Read Online Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique by Dan LeRoy - Free Book Online

just clicked. We became very, very tight. Especially Mike D and I. We quickly became best friends.”
    Hearing the album was also an important factor in her decision. Turkkan admits she had grown “bored with the stuff I was representing,” and
Paul’s Boutique
was the perfect tonic. “It was like, ‘Fuck being a departure from
Licensed to Ill
—this is a departure from everything!’”
    But the band was still wary of the press, tabloid memories still fresh in everyone’s mind. “They didn’t wanna talk about
Licensed to Ill
. They didn’t wanna talk about the [Def Jam] lawsuit. They didn’t want to talk about that period in their lives,” Turkkan says. “My feeling was, they had created such a piece of art, that the art would get lost … if we opened up the doors to interviews.”
    Thus, the decision was made to severely limit access to the group. The Beasties would still grant some interviews prior to the album’s release. They would make themselves eminently available to “Yo! MTV Raps,” joining their old DJ, Dr. Dre, on a supposed around-the-world tour, and taking a walking trip around New York City with another longstanding acquaintance, Fab 5 Freddy.
    But compared to the media saturation then common for such a high-profile release, the band gave
Paul’s Boutique
very little advance press. Only a handful of print interviews exist, with two of the most substantial published in the UK. This lack of coverage has undoubtedly helped provide the album its mystique. At the time, however, Capitol executives were furious.
    “I got so much pushback, you don’t know,” recalls Turkkan. “There would be evenings when I would be in my office in tears, with people calling me up, just screaming at me. Why was I not setting up interviews? Why was I not using a different media strategy? But I was completely committed to letting the music speak for itself.”
    * * *
    Tim Carr’s relief at finally having a completed album—“The best record I had ever been involved with,” to boot—did not obscure an important observation.
Paul’s Boutique
contained endlessly inventive songs like “Hey Ladies” and “Shadrach,” but no obvious hit single. Reverting to his role as record company employee, Carr drafted what would come to be known as the “Jumpin’ Jack Flash memo,” and gathered the Beasties and their producers to deliver his pitch.
    Carr reasoned that what had kept the Rolling Stones from being trapped by their early success, defined by the single “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” was the creation of a new signature hit. That was 1968’s “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” which gave the Stones a hard-edged new sound that effectively wiped the slate clean. The Beastie Boys, Carr argued, would be prisoners of “Fight for Your Right (To Party)”until they came up with a hit to top it.
    It was just about the worst thing he could have suggested to three MCs desperate to not only eradicate “Fight for Your Right” from the public’s memory, but from their own as well. The Beastie Boys might have had occasional lapses into
Licensed to Ill
-style buffoonery over the past year, and their transition from drunken louts to more mellow pot-heads might have been lost on the general public, but they were determined to be taken seriously as artists. “A big hush went over the room,” recalls Matt Dike. “Then Yauch yells, ‘Fuck that!! This is the record, with no fucking single!’” Diamond, meanwhile, remembers the memo being greeted with “either laughter, or disbelief, or both. We were clowning on it.”
    Dike and the Dust Brothers, however, were less dismissive. As much as they loved the freedom they’d been afforded while making
Paul’s Boutique
, all three men had hits to their credit and harbored doubts that this album would generate any new ones. “I agreed with Tim, but I couldn’t let him know. That wouldn’t have been a cool move,” confesses Dike. He half-seriously suggested the band consider