This Sunday, Nov 15, marks the 40th anniversary of Beastie Boys’ debut album, Licensed to Ill. In celebration of that milestone, Ad-Rock and Mike D will appear on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart this Monday, a rare joint appearance by the surviving Beastie Boys principals.
The Beastie Boys have also announced that they will release a limited-edition special Vinylphyle version of the album on March 18, 2027. Mastered from original sources and pressed on 180-gram black vinyl LPs with lacquers cut from a high resolution digital transfer from the original 1986 1/4” album master by Joe Nino-Hernes at Sterling Sound, the newly remastered Vinylphyle edition will be housed in a gatefold tip-on wrapped jacket with a satin-matte finish and printed on clay-coated board and includes a four-panel insert with scans of the original tape boxes, a classic band-logo etching on the vinyl, and all-new liner notes by Public Enemy co-founder Chuck D.
Nino-Hernes received the physical master tapes for this album, but in the interest of tape preservation and mastering flexibility, he elected to introduce a digital step into his cutting process. “For this project I felt that making a high-resolution digital transfer, using the same machine and electronics that I use for cutting, would yield the best results and come closest to actually cutting from the first-generation master tape itself,” Nino-Hernes said in a statement. “It also allowed me to minimize handling of the tapes that have become fragile with time. In this case, I felt that fidelity was better preserved by working from my digital transfer of the original master, than by making and working from a second-generation analog copy.”
While together, Ad-Rock and Mike will also tape an appearance on Smartless. MCA, the third member of the group’s classic lineup, passed away in 2012. He was 47.
