Beasties Play for Jay

The Beastie Boys will play a benefit for the family of late Run-DMC DJ Jam Master Jay April 25th at the House of Blues in Las Vegas. Slotted in one day before their appearance at the Coachella Arts and Music Festival in Indio, California, the event will be the Boys' first gig in the western U.S. in four and a half years. Former Beasties regular DJ Hurricane is also bill.

Jam Master Jay was shot and killed last October in his Queens, New York, recording studio, leaving behind a wife and three children. Police have yet to find his killer.

The Beastie Boys also plan to put in a live appearance at the Tibetan Freedom Concert in Japan on April 19th, for a total of three shows in one week, a frantic schedule for a group that has rarely performed since they stopped supporting 1998's Hello Nasty.

The Beasties did release one new song, the anti-war "World Gone Mad," via the Internet, but Nasty's in-progess follow-up won't be ready until 2004.

"I don't quite know how bands put out a record every year," Adam Yauch told Rolling Stone. "It takes a year to make the record, a year to tour and then a year of vacation. We just happen to stretch that vacation part to two or three years."

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Song Stories

“All Along the Watchtower”

The Jimi Hendrix Experience | 1968

Jimi Hendrix got hold of Bob Dylan's early John Wesley Harding tapes and in late 1967 recorded a version of "All Along the Watchtower" with the Experience in London. Dissatisfied with that first development, Hendrix brought those tapes with him to New York in early 1968 when he began work on Electric Ladyland. Eddie Kramer, Hendrix's engineer at the time, told Rolling Stone that Hendrix "was still looked upon by his basically white audience as the mammoth black guitar hero. There was a constant fight within him to expand himself." Hendrix's successful take on Dylan's work has long been recognized by the songwriter. "I liked Jimi Hendrix's record of this and ever since he died I've been doing it that way," Dylan wrote in the liner notes to his Biograph box set. "Strange how when I sing it, I always feel it's a tribute to him in some kind of way."

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