Beck is not a preacher.  He's a musical sponge, the ultimate product of a
generation of young adults raised in broken homes, shuttled back and forth
from one family member to another, and nurtured by the almighty TV. Today
Beck doesn't even have a TV.  Yet television -- specifically MTV -- has
made him practically a household name.  By the end of March, his oddball
hit, "Loser," had rocketed into the Top 20.  That's not normal for a song
recorded on an eight-track machine at a friend's house in six hours.

  But will Beck be able to weather the storm of a hype surrounding "Loser,"
and walk away a lasting folkie figurehead for the kitchen-sink generation?
Or is he doomed, despite his best intentions, to be another one-hit wonder?
No matter how clear and observant Beck is, to the pop world at large,
"Loser" is a novelty song.  Aside from a few indie purists, and the kids
who debate about him on computer bulletin boards, hardly anyone knows about
the other Beck projects, such as the obscure Fingerprint 10-inch, A Western
Harvest Field by Moonlight, or his various indie cassettes and singles.
Moreover, while his major-label debut, Mellow Gold (DGC), is a strong first
album with plenty of promise, it ultimately finds Beck a
not-quite-fully-realized artist who could use a little time to grow.

  Fortunately, Beck is asking those questions too.  "At first I thought it
was a joke," he says of the hubbub surrounding "Loser."  "So I just ignored
it for a while.  But when the commercial stations started playing it, and
the thing started getting on the charts, I figured it must be for real.  It
was so freaky.  I spent about seven months trying to decide it I wanted to
have any part of it or if I should just ignore it."

  He couldn't ignore it, because the major labels wouldn't stop knocking at
his door.  But when Beck finally answered, he had a list of conditions:  he
would get to do whatever he wanted to do musically, including continuing to
put out weird records on indie labels like K. Bong Load, and Flipside.  "I
figured if people wanted me to come and play my songs for them, I'll come
and play 'em.  But they have to know that it's not all going to be like
'Loser.'"

  I just wanted to tell all the teeny-boppers who like "Loser" that you
won't like Mellow Gold.  It's mostly folk music with a little punk stuff.
Did anyone see the new video for "Pay No Mind" on 120 Minutes?  I hope they
don't turn it into a "poser clip" like they did "Loser."  ---Donna, Prodigy
computer bulletin board, 12:30PM, 3/23/94

  From his T-shirt collection -- which also includes an Orange Crush, a
Reese's Peanut Butter Cup, and a vintage green Mountain Dew -- to the Star
Wars storm-trooper mask he sports on the back cover of Mellow Gold, to his
references to mini-malls, Dixie cups, and K-tel, Beck is an amalgam of late
20th-century multi-media fallout.  In his music, he spits it all out in
tangled, Dylanesque lyrical puzzles, hip-hop sound collages, bleeps,
blurps, distortion and old-timey folk melodies.  If Dylan had his finger on
the pulse of his inquisitive generation back in 1966 when he declared,
"Everybody must get stoned," Beck seems every bit as in tune with his own
cynical peers when in "Loser" he commands, "Get crazy with the Cheese
Whiz."

  Take away the noise and bear-box backing tracks, the voice modulators and
wacky non-sequiturs, and Beck Hansen is a fairly traditional folk musician.
At 17, the fan of Pussy Galore and Sonic Youth made a musical discovery
that changed his life.  "I was at my friend's house and I saw this album
with a close-up of an old man's wrinkled face on it; he was sweating
profusely and sort of had a sleepy look in his eyes.  It was Mississippi
John Hurt.  I guess it had been issued in the '60s, because the lettering
was all psychedelic and stuff.  I thought, 'Wow, this is going to be
crazy.'  But when I took it home and put it on the record player, it was
this droning, deep, slow, warm world that just let you come in and be there
with him.  All the music I'd ever heard before that was justbig beats and
drums pumping and everything.  It never really gave you any room to step
in, look around and breathe the fresh air."

  Born in Los Angeles, Beck spent his pre-teens moving back and forth
between his paternal grandparents, who lived outside of Kansas City, and
his single mom, an office worker who lived in the rough, Pico-Vermont area
of Los Angeles.  Beck's mom and dad and split up when he was young, and he
never had much contact with his dad, who remarried and started a new
family.  When he mentions this, there's only a trace of resentment in his
voice.  One way he dealt with his feelings was to immerse himself in Star
Wars culture at around age seven; he estimates he saw the movies more than
50 times.

   Beck's grandfather, a Presbyterian minister, tried to encourage him to
become a Christian.  By 12, Beck decided he'd rather stay with his mom full
time.  Like many creative teenagers, he felt alienated from the kids his
age and wound up hanging out with an older crowd.  Beck became fed up with
school and quit after junior high.  "I just didn't have the patience for
it," he says.  "It was just so mind-bogglingly tedious and hollow.  Of
course, I didn't go to a very good school.  I know some people who went to
good schools and probably benefited from it."

   He worked a series of dead-end jobs -- including driving a forklift at a
warehouse in South-Central, and moving furniture -- to help his mom.  But
after discovering Mississippi John Hurt, and later Woody Guthrie, Beck
started getting antsy.  "I was just constantly romantically envisioning
this Woody Guthrie-type America -- just traveling around and singing.  So
one day I saw this commercial on TV about a Greyhound bus ticket to
anywhere in the U.S. for like $40.  I got the ticket and took off to New
York.  It was a long hot trip."

   Arriving in New York in 1989, he caught the tail-end of the short-lived
"anti-folk" scene, and hooked up with its spearheads, Roger Manning, Kirk
Kelley, and Lach (who ran the legendary Chameleon club on Sixth Street
below Ave. A).  The story goes that most of the anti-folkies, perhaps
bitter over their own inability to rise above the fringe, wouldn't give the
young troubadour the time of day.  And yet Beck, in an uncharacteristic
moment of complete sincerity, recalls his two years in New York wistfully
as a pivotal time in his musical life.

   "It was so creative," he says.  "There was so much stuff happening, it was
inspiring. To me it looked like everybody was going places.  Of course, it
never really happened.  I dunno," he reflects, "maybe for me it was just my
age -- I was like 18 or something -- but it just felt so great.  It was
such a special time.  Suddenly I was turned on to the whole world.  Being
18 really is such a turning point.  And being in New York at that time made
it so much better. You could write your own music, get drunk, and not
really care about anything."

   It was then that Beck started getting serious about writing songs.  "I
would go to the Chameleon for the open-mike night and play Woody Guthrie or
Mississippi John Hurt songs -- which was my whole world at the time; I
didn't even want to know about anything else. But Lach wouldn't book me for
a whole night unless I wrote my own songs.  So I said, 'OK.'  And I went
and got a pen and paper and wrote five songs about stuff like pizza or
waking up after having been chain-sawed in half by a maniac -- stuff like
that.  He finally gave me a Friday night."

  After a series of bad financial situations -- like getting ripped off by a
crack addict in a phony apartment deal -- Beck returned to L.A. in 1991.
"I got totally depressed because there was no folk scene here.  I tried to
find one, and there's just nothing.  Not like in New York.  I was depressed
for like a year, 'cause I just felt like there was such a community there.
Here I just felt sort of lost.  I was this freak playing solo acoustic
guitar and, uh. . ."

  He discovered the Onyx cafe in Los Feliz, the Gaslight, Al's Bar, Raji's,
and a string of supportive bands such as Ethyl Meatplow and PossumDixon,
who would let him warm up for them.  His mother had even opened up a poetry
hot spot, the Troy cafe.  One evening at the hip indie nightspot Jabberjaw,
he met Tom Rothrock, who was starting a label called Bong Load.  The two
exchanged phone numbers, and three months later got together one afternoon
to do some recording.  That was the day "Loser" was born.

  "Tom had called up and said, 'Hey, I know this guy who does hip-hop beats
and stuff.  I said, 'Oh yeah, well sometimes I rap between songs and get
people from the audience to do the beat-box thing into the mike.'  So we
went to this guy's house and I played him a few of my folk songs.  He
seemed pretty all-around unimpressed.  Then I started playing this slide
guitar part and he started taping it.  He put a drum track to it and it
was, you know, the 'Loser' riff.  I started writing this lyrics to the
verse part.  When he played it back, I thought, 'Man, I'm the worst rapper
in the world -- I'm just a loser.'  So I started singing.  'I'm a loser
baby, so why don't you kill me.'  I'm always kinda putting myself down like
that."

  The casual birth of "Loser" reflects Beck's breezy world view.  He didn't
give the recording another thought until a year later, when Rothrock called
again and said he was thinking about putting "Loser" out as a single.  He
pressed a few copies, sent them out to a few alternative radio stations,
and -- boom -- the song became an instant smash.  First the tiny, L.A.
college station KXLU started playing it, followed by the NPR flagship KCRW,
and then the commercial "alternative" station KROQ.  By that time, nearly
every major label A&R rep in town was scrambling to sign the wunderkind.
Geffen won the bidding war partly because they offered him the most freedom
-- but also because it's the label of Beck's guitar-noise heroes, Sonic
Youth.

  Beck is cool.  If you think he's a loser, well we all know who the f--in'
loser is. (It's not him!)  Besides, he's good lookin'"  -- Sarah, Prodigy
computer bulletin board, 5PM, 3/16/94
  
  Ohmygod, isn't he!!!!!!   -- Lisa, Prodigy computer bulletin board,
6:24PM, 3/16/94

  As we wait for another load of laundry to dry, Beck and I walk into the
dim light of the parking lot and sit on the hood of his faded gray Volvo
with two bumper stickers on the back that together read, "Dream On!"
"Karaoke Queen."  It's a typical hazy L.A. March night --kind of cool, kind
of scary.  Two kids on rollerblades whiz by and giggle.

  "I think the biggest misconception of me is that all this hype is
something I planned or something," Beck says.  "I've had no part in it, I'm
really surprised about it, and I think it's completely ridiculous when
people put me on the cover of magazines.  It seems really funny, you know.
Sometimes I go out of my way not to get into that position, but I keep
ending up there.

  "Like when we made the video for 'Loser' -- we were fucking around.  We
weren't making anything slick -- it was deliberately crude.  You know?  It
wasn't like one of these perfect new-wave color soft-focus extravaganzas.
We were just fucking around.  And now they're playing it all the time.
It's the same thing with the song -- that song was written and recorded in
six hours.  No plans went into it."

  His face turns slightly frightened.  "It's just totally ridiculous.  It's
like waking up on an airplane that's going down, and you don't know if you
should get in a parachute and jump or...wait until they serve the drinks."