beck: the untold story

today, beck hansen, born bek david campbell, sold to us as beck, had a double celebration. now's as good a time as any for me to tell you his secrets.

but first, the auspiciousness of today, july 8th, 2008. cause for celebration #1: beck had his 38th birthday. cause for celebration #2: he released his 12th (or is it 10th? or 8th? it depends on which albums you count) LP, modern guilt. it's great, but i'm too much of a fan to judge it with much objectivity. feel free to read what everyone else thinks. (i'm particularly fond of the rolling stone review.)

and so, with that double-whammy as a time-peg, i figured it was high time to do something i've meant to do for a long, long time: write down what he told me behind closed doors in the autumn of 2006.

mtv has a little sub-division called mtvU, aimed at college students, and they have a show there that they put out periodically, called "my shot with..." it's pretty simple: they give college kids the chance to interview their pop-culture idols. in 2006, with the information hot off the presses, the high lords of mtv sent word out to beck fans that they could sit on the interview couch with mr. hansen. i applied, went through several vetting processes, and got the gig.

on october 20th of that year, i entered the mtv studios, planted myself on a designated sofa, and after a bit of delay, he entered the room. we talked for about 45 minutes. i can't really describe the rush, but that's not important. if you want a more detailed account of how it all felt, here's a memoir i wrote about it (sans secrets) right after i did the interview, but before it was aired.

here's what mtv aired (sorry for the watermark—it was one of my first dvd rips, back in 2006, and i was using lame freeware):


My Shot With Beck from Abraham Riesman on Vimeo.

(oh also, i've lost a lot of weight since then. don't judge.)

now, here's the thing: they butchered the interview. they took 45 fascinating, revealing minutes and cranked out a 3-minute set of soundbites primarily aimed at selling the CD. can't say i exactly blame them, but it still feels shitty. and more importantly, they destroyed the remaining footage. it's gone forever.

but i have my memories.

so, without further ado, here are some points of interest that beck told me, and which have been lost to time until now. choose to doubt me, if you want, but i swear to god he told me all of these things:

• 1999's midnite vultures was originally going to be produced by richard d. james, aka aphex twin. how much of a wild insanity fest would that have been? apparently, the deal only fell through because richard was buying a new house at the time.
  
• the only song he hates performing is "debra"—a huge fan-favorite. he said people took it as a satire of R&B slow-jams, a reaction that made him uncomfortable, because he wanted to write a genuine slow-jam—no mocking intended. he didn't want to mock a genre he loved so much.
• despite his reputation as a secretive fellow, he thinks he doesn't hide his faith, his home life, or his real self—what you see on stage or in the hour of DIY videos he made at his house is basically all there is, given how tour- and recording-filled his life is. he was surprisingly calm when he talked about the topic of his personal life, even though i said "faith" (and i saw the producers cringeing, what with the flak he gets about scientology). he really felt that there wasn't anything to hide. (take that assertion for what it's worth—the anti-scientology types out there won't buy it, i'm sure.)
  
• nevertheless, he let me in on the raising of his then-two-year-old son, cosimo henri. it was a-do-ra-ble. i asked him if he sang songs to put his son to sleep, and he said yes. i asked if he sang his own hits, and beck laughed and said, "no, see, he forces me to write new songs." apparently, cosimo would say things like "daddy, sing your song about the airplane," and beck would say, "but i don't have a song about an airplane," and cosimo would then just demand that beck make one up!
• also, he said cosimo was weirdly inspiring, given that he was at an age when kids don't really know what words mean, so they'll just string together bizarre sentences, based on how the words sound. dammit, beck had an example, but i have forgotten it.
• he was a huge proponent of filling his website with tracks that would never see release anywhere else — like three nick drake covers that he abruptly posted just a few weeks prior to the interview — because he didn't really know how to fit lots of his songs onto albums. i mean, where would those nick drake covers go on an LP of mixed-genre acoustic funk?
• he'd just seen orson welles's f is for fake, and recommended it to me.
• working with michel gondry is freaking insane, because you have no idea of what his general vision is going to be—he just tells you to do things, and none of it makes sense until you see the final product.
  
• UGH HERE'S WHAT FRUSTRATES ME: i know i asked him (a) about how his music is received differently in japan, and (b) whether he has strange dreams, and i KNOW that he had interesting answers to both questions, but they're gone, like tears in rain.

man, when i started this post, i thought i was going to be all proud of myself for what i remembered, but now i'm just angry at what i forgot. i'm not sure i'll be able to sleep comfortably tonight. well, maybe some director kept a copy of the full thing somewhere, and it'll surface someday.

but in general, it was the first time he'd ever talked candidly about his personal life, which is a big deal for beck fans. but mtv (and his handlers) probably didn't really want you to see that stuff.

oh the terror of memory.