So how do you interview one of the most documented bands on the planet? Fucked if I know. I spoke with Mike D from the legendary Beastie Boys shortly before going to print (not bad, it only took two months to arrange time in the man's remarkably busy schedule). By the time I actually interviewed him I had listened to Ill Communication far, far too many times and spent many an hour on the Beasties' web site supposedly researching the piece (mainly downloading the many quicktime movies) - but when it came to the crunch I already knew the answers to most of the questions that I was to ask. The point of printing the article? Well you might pick up on a few facts that you didn't know and get a feel for the man. This was to be the only article in Convulsion which has no creative embellishment, as it turned out the interview was far too long and had to be edited.

What happened with the last tour, I know you were supposed to come across in October/November but ...

We'd been in Australia and Japan just before that, and then I dunno we just got to a point where everyone was really burnt out, and Mark, our keyboard player, and his girlfriend had a child, he really wanted to get home, rightfully so. Then Eric, our percussion player, completely burnt his wrist up, the tendons in it or whatever. So he couldn't playÉ so then we were kinda looking at replacing both of them, and then everyone on our crew burnt out. So it was kinda like well, we've got like the three of us ready to go. And then actually once I got home, I went to see a couple of bands who'd been on tour for a while, and I was really thankful that we'd pushed it back. If we'd have gone, it could've been fine and everything, but we would've, like, played these shows and been kinda burnt out. The thing we felt most about it was "Fuck, we've been doing this long enough " We've gotten to the point where we know when to say no. Like, yeah, we can go back there but we wanna wait a month. It's like the hardest thing. I think we kinda learned a lesson.

Can you think of any reason why people have gone so ballistic over ill Communication?

I don't really know what we're doing so different than we we were doing three years ago. It's very confusing to me as to why two years ago, that we put out a record, y'know, and now this year we put a record out: a whole different scenario, whatever, on like a commercial level butÉ

D'you think that the whole music climate's changed now, and that your music is more acceptable again.

I guess maybe to some extent, at least maybe in Great Britain. I think maybe we came up because in certain ways people were kinda accustomed to listening to certain categories of music that they were very passionate about, and it was hard for them to go beyond that and accept different kind of things going on or being open to different ideas and stuff, whereas I think now there is like an in-fashion-ness or whatever, or in-vogue-ness about being able or "I should be open-minded about listening to a different kind of music". So hopefully that will go beyond being a musical trend. But, you know, who knows?

Do you ever worry about getting old? Y'know, you think you'd better do this now while you still can?

No, cos it's not ...hold on, we have like a gas meter reader here. OK, sorry, just had to, y'know, get my lethal dog under control. He might lick the meter maid to death....................

(forty seconds later)

that was quick

Alright Rufus, I can let you outside now. Hold on, let me just put the dog out..................

OK

(a minute later) Hey

Yo

So anyway.

What's up with Grand Royal Magazine , is it still going? Issue 1 came out in 93, that's long time between issues.

Yeah. (laughs) We were gonna be like at least twice a year, right now we're kind of a more of an annual status. But actually we were supposed to get paper in this weekÉand then of course, like, now we're not getting it this week, so we're getting paper next week so it will go to the presses next week and hopefully an issue might happen.

So have you done many band Interviews for Grand Royal?

Some. We are trying to go more along the lines of getting other bands and other musicians that we know or like to contribute stuff, as opposed to just interviewing them, you know they're getting interviewed in other magazines and I am not terribly good at interviewing anybody anyway. Ideas like, well let's get people to do something that we think is cool, that wouldn't ordinarily appear anywhere else.

How was it to interview other people who are generally lower on the great ladder than yourself?

It's a little bizarre being on the other side of it. I had to interview Karim Abdul Jabhar and I was nervous enough, y'know, cos I had so much respect for the guy, it was pretty difficult.

Your net site, how did it start, was it just a fan coming to you, or was it a conscious decision?

Completely without our involvement at all. I mean it started maybe with this kid Ian Rogers who's out of Indiana, and people just started telling me, I mean I wasn't even on the net or anything, people just started telling me "You've gotta check out the Internet, you've gotta check out the sites that you can have on your stuff." And then I checked it out, and then I contacted him, and he came to a couple of shows when we were like in the area, and we got along very well, and we just kinda co-opted y'know, what he did. Cos at that time, when Ian first put it up, it was only available y'know by Ian. Y'know, the Beastie Boys site, the Grand Royal site, it was all through him. We established our own sites and stuff, and he's in charge of kind of maintaining it, adding all new stuff and keeping it growing. I'm really psyched about the magazine being on the net. It's becoming more like the magazine's gonna be like really cool on there, because we have like sound bytes for everything, we got like video clips of some stuff and it's gonna be really cool that way. But then like for you or me, it'll takes many nights to down load it. I mean that's kinda the thing, like the modem connections gotta catch up. So unfortunately it's not gonna be like great but then.. but if you're at University or whatever you'll be able to access it all instantly. It's great.

I see that on the site you've got the piece about Tibet, how did you get into that? Is that sort of your chosen cause?

Well Adam Yauch was like on his travels, he was in Nepal, and he got exposed to a lot exiled Tibetans. So he got exposed to their situation, and their ideas of the situation that the people in Tibet are going through a kind of repressed reality, and we just continued to learn more about it or whatever, and then it just kind of grew, and we found Milapera which is like a non profit organisation for like, what we do, all the benefits we do and stuff. It's a matter of staying true to what we wanna do, helping people out and doing things what we believe in.

You have limited vinyl only instrumental album out. Why instrumental?

It was actually just done as a promo for the publishing company over here, and sent to radio stations and stuff cos we kinda liked the idea of our instrumental music being used for like weather forecasts and traffic reports and stuff, we really thought that that was a kinda appropriate use for it. It kinda came out of that and then the record itself came out really cool so we figured lets press it as a limited edition vinyl so that people who are into it can have it. It worked out pretty well.

I read about you suing British Airways in the dim and distant past. What was that about considering the amount of samples in your own music?

Well that's hard, but the British Airways thing was a very different situation, it was like a big multi-national corporation using our music to sell their product. In the one sense I guess a soundtrack in a commercial where one person uses our music creatively to create another piece of music is cool but the problem I have with that is that music's being used to sell something. We have a very different attitude towards people who are just sampling our music, which is something we do and something we would like to continue as an art-form....it's definitely changed now in terms of there's so much greed surrounding the whole issue, it's kinda forcing people to look to other means of expression anyway.

Everyone is paranoid about samples these days. The potential for disaster is huge. The only currently safe place is on the net.

When it becomes common enough and valuable enough and profitable enough, and there's actually money to be made, then all of a sudden that nature is gonna change unfortunately. Which is really sad, because right now the freedom that exists with it, it's great, but at a certain point, y'know ideally it's growing at a rapid rate and that's great, and then of course at some point, when it comes to people's attention it's like, OK so...It's no different in a sense though from choosing what magazine or newspaper you're gonna read. Here you've got America Online, which is like picking up USA Today. It's laid out very easily, big letters, big pictures, y'know? It's all very easy to access and very transparent and very light in terms of the nature of the information for the most part, compared to the Internet which is way more intensive, way more worldly &endash; you don't get some big huge happy face colour greeting when you turn it on.

Was doing Lollapalooza fun?

As it turned out for us, certainly not for everybody, but for us, we had fun. For us it was like we went out in the summer and we did a show and we felt good about doing it. The hardest thing for us was that it wasn't under our complete control in the same way as when we play our own shows. But at the same time we kinda surrendered, once we accepted the fact we decided to just put into it what we can, and try and make it as good as we can. Ultimately there's a lot of aspects of it that maybe fall short, or that we didn't like or whatever, but we were determined to enjoy ourselves and get the most out of it that we could and play good shows and for us in a sense it kinda worked out. Ultimately it is simply putting on a big rock concert, it isn't anything more holistic or charitable than that. But at the same time within those confines we had a table with all our Tibetan stuff on. At the beginning of every day, a group of monks doing a chant, blessing the stage and kinda opening the show and getting kids aware of their whole music and culture and their situation. So there were things that we did with it where we kinda manipulated the situation to try to put different ideas out there but that being said all you can do is be completely honest about what it is, and it's a big rock concert, y'know? It's ridiculous to try and make it into something that it isn't.

Do you ever feel that your message is being wasted on the mindless drones of suburban America, when playing live?

Well sometimes it is frustrating, when you play shows there's elements of that going onÉ I think it's only natural that you play shows and you feel "Fuck, these people just don't get it" and you look out at these people and you feel, you don't feel enfranchised with it at all, at most, kind of against it, but y'know, at the same time I think it's kind dangerous to get too hung up on that, because you can get to a really negative place, only focusing on that. It's like you've got a couple of options, you can either take control of what you're doing and the way it's presented and keep that down to a certain audience or you can put out what you're putting out, be kinda careful what you're putting out but ultimately you're not gonna choose who's gonna listen to it, you're not gonna choose the audience that's gonna buy it, you just have to accept that.

Ever wanted to kick the shit out of someone in your audience?

Oh yeah, for sure. I mean without question, and in a way, fairly often. At the same time I'm at point right now for myself where I have to check myself because if I'm gonna let that ruin my night and therefore ruin the show, you've got all these other people and it's really kinda lame. But at the same time, it happens all the time.

I understand your wife made Gun Crazy, the Badlands of the 90's. That film was the first time I'd seen Drew Barrymore since ET.

There's a lot of people who've said that but she's doing lots of movies now.

Hot property?

I guess if you wanna refer to people as property, yeah.

But isn't that the way people are viewed in Hollywood?

Yeah, probably, unfortunately.

Éand the music industry?

The music industry in a way doesn't seem as bad to me, it's not as much money, so more people have control.

You seem to manage to keep in control.

As much as possible, but to an extent cos we have so much going on, it's necessary to let go with certain things and become inter-dependent on people we can trust. But at the same time I think we've been through so much shit that also we're kinda too permanently scarred to really trust that many people that much. We're pretty fortunate in that we're probably like one of a handful of bands that really does have complete free reignÉ The cats here, hang on. He's cleaning himself right by the phone.......

Are you an Animal lover?

I like my animals.

What are they called.

The dog's named Rufus, Rufus Thomas, and the cat's named Louis Etan, just like the luggage.

So, do you actually wear X-Large clothes?

I pick and choose. I'm a pretty picky guy.

Not a fashion consultant yet?

No, but I think that would be a good job for me.

When you stop making music...

It could be another sideline