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fancy cars,” marvels Adams. “I was just amazed at the amount of wealth.”
    Two others who drifted into the Beasties’ orbit were the children of folk singer Donovan: his son, musician Donovan Leitch Jr., and his actress daughter, Ione Skye. Leitch remembers 1988 as “a 24-hour party,” beginning with leisurely breakfasts—“You never went with less than ten people,” he says—where the band and its friends would map out the day. There were pool parties, frequent road trips to Lake Arrowhead and Joshua Tree National Park, and nights of clubbing at Matt Dike–affiliated spots like Enter the Dragon and Dirt Box.
    Adam Yauch and John King, meanwhile, would frequently depart in the wee hours for some skiing. “Set the cruise control on the Mercedes to over 100 in the middle of the night, heading to Mammoth,” recalls King. “Then, since the snow sucked there, we took off to Tahoe or Snowbird, which was awesome.”
    All this recreation, funded by Capitol, was helping the Beastie Boys recover the sanity lost during the last days of
Licensed to Ill
. But it was little wonder that the new album was taking shape at a less-than-frantic pace. Even the group’s afternoon writing sessions at the Mondrian, work “which involved a good deal of red wine and marijuana,” according to Mike Simpson, would soon become dominated by one of the Beasties’ favorite sports. “We noticed that every day at a certain time, people would line up outside the ComedyStore, which is right across the street. So, someone—I don’t know who—had the idea that it might be fun to throw eggs at these people. So it sort of became a daily ritual.”
    “One night … there was a line of people waiting to see Billy Crystal. And the Beasties went up on the roof, and lobbed from across the street. So these things hit like boulders,” says Tim Carr. “And the Comedy Store called the Mondrian, and the Mondrian security and the police were there. And nobody was taking any blame for anything.”
    The egging would spread to drive-by excursions throughout downtown Los Angeles, and it even inspired a new song, “Egg Man.” “There was a certain amount of research going into all these stunts,” Carr admits with a smile. “But they knew no bounds.”
    The Mondrian staff would address the mounting disturbances in a “very politically correct letter” to the band. “It said that there were complaints of things falling out their window, and that if there was a problem with the window, they could have maintenance come up and address it,” recalls Simpson. “It was just hysterically funny.”
    The man who would have to answer for the Beasties, Tim Carr, was beginning to disagree.
    * * *
    “It would be great, you know, if we could all just go to work every day and say, OK, we’re gonna work in the studio from one o’clock until dah-dah-dah, and we’re gonna finish the album in two months,” Michael Diamond would tell a radio interviewer in 1989. “But it never works like that …. You might go for two weeks and get one day of work done. Butthat one day of work is very special, for very special people like ourselves.”
    It would be hard to better summarize the work habits of these very special people during the summer of 1988. The days ran together in Matt Dike’s sweltering apartment as the seven collaborators tried out new ideas and foreign substances. Not surprisingly, that combination lengthened the sessions appreciably. An insider recalls that Adam Yauch, who often took the creative lead, “would drive everyone bananas” with his suggestions. “He’d take mushrooms and say, ‘OK, let’s run the whole mix through a guitar stomp-box!’ And you’d think, ‘Will somebody fucking kill this guy?’” The band’s drug use, by rock-star standards, was fairly benign. “Wine and weed” were the primary vices, according to Mario Caldato, who not-quite-jokingly calls the group’s “friendly dealer, Hippie Steve,” a major influence