by LeRoy, Dan
All this recreation, funded by Capitol, was helping the Beastie Boys recover the sanity lost during the last days of Licensed to Ill. But it was little wonder that the new album was taking shape at a less-than-frantic pace. Even the group’s afternoon writing sessions at the Mondrian, work “which involved a good deal of red wine and marijuana,” according to Mike Simpson, would soon become dominated by one of the Beasties’ favorite sports. “We noticed that every day at a certain time, people would line up outside the Comedy Store, which is right across the street. So, someone—I don’t know who—had the idea that it might be fun to throw eggs at these people. So it sort of became a daily ritual.”
“One night … there was a line of people waiting to see Billy Crystal. And the Beasties went up on the roof, and lobbed from across the street. So these things hit like boulders,” says Tim Carr. “And the Comedy Store called the Mondrian, and the Mondrian security and the police were there. And nobody was taking any blame for anything.”
The egging would spread to drive-by excursions throughout downtown Los Angeles, and it even inspired a new song, “Egg Man.” “There was a certain amount of research going into all these stunts,” Carr admits with a smile. “But they knew no bounds.”
The Mondrian staff would address the mounting disturbances in a “very politically correct letter” to the band. “It said that there were complaints of things falling out their window, and that if there was a problem with the window, they could have maintenance come up and address it,” recalls Simpson. “It was just hysterically funny.”
The man who would have to answer for the Beasties, Tim Carr, was beginning to disagree.
* * *
“It would be great, you know, if we could all just go to work every day and say, OK, we’re gonna work in the studio from one o’clock until dah-dah-dah, and we’re gonna finish the album in two months,” Michael Diamond would tell a radio interviewer in 1989. “But it never works like that …. You might go for two weeks and get one day of work done. But that one day of work is very special, for very special people like ourselves.”
It would be hard to better summarize the work habits of these very special people during the summer of 1988. The days ran together in Matt Dike’s sweltering apartment as the seven collaborators tried out new ideas and foreign substances. Not surprisingly, that combination lengthened the sessions appreciably. An insider recalls that Adam Yauch, who often took the creative lead, “would drive everyone bananas” with his suggestions. “He’d take mushrooms and say, ‘OK, let’s run the whole mix through a guitar stomp-box!’ And you’d think, ‘Will somebody fucking kill this guy?’” The band’s drug use, by rock-star standards, was fairly benign. “Wine and weed” were the primary vices, according to Mario Caldato, who not-quite-jokingly calls the group’s “friendly dealer, Hippie Steve,” a major influence on Paul’s Boutique. And to Ione Skye, the Beastie Boys’ smoking and ’shrooming seemed worlds away from the heroin nightmares surrounding her boyfriend Anthony Kiedis’s band, the Red Hot Chili Peppers. “It just seemed so much more fun, and less dark, around the Beasties,” she says.
Another observer from the time adds, “People ask, do drugs ever help you create art? I’d have to say, listen to Paul’s Boutique.”
Which was exactly what Tim Carr wanted to do. Unfortunately, he couldn’t. “Because they didn’t finish anything!” he recalls. “Still at this point, ‘Shake Your Rump’ and ‘Dust Joint’ were the best tracks. And it was just like, fuck it, what is going on here?”
Part of the problem was that the Beasties, free to find a new direction, were no longer sure what to write about. This, contends Diamond, was not a situation unique to Paul’s Boutique. “On every record we’ve had that. We sit down and we look at each other: ‘OK, what the fuck are we gonna say now?’” The dilemma this time, however, was pronounced enough that Matt Dike remembers: “We had to write some of the lyrics for those guys when they first came out here, because they had such writer’s block. I have some notebooks of things we suggested, just to get things moving.”
While he waited, Carr amused himself by browsing the collector’s fantasyland in Dike’s apartment. The half-million records were the centerpiece, but there was also plentiful seventies memorabilia, nestled alongside valuable paintings by the likes of Dike’s old boss, Jean-Michel Basquiat. “He just knew exactly what was the right stuff to have,” Carr says admiringly of Dike. “The coolest Ohio Players album cover next to a Haring, for example.”
That aesthetic, which dovetailed perfectly with the Beasties’ own retro leanings, would heavily inform Paul’s Boutique, as well as the band’s future business venture, Grand Royal. And Carr appreciated that something was going on amidst all the tokes and tokens of a bygone age. It was just hard to say what. “This beat would go into this beat, but you never knew what was gonna come out of it. The Beasties had notebooks and notebooks, but each page began a new rhyme,” Carr recalls. “The Dust Brothers were, like, splitting the atom. But it all existed as a thousand petri dishes.”
Because the band was recording at Matt Dike’s, with almost no real instruments, the potential savings were immense. But the Beasties were “still spending $30,000 to $40,000 a month,” Carr says, with no manager to help rein in the multiple excesses—like the rental cars Horovitz kept crashing “doing those ‘Streets of San Francisco’—type jumps, where you go over a hill and airborne,” remembers Donovan Leitch with a chuckle.
Carr was, he admits, having the time of his life. His Midwestern common sense, however, was tingling. “It really felt like a freight train running out of control, downhill, heading toward the wall. And there was nothing I could do to stop it.”
Yet the Dust Brothers, Dike and Caldato, who were pushing their equipment well past its boundaries, couldn’t go fast enough. When Paul’s Boutique was released, it became fashionable to compare the album to Sgt. Pepper’s because of its evident ambition and air of psychedelia. What few critics realized was another, more pertinent, parallel. Just as George Martin and the Beatles had taken four-track recording as far as it could go on their 1967 magnum opus, the team behind Paul’s Boutique was testing the absolute limits of still-embryonic technologies like computer recording and automation.
Looping and layering samples that synchronize perfectly has since become a simple task for anyone with a computer. In 1989, the process was laborious. “Basically, we would find a groove, and we would loop it, and then we would print that to tape, and we would just go for five minutes on one track of the tape,” Simpson recalls. “And then we would find another loop, and we would spend hours getting that second loop to sync up with the first loop, and then once we had it in sync, we would print that for five minutes on another track. And we would just load up the tape like that.
“And once we had filled up the tape with loops, we would go in, and Mario had this early, early, mixing board that had this very primitive form of automation. It was pretty complex, but if you knew which tracks you wanted playing at any given time, you typed the track numbers into this little Commodore computer hooked up to the mixing board. And each time you wanted a new track to come in, you’d have to type it in manually. It was just painful. It took so long. And there was so much trial and error … there was no visual interface to show you what was going on. That was the main difficulty we faced.”
The Dust Brothers’ secret weapon—“without it, we would not have been able to make records”—was a device called the J. L. Cooper PPS-1. It converted the two forms of time code commonly used by musicians, MIDI and SMPTE, back and forth; this electronic dialogue allowed loops to be synchronized to tape. Although crucial to their work, the Dust Brothers grew to hate the gadget. “It was a little piece of shit box that looked like it was made as a high school metal shop project,” Simpson says with some asperity. “And it wasn’t a thing that worked every time, either. It was a finicky little machine.”
While those struggles were taking place in the seedier part of Hollywood, there was also
unrest not far away within the Capitol Tower. In a harbinger of the music business’s turbulent, merger-happy nineties, the EMI Music Group—Capitol’s parent—had reached outside the industry in May 1988 and hired former General Mills executive Jim Fifield to head the company. The move would begin a new era of corporate accountability, in which “the suits” would assume greater control of decisions, and the bottom line would trump artistic considerations.
It was ominous news for Capitol executives David Berman and Joe Smith, then into the second, “prove-it” year of a three-year deal, and badly needing to justify their risky expenditure on the Beasties. Smith would set the label’s new agenda soon afterward: “Our careers, our salaries, our future, is ours to win or lose in this next year,” he told employees at Capitol’s 1988 annual convention. “I want you to leave here with a sense of urgency, a sense of intensity, a sense of determination, and even a little desperation.”
The A&R man who represented the only real link between Capitol and the Beastie Boys was feeling the desperation. At times, Carr simply adopted an if-you-can’t-beat-’em approach. Knowing the band’s fondness for egg-related jokes, he once bought dozens of the plastic egg-shaped containers that held L’Eggs pantyhose and filled them with Velveeta cheese, then booby-trapped the Beasties’ hotel rooms. But soon afterward, Carr received a forceful reminder that he was certainly not in his charges’ league as a prankster.
“They went to the afterparty of the MTV Music Awards, and they had Mario dressed as a security guard,” Carr remembers. “Then they found a stairwell with a balcony, and they went upstairs, and Mario wouldn’t let anybody in. So then it became this private party, inside the party, and people like Cyndi Lauper would come by and go, ‘What’s up there?’ And Mario would say, ‘The Beastie Boys are having a private party up there.’ And they’d say, ‘Can I go up there?’ And he’d say, ‘I don’t know. Are you on their list?’
“So then Arsenio Hall wants to come up, and Mike says, ‘See if you can borrow $100 from Arsenio, Mario.’ So Mario says, ‘I know this is weird, but Mike D wants to borrow $100. Would that be OK?’ And Arsenio looks around and goes, ‘Yo, man, you gotta be shittin’ me.’ And Mario goes, ‘I wish I was, but he’s pretty serious.’ So Arsenio gives $100 to Mario. Then afterwards, Mike comes down and talks to Arsenio, and Arsenio says, ‘What about that hundred?’ And Mike goes, ‘What hundred?’”14
Carr boarded a plane for New York the next day, still amazed at how the Beastie Boys had made fools of so many of their music industry peers. Whether he and Capitol were next on the list was something he tried to put out of his mind.
* * *
The G-Spot has entered Beastie Boys lore as the house that allowed them to indulge their deepest, darkest blaxploitation fantasies. It is imagined as a mansion-slash-museum of perfectly preserved seventies chic, which the band and its associates would thoughtlessly trash in orgy after Licensed to Ill—inspired orgy.
In fact, an argument can be made that the one-bedroom house on Torreyson Drive, owned by Alex and Marilyn Grasshoff, actually provided the Beastie Boys some much-needed stability at a time when Paul’s Boutique was threatening to get lost in a morass of recreational drug use and hotel bills. If nothing else, the $11,000 rent the band paid each month still beat the cost of three $200-a-night hotel rooms. “It never had occurred to us that you don’t have to live in a hotel,” admits Diamond with a laugh. “But I think we had all become more serious about thinking, ‘OK, we’ve gotta finish this record.’”
The property offered a view of all the major movie studios and the Griffith Observatory, while the band’s neighbors would have included actress Sharon Stone; the old Errol Flynn estate (later owned by singer Justin Timberlake), was close by on Mullholland Drive. A less glitzy, but still important, benefit was the large gold “G” on the front of the house, making the location’s new nickname both perfect and inevitable.
When they attempted to rent from the Grasshoffs, the Beasties’ reputation—for once—did not fully precede them. As Marilyn Grasshoff remembers it, “The agent didn’t tell us anything about the Beastie Boys. He said they were three young men who were writers.”
The Grasshoffs would soon learn the rest of the story. “When I said, ‘The Beastie Boys are living in my home,’ people said, ‘Oh my gosh, you let them in your home?!’ Because they had made this movie where they trashed this house,” says Mrs. Grasshoff. Once again, “Fight for Your Right (To Party)”—via its video—had come back to haunt the band. “And of course, I don’t watch those kinds of movies, so it made me a little nervous. Maybe we made a mistake.”
It was not as if the Grasshoffs were unworldly rubes. Alex Grasshoff was a producer and director who had helmed episodes of “The Rockford Files,” and “ChiPs,” as well as several films, including the Emmy-winning 1973 documentary Journey to the Outer Limits. His wife, better known under her stage name Madelyn Clark, owned a Los Angeles studio, which A-list musicians would often rent for tour rehearsals.
The couple, who traveled frequently, also had experience turning their home over to showbiz personalities. Actor Bill Murray had lived at the Grasshoffs’ in 1980 while playing gonzo writer Hunter S. Thompson in the film Where the Buffalo Roam. (Thompson himself stayed in the guesthouse.) And even rocker Jon Bon Jovi had once been a tenant, pleasantly surprising Mrs. Grasshoff with his tidiness and good manners. “He was very good to the house,” she recalls.
Speculation to the contrary, she would say the same of the Beasties. “What happened was, they were absolutely clean and neat,” she says, “and took care of the place very, very well.”15
Of course, the Grasshoffs were also not aware of the activities taking place in their absence. The foremost attraction happened to be Mrs. Grasshoff’s closet, which yielded, as Ricky Powell remembers, “Crazy, crazy seventies shit. Fur coats. Crazy pimp hats. Platforms. Lots and lots of velvet.” Mike Simpson, who also got a good look at the collection, observes, “I don’t think she ever threw anything away.” It was this gold mine of a wardrobe that would give the Beasties—in particular, Mike D—much of their retro look for the Paul’s Boutique era.
The trio managed to get a Ping-Pong table into the house—chipping Mr. Grasshoff’s Emmy Award in the process. They also made frequent use of the home theater system, rare for its time, and what Mike Simpson remembers as Mr. Grasshoff’s “huge collection of prison movies.” Simpson and John King, who had access to the house even when the Beasties were away, spent as much time there as possible.
“Despite the fact that John and I had success from the Tone-Loc and Young MC records, we still hadn’t seen a dime. We were sharing a $600-a-month apartment, and we had to step over bums to get into our building, and we were digging in our couches for loose change to buy a burrito at 7-Eleven,” Simpson recalls, laughing. “So the G-Spot offered a lot of luxuries that we weren’t accustomed to.” Yet the only truly crazy thing King noticed there “was a bunch of late teen/early twenties kids hanging out in such a mack-adocious—yet dated—pad, partying.”
“They didn’t trash the place the way they trashed a lot of other places,” admits regular guest Sean Carasov, who had seen more than a few accommodations wrecked by the Beasties. “But they worked it.”16
Although Diamond commandeered the home’s master suite, while Yauch set up shop in the video room, it would be Horovitz’s underground bedroom in the guesthouse, with its window into the swimming pool, that became the G-Spot’s best-known feature. Ricky Powell would shoot the inner sleeve photo of Paul’s Boutique through this porthole, capturing the Beasties clowning underwater. Back on land, however, they were about to get serious.
* * *
After months of incubation in their thousand petri dishes, the songs that would comprise Paul’s Boutique reached maturity in surprisingly short order. All during the late fall of 1988, the album’s creators buckled down; by Christmas, when Tim Carr returned to California for a progress report, the record was almost completely written and recorde
d.
The track that had turned things around, Carr thought, was “High Plains Drifter.” Based on a large, ominous chunk of The Eagles’ “These Shoes,” it was less complex than many of the creations that surrounded it, and its true-crime verses were written “from beginning to end, based around a really interesting set of samples. And all of sudden they had this complete song.” It was a psychological boost—for the beleaguered Carr, at least.
One factor that helped the project overcome its rough patches, Matt Dike thought, was the Beasties’ unusual closeness. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen ’em fight,” he muses. “They could fuck with anybody else, but they knew just when to give each other space.” It was a friendship that even survived what could have been a traumatic romantic dispute, when Yauch began dating Lisa Ann Cabasa, who had gone out a few times with Horovitz. “Yauch had asked him if it was OK to call me, and he said, ‘No, it’s not OK,’” recalls Cabasa with a laugh. “I didn’t wanna be a Yoko Ono, so we kept it hidden for a while.”17
The work done in Matt Dike’s apartment during this period is now “all kind of a blur,” confesses Mike Simpson, who still has to hum several songs to remember their titles. No other collaborator offers a clearer recollection. “After we did the first two songs,” says Mario Caldato, “there was a break, then it went full-on till we finished.”
Most likely, the ingredients Simpson once listed as essential to the making of Paul’s Boutique—“a blue bong, high quality indica buds, hash, hash oil, freebase, red wine, cigarettes, LSD, coffee and whippets”—have a lot to do with everyone’s hazy memories. What is certain is that Capitol’s executives, who had the album on the label’s spring 1989 release schedule, were finally demanding to hear the music. Carr was dispatched to get it, but instead received proof of that age-old saw about payback being a mother.
