Bill Adler, hip-hop historian and former publicist for the Beastie Boys while they were signed to Def Jam.

Although these days they seem inseparable, the Beastie Boys started out life in different bands. Michael Diamond, born on November 20th, 1965 to art dealer parents, was originally a vocalist in a band called The Young Aborigines. His cohorts in this short-lived enterprise were guitarist John Berry and drummer Kate Shellenbach. To describe their career as short-lived would be putting it mildly: they called it a day after their second gig, which had taken place on the same day as their first.

These three formed the Beasties in New York in 1981 along with their friend Adam Yauch. The son of an architect, born 5th August 1964, Yauch started out as a bassist. Tellingly, he and Diamond had first met at a gig by the widely respected Washington DC black hardcore punk band Bad Brains when still in their early teens: it must have been coincidence, but it seems almost karmic that a white band who would make an indelible impression on the black music form, hip-hop, came together while watching a black band playing music that came from an almost totally white musical culture. Diamond recalled the meeting during a 1998 interview with NME's Ted Kessler. "I was this incredibly awkward punk rock kid with spiky hair. I'd tried to dye it orange but it hadn't really worked at all, and it looked like shit. I was going to a lot of punk rock shows on my own because I didn't have any friends who were into that. And because I was young and he [Yauch] was young, a lot younger than most people at the gigs, we became part of this group of kids who went to clubs and to see bands together. I don't know if it's to do with being from New York or just from being insecure, but we certainly didn't just stroll up to each other and say 'What's up'. We scowled at each other for some time first."

Meanwhile, future Beastie Adam Horovitz, the son of playwright Israel, was thrashing about in a hardcore band called The Young And The Useless. Suitably for one who would be accused of terrorising society, he was born, in 1966, on Halloween. He wouldn't meet his latterday band mates until a while later, again at a gig, though - again, tellingly - it wasn't a punk event. It was at a rap show by the Sugarhill Records-signed Funky Four Plus One More, a later line-up of a band whose classic 'It's The Joint' would be referenced and sampled by the Beasties several times in the ensuing years.

The Beastie Boys and The Young And The Useless played gigs around Manhattan's punk cellars during the first eighteen months of the 1980s. Venues such as A7, CBGB's and Max's Kansas City provided them with their first footings in live performance, although the pre-Horovitz line-up's first ever gig was at Adam Yauch's seventeenth birthday party, held in John's loft. Kate Schellenbach's recollections a few years later give a fair indication of where the early Beasties' heads were at: "They were just the same as they are now," she maintained in the 1989 press biography released prior to their second album. "Loud, obnoxious and ugly, and a lot of fun rather than a serious hardcore band. Whereas other bands, just as awful as the Beastie Boys, would actually believe they were good, for Mike and Adam the whole point was to be terrible and to admit it."

The soon-to-be trio had wanted to be rock stars since their pre-teen years. Adam Yauch later told Guitar World that "I always wanted a bass when I was a kid, though I didn't get one at first. My parents were too tired of buying me things that would just end up in the closet. I knew this girl who had a bass, and I'd go over to her house to play. My parents eventually rented one for me on the condition that if I played it, I could have it." In the same magazine, Horovitz remembered his first electric guitar, and why he wanted one: "For my twelfth birthday my Mom and all her friends got me a guitar and a little practice amp. I talked about playing guitar all the time - I was listening to a lot of Kiss, and I wanted to be Ace. I thought 'Shock Me' - the song where Ace sings - was the shit! 'Making Love' too. So my Mom and her friends bought me a Hondo II Professional."

Like so many young men of their generation, the nascent Beasties had been attracted to punk by the music's energy and its anti-establishment stance. But punk rock in the early '80s in New York was a very different creature to that which had crawled out of London almost a decade earlier. The Big Apple was home to the New York Dolls (managed by Malcolm McLaren, the svengali figure behind the Sex Pistols, who would jump on the hip-hop bandwagon around the same time as the Beasties in the mid-80s) and Johnny Thunders, artists who became massive influences on the first wave of British punk. The city also produced the goofier but very much punk-inspired Ramones, but despite these legacies, New York didn't experience an explosion of this music in the same way British cities like London or Manchester did. By the early '80s America seemed to be crying out for its own punk-like catharsis, and one of the ways this need manifested itself was in the growth of a post-punk hardcore scene. Though more readily associated with Washington DC than New York, American hardcore is to this day synonymous with an uncompromising seriousness of purpose. Many hardcore bands are "straight edge", meaning they eschew drinking or drug use, and the majority of the music is concerned with socio-political point-making. At its best, hardcore can transcend such constraints and produce music that succeeds despite (or perhaps because of) the limitations of the form: Washington band Fugazi have become the scene's de facto leaders, although they, being opposed to all forms of authoritarianism and social inequality, don't see it that way, and their determination to remain outside the music business is reflected in their edgy, dramatic and compelling records just as much as in the uncompromising attitude they take in manufacturing, distributing and selling them. At the other end of the spectrum, though, hardcore can be pretty grim stuff.

This clearly seems to have been the Beastie Boys' impression when they began their irreverent stab at being a hardcore band. Exhibiting, even at such an early stage, the self-deprecating humour that would become a defining trait of their music over the coming years, the band tried to introduce a few laughs to the po-faced hardcore scene. They were not particularly successful.

It's safe to say the Beastie Boys, even before Horovitz joined, didn't behave exactly in keeping with the inordinately serious vibe of the hardcore scene, and their evident glee in attempting to add a lighter shade to the music's palette divided opinion on them. Some influential figures were clearly impressed: HR of Bad Brains caught a Beastie show and asked them to support his group at Max's Kansas City, while other people, such as Phoebe and Simon Stringer of North Carolina, clearly disagreed. "The Beastie Boys are the most feeble band I have ever and will ever seen or see," the couple wrote, somewhat confusingly, in a letter to the band, later reprinted in the sleeve notes to Some Old Bullshit: "Please save face and bow out of this mess as gracefully as you can before everyone realises the same thing that we did." (Little did the correspondents know back then, but the Beastie Boys had already split up on several occasions. By the time they got to record their debut release they'd already called it a day, splitting after the Bad Brains support because, as Diamond put it in the Some Old Bullshit sleeve, "it didn't seem funny anymore". They split again before the record's eventual release convinced them to "re-form" for some gigs.)

One of the band's mates, Dave Parsons, ran a record shop called Rat Cage that the group and their friends frequented at the time. "We came across Johnny Thunders selling autographed 10" x 8" glossies outside Rat Cage to feed his heroin habit," Adrock told Stuart Clark at Hot Press in 1994. "Stiv [Bators], Johnny and most of the other Dolls are dead by now which, I think, underlines the redundancy of the era." Parsons had decided to start a label named after his shop, and, much to the Horovitz-less Beasties' delight, he asked them to make a record for this new imprint. The 'Polly Wog Stew' EP was recorded in a single winter weekend late in 1981 in a studio in the same building as Parsons' shop. The boss of the fledgling label had access to the studio for free because it was then on the verge of being shut down. Although the band didn't have time to mix the record before the studio was closed, the 7" EP was nevertheless released by Parsons early in 1982.

An amateurish slew of fuzztone guitars, bluebottle bass and shouting, 'Polly Wog Stew' is not the finest recorded work the Beasties ever produced. Its eight tracks, though, do reveal something of the group's later pre-occupations and hint at why their time in the hardcore wilderness was not idly spent. All hardcore bands were seemingly obliged to have at least one anti-police song, and in 'Transit Cop' the Beasties vent their spleen at traffic police: the technique they would employ most fruitfully on their debut LP Licensed To Ill - blowing trivial problems up to a level their more serious-minded musical peers would use to talk about real issues - is here given an early try-out. 'Michelle's Farm' finds them insulting one another; again, a recurring theme in their later work ("you're so ugly, Adam, you look like a pig farmer"), and displays hints of the wordplay that would soon develop. 'Egg Raid On Mojo' was revisited in infinitely more engaging form on the Paul's Boutique album, where elements of it were overhauled to make the track 'Egg Man', while the eponymous 'Beastie Boys' spells out the band's name and does little else. Diamond has frequently maintained that the moniker is an acronym, standing for Boys Entering Anarchistic States Towards Internal Excellence. Hip-hop music doesn't have a monopoly on this trend, but the genre certainly has more than its fair share of such appellations: e.g. KRS-ONE (Knowledge Reigns Supreme Over Nearly Everyone), Blade (Beneficial Living Always Develops through Experience) and the Wu-Tang Clan track 'C.R.E.A.M.' ('Cash Rules Everything Around Me'). As the band were still part of the hardcore genre when they settled on the name, and given (a) that 'Beastie Boys' doesn't include the words, just the initial letters, and (b) the whole phrase is more than a little cumbersome, it seems safe to assume the "meaning" to the name was concocted after the band had already begun using it.

John Berry's departure cleared the way for the Beasties to take more recognisable shape (Berry went on to join Thwig). He jumped ship shortly after the EP's release and the subsequent gigs, and, in looking around for a replacement, Yauch, Diamond and Schellenbach settled quickly on Horovitz. The Young And The Useless had opened gigs for the Beasties on several occasions, and not only did Adam's guitar style seem suitably rudimentary, his band had even covered some Beastie Boys songs, so he didn't require much tutelage. Tragically for the history of western music, this move spelled the end for The Young And The Useless. "We fell apart really bad," Horovitz told Guitar World. "The drummer went to military school in New Jersey."

Yet even as this new line-up was settling in, the Beasties' listening habits were changing. Leaning increasingly towards the new sounds emanating from New York's black neighbourhoods, the Beasties spent 1982 and 1983 devouring hip-hop.

This was the era when the still relatively new music began to spread outside the communities that had spawned it, and plenty of curious onlookers got caught up in the excitement. The Clash invited the epochal rap group Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five to support them at a sold-out New York residency, Blondie released the rap-inflected love song to the hip-hop movement, 'Rapture', and the music's visual equivalent - graffiti art - began to get shown in downtown galleries as street-spawned artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat began to get taken seriously by the notoriously stuffy NY art establishment. Breakdancers began to throw down at Manhattan niteries like the Mudd Club, influential hip-hop DJs such as Afrika Bambaataa and Flash got booked to play in the more eclectic and progressive downtown clubs, and the whole movement was embraced by the open-minded but predominantly white and affluent Greenwich Village crowd.

Hip-hop became, for those that wanted it, New York's punk rock. Dynamic, exciting, opinionated and provocative, the new music-based culture galvanised people and quickly became compulsive. To a band like the Beasties it must have been a godsend: after underground America had spent years struggling to recreate the aura of punk, here at last was the home-grown real thing - a revolutionary music set to blow everything before it out of the water, cheap and easy to make, enabling its practitioners to find their own sound, style and voice. "Attitude-wise, hardcore and rap are remarkably similar," Diamond told American-based British hip-hop journalist Frank Owen, writing in Newsday in 1992. "The energy is the same. And you can express yourself without having had to study music for fifteen years. I used to say that the only difference was that with punk rock you have funny haircuts, whereas with rap you have funny hats."

The Beasties first heard rap on the subway trains as they rode to and from Yauch's place in Brooklyn to Manhattan and back - bootlegged cassettes of rap battles from Harlem and the Bronx, tapes of early singles on the Enjoy and Sugarhill labels, played on the tape machines of young black kids from Uptown, Brooklyn and Queens. "The first hip-hop I ever heard - really before it was ever on wax - was on the subway when I was going to school hearing kids playing battle tapes," Mike D told Jim Treymayne of DJ Times in 1994. "As soon as [Sugarhill Gang's] 'Rapper's Delight' or 'Flash To The Beat' by Grandmaster Flash came out, we'd start to request them downtown. A DJ who was influential - and this wasn't a hip-hop thing - was this woman Anita Sarko who used to play clubs like Mudd Club. We'd convince her to play stuff. She played No Wave stuff, but also New Wave dance stuff. She was the first downtown DJ we could convince to play 'Birthday Party Rap' or 'Spoonin' Rap'. Another influential DJ was [Afrika] Bambaataa and that definitely changed the world for us when we heard him spin. First of all, he had this presence - not as a performer or someone on-stage - but when he came into the place, him and his whole Zulu Nation crew, it was this presence. He just took over the vibe, dominated the vibe, he made the vibe. The thing that really fucked us up was that we expected him to play hip-hop jams, and he did, but the whole shit was mixing in 'Apache' or 'Son Of Scorpio' and then he'd go into the craziest pop record and make it work, like "Oh Mikki, you're so fine!" That's what I mean by freakin' it. Bam could mix the most unlikely records and make it work."

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