Beasties Ready Summer Release

The Beastie Boys are planning a June release for their long-awaited sixth album. The set will be the New York trio's first collection of new material since Hello Nasty six years ago.

"I know you're like, 'What's up fool? Where's the record?'" reads a note by the Boys to their email list. "We are in the studio finishing it now, so ease up already. We're putting the final touches on the mixes right now and it will be out beginning of June. Until then, cool your jets, step back, relax and ease off the throttle. The shit's on its way, no delay."

Actually, delays are nothing new for the band -- Nasty came four years after its predecessor Ill Communication -- though the current wait tops the group's previous silences. "We always work a little slower than others," Beastie Adam Yauch told Rolling Stone last year. "I don't quite know how bands put out a record every year. 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."

The Beasties started writing material for the record in late 2001 and initial recording sessions were held in early 2002. Last year, the Beasties knuckled down on the record in their new New York City studio. Since wrapping promotion for Nasty, the Beasties have flown way below the radar. The group played a benefit for slain DJ Jam Master Jay's family last year, hosted the New Yorkers Against Violence concert in October 2001 and made a handful of other festival and benefit performances. The only new music to surface during that time was "In a World Gone Mad," an anti-war cut that the Beasties put on their Web site last spring.

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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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