“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. Hear Clairo Join Phoenix for Atmospheric Remix of 'After Midnight' 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.
#BECK LOSER CRACK#
And now that his ingenious video clip for “Loser” is safely ensconced in MTV’s Buzz Bin, Beck better break out his crack pipe. 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. “If all this ridiculous stuff keeps on happening to me,” he says, shaking his head, “I’m really going to have to change those lyrics.” That is, by striking a mock rock-star pose and gleefully parodying his own surreal, hip-hop-inflected breakthrough hit so that it better reflects his current chart-topping status. The baby-faced singer – who goes by his first name professionally and whose “Loser,” a quirky, winning anthem of downward mobility, has become an unexpected pop smash – is sitting in a dimly lit Mexican restaurant in Los Angeles, attempting, in his own charming and eccentric way, to shed a little light on who he is.
If he’s a schmoozer, Beck, 23, is definitely an alternative schmoozer. “When I do ‘ Loser’ now,” says Beck Hansen of his big hit record, “I should go, ‘I’m a schmoozer, baby, so why don’t you rock me?'”
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