Beastie Boys‘ Ill Communication turned 30 this year, and as part of the press cycle for the new reissue, Mike D and Ad-Rock stopped by Conan O’Brien‘s Sirius XM podcast Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend.
In addition to talking about Ill Communication, the conversation drifted into other areas of the Beastie-verse. They talked about how their physical gold record for Paul’s Boutique may or may not have been real. “We had a gold record on the wall,” Ad-Rock told Conan. “It was our record Paul’s Boutique and I was looking at it and I could see it has our label and I could see that it has, whatever, like nine songs on the one side and I was looking at the actual gold record. It only had four songs on it and I was like, ‘Wait, wait. You guys’ and so we opened it and we put the record on a record player… and it was somebody doing piano versions of Barry Manilow.”
They also talked about the late Adam “MCA” Yauch and listening to his verses on Beastie Boys records. Mike D says, “I think enough time has gone, there was definitely a period of time where it just, I couldn’t even open up a computer music file, something that we are working on, because I would just get too sad the process would bring me right back to making, ’cause we really worked with Adam up to very close to the very, very end because that’s what made him happy.”
Watch in-studio video of the gold record and Adam Yauch clips, and listen to the whole Beastie Boys episode of Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend, below.