Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique (4 page)

The artist was a new signing named Marvin Young, a clean-cut USC economics major who called himself Young MC. Ross had offered Young a deal after hearing him rhyme over the phone. “He was just an amazing lyricist,” Ross says. “I was blown away by his ability to come up with these funny stories.” One of them would become the basis for “Wild Thing,” a number two hit for cowriter Tone-Loc in 1988. But even before that success, the label’s 12-inch releases had generated enough buzz to win Delicious a distribution deal with Island. By then, Simpson and King had been rechristened the Dust Brothers, a name which captured the psychedelic qualities of their music.
⁵

The studio dynamic at Dike’s apartment was unorthodox, to say the least. “Matt was a bit reclusive. His bedroom was all the way back at the end of this long hallway. To get from the living room to the rest of the house you had to go through the kitchen. And he would often just lock the kitchen door and hide away back in his bedroom,” says Simpson. “Every once in a while he would come out with a couple of records, and say, ‘Check out this one. Check out this one,’ and then disappear back into his bedroom, after feeding us samples—in addition to the samples that we were pulling from our own records. And basically, that’s how the three of us started working together—John and I doing more of the hands-on sampling, and doing the equipment and more of the arranging.”

Dike, however, is described by nearly everyone present as the “mastermind and mentor” of the sessions—the idea man and creative spark. And Mario Caldato, many insist, was the unsung hero of the team, a tireless worker who slaved to translate brilliant concepts into great records. “Mario made it all happen,” says Max Perlich. “Matt had the ideas, and Mario put it down.”

The results of the partnership were inarguable, placing the emphasis on songs rather than artists. “We were just putting together instrumental tracks, not knowing who they were for. And every day, a different rapper would come in—Tone-Loc,
Young MC, Def Jeff,” Simpson says. “I think it was sorta like the old Motown days, where they recorded the tracks, and then had all the artists come in and try to do a vocal on it. And whoever did the best one got the track.”

A handful of the instrumentals, however, resisted any efforts to find an appropriate MC. “They were these crazy mega-mixes, that had tons of samples, tons of scratching. A lot of them were so dense that there really wasn’t room for a rapper on the track,” says Simpson. “We would try with Loc, and we would try with Young MC, but there just wasn’t room for anything. And they were a little weirder than the other stuff we were doing. So we just put those aside as Dust Brothers tracks. And we guessed at some point, we’d have enough to make a record.”

Before that could happen, however, the perfect rappers for those dense and dusted backing tracks would walk right into Matt Dike’s living room.

* * *

Michael Diamond and Adam Yauch were ostensibly just looking for a good time when they showed up at Dike’s apartment one February evening in 1988. Diamond and Yauch had made several trips to Los Angeles over the previous few months, joining
Lost Angels
star Adam Horovitz in an effort to sort out their post—Def Jam future. “We realized we had to get our shit together and take things more seriously,” says Diamond, “and meet with a couple of labels.”

In the meantime, they naturally turned to Dike to find a party. He was now running a new club called Enter the Dragon with Pam Turbov, and combined with the growing
success of Delicious Vinyl, Dike’s reputation as LA’s arbiter of after-hours cool was nearing its peak.

However, Dike had also heard the Beasties were looking to leave Def Jam, and had convinced Simpson, King and Caldato that “we should try to get this project.” Thus, when his guests arrived, “Matt slyly pressed ‘play’ on a tape of our works in progress on a boom box,” recalls King. A crazily dense collage of funky drumming and disco titled “Full Clout”
⁶
burst forth, and the Beasties were stunned.

“It all sounded incredible,” recalled Yauch years later. “It was so rich with layer upon layer of music.” Diamond, who had already cultivated a reputation as the fast-talking businessman of the group, had a more pragmatic reaction: “He was like, ‘Wow! Can we buy this?,’” Simpson recalls with a laugh.

No deal was struck, but the Beasties’ curiosity had been piqued. “Mike said, ‘Listen, we’re going back to New York tomorrow. Can you put together a cassette of all the songs you have that are like this?,’” Simpson says. “And so that’s what we did.”

The tape, containing “Full Clout” (which would become “Shake Your Rump”) and “Dust Joint” (the original title of “Car Thief”), was duly overnighted to the Beastie Boys. Then came the wait, particularly agonizing for Simpson,
who had been accepted to law school at Columbia University. A tuition deposit was required to hold his place for the fall, and the deadline was fast approaching. When a call to Fed Ex revealed that the package containing the demo tape could not be delivered and was sitting in a New York warehouse, a dejected Simpson began preparing for a career as a lawyer.

Then one Sunday night, less than a week before his tuition deposit was due, the phone rang. “It’s Mike D, and he says, ‘OK, book some studio time. We’re flying out on the red-eye, and we wanna start working on the record tomorrow.” Some frantic calls turned up space at the Record Plant, one of the most famous studios in Los Angeles and the site of such recordings as the Eagles’
Hotel California
and Fleetwood Mac’s
Rumours
.
⁷

This was a daunting proposition for John King and Mike Simpson, who to that point had never even been inside a professional recording studio. “We didn’t know how anything worked,” admits King, “but just acted like we did.” The Beasties would hedge their bet on the Dust Brothers elsewhere: “They wanted to rerecord the demos with a big famous engineer,” recalls Caldato, who did not receive an invite to the Record Plant. Instead, the group hired “a super-overpriced guy who had worked on Sly and the Family Stone stuff back in the day,” according to Simpson. “I guess they thought he’d be appropriate, based on his resume.” He wasn’t. “We did some rough mixes, and he was fired immediately
afterwards,” Simpson says, laughing. “And we were able to bring Mario in to engineer the rest of the record.”
⁸

The Beasties’ original plan for the album had been to produce themselves, but when Dike heard one of their few new songs—a drum program for what would become “Hello Brooklyn”—“I knew they were in trouble.” Next, the idea was to work with multiple producers, but the chemistry—and chemical use—shared by the band members and their Los Angeles counterparts would prove too strong to resist.

“Matt and Mario had been really nervous, but when the boys rolled in, it was like family,” recalls actress Lisa Ann Cabasa, a member of Dike’s circle.
⁹
“When they first got here, I think they all went out and played basketball—talked music and talked shit.”

Two songs were recorded during these initial sessions: “Full Clout” and “Dust Joint.” Simpson and King had suggested stripping the tunes down to hip-hop’s more familiar, skeletal form, but the group refused. “We said, ‘No, we want to rhyme on it the way it is,’” Yauch said. It was an instinct antithetical to most commercially successful hip-hop of the day, and certainly took the trio a long way from the barebones, metallic sound of
Licensed to Ill
. But it was about to win the Beasties an important new fan—and a new record deal.

* * *

In the spring of 1988, Tim Carr was in his office at Capitol Records when an attorney he knew called with a question. The Beastie Boys wanted off Def Jam. Did Carr want to meet with the band?

Given the success of
Licensed to Ill
, Carr could hardly have said no. But his reasons for agreeing to the meeting had to do with art, as well as commerce.

A Minnesota native who had moved to New York City in 1980 to work at the Kitchen Center for Performing Arts, Carr had first noticed the Beastie Boys when they were shedding their hardcore punk roots and turning to hip-hop with the underground hit “Cooky Puss.” Carr could recall the Beasties, who had just added Adam Horovitz to their lineup from the Young and the Useless, performing at a Kitchen-sponsored concert with the equally unknown Sonic Youth.

At that time, Carr’s life “was more Laurie Anderson and Glenn Branca and the experimental side of the downtown arts scene.” Yet he was also managing pioneering rapper Fab 5 Freddy, and was on the forefront of the early-eighties mixture of hip-hop culture and high art.

Carr would make the move into the music business in 1986. “I started to bring bands to labels, because you could get Laurie Anderson a record deal when you could no longer get her a grant,” he remembers. “I’d been selling acts to different A&R people, and they said, ‘You should be in A&R.’”

He found a place at Capitol’s New York office, which was “just an A&R outpost” for the label’s West Coast headquarters. Carr would make an immediate impression with the first act he signed: the Los Angeles metal band
Megadeth. Within six short months, Carr had become the head of Capitol’s East Coast operation, at age 29.

When the Beasties visited his office, they first rifled through his record collection. Carr had just returned from Jamaica with a load of dancehall and ragga singles, and also had plenty of hip-hop vinyl on hand. That, he felt, made an impression on the group. “I don’t think when they went into other A&R people’s offices, that’s what they saw.” What Michael Diamond saw was a nervous executive thrust into an unenviable role. “He had to all of a sudden step into our world, and meet us on our own terms,” Diamond says. “It must have been hard, especially in those days.”

But Carr, like the Beasties, had a keen sense of the absurd, particularly as it applied to the music business. “I was sitting in this big chair,” Carr explains, “when I really didn’t deserve it.” With some mutual understanding established, they got down to business. “They played me two pieces, ‘Full Clout’ and ‘Dust Joint,’” Carr says. “And I said, ‘We should do this.’”

Many of Carr’s fellow staffers at Capitol disagreed. First, there was the small matter of the band still being signed to Def Jam. The Beasties had assured Carr their lawyer could extricate them from the contract, but no one was willing to take that assertion on faith. And even if the group could free itself from Def Jam’s clutches, there were still serious questions about exactly what sort of prize Capitol would be winning.

“Everybody was really afraid. They said, ‘The Beastie Boys are really Rick Rubin,’” Carr recalls. “Everyone felt he wrote their music and he created their persona.” The band’s bad-boy reputation also gave Capitol officials pause. A story
that was still making the rounds concerned the group’s banishment from Black Rock, the headquarters of CBS Records. The Beasties had been accused of stealing some company cameras at a 1985 press conference, and joined Ozzy Osbourne—who had bitten the head off a dove during a label meeting three years earlier—as the only artists unwelcome on CBS property.

Yet when Capitol decided to fly the trio to Los Angeles later that spring, the Beasties were on their best behavior, dusting off the social graces of their childhoods. Ad-Rock was the son of a painter and playwright Israel Horovitz; MCA’s father and mother were an architect and a public school administrator, respectively; and Mike D was born to an interior designer and Harold Diamond, one of the country’s best-known art dealers.

That background came in handy when the band met Capitol CEO Joe Smith. “It turns out that Joe Smith had bought a Brach
¹⁰
from Mike’s father years before,” Carr says. “Mike walked in and was like, ‘You bought a Brach from my father,’ and Joe Smith is like, ‘What?!’ And he realizes that this kid, who’s this terror that he’s been told about, is all of a sudden the son of the most important art dealer in New York.”

After the Beasties broke bread with Carr, Capitol president David Berman, and Tom Whalley, the label’s head of A&R, at a soul food restaurant in the Wilshire district, the braintrust left impressed. “They were, without a doubt, the smartest bunch of really arrogant kids I had ever met,”
Berman would later say. “I was like, ‘They’re too smart not to pull it off.’”

Yet what clinched the deal, in Carr’s view, was the arrival of a competitor: MCA Records, chaired by the powerful Irving Azoff. “Columbia had pretty much spooked the competition,” Carr says. But Azoff’s bid, he thought, stirred Berman’s competitive juices. “Irving and David Berman had a longstanding kind of competition. So David said, ‘If Irving wants ’em, maybe I want ’em.’”

Having received less than $100,000 in royalties from the multiplatinum
Licensed to Ill
, the Beasties weren’t going to come cheap. Their lawyer, Ken Anderson, was demanding a guaranteed $3 million, two-album deal, Carr says. “It was the equivalent of a $20 million deal today. It was just a huge deal.” Especially for a group that Joe Smith was being advised was a one-hit wonder. “He said, ‘Why are we doing this?’ And David said, ‘Tim believes in it. Tom believes in Tim. I believe in Tom and Tim. I wanna do it.’”

Azoff also jetted the band to Los Angeles, and was reportedly willing to meet the $3 million asking price. If Capitol matched, Carr thought, they would get the group—perhaps in part because of the rapport he had established with the Beasties. “My background as a record store clerk, and as a collector, and as a journalist and as a curator and as a manager and as a music fan,” he says, “had made it so that I had the right computer bank to interface with the Beastie Boys.”

That summer, the trio would officially choose Capitol,
¹¹
triggering lawsuits at the federal and New York state levels
from Def Jam and CBS, which believed it still had the Beasties under contract. When rumors of the band’s label shopping had reached him weeks earlier, Rick Rubin had told the
New Musical Express
he wasn’t sure if the group would record again. That brought an angry reply from Adam Yauch, who claimed Rubin was trying to “throw a monkey wrench” into the trio’s plans to release a new single later in the summer and an album by Christmas 1988. The Beasties’ response to Def Jam’s lawsuit was equally swift: they countersued the label for breach of contract and breach of fiduciary duty, demanding their missing royalties.