If you’re looking for proof positive that persistence pays off look no further than the quest of Mix Master Mike, the DMC World DJ Championship-winning turntablist (in both 1992 and 1993) who’d been scratching out a living (literally) with Invisbl Skratch Piklz alongside fellow DJs Qbert, and DJ Apollo.
However, when DJ Hurricane unexpectedly split from the Beastie Boys following 1994’s Ill Communication – an album that saw the group pick up instruments and expand into a real band for the first time – Mike saw his opportunity to step over into the big leagues.
“It took a lot of balls,” Mike (aka Michael Schwartz) explained to Spin in a new interview. Pre-1998’s Hello Nasty The Beastie Boys were officially huge, but while single Sabotage had crossed over from rap into the rock world big-style, perhaps even greater success was to come.
Thus Mix Master Mike took to calling The Beastie Boys' Adam ‘MCA’ Yauch and leaving messages on his answering machine, sussing out if the band were in need of a DJ and putting himself forward if that role were available…
In fact, so eager was Mike to get the gig that he even went on to audition, unsolicited down the phone, taking advantage of Yauch’s answerphone to leave a calling-card recording for the star, demonstrating his ‘tweak scratch’ technique – the result of playing his turntables through a wah-wah pedal then scratching and modulating its controls simultaneously to produce a new, wild scratch sound.
And that self-same answer phone audition is still around today, immortalised forever as the intro to 3 MCs and One DJ, the first track that Mike worked on with the Boys and one which earned him his stripes and his place with the band going forwards.
“Hey yo Adam, what’s up? This is Mix Master Mike calling from Sacramento,” says a hopeful Mike in the recording. “Um, I’ve been wanting to hook up with you maybe on some tracks? I got some shit right here. I turned my turntables into a wah-wah pedal. It’s called the tweak scratch…”
And sure enough, after hearing the recording, Yauch invited Mike to their studio.
“It was spawned through the telephone messages I left to Yauch, right?” remembers Mike. “That was the beginning of the song. I was doing all these tricks in the studio, and the guys were gathered around the DJ booth. I was just doing all kinds of shit and everybody was just watching me. Mario (Caldato Jr. AKA Mario C), Mike (Diamond), Adam [Yauch], and Adam [Horovitz] were there, and I was just dazzling them.
He'll tweak ass your ass across the cross-fade…
“We weren’t even recording, I just started doing some shit, so they could wrap their head around me and what they had. Then I grabbed the drum and started scratching the drum by itself. They started freaking out. They’re like, 'What the fuck? He’s scratching the drum and it sounds percussive.' Then I stopped and I’m like, 'You guys should rap over this shit. It would be fucking crazy'.
“That’s when the light bulb sparked. The light bulb blew up. And they were like, 'OK, I’ll be right back.' So Adam, Adam, and Mike disappeared. They got in the car and started driving around Manhattan and thinking about ideas and lyrics…
“It came together really fast, like five hours… When they came in, it was already laid down so they went in the booth and started rapping, “I got the d-double-O-D-double-O-style,” and me and Mario were looking at each other like, 'Oh shit!”'
“They all had the verses and just did it perfectly. Everything was perfect. They really wrapped their heads around it and really made it into a song.
"Especially at this point, they’re just like professionals, you know? When it was like, 'Mix Master Mike, what you got to say,' that was it. We knew that our commitment to mastery was in full effect.”
And when – of his own volition – Mike sought out and dressed up in a NASA jumpsuit and jet pack (props originally from the Dennis Quaid and Louis Gossett Jr. movie Enemy Mine) the band knew they had their new main man.
“I was thinking like, 'Yo, I can’t just go in there. I need something extra,' remembers Mike. “I needed to do something and bring something, so we went to the 20th Century Fox prop shop, and I was like, 'Give me a space suit or something I could take.'
“The boys had no idea that this was gonna be so fucking great until this day. I still remember checking that jet pack in at the airport. We had trouble checking that in on the plane…
“We got there, walked down the stairs and the guys were all there. I walked in with my jetpack and the guys looked at each other like 'Oh my god.'
"I knew at that time they’re like, 'Yeah, we got our dude. This guy’s gonna fit right in.' They were high-fiving and everything.”
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