Beastie Boys broke open their gold record to play it – only to be confronted by piano covers of Barry Manilow "and some other shit"

News
By ( Louder ) published

Studio shenanigans were fairly standard for the Beastie Boys, but this stunt left them more than a little confused

Cover art for the Beastie Boys album Paul's Boutique
(Image credit: Captiol Records)

The Beastie Boys once broke open the gold record they were awarded for sales of ther 1989 album Paul's Boutique – and they were stunned to hear piano versions of Barry Manilow and other artists rather than their own music.

Ad-Rock and Mike D recall the marijuana-fuelled incident and the realisation that gold records not only may contain no gold at all, but they also may not even contain the music being lauded.

Ad-Rock tells the Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend podcast: "So we're at our studio here in California and I was smoking the pot.

"This was a long time ago. And we had a gold record on the wall. It was our record, Paul's Boutique. I was looking at it and I could see it has our label and I could see that it has whatever, like nine songs on the one side. And I was looking at the actual gold record and it only had four songs on it."

So naturally, the band had to know what was up and they smashed open the frame to play the record.

Ad-Rock continues: "And so we opened it and put the record on a record player." Mike D adds: "Open it like, I mean, broke the glass and took the record out and put it on the thing."

What they heard came as a shock. Ad-Rock says: "It was somebody doing like piano versions of like Barry Manilow, like Feelings. Just some other shit."

The rappers say they can't be sure if this just happened to them or if all gold records contain elevator music.

"I'd like to think that for, you know, Barbra Streisand, Donna Summer, Barry Manilow, a real mega-star, that it was actually their record," adds Mike D.

Paul's Boutique was produced by The Dust Brothers and has gone on to become a double platinum selling album.

Stef Lach

Stef wrote close to 5,000 stories during his time as assistant online news editor and later as online news editor between 2014-2016. An accomplished reporter and journalist, Stef has written extensively for a number of UK newspapers and also played bass with UK rock favourites Logan. His favourite bands are Pixies and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. Stef left the world of rock'n'roll news behind when he moved to his beloved Canada in 2016, but he started on his next 5000 stories in 2022.