Beck: The Art of Mutation

Chapter One: Even in His Youth

“I didn’t have that social know-how, I didn’t have those cliques. I was on…my own island….It really liberated me to just form my own universe, really form my own view of the world. I wasn’t influenced by what all, the other kids did. I was able to step back from the culture at the time.”

The man we know today as simply Beck was born in Los Angeles at 11:59 P.M. On July 8, 1970, as Bek David Campbell. His parents, David Campbell and Bibbe Hansen, were an artistically inclined couple who would prove to be a considerable influence on Beck’s art. He was the younger of two; and his brother, Channing, would follow his own creative path over the years.

Born and raised in the Great White North of Canada, David Campbell grew up the son of a preacher man. His father, a Presbyterian minister, filled the young lad’s head with classical and choral music from the get-go, and Campbell’s future began taking root. At the age of nine, he moved down to Seattle where he began taking violin lessons. At one point, he performed with David Harrington in a string quartet (Harrington would later go on to lead the critically acclaimed Kronos Quartet). In the mid-sixties, Campbell relocated to New York to study at the Manhattan School of Music. After this burst of formal education, the young Campbell switched coasts to L.A. to pursue a career in music. It was there he began to appreciate the pop maestros of the time, falling in love with the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Leonard Cohen.

Campbell’s big break came when he was chosen to back Jackson Browne on the viola for “Song for Adam,” a tune that ended up on Browne’s massively popular eponymous debut. Soon thereafter, he hit the road with Carole King’s traveling band, an opportunity which led to him arranging strings on King’s Rhymes and Reasons album. This record plucked Campbell out of virtual obscurity when it peaked at #2 on the Billboard charts, while the single “Been to Canaan” hit the Top 25. This resume builder was the cornerstone of his professional career, and he ultimately went on to become one of the music industry’s most called-upon studio musicians and string arrangers. He has contributed his skills to over eighty gold and/or platinum albums for artists as diverse as Joe Cocker, Leonard Cohen, Green Day, Neil Diamond, R.E.M., Dolly Parton, Alanis Morissette, Linda Ronstadt, and Aerosmith, while playing on such timeless slices of pop memorabilia as Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On” and Bill Withers’s “Lean on Me.” Beck says that his father “always had an ear for the weirder harmonies. That’s probably what he passed to me.”

Beck’s mother Bibbe is an equally compelling artist. Born in New York, she was Warhol’s youngest star when her fifteen minutes started at the tender age of thirteen. She starred in Warhol’s unreleased 1965 film Prison opposite Edie Sedgwick, as well as in a production for avant-garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas. After a chance trip to L.A., she moved out West and continued to be a part of the art scene — acting in B movies, founding a theater company, rocking out with the gender-bending band Black Fag, and serving as a documenter of the area punk-rock scene. When she married Campbell, the couple moved to Hollywood, where she soon gave birth to Beck (then Bek).

It may have been Al Hansen, Bibbe’s father and Beck’s grandfather, who had the most influence on Beck. He was most likely the family member from whom Beck learned the most, as well as the artist who most inspired Beck’s later work. A native of Queens, New York, Hansen was an avid fan of drawing and sketching from an early age. Due to World War II, he wasn’t able to follow his artistic muse throughout his early adulthood, and instead joined the air force. While stationed in Frankfurt, Germany, he pushed a grand piano off the top of a bombed-out five-storey building and listened to its cacophonous crash. This explosion of noise was a life-defining moment for him, and it would later serve as the impetus for his performance-art piece “The Yoko Ono Piano Drop,” in which he would push a piano from a great height.

Upon his return Stateside, he studied at New York’s Art Students College League, Brooklyn College, and the New School for Social Research, where he met his mentor John Cage. Hansen later wrote, “One of the things John Cage taught was, that if you began to compose music, or paint, or make a dance and you knew what the end product would be, then you were not experimenting. To experiment one sets out to do things without knowing what the end result will be. You must agree in advance. John always said to accept whatever happens. So the end product is a ‘happening.’ This is exactly the way I did all my Happenings. Free form, No rehearsals.”

Hansen became heavily involved in the Happenings scene and in 1965 wrote A Primer of Happenings and Time/Space Art, which came to be widely regarded as a must-have tome in artistic circles. The gifted avant-garder was a part of Warhol’s Factory; in fact he was one of the first people to discover the injured pop artist after SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) leader Valerie Solanas shot him (Hansen bumped into her in the elevator as she made her hasty retreat, smoking gun still in hand). He later made a book about the incident entitled Why Shoot Andy Warhol? In another Pop-Up Video aside, Hansen is even responsible for Velvet Underground’s moniker: “It was a few weeks before their first gig, and they were calling themselves Falling Spikes or something and desperately looking for a better name,” Beck remembers. “Al had this semi pornographic book called The Velvet Underground, and he was having lunch with their manager one day, and he said, ‘Well, this is a good name. Why don’t you use it?’ The manager ended up taking credit for the whole thing and said it was his book.”

Along with his Happenings, Al was closely associated with Fluxus, an art movement of the late sixties and early seventies that challenged conventions with playful games, odd performances, and a willingness to push all boundaries. In his own essay on the matter, Al describes a movement that is founded in its lack of structure or definition: “Anyone who thinks Fluxus is serious misses the point. One who thinks Fluxus is not serious is closer to the point, but still misses the point. A unique thing about Fluxus is it is also not ‘in-between.’ Fluxus is not between ‘this’ and ‘that.’ Fluxus is everywhere at once. And nowhere. Its secret is — it does not really exist — but it exists. In that way Fluxus is like God — it might not exist. But we talk about God and we talk about Fluxus.” Or, as Ben “Obi-Wan” Kenobi once intoned, “The Force is what gives a Jedi his power. It’s an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together.” The movement’s critical players included George Maciunas, Ben Vautier, George Brecht, Robert Watts, Allison Knowles, and even John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who became close friends of Hansen. In 1970, the trio collaborated on a piece entitled This Is Not Here Show in Syracuse, New York. Despite all this, Hansen may have garnered the most public attention for his collage work, in which he created a variety of Venus figures out of Hershey wrappers, cigarette butts, lighters, or whatever found detritus he could incorporate.

Beck was probably most literally influenced by Al’s Intermedia Poems, in which the poet would take random headlines and put them together to form collagist poems. A sample of one piece steals poetry from the headlines: “The rooster, the hawk and the phoenix/The McMiracle Continues: A Coot Head Wins a Heated Crapshoot/Bills Find New Way to Pain Raiders: The Boot in Overtime/Monetary milestone on a European two-speed road to ruin.” Beck would later mimic the form in