Beastie Boys Founder John Berry Dead At 52

Th year 2016 has been a rough year for music, and the month of May is only making it worse for fans of New York hardcore punk. John Berry, founder of The Young Aborigines and the Beastie Boys, died of complications of frontal lobe dementia on Thursday morning.

Berry founded the Beastie Boys in 1981 with friends from high school and left the band shortly after the release of their first EP, Polly Wog Stew.

For those who don’t recall the Beastie Boys before they were named Billboard magazine’s top-selling rap group in 1987, here’s a bit of history.

It all began in the late 1970s at Walden High on New York’s Upper East Side. The progressive “hippie” school, as Michael Diamond described it to New York Magazine, was where he first befriended Adam Yauch, Jeremy Shatan, and John Berry. Kate Schellenbach, an acquaintance who would become an original Beastie Boy, attended nearby Stuyvesant High. Diamond was a drummer in the Walden school jazz band, but that wasn’t destined to last. Dante Ross, who later became an A&R executive at Def Jam Recordings, and future Bad Brains bassist Darryl Jennifer were also part of the close-knit crowd of punk rock kids.

Schellenbach and Yauch were the first of the bunch to test their rapping skills, playing Sugarhill Gang’s “Apache” while recording their own vocals on a Radio Shack cassette deck. Soon another friend, singer Sarah Cox, joined them, and they named their new group Triple Sly Crew. They never gigged or performed in public, but Adam Yauch did make buttons for the band.

Which bring us to the naming of the Beastie Boys. According to Darryl Jennifer, he and his unnamed associates “sold a little ganja” on Avenue A near the Ratcage Records store. Adam Yauch, Adam Horovitz and John Berry, while not described as selling herb, were often sitting on a nearby stoop. If and when police were seen in the area, the friends would call out, “Beast!” According to band legend, John Berry came up with the name Beastie Boys after such an incident, and Yauch made buttons commemorating the event shortly thereafter. According to the band bio at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the name stood for “Boys Entering Anarchistic States Towards Internal Excellence.”

In 1978, Michael Diamond left the Walden high jazz band and joined musical forces with percussionist Kate Schellenbach, bassist Jeremy Shatan, and guitarist John Berry to form the experimental hardcore group The Young Aborigines. Three years later, Diamond put down his drumsticks and picked up the mic, Schellenbach took over drum duties, and Adam Yauch replaced Shatan on bass. Diamond raps about being an “original young aboriginal” in the following YouTube clip:

Former WNYU radio host Tim Sommer told New York Magazine that in 1981, Diamond and/or Yauch often called in while his “Noise the Show” was on the air. With disguised voices, they’d demand “Play the Beastie Boys, play the Beastie Boys!” and hang up. At the time of the prank calls, there were a few “Beastie Boys” buttons floating around, but no Beastie Boys band, much less any Beastie Boys music to play. That changed later in 1981 when The Young Aborigines changed their name to the Beastie Boys and recorded a cut for a punk cassette compilation called New York Thrash.

John Berry’s loft at the corner of Broadway and West 100th Street was home to the first official Beastie Boys shows. As the band gained credibility, they played important punk venues including CBGB and Trudy Hellers Place, opening for The Misfits, Bad Brains, and Reagan Youth.

The Beastie Boys recorded and released Polly Wog Stew in 1981, after which Berry left the band. In later years, Berry played with Highway Stars, Big Fat Love, Bourbon Deluxe, and Even Worse, but never again achieved the fleeting fame that he enjoyed as a member of the brand-new Beastie Boys.

Beastie Boys co-founder Adam Yauch died from salivary gland cancer in 2012.

Original Beastie Boys member John Berry has died at age 52 https://t.co/yiaN0OoV2Q pic.twitter.com/LwRThyApVN

— Rolling Stone (@RollingStone) May 19, 2016

RIP John Berry 1964-2016

[Photo by Dennis Brekke | Creative Commons | Cropped and Resized | CC by 4.0]