afraid that it could all blow up in their face at some point? "We definitely have hesitation doing it, because Lollapalooza at this point definitely has a lot of negative association with it," Mike confesses. "I'm the first one to be totally honest. I'm also the first one to say the whole reason why it looks like we're probably gonna confirm to do it is that it's going to be a good day of music. I think it's really a worthwhile bill of music. That's why it works for us. But I think if people are expecting too much...if they're going to go for an afternoon and their lives are going to be completely changed--music can change your life--but if they think us doing that afternoon of music is going to truly change the world, I think that's a little much. Basically it's a music festival, and people have to be realistic about that."
As Kojak would say, "Goddamn hypocrite squares!"
Beastie Boys appear at the Hollywood Palladium with Rage Against The Machine, X, Cypress Hill, John Tnudell, Stanford Prison Experiment and others at a benefit for the freedom of Leonand Peltier on April 7.