The New Yorker - USA (2019-12-02)

THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER2, 2019 39

a cover of Skip James’s “Jesus Is a
Mighty Good Leader,” one of a hand-
ful of songs that James, the spookiest
of the Delta-blues legends, recorded
in 1931. Beck said, “A friend of one
of my mother’s friends was a guitar
player and a huge collector of 78-r.p.m.
records. I was just a kid, but he would
let me come over and bring a blank
cassette and record his 78s.” With the
man’s help, Beck began learning how
to play blues songs by Mississippi John
Hurt and Fred McDowell on guitar.
“It was pretty obvious that he had mu-
sical chops,” Channing said. “When
he was eleven or twelve, he was record-
ing professional-sounding music on a
four-track.”
In 1986, when Beck was fifteen, the
Central Library caught fire. “Probably
the saddest day of my childhood was
watching the downtown library burn
down,” he said. “That was the moment
I thought, I have to leave L.A.—I have
nothing here. It was the only place that
I could go. I didn’t even have money
to go to a coffee shop. I was supposed
to be in school.”
One afternoon, he was riding the
bus up Vermont Avenue when he passed
Los Angeles City College. “I didn’t even
know what a community college was,”
he said. But he saw people walking

around carrying books. “It looked cool.

It felt safe.” He sneaked into a few

classes and eventually befriended the

writer Austin Straus, who was teach-

ing a literature course, and his wife, the

poet Wanda Coleman. “I showed him

some of my writing. He let me come

to his classes,” Beck said. “The next

year, I got a fake I.D., because you had

to be eighteen to go there, and I was

maybe fifteen or sixteen. I enrolled, and

I was in heaven.”

Eventually, he again grew frustrated

by his prospects in Los Angeles. “I

felt I just sort of slipped through the

cracks of the system,” he said. When

he turned eighteen, he saw a Grey-

hound commercial advertising a cheap

fare to anywhere in the United States.

It took him three days to get to New

York by bus. He had a flat-top Gib-

son—“a Woody Guthrie kind of gui-

tar”—and about two hundred dollars.

He slept in dorm rooms and on friends’

couches. He took I.D. photos at a pho-

tomat and worked as an usher at a

theatre, and he started playing acous-

tic songs at clubs downtown. The city

was then nurturing a so-called anti-

folk scene, which sought to disman-

tle some of the piousness and sancti-

mony of the folk revival. He tried to

rent a small studio apartment, but the

landlord disappeared with his secu-

rity deposit. He stayed for a while in

a flophouse in Hell’s Kitchen. “It was

basically a room with a bare bulb and

a cot,” he said. “I remember the hall-

ways being flooded with water. That

was ... not romantic.”

“I was a street person, basically,” he

added. We sat for a moment at a red

light. What was it was like, I asked, to

be able to offer his kids a very differ-

ent kind of childhood?

“I feel really proud that they’re able

to have this other life,” he said. “It is a

miracle to me.”

I

n 1994, Thurston Moore, of Sonic

Youth, hosted an episode of MTV’s

“120 Minutes,” with Beck as his guest.

The show, which aired on Mondays

between 1 and 3 A.M., generally fea-

tured videos too obscure or perverse to

be broadcast at any other time. The in-

terview is less than four minutes, not

counting commercial breaks, but it en-

capsulates the cynicism and theatrical

apathy of alternative culture in the nine-

teen-nineties. I love watching it. Nei-

ther man raises his voice—to express

agitation would have required admit-

ting to some level of engagement in

the conversation—yet a vague con-

tempt for the scenario they’ve found

themselves in is palpable.

Moore asks Beck, who was then

twenty-three, what it was like to have

“Loser” become a smash hit. “It’s like

surfing in some oil spillage,” Beck says.

“Yeah, it is like that,” Moore replies.

Beck pulls out a small device and starts

playing what sounds like a melted cas-

sette. “That’s it, man,” Moore says. After

returning from a break, Moore asks

Beck what his real name is. Beck re-

moves his shoe and chucks it at the

wall. “All right,” Moore says.

It was perhaps not wrong to be un-

serious about MTV. A year before he

was a guest on “120 Minutes,” Beck

recorded a throaty, jagged folk song ti-

tled “MTV Makes Me Want to Smoke

Crack.” “MTV makes me wanna smoke

crack/Fall out of a window and never

come back,” he sang. Nowadays, it is

expected that a celebrity will express

only boundless gratitude for his posi-

tion. But, for the middle-class subur-

ban teen-agers watching MTV in 1994,

not giving a shit about anything (or at

Click above the dial, the deal

Downriver is how you will get paid,

Later, further. Out beyond

Where you just see. Trust the flow

Is what he said, sort out the secular

As each day reconciles you

Into a morning of leaving. Or at least going;

Coming back at dark to take off your shoes

And ease into that chair. With that glass. Filled

Again. Not yet paid for. All resting

On an infinitesimal wire you have never seen.

Their wire. Their there. You here. Not there.

—Sophie Cabot Black