apple juice

The Beastie Boys are one of the bands that I grew up with, and learning that Adam Yauch had passed away was more surreal than I expected. They bring back otherwise meaningless memories from my past that otherwise would have faded away. I haven’t listened to them regularly for a long time, but like a smell that transports you back in time, just hearing a few songs takes me back…

I remember having a long talk with my Dad about the lyrics to songs after a few of my latest CD purchases were discovered. The new Beastie Boys album Paul’s Boutique being one of them. We sat on my bed and read the lyrics out loud for about 30 minutes. I purchased Paul’s Boutique because it lacked the Parental Advisory Explicit Lyrics sticker that I was banned from bringing into the house. There was no sticker for metaphor and simile. Ultimately I lost about five CDs that evening, and in frustration I threw my brother under the bus for having purchased Nivrana’s Nevermind.

I remember shopping at Best Buy with Doug and purchasing Ill Communication. We saw two girls from our school, they were purchasing some other album. Doug and I put the CD on in my parent’s Ford Explorer, which had a subwoofer. We thought this to be pretty cool, Sure Shot bumping out of the windows as we rolled through the suburbs.

After some of the jazzy interludes from Check Your Head were featured in a Greg Stump’s movie P-Tex, Lies, and Duct Tape, I brought the Beastie Boys back into the public in our household, playing The In Sound From Way Out for the family one evening. I remember the reaction being tepid even though I loved it.

The Beastie Boys were on my list of concerts to see in my lifetime, and feeling like rappers couldn’t keep on rapping for ever, we started looking for them on tour. Ultimately, in an amusement park in Stockholm, Sweden, Sonja and I saw the Beastie Boys live. There were about 2500 people there. Most seemed interested in the punk beginnings rather than their latest hits, but we jammed away the afternoon.