Paul’s Boutique dropped in July of ’89. I was 25, spending that summer living in a campground on a beach in Olowalu. The previous July, I was competing for a spot on the US Olympic Team. I put the shot. Which is to say I was a shot putter. And the difference between July 1988 and July 1989 was profound: in 1988, I was a focused, goal-driven athlete taking on the world; a year later I was confused, depressed, and questioning my existence. I just didn’t know it then.
My mom was a science teacher, and for her July of 1989 meant attending a summer-long Science Teacher Seminar on Maui. My little brother was 10 and busy being an adolescent. And I just tagged along. My brother and I had nothing but time, the ocean, and a pair of cassettes that would soundtrack those months: Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique and De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising. Literally, it’s all we listened to.
Now, decades later, the 7th record in my 10-album-is-the-max collection is Paul’s Boutique Demos, an “unofficial release” on 21 Bridges Records. (Unofficial release AKA “bootleg”, which is something I don’t hear the hip, vinyl-collectin’ Millennial-and-GenX Hipsters talk about too much when they’re talkin’ “vinyls”.) Tony and I played Paul’s Boutique and 3 Feet High and Rising over and over. We couldn’t get enough of either. Which is what appealed to me about this record. I’ve lived inside Paul’s Boutique for so long, I wanted to hear the songs in their infancy, stripped down and raw and maybe very different from what made it to the final release. A new way of hearing something so familiar, like watching a film in black and white instead of color. And speaking of color, how about the bright pink vinyl the fine folks over at 21 Bridges chose to press these?
