One thing that never ceases to amaze me is how quickly you can help recall some of your favorite memories of concerts past via the magic of YouTube. Somehow I was stumbling through a set of videos and I got into the mood to see if any good Beastie Boys clips ever surfaced from the first time I caught them back in 1998 on their Hello Nasty tour. I was still in high school at the time and it was my older, cooler friends that were going to be taking me out to O’hare Airport’s neighbor, Rosemont Horizon (when it was still called that), and we got front row in the seats on what would have been great sight-lines for many a portion of the show thanks to their revolving LP stage setup.
But perhaps more memorable for me was the Mix Master Mike intro, as he dropped into the Rush classic, “Tom Sawyer,” way early in the intro and started scratching, cutting and mixing it with his hip-hop flavor. At the time, I was deep into the music of Rush and falling in love with the idea that while my friends tended to be unimpressed by the band and the idea of their music being rather uncool to like, I was feeding off of their energy and absolutely loved discovering that band. Then Mix Master Mike basically dropped it for me, like he knew that one suburban kid in the audience would be amped on having a hip-hop show start with a serious rock/rap mashup feel.
The above video is from the next year but same tour and same stage setup; this is a pretty close representation to what I remember hearing live. Anyone see this tour and remember this nonsense? So rad.
