Dan LeRoy - "Paul’s Boutique"

To this day, I’m still ashamed to admit I didn’t appreciate the Beastie Boys’ iconic and classic rap album Paul’s Boutique upon its release. I’m afraid I followed the herd, scratching my head, wondering what they’d done with the rock/rap I loved so much on Licensed to Ill. (Hey, I was only 19.) I then followed the herd again years later, after the Beastie Boys early and mid-90’s revival, and found, like everyone else, that I now got their point and loved nothing better than throwing on my headphones and getting lost in the intricate quilt the band built with the hundreds of samples used on the album. (Odd fact from the Dan LeRoy’s book: no one knows for sure how many samples were used. And another: sampling laws were changed after this album, ensuring there will never be another quite like it.) So it was with a sense of nostalgia and humility that I sat down to read LeRoy’s take on Paul’s Boutique for the 33 1/3 series.

LeRoy is a regular contributor to The New York Times and Rolling Stone, so you get a piece of professional rock journalism here. He covers a lot of ground, interviewing almost everyone involved in the music, the bands’ friends from that time, like Donovan Leitch and Ione Skye, and even Mike D. (Though not interviewing MCA and Ad-Rock are major misses.) A good chunk is devoted to the origins of the music, probably because so many people were involved. Rap albums seem to be unusually dependent on producers, who often craft many of the beats and samples underneath the rap. Paul's Boutique was no exception.

LeRoy goes back to the mid 80's and the beginnings of the California DJ scene where Matt Dike and The Dust Brothers, the producers of the album, got their starts. He follows them through their discovery of sampling and its evolution as an art form at clubs and parties. The Beastie Boys got hooked into this scene when they flew out to California in 1988 to get away from their protracted legal battle with their first label, Def Jam. (A battle that LeRoy sheds some juicy nuggets about through the Capitol A&R guy who had run-ins with Russell Simmons over the matter.) They were literally just hanging out at Dike’s apartment when they heard for the first time the music that would eventually end up on the album. Mike D offered to buy Dike's work on the spot. The first quarter of the book dwells so much on Dike and The Dust Brothers that one could be forgiven for wondering what the Beasties themselves actually did other than buy the music.

Thankfully the book gets to that, and it's here where we come to understand why the Beasties are the stars. The book, which will be slow going at first for anyone who isn’t a fan of Matt Dike and the Dust Brothers, bursts forth with life once they jump onto the stage. LeRoy shows us their childish pranks and rock star lifestyles, their antagonism towards their record executives, and we remember why we loved them so much.

What LeRoy does best though is to show us what a risk Paul's Boutique really was. Everyone (I raise my hand meekly here) expected more of the metal-rap that had made the band famous. Instead, The Beastie Boys, like all true artists do after a success, went another direction. They went back to their favorite music of the 70's (though not Led Zeppelin this time), tore the songs apart, and put them back together into a musical stew centered on the work of their three unknown producers. It was a recipe for commercial disaster and a particularly scary moment in the book for fans of the band’s later work is when Mike D shares that the band really thought their careers could be undone by the album and wondered what they would do next.

Though the album got some great early critical reviews, the shock people got when they heard the work, the 70's aesthetic the Beasties prominently displayed in the first video, and the lack of a tour all ensured that Paul's Boutique would be a commercial flop. Luckily, time often renders great art great. Once the Beasties put out two more great albums (Check You Head and Ill Communication) and once the times caught up with its own 70’s nostalgia, Paul's Boutique finally got the credit it deserved.

This is one of the better installments of the 33 1/3 series. If you’re a Beastie Boys fan, you’ll want to pick this up.