Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique (12 page)

The group’s relationship with Cohen, meanwhile, is another matter. “But,” says Carasov, “Lyor always used to revel in the role of villain.”

If there is a morality tale on
Paul’s Boutique
, as some critics wanted to believe, then “What Comes Around” is as good a choice as any for the honor. As befits the cut-and-paste style of the Beasties’ lyrics throughout the album, the song isn’t a coherent examination of any social ill, but does boast the disc’s most cutting couplet—a reference to the 1988 skinhead brawl on Geraldo Rivera’s television talk show—and a few incisive lines that seem to reference domestic violence.

However, the tune has a much lighter side as well. It closes with what
Rolling Stone
called “a wild Beastie version of scat humming,” a tribute to one of the band’s Los Angeles friends—Pam Turbov, the “Funky Pam” of the fade-out. “I just walked into the studio one day, and they start freestyling and saying ‘Funky Pam,’ and it ends up on the record,” recalls Turbov. “Pretty cool.”

According to Mike Simpson, such ad-libs reflect the way the album was created. “Doing the vocals, nothing was ever really planned out,” he says. “The guys never just came in
and said, ‘OK, we have a song written. Let’s record it!’” It was always a work in progress, and they would all come in with their own lyrics. And then they would trade off—sometimes they would all do all the lyrics together, sometimes we would just punch out track-by-track, each one of ’em.”

“So if it sounds like it was just made up in the studio,” Simpson adds with a laugh, “it was.”

The backing track is one of the simplest on
Paul’s Boutique
. Bass, drums and guitar—as well as the jaunty piano phrase that ends each verse—were all drawn by Matt Dike from “Put on Train,” a 1971 soul-jazz recording by the late pianist Gene Harris and his group, the Three Sounds. Complementing this sample is the opening guitar lick of Alice Cooper’s “It’s Hot Tonight,” which conveniently happens to be in the same approximate key. A drum fill from “Moby Dick,” by old Beastie favorites Led Zeppelin, opens the song and is the other significant element.

The most important track on
Paul’s Boutique
does not reveal itself until midway through Side Two. Although it boasts its share of samples, “Shadrach” is actually one of the disc’s least complicated assemblages; it’s based on large pieces of Sly and the Family Stone’s 1974 single “Loose Booty,” which also provides the chant of “Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego” that inspired its title. The dizzying collage comes via the verses, packed with more allusions per square inch than any other song here; from Harry S. Truman to Alfred E. Neuman, this is the tune
Time
magazine’s Emily Mitchell doubtless had in mind when she suggested the album
dropped “almost enough names to rival Andy Warhol’s diaries.”

Yet despite all that pop culture flotsam and jetsam, “Shadrach” benefits from a underlying and straightforward message. For all the previous depictions of the Beastie Boys as the Three Horsemen of the Apocalypse, this was their true declaration of independence.

Longtime Beasties friend Cey Adams calls the
Paul’s Boutique
era “the wildest period of their career.” That, he explains, is not merely because of the Beasties’ exploits, but because it represented their first taste of real freedom. “They had to answer to Russell [Simmons], who had been managing them, and Rick [Rubin] at the label.” And, as representatives of Def Jam, “they had to answer to the hip-hop community at large.” Finally on their own—and royally pissed about their past treatment—the trio used their exhilaration and (self-)righteous anger to create an anthem of empowerment. “They tell us what to do? Hell no! / Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego” isn’t “Anarchy in the UK,” quite, but it’s as punk rock a moment as anything in the Beastie Boys catalog.
³⁴

Recalled by Adam Horovitz as one of the last tracks recorded, “Shadrach” fuses the horns and bassline of “Loose Booty” with the urgent drum lick from the opening of “Hot and Nasty” by Southern raunch-and-rollers Black Oak Arkansas—one of the cross-genre collisions Matt Dike “just loved.” However, it was the names recited in “Loose
Booty” that fascinated Adam Yauch, who was then spending lots of time “taking acid and reading the Bible,” according to his girlfriend, Lisa Ann Cabasa. “I think Yauch had a lot of discoveries during the making of
Paul’s Boutique”
suggests Mike Simpson.
³⁵

What Yauch discovered in this instance was the story of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, who appear in the third book of Daniel. The three young Jewish men who oversaw the province of Babylon ignored a decree from King Nebuchadnezzar commanding his subjects to “fall down and worship” his golden image “at the sound of the horn, flute, zither, lyre, harp, pipes and all kinds of music.” The penalty for refusal was to be thrown into a blazing furnace, but after the king had ordered the trio incinerated, he was amazed to see four men walking unharmed in the flames. The fourth figure, Nebuchadnezzar concluded, was an angel, and after the trio emerged from the furnace, the chastened king ordered his subjects to serve the Jewish God, “for no other god can save in this way.”

The parallel to the Beasties’ own refusal to bow down to Russell Simmons and Def Jam was hardly exact. Horovitz, Diamond and Yauch, as the song states, might have seen themselves as Robin Hood figures, and might even have quoted from “Amazing Grace” and repeated the gospel beatitude that the meek shall inherit the Earth. But they
most likely weren’t including themselves among that number; as the lyrics make clear, they were mostly interested in smoking dope, creating their own religion and serving no one but themselves. Still, the tale behind “Shadrach” was simply too good not to use, and the Beasties would evoke their biblical counterparts when discussing the song. “What happened was that they didn’t get paid by their former record company, so they went to Capitol,” Yauch told
Melody Maker
. “The story has a good ending.”

The choice of “Shadrach” as the album’s second single turned out less well; the tune sank without a trace, despite a January 1990 performance on “Soul Train” and a stunning video. The basis of the clip is black-and-white footage of the Beastie Boys and DJ Hurricane performing the song at the Country Club in Reseda, sometime in September following the album’s release. However, rotoscope animation—a technique that allows filmmakers to turn live action into animated sequences by tracing over the original footage, frame by frame—was used to transform the concert shots into something special. Rotoscoping dated back to 1915 and had been used seventy years later to great effect in the music video for a-ha’s “Take on Me.” A team of about twenty painters hand-tinted the tracings of the Beastie Boys; the result was an explosion of color and movement that looked like a LeRoy Neiman painting come to life.

“It…symbolizes where the three of us are now, and where we’re going tomorrow,” Mike D said of “Shadrach” in 1989. Given the creative independence the song celebrates—something that would earn the group greater commercial success on its next album,
Check Your Head
—he was probably more right than he realized.

Yet another apparent throwaway with a larger story, this is the radio ad that gave
Paul’s Boutique
its name. It was a last-minute addition to the album, sneaking in during sequencing, says Mario Caldato, who was jokingly listed as the song’s producer.

The ad contained the purported phone number of Paul’s Boutique, which guaranteed quite a few calls from curious fans. One was apparently a Cincinnati man named Allen Silvey, who claimed to have left numerous messages at the number. Silvey said he was later contacted by the band, seeking permission to use one of the messages, which he alleged became the introduction of “The Maestro” from
Check Your Head
.

The Beasties were certainly open to adding phone pranks to their arsenal. They victimized Mike Simpson in the original video for “Shake Your Rump,” running his home phone number underneath his photo in the clip. Before the number was replaced with Simpson’s zodiac sign, Libra, “I got tens of thousands of phone calls,” he remembers. “So I started saying, This is the EZ Mike fan club.’ And they’d be, like, ‘Cool! How do I join?’”

“I actually got several people to send me ten bucks,” says a still-incredulous Simpson, adding, “Of course, I sent the money back.”

Despite all the innovation that preceded it on
Paul’s Boutique
, “B-Boy Bouillabaisse” was the moment that marked the
Beastie Boys as Serious Artistes. It was a gesture almost guaranteed to appeal to critics still struggling to make sense of hip-hop and sampling, but who thought they could recognize the old-fashioned ambition of a Paul McCartney or a Pete Townshend when they heard it. A suite of nine unrelated pieces, it invites a pair of Beatles parallels: the composition mirrors the medley that dominates Side Two of
Abbey Road
, and the decision to close the album with a reprise of “To All the Girls” seems an obvious nod to the structure of
Sgt. Pepper’s
.

Except that it wasn’t, according to Michael Diamond. “We never thought that by doing the medley, all everyone would talk about for the next twenty years was the Beatles,” he jokingly laments. But was “B-Boy Bouillabaisse” a statement of artistic intent, or merely a way to collect some of the many “petri dish” experiments that had as yet gone unused? In the recollection of most participants, it was a little of both.

The driving force behind the suite, according to Mike Simpson, was Adam Yauch. “There were some shorter bits, like ‘Mike on the Mic.’ And I remember Yauch had a vision, way before the record was sequenced, of putting them together in a medley,” says Simpson. “I don’t know if he ever fully articulated it …. I never really understood it until I heard it.”

Simpson, however, has always believed
Paul’s Boutique
should be considered one long medley, and finds the focus on this twelve and a half minute segment much ado about nothing. “If it wasn’t called ‘B-Boy Bouillabaisse,’” he argues, “you wouldn’t know this part of the record was any different.” David Handelman of
Rolling Stone
picked up on
this idea, calling the entire disc “a rap opera, if you will.” Which makes this track an apt finale—the album in microcosm, as noted by author Angus Batey.

If the pieces of the suite have no obvious musical coherence, they do seem bound by a recurring Big Apple theme. There are overt references (the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens); associative links (several early hip-hop samples) and hipster trivia (Hawthorne Wingo, the popular ex-Knick from the early seventies). To consider it all an exclusive love letter to New York City is a reach, but the impression it leaves certainly has more to do with the Beasties’ East Coast roots than their West Coast future.

Built on a Burundi drum sample from Joni Mitchell’s “The Jungle Line,” “59 Chrystie Street” suggests a “Lola”-esque encounter with a groupie, but pays titular homage to the address of the Beasties’ old Chinatown loft. Rented in the early eighties, it allowed the fledgling group to practice well into the wee hours, as it was conveniently located atop a sweatshop and a brothel. During the Beasties’ 1989 guest appearance with Fab 5 Freddy on “Yo! MTV Raps,” they returned to Chinatown to revisit their old digs; they found the building, but had trouble locating the door.

Rhymed by Ad-Rock and MCA over a beat from old-school rapper Lovebug Starski’s 1983 single “Live at the Disco Fever”—the underrated Starski was once the DJ at this early hip-hop hot spot in the South Bronx, following
Grandmaster Flash—“Get on the Mic” is perhaps most notable for its contribution from another Mike. According to Mike Simpson, he suggested Yauch rhyme “selfish” with “shellfish”—surely the latter term’s hip-hop debut.

Usually overlooked because of its placement in the medley, this is an impressive and fully realized portrait of a late-night/early-morning subway ride. The bleary-eyed trip is sketched with arresting details: turnstile-hopping, hookers in spandex and the strange juxtaposition of crashing partygoers headed home and working stiffs headed out, with their morning papers, wing-tips and coffee. Only a casual reference to being shot by subway vigilante Bernard Goetz seems out of place against the vivid realism.

In a bit of third-hand larceny the following year, Vanilla Ice would use the same snippet from “Draw Your Brakes”—reggae singer Scotty’s contribution to the 1972 soundtrack of Jimmy Cliff’s
The Harder They Come
—in a song with the same title as the
Paul’s Boutique
composition.

Prior to
Paul’s Boutique
, Adam Yauch enjoyed a reputation as the Beastie prankster who would take a joke the farthest. Or, as Sean Carasov recalls it, “he was the biggest dick of all of ’em. He was the one who Russell [Simmons] would tell to piss in the shrimp at Beefsteak Charlies. You want someone to push a room service cart down six flights of stairs at the Hotel Daytona, Yauch’s your man. He was the biggest drinker, too—the other two were pot guys.”

Conversely, no band member seemed more affected by the fallout from
Licensed to Ill
.“‘Fight for Your Right’ became Yauch’s worst nightmare,” says Carasov. “So he went to the other extreme and became a monk.” And Yauch would contend, years later, that this solo performance—with its references to dreams, destiny and prophecy—marked the first stirrings of a spiritual life that would blossom to encompass a friendship with the Dalai Lama and a fervent dedication to the cause of Tibetan freedom.

To openly divulge such yearnings, of course, invited scorn, and Yauch was not then ready to risk it. He would point out to the Buddhist magazine
Shambhala Sun
in 1995 that “the lyrics to that song aren’t on the lyric sheet, and I’m using a real distorted mic, so it’s not really clear.” But perhaps the biggest bit of bet-hedging came when the track was buried in the middle of “B-Boy Bouillabaisse.” With a great melody and fuzz-guitar riff cribbed from the Isley Brothers’ “Who’s That Lady (Pts. I & II),” the tune had the obvious sound of a single.