Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique (7 page)

Carr would grudgingly admit that the band “did set up vocal booths in front of all that shit, and they did do the work. But every time you went there, somebody was playing foosball or Ping-Pong.” For Mike D, however, the games were a declaration of independence, after being forced to
record
Licensed to Ill
at Rick Rubin’s favorite studio, Chung King, in New York’s Chinatown. “We’d be like going into this bummy studio at two in the morning,” Diamond said in 1994. “And then all of a sudden we were here, going into these fancy studios where you pay like $15,000 a day. And we’d just go in there and play Ping-Pong. Seriously.”
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Because most of the hard decisions and technical tweaks had already been made at Matt Dike’s apartment, recording would go relatively smoothly. ‘“Car Thief’ was a challenge, because we had to work in a different room with a new SSL board,” recalls Caldato. “We were also experimenting with some new substance for inspiration, to complete the vibe of the song. It worked!”

Dike, however, was never happy with the rerecorded results of this song, or any others. “I think the tracks we recorded at my apartment are better—they’re punchier,” he contends. Part of the problem, Dike believes, is that many of the original vinyl samples were later sourced from CD.

Some additional tracking would take place elsewhere in Hollywood, at Ocean Way Recording. There, “Looking Down the Barrel of a Gun”—one of the only tunes on the album to feature real instruments—was put to tape. A rough mix of “Egg Man” that would eventually make the album was completed at Ocean Way as well. And a few songs would also be finished at Matt Dike’s apartment, including
“Hello Brooklyn,” absorbed into the closing suite, “B-Boy Bouillabaisse.”

The sessions had been completed, but
Paul’s Boutique
was not yet
Paul’s Boutique
. For title of their California opus, the Beasties would turn back to New York.

* * *

To create the cover artwork for their as yet unnamed second album, the Beastie Boys first approached old friend Eric Haze, a legendary graffiti artist who had become equally successful designing record sleeves and logos for the likes of Public Enemy, Delicious Vinyl and the Beasties themselves. Haze, in turn, enlisted the help of David Fried, a member of an artists’ collective called Avant.

“David had been playing around with this technique of burning other textures into photographs,” recalls Haze. Inspired by the mind-bending qualities of the Beasties’ new music, Haze wanted to “go for an
Are You Experienced?
vibe” for the cover, and had Fried infuse Ricky Powell’s underwater photo from the G-Spot with a wash of neon color. The result, Haze proudly thought, “was fucking gorgeous and psychedelic.”

Haze and Adam Yauch then took the photo to a special effects studio, where for $500 an hour they burned Haze’s hand-lettered Beastie Boys logo into the photo. “A couple hours into it, Yauch was like, ‘I don’t know …,’” says Haze, who adds that he and Fried never heard from the band again about the photo.

But before breaking contact, according to Haze, Fried had showed the Beasties some tests of a novel idea: 360-degree
photos he had taken of city rooftops. The cover—and the tide—of the Beasties’ new album were coming into focus.

* * *

Jeremy Shatan had been a friend of the Diamond family for years, and had played bass in the band Young Aborigines with Mike D in the early eighties. He was also less than impressed with his old pal’s reincarnation as a drunken, leering Beastie Boy. “I remember Michael offered me a copy of
Licensed to Ill
, which I refused,” recalls Shatan. “He said, ‘Yeah, I know.’”

But when Diamond had lunch with Shatan one afternoon in the spring of 1989, he had a different proposition. “He said, ‘We have this idea for our album cover, but we have no idea how to execute it.’” Shatan, who had studied photography in college, volunteered to rent the equipment needed to shoot a 360-degree panorama of a shop on New York’s Lower East Side.

The business in question was actually Lee’s Sportswear, located on the corner of Ludlow and Rivington streets. The Beasties would transform it into Paul’s Boutique, a name taken from a radio ad on one of Adam Horovitz’s reggae cassettes. Read by Gil Bailey, a veteran DJ then playing Jamaican music on WLIB, the advertisement touted a Brooklyn haberdashery that sold “the best in men’s clothing.”
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The trio came amazingly prepared for the early-morning
shoot, thought Shatan. “They had contracted with the guy who owned the store in advance, and they had made the sign. And they made this whole still life in front of the store—all this goofy shit they thought represented the aesthetic of the record. The banjo, the platform shoes.” That advance work, Shatan thought, made the eventual photo credit—given to Yauch, aka Nathaniel Hornblower, instead of Shatan and his assistant Matt Cohen—somewhat defensible.

The photos would become part of an album package as spendthrift as the Beasties’ exploits. The first 50,000 vinyl copies featured an eight-panel gatefold sleeve; cassettes of
Paul’s Boutique
were housed in shells of every hue. “Whatever the Beasties wanted,” Tim Carr recalls, “the Beasties got.”

One person who took issue with the design was Eric Haze, especially after he discovered an early copy of the aborted album cover
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on the inner sleeve. “With all due respect, it was a disappointment,” says Haze, who would find more satisfaction working on the Beasties’ next album,
Check Your Head
. “I still feel like what David and I were doing was way more revolutionary.”

* * *

Around this time, the Beastie Boys also acquired a manager, their first since splitting with Def Jam. Andy Slater was employed by Howard Kaufman Management—part-owned by Irving Azoff, who had failed to land the Beastie Boys on his label, MCA. “So Irving kinda got ’em through the back door, anyway,” says Tim Carr with a laugh.

Slater was an up-and-comer with a well-rounded resume. A native New Yorker then in his early thirties, he had been a college friend of R.E.M.’s guitarist, Peter Buck; spent time as journalist for
Rolling Stone
and
Billboard;
and got into production (at the time, he had just completed Warren Zevon’s
Transverse City
). He would go on to produce and manage the likes of Fiona Apple, Macy Gray and the Wallflowers, and in 2001 he was chosen as president and CEO of Capitol Records, becoming the Beasties’ ultimate boss.

However, Slater was a man who was “battling his own demons at that point,” says one observer close to the band. “In hindsight, I don’t know if it was really the right fit,” offers Diamond, with understandable diplomacy. Sean Carasov is more direct: “You were either down with this rolling practical joke that was the Beastie Boys, or you weren’t. And if you weren’t, you got picked on relentlessly. They were never close with him the way they were with Russell, even.”

Still, with a new album, a new label and new management, the Beasties were ready for the future. Now they only had to find a way to avoid endlessly discussing their past.

* * *

Leyla Turkkan was the ideal choice as the Beastie Boys’ new
publicist. No one in the PR business knew more about hip-hop; at age 21, she was stealing her parents’ Mercedes for late-night trips to the South Bronx, where she would pick up Grandmaster Flash and hang out at pioneering clubs like the Fever and the Broadway. No one in the business was tougher; during the summer of 1989, she would castigate Chuck D of Public Enemy for his failure to rein in the group’s anti-Semitic Minister of Information, Professor Griff. And no one in the business had a longer association with the Beasties; Turkkan had first met them during their mid-eighties Danceteria days, when her clubhopping partners were Russell Simmons and Lyor Cohen.

There was only one small problem: Leyla Turkkan hated the Beastie Boys. With a passion.

“When I got the call, I remember going, ‘Not these assholes again,’” Turkkan says. “I had been exposed to a lot of things, but the Beastie Boys were the worst out of the bunch. They were just horrible.”

Turkkan had despised the Beasties, in fact, since she first laid eyes on them. “Everyone else tried to control themselves a little bit around other people. They didn’t. And I remember Russell and Lyor saying, ‘You’re gonna see, they’re gonna play the Garden. They’re gonna be the biggest thing ever.’ And I was like, ‘You guys are so dusted. You’re crazy! And these guys are just gonna fuck themselves over.’”

Time, and
Licensed to Ill
, had proven Simmons and Cohen right, but that hadn’t altered Turkkan’s low opinion of the group. Besides, there were other reasons not to get involved. Turkkan’s PR agency was the country’s top choice for hip-hop acts seeking an independent publicist. And much of the business was supplied by Turkkan’s old
friends at Def Jam—who were still fighting for their right to the Beasties, in court.

“We were extremely close to Russell and Lyor, and loyalty is extremely important in this industry,” she says. “So there was tons of discussion about that. Is this gonna be a problem? Is Lyor gonna get pissed?”

However, Turkkan finally agreed to travel to Los Angeles and meet the group. The experience melted her animosity. “We all had a lot in common—we all grew up in the same environment in New York City,” recalls Turkkan. “And we just clicked. We became very, very tight. Especially Mike D and I. We quickly became best friends.”

Hearing the album was also an important factor in her decision. Turkkan admits she had grown “bored with the stuff I was representing,” and
Paul’s Boutique
was the perfect tonic. “It was like, ‘Fuck being a departure from
Licensed to Ill
—this is a departure from everything!’”

But the band was still wary of the press, tabloid memories still fresh in everyone’s mind. “They didn’t wanna talk about
Licensed to Ill
. They didn’t wanna talk about the [Def Jam] lawsuit. They didn’t want to talk about that period in their lives,” Turkkan says. “My feeling was, they had created such a piece of art, that the art would get lost … if we opened up the doors to interviews.”

Thus, the decision was made to severely limit access to the group. The Beasties would still grant some interviews prior to the album’s release. They would make themselves eminently available to “Yo! MTV Raps,” joining their old DJ, Dr. Dre, on a supposed around-the-world tour, and taking a walking trip around New York City with another longstanding acquaintance, Fab 5 Freddy.

But compared to the media saturation then common for such a high-profile release, the band gave
Paul’s Boutique
very little advance press. Only a handful of print interviews exist, with two of the most substantial published in the UK. This lack of coverage has undoubtedly helped provide the album its mystique. At the time, however, Capitol executives were furious.

“I got so much pushback, you don’t know,” recalls Turkkan. “There would be evenings when I would be in my office in tears, with people calling me up, just screaming at me. Why was I not setting up interviews? Why was I not using a different media strategy? But I was completely committed to letting the music speak for itself.”

* * *

Tim Carr’s relief at finally having a completed album—“The best record I had ever been involved with,” to boot—did not obscure an important observation.
Paul’s Boutique
contained endlessly inventive songs like “Hey Ladies” and “Shadrach,” but no obvious hit single. Reverting to his role as record company employee, Carr drafted what would come to be known as the “Jumpin’ Jack Flash memo,” and gathered the Beasties and their producers to deliver his pitch.

Carr reasoned that what had kept the Rolling Stones from being trapped by their early success, defined by the single “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” was the creation of a new signature hit. That was 1968’s “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” which gave the Stones a hard-edged new sound that effectively wiped the slate clean. The Beastie Boys, Carr argued, would be prisoners of “Fight for Your Right (To Party)”
until they came up with a hit to top it.

It was just about the worst thing he could have suggested to three MCs desperate to not only eradicate “Fight for Your Right” from the public’s memory, but from their own as well. The Beastie Boys might have had occasional lapses into
Licensed to Ill
-style buffoonery over the past year, and their transition from drunken louts to more mellow pot-heads might have been lost on the general public, but they were determined to be taken seriously as artists. “A big hush went over the room,” recalls Matt Dike. “Then Yauch yells, ‘Fuck that!! This is the record, with no fucking single!’” Diamond, meanwhile, remembers the memo being greeted with “either laughter, or disbelief, or both. We were clowning on it.”

Dike and the Dust Brothers, however, were less dismissive. As much as they loved the freedom they’d been afforded while making
Paul’s Boutique
, all three men had hits to their credit and harbored doubts that this album would generate any new ones. “I agreed with Tim, but I couldn’t let him know. That wouldn’t have been a cool move,” confesses Dike. He half-seriously suggested the band consider a song in the vein of the first album’s “Brass Monkey,” which only made Yauch angrier. “He was like, ‘Fuck “Brass Monkey”! None of that fast-rapping commercial shit!’”

Mike Simpson had already discovered the futility of trying to nudge the Beasties in a more obviously saleable direction. “I was kind of nervous about all the Dust Brothers tracks, that they were so uncommercial, there might not have been a venue for them. On the one hand, that was cool. But on the other hand,” he laughs, “we were poor, so we needed to sell some records and pay our rent.

“So I did some stuff that had Zeppelin samples, and was more upbeat and fun, à la ‘Wild Thing.’ And it actually sounded like money,” jokes Simpson. But the Dust Brothers’ version of
Licensed to Ill
was destined to go unheard. “I brought it up to the G-Spot,” Simpson recalls, “and the guys couldn’t have been more bummed!”
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