The Beastie Boys, making their first onstage appearance in more than two years, will headline a benefit concert October 28 in New York for charities helping those affected by the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.
The show, titled New Yorkers Against Violence, will take place at the Hammerstein Ballroom and will also feature the Strokes, Cibo Matto, poet Saul Williams and DJ Stretch Armstrong, Beastie Boys MCA and Ad-Rock told MTV News on Tuesday (October 16). The B-52’s, whose singer Fred Schneider was born in New Jersey, round out the primarily New York-area lineup.
The inspiration for the show hit the Boys almost instantly. “[The idea came to us] at about 11:00 on the 11th,” Ad-Rock said. “We all watched it happen, and it was like, ‘Man, we’ve got to do something.’ The immediate reaction was, we’ve got to go down there – we could dig – what can we do to help? We’re musicians. We know musicians. This is what we’re going to do. This is how we can help out.”
A second show is being discussed, possibly with post-hardcore vets Rival Schools, MCA and Ad-Rock said.
Tickets for the concert, priced at $50 each, go on sale Wednesday. Proceeds will be donated to a disaster relief fund established by the New York Women’s Foundation, a nonprofit group that aids low-income women, and the New York Association for New Americans Inc., a group dedicated to helping refugees and immigrants rebuild their lives, families and communities.
“We’re trying to do this in two parts,” Ad-Rock explained. “First off, we’re doing our part to raise money for the people who need help. While we’re doing that, there’s a lot going on right now. There’s a lot of violence going on right now, and we feel like we need to talk about that.”
The last time MCA, Ad-Rock and Mike D passed the mic publicly was for 1999’s Tibetan Freedom Concert in East Troy, Wisconsin, alongside Rage Against the Machine, Run-D.M.C., the Roots and Eddie Vedder. Plans for a 2001 TFC in London fell through earlier this year.
Ad-Rock, however, embarked on a brief tour this spring in support of Simply Mortified, the second album by his BS2000 side project, released in February.