Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique (9 page)

“I guess I probably knew that I was walking away with a certain amount of unfinished business. But I felt like all the A&R had been done,” Carr adds. “But maybe I could’ve seen the trouble coming … maybe pushed management to have them tour.”

He didn’t, and for all intents and purposes, they would not, thus sealing the album’s fate. But that great lost tour is the last great mystery of
Paul’s Boutique
.

* * *

In all the press granted for
Paul’s Boutique
, few subjects were discussed as frequently as the band’s tour plans. Mike D
would sift through a ridiculous array of concert ideas, changing his story with nearly every interview. Opening acts from Charo to Buck Owens to Blue Cheer to a supposed unknown rapper called the New Wave MC were mooted. A female equivalent of the band’s old hydraulic penis was proposed for the stage show, although Adam Yauch sagely noted such a prop would not require “hydraulics in the same capacity.” And, in a nod to the spate of dinosaur-rock reunion tours taking place during the summer of ’89, Diamond said the trio “figured we’d do a Beasties reunion to jump on the bandwagon.” Those fancies aside, an imminent tour, beginning “in late August,” would be reported by MTV’s Kurt Loder; as a guest on “Yo! MTV Raps,” Mike D later announced some US dates beginning in January 1990.

In truth, there were serious obstacles to a tour. The band had probably not been banned from several hotel chains and Eastern Airlines, as they sometimes alleged. But since the Long Beach concert riot of 1986, which the Beasties had witnessed as Run-DMC’s opening act, hip-hop shows carried a stigma in the minds of many promoters. “Logistically, it’s turning out to be a fucking nightmare,” Diamond told
Melody Maker
. “There are only about five places we can play at the moment.”

Still, after finally finishing the album in “what seemed like a kazillion years … we were psyched to go out and play some shows,” Diamond claims. But their management company, he says, was far less enthusiastic about the band’s plans for a club tour. “Howard Kaufman said, ‘If you guys go out now, you’re not big enough to play arenas, and if you play in something smaller, you’re never gonna be an arena band,’” says Diamond. “We were like, ‘Huh?’”

Others aren’t so sure about the band’s resolve. After the insanity surrounding
Licensed to Ill
, touring “was something Yauch had a little bit of fear towards,” says his then-girlfriend Lisa Ann Cabasa. “I know they weren’t too keen to jump back into that.” Besides not wanting to play old material, she adds, the Beasties were slowly settling down. Horovitz and Ione Skye had begun dating, and Diamond and his future wife, Tamra Davis, had set up house. Ensconced with Yauch in a log cabin high in the Hollywood Hills, Cabasa saw a group reluctant to give up the newfound pleasures of hearth and home.

Two live performances in support of the album are well-documented. The Beasties would appear that September at the Country Club in Los Angeles, where live footage was shot for the “Shadrach” video. And in January 1990, that song was reprised on “Soul Train,” although the show’s host, Don Cornelius, refused to actually let the band play it live.
²⁸
The question that has long baffled Beastie scholars—and sometimes, the Beasties themselves—is, “Were there any additional
Paul’s Bountique-era
shows?”

The answer is yes, although it’s easy to understand why everyone involved would want to forget the brief, radio station—sponsored “tour” where the gigs occurred. Mario Caldato, who served as the group’s concert soundman, recalls half a dozen appearances which took place that fall,
in “Miami, Dallas, Atlanta, San Francisco and Boston, or somewhere in that area.”

The venues were nightclubs, and the setlist was short, comprising “only five or six songs total,” Caldato says. Two were old, drawn from the group of “Hold It Now, Hit It,” “Time to Get Ill” and “Paul Revere”; the others were new, and included obvious choices like “Shake Your Rump,” ‘Egg Man” and “Hey Ladies.”
²⁹
The brevity, and the unusual circumstances of the radio station involvement—“It was like, The first 250 Z-100 listeners can get a free Diet Coke and popcorn, and see the Beastie Boys,’” Diamond recalls—made the concerts a bitter cherry atop the commercial disaster of
Paul’s Boutique
. “People were really excited to see the boys,” Caldato says, “but were a little confused after the shows.”

How low the mighty road warriors of
Licensed to Ill
had fallen. “The tour was pretty straight-up humiliating,” agrees Diamond. “It’s a miracle the band survived it.”

* * *

The trio’s long, rancorous battle with Def Jam would finally be resolved before year’s end. The Beastie Boys agreed to forego the royalties they had earned, to that point, from
Licensed to Ill
, and Def Jam relinquished its claim to the
group. Some believed Def Jam had also received points on
Paul’s Boutique
in the deal. In any event, the Beasties were officially free of Russell Simmons.

For all the problems it had faced in the marketplace,
Paul’s Boutique
had at least not had to compete with an album of Beasties’ outtakes Simmons had been threatening to release for the past year. Provisionally titled
White House
, the record was at times rumored to have been produced by Public Enemy’s Chuck D. At others, it was to have been comprised of “vocal tracks sampled into house music,” as Yauch told
LA. Weekly
. “I can’t even figure out what [Simmons is] using … all he has is a couple of lines or some shit.”

The group remained convinced the project was a sham. “You wanna know where the album is?” Mike D asked
Melody Maker’s
Ted Mico. “It’s up here in Russell’s head.” Leyla Turkkan, who remains a close friend of Simmons, concurs, calling the alleged collection “bullshit. That wasn’t true.”

Meanwhile, even after the sales debacle of
Paul’s Boutique
, the band still attempted to work the record behind the scenes. A total of four videos would be shot—Yauch would later say it had been his goal to make a video for every song on the disc—but Capitol, once bitten, was twice shy.

“They had two videos and they wouldn’t put them out. Finally, after a long time we got a meeting with the president guy and we’re saying, ‘Come on, man, give us a break, we did a lot of work on this,’” Horovitz would later say, recalling a discussion with David Berman’s successor, Hale Milgrim. “He said, ‘Well, you know guys, there’s so much work on at the moment, we’ve got a new Donny Osmond record coming out. Next time …’ We said, ‘What does next time mean?’ He just said, ‘Well, you know … next time.’”

“You don’t feel very good coming out of that meeting,” says Diamond, simply. “We were just frustrated.”

Years later, Yauch would tell MTV, “I remember being very surprised that the album didn’t do any better than it did when it first came out because I think it was just so much of a better record than
Licensed to Ill
, but … you never know.” Matt Dike, who felt responsible for the album’s failure and fretted that “I buried these guys!,” recalls a more visceral reaction: “They were completely disillusioned.”

In 1994, a far more successful band would look back on its ultimate prank more fondly. “We just pushed [Capitol] to the absolute limit you could possibly push a record label. And all of this with them having the expectation that they were going to sell a lot of records,” Horovitz would cackle, before an even more enthusiastic Mike D added, “And then, and then—the best fuckin’ part, after we’d spent all this money playing Ping-Pong, the record did not even sell anything!”

Such pleasant thoughts had to sustain the Beastie Boys during the two years of hibernation that followed
Paul’s Boutique
. At that moment, it seemed their greatest joke might be their last.

* * *

Tim Carr returned to New York in the spring of 1990, his money depleted and the past dream summer gone wrong still heavy on his mind. One day, he happened to visit the Russian bathhouse where he had first encountered Russell Simmons, during headier times. And by chance, when Carr put on his towel and entered the steam room, he found himself
once again seated next to the Def Jam impresario.

Simmons surveyed him through the mist, evidently deciding that his former adversary was now deserving of pity.

“Man,” Simmons said finally, shaking his head, “even I coulda done better with that record.”

For several reasons, the following section does not come close to being a definitive guide to the samples used to construct
Paul’s Boutique
. The first reason is the practical matter of space. The second, as mentioned in Chapter One, is that the album’s creators are reluctant to talk about some of the samples, particularly borrowings that have not yet been widely identified. And finally, the men who made
Paul’s Boutique
can simply no longer remember every sample that appears on the album—if, indeed, they ever could.

“There must be some dust-covered list of all those samples somewhere,” says Michael Diamond hopefully. Until it surfaces, however, there are several excellent Web sites that minutely detail a great deal of the album’s samples and references. Two of the best resources are
www.beastiemania.com
and
www.moire.com/beastieboys/samples/index.php
, which is dedicated solely to an examination of
Paul’s Boutique
. Annotated lyrics can also be found at
http://beastieboysannotated.com/paul.htm
.

In addition to the fifteen songs from
Paul’s Boutique
, this chapter covers six non-LP remixes and outtakes from the same era; most have interesting—or sometimes just ridiculous—stories of their own.

It says something about the complexities of
Paul’s Boutique—
or at least, something about its creators’ penchant for pranks—that even some of the slightest tracks have back stories worth recounting. One example is the opening tune, an apparently straightforward creation. Over the moody introduction to jazz drummer Idris Muhammed’s 1974 song “Loran’s Dance,” Adam Yauch murmurs a dedication to women all over the world, his simple lyrics buoyed by clouds of electric piano from keyboardist Bob James.

The idea for the new track originated with Yauch, acknowledged as the Beasties’ ladies’ man. In a 1998
Spin
retrospective, no less a sex symbol than Madonna shared a hazy memory of making out with MCA backstage during the Virgin Tour, while road manager Sean Carasov calculated that Yauch, thanks to his “swarthy George Michael thing,” attracted the most “fly girlies” of the three Beasties. By the time of
Paul’s Boutique
, Yauch’s stubble had become a full beard, but, as Mike D pointed out, “if you read
Ms
. magazine … a lot of women these days are attracted to facial hair.”

However, Yauch hadn’t found the proper backing for this tribute until Matt Dike cued up “Loran’s Dance” one afternoon. “Yauch just said, ‘That’s the one!,’” recalls Mike Simpson. His bandmates agreed, says Dike: “They were like,
‘Oh my God—we gotta do a Barry White over this!’”

“To All the Girls,” a simple needle drop, was assembled quickly. However, the painstakingly long fade-in—the song doesn’t reach maximum volume until about 1:10—was no accident. “I think Yauch wanted people to keep turning up the volume, so they would think something was wrong with their stereo,” says Simpson. “And then it would finally kick in, and just blow up their speakers.”

The Beasties and their conspirators would test this theory while mastering
Paul’s Boutique
. “There were these massive speakers, and everyone at Masterdisk was so proud of this room,” remembers Simpson. “And sure enough, the song worked like a charm: The record starts, the engineer could barely hear it, he turns it up, you could still barely hear it—he turns it up more … BOOM! The bass note kicks in, and tiles fall from the ceiling. It was incredible.”

As a further in-joke, the title alludes to Willie Nelson’s treacly 1984 duet with Julio Iglesias, “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before,” which has inspired more than its fair share of parodies. But Yauch’s shout-outs to girls from Brooklyn and “nubiles” from the Upper East Side are more than a Lotharian goof. They immediately affirm what is suggested by the cover’s panorama:
Paul’s Boutique
has the Big Apple beating as its heart.

Then the meditative calm is shattered by a tom-tom fill poached from yet another fusion drummer, Alphonse Mouzon, and the party begins in earnest. Originally titled “Full Clout,” this song was renamed after a line from hiphop
pioneer Afrika Bambaataa, who growled it in “Unity Part 2 (Because It’s Coming),” part of a 1984 collaboration with James Brown. But the bulk of “Shake Your Rump” is borrowed from several disco-era recordings, making it—musically, at least—the best example of the retro aesthetic that initially confused so many listeners.

With at least a dozen samples, it is also one of the most complex songs on
Paul’s Boutique
. And, like the album’s best tracks, the painstakingly matched rhythms and riffs create the illusion that this is all one solid slice of vintage soul.

The arresting rhythm guitar lick comes courtesy of Ronnie Laws’s 1975 cover of Stevie Wonder’s “Tell Me Something Good.” A second riff, which debuts at 2:10, is nicked from the soundtrack to
Car Wash
, as is the tune’s most ear-catching ingredient: the unbelievably fat Moog bassline that begins Rose Royce’s “6 O’Clock Rock.” On that brief instrumental, the sound is a throwaway; chopped up and reassembled, it made “Shake Your Rump” sound both reassuringly old and shockingly new in the bland, digital summer of ’89, and is one of the album’s best recycling jobs.

The song’s exuberant atmosphere carried over into the studio, a frequent hangout for the Beasties’ LA entourage. “Very often in the studio it would just end up being a party. So for that one, I remember at one point there were probably twenty people in the vocal booth doing these gang vocals,” Mike Simpson recalls. However, it was the Record Plant’s security guard who was drafted at the last minute to ask Mike D to identify himself. And the most famous element—the mid-song bong hit—was suggested and supplied by Matt Dike. “The funny thing is,” he says, “I heard bong hit sounds on fifty other CDs after that.”