Beastie Boys inspire laughter, tears in emotional book tour
Fans will never see the Beastie Boys back onstage. But on Monday, Nov. 5, they got the next best thing. Michael Diamond and Adam Horovitz, the New York rap trio’s surviving members, better known as Mike D and Ad-Rock, respectively, appeared at a City Arts & Lectures event at the Nourse theater in support of their hefty new memoir, “Beastie Boys Book.”
“It’s the best title I could come up with,” shrugged Horovitz, 52, the one with the windswept gray hair, settling onto the stage.
A 590-page collection of old photographs, half-remembered anecdotes, discography notes, guest columns, maps, manifestos and anything else the guys could come up with (it also contains a graphic novel and, separately, a cookbook by Los Angeles chef Roy Choi), the tome is a fitting documentary for a group whose career is defined by its thrilling unpredictability.
The book feels like a throwback to a wild and woolly time when worlds collided, popular music could still spark genuine excitement across ages and demographics, and no one could top the
Beastie Boys for their absurdist rhyme capabilities (does it get any better than “More Adidas sneakers than a plumber’s got pliers/ Got more suits than Jacoby & Meyers”?) and rib-rattling beats.
The San Francisco appearance, part of a short multicity tour, followed suit.
A hilarious, loosely scripted 2½-hour performance, the evening featured Horovitz and Diamond doing their best to read various chapters from the book against an ever-changing backdrop of snapshots and video clips from the Beastie Boys’ archive, paired with a bunch of cheap props and a live soundtrack by DJ Mix Master Mike.
“We really do practice,” Horovitz said after flubbing another line.
The evening aimed to trace the group’s evolution from the early 1980s New York hardcore and rap scenes to chart-topping buffoons with the diamond-selling 1986 debut, “Licensed to Ill” (they apologized repeatedly for its many transgressions, such as the go-go dancers and giant inflatable penis that accompanied them on tour); from Hollywood burnouts in the early 1990s (a flop at the time, “Paul’s Boutique” is now considered their masterpiece) to major festival headliners and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees.
There were plenty of detours along the way, like the story about supporting Madonna on her “Like a Virgin” tour in 1985 (“We were going to be rude and awful onstage,” Horovitz said. “We were going to be memorable”), and the one about Diamond’s wayward conversation with Bob Dylan at Dolly Parton’s birthday party in Los Angeles in 1988, when the folkrock icon asked if the scruffy rap trio would be willing to play a pro-smoking benefit concert he was dreaming up.
Ultimately, every story seemed to lead back to one theme: The vital contributions and constant inspiration provided by the group’s third member, Adam Yauch, a.k.a. MCA, who died at age 47 in 2012 of salivary gland cancer. Yauch was the hardest partyer of the bunch
but ended up being the most mindful, the member who befriended the Dalai Lama and organized the massive two-day Tibetan Freedom Concert in 1996 in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.
“He was a labyrinth of ideas and emotion,” said Diamond, 52, remembering his friend.
After Yauch’s death, it was hard to imagine where the Beastie Boys might go next. In the book, they say they would be back together today if Yauch were alive. Yet while that classic chemistry was still very much in evidence at the Nourse — Diamond and Horovitz came off as more mindful versions of their 14-year-old selves (they would rather fight for your reproductive rights these days) — performing without one of the Beastie Boys’ integral voices is out of the question.
Having gone deep into their formative years and practically skipping over the last 15 years, the evening closed with Horovitz and Diamond sitting at a high table outside a projected image of a French bistro, reminiscing solemnly about Yauch, followed by a video collage of his parts in the Beastie Boys’ incredible string of hits.
It’s fair to say not one of the 1,600 people in that room expected to walk out into the night having cried to a clip of “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party!).”