Beastie Boys – Hotsaucecommitteparttwo
The Beastie Boys are probably the single most important band in my life. They were something just for me, in many ways. At the end of this entry, I’ve copied in the little reflection I wrote when Adam Yauch (MCA) died in 2012.
I’m interjecting here with something. I’ve been listening, just today, to a podcast called Broken Record. It’s Rick Rubin and Malcom Gladwell (mainly) in conversation with musicians. I listened to Questlove (10/10, would go again), Ezra Koenig, Justin Vernon from Bon Iver and one where Rick runs through some of his stuff.
He met the Beastie Boys before they were doing anything of note. He DJ’d for them a bit, then produced. One of the things he covers in this interview is how they thought about things. How Ad Rock, MCA and Mike D tried to play around with the music they made.
I just sat and listened. Stories about the Beastie Boys feel like stories about old friends or ancestors. Here’s how the things that made you the way you are came to be.
Also, Rick Rubin sounds (and looks) indistinguishable from Pat Rothfuss. I just searched for this online. Is no one else seeing this?
Hot Sauce was the Beasties final album, released just over a year before MCA died. It wasn’t supposed to be their last album. It was supposed to be the album they released in 2011, which would set them up for the album they released in 2015, or whatever.
It’s the In Utero of the Beastie Boys’ discography. Fantastic. Maybe their best. Certainly not designed as their last.
Lee Majors Come Again is a fantastic track, piling on the same sorts of punches the group threw back in 1995 on Aglio E Olio (and in their earlier punk days). It lingers on the tracklist back in the second half, but it’s one of my favorites as a central figure in the album. “Dropping bombs like a bombardier, Cacao – he’s a chocolatier.”
The playfulness and goofiness that Rubin talks about are present throughout. In the interview, he talks about writing tracks with the Beastie Boys. They’d sit and dream up lines, reading them off to each other until someone laughed. That’s when they knew they had a winner.
I got into the Beastie Boys (apologies if some of this is repeated in the piece at the end, I forget what I wrote and I hate reading my writing) in the mid-90s. Sabotage was the first song that really hooked me and most of that was from seeing the video a few times.
Once I was into it, though, I was set. I listened to Ill Communication on repeat. I picked up older albums like License to Ill and Check Your Head. Paul’s Boutique never hit me like it did some other people. When Hello Nasty came out, I listened to it over and over, learning as many of the lyrics as I could pick up. Same with To the Five Boroughs.
Hot Sauce was something new. It was the first lyrical album from the Beastie Boys in seven years (the incredible, instrumental album The Mix-Up came in between). I was a real-ish adult, not a kid working his first job. And the Beasties seemed grown up. They talked about Ted Danson and high end restaurants and ornithology.
Hot Sauce was a record showing me how bands could grow up with a person. Beck is maybe the other great example of this, by the way.
Despite my love of the Beastie Boys, I didn’t have their albums on my vinyl watchlist. I don’t know why things go on the list or not. I wrote up a vinyl manifesto the other day, but it’s full of holes.
I saw this album pop up on the Instagram of the local record store. If I’m going to have a connection to a store, I now know it’s going to be this one. I’ve struck out before and even this doesn’t have a ton of things for me, but it has some stuff. And the dude who runs it seems like a champion.
I went in and asked the owner about it. Did they still have it? What pressing was it? Part of my collecting is trying to get interesting pressings. First runs, limited editions, new or funky remasters. This was the white vinyl version. It was supposed to come with a 7” single and an iron-on shirt thing. The single was missing, but the iron-on is there.
I’m gonna hunt that single down.
We talked about Beastie Boy albums and our personal histories with the group. He’d seen them a few times, having grown up on Long Island. He liked Check Your Head. There’s a new book and a documentary. Part 2 seemed like an odd thing to name the first one.
It’s odd, owning a little piece of yourself in plastic. I ended up putting the album in my backpack while I went to the coffee shop and store. It was raining a kind of sleety rain and I was worried it would get on the album or that it would get bent in my backpack. I set everything down very gently in the coffee shop.
On Long Burn the Fire, Mike D says, “Makin’ music for librarians to burly jocks, The rapper Mike D known for my curly locks!” I think that’s a good summary of the whole thing for me. The Beastie Boys made music for everyone and they didn’t take themselves too seriously while doing it.
I hope my son listens to the Beastie Boys. I don’t need him to love them, but I want him to understand why they were important to me. They made it okay for me to be me. Or to feel weird sometimes. Or to think that having a record in your backpack was neat.
All that stuff is okay. It can even be great.
Below is the thing I wrote up the day after MCA died. We had the same birthday.
In 1995 I got Ill Communication, after seeing Sabotage on, then-music-video-playing, MTV. I think I finally broke free of listening to just the single a month into ownership, when I finally took the time to look through the liner notes. After that, there was no turning back, the Beastie Boys gave me my first Matrix moment – I knew kung fu.
As a kid I was shy, bad at sports, into fantasy novels, and overweight. School was never a nightmare, and I never got picked on, but I didn’t like being there. It was that time in life when everyone seems to be judging you for who you are inherently. Which is just to say, as a kid you internalize those sideways glances, making them about you instead of about the viewer.
A large part of what separates high-schoolers into packs is confidence. If you’re good at sports you make that a defining characteristic in such a way that it changes your outlook on life. You walk the hallways setting yourself up against everyone else and weighing the outcomes in your favor.
I could never do that. But then the Beasties came along and changed it all. Once I discovered Root Down and Get It Together, I knew something that other people didn’t. I had that hint of confidence running through me as I walked down hallways, looking over the other kids and knowing that I had one up on them. I had the Beastie Boys.
The music provided me with something that friends couldn’t. You can run to a friend to make you feel better about yourself. Friends provided a great support group and a distraction from failed classes, but they were always external. License to Ill was the first album to become a part of me, to help define who I was.
I’d come home from school and go into my room, ostensibly to do homework. But really I’d pull out liner notes and work my way through songs, memorizing everything I could stuff into my little head. The way they talked about the world made me think about things in new ways.
What did it mean to be clever, not just smart? Who was looking out for me, who could I help? Even little things like Heart Attack Man made me stop to think about how I was defining music. Here was punk, my first real taste of 90s punk, on a hip-hop album.
Each little nugget of information gave me confidence, gave me a reason not to avoid hallways. Each lyric gave me something to show off to friends, and to fill my mind when otherwise it would be filled with self-doubt. The Beastie Boys became one of my best friends. They followed me everywhere and could be called on at a moment’s notice for support.
After that the whole world opened up. Bad Religion, Sublime, RHCP, Ash, Blur, the list just goes on. Their surely the main reason I like Gift of Gab and Blackalicious. My iPod is filled with music they inspired me to listen to and that they made themselves.
So I don’t think that it’s too much of a stretch to say that I lost a very good friend. Adam Yauch always came last in the line-up, always sealed the deal and did so in a way that made him seem older and wiser than the others. He was like the friend from college, who just happened to enjoy a high school kid’s sense of humor.
Even though I have more to rely on, and a better support network behind me, the Beastie Boys are still my friends. They helped me become who I am today, and I don’t think anyone who’s grown up with me would dispute that. In losing Adam I lost a role model, and a friend that had kept me safe and sane for 17 years. He helped me navigate hallways in high school, and he’s helped me find happiness in life. I know he can never know it, but I’ll miss him.
The Beastie Boys taught me how to be me and ingrained themselves in my being. With MCA gone, a tiny part of me is changed. In a way, I’m happy. I’ve never looked back and thought all this through. It’s good to know that that piece of me is there. I’m sure a lot of people have a similar chunk of themselves, a little sliver that now feels cold or empty. But I’m glad I have it and I’m glad I had Adam.