Beasties-Rage Tour Sidelined
Say it ain’t so, yo. Just one week before the opening date of the Beastie Boys’ Rhyme and Reason 2000 tour with Rage Against the Machine, injuries sidelined the Beasties, postponing the tour at least until the fall.
The trio was already hobbled after Adam Horovitz strained a ligament in his right foot diving for a loose ball during a pickup basketball game. Then came the coup de grâce: Riding his mountain bike home from rehearsals just two days after these photos were snapped, Mike D hit a pothole and took a nasty spill, severely injuring his right shoulder. In RS 847, Mike may have jinxed himself when he joked that on this tour the band members would be “severing their body parts and putting them back together.” (In the same interview, Mike also promised that the Beasties were “ready to come bold like Hasselhoff,” causing many to fear for the trio’s chest hair.)
After a brief hospital stay and some surgery, Mike has been put on the DL for two to three months of rest and rehab. Recuperating at his Manhattan home, he sent this word: “I would like to take this opportunity to apologize to my band mates, Rage Against the Machine and the other artists slated to perform on the Rhyme and Reason 2000 tour, and, most of all, the good people who will now have to wait a little bit for our tour. I can assure everyone, however, that I took every possible safety precaution, as all of you sensible beings should when bicycling through New York’s mean streets. However, I can’t figure out how my bike’s digital navigation software failed to pick up that pothole.”
This story is from the August 31st, 2000 issue of Rolling Stone.