Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique (8 page)

The band would come to trust Carr’s judgment; long after he had left Capitol, he remained a confidante and advisor. But at the time, Carr realized, the Beasties still viewed him, in some sense, as the enemy. “Because they always thought if you were asking for a single, you were asking for the art to be lessened in some way.”

At that point, Carr threw up his hands. “I said to Tom Whalley and David Berman, ‘I’ve done my part. I can’t push ’em any more. The artist has to make the art, talent defines the marketplace.’ That’s what we believed there at Capitol.”

The tapes of
Paul’s Boutique
would be flown to New York for mastering. Mario Caldato, who had been instructed to take the band’s recordings home from the studio each night, recalls being “almost handcuffed” to the tapes on the plane ride. Partly, Caldato now believes this was because the Beasties—who also liked having him pose as a security officer, or dress in a suit and carry a cell phone—just enjoyed playing cloak-and-dagger. “It was kind of like a top-secret mission,” he says.

However, Caldato’s duties were more than just a game,
thanks to the band’s ongoing legal struggles with Def Jam. While the Beasties had been living at the Mondrian the year before, they had allegedly managed to avoid being given subpoenas by process servers who waited outside their rooms “for two days,” Yauch claimed. “We got security to chuck them out.” As usual, the trio turned the situation into a goof: “We called all our friends in LA and got them to come over with disguises,” recalled Horovitz. “Yauch had a big curly afro wig and I had long robes on, and they were trying to get at us, but couldn’t work out who was who.”

Diamond, though, confirms there was a real fear that Def Jam, which was claiming ownership of the band in court, might try to seize the tapes of
Paul’s Boutique
. “We were mad paranoid about it the whole time,” he admits.

The recordings made it without incident to a marathon three-day mastering session at Masterdisk. Six of the album’s seven main contributors were present; Yauch, according to engineer Andy Van Dette, was sick. Still, the presence of so many people at the session was unusual—and triggered additional fees. “I swear to God, it was probably the most expensive mastering out of a record ever,” says Carr.

It was also difficult to get any work done, Van Dette told
Beastiemania.com
, because his guests “were more interested in hitting on our then-receptionist—and 22-year-old virgin—Tina.” He would recall the session as “one of the most challenging editing gigs ever,” noting that “I was seeing the light at the end of the tunnel when Ad-Rock pulled out an audio cassette and said ‘Oh yeah, I wanted to use four bars
off this.… in the middle of the record.”
²⁴
That, in a time before computer editing, meant “a couple hours more work.” Van Dette would, however, have special praise for Caldato. “He knew what issues had to be resolved by whom, and would patiently track down whoever was needed.”

More than a year in the making,
Paul’s Boutique
was now complete. And Carr had managed a feat that would have seemed impossible a few months earlier: he had delivered the album on budget, right down to the numerous cartons of eggs. It was time for a well-earned vacation—a fateful decision he is still explaining to this day.

* * *

While the Beastie Boys had been Tim Carr’s most important responsibility during the past year, they were far from his only assignment. In May of 1989, Carr was also the A&R man for a number of other Capitol artists with new releases due that summer. Female-fronted North Carolina rockers Fetchin’ Bones, “Late Show” musical director Paul Shaffer and Algerian rai singer Cheb Khaled were three of eight other acts whose albums Carr had turned in around the same time as
Paul’s Boutique
.

But Carr was, in his own words, “a very opinionated guy,” whose presence would have been unwelcome while Capitol’s marketing department developed its plans for his artists. “For an A&R person, this is the nail-biting time, and the time when you second-guess the record company,” he
admits. “And except for the Beasties, who had a blank check from [David] Berman, I was being shouted down at every corner about how best to present the artists to the public. Tom Whalley was even getting fed up with my constant kvetching.”

So when Carr told Berman and Whalley he was “on the edge of a nervous breakdown” and needed some time off, they obliged. Carr set off in June on a backpacking trip throughout Asia, planning to return in September “as the conquering hero, the ruler of the top ten”—with
Paul’s Boutique
a major part of that commercial coup.

Needless to say, things didn’t quite go according to plan.

* * *

The problem with
Paul’s Boutique
, unlike many other albums considered flops upon release and recognized for their greatness later, had nothing to do with its initial reviews. Leyla Turkkan’s decision to force writers to focus on the music had evidently helped produce the desired result; not only did most critics respond quite favorably to the album, a few would spot its groundbreaking qualities straightaway.

“At the risk of sounding ridiculous, let us assert right off the bat that
Paul’s Boutique
is as important a record in 1989 as Dylan’s
Blonde on Blonde
was in 1966,” wrote
Time
magazine’s David Hiltbrand, who called the album “the most daring, clever record of the year.”

That didn’t sound ridiculous at all, as reviewers from both sides of the Atlantic joined Hiltbrand in exalting the rehabilitated Beasties.
The Washington Post’s
Mark Jenkins noted the band’s astounding growth since the debut—“in
the space of two albums, the Beasties have catapulted from “Blue Suede Shoes” to “A Day in the Life”—before warning, with some prescience, that the new effort was “a party, but it’s no beer blast.” David Handelman made the same point in
Rolling Stone
, but his four-star review declared the Beasties were “here to stay.”

“It could have been so bad,” noted
Melody Maker’s
David Stubbs, before declaring the Beasties’ transformation “miraculous” and the album an “outrageously funky triumph.” Meanwhile, in the
Village Voice
, Robert Christgau advised, “give it three plays and half a j’s worth of concentration, and it will amaze and delight you,” calling
Paul’s Boutique
“a generous tour de force.”

There were certainly some discouraging words. Several critics would hone in on purportedly “violent” songs like “Looking Down the Barrel of a Gun,” while others, like
Hip Hop Connection’s
Nick Smash, found the disc’s collages lacking in “song structure.” And then there was the London
Daily Mail’s
Marcus Berkmann, who called
Paul’s Boutique
“the single most tedious album by a supposedly ‘major’ act that I have ever heard.”

Surprisingly, some of the band’s close friends had initial reservations about the album as well. Cey Adams, who has been one of the Beasties’ principal sounding boards throughout their career and who now counts
Paul’s Boutique
among his favorite records, admits, “I really didn’t know what to think…it sounded like musical Swiss cheese to me.” Mike Ross of Delicious Vinyl thought his production partners had forgotten the MCs. “I remember being a little disappointed. Musically it was cool, but I just thought: ‘Where are the Beasties on this record?’”

In addition, at a time when hip-hop was entering its Afrocentric Golden Age, the silence of prominent rappers and producers about the album was deafening. While some of that was surely attributable to the Beasties’ defection from Def Jam—the home of many of those high-profile MCs—others had their own theories. Leyla Turkkan believed that without the protection of Russell Simmons, the Beastie Boys suffered in the hip-hop community because of their skin color. “There was definitely a racial undertone,” she asserts. “Absolutely. There’s no question.”

On the other hand, Sean Carasov, who was by now working in A&R at Jive Records and had signed A Tribe Called Quest, disagreed. “Capitol never had any faith in
Paul’s Boutique
as a black album,” he says. “So people like D-Nice and KRS-One weren’t even given the opportunity to endorse it.”
²⁵
Neither was Marvin Young, whose massive single “Bust a Move” peaked that fall, just as the Beasties were fading. Young would have told anyone who asked that he thought
“Paul’s Boutique
was the greatest sampling record ever.”
²⁶

Mike Simpson also believes the album’s cool reception
from the hip-hop community had little to do with the music. He recalls the Beasties being invited onstage at the Greek Amphitheatre during Run-DMC’s Hollywood tour stop in 1988, and performing “Shake Your Rump,” to rapturous response. “The crowd went crazy,” says Simpson, “and I remember Darryl Mac—DMC—going, ‘Holy shit! This is the jam!’” The reason such sentiments never reached the public, Simpson thought, was that “there was just so much cool stuff happening at the time—you already had A Tribe Called Quest, and De La Soul.”

Comparisons to the latter group, and its own sample-heavy, Day-Glo masterpiece,
3 Feet High and Rising
, would dog
Paul’s Boutique
for the remainder of 1989 and beyond. De La’s debut, produced with élan by Stetsasonic DJ Prince Paul, would beat the Beasties’ disc to the shops that spring. And “because it came out first,” notes biographer Angus Batey, “the Long Island trio stole much of the Beasties’ thunder.”

This has led to the charge, over time, that
3 Feet High
was a direct influence on
Paul’s Boutique
, a theory which Prince Paul himself believes is correct. “Ad-Rock told me that. And I was like, really? Because I thought
Paul’s Boutique
was a great record, but I’ve never really seen any similarities. I’ve just never seen the overall feel of a record that came close to
3 Feet High”
he says, before adding, “But maybe that’s just my ego!”

Paul’s friend, producer Dan the Automator, also says the Dust Brothers and Mario Caldato have told him that “physically, they wore that tape out” while making the Beastie Boys’ album. He continues, with a chuckle, “And you wondered why they called it
Paul’s Boutique?”

Simpson, however, disputes this allegation. “I remember listening a lot to ‘Plug Tunin’”—De La’s 1988 independent single—“but not the album.” Mario Caldato confirms that
3 Feet High
didn’t reach the shops until
Paul’s Boutique
was being mixed—although after a studio runner brought back a cassette of De La’s classic, Caldato adds, “we were bugging out.”

All opinions pro and con about the album aside, it would be sales figures that would cast the final judgment on
Paul’s Boutique
for some while to come. By that yardstick, it would come up more than a little short.

* * *

“Hey Ladies” was released to radio in June as a 12-inch EP titled
Love, American Style
. The seventies reference
²⁷
was most likely lost on programmers, foreshadowing the confusion that would be created by the song’s abstract throwback of a video.

Director Adam Bernstein would say years later that the
Saturday Night
Fever-cum-blaxploitation feel of the “Hey Ladies” clip had been the Beasties’ idea. “They were just completely engrossed in the cinema of the seventies,” Bernstein said, “especially the Rudy Ray Moore movies, the Dolemite movies.” Undoubtedly, seeing the trio in Afro wigs and bell bottoms, instead of the leather jackets and jeans of the
Licensed to Ill
era, helped fulfill what Mike Simpson had
realized was a major goal of the band: “To weed out the ‘Fight for Your Right’ fan from the true Beastie Boys fan.”

The problem was, there weren’t nearly enough of the latter at that moment to satisfy Capitol Records’ multiplatinum expectations. “Hey Ladies” had success on the dance charts, reaching number 15, but the single peaked at just number 36 pop, a poor showing indeed.

But that was only the beginning. The album, officially released July 25, shipped more than a half-million copies, in anticipation of moving huge initial numbers. In the pre-Soundscan era, when chart positions were determined by ship figures and not by actual sales, this led to an overinflation of commercial strength. Such inaccuracies were likely responsible for an encouraging report in the August 11
Los Angeles Times
, which called
Paul’s Boutique
the week’s “hottest new album.”

In truth, it was already finished in the marketplace. According to Tim Carr, merchants were returning unsold copies of the record during the first month, and there were none of the expected reorders. Sean Carasov remembers seeing gold sales plaques for the album at Capitol, “and they had not been given out, because it hadn’t actually gone gold.” The disc would top out at number 14 on the Billboard album charts before sinking; “in a Soundscan world,” Carr notes, even that lower-than-expected number would have been much worse.

What made Carr’s own situation much worse is that while the album—and all his other projects—were going belly-up, he was hiking through Indonesia and Thailand. “I would have had that nervous breakdown,” he claims, “had I been around.” But his departure on the eve of a disastrous
release has given him an unenviable role in Beastie history. Though seldom mentioned by name, he has become, as Angus Batey’s
Rhyming & Stealing
characteristically put it, “the A&R executive who’d signed the band,” then “left for a holiday and never came back”—allegedly because he had already determined the album would bomb.

This depiction of Carr has not been limited to the press. Several years afterward, when he visited the Beastie Boys on the Lollapalooza tour, Carr was introduced to the group’s new percussionist, Eric Bobo, by Adam Horovitz. “Adam says, ‘Do you know Tim Carr? He’s the guy who signed us to Capitol. Well, then he left right away, but he’s the guy who signed us.’”

Although he laughs such moments off, this perception of events still clearly haunts Carr. “If I would have known … if I could have known … I never would’ve gone to Southeast Asia,” he says earnestly. “And I’ll always feel that loss, and it’s really hard to explain.