“We were just kids/freaking out” sang Beastie Boys’ Mike D last night to about 150 people inside Los Angeles’ cash-only gay dive bar The Plaza Nightclub & Dance Hall. He dropped the line toward the end of his first of four rare and intimate solo shows, his voice drenched in reverb — so much so that it was hard to make out his vocals — and felt like an appropriate sentiment. While Mike D performed mostly new songs from an upcoming album, he still found nostalgia for his old band’s classic, singular sound as a vibe more than through direct affirmation.
Famously, Beastie Boys never broke up. Rather, the trio, which gained fame in the late 1980s through classic rock-meets-rap hits like “No Sleep ‘Til Brooklyn,” and later became one of the most groundbreaking acts on Earth thanks to sample-laden albums like Paul’s Boutique and the kitsch-collage classic Hello Nasty, only stopped playing and recording following the death of bandmate Adam “MCA” Yauch in 2012. Public appearances from the surviving members — Mike D and Ad Rock — have been extremely rare, save for a run of festival DJ sets from Mike D in the late 2010s and a couple of other surprise sets. This show followed two unannounced guest appearances in the past few weeks with his kids’ band, Very Nice Person; tickets for this performance went on sale a day before the show, and unsurprisingly sold out immediately.
The shockingly not-packed tiny club (a spot so not-on-the-radar that even locals were unaware of its existence) also wasn’t full of Hollywood A-listers or even music-biz cognoscenti. From the first minute of the show, it was clear these were mostly champing-at-the-bit Gen Xers there to see one of their heroes for the first time in years. Backed by 5D — a band composed of five members clearly 30 or more years younger than the 60-year-old headliner — and embodied with the punk energy that led to his band’s early breakthrough, Mike D came out swinging with the new track “What We Got,” backed by an off-kilter, guitar-driven DJ groove and wearing a matchy-matchy sweatsuit uniform embroidered with his name above his left breast (the other members’ matched his look as well, though their uniforms read “5D” in the same spot).
Mike D’s vocals were unfortunately filtered and distorted for almost the entire set, conjuring a Check Your Head feel to the bulk of the songs but frustrating members of the audience who may have wanted to hear if D’s signature wordplay stood the test of time. “Make It Stop,” the second song of the set, was a jumpy jaunt with the lyrics “take a name/take a number/fool yourself/fool each other,” and a woozy octave synth line that broke down into an 808-beat before a dense, Moog-flavored outro. A blast-off, high energy version of “Looking Down the Barrel of a Gun,” one of only two Beastie Boys songs played, was next, featuring a guitar solo that suggested the 5D guitarist may have taken lessons with Mike D’s buddy Tom Morello at some point.
Brandon Gonzalez*
“Crypto Anthem” followed, with a neck-rattling guitar lick that called to mind the Breeders’ “Cannonball” and coin-drop samples a la Pink Floyd’s “Money.” The one-chord sing-songy “True Colors” was next, followed by “I Don’t Care,” a boppy, acoustic-swamp slow jam. “Secrets” and “It’s Time” followed, the former imbued with giant dynamic shifts and the repeated line “I say what you say” and the latter a deep-bass conga groove with off-kilter movement recalling the Beasties’ best work.
“Switch Up” was dropped as a single just before the show started and definitely stood out as an anomaly: the song was produced by Mike D’s sons and 5D members Sklyer and Davis Diamond, and is more of a Prodigy-style electro-rock song than a rap-rock banger. Mike D introduced it as “a big moment’ before launching into its challenging rhythmic dance vibes, a description that felt accurate: After all, there hasn’t been a new song released to the public by a Beastie Boy in over a decade, and this feels less like a return to form than a new approach overall.
The show closed out with “Thank You,” the aforementioned reverb-drenched ballad, followed by the finale in the form of the second Beasties song of the night: the classic “So What’cha Want,” with Mike D serving up the rhymes previously rapped back and forth between the members of his sadly defunct band. Rather than a bummer trip, though, it was a passionate call-to-arms, with band members playing instruments behind their heads and Mike D holding the microphone out to the audience for some call-and-response action. It’s a shame his old band met such a tragic end, but it’s clearly a celebration that he’s back out there doing what he loves again, especially in a way that feels so organically familial – and full of the same energy that has made his and the Beasties’ audience feel like an extended family themselves, one that is eager to reunite after so much time apart.
On Sunday, Mike D will perform at Sid the Cat Auditorium in Pasadena, followed by two shows at Xanadu Roller Arts in Brooklyn on May 22 and 23.
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