Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique (5 page)

This legal activity made Tim Carr’s first meeting with Def Jam’s Russell Simmons an awkward one. The setting didn’t help: the encounter took place at the Tenth Street Baths, an East Village steam room frequented by a diverse clientele of music business-types and Russian mafiosi.

Simmons’s right-hand man, Lyor Cohen, recognized Carr and pointed him out as “the guy who’s stealing the Beasties from us.” Simmons, Carr says, “didn’t know who I was, and all of a sudden he’s meeting me, naked, in this room. And he goes, ‘You don’t wanna get involved with me, man. You’re gonna lose this battle. We’ve got them tied down in a very firm deal. This could be a lot more trouble than you want.’”
¹²

That threat, Carr believed, would come back to haunt
Simmons later, when it was repeated during depositions taken during Def Jam’s lawsuit. But the band the two men were battling for was oblivious. The Beastie Boys had finally gotten paid, and were officially trading their Big Apple past for even brighter, wilder California dreams.

* * *

Under the terms of the deal with Capitol, Horovitz, Yauch and Diamond received an advance of about $750,000—minus their lawyer’s fees—for
Paul’s Boutique
. They wasted no time putting this long-awaited windfall to use, setting up headquarters on the ninth floor of the Mondrian, a luxury hotel on Sunset Boulevard. A favorite stop for traveling rock stars, it was the perfect location for the Beasties to perfect their spendthrift philosophy.

“It was this whole thing that money doesn’t matter,” Tim Carr says. “And if it costs money, it’s funner—especially if it’s somebody else’s money.” Not that using their own money stopped the three from any pranks. “They would tip each other. Ad-Rock would order iced tea and charge it to Mike D’s room, and give a $25 tip,” Carr recalls. Of course, having some fun at their new labelmates’ expense was better still. “We’d be sitting by the pool, and they’d yell to Bret [Michaels] from Poison, ‘What room you staying in?’ Then they’d sign tons of shit off on his room. I’d be going, ‘God, is this really happening?’”

The band indulged in more than iced tea and tips, as Carr would learn during the trips he made to Los Angeles every six weeks or so. “It was the early days of cell phones, so the Beasties would walk around with these, like, walkie
talkies and call each other, from one side of the bar to the other. And they all had unbelievable cars. These guys dove headfirst into the LA car culture. But everything they had was that way.”

Capitol received an early warning of this attitude. One of the band’s first official acts after signing to the label was to commandeer a conference room and arrange a phony “video casting call” to meet girls. “The record isn’t even conceived of at this point,” recalls Dike. “But what could be better than having 500 hot chicks show up in their bikinis?” The Beasties and their producers watched the aspirants dance to some of Dike and the Dust Brothers’ instrumentals, while seated at a table, “drunk, with huge joints, and stacks of money in front of us,” Dike says.
¹³

Such conspicuous consumption, combined with the Beasties’ already larger-than-life image, quickly made them the toast of Los Angeles. “They were treated like gods,” says photographer Ricky Powell, often referred to at the time as “The Fourth Beastie.” “Wherever they went. Clubs, parties—you name it. They had a lot of female admirers, and a lot of male groupies, too.”

Powell would be flown to California many times, one of several old friends—like Sean Carasov, Cey Adams and Max Perlich—who remained part of the band’s inner circle. But the group was rapidly building an influential new group of acquaintances as well. “These kids were actors and musicians,” Adams remembers, “the sons and daughters of
Hollywood royalty.” Among them were Balthazar Getty, the grandson of billionaire J. Paul Getty; Mick Fleetwood’s daughter Amy; and Karis Jagger, daughter of Mick.

“None of these kids had jobs, and they all had these huge houses and were driving these fancy cars,” marvels Adams. “I was just amazed at the amount of wealth.”

Two others who drifted into the Beasties’ orbit were the children of folk singer Donovan: his son, musician Donovan Leitch Jr., and his actress daughter, Ione Skye. Leitch remembers 1988 as “a 24-hour party,” beginning with leisurely breakfasts—“You never went with less than ten people,” he says—where the band and its friends would map out the day. There were pool parties, frequent road trips to Lake Arrowhead and Joshua Tree National Park, and nights of clubbing at Matt Dike–affiliated spots like Enter the Dragon and Dirt Box.

Adam Yauch and John King, meanwhile, would frequently depart in the wee hours for some skiing. “Set the cruise control on the Mercedes to over 100 in the middle of the night, heading to Mammoth,” recalls King. “Then, since the snow sucked there, we took off to Tahoe or Snowbird, which was awesome.”

All this recreation, funded by Capitol, was helping the Beastie Boys recover the sanity lost during the last days of
Licensed to Ill
. But it was little wonder that the new album was taking shape at a less-than-frantic pace. Even the group’s afternoon writing sessions at the Mondrian, work “which involved a good deal of red wine and marijuana,” according to Mike Simpson, would soon become dominated by one of the Beasties’ favorite sports. “We noticed that every day at a certain time, people would line up outside the Comedy
Store, which is right across the street. So, someone—I don’t know who—had the idea that it might be fun to throw eggs at these people. So it sort of became a daily ritual.”

“One night … there was a line of people waiting to see Billy Crystal. And the Beasties went up on the roof, and lobbed from across the street. So these things hit like boulders,” says Tim Carr. “And the Comedy Store called the Mondrian, and the Mondrian security and the police were there. And nobody was taking any blame for anything.”

The egging would spread to drive-by excursions throughout downtown Los Angeles, and it even inspired a new song, “Egg Man.” “There was a certain amount of research going into all these stunts,” Carr admits with a smile. “But they knew no bounds.”

The Mondrian staff would address the mounting disturbances in a “very politically correct letter” to the band. “It said that there were complaints of things falling out their window, and that if there was a problem with the window, they could have maintenance come up and address it,” recalls Simpson. “It was just hysterically funny.”

The man who would have to answer for the Beasties, Tim Carr, was beginning to disagree.

* * *

“It would be great, you know, if we could all just go to work every day and say, OK, we’re gonna work in the studio from one o’clock until dah-dah-dah, and we’re gonna finish the album in two months,” Michael Diamond would tell a radio interviewer in 1989. “But it never works like that …. You might go for two weeks and get one day of work done. But
that one day of work is very special, for very special people like ourselves.”

It would be hard to better summarize the work habits of these very special people during the summer of 1988. The days ran together in Matt Dike’s sweltering apartment as the seven collaborators tried out new ideas and foreign substances. Not surprisingly, that combination lengthened the sessions appreciably. An insider recalls that Adam Yauch, who often took the creative lead, “would drive everyone bananas” with his suggestions. “He’d take mushrooms and say, ‘OK, let’s run the whole mix through a guitar stomp-box!’ And you’d think, ‘Will somebody fucking kill this guy?’” The band’s drug use, by rock-star standards, was fairly benign. “Wine and weed” were the primary vices, according to Mario Caldato, who not-quite-jokingly calls the group’s “friendly dealer, Hippie Steve,” a major influence on
Paul’s Boutique
. And to Ione Skye, the Beastie Boys’ smoking and ’shrooming seemed worlds away from the heroin nightmares surrounding her boyfriend Anthony Kiedis’s band, the Red Hot Chili Peppers. “It just seemed so much more fun, and less dark, around the Beasties,” she says.

Another observer from the time adds, “People ask, do drugs ever help you create art? I’d have to say, listen to
Paul’s Boutique.”

Which was exactly what Tim Carr wanted to do. Unfortunately, he couldn’t. “Because they didn’t finish anything!” he recalls. “Still at this point, ‘Shake Your Rump’ and ‘Dust Joint’ were the best tracks. And it was just like, fuck it, what is going on here?”

Part of the problem was that the Beasties, free to find a new direction, were no longer sure what to write about.
This, contends Diamond, was not a situation unique to
Paul’s Boutique
. “On every record we’ve had that. We sit down and we look at each other: ‘OK, what the fuck are we gonna say now?’” The dilemma this time, however, was pronounced enough that Matt Dike remembers: “We had to write some of the lyrics for those guys when they first came out here, because they had such writer’s block. I have some notebooks of things we suggested, just to get things moving.”

While he waited, Carr amused himself by browsing the collector’s fantasyland in Dike’s apartment. The half-million records were the centerpiece, but there was also plentiful seventies memorabilia, nestled alongside valuable paintings by the likes of Dike’s old boss, Jean-Michel Basquiat. “He just knew exactly what was the right stuff to have,” Carr says admiringly of Dike. “The coolest Ohio Players album cover next to a Haring, for example.”

That aesthetic, which dovetailed perfectly with the Beasties’ own retro leanings, would heavily inform
Paul’s Boutique
, as well as the band’s future business venture, Grand Royal. And Carr appreciated that
something
was going on amidst all the tokes and tokens of a bygone age. It was just hard to say what. “This beat would go into this beat, but you never knew what was gonna come out of it. The Beasties had notebooks and notebooks, but each page began a new rhyme,” Carr recalls. “The Dust Brothers were, like, splitting the atom. But it all existed as a thousand petri dishes.”

Because the band was recording at Matt Dike’s, with almost no real instruments, the potential savings were immense. But the Beasties were “still spending $30,000 to $40,000 a month,” Carr says, with no manager to help rein in the multiple excesses—like the rental cars Horovitz kept
crashing “doing those ‘Streets of San Francisco’—type jumps, where you go over a hill and airborne,” remembers Donovan Leitch with a chuckle.

Carr was, he admits, having the time of his life. His Midwestern common sense, however, was tingling. “It really felt like a freight train running out of control, downhill, heading toward the wall. And there was nothing I could do to stop it.”

Yet the Dust Brothers, Dike and Caldato, who were pushing their equipment well past its boundaries, couldn’t go fast enough. When
Paul’s Boutique
was released, it became fashionable to compare the album to
Sgt. Pepper’s
because of its evident ambition and air of psychedelia. What few critics realized was another, more pertinent, parallel. Just as George Martin and the Beatles had taken four-track recording as far as it could go on their 1967 magnum opus, the team behind
Paul’s Boutique
was testing the absolute limits of still-embryonic technologies like computer recording and automation.

Looping and layering samples that synchronize perfectly has since become a simple task for anyone with a computer. In 1989, the process was laborious. “Basically, we would find a groove, and we would loop it, and then we would print that to tape, and we would just go for five minutes on one track of the tape,” Simpson recalls. “And then we would find another loop, and we would spend hours getting that second loop to sync up with the first loop, and then once we had it in sync, we would print that for five minutes on another track. And we would just load up the tape like that.

“And once we had filled up the tape with loops, we would go in, and Mario had this early, early, mixing board that had this very primitive form of automation. It was pretty
complex, but if you knew which tracks you wanted playing at any given time, you typed the track numbers into this little Commodore computer hooked up to the mixing board. And each time you wanted a new track to come in, you’d have to type it in manually. It was just painful. It took
so
long. And there was so much trial and error … there was no visual interface to show you what was going on. That was the main difficulty we faced.”

The Dust Brothers’ secret weapon—“without it, we would not have been able to make records”—was a device called the J. L. Cooper PPS-1. It converted the two forms of time code commonly used by musicians, MIDI and SMPTE, back and forth; this electronic dialogue allowed loops to be synchronized to tape. Although crucial to their work, the Dust Brothers grew to hate the gadget. “It was a little piece of shit box that looked like it was made as a high school metal shop project,” Simpson says with some asperity. “And it wasn’t a thing that worked every time, either. It was a finicky little machine.”

While those struggles were taking place in the seedier part of Hollywood, there was also unrest not far away within the Capitol Tower. In a harbinger of the music business’s turbulent, merger-happy nineties, the EMI Music Group—Capitol’s parent—had reached outside the industry in May 1988 and hired former General Mills executive Jim Fifield to head the company. The move would begin a new era of corporate accountability, in which “the suits” would assume greater control of decisions, and the bottom line would trump artistic considerations.

It was ominous news for Capitol executives David Berman and Joe Smith, then into the second, “prove-it” year
of a three-year deal, and badly needing to justify their risky expenditure on the Beasties. Smith would set the label’s new agenda soon afterward: “Our careers, our salaries, our future, is ours to win or lose in this next year,” he told employees at Capitol’s 1988 annual convention. “I want you to leave here with a sense of urgency, a sense of intensity, a sense of determination, and even a little desperation.”

The A&R man who represented the only real link between Capitol and the Beastie Boys was feeling the desperation. At times, Carr simply adopted an if-you-can’t-beat-’em approach. Knowing the band’s fondness for egg-related jokes, he once bought dozens of the plastic egg-shaped containers that held L’Eggs pantyhose and filled them with Velveeta cheese, then booby-trapped the Beasties’ hotel rooms. But soon afterward, Carr received a forceful reminder that he was certainly not in his charges’ league as a prankster.