Fan Review by Soopageek:
I don't know if words can begin to describe what this concert experience has meant to me as a person and as lover of music. I guess I'll try and do my best. After a short 4-week opening spot with Madonna (that was disastrous) and an opening spot on the last leg of Run-DMC's Raising Hell tour, the Beastie Boys mounted their own, headlining world tour in support of their debut LP, Licensed to Ill. They decided, of all places, to open this tour in Louisville, Kentucky at the Louisville Gardens. I think if my parents had known anything about what these guys were about, there is no way in the world I ever would've gone. And if they had watched the Louisville news instead of the Lexington news stations that night, they probably would've been worried sick. I had already become a total Beastie Boys fan by this time. I could flow every rhyme to the letter. I had a favorite Beastie Boy (the King Ad Rock, he still is) and me and my crew decided to go up. The crew was Brian Hoppes and Perry Carrico. We took "the Tank" for the hour and a half drive to Louisville. We got off I-65 at 9th Street and then took it straight up to Muhammad Ali Blvd. We parked in the lot right across from the Louisville Gardens. The Gardens is Louisville's "old" convention center. The American Basketball Association's Kentucky Colonels played there in the early years of the ABA. It is downtown, flanked by adult bookstores and strip clubs. We got there 2 hours early, when the doors opened, and security was still clearing all the whinos off the sidewalk in front of the arena. We saw a kid on a bicycle get hit by a car. This wasn't exactly the ritziest part of Louisville.
We were first treated to Murphy's Law, which made for my first punk rock concert. While it was cathartic, I don't recall it being rather interesting. But Fishbone on the other hand was something to behold. Here was a rock band with a full brass section. Mid-song they would toss their trombones and trumpets around the stage and pick up where the previous musician had left off. They were versatile and very energetic. Nothing I had ever seen in my limited concert-going to this point could prepare me for what the Beastie Boys were going to provide. Since this was the opening gig of their headlining tour, I don't think the promoters knew what they were getting themselves into either. The stage was set with a huge dancing cage filled with a go-go dancer for the entire show. The B-boys freewheeled around the stage (you know how it looks) guzzling cans of Budweiser the entire time. The encore featured a 10-foot inflatable penis which rose out the stage while they performed "Fight For Your Right (To Party)". They tagged the end of each line in the song with "You can suck my dick!" (i.e. "You wake up late for school... you can suck my dick, you ask your mom please? she can suck my dick"). Yes, kind of dumb, but in the conservative, pre-Nirvana-MTV-Alternative-Nation era of the mid-80's, it was subversive as hell. It raised the kind of furor that Marilyn Manson did a decade later with concert banning. Rumor has it the Beastie Boys have never played in Kentucky since then because of outstanding warrants for their arrest on public indecency charges. I may have just gotten older and more cynical than when I was 16, but I have yet to witness anything since then as subversive and purely rock-and-roll since the Beastie Boys raised a 10-foot white penis out of a stage to an ethnically and socially diverse crowd in Louisville, KY. God bless you boys.
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