Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique (10 page)

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.

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 resist 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.

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.

From such sophomoric beginnings came one of the album’s most sophisticated creations. The bass-and-percussion intro of Curtis Mayfield’s “Superfly” is expertly matched to the beat of another, less familiar blaxploitation recording: “Sport,” from ex-Last Poet Lightnin’ Rod. But it’s a small touch that makes a big impact. A snippet of the bass from Tower of Power’s “Drop It in the Slot” is inserted at the end of certain verses; speeded up, it matches keys with the bassline from “Superfly,” creating a complete bass
part that holds the song together. And the Beasties’ verses are equally deft; the trio hot-potatoes rhymes with precision, making full use of the implied harmonies created by combining Yauch’s growl and the whine of Horovitz and Diamond.

The coup de grace, though, was the late addition of two of the most pulse-quickening pieces of movie music in history: the stabbing, staccato strings from the
Psycho
shower scene—Matt Dike had first used the sample in an earlier tune for another client, but the track had never been released—and the two-note string motif played in
Jaws
just before the shark attacks. Combined to form a sort of bridge, the samples lend the song a sense of humor that the band’s egging might sometimes have lacked.

“Egg Man” shares one verse with “Egg Raid on Mojo”—with the band’s friend, artist Eric Haze, replacing Mojo as the victim. The incident which inspired the lyric occurred in the wee hours one morning in 1988 on Melrose Avenue, where Haze was talking to Matt Dike on a pay phone. “An El Camino full of cholos drove by going the opposite direction,” Haze recalls. “Then they made a violent U-turn and bore down on me. I was scared shitless, because I thought I was gonna get shot. But it turned out to be an egg-by”—evidently, by a rival gang of eggers.

Meanwhile, the egg gun mentioned in the song was apparently more than just a rhetorical device. Mike Simpson recalls the band “actually employed some toy designers—maybe they were from Hasbro?—to come up with a Beastie Boys egg gun. And I believe there were a couple of prototypes, which Yauch probably still has.”

Diamond, however, says the prototypes came tantalizingly
close to being developed, yet were never completed. “But imagine if we had,” he muses. “The egg business would’ve blown up. Chicken farmers would be like oilmen today.”

After the densely packed, nonstop collage of the previous three tracks, “High Plains Drifter” opens up aurally like the vista of its title. Matt Dike’s memory of the song as one of the most rapidly assembled on
Paul’s Boutique
is easy to credit, given the simplicity of the arrangement. There are just three primary elements, foremost being a chunk of the Eagles’ “Those Shoes,” which features in certain sections, snatches of Joe Walsh and Don Felder’s talk-boxed guitars. “Matt and I just thought it was hilarious, sampling the Eagles,” Diamond remembers. “You wouldn’t have thought an Eagles record would have this incredible beat.”

Disembodied bedroom moans from the Fatback Band’s disco-era “Put Your Love (In My Tender Care),” meanwhile, add an eerie quality when slowed down and removed from their original, gettin’ busy context, and the rhythm is buttressed by beats from Adam Horovitz’s Roland 808 drum machine—a model that, in Mike Simpson’s recollection, “sounded spectacular. Every 808 sounds different, but this one just sounded great.”

The audio breathing room coincides with the album’s most straightforward narrative. “High Plains Drifter,” named for Clint Eastwood’s surreal 1973 western, is one of less than half a dozen tracks that explicitly cast the Beasties as outlaws. Yet those few songs made an indelible impression on some reviewers, who criticized the band for glorifying
violence. The record was not even in the shops when Mike D complained to
Melody Maker
about such misreadings. “I don’t understand why people think those songs are about us. We just get together and write stories.” To
Billboard’s
Chris Morris, he expressed disappointment about the album receiving a Parental Advisory sticker, and asked why the group’s “character narratives” should be treated differently than William Burroughs’s famous cut-up novel
Naked Lunch
.

There is some validity to the complaint. “High Plains Drifter” has much more to do with the juvenile hooliganism the Beasties had allegedly perpetrated in the offices of Def Jam and on the roof of the Mondrian Hotel than with any serious criminal activity. The antihero is a shoplifter on the run, knocking over mailboxes and paying extra for a porn movie at Motel 6; his most heinous crime is sticking up a 7-Eleven. But such low-stakes offenses, and the fact that the perp ends up in the drunk tank with the beloved Otis, from “The Andy Griffith Show,” are all part of the joke some missed. Considering that N.WA.’s inflammatory “F*** tha Police” had already been out for a year, it’s even more difficult to imagine anyone discerning a threat in the Beasties’ rather garden-variety thuggery.

However, the lyrical misbehavior does contribute to a significant album track. In Mike Simpson’s view, it was the clear descendant of the debut’s “Paul Revere,” and filled an important niche: “that sort of feel-good story rhyme.”

Perhaps the best gauge of the difference between
Licensed to Ill
and
Paul’s Boutique
is provided by the first half of this
track. In the infamous video that accompanied “Fight for Your Right (To Party),” the Beasties pushed around bespectacled nerds. On “The Sounds of Science,” they have become—for a few lines, at least—those nerds instead. “In high school, we all had to wear science-class glasses and work with the Bunsen burners, so it’s kinda like second nature to us,” Mike D would explain. “Somebody like N.W.A. might be talkin’ about ‘science,’ but they never bust out in science-class glasses.”
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In typical Beastie fashion, something serious was lurking beneath that nonsense. Discounting the novelty rap records that proliferated in the eighties, hip-hop had never been this deliberately square. Yet with its British music-hall bounce and lyrics that name-checked Galileo, Sir Isaac Newton and Benjamin Franklin, the initial half of “The Sounds of Science” was a groundbreaking moment, one that lived up to the boast that the Beasties were expanding the genre’s boundaries. It offered proof that there was room for geeks—albeit lyrically acute ones—in hip-hop’s big tent, and opened the gates for a flood of defiantly nerdy rappers who would pour into the underground a decade later. The song also momentarily drops the gangsta facade the Beasties had toyed with since their inception, and reveals them in all their middle-class whiteness—a rather brave thing to do for a group hoping to maintain its hard-won street cred and its place in a predominantly black style.