St. Petersburg Times, February 20, 1987:
Critics have called the Beastie Boys obnoxious, snotty, lewd, thug-like, abrasive and obscene. And those are the good reviews. This hard-rappin' New York trio has won over big-city rock critics and small-town grade-schoolers alike with the raw blend of heavy metal and rap music on their controversial debut LP, Licensed to Ill. Propelled by the MTV hit, "Fight For Your Right (To Paaaarty)," the album has climbed to No. 2 on the Billboard charts. Love 'em or loathe 'em, the Beasties--their names are Mike D, King Ad-Rock and MCA--are packing arenas on their national tour, which stops at the Bayfront Center Wednesday at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $13 in advance and $14 the day of the show at Select-a-Seat outlets. Expect the rafters to shake, beer to spill and obscenities to fly. If you're brave enough to show up, be sure to arrive early to catch special guest Fishbone, whose wild mixture of ska, funk, rock and rap has already led to college-radio stardom. Opening act Murphy's Law is a hardcore-punk band. You've been warned.

St. Petersburg Times, February 24, 1987
By David Okamoto:
The Beastie Boys, with opening acts Fishbone and Murphy's Law, in concert Wednesday at 7:30 at the Bayfront Center. Tickets are $14 plus a service charge at all Select-a-Seat outlets.

Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys is speechless. "How did you find this out?" the deep-voiced Beastie blurts out.
He was asked if it's true that the hard-rock rap trio's contract with concert promoters specifies that a "rainbow assortment" of condoms must be stocked in their dressing room. Yauch seems surprised, even though this is just the sort of hype one can imagine a publicist dreaming up to fuel the group's street-punk image.

"Yes, it does say something to that effect," Yauch admits, noting that the rest of their backstage demands and perks are pretty ordinary. "We got a lot of beer on the (contract) rider. And a bottle of Jack Daniels. A bottle of tequila. I think there's like a case of Heineken, two cases of Bud in bottles and two cases of Bud in cans. Cheese-filled Combos is on it, or 'other cheese-flavored snacks,' if I remember correctly.

"We purposely asked for no potato chips and no cold-cut platters, because it made us all sick on the last tour," Yauch adds. "No cold-cut platters."

Last year, the Beastie Boys were merely the unknown opening act for friends Run-D.M.C., dismissed by most industry watchers as three obnoxious white kids from New York trying to sound black. Today, they're still obnoxious--but Yauch (MCA, age 22), Mike Diamond (Mike D, 20) and Adam Horovitz (King Ad-Rock, 19) also happen to be the hottest thing to hit MTV since Duran Duran, thanks to an uproarious video for their latest single, "Fight For Your Right (to Paaarty)."

Their debut LP, Licensed to Ill, is No. 2 on the Billboard charts and sold 1-million copies in less than two months. And their tour, which stops at the Bayfront Center Wednesday, is selling out all over the country.

The Beastie Boys are cleaning up right where Run-D.M.C.'s hit version of Aerosmith's "Walk This Way" left off, presiding over a shotgun marriage between the cocky rhymes and rhythms of rap and the grinding guitars of heavy metal. The result is as intoxicating as it is irritating. Such raunchy workouts as "Brass Monkey" (the next single), "Time to Get Ill" and "The New Style" ("Some voices have treble/some voices have bass/ we have voices that are in your face") have even received raves from big-city rock critics.
"The wisecracking arrogance of this record is the only rock 'n' roll attitude that means diddley right now," Robert Christgau observed in the Village Voice.
On stage, the Beasties flail around, body-blocking each other while ranting and raving, microphones in one hand and a bottle of beer in the other. Accompanied by a disc jockey, pre-recorded backing tracks and a gyrating dancer, they look like plastered pledges staggering home from an all-night frat party.

Bay area concertgoers got their first look at the Beasties in 1985, when they opened for Madonna at the USF Sun Dome. Needless to say, they were lewd, rude and booed.

"That was the whole point," Yauch recalls by phone from his hotel room in Corpus Christi, Tex. "Our job was to get the crowd riled up before Madonna went on. And we did it. And whether we got them happy or got them mad, we definitely didn't leave them bored."

With their glorification of alcohol, drugs and sex, the Beastie Boys have emerged as every parent's newest nightmare.

"They're basically looking for a way to condemn the new form of music that their kids are listening to, just as they did with rock 'n' roll and when Elvis Presley shook his hips," Yauch explains.

More soft-spoken and articulate than his thug-like stage persona suggests, Yauch claims the Beastie Boys are party animals, not threats to society.

"We basically do whatever we want to do and have a pretty good time about it," he says. "And if we end up breaking anything, we pay for it, because we make enough money now. A lot of adults are worried that we're doing crazy, terrible things. We're actually not doing anything terrible. We're just having a good time."

Of course, their idea of a good time includes stunts similar to last week's incident in St. Louis, when Yauch and his cohorts invited a woman on stage to remove her shirt and then proceeded to pour beer on her chest.

Yes, where Beasties go, trouble follows. The Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) hasn't demanded warning stickers on their album ("I don't think they've figured out who we are yet"), but the group was barred from Columbia Records' offices. That is, until the LP went platinum.

Now the door is even opened for them. "These are people who wouldn't even speak to me up until recently," Yauch says, launching into his imitation of a squeaky-voiced executive. "And they say, 'You know, Adam, I just really wanted to get on the phone with you and congratulate you. I think it's just so wonderful.' And I thought, 'Shut the f--- up. You wouldn't even let me in your office a week ago.'"

But wait, there's more.

Hotels are canceling their reservations before the band even gets to town "because they read in Newsweek that we trashed a hotel room," Yauch says.

The University of California-San Diego canceled a scheduled Feb. 8 concert when they heard rumors that the Beasties were throwing beer into the crowd and spray-painting their dressing rooms. Michael Jackson, who owns the Beatles' song catalog, refused to let the Beasties release an irreverent cover of "I'm Down" (although a CBS sampler cassette handed out at last year's New Music Seminar features the track and has turned into a collector's item). And a fiesty Joan Rivers surrendered her Late Show set to them during a recent appearance, which ended with MCA sitting behind her desk and Ad-Rock sitting on it. "How'd you all three get together?"

Rivers asked. "Julliard?"

"It was cool," Yauch recalls. "... I've always hated her watching her on TV. But meeting her, she was all right."

Yauch and the Beasties clearly are enjoying their bad-boy reputations. But his tone turns serious when discussing the controversial stigma that rap music has been saddled with since the 1986 Run-D.M.C. tour. Those shows drew numerous, and some say exaggerated, reports of crowd disturbances and arrests after 42 people were injured during a Long Beach Arena show near Los Angeles.

"The violence everyone talks about went on at one concert," Yauch says. "I was on that tour for four months and there was no other violence on the entire tour except for this one show in L.A., where two gangs showed up and got into a gang war ... which was completely irrelevant to Run-D.M.C. It's a problem L.A. has with their gangs. A lot of people got hurt. But I never saw a person even get hit on the whole rest of the tour."

There is a potential for violence at any type of youth-oriented concert, he adds. "There's less of it at rap concerts than any other kind of music. And 90 percent of the messages in rap music are all positive--'stay in school' and stuff like that."

Yauch says the Beastie Boys' most outrageous antics are taking place behind the hotel-room door. The details are not fit for a family newspaper.

"We're talking about things that Led Zeppelin only dreamed about doing," he brags. "All the cruel stuff that you'd imagine rock 'n' roll bands make up and pretend they do, we decided we're actually going to do. And we do, but nobody hears about it."

St. Petersburg Times, February 28, 1987
By Wilma Norton:
ST. PETERSBURG - After a rock concert at the Bayfront Center on Wednesday night, some teenagers who were leaving the concert were punched and robbed by some other teenagers who were waiting outside. Some concert-goers lost necklaces and souvenir T-shirts they had purchased, and some who resisted the robbers were assaulted, police said Friday. At least 100 people were involved in one of the fights, and there were scattered smaller scuffles.

Reported injuries included loose teeth, black eyes, bruises and cuts. Six people were treated around midnight in the emergency room at Bayfront Medical Center. Two juveniles were arrested, police spokesman George Pinckney said.

The melee followed a concert by a group called the Beastie Boys, a rock group with appeal largely among adolescents. More than 4,600 people attended the concert. Police Lt. John Tallon, who was in charge of off-duty police officers providing security at the concert, estimated the average age of the crowd at 13.

The Beastie Boys have a reputation for raunchy and obnoxious behavior, on- and off-stage, but a Bayfront Center official said the band members were pretty well-behaved.

"I was pleasantly surprised," said Vernita Batchelder, acting director of the center.

It was after the concert that some young people without concert tickets were milling around outside the center, Lt. Tallon said. Just before the show ended, a group of 30 to 40 "in their mid-teens and up" threw rocks at a side door and were escorted from the property by police and told not to return, Tallon said. As the doors opened to let the crowd out, 60 to 80 youths from outside ran in one set of doors, ran through the lobby and out doors on the other side, spreading around the building.

Six to eight police cars were called about 11 p.m. in addition to about 20 off-duty police and 41 private security officers hired by the Bayfront to handle crowds and traffic at the concert. Police split into groups of three or four and began trying to get the crowd to leave the parking lots as quickly as possible, Tallon said. One large group reassembled at Fifth Avenue S and First Street and was scattered by police. It then moved to the parking lot of the vacant Uncle Ed's Restaurant, where some youths began chipping up concrete and throwing bricks, he said. Five to six officers again broke up the group, and there were no injuries.

Tallon said the disturbance began and ended swiftly. "It was all over in about five minutes," he said.

Some parents complained that police would not take reports. Tallon said officers tried to take reports, but their main concern was dispersing the crowd before the situation became more serious.