“I think Yauch would genuinely want us to try some crazy things we wanted to do but never got around to,” Mike D tells Rolling Stone. “He’d say, ‘That’s exactly what you should be doing now.'”
The duo says they looked to Adam as “their leader” and that his untimely death at the age of 49 has left them completely destroyed. “I’m totally confused,” reveals Adam. “I’m walking my dog and I’ll start crying on the street. I don’t know what to do. It f—ing sucks.”
After the Beastie Boys’ final concert at Bonnaroo in June 2009, Adam mentioned that his throat was bothering him, and within a month, he was diagnosed with salivary cancer. “He really never considered dying from cancer an option,” explains Mike D. “Because of that we didn’t consider that to be an option.”
Over the course of his life, Adam transformed from high-school outcast to hip-hop star to enlightened Buddhist and feminist. After his passing on May 4, “monks in monasteries all over the world began chanting to ease his soul’s passage.” In NYC, Adam’s friends including Michael Stipe, Jack White and Ben Stiller “gathered on a rooftop for a nighttime celebration of his life.”
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Jennifer Kamm
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