Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique (3 page)

When
Spin
reporter Greg Sandow visited a Los Angeles studio in 1989 to watch Dike at work, he discovered Dike was merely phoning in directions from his house to the studio engineers. Sandow also got a glimpse of the demons that would drive Dike further underground. “We had a visit from a woman who, basically, wanted to murder Dike; when she left to track him down at home, someone called to warn him,” Sandow wrote years later. “The last words I ever heard from him were, ‘I’m turning on the electric fence.’”

These days, rumors about Dike abound. There are stories of friends tossing bags of food over the security fence at his Echo Park home to insure he has enough to eat. Another tale involves Dike unknowingly being robbed while sequestered in his bedroom, then accidentally hitting the burglar with a bag of garbage he threw out the window. A few old friends, like producer Mario Caldato Jr., drop in from time to time, but the case of Jon Sidel, who hasn’t spoken to Dike in years, seems more typical. “I spent more time with that motherfucker than anyone, and he was a genius,” Sidel says. “I’d just like to get in touch with him.”

Tracking Dike down does require some amount of effort. Yet despite all the legends, his charm and charisma are immediately apparent, as he generates ideas nearly faster than he can spit them out. Imagining this bright, enthusiastic figure as the driving force behind
Paul’s Boutique
—a claim made by more than one insider—takes little imagination.

“Making that record … it was such a clowning around experience,” Dike recalls with a laugh. “It just didn’t seem real at all.”

Born in West Nyack, New York, Dike began DJing as a teenager in the late seventies at basement parties on the campus of New York University. There he would befriend a homeless graffiti artist named Jean-Michel Basquiat and experience firsthand the growth of hip-hop. It was far from his only musical love, however; a “total mod,” Dike spent a year in England after high school, reveling in the post-punk sounds of the Jam and Public Image Ltd. And when he returned stateside and moved to Los Angeles, “literally with $20 in my pocket,” he began a lifelong obsession with vinyl. “It was when CDs first started to come out,” Dike says, “and you could get any great seventies funk record for a quarter.”

He would spend four years as an assistant to Basquiat, who had set up shop in California and was becoming a star in the art world. “It was a very educational episode of lunacy,” says Dike, who was beginning to find his own creative voice via his rapidly expanding record collection.

Paul’s Boutique
has its roots in the underground Los Angeles club scene that Dike, Sidel and small group of friends built during the eighties, emulating the blend of hip-hop culture and punk rock attitude found at Big Apple nightspots like Danceteria and AM/PM. Sidel, a New Yorker attending UCLA, began his career at a bar on Melrose Avenue called the Rhythm Lounge. He convinced the owner to install him as the doorman—a concept then foreign to Los Angeles nightclubs, but “a good way to scam on chicks.”

The Rhythm Lounge was where the Red Hot Chili Peppers played their first gig. Ice-T served as the house MC, and a pre-fame Madonna was a frequent visitor. But Sidel was most taken with the club’s DJ, who was playing a headscratching
mixture of heavy metal, early hip-hop hits and thrift-shop obscurities—and keeping the dancefloor packed.

“Matt could make a bunch of old ladies go crazy. He was like a freak of nature. Chicks dug him,” says Sidel, who quickly befriended Dike. “People thought I was cool, but when I partied with him, I was like the bass player, not the lead guitarist.”

Recognizing Sidel’s gift for moneymaking ideas, Dike soon hired him as the doorman at another club, Power Tools. Probably the most famous of all the Los Angeles underground hot spots in the eighties, Power Tools was started by Dike and
Interview
photographer Brad Branson “as a small intimate gathering,” recalls Pam Turbov, an A&R representative at Columbia Records who would later become an executive at Delicious Vinyl and manage several artists. “It was a pretty eclectic crowd.”

The club began at Branson’s loft on Crenshaw Avenue, with Dike, Branson, Turbov and model Kathy Yeung as hosts. But when Branson left California for Europe soon afterward, Dike and Sidel decided to move the party to a bigger space downtown. Headquartered in the old Park Plaza Hotel, Power Tools began drawing two thousand patrons a night. And in the summer of 1986, it hosted an accidentally momentous show which brought together most of the players responsible for
Paul’s Boutique
.

Sidel had booked the Beastie Boys, then opening for Run-DMC on the Raising Hell tour, for an appearance at Power Tools.
²
But he was more excited that the latter group,
then on the verge of superstardom, had agreed to come along.

“It was so intense, and so crazy. The energy was like a rock show,” remembers Turbov of the pre-concert atmosphere. “There hadn’t been that before on a hip-hop level.” An impressed Run-DMC offered to perform their current single, “My Adidas,” which Sidel wistfully says “would have been the ultimate for us.”

It never happened. The Beastie Boys’ brief set, based around the songs “Hold It Now, Hit It” and “It’s the New Style,” ended the evening prematurely with a blown PA.
³
Sidel had already pleaded with Dike, who he says was “cheap as shit,” about upgrading the club’s equipment, powered only by a home stereo amplifier. Now they would have no choice. And as the club began to empty, an angry patron came to bend Sidel’s ear about the failure.

“I was upset, and I said, ‘You need a soundman.’ And he said, ‘I know,’” recalls Mario Caldato Jr., who had visited Power Tools that night with his friend Mike Nishita, both men tripping on acid. “So I got the gig the next week.”

Caldato, a native of Brazil, was a machinist who spent his days making airplane parts and his nights playing in Los
Angeles rock and ska bands. He had mostly given up making music by the time he came to Power Tools, but developed a close friendship with Matt Dike while revamping the club’s equipment. “I enjoyed watching him while he was spinning,” says Caldato. “It was fun watching people react to the records.”

Those reactions were a source of perpetual fascination for Dike. “We’d sit there and talk all day—all day—about what people were doing when he was playing a certain song,” says Sidel. So it was little surprise when Dike decided to try creating music of his own. Caldato remembers Dike using a four-track cassette recorder to tape a drummer friend, Kevin Dolin, playing various funky breaks, which became part of Dike’s DJ sets. “It worked, and so the wheels started to turn in his head, I think,” Caldato says. “Like, ‘Hey, I can do this.’”

The next step was getting better equipment. Caldato helped Dike choose it—including an Emu SP12 sampling drum machine and a Tascam 388 recorder and mixer. Caldato supplied the microphones, compressors, reverbs and other effects, and helped Dike turn the living room of his Hollywood apartment into a makeshift studio, with a closet as the vocal booth.

Most of
Paul’s Boutique
would be created in this cramped space, overflowing with crates of records. But Dike’s first collaborator was ex—Public Image Ltd. guitarist Keith Levene, a London punk legend then living in Los Angeles. Sidel recalls the two men holed up in Dike’s apartment with the SP12, also known as the Emulator. “We used to joke about it—‘What are you doing in there on the E-mulator?’” laughs Sidel, in a faux British accent. Something momentous
was happening during those sessions, however. “Keith was the guy who got me into sampling,” recalls Dike.

Early in 1988, Adam Horovitz would run into Dike at a party. The songs he was playing sounded otherworldly, “like four breakbeat records playing at the same time,”
⁴
Horovitz recalled. “I asked him what the music was, and he said that he had made it.” A lot had changed in a few months. Although no one knew it at the time, the team that would bring
Paul’s Boutique
to life was now complete.

* * *

The term most often used to describe Mike Simpson and John King is probably “laid-back.” That quality has something to do with how they first met in the early eighties, at the Claremont Colleges, a partnership of six schools about a half hour east of Los Angeles. Both men had neglected to turn in college applications; King finally applied to McKenna College because it had the fewest requirements and the latest deadline, while Simpson’s high school adviser simply signed him up for Pitzer College and informed him later.

The Manhattan-born Simpson would study philosophy, while King, a Florida native, would switch to Claremont’s Harvey Mudd College and major in computer science and economics. More importantly, the two were DJs who loved old funk and new hip-hop. Their paths would not cross,
however, until Simpson abandoned his hip-hop show on the campus radio station, KSPC, during the summer of 1985, and King was hired to replace him. Three weeks later, Simpson changed his mind and returned to school. “They said, ‘You should talk to this guy John. I’m sure you could probably do the show together,’” Simpson recalled.

Their low-key personalities and musical tastes were a perfect match, and “The Big Beat Showcase”—hosted by “EZ Mike and King Gizmo”—became what Simpson believes was “the first dedicated hip-hop show in California.” They would also start a mobile DJ business together, playing parties at the colleges and polishing their skills, King says, “in a tiny, dilapidated shack behind my ramshackle college party house,” with carpet salvaged from dumpsters tacked to the walls as soundproofing.

Eventually, the duo would find room on the air for their own tracks, instrumental beds they created to play beneath public service announcements. Their initial songs were recorded on a four-track, with Simpson creating loops manually on a turntable. Soon they would explore sampling at the home of local musician Jeff Stacy, who let the pair borrow his studio for an evening. “We showed up at this guy’s house totally unprepared,” Simpson recalls. They recorded a rap song; an unimpressed Stacy remembered years later “how dorky it was.”

But after Simpson and King purchased their own Roland S-10 sampler at the end of 1986, their work improved. One of the first people to notice was a gravelly-voiced rapper named Anthony Smith, who would become much better-known as Tone-Loc. He visited KSPC in 1987 with his manager, Orlando Aguillen, to promote the single “Cheeba
Cheeba.” “Loc loved the instrumental tracks that we’d been doing announcements over,” Simpson recalls. “And he said, ‘I’m getting ready to do my first album. You should meet these guys that started this label, Delicious Vinyl.’”

The next day, Aguillen called Simpson and asked to hear some of the instrumentals over the phone. Simpson obliged, and “when I got back on, it was somebody else, a different voice. The guy was freaking out, saying, ‘This stuff’s incredible! Where are you guys? Can you come meet us in Hollywood?’”

The voice on the phone was Matt Dike, who had just found his long-lost Dust Brothers.

* * *

After his experiments with Keith Levene, Dike had gotten serious about making music. He and a fellow DJ, California native Mike Ross, had decided to start their own label. Ross was one of the regulars at the Rhythm Lounge while he was a student at UCLA, and he recognized a kindred spirit in Dike. “We were just like-minded white DJs who were into hip-hop and soul,” Ross recalls. “We would go and buy records together.”

Soon, they decided to make their own. Caldato had given them the studio and the gear, and they were inspired by the example of Def Jam. “We saw what Rick Rubin was doing, and we said, ‘We can do that. Or we should at least try to do that,’” says Ross. “Just playing records wasn’t enough.”

The ability to sample them, however, had opened the door for a whole new type of producer: a DJ who might lack traditional musical skills, but had an ear for collage.
Sampling had been around in various forms since the 1950s, when Dickie Goodman began using lines from popular hits of the day on a series of novelty “break-in” records. But it wasn’t until the mid-eighties, when digital samplers allowed such bits and breaks to be easily obtained, looped and manipulated, that sampling became a serious option for artists and producers.

In partial homage to their source material, Dike and Ross’s new label would be called Delicious Vinyl. Their first signing was Tone-Loc, who impressed Ross the moment they were introduced. “Eric B and Rakim were happening then, and when I heard Tone speak, I thought, ‘Man, this guy’s got a great voice. He could be our Rakim.’” The label’s debut 12-inch, “Cheeba Cheeba,” was selling briskly when Dike spoke to Mike Simpson at KSPC.

The day after that phone call, Simpson recalls, he and King “loaded up the car and drove over to Matt’s crappy place on Santa Monica Boulevard.” They found that “DV Studios” was actually an old second-floor railroad apartment over a brake parts store. “It was in a very, very sketchy part of Hollywood,” says Eric Haze, who had a set of keys to Dike’s residence and would stay there when he was in town. “My car got broken into twice in front of the place, that’s how live it was. It was grungy before they called it grunge.”

At the time, the peeling paint and lack of air conditioning didn’t register much with King and Simpson. They were more interested in their host, who was dancing around the living room to the demos they played for him and Mike Ross. “So Matt and Mike said, ‘Maybe you guys could come use our studio and help us make our records, and you guys could do your own music,’” Simpson says. “So we thought,
‘Hey, this could be kinda fun.’”

Simpson and King began commuting daily to Hollywood, where their talents meshed easily with the skills of Dike, Ross and Caldato. Living up to his nickname of “Giz,” King “was the technical guy,” says Mike Ross. “He was very good with samplers and stuff. And Mike was a very good DJ.” The pair had also brought with them 30 to 40 instrumentals they’d been working on previously. “Some of them became Tone-Loc tracks,” Simpson says, “and some of them became Beastie Boys tracks.” And one of them, an incredibly funky reworking of the classic hip-hop break “Apache,” became Delicious Vinyl’s second single, “Know How.”