Beck
Dialing Down the Cheez Whiz
Published by Under The Radar

Beck and I are situated at a banquet-length conference table in the lower part of the loft-like space housing Beck’s management offices. He’s six minutes late, which is apparently early for him. Two staff members sit nearby, hushing even their keystrokes. “I don’t think I felt like I had to do anything,” says Beck slowly, softly. “It’s just more of what came out, what the mood was.” I thought he might say that when I asked him whether he felt like his new record, Guero, should show a different side than the vulnerable one that dominated 2002’s Sea Change. I can’t think of too many instances where an artist will tell you his work is anything other than that which simply comes out, but shit, you gotta ask. Who knows, maybe you’ll hear what you least expect, in this case something like, Well, I kinda figured I’d throw a bone to all the fair-weather party people out there. Sea Change was a bummer, and it didn’t exactly burn up the charts, so here I am back with the Dust Brothers. Not that I’d attribute to Beck such a finger-in-the-wind opportunism, but people have questions, and I figure that one’s valid.

Beck’s answers are short when it comes to personal matters. He’s a private guy, and barring a couple of mildly frustrated attempts, I try to respect that. Among significant biographical facts is Beck’s April 2004 marriage to Marissa Ribisi, twin sister of Lost in Translation co-star Giovanni. In July the couple had its first child, a boy named Cosimo. Professionally, Beck has been fairly quiet. Following the musically and visually captivating Sea Change tour on which The Flaming Lips served as both his opening act and backing band, Beck recorded a track with Jon Brion for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, an appropriately melancholy cover of The Korgis’ “Everybody’s Gotta Learn Sometime.” He just recently performed the song, along with a handful of acoustic Sea Change cuts, at a Los Angeles tsunami relief benefit, sharing the bill with Tenacious D, Eddie Vedder, Dave Grohl, and Queens of the Stone Age’s Josh Homme.

For better than five years now, it’s been tempting to think that, for any given studio release, Beck is either in party mode or doing the introspective thing. There were mixed moods and multiple dimensions to be found as early as Mellow Gold and Odelay, but the televised leap from “Loser” to “Where It’s At” and “The New Pollution” made Beck’s household name ring disproportionately with fresh grooves, demented streetspeak, and generally carefree vibes. Then came the let-it-hang sad-sack of Mutations, a disc that didn’t play like a real Beck album. (In fact it was conceived as something of a stopgap.) Following one more of each subsequent pendulum swing, Guero might just bring an end to absolutist thoughts about this artist’s output.

“With this record, it depends on the song,” says Beck. “I was just writing from experiences or trying to articulate things that I was thinking about in a way that works. The last record was pretty direct and simple and more about the emotion than trying to be overly interesting with the words.”

That lyrical earnestness holds over from Sea Change, but on Guero it’s delivered to musical accompaniment that to an extent plays like a survey of Beck’s work to date. Odelay’s crisp beats and snaky grooves reappear on the gringo-rapping title cut and “Earthquake Weather,” an equatorial Isley Brothers-style soul joint complete with clavinet and steel-slicing guitar licks. “Hell Yes,” with its vocoder action and electro whimsy, would have been at home on Midnite Vultures, while “Missing” again checks Tropicalia and reprises the string sweeps of Sea Change. But something’s different even in the hints at back catalog. There’s a cohesion to Guero’s songs that suggests an artist recognizing the confines of “musical collage,” a frequently exploited metaphor that consciously or not links Beck’s aural mash-ups to grandfather Al Hansen’s famous visual paste-ups.

Beck agrees that Guero holds together differently. “I just really wanted to keep it simple,” he says. “On Midnite Vultures I would literally write four songs and then somehow try to figure out some way to Erector-set it all together into one song. At the time I loved that idea, songs that had all these different sections and changes and mood shifts. On this record, most of the time I just wanted to really work through one idea. Not to say that’s a better way of doing it. There is something cool about having five ideas and half doing all of them, and it’s all sort of the promise of what each one could be. But I’ll hear things on Midnite Vultures or other things where it goes through five different beats but there’s one that’s great. You almost wish that that little 15-second thing was the whole song—and it probably would’ve been a better song—but that wasn’t the point of what I was doing at that time.”

If that sounds like a renunciation of past creative overdrives, it gets better. “I tried to make it not so clownish,” Beck says. “I had to dial the fun knob down a few times. I think I’ve done stuff in the past that was funny, and then later on it just sounds too goofy to me. We’re all laughing and cracking up and making some silly song, and I’ll throw in some stupid line about Cheez Whiz or something, but after you do it you just kind of cringe when you hear it. I don’t wanna cheapen the music either. You can put all the intent and sincerity in something, but if there’s an aside or a punchline in there, then that sort of makes the whole thing “ironic” or kind of a joke. I think “Hell Yes” is pretty fun, but it doesn’t clobber you over the head with goofiness. It’s just enough.”

The same could be said of Guero’s title track, a buoyant Spanglish scene-setter that Beck says he’s been meaning to write for a long time to address his oft-cited relationship with Los Angeles. A playful slur heard in Latin neighborhoods like Beck’s native Pico Union, guero (wear-o) means “white boy.” The song is neither cynical nor exploitative, claims Beck, who grew up in a part-Mexican family and today lives in a considerably nicer part of L.A.’s east side. “That’s just what I would hear walking to the bus stop to go to school, so I didn’t really think about it.”

When he does think about it, he explains it like this: “[The song] speaks to a lot of things that I relate to or that relate to the world—the interesting aspect of looking at the guero, the white culture through another filter, from an immigrant experience or a European experience or an Asian experience.” But from the look of the song’s Spanish candles, mango ladies and sidewalk-sleeping cerveza fans, it’s more an avenue for wielding words and images in ways that both capture a truth and elicit a chuckle. In other words, signature Beck.

The artist himself was ambivalent about the ethnic implications of the song, so he road tested it with some friends, Mexican rockers en español Café Tacuba. Some Geffen affiliates in Mexico joined the band in voicing their approval. Beck also wasn’t sure about the word “guero,” at least as a title for his album. “Odelay was kind of a misspelling and a play on the word ‘orale,’ which is a Spanish word [for ‘I hear you’],” says Beck. “So I guess I was trying to do something different. But sometimes an album just wants to be named what it wants to be named and it doesn’t care what you think. It just kinda worked, and I think it summed up the record and some of the sounds.”

Much has been written about Beck as a po-mo imprint of L.A.’s jumble and sprawl. To say that this artist is cut from the patchwork cloth of the city is also to understand that the evocations of those before him have often represented a hold on a single thread. From the sunshine cowboy crop to the Compton drive-by guys, L.A. musicians have mostly offered zip code-sized servings of the city’s dreams and nightmares. Beck, product as he is of worldly parenting and localized culture collecting, has shown what can be gleaned from moving around. Even the colorful barrio surroundings of Beck’s youth were never meant to be the whole enchilada, an extended family strongly credentialed in art and music making sure that urban reality was more fodder than fate. While the streets may have led him to Prince, Bukowski and the Virgin of Guadalupe, Beck didn’t need to leave the house to get within a couple of degrees of separation from an Andy Warhol or a John Cage.

Funny things sung in Spanish will always have a home in a Beck song, but let’s be honest, gone are the days of busking on the stretch of sidewalk between the taqueria and the check-cashing place. Gone are the thrift shop shirts and crazy neighbors. These days Beck’s more likely to roll in a limo than a city bus, but he says that fame hasn’t felt isolating. He feels like he’s at least understood, which wasn’t the case in the early days when he was helping shape the piss-taking acoustic punk movement known as anti-folk. “I felt very isolated in the beginning,” he says, “because most people didn’t care. You were just some guy banging on a guitar while they were waiting to see the band that they really came to see. There really wasn’t, from what I could tell, an interest in acoustic music or any revisiting of that kind of music. It wasn’t interesting, it wasn’t fashionable, ’cause, that’s the years right before grunge. It was more about how heavy you could be and how loud and cathartic you could be.”

But Beck rode it out, and by the time he released his Dust Brothers-co-produced masterpiece, 1996’s Odelay, angst was becoming a caricature of itself, and well-adjusted alt-pop acts like No Doubt, Oasis and Green Day had stepped in with a dose of levity. Beck’s serious silliness struck a chord at a time when abrupt genre splicing, once the precursor to head scratching, suddenly spelled survival.

A decade later, the slacker poster boy turned hyper-motivated pop culture deity does whatever he wants. While Sea Change found Beck flashing his creative license to gain entry to his emotions, Guero finds him comfortable re-imagining his music in the context of familiar partnerships. “They don’t try to put too much of a spin on what I do,” says Beck of his on-again co-producers, the Dust Brothers. “I think that’s what I originally liked about them. They understood the parts that weren’t fully formed and over-professionalized and appreciated some of the things that were offhand and made the whole thing not be so generic. They would always tend to encourage me to put in the rough vocal or the part that was out of tune. So in a way they were kind of encouraging me to keep doing what I’d always done with my four-track stuff when I started out.”

Credited as co-writers in most cases, Dusts Mike Simpson and John King are present as a song takes shape. Except in the case of the strummy, straight-up confessional stuff of Mutations or Sea Change, Beck says he likes to write in the studio. “For me it’s kind of a laboratory,” he says, “because I can have a basic idea of a song or a melody, and then as I’m playing parts and accidents happen, that can take a song in a whole different direction. I can record most of the parts of a song and then come in and do the background vocal, and the background vocal is the coolest thing about the song, so then we’ll take everything away from the song and build around what’s good about that background vocal.”

As far as the collage aspect of Beck’s music, I’m curious to hear about it from the artist’s mouth. Much has been made of his transforming use of the aural equivalent of found objects—“refuse” or “detritus” are coined frequently, again a link to Al Hansen, one of whose most famous sculptures was constructed of hundreds of cigarette butts. Such analysis can carry an unpleasant elitist whiff—Beck is gifted, so let him collect the garbage of our culture and redeem it. Plus, hasn’t hip-hop been cutting and pasting for a while now?

Beck has a different take anyway. “I don’t think I’m really doing anything different than 10,000 other musicians as far as the way I work. The mechanical aspect of it is just songwriting. I think one of the places where there’s an intersection between my work and [my grandfather’s] is, I mean, he was just working in a very modern manner. So there are things that correspond with that sensibility, but I don’t necessarily think of myself as someone who goes and collects garbage and works out of it. I’m coming from an instinctual and emotional place, trying to articulate things that are intense to me or that I think are interesting or funny or moving, like any performer.”

“Upbeat” records (as Beck mockingly refers to them) like Guero, Midnite Vultures and Odelay are often harder to construct than the other ones, where a completed guitar/vocal treatment can be taken into the studio for fleshing out by other players. “On this record in particular I didn’t have a band,” he says, “so it was kind of up to me to come up with the bass lines and the keyboard parts and all that stuff. Then I’m very particular about the mixing and how it’s supposed to sound. We’re all very picky and discerning, so it’s gonna get worked on ’til it’s done and it feels right.”

With business out of the way, I’m curious about a few matters of flesh and bone, starting with Beck’s eight-month-old son. My own first child was born around the same time, so I’m genuinely curious how he navigates the wonderful chaos. I rarely find time to complete a paragraph, let alone artfully articulate the hopes and sound bites of a generation. Plus, new babies bring an indescribable euphoria. I’d probably sit there writing a string of “Sweet Pea”s and “Born For Me”s, boring the fuck out of the non-breeding lot.

“I just experience and enjoy and savor all the time that I get to be with him,” Beck says of striking the work/family balance, “but also just make the most out of whatever I have to do.”

He gives me a little more when I ask him what he was thinking when his little fella came into the world. “I wasn’t thinking at all. I was just being and doing. Every fiber of me was just there to make sure he was okay. This overwhelming protective instinct just surges out. It almost feels like you don’t exist any more.”

Okay, I’m feeling Beck’s skin submit to my scalpel. We have an incision. Next instrument. What have we got? What question—five words or less; leave it open ended—is going to cut through the next layer? Here’s one…

What scares you most?

“Probably the boogie man when he comes out of my closet. Pottery Barn is pretty scary sometimes too.”

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