After two decades of being in the public eye, it’s easy to think that Beck is out of surprises. That’s partially because his last truly great album was a decade ago, but also because he’s already messed around with just about everything at this point, packing a lifetime worth of musical experimentation into half a career—after all, he’s only 42.
But his new Song Reader album, a collection of pieces released in sheet form so that others can perform and record them without hearing Beck’s own version of them, is a sign that his unique talent for the construction, deconstruction and reconstruction of melody and lyrics is back in full force. At his best, this guy is a glorious weirdo.
Some of his recent shows in the Bay Area, like his last appearance at Outside Lands, didn’t give him a whole lot of space to fly his freak flag. But at his acoustic show Sunday (May 19) at the Rio Theatre in Santa Cruz, he got to really let loose.
I’ve been seeing him live since his first concert at the Catalyst on the Mellow Gold tour, and even without the Stormtrooper mask, bullhorn and other assorted craziness that made those early shows so great, I’d say this was the best performance I’ve ever seen from him. It was refined enough to display the craft he’s been emphasizing over the last few years. But it was loose enough to let him be goofy and spontaneous. This meant a series of remarkable surprises for a sold-out crowd that seemed to realize they had gotten in on something extraordinary.
There were the obvious highlights, like the acoustic version of “Where It’s At” that wove in half-remembered pieces of “The Humpty Dance” while Beck fiddled with a ’70s-era drum machine dubbed Joey. A show-stopping version of “Debra” (in which the seducee’s name, Jenny, begat a riff on “Benny and the Jets”) morphed into the harmonica frenzy of “One Foot in the Grave.” He played the lost fan favorite “MTV Makes Me Want to Smoke Crack” (his first, pre-“Loser” single), mashing it up with “Pay No Mind” and then winding it down with the opening of Mutations’ “Cold Brains.” That was all one song, mind you. I’m not sure if you’d call it a medley, or a musical acid trip.
But some of the more subtle pleasures were even more sublime. He did his cover of George Jones’ “She Thinks I Still Care,” calling the recently deceased Jones “my biggest influence as a singer.” (Although it was the next song, a particularly honkytonk version of Beck’s own “Sissyneck,” that drove the point home.) And he broke out a fantastic new cover, “I Am the Cosmos.” Originally by Big Star’s Chris Bell, it’s become a cult classic among certain indie rockers, but Beck’s version brought the undertone of anger and bitterness out into the open, giving voice to feelings that the tragic Bell (who died at 27 in a car crash) preferred to mask in a mournful melancholy.
There were even songs Beck had never played live, ever, like the unreleased “Don’t Let It Go Away,” and three songs from the Song Reader album: “Sorry,” “Heaven’s Ladder” and “Don’t Pretend Your Heart Isn’t Hard.”
Even familiar selections like openers “The Golden Age” and “Jackass” seemed to have an extra layer of otherworldliness to them, like the way he’d hold the notes on the latter, making the strange invitation all the stranger.
Whether this show is an anomaly or a trend for Beck remains to be seen. But it delivered on the promise that has set apart all of his best creations: there will never be another one quite like it.
