I’ll Steal Your Honey Like I Stole Your Bike: MCA RIP and the Influence of Beastie Boys On My 1989
Let me preface with this: I don’t currently have License to Ill on my iPod (I might have forgotten to rip it, or maybe I feel that a true Beastie Boys connoisseur should jump from “Cookie Puss” to “Hey Ladies” in the oeuvre), I will never listen to “Girls” and my view on “Fight For Your Right” is that, though I don’t turn it off when it comes on the radio, it is responsible for the unfortunate invention of Kid Rock and Limp Bizkit. But I’m listening right now and remembering the importance of that album in my life.
In early 1989 (that would make me eighteen years old), I took a job in, for lack of a better term, an ice factory. During the previous six months, I dropped out of college mid-semester, lost my host / waiter job when the Ogden, Utah Marie Calenders went bankrupt, quit a terrible waiter position at JB’s Restaurant and pulled a no-show after three weeks of a soul-sucking job (it only ranks about eight on my “Employers That Sucked My Soul” list) at a frozen vegetable packing plant; driving my 1965 Bug with no heater during cold Utah January mornings, I was there at 6 AM, either using a 30 pound staff to dislodge frozen Brussels sprouts from a giant vat (“poke it!” my Latino coworkers would shout up to me) or standing at the end of the assembly line to stack boxes and wrap up the pallet when full (the timing of getting the latter just right so no box of broccoli falls off the belt played with my anxiety).
