Related: St Marks Place: is this America's coolest street?  Former Beastie Boy Ad-Rock appeared on stage with a mini-East Village supergroup in New York on Monday night to celebrate the launch of a new book charting the history of one of the area’s most culturally significant streets, St Marks Place.  Ad-Rock – who as a young Adam Horowitz wrote the song Paul Revere sitting on the steps of Sounds records on the street – took part in the show because author Ada Calhoun is a friend, he told the Guardian, adding: “She’s a great writer.”  His wife and fellow performer Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill and the Julie Ruin was more forthcoming. “Shall I tell everyone how she saved our marriage?” she asked the excitable crowd at the Cooper Union’s Great Hall, where Lincoln gave his “right makes might” speech in 1860. “We had a very big fight and we were going to get a divorce and I called Ada and spilled my guts to her and she said, ‘That’s so exciting; I’m writing a new book about marriage!’”  The group, formed for the night as the St Marks Zeroes also featured Calhoun’s husband Neal Medlyn, AKA performance artist Champagne Jerry, and their young son Oliver, who played a cowbell and left with his hands over his ears after the first song. The group played a short set made up of songs that mention the three-block stretch of the East Village, which was home to everyone from Trotsky to Debbie Harry, and played a key role in cultural movements such as beat poetry and punk.  “We’ve got a setlist on a paper plate and so … you can just all think in your own minds and try to decide how many rehearsals we’ve had,” Medlyn said, although in fact they gave a lusty and exuberant performance of songs such as Downtown by John Waite, Lower East Side by David Peel, Avenue A by the Dictators and – perhaps most enthusiastically – Detachable Penis by King Missile.  During St Marks Place by Lydia Lunch, Ad-Rock took the mic to tell a story that conjured up the threatening streets of the East Village of the 1970s and 80s. After a Butthole Surfers concert, two teenagers followed him and his friend along the street with a “huge knife – like a fucking machete – sorry, Oliver”.  “A car pulls up and stops at a red light and it’s Gibby Haynes of the Butthole Surfers,” Ad-Rock said. They got in and escaped to safety. “The Butthole Surfers saved my life!” concluded the former Beastie Boy to cheers from the crowd.  Before the gig, Calhoun gave the crowd a quick spin through the book, with different sections of the audience applauding when she mentioned different St Marks subcultures: skaters, drag queens, punks. Showing a picture of the bucolic Manhattan of 400 years ago, she summed up her main thesis, that people have always looked back nostalgically to a supposed golden age in the East Village and declared “St Marks is dead”.  “A lot of people complain about new neighbours coming in,” she said, “but if you’re not a Lenape Indian I just don’t have a lot of compassion for you.”
Beastie Boys’ Ad-Rock joins an ad-hoc band at launch event for a new book about St Marks Place, the New York locale dubbed one of the coolest streets in America