Eclectic artist has record world at his Beck and call
Sam Wollaston

LOS ANGELES - We're in a painfully fashionable L.A. photo studio called
Quixote - all minimalist white and steel and baffling paintings. Beautiful
people scuttle around. It being California, there's a bowl of beans
to eat - raw green beans. And fruit.

A man in a black polo shirt walks through - wide-eyed, boyish, mousy-
blond hair, unshaven but boyish. He doesn't so much walk as lope,
in a way tall people do, though he's only about 5 feet 6 inches tall.
He's looking for his lip balm.

"Hello," he says in a deep drawl - too deep for his size, about right
for his walk. But it's not my turn yet. Beck needs the lip balm
for a photo shoot for a French magazine. The cover, no doubt; Beck
generally gets the covers of magazines these days. There's a pretty,
hippyish girl in jeans and an old purple top helping him with his
outfits. She's Leigh, Beck's girlfriend since way before he was getting
on the covers of magazines. The old green Volvo outside is Leigh'
s.

The reason Beck gets on the covers of magazines - apart from the fact
that he's a pretty cool guy - is that he is perhaps the most interesting,
original thing going on in popular music right now. "Odelay," his
last album - a hybrid of hip-hop, delta blues, folk, gangsta rap,
country, even Schubert - was at the top of most people's lists when
it came out several years ago.

When there's a list around, Beck usually gets to the top of it. He'
s Rolling Stone magazine's Best Male Performer, Melody Maker's Best
Solo Artist, Mojo's best something else and Select's Most Important
Person in the World. There's a Grammy for this and a Brit award for
that.

But it's not just the critics who adore Beck. He's a musician's musician,
too - and a fairly diverse bunch have come out in praise: Bob Dylan
said he had a great future, Johnny Cash that he had "that mountain
music in his blood." Then there are Noel Gallagher, Bono, Damon Albarn,
John Squire, Cypress Hill and Snoop Dogg (even the rappers don't
mind this skinny white kid who stole their music from under their
noses). No doubt if Schubert were still around, he would dig Beck,
too.

"I just do my thing, and if people are into it, then they are, you
know," he says. "There's a lot of work put into it, so if people
appreciate it, I feel satisfied."

Beck speaks slowly and deliberately, as if he has just awakened.
He says "you know" a lot and pauses between sentences. The pauses
can be so long it's hard to know when he has finished saying something
- but if he hasn't, he just carries on, even though you might have
moved on.

The French photo shoot is over, and we've moved into a small room.
He sits diagonally on a sofa, slightly awkward - but he seems comfortable
in his awkwardness, if that's possible. His staring, startled blue
eyes focus somewhere in the distance over my head. And he has a new
outfit from when I saw him 10 minutes earlier: a scruffy camouflage
T-shirt this time, and black trousers that appear to have been cut
up and sewn back together.
"It's just a form of expression," he explains. "I don't think it'
s that serious."

Beck doesn't care for interviews much.

"Oh, they're all right. They're usually the same questions, so it'
s a challenge to explore saying the same things in different ways.
I'm not the type of guy who sits down and goes off on my take on
the universe, so it's something I've had to become used to doing.
I used to try to deflect things in interviews and be evasive, but
then again it's probably more interesting to hear your honest opinion
on how you think the whole puzzle fits together."

In "Odelay," you can hear a lot of Beck's 28-year past: Dad a bluegrass
violinist, Mom an actress who had hung out with Andy Warhol and was
heavily into the L.A. glam-punk scene. He was the only white kid
in a Latino neighborhood of Los Angeles, but he also had spells with
his Presbyterian preacher grandfather in Kansas.

He went busking in New York City, came back and made "Loser," a hip-
hop blues song with a sing-along chorus that everybody wanted to sing
along to: "Soy un perdidor / I'm a loser baby / So why don't you kill
me?"

Beck was snapped up by Geffen Records. The resulting album, "Mellow
Gold," didn't quite live up to "Loser's" promise. He did a couple
of small-label albums and then made "Odelay," which seemed to embrace
America's entire musical heritage - from Mississippi John Hurt to
Cypress Hill, from Mr. Dylan to Nirvana via Prince.

He puts it better: "It's like accidental chemistry - sneaking into
the lab and mixing a bunch of chemicals together and seeing if you
can create an explosion."

Onstage he's a fanatical minister with an enthusiastic congregation.
He's like Elvis Presley and James Brown and Prince all at once. It'
s a dazzling party, that explosion he was talking about.

The other grandfather - the one who isn't a Presbyterian preacher
- was Al Hansen, an avant-garde artist of the Fluxus anti-movement
in the 1960s, and Beck's music often has been compared to his work.

"I remember him at the dining room table with piles of . . . newspaper
ads, cigarette butts, and he was gluing them onto boards and spray-
painting them colors and making these incredible collages." This
is pretty much what Beck does with sounds.

Or did, until now. Now, he has gone back to basics: watercolor landscapes
or still lifes. The new album, "Mutations," will disappoint those
expecting a follow-up to "Odelay." It's a simple, personal country
record, unremarkable even, with none of the wizardry of the Dust Brothers
or the hint of a hip-hop beat.

"I don't really think of it as a step back - it's just a sort of step
aside. Everyone and their mother is using a drum loop and samples
and integrating dance culture into pop music, and I just, you know,
I've become wary of becoming a formula."

Beck seems to have survived celebrity quite well. The same things
make him happy ("seeing a movie with a friend") and angry ("judgmental
attitudes, closed minds - you can't get much worse than that"). Things
take a little longer to do when everyone thinks he knows you. "It'
s like living in a village - you have to stop and have a five-minute
conversation with everybody you run into."

Back to the safety of music, then. I tell him about the gloom in
pop music in Britain - the charts full of 12-year-olds or fortysomething
comeback people, learned articles sounding the death of rock. Beck
is more optimistic.

"We're always coming to the end of something. And we can look forward
to the beginning of something else. I don't know if rock music is
dead per se, though good songs may be scarce. I've kept myself away
from anything that could be considered rock for a number of years."
 

So what's he into listening to now?

"I tend to listen to the radio a lot; I like stumbling into things.
I'm a fan of all music where the person believes in what they're doing.
What I don't care for is the sort of tepid, mediocre stuff that's
tasteful but takes no risk, stuff that you could call `product.'
Tastelessness, though, I find fascinating."