Sunday 6 May 2012

BECK "WHERE IT'S AT" 1995 . . . . THE NEWS OF MCA MOVING ONTO THE BIG GIG IN THE SKY GOT ME THINKING OF ANOTHER GOOFY, GEEKY, MUSICAL SUPER DORK I LOVE, BECK . . . . WEIRD THING IS I SAW EM BOTH ON THE SAME BILL IN JANUARY 1996 . . . . BECK WAS ONE DIFFERENT DUDE !!!

MY DEAR AND NOW DEPARTED HOMBRE, MARIO SPINA, WAS PUTTING TOGETHER A DOCO OF A GIG CALLED 'SUMMERSAULT', AN OUTDOOR FESTIVAL THAT VISITED THE COAST IN JANUARY OF 1996, PEAK SUMMER, STINKIN HOT AND READY TO ROCK AND ROLL !!!

On the bill were The Beasties, Foofighters, Sonic Youth, Beck, Rancid, Pavement, Bris Vegas band Pangea and some others I can't recall, and a skate demo that I'm pretty sure featured a fella by the name of Max Schaaf . . . . Mars had organised all the paperwork, the cameras, passes, the artist interviews and the other bullshit needed to pull this sort of caper off properly . . . . as I'd spent five years of my life singing and ruining my liver in a band with him, Mario asked if I would like to do the artist interviews, I thought about it for a nano second and said "fuck yes" . . . .

We were denied access to both the Beasties and the Foofighters, but had carte blanche on all the others, un fucking real, I was not surprisingly, a bit excited about the prospect. All I had to do was basically talk to the artist while Mars and Johnny did the shoot and the sound.



As fate would have it, the entire project got tied up in red tape and copyright issues and never saw the light of day and now Mars is seven years in the ground, we can never find out what became of all the footage . . . . nonetheless, that day I got to have a yarn and hang out with Lars and the Rancid crew for a couple of hours, full on those boys were, ask a few questions of the Sonic Youth drummer, whose name I forget only every time, and the same with Pavemant, Bikini Kill and the Beckster . . . .

Beck was as out there as Rancid were street level, not in a bad way, just a sorta detatched, in his own loop kinda way, fairly quietly spoken, a bit scatty but intense and open at the same time, and just a little out of his comfort zone with all the rock stuff going on around him . . . . he answered all my questions politely and with good grace, he was just, well, different. Later in the arvo we saw him just wandering about by himself, taking things in and logging them down in that slightly off centre mind of his, a sea of personal calm in an ocean of writhing, sweaty, moshing madness . . . .

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