The Illest Video

I was somewhat of a mall rat as I got into my teenage years in grade eight having turned 13 that January. One of my most favorite things to do was frequent the record stores and look through all the wonderful records I wished I could own. I'd stare at the artwork, read the backs of the records, and browse through t-shirts, pins and other memorabilia.

Speaking of pins I've just unlocked another old memory from gradeschool. I used to make my own homemade rock pins by cutting out small record covers from ads in metal magazines, I'd carefully glue them to a square of cardboard I had cut out the same size, then wrap it in layers of scotch tape for a nice glossy finish. I'd also painstakingly apply very thin strips of tape through a safety pin, attaching it to the backside of the pin on the cardboard and voila! Custom pins! Back to the story...

Once in awhile my mom would bribe me with getting something from a record store so she could get me to go to the dentist, and I happily obliged. Since I hung out at the mall so much to begin with, I always caught the new items in the record stores before a lot of other people. My dentist was in the mall and on one particular day after a visit, my mom took me to Sam the record man to get a record or tape. At the time bands were starting to release VHS tapes of live concerts and their music videos. As I scanned the shelf a very familiar image caught my eye. It appeared to be a joint butted out in an ashtray but it was actually a plane crashed into the ground or a mountainside depending on which way you looked at it. If you don't know where I'm going with this perhaps you haven't been following the story, it was the cover art from the Beastie Boys "Licensed to Ill" only it was a home video!

I quickly snatched it up as it was the only copy there and my mother agreed to buy it. The entire car ride home I scanned it over, reading the track listing. There were 2 videos I had seen on tv before which were "Fight for your right" and "No sleep till Brooklyn" but other than that everything was new to me and I was super pumped! As soon as we got home I rushed down to the basement and popped the tape in the good ole trusty VCR. Asides from the 2 videos I had already seen, there were 4 other music videos. One of which was a song that wasn't on the album but was a song I had briefly heard in the film Krush Groove, She's on it! I was very ecstatic to finally hear the song in its entirety and it didn't disappoint one bit. After the videos there was some footage of the boys partying backstage with some groupies which was also cool to see. This tape was legend and I had scored gold once again!

I ended up loosing mine somewhere over the years and then acquired another one years later. I also went through the labour recently of downloading the video off the Internet so I could burn it to DVD and have it on my hard drive and it's still a classic. If you can get your hands on it somehow I strongly urge you too!