lyneday
03-09-2006, 01:59 PM
Beastie Boys Are F@#kin' Awesome (http://music.ign.com/articles/694/694629p1.html)
A concert film experience that's better than the real thing.
by Spence D.
March 8, 2006 - While I wouldn't consider myself an absolute Beastie Boys fan, I do own all of their albums on vinyl and CD and have managed to see them throw down live at least five times. The first time I caught them was in the early '90s about a year after they dropped Paul's Boutique. They did a show with Cypress Hill and The Fu-Schnickens at a now defunct little venue in the Upper Haight district of San Francisco called The I-Beam. The show was billed as one of their last as just three MCs and one DJ before they headed into the studio to effectively return to their initial band oriented roots (i.e. playing live instruments). That I caught the show with a passel of NYC bred hip-hop heads only made the evening that more memorable. Plus it was one of the last times that Shadrach, Meshach, and Abendigo rocked it with DJ Hurricane.
The second time I caught the Beasties was shortly after Check Your Head had hit stores. They performed at the Marin Civic Auditorium in San Rafael, California with the likes of all girl rawkers L7 on the bill. I took my brother to the show, him being a bona fide lip syncing B-Boys fanatic. The two things I remember about that show is that my brother flipped out when the Beasties swapped all of their beats around, dropping entirely new jams for classics like "Paul Revere" and the fact that some crazy-as-f@#k kids had climbed the walls of the venue, jaunted across the roof, pried open the sky lights and then proceeded to drop more than 50 feet to the venue floor. That's some damn dedicated (and as I mentioned, crazy-as-f@#k) fans right there.
It's often said that the third time's a charm, but sadly the next time I caught the B-Boys was after they had blown up worldwide (again) with Ill Communication. The show this time had moved back to the arena (the Oakland Coliseum, to be exact). True to form the guys brought along some of their musical heroes in the form of the then newly reunited Bad Brains. The memories I have of this gig don't so much involve the music as they do the fan base the Boys had accumulated by this point in their career. Me and my buddies, we're the same age as MCA, Adrock, and Mike D. But the kids at this show were just that, kids. I'm talkin' junior high and high school kids who seemed as if they had snuck out the house under the pretense of "studying over at Billy's and/or sleeping over at Sally's." The Coliseum was packed to the rafters with drunken young idiots trying to recreate the Beastie's obnoxious early days close to a decade later. I recall spending the better part of the show trying to prevent some young turk from puking Jack D. all over my shell toes.
When Hello Nasty hit the airwaves in 1998, I was again front and center at the subsequent tour. This time I had my good buddy Matt B.'s wife in tow (Matt had drawn the short straw and had to stay home with his kid, thus making me official chaperone for his betrothed). The show was again at the Oakland Coliseum, but this time instead of being back in the nosebleed seats, I had scored front row action. That the B-Boys had a "theater-in-the-round" made it somewhat better, but it was still huge and lacking any of the intimacy or crazy-as-f@#kness of those first two shows I'd seen back in the day.
Five years later and I was again in a darkened venue, this time the slightly smaller Bill Graham Civic Center in downtown San Francisco. The show was okay, with Mixmaster Mike supplying some serious beat attitude and the Boys themselves showing how they've matured on their instruments. But it wasn't quite as awesome-as-f@#k as I would have expected (yeah, I'm a hard sell when it comes to live music).
A funny thing happened on the way to the lab, though (and when I say lab, I'm referring to Dolby Laboratories in the Potrero Hill district of S.F.). I found that the Beastie Boys are alive, well, and seriously back in action. Okay, I'll admit that there's probably a little confusion on the reader's part right about now, but don't fret. Here's the deal: last night I managed to sneak my way in (no, crashing through skylights was not involved) to an uber advance screening of the new Beastie Boys' concert film Awesome: I F@#kin' Shot That at the Dolby in-lab theater. Now I'm sure you're all familiar with Dolby and their sound enhancements. Well, as you can imagine their on-site theater is off-the-hook. We're talking wall-to-wall, crevice-to-crevice, ceiling-to-floor speaker cavalcade. To put it in perspective, when I saw the re-release of the Talking Heads' concert film Stop Making Sense I found myself crying just as my ears were bleeding with joy. To say that the same effect was heaped upon me during the B-Boys screening wouldn't be far from the truth.
For those out of the loop, the film was shot by 50 concert goers at the group's Madison Square Garden concert back in October of 2004. And for somebody who caught the band on that particular sweep of the To The 5 Boroughs tour, lemme tell you something: the film RAWKS. I seriously found it to be 179 times doper than the actual concert I attended. Seriously. Okay, so the film is filled with requisite lo-fi handheld jittery action, black/white negative retro-flux, echo image flash cuts, and all the other standard video tricknology you can imagine. Yeah, it can be cheesy from time to time, annoying here and there, but that's what the Beastie's modus operandi has always been since Day 1.
But let me tell you about the audio, my friends. It's roper than the original landlord from Three's Company. Point blank, no lie. If the Boys don't release this as a live CD then they're serious fools. Serious, I tell ya! Perhaps it was the totally immersive surround sound of the Dolby Labs theater. Perhaps it was the fact that my ears were ringing after the first five minutes and I still have another 85 to go. Perhaps it was because the bass went BOOM! to the point of rattling my chest cavity and vibrating the hollows of my cheeks like a blowfish gasping for breath. Whatever the case may be, this film totally blew away the last three live experiences I've shared with the Beasties combined! In retrospect, I'm sure a lot of it had to do with the Boys throwing down at the historic Garden and in their hometown, but who cares. Rawkin' is rawkin' is rawkin' and this film does that in spades.
While I'm still up on my soapbox, I'll say this: the music from the film was so immersive I had to restrain myself from actually jumping out of my chair and rushing the screen. To wit, I did manage to earn some serious whiplash from my incessant head-nodding and got a sore throat from whisper/yelling out some key lines, mostly MCA's sly refrains like "sweeter than a cheery pie with Ready Whip topping" and "I've got more rhymes than I got gray hairs and that's a lot 'cuz I gots my share." If I have one complaint about the evening it was that the milquetoasts in the theater with me weren't moving a single muscle. Riddle me this: how can you sit bone still during a Beastie Boys' concert film? Not only that, how can you sit bone still through a Beastie Boys' concert film that was better than some of their actual live concerts? If I had the answer I'd be a millionaire sucking down sweet mangoes on some Jamaican isle and wouldn't that be nice, eh?
Oh yeah, if you're a regular Joe (or Jane) you can catch the flick when it hits theaters at the end of March.
A concert film experience that's better than the real thing.
by Spence D.
March 8, 2006 - While I wouldn't consider myself an absolute Beastie Boys fan, I do own all of their albums on vinyl and CD and have managed to see them throw down live at least five times. The first time I caught them was in the early '90s about a year after they dropped Paul's Boutique. They did a show with Cypress Hill and The Fu-Schnickens at a now defunct little venue in the Upper Haight district of San Francisco called The I-Beam. The show was billed as one of their last as just three MCs and one DJ before they headed into the studio to effectively return to their initial band oriented roots (i.e. playing live instruments). That I caught the show with a passel of NYC bred hip-hop heads only made the evening that more memorable. Plus it was one of the last times that Shadrach, Meshach, and Abendigo rocked it with DJ Hurricane.
The second time I caught the Beasties was shortly after Check Your Head had hit stores. They performed at the Marin Civic Auditorium in San Rafael, California with the likes of all girl rawkers L7 on the bill. I took my brother to the show, him being a bona fide lip syncing B-Boys fanatic. The two things I remember about that show is that my brother flipped out when the Beasties swapped all of their beats around, dropping entirely new jams for classics like "Paul Revere" and the fact that some crazy-as-f@#k kids had climbed the walls of the venue, jaunted across the roof, pried open the sky lights and then proceeded to drop more than 50 feet to the venue floor. That's some damn dedicated (and as I mentioned, crazy-as-f@#k) fans right there.
It's often said that the third time's a charm, but sadly the next time I caught the B-Boys was after they had blown up worldwide (again) with Ill Communication. The show this time had moved back to the arena (the Oakland Coliseum, to be exact). True to form the guys brought along some of their musical heroes in the form of the then newly reunited Bad Brains. The memories I have of this gig don't so much involve the music as they do the fan base the Boys had accumulated by this point in their career. Me and my buddies, we're the same age as MCA, Adrock, and Mike D. But the kids at this show were just that, kids. I'm talkin' junior high and high school kids who seemed as if they had snuck out the house under the pretense of "studying over at Billy's and/or sleeping over at Sally's." The Coliseum was packed to the rafters with drunken young idiots trying to recreate the Beastie's obnoxious early days close to a decade later. I recall spending the better part of the show trying to prevent some young turk from puking Jack D. all over my shell toes.
When Hello Nasty hit the airwaves in 1998, I was again front and center at the subsequent tour. This time I had my good buddy Matt B.'s wife in tow (Matt had drawn the short straw and had to stay home with his kid, thus making me official chaperone for his betrothed). The show was again at the Oakland Coliseum, but this time instead of being back in the nosebleed seats, I had scored front row action. That the B-Boys had a "theater-in-the-round" made it somewhat better, but it was still huge and lacking any of the intimacy or crazy-as-f@#kness of those first two shows I'd seen back in the day.
Five years later and I was again in a darkened venue, this time the slightly smaller Bill Graham Civic Center in downtown San Francisco. The show was okay, with Mixmaster Mike supplying some serious beat attitude and the Boys themselves showing how they've matured on their instruments. But it wasn't quite as awesome-as-f@#k as I would have expected (yeah, I'm a hard sell when it comes to live music).
A funny thing happened on the way to the lab, though (and when I say lab, I'm referring to Dolby Laboratories in the Potrero Hill district of S.F.). I found that the Beastie Boys are alive, well, and seriously back in action. Okay, I'll admit that there's probably a little confusion on the reader's part right about now, but don't fret. Here's the deal: last night I managed to sneak my way in (no, crashing through skylights was not involved) to an uber advance screening of the new Beastie Boys' concert film Awesome: I F@#kin' Shot That at the Dolby in-lab theater. Now I'm sure you're all familiar with Dolby and their sound enhancements. Well, as you can imagine their on-site theater is off-the-hook. We're talking wall-to-wall, crevice-to-crevice, ceiling-to-floor speaker cavalcade. To put it in perspective, when I saw the re-release of the Talking Heads' concert film Stop Making Sense I found myself crying just as my ears were bleeding with joy. To say that the same effect was heaped upon me during the B-Boys screening wouldn't be far from the truth.
For those out of the loop, the film was shot by 50 concert goers at the group's Madison Square Garden concert back in October of 2004. And for somebody who caught the band on that particular sweep of the To The 5 Boroughs tour, lemme tell you something: the film RAWKS. I seriously found it to be 179 times doper than the actual concert I attended. Seriously. Okay, so the film is filled with requisite lo-fi handheld jittery action, black/white negative retro-flux, echo image flash cuts, and all the other standard video tricknology you can imagine. Yeah, it can be cheesy from time to time, annoying here and there, but that's what the Beastie's modus operandi has always been since Day 1.
But let me tell you about the audio, my friends. It's roper than the original landlord from Three's Company. Point blank, no lie. If the Boys don't release this as a live CD then they're serious fools. Serious, I tell ya! Perhaps it was the totally immersive surround sound of the Dolby Labs theater. Perhaps it was the fact that my ears were ringing after the first five minutes and I still have another 85 to go. Perhaps it was because the bass went BOOM! to the point of rattling my chest cavity and vibrating the hollows of my cheeks like a blowfish gasping for breath. Whatever the case may be, this film totally blew away the last three live experiences I've shared with the Beasties combined! In retrospect, I'm sure a lot of it had to do with the Boys throwing down at the historic Garden and in their hometown, but who cares. Rawkin' is rawkin' is rawkin' and this film does that in spades.
While I'm still up on my soapbox, I'll say this: the music from the film was so immersive I had to restrain myself from actually jumping out of my chair and rushing the screen. To wit, I did manage to earn some serious whiplash from my incessant head-nodding and got a sore throat from whisper/yelling out some key lines, mostly MCA's sly refrains like "sweeter than a cheery pie with Ready Whip topping" and "I've got more rhymes than I got gray hairs and that's a lot 'cuz I gots my share." If I have one complaint about the evening it was that the milquetoasts in the theater with me weren't moving a single muscle. Riddle me this: how can you sit bone still during a Beastie Boys' concert film? Not only that, how can you sit bone still through a Beastie Boys' concert film that was better than some of their actual live concerts? If I had the answer I'd be a millionaire sucking down sweet mangoes on some Jamaican isle and wouldn't that be nice, eh?
Oh yeah, if you're a regular Joe (or Jane) you can catch the flick when it hits theaters at the end of March.