Thirty years ago, Beck told us that back in the days of chimpanzees, he was a monkey: a baby-faced singer-songwriter who crashed into the grunge era with a hard-to-classify hit called “Loser.” The song on his 1994 major-label debut, “Mellow Gold,” combined folk guitar strums with a throbbing hip-hop beat and found the lifelong Los Angeles native stringing together lines of gonzo poetry that made him a reluctant spokesman for a generation that didn’t quite know what it wanted to say.
Beck spent the rest of the ’90s and early 2000s evading fixed perception — flitting between thrift-store psychedelia, crunchy garage rock, rousing R&B and spacey acoustic ballads — and ended up becoming something of an icon for the endless variety of his sprawling hometown. Now he’s scheduled to play the Hollywood Bowl on Saturday night with the Los Angeles Philharmonic as part of a tour that will see him perform orchestral versions of songs from across his catalog.
At the Bowl, Beck, 53, will draw on arrangements by his father, David Campbell, a veteran arranger and conductor with whom he first worked on an alternate version of his 1996 song “Jack-Ass” and who provided the chart-topping for Beck’s 2008 performance with the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra Strings. “But that was only five or six songs, not a full concert,” said the singer, whose last LP, the brilliant “Hyperspace,” came out in 2019. (Other recent work includes 2014’s “Morning Phase,” which won the Grammy for album of the year, and production work on records by Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore and Pavement’s Stephen Malkmus.)
Does the scope of this show mean you’ve been rehearsing with the Los Angeles Philharmonic? “Oh, there are no rehearsals,” he said, laughing. “I like to be prepared, but getting that many people together is a bit much.”
Beck, who has two children with his ex-wife, actress Marissa Ribisi, met for lunch last week at Little Dom's in Los Feliz to discuss the concert, the impact of streaming on his career, his rocky introduction to pop stardom and his ambitions with 1999's sexualized “Midnite Vultures.”
Why an orchestral tour?
It all started when the Royal Philharmonic called me out of the blue last year as my tour with Phoenix was ending: “Hey, we want you to come and do a night with the orchestra in October.” I said, “October 2024, great,” and my manager said, “No, it’s in about 10 days.” So we put something together and did that show last October and we all had a blast.
Do you care about orchestral music?
I used to spend a lot of time at the LA Philharmonic. I would go there without even knowing if I was going to play Brahms, Schubert or Philip Glass. I would just go for a walk. It was part of my weekly ritual.
I guess the environment calls for adding some new additions to your squad.
We're playing songs that we don't normally play live because they don't work without the orchestra: “We Live Again,” “Waking Light.” We're adding a song called “Missing.” [from 2005’s “Guero”] —A kind of Brazilian arrangement from the 60s.
It's probably refreshing to get away from the kind of greatest hits shows that are done at festivals.
That's evolving, too. There are songs I'd do 10, 15, 20 years ago that would get a predictable reaction from the audience. And now, thanks to streaming or just the evolution of taste, other songs have emerged that people like more. I did a song called “Everybody's Gotta Learn Sometime” for “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” (it wasn't in my repertoire at all, but thanks to the movie, there's a whole generation of people who know me for that song). Or “Go It Alone,” a song I did with Jack White for “Guero.” That was never a single, but now it's one of my biggest songs. People found it and liked it, so now we play it.
Like the pavement with “Take advantage of your hopes.”
My daughter played me that song: “Look at this band I found.” And I said, “You know this guy was at your house recording his album when you were 3.” It’s funny, because we’ve had this whole history of record labels deciding, “We think this is going to be the hit song, so we’re going to promote it and get it played on the radio and people are going to listen to it over and over and like it.” But now, with the choice they have, [with streaming]They can choose for themselves.
I came into a music business that was very… I don’t know what you call it… codified. There was this apparatus that you just tried to squeeze yourself into, and it was like ironclad. When I came out, I was in a very prolific period. I had put out three EPs and three albums in six or seven months. Then, immediately after I got on a major label, everyone was like, “Wait, you have to do this.” shape I had to come to terms with the idea that I was only going to put out 10 or 12 songs every three or four years, whereas that first year I put out 50 or 60. I really retrained my creative brain.
On his final tour, Beck plans to play songs he rarely performs.
(Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)
Would you be able to compose 50 songs in a year?
Easily. Having 50 number one singles is different. But I think we just left it at that because nobody knows what makes something a success anymore. I think it's more to do with personality, which I guess has always been a part of it. But I don't think it was as much when I started.
Did you feel like a personality in the 90s? Were you trying to fulfill that part of the pop star equation?
I think I retreated from that. When my first record came out, I saw a reflection in the media of what they understood me to be doing, and I was a little horrified because it wasn't what I thought in my mind. I was very offended by the slacker thing; I hated that characterization. Some people gravitate toward whatever character is constructed between them and the media. And maybe now I would have given myself license to do that. But at the time I thought, “No, no, no. I want to be a serious artist. I love Leonard Cohen, Anton Webern, and Luis Buñuel. I don't want to be a silly caricature.” So I fought against that, or at least tried to subvert it.
How is that?
I would show up on stage in a three-piece suit. I would cut all my hair off when people had long, shaggy hair. I would try to dress like a French movie star from the 60s instead of wearing the second-hand T-shirts and baggy trousers that were the uniform of the time. I don't know if it was really provocative, but breaking expectations was part of the zeitgeist. And it seemed like a way of projecting some kind of artistic side to what you were trying to do. You have to understand: my first two records came out and people thought of them as mainstream pop music. But you can listen to them now and think: This is weird shit.
I'm seven years younger than you, which back then was enough of a difference for “Mellow Gold” to open the door to all kinds of music I didn't know about.
That's what I wanted to do: plant seeds for people to find interesting things. Something we don't have to do now because we have YouTube. But back then it was part of the job: sampling old records or [Kurt] Cobain did covers of Leadbelly. He was sneaking things in to say, “This should be part of the writing of popular music.”
I'm pretty sure Nirvana's “Unplugged” introduced me to Leadbelly.
And that was a song I'd probably performed a hundred times in bars and coffee shops. People would come up to me and say, “Yeah, man, that's a great Zeppelin cover.”
Despite your initial suspicions about the record business, you've continued to participate in some old-school industry rituals: Clive Davis' pre-Grammy gala, for example.
There's a lot of history there. I think we've been in this decade-long transition from a business that was pretty much the same for 50 or 60 years to this new thing. I mean, it's like so much of the world. I constantly find myself thinking, OK, take this, because in six months, this whole block could be gone.
Certainly in Los Angeles
Los Angeles, New York, everywhere, really. I love walking through the old neighborhoods in New Orleans, and I remember right before COVID, I went and they had just converted all the gas lamps to LED. To have a street in the French Quarter lit up at midnight like a CVS? It was one of those moments where you were glad you had seen it before because now it’s a completely different thing. You lose the poetry of the place. Anything to do with technology is a sacrifice: you get five cool new things and then you lose five old things.
How is this reflected in the music?
I have a theory: There's a point where we cross the digital threshold, which means that what kids will remember most strongly (in the same way we remember radios and eight-channel television) is the iPhone. And the iPhone is very sleek and minimalist. They see the world through that prism, so I think music has evolved to sound like something that should come out of that thing. And rock music doesn't sound very good coming out of those little speakers, but pop and electronic music sounds great. It's like music from the '60s that sounded like what should come out of a transistor radio.
Are you worried about your children's relationship with their phones?
It's something you can't really compete with, it's a force that envelops them. When they were little, I had a habit: whenever they were home during waking hours, I didn't want them to see me on the phone or the computer. I thought maybe that would be ingrained in their subconscious, so they weren't used to always seeing an adult buried in technology.
Beck: “I came into a music business that was so… I don’t know how to put it… codified.”
(Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)
You grew up with artistic parents: a musician father and an artist mother. Was it important to you that your children had creative inclinations?
I wasn't too blunt about it. I think my approach was that it would be more meaningful for them to discover things for themselves. I've seen friends who would sit down with their kids and play them all the good music; they really indoctrinated them. I think I tried that a few times, but from the beginning they didn't want to know anything about it. For them it was just Top 40. They were kind of like, “No, Dad, you listen to music from other countries.” this. “So I tried to find the beauty in what they love. But maybe I should have bombarded them with Velvet Underground and Caetano Veloso.
Nowadays we divide the work of pop stars into eras. You did that decades ago, making records that each had their own style and attitude. Did you think of it that way? Were you in your “Midnite Vultures” era in 1999?
Absolutely. It all comes from your life, what you like and who you hang out with, the temperature of the times. That particular album was kind of a sharp turn. I felt like I had a big parade behind me and I thought, “Everybody, over here!” I kept going full speed ahead and at some point I turned around and there was no one behind me anymore.
Who did you think would follow you?
I don’t know. I was thinking, it’s the year 2000, come on. I thought Aphex Twin was going to be number one and the future was here. Then I remember feeling so frustrated. I’d watch Outkast and The Roots and when they played, everyone was dancing, it was a celebration. We were trying to get people to join in: let’s make this physical and visceral and fun. But our audience wasn’t moving, they weren’t celebrating, there were no hands in the air. There were people in alternative music who loved rap, but for some people it wasn’t cool.
It's hard to imagine now.
Almost impossible. Everything is so integrated that there is no real division between dance, indie, rap, electronic music and folk.
Look at Post Malone: He started out as a rapper, now he's a country kid and it's no big deal.
While I went the opposite way: I started as a country boy and became a rapper.
