The Scott & Gary Show: Birthing Beastie Boys and Buzz Alike

Think back to the dark ages before the Internet. Before anybody with a keyboard-playing cat and a video camera could captivate the world. The amateur auteur’s only option for small screen stardom: public access television. It was the YouTube of its day, but fuzzier and far less respected. In early ‘80s New York, public access aired an uninspiring grab bag of shows by preachers, horror film fanatics, and Sprockets-like German graffiti artists. That is, until December 1983, when a couple of twenty-something pop culture enthusiasts from Sheepshead Bay made low-budget TV history. That was the month they debuted one of the wildest music shows ever aired, a show that introduced public access TV to bands like Woofing Cookies and Half Japanese and featured, to give just one example, the acid-addled lead singer of the Butthole Surfers interviewing a mole on his own leg. And also, four young kids from Brooklyn -- three guys and a girl, their drummer -- who, as a trio, would soon be known to the world by their band's name: the Beastie Boys.

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Scott Lewis was a funny, quick-witted guy always in search of new sounds and unique talents. A rabid music fan and part-time stand-up comic, he longed for a TV show that featured the alternative bands he listened to as Brooklyn’s disco age raged on around him. Gary Winter—an aspiring director with a penchant for Marx Brothers films and Tennessee Williams plays and an artist’s ability to find beauty in the mundane—was volunteering at a public access station on 23rd Street in Manhattan, so he proposed an idea. They could do it themselves, creating a half-hour show of screwball comedy and new music from bands they’d seen perform at clubs like the Mudd Club, CBGB’s, and Danceteria. With the single-minded power of youthful idealism—and a willful myopia to the costs and labor it would entail—that’s exactly what they did. For five years, The Scott & Gary Show hosted some of the most influential acts in indie music, garnering a cult following in New York, Austin, Minneapolis, and a handful of other public television markets around the country as the two chums from Homecrest Avenue had the time of their lives.

“We wanted it to be like a Bizarro version of American Bandstand crossed with Hugh Hefner’s Playboy After Dark and Soupy Sales,” said host and producer Lewis, now 52, over clam chowder and a margarita on a recent evening at Walker’s in Tribeca.

“This was our reaction against MTV,” added Winter, a shade younger, the show’s director and producer. “MTV was polished, and we felt like if we could do something really fun we could get the energy of television coming across live.”

If The Scott & Gary Show had any archetype, it was the variety shows of the 1960’s that the two had grown up watching, with their unwavering cheer and devotion to showmanship. Lewis and Winter added a healthy measure of mayhem, twisted humor, and south Brooklyn sensibility and hit upon a formula that suited the times to a tee.

“The whole idea was a teen dance show for adults with cool bands,” said Lewis. “I loved asking people on the show, ‘What high school are you from?’ and they’re in their thirties. That cracked me up.”

Among the many bands to answer that question were the Beastie Boys, who taped the show’s Valentine’s Day episode on January 30, 1984. Comprised of teenagers Michael Diamond, Adam Yauch, Adam Horowitz, and Kate Schellenbach, the Beasties were ascendant, enjoying considerable buzz in the New York music scene on the back of a single called ”Cooky Puss,” the first rap/hardcore hybrid and an inspiration to a generation of prank callers. “Cooky Puss” had sold 10,000 copies, and deejays like KISS FM’s Jazzy Jay and Red Alert and the various personalities on WLIR FM were giving it plenty of airplay. On top of that, a recent gig opening for the Dead Kennedys convinced the band that they were the next big thing, leaving Lewis and Winter with a group of seriously cocky adolescents to deal with.

“We picked [Diamond and Yauch] up on Hicks Street in Brooklyn Heights,” recalled Winter, seated before an open-faced roast beef sandwich and Blue Point Winter Ale. “I had a ’69 Buick with a big trunk, and we went up there and looked at each other and went ‘woah!’”

“They were quite wealthy and had incredible film equipment in their homes,” added Lewis. “And they were very pompous—saying things in the car like ‘We shouldn’t have to do this show, we’re going to be big stars.’”

“I was like ‘If you really don’t want to do it you don’t have to. If this is too much for you.’ ‘No, no, we’ll do it.’ That was our second episode.”