The Untold Truth Of Beck

Beck has been responsible for some of the most inventive, genre-bending, boundary-pushing, and just all-out fun music of the last 25 years. Breaking out of the indie world in a huge way in the mid-'90s with the irony-soaked, hilarious slacker anthem "Loser," Beck has dropped more than a dozen albums of difficult-to-categorize music. Is it funk? Electro-pop? Folk? Country? Alternative rock? It's all of the above — let's none of us try to box in Beck, singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist behind all-time jams like "Where It's At," "Sexx Laws," "The New Pollution," "Lost Cause," "E-Pro," and "Cellphone's Dead." 

This champion of the DIY and independent music even earned one of the mainstream entertainment industry's most prestigious stamps of approval: the Grammy for Album of the Year for Morning Phase. There's just nothing Beck can't do, it would seem. A musician who creates such layered soundscapes has necessarily lived a wild and interesting existence. So grab your two turntables and your microphone and check out some of the most intriguing highlights from the life and career of Beck.

Going by a single name carries with it a magical rock n' roll mystique: take for example Bono, Cher, and Beck. That's not the latter's full name, obviously, and nor is it even his real first name. The name on the birth certificate issued upon his entry into the world in 1970 read Bek Campbell. When he started school, a teacher changed his name to the more conventionally spelled Beck. When his parents, scenster Bibbe Hansen and musician David Campbell split up, Bek-turned-Beck adopted his mother's last name. 

The whole "going by one name" wasn't a bit of rock n' roll legend-making, however. "It started when I was playing open-mike nights and small gigs. They would write out the bill and they'd only remember my first name and never bothered with my last name. Beck was easier to remember than Beck Hansen," he told Spin in 1997. After he found fame and fortune, he tried to bring his last name into his stage name by printing it on the cover of Odelay. "If you look at the back cover, in the lower-right-hand corner — they didn't want to put it on the front cover — it says in really tiny print, 'Hansen.' It's kind of too late to change, though."

Beck's first major release, Mellow Gold, was an odd album by mainstream music standards, which in an interview with Rolling Stone the artist likened to "a satanic K-Tel record that's been found in a trash dumpster" that some people "half-swallowed before spitting it out." 

A dazzling pastiche of punk, noise, folk, and country, Odelay was arguably even odder, and was met with near universal acclaim upon its release in 1996. Rolling Stone said it "takes Beck's kitchen-sink approach to new extremes while also managing to remain a seamless whole; the songs flow together with intelligence and grace." At the 1997 Grammy Awards, it earned a nomination for Album of the Year and won for Best Alternative Performance. When all was said and done, Odelay sold more than two million copies and generated alt-rock radio classics like "Devils Haircut" and "Where It's At." And yet, for some reason, the behind-the-scenes, pre-release scuttlebutt on the album was that it was going to fail. In 2012, Beck told Vulture that "someone major in the business" told him that "putting out Odelay would be a huge mistake." Up until its success, Beck believed that notion, too, convinced for months that he'd "blown it forever."

While recording Mutations was a brief endeavor for Beck, the album's release proved to be a major hassle for all parties involved. At the time, Beck had a unique contractual arrangement: While signed to major label Geffen Records, he maintained a relationship with the indie Bong Load Records. That's the company which had released "Loser," and still held the vinyl rights to Beck's recordings, even the big albums he made for Geffen. Beck wanted to continue releasing more experimental work with Bong Load, and so that's where he sent the Mutations masters. But then the album came out on Geffen, without, Beck says, his permission, leading him to sue both of his labels in early 1999. The suit wasn't settled until later that year, just weeks before the scheduled release of Midnite Vultures. Under the terms of the settlement, Beck agreed to record solely for Geffen from that point, while Bong Load could keep its right to make Beck's vinyl records.

The American Music Awards were created in 1973 by Dick Clark, entertainment impresario and host of American Bandstand, a "live" music show in which the biggest bands in the land appeared and lip-synced and mimed playing their instruments to their own pre-recorded hits. For years, pretending to play was the modus operandi for Clark's American Music Awards, too, much to the delight of Beck, slated to perform on the show's 2000 iteration. "When we got there they told us that we had to play to a recording," Beck told Pitchfork. "I thought, 'This is going to be really good because now I can just have the band do other things.'" 

After less than a minute into "Mixed Bizness," most of the band dropped the charade of play-acting at playing. "Some people were doing calisthenics while others had gone in the audience and were just hanging out," Beck said. The drummer kept playing, although he beat on the drums with his hands instead of sticks. "It might have been a little bit obnoxious or bratty, but it was so liberating — just having Garth Brooks and Whitney Houston in the front row, not sure what was happening. It was one of those moments when the machine shudders for a second." People watching the broadcast didn't see much of Beck and crew's antics, however. "They just cut to my face so you couldn't see anything," Beck explained.

After recording more than 10 albums by 2012, how else could Beck keep innovating modern music and also challenge himself? He prepared a new collection of songs and then released them to the world in their most elementary and bare bones form: as sheet music. 

In the 19th century, before the arrival of mass-produced audio media, songs gained popularity as sheet music — essentially instructions on how to play a tune on an instrument, usually the piano. That's the gist of Beck's 2012 project Song Reader, an album not of recorded tracks but a blue binder packed with the the sheet music of 20 new songs. The singer-songwriter invited fans to play the songs themselves to see how they sounded. Groups like the all-cello Portland Cello Project obliged, although in 2014, a proper Song Reader LP arrived. However, Beck sings on just one song, handing off the work to stars like Jack Black, Norah Jones, and Jeff Tweedy of Wilco.

After the demise of his nine-year relationship-then-engagement to a woman that inspired his 2002 album Sea Change, Beck was fortunate enough to fall in love again. In 2004, he married actress Marissa Ribisi, probably best known for playing Cynthia, the quiet, smart redhead that Matthew McConaughey's character hits on in the 1993 teen classic Dazed and Confused. Before long, they started a family — the couple had two kids together, son Cosimo and daughter Tuesday. 

The marriage suddenly and quietly fell apart in June 2017. That's the date of separation mentioned in the legal paperwork Beck submitted when he filed for divorce in February 2019. That was news to Ribisi, as was her husband's move to divorce her — in her paperwork, she listed the date of separation as February 15, 2019 ... the day Beck asked a court to set him free. The divorce proceedings are still ongoing as of this writing and could be contentious — Beck requested joint custody of their children, while Ribisi asked that she be granted primary custody.