Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique (11 page)

It hadn’t started out that way. When the Beasties had
given Matt Dike and the Dust Brothers carte blanche to sample anything their hearts desired, Dike first indulged by lifting Ringo Starr’s drums from the reprise of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” and coupled them with the two-chord guitar riff of “The End,” scratched in by Mike Simpson. This pair of Beatles samples made for a straightforwardly catchy backing track, one that Simpson was sure had hit potential. “If you didn’t get all the other wacky stuff we were doing,” he says, “you might get this one.”

The Dust Brothers, Simpson admits, were not Beatles fans. “It was more that they had these amazing breaks on their records,” he says. And once one Beatles sample was in the mix, “it was like, ‘Shit, there’s so much great stuff to take from them. Why stop here?’” Thus, “The Sounds of Science” would gain a new, and stranger, life, as the Paul McCartney ditty “When I’m 64” was slowed down considerably by Simpson and King and became the tune’s opening; the two sections were linked with the orchestral tuning heard at the beginning of
Sgt. Pepper’s.
³²

Lyrically, “The Sounds of Science” is perhaps the most far ranging of any song on
Paul’s Boutique
, beginning high-mindedly in the lab before MCA, out of the blue, compares himself to the crucified Christ. This would one day become standard practice for the MC persecuted by “haters” or the
police, who often affronted the hip-hop community by arresting its stars for actual crimes. Yauch’s reference, however, suggests the aftereffects of the media scrutiny the Beasties had endured during the
Licensed to Ill era
. Even more likely, it was simply an attempt to rile folks up, a habit Yauch and his bandmates had not yet abandoned.

In the same vein are the verses that begin the second section of the song, as puerile a description of a sexual encounter as any mentioned on the first album. And Ad-Rock throws another curve by alleging police were behind the crack epidemic then raging in urban communities. Reinforced in “Car Thief,” where the Beasties brag about scoring weed from the local cop, this theory was coming to the fore in hip-hop, most prominently in Boogie Down Productions’ 1988 song “Illegal Business.”

“The Sounds of Science” would later lend its name to the Beasties’ anthology (which did not, however, include the title song). Part of the band’s live set for a few years, the tune has been on mothballs since the second Tibetan Freedom Concert in 1997.

The first of two Adam Yauch basslines to make the album forms the bedrock of “3-Minute Rule.” Paired with a treated drum loop from the seventies funk-rock group Fancy’s “Feel Good” (and not, as is sometimes claimed, “Take the Money and Run” by Steve Miller), Yauch’s riff drives a series of verses that encompass nearly all the Beasties’ major concerns on
Paul’s Boutique
.

The boys reference vintage TV favorites from “Our
Gang” to “Dragnet” to “Three’s Company”; slyly salute disparate musical inspirations (John Fogerty and George Clinton); compare themselves to a Big Apple sports team (the Yankees); bemoan their bad reputation while also threatening gunplay; and of course, make pit stops for girls and weed. The rhymes never reach the level of the two most famous writers cited—Jack Kerouac and Bob Dylan, who both had a better knack for such breakneck lyrical bric-a-brac—but they do provide an effective three-minute Cliff’s Notes version of the disc.

The most intriguing couplets, however, belong to Adam Horovitz. The female object of his ire is not identified, but the references to her agent and promotional glossies suggest his sneering rhymes may have been directed to an actress girlfriend. Matt Dike concurs, noting, “They were really disgusted with a lot of these Hollywood chicks.”

“As to why this became the first single,” Mike D would say of “Hey Ladies” years later, “… your guess is as good as mine.”

The question is certainly valid, especially given the tune’s weak chart performance. But its density aside—and with no fewer than 16 samples and an equal number of pop-cultural references in the lyrics, it is the album’s most complex song—“Hey Ladies” made a certain commercial sense. One reason is its catchiness; the rhythm guitar lick from the breakdown of the Commodores’ instrumental “Machine Gun” provides a simple and solid foundation for the track’s wide reaching collage. Yet the tune can also be argued as single
-worthy when considered alongside the trends of the moment.

In the summer of 1989, the swinging triplet-powered rhythm that powered “Hey Ladies” was nearly inescapable. Led by Bobby Brown, new jack swing remained urban music’s hottest offshoot; the influence of Britain’s acid house movement was beginning to make its way across the Atlantic, in mongrel fashion, via the group Soul II Soul; and even go-go, which had already missed the big time in the mid-eighties, was making a last-ditch attempt at wider acclaim, thanks to the huge 1988 success of E.U.’s “Da Butt.”

Go-go would also play a role in “Hey Ladies,” thanks to the Kurtis Blow sample from “Party Time” that gave the song its title. The tune’s other signature element, its cowbell, came from “Come Let Me Love You,” a 1981 club favorite by Jeanette “Lady” Day. And the presence of both samples points to something interesting about the
Paul’s Boutique
aesthetic.

While its Adam Bernstein–directed video, with its mirror ball, pimp suits and blaxploitation references, forever stamped “Hey Ladies” as a seventies pastiche, the fact is that such a title more properly belongs to “Shake Your Rump,” which draws much of its musical inspiration from disco-era touchstones. “Hey Ladies,” on the other hand, actually features more samples from the eighties, including bites from early hip-hop hits by Afrika Bambaataa and the World Famous Supreme Team.

The album’s fond look back ends at around 1986, when the rhythmically uninventive and aurally sterile pop of Stock, Aitken, Waterman and various imitators became music’s dominant sound. But several samples from the early
years of the decade—before rich, analog sounds gave way to cold, digital replacements—figure prominently on
Paul’s Boutique
.

Only hip-hop, music’s beacon of creativity during the digital winter, remained a valid post-1986 sample source for the Dust Brothers; Public Enemy’s “You’re Gonna Get Yours” and “Bring the Noise,” a hit just the summer before, are both quoted in “Egg Man.” Which made sense; at a moment when hip-hop was being absorbed into the musical mainstream,
Paul’s Boutique
represented, as writer Angus Batey contended, a trip “back to the roots of hip-hop music in an attempt to find the inspiration needed to move the art form forward.”

The inspiration for “Hey Ladies” came not in the studio, but during one of Matt Dike’s weekly DJ sets. The Beasties, he recalls, would frequently come clubbing to get ideas from his dancefloor mixes. “That’s how a lot of those hooks developed,” he says, “and then we’d put it down the next day.” One night, when Adam Horovitz heard Dike juxtapose “Party Time” with the “Get funky!” chant from the Supreme Team’s “Hey DJ,” “he said, Aw, man, this’d be great!’”

For some reason, Capitol Records decided to market “Hey Ladies” with a unique promotional tool: a gold cowbell emblazoned with the song title. This gimmick surprisingly failed to send the single to number one, but the cowbells have become sought after collector’s items. Equally odd is that while “Hey Ladies” was one of the handful of tracks slated for live performances in 1989, it has apparently never been attempted in concert since.

An Ad-Rock suggestion, according to Mike Simpson, that begins Side Two with an unexpected burst of Beastie yee-haws and hillbilly rowdiness. “5-Piece Chicken Dinner” is simply a needle drop onto Eric Weissberg’s version of the banjo feature “Shuckin’ the Corn,” which wound up as part of the soundtrack for
Deliverance
. The most notable (and original) thing about these 23 seconds is the title, one of the best jokes on an album full of good ones.

How, after hearing whatever
Paul’s Boutique
demos were circulated, could Capitol executives have possibly thought they were getting another
Licensed to Ill?
This track might provide a partial, if ultimately unconvincing, answer. “Looking Down the Barrel of a Gun” is the one tune similar in style to the hugely successful rap-metal of the Beasties’ debut; it is, in fact, a funkier, more sophisticated doppelganger of the first album’s “Rhymin’ and Stealin’.”

The thunderous drum sample comes courtesy of the Incredible Bongo Band, a jazz-funk ensemble led by MGM Records executive Michael Viner. The group had long been a favorite of breakbeat aficionados, thanks to a 1973 cover of “Apache” that became an essential building block of hip-hop. But there was plenty of other sample-worthy material on the Bongo Band’s two albums, including “Last Bongo in Belgium.” Mike Simpson remembers this beat had been stored in the Dust Brothers’ sampler for some time, “long before we met the Beasties,” waiting for the right opportunity
to use it.

That chance came one day when Dike was experimenting by scratching the chiming clock from Pink Floyd’s “Time” atop the “Last Bongo” drum loop. “Yauch said, ‘Hey, I’ve got this bassline,’” says Dike, “and that started it.” The song features two segments of drumming—with and without a phase effect applied—which are slowed down to add a John Bonham-esque weight. The result, when combined with Horovitz’s metallic guitar riff and Yauch’s heavily treated bass, is suitably Led-en.

It is also the song cited most frequently by reviewers to demonstrate that the Beasties were dangerously antisocial, thanks to its pair of
A Clockwork Orange
references and a mention of David Berkowitz, aka the murderous Son of Sam. Yet there is also a more personal, and ultimately more poignant, name-check: of Horovitz’s best friend Dave Scilken, who made a cameo in the song’s video, but would die of a drug overdose in 1991.

If Capitol executives ever believed this tune might recapture some of
Licensed to Ill’s
multiplatinum luster, that impulse was apparently short-lived. By 1991, Beasties fan Catherine Lincoln had become the label’s product manager, and she tried to generate interest in releasing “Looking Down the Barrel of a Gun” as a single. “But no one wanted to deal with a record that was over two years old,” she told the Web site
Beastiemania.com
. A low-budget, abstract promotional clip already existed for the song, although, as director Adam Yauch later noted, it was “another one of the videos that was made without Capitol’s interest or incentive.”

While never released as a 45, the tune did enjoy a brief
second life in a cover version performed by Anthrax for the 1993 compilation album
The Beams and Butt-Head Experience
. Somewhat ironically, since it is far and away the song on
Paul’s Boutique
with the most live instrumentation, “Looking Down the Barrel of a Gun” featured only briefly in the Beasties’ concert repertoire, and to date, has not been performed for more than a decade.

It couldn’t pass for a
Licensed to Ill
outtake, but “Car Thief” may provide another clue as to why Capitol was so mistaken in its assumptions about
Paul’s Boutique
.

Musically, the song would change little from its inception. Written after the Dust Brothers had purchased their first sampler, “Car Thief” makes liberal use of the 1975 cut “Rien Ne Va Plus,” the standout composition of the Polish-American fusion band Funk Factory. That tune’s samples were sped up and a guitar lick from Funkadelic’s 1970 freak-out “I Bet You” was grafted to the bridges, creating a simple but effective piece of work, its somewhat stiff drum programming notwithstanding. (The synth whooshes, meanwhile, came courtesy of an early computer soundcard that John King’s father had brought home from his job at IBM.)

But the lyrics were altered significantly between the demo stage and finished product, and an early bootleg shows “Car Thief” was a far nastier piece of business as originally envisioned. With references to discovering a set of car keys in a somewhat unlikely orifice, golden showers and Ad-Rock’s claim, “I be jerkin’ off with my head in a noose,”
the track was more deliberately offensive than anything on the band’s debut. If this was indeed the version shopped to executives at Capitol and MCA, it must have seemed the Beasties were out to top the excesses of
Licensed to Ill
, not escape them.
³³

Yet the “Car Thief” of the title is simply an MC biting another’s rhymes, and not further proof of the Beasties’ delinquency. And the scenes of drug abuse and violence that made the final cut are less interesting than the more subtle touches sprinkled throughout the track, such as the reference to David Bowie’s seventies cocaine jones.

Most notable is the verse about the “money-hungry miser” whom the band had to deal with (punch in the face, on the demo). This presumed mention of Russell Simmons, however, was only a small part of a long and complex love-hate relationship often played out in public.

When the band’s legal battle with Def Jam began, the Beasties would sometimes run when they saw Simmons coming. And as late as 1994’s “B-Boy Makin’ With the Freak Freak,” the group was still making unflattering references to Simmons in song—in that case, rather directly accusing him of theft.

Yet Mike Simpson found himself surprised at the lack of animosity displayed by the Beasties toward their old boss. “Whenever they talked about Russell or Rick [Rubin], there was this fondness. Despite whatever issues they may have been having, they really seemed to like those guys, and were just kinda bummed that things didn’t work out.” There was
a reason for this, thought Sean Carasov: Simmons had played the good cop to Lyor Cohen’s bad one during the split. Regardless of the feuding, Simmons once agreed to an interview in the Beasties’ magazine,
Grand Royal
, and devoted a generally favorable section of his 2001 autobiography to the band. On many occasions, Simmons has also acknowledged his mistakes in dealing with the Beasties.