Fade In…
When I was a kid I had this Members Only jacket, which must’ve been a hand-me-down or bought second hand. It was gray and I’m not sure what the Members Only were members of, but whatever it was I don’t think I was a member, unless it was a member of being a sort of poor white trash kind of kid. Anyhow I recall this particular jacket for one reason and one reason only and that’s because for a period of time, to when the jacket was ultimately out of my life, it held the fabric sticker backstage pass to the Beastie Boys Licensed to Ill tour. It was brilliant. The pass was also mostly gray, sort of grayish blackish, and stuck right on the jacket opposite the Members Only insignia. It looked like it belonged on that jacket, actually it did belong on that jacket. That jacket was born to wear that pass. It represented that I had gone backstage to a concert and that. was. fucking. cool. That carried some damn weight with it. Because it was so damn cool I left that backstage pass on that jacket until the day it died, at least as far as I was concerned. Hopefully some kid in Bangladesh or some far off damn place is currently wearing that jacket with the patch still on it and his friends are walking around him saying, “Backstage to the Beasties, that’s. fucking. cool.”, only they’re saying it in Bangladeshian so it sounds even cooler.
Other than the jacket itself, the firework memory I have related to that jacket is a time when I was wearing it with the Beastie pass attached to a boxing match that was taking place at my high school, good old Richmond Heights High. The fact that there was a boxing match happening there is kind of crazy in and of itself. I remember the gym being smoky from the degenerates watching boxing in a high school gym smoking. Even with the vivid memories of the boxing and the smoke and haze I probably wouldn’t have remembered attending that boxing match if it weren’t for that jacket because as my buddies and I were walking along the top of one of the bleachers a fella sitting there taking in the boxing, and smoke, said to me as I walked pass, “Hey, no shit, you went to that concert? I went to that concert too.” I remember nodding and being like yeah as we just kept going. I remember it being a little weird that this older gentleman said that and also, as it has stuck in my brain, I remember it being kind of fucking cool too.
I definitely have a number of memories about the actual concert though. While one of the main things I remember about the Judas Priest concert was the invite that came from my Mother in our front yard, I don’t have an ounce of recollection about the invitation to go backstage to the Beastie Boys concert and drop off their microphones. No joke, that’s what we were doing.
My oldest brother was a roadie, actually, and this is fucking cool, it’s officially, I think, called a sound engineer. How cool is that? An engineer of sound, which is boiled down to the more widely known, roadie. He worked for a company called Eighth Day Sound, which in and of itself is a fairly cerebral name for a Company, kind of like sound engineer. Anyhow he had to drop off the Beastie Boys microphones and so I guess he took me with him. He did all kinds of cool shit like this. He was a fucking rock star in my eyes without being an actual rock star. He toured with the Pope. Again, no joke, he toured with the Pope. There was a concert shirt and shit.
The cool thing about being a roadie is you can literally do almost anything you want backstage at a show you’re associated with. When roadies are in their environment they are the types of dudes and ladies that likely look like they don’t belong anywhere. There’s a bunch of different reasons for this, including the fact that they are essentially nomads, they go from city to city doing all of the behind the scenes work for this band, or the Pope for Christ’s sake (oh, that wasn’t cool), that gets all of the attention and then they sit around and wait to move on and do everything all over again, sleeping in buses, eating fast food, all of the great stuff that makes being a roadie being a roadie. In there environment however they are the thing, and what I mean is, if you saw a roadie in roadie mode walking into a bank you would say something’s up, that person doesn’t belong here, keep your eye on them, but if you saw a fella in a cardigan backstage at a concert you would know, that fella doesn’t belong here. The roadie is the norm of society when you’re backstage at a show.
This all dawned on me fairly quickly as we walked into some back door the night of the show, The Beastie’s microphones in hand, well in my brother’s hand, he wouldn’t let me hold them, in fact I’m fairly sure he wouldn’t let me near them. I’m pretty sure I asked to take one out so I could “sing” into it. He said no, probably for a number of different reasons. So we go rolling in and at some point I get the Beastie sticker affixed to my Members Only jacket (now this is something worth being a Member to Mother Effers!!!!), and we just roll on up to the stage right next to the sound board and behind the amps stage left. Then we just set up camp there for a bit. I wanted to roam the back hallways, I was particularly taken with the fact that the pass said All Access on it. I was like, shit yeah, we can access anywhere. However, my brother wasn’t having that. I don’t know what all was happening backstage, but there was a world of stuff taking place that my brother decided was best left where it was and determined that we would not be exploiting the All Access power of our passes. At one point I remember him also sort of shielding me from something that was happening behind us. Funny I remember that, but I remember him stepping up close to me and making sure I couldn’t see around him.
As much as music was in my life and in my life early I’d have to say that it pretty much had blinders on. If it wasn’t heavy metal or rock & roll I wasn’t really interested. Not only was I not really interested but I’m pretty sure I outwardly referred to it as “sucking”. Don’t get me wrong, I think a lot of it really did probably suck, but it’s amazing how you start to see that maybe there’s more out there than what you’ve been myopically focused on. I think the expansion of my acceptance of music runs very closely parallel to the ways in which my world views, acceptance and tolerance have grown as a whole. I suppose the day I willingly sit down and listen to a country music song will be the sign that I am truly at one with the world, or it will be a sign that I am absolutely out of my mind. My guess is that neither will happen, well, one probably already has happened I suppose, just ask some of my ex-girlfriends. Back to some semblance of a point here, my brother and I watched Fishbone from that spot backstage and I was thinking, these fellas are crazy and fun, and what the hell is this, ska??? I also remember thinking, how many guys are on stage right now?!?!?! (if you know, you know, if you don’t know, then check out Fishbone yo!)
A step in the evolution of my musical taste was also taken when it came strictly to the Beastie Boys themselves. When Fishbone was getting ready to come off stage we actually cleared out. I think they limit the number of folks that are loitering around backstage when the main act comes up, even if you’re a roadie. Little kids, unless they are on a Make a Wish or something, fall into the area of “don’t need to be here”. So we went out with the people to watch the end of Fishbone and the Beasties.
It was really cool because the show was at Public Hall, which is a venue in which the entire floor is open for standing room. We situated ourselves about a quarter way back and watched the show from there. I remember my brother throwing me on his shoulders, you could do that apparently and if you had a backstage pass on your Members Only jacket you could pretty much do whatever you wanted in the common area.
I think I must’ve asked him why he brought me with him or something like that. We were kind of yelling at each other over the noise and he was like, I thought you liked this stuff (I think he literally called it this stuff), and I was like, no, not really. I admittedly didn’t know much about the Beasties at that point, they were relatively new and it was rap music and I was fairly certain that I wasn’t a fan of rap music, (again, it’s funny how our taste and acceptance of the world of music evolves in much the same way as our view of the world and of others around us, at least mine has). At the time I saw rap as an invasion into my world of hard rock and heavy metal. That being said, it was kind of kick ass. I had taken a slight interest in the Beastie Boys, kind of like a comic act, but there was a bit of a blurred line and they had lyrics referencing them picking up metal, which I connected to, but I wasn’t cool enough to appreciate them for what they were and what they would become and what I was witnessing, I don’t think.
One of my final recollections of the night was when the Beasties got to their last song, Fight for Your Right, I was totally into it by this point and I think I was trying to rock out while my brother stood idly by. One of the Beasties had climbed up to the balcony off stage and was singing and performing from there, which I found to be innovative and fun! So I’m standing there with my oldest brother, a good generation apart, and all of a sudden a huge dick starts coming out of the middle of the stage, when I say dick I mean penis, cock, eggplant emoji, twig of twig and berries, wiener (my favorite). So this huge phallic dick, probably 20 feet high, is just continuing to rise as the Beasties flip the lyrics to statements like, “You gotta fight for the right, to suck my dick.”
I was a degenerate little kid, but also very naive at this point and I remember thinking, hmmm, not sure where they’re going with this, apart from it creating kind of this weird atmosphere between my brother and I, the guy that played a bunch of different roles in my life. It was all good, because we’re brothers, and to be honest it kind of created a weird awkwardness around us entirely, two midwestern catholic boys in C-Town. That’s about all I remember, which I guess is more than enough. I think we must’ve cut back out the back door, jumped into the old van and headed home.
Turned out to be a major success I think. Words alone can’t capture how awesome it is to have shared that “casual” trip to see the Beasties with my oldest brother, it’s otherworldly. Opened my eyes and mind to some new things like ska music, starting to appreciate rap, and big dicks I guess. Seriously though, it’s very interesting thinking about the way my mind has opened up, and I’m not saying this is solely attributable to the Beasties, but again this weird parallel in which my appreciation and acceptance for new music, new genres expanded like my acceptance and interest in the world around me and the people in it. My views and opinions and quick to judge approach have changed so drastically from then to now.
This whole thing made me think of another time when my oldest brother, who had laid the foundation for my intense interest in hard rock and heavy metal, was having a party at our house but it was more like a soiree, he’d kill me if he heard me call it that. He had some friends over just kind of chilling but definitely in a somewhat formal way with ladies and such, and I’m milling around annoyingly like always and I notice a not so “normal” genre of music so I say, “Hey, what’s this you put on the old bookshelf stereo in the living room?” (probably not a direct quote, was probably more like, “What’s this?”). He hands me the cassette case and says, it’s Sam and Dave, and I’m like, uh, Sam and who? (dummy) and there were Sam and Dave staring up at me from the cover of the cassette case.
I remember thinking, this isn’t rock and roll, then, like a grizzly bear in a zoo figuring out that the door lets you out of the cage, I thought, wait a minute, we can listen to other stuff and it’s cool???? My horizons were broadened, and that’s an outstanding thing. That’s one of the things that hits me most about this look back I think, my brothers took me to these shows, which had to be a bigger pain in the ass than not taking me, and it was memory inspiring stuff, legendary in my eyes and mind. It probably further fueled a curiosity not only for music but for the world.
It dawns on me that when you’re a little kid older brothers and sisters are the keys to the world. My first concerts were Judas Priest and going back stage to the Beastie Boys concert, which took place around my middle school years I’m guessing, somewhere between ages 10 and 13. Could be considered a little advanced for that age, especially when huge penises were coming out of the middle of the stage. To at least one of these events, as I explained in my prior entry, my Mom is the one who “invited” me to go and the reason neither of these were an “issue” for my Mom is because I was going with a brother, the shielded veil to the world of experiences beyond your current maturity. When I was in high school I landed front row tickets to Motley Crue, the tour where Tommy Lee’s drum cage goes out above the audience and then spins the fuck around while he’s playing, and I had scored them with friends, no brothers would be attending. The minute my Mom caught wind…nope, you’re not going. By this time I had been to scores of concerts, but this was a no go without a brother or sister shield. I ended up selling my ticket to this cool cat at high school. I would say he was a Senior, but I’m thinking maybe he was one of those guys that actually wasn’t going to school but still just came back to school when he was beyond his school years. If I recall he gave me $60 bucks, which was like triple the cost, and agreed to buy me a shirt at the show, one of those ones for “losers”, which he delivered on. Front row to that show, I might’ve been able to get more, but remember this was a world in which ebay didn’t exist, and he was so appreciative, to this day I still think of that dude as super cool and sticking to his word, which he gave to some punk little freshman.
Who knows what that Motley Crue show would’ve been like, it might’ve been the most amazing experience of my life (to this day I still haven’t seen the band and was scheduled to see them last year at Cleveland Browns Stadium but it was COVIDed out), but I’m thinking it wouldn’t have been as great without one of my brothers there to be honest. While they were the veil to these beyond my years experiences they were also the heart and soul of it for me. Forever I will always think of my older brother as my concert godfather, and would likely not pick anyone else over him to attend a concert with, probably for the rest of my life. I’ve been to shows without him of course, and they’ve been great, but not quite the same. A few years back I attended a tribute to Jani Lane of Warrant fame (yeah, no shit, that’s a real thing that happened and yes, I went to it) and I saw these two cool cats sitting down the row from us, so I took a picture of them and thought to myself, there we are, my brother and I as two way too old to be here geezers, just chilling at a show and taking it all in. Mad thanks to my siblings for showing me the ropes and in so many instances taking me along when I know it was easier not to.
