5 Feet of Fury

Going to see ‘Rude Boy’ almost got Eugene S. Robinson killed

Hey, it was NYC in the 1980s…

But as I closed the distance, a guy came running up with a German shepherd and a large crescent wrench. At which point the rasta jumped into the driver’s seat, the two white cats who had been in his cab jumped into the back seat, and the cugine with the wrench let the dog go while he jumped onto the trunk and smashed out the back window in a last-ditch attempt to get at the interior of the cab.

The cab skidded off. The cugine rolled off into the street a few feet from my feet, and all at once the three guys turned from the cab to me, now standing alone in the middle of the avenue.

“What the fuck do you want?”

By the way: Some of the concert vocal performances sounded “like they’d been recorded on a cassette machine zipped up in a girl’s handbag,” so that singing was redubbed in the studio later. Pretty convincing.

The official reason given for Mick’s firing was “tardiness.” Early evidence here: