Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique (16 page)

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Most accounts claim the system shorted out before the band took the stage, but Dike says he has a cassette of the Beasties’ performance. “There was a lot of cursing at the audience and throwing beer,” Dike recalls. “A Neanderthal mentality, but funny.”

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Tracks, Horovitz added, that would later become part of Young MC and Tone-Loc’s debut albums.

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Both Dike and Simpson claim to have thought up the name. Simpson says he and John King were inspired by the old underground comic series
The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers
and wanted an “anachronistic drug reference,” after rejecting the name “Crack Brothers” as a bad joke, in light of then-current events. Dike, meanwhile, recalls Simpson and King proposing “Three the Hard Way” as a
nom de pop
for the trio’s production work, and taking his suggestion of “Dust Brothers” instead. Dike, Simpson adds, “was never officially a Dust Brother.” Although the Dust Brothers are listed as a threesome on
Paul’s Boutique
, that, guesses Simpson, “was just for the sake of brevity.”

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The original version, John King says, was the Dust Brothers’ “instrumental masterpiece.” Before meeting the Beasties, King and Simpson had taken a copy to Funky Reggae, a once-a-week dance club where Dike sometimes DJed. “Matt put it on unannounced and we watched the place explode,” King remembers. “People went nuts and applauded after the song. That was really cool, and weird.”

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These sessions almost certainly began at Dike’s apartment, however, before moving to the Record Plant.

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While the Beasties were disappointed with the mixes, Diamond says they were still used on the band’s two-song demo, which was shopped to new labels.

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And the star of Tone-Loc’s “Wild Thing” and “Funky Cold Medina” videos.

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American Expressionist painter Paul Henry Brach.

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Diamond professes not to remember what made the group sign with Capitol. “I have to think, the paper was better,” he says. “John, Paul, George and Ringo gave them more bank than New Edition gave MCA, I guess.”

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That same night, Carr would run into Simmons again at Frankie Jackson’s Soul Kitchen. Simmons ignored Carr, but Carr would rationalize this to a friend: “He just doesn’t recognize me with my clothes on.”

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“The record was started when we did it,” Diamond counters, groaning at the memory, “but that doesn’t make it any less dubious, or wrong.”

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For the record, Diamond and Caldato remember this story differently. “I gave Arsenio $100 from the Beasties,” Caldato says, “and told his bodyguard they wanted to talk to him.” File Carr’s anecdote under “If it isn’t true, it oughtta be.”

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However, the Beasties would be the last tenants to rent the Grasshoffs’ home. The band had wanted to extend the lease, Marilyn Grasshoff recalls, “but my husband said, ‘No, I want to come back home.’” The trio would still recall the Grasshoffs fondly in the 1998 song “The Grasshopper Unit (Keep Movin’),” comparing the couple to Thurston and “Lovey” Howell from “Gilligan’s Island.”

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Perhaps the worst bit of damage the band inflicted on the G-Spot, however, wound up having a unexpectedly beneficial effect. A wooden gate, smashed into by Mike D’s car, would be repaired by Caldato’s friend Mark Ramos-Nishita—later a valuable musical collaborator as the keyboardist Money Mark.

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However, soon afterward, Horovitz began dating Ione Skye, with whom he’d been infatuated for months. Skye, who was still living with Anthony Kiedis, had tried to avoid Horovitz, “but it was clear we were gonna end up together.” The pair was married for most of the nineties; despite a very public split, Skye still calls Horovitz “the love of my life.”

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Over the years, the Dust Brothers have hazarded several different guesses as to the correct number of samples used; Mike Simpson now says he simply has no idea. His best estimate is “between 100 and 300.”

¹⁹
Including a stop at one star-studded Christmas gala, hosted by Dolly Parton. “Everyone was there—Madonna, Sylvester Stallone and Bob Dylan,” recalls Caldato. “We were chillin’, and Bob was hanging out with us, having a drink and a smoke. It was great—they even had snow in Beverly Hills!”

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The Ping-Pong game heard at the beginning of “3-Minute Rule” was “probably just an accident, where a vocal mic happened to be on and the Ping-Pong game synched up with the track,” says Mike Simpson. “And one of us went, ‘Roll the tape! Roll the tape!’”

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The inescapable question remains: was Paul’s Boutique a real place? Many of the Beasties’ New York friends say yes, remembering they heard the Paul’s Boutique ad on WLIB. Asked to comment, Gil Bailey first says no, but later corrects himself. The last word on the subject belongs to Diamond: “I would think it was real. Unless someone bought an ad for something that didn’t exist. That’s possible—not probable.—but possible.”

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The original can be viewed at Haze’s official Web site,
www.inter haze.com
.

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Max Perlich recalls one scrapped proposal actually considered for the album: a Matt Dike instrumental that sampled Wilson Pickett’s “Engine No. 9.” “It was one of the best ideas I’d ever heard,” Perlich says.

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Probably the radio ad which became “Ask for Janice.”

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However, it’s possible the album might have impressed another artist who would make sampling a staple of his repertoire: Sean “Puffy/P. Diddy” Combs. “I remember Puffy was always lurking around in those days,” says Carasov, who often played rough mixes of
Paul’s Boutique
for his coworkers. “That was when he was an intern at Uptown, and he used to always hit on this chick in the video department at Jive.”

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Meanwhile, another musician who didn’t go public immediately with his thoughts about the album, according to Ione Skye, was her ex-boyfriend, Anthony Kiedis. “Anthony was really jealous of
Paul’s Boutique”
she alleges.

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“Love, American Style” was an ABC TV series from 1969-74. The show is best known for spawning “Happy Days,” premiered via a pilot episode in 1972.

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The Beasties got revenge, says Max Perlich, by preparing a special version of “Shadrach,” which included the soundbite, “Do the Don Cornelius.” “He freaked on the spot, because he thought it was live,” remembers Perlich. “And he stopped the taping. But they said, ‘No, this is on the record.’ So they got away with it.”

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In October 2005, a private collector purchased four
Paul’s Boutique
‘show vinyls’—filled with instrumentals that would have been used in concert by the Beasties’ DJ Hurricane—on eBay. One of the discs was inscribed “Oct. 13,1989”; this was presumably one of the tour dates.

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Although named as a co-conspirator by Diamond, John King denies involvement in these exploits. “I was embarrassed by the egging thing,” he says. “I didn’t like it or throw any.”

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However, Adam Yauch occasionally donned a pair, during interviews about the album.

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The barnyard noises on the track have been commonly assumed to be a cow-(or sheep)-in-a-can—a toy that approximates the sound of a farm animal when turned upside down. Not so, according to Mike Simpson. “I don’t wanna say where it’s from, but it’s basically a famous person’s voice, that I tweaked in such a way that you would never know what the original source is. But it does sound exactly like a cow-in-a-can.”

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The first-ever lyrics for the song had been provided by a rapper named Stevie J, who wrote a rhyme tided “I’m in Demand.”

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Which makes its adoption as a neoclassical composition even more novel. “Shadrach” turned up on the bill at the New England Conservatory in 1995 during a program of Jewish music, “convincingly performed” by conservatory students and New York DJ David Shea, according to a
New York Times
review.

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He also found the ancient cover artwork for the song’s 12-inch version, titled
An Exciting Evening at Home with Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego
.

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As Andy Miller points out in his brilliant 33 1/3 examination of
TKATVGPS
. If you don’t already own it, you should.