Slayer’s Kerry King has one regret about his Beastie Boys’ ‘No Sleep Till Brooklyn’ guitar solo

Slayer guitarist Kerry King recently spoke about his inclusion on the iconic Beastie Boys track "No Sleep Till Brooklyn," revealing he would have likely made better business arrangements back in 1986 if he had been in a more secure financial state.

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Speaking with Border City Rock Talk , the Slayer guitarist tells host Ernest Skinner that he wished he had made a better deal for his now iconic guitar solo on Beastie Boys ‘ “No Sleep Till Brooklyn,” admitting his financial situation at the time led him to make a hasty decision.

While the Slayer gang was in the studio in Los Angeles recording Reign In Blood with super-producer Rick Rubin . the Beastie Boys were also laying to tape their debut album Licensed To Ill with Rubin mostly in NYC, who employed King to record a solo for their sessions after agreeing to a one-time payment. That solo would eventually make it onto the fan-favorite, breakout Beasties single “No Sleep Till Brooklyn.”

“The simplicity of it is what’s funny about it,” King says, explaining how the two groups both ended up recording “down the hall from each other.” Rubin and the Beasties, he says, needed a lead guitar track on that particular song, “So I thought about it, and I went, ‘Yeah, why not? I can use a couple hundred bucks.’”

King adds, “I certainly wasn’t well to do back then. So, that’s what I did. I went in there and I did it. And in hindsight, I wish I didn’t get paid. I wish I took a quarter point or something, because now I would be a rich man!”

Beastie Boys’ Licensed To Ill , released in November of 1986, has since gone on to reach Diamond status after selling over 10,000,000 copies in the U.S. alone according to the RIAA, as well as double-platinum in Canada and Gold status in the U.K. Ouch.

You can check out the full interview with Kerry King below.