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“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 prettycomplex, 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” yearof 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, ‘Iwish I was, but he’s