Anyone who sells enough copies of an album will be presented with a gold record plaque — but have you ever wondered what happens if you try to listen to that framed record? Beastie Boys have revealed that they tried putting their own gold record on a turntable, only to discover that their own music wasn't on it.
Appearing on the podcast Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend, surviving Beasties Adam "Ad-Rock" Horovitz and Michael "Mike D" Diamond reminisced about the surprising discovery.
"We were at our studio here in California, and I was smoking the pot," said Horowitz. "This was a long time ago. We had a gold record on the wall; it was our record, Paul's Boutique. I was looking at it. It has our label, and I could see that [the real version] has nine songs on the one side, and I was looking at the actual gold record, and it only has four songs on it. And I was like, 'Wait, wait, you guys.'"
Naturally, they smashed the glass, took out the record and put it on a turntable. What started playing, however, wasn't Paul Boutique opener "To All the Girls."
"It was somebody doing piano versions of Barry Manilow," Horovitz revealed. "It was just some other shit."
Diamond suggested that whoever presented the award had just spray painted a random record gold and put it in a frame, although it's not clear if all gold records similarly don't contain the music of the artist they're being presented to.
Watch the exchange below.