The story of Beastie Boys

Punk kids in New York

The Beastie Boys story starts in the New York hardcore punk scene at the end of the nineteen seventies. Michael Diamond, the future Mike D, grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, the youngest son of an art dealer and an interior designer, in an apartment hung with paintings by Rothko and de Kooning. In 1979 he co-founded a scrappy punk band called the Young Aborigines, with his Walden School friend John Berry on guitar and Jeremy Shatan on bass, and soon Kate Schellenbach on percussion. They played fast, snotty ninety second songs in the style of Black Flag and Bad Brains, the bands they worshipped.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Over in Brooklyn Heights lived Adam Yauch, an only child whose father was an architect and whose mother was a social worker. As a kid he was fascinated by electronics and explosives, and built little homemade bombs out of hoarded fireworks. At fourteen he left his Quaker school for a public high school because he felt sheltered. There he discovered punk through the first Clash album and taught himself to play bass. Yauch met John Berry at a tiny punk club called Tier 3, and Berry soon brought Mike along. When Shatan stepped away in 1981, Yauch took over the bass.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The new line up needed a new name, and John Berry is credited with suggesting the Beastie Boys. Their very first show was a party at Berry's loft at West 100th Street and Broadway, held on Yauch's seventeenth birthday, the fifth of August 1981. Yauch later said they bought a bunch of beer and that it was probably the first time Mike ever got drunk. After the set, Dave Parsons, who ran the Rat Cage record shop downtown, asked if they wanted to make a record. Soon they were opening for Bad Brains, the Dead Kennedys and the Misfits at CBGB, Max's Kansas City and the club A7.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In November 1982 the band recorded an eight song hardcore EP called Polly Wog Stew at a studio called 171A, and Rat Cage put it out. The sessions were chaotic. The studio went under between recording and mixing, so the engineer carried the tape machine to his girlfriend's apartment, and the band mixed the record on her bed. That same month they played a birthday concert at Bard College for Philip Pucci's short film Beastie, their first appearance on film. The opening act was a band called the Young and the Useless, fronted by a teenager named Adam Horovitz, the son of the playwright Israel Horovitz.[1] [2] [3] [4]

John Berry was drifting away. In a Spin oral history he admitted he lost interest, missed rehearsals, and a couple of times turned up high on crystal meth. When he left, Adam Horovitz, who had become close friends with the band and whose own group had been covering Beastie Boys songs, took his place. He was sixteen. Horovitz, soon known as Ad-Rock, joked that he had come up from the minor leagues. With Mike D, Yauch, Ad-Rock and Kate Schellenbach, the pieces were almost in place, but the music they were about to make would not be punk at all.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Cooky Puss, Rick Rubin and Def Jam

By 1983 the whole crew was obsessed with rap records by Grandmaster Flash, the Sugarhill Gang and the Funky Four, and with clubs like Danceteria and the Roxy. In the studio, while messing about, they recorded Cooky Puss, built around a prank call to a Carvel ice cream shop about its novelty cake. Released by Rat Cage as a twelve inch, it was their first hip hop record, their first with Ad-Rock and their last with Kate Schellenbach. It became a hit in New York's underground dance clubs and started getting college radio play.[1] [2] [3]

Then came an unexpected windfall. British Airways used a slice of the B side, Beastie Revolution, in a television advert without permission. The band threatened to sue and the airline paid them forty thousand dollars. The money let them rent a floor in a Chinese sweatshop building at 59 Chrystie Street on the Lower East Side, where they lived, rehearsed and recorded. Yauch remembered the floor was covered in tar like a street, and that one day a bullet came up through the floor from the apartment above and blew a hole through their toaster oven.[1] [2] [3]

To bring hip hop into their live show they needed a DJ, and they found one in a New York University student named Rick Rubin, who called himself DJ Double R and owned a bubble machine. Rubin was building a label, Def Jam, out of his dorm room in Weinstein Hall, soon in partnership with the promoter and manager Russell Simmons. Rubin dressed the band in matching tracksuits and pushed them toward a tough rap persona. In 1984 the Beastie Boys single Rock Hard became one of Def Jam's first official releases, alongside LL Cool J's I Need a Beat.[1] [2] [3] [4]

That transition cost Kate Schellenbach her place. Rubin gave the band an ultimatum and she was pushed out in 1984. Rubin reportedly told her he did not like the sound of women rapping. Schellenbach later called Rubin's influence sexist and alienating. Mike D moved to the drums for live shows, and the Beastie Boys became a trio of rappers with a DJ. Decades later, in Beastie Boys Book, Ad-Rock said he regretted firing her, and in the 2020 documentary both surviving members seemed genuinely mortified about it. Schellenbach landed on her feet, drumming for Luscious Jackson and later becoming an Emmy winning television producer.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 1985 the trio got an unlikely break, opening for Madonna on her first tour, the Virgin Tour. Madonna had seen them at Danceteria. Ad-Rock later said her teenage fans hated them, but that Madonna fought to keep them on the bill, because the crowd was so relieved when she finally appeared. The next year they joined Run-DMC, LL Cool J and Whodini on the Raising Hell tour. Darryl McDaniels of Run-DMC admitted he first suspected Yauch was an actor planted by Candid Camera, but said an all Black crowd in Georgia loved them because they were not pretending to be anything.[1] [2] [3]

Licensed to Ill

The debut album came out on the fifteenth of November 1986, on Def Jam and Columbia. It was produced by Rick Rubin, recorded largely at Chung King studio in Chinatown, and it fused rap with heavy metal riffs. Rubin played guitar himself, and Kerry King of Slayer, another Rubin act, played the solos on Fight for Your Right and No Sleep till Brooklyn. Before release, Rubin wanted a working title built on an anti gay slur. Columbia refused, and the record became Licensed to Ill. Ad-Rock later apologised publicly to the gay and lesbian community for the things the band said on that first record.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Licensed to Ill became the first rap album to reach number one on the Billboard 200, where it stayed for five weeks. It sold more than seven hundred and fifty thousand copies in its first six weeks, the fastest selling debut in Columbia's history at the time. The breakout single was Fight for Your Right, written by Yauch and his friend Tom Cushman as a parody of dumb party songs for a side band called Brooklyn. It reached number seven on the Hot 100 in March 1987, the only top ten hit the Beastie Boys ever had in America.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The joke landed a little too well. The video, directed by Ric Menello and Adam Dubin, showed the band wrecking a house party and ending in a pie fight. There was no budget for whipped cream, so it was scavenged from supermarket bins, and the actress Tabitha Soren recalled the room smelled like rotten eggs. Mike D later said huge numbers of fans singing along had no idea the song was mocking them. The music writer Rob Tannenbaum said only a handful of videos ever did more for a band's career. In 2015 the album was certified diamond, for ten million copies shipped in the United States.[1] [2] [3]

There was grief behind the party. Ad-Rock's mother, Doris, died in 1985, shortly before the album came out. Mike D's father, the art dealer Harold Diamond, had died a few years earlier, when Mike was still a teenager. Years later Mike D said that the New York they grew up in had a high mortality rate, with a club scene full of drugs and the early years of AIDS taking people they knew, and that he never really dealt with all that emotion until much later. Fame arrived fast and young. When a Washington Post reporter caught up with them in a West Hollywood hotel as the album climbed the charts, Ad-Rock was twenty, Mike D twenty one and Yauch twenty two.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The 1987 backlash and the break with Def Jam

The Licensed to Ill tour of 1987 leaned into the frat boy image. The stage show had go go dancers in cages and a twenty foot hydraulic penis that rose out of a box during Fight for Your Right. Mike D wore a Volkswagen badge on a chain, which set off a wave of fans stealing the emblems from cars around the world. In Columbus, Georgia, a controversial show led the city to pass a lewdness ordinance. In Washington, the band had to tone the show down and then meet about a hundred and twenty worried parents in a quiet room at the arena.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In Britain it turned into a moral panic. The tabloids went after them relentlessly, MPs called for them to be banned, and one Mirror headline simply told them to get lost. On the thirtieth of May 1987, at the Royal Court Theatre in Liverpool, the show collapsed into a riot within minutes of the band taking the stage, with the group accused of provoking the crowd. Ad-Rock was arrested by Merseyside Police and charged with assault causing grievous bodily harm. Mike D later called the whole British experience terrifying, humbling and surreal, and said it was when they realised their words actually affected people.[1] [2] [3]

Back home that summer, the Beastie Boys and Run-DMC co-headlined the Together Forever tour, one of the few big tours of the era to give equal billing to a Black act and a white act. Their shared management company said it would spend more than six hundred thousand dollars on security alone, with metal detectors and double barricades. The tour was planned to run from Honolulu in June to Madison Square Garden in August, and by then both groups' albums had passed three million sales. Plans were also under way for a Beastie Boys feature film called Scared Stupid, written with Tom Cushman and backed by New Line Cinema. It was never made.[1] [2] [3]

Behind the scenes, the relationship with Def Jam fell apart. The band said the label stopped paying them money they were owed, and the dispute over royalties turned bitter. Mike D said they nearly split up that year. In 1988 the trio appeared in Rubin's film Tougher Than Leather, a Run-DMC vehicle that flopped at the box office, and then they walked away from Def Jam altogether and signed with Capitol Records. Ad-Rock moved to Los Angeles first. Looking back, Mike D called the whole money fight a great lesson that everything comes with a price.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Exile in Los Angeles and Paul's Boutique

Written off by many critics as a one hit novelty act, the Beastie Boys moved to Los Angeles. There they met the Dust Brothers, Mike Simpson and John King, and their friend Matt Dike of the Delicious Vinyl label, who had built dense instrumental tracks meant for a Dust Brothers album. The band wanted to rap over them exactly as they were. Most of the record was made in Dike's apartment above a carburetor repair shop on Santa Monica Boulevard, with a carpeted closet for a vocal booth that had already produced hits for Tone Loc and Young MC.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Paul's Boutique came out on the twenty fifth of July 1989. It is a collage of around a hundred and five sampled songs, with twenty four samples on the final track alone, drawing on everything from the Beatles and Led Zeppelin to Curtis Mayfield and Johnny Cash. Engineer Mario Caldato Jr. said they spent about a quarter of a million dollars clearing samples, a feat that would be unthinkable after the lawsuits of the early nineties. The album is named after an imaginary shop. For the cover, the band hung a Paul's Boutique sign on a real clothing store at Ludlow and Rivington streets on the Lower East Side.[1] [2] [3]

Capitol barely promoted it and Paul's Boutique stalled at number fourteen, a painful comedown after Licensed to Ill. Its one charting single, Hey Ladies, reached number thirty six. But over time the album's reputation soared. It went double platinum by 1999, and it is sometimes called the Sergeant Pepper of hip hop. Chuck D of Public Enemy said the dirty secret among Black hip hop artists at the time was that Paul's Boutique had the best beats. Rolling Stone and Pitchfork both rank it among the greatest albums ever made.[1] [2] [3]

The Los Angeles years were wild and expensive. Caldato said many of the lyrics were true stories, including throwing eggs from the Mondrian Hotel at passing cars. The band rented a huge house with a bridge over the swimming pool, and in the Beastie Boys Story documentary they recalled their accountant phoning to tell them they were broke, then hanging up because Donny Osmond was on the other line. The failure of the album forced them to rethink everything, and the next step would mean picking up their old instruments again.[1] [2] [3]

Check Your Head and Ill Communication

The band built their own studio, G-Son, in Atwater Village in Los Angeles. A carpenter named Mark Nishita, who had first met them when Caldato hired him to fix a wooden gate at their house, helped build it and became their keyboard player, Money Mark. Inspired partly by the Dutch band Urban Dance Squad, the trio played their own instruments again, Mike D on drums, Yauch on bass and Ad-Rock on guitar. Check Your Head came out on the twenty first of April 1992 and reached number ten, a genuine comeback that eventually went double platinum.[1] [2] [3] [4]

With Capitol they launched their own label, Grand Royal, in 1992. The name came from Biz Markie, who would shout a phrase containing it whenever he played a record he loved. The first signing was Luscious Jackson, a band of old friends that now included Kate Schellenbach on drums. Grand Royal also published a magazine that ran for six issues from 1993 to 1997. A 1995 piece on a certain haircut is cited by the Oxford English Dictionary as the first published use of the word mullet, which the dictionary says the band apparently coined.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Ill Communication came out on the twenty third of May 1994 and went straight to number one. Its lead single, Sabotage, began as a bass line Yauch played through a cheap Univox Super Fuzz pedal, and Ad-Rock later described the lyric as a made up rant against their producer Mario Caldato. Spike Jonze's video, a spoof of seventies cop shows with the band in fake moustaches, lived on MTV. When it lost all five of its nominations at the 1994 Video Music Awards, Yauch stormed the stage dressed as his Swiss alter ego Nathaniel Hornblower and interrupted Michael Stipe's acceptance speech.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Ill Communication also showed how much the band had changed. On Sure Shot, Yauch used a verse to offer respect to women and call time on the disrespect in rap, widely heard as an apology for their early lyrics. Bodhisattva Vow set a Buddhist vow to a hip hop beat. Yauch had become interested in Tibet while hiking in the Himalayas around 1992, and he co-founded the Milarepa Fund in May 1994 with activist Erin Potts, initially to pass royalties to the Tibetan monks sampled on the album. That summer the Beastie Boys headlined Lollapalooza with the Smashing Pumpkins.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

By 1995 they were an arena act. Tickets for Madison Square Garden sold out within thirty minutes, and a dollar from every ticket went to local charities. They toured South America and Southeast Asia for the first time, and in March 1995 they played their only two concerts in Israel. That year they also released Aglio e Olio, eight hardcore punk songs in about eleven minutes, a nod to where they started. Over New Year 1995 into 1996 they headlined the Summersault festival tour of Australia with Sonic Youth, Beck and Bikini Kill.[1] [2] [3]

Tibetan Freedom and Hello Nasty

On the fifteenth and sixteenth of June 1996, Yauch's Milarepa Fund staged the first Tibetan Freedom Concert in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco. About a hundred thousand people came to see the Beastie Boys, the Smashing Pumpkins, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Rage Against the Machine, Björk, the Fugees and Yoko Ono, making it the biggest rock benefit since Live Aid. It raised around eight hundred thousand dollars. The Monday afterwards, Yauch and Erin Potts were arrested with eight others for blocking traffic outside the Chinese consulate, though no charges were filed.[1] [2] [3]

The concerts continued until 2003, in cities including Washington, Tokyo and Taipei. The 1998 edition in Washington was scarred by tragedy when a storm hit RFK Stadium during Herbie Hancock's set. Lightning struck a fan, Lysa Selfon, who had to be resuscitated, and twelve people were injured, four of them critically. In 1995, at a talk by the Dalai Lama at Harvard, Yauch met Dechen Wangdu, a Tibetan activist. They married in 1998 in a traditional Tibetan ceremony, with his favourite punk band Rancid playing the reception, and their daughter Tenzin Losel was born that year.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Hello Nasty took four years and came out in the United States on the fourteenth of July 1998, partly recorded in a basement on Mott Street in Little Italy. It brought in Mix Master Mike, a three time world DJ champion, and guests like Lee Scratch Perry. It sold six hundred and eighty one thousand copies in its first week and hit number one in the United States, Britain, Germany and Australia. Intergalactic, with a video Yauch shot in Tokyo as a giant robot movie, became their biggest British hit. At the 1999 Grammys they became the first act to win in both the rap and alternative categories.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The band used their awards moments for more than jokes. Accepting MTV's Video Vanguard award in 1998, weeks after the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, Yauch spoke out against prejudice toward Muslims and Arabs. In 1999, just after reports of sexual assaults at Woodstock 99, Ad-Rock, encouraged by his girlfriend Kathleen Hanna, used their Intergalactic win to urge musicians to work with promoters and security to keep women safe at shows. The room fell into an awkward silence, and Hanna later said they left soon after because it felt like people wanted to kill them.[1] [2] [3]

They were early internet adopters, putting live MP3s on their website in 1998, until Capitol briefly took them down. In 2000 they planned a huge co-headlining tour with Rage Against the Machine and Busta Rhymes, but Mike D badly injured his shoulder in a bicycle accident and needed surgery, and by the time he recovered Rage had split up. After the September eleventh attacks, the band organised the New Yorkers Against Violence concert at the Hammerstein Ballroom in October 2001. Meanwhile Grand Royal, weighed down by debt, closed that August and declared bankruptcy in 2002.[1] [2] [3]

To the 5 Boroughs and The Mix-Up

In 2002 Yauch built a studio in downtown Manhattan called Oscilloscope Laboratories, and the band began a new album there. In 2003 they released a protest song against the Iraq war, In a World Gone Mad, as a free download. To the 5 Boroughs followed on the fifteenth of June 2004 in the United States. It was the first album they produced entirely themselves, and it was written in the shadow of the attacks on their home city. It became their third straight number one, and the single Ch-Check It Out, which debuted on the television show The O.C., reached number one on the Modern Rock chart.[1] [2] [3]

On the ninth of October 2004 the Beastie Boys played a sold out Madison Square Garden and handed fifty camcorders to fans, asking them to keep filming the whole night. Yauch, again as Nathaniel Hornblower, edited the footage into the 2006 concert film Awesome, I Shot That, which screened at Sundance. The budget was so tight that the cameras were returned to the shop for a refund afterwards. Ben Stiller can be spotted rapping along in the crowd. Yauch's company grew into Oscilloscope Pictures, releasing films like Wendy and Lucy, Exit Through the Gift Shop and We Need to Talk About Kevin.[1] [2] [3]

In 2007 the band did something nobody expected. The Mix-Up, released on the twenty sixth of June, was a completely instrumental album of their live funk and post punk playing. It peaked at number fifteen, their lowest chart placing, but won the Grammy for Best Pop Instrumental Album. They played festivals across Europe that summer and performed at Live Earth at Wembley Stadium. Ad-Rock explained that after an all rap record they simply wanted to play instruments, liked how it sounded, and kept going. Mike D added that people always seemed to want them to criticise modern hip hop, when to them it was still the most inventive music around. Yauch also produced Build a Nation, the 2007 comeback album by his heroes Bad Brains.[1] [2] [3]

Yauch's illness and the last album

In 2009 the band were ready with a new record, first nicknamed Tadlock's Glasses and then Hot Sauce Committee, announced on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. On the twelfth of June 2009 they headlined Bonnaroo in Tennessee, with Nas joining them for Too Many Rappers. Nobody knew it would be the last Beastie Boys concert. On the twentieth of July, Yauch posted a video revealing a cancerous tumour in his parotid gland that had spread to a lymph node. He called it very treatable. Tour dates were cancelled and the album was put on hold.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Yauch had surgery and radiation, and he also travelled to Dharamsala in India for Tibetan medicine. He wrote to fans that he felt healthy, strong and hopeful, that he was eating a vegan organic diet on his doctors' advice, and that nuns at a local nunnery had held a prayer ceremony for him. He happened to arrive while the Dalai Lama was teaching, and attended. In January 2010 he had to deny reports that he was fully cured, saying he was still in treatment and hoping to be cancer free soon.[1] [2] [3]

In October 2010 the band announced, in a deadpan email, that Part One would be delayed indefinitely, while Part Two would come out on time with the same songs originally planned for Part One. Hot Sauce Committee Part Two arrived on the third of May 2011, entering the Billboard chart at number two behind Adele's 21. The Guardian called it their freshest record in years. For the video to Make Some Noise, Yauch wrote and directed a thirty minute sequel to the Fight for Your Right video, with Seth Rogen, Danny McBride and Elijah Wood as the young Beasties and Will Ferrell, John C. Reilly and Jack Black as their future selves.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Beastie Boys were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on the fourteenth of April 2012 in Cleveland, presented by Chuck D and LL Cool J. Yauch was too ill to attend and was admitted to hospital that same day, so the band did not perform. Mike D and Ad-Rock read a letter from him instead. In it he dedicated the honour to his brothers Adam and Mike, remembered John Berry as part of the early days, and said the induction belonged as much to the fans as to the band.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Adam Yauch died in Manhattan on the fourth of May 2012, after a near three year battle with cancer. He was forty seven. He left his wife Dechen, his daughter Tenzin Losel and his parents Noel and Frances. Tributes poured in from across music. The Onion marked his death with a headline joking that a grieving China had freed Tibet. In the week after, Licensed to Ill went to number one on Billboard's catalog chart. In his will, Yauch left instructions that the band's music must never be used in advertising.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

After Yauch

Without Yauch, the band was over. In June 2014 Mike D confirmed that he and Ad-Rock would not make music as the Beastie Boys again. They fought hard for his wishes. In 2012 they sued Monster Energy, which had used their songs in a promotional video after a DJ set by Z-Trip at a festival days after Yauch's death. Monster claimed an employee thought Z-Trip's one word email reply, dope, meant permission. In June 2014 a jury awarded the band one point seven million dollars, and in 2015 a judge added six hundred and sixty eight thousand dollars in legal fees.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The years that followed brought more loss. John Berry, the founding guitarist who named the band, died on the nineteenth of May 2016 at a hospice in Danvers, Massachusetts, of frontotemporal dementia. He was fifty two. Mike D called him his first high school older brother and his first teacher of all things punk. In November 2016, swastikas and the words Go Trump were spray painted in Adam Yauch Park in Brooklyn Heights, the playground renamed in Yauch's honour in 2013. Ad-Rock joined a protest there and spoke out against Trump.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

In November 2017 the New York Times reported that nine women accused Ad-Rock's father, the playwright Israel Horovitz, of sexually assaulting or harassing them between 1986 and 2016, some of them underage at the time. Ad-Rock issued a short statement saying he believed the allegations against his father were true and that he stood behind the women. Similar accusations from six women had surfaced in a Boston newspaper back in 1993, which he dismissed at the time as rubbish. In 2018 the actress Heather Graham, who briefly dated Ad-Rock, said the elder Horovitz had made predatory advances toward her after an audition in 1989. Israel Horovitz left the theatre company he had founded and died of cancer in November 2020.[1]

In October 2018 Mike D and Ad-Rock published Beastie Boys Book, a sprawling memoir of nearly six hundred pages. It was frank about their early sexism and about firing Kate Schellenbach. They turned it into a live show, filmed by Spike Jonze at the Kings Theatre in Brooklyn and released on Apple TV Plus in April 2020 as Beastie Boys Story, after its festival premiere was cancelled by the pandemic. On the ninth of September 2023, the corner of Ludlow and Rivington from the Paul's Boutique cover was officially named Beastie Boys Square, after a campaign that began in 2013.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

As of 2026, the story has a new chapter. In May 2026 Mike D released his first ever solo single, Switch Up, made with his sons Davis and Skyler, who play in the band Very Nice Person. His debut solo album, Thank You, came out on Capitol on the twenty eighth of August 2026, the first album by any Beastie Boy since 2011, and he is touring North America and Europe with his band Mike D 5D through the autumn. He told the Guardian that after Yauch died he could not make music for a long time, because opening a computer file just made him sad.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The people around Beastie Boys

Adam Yauch and Mike D. They were teenage punks together before there was a band, and Mike D described Yauch as his closest older brother. Yauch was the prankster and the spiritual seeker, Mike the organiser often called the group's unofficial CEO. After Yauch's death Mike D said he thinks of him in the form of his life rather than his death, and still hears Yauch's voice of approval in his head when he pushes himself creatively.[1] [2] [3]

Beastie Boys and Rick Rubin. Rubin started as their DJ, DJ Double R, then as co-founder of Def Jam turned them from punks into rap stars and produced Licensed to Ill. He also pushed the crude image, and Kate Schellenbach called his influence sexist. The partnership collapsed in a money dispute after 1987, and the band left Def Jam for Capitol. Mike D and Ad-Rock later discussed Rubin frankly in Beastie Boys Book.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Beastie Boys and Kate Schellenbach. A founding member on drums, she was pushed out in 1984 as the band remade itself as a rap trio. The band later signed her new group, Luscious Jackson, as the first act on Grand Royal. In Beastie Boys Book, Ad-Rock expressed regret for firing her, and she was given a whole section to tell her side. She went on to become an Emmy winning television producer.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Beastie Boys and Russell Simmons. Simmons co-founded Def Jam with Rick Rubin and managed the Beastie Boys alongside Run-DMC through his Rush company in the Licensed to Ill era. The band mocked him on Paul's Boutique after the bitter split. In 2017 Simmons was publicly accused of sexual assault and rape by multiple women, including former Def Jam employees. He denied the allegations but stepped down from his businesses.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Ad-Rock and Kathleen Hanna. Ad-Rock met the Bikini Kill singer in 1995 at a show where both their bands were playing, and they were filmed together on the Summersault tour of Australia. They began dating after his separation from Ione Skye and married in 2006, adopting a son in 2013. She encouraged his 1999 speech on women's safety at concerts, and he cared for her through years of Lyme disease.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Ad-Rock and Ione Skye. The actor, daughter of the singer Donovan, married Ad-Rock in 1992. They separated in 1995, reunited in 1996, split again that year and divorced in 2000. In her 2025 memoir she wrote that he was the first great love of her life, and that she wrecked the marriage by repeatedly cheating on him while he was away on long tours, including affairs with women.[1] [2] [3]

Mike D and Tamra Davis. Tamra Davis, director of Billy Madison and dozens of music videos, married Mike D in 1993 and gets a name check on Intergalactic. They have two sons, Davis and Skyler, who now make music with their father. The couple later legally separated but stayed close and co-parent, and in 2026 she released The Best Summer, a documentary built from her own tapes of the 1995 Summersault tour.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Adam Yauch and Dechen Wangdu. Yauch met the Tibetan activist Dechen Wangdu in 1995 at a talk by the Dalai Lama at Harvard University. They married in 1998 in a traditional Tibetan ceremony, and their daughter Tenzin Losel was born that year. After his death, Dechen joined Mike D and Ad-Rock as a plaintiff in the lawsuit against Monster Energy to defend his wishes.[1] [2] [3]

Beastie Boys and Spike Jonze. The skateboard filmmaker directed their videos for Sure Shot and Sabotage in 1994, the latter becoming one of MTV's defining clips. He later directed their action figure video for Don't Play No Game That I Can't Win in 2011. After Yauch's death, Jonze staged and filmed the Beastie Boys Story live show, released as a documentary in 2020.[1] [2] [3]

Beastie Boys and Mario Caldato Jr. and Money Mark. Caldato engineered Paul's Boutique and co-produced Check Your Head, Ill Communication and Hello Nasty, and even became the imaginary villain of Sabotage. He brought in a carpenter to fix their gate, Mark Nishita, who helped build the G-Son studio and became Money Mark, playing on every album from 1992 to 2011 and co-writing the Grammy winning Mix-Up.[1] [2] [3]

Beastie Boys and Run-DMC. Run-DMC were their mentors and label mates. The Beasties opened on the Raising Hell tour in 1986 and co-headlined the Together Forever tour in 1987. Darryl McDaniels at first thought Yauch was a Candid Camera plant, but said crowds accepted them because they were real. Ad-Rock said the famous opening line of Paul Revere was something he first heard from Run on a stoop.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Adam Yauch and Bad Brains. Bad Brains were the punk band that made the young Beastie Boys want to play, and the early group supported them at clubs like A7. Decades later Yauch produced their 2007 comeback album Build a Nation. When Bad Brains released Into the Future in 2012, they dedicated it to Yauch, their longtime friend and backer.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Rare facts about Beastie Boys

• Yauch played his first ever Beastie Boys show on his seventeenth birthday, at a party in John Berry's loft. The gig was at West 100th Street and Broadway on the fifth of August 1981. Yauch said they bought a load of beer, and that it was probably the first time Mike D ever got drunk.[1] [2] [3]
• The band's first hardcore EP was mixed on a bed, after the studio went bust between recording and mixing. The engineer of Polly Wog Stew carried the tape machine to his girlfriend's apartment. The band did the final mixes there, editing the tape together by hand.[1] [2]
• A bullet once came up through the floor of their Chrystie Street loft and blew a hole through the toaster oven. Yauch told Spin a gun was fired in the sweatshop apartment above. When they ran upstairs, they found only an old woman who did not speak English.[1]
• British Airways paid the young band forty thousand dollars for using one of their tracks in an advert without asking. The airline used part of Beastie Revolution, the B side of Cooky Puss. The band later thanked the man who picked it, because the money kick started their career.[1] [2]
• Ad-Rock found LL Cool J's demo tape among the demos at Rick Rubin's place and helped make his first single. Going through a pile of demos, Ad-Rock came across LL's tape, produced a beat and co-wrote I Need a Beat with LL and Rubin, launching Def Jam.[1]
• Rock Hard was one of the first two records ever issued with an official Def Jam catalogue number. The other was LL Cool J's I Need a Beat, in 1984. Rock Hard was later withdrawn because it sampled AC/DC's Back in Black without permission.[1] [2]
• AC/DC refused to let the Beastie Boys reissue their early single Rock Hard, even after Mike D phoned Malcolm Young himself. The band wanted it on their 1999 anthology. When lawyers refused to clear the AC/DC sample, Mike D called Malcolm Young personally, but it made no difference.[1]
• A Beatles cover was pulled from Licensed to Ill at the last minute because Michael Jackson owned the song's publishing. The band recorded a loose version of I'm Down, sampling the original. Legal problems with Jackson killed it, though bootlegs still circulate.[1]
• The whipped cream in the Fight for Your Right video was dug out of supermarket bins and smelled of rotten eggs. There was no money in the budget for it. Tabitha Soren, later an MTV news anchor, appears in the video and said she worked hard not to get any on her.[1]
• Fight for Your Right was written for a Beastie side band called Brooklyn, not for the Beastie Boys. Yauch and his friend Tom Cushman wrote it as a parody of dumb party songs. Yauch then suggested using it for the main band, and it became their only American top ten hit.[1] [2]
• Mike D's Volkswagen necklace set off a wave of VW badge thefts around the world. Around the release of Licensed to Ill he wore the emblem on a chain on stage and in photos. Fans copied him by prising the badges off parked cars.[1] [2]
• The band kept their notorious twenty foot hydraulic stage penis in a New Jersey storage unit for thirty years. It rose from a box every night during Fight for Your Right on the 1987 tour. A photo of it appears in Beastie Boys Book.[1]
• In Washington in 1987, the Beastie Boys had to reassure about a hundred and twenty worried parents in an arena quiet room. After a row over their show, they toned it down to a family friendly version and met the parents backstage at the Capital Centre before the concert.[1]
• Money Mark was a carpenter who first met the band when he was hired to fix a wooden gate. Mario Caldato Jr. asked him to repair the gate at the house where the band stayed during Paul's Boutique. He then helped build their G-Son studio and joined them on keyboards.[1]
• The Paul's Boutique cover was credited to Yauch's alter ego, but it was actually shot by the band's original bassist. The photo of Ludlow Street was taken by Jeremy Shatan, bassist of the Young Aborigines, though the sleeve credits Nathaniel Hornblower.[1]
• A lost Paul's Boutique track called The Jerry Lewis was found on a forgotten tape in a Los Angeles storage unit in 2013. The reel from the first sessions in Matt Dike's apartment turned up in the Delicious Vinyl archive. Asked about releasing it, Mike D said probably not this year.[1] [2]
• Hey Ladies was the first single ever to reach the top twenty on both Billboard's rap and modern rock charts. It was the only charting single from Paul's Boutique, reaching number thirty six on the Hot 100.[1]
• The Oxford English Dictionary credits the Beastie Boys with apparently coining the word mullet. It cites a 1995 article in their Grand Royal magazine and their 1994 song Mullet Head as the earliest published uses of the term.[1]
• The Grand Royal label name came from Biz Markie's favourite catchphrase. Mike D said whenever Biz played a record he loved in the studio, he would shout a phrase with the words grand royal in it.[1]
• Luscious Jackson took their name from a sports announcer mispronouncing the basketball player Lucious Jackson. Their first gig was opening for the Beastie Boys and Cypress Hill, and they became the first band signed to Grand Royal.[1]
• The Root Down EP ends with a hidden Hebrew jingle from the Israeli army radio station Galei Tzahal. It promoted a Beastie Boys special before their only two concerts in Israel, in March 1995. Mike D and Ad-Rock heard it during an interview and asked for a copy.[1]
• For one Check Your Head track, Yauch built a huge tunnel of cardboard boxes around Mike D's bass drum. The trick at the G-Son studio gave the drum a giant, John Bonham style boom. Ad-Rock said that clubhouse turned them into real musicians.[1]
• Sabotage's working title was Chris Rock, reportedly after an engineer named Chris who thought the track rocked. The backing track sat unused for about a year before Ad-Rock wrote the vocals, which he later described as a made up rant against producer Mario Caldato Jr.[1] [2]
• Danny Boyle has credited the opening credits of Trainspotting to the Sabotage video. He said so in the DVD commentary. Amy Poehler went further in Beastie Boys Book, arguing there would be no Anchorman or Adult Swim without it.[1]
• Yauch crashed Michael Stipe's MTV award speech in 1994 disguised as his Swiss alter ego Nathaniel Hornblower. He was protesting that Sabotage had lost all five of its nominations. In 2009 MTV finally gave the video an award for the best video that should have won.[1]
• When asked if he was the Swiss director Nathaniel Hornblower, Yauch replied with a straight face that Hornblower was his uncle. Hornblower, with lederhosen and a white beard, was credited with directing many of their videos. Billboard once described him as a Swiss independent filmmaker.[1]
• Yauch registered at hotels as I. Clouseau, after Peter Sellers's bumbling detective. Mike D checked in under the name of whoever was leading the golf tour that week, while Ad-Rock simply used his own name.[1]
• Yauch pulled a prank on Ad-Rock with a mysterious ring that kept reappearing for about fifteen years. A stranger gave Ad-Rock the ring backstage in San Francisco, and it kept turning up in unlikely places until he realised Yauch was behind it all along.[1]
• Mike D could not finish his lyric for Remote Control until his bandmates locked away his mobile phone. Fittingly, the song is about the maddening distractions of modern life. It appeared on Hello Nasty in 1998.[1]
• After the 1996 Tibetan Freedom Concert, Yauch was arrested for blocking traffic outside the Chinese consulate in San Francisco. He was held along with Milarepa director Erin Potts and eight others. No charges were filed, and one officer handed them his card and asked to police their next protest.[1]
• The camcorders used to film Awesome, I Shot That were all returned to the shop for a refund after the concert. Fifty fans filmed the October 2004 Madison Square Garden show. Keeping costs down was part of the plan.[1]
• Ad-Rock has worn a medical alert bracelet since having a seizure in 2003. He had a tonic clonic seizure that year and began wearing the bracelet afterwards.[1]
• Hot Sauce Committee Part Two credited its samples to fake songs by bands that never existed. The tracks were actually performed by the Beastie Boys themselves. Ad-Rock said the sessions felt like 1992 again creatively.[1]
• Monster Energy argued a DJ's one word email reply, dope, gave it permission to use Beastie Boys music. The court ruled that approving how he looked in a video was not a licence. Asked about the band's win, Z-Trip told Rolling Stone simply, dope.[1]
• A toy company that parodied the Beastie Boys song Girls ended up paying into a charity for girls in science. GoldieBlox used the song in a 2013 ad. The settlement required one percent of its revenue, up to a million dollars, for science and engineering education for girls.[1]
• The Paul's Boutique street corner in Manhattan became Beastie Boys Square in 2023, after being voted down in 2014. Historian LeRoy McCarthy campaigned from 2013. Ad-Rock joked that a kid fifty years from now would look up and wonder what a Beastie Boy even was.[1] [2]
• Mike D's first solo gig in Britain in two decades was in a bingo hall on Tyneside in 2026. The show in June 2026 teed up his debut solo album, Thank You, which features his sons Davis and Skyler.[1] [2] [3]
• Tamra Davis rescued her 1995 tour tapes of the Beastie Boys from her Malibu home as the Palisades fires approached. The box of forgotten videotapes became her 2026 documentary The Best Summer, about the Summersault tour of Australia.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.