Mike D was born on November 20, 1965, in New York City. Born Michael Louis Diamond, he helped found Beastie Boys and became both an MC and drummer. Alongside Adam “MCA” Yauch and Adam “Ad-Rock” Horovitz, he worked across rap vocals, sampled beats and songs built from the musicians playing together.
Before Beastie Boys, Diamond played with drummer Kate Schellenbach in the Young Aborigines. His musical education came through New York’s punk scene, where the listening was broader than the label suggests. In their 2006 interview with NPR’s Fresh Air, Yauch remembered hearing early hip-hop records in punk clubs and learning the rhymes while the group was still playing punk. Rap was already part of their lives before it became the focus of the band.
Their 1986 debut, Licensed to Ill, became the first rap album to top the Billboard album chart. Paul’s Boutique followed in 1989, using dense sample arrangements as the setting for the trio’s exchanged lines. In that Fresh Air conversation, Diamond described a practical starting point for their writing: a beat repeating while all three sat together with notebooks. Yauch explained that for songs such as “Shake Your Rump,” they pooled lyrics and divided the lines according to how the performance worked. The member delivering a line wasn’t necessarily the one who had written it.
For Check Your Head in 1992, Diamond’s drum kit became part of a different way of building tracks. Working at their G-Son studio with producer Mario Caldato Jr. and keyboardist Money Mark, the group developed material through playing together as well as sampling. Diamond connected that approach to their listening in a 1994 Billboard interview: “it was the stuff that we had been sampling.” Playing those kinds of grooves themselves also reopened a route to hardcore, he explained. The music they’d collected was feeding directly into the music they could make together.
That approach carried into 1994’s Ill Communication. Caldato recalled in a 2013 Sound on Sound interview that “Sabotage” began with Yauch experimenting with a distorted bass riff. Caldato sent Diamond in to join the developing jam, and his drums picked out the riff’s accents as the arrangement grew around them. It took much longer to finish the vocal: Horovitz recorded it near the end of the album sessions. The band then completed the track using the existing stereo instrumental mix, adding backing vocals and scratches. The finished recording kept the instrumental performance from that jam.
On Hot Sauce Committee Part Two, released in 2011, Diamond described a deliberate effort to bring the band’s different methods into the same record. “On this record we wanted to combine everything,” he told Sound on Sound. That meant samples, programmed parts and live performances that could be recorded and sampled again. He played drums, while programming was shared among the three members.
The opening track, “Make Some Noise,” put that approach into practice. Engineer Andre Kelman recalled that it began with a jam between Diamond and Horovitz. They sampled and looped part of their performance, then added overdubs and further samples. A passage the two had played together became the foundation for the finished song.
