Now that the Beastie Boys Story documentary is out in the world, the surviving members of the New York Hip Hop legends — Michael “Mike D” Diamond and Adam “Ad-Rock” Horovitz — are popping up in interviews more often.
Following Thursday’s (April 23) premiere of the Beastie Boys Story on Apple TV +, Ad-Rock, Mike D and director Spike Jonze participated in an “Ask Me Anything” event on , which RealStreetRadio was asked to join. When a fan asked what ever happened to Hot Sauce Committee Part I, there was some good news and some not so good news.
“Hot Sauce Committee Part I, we don’t know where it is,” Ad-Rock says. “We lost it. We can’t find it. If we find it, we’re gonna try to work on it and put it out. But we do have other, like … I was going to say material … we have a bunch of old music that we might put out one day. Old projects.”
Mike D asks, “What do you mean material? Like skits? Vaudevillian acts?” to which Ad-Rock replies, “Yeah, It’s like 17 hours of just this that we’re doing now.”
Jonze laughs, “If anyone even still listening, they’re going to be pre-ordering it.”
Ad-Rock adds, “It’s going to be Biz [Markie] snoring on the left speaker and me snoring on the right speaker. Just so you know.”
Jonze questions how it was possible to lose a record when they were so late into their career and more experienced.
“Yeah, well what had happened was, we had these hard drives, you know?” Ad-Rock answers. “It’s called an external hard drive. It’s like this thing that you put the songs on. We had one for Part I and one for Part II. At the same time that we were going to finish the record, the mastering it’s called when you do the final mix of the thing, we had actually also been working on this documentary that we’d never put out that was about like boxcar travel in the 1920s. You know what I’ll do? I’ll write it and I’ll put in a book called the Beastie Boys Book, available for downloads now.”
In a recent interview with DX, Mike D, Ad-Rock and Jonze discussed the new film, which really spotlights their growth as not only artists but also people. The most blatant example is evolving from the “Fight For Your Right” party bros to the (partly) serious musicians they eventually became.
“In writing ‘Fight For Your Right,’ we were in my apartment in the West Village in New York City,” Mike D told DX. “We don’t have any bro dudes in our social circle, so it seemed like a really funny thing to make fun of. We didn’t have this vision of, ‘We’re gonna make it big.’ It was more like, ‘Oh this is awesome. We get to make our record, fuck around and do what we wanna do.’ Why not? We’ll do this song that’s kind of a goof, making fun of these bro-y guys that we don’t even know.”
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He added, “Then we go on tour, and those dudes are in the front row. You kind of go with it for a little bit. You’re getting applause for doing this thing and after a bit, you’re like, ‘Whoa, wait a second, the world where we came from in New York City was so not that world — and we missed it. We missed who we were in that world.
“I don’t know — I think we got fortunate in this sense that because of the falling out with Def Jam, it brought it back to being about the three of us. We got to sort of really take a break and look at each other, the three of us, and be like, ‘OK, what do we want to do?’”
Beastie Boys dropped eight studio albums during the course of their career, beginning with Licensed To Ill in 1986 and culminating with 2011’s Hot Sauce Committee Part Two. Adam “MCA” Yauch would lose his battle with cancer in 2012.
Check back later this week for Part II of DX’s interview with Mike D, Ad-Rock and Spike Jonze.