Great Days. It was the summer of 1987. Sweet talk to the girl behind the counter at the record store had a 6’x4′ black & white Licensed to Ill poster on my dorm wall . Paul and I were the straight-from-central-casting examples of white-suburban males drawn to the siren song of urban hip hop, and we were headed to the Rosemont Horizon to see the Beastie Boys open for Run DMC. ‘Raising Hell’ was at the top of the pop charts fueled by ‘Walk this Way’ and we had collectively graduated from “Fight for Your Right” to “No Sleep ‘Til Brooklyn’. The show was “super def ill”. My two favorite details. Two rows behind us were a trio of 6’6″ black dudes in Run DMC fashion shirts who sat 
during the Beastie Boys and stood silently with arms crossed during the Run DMC set. Between the two acts, while they roadies reconfigured the stage, the show managers decided to play a new Def Jam release that had dropped a couple of weeks earlier, and we rocked for 45 minutes to LL Cool J’s ‘Bigger and Deffer’. Holy crzap. It rips off the lid with “I’m Bad” straight-out-the-box (we still didn’t have all the words right six months later) and then crushes it through “Get Down”, “Go Cut Creator” and “Let’s Get Ill”. Monumental. White boys gettin’ ill!