I was 13 years old when Beastie Boys hit. Licensed To Ill. Fight For Your Right To Party. The song, the video. Thirteen. You couldn’t not take notice. But, it wasn’t until Paul’s Boutique came out three years later that I saw the Beasties as having something for me.
To my ears, Licensed To Ill was just juvenile rapping and sampled guitar over top of a repetitive beat, created with loops of popular drum beats or a Roland TR-808. It was funny, cool, new and kinda awesome to hear familiar bits of When The Levee Breaks and Sweet Leaf used in new ways. It helped me feel at home in a style of music which was still a bit alien. Thanks to my cushy, middle-class rural upbringing, I still feel a bit like a fraud when I listen to anything even slightly urban.
Paul’s Boutique was and remains a landmark, foundational record for me. Deceptively made almost entirely of samples, it had an authentic groove that Licensed To Ill was missing — and any other record made at that time, with the possible exception of Let Love Rule by Lenny Kravitz. I can’t tell you how good it felt to hear that Fender Rhodes lick at the very start of the album. I could have listened to To All The Girls on repeat for an hour. I can’t really think of what it reminded me of. I was just 16 years old. I had no reference for it, but it just sounded right. Like something I didn’t know I was seeking. The feeling was as though Beastie Boys had gone through my home and found 100 objects, which they put on display for everyone — and everyone flipped out at how cool these objects were, but I hadn’t really noticed them before.
I didn’t even realize at first that Paul’s Boutique was constructed almost entirely of samples. Once I did, I became slightly obsessed with figuring out the sources of my favourite bits, licks, loops and samples on the album — the guitar riff on Johnny Ryall, the bass lick on Egg Man, the fuzzed-out guitar on A Year And A Day, the main musical refrain in Car Thief, and the goddamned bassline in Lay It On Me. In the ensuing years — pre-Internet — I’d sometimes hear these components in the wild, in their original form and have to try and stop the world so I could figure out who and what it was. One of the first was Superfly by Curtis Mayfield, which I found by chance on a thrift-store copy of the 1974 K-Tel compilation Super Bad. This, of course, is the heart of Egg Man. I only recently acquired 3+3 by The Isley Brothers so I could have the source of A Year And A Day — the opening track, That Lady.
I was all in with the next two Beasties albums as well — Check Your Head and Ill Communication. Bona fide masterpieces which show Ad-Rock (Adam Horowitz), Mike D (Michael Diamond) and MCA (Adam Yauch) maturing, seemingly along with me. In my impoverished years as a young journalist and father, I stopped buying new albums and pretty much only bought stuff from thrift stores and yard sales. I managed to get a copy of the Root Down EP on CD, but that was the last Beasties album I bought. Apart from the singles and a few videos I was wholly unfamiliar with Aglio e Olio, The In Sound From Way Out!, Hello Nasty, To The 5 Boroughs, The Mix-Up and Hot Sauce Committee Part 2. I’m still a little behind on many of these.
But I will get there — chiefly thanks to their memoir The Beastie Boys Book, which came out in late 2018, six years after the death of Yauch. The book spawned a 2020 documentary which I enjoyed. But it’s the audiobook version which is just as essential as any of the trio’s albums. It’s the best audiobook I’ve ever heard, with chapters read by famous friends including Kim Gordon, Snoop Dogg, Chuck D, Bette Midler, Elvis Costello, Will Ferrell, John C Reilly, Steve Buscemi, Jon Stewart, Rosie Perez, Chloë Sevigny, LL Cool J, Tim Meadows, Ben Stiller, Jarvis Cocker and Amy Poehler, along with Horovitz and Diamond. The chapter about how the band unceremoniously fired drummer Kate Schellenbach is read by Schellenbach herself (and rightly so, since she also wrote that chapter in the memoir).
It is a coming-of-age story about three best friends, a love letter to New York City, and a beautiful, genuine tribute to Yauch. When I first got into Paul’s Boutique, it became apparent to me that these guys must have one hell of a record collection. Having just finished the audiobook, it seems to me the primary collector in the group was Horovitz. But all three of them paid intense attention to the music around them — the stuff which created the soundtrack for their lives and served as inspiration for their evolving craft. I mean, you’ve got three intelligent guys who play instruments, do hip-hop, but come from a hardcore/punk background during a time when their city was the epicentre of indie dance music and eccentric DJs, amidst the dawn of rap music. Their ears were acutely tuned to never miss a great drum break or any two bars of musical gold which could be repurposed into a new song. And I mean “any.” Beastie Boys found gold in krautrock, disco, funk, jazz, ye ye, psychedelia, R&B, blues, boogaloo, metal, pop, rock and hip-hop.
The book, and especially the audiobook, is like a treasure map to some of their greatest discoveries. There are loads of name drops, and even more — they actually have playlist chapters. There’s one inspired by the music they would hear as regulars at Danceteria nightclub in the early ’80s. Another is based on the songs you’d have heard if you found yourself riding with Horovitz and his girlfriend in her beat-up burgundy Toyota Corolla in 1991. A third playlist is a memorial compendium of Yauch’s most-played, most-loved songs. But, there are countless occasions in the book where Diamond and Horovitz talk about specific, critically important songs.
I tried to keep notes and follow up on some of their suggestions, and oh my gawd — it’s the next best thing to being in a room with them as they pluck wax from their collections and drop the needle. I’m delighted to say I was already familiar with about 60% of the stuff which was singled out. But here’s a playlist of some of the new-to-me albums I’ve been freaking out about and buying, directly as a result of this audiobook.
Back Door | Back Door (1972)
This British jazz-rock trio put out this ridiculously funky and cool debut album independently on Blakey Records, later reissued by Warner Brothers. There are two songs mentioned in the book — Slivadiv, which was sampled for Stand Together on Check Your Head, and Plantagenet. This album is proving to be a little tricky to find.
Manu Dibango | Soul Makossa (1972)
Known as “The Lion of Africa,” Dibango’s track New Bell gets singled out in the book, but the truth is this whole album is a flawless masterpiece. So seriously good. Funky, jazzy, dry and absolutely delightful. Dibango, a saxophonist who hailed from Cameroon, was 86 years old when he died in 2020 of complications from COVID. I’m currently addicted to this track, which opens Side 2 of Soul Makossa.
The Crusaders | Southern Comfort (1974)
This Houston jazz fusion group were around from 1960 to the 2010s, with material which fit into a variety of categories — blues, R&B, jazz, and funk. They didn’t get a hit single until 1979’s Street Life. Coincidentally, keyboardist Joe Sample was one of the three founding members. Beastie Boys sampled The Well’s Gone Dry from 1974’s Southern Comfort for the Dropping Names section of B-Boy Bouillabaisse on Paul’s Boutique, and it serves as the main influence for In 3’s on Check Your Head. It was also famously sampled by The Chemical Brothers for Block Rockin’ Beats.
The Meters | Struttin’ (1970)
I already have three Meters albums — their self-titled debut and the followup Look-Ka Py Py, which both came out in 1969, and 1974’s Rejuvenation. But I’d never heard this, their third album. The Beasties book makes particular mention of Tippi-Toes.
Afrique | Soul Makossa (1973)
Yes, another album called Soul Makossa. But by a different artist. This L.A. band cover the Dibango classic, then follow that up with a cover of Bill Withers‘ Kissing My Love. But it’s one of their own compositions that gets a mention in the book — House Of The Rising Funk. I’m not surprised this is the selection, because Horovitz is pretty candid about his approach to record-bin digging. He looks for these kinds of albums — especially those on the CTI label — and then checks the track names. If there’s anything with a title like Bumpin’, it’s almost guaranteed to be killer.
Willie Bobo | Uno Dos Tres 1-2-3 (1966)
Horovitz is also pretty candid about his boogaloo epiphany — the sudden realization that this type of music he knew nothing about, is amazing. Again, he somehow manages to single out the song on the album with the best name. There is no other song anywhere near as good as this on the record, but I’m still actively hunting for it because this one song is as good as five on most other albums.
And here’s the playlist:
• • •
Area Resident is an Ottawa-based journalist, recording artist, music collector and re-seller. Hear (and buy) his music on Bandcamp, email him HERE, follow him on Instagram and check him out on Discogs.
