''Everything is in a state of flux, including the status quo.'
   Robert Byrne (Writing Rackets, Lyle Stuart Publishing, 1969)
 

   March 1946. Private Al Hansen, a 19-year-old American soldier, stands in line, waiting to jump out
   of a plane. As part of the invading army, paratrooper Hansen and the 508th Parachute Infantry
   Regiment (known as the Red Devils by the German Luftwaffe, who are mightily impressed with their
   daring-do and bravado) are going to police the dregs of the extinguished war.
    One by one they parachute out of the door of a B-29 Superfortress. Ice cold winds whip through
   the metallic hull of the plane. Their chutes open like spores over the incredibly green fields of
   Germany, bitter winds alternate with the warming sun as spring comes around. Once on the
   ground, the officers shout orders that echo off the bullet-stripped village buildings. The Red Devils
   are parachuting into the ruins of what was once Europe's most progressive culture. With muddy
   boots, worn from basic training and fighting across Europe, the regiment make their way into
   Frankfurt, which resembles nothing so much as a honeycomb, with shattered walls and windows
   caving in amidst powdery fine dust coating tons of brick and twisted wires. The detritus lies all
   around as the soldiers tramp down the mud banks and through the ghostly cathedral-like shells of
   buildings.

    The regiment requisition abandoned houses in Hedderheim, a suburb of Frankfurt. In the chaos
   of the closing days of the war, dodging the black marketeers, wandering refugees, demobilised
   German soldiers and locals trying to pick up the pieces, Al Hansen surveys the ruins of Frankfurt.
   The young man from Queens, the immigrant-filled borough of New York City, marvels at the
   destruction. The firebombing of Frankfurt has reduced centuries of history to dust and boiled
   lakes. A frisson goes up and down his spine and he looks at the houses, some totally intact, as if
   by chance operation, in the midst of utter ruination. It all seems so arbitrary, a throw of the dice.
   Hansen later recalled his stunned impressions of the destruction wrought on Germany's defeated
   cities in his Notes On A Mini-Retrospective: 'The devastation in Frankfurt, Köln and Berlin from
   aerial bombing was awesome; a surreal, lunar landscape of skeletal buildings, ruins, bomb craters
   and mounds of rubble.'1

    Hansen's regiment found themselves a makeshift camp in a bomb-blasted house. The doors on
   their floor opened onto a straight five-storey drop down to the ground; against a wall in one room,
   hanging right at the precipice, stood an upright piano. 'It was just a few centimetres from the
   edge,' Hansen recalled. Day by day the young paratrooper grew obsessed with the piano's parlous
   state: 'I thought about it while drinking and eating. I thought about it while fucking. I thought
   about it while jumping out of aeroplanes, while shooting machine guns, while on guard duty.'2
    One night, after the final reveille, and when all the other soldiers had fallen asleep on their cots,
   Hansen snuck out of their room, and put his hand on the piano. He pushed it a hair's breadth; the
   entire floor groaned as if about to give way. He jumped back. He pushed a little more, a little more.
   The piano teetered on the edge, about to fall, each second of anticipation sending an electrical
   current coursing through Hansen's blood. And finally, off it went. The piano fell five stories and hit
   the ground with an unbelievable crash:

'Tsccchwauuuuuuuuuuungha!'

    'The sound of it and the whole experience was the starting point for Al's interest in performance,'3
   Hansen's grandson Beck explained some fifty years later. Al called the toppling of that piano his
   first piece and later re-created it at the Happenings Fluxus Show at the Kunstverein in Köln,
   Germany, in 1969.

   1 Hansen, Al. Notes On A Mini-Retrospective, Kölnisches Stadt Museum, 1995
   2 McCormick, Carlo. 'Interview with Beck Hansen', Playing With Matches, Smart Art Press/Plug In
   Editions, 1998.
   3 Smith, Ethan. 'Re: Fluxology – Beck And Yoko Ono Sound Off On Found Art, Family Ties, And
   Flying Pianos', New York Magazine, 21 September 1998
 
 
 
 
 
 

1: MYSTIC REGULATION AT THE GRAND OLE OPRY
 

   Please don't tell what train I'm on
   So they won't know where I've gone'
   -'Freight Train' by Elizabeth Cotton
 

   24 March 1997
   Nashville, Tennessee

   This afternoon Beck is taking a walk through the Country Hall Of Fame Museum. It is noontime,
   and very quiet. All the tourists are downtown on Broadway with melting popsicles running down
   their hands, eating nachos or treading the wooden boards of record stores which stock three
   hundred and sixty Minnie Pearl albums. All the black and white photos of broken down shacks and
   gaunt, serious farmers only serve to remind one what the heart source of the music is, and to
   never forget it. Lefty Frizzell was born in an oil field behind an oil well and his music was hobo
   music, mountain music. The fallen stars of country, dead from drunkenness or barbiturates, car
   wrecks or plane crashes, are remembered in this place. And those country tears were not crocodile
   tears: Hank Williams must have sat shell-shocked many times, thinking about where Audrey was
   that night, and with whom. A song like 'Your Cheating Heart' is coloured with real pain.
    Beck walks past the pictures that trace country's increasing adoption of gaudiness and glitter, the
   stars whose music was heard from taxicabs in Indonesia to bars in Glasgow; Dolly Parton's
   ten-thousand-watt capped teeth glittering on television at the new Opry, a massive auditorium
   somewhere out past the blinking lights of Nashville, far from the studios where a thousand top
   session men toiled in anonymity. And all the while Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and Johnny Cash
   kept it outlawed and real. Lots of junk, lots of treasures, sometimes both one and the same, all
   under glass cases and under lights. And there at the end of it all is Hank Williams' car.

    This is not just any old Hank Williams car. It is the 1952 Cadillac in which, just shy of midnight on
   New Year's Eve that same year, Hank died of an overdose, curled up in the back seat on a freezing
   cold night, the last four lines he ever wrote on a small scrap of paper, held so tightly that it had to
   be pried from his hand. It read: 'We met, we lived and dear we loved, then comes that fatal day, the
   love that felt so dear fades far away.' His driver, Charles Carr, drove him nearly 300 miles before he
   realized his boss's long-suffering heart had finally failed. Hank was 29 years old. Where do you go
   when you reach the end of the road?

    The history of country is, of course, the mirror image of the history of another American music,
   that of black America, which is still as startling to most white Americans as looking into a mirror
   and seeing a different face. The blues stems from something else completely. The Scottish-Irish
   roots of country are thousands of miles from the outback land of Dahomey and Ghana, where
   storytellers wandered from village to village, playing instruments and reciting history in long,
   memorized stretches. But the blues is a music of pain and regeneration, as is country. 'The blues
   is connected to a tradition, and has all these other levels and dimensions to it,' Beck once noted:
   'the Biblical side and the religious side, the African roots, and elements of English balladry, and
   characters and stories from that tradition. It's a rich music.'1 The blues was born out of sanctity
   and sacrilege, a carnal version of the holy hymns sung in black churches. It was moulded and
   made on whorehouse pianos with players like Scott Joplin playing ragtime accompaniment to the
   carnality that is never far from the surface of the blues. It was an attempt to branch out from the
   modal and into a rigid scale that can be played forever, its subtle variations ever changing.

   Omnivorous by nature, blues references pure African music and adopts European instruments,
   taking European scales and bending two notes to give it flavour, emotion and a cultural stamp.
   'That's what I love about the blues,' Beck told the Shambhala Sun in September 1999, 'a lot of
   those refrains were spread out in a lot of different people's songs. They would take verses from
   different things and assemble them. They just become a part of you and then they just come out.
   I've done that a few times. It just becomes unconscious if you're playing that music long enough...
   [I] got really heavy into the old music, from the Carter Family to all the blues stuff, and the field
   recordings. Became fascinated by it... We'd just sit, listening for hours, trying to figure out how to
   do this stuff. And wrestled with it for five, six years.'2

    Son House, the Delta bluesman, cited field hollers and singing as the roots of the blues: call and
   response, extending back to Africa, through the fields and the church. Black music thrives on
   communication between audience and performer; it's the magic element. In the classical European
   tradition, music is passively observed; it's almost joy by proxy, with the musician reaching rapture
   and the listener vicariously thrilling to that rapture.

    It is fitting that Beck has covered 'John Hardy' and 'Stagger Lee'. It is fitting that he most admires
   the white country singer Jimmie Rodgers who yodelled his way through the black blues, and
   Mississippi John Hurt, the black Mississippi bluesman, whose favourite musician was Jimmie
   Rodgers. Beck is straddling the line of two worlds that seem so far apart. White music and black
   music are an ocean apart, and not since the turn of the century have these two worlds been
   anywhere near each other, except for that marvellous fluke -  the rapid fire birth of rock and roll in the 1950's.

    This union and schism oscillate at intervals, sometimes forty or more
   years apart, both tied to rapid industrialization and migration. During the advent of the
   gramophone, it was often difficult to distinguish which artist was white and which was black. The
   advent of the record itself widened the schism, separating white and black music into marketable
   categories. The dividing of genres has long been a form of racism. It was Englishmen who took
   black blues and white country blues and reconfigured them and sent the finished product back to
   America. In America, we are often blind to our own heritage, and this blindness is to our profound
   detriment.

    Far beyond the Mississippi Delta, or the hills of Appalachia, Beck is also in the forefront of
   cutting-edge international pop music, slotting in nicely with the likes of Japan's Cornelius and
   England's Stereolab. He has played harmonica on albums by Japanese pop sensation Kahimi
   Karie, performed with American country icons Willie Nelson and Emmylou Harris, and bridged the
   gap between hip-hop and pop. He has collaborated with hip-pop visionary (so visionary he is
   blinded by it at times) Carl Stephenson, the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, rapper Kool Keith and
   electro-folkist Beth Orton. He has worked with producer teams the Dust Brothers and the Bong
   Load squad of Rothrock and Schnapf; he has covered songs by Skip James, Son House, Skip
   Spence, Mississippi John Hurt, and Jimmie Rodgers. He ties into that underside of American
   folklorica of lonesome innovators going it alone, entertainers and minstrel men, song and dance
   men.
 
 
 

   9 p.m.

   Well, this is it, the Grand Old Opry in Nashville, Tennessee. This is the shrine of country music, the
   place where all the backwoods twangers and hayseed mirabli make it or break it. This is where
   Hank Williams became a star, only to be asked to leave, in the last throes of his brokenhearted
   drunken dissipation. Beneath the famed feather backdrop and the announcers whose phantoms
   now announced fixed dates with the vanished past, when Johnny Cash and Jimmie Rodgers, Hank
   Snow and George Jones held their radio-bound audience on WSM in thrall. And the Grand Old Opry
   is also where the Byrds, with Gram Parsons, had introduced their 'Sweethearts of the Rodeo'
   country set in February 1968 to a thoroughly conservative audience that was sceptical, to say the
   least, at long hair rockers displaying a fondness for country music. After a refurbishment of the
   sort that seeks to preserve but often destroys the charm of a building, the Grand Ole Opry has
   been transformed into a theatre with carpeted stairwells and pleasant, bland lights in beige hues
   chosen by interior designers to highlight old posters with wondrous names.

    The Ryman Auditorium, as the Opry is officially known, is the latest stop on Beck's whirlwind jaunt
   through the United States and the world. He is touring in support of Odelay; a most remarkable
   album of cut and paste artistry, loving pastiche, long loping grooves and devilishly beguiling lyrics.
   The touring band is solid, in contrast to the ragtag band of holy amateurs that bewildered the
   Lollapalooza audience just two years before. Beck's show this time around has taken a quantum
   leap forward in presentation, with its tribute-pastiche of the soul revues of lore and evoking the
   participatory hip-hop block parties that were as popular in the late 1970s as the Ryman's country
   radio shows had been in theirs.

    The audience, mostly teenagers, file in, fresh scrubbed and self-aware, milling around the lobby
   and stairs and talking in polite tones, ignoring the country relics posted on the walls. This is a sell
   out show and the sense of anticipation among the gathering throngs is palpable. People glance at
   each other, as if to see just who else would have come down to see Beck. There are those who
   knew Beck as a wacky iconoclast who did a novelty song called 'Loser'. To others, Odelay has
   become the soundtrack to a springtime of illicit beer drinking on back lawns in the South, amid the
   smell of fresh mown grass and sterilized, antiseptic suburbs. Sprinkled among the crowds are
   indie fans, dressed in the retro fashions that have been recycled to the point at which their original
   cultural subset has been long forgotten. Here and there, people in their thirties look bewildered to
   find themselves in such a young group. They have heard Beck in their cars on the way to work, on
   National Public Radio, where dulcet-toned radio jocks sprinkle him in alongside Lucinda Williams or
   the Indigo Girls, and have become charmed by his offbeat weirdness.

    All and sundry begin to fill the august auditorium, with its pews of oak, buffed and finished to
   lacklustre perfection, arranged in a half-octagonal configuration facing the stage, grandly draped in
   velvet curtains. Rising in two tiers, the hard wooden seats make it feel more like a church than the
   setting for a rock and roll show. The stained glass overlooking the stage only serves to heighten
   the effect. The crowd is dressed well, with nary a ripped jean or an untucked shirt among them.
   The air of mild affluence engendered by recent economic prosperity is shown by their middle-class
   accoutrements: cellular phones, brandished for no ostensible purpose, clean white trainers costing
   more than most Third World workers' annual salaries, Levi's jeans and ironed T-shirts.

    Swedish pop band the Cardigans, led by the lissom and lovely singer Nina Persson take the stage,
   with the all-male Nordic instrumentalists seemingly hell bent on derailing their thin gossamer pop
   into a mutated metal hybrid. They sing 'Iron Man' by Black Sabbath and inoffensive pop tunes
   beefed up with power chords, making for an interesting juxtaposition. They obligingly play their
   current hit, 'Lovefool', with its meagre lyrics celebrating female witlessness. The only untoward
   moment occurs when a strange lad with a Cheshire Cat grin appears between bassist Magnus
   Sveningsson and drummer Bengt Lagergerg, popping and jerking in breakdance movements to
   their juggernaut rhythm. The Swedes smile, puzzled but tolerant at the intrusion. Is he taking the
   piss? Who is he? In fact, it's a member of Beck's band, sent like the emissary of chaos into a
   calculated and somewhat boring 30-minute set. He waves his arms in robotic fashion, seemingly
   double-jointed and soon all eyes are riveted on him. Giggles erupted from the bevy of twelve- and
   thirteen-year-olds already out of their pews and crushed to the front of the mahogany stage
   despite the admonitions of the besuited ushers, with their walkie talkies, ill-fitting beige pants and
   sweaty brows.

    Seeing the breakdancing fool on stage gives me the oddest feeling, as if I had been stuck in a
   time warp without realizing it for the past hour. The whole scene feels like 1960s America right
   before the Beatles arrived and changed all the rules, or a Blackpool theatre in the late 1950s where
   fresh-faced British teens await the Nabob of Sob, Johnny Ray. But the breakdancer is like an
   emissary from another place entirely, a jester in a tepid court, the facsimile of soul in a very
   ordinary event. The Cardigans bang to a close and exit, the lights dim and roadies mull in the semi-
   darkness, rolling amplifiers away and winding cables up with meaty paws.

    During the break, my mind keeps returning to the history of this home of country music. I think of
   the WSM Barn Dance radio show, with the Carter Family taking the bus to Studio B of WSM, in the
   old National Life & Accident Insurance Building, first home of the Opry, to sing 'Keep On The Sunny
   Side' in 1928. I try to imagine the two girls, Sara and her sister-in-law Maybelle, harmonizing pure
   and sweet on 'Will the Circle Be Unbroken' as Sara's solemn husband Alvin P. Carter plays the
   guitar with righteous force and fervour and sings in low rumbling thunder, all of them shaking
   under the hot lights for a fitful audience who could make or break them. I can picture Sara's
   trembling fingers stroking her autoharp while Maybelle picks the bass line on a Gibson L-5 guitar
   that dwarfs her small frame. The Carter Family seem like phantoms of an America now paved under
   and denuded by television, cars, tract homes, violence and apathy.

    The auditorium feels like church and court house, theatre and circus, museum and music hall. And
   it is all those things; make it or break it in Nashville or take the train home. It was once a church,
   through which travelling revival preachers of the 19th century had stormed, demonizing the
   saloons a block away on Broadway to an auditorium full of the faithful, fanning themselves in the
   heat with fans bought wholesale from a funeral parlour. The windows seem as old as time itself.
    Smokey Hormel, in a three-button mod suit and slicked-back lounge lizard hair ambles to his
   guitar as cheers rustle through the hall like small waves. The drummer, Joey Waronker, takes his
   seat at the stool, sharp and professional, rolling his wrists and clutching Bonham sticks. Bassist
   Justin Meldal-Johnsen plugs in and DJ Swamp follows, assuming his place behind the fabled
   'wheels of steel'. Theo Mondle, keyboardist, settles in behind his Moogs and a battle-worn Fender
   Rhodes piano (are those things indestructible?). I am almost certain turntables have never been
   onstage at the Ryman before.

    Bam! All the lights go on at once and the stage is bathed in harsh electric white light, startling
   everyone on my pew. The bone-breaking riff to 'Devil's Haircut' kicks off and Beck dashes in, not
   as small as one would have thought, and vibrating head to toe with visible energy, grabbing the
   mike off the stand just like a revival minister, ready to testify damnation or salvation. Everyone
   jumps to their feet.

    His voice crackles with laconic intensity as he belts out the opening line, 'Something's wrong 'cos
   my mind is fading', voiding the febrile overture awkwardness. It's as if he's dropped in from the
   sky with an urgent message that he has to relay to us, the assembled throng. He stares out into
   the auditorium, pointing and pivoting on his heels. He is dressed like a cross between the louche,
   unshaven panache of Serge Gainsbourg and the Nudie suit rhinestone grandeur of George Jones.
    He shakes, he shimmies. The band break into co-ordinated dance moves, hopping up and down
   in a late 20th century approximation of the Ubangi stomp. What is immediately impressive is how
   tight the band is, seasoned professionals to the man, on cue, in tune and in time. How far Beck
   has come from his scuffling days, his steady rambling days, shambling to the mike at New York or
   Los Angeles coffee bars, singing his songs to indifferent audiences, big blue eyes blinking under
   the lights. Here is someone in control and confident, declaiming and shouting. His words ring out
   like shattered poetry, obeying their own internal logic and always hinting at something that remains
   unarticulated but hints at plain truths. Following the old maxim that people always scrutinize what
   they don't quite understand, the audience takes in scattered phrases: 'Everywhere I look there's a
   devil in waiting.' How many of them know he is invoking the spirit of Stagger Lee, the murderous
   gambler who stalked the rough house bars of the barely settled frontier?

    Beck and his band toy with the songs, treating them irreverently, sometimes following what seems
   to be either a backing tape or just samples spun with liquid ease by DJ Swamp. Occasionally they
   abandon the song's recorded structure completely, venturing into a bit of freeform jazz or funk.
   The band is seasoned like a Broadway fajita, charred on the outside, tender on the inside. My
   girlfriend Anja and I dance, but we and the teenies up front are the only ones; everyone else just
   stares. Jesus, the guy is packed full of vigour and spark!

    Nina Persson watches Beck from the wings, as he does trouser-bursting splits and kicks. Persson
   stands theatrically in the wings, arm across her breasts, tapping a cigarette, hip slung to the right,
   smoke trailing up in slow, undulating waves in the spotlights. She stands in cool European repose,
   studying Beck. At the front of the stage a young Swedish photographer, with short cropped hair
   and octagonal glasses, black turtle neck and beige jodhpurs – the very essence of European
   intellectual cool – is snapping away, pausing occasionally to study Beck and smile. I laugh when I
   realize Beck has come all the way from media post-grunge moppet to sex symbol.
    He runs through a selection of his songs in quick progression, never pausing or faltering. He
   sings 'Hotwax', voice cracking every now and then, a side effect of so many gigs in so many places
   on so many lousy public address systems. At the halfway point, the band retreat into the wings
   and the lights switch to a solitary spotlight hovering over the fevered tangle of unkempt hair as
   Beck steps to the lip of the stage. His smallest fans reach out to touch him. Armed only with a
   harmonica he breaks out into some full-bore Sonny Terry-style harp playing. Damn me if he isn't
   an apparition lifted from the Delta and dropped into the citadel of country. It is electrifying and
   confusing in equal measure, as a quick look around me confirms. People try to clap along with his
   frenetic, uneven beat as he lets loose squalls of harmonica and shouts out the words to 'One Foot
   in the Grave', his foot stamping like a metronome on the hallowed stage. He exhorts the audience
   to participate, and they try. Should they take this ride with him? He seems so febrile, on the verge
   of something even he isn't sure he can channel.

    The rawness of his voice and his harmonica, tag-teaming each other to ever greater heights, is
   shocking in its looseness. No effort has been made to smooth out the rough edges that pop
   pundits, record label A&R men and cursed radio programmers strive to eradicate. Beck shouts
   himself hoarse between harmonica blasts, his voice over-amplified until the stained-glass windows
   shake with dissonance. 'I never rocked the pews before,' he wisecracks in an aside that garners a
   ripple of laughter, followed by a shouted 'Clap your hands!' Crazed he is, with a vocal quality
   somewhere between a rabbinical cantor intoning the Torah and Yamataka eYe of the Japanese
   noise band the Boredoms. There is something almost frightening about the intensity of Beck's
   solo spot under the lights, standing alone. He has to get through, to communicate, shouting with
   something approaching desperation.

    'You got to REGULATE!' he exhorts, getting half the audience to respond to his shouted plea.
   Beck's regulation seems something almost mystic, a means by which to decode the puzzles he is
   presenting, urging his audience to work their way into a new mode of thinking. To submit to flux
   and turn off the static; the static that pervades modern culture.

    'YOU KNOW THAT FEAR, WHEN YOU GET UP IN THE MORNING,
THAT'S ONE FOOT IN THE GRAVE, BABY.
    YOU KNOW WHAT YOU GOT TO DO TO GET OVER THAT FEAR,
YOU GOT TO REGULATE!'
 

    With much effort he finally manages to get nearly everyone to chant along with him.
    The gut bucket country blues ends and he exhales, a hoarse, theatrical sigh that sweeps through
   the congested pews, where everyone stands but no one seemed to know what to do. I've never
   seen an audience so utterly fixated on a performer before, watching to see what he would do next
   and looking for clues, both tense and delighted. Despite the set lists taped to the stage, Beck and
   the band give off the vibe that the script will be abandoned at any moment.

    He leaves for the wings and the audience crane their necks following him. His heels crack the
   boards where so many rambling phantoms have alighted for a moment. He returns with a Martin
   acoustic guitar and intones calmly about the Ryman's illustrious past and how he had grown up
   enamoured of old-time country and blues, namechecking the Singing Brakeman Jimmie Rodgers,
   and Fred McDowell, making note of the latter's finger-picking prowess. He plays an acoustic set
   comprising 'Jack-Ass', 'Rowboat', Rodgers' 'Waiting on a Train' and 'I Get Lonesome'. Around
   about this time comes the first sign of discord, as some young malcontents, drunk on smuggled
   beer, shout abuse from behind us, insinuating Beck was not what he said he was, that he was that
   worst of all interlopers in the South: 'Carpetbagger!'

    But Beck, if he notices the catcalls at all, ignores them. He continues to strum quiet, plaintive folk
   and country, delving a bit deeper into his repertoire to evoke the yodels of Rodgers and the gritty
   flavour of back roads, cotton plantations and trains leading to fixed destinations to nowhere but
   back on themselves. Through the music comes a sense of a blessed and cursed land that still
   surprises outsiders with its curious manners and charm so out of place in the fast-edit future of
   strip malls, videos and conspicuous consumption that increasingly make up the American
   landscape. It's the South of moss-shrouded plantation houses, levees where thieves roamed, the
   tar paper shacks of the black sharecropper and the Devil waiting at the crossroads. The juke joints
   and firewater moonshine distilled in the hills of Kentucky, the Appalachian songs with their traces
   of 17th-century Scottish ballads. It's the cut-throats and card cheats on the Mississippi, the
   gentlemen of the Crescent City, New Orleans, drinking to their own success, the Madames and the
   mad spinsters, the murderers and the minstrels, the roving medicine shows of the early 1900s.
   Scott Joplin fingering ragtime licks on a broken down piano, XFM broadcasting across the Mexican
   border. The genteel homes of mysterious Savanna where debauchery is done on the sly.

   Suffocating summertime heat and kudzu vines choking fields, cotton bales and sweaty farmhands,
   farmers with taciturn faces and leather-bound Bibles cracked at the spine. Boo Radley and Atticus
   Finch, and Faulkner's never-ending sentences. The whips of slavery, the water hoses and lunch
   counters and back seats on the bus of Jim Crow, the gospel churches. The mandolins and guitars,
   the radios beaming out of Memphis, Elvis' stillborn twin in Gladys' hands. The mud, water, fire and
   rain and sun of the South.

    The audience settle back into their pews, and I marvel at the rapt attention paid by the worshipful
   pre-pubescents up front. That they should sit and listen to someone playing songs beloved of
   their grandparents seems utterly alien to me; America's richest musical heritage is so often
   consigned to the dustbin of history by those besotted with the illusions of progress. The songs of
   the Singing Brakeman had no relevance to their lives until someone shook them and said, 'Here,
   look, these are fantastic living, breathing songs'. These are folk songs that are burnished by age
   and people playing them until they constitute true history, the history of plain people in motion,
   stasis, joy and pain, the maudlin despair of drunkenness and adultery, travel and escape, and
   most of all, transcendence.

    By reclaiming those vital pieces of music and restaging them in this church of country music, Beck
   is trying to preserve the fruitful traditions of Southern music in a modern context, to put these
   people in touch with their own culture in a tantalizing array of country-inflected songs. The rest of
   the audience, not used to slow music, absorbs the lesson suspiciously. What was he trying to
   prove? When would he play 'Loser' or 'Where It's At' with its sing-along chorus of 'two turntables
   and a microphone', something that was tangible to them? (Even if the song's refrain of 'Ooo la la
   Sassoon', references to designer jeans stitched and worn and torn before they were born, is as
   oblique as any of Rodgers' blue yodels.)

    The band returns, the lights flash on and Beck barnstorms through six more numbers, the
   audience taking it in as a spectacle that, in the words of one Beck fan, they knew they liked but
   were not sure exactly why. My girlfriend Anja and I are still the only ones dancing, except for the
   teenies whom Beck addresses with loving grace – 'My freaks, my freaks are in full effect.' While so
   many others stand with arms folded and passively observe the spectacle, those kids are actively
   engaged in the participatory ethic which underpins Beck's shows. In the call and response
   sections, it is they who are here to represent. They apparently understand and grasp intuitively
   what the rest of us are trying to puzzle through using logic. Beck seems to realize they are his
   prime constituency, the ones who get it without questioning why. His music reaches them viscerally
   and raw, without being filtered through the media who so often seek to paint him as a wacky
   novelty act, a goof, an error in the spectrum of predictable acts that go through the required
   motions, cash in and sell out with a flash of a pen on a corporate contract.

    A giant board of flashing lights – you might call it a Diskobox – pulses irregularly to the beat of
   the music, and Beck's DJ Swamp drops in all manner of samples that had never been cleared for
   inclusion on Odelay. They are the fruits of the eclectic record collection of Odelay co-producers, the
   Dust Brothers. A sample of Barbie, the doll epitomizing the vacuous nature of America's chosen
   iconography, is dropped into the mix; her silicone voice chirps, 'Let's get together and eat
   ice-cream!' The lights flash off, casting the auditorium into near darkness as Beck and his band
   freeze in place, heads bowed, while a few bars of Franz Schubert's 'Unfinished Symphony #9 in B
   Minor', blast through the speakers. There is so much to communicate, and so little time to do it in.
   The feeling of this being a band on the run, one step ahead of irony and categorization, is all too
   palpable. One can sense the tour bus with its engine idling, ready to whisk them off over to
   Raleigh, North Carolina for tomorrow's performance.

    Beck and band slip into a mesmerizing rendition of 'Derelict', the haunting essraj-laced number
   that evokes black skies over Bombay, and send a hush through the house. The drones seem to
   make the audience restless and uneasy. Indeed, there is something foreign about Beck's stage
   presentation; it reminds me of his grandfather, the artist Al Hansen's happenings, with all the
   props assembled as if to highlight and deride any presumed talismanic significance. The Diskobox
   is crude and primitive, blinking erratically, but its place on the stage elevates it to the status of a
   totem. The vibe the band give off is a copy of a copy of a copy until it is original. Like a Michigan
   garage band learning ? and the Mysterians' '96 Tears' from a knock-off Mexican Sixties
   compilation of garage bands. In Beck's phrase, they were 'doing it to it'.

    For me, the magic moment that encapsulates Beck's performance comes during an incendiary
   'High 5 (Rock The Catskills)' as Beck shouts out the verses with all the maniacal fervour of Luigi
   Russolo winding his Futurist noise machines. He is dancing like a Jajoukan Pan at the height of his
   ecstasy, rubbing a soft-shoe at the lip of the stage. He shakes his slight hips with such vigour you
   pray he won't fall into the pit. Then comes the Zen moment – a low-lying bank of monitors jut out
   from the stage at an angle, directly in the line of Beck's gyrations. Beck leaps backwards over the
   monitors, as nimble as Nijinsky, without a glance, chicken-scratching riffs Jimmy Nolan-style on his
   guitar. That strikes me like nothing else in his performance. I'm amazed at how sure-footed he is,
   how he doesn't trip and how he is up there with all the confidence, humour and aplomb so
   conspicuous by its absence in so much of our generation. It is liberating to see someone shake off
   the cloak of apathy, the numbness of cynicism. It isn't that he is infallible, but just that he is
   human, talented and doing it, not just thinking or talking about it. And most importantly, he is
   succeeding.

    Beck and the band withdraw into the wings as DJ Swamp steps to the fore. Swamp, an Ohio native,
   is working on serious inspiration. He deftly uses scratches and the cross fader to construct a
   collage from heavy metal classics, such as the famed riff from Deep Purple's 'Smoke on the Water'.
   The audience gasp as he drags the needle back and forth, using the cross fader as an instrument
   in its own right. This is probably the first time most of the audience have actually witnessed
   turntable techniques up close, showing the artistry and co-ordination that belie hip-hop's
   detractors.

    The band returns with a grand encore of 'Where It's At'. The performance is playful and forceful,
   acoustic and bombastic – always alternating between twin poles of opposite polarities until the
   chaos is peeled back to reveal a small pulsing fractal of perfect order at the centre. That is to say,
   Beck, and whatever fevered processes in his mind have engendered this barnstorming show.
    Laura, a young fan who is there that night, drags her friend around to the back and waits for one
   hour and 30 minutes to meet Beck. When he finally ambles out the steel doors, they crowd in to
   say hello. 'At first I thought he was high,' Laura recalled later, 'but after standing close for awhile I
   decided that he was just really tired... He looks really good close up. One thing I noticed was that
   he had really nice hands. They were really soft and smooth and thin, really gorgeous, so if he ever
   flops in the music business, he can always get rich by being a hand model.'3 Bibbe Hansen,
   Beck's mother, once commented, 'Beck's so off the wall, people attracted to his persona and his
   music would be a little out of the ordinary. No matter what their age.'4 So Laura, wherever you are,
   bless your little heart. You knew what I knew: it was a damn good show and had been worth
   whatever it took to get there.
 

   1 Babcock, Jay. 'Beck', Huh July 1996
   2 Ginsberg, Allen. 'A Beat/Slacker Transgenerational Meeting Of Minds', Shambhala Sun, 27
   September 1999
   3 Slo-jam central website. http://earth.vol.com/~debber/beck/mainpg2.html
   4 Dedman, Donna. 'Interview with Bibbe Hansen', Gellow Molde fanzine
 
 
 
 
 

2: THE END OF THE PARTY LINE: BECK'S GRANDPARENTS
 

   Back in the day...
 

   Audrey Ostlin Hansen, Beck's maternal grandmother, whom he never met, was a Greenwich Village
   bohemian at a time when the term actually held some cachet, implied some risk and involved
   cutting links with the straight world. She had opted out of the world of White Plains, New York to
   be, at various times, an actress, model, poet and general bon vivant. Audrey came from Eastern
   European Jewish stock. Known to her friends as 'Nikki', she was truly ahead of her time,
   wandering through Washington Square with dyed green hair in the 1950s.
    Audrey was the belle of the bohemian ball in those freewheeling days in downtown New York City,
   a pixie-sized fireball of intensity. Her friend David List remembered her fondly: 'What a great spirit
   she had been back in the days of the old Waldorf Cafeteria on Sixth Avenue. At that time, we all
   lived together in lofts this side of the Bowery... It was pretty hot stuff, and quite usual for
   someone to produce a real joint of 'gage' like the musicians used on 52nd Street – but our scene
   was booze, the cheaper the better, and Charlie Parker. It was a red wine world and fundamentally
   pretty harmless.'1

    It was a different world then, populated by the same milieu that Jack Kerouac, LeRoi Jones, Diane
   DiPrima and Allen Ginsberg circulated in and out of, sharing the same cold water flats and hot
   bebop 78s. This was the world of 52nd Street jazz clubs like the Royal Roost and Birdland where
   Charlie Parker played the saxophone he perpetually had in hock at the pawnshop, where Miles
   Davis blew hot and then cool. The squares marched by in their grey flannel suits, hats and ties,
   oblivious or hostile to the freaks and eccentrics on the pavement. The Beats scribbled in
   notebooks dug out of rucksacks at the Café Figaro on MacDougal Street, old-style Italian cafés
   with steam shrouding the mirrors. A world where the neon glare of all-night cafeterias contrasted
   with rain-slicked dirty streets, where Herbert Huncke scribbled a few words on paper between
   heists and scams, hustles and fixes. The nights were Benzedrine-fuelled odysseys of elliptical
   conversation that took in the straight world and fixed a squinted eye of disdain on it. And the
   ever-present threat of world destruction by the atom bomb added a pinch of tetchy restlessness to
   the brew. It was a world of hard-drinking abstract expressionist painters such as Jackson Pollock
   lurching out of the San Remo bar and the Cedar Tavern, the sky black and scattered conversations
   drifting around fire escapes and the billows of subway steam hatches. and also where
   homosexuals enjoyed their own clandestine company in apartments overlooking chain link
   gardens. Audrey was a part of this furtive world of free spirits roaming crooked streets.
    Her daughter Bibbe remembered: 'Audrey was a dancer on the Perry Como Show – the one who
   did the Thumbalina dance. And she was in those old commercials that were done live. One of the
   famous ones was the one she goofed up, where the girl comes onscreen in elegant profile and
   gets her cigarette lit. Then she turns to the camera to exhale and coughs half a lung out. She
   could be very silly and fun.'2

    Al Hansen, now an artist living on Bleeker Street, met Audrey in the Village and theirs was a
   full-on bohemian romance, full of circumlocutions and verbal badinage conducted between
   Houston Street and 14th, amidst the tight ellipses that drew them into each other's orbit. They
   first locked eyes at the Waldorf cafeteria, where the all-night bohemians congregated round coffee.
   'Al met his first wife, Audrey, in 1950 in New York,' Beck later recalled. 'She was doing a cabaret
   act and she'd painted herself green and dyed her hair green. She walked into a cafeteria with two
   black guys dressed as eunuchs, and Al took one look at her and said "That's the woman I'm
   marrying."'3

    They married, producing a lovely daughter, Bibbe, then split and Audrey started hanging out at
   society nightclubs such as the 21, the Pompeii Club, the Stork Club, mixing with lowlife and
   gangsters. Bibbe remembered her mother in scattered, vivid images –sitting up in bed in a lilac
   satin dress, with a record playing off the gramophone, instructing four gangsters in music
   appreciation. But Audrey found herself spiralling deeper into the world of the 'scurves' (David
   List's phrase), taking refuge with those she should have escaped had she had the strength. By
   the time the 1960s rolled in, and bohemia had been repackaged for the masses by the media in
   the aftermath of the phenomenal success of Kerouac's On the Road, the Village had become for
   her both a hiding place and a watershed of tears.

    Audrey ended up living at a Bank Street brownstone, were she lived with a cast of angels and
   no-hopers, a rundown Village flophouse filled with eccentrics, drug addicts and dubious
   personages of all shades and stripes. The original Auntie Mame (Marion Tanner) presided, living
   in a room chock-a-block with the ephemera of her scattered, ebullient life. She took a liking to
   Audrey, perhaps seeing a bit of herself in her, a bright spirit trying to keep her chin up despite
   bad circumstances. While at Bank Street, Audrey wrote short feverish poems, including a series
   called 'BROAD SONGS' from July of 1964 through October 1965. The poems, wistful and jaded,
   are filled with longing for things she knew she wouldn't have for much longer, not least of which
   was her daughter. In a poem entitled 'Lament' Audrey writes with devastating clarity of:

   'the longmade beds
   Of lonely, unmade broads.'

   Tanner moved to Bierer House, a halfway house in Chelsea, where she worked and lived. She
   urged Audrey to apply for entrance, which she did, successfully. Audrey slowly began to get her
   life back together. She cut out the vices and enlisted in a rehab program, seeing a shrink at
   Greenwich House, a counselling centre on 14th Street. As she got things together a bit more, she
   started to teach a poetry workshop there. Her old enthusiasm and vibrancy returned in time; such
   an indomitable spirit was she, and so well liked by her fellow patients and the program directors,
   that she was offered a position as an assistant case worker. She was the first patient ever asked
   to act in that capacity. She reported for her first day with a great smile, eager to help. A snooty
   lady behind the desk, one of those people whose job it is to make people wait, told her to wait in
   the reception room. Audrey waited and waited. She felt ill, her hands trembling. A few minutes
   later she keeled over with a great sigh. By the time they got her to St Vincent's Hospital she was
   dead on arrival. It was August 1968 and she was gone much too soon at thirty-seven, 'a great
   broad' in her daughter Bibbe's estimation.

    Back in White Plains, Audrey was laid to rest. Al Hansen stood next to her estranged brother, with
   a dozen others, mostly friends from the Village. It had been a sunny day as the funeral cortege
   wound its way up to the burial site, but as soon as the ceremonial handful of earth was dropped
   on Audrey's casket, the sky crackled with thunder, the clouds split at the seams and rain poured
   down. Some bright spark had brought along an umbrella and popped it open: it was bright, vivid
   green, as bright and vivid a shade as Audrey had been when she skipped down the streets of the
   Village in her doe-skin slippers. You could almost hear her laughter pealing from somewhere far
   away. 'It was really very poetic,' Daniel List wrote in her obituary for the Village Voice. 'Audrey
   would have loved it.'4

1 List, Daniel. 'Bibbe's Ma, Audrey', Village Voice, 15 August 1968
2 Bibbe Hansen Interview With Vaginal Davis, Index magazine, November–December 1999
3 McKenna, Kristine. 'Beck's First Sampling', Los Angeles Times. 3 May 1998
4 List, Daniel. 'Bibbe's Ma, Audrey', Village Voice, 15 August 1968