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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 keptcrashing “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.