I was expecting Beck Hansen’s speaking voice to flow like one of his songs.
You know what Beck lyrics sound like: jigsaw jazz with a get-fresh flow.
It’s as if William Burroughs has been reincarnated as a DJ. There’s a dusty
shopping-mall lexicon of trash-culture references, sliced and diced with
garage-sale vocabulary and a Dr Seuss on Xanax cadence.
But I was wrong. Hansen is a man permanently set to 33rpm, a super-shy guy
with a conversational delivery akin to a premedicated Napoleon Dynamite, or
Stephen Hawking when his voice-box batteries are running low on juice. I am
disappointed to see he has shaved off his beard. As an aspirant beardy, I
was hoping for some advice on follicular growing pains. “I never really
experienced irritation. You have to get past the critical point,” he says.
“I went from Michael McDonald to Kris Kristofferson without too much
trouble. Now, I’m clean-shaven again.”
Even a simple statement like this has gaps between words you could drive a
1957 Buick through. Sometimes the drawl slows down so much you have to
squint at the boy-man opposite to make sure he is still conscious. At first
I thought this was a bit annoying. But, pretty soon, I decided to regard it
as rather cool. We’ll all probably be speaking like him soon.
He does that to you, does Beck. This, after all, is the man whose
free-wheeling, lo-fi lifestyle has made him a hero for a generation. Vintage
clothes, Kmart-slacker chic, dropping out, even modern bohemianism — they
could all be said to have been invented by Beck. And that’s before you even
get to the music: from his first anthemic hit, Loser, in 1994, to the
single, Girl, from his latest album, Guero, he has delivered the most
creatively vibrant, adorably skewwhiff and downright funky novelty records
in pop history.
He has recently done two things that many people would not think particularly
cool: he has followed his own father by becoming a Scientologist and he has
become a dad himself. Has having his son, Cosimo Henri (his wife, Marissa
Ribisi, is the sister of the actor Giovanni Ribisi), changed him? “Yes and
no,” he says slowly. “The responsibility doesn’t weigh on me, like it seems
to do with some people. Not in a heavy way anyway. It’s more like having
something leaning on you. It hasn’t changed the way I live my life. It just
means I have a little person there.” Beck says he is looking forward to the
day he can come on tour and dance in the wings: “I think he likes my music.”
And L Ron Hubbard’s Scientology? Is it a cult? Has he met Tom Cruise yet? “It
brings a certain happiness and fullness to things,” he says tentatively. “It
has reinforced certain things that were really constructive and good. Is it
sinister? Not a bit. There’s a lot of stuff to read. If you actually look at
what’s been done through Scientology, I think it blows away the criticism.
Tom Cruise,” he adds, “is a nice guy.”
Now 35 years old, Beck has an enviably colourful CV. Born in the MacArthur
Park area of downtown LA, his mother, Bibbe Hansen, hung out with Warhol and
was a member of the punk outfit Black Flag, while his dad, David Campbell,
was a session musician who played on Marvin Gaye’s classic What’s Going On.
His grandfather, “who once shaved off half of his beard”, was part of the
cutting edge Fluxus art movement, which is widely credited with inventing
warehouse parties. “My grandfather helped organise what they called
‘happenings’,” he says proudly. “And, then, I think Warhol copied the idea
and created something called the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, and that’s
when the warehouse-party thing started getting popular.”
As a teenager, Beck would listen to religious broadcasts from the deep south
on his AM radio. “It was wonderful. All that yelling and wailing sounded to
me like the most explosive, hellacious punk-rock shows.” He has thrived on
skewwhiff, lo-tech culture ever since. “I don’t think they’ll ever want me
on MTV Cribs,” he says with a wry grin.
When Loser came out, he was a minor revelation. A rumpled, elegantly deranged,
thrift-store-clad swamp rocker. “I was doing everything I could to ruin my
career,” he laughs. “I would make this big mess of a noise and dress all
downbeat. My look was kind of like a 12-year-old. That’s what I was told at
the time.”
He became a style icon. “Did I? It wasn’t a conscious thing. When I was
younger, I didn’t have any money, so all I could afford were these really
bad T-shirts from the 1970s. I kind of wore them as a sort of ‘f*** you’
thing. Within a couple of years, people had kinda caught on. Thrift stores
now sell what they call ‘vintage’. The golden era of second-hand clothes is
definitely over. It makes me kinda sad.” Beck’s inventively downbeat Larry
Clark-goes-to-Kmart style has since been globally franchised by the likes of
Urban Outfitters and H&M. There’s a bit of Beck style in all of us these
days.
His sartorial bent and the way it was represented in the press didn’t
captivate everyone. A few years ago, he bumped into Gregg Alexander, the
lanky writer of the huge New Radicals’ hit You Get What You Give, which
ended with the vituperative rap of “Fashion shoots with Beck and Hanson /
Courtney Love and Marilyn Manson / You’re all fakes / Run to your mansions /
Come around / We’ll kick your ass in”.
“I was in a grocery store and he [Alexander] came running up to me, so
apologetic, and saying, ‘I hope you weren’t offended. It wasn’t supposed to
be personal.’ I was kind of pleased, because he’s a big guy.”
These days, Beck has traded in the second-hand utility casuals for something
more fashion forward. “Hedi Slimane sent me a bunch of stuff,” he says.
“It’s nice, because it actually fits, you know. It’s cut nice and small,
which suits me.” The Dior Homme designer has also become a friend. “He came
down to a show and did some photos. A few weeks later, he delivered this big
album with these really wonderful pictures. He’s a really good photographer.
And kinda tall too.”
These days, Beck lives in East Hollywood with his wife and child, “on a street
where every house looks like it comes from a different movie set. You’ll get
a Tudor house next to a 1950s space-age house, next to a Spanish house”.
Does he have any famous neighbours? “There’s a guy over the road who has
lived there for 60 years,” he replies, with typical whimsy. “He has 10 kids
and not many bedrooms. He’s kind of famous on our street.”
The aural alchemist with the pubescent bum fluff, who once dated Winona and
cut a demo track with P Diddy (“I saw him at this thing a couple of weeks
ago. He just walked by me like I wasn’t there.”), is currently busying
himself by being a good dad, a good husband, collecting local art, working
on a new album and a film project with his brother-in-law Ribisi. He has
even written the odd article for Vanity Fair about album-cover art. His
favourite cover is for a soundtrack album called The Flasher. “It has a
picture of a guy in a ‘flasher’s’ raincoat,” he deadpans. “Shooting through
space.”
What about LA? I ask. Is it a Beck kind of place? Isn’t it a bit shiny and
fake and corporate? Beck shrugs and thinks for while. “Yeah,” he decides
finally. “Maybe it is.” A long, long pause. “You know, sometimes I wonder
what I’m doing here, you know?”
