The way the Beastie Boys rapper turned movie director Adam “MCA” Yauch tells it, the idea to film the band’s sold-out homecoming gig at Madison Square Garden in October 2004 just dropped out of the sky a few days before showtime. Scrabbling around for last-minute ideas, they could have hired a hip Hollywood director such as their friend and collaborator Spike Jonze, whose career they helped to launch. They could have packed the venue with high-tech cameras and super-sized themselves into rock gods, the method favoured by most bands of their vintage.
Instead, the fortysomething rap-rock trio recruited 50 amateur camera operators via their website. Each was given a cheap digital video camera and instructed to keep filming for the entire concert, no matter where they were or what they did. Eighteen months, $1.2 million and 6,732 edits later, a mountain of raw footage has been spliced into one of the most frenetic, funny, boldly experimental concert videos yet made.
Graced with the ungainly title Awesome: I F***in’ Shot That, the film was directed by Yauch under his film-making alias Nathaniel Hornblower, and serves as a refreshing antidote to the super-slick narcissism of most modern rock-docs. “I just got tired of the way concert documentaries are made, especially now with video cameras instead of film,” he tells me. “It has become very standard, the way concerts are documented, the sweeping boom shots of the crowd
. . . You can almost hear the director calling out the shots. This seemed a more exciting way to do it.”
The gruffest of the three Beasties rappers (Adam “Adrock” Horovitz is more nasal, Michael “Mike D” Diamond more booming), Yauch has previously directed several of the band’s promo videos. He traces the stylistic catalyst for Awesome back to a 30-second clip of concert footage, shot by a fan on a camera phone and uploaded to the band’s website. He was impressed at how this crude, jerky snippet caught “the energy of the room”.
The film’s grungy bootleg style and populist spirit also links directly back to the trio’s proto-Beasties origins as teenage punks on the early 1980s hardcore scene in New York City. Decades later, they are still dissolving the divide between band and audience, still celebrating fan-friendly amateurism over polished professionalism. “That was definitely part of it,” nods Yauch. “We came out of being a punk band, being part of the audience and the scene. We all used to go and see each other’s bands.”
Yauch is now a 41-year-old Buddhist, husband and father. Not very punk rock, surely? “Maybe not,” he shrugs. “I’m certainly not wandering around in combat boots and a mohawk. It depends how you define punk, I guess. But the spirit of it still affects me, especially in the sense of the do-it-yourself thing. We come out of being a punk band, making our own record covers and flyers.”
In this rare solo interview, Yauch seems unusually sober and thoughtful. For music releases the Beasties insist on being interviewed collectively, and constantly undercut each other with self-consciously goofy humour. This is partly a defensive shield developed since their first brush with success in the mid-1980s, when they were vilified as foul-mouthed louts in several UK tabloids. A stage show featuring caged go-go girls and a giant hydraulic penis hardly helped their image. Nor did a 1987 assault charge against Horovitz for throwing a beer can at a female fan in Liverpool (he was later acquitted).
Two decades later, Yauch dismisses the band’s youthful brattishness as an exaggerated cartoon that became a Frankenstein-style monster. “It’s like you start out making fun of something, but then you become it,” he says. “If you’re drinking beer and acting like an asshole every day, you basically are an asshole.”
Yauch rejects suggestions that the Beasties have become more politically correct, arguing that they are just more wary of being misconstrued. “You just take more responsibility,” he says. “I used to rap about sniffing glue. I wasn’t into sniffing glue but it just sounded funny to me. I would think twice about doing that now. You go through different phases.”
A Buddhist since the mid-1990s, Yauch married the Tibetan-American activist Dechen Wangdu in 1998 after launching the pro-Tibet Milarepa Fund with a series of Beasties-backed benefit concerts. More recently, the trio released a download single called In a World Gone Mad, a protest against the war in Iraq. Even so, Yauch remains ambivalent about addressing politics. “It makes a bigger difference when somebody like Neil Young does it, because he plays to a more right-wing crowd than we do,” he says.
After its recent UK premiere in the National Film Theatre’s rock documentary season (see box, right), Awesome is going on nationwide release early next month in a series of special digital projections. The DVD release follows two weeks later. Yauch is also preparing to direct his first “proper film”, a low-budget drama about graffiti artists in New York.
But despite his blossoming extra-curricular career, Yauch insists that there has been no talk of retirement in the Beasties camp. Their next album is currently “at the messing around stage” and he sees no reason why they should not continue performing into their fifties and beyond.
“I know it sounds weird but by that stage there will probably be a lot of people rapping on stage who are 50,” he laughs. “Maybe in the 1920s the idea of an old blues guy sounded pretty weird, too. Now it’s pretty normal.”
He would say that, of course. But with Awesome the Beasties are still pushing the boundaries. Even as middle-age looms, these former rap-rock brats are still fighting for their right to rock the arty party.
Awesome: I F***in’ Shot That is on release from July 7
The NFT's Rock Highlights
Festival (Murray Lerner, 1967) Heavily sampled in Martin Scorsese’s No Direction Home, this lively record of the Newport Folk Festival from 1963 to 1966 includes Bob Dylan going electric. Screenings: June 26, 29
Standing in the Shadows of Motown (Paul Justman, 2002) A moving all-star homage to the Motown studio band the Funk Brothers. Screenings: June 27, 28
The Flaming Lips: The Fearless Freaks (Bradley Beesley, 2005) Two decades of cosmic innovation with the Oklahoma wig-out kings. Screenings: July 7, 10
The Clash: Westway to the World (Don Letts, 2000) Punk legends commemorated with incendiary archive footage and contemporary interviews. Screenings: July 17, 23
Glastonbury (Julien Temple, 2006) Fabled festival celebrated with archive footage and fan film clips. Screenings: July 25, 26, 27
Neil Young: Heart of Gold (Jonathan Demme, 2006) The troubled recording and triumphant unveiling of Young’s Prairie Wind album. UK premiere with Demme interviewed in person: July 19
All the above feature in the NFT’s Access All Areas season, South Bank, London SE1 (www.bfi.org.uk 020-7928 3232)
