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. Faustus’s downward spiral when the door was smashed open. The shock caused Mr. Weakstone to leap a good five inches out of his desk chair. But my friend Gripper had more modern concerns than Elizabethan tragedy. In fact, he had astonishing news to break. “The Beastie Boys are coming to Liverpool!” he screamed, losing all decorum in the enormity of the moment. “The fucking Beastie Boys are going to be HERE … playing a gig and everything … live and in bloody person.” At my desk, I held my head in my hands, unable to process this news.
It was true. 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. “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.
The Beasties’ hold on our imaginations was enormous. And we were not alone. 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. 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. 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. Every article was expertly constructed to make readers like my father, who wanted to be disgusted, seethe as these debased destroyers kept rolling north. 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.
My father’s contempt only deepened the love I harbored for the Beasties. Such was the obsession my friends and I shared that we had decided to form our own Beastie Boys–style collective, the Liverpool College Breaking Crew, which consisted of a handful of the hardest kids in my year. There was Gripper Stark, who was feared throughout the College as the “Cock of the School,” an honorific title bestowed upon the best fighter in the schoolyard; Tuff, his sidekick, was filled with a spiky energy, always looking for objects to smash, graffiti, or commit a minor act of vandalism upon; and Joseph Nwanko a wiry beanpole of a boy who, as the son of the local Nigerian consul, was one of the only Black kids in my grade and remained super cool, despite having to answer to the obvious yet unfortunate nickname “Wankstain.” Wank for short. I had gained membership in this inner circle of alphas by virtue of my ownership of a VHS copy of an instructional break-dancing video, Let’s Bust A Move, which I had brought home with me from a summer-trip in Chicago.
Indeed, I was so eager to have my morals debased, I cut an entire day of school with the rest of the crew to snap up tickets the second they went on sale at the box office. We stood in line at the aging art deco concert venue, the Royal Court Theatre, braving the frigid Liverpool morning with four dozen fellow hip-hop heads, trying to look streetwise and mean, even while clad in the matching ties and blazers of our school uniform. If enormous inflatable penises were going to explode in my town, I sure as hell was going to be there to witness them.
With tickets safely acquired, we frittered away the rest of the afternoon by snapping medallions off the front grills of parked Volkswagens so we could dress like Mike D, who delighted in wearing the chrome emblem on a hefty gold chain around his neck. The style was an ironic visual gag poking fun at rappers who fetishized the Mercedes logo. After immense peer pressure from Wank and Tuff, I joined in this act of petty vandalism, snagging a logo off the front air vent of a rusty VW Golf parked near school. The moment the badge’s resistance buckled under the pressure of my fingers it conjured a jolt of intense satisfaction fused with a pang of guilt.
The VW emblem was the final detail in an elaborate process I had undertaken to make over my wardrobe of late, into that of an aspiring English break boy, replete with Adidas tracksuit, Puma Clydes, and a Budweiser porkpie hat I had nabbed on special order direct from St. Louis. The fine details of this look were crucial because the Beastie Boys were more than just dumb fun in my eyes. They may have been able to manufacture outrage on demand, but I saw beyond that and drew a sense of identity and inspiration.
There were many aspects of their approach I felt connected to: Their friendship, as three young Jewish kids from New York City who met in their early teens haunting downtown TriBeCa clubs, was the kind of coreligionist camaraderie I craved. The elasticity of their humor was also enticing; being in on the joke, being the joke, ricocheting between bombast and self-deprecation in the span of just a few lines. Indeed, their entire attitude toward music, piecing together a signature sound forged of their schooling in punk clubs, with rock and old-school hip-hop woven in, was an education in aspirational crate digging.
Yes, they were brash, obnoxious wise-asses. The lyrics were violent in a manner I did not physically relate to, and often immensely sexist in a way I could not compute. Yet I rationalized this clumsy, almost cartoonish deviance away. To me, the Beasties were like kids attempting to bring life to a double period of Latin class by blurting shit out to see what they could get away with. That’s how the ginormous stage penis had come about in the first place, I discovered. Their record label told the band they could have anything on the stage, to which they responded, “Really. Anything?”
Besides, I was fascinated less by their boundary pushing and more by the achievements they had made manifest because of it. They were big-dreaming, big-talking lads who had used their mouths and minds to create something that had grabbed the attention of the world, opening for Madonna, crafting a number one album, and for one of them, dating the ultimate dream girl, Molly Ringwald. The trio’s Starter jacket swagger was the wondrously unhindered confidence I had always aspired to, untamed, and uncontained by what others thought. “What others thought” was 93 percent of what I actually did think about. So, on school nights, instead of doing my homework, I would circle around my room with headphones on, memorizing the lyrics to the album until I could spit them out like a mystic speaking in tongues.
When I lay on my bed on May 30, 1987, staring at the £5 ticket I had bought for that night’s gig, it felt like I had acquired a golden ticket to enter New York City itself, the boom-box-filled five boroughs the Beasties embodied. I pulled on that hat, Def Jam T-shirt, and VW badge (now dangling off a plate-gold necklace I had liberated from my mother’s jewelry box) and became King Rog Rock. A man transformed, willing himself to believe that a sense of possibility, adventure, and fearlessness was his for the taking.*
(*Reality often proved to be frustratingly different. After I read that the Beasties grew up skateboarding, I instantly went out and procured a skateboard, attempting to teach myself ollies and kick flips in my own driveway. One nasty, involuntary dismount straight into my mother’s rosebush persuaded me to carry it around as an accessory in my arms rather than a mode of transport. For three months, I lugged that skateboard around everywhere with me, like Dorothy schlepping Toto around Oz.)
Beastie Boy Adam Yauch had appeared on local TV early that night declaring that Liverpool should be ready to exercise “its constitutional right to be fresh.” I did not know exactly what he meant but could not have been more exhilarated. I was not alone. Walking into pregame beers at Rigby’s pub was akin to crashing a costume party packed full of fellow B-Boys, clad in shell tops, trucker hats, chunky gold chains, and “fake-vintage” high school T-shirts. By the time we got to the Royal Court the place was heaving. Two thousand fellow fans were stuffed into a sold-out venue. Somehow, though, the energy was off-kilter, and strangely agitated. I expected a communal spirit born of a sense we were all about to experience something special—our version of the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show, or Hendrix at Woodstock—but the prevailing atmosphere felt nervy and simmering, as if we were a Saxon horde preparing for battle.
We half-dozen members of the Liverpool College Breaking Crew stood at the back of the packed theater, marking out our territory as we marveled at the stage. Giant tall boys of Budweiser bookended a cage designed to enclose one scantily clad female. Center stage featured a pair of DJ turntables on a high riser, alongside a mysterious black box at which Gripper pointed with delight as soon as we walked in. “I’ll bet that’s where the huge nob springs out from.”
The energy surged the second the lights went dark across the venue. I was hit by a hyper-awareness that I, King Rog Rock, was about to be in the same room and breathe the very same air as Ad Rock, MCA, and Mike D. This meaningful thought was interrupted by the hoarse tones of MCA booming into a mic offstage, “Fuck you, Liverpool.” The second I heard his signature gravelly Brooklyn bark hit the third syllable, a long, drawn-out “Livahhhhhhh … ,” my excitement was burned away and replaced by the cold, sickening realization that MCA had just made a terrible mistake.
“Fuck you, Livahhhhhh-pooooooooooollllllllll.”
This riff might have been standard Beastie Boy stage patter, swagger that worked perfectly well in Los Angeles, Chicago, Brighton, or Birmingham. But Liverpool is different. You simply can’t roll into town, say that, and expect to escape a beating. It does not matter who you are. Those are fighting words, akin to insulting someone’s mum in front of her face.
The three Beasties, however, were blithely unaware of the sin they had just committed. They pogoed onto the stage, grabbing their crotches and spraying cans of beers on the crowd, as banks of light illuminated the cage, now featuring a bikini-clad dancer writhing against the bars. Yet even as the shiny bald-headed DJ Hurricane spun the opening beats of “Slow and Low,” something irreparable had broken in the crowd. As the fans crushed forward, all of them were suddenly seething, ready to show the Beasties that the pupil had become the master.
“Let it flow, let yourself go …”
After the first beer can spiraled toward the stage, exploding upon impact, a dozen more followed its arc, causing Mike D to exclaim, “Suck my dick.” This invited fans at the front to spew forth a sea of spit, coating the bouncers, who were now desperately linking arms in an attempt to push the hordes back. The entire floor of the theater became a blanket of furious two-fingered V-signs. The Beasties were being given a true Liverpool welcome.
They had not made it halfway through their first song and now were in danger of completely losing control of the show. A barrage of cans began to fly down from the balcony. MCA barked for stagehands to turn up the houselights, a move that only pushed the Scousers to do something I had hitherto believed was unthinkable: waste full cans of beer, preferring to defend their city’s honor by flinging them angrily at their now fully exposed prey rather than drink.
I watched in horror at the surreal scene unspooling around me. The go-go dancer, who had probably turned up at the gig believing this night would be one of the most exhilarating of her life, was now cowering for cover at the back of the cage as lagers exploded all around her. A lad standing to my left, clad in a freshly purchased Beastie Boys concert T-shirt, hurled his Bud with the one-in-a-million accuracy of a proton torpedo aimed for the Death Star. The can traveled a high trajectory, spinning end over end until it clipped a stunned DJ Hurricane flush in the center of his shiny bald pate, sending the chunky mixmaster tumbling backward off his platform.
Roadies and bouncers careened across the stage in panicked damage limitation mode. One stagehand shook his head and mimed shooting at the crowd, as the rest used their own bodies to shield the Beasties from incoming fire, guiding the beleaguered stars toward safety.
A moment of pause ensued, but regrettably, it proved only temporary. Ad Rock refused to be cowed. Something told him the wise move was to storm back onto the stage, armed this time with a baseball bat instead of a microphone. At first, he stood defiantly, a gesture that brought on a fresh fusillade of cans. He then swung his body into a slugger’s stance and began to take his licks, smashing three or four cans back into the audience as if the entire theater was just a batting cage dispensing beer cans instead of fast-pitch baseballs.
It required at least half a dozen roadies to perform the extract-and-rescue operation, as they courageously smothered Ad Rock and carried him off, dragging and screaming against his will. With the stage now clear, the set lights went black, a symbol of surrender that inspired a cry of “We tamed the Beastie Boys” to arise spontaneously among the crowd, resounding around the auditorium in thick, defiant, victorious Scouse tones—a football-style chant as delirious as any I had heard on the terraces, even on cup final days.
Yet, emasculating the Beastie Boys and dispatching them inside of twelve minutes was not enough for this angry mob. Like many a triumphant army, they now wanted to pillage and hell-raise to commemorate their moment of victory. With no other outlet, the throngs elected to vent their fury upon each other. Chaos erupted all around us. Strangers started to wrestle each other to the ground, haymakers were thrown, and pint glasses were smashed.
Gripper was never more in his element than when surrounded by anarchy. “Get back,” he said to us calmly. Without having to exchange a word, Stevie Tuffnell stepped up alongside him and the two of them began dropping anyone unfortunate enough to stumble into our vicinity, unleashing a ferocious battery of uppercuts, hooks, and the occasional headbutt. The brutality they dispensed was sickening yet effective, creating a protective force field around our crew. Even as violence exploded across the theater floor, we never feared for our safety. Instead, I was able to scan the room, which now resembled a gladiatorial battle royale. One man picked a stranger up above his head then flung him, full body, onto the stage; a group of feral teens stomped on a limp-bodied victim; a desperate woman glassed an assailant who seemed hell-bent on choking out her boyfriend.
Then our throats constricted. A tightness gripped my chest. Breathing became impossible. “Fuckin’ ’ell, tear gas,” the cry went up. “The Bizzies* ’ave gassed us.” (*A common, derogatory Scouse name for the police.)
A stampede formed as the crowd moved from fight to flight. Every man for themselves, bodies colliding in every direction seeking an escape from the fear, burning, and the sudden absence of oxygen. Concertgoers jumped down from the balcony; others crawled along the floor, hoping to dodge the gas by dragging themselves over the beer, glass, and bloodstained carpet. I stumbled backward, half searching for a way out, half dragged by the wave of bodies crashing through the exit. Suddenly I was spat out into the street, a scene of carnage and confusion. People were doubled over, retching, fighting to breathe. A girl ran past me, her face shocked, scalp matted with blood, bits of glass still caught in her hair.
The blue lights of police cars and ambulances flooded the scene. I collapsed onto the curb opposite the venue, gulping down the glorious fresh air, simply relieved to have survived the madness. “That was mental.” I heard a group of lads begin swapping exaggerated narratives over what had just happened. “Total aggro. One of them bouncers fired a pistol at us from the stage, like,” they boasted. “They ran off stage like a bunch of wimps. Best night of me life.”
Cold, heavy rain started to pour from the sky, as an exhilarated Liverpool College breaking crew reassembled. The only injury to report was a cut on Tuff’s knuckles, apparently the result of his socking some kid who had braces on his teeth. “We’ll always be able to say we were there,” a hyped Gripper declared while bopping his head back and forward like a fighting cock. “Let’s get to the State right now,” he commanded, beckoning us to join him at the legendary Liverpool nightclub where so many of our great Saturday nights ended. “We got to tell people our war stories before idiots who weren’t there start bullshitting that they were.”
There was no way I was going to the State. There was no way I could celebrate what I had just witnessed. Liverpool had not “tamed the Beasties.” We had merely brought them down to our level of hopelessness. I did not want to be with Gripper. I did not want to be with any of the crew. I was honestly relieved when they agreed to leave without me. I stayed on the curb and watched them march off into town, chanting “We tamed the Beasties” as they danced and pumped their arms in the rain. I was done. With all of it. The drudgery, fear, fists in the face, and doner kebabs and everything of late-night Liverpool life. I felt only a debilitating sense of disgust and sadness. It wasn’t the violence; I was numb to that. It was the emotional whiplash of the twelve-minute
Beastie Boys show. It felt like it was the embodiment of what English life had to offer. Two thousand people had paid for tickets to enjoy a once-in-a-lifetime experience, only to realize they would gain more pleasure from destroying it.
A girlfriend had once told me that the English derive pleasure from tearing others down, and now more than ever I understood what she meant. Usually it was just each other. On this night, it was those “most illingest B-Boys,” the Beasties. I sat there in the rain listening to my countrymen milling around outside the venue bragging to each other about what they had just experienced, and the gun became bigger and bigger with each telling.
Roger Bennett is a broadcaster and half of the NBC Sports duo Men in Blazers.
Excerpted from the book REBORN IN THE USA: An Englishman’s Love Letter to His Chosen Home by Roger Bennett. Copyright © 2021 by In Loving Memory of the Recent Past 2 Inc. From Dey Street Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Reprinted by permission.