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LA Weekly, 28th August 1986 Power Tools threw a beastly bash for The Beastie Boys last Saturday. The Beastie ones flew down in Bill Graham's private Lear Jet along with Hurricane and The Hollis Crew after their Oakland show. And Jam Master Jay Mizell hisself sat in at the turntables with Matt Dike - in the master's only LA performance, thanx to the episode in Long Beach - and spun PT's largest ever crowd into ecstasies. (The pose of the night among the lobby crowd was a puzzled, finger-in-the-dimple - very psychedelic - look.) The crowd wasn't so ecstatic when the Beasties' unannounced live performance was prematurely ended thanx to equipment failure. It turned out to be their only LA performance, too, though they did pack in a week of junk-food junketing - they do look well-fed - as Ad Rock dined at Fatburger, La Salsa, Tommy's and Oki Dog ... and that was just for lunch! Those who turned out to welcome the hot honky rapsters included Chili Peppers, Fishbones, Def Jam-sters Rick Rubin and Glen E. Friedman (chaperone and finder of fast food for Def Jam artistes), DJ Europa, Carman Squire with Auntie Loola and Chaz, urban poet Dennis Kerr, 10 Foot Faces (who played a set downstairs), and various fire marshals, who were apparently not amused by the frolicking. Beastie Boys Book (Chapter by Mike Diamond) August 1986. We were playing the Oakland-Alameda Coliseum Arena on the Raising Hell tour, and playing our first-ever L.A. headlining gig later that same night. The plan was that we'd get offstage in Oakland around 7:45, fly to L.A., and play a late show at the club Power Tools, which was located in an amazing old ballroom at the former Park Plaza Hotel on MacArthur Park. At the time, Power Tools was to L.A. what Danceteria was to NYC: an underground nightclub that catered to art students, aspiring musicians, club kids, and everything in between. We were psyched; playing two shows on the same night in different cities was like some Phil Collins Live Aid-type shit to us, especially if one of the gigs was headlining an underground club. The people at Power Tools told us that a driver'd be waiting for us at LAX, so when we landed, we were on the lookout for, like, a driver in a suit holding a placard. Instead, we were greeted by a short kid who legit looked twelve years old. His hair was brushed back, rocker-style, and he was wearing a leather jacket; instead of making him look older, though, all of that made him look even younger, like a kid sporting a Grease costume for Halloween. His name was Max Perlich, and he was driving this ginormous white Chrysler Imperial. I'm sure he didn't actually sit on phone books to see over the steering wheel, but that was the vibe. On the way to the club, he told us we needed to buy booze for the DJ booth. To us, this was already an odd task - like what club wouldn't have that squared away before now? But then, instead of just walking to the liquor store, Max had to ask people walking in and out of the store to buy the booze for him; he was only eighteen and he definitely didn't look like he could pass for twenty-one. It took a while for someone to say yes. While we waited and then drove to the club, Max regaled us with various tall(ish) tales, the kind that I later discovered were his forte. He was a successful character actor - as in, that was literally his job - but Max was fundamentally an L.A. club kid, a real music fan. Like, if it were this day and age, he'd be a DJ. In that era, even though he knew a lot and had tons of vinyl, Max was just an actor who was really into music. Soon we were up in the DJ booth having some drinks. Power Tools was packed. The DJ - and co-owner/mastermind of the club - was a guy named Matt Dike. That night, he played everything from the Junkyard Band to Doug E. Fresh to Led Zeppelin. People were into it. We were getting all psyched, thinking 'wow, we are finally getting to kill it headlining our own show in L.A.'. (It didn't hurt that the place was packed with beautiful L.A. women, whom we imagined meeting immediately following our soon-to-be-triumphant gig). In the audience we'd find out later, were musicians from Fishbone and Jane's Addiction - kindred spirits who made up an L.A. scene similar to ours in New York; Bob Forrest, the singer of Thelonious Monster, was running sound for the show. Right before we went on stage, a dude with long, straight hair bum-rushed us and said "Hi, I'm Anthony and I'm going to say something and introduce you guys." Before we could even react, he went onstage and read some spoken-word thing that we couldn't hear anyway. (The guy, we soon realized, was Anthony Kiedis from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, with whom we'd played a show earlier that year.) Then DJ Hurricane played some kind of intro, and we went onstage as he dropped "Slow and Low". Then we started rapping. The sound was utter garbage. You could barely hear the music, our vocals were way too loud, and anytime we all rapped at the same time, the whole thing got distorted and the sound started to cut out entirely. Bob Forrest, by his own admission, was not a soundman. He definitely didn't know hip hop or understand low end or 808 kick drums. We somehow made it through that first song, but on the very first beat of the next one, "Hold It Now, Hit It" - when that 808 kick drum dropped - the entire PA blew out. Completely gone. Now, by this time in our careers, we'd played a good batch of shows and had some idea of what they took, both musically and professionally. So when the entire sound system got blown while we played a headlining gig to 1,500(ish) paid audience members, did we tap into that reservoir of professionalism and experience to get the problem worked out? No, we most certainly did not. Transcript of our stage banter during the first song: "Yo, man, what the fuck is wrong with you, turn the music up!" "I don't know about you, but in New York we're not a bunch of suckers. Did I say that?" Transcript of our stage banter after the PA blew: "We gotta get outta here." "Yo, the sound system sucks my dick, no offence to anybody." "Y'all come down to the Palladium on Monday, we're gonna kick some fucking ass." And then we left. A few thing happened in the club after we took off - which we wouldn't find out about until years later - that had a far greater impact on our trajectory as a band than the disastrous show itself. One of the angry attendees we left behind was a young engineer and musician named Mario Caldato, who tracked down Matt Dike and his co-owner Jon Sidel and said, 'This place is a joke. I have a PA system. I should set up my PA at your club and you need to let me run the PA and the sound'. Matt hired Mario on the spot. Power tools closed the following year, but by then Matt wanted to start recording as a producer. So Mario started bringing some of his recording equipment over to Matt's apartment in (a shady part of) Hollywood and became his engineer. That crap apartment was where Matt co-wrote and produced massive hits for Tone Loc ('Wild Thing", "Funky Cold Medina") and Young MC ("Bust a Move"). It was there that we later made (most of) our second album. |
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