Beck Cruises Through Catalog at 'Surprise' San Francisco Show

Misha Vladimirskiy/ http://butchershopcreative.com

Is a "surprise show" packed with several hundred people that much of a surprise? Not really, but that's how Beck's gig was billed at Bimbo's last night in San Francisco. In town for the massive Outside Lands festival in Golden Gate Park this weekend, the singer squeezed in a show here at the last minute, and tickets sold out after going on sale at noon with little warning.

The show was a semi-surprise, but for the most part, the set list was not. It's been four years since Beck's last album, and in the absence of new material, the 90-minute performance drew from songs spanning most of his career, from his 1994 breakthrough Mellow Gold to 2008's Modern Guilt. The mild surprise these days lies not so much in what he'll play as in what order he'll play it. Most of his concerts, including this one, make room for favorites like the set-opening "Black Tambourine," "Girl," "Where It's At" (with a brief puzzling keyboard riff quoting Fleetwood Mac's "Rhiannon") and "Think I'm in Love," even if he did tease things out by waiting until the first encore to unleash the inevitable "Loser" (and, refreshingly, refrained from doing "Devil's Haircut" at all).

Even the most offbeat offering, a barely recognizable thumping blues-rock cover of Bob Dylan's "Leopard Skin Pill Box Hat," found release in 2009 on the War Child Presents Heroes benefit compilation. A little oddness peeped out elsewhere as well, with "Bad Blood" (from a soundtrack album to the HBO True Blood series) receiving only its second live performance. Oddest of all, the band tried out Neil Young's "Barstool Blues"without even having rehearsed it, as they cheerfully admitted onstage.

But if the mostly younger-than-Beck crowd was impatient to hear evidence of more recent original material, they didn't show it. The crowd's mood was made merrier by clouds of marijuana smoke, the contact high reaching the stage when the band stumbled over lyrics on "Lost Cause" and had to start over (and then launched into the second verse). "Don't hold it against us if we're playing these a little slower than usual," advised the unruffled star, sporting a natty black hat as he delivered his catalog with calm assurance.

Misha Vladimirskiy/ http://butchershopcreative.com

While the five-man lineup Beck now fronts can't replicate all the sampling and miscellaneous special effects that give his studio work much of its exoticism, it also frees him to deliver a more straightforward sound unfettered by gimmickry. Few bands are as adept at combining rock and funk in equal measures, chest-thumping bass deftly supporting squealing rock guitar heroics. "Hotwax" mixed country blues (courtesy of Smokey Hormel's slide guitar), Steve Wonder and hip-hop without coming off as the forced genre-blender it would have sounded like in almost anyone else's hands.

And when Beck exchanged his electric guitar for an acoustic model for a sequence of rootsier songs in the middle of the evening, you almost wondered whether he might have missed his calling as a more sensitive country-blues-flavored singer-songwriter. He hit his most comfortable stride on the chorus of the most lilting of these, "Sunday Sun." Almost as if to make sure the crowd didn't get as comfortable as Beck, however, Hormel and bassist Justin Meldal-Johnsen concluded the song with some ear-piercing, amp-humping feedback.

Indeed, Meldal-Johnsen was more animated than the bandleader, leaping onto the drum riser at a couple points. Beck himself rarely strayed more than a few feet from his microphone. Only occasionally did he utter droll asides to the audience, enigmatically announcing, "We have come to tell you about the rhythms of . . . Glendale" before launching into the title cut from Modern Guilt. No comments were forthcoming on his just-announced December 2012 "album" Beck Hansen's Song Reader, featuring 20 songs and "existing only as individual pieces of sheet music, never before released or recorded." Perhaps actually playing them in concert might have been spoiling the fun, at least before those buying the album have the chance to play the tunes themselves.

Beck did have one more genuine surprise to unveil, however, before the evening was over. Barely had the second encore, "Mutherfuker," gotten off the ground before he brought it to a halt, finding it not "grooving" enough for a Thursday night San Francisco audience. Revving up their engines again, the band launched into a far faster and funkier version, somewhat along the lines of how Sly & the Family Stone might have played it. "Okay, that's enough dancing," Beck barked after a few minutes, ever the contrarian. "Stop!"

Misha Vladimirskiy/ http://butchershopcreative.com To read the new issue of Rolling Stone online, plus the entire RS archive: Click Here

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Beck Cruises Through Catalog at 'Surprise' San Francisco Show

Misha Vladimirskiy/ http://butchershopcreative.com

Is a "surprise show" packed with several hundred people that much of a surprise? Not really, but that's how Beck's gig was billed at Bimbo's last night in San Francisco. In town for the massive Outside Lands festival in Golden Gate Park this weekend, the singer squeezed in a show here at the last minute, and tickets sold out after going on sale at noon with little warning.

The show was a semi-surprise, but for the most part, the set list was not. It's been four years since Beck's last album, and in the absence of new material, the 90-minute performance drew from songs spanning most of his career, from his 1994 breakthrough Mellow Gold to 2008's Modern Guilt. The mild surprise these days lies not so much in what he'll play as in what order he'll play it. Most of his concerts, including this one, make room for favorites like the set-opening "Black Tambourine," "Girl," "Where It's At" (with a brief puzzling keyboard riff quoting Fleetwood Mac's "Rhiannon") and "Think I'm in Love," even if he did tease things out by waiting until the first encore to unleash the inevitable "Loser" (and, refreshingly, refrained from doing "Devil's Haircut" at all).

Even the most offbeat offering, a barely recognizable thumping blues-rock cover of Bob Dylan's "Leopard Skin Pill Box Hat," found release in 2009 on the War Child Presents Heroes benefit compilation. A little oddness peeped out elsewhere as well, with "Bad Blood" (from a soundtrack album to the HBO True Blood series) receiving only its second live performance. Oddest of all, the band tried out Neil Young's "Barstool Blues"without even having rehearsed it, as they cheerfully admitted onstage.

But if the mostly younger-than-Beck crowd was impatient to hear evidence of more recent original material, they didn't show it. The crowd's mood was made merrier by clouds of marijuana smoke, the contact high reaching the stage when the band stumbled over lyrics on "Lost Cause" and had to start over (and then launched into the second verse). "Don't hold it against us if we're playing these a little slower than usual," advised the unruffled star, sporting a natty black hat as he delivered his catalog with calm assurance.

Misha Vladimirskiy/ http://butchershopcreative.com

While the five-man lineup Beck now fronts can't replicate all the sampling and miscellaneous special effects that give his studio work much of its exoticism, it also frees him to deliver a more straightforward sound unfettered by gimmickry. Few bands are as adept at combining rock and funk in equal measures, chest-thumping bass deftly supporting squealing rock guitar heroics. "Hotwax" mixed country blues (courtesy of Smokey Hormel's slide guitar), Steve Wonder and hip-hop without coming off as the forced genre-blender it would have sounded like in almost anyone else's hands.

And when Beck exchanged his electric guitar for an acoustic model for a sequence of rootsier songs in the middle of the evening, you almost wondered whether he might have missed his calling as a more sensitive country-blues-flavored singer-songwriter. He hit his most comfortable stride on the chorus of the most lilting of these, "Sunday Sun." Almost as if to make sure the crowd didn't get as comfortable as Beck, however, Hormel and bassist Justin Meldal-Johnsen concluded the song with some ear-piercing, amp-humping feedback.

Indeed, Meldal-Johnsen was more animated than the bandleader, leaping onto the drum riser at a couple points. Beck himself rarely strayed more than a few feet from his microphone. Only occasionally did he utter droll asides to the audience, enigmatically announcing, "We have come to tell you about the rhythms of . . . Glendale" before launching into the title cut from Modern Guilt. No comments were forthcoming on his just-announced December 2012 "album" Beck Hansen's Song Reader, featuring 20 songs and "existing only as individual pieces of sheet music, never before released or recorded." Perhaps actually playing them in concert might have been spoiling the fun, at least before those buying the album have the chance to play the tunes themselves.

Beck did have one more genuine surprise to unveil, however, before the evening was over. Barely had the second encore, "Mutherfuker," gotten off the ground before he brought it to a halt, finding it not "grooving" enough for a Thursday night San Francisco audience. Revving up their engines again, the band launched into a far faster and funkier version, somewhat along the lines of how Sly & the Family Stone might have played it. "Okay, that's enough dancing," Beck barked after a few minutes, ever the contrarian. "Stop!"

Misha Vladimirskiy/ http://butchershopcreative.com To read the new issue of Rolling Stone online, plus the entire RS archive: Click Here

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Read more »

Creator's Project Brings James Murphy, Karen O to San Francisco

The Yeah Yeah Yeahs perform during The Creators Project in San Francisco.

When the Creators Project, Vice and Intel’s showcase of art, music and film, touched down on the windy piers of San Francisco’s Fort Mason this weekend, the collective reaction could best be described as a cheery, "What took you so long?" San Francisco needs more cultural events of this size, and the weekend’s crowd was eager to get that point across.

The three-year-old Creators Project, as a concept, benefits from an elevator pitch, which San Francisco Mayor Edwin Lee was happy to provide during a brief speech Saturday: "Art, music and technology!" (This got some eyerolls.) Typically housed indoors, the Creators Project is something like going to a huge museum with the goal of seeing every exhibit on show. Unlike bigger festivals like South By Southwest and CMJ, it’s easy to be immersed in a Creators Project event, appreciate the common themes on display, and come out the other side inspired, rather than dehydrated and counting down the layovers til you’re home. This weekend, which kicked off the Creators Project’s 2012 tour, one could conceivably see ten musical acts in a row, check out some interactive art pieces between sets, and come back the next day to hit up a screening of David Bowie’s remastered and remixed "Life on Mars" video, a talk on Bjork’s Biophilia iPad app, and a documentary on Karen O’s rock opera Stop the Virgens.

The biggest draw, judging from how he transformed a quiet crowd into an elated one, was LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy, who DJed the last two hours of the night with help from bandmates Nancy Whang and Pat Mahoney. Being able to bring this hugely popular figure back from "retirement" (let’s hope the quotes stick) lent legitimacy to the event to anyone doing a quick scan of the lineup. But the organizers deserve credit for nabbing a delightfully disparate group of up-and-comers to precede the big guns. Murphy and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs were the necessary crowd-pleasers, but the other bands, particularly Shabazz Palaces and Zola Jesus, made at least as big a splash.

Nika Danilova, aka Zola Jesus, is a trained opera singer raised in rural Wisconsin, now living in L.A., whose goth-pop is evocative of her childhood landscape. It’s also fun. Saturday night she essentially performed 2011’s Conatus, her impressive third full-length, in its entirety, stomping around the stage in a white minidress and at one point launching herself into the crowd. Her band consisted of a laptop guy, a drummer, and a woman playing an electric violin, and like preceding act, Seattle’s Shabazz Palaces, it was all about the drums: big, booming bass drums, glitchy beats, and a general relentlessness. For Shabazz Palaces, rhythm is melody – especially inside the nearly 200-foot-long building that housed the weekend’s music, where vocals indecipherably fly down the structure so that all that was really left was a beat.

The event’s largely 20-something crowd didn’t let loose until Karen O took the stage for a brief set of Yeah Yeah Yeahs singles old and new-ish, clad in a zebra-print shirt, sparkly red blazer with fringed sleeves, and matching red pants. There was a detectable swell for influential British electronic maestro Squarepusher, who hasn’t performed in the U.S. for years, but his impact was lost on some of the crowd. One person remarked that he "expected more from an electronic DJ from 1996." (Someone should tell him that Squarepusher was doing LED lightshows with a helmet over his head when Deadmau5 was still a kid.) But another guy just as dramatically decided, "This is the best electronic show I’ve ever seen!"

Those who came back for Day Two got some food for thought to go with Saturday’s revelry. The interactive art, which included a few video games, was fun and visually entertaining, but the panels and films offered deeper rumination on making art in the 21st century. The accessibility of art-enabling technology was a powerful theme, as was privacy, fame, and fandom. The schedule showcased creative teams that try to shirk broad categorizations in music, theater and technology. Bjork’s revolutionary iPad app for her album Biophilia is a great example of this, bringing "experiences that aren’t meant for a digital platform to a digital platform" as one of the app’s creators, Max Weisel, put it. Similarly, the director of Karen O’s Stop the Virgens described the work as musical theater for people who don’t necessarily like musical theater.

Intel and Vice did a fine job of catering the event specifically to San Francisco without getting heavy-handed about it. Internet Rising, a cerebral documentary about the future of the Internet, fit comfortably alongside On My Way Back Home, a short film of a Band of Horses concert in Big Sur, California. The end result: a free, diverse, art-and-tech geek-out.

To read the new issue of Rolling Stone online, plus the entire RS archive: Click Here

Amazon Music and MP3 Center

Read more »

Creator's Project Brings James Murphy, Karen O to San Francisco

The Yeah Yeah Yeahs perform during The Creators Project in San Francisco.

When the Creators Project, Vice and Intel’s showcase of art, music and film, touched down on the windy piers of San Francisco’s Fort Mason this weekend, the collective reaction could best be described as a cheery, "What took you so long?" San Francisco needs more cultural events of this size, and the weekend’s crowd was eager to get that point across.

The three-year-old Creators Project, as a concept, benefits from an elevator pitch, which San Francisco Mayor Edwin Lee was happy to provide during a brief speech Saturday: "Art, music and technology!" (This got some eyerolls.) Typically housed indoors, the Creators Project is something like going to a huge museum with the goal of seeing every exhibit on show. Unlike bigger festivals like South By Southwest and CMJ, it’s easy to be immersed in a Creators Project event, appreciate the common themes on display, and come out the other side inspired, rather than dehydrated and counting down the layovers til you’re home. This weekend, which kicked off the Creators Project’s 2012 tour, one could conceivably see ten musical acts in a row, check out some interactive art pieces between sets, and come back the next day to hit up a screening of David Bowie’s remastered and remixed "Life on Mars" video, a talk on Bjork’s Biophilia iPad app, and a documentary on Karen O’s rock opera Stop the Virgens.

The biggest draw, judging from how he transformed a quiet crowd into an elated one, was LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy, who DJed the last two hours of the night with help from bandmates Nancy Whang and Pat Mahoney. Being able to bring this hugely popular figure back from "retirement" (let’s hope the quotes stick) lent legitimacy to the event to anyone doing a quick scan of the lineup. But the organizers deserve credit for nabbing a delightfully disparate group of up-and-comers to precede the big guns. Murphy and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs were the necessary crowd-pleasers, but the other bands, particularly Shabazz Palaces and Zola Jesus, made at least as big a splash.

Nika Danilova, aka Zola Jesus, is a trained opera singer raised in rural Wisconsin, now living in L.A., whose goth-pop is evocative of her childhood landscape. It’s also fun. Saturday night she essentially performed 2011’s Conatus, her impressive third full-length, in its entirety, stomping around the stage in a white minidress and at one point launching herself into the crowd. Her band consisted of a laptop guy, a drummer, and a woman playing an electric violin, and like preceding act, Seattle’s Shabazz Palaces, it was all about the drums: big, booming bass drums, glitchy beats, and a general relentlessness. For Shabazz Palaces, rhythm is melody – especially inside the nearly 200-foot-long building that housed the weekend’s music, where vocals indecipherably fly down the structure so that all that was really left was a beat.

The event’s largely 20-something crowd didn’t let loose until Karen O took the stage for a brief set of Yeah Yeah Yeahs singles old and new-ish, clad in a zebra-print shirt, sparkly red blazer with fringed sleeves, and matching red pants. There was a detectable swell for influential British electronic maestro Squarepusher, who hasn’t performed in the U.S. for years, but his impact was lost on some of the crowd. One person remarked that he "expected more from an electronic DJ from 1996." (Someone should tell him that Squarepusher was doing LED lightshows with a helmet over his head when Deadmau5 was still a kid.) But another guy just as dramatically decided, "This is the best electronic show I’ve ever seen!"

Those who came back for Day Two got some food for thought to go with Saturday’s revelry. The interactive art, which included a few video games, was fun and visually entertaining, but the panels and films offered deeper rumination on making art in the 21st century. The accessibility of art-enabling technology was a powerful theme, as was privacy, fame, and fandom. The schedule showcased creative teams that try to shirk broad categorizations in music, theater and technology. Bjork’s revolutionary iPad app for her album Biophilia is a great example of this, bringing "experiences that aren’t meant for a digital platform to a digital platform" as one of the app’s creators, Max Weisel, put it. Similarly, the director of Karen O’s Stop the Virgens described the work as musical theater for people who don’t necessarily like musical theater.

Intel and Vice did a fine job of catering the event specifically to San Francisco without getting heavy-handed about it. Internet Rising, a cerebral documentary about the future of the Internet, fit comfortably alongside On My Way Back Home, a short film of a Band of Horses concert in Big Sur, California. The end result: a free, diverse, art-and-tech geek-out.

To read the new issue of Rolling Stone online, plus the entire RS archive: Click Here

Amazon MP3 Download Center

Read more »