Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique (14 page)

It also ushered in the collective midlife crisis of the baby boomers. Woodstock would celebrate its twentieth anniversary that summer; the resultant concert, which attracted few big names and less than a tenth of the original audience, underscored for some the erosion of sixties idealism. That fall, 40-year-old Billy Joel would have a number one hit with “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” a half-rapped litany of boomer history.

If that song was the backward-looking anthem of the baby boomers in 1989, defensive and anxious, then
Paul’s Boutique
was the yet-to-be-named Generation X’s more optimistic answer. The ironic thing was that the irony so many thought they heard often didn’t exist. Far from being a hipster joke, the album’s vintage source material was genuinely loved by its creators. “Things like
Car Wash …
I never stopped listening to that stuff,” says Mike Simpson. “All the records we sampled were records from my record collection. We weren’t crate digging, going out and trying to find this stuff.”

The gag-filled circumstances of its creation aside, the Beastie Boys also faced personal upheavals during the making of
Paul’s Boutique;
the ongoing lawsuit with Def Jam, the public doubts about the band’s viability, the lingering backlash from
Licensed to Ill
. Was it any wonder the album so often returned—consciously or not—to less complicated memories? Saturday morning cartoons and sitcom reruns; the disco sounds of grade-school days; rare old hip-hop singles; and, of course, the city the trio loved but had publicly departed under a cloud. “Nostalgia is a longing for home,” Svedana Boym writes, “that no longer exists or has never
existed.” In the 20th century, that longing, she adds, quoting historians Jean Starobinski and Michael Roth, had “shrunk to the longing for one’s childhood.”

That longing has also given
Paul’s Boutique
its most widespread influence, one which extends far beyond popular music. In 1989, as Adam Yauch later pointed out, pining for the seventies—an era of supposed bad taste—seemed embarrassing. “It could be that … people were kinda cringing when they saw this,” he admitted, while watching the video for “Hey Ladies.” However, the album and its aesthetic would spearhead a “Me Decade” revival that continues to this day.

In 1997,
Village Voice
nightlife columnist Michael Musto would note that “the seventies revival has been going on in clubs nonstop for the last ten years.” The British duo S-Express would even sample Rose Royce’s “Is It Love You’re After” on the 1988 hit “Theme From S-Express.” Yet no single event would jog America’s memory quite as vividly as the “Hey Ladies” video, which helped sink an album, but sparked a retro revolution.

“Because of the very banality and mindlessness of so much seventies culture,” contended author Josh Ozersky in 2000, “we are free to project a childish innocence onto it.” Perhaps the widely familiar cultural references of
Paul’s Boutique
are indeed banal, but the innocence of those names, images and sounds has helped keep the album peculiarly ageless, its collages reminiscent of past eras, but fixed in none.

* * *

“I never felt like I knew less, and I have never been more confused about what’s going on,” Mike D told
Village Noize
in 1990. He was talking about movies, but it’s easy to read more than that into the statement. The confusion created by
Paul’s Boutique
would be resolved—at the band’s record label first. It would turn out to be one of the most shortsighted house cleanings in music history.

Tim Carr finally returned from his Asian backpacking trek in the autumn of 1989 to learn that David Berman and Capitol’s entire A&R staff had been dismissed. Joe Smith, Carr says, had disparaged Tom Whalley and his staff as “A&R run riot. The music business is about hits, not Skinny Puppy or the Cocteau Twins!”

Unfortunately, at the time he was sacked, Whalley was in the process of signing Compton rappers N.W.A. He would take the unfinished deal with him to Interscope Records—along with Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg and a familial line of multiplatinum hip-hop acts that included Tupac Shakur, Eminem and 50 Cent. Capitol’s efforts at becoming a major player in the urban music field have never recovered.

“It was as if,” Carr dryly observes, “NBC cancelled ‘Friends’ the first season.”

* * *

Never officially dismissed from Capitol—he simply didn’t return—Carr turned up six months later at Warner Brothers Records. When he interviewed for the job, he visited the Beastie Boys at what would become their G-Son studio at Atwater Village in Los Angeles.

“Yauch said to me, ‘We wanna do an instrumental
record.’ I said, ‘Great, everyone’s so tired of those adenoidal, nasal voices anyway. It’d be so much better if you guys just did an instrumental record.’” says Carr. “And all of a sudden he gets it, and he’s like, ‘Yo, you motherfucker!’”

That proposed instrumental record would become
Check Your Head
, which would save the Beasties. The band had used the last of its Capitol advance to build a studio, outfitted with a half-pipe and basketball court, and would retreat to this virtual clubhouse to record hundreds of hours of jams during 1990 and 1991, trying to recreate the sampled grooves of
Paul’s Boutique
. “We all love to play and switch instruments, so it was cool,” says Mario Caldato, who would helm the informal sessions.

The resultant mixture of hip-hop, funk and a return to the band’s punk roots seemed uncommercial enough, but Capitol would soon have been rid of the Beasties anyway, following this second album of a two-record deal. “There really wasn’t much expected of us,” Mike D would later say.
“Check Your Head
was going to be our last cigarette.”

That final smoke would unexpectedly catch fire during the spring and summer of 1992. The label employed a patient grassroots marketing campaign that was particularly effective in reaching the growing “alternative” market, and sent the album into the top ten. A full-fledged tour followed, and suddenly Capitol had the stars it thought it had purchased four years earlier.

* * *

The Beastie Boys were on the way up again, but the Dust Brothers and Matt Dike weren’t along for the ride. The
three-way partnership between King, Simpson and Dike had faded after
Paul’s Boutique
, while Dike and Mike Ross would fall out; the label survived, but Delicious Vinyl’s short run as the West Coast answer to Def Jam was over.

Despite the poor commercial showing of
Paul’s Boutique
, Mike Simpson still felt certain he and John King would work with the Beastie Boys again. That the call never came “was just kind of surprising,” he says, still sounding baffled. “Once the record came out, we basically never heard from them again.”

He struggles to explain the end of the collaboration. “I don’t know if this is true or not … but we got a lot of the credit for
Paul’s Boutique
. And on some level, they may have wanted to get away from us, and say, ‘Hey, we’re the talent here.’ And they are. But I’m sure they wanted to prove they could do it themselves.”

John King’s take is slightly different. “After the album was done, we got exposed to the business side of the music industry, and being new to it all, had idealistic views of how things worked. We felt like we were being treated unfairly, but really we weren’t,” he contends. “It’s too bad, because I think that created a rift—if not mutually—at least from our side.”

The Dust Brothers would nonetheless prosper. They produced the massive bubblegum hit “MMMBop” for the teenaged sibling trio Hanson in 1997, and lent their skills and credibility to the Rolling Stones on that year’s
Bridges to Babylon
. But it was their collaboration with a Silver Lake neighbor, Beck Hansen, that produced the collection now viewed as the logical successor to
Paul’s Boutique
.

Nowhere near as sample-heavy as that album, Beck’s
Odelay
nonetheless boasted the same multigenre bouillabaisse. This time, though, the public was ready for it; the disc not only erased Beck’s reputation as a one-hit “Loser,” it won a pair of Grammys. The partnership was so successful, Simpson says, because “at the end of the day, my best work comes from turning samples into songs. And often when successful people have hired us, I wasn’t hired to do what I do best.”

“So when it came to doing
Odelay
with Beck, he really recognized, ‘Okay, this is what these guys do. Let me use them to their fullest.’ Very similar to the way we did it with the Beastie Boys, except that Beck was a lot more involved musically.”

In 2004, the Dust Brothers rekindled their relationships with both Beck and the Beastie Boys. Simpson and King joined Beck to make
Guero
, while Simpson and Mario Caldato would help remix the Beasties’ single “An Open Letter to NYC.” Also joining in, unexpectedly, was Matt Dike. The
Paul’s Boutique
team had nearly come full circle, at last.

* * *

The old axiom about the Velvet Underground’s first album was that it might have sold modestly, but inspired anyone who bought it to start a band. Everyone who purchased
Paul’s Boutique
didn’t also buy a sampler, yet many people who did have made their own profound contributions to music history.

According to Russell Simmons, producer Eric B once claimed he could have created fifteen albums with the ideas
from
Paul’s Boutique
. Even the late Miles Davis reportedly once said he never tired of the record. Yet the crackdown on sampling that occurred soon afterward meant that the disc’s full influence would not be realized until years later, when a new generation of artists would craft even more dense soundscapes—DJ Shadow’s breathtaking debut,
… Endtroducing
, and the Avalanches’ own thrift-shop opus,
Since I Left You
, among them—from even more obscure source material.

Despite the public cold shoulder it first received from the hip-hop world,
Paul’s Boutique
became a touchstone for coundess rappers and producers, particularly in the fertile American underground. Otis Jackson Jr., better known as Madlib, would adopt the album’s musical MO and bong-friendly aesthetic on a series of acclaimed releases.

“I didn’t expect that record, but it’s one of my favorites.
Paul’s Boutique
inspired me to get all crazy with my beats—it just let me know you could do it,” says Madlib, adding with a chuckle, “‘Course, you gotta be sneaky about it nowadays.”

* * *

After being ahead of the game for so long, the Beasties found themselves perfectly aligned with the zeitgeist in 1994, thanks in no small part to the cultural wheels set in motion by
Paul’s Boutique
. Retro-chic, seventies funk, sampling, credible white rappers—all had gradually entered, or re-entered, the common lexicon after 1989. The recorded beneficiary of that trailblazing,
Ill Communication
, went to number one, the Beasties headlined Lollapalooza and Adam Yauch made millions aware of the plight of Tibetans
oppressed by communist China.

Following that peak, marriages, families and side projects began to intrude on the trio. Not only did they have to live up to their first three releases—each of which had helped redefine pop music—but they were competing with an image fueled by a bratty sense of humor they’d outgrown. Yet the Beasties’ mid-nineties renaissance had kept interest high in their back catalog, and
Paul’s Boutique
would be certified platinum before the decade ended, rediscovered as a classic by fans both old and new. As writers began compiling end-of-the-millennium best ofs, the once doomed disc became a fixture on such lists. Around that time, Tim Carr—then working at DreamWorks, now a resident of Bangkok—“stopped being Tim ‘Megadeth’ Carr and became Tim ‘Beastie Boys’ Carr,” he says with a grin. “So I guess at that point I felt vindicated.”

* * *

Long ago, John King shared a joint on the flagpole tower of the Capitol Records building, at the
Paul’s Boutique
release party, with Michael Diamond and Adam Yauch. A security guard forced them to come down, but King is reminded of that strange afternoon every day. “I can see that building from my house,” he says, “and I always tell my kids how I climbed up on the top.”

* * *

Because
Paul’s Boutique
was the product of such an unlikely set of circumstances, it is impossible not to wonder: what if
the Beastie Boys had never left Def Jam? The question has been asked numerous times over the years, but Mike D pauses to consider it anew.

“At the very best, we would have ended up with a compromise,” he says finally. “They would not have let us go to LA and work with some producers they’d never heard of, and stay out there forever. And we definitely couldn’t have gotten an air hockey table.”

* * *

The familiar-looking building on the corner of Rivington and Ludlow streets in New York City, is now a café called … Paul’s Boutique. What comes around, goes around.

* * *

“So once upon a time,” Tim Carr had said hours earlier, “there was a band called the Beastie Boys, and a kingdom called
Paul’s Boutique.”

That kingdom, somewhere between Oz and the Playboy Mansion, still exists, as close as a needle, a laser or a mouse click from entry, yet as impossible as ever to comprehend in its sprawling totality.

But there’s always the chance that one more journey will make everything clear, and even if it doesn’t, there are no bad trips to the musical wonderland of
Paul’s Boutique
. Whether you’ve never been, or just returned an hour ago—what are you waiting for?

Unless otherwise indicated, all quotes are from interviews conducted by the author between January and November 2005.

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