I don't know about you but the world has felt very long-faced recently. Heavy. Not funny. Serious. So endlessly serious. And today I just decided that for me it's enough. I've had it. I can't be serious any more. Time to do something stupid. I looked on my weather app. It said “100% rain” and I said, Great, I'm going for a night hike. And I jumped in the Uber and went to my trail and as I approached the park gates it started absolutely lashing it down, and there wasn't another person in sight, and I turned the music up and kept walking. It's rare that you see an LA trail look like a gothic Edwardian moor but tonight it was misty and ominous and epic. And there was nobody in the park at all. Except me. And as I got higher up, the rain got heavier and louder, and was so aggressive at one point that I stopped myself and thought, “What in the hell do you think you are doing here?” And I laughed at myself, and kept laughing, and couldn't stop; me, on the side of a mountain, drenched, with another side of the mountain to deal with, noticing that actually now there's a river that runs through this canyon that never existed before, and everything else is meaningless at this moment in time. I opened my mouth at the sky and rain poured in from the heavens and I felt like a crazy person, and more importantly like myself. So so stupid.
I've always been at ease with my own company. When I was a kid my favorite toys were jigsaws because I liked sitting on my own for hours and building a picture. I loved to plug into my own world, and that's how I fell in love with music. Music has been my lifelong companion since I got my first Walkman, and some blank C-90s, which my brother would take and use to make mixtapes mostly of '90s house/rave acts like Black Box, Dr Alban and Haddaway. I remember he misjudged the timing on them and I once had a mixtape during which Side A ended abruptly halfway through Reel 2 Reel's “I Like To Move It”, so I never knew how or if the song had a second half and what it sounded like. With hindsight turns out the second half of “I Like To Move It” by Reel 2 Reel sounds very much exactly like the first half. Since about 1993, there hasn't been a day of my life in which I haven't spent time escaping reality in my headphones. I put them in and I go somewhere else. Somewhere better.
Today I was thinking about how somewhere around 2007 I heard 'Paul's Boutique' for the first time. The second album from the Beastie Boys came out in 1989 and once I heard it, I needed to know everything I could find out about three Jewish guys from New York City. I remember specifically listening to the track “Car Thief”, which is just a trippy vignette about some shady criminal-like character, and I was captured by how much more creative it sounded than any of the hip-hop I was hearing in the late 2000s:
“I'm a writer, a poet, a genius, I know it
I don't buy cheeba I grow it
People always trying to get next to me
I had a beautiful experience on Ecstasy
I smoked up a bag of elephant tranquilizer
Because I had to deal with a money-hungry miser
Had a 'caine-filled Kool with my man Rush Rush
Saw my teeth fall in the sink when I started to brush…”
The song samples The Jackson 5, Funkadelic and Funk Factory, and references Hawaii Five-O and Donovan. And it lives on one of the most inventive records you will ever hear in your life. If I'm feeling sad, I will listen to some '90s rave classics or a Beastie Boys album, and after I've done that it's impossible to feel sad. After I heard “Paul's Boutique” I went out and bought physical copies of all the Beastie Boys' records. I loved the lunacy of “License To Ill” but I was blown away by the punk edge of “Check Your Head”. “Ill Communication” was a total odyssey of funk and jazz and live instrumentals and by the time I got round to “Hello Nasty” I understood that here was a band who would forever be in my Top 3, because their artistry was as sophisticated as it was reckless.
I remember the day Adam Yauch died. May 2012. It was a Friday afternoon. I was working at the Q Magazine office and my dreams of being a music journalist weren't being taken particularly seriously at the time by anyone on staff. Ted Kessler was the resident Beastie Boys man. He had interviewed them a bunch in the '90s, and when the news came in that Yauch had died from cancer (a death made even more tragic by the eternal youth and jovial nature of the guy's output), Kessler went over to the stereo and broke the silence that had descended upon the office by playing “Shadrach” really loudly. There's something fucking weird about listening to such an animated song on the news of a death, but the Beastie Boys didn't have anything in their catalogue that wasn't going to hit you on the head with humor, attitude and a reason to smile.
Six years later, my dreams of being a music journalist were being taken seriously because I'd decided to persevere, and I was living in LA with a hefty freelance career under my belt, and a very long list of interviews to my name. And I got an email from Kessler, who had since become the editor of my former place of work Q Magazine. He told me that the remaining Beastie Boys – Mike D and Ad-Rock – were releasing a book about the band's history, and they were going to do their first interview since Yauch's death, and it was going to be a Q cover, and was I free to fly to New York to meet them at the Bowery Hotel to do the story. It's hard to describe the cocktail of abject fear, disbelief and panicked excitement that would set in when I would get emails or calls of that nature, but this one I will never forget. I said yes, of course. And I proceeded to do my first and last Q cover (the magazine folded during the pandemic), and with one of the bands that made me want to write about music. I sat in that hotel room with those two guys, who are notorious for punking journalists, and I gave as good as I got from them, and I loved and relished every last moment of it. Turning that into a 3 or 4,000 word story was one of the greatest honors of my writing career, and when the magazine printed, Kessler dedicated most of his editor's letter to me and my capacity to outdo his original Beasties interviews. And the first time I ever submitted a review to Kessler when I was 21 and clueless and desperate, he looked at me like I had turned up to the wrong internship. That full circle still makes my heart swell.
I didn't want to interview the Beastie Boys because I'm a sycophant about my favorite bands. I only ever wanted to interview bands because of the music. Because the music made me feel alive. And there are lessons to be learned about the way artists live and think and create that tell you why they're able to make this thing that speaks to people they've never even met. Something sacred is in that. And I got to explore that over and over again.
I've done some cool shit. And you can't plan for that. You cannot plan for your pipe dreams to happen. Sometimes they just do if you stick your neck out for long enough. If you believe in yourself despite every single reason not to. If you love yourself enough to choose your stupid decisions over what's expected of you then you might actually get the things you never even dared to ask for. And most of the time it means going out on your own, getting away from the serious weight that bogs down a life and turning your face to an open sky, widening your mouth and tasting the rain. It's not that serious.
Eve, this was fantastic. What a great story (both your article and how it came to be!)!
Paul’s Boutique is hands down one of the greatest and most underrated albums ever created. Thank you for sharing this joyous memory with us. And please don’t hike alone at night - you’ve made this Jewish mom worried!