BEASTIE BOYS BOOK

By Michael Diamond and Adam Horovitz

Illustrated. 571 pp. Spiegel & Grau. $50.

There is a giant hydraulic penis that has, for the last 30 years, lived in a storage facility in New Jersey. Once, in its glory days, it was a phallic jack-in-the-box transported from arena to arena across America as part of the Beastie Boys’ 1987 “License to Ill” tour. The finale of each show was their hit “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party).” “When the song would start,” writes Adam Horovitz, the co-author of a new book along with his bandmate Michael Diamond, “someone would flip the switch and out, and up,” the penis rose. “In retrospect, of course, this was a really unfortunate move. But it seemed funny at the time.”

The hydraulic penis is both a totem for the band’s pranking badness at the height of their first fame, and a way to measure their subsequent remorse and enlightenment. A photo of the penis — out of the box — appears on Page 238 of “Beastie Boys Book.” About 150 pages later, Adam Yauch, the third member of the band (who died in 2012), is pictured with the Dalai Lama sharing a moment of warmth and good humor.

As with their records, the book’s structure is a lyrical three-man weave, except now it’s two voices covering the three parts. The chapters alternate between Diamond and Horovitz. Most are just a page or two and filled with captions, affirmations, interruptions, shout-outs, heckles and fact checks. Horovitz’s account of Yauch blowing up his backyard fence at age 12 is augmented by a box of text in which we suddenly have Mrs. Yauch on hand to confirm that yes, her son set off a giant explosion in their Brooklyn Heights backyard, but no, contrary to legend, it did not destroy the fence. Horovitz’s description of the Yauch residence is one of the most vivid passages of the book, especially the creaky wooden stairs of the ancient brownstone; after their shows they would have to carry all their equipment up to Yauch’s room on the top floor, right above his parents, who either slept through it all or pretended to.

My enthusiasm for this passage is literary — it’s so vivid and, given Yauch’s fate, moving as hell — but I also recognize this prelapsarian New York City as my own. I was classmates at Saint Ann’s, the Brooklyn private school, with Mike Diamond and Tom Cushman, the friend of the band who co-wrote “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party)” among many other contributions to the Beastie Boys canon. I was in the band’s orbit from approximately “Cookie Puss” in 1983 through “Paul’s Boutique,” circa 1990. On any given night in the mid-1980s I would find myself rushing on their coattails into Danceteria or Pizza-a-Go Go, or some other nightclub. So take it with a grain of salt when I say I found the book fascinating.