Beastie Boys have revealed that their classic track ‘Sabotage’ was actually written about an annoying recording engineer.
The song featured on their 1994 album ‘Ill Communication‘ and has gone on to become one of the New York hip-hop trio’s most famous songs.
In the group’s new autobiography, released today (October 30), Ad-Rock (aka Adam Horovitz) revealed the true inspiration behind the track. He explained the band worked with an engineer called Mario Caldato Jr, who was not happy with the speed sessions were moving at.
“We were totally indecisive about what, when, why and how to complete songs. Mario was getting frustrated,” Ad-Rock said. “That’s a really calm way of saying that he would blow a fuse and get pissed off at us and scream that we just needed to finish something, anything, a song. He would push awful instrumental tracks we made just to have something moving toward completion.”
He added that ‘Sabotage’, the last song to be completed on the album, went through several incarnations before it became the song we know today. It only reached completion after Ad-Rock decided “it would be funny to write a song about how Mario was holding us all down, how he was trying to mess it all up, sabotaging our great works of art.”
Meanwhile, Ad-Rock and Mike D recently discussed the “tremendously sad” loss of their bandmate, Adam ‘MCA’ Yauch.
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“It’s really hard,” Mike D said of Yauch, who died of cancer in 2012. “It’s a tremendously sad thing. We never anticipated experiencing this incredible loss of our friend and partner dying, and dying the way he did. It’s still sad.”