The Making (And Unmaking) Of Paul's Boutique

The Beastie Boys made a masterpiece. And then they werefoiled by Donny Osmond.

- Donny Osmond

MICHAEL DIAMOND: After the success of Licensed to Ill, a bunch of people thought they knew exactly what our future should look like. After we parted ways with Def Jam, we started meeting with other labels and eventually signed with Capitol. In the music business of the late 1980s, fortunes could still be made, and Capitol was betting millions of dollars on us. They wanted a new record immediately. We were … in less of a hurry.

Matt Dike introduced us to Mario Caldato, the engineer with whom he’d built a makeshift studio at Matt’s down-and-out apartment on Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood. They were recording instrumental tracks there with these two hip hop fanatics named John King and Mike Simpson, who recorded under the name the Dust Brothers. We loved the Dust Brothers’ shit the second we heard it and immediately wanted to work with them on our next record; their stuff had an entirely different vibe than the tracks on Licensed to Ill: funkier, jazzier, less classic rock, more R&B. It also pushed the boundaries of what we thought was possible with sample-based music.

We started working together and ended up recording most of the music and a fair number of vocals for Paul’s Boutique at Matt’s apartment. We really could have just recorded our entire album there, and in hindsight, I’m not exactly sure why we didn’t. Capitol may have started to get nervous that we were holed up in a shitty apartment in the middle of a drug-and-prostitution zone. Or maybe we were just insecure and thought that to make a “big time” record, we had to do it at some “big time” studio with dudes with mullets crouched and poised to set up a mic or coil a cable. Or maybe we thought it was funny to record where Debbie Gibson and Lionel Richie might have recorded.