few songs would also be finished at Matt Dike’s apartment, including“Hello Brooklyn,” absorbed into the closing suite, “B-Boy Bouillabaisse.”
The sessions had been completed, but
Paul’s Boutique
was not yet
Paul’s Boutique
. For title of their California opus, the Beasties would turn back to New York.
* * *
To create the cover artwork for their as yet unnamed second album, the Beastie Boys first approached old friend Eric Haze, a legendary graffiti artist who had become equally successful designing record sleeves and logos for the likes of Public Enemy, Delicious Vinyl and the Beasties themselves. Haze, in turn, enlisted the help of David Fried, a member of an artists’ collective called Avant.
“David had been playing around with this technique of burning other textures into photographs,” recalls Haze. Inspired by the mind-bending qualities of the Beasties’ new music, Haze wanted to “go for an
Are You Experienced?
vibe” for the cover, and had Fried infuse Ricky Powell’s underwater photo from the G-Spot with a wash of neon color. The result, Haze proudly thought, “was fucking gorgeous and psychedelic.”
Haze and Adam Yauch then took the photo to a special effects studio, where for $500 an hour they burned Haze’s hand-lettered Beastie Boys logo into the photo. “A couple hours into it, Yauch was like, ‘I don’t know …,’” says Haze, who adds that he and Fried never heard from the band again about the photo.
But before breaking contact, according to Haze, Fried had showed the Beasties some tests of a novel idea: 360-degreephotos he had taken of city rooftops. The cover—and the tide—of the Beasties’ new album were coming into focus.
* * *
Jeremy Shatan had been a friend of the Diamond family for years, and had played bass in the band Young Aborigines with Mike D in the early eighties. He was also less than impressed with his old pal’s reincarnation as a drunken, leering Beastie Boy. “I remember Michael offered me a copy of
Licensed to Ill
, which I refused,” recalls Shatan. “He said, ‘Yeah, I know.’”
But when Diamond had lunch with Shatan one afternoon in the spring of 1989, he had a different proposition. “He said, ‘We have this idea for our album cover, but we have no idea how to execute it.’” Shatan, who had studied photography in college, volunteered to rent the equipment needed to shoot a 360-degree panorama of a shop on New York’s Lower East Side.
The business in question was actually Lee’s Sportswear, located on the corner of Ludlow and Rivington streets. The Beasties would transform it into Paul’s Boutique, a name taken from a radio ad on one of Adam Horovitz’s reggae cassettes. Read by Gil Bailey, a veteran DJ then playing Jamaican music on WLIB, the advertisement touted a Brooklyn haberdashery that sold “the best in men’s clothing.” 21
The trio came amazingly prepared for the early-morningshoot, thought Shatan. “They had contracted with the guy who owned the store in advance, and they had made the sign. And they made this whole still life in front of the store—all this goofy shit they thought represented the aesthetic of the record. The banjo, the platform shoes.” That advance work, Shatan thought, made the eventual photo credit—given to Yauch, aka Nathaniel Hornblower, instead of Shatan and his assistant Matt Cohen—somewhat defensible.
The photos would become part of an album package as spendthrift as the Beasties’ exploits. The first 50,000 vinyl copies featured an eight-panel gatefold sleeve; cassettes of
Paul’s Boutique
were housed in shells of every hue. “Whatever the Beasties wanted,” Tim Carr recalls, “the Beasties got.”
One person who took issue with the design was Eric Haze, especially after he discovered an early copy of the aborted album cover 22 on the inner sleeve. “With all due respect, it was a disappointment,” says Haze, who would find more satisfaction working on the Beasties’ next
The sessions had been completed, but
Paul’s Boutique
was not yet
Paul’s Boutique
. For title of their California opus, the Beasties would turn back to New York.
* * *
To create the cover artwork for their as yet unnamed second album, the Beastie Boys first approached old friend Eric Haze, a legendary graffiti artist who had become equally successful designing record sleeves and logos for the likes of Public Enemy, Delicious Vinyl and the Beasties themselves. Haze, in turn, enlisted the help of David Fried, a member of an artists’ collective called Avant.
“David had been playing around with this technique of burning other textures into photographs,” recalls Haze. Inspired by the mind-bending qualities of the Beasties’ new music, Haze wanted to “go for an
Are You Experienced?
vibe” for the cover, and had Fried infuse Ricky Powell’s underwater photo from the G-Spot with a wash of neon color. The result, Haze proudly thought, “was fucking gorgeous and psychedelic.”
Haze and Adam Yauch then took the photo to a special effects studio, where for $500 an hour they burned Haze’s hand-lettered Beastie Boys logo into the photo. “A couple hours into it, Yauch was like, ‘I don’t know …,’” says Haze, who adds that he and Fried never heard from the band again about the photo.
But before breaking contact, according to Haze, Fried had showed the Beasties some tests of a novel idea: 360-degreephotos he had taken of city rooftops. The cover—and the tide—of the Beasties’ new album were coming into focus.
* * *
Jeremy Shatan had been a friend of the Diamond family for years, and had played bass in the band Young Aborigines with Mike D in the early eighties. He was also less than impressed with his old pal’s reincarnation as a drunken, leering Beastie Boy. “I remember Michael offered me a copy of
Licensed to Ill
, which I refused,” recalls Shatan. “He said, ‘Yeah, I know.’”
But when Diamond had lunch with Shatan one afternoon in the spring of 1989, he had a different proposition. “He said, ‘We have this idea for our album cover, but we have no idea how to execute it.’” Shatan, who had studied photography in college, volunteered to rent the equipment needed to shoot a 360-degree panorama of a shop on New York’s Lower East Side.
The business in question was actually Lee’s Sportswear, located on the corner of Ludlow and Rivington streets. The Beasties would transform it into Paul’s Boutique, a name taken from a radio ad on one of Adam Horovitz’s reggae cassettes. Read by Gil Bailey, a veteran DJ then playing Jamaican music on WLIB, the advertisement touted a Brooklyn haberdashery that sold “the best in men’s clothing.” 21
The trio came amazingly prepared for the early-morningshoot, thought Shatan. “They had contracted with the guy who owned the store in advance, and they had made the sign. And they made this whole still life in front of the store—all this goofy shit they thought represented the aesthetic of the record. The banjo, the platform shoes.” That advance work, Shatan thought, made the eventual photo credit—given to Yauch, aka Nathaniel Hornblower, instead of Shatan and his assistant Matt Cohen—somewhat defensible.
The photos would become part of an album package as spendthrift as the Beasties’ exploits. The first 50,000 vinyl copies featured an eight-panel gatefold sleeve; cassettes of
Paul’s Boutique
were housed in shells of every hue. “Whatever the Beasties wanted,” Tim Carr recalls, “the Beasties got.”
One person who took issue with the design was Eric Haze, especially after he discovered an early copy of the aborted album cover 22 on the inner sleeve. “With all due respect, it was a disappointment,” says Haze, who would find more satisfaction working on the Beasties’ next
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