He was like nineteen-seventies Jack
Nicholson, with a little Bukowski, and
some Lou Reed from that interview
in ’74 where he has the blond hair.”
Al Hansen often made collages from
found detritus, including cigarette butts,
centerfolds, and candy wrappers. (His
papers contain a letter from Philip
Morris, in which the company agrees
to “put 3000 Marlboro Cigarettes at
your disposal to support your artistic
work.”) In 1998, the Santa Monica Mu-
seum of Art hosted an exhibition ti-
tled “Beck and Al Hansen: Playing
with Matches.” The show’s curators
found an easy line from Al Hansen’s
aesthetic—the juxtaposition of odd-
ball bits, resulting in a provocative and
unexpected whole—to Beck’s music.
Beck, the keyboardist Roger Manning,
and the bassist Justin Meldal-Johnsen
performed at the exhibit’s opening,
débuting a one-off piece called “New
Age Evisceration, (Part 1).” Beck in-
troduced it to the crowd by saying,
“This will be the longest twenty min-
utes of your life.” Toward the end of
the performance, he attempted to cut
his synthesizer in half with a chainsaw.
It was, by any measure, a “happening.”
Hansen married the poet Audrey
Ostlin, and in 1952 they had Bibbe.
Ostlin died suddenly, in Greenwich
Village, in 1968. When Bibbe was a
teen-ager, Al introduced her to Andy
Warhol. She appeared in several of
Warhol’s films and two of his “Screen
Tests”—the black-and-white portraits
that Warhol made in the mid-sixties,
in which his subjects sat still in front
of a camera for a few minutes. “When
I was about fourteen, I discovered the
Velvet Underground,” Beck said. “I re-
member her making a comment like
‘You like that? I used to know those
people.’ She started telling this story
about how her friend was Warhol’s as-
sistant. He was the guy who used to
crack the bullwhip onstage with the
band, and she was one of the dancers.”
On his phone, Beck showed me a
few photographs of his mother and the
model Edie Sedgwick, one of Warhol’s
muses. He kept scrolling, stopping on
a picture of Bibbe cramming a ham-
burger into her mouth while Warhol,
wearing a dark blazer and sunglasses,
coolly flips through a book. Beck be-
held it with genuine disbelief: “There
are actual pictures of her eating a ham-
burger next to Warhol.” He laughed.
“You can see how hungry she is. She’s
just, like, ‘I haven’t eaten in three days.’
If I had seen this when I was a teen-
ager, I probably would have died.”O
ne evening, Beck took me for a
drive around central Los Ange-
les, where he was born and raised. “It’s
not a definitive neighborhood, like
Hollywood or Silver Lake or Santa
Monica. It’s sort of an in-between, for-
gotten area,” he explained, steering a
silver Mercedes through traffic. “Some
people call it Pico-Union, other peo-
ple call it Westlake. I grew up with ev-
eryone going, ‘Ugh, L.A.—so cheesy.’
My reality of L.A. was quite different
from ‘Baywatch,’” he said. “‘There’s a
beach? What is this beach that they
speak of ?’” He has recently taken to
listening to KROQ-HD2—which
plays mostly New Wave and punk from
the eighties—while cruising around
town. “It’s sort of a time portal,” he
said. “It’s like opening a secret door.
They even have the original d.j.s from
when I was a kid.”
His parents got engaged at a diner
downtown that is now a MetroPCS
store. They had Beck and Channingwhen they were young. “Kids were kind
of invisible when we were growing up,”
Beck said. “I pretty much had free rein
to do whatever I wanted from a really
young age.” Bibbe and David divorced
when Beck was in his early teens.
Mostly, he lived with his mother and
brother in rooming houses or studio
apartments. “We had nontraditional
parents,” Channing Hansen, who is
now a visual artist in L.A., told me.
“We didn’t have parents with nine-to-
five jobs, or a white picket fence.”
Westlake’s streets used to be lined
with stately Victorian houses, but
eventually, as Robert Jones wrote in
the L.A. Times, in 1997, “the white
gentry fled to Encino and Westwood,
leaving their ghost buildings behind
them.” Beginning in the late nineteen-
seventies, there was an influx of drug
dealers and gang members, including
some fleeing the civil war in El Sal-
vador. Beck was nine years old when
the L.A.P.D. began its Community
Resources Against Street Hoodlums
program, a notoriously savage unit
that was shut down in 2000, after
officers were alleged to have been in-
volved in gang activity, murders, rob-
beries, evidence planting, and brutal-
ity. Cops would occasionally burst into