How three New York punks made the first chart-topping rap album
The Beastie Boys started as a teenage hardcore punk band playing CBGB. A prank call to an ice cream shop became their first hip-hop track, a university student named Rick Rubin became their DJ, and by 1986 Licensed to Ill was sitting at number one on the Billboard 200, a first for rap.
The group grew out of the Young Aborigines, formed in 1979. In 1981, when bassist Jeremy Shatan left New York for the summer, Michael Diamond, John Berry and Kate Schellenbach began playing with Adam Yauch under a new name that Berry suggested. The claim that Beastie stood for Boys Entering Anarchistic States Towards Inner Excellence was, Yauch and Diamond later admitted, invented afterwards. They opened for Bad Brains and the Dead Kennedys and recorded the hardcore EP Polly Wog Stew in November 1982. Adam Horovitz soon replaced Berry on guitar.
Cooky Puss, built from a crank call to a Carvel franchise in 1983, was their first hip-hop recording and a hit in underground clubs. When British Airways used another of their tracks in an advert, the band threatened legal action and the airline paid $40,000. Rubin, then studying at New York University, came in as their DJ, founded Def Jam with Russell Simmons, and pushed Schellenbach out in 1984, saying he disliked women rapping.
After supporting Madonna on her first tour in 1985, they released Licensed to Ill on November 15, 1986. It held the top spot for five weeks and sold over nine million copies. The 1987 world tour brought arrests, a debate in the British Parliament over whether they should be let in, and a riot in Liverpool about ten minutes into a show on May 30.
Unpaid by Def Jam, they moved to Capitol. Paul's Boutique, assembled almost entirely from samples with the Dust Brothers, stalled at number 14 in 1989 yet later landed at 156 on Rolling Stone's list of the greatest albums. For Check Your Head they picked up their instruments again, and Yauch directed many of their videos as Nathanial Hörnblowér. They last played live at Bonnaroo in 2009, entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2012, and disbanded after Yauch died that year.
Source: Beastie Boys
