"You Can’t Rock Out with Flabby Thighs"

An interview with Beck about KISS, Bing Crosby, Gary Wilson, and Dadaism

The first time I saw Beck in concert was in 2005, at a benefit show in Los Angeles. Beck played “Lost Cause,” a mournful ballad about divorce and emotional isolation. Will Ferrell, wearing a red spandex unitard, wandered onstage to do an interpretive dance, eventually dry-humping Beck’s pump organ. Beck complained at first, reminding Ferrell, “I gotta play that thing, man.” But before long, he went back to singing with the same thinly concealed grief in his voice.

Over fourteen albums (and counting), Beck has provided ample evidence of an artist suffering from multiple personalities. He’s gone from the white-trash rock of Mellow Gold to the earnest folk of Mutations to the silly sex-funk of Midnight Vultures to the down-tempo introspection of Sea Change to the mariachi-style party anthems of Guero (Spanish slang for “white boy”). How does he go from “Satan Gave Me a Taco” to “Nobody’s Fault but My Own” and back again? How does he write lyrics like “Gettin’ crazy with the Cheez Whiz” and then, just a few albums later, “You gotta drive all night just to feel like you’re OK,” and make it feel part of a creative continuum?

ERIC SPITZNAGEL: You got pigeonholed right from the beginning because of “Loser.” If you could start your career from scratch, would you come out of the gate with a less blatantly funny song?

BECK: That’s a good question. [Long pause.] Probably not. But, y’know, I try not to worry too much about how people react. It is what it is. Everyone approaches a song with their own baggage and their own ideas. It’s weird; at the time I was writing “Loser,” I was really into Dada. I was reading a lot about André Breton, Tristan Tzara, and Duchamp. And I was big on Artaud and the Theater of the Absurd. So, in my mind, “Loser” also had those influences. But not a lot of people picked up on that because it wasn’t wearing it on its sleeve. It was being filtered into some kind of haphazard rap song. Even the video for “Loser” was partly a take on Buñuel’s Simon of the Desert. But if someone’s radar only goes as far as The Brady Bunch, that’s what gets reflected back at you.

B: That’s one of the limitations, that misunderstanding or misreading of what you’re doing. But it’s also where things get interesting and bizarre. You know, frat boys on Bourbon Street doing karaoke to my song, singing lyrics like, “Plastic eyeballs, spray paint the vegetables, dog food skulls with the beefcake pantyhose.” [Laughs.]

ES: Were the Dada influences a conscious thing or is it only something you look back now and notice?

B: It was very conscious. My grandfather [Fluxus artist Al Hansen] was involved in performance art, with John Cage and Al Hendricks and Yoko Ono. When I was growing up, he did a number of shows that, well, I guess you could call them “undetermined events.” Directions would be given, but what ended up happening would be left entirely to chance. There’d be a ballerina hanging from the ceiling and somebody marching around dressed as a soldier and somebody tied to a chair. They were ephemeral art moments. My brother and I really took these performances in. But when I tried to do something similar in music, it got misinterpreted as irony, probably because I didn’t put it in the right context.

ES: The video for “Loser” could have passed for a very bizarre performance art piece.

B: Yeah, I like to think so. It must have seemed pretty random at the time. None of it was supposed to make sense in a literal way. There was a moment when I’m running up to a car with a squeegee that’s on fire. That was taken from these homeless guys, like the kind you see hanging out next to the interstate off-ramps in L.A. We had one of them in the video. In one shot, he’s playing my guitar by the freeway off-ramp and he turns and just spits. Probably one of the weirdest and darkest moments in MTV history.

ES: Wait, that was an actual homeless guy?

B: Yeah. I was friends with a lot of them. One of them sang on one of my records. I’ve always been interested in hobos and outsiders.