Since my older brother was blasting License to Ill from his bedroom, I’ve been a huge Beastie Boys fan.
When I met my husband, there was basically one requirement: must love the Beastie Boys. Luckily that worked out. He even had some CDs I didn’t own, so we married each other and our music collection.
My kids have also been properly indoctrinated. The know they can only wear my Beastie Boys tshirts from high school on loan and that any given moment I may quiz them on Beasties facts like I’m Professor Booty.
Once in a while, I’ll get emotional about not being able to take them to a Beastie Boys show.
But I do have one pretty good Beastie Boys story I am able to share with them.
How I Ended Up at SNL
When I was a student at Boston University, I had a photography assignment: photograph someone famous. Around the same time I found out the Beastie Boys were going to be the musical guest on Saturday Night Live. My brother-in-law’s mom grew up next door to Lorne Michaels in Toronto, so when I heard the Beasties were performing, I called him and basically said, “Any chance you can call in a favor?”
And he did.
We ended up getting tickets, and I went to the taping with my brother-in-law and two friends.
And because I had that assignment, I brought a 35mm Minolta camera with me.
The Photo
We were sat in the balcony and I remember being disappointed we weren’t closer. They came out dressed up in their Sabotage gear and that’s when I snuck my camera out of the bag. I realized I was actually in a better position further away from staff (so they wouldn’t see the camera) and I was sat behind a bar on the front row of the balcony that I could rest my camera on. This allowed me to open up the F-stop a little more to bring some extra light and use that space as a make shift tripod for balancing.
The performance was epic. I may have run into MCA’s wife in the bathroom. We tried our best to find the after party that the SNL cast and hopefully the Beastie Boys were hanging out at, but no dice. As eager as I was to see them close up, I was even more eager to get back to campus and see how the pics turned out in the dark room.
The negatives ended up being a little thin, but I was able to adjust. Don’t ask me what I did. I just remember waving my hand around beneath the light. This was 28 years ago.
I turned in the photo, got an A, and the negatives went into a box like most things from college.
Years later I came across the film again and realized I had a black-and-white photo of the Beastie Boys performing on SNL in 1998, during the Hello Nasty era.
Which felt like a pretty good thing to have sitting in a box.
The Print
So I decided to make the photo available as a print for Beastie Boys fans.
It’s a black-and-white 35mm photograph from their 1998 Saturday Night Live performance.
You can see the available print sizes here:
Basically
It’s not a press photo or anything official.
It’s just a picture taken by a Beastie Boys fan who happened to be sitting in the audience at SNL in 1998 and had a camera because she had homework.
Which, in a weird way, feels pretty Beastie Boys.