Happy 20th, Paul’s Boutique

I don’t think any album has actually changed the course of my life as much as Beastie Boys’ 1989 masterpiece, Paul’s Boutique. Therefore it’s with tremendous pleasure and pride I announce you can purchase a deluxe edition of this classic album –

Wait, before I go into that, let me share my Paul’s Boutique story. We’ve all got one and you can share yours in the “User Photos and Stories” section of PaulsBoutique.BeastieBoys.com, but if you’ll indulge me for a few lines I’ll share mine here.

1989, my best friend Ryan Timmons and I were headed to the Warren Dunes in Michigan from Goshen, Indiana, where we grew up. There was no record store in Goshen, so we convinced my sister to stop at Concord Mall so we could shop for music. I can remember distinctly Ryan looking at the rack of tapes and letting out an excited, “Hey! There’s a new Beastie Boys record!” And I remember just as clearly me looking at him like he just admitted to digging Vanilla Ice and saying, “So?” He bought Paul’s Boutique (on cassette) that day, I bought Honey Bubble by Tar Babies.

Now I don’t mean to dis, but you have to remember that Beastie Boys were these beer-swilling pop stars who had disappeared as far as I could tell. No one was looking for another Licensed To Ill in 1989. Or at least I wasn’t.

Lucky for me Ryan hated Paul’s Boutique. For whatever reason he gave the tape to me, and for whatever reason (curiosity? boredom? destiny?) I played it. But I didn’t just play it, I sat down on the floor of my bedroom with headphones on, opened up the lyric sheet, and dove in. It would be an exaggeration to say my life changed at that moment but it would be an understatement to say I simply liked it — I was mesmerized by Paul’s Boutique. I played it, literally, to death, I wore the tape out and had to buy the CD. It felt as if someone made an album out of my record collection (from Cash to Sly to Mountain to The Isley Brothers) and it was these punk rock hip hop skateboard kids from NYC who took drugs and seemed to love music just as much as I did. I identified with it even more than the punk rock records that seemed to be made by kids just like me. Not only was it cool and accessible, it was musical, complex, and unattainable at the same time.

It was also a relative failure. After selling six million-plus for Def Jam Beastie Boys had jumped to Capitol Records, spent a ton of money, and not managed to find one commercial hit. The record peaked out at a few hundred thousand records and the band never even toured. There was a bit of critical acclaim as the album was discovered randomly but Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique was located very near purgatory; the album had too much depth for your average Licensed to Ill fan and us music nerds who avoided pop music weren’t exactly looking to Beastie Boys for our latest fix. That was respect the band would earn over the next ten years, their cache was near-zero at the time, at least from my point of view as a kid in Indiana.

Just a year later, Zoe was born. I was a few weeks shy of eighteen, working two jobs and just started college full-time. I don’t remember much about that first year of Zoe’s life, but I remember distinctly pacing around the living room in our Section 8 apartment in the middle of the night, Paul’s Boutique playing, me singing along, trying to calm a colicky baby.

Thankfully for everyone, Beastie Boys were far from done. They continued to reinvent themselves, playing live instruments and making another classic in 1992, Check Your Head. My fan-dom continued and in 1993 I moved the discography I’d been maintaining on Usenet to this new thing called The World Wide Web. I kept the Beastie Boys Web site up religiously as a fan through the release of Ill Communication in 1994 when I put up video of Beastie Boys live on Letterman before it aired on the West Coast. After that, I got a call from Beastie Boys management, John Silva (actually Bethann Buddenbaum, who was tipped off to my site by the only guy in the building with a computer, Jason Fiber, who was working for Dave Allen at World Domination at the time). I figured they were calling to shut me down for copyright infringement but John, forward thinking even then, said, “Are you crazy?! I wanted to know if you’d do this for *all* our bands!” I started a little consulting business charging John and Old School Ron Stone $8.50/hour to build Web sites. Laughable today but living in family housing in Indiana in 1994 it was just fine.

I spent a little time on Lollapalooza in 1994 and made friends with Beastie Boys. Mike D had Grand Royal, Yauch had Milarepa, and this Internet thing just might be useful for those low-budget endeavors. I was, of course, excited to be able to help in any way. Late in the year they asked if I’d come on tour with them in the spring of 1995. I was in grad school studying computer science at the time but made a decision to be done with that about five minutes after their invitation. Tour I did, and then moved to LA where Beastie Boys were at first the only people I knew, really.

So as I was saying…

I don’t think any album has actually changed the course of my life as much as Beastie Boys’ 1989 masterpiece, Paul’s Boutique, and it’s with tremendous pleasure and pride I announce you can purchase a deluxe edition of this classic album, complete with DVD-style “director’s commentary”, limited edition eight foot long poster and t-shirt, lossless remastered audio in addition to the MP3s, and interactive album art, all via Topspin’s technology at BeastieBoys.com. Hopefully you’ll agree it’s the treatment the album deserves.

If you already know this album, I hope you’ll appreciate the excellent remastering and hearing the band recall those days. If you skipped over this one, well, I envy the experience of sitting with this album for the first time. Grab the below to throw the album on your blog or Web site and maybe even read the 33 1/3 book for some serious back-story. Sampling laws shut albums like this out of existence. Enjoy of of the crown jewels of the era.

The very fun Paul’s Boutique Web site was created by the fine folks at Prod4Ever. Thanks to Jon, Jon, Greg, Nick, and everyone else over there for getting it and making it happen. Thanks to Jen Hall at Silva Artist Management for being the glue that holds this project together. Thanks to Jesse Ervin and Cory Ondrejka at EMI for fighting the good fight from within. And thanks of course to Beastie Boys and John Silva for, well, for everything. Always a pleasure. Thanks for believing in me fifteen years ago and for believing in Topspin today.

ian c rogers
Topspin

ps – Beastie Boys were kind enough to speak to me from Oscilloscope Labs this morning via Skype. Results below: