Mix Master Mike shot the intro scene to the Beastie Boys’s “Three MCs and One DJ” video 10 times over the course of eight hours in 1998. He would begin by walking from a coffee shop in New York City to the Beastie Boys’s “secret” rehearsal space—which he says was “basically a dungeon”—wearing a Ghostbusters proton pack he’d picked up from a Hollywood prop shop and a NASA spacesuit. MCA (Adam Yauch), Mike D (Michael Diamond), and Ad-Rock (Adam Horowitz) didn’t expect that, but this was Mix Master Mike’s first video with the Beasties and he wanted to make an impression.
“They had no fucking idea I was coming in with that,” Mix Master Mike tells High Times.“To see their faces when I walked in with that jetpack for the first time, they were like, ‘Yeah, he’s awesome.’ I needed something that was gonna stick in everyone’s minds.”
It took Mix Master Mike, whose real name is Michael Schwartz, almost two minutes to walk from the coffee shop and down the six flights of stairs to the room where Beasties were patiently waiting for him to put the needle on the record. Mike later found out they ended up using the first take, which makes him wonder if the nine extra takes was their way of hazing him. After all, these are the same guys who toured with a giant inflatable penis during the Licensed To Ill era and essentially made debauchery into a full-time (and very lucrative) job. But Mike didn’t care—he was just happy to be along for the ride.
Mix Master Mike, a founding member of the Invisibl Skratch Piklz turntablist crew and DMC World DJ Champion, was crab scratching his way into becoming the fourth Beastie. …
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Author: Kyle Eustice / High Times
