by LeRoy, Dan
The answer is yes, although it’s easy to understand why everyone involved would want to forget the brief, radio station—sponsored “tour” where the gigs occurred. Mario Caldato, who served as the group’s concert soundman, recalls half a dozen appearances which took place that fall, in “Miami, Dallas, Atlanta, San Francisco and Boston, or somewhere in that area.”
The venues were nightclubs, and the setlist was short, comprising “only five or six songs total,” Caldato says. Two were old, drawn from the group of “Hold It Now, Hit It,” “Time to Get Ill” and “Paul Revere”; the others were new, and included obvious choices like “Shake Your Rump,” ‘Egg Man” and “Hey Ladies.”29 The brevity, and the unusual circumstances of the radio station involvement—“It was like, The first 250 Z-100 listeners can get a free Diet Coke and popcorn, and see the Beastie Boys,’” Diamond recalls—made the concerts a bitter cherry atop the commercial disaster of Paul’s Boutique. “People were really excited to see the boys,” Caldato says, “but were a little confused after the shows.”
How low the mighty road warriors of Licensed to Ill had fallen. “The tour was pretty straight-up humiliating,” agrees Diamond. “It’s a miracle the band survived it.”
* * *
The trio’s long, rancorous battle with Def Jam would finally be resolved before year’s end. The Beastie Boys agreed to forego the royalties they had earned, to that point, from Licensed to Ill, and Def Jam relinquished its claim to the group. Some believed Def Jam had also received points on Paul’s Boutique in the deal. In any event, the Beasties were officially free of Russell Simmons.
For all the problems it had faced in the marketplace, Paul’s Boutique had at least not had to compete with an album of Beasties’ outtakes Simmons had been threatening to release for the past year. Provisionally titled White House, the record was at times rumored to have been produced by Public Enemy’s Chuck D. At others, it was to have been comprised of “vocal tracks sampled into house music,” as Yauch told LA. Weekly. “I can’t even figure out what [Simmons is] using … all he has is a couple of lines or some shit.”
The group remained convinced the project was a sham. “You wanna know where the album is?” Mike D asked Melody Maker’s Ted Mico. “It’s up here in Russell’s head.” Leyla Turkkan, who remains a close friend of Simmons, concurs, calling the alleged collection “bullshit. That wasn’t true.”
Meanwhile, even after the sales debacle of Paul’s Boutique, the band still attempted to work the record behind the scenes. A total of four videos would be shot—Yauch would later say it had been his goal to make a video for every song on the disc—but Capitol, once bitten, was twice shy.
“They had two videos and they wouldn’t put them out. Finally, after a long time we got a meeting with the president guy and we’re saying, ‘Come on, man, give us a break, we did a lot of work on this,’” Horovitz would later say, recalling a discussion with David Berman’s successor, Hale Milgrim. “He said, ‘Well, you know guys, there’s so much work on at the moment, we’ve got a new Donny Osmond record coming out. Next time …’ We said, ‘What does next time mean?’ He just said, ‘Well, you know … next time.’”
“You don’t feel very good coming out of that meeting,” says Diamond, simply. “We were just frustrated.”
Years later, Yauch would tell MTV, “I remember being very surprised that the album didn’t do any better than it did when it first came out because I think it was just so much of a better record than Licensed to Ill, but … you never know.” Matt Dike, who felt responsible for the album’s failure and fretted that “I buried these guys!,” recalls a more visceral reaction: “They were completely disillusioned.”
In 1994, a far more successful band would look back on its ultimate prank more fondly. “We just pushed [Capitol] to the absolute limit you could possibly push a record label. And all of this with them having the expectation that they were going to sell a lot of records,” Horovitz would cackle, before an even more enthusiastic Mike D added, “And then, and then—the best fuckin’ part, after we’d spent all this money playing Ping-Pong, the record did not even sell anything!”
Such pleasant thoughts had to sustain the Beastie Boys during the two years of hibernation that followed Paul’s Boutique. At that moment, it seemed their greatest joke might be their last.
* * *
Tim Carr returned to New York in the spring of 1990, his money depleted and the past dream summer gone wrong still heavy on his mind. One day, he happened to visit the Russian bathhouse where he had first encountered Russell Simmons, during headier times. And by chance, when Carr put on his towel and entered the steam room, he found himself once again seated next to the Def Jam impresario.
Simmons surveyed him through the mist, evidently deciding that his former adversary was now deserving of pity.
“Man,” Simmons said finally, shaking his head, “even I coulda done better with that record.”
Chapter Two
Paul’s Boutique
For several reasons, the following section does not come close to being a definitive guide to the samples used to construct Paul’s Boutique. The first reason is the practical matter of space. The second, as mentioned in Chapter One, is that the album’s creators are reluctant to talk about some of the samples, particularly borrowings that have not yet been widely identified. And finally, the men who made Paul’s Boutique can simply no longer remember every sample that appears on the album—if, indeed, they ever could.
“There must be some dust-covered list of all those samples somewhere,” says Michael Diamond hopefully. Until it surfaces, however, there are several excellent Web sites that minutely detail a great deal of the album’s samples and references. Two of the best resources are www.beastiemania.com and www.moire.com/beastieboys/samples/index.php, which is dedicated solely to an examination of Paul’s Boutique. Annotated lyrics can also be found at http://beastieboysannotated.com/paul.htm.
In addition to the fifteen songs from Paul’s Boutique, this chapter covers six non-LP remixes and outtakes from the same era; most have interesting—or sometimes just ridiculous—stories of their own.
To All the Girls
It says something about the complexities of Paul’s Boutique— or at least, something about its creators’ penchant for pranks—that even some of the slightest tracks have back stories worth recounting. One example is the opening tune, an apparently straightforward creation. Over the moody introduction to jazz drummer Idris Muhammed’s 1974 song “Loran’s Dance,” Adam Yauch murmurs a dedication to women all over the world, his simple lyrics buoyed by clouds of electric piano from keyboardist Bob James.
The idea for the new track originated with Yauch, acknowledged as the Beasties’ ladies’ man. In a 1998 Spin retrospective, no less a sex symbol than Madonna shared a hazy memory of making out with MCA backstage during the Virgin Tour, while road manager Sean Carasov calculated that Yauch, thanks to his “swarthy George Michael thing,” attracted the most “fly girlies” of the three Beasties. By the time of Paul’s Boutique, Yauch’s stubble had become a full beard, but, as Mike D pointed out, “if you read Ms. magazine … a lot of women these days are attracted to facial hair.”
However, Yauch hadn’t found the proper backing for this tribute until Matt Dike cued up “Loran’s Dance” one afternoon. “Yauch just said, ‘That’s the one!,’” recalls Mike Simpson. His bandmates agreed, says Dike: “They were like, ‘Oh my God—we gotta do a Barry White over this!’”
“To All the Girls,” a simple needle drop, was assembled quickly. However, the painstakingly long fade-in—the song doesn’t reach maximum volume until about 1:10—was no accident. “I think Yauch wanted people to keep turning up the volume, so they would think something was wrong with their stereo,” says Simpson. “And then it would finally kick in, and just blow up their speakers.”
The Beasties and their conspirators would test this theory while mastering Paul’s Boutique. “There were these massive speakers, and every
one at Masterdisk was so proud of this room,” remembers Simpson. “And sure enough, the song worked like a charm: The record starts, the engineer could barely hear it, he turns it up, you could still barely hear it—he turns it up more … BOOM! The bass note kicks in, and tiles fall from the ceiling. It was incredible.”
As a further in-joke, the title alludes to Willie Nelson’s treacly 1984 duet with Julio Iglesias, “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before,” which has inspired more than its fair share of parodies. But Yauch’s shout-outs to girls from Brooklyn and “nubiles” from the Upper East Side are more than a Lotharian goof. They immediately affirm what is suggested by the cover’s panorama: Paul’s Boutique has the Big Apple beating as its heart.
Shake Your Rump
Then the meditative calm is shattered by a tom-tom fill poached from yet another fusion drummer, Alphonse Mouzon, and the party begins in earnest. Originally titled “Full Clout,” this song was renamed after a line from hiphop pioneer Afrika Bambaataa, who growled it in “Unity Part 2 (Because It’s Coming),” part of a 1984 collaboration with James Brown. But the bulk of “Shake Your Rump” is borrowed from several disco-era recordings, making it—musically, at least—the best example of the retro aesthetic that initially confused so many listeners.
With at least a dozen samples, it is also one of the most complex songs on Paul’s Boutique. And, like the album’s best tracks, the painstakingly matched rhythms and riffs create the illusion that this is all one solid slice of vintage soul.
The arresting rhythm guitar lick comes courtesy of Ronnie Laws’s 1975 cover of Stevie Wonder’s “Tell Me Something Good.” A second riff, which debuts at 2:10, is nicked from the soundtrack to Car Wash, as is the tune’s most ear-catching ingredient: the unbelievably fat Moog bassline that begins Rose Royce’s “6 O’Clock Rock.” On that brief instrumental, the sound is a throwaway; chopped up and reassembled, it made “Shake Your Rump” sound both reassuringly old and shockingly new in the bland, digital summer of ’89, and is one of the album’s best recycling jobs.
The song’s exuberant atmosphere carried over into the studio, a frequent hangout for the Beasties’ LA entourage. “Very often in the studio it would just end up being a party. So for that one, I remember at one point there were probably twenty people in the vocal booth doing these gang vocals,” Mike Simpson recalls. However, it was the Record Plant’s security guard who was drafted at the last minute to ask Mike D to identify himself. And the most famous element—the mid-song bong hit—was suggested and supplied by Matt Dike. “The funny thing is,” he says, “I heard bong hit sounds on fifty other CDs after that.”
It would become one of the album’s signature tracks, but “Shake Your Rump” was merely released as the flipside of the “Hey Ladies” single, although a video for the song was shot by the trio on a Los Angeles rooftop. The tune has remained a consistent part of the band’s live repertoire since 1992, subject to tweaking by the group’s new DJ, Mix Master Mike. Ten years after Paul’s Boutique, bootlegs document him keeping the Beasties on their toes during “Shake Your Rump” by occasionally cutting the Commodores’ “Brick House” in amongst the original samples.
Johnny Ryall
While sampling had revolutionized hip-hop in the mid-eighties, little had revolutionized sampling until 3 Feet High and Rising and Paul’s Boutique appeared in 1989. Prior to that, “all samples were from a small, select set of breakbeats,” notes Tim Carr, “that you fucked with at your own risk.” On “Johnny Ryall,” the Beasties and Dust Brothers reached beyond the limits of “Funky Drummer” and “Apache,” with Matt Dike as the instigator.
Save for a beat cribbed from Donny Hathaway’s “The Magnificent Sanctuary Band,” the primary samples come from a then-unlikely source: “Sharon,” a 1972 song by Greenwich Village folkie and Dylan sideman David Bromberg. Dike had always loved the “crazy folk stripper riff” in “Sharon,” and built a new tune around it. The track became the special project of Mike D—“it was one of the few that [he] had a lot to do with, musically,” Mike Simpson says—who had the perfect subject for its rockabilly-gone-hip-hop feel.
Johnny Ryall was a vagrant who frequently turned up on the stoop of Diamond’s New York apartment building after the Licensed to Ill tour. No one recalls his real name, but he was rechristened by Diamond’s roommate at the time, Sean Carasov, who also invented a history for the amiable beggar. “I had this brain fart that he used to be a rockabilly star. He had that look,” says Carasov. “Actually, he kinda looked like the fifty-miles-of-bad-road version of Chet Baker.” Choosing to write about this unfortunate, however, would end up placing the band in some unlikely company.
While the Beasties were still being victimized by the backlash to Licensed to Ill—the outraged response to law-breaking fantasies like “Looking Down the Barrel of a Gun” being a case in point—other critics were happy to award the group bonus points for displaying any shred of humanity. Thus it was that “Johnny Ryall” became one of the linchpins of the argument, advanced in some quarters, that the Beasties had developed a conscience—at least since considering Don’t Be a Faggot as the title of their first LP. Even America’s “Dean of Rock Critics,” Robert Christgau, praised the new album’s “moral tone.”
The band members contested such assumptions. “Everyone’s been trying to say [the album is] more mature, so it very well may be, since that seems to be everyone’s opinion,” Yauch said. “But we weren’t really aware of it until everyone said it …. As far as the social community goes, it’s just stuff that we felt like writing about.” Diamond still dismisses the idea: “It wasn’t any agenda on our part. That’s giving us way too much credit.”
Yet post—Live Aid, musical activism had become an easy ticket to credibility. The culmination of this trend came only a few months after Paul’s Boutique, via Phil Collins’s … But Seriously. As its title suggested, the disc was intended to show critics who had dismissed the Genesis frontman’s hugely successful soft-rock that he was a singer of substance. And the showpiece of the collection was the ironically-titled “Another Day in Paradise,” which tackled the issue ranked number three (behind AIDS and African hunger) on the list of eighties celebrity causes: homelessness. Neatly summing up a decade of pop star guilt, with a reminder to “think twice” set to a typically catchy Collins melody, the song became a number one hit and Grammy winner.
By the time “Another Day in Paradise” began ascending the charts in the autumn of 1989, Paul’s Boutique had already vanished. However, writers conditioned to search for nuggets of social conscience had done their best with the album. The stray references to the folly of racism in “Egg Man” and “Looking Down the Barrel of a Gun” were duly plumbed, despite the fact that both mentions have nothing at all to do with the rest of the respective songs. In fact, the former track seemed to justify the Beasties’ egging excursions, on the grounds that the band was actually targeting racists; how this determination could have been made from the roof of the Mondrian was never explained.
“Johnny Ryall,” however, appeared to be a clearer-cut case. Except that the Beasties address his situation with something less than the usual gravity from the outset, as Mike D first refers to him, simply enough, as a bum. Wrestling with the lure of political correctness and the comfort of their old, piss-taking nature, the Beasties insist a few verses later that Mr. Ryall is not a bum, even though he lives in the street.
This confusion manifests itself throughout the song, as Johnny receives empathy in one line and subtle mockery the next, and was also evident in interviews. At times, the Beasties used their subject (who allegedly wrote “Blue Suede Shoes,” but got shafted on the credits), as a symbol of their ongoing legal battles with Def Jam. “He definitely has a lot of stories about not getting paid,” Mike D told Request. “So Johnny has become our main adviser.” And even when Diamond waxed philosophical about Johnny—“He’s just one symbol of a much larger problem … that’s only getting worse in this country”—Ad-Rock couldn’t resis
t piping up, deadpan, “He’s only a pawn in their game.”
Yet the references to bread-bag footwear and Johnny Ryall’s fondness for drink make him a far more tangible character than the noble savage who inhabits “Another Day in Paradise.” In fact, this may be the best—and is at least the most honest—song about homelessness to be waxed during the self-righteous eighties.
Egg Man
The Beastie Boys’ fascination with eggs is long and well documented. “Egg Raid on Mojo,” a track off the 1982 hardcore EP Polly Wog Stew, concerned a Manhattan doorman named Mojo, who refused to let the Beasties into his club for free, and paid the price later. Tales of the group’s egging exploits at the Mondrian Hotel, meanwhile, have become an important part of the Paul’s Boutique legend.
Less well known is the incident that apparently inspired the opening lines of “Egg Man.” “Some tourists had pulled up in front of the Comedy Store—a large, bald man, his wife and two kids. Right as he gets out of the car, he gets hit on the side of the head with an egg, and it explodes all over his family,” says Mike Simpson, giggling in spite of evident embarrassment. “And they immediately get back in the car and drive away. It was pretty sad, really.”30
The era’s egging actually began, according to Diamond, in New York, from the window of Adam Horovitz’s 12th Street apartment, where the group and the Dust Brothers would occasionally convene. After the Beasties left the Mondrian, the poultry continued to fly. In fact, egging “began to dominate our free time,” Simpson says. “Yauch had purchased this super macked-out, crazy ass car from the seventies—a Lincoln Continental, or a Cadillac. So we would drive around town in that thing—it had a sunroof—and bring a couple dozen eggs.” Donovan Leitch, a frequent guest on these missions, recalls clubgoers and wannabe rockers departing the Guitar Institute as favored targets.