Skip hop rocker1/14/2024 “This wasn’t some hippie guy finger picking in the ’70s, singing about rainbows. “I’d never heard anything like that,” Beck remembers. While Beck bravely confesses that his first record purchase may have been the Olivia Newton-John-heavy soundtrack to Xanadu, he soon graduated to far rootsier stuff like Mississippi John Hurt. “His stuff was taking trash and making it art. “He collects cigarette butts and glues them together and makes pictures of naked ladies, then sprays the whole thing silver,” says Beck. “There’s something biblical and awkward and great about all those lyrics.” Beck also spent time in Europe with his other grandfather, artist Al Hansen. “That music influenced me a lot, but not consciously,” he says. “I think they were kind of concerned.”īeck’s grandfather was a Presbyterian preacher, and the church music and hymns Beck heard growing up had an impact. “I had kind of a weird home,” he says convincingly. Beck apparently comes by his taste for street music honestly: As a baby, he says, he hung around with his father, a bluegrass street musician.Īs a young boy, Beck was sent for a time to live with his maternal grandparents in Kansas. Though he has traveled quite a bit, Beck spent a lot of his wonder years living with his office-worker mother and half brother in some seedy but lively sections of town, riding his bike around Hollywood Boulevard to check out all the punks, who intrigued him, listening to early hip-hop and even doing a little break-dancing along the way. So where exactly, you might ask, did this guy come from? From Los Angeles, of course. Teezo Touchdown Asks Fans to 'Spend the Night' With Him on 2024 Tour Tracks like “Nitemare Hippy Girl,” “F-in With My Head (Mountain Dew Rock)” and “Soul Suckin Jerk” make it clear this LP is not a calculated pop cash-in. Funny, folky, funky and freaky (often at the same time), Mellow Gold is a trip to a strange place where Woody Guthrie meets Woody Allen. And until, like, six months ago, I didn’t know that you could get paid for playing.”īeck hopes Mellow Gold – his first album under an unusual deal with DGC that allows him plenty of creative freedom and the right to continue releasing various indie releases – will prove that there’s more to him than just “Loser.” A low-budget effort recorded at home on an eight-track recorder, the record freely blends folk, blues, rap, country and just about everything else Beck found around the house. “I was never good at getting jobs or girls or anything. “Believe me, all of this has fallen in my lap,” Beck says. I was working in a video store doing things like alphabetizing the pornography section for minimum wage. “I had zero money and zero possibilities. “A year ago I was living in a shed behind a house with a bunch of rats, next to an alley downtown,” Beck recalls. And before the small Los Angeles-based, guerrilla-style label Bong Load Custom Records put out a 12-inch of “Loser” last year, things were looking mighty bleak for him. To hear him tell it, Beck’s sudden rise has come with little effort or even inclination on his part. I mean, that slacker kind of stuff is for people who have the time to be depressed about everything.” “I was working a $4-an-hour job trying to stay alive. “I mean, I never had any slack,” Beck continues. I was like ‘What?’ I said, ‘Turn off the TV.’ I was like ‘Slacker my ass.’ “The guy on the air was talking about all this slacker stuff, saying that ‘Loser’ was like some slacker anthem or something. “I was up in Olympia, Wash., and someone called up and said they were going to premiere the video,” Beck says. And now that his ingenious video clip for “Loser” is safely ensconced in MTV’s Buzz Bin, Beck better break out his crack pipe.Īs he drums with a tortilla chip in time to a Muzak version of Al Stewart’s “Year of the Cat” blasting on the restaurant sound system, Beck remembers seeing the “Loser” video on MTV for the first time and being pegged as a new spokesman for the grunge generation. Not long ago, Beck was an underground – way underground – Los Angeles act whose indie recordings included a 1993 single entitled “MTV Makes Me Want to Smoke Crack.” But in today’s brave new alterna-rock world, Beck has a Top 40 hit and has become a major-label priority for DGC Records. “All this ridiculous stuff” is by far early ’94’s most unlikely overnight-success story, one bound to destroy any claims this likably offbeat guy may have ever had to lower status.
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