Throwing Frisbees At The Sun

Rob Jovanovic

Description

At a time in rock and pop history when almost everything has been done before, few artists have proved as restlessly innovative as Beck.

Since bursting onto the scene in 1994 with ‘Loser’, he has zigzagged his way across the contemporary music landscape, consistently remaining one step ahead of expectations and doing things his own way, shape-shifting from indie icon to pop crooner, from folk hobo to Latino-rap hipster, balancing big-budget chart highs with low-key, introspective acoustic albums.

Beck’s early shows saw him clearing the stage with a leaf-blower, and his enthusiasm for the experimental has not diminished with age. In the twenty-first century, he founded the Record Club, which brought together disparate artists to record cover versions of whole albums in a single day for release online. Then he took a troupe of doppelgänger marionettes  out on tour and made the brave decision to release Song Reader as a set of sheet music, challenging buyers to record and play their own versions of his new songs.

Drawing on new interviews with friends, family, collaborators, and bandmates—as well as conversations with Beck himself—Throwing Frisbees At The Sun is a carefully crafted, career-spanning retrospective befitting the many twists and turns of this intriguing performer’s path through life and music.

Sujets

• Musique
• Histoire de la musique
• Music
• Rock
• Genres
• Styles

Informations

• Publié par: Jawbone Press
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781908279620
• Langue: English

Extrait

Throwing Frisbees At The Sun
A Book About Beck
Rob Jovanovic

A Jawbone ebook
First edition 2015
Published in the UK and the USA by
Jawbone Press
2a Union Court,
20–22 Union Road,
London SW4 6JP,
England
www.jawbonepress.com

Volume copyright © 2015 Outline Press Ltd. Text copyright © Rob Jovanovic. All rights reserved. No part of this book covered by the copyrights hereon may be reproduced or copied in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in articles or reviews where the source should be made clear. For more information contact the publishers.
Jacket design by Mark Case
Jacket image by Dan Tuffs/Getty Images

Contents
Introduction: Que Onda?
Chapter 1: ‘She was in bed, dressed like Jean Harlow.’
Chapter 2: ‘Try to turn something disposable into something beautiful.’
Chapter 3: ‘There were still chickens running around in the street.’
Chapter 4: ‘She gave me a key that didn’t work and I never saw her again.’
Chapter 5: ’All we had was an acoustic guitar and energy.’
Chapter 6: ‘I was expecting my shoes to get stolen.’
Chapter 7: ‘I was lost in my own little world.’
Chapter 8: ‘I nailed my earlobe to the speaker.’
Chapter 9: ‘I wasn’t prepared for any kind of success at all.’
Chapter 10: ‘I thought it would be a disaster.’
Chapter 11: ‘You hear it and it immediately attacks your immune system.’
Chapter 12: ‘We had to run out in the rain and put him in a town car.’
Chapter 13: ‘In the end it worked itself out.’
Chapter 14: ‘It was a reunion of sorts.’
Chapter 15: ‘I think it meant something at some point.’
Chapter 16: ‘It’s something else.’
Chapter 17: ‘You get an idea and go with it. There’s no great plan.’
Chapter 18: ‘These songs are meant to be pulled apart.’
Discography
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Que Onda?
Even in the twenty-first century, a long-distance line to Denver, Colorado, can be pretty crackly. Through the intermittent static, I had been passed from publicist to publicist, and now I had Beck Hansen on the line.
‘I’m sorry if the tape recorder puts you off,’ I told him. ‘It will keep beeping.’
‘It beeps?’ he replied.
‘Yes, it’s a legal thing to let the other person know that I’m recording them.’
‘OK!’ he laughed. ‘A little espionage!’
I was perched at the bottom of my stairs, hoping that my tape recorder was working properly, while Beck regaled me with stories of his home, life, and music. Though I couldn’t see him, I knew he was eating an apple for his lunch.
Our chat covered lots of ground, and is peppered throughout this book. Apparently, he still set his alarm clock on some Sunday mornings to get down early to the swap meets so that he could battle through the hoards of shoppers and riffle through the stacks of old vinyl, hoping to find an obscure old folk collection, or some Tropicalia that he’d never heard of.
He was just as I’d expected.
* * *
Wednesday, July 7th, 1993. Beck is at the KCRW studio in Los Angeles for his first live radio session. That night, he’ll be playing another show at his mother’s venue, Café Troy, but for now the airwaves are filled with Woody Guthrie’s voice:
All these people, seeing how they lived, outside, like coyotes. Around in the trees and under the bridges and all along the railroad tracks and in their little shack-houses that they built out of cardboard and coal sacks and old corrugated iron that they got out of the dumps. It just struck me that I should write this song called ‘I Ain’t Got No Home In This World Anymore’.
It was quite an introduction. Beck’s own song followed: a slide guitar riff, a backing tape, a shambolic drum beat in the studio, opening up a song that would become the sound of late 1993: ‘Loser’.
It’s all here in these few stolen moments: the genius songwriter, a very deliberate nod to his influences, a mother on the fringes of the art house music scene, and an incredibly infectious song.
* * *
Beck is arguably the most important, original force in contemporary music, matching critical acclaim and ever growing sales figures. His rock/rap/folk albums Mellow Gold (with hit single ‘Loser’) and Odelay came to define the mid-90s American cutting edge, while introspective albums like Mutations and Sea Change gained him a whole new audience. He returned to the sublimely distinctive mix of rap, rock, and Latino beats on Guero and The Information , before the precise half-hour of Modern Guilt preceded a six year recording hiatus—at least as far as new albums were concerned. In 2014, he released the acclaimed Morning Phase , an album rooted in the Californian vibes of his upbringing.
During his break from releasing albums, Beck had undertaken numerous production duties, put out cover versions of entire albums via his website, published a collection of sheet music, and much more. All this cemented the long-held view that Beck is truly an original in an age when originality is at an all-time low.
* * *
Another meeting with Beck. At the end of the last century I’d been sent a strange invitation, and was dispatched to the West Coast of America by a magazine editor in order to produce a Beck travelogue. I spent a week in the desert. The month of May was especially hot and walking down the strip in Las Vegas became almost unbearable during the day. However, in the cool of the evening, it was comfortable to be outside, as the heat dissipated across the desert from the rotten oasis. I made my way to the Tropicana, an old-school casino opposite the plastic splendour of Luxor and New York, New York. Beck was mixing bizness with pleasure that night in a dinner-theatre setting, dropping his lobotomy beats to the banks of curved booths and red leather seats.
The sold-out crowd slowly made their way in. The atmosphere was exquisite, with local hipsters and the travelling hardcore from LA mixing happily with the nonchalance of the city itself. The few hundred souls-in-the-know witnessed the then-unknown Tenacious D play a support set, and then it was time for the main event. The opening chords rippled out from behind a velvet curtain, and slowly the barrier was raised and the band revealed. Bass guitar, dark and heavy: Justin Meldal-Johnsen. Cymbals frying: Joey Waronker. Beat suffocating. ‘Novacane’. Snare drums echoing like breaking glass. Beeps from Casio calculators invading the mix then faded away: Roger Manning Jr. ‘Novacane’. Turntables scratch, drums break: DJ Swamp. Guitars cackle and hiss: Smokey Hormel. Brass section complete. ‘Novacane’.
The show was ingenious. The genius was centre stage. After the show, Beck was surrounded. An English accent, mine, broke through the scrum. Beck’s eyes alighted, looking for the speaker.
‘Did you like the show?’ he asked.
I sure did.
It’s what led me to write this book.
Chapter 1
‘She was in bed, dressed like Jean Harlow.’ (1915-72)
The SS Potsdam was a German-built, steam-driven ocean liner dating back to 1900. In 1915, it had been sold to the Swedish-American Line and renamed the SS Stockholm as it began transporting thousands of Swedes across the North Atlantic to the USA. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, more than 1.3 million Swedes made the journey. Most continued on to the Midwest where the weather, logging opportunities, and farms reminded them of home.
By late 1915, with the Great War raging across Central Europe, the number of people making the trip had decreased, the sinking of the Lusitania in May having sent shockwaves around the world. But despite the risks involved, nineteen-year-old Olaf Gabriel Ostlin boarded the SS Stockholm in Gothenburg in December and began his journey to the USA. 1 He arrived at Ellis Island on December 26th and was processed into the country, ready to start a new life.
Rather than head across the continent, Ostlin settled in New York. There he found work with the American Can Company and met and married Sadie Rosenberg, who came from a family of Russian-Polish Jews and was one of twelve children of Abraham and Fanny Rosenberg. 2 Olaf and Sadie had two children: Robert, born in 1921, and Audrey, born in 1929. Sadie committed suicide at the age of thirty-five, leaving Olaf to raise the children alone.
Audrey Ostlin was a real free spirit. During World War II, she fell in with the Beats and bohemians around Union Square. She danced, stripped, appeared on TV, and wrote poetry. In 1949, the petit Audrey appeared in a stage show that required her to have green hair. After one performance, she headed down to Greenwich Village, wearing just a raincoat, a green G-string, and a pair of emerald green sequinned pasties. At around three in the morning, she entered the Waldorf Cafeteria, a dreary place that had become the preferred hangout for painters and sculptors. Across the bar sat a group of Beats and artists. One of them, Alfred Earl ‘Al’ Hansen, was transfixed as she walked over in her green high-heels. ‘I’m going to marry that cunt,’ he was heard to mutter. 3
Like Ostlin, Hansen (two years her senior) also came from Scandinavian stock. His grandfather, Nicholas Sr., had hopped on to a Schooner from his native Norway and relocated to Queens, New York. His father, Nicholas Jr., was born in a shack in the yard of a dry dock in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where Nick Sr. worked. Nick Jr. served in World War I as a motorcycle messenger, and from then on was an avid motorcycle enthusiast. On the eve of the Depression, Nick Jr. started a small construction company, which did well throughout the downturn. Later on, he bought a few gas stations. One was right next door to the family home in Jamaica, Queens. His wife, Katherine, worked for the Democratic Party; she was a ‘ward heeler’ and politically well connected.
Al grew up with a love of art, and had spent much of his childhood drawing. One of his earliest projects was a hand-made newspaper, the Daily Flash , which he produced with his brother, Gordon, and a friend, Jimmy Breslin. 4