Mike D 5D, Masonic Temple, Detroit, MI, October 17, 2026

I didn’t think you were a big Beastie Boys fan, said a friend when discussing weekend plans. And, I mean, I’m not, not in any traditional definition of the word. But they were from New York City and so they were ours, they were one of us, at least for a certain generation of New Yorkers. Those are the same people who could play a version of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon except in this case it’s more like Five Degrees of Beastie Boys. It’s not like downtown NYC was any kind of paradise of racial equality in the 80s but if you were young and fiercely in love with music you easily navigated the crossover between hardcore and punk and rap and rock and roll and you didn’t think much about it until someone tried to say that it was weird, and then you stopped and thought about it for a minute and said, well maybe I guess? But it’s all good music, I don’t care what kind it is. 

So we all knew about the Beasties, we all heard “Cookie Puss” on WNYU, I owned a copy until I loaned it to a friend and never got it back. It is not a very good song but it is a very very New York City specific song, which is why we all loved it. We all saw the Carvel commercials and thought about prank calling the 800 number, they just were the first ones to do it and record it. They talked like us, they sounded like us, they were ours. 

And they were still ours even after Licensed to Ill came out and they suddenly belonged to everybody. It still felt very hyperlocal, though. I specifically remember one unseasonably warm late fall night where I was meeting two friends for dinner and we agreed to meet up outside of Trash & Vaudeville on St. Mark’s Place. I got there and met up with my friend Miriam, and either T&V or Sounds were playing Licensed to Ill and we could hear it outside. The third person in our party was late, and we waited the standard 15 minutes that you did back when no one had a flying car in their pocket. 

I was hungry and I said “let’s go already” and Miriam said “let’s wait for the end of the side” because the record was up to “Girls” and the last song on side one was “Fight For Your Right.” After “Fight for Your Right” the small gaggle of other folks also clearly rendezvousing in front of the commercial establishment all went off on their way. I’m guessing we were going to either Cozy Soup & Burger or the Riviera, the latter was the diner in the space the Cooper Square Starbucks used to be in. When we got wherever we were going one of us went to the payphone to call the third in our party to leave a message on the answering machine to tell them where we were in case they showed up eventually or if they were stuck on a train or whatever and checked their messages. 

I am writing all this down so we remember that once upon a time we functioned as a society just fine without a phone in our pocket. I am writing it down because I still remember standing there with my best friend in the part of the city that was like our living room or at least our backyard, we had the places that we went and the ways that we did things and all of it was well understood and agreed upon. I am writing it down because it is the same world that the Beastie Boys emerged from, they would also know these places and have their own systems for managing the one person in the friend group who was always fucking late.  

I am still writing about Mike D here, because all of this lore is in every note of what he played onstage Saturday night, both the handful of Beasties songs and the newer 5D material, which resonated because it didn’t feel separate from the older stuff but absolutely flowed like a logical tangent, a sonically compatible continuation. I love that Mike is playing music with his kids and their friends, the energy from the younger people meshed so well with the very Michael Diamond energy happening onstage.

He still moves the same, he still sounds the same, and the combination of lights and sounds and words and beats and movement still delivered that same futuristic/scifi kind of vibe, it all felt like a portal had been opened and I was walking down the street somewhere in the New York City of the 80s, when there were parts that still felt abandoned or at least forgotten, this mix of cool store / ancient storefront that has been there forever / newcomers who lived there because it was cheap / the elders who couldn’t leave when there was a downturn and then either embraced the new guard or didn’t / the ways we repopulated places like Kiev or Christine’s or Veselka because it was cheap and it was the kind of food our grandmothers made us. 

There was so much happening. There was so much possibility. You were young and you feel both like you’re running out of time to get everything done you need to do and also that the world is out there waiting for you to get started. Even though, again, I am not any kind of enormous fan, I always admired the Beasties’ hustle and their style and how they interconnected so seamlessly, they made it look easy but it was equally obvious how hard they worked, which is also a very New York City kind of energy. 

This show was originally scheduled for a different, smaller venue and while the vibe and the sound in the Cathedral (now Jack White) space at Masonic was better it was definitely a weird vibe for this particular show. They removed the seats from the immediate front of house so while the whole venue was general admission, the front was a first-come, first-served pit. While I was initially abashed that it seemed like Detroit didn’t show up better for Mike D, closer to showtime the place filled up and although it sure looked like every single person in the pit had their phone out all night, the energy was excited and enthusiastic and full of love.