by LeRoy, Dan
From such sophomoric beginnings came one of the album’s most sophisticated creations. The bass-and-percussion intro of Curtis Mayfield’s “Superfly” is expertly matched to the beat of another, less familiar blaxploitation recording: “Sport,” from ex-Last Poet Lightnin’ Rod. But it’s a small touch that makes a big impact. A snippet of the bass from Tower of Power’s “Drop It in the Slot” is inserted at the end of certain verses; speeded up, it matches keys with the bassline from “Superfly,” creating a complete bass part that holds the song together. And the Beasties’ verses are equally deft; the trio hot-potatoes rhymes with precision, making full use of the implied harmonies created by combining Yauch’s growl and the whine of Horovitz and Diamond.
The coup de grace, though, was the late addition of two of the most pulse-quickening pieces of movie music in history: the stabbing, staccato strings from the Psycho shower scene—Matt Dike had first used the sample in an earlier tune for another client, but the track had never been released—and the two-note string motif played in Jaws just before the shark attacks. Combined to form a sort of bridge, the samples lend the song a sense of humor that the band’s egging might sometimes have lacked.
“Egg Man” shares one verse with “Egg Raid on Mojo”—with the band’s friend, artist Eric Haze, replacing Mojo as the victim. The incident which inspired the lyric occurred in the wee hours one morning in 1988 on Melrose Avenue, where Haze was talking to Matt Dike on a pay phone. “An El Camino full of cholos drove by going the opposite direction,” Haze recalls. “Then they made a violent U-turn and bore down on me. I was scared shitless, because I thought I was gonna get shot. But it turned out to be an egg-by”—evidently, by a rival gang of eggers.
Meanwhile, the egg gun mentioned in the song was apparently more than just a rhetorical device. Mike Simpson recalls the band “actually employed some toy designers—maybe they were from Hasbro?—to come up with a Beastie Boys egg gun. And I believe there were a couple of prototypes, which Yauch probably still has.”
Diamond, however, says the prototypes came tantalizingly close to being developed, yet were never completed. “But imagine if we had,” he muses. “The egg business would’ve blown up. Chicken farmers would be like oilmen today.”
High Plains Drifter
After the densely packed, nonstop collage of the previous three tracks, “High Plains Drifter” opens up aurally like the vista of its title. Matt Dike’s memory of the song as one of the most rapidly assembled on Paul’s Boutique is easy to credit, given the simplicity of the arrangement. There are just three primary elements, foremost being a chunk of the Eagles’ “Those Shoes,” which features in certain sections, snatches of Joe Walsh and Don Felder’s talk-boxed guitars. “Matt and I just thought it was hilarious, sampling the Eagles,” Diamond remembers. “You wouldn’t have thought an Eagles record would have this incredible beat.”
Disembodied bedroom moans from the Fatback Band’s disco-era “Put Your Love (In My Tender Care),” meanwhile, add an eerie quality when slowed down and removed from their original, gettin’ busy context, and the rhythm is buttressed by beats from Adam Horovitz’s Roland 808 drum machine—a model that, in Mike Simpson’s recollection, “sounded spectacular. Every 808 sounds different, but this one just sounded great.”
The audio breathing room coincides with the album’s most straightforward narrative. “High Plains Drifter,” named for Clint Eastwood’s surreal 1973 western, is one of less than half a dozen tracks that explicitly cast the Beasties as outlaws. Yet those few songs made an indelible impression on some reviewers, who criticized the band for glorifying violence. The record was not even in the shops when Mike D complained to Melody Maker about such misreadings. “I don’t understand why people think those songs are about us. We just get together and write stories.” To Billboard’s Chris Morris, he expressed disappointment about the album receiving a Parental Advisory sticker, and asked why the group’s “character narratives” should be treated differently than William Burroughs’s famous cut-up novel Naked Lunch.
There is some validity to the complaint. “High Plains Drifter” has much more to do with the juvenile hooliganism the Beasties had allegedly perpetrated in the offices of Def Jam and on the roof of the Mondrian Hotel than with any serious criminal activity. The antihero is a shoplifter on the run, knocking over mailboxes and paying extra for a porn movie at Motel 6; his most heinous crime is sticking up a 7-Eleven. But such low-stakes offenses, and the fact that the perp ends up in the drunk tank with the beloved Otis, from “The Andy Griffith Show,” are all part of the joke some missed. Considering that N.WA.’s inflammatory “F*** tha Police” had already been out for a year, it’s even more difficult to imagine anyone discerning a threat in the Beasties’ rather garden-variety thuggery.
However, the lyrical misbehavior does contribute to a significant album track. In Mike Simpson’s view, it was the clear descendant of the debut’s “Paul Revere,” and filled an important niche: “that sort of feel-good story rhyme.”
The Sounds of Science
Perhaps the best gauge of the difference between Licensed to Ill and Paul’s Boutique is provided by the first half of this track. In the infamous video that accompanied “Fight for Your Right (To Party),” the Beasties pushed around bespectacled nerds. On “The Sounds of Science,” they have become—for a few lines, at least—those nerds instead. “In high school, we all had to wear science-class glasses and work with the Bunsen burners, so it’s kinda like second nature to us,” Mike D would explain. “Somebody like N.W.A. might be talkin’ about ‘science,’ but they never bust out in science-class glasses.”31
In typical Beastie fashion, something serious was lurking beneath that nonsense. Discounting the novelty rap records that proliferated in the eighties, hip-hop had never been this deliberately square. Yet with its British music-hall bounce and lyrics that name-checked Galileo, Sir Isaac Newton and Benjamin Franklin, the initial half of “The Sounds of Science” was a groundbreaking moment, one that lived up to the boast that the Beasties were expanding the genre’s boundaries. It offered proof that there was room for geeks—albeit lyrically acute ones—in hip-hop’s big tent, and opened the gates for a flood of defiantly nerdy rappers who would pour into the underground a decade later. The song also momentarily drops the gangsta facade the Beasties had toyed with since their inception, and reveals them in all their middle-class whiteness—a rather brave thing to do for a group hoping to maintain its hard-won street cred and its place in a predominantly black style.
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, sugges
ts 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.
3-Minute Rule
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.”
Hey Ladies
“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.
5-Piece Chicken Dinner
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.
Looking Down the Barrel of a Gun
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.
Car Thief
