D.C.

 Thought about the answer to a question someone laid on me the other day concerning the debt crisis and the knuckleheads in D.C.  -and I don't mean the outrageously expensive motor. "What do you think they're really doing up there?" I didn't really have an answer because, quite frankly at this point, who gives a shit? I could only respond with a picture I had in my head of this album cover. Then as any good conversation goes, it turned to the Beasties.

 This album reminds me of a lot...a lot. Too much to list, obviously, but I do know it's 1987 and my buddy Raymo and I are leaving his house in the Fairmont District. Raymo had the best '73 Dart Sport you'll ever have surf racks on. As we pull away from his pad, he pulls out a shiny new, cellophane wrapped, cassette tape of Some Old Bullshit. I couldn't believe my eyes. A new Beastie album that I had never hear of? Impossible. Raymo was shittin', too. Turns out he found it at a random record store in The City -random 'cause I don't remember the place. Think about this, Raymo waited to listen to said found gem until it could be enjoyed with his bro. Real friends are the realest. Anyway, the moment seemed too momentous to be driving, so he pulled the Dodge to the curb. Off went the cellophane and in the mouth of the pull-out-style Kenwood the tape went.

 From quiet... to a million miles an hour. That's the only way I can explain what started to come out of the car's 12" woofers. The set-up in Raymo's car should tell you what we expected to come blaring from those big-ass speakers and punk rock, wasn't it. Punk Rock?! Did someone play a shitty trick on us?! Did they put the wrong cassette in the case!?  Where's the beats and rhymes?! What the FUCK?!?! What the fuck, was that we really weren't the Beastie fans we thought we were. "The Beasties started in punk idiots!"

 I didn't get punk rock yet, neither did Raymo. We understood it, but it still just semed like shitty bands, doing shitty songs. I mean, "What the fuck are they saying?" was Raymo's  first response to hearing this virgin Beastie material. We were urban kids from in and around The City and if it wasn't gonna be hip-hop, you better be rockin' some Zep or AC/DC. This was not the Beasties telling us "you think you know what time it is, it's time to get ill" -nope! So, after further disappointment in the rest of the songs, Raymo hit the orange eject button, out that retched piece of plastic came and out the Dart's window it went. I think we ran over it as we drove off.

 To this day, I still think the 2 best bands that have ever been, have been Led Zeppelin and The Beastie Boys. If I have to explain it... The reaction Raymo and I had to what the Beasties were, to what we had known them to be, was short sided, ignorant, arrogant and a whole lot of other words that tend to get thrown around so freely in Washington AND the Country these days [sic]. I may not have agreed with what they were saying or how they were saying it, but I'll never forget how great they are and I'll never forget the good times they brought me and my friends over the years.

 RIP Adam Yach, and thank you for the lesson. As for DC, if I have to explain it...