![]() ![]() My father’s contempt only deepened the love I harbored for the Beasties. Amid tabloid talk of bans and lawsuits, the Beastie Boys’ Mike D declared, “We’re going by the blitzkrieg theory on this tour: hit hard, hit fast, get out of there quickly, and leave a long-lasting impact.” Little did he know how that philosophy would be distilled to its essence on their closing night in Liverpool. Every article was expertly constructed to make readers like my father, who wanted to be disgusted, seethe as these debased destroyers kept rolling north. ![]() ![]() As the Beastie circus rumbled across England, from London to Birmingham up to Manchester, the press were frothing at the mouth at the moral corruption these horrid Americans were spewing. Journalists reveled in every detail of the trio’s stage set, which featured gigantic Budweiser cans, barely clad female go-go dancers grinding away in cages, and the pièce de résistance, a twenty-foot-high hydraulic pink phallus that sprang open like a crude jack-in-the-box at the climax of the show. By the time their eight-city swing began, the English tabloid media had worked themselves into a frenzy over the prankster band and their bawdy behavior. The Beasties’ hold on our imaginations was enormous. “No Sleep Till Brooklyn” was now played so often on the jukebox at the Rose of Mossley, the closest pub to the school, that the landlord had taped up a sign prohibiting its selection, a sign that Gripper routinely ignored, slipping in fifty pence and choosing the song three times back-to-back on repeat. My current heroes the Beastie Boys would indeed be rolling into Liverpool on the last night of the short British leg of their Licensed to Ill Tour. live and in bloody person.” At my desk, I held my head in my hands, unable to process this news. “The fucking Beastie Boys are going to be HERE. “The Beastie Boys are coming to Liverpool!” he screamed, losing all decorum in the enormity of the moment. In fact, he had astonishing news to break. But my friend Gripper had more modern concerns than Elizabethan tragedy. Weakstone to leap a good five inches out of his desk chair. Faustus’s downward spiral when the door was smashed open. One May afternoon in 1987, toward the end of my senior year of high school, our English teacher was in the midst of an hour-long interpretation of Dr. ![]()
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