Free Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique by Dan LeRoy Page A

it would come up more than a little short.
    * * *
    “Hey Ladies” was released to radio in June as a 12-inch EP titled
Love, American Style
. The seventies reference 27 was most likely lost on programmers, foreshadowing the confusion that would be created by the song’s abstract throwback of a video.
    Director Adam Bernstein would say years later that the
Saturday Night
Fever-cum-blaxploitation feel of the “Hey Ladies” clip had been the Beasties’ idea. “They were just completely engrossed in the cinema of the seventies,” Bernstein said, “especially the Rudy Ray Moore movies, the Dolemite movies.” Undoubtedly, seeing the trio in Afro wigs and bell bottoms, instead of the leather jackets and jeans of the
Licensed to Ill
era, helped fulfill what Mike Simpson hadrealized was a major goal of the band: “To weed out the ‘Fight for Your Right’ fan from the true Beastie Boys fan.”
    The problem was, there weren’t nearly enough of the latter at that moment to satisfy Capitol Records’ multiplatinum expectations. “Hey Ladies” had success on the dance charts, reaching number 15, but the single peaked at just number 36 pop, a poor showing indeed.
    But that was only the beginning. The album, officially released July 25, shipped more than a half-million copies, in anticipation of moving huge initial numbers. In the pre-Soundscan era, when chart positions were determined by ship figures and not by actual sales, this led to an overinflation of commercial strength. Such inaccuracies were likely responsible for an encouraging report in the August 11
Los Angeles Times
, which called
Paul’s Boutique
the week’s “hottest new album.”
    In truth, it was already finished in the marketplace. According to Tim Carr, merchants were returning unsold copies of the record during the first month, and there were none of the expected reorders. Sean Carasov remembers seeing gold sales plaques for the album at Capitol, “and they had not been given out, because it hadn’t actually gone gold.” The disc would top out at number 14 on the Billboard album charts before sinking; “in a Soundscan world,” Carr notes, even that lower-than-expected number would have been much worse.
    What made Carr’s own situation much worse is that while the album—and all his other projects—were going belly-up, he was hiking through Indonesia and Thailand. “I would have had that nervous breakdown,” he claims, “had I been around.” But his departure on the eve of a disastrousrelease has given him an unenviable role in Beastie history. Though seldom mentioned by name, he has become, as Angus Batey’s
Rhyming & Stealing
characteristically put it, “the A&R executive who’d signed the band,” then “left for a holiday and never came back”—allegedly because he had already determined the album would bomb.
    This depiction of Carr has not been limited to the press. Several years afterward, when he visited the Beastie Boys on the Lollapalooza tour, Carr was introduced to the group’s new percussionist, Eric Bobo, by Adam Horovitz. “Adam says, ‘Do you know Tim Carr? He’s the guy who signed us to Capitol. Well, then he left right away, but he’s the guy who signed us.’”
    Although he laughs such moments off, this perception of events still clearly haunts Carr. “If I would have known … if I could have known … I never would’ve gone to Southeast Asia,” he says earnestly. “And I’ll always feel that loss, and it’s really hard to explain.
    “I guess I probably knew that I was walking away with a certain amount of unfinished business. But I felt like all the A&R had been done,” Carr adds. “But maybe I could’ve seen the trouble coming … maybe pushed management to have them tour.”
    He didn’t, and for all intents and purposes, they would not, thus sealing the album’s fate. But that great lost tour is the last great mystery of
Paul’s Boutique
.
    * * *
    In all the press granted for
Paul’s Boutique
,