Beck has been responsible for some of the
most inventive and boundary-pushing music
of the last 25 years.
There's just nothing Beck can't do, it would
seem.
A musician who creates such layered soundscapes
has necessarily lived a wild and interesting
existence.
This is the untold truth of Beck.
As a musician with a deep musical and cultural
vocabulary, it should come as little surprise
that Beck comes from an artsy family full
of intriguing individualists.
His paternal grandfather, a Presbyterian minister,
introduced him to the world of church music.
Beck told Rolling Stone:
"That music influenced me a lot, but not consciously.
There's something biblical and awkward and
great about those lyrics."
Beck's mother is Bibbe Hansen, a performance
artist and disciple of Andy Warhol.
Beck's father is David Campbell, a bluegrass
musician and arranger who worked on Beck's
Sea Change.
In addition to some musical tendencies, Beck
also inherited his father's religion.
He told the Sunday Tribune:
"Yeah, I'm a Scientologist.
I grew up in and around it and stuff."
That doesn't comprise his whole identity,
however.
He was "raised celebrating Jewish holidays"
by his Jewish mother, Beck told Spin.
Going by a single name carries with it a magical
rock n' roll mystique: take for example Bono,
Cher, and Beck.
That's not the latter's full name, obviously,
and nor is it even his real first name.
"What exactly is your real name?
Is it Beck?
Were you christened Beck?"
"Alright."
The name on his birth certificate is Bek Campbell.
When he started school, a teacher changed
his name to the more conventionally spelled
Beck.
When his parents split up, Beck adopted his
mother's last name: Hansen.
The whole "going by one name" wasn't a bit
of rock n' roll legend-making, however.
Beck told Spin in 1997:
"It started when I was playing open-mike nights
and small gigs.
They would write out the bill and they'd only
remember my first name and never bothered
with my last name.
Beck was easier to remember than Beck Hansen."
After he found fame and fortune, he tried
to bring his last name into his stage name
by printing it on the cover of Odelay.
"If you look at the back cover, in the lower-right-hand
corner they didn't want to put it on the front
cover it says in really tiny print, 'Hansen.'
It's kind of too late to change, though."
Experimental musicians don't usually become
major rock stars.
But the world fell in love with Beck in 1994
because of "Loser," a song that sounded like
nothing else at the time.
It's a decidedly low-fi, DIY rap song, with
a slide guitar riff, dialogue samples, and
bizarre lyrics like "dog food skulls and the
beefcake pantyhose."
And to think, none of it would've been possible
if Beck, an obscure Los Angeles indie/folkie
hadn't spent an afternoon in the early '90s
jamming with a stranger.
Beck's friend Tom Rothrock was starting up
an independent label called Bong Load Records.
Beck told Option in 1994:
"Tom had called up and said, 'Hey I know this
guy who does hip-hop beats and stuff.
I said, 'Oh yeah, well sometimes I rap between
songs and get people from the audience to
do the beat-box thing into the mike.'"
Beck said the guy, Carl Stephenson, seemed
"unimpressed" until he busted out the song's
slide guitar riff.
Rothrock's friend put a drum beat over it,
and Beck brainstormed some lyrics.
"When he played it back, I thought, 'Man,
I'm the worst rapper in the world I'm just
a loser.'"
Now they had a title for the song, which was
entirely written and recorded in just six
hours.
Amazingly, "Loser" hit #10 on the pop chart,
and Beck's long career was truly underway.
Beck's first major release, Mellow Gold, was
an odd album by mainstream music standards,
which in an interview with Rolling Stone the
artist likened to, quote, "a satanic K-Tel
record that's been found in a trash dumpster"
that some people "half-swallowed before spitting
it out."
A dazzling mix of punk, noise, folk, and country,
Odelay was arguably even odder, and was met
with near universal acclaim upon its release
in 1996.
At the 1997 Grammy Awards, it earned a nomination
for Album of the Year and won for Best Alternative
Performance.
When all was said and done, Odelay sold more
than two million copies and generated alt-rock
radio classics like "Devils Haircut" and "Where
It's At."
And yet, for some reason, the behind-the-scenes,
pre-release opinion on the album was that
it was going to fail.
In 2012, Beck told Vulture that "someone major
in the business" told him that "putting out
Odelay would be a huge mistake."
Up until its success, Beck believed that notion,
too, convinced for months that he'd "blown
it forever."
After finishing up a long tour in support
of his 1996 album Odelay, Beck realized that,
apart from a quick song for the soundtrack
to A Life Less Ordinary, he hadn't laid down
any tracks in a recording studio for a few
years.
He told Rolling Stone at the time:
"I was insanely anxious to do something creative
with the band go in and just do some stuff
real quick.
So I scared up a bunch of songs I had sitting
around."
He recorded and then mixed that handful of
songs in about a day, but didn't know what
to do next.
"Unfortunately, Nigel was supposed to go on
vacation, so I was trying to figure out what
to do, and then he suddenly called and said,
“I’ll blow it off.
I have fourteen days.
We’ll just go in and do it.”
We decided we’d do a song a day, record
and mix.
No looking back.
No doctoring anything."
And so, in 14 days, Beck and Godrich recorded
and mixed 14 songs.
That album, as it was speedily recorded, became
Beck's 1998 LP Mutations.
While recording Mutations was a brief endeavor
for Beck, the album's release proved to be
a major hassle for all parties involved.
At the time, Beck had a unique contractual
arrangement: While signed to major label Geffen
Records, he maintained a relationship with
the indie Bong Load Records.
That's the company which had released "Loser,"
and still held the vinyl rights to Beck's
recordings, even the big albums he made for
Geffen.
Beck wanted to continue releasing more experimental
work with Bong Load, and so that's where he
sent the Mutations masters.
But then the album came out on Geffen, without,
Beck says, his permission, leading him to
sue both of his labels in early 1999.
The suit wasn't settled until later that year,
just weeks before the scheduled release of
Midnite Vultures.
Under the terms of the settlement, Beck agreed
to record solely for Geffen from that point,
while Bong Load could keep its right to make
Beck's vinyl records.
Beck makes wild music videos that can be just
as postmodern and baffling as his songs.
Arguably his most entertaining is the clip
for "Sexx Laws," a boisterous slice of horn-driven
funk off his 1999 album Midnite Vultures.
This video, directed by Beck himself, has
everything: a support group interrupted by
football players crashing through walls, floating
furniture, a banjo player with a zebra head,
sky pirates, cheesy robot costumes, a wizard,
an inspirational monologue about violas from
Jack Black, and a brief appearance by a man
with long, curly black hair playing a saxophone
who looks just like smooth jazz king Kenny
G.
Beck was apparently so inspired by the mere
notion of being in the same orbit as Kenny
G that he re-recorded "Sexx Laws" as an ultra-smooth,
G-worthy tune called "Saxx Laws" that runs
more than six minutes, and then remade a video
to match the smooth new track.
Beck said on his website:
"The track came about when the idea arose
to get someone to do a Smooth Jazz arrangement
of the song instead of a remix.
[...] The track beautifully evokes the abandon
of smooth.
It's a little long, but if you stay with it,
it will reward you with a smooth outlook for
the rest of the day."
The American Music Awards were created in
1973 by Dick Clark, host of American Bandstand,
a "live" music show in which the biggest bands
in the land appeared and lip-synced and mimed
playing their instruments to their own pre-recorded
hits.
For years, pretending to play was the order
of business for Clark's American Music Awards,
too, much to the delight of Beck, slated to
perform on the show's 2000 iteration.
Beck told Pitchfork:
"When we got there they told us that we had
to play to a recording.
I thought, 'This is going to be really good
because now I can just have the band do other
things.'"
After less than a minute into "Mixed Bizness,"
most of the band dropped the charade of play-acting
and just started doing whatever they wanted.
As Beck described it:
"Some people were doing calisthenics while
others had gone in the audience and were just
hanging out.
My drummer was wearing a ski mask and playing
with his hands.
It might have been a little bit obnoxious
or bratty, but it was so liberating.
[...] It was one of those moments when the
machine shudders for a second."
"That song doesn't usually last three hours,
but we got into a serious thing."
Throughout his entire output of music in the
'90s, Beck leaned toward the danceable and
the electro-funk, stuff he could groove to
on stage.
That all changed in 2002 when Beck made a
major statement with Sea Change, a sad, stark,
folk record about the end of a relationship.
Sea Change came in the wake of a change in
Beck's personal life he wrote those songs
just after he split with his fiancee after
nine years together.
According to the magazine Allstar, the pair
broke it off after Beck, finishing up a tour,
discovered his fiancee had been seeing a member
of the band Whiskey Biscuit on the side.
While Beck wouldn't directly address his split
while doing press for Sea Change, he did explain
why he made the record.
He told MTV:
"They're honest and simple songs and they're
trying to capture a universal experience that
anybody goes through.
It's taking something sad and trying to turn
it into something that's hopeful at the end."
He went on to add:
"It's not necessarily something that brings
you down.
People always used to tell me, 'Oh, that Joni
Mitchell record or that Leonard Cohen record
is so depressing,' but to me it kind of eases
[your pain] and it just feels good.
Those records are important, and I've always
wanted to make one of those."
After recording more than 10 albums by 2012,
how else could Beck keep innovating modern
music and also challenge himself?
He prepared a new collection of songs and
then released them to the world in their most
elementary and bare bones form: as sheet music.
In the 19th century, before the arrival of
mass-produced audio media, songs gained popularity
as sheet music essentially instructions on
how to play a tune on an instrument, usually
the piano.
That's the gist of Beck's 2012 project Song
Reader, an album not of recorded tracks but
a binder packed with the sheet music of 20
new songs.
The singer-songwriter invited fans to play
the songs themselves to see how they sounded.
Groups like the all-cello Portland Cello Project
obliged, although in 2014, a proper Song Reader
LP arrived.
However, Beck sings on just one song, handing
off the work to stars like Jack Black, Norah
Jones, and Jeff Tweedy of Wilco.
In 2005, Beck filmed a video for his single
"E-Pro," in which he soars and dangles like
a puppet over a series of CGI backgrounds.
The singer's drummer Joey Waronker told Rolling
Stone.
"There was this crazy choreography, where
he was in a harness inside this moving wheel,
being hit with sticks."
During the 10-hour video shoot, Beck got seriously
hurt.
The singer hasn't said much about the specifics
of what amounted to years of intense spinal
pain, but it did limit his ability to dance
on stage, and finally forced him off the road
altogether.
He said:
"I stopped touring indefinitely, and I didn't
know if I ever would again.
I wasn't able to use my guitar and voice in
the same way.
It altered my life for a long time."
In late 2013 more than eight years after the
"E-Pro" shoot Beck told an Argentine paper
that he was finally on the mend, although
he didn't think he would be able to get up
to all the stage antics he used to.
After the demise of his nine-year relationship
to a woman that inspired his 2002 album Sea
Change, Beck was fortunate enough to fall
in love again.
In 2004, he married actress Marissa Ribisi,
probably best known for playing Cynthia, the
quiet, smart redhead that Matthew McConaughey's
character hits on in the 1993 teen classic
Dazed and Confused.
Before long, they started a family the couple
had two kids together.
The marriage suddenly and quietly fell apart
in June 2017.
That's the date of separation mentioned in
the legal paperwork Beck submitted when he
filed for divorce in February 2019.
That was news to Ribisi, as was her husband's
move to divorce her in her paperwork, she
listed the date of separation as February
15, 2019 ... the day Beck asked a court to
set him free.
Beck requested joint custody of their children,
while Ribisi asked that she be granted primary
custody.
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