Eat their Dust

Meet the men behind Beck and the Beasties

by Matt Ashare

A couple weeks ago, Morphine's Mark Sandman went out to LA to sit in on a remixing session for two songs from his band's forthcoming disc on the Dreamworks label. The standard remix usually involves a hotshot producer electronically tweaking the existing tracks for a song to create a groovier version of the original tune. But the maverick team assigned to the Morphine mission have never been ones to follow standard procedures. And as John King and Mike Simpson, a/k/a the Dust Brothers (the guys who produced Beck's latest DGC release, Odelay), tell it, Sandman became a willing participant in a process that went well beyond simply remixing two songs.

"That was an interesting situation," explains Simpson, who's also the latest addition to the A&R staff at Dreamworks and is credited with bringing the eels on board the new mega-label. "It was supposed to be a remix, but Mark was here, so we basically started from scratch and retracked the songs. Working with Mark actually turned out to be a lot like a full production project. He played some additional tracks and we did our thing. Our best work comes out of that sort of collaborative environment, and more of what might be called the Dust Brothers signature sound comes through on the material that we've co-written, rather than on the things where we just produce."

The Dust Brothers' "signature" is a tripped-out, though not quite trippy, sample-happy kind of aural collaging in which anything -- from the bubbling sound of a bong hit to a classic Bernard Purdie drum fill to cheesy heavy-metal guitars -- might rear its funky head. Although they're considered producers, their role has often extended far beyond simply recording bands in the studio. For example, King and Simpson both have co-writing credits on the two highest-profile discs they've helmed, Odelay and the Beastie Boy's 1989 release Paul's Boutique.

The duo got their start more than a decade ago when they began collaborating on a free-form hip-hop radio show at Pomona College. They graduated from goofing around to hitmaking as house producers for Delicious Vinyl in the late '80s, tailoring their aesthetic to help create platinum artists like Tone Loc and Young MC. The Dust Brothers wrote the music using their vast library of samples, someone threw a rap on top, and everybody involved collected a paycheck. But King and Simpson were putting aside their more extreme tracks -- the ones that "didn't have room for a rap" -- for a solo disc.

As Simpson tells it, "When we first started making records, we were basically in the Delicious Vinyl studio for two full years, just creating tracks. We never knew who the tracks were going to be for. Tone Loc would come in and try a vocal on something, and if it didn't work we'd erase it. And then Young MC would try a vocal, and if that didn't work, then Def Jeff would try a vocal. Some of the tracks we'd put together were just so crazy and had so much stuff going on in them that we figured there was no more room for a rap on them. So we put those aside for a Dust Brothers album."

That album never happened because the Beastie Boys, in the wake of their Licensed to Ill conquest, wanted those tracks. So, working with the raw ingredients of what might have been a Dust Brothers solo disc, the Beasties, King, and Simpson created Paul's Boutique, an extraordinary, challenging, adventurous disc that pushed sampling technology to a new extreme. Critics praised it, other artists admired it, and only a fraction of the four million fans who had pumped their fists to Licensed to Ill bought it. In other words, though it's since gone platinum, Paul's Boutique was a big commercial letdown.

"In retrospect," Simpson reflects, "Paul's Boutique made it okay for people to start doing a lot of fucked-up shit on their records. And it was so well received in the artistic community that it didn't matter quite so much how it did commercially."

Adds King, "It was ahead of its time. Back then other producers and engineers would just look at us like, `What the fuck are you doing?' And all we were doing was using a combination of our own techniques, which we had dreamed up, combined with our main influence, hip-hop DJ production."

Actually, what the Dust Brothers were doing was redefining the limits of a new technology. As Simpson explains, "Sampling and sequencing was very new, and it had only recently become affordable for people at our level. We used those machines in ways that nobody had ever used them before. It's fairly technical, but we had a sampler that was capable of putting out one or two samples at a time. So we'd load it with a sample, loop the sample, and then print it to tape. Then we'd load another sample, loop it, and print it to tape in synch with the other sample. We'd keep doing that until we had 24 tracks filled with these loops that ran the entire length of the song. Then we'd sit down at the mixing board and arrange the song using the mute buttons on each track to turn on and off different loops as we went along. People were used to seeing songs recorded on tape the way the song sounded. With our songs, if you turned on all the tracks and listened back to the tape, all you'd hear was a total mess. So the song would really come together in the muting of the various tracks."

What Simpson describes is more or less a method of using a studio mixing console as if it were a sampling keyboard. It certainly accounts for the abrupt, cut-and-paste feel of Paul's Boutique. And it helped open the door on a new concept in pop/rock songwriting: one based on looped layers of sound rather than on the standard guitar/bass/drums foundation. They might not have been the only ones -- other hip-hop producers were following the lead of Public Enemy's dense, chaotic masterpiece It Takes a Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back (Def Jam, 1988). But with the rock/rap crossover kings the Beastie Boys in their corner, the Dust Brothers were in a unique position to spread an aesthetic beyond hip-hop that embodied something more than just a new technology. There was an ironic humor stitched into the lining of Paul's Boutique, with its array of samples from blaxploitation movies and the classic rock canon (Sweet's "Ballroom Blitz" is one of the disc's more salient salutes to '70s pop culture). And that brand of retro-futurism also proved to be ahead of its time, predating by several years the emergence of Urge Overkill's polyester leisure suits, nouveau-cocktail chic, the Kiss and Abba revivals, and alternative rock's tendency to toy sardonically with the conventions of classic rock.

"I don't know that many people put out albums that are jokes to them," offers King. "But to me and Mike and to the Beastie Boys, those tracks were funny when we made them. We also think they're cool. But there's humor in every song; it's got both humor and emotion."

The Dust Brothers have kept themselves amused since Paul's Boutique in a studio they built in the Silver Lake region of LA. They've taken on various projects, including an ill-fated solo album by former Mötley Crüe singer Vince Neil in 1994. ("We figured that if the guy wanted to use some of our tracks, then he must be pretty adventurous," explains Simpson. King admits that the eight months they spent working with Neil was "more like babysitting" than producing an album.) But it wasn't until earlier this year, when King and Simpson teamed up with Beck, that they found an artist with whom they could foster the kind of songwriting/production partnership they'd had with the Beastie Boys.

"We're only as good as the artists we work with," says Simpson. "I mean, we worked just as hard with Vince Neil as we did with Beck. But the caliber of the artists in question made a big difference in the end products."

Beck came to the Dust Brothers, Simpson relates, because "he really wanted his record to sound like he'd had a good time making it. He'd already recorded quite a bit of material for it before he even met with us. Most of it was straight-ahead band stuff or just solo acoustic material. I think he felt that it didn't sound like he'd had fun recording those tunes. We have a huge collection of vinyl at our studio, so it just started out with Beck coming over and John and I putting on these records we thought were funny or cool. We'd play a song for him and he'd say like, `Oh man, I want to do a song that has that kind of vibe.' So Beck would start out by playing and singing something that we'd sample, and then we'd sort of force the hip-hop production onto that by building samples and beats around his idea."

The result has been heralded by some as the long-awaited sequel not to Beck's Mellow Gold, but to Paul's Boutique. Although King and Simpson emphasize that Odelay is, in their words, "definitely a Beck record," it's hard to miss the parallels between it and Paul's Boutique. The technology at the Dust Brothers' disposal has certainly come a long way in the past seven years, and King and Simpson have been honing the method to their madness, but there's an infectious chaos and rough-hewn feel to their work that's remained constant.

"We could make very precise records," admits Simpson, "but that would kind of defeat the purpose. The looseness makes it more digestible. It's not as intimidating that way. A big problem in music is that a lot of bands have this attitude like `Behold our music.' They sort of alienate the listener by being so tight. Then you get a band that's being loose and having fun, and it allows the audience to have fun too."

Now that the times have finally caught up with the Dust Brothers aesthetic, King and Simpson have expanded their operations to include a independent record label, Nickel Bag. Its first release, Contacto Espacial con el Tercer Sexo, is the debut of an LA outfit named Sukia, who specialize in a bizarre, sci-fi strain of electronic exotica. There are also finally plans in the works for a long-awaited Dust Brothers album, if the in-demand King and Simpson, who recently turned down an opportunity to work with Ozzy Osbourne, can ever manage to clear enough time for it.

"It's hard," admits Simpson, "because we keep getting all these great opportunities to work on great projects. But we have a huge library of unreleased material that will become the Dust Brothers record. We've already talked to Beck about doing a song and to Lou Barlow about doing a song. So I would guess that 1997 is going to be the year that we actually wrap up that chapter of the Dust Brothers saga."