by LeRoy, Dan
“It was a good lesson for me as a producer,” Simpson adds with a rueful laugh. “You’re not the artist.”
e.) Hello Brooklyn
Originally begun in 1987 at Adam Yauch’s Brooklyn apartment (aka The Opium Den), the oldest track on Paul’s Boutique is driven by the sonorous kick drum of Adam Horovitz’s Roland 808. Despite its paraphrase of “New York, New York” and the arresting image of a long-haired hermit constructing explosives in his attic (whether they are to be used by or against the “public officials” mentioned isn’t clear)—the song is essentially all setup for an inspired punchline: Johnny Cash’s famous quote about shooting a man in Reno, lifted direct from “Folsom Prison Blues” and transported to Brooklyn.
The sample was the Beasties’ idea, recalls Mike Simpson. And the snippet almost completely refutes the stickup songs that precede it and underscores the album’s true aesthetic. The Man in Black is referenced less as an Original Gangsta than as a dimly-recalled totem from another generation, in a snatch of music that might have been heard by the adolescent Beasties on a commercial for some K-Tel collection of Cash’s greatest hits. It’s pure nostalgia, not threat, and—as author Angus Batey notes—predates the iconic nineties resurrection of Cash, overseen by none other than Rick Rubin.
f.) Dropping Names
Three fragments in one: An opening, public-domain tongue-twister—“He thrusts his fist against the post and still insists he see a ghost”—is followed by a second-line rhythm copped from the Meters’ “Hey Pocky A-Way” and then a short segment from the Crusaders’ “The Well’s Gone Dry,” connected by the (gradually detuned) bass intro from the latter song. An observation from Bob Marley about the problems of communicating with musicians, captured from the Legend documentary, closes the track.
The Beasties contribute one of their better couplets, about the dullness of trying to live life in a world where everything is viewed in black-and-white. But the primary lyrical focus of “Dropping Names” has long been the intro, where careful listening reveals Ad-Rock apparently advocating the use of PCP.
g.) Lay It on Me
Large portions of Kool & the Gang’s “Let the Music Take Your Mind” are tapped for this piece of the medley. Lyrically, comparing the band’s “flavor” to Fruit Stripe Gum —a multicolored seventies staple—is one of the Beasties’ most inspired pop culture references, although Mike D’s mention of Cezanne is a noteworthy nod to his roots as the son of an art dealer.
h.) Mike on the Mic
Mike D’s answer to “Get on the Mic” is offered over the same Lovebug Starski beat, and veers from serious concerns about his bad reputation to utter nonsense about being rechristened “Spinach D” for eating Popeye’s favorite vegetable. Nonsense wins out with the closing quote, commissioned by the band from goofy weatherman Lloyd Lindsey Young. Young was a fixture for a dozen years on New York’s WWOR-TV, which is where the Beasties discovered him using nontraditional objects—like rubber chickens—as pointers during forecasts.
i) A.W.O.L.
A live in the studio shout-out to various Beastie friends and acquaintances, rounded up by Donovan Leitch. “I can’t remember who all was there,” says Matt Dike. “At that point, I was seriously losing interest.” The Beasties had noticed. “Definitely, Matt would get annoyed with us,” Diamond says. “I know sometimes he would be going, ‘You gotta be kidding me … another night wasted.’”
“A.W.O.L.” quickly gives way to the electric piano riff of “Loran’s Dance,” and then we’re back where we started, waking up in Kansas wondering if it was all a technicolor dream. It wasn’t—and before long, Paul’s Boutique would no longer be the Beasties’ nightmare.
Paul’s Boutique remixes and outtakes 33% God
Not long after Paul’s Boutique was completed, the Dust Brothers and Beastie Boys reconvened at the Record Plant’s Big Apple headquarters to come up with some remixes and B-side filler. Once again, Capitol signed off on an intriguing, but commercially dubious, proposition. “The label probably wanted us to use whoever was hot at the time, like maybe Prince Paul, for the remixes. But we were so into our own world, we were like, ‘No, we’ll do it ourselves,’” says Diamond, adding with some understatement, “I don’t think it achieved what the label was hoping.”
What the sessions did accomplish, however, was to give a home to all the samples that had yet to see action on the album. Among the Beasties, Adam Horovitz apparently had the longest list of unused sample fodder, which included everything from the dancehall singles he loved to a line from the recurring Monty Python sketch, “Spanish Inquisition.” In all, three songs—“Hey Ladies,” “Shake Your Rump,” “Shadrach”—were given mostly instrumental rethinks and renamed, while a fourth, “Stop That Train,” received a dub-inspired treatment and a new title as well.
Otherwise, details are hazy; it’s possible that “33% God,” a version of “Shake Your Rump” that John King says “was closer to the original Dust Brothers track,” might have actually been recorded in Los Angeles, at Westlake Audio. The unusual title came from an experience the Dust Brothers had at that studio, when superproducer Quincy Jones walked in one day. “We asked him how he made all those great records,” Mike Simpson recalls, “and he told us it was thirty-three percent talent, thirty-three percent luck … and thirty-three percent God.”
Dis Yourself in ’89 (Just Do It)
The instrumental remix of “Hey Ladies” is worth hearing just for its audio glimpses of how the song’s many disparate parts fit together. Yet it also adds to the inspired mashups of the original, with a drum loop that is an ingenious combination of the funky Jamaican shuffle from Stevie Wonder’s “Boogie on Reggae Woman” and the percussive introduction of “Keep Your Eye on the Sparrow,” Sammy Davis Jr.’s discofied theme from the cop show “Baretta.”
Along with “Shake Your Rump” and its instrumental “33% God,” this track was included on the “Hey Ladies” 12-inch. Titled Love, American Style, the four-song EP also boasted a striking cover photo, depicting the red, white and blue-painted kitchen of Adam Horovitz’s Los Angeles apartment.
Caught in the Middle of a 3-Way Mix
This reworking of “Stop That Train” attempts to play up the dub reggae influence suggested by its primary sample, taken from The Harder They Come soundtrack. Unfortunately, the mix reflects its title a bit too accurately, with the echoed voices of Ad-Rock, MCA and Mike D ricocheting arrhythmically off the horn-spiked riddim. The results were appended to the “Shadrach” 12-inch; the Beasties would tackle dub more successfully almost a decade later, teaming with the visionary producer Lee “Scratch” Perry for the tribute “Dr Lee, PhD” on Hello Nasty.
And What You Give Is What You Get
The instrumental version of “Shadrach” boasts a laundry list of new samples, including the riff from Black Flag’s hardcore anthem “Rise Above,” soundbites from various dancehall records and an interjection from comedian George Carlin. Yet although it only appears at the tail end of this mix, the snippet of the Jam’s “Start!” that gives the track its title is the most intriguing lift.
That Adam Horovitz chose the sample is probable; a few months later, he remarked to the NME’s James Brown, “Paul Weller’s def, man. What happened to him?” The answer was that fewer and fewer people considered the onetime mod icon def by the summer of 1989. His soulful post-Jam band, the Style Council, was in its death throes, after Polydor had rejected Weller’s house-inspired album Promised Land. The very week it ran part two of the aforementioned Beastie Boys interview, the NME also reviewed the infamous Albert Hall performance from the Council’s farewell tour, which found the group baffling even its fans with dayglo cycling shorts and garage beats. Critic Stephen Dalton gave the show a proper slating, criticizing Weller for playing almost no past hits and alleging, “no one alive could be more white and uptight.”
Yet while 1989 would mark a commercial low point for Weller and the Beastie Boys, both would experience a rebirth in 1992 with recordings tha
t reflected immersion in vintage funk: Weller on his first solo album, the Beasties via Check Your Head. Years later, the Beasties would fully acknowledge whatever debt they owed the Modfather by turning “Start!”—with guest vocals by Cibo Matto’s Miho Hatori—into an organ-fueled, soul-jazz shuffle not a million miles away from the Style Council. This version became part of the Jam tribute album Fire and Skill.
Weller, whose bands always struggled to gain commercial acceptance in the US, found the Beasties’ attention “really nice. I didn’t even know they knew who the Jam was,” he says. “It kind of shows how ignorant I was about North America, and what we meant to people over there.”
Some Dumb Cop Gave Me 2 Tickets Already
One of the most endearingly wack moments in the Beasties’ discography, this come-on from Mike D is also proof of his importance to the group. His old roommate, Sean Carasov, can recall a time when Diamond’s status in the band was uncertain. But against the more conventional cool of Adam Horovitz and Adam Yauch, Mike D’s willingness to play the clown has proved integral to the Beastie Boys’ success. His stream-of-consciousness interviews helped take the edge off the band’s early image, and it could even be argued that within the group, his gentler sense of humor has become ascendant.
Had “Some Dumb Cop” received a wider hearing, it might well have been slammed as the sort of hip-hop misogyny for which the Beasties remained well known. Reviewing Paul’s Boutique and LL Cool J’s contemporaneous release, Walking with a Panther, critic J. D. Considine focused on the “arrant sexism” of both albums, worrying they might “undo a lot of the good rap has managed for contemporary African-American culture.”
And lines like “Just leechin’ off my bitch, that’s what it’s about” could also have supported such an argument, were they not delivered in a voice ludicrously slowed down by tape manipulation, atop the Young-Holt Unlimited chestnut “Soulful Strut.” The incongruity between lyrics and breezy, brassy AM soul backing just keeps widening, as Mike D apologizes for a tryst with his girlfriend’s mother: “You know, I’m real sorry you had to walk in like that and see / Hey, shit happens, you know.” It’s the best Biz Markie record the Biz never made himself.
Your Sister’s Def
Although included on the 12-inch version of “Shadrach” and treated as a Paul’s Boutique outtake, “Your Sister’s Def” has no real connection to the album. Instead, it’s an a capella demo of a song by Dr. Dre, the Beastie Boys’ former DJ and the co-host of “Yo! MTV Raps.”
He submitted this track to the Beasties “as a potential song for them to use,” remembers Mike Simpson, “based on Licensed to Ill” Cowritten by Dre and Anthony Davis, “Your Sister’s Def” makes it clear that they, like most observers, imagined the Beasties’ sophomore album would be much like the first.
Set to an aggressive, Rick Rubinesque rhythm, the lyrics—which entreat a nerdy fan to help the Beasties gang bang his sister—represent the payoff of almost everything the “Fight for Your Right” video implied. Given that, and some nauseating sexual references, it’s somewhat surprising the track saw release. According to Mike Simpson, “We just thought it was really funny.” The Beasties found it amusing enough, at least, to rhyme the opening verse during one of their 1989 MTV appearances.
Chapter Three
What Comes Around: The Future of Nostalgia
If one were searching for an album to compare to Paul’s Boutique, the 1968 masterpiece The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society would assuredly not be the first choice. Or the second. Or, for that matter, the 583rd.
Yet these are two of the most nostalgic records ever released. And if Ray Davies’s odes to a green and pleasant England are not always as sentimental as they first appear,36 neither are the Beasties’ remembrances of seventies and eighties pop culture quite as cynical as is commonly believed.
In her book The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym notes that nostalgia “inevitably reappears as a defense mechanism in a time of accelerated rhythms of life and historical upheavals.” The AIDS and crack epidemics, Tiananmen Square, the Valdez disaster, and—most significantly—the fall of the Berlin Wall made 1989 one of those years.
It also ushered in the collective midlife crisis of the baby boomers. Woodstock would celebrate its twentieth anniversary that summer; the resultant concert, which attracted few big names and less than a tenth of the original audience, underscored for some the erosion of sixties idealism. That fall, 40-year-old Billy Joel would have a number one hit with “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” a half-rapped litany of boomer history.
If that song was the backward-looking anthem of the baby boomers in 1989, defensive and anxious, then Paul’s Boutique was the yet-to-be-named Generation X’s more optimistic answer. The ironic thing was that the irony so many thought they heard often didn’t exist. Far from being a hipster joke, the album’s vintage source material was genuinely loved by its creators. “Things like Car Wash … I never stopped listening to that stuff,” says Mike Simpson. “All the records we sampled were records from my record collection. We weren’t crate digging, going out and trying to find this stuff.”
The gag-filled circumstances of its creation aside, the Beastie Boys also faced personal upheavals during the making of Paul’s Boutique; the ongoing lawsuit with Def Jam, the public doubts about the band’s viability, the lingering backlash from Licensed to Ill. Was it any wonder the album so often returned—consciously or not—to less complicated memories? Saturday morning cartoons and sitcom reruns; the disco sounds of grade-school days; rare old hip-hop singles; and, of course, the city the trio loved but had publicly departed under a cloud. “Nostalgia is a longing for home,” Svedana Boym writes, “that no longer exists or has never existed.” In the 20th century, that longing, she adds, quoting historians Jean Starobinski and Michael Roth, had “shrunk to the longing for one’s childhood.”
That longing has also given Paul’s Boutique its most widespread influence, one which extends far beyond popular music. In 1989, as Adam Yauch later pointed out, pining for the seventies—an era of supposed bad taste—seemed embarrassing. “It could be that … people were kinda cringing when they saw this,” he admitted, while watching the video for “Hey Ladies.” However, the album and its aesthetic would spearhead a “Me Decade” revival that continues to this day.
In 1997, Village Voice nightlife columnist Michael Musto would note that “the seventies revival has been going on in clubs nonstop for the last ten years.” The British duo S-Express would even sample Rose Royce’s “Is It Love You’re After” on the 1988 hit “Theme From S-Express.” Yet no single event would jog America’s memory quite as vividly as the “Hey Ladies” video, which helped sink an album, but sparked a retro revolution.
“Because of the very banality and mindlessness of so much seventies culture,” contended author Josh Ozersky in 2000, “we are free to project a childish innocence onto it.” Perhaps the widely familiar cultural references of Paul’s Boutique are indeed banal, but the innocence of those names, images and sounds has helped keep the album peculiarly ageless, its collages reminiscent of past eras, but fixed in none.
* * *
“I never felt like I knew less, and I have never been more confused about what’s going on,” Mike D told Village Noize in 1990. He was talking about movies, but it’s easy to read more than that into the statement. The confusion created by Paul’s Boutique would be resolved—at the band’s record label first. It would turn out to be one of the most shortsighted house cleanings in music history.
Tim Carr finally returned from his Asian backpacking trek in the autumn of 1989 to learn that David Berman and Capitol’s entire A&R staff had been dismissed. Joe Smith, Carr says, had disparaged Tom Whalley and his staff as “A&R run riot. The music business is about hits, not Skinny Puppy or the Cocteau Twins!”
Unfortunately, at the time he was sacked, Whalley was in the process of signing Compton rappers N.W.A. He would take the unfinished deal with him to Interscope Records
—along with Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg and a familial line of multiplatinum hip-hop acts that included Tupac Shakur, Eminem and 50 Cent. Capitol’s efforts at becoming a major player in the urban music field have never recovered.
“It was as if,” Carr dryly observes, “NBC cancelled ‘Friends’ the first season.”
* * *
Never officially dismissed from Capitol—he simply didn’t return—Carr turned up six months later at Warner Brothers Records. When he interviewed for the job, he visited the Beastie Boys at what would become their G-Son studio at Atwater Village in Los Angeles.
“Yauch said to me, ‘We wanna do an instrumental record.’ I said, ‘Great, everyone’s so tired of those adenoidal, nasal voices anyway. It’d be so much better if you guys just did an instrumental record.’” says Carr. “And all of a sudden he gets it, and he’s like, ‘Yo, you motherfucker!’”
That proposed instrumental record would become Check Your Head, which would save the Beasties. The band had used the last of its Capitol advance to build a studio, outfitted with a half-pipe and basketball court, and would retreat to this virtual clubhouse to record hundreds of hours of jams during 1990 and 1991, trying to recreate the sampled grooves of Paul’s Boutique. “We all love to play and switch instruments, so it was cool,” says Mario Caldato, who would helm the informal sessions.