Before they ever rapped, the Beastie Boys were a hardcore band. They played the same New York rooms as Bad Brains and the Dead Kennedys. That part of the story gets left out a lot.
They Started Out as a Hardcore Band
It starts in 1979, with a band called the Young Aborigines. Michael Diamond played drums, and Jeremy Shatan played bass. John Berry rounded it out on guitar. Kate Schellenbach joined later, also on drums. Several of them had first crossed paths at a Bad Brains show at CBGB, and they spent their weekends at Lower East Side basement clubs with names like A7, 171A and Tier 3.
Then, in 1981, Shatan left New York for the summer. He didn't come back to the band. Adam Yauch stepped in on bass, and the group renamed itself the Beastie Boys. John Berry left not long after that, and a new guitarist named Adam Horovitz took his spot.
Opening for Bad Brains and the Dead Kennedys
The new lineup started playing CBGB and Max's Kansas City, two of the most important clubs in New York punk history. CBGB's name stood for "country, bluegrass and blues." Almost nobody who actually played there did any of those three things. It became the birthplace of American punk instead, and the Beastie Boys were part of that scene from early on. Max's Kansas City had already lived a whole life before them, too. Andy Warhol used to hold court in the back room there during its glam years, and by the time the Beastie Boys got onstage, the club had shifted into punk.
They opened for Bad Brains and the Dead Kennedys, two of the loudest and fastest hardcore bands in the country at the time. In November 1982, the Beastie Boys recorded a 7-inch EP called Polly Wog Stew at 171A Studios, the same block where a lot of them had been going to shows for years. It stands as one of the earliest hardcore records to come out of New York City. This was a real band playing real shows, not a side project waiting to become something else.
Then a Joke Rap Record Took Them to Number One
In 1983, the joke happened almost by accident. That March, Adam Horovitz called a Carvel ice cream shop and asked for "Cookie Puss," a cake with cookies for eyes that Carvel had been advertising on local TV for years. The band built a comedy hip hop single out of that prank call, put it out on a tiny label called Rat Cage Records, and called it "Cooky Puss." It became a local hit almost overnight.
That single changed everything. By 1984, the Beastie Boys had moved fully into hip hop. Kate Schellenbach left the band. The three remaining members signed with Def Jam, a label that was barely two years old itself.
Rick Rubin produced their album. It was recorded at Chung King Studios in New York and came out on November 15, 1986, through Def Jam and Columbia Records. The title was Licensed to Ill.
It became the first rap album ever to top the Billboard 200. Nobody in hip hop had done that before. In 2015, it was certified Diamond for shipping more than ten million copies in the United States.
Four years before all of that, the same three guys were onstage at CBGB, playing hardcore.
Want more stories like this?
Sign up free for the Not Upstate Digital Magazine — a new issue every two weeks on the people, places, and culture of Westchester and the Hudson Valley.