My Close Encounters with Adam Yauch

It’s been a really sad afternoon and evening for me. Adam Yauch, one of my longtime heros, died today. As usual, there are a million things that I’m supposed to be doing right now, but I just had to stop everything and grieve. I live in Brookyn, Adam’s hometown, and it feels like everyone should be pointing their stereo speakers out the window and blasting “Pass The Mic,” but no one is (me included). I feel like news stories about Adam should be rolling on every TV station in town, but there’s been little mention of him. It’s just a normal night in Brooklyn. Vibrant. Alive. Overflowing with life.

I know I truly love a band when I imagine that I’m in the band when I listen to their music. This hasn’t happened with very many musicians, but this feeling was probably the most intense with the Beastie Boys. I loved their music so much in the early 1990’s that I essentially dedicated my life to trying to become a Beastie. It was more than a long shot: it was nothing short of an entirely impossible quest. But I had no choice. There was no other reality worth seeking.

Close Encounter #1

Even though I became a true lifelong Beastie fan in the early nineties, my first close encounter with MCA took place 27 years ago. I was a huge Madonna fan, so my mom took my sister and I to a Madonna concert at the USF Sun Bowl in Tampa Florida. We were very young, so mom got us to the show nice and early. The opening act that evening happened to be a group from Brooklyn called the Beastie Boys.

Licensed to Ill hadn’t been released yet, but that didn’t stop the Beasties from walking in like they owned the place. It was wild. I was so innocent at the time that I was shocked to hear them curse. Early in the set one of them yelled “Make some noise! This isn’t a fucking library!” The audience of teeny boppers got a good chuckle out of that. The show seemed alien, but they won us over. Mid point through the set, they stopped and explained what was going on. They explained what the DJ was, what he was doing, how he could change musical styles in a heartbeat and scratch records. Syd (my sister) and I thought it was really cool. They put on a good show. We were fans. Syd even claimed to have spotted the Beasties getting into a red stretched limo after the show.

Note: I wore a cut-off sleeves t-shirt with a giant British flag printed on it to the show. The shirt had been purchased at Spencer’s. I was trying to look like I was in Def Leppard.  

Close Encounter # 2

My second encounter with Yauch isn’t with his physical form. It was dealing with the Beastie mayhem that had consumed the nation. You see, when the Beasties hit it big (1986 – 1988), I lived in a small town in Florida. I liked their songs. I thought the video and lyrics for Fight For Your Right were funny, and I was mystified by the awesome sounds in the song Hold It Now, Hit It. But I couldn’t really appreciate the Beasties because their fans were constantly trying to beat me up.

During these years I was 100% consumed with skateboarding and punk rock music. Seriously. The only things I did was eat, sleep, go to school, skate and listen to punk. This wasn’t a very popular thing to do in those days. My friends and I were considered outcasts, and treated as such.

The same awful scenario played out several times. We would be skating in a ditch on the side of the road, or in a parking lot at night, and a nefarious looking car would suddenly creep up out of nowhere, blasting License To Ill. The doors would fly open and meatheads would emerge and claim that we had just flipped them off, and they were ready to fight. It got to the point where we would hear someone blasting License To Ill from a car, and an instinct would kick in to go run and hide. It sucked. The terrible irony is that the Beasties were a skate punk band at heart.

Close Encounter #3

Fast forward three years. In college I had become a Beastie devotee. My good buddy Larry Lillvik had played Paul’s Boutique numerous times during our freshman year, and really showed me how to appreciate what the Beasties had done. My fear of Beastie Boy fans had died away, and my deep appreciation for their music had begun.

When you’re young and finishing high school and heading off to college, your life has a trajectory. You’re like a rocket arching through the sky. We had spent the fall and winter listening to Paul’s Boutique during our freshman year in college, and my friends and I were actively putting plans into motion to drive across the country for a month in the coming summer. Now it was spring, and the flightpath of our young lives was just soaring. Then Check Your Head arrived.

There’s no way to describe it. It was the perfect music at the perfect time. That album hit us like a bomb. It was everything I loved in life, blended together and turned into something totally new. You may not hear it entirely when you listen today, but in its time, there just had never been music like that before. Check Your Head was beyond a triumph. It shot me on my mission to try to become a Beastie. This was the only thing I could possibly do.

So you’re a broke college kid in Boston who can’t rap, but you now must become a Beastie Boy. Where do you start? I took a note from Adam Yauch himself and started playing electric bass guitar. Soon I was in bands, and before long I was playing shows. Before you know it my band was playing a show opening up for Huggy Bear, who Mike D name drops on Ill Communication. By gum, my plan was working!

I’m getting a bit ahead of myself here. The band I was in was called Syrup USA. Our sound was about as un-Beastie as you can get, but I liked playing the dense and poppy songs that we would write collaboratively. The drummer of this band is my buddy Orrin Anderson.

Just Orrin and myself were in the practice space one evening, about a year or so after he had joined the band. We were chatting, and he mentioned something about the giant Check Your Head poster that was hanging on the wall (another band sharing the space had put up). It was the first time the Beasties had come up in conversation, and I told him flat out that Check Your Head was one of my favorite albums of all time. What he said next rocked my tiny, tiny world. “Adam Yauch and I were best friends growing up.”

I stopped talking. I had to sit down on the nasty floor. I experienced great difficulty processing the information coming out of Orrin’s mouth. “We grew up together in Brooklyn… We hung out all the time… He used to have a band called Medical Junta… They had a great song with the lyrics “I was gunna to sit down and write you a letter, but I think I’ll write a postcard cuz it’s shorter and it’s better”… I recorded the first Beastie Boys demo tape at my dad’s house…” Suddenly I could speak again. “Whoa whoa whoa, you recorded the first Beasties demo tape?!?!”

My brain was blown completely out of my head. The mission of Syrup USA had always been to write a great pop song, get a record deal, and then make that song a fixture in pop radio for the duration of eternity. Suddenly there was an additional mission. We needed to become a success so that Orrin could somehow reconnect with his long lost best pal MCA. The future was abundantly clear.

Encounter # 4

Syrup USA never became a fixture in pop radio, but we did manage to get a record deal and go on a few extensive tours around the US and Canada. In 1997 we were touring in support of our album All Over The Land, and we were in Atlanta playing live at a radio station. After our set, the singer and keyboard player took off to have a break, while Orrin and I stayed and packed up equipment in the steamy little live room at the station. Suddenly some dude pops his head into the room and asks if he could look at the keyboards. Since I was too shy to speak, Orrin told him to come on in.

The dude checked out the keyboards and Orrin made small talk with him as he packed his drums. Orrin’s small talk was revealing some curious factoids about the dude. It turned out that he was “sponsored” by Korg in Japan. That wasn’t normal. Orrin pried a bit more, and then it came out. The dude in the room with Orrin and I was none other than Money Mark. Naturally, I could no longer move.

Orrin, however, didn’t have this problem and continued to freely chat with Mark. Eventually Orrin told him that he was an old buddy of Adam’s, but they had lost touch over the years. Before long Orrin was talking to Money Mark’s manager, perhaps even chatting about getting back in touch with Yauch. I’m not sure what was being said because my brain had turned into Oodles of Noodles the moment I realized it was Mark Nishita. I was seriously mute and useless. Towards the end of the encounter, Mark couldn’t take seeing me suffer. He walked over to me, introduced himself, and shook my hand. He likely said other things to me, but my noodle brain was incapable of recording any information at the time.

Note: I was wearing a purple Tarpon Springs Chimp Farm t-shirt when I met Money Mark. I forget everything else.

Encounter # 5

I moved to New York City in September of 2000. One year after I arrived, the city experienced a terrible calamity. I got one complete year of the irreverent old New York, and I’ve remained here ever since. NYC is still recovering from that horrible event.

A few weeks after September 11th, I was walking around Greenwich VIllage in the early afternoon on a weekday. I was making my way down Lafayette Street headed toward Other Records, and staring at the sidewalk as I went. As the sidewalk rolled by my eyes, I noticed someone’s feet standing on an old skateboard. Old-style skateboards are really popular today, but in 2001 they were not. It struck me as odd, so I looked up to see what the rest of this person looked like. It was Adam Yauch.

Most shockingly, it wasn’t only MCA. Standing to one side was Michael Diamond, and to the other was Adam Horowitz. In that instant I was literally standing in the middle of the Beastie Boys. I, of course, kept walking. It was too unbelievable. For shining a moment, I had been a Beastie Boy. I took twenty more steps and stopped. I turned around to glance at them again, just to confirm what I had seen. There’s no mistaking those guys. I didn’t bother them. They were standing in a circle, smiling and chatting with one another, just as you would expect them to.

And that was it. I went on with my life, and they went on with theirs. I never got to see them perform live again, just that one set at the Sun Dome in 1985. It’s kind of a shame, but it’s also kind of special too.

The loss of Adam Yauch is really tragic. It was a full-blown kick in the chest today, and it’s going to continue to sting for a long time. I know that he had an amazing life, and I know we should celebrate it. But it’s also okay to just be sad.

There’s no doubt that the course of my life has been drastically influenced by the existence of the Beastie Boys. If there’s 40 gigabytes in my head, at least 28 of them are used to permanently store Beastie rhymes.

It sucks to say goodbye when you never had the nerve to say hello. But we have to do it anyway. My heart and prayers are with his young family tonight. Darkness is not the opposite of light, it’s the absence of it. Namaste.