Beck: 15 Years

Photos by Autumn de Wilde

The way Beck tells it, most of his career is based on luck. Or, sometimes, lack of it. Like in the late 1980s, when he had left his native Los Angeles for New York City and, after months of couch surfing, was ready to settle into his own apartment downtown. "When I met the woman to exchange the money and the key, she somehow convinced me to give her the money, and that she was going to give me the key in two days-- she disappeared," he says. "I really loved living in New York; if things had worked out differently, I would have stayed there." Instead, he was forced to move back to L.A., where he recorded "Loser"... and performed infamous leaf-blower-assisted live sets... and was signed by Geffen Records... and eventually became the face of 90s alternative culture. All because of one dirtbag real estate scammer.

Well, Beck's gift for the unexpected probably helped a bit, too. And it's that mix of out-of-nowhere talent and circumstance that has marked his singular path over the last 15 years, from 1996's genre-smash Odelay to his current guise as producer for people like Thurston Moore, Stephen Malkmus, and Charlotte Gainsbourg. When we met up with him in his manager's Hollywood office last week, he had recently returned from a couple of months in France, where he was once again working with Gainsbourg. Now 41, Beck lives with his wife, actress Marissa Ribisi, and two kids, Cosimo and Tuesday, about an hour and a half north of the downtown L.A. neighborhood where he grew up. He's inconspicuous in dark trousers and a gray t-shirt underneath a navy cardigan, his once-again-short hair curling around his head. While still youthful, it's clear that his robot-dancing days are behind him; a little grey sprinkles his sideburns, and creases crinkle out of the corner of his right eye when he smiles. His calm, gingerly manner gives off something of a Yoda vibe.

In a wonderfully bizarre "120 Minutes" interview with Thurston Moore from 1994, the Sonic Youth frontman pokes fun at the then 23-year-old Beck's babyface. "You look about 45," he says, to which Beck gleefully responds, "I kinda feel like 60." Back then, few would have guessed this brash goofball would still be a matter of concern in his 40s. At this point, though, it's easy to imagine we'll still be following him into his 60s.

(All photos are from Autumn de Wilde's forthcoming photo book Beck, out November 9 via Chronicle.)

Pitchfork: As far as your mainstream popularity in the 90s, is it safe to say that was more of a right-place-right-time thing rather than the result of an explicit drive for success on your part?

Beck: Yeah, it was a complete surprise. I was so thoroughly unprepared. If you were around the scene in Los Angeles at that time, I was the least likely tipped for success. Every band I knew or played with had flyers and properly-recorded demos and contacts; I couldn't even get a gig. Even when "Loser" came out, I would try to talk bookers into letting me play 20 minutes on a Thursday night, and they still wouldn't go for it. The only way I was allowed to play was by convincing bands to let me do a few songs while they set up. That went on for years. I marvel at bands now who are playing the Wiltern Theatre after just nine months of existence.

Pitchfork: Was signing with a major label a hard decision for you?

B: It was a really hard decision. I didn't want to be on a major label. I wanted all the attention and the noise to go away because I wanted to be something a little bit more substantial. I thought of "Loser" as this fluke that I'd done messing around at a guy's house in 1991-- I hadn't even seen that guy in two years. I didn't even have a copy of the song. I just remember it being a laugh, but some people heard it and liked it.

On "Loser": "It's like if a friend took a stupid picture of you at a party on their phone, and the next thing you knew, it was on every billboard."

There was a team of producers who had a label they eventually called Bong Load Records, and they wanted to put 500 copies of "Loser" out. And it got to the point where there was nobody who could front the money to print [more] copies to get it out there. So I just ignored it for six months and thought it would go away. I told all the labels no, or had stopped returning their calls. But then we'd put together all these demos, which became Mellow Gold, and the only way to put it out was through one of these labels that had the interest and the money. I literally didn't have the $4,000 to print the copies.

Now, I wish I'd borrowed the money and done it myself, but at the time, there was a really good group of people at Geffen, people who had been at indie labels like SST and Blast First in the 80s and had worked with people like Sonic Youth. Plus, indie labels didn't want anything to do with me because "Loser" had already become a big hit song. There was such a stigma with that. And Geffen understood the indie world, but they were putting out big records and selling a lot of copies and getting videos on MTV at the same time. It was a weird moment; it was short-lived.

Pitchfork: If you were just starting out now and happened to hit upon a song like "Loser", do you think you would have done anything differently?

B: Maybe. It was disturbing to me that an idea or a song could become something so different from what you originally intended. It's like if a friend took a stupid picture of you at a party on their phone, and the next thing you knew, it was on every billboard.

But after a few years, I realized that I was in a weird position and I could play with it a little bit-- see what what I could get away with. I was very influenced by this infamous appearance by Crispin Glover on "David Letterman" that I saw it when I was about 15. It was so weird and disturbing-- I'd never seen anything like that on TV. It was exciting to me that someone could break the wall a little bit. So I thought of breaking up the routine of the promotional cycle and the TV appearances and the generic treadmill of it. There were a lot of bands doing that already, but it felt exciting after growing up in the 70s and 80s, when things had gotten a little bit staid and very pro.

Pitchfork: I interviewed Thomas Mars from Phoenix when they won a Grammy last year, and he talked about how your 1997 Grammy performance of "Where It's At" had a big effect on him because it was so off-center.

B: That's interesting. So much felt like it was going into a black space at that time-- there was no way to register what it was doing or if it was just being ignored. Like, there was one time we were on the American Music Awards, and 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."

So the band stopped pretending to play within the first 30 seconds-- 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-- just having Garth Brooks and Whitney Houston in the front row, not sure what was happening. It was one of those moments when the machine shudders for a second.

I saw the telecast later that night, and after about the first 30 seconds, they cut to the horns, and they were gone-- it was just empty microphones. And then you see somebody doing sit ups, and then they just cut to my face so you couldn't see anything. The rest of it was just on my face and shots of confused audience members. I do remember seeing a few little things, like a fist fight or somebody knocking down an amp, near my ear lobe in the frame. [laughs] That's the kind of thing you do in your 20s. But a few moments like that one felt like this last blast of something random.

"[Early on,] the attitude was that what I was doing wasn't music."

Pitchfork: Do you feel like that randomness has gone away?

B: Oh yeah. It's hard for me to say why that happened. Maybe it's the "American Idol" approach to things; people are more well-adjusted, more nurtured. But that was a weird moment. I think about it a lot. Just out of curiosity, I wonder what makes music or culture or taste go in certain directions. Who knows what the forces are behind it.

When I was a kid and putting out my first records, there was a lot made out of the fact that the 50s/60s generation was so dominant. Then, about 10 years ago, this "American Idol" thing became so dominant. I was reading something in The New York Times where they were looking at the demography of the last 60 years. It struck me that, after the 50s/60s generation, [the birthrate] was about two thirds less in the 70s, and then, in the late 80s and 90s, it goes back up. So if you're of that 70s generation, you're bookended by these two other monolithic generations-- maybe that's one of the reasons why that little time of weirdness in the late 80s into the early 90s was coming through the mainstream. The field was a little more open, in a way.

There's definitely a shift going on now, too. When the Grammys were on this year, I noticed that almost every Album of the Year nominee was under 30. I came up in a time when Springsteen, the Stones, Dylan, and the Beatles were still dominant. For every magazine cover with a new band, there were five covers with one of those guys.Pitchfork: Do you still watch the Grammys?

B: No. It was just on; it's the kind of thing you can watch for a couple of minutes. I've been a few times, but anytime I was nominated, you're up against Steely Dan, Celine Dion, things like that; Kid A is losing to Steely Dan. And while there's no question that Steely Dan put out classic records, you can't find a poll where Kid A wasn't the album of the decade. At this point, though, I don't think Steely Dan would've won.

Pitchfork: A lot of people thought Arcade Fire winning Album of the Year could mark a cultural turning point.

B: We're also in a time where there are peers to back them up, which we didn't have 20 years ago. I can't speak for other artists, but back then I had a feeling that we weren't quite measuring up to the music that had come before, or it just wasn't as important somehow. But I wonder if it never got to have that momentum because it didn't have the audience to get behind it in the way that bands in the 60s had such a community behind everything they did.

Pitchfork: How does the immense success of Nirvana's Nevermind fit into this continuum you're talking about?

B: That was such an anomaly. There aren't many other albums from that era like that, whereas, in the 60s, there were probably a couple dozen equivalents. But [Nirvana] were working in such a classic mold. There's no question that they brought something completely new to it, but it was in an established form that could be embraced by such a wide swath of people.

Pitchfork: Compared to Nevermind, something like Mellow Gold or Odelay sounded like it was working within a totally new musical vocabulary, one that a lot of people who grew up with classic rock wouldn't really understand.

B: That's true. I can't tell you how many times I was looking at faces that were looking back at me with complete bewilderment-- or just pointing and shaking their heads and laughing-- while performing during that period. The attitude I got most of the time was that what I was doing wasn't music. I dealt with that for years. Other bands did, too. Lollapalooza in 95 was a great example of that; a lot of these vast audiences in the Midwest, Canada, and the South being confronted with the Jesus Lizard and Wowee Zowee. It's hard to quantify or qualify what those things do, but they plant seeds. Eventually, if you're experimenting with a sound that's unfamiliar, it gets absorbed, and somebody comes and does it better, and it becomes part of a vocabulary.

Pitchfork: Are there any bands from the last 10 years that you feel might be influenced by what you were doing then?

B: Not really. Post-White Stripes, I heard 150 bands that sound like that, some more blatant than others. The same was true for Nirvana and Sonic Youth. You can hear people trying to sound like Bright Eyes.

Pitchfork: Is that a badge of honor to you, or would rather be emulated more?

B: I don't know. I have heard some stuff that might be influenced by my records, but it's usually pretty wacky and off-the-wall, which is kind of annoying, to be frank. Most of my early records were not cohesive at all, just collections of demos recorded in different years. Odelay was the first time I actually got to go in the studio and record a piece of music in a continuous linear fashion, although that was written over a year.

I think anything I did on my first couple of records would've been done eventually. It's in the atmosphere. I can't tell you how many things I've worked on where I sat on it for a few years, and then somebody else did something very similar. Whether it's some weird vocal effect you hear on another record, or a drum beat, or even a song title, a subject matter, or a mixture of different kinds of music. It does move pretty quick now. It used to be a lot slower. I mean, somebody would have eventually come out with a song called "Loser". I remember when "Creep" came out. That was about the same time. It's a similar kind of in-joke.

Pitchfork: I hear some of Odelay's freewheeling attitude when it comes to genre in the work of somebody like Girl Talk.

B: Yeah, he played with us about six years ago. It's funny, I think the things that made Odelay stick out were the stylistic combinations and mish-mashes, but I always think of racking my brains and trying to write the songs on that album.

Pitchfork: Do you feel like that songwriting aspect of your work has been underappreciated?

B: God no. I'm more critical of my songwriting than anybody, but I've worked really hard in the last five to 10 years to improve. I didn't take it all that seriously when I started. It was a little bit of a stigma to being a songwriter or a folkie back then, so you had to hide that with a lot of humor. I did a lot of send-ups of sensitive singer-songwriter stuff when I was starting out, which limited my development as a songwriter in a way. I wasn't really fully given license to explore that until the mid-90s. I'm still working on it; I'm a little bit of a late bloomer.

"I didn't even have a computer until like 10 years ago. I was still using a typewriter until 2002."

Pitchfork: As far as your songwriting, Sea Change really sticks out to me as being different and more straightforward than anything else, and you haven't really returned to that style since.

B: There are a couple of reasons why I didn't go right back to that. It was a scary record to put out in that it didn't have any of the other stylistic aspects or tropes or devices that had set my other records apart. It was so straight ahead and all about the songwriting; I wanted to have something that could've made sense in any decade.

When Sea Change was coming out, I felt like those songs were sketches for something that were a little bit more evolved in that direction. I mean, there are songs on Sea Change that I wrote when I was 19. So, after finishing that record, I'd written about 35 more songs in that vein, and had solo demos of them all on these tapes in a suitcase. Around that time, I was doing a solo tour and the suitcase got left backstage in D.C. I was never able to retrieve those songs, which I thought were so much better than Sea Change. Anyone could have those songs; somebody has them. [laughs] I don't want to name any names, but I thought I recognized a few of those songs over the years!

But I was so disheartened by that, and felt bereft of these two years of songwriting that I had done. Those were songs I worked particularly hard on, and I felt like I really had something with them. I could remember the music to about three or four of them, and a couple lines here or there, but most of them were just on those tapes. They were fairly complex songs, and much more involved, technically, on the guitar, than anything I'd done. So, for a year after that, I didn't write any songs. And then I went in with the Dust Brothers to finish what turned out to be Guero, which we'd started in the 90s, and a third or half of those songs had already existed. It took me a while to get back to that [songwriting] territory.

Pitchfork: It seems like this wave of 90s musical nostalgia is really permeating culture right now, with lots of bands from the era reuniting or performing Don't Look Back concerts where they play an old album straight through. Would you ever do a show like that?

B: I've been asked to do Odelay live, but it didn't feel right for me. I toured that album incessantly for three and a half years straight when it came out, and it's not going to really get better than it was then. It seems a little soon to bring something like that back, too. The window for nostalgia is getting narrower. I feel like I'd need a good couple of decades to be far enough away from it to see it.

Pitchfork: A deluxe reissue of Odelay came out in 2008, was that awkward or did you enjoy revisiting those recordings?

B: I'm a little conflicted on it, but they were going to do it with or without my help. I was able to find some things to include that hadn't been heard before, but it was probably a little soon to be doing a special edition. I don't think it sold that well. The people who wanted it probably had it. Sometimes, reissues can be revelatory, or put the original record in a different light, but those are rare. Everything that was left behind from Odelay was pretty much just scraps and four-track B-sides. I feel like the original should stand on its own, and sometimes the ephemera does detract.

Pitchfork: Are there any of your albums that maybe didn't get the reception you wanted when they first came out and that you would want to reissue now?

B: Yeah, a less obvious one would be Midnite Vultures because that was originally recorded as a double album. There must have been 25 songs that were left behind, and about two thirds of them are finished. Until recently, I hadn't heard those songs in about 10 years. A lot of them were on hard drives from the late 90s, and it took me several years to find a specialist who could get them to work with a modern computer, because some of them were made in old operating systems with programs that nobody knows how to use anymore.

A lot of [the outtakes] are probably better off not having seen the light of day-- some arguments could be made for the album itself being better left in the vault, too. But it was an experiment and all the things that were recorded during that time were of a piece. There was a specific sound and idea behind it.

Pitchfork: That album is actually a favorite of mine.

B: Oh really? I don't think I've heard that from anybody before.

Pitchfork: I think it would get a better reception now because a lot of its R&B and hip-hop influences seem to be more acceptable.

B: You might be right. At the time, any kind of attempt at R&B or soul was tricky; unless you took a more rockist, Stones-type approach, it was easy to fail miserably. But we were in the studio listening to R. Kelly and a lot of contemporary hip-hop and R&B and trying to embrace and use that in some way. It seemed acceptable to incorporate elements of classic soul like Al Green and Stax recordings, but the more contemporary stuff had definitely not been accepted that way. That music was being ignored by rock or "alternative" audiences, so it felt like a liberating place-- there were no rules. Though there were certain things, like playing with some humorous ideas of sexuality, that might not have been acceptable; that would rub a lot of people the wrong way, for sure. Maybe there's more of an appreciation for that gray area in that [R&B] world, where there is such blatant sexuality or sensuality mixed with this grandiose and strange and sometimes-demented bent.

It might be like how Little Richard was fantastic and maybe even grotesque to certain audiences at that time, but the kids listening to him were the Stones and Dylan, and they incorporated something about him that the older generation didn't see. In a weird way, people like R. Kelly have something that has influenced kids now.

"Odelay was expected to be such a failure. The head of the record label was obviously very confused about its success."

Pitchfork: I was reading an old interview you did from the Odelay era where you talked about how some people were dismissing you as this wacky guy, and that you were were gunning to be taken more seriously. Midnite Vultures was your next big record and I'm not sure if that's the album most people would make if they wanted to be taken seriously.

B: Yeah, there was also the fact that music was taking a really severe turn around that time. On the one hand, you had all the nu-metal and dude rock, and on the other side you had all the teen-pop boy bands and Britney Spears coming in. For someone like me, there was this narrow margin of space that was quickly evaporating, and it just felt like a good time to do something that was antithetical to the time. The music was so un-tough, but also complex and weird. It wasn't pop music

Maybe certain aspects of what I was doing were reacting against what was happening or what people said, too. That's something that happens when you're starting out. After some time goes by and you get a little perspective, you realize that you don't need to react. You can just carry on with what you're doing. That took me a long time figure out; I've only gotten to that point in the last five or 10 years.

Pitchfork: Recently, you're having this second act as a producer, working with people like Charlotte Gainsbourg, Thurston Moore, and Stephen Malkmus. But you're not just making these albums sound like Beck albums-- like, I never would have guessed you produced Malkmus' new album just listening to it.

B: There's a perception that if an artist produces another artist, they're going to imprint on them. But I'm the opposite. I want to hear that artist; I don't want to hear me-- that's the last thing I want to hear. [laughs] There are a lot of technical studio things I've learned or figured out, and I feel like I could use those things to help other people with what they're doing. I had such a problem with album production when I was coming up. I thought a lot of records in the 80s and early 90s were just not being recorded well. There are certain records that you love because the songs are great, but you don't go to them as an example of great production. Over the last 20 years, myself and a lot of other musicians my age have tried to discover things in 50s, 60s, and 70s recording techniques that were lost or discarded. We've all been trying to crack this code. It's been an important period in the last 15 years, reclaiming some of those lost approaches to making records.

"There is a lot of good music coming out now-- like Deerhunter, Animal Collective, St. Vincent-- certainly more than when I was 25."

Pitchfork: You have an interesting relationship with technology in that your music can sound old-fashioned and forward-thinking at the same time.

B: Technology was something I avoided when I started out-- I didn't even have electric guitars. Only played acoustic. But after a while, I realized that it's important to embrace things that are available in your time, and try to do something different with them. Even when Pro Tools came out, we used it because it was cheap, available, accessible. You traded away sound [quality], but you could use it to do other things that weren't possible with tape. It was this duality. I'm always looking for older equipment and ways of recording, but you can't escape the fact that it's all going to be digitized and reduced. The last few records I've worked on and produced use eight-track tape, but we end up putting it in the computer.

I do think music sounds better when it's on tape and more simply recorded. I've been arguing with people for 10 years about tape versus digital, and I believe tape is absolutely essential in getting the sound that's conducive to the enjoyment of music. I wonder if it's going to go back to that. Sometimes think it has to. As music becomes more computer-based, it's lost some emotional impact. When I pull out vinyl-- which isn't that often anymore-- it's undeniable that I get a different feeling. There's a different physiology happening between the sound waves and the body that doesn't happen with music playing off the computer. About five years ago, I got a turntable that hooks up to your computer, and I put the vinyl in there and I listened to it back-to-back with a CD, and it didn't even compare. But people don't have time to go track down vinyl, lower it in, all that. And they probably don't care. It's hard to make music knowing that it's not going to be received by the listener in the way that it should be.

And you just want to go back to those 70s albums. Even a lot of the 90s indie records were still done on tape, and you hear the difference. I think people will wake up to it. It's going to be a slow return. It's analogous to how a lot of the classic analog synths from the 60s and 70s were thrown out in the 80s, and now they're all priceless because most of them have been reclaimed. But there is technology coming out now that links tape machines to the computer in real time, so I think things like that are going to bring it back into use.

Pitchfork: Does part of you wish you were making albums in the 70s?

B: Yes and no. I lived in that time, so I know that it would've been hard to convince anybody to release the kind of music I would have wanted to make. It sounds like the premise for a really bad movie: "Musician goes back in time and sees if he can make it!" [laughs] There have been many times where I've made a record and thought it was very pop or, for lack of a better word, mainstream, and then people would tell me it was bizarre or made no sense.

And there's a reason the music I've made came out at the time it did. I qualify that with the fact that there were many records and musicians who were doing stuff that was really ahead of their time back then. There have been many times when I thought we stumbled upon something new, and then I'd hear something like Os Mutantes or Brigitte Fontaine and just think, "How did nobody hear this?" It's so easy to criticize your own time, and I see that as a problem, even for myself, as a listener.

Pitchfork: Do you get anything out of the hyper-compressed digital sound that's very popular today?

B: Yeah, it's appropriate for certain kinds of records and approaches. I don't negate any of that. It gets a little bit troublesome when you have something that's overcompressed that shouldn't be. It's a real battle. For the records I've work on over the last 10 years, I get sent the really compressed version and the non-compressed version, and oftentimes you end up going with the more compressed one because it's what people's ears are attuned to. I think the bigger problem is saturation and people being desensitized.

Pitchfork: One of the main themes of your songwriting involves exposing that sort of desensitization, and it seems like people have only become more and more distracted over the last 15 years.

B: Yeah, I think the best example of that is the Fred Armisen sketch he did for ["Portlandia"] where he's on five different websites, he's got his iPad and his iPhone, he has to send his Netflix back, and somebody is sending him a funny link. He's doing 15 things at once and it's all accelerating.

I stay away from that stuff. I try not to do email; I try to talk to people on the phone. I've had the same $30 cell phone for forever. It only makes calls. I didn't even have a computer until like 10 years ago-- there was one in the studio, but other than that I didn't want to look at it. I was still using a typewriter until 2002.

Pitchfork: Now that you're out of your label contract, how do you plan on releasing your new music?

B: I've been working on my own label for about seven years. It's gone through three different names and I have a lot of things that I want to release on it, but they'll probably just be limited things. I don't know if I would use that for a wider release or a proper album. But then you get to the question of putting out an album at all. I've spent a lot of time debating that: "What am I trying to do? Does the world need another record? Is this necessary?" You ultimately don't know until you put something out, but I do get inspired by artists or filmmakers who just work to work, even if it isn't necessary or revelatory or essential-- it can act as momentum toward something else.

With my own music, I try to get away from things that are familiar and things that would be easy for me to go to. Doing a style change is pretty easy-- that's what I started out doing and then I avoided it for so long. I guess you don't really know what something is until you put it out, and then the fans and the critics tell you what it is, and it's like, "Oh, is that what this is? Guess I'm not going to do that again. Fuck." [laughs]

"And as far as recording my own songs, I'm just trying to get back to being satisfied with doing it for my own amusement. Sometimes I forget I haven't released certain things, like, 'Shit, that isn't out?'"

Pitchfork: Considering your 90s success, does part of you still want to have that loud of a voice in the overall musical conversation?

B: No, no. I think I've done everything I could to avoid that. If anything, even Odelay was expected to be such a failure. I remember the record company having some kind of party right before there was a big merger when everyone got fired. It was after Odelay had sold 2 million copies and I remember the head of the record company giving this speech in which it was obvious that he was very confused about its success. I think everyone felt that way. So pretty much everything since has been a bit of a retreat from that kind of success. There was a moment when I felt like that door had opened and I could walk through; I'd go to the store and the guy behind the deli counter is yelling, "Hey, Beck guy!" It's just weird. It doesn't feel right. It doesn't feel natural to me. I don't think I was made for that. I was never good at that.

But there are people who've prepared their whole lives for real heavy success and bask in it. They're so good at it and they obviously love it. I'm just happy to be making a record. And as far as recording my own songs, I always did that just for my own amusement. For a long time, I've just been trying to get back to being satisfied with that. Sometimes I forget I haven't released certain things, like, "Shit, that isn't out?"

I feel like there is a lot of good music coming out now-- like Deerhunter, Animal Collective, St. Vincent-- certainly more than when I was 25. I mean, things like Pavement or a Sebadoh or Wu-Tang Clan only came along once in awhile. I feel like I can hear something new pretty much every day of the week that I think is good. There's more well-known artists who aren't making as good songs as people who are just coming out of nowhere. That seems to be more typical in the last few years than ever. I don't remember half of the new bands, though-- and I think that's kind of where we're going. It's turning into just a big derby of songs. May the best song win.