“When we met Beck, it was like kids messing around in a playground playing with popsicle sticks or whatever to create something with no agenda,” E.Z. Several ideas were plucked from Them’s 1966 record Them Again the surf-tinged “ Devils Haircut” featured a borrowed riff from “ I Can Only Give You Everything” and the gorgeous ballad “Jack-Ass” sampled their cover of Bob Dylan’s “ It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.” The club-ready “Where It’s At” - the one that contains his unofficial slogan “Got two turntables and a microphone!” - was hung on a sample from a middle-school sex-ed record.ĭespite its kooky range of source material, Odelay flows from beginning to end, its livewire experimentation tempered by endless post-production on primitive software. Left to their own devices, the three plundered old records. “Even the record company was like, ‘Yeah, cool. “It was great to make a record with nobody looking over our shoulders, nobody anticipating what we were going to do, so we were freed up,” E.Z. the Dust Brothers, who had produced visionary sample-based albums like the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique and Tone-Lōc’s Lōc-ed After Dark.īeck had been pigeonholed as a one-hit-wonder, so the pressure was off. 1994’s Mellow Gold, which kicks off with “Loser,” had all the ingredients for greatness scattered on the table, but they didn’t add up to a front-to-back experience. What he needed was a cohesive, classic album. It was like, ‘Is this guy for real? Is he making music that’s worthy or valuable?’ I felt like I was constantly having to prove myself.” “It didn’t seem like people understood what I was doing. “It totally disturbed me,” he told Rolling Stone in 1997. When “Loser” hit mainstream culture, Beck felt the new audience he accrued didn’t comprehend his craft. In 2014, he completed his arc from a shed tenant to a household name when Morning Phase won him a Grammy for Album of the Year. “A year ago, I was living in a shed behind a house with a bunch of rats, next to an alley downtown.” But the album it belonged to, 1994’s Mellow Gold, became a platinum hit, setting the stage for decades of alt-rock classics like 1996’s Odelay. “I never had any slack,” he told Rolling Stone. “I was blown away.” After making his way to the towheaded stage-crasher and discovering he loved Leadbelly as much as Public Enemy, he and co-producers Rob Schnapf and Karl Stephenson asked to work with him, and the four of them brought “Loser” to life.īeck resented the “slacker” image that “Loser” pinned on him, despite it being a titanic MTV hit. one summer day, and in between bands this guy bum-rushed the stage with a jazzercise sticker on his acoustic guitar,” Rothrock told Billboard in 2019. His shot paid off in 1990 when Bong Load Records’ founder Tom Rothrock happened to be part of Beck’s captive audience. “I would always sing my goofy stuff because everybody was drunk, and I’d only have two minutes,” he said. clubs, he clambered onstage with his acoustic guitar. While opening acts broke down their gear at L.A. I had, like, $8 in my pocket like a total idiot with a guitar and nothing else.” Beck soaked up the East Village anti-folk scene and rode home a year later. So he took a different tack and freestyled over the chords: “I’d start singing about Axl Rose and the levee and bus passes and strychnine, mixing the whole thing up.”Īt 17, he bought a one-way ticket from Los Angeles to New York “It was the whole cliché,” he told Rolling Stone. “Some drunk would start yelling at me, calling me Axl Rose,” he told Rolling Stone in 1994. The Angeleno son of a bluegrass musician father and a mother who hung out at Andy Warhol’s Factory, Beck quit school in the ninth grade and busked Mississippi John Hurt songs on city buses. If Beck’s wildly divergent discography might make one feel alone in the new pollution, Discogs is here to cast a lifeline. On his 2019 album, Hyperspace, he identified the vaporous space between pop’s past and present with the aid of Pharrell Williams. His devastating 2002 breakup album, Sea Change, and its atmospheric 2014 companion, Morning Phase, exude the feeling of gliding above a cloud cover. On 1996’s Odelay, he rifled through the junk-drawer of music’s past and assembled futuristic pop from its disused pieces. “How do you make something levitate?”īeck’s greatest albums are both comedic and dramatic, sailing over previous notions of common sense. “People talk about comedy being harder to pull off than drama,” he mused to The New Yorker two years later. “They can exist beyond the artist, beyond the genre, beyond the era. “There’s power in being non-profound, throwaway,” he explained to The Guardian in 2017. More than any artist this side of John Lennon, Beck understands the vital role of nonsense in music.
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