'if Odelay sucked...' How Alt-Rock Dealt With Beck In The '90s

My wife tells me that the singer dude (Chris O'Connor) played a solo show at the University of Maryland in I guess 96 or 97, and he exuded arrogance and impatience with the dinkiness of the gig - like, "I'm a national superstar due to my one massive hit, why the fuck am I playing at this lame-ass college student center food court?"

Now he works at that same food court...

the plane takes off from Baltimore, and touches down at Burger King

I thought Primitive Radio Gods was just a one-man band until I checked Wikipedia. Why would they guy think people would automatically know who he is?

have to admit i have always thought PRG = one bloke as well.

I always assumed they were British until right now (lumped them together with The Stereo MCs).

supposedly the album sounds basically unfinished/awful. but americans had to buy it anyway because no retail single was issued for the one song anyone wanted to listen to

RE: one man band, you might be thinking of White Town.

nah, that track had already crossed my mind.

this has finally reminded me of Forest For The Trees, "Dream," which I think was a one-man-band, whose one man had actually co-created "Loser" with Beck, and then recorded this whole album which got shelved for a while. understandably it has more in common with Beck than most of our subjects here. at the least it's kind of like a sped-up "Loser" with some of the same abrupt shifts between sections and more new-agey trappings.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHVMdGL0kno

another thought not specifically related to this: surely in a lot of cases of 'influence,' what we're tracking is not necessarily "this artist heard this record and that caused them to start making music of this kind," and more "because this other record was successful, the engineers, producers, and studio people were more willing to release and market the music that this artist was making anyway." or perhaps: "this artist or the producers had this wacky idea in the studio, and instead of dismissing it out of hand, they thought it seemed like a reasonable thing to try, because these other records had shifted the prevailing sense of acceptability in music."

put another way: as under-marketed and commercially doomed as this album was, i'm not sure it comes out at all if Odelay had been a complete flop and Beck deemed a one-hit wonder.

also: the almost completely forgotten POTUS proteges Bicycle, who i keep trying to force upon a totally disinterested ILM: The band: Bicycle. The album: Bicycle.

was surprised by how well it held up (as do all the other 90s beck albums, which I subsequently listened to, then I made it a couple of songs into Sea Change before shutting that off).

lol, otm

also worth mentioning that his tour for this record just absolutely slayed, one of the best/most chaotic & crazy/most joyful/most crowded shows I've ever attended. My girlfriend lost her fucking shoe! total insanity. Beck was using a set of opera glasses to check the audience out, swaggering all around. they did fucking "Debra" for the encore and it brought the house down, then didn't show up on a record for another THREE YEARS. the day after the show there was a record convention and he came to my booth and flipped through my stuff, but the copy of the Pink Panther soundtrack I had wasn't minty enough for him.

like sure they opened with Devil's Haircut and things were bumping, but like 4-5 mindblowing songs later when the crack band tore into the hidden gem "Thunder Peel" the whole place was freaking out

i love stories like that sleeve.
ta.
once again - ilm delivers.

the only beck story i have is that i saw him come out of heathrows departure gate with an insane amount of luggage and his entourage as he was due to appear at a festival that weekend.

reality contradicts my memory, "Thunder Peel" came much later in the set, the freakout moment I remember was probably "Loser"

and thanks mark e <3

https://www.setlist.fm/setlist/beck/1997/emu-ballroom-eugene-or-43d12333.html

otm re: that tour, extremely fun & chaotic. i remember multiple band members wearing giant rubber horse masks & Beck doing some kind of move where he somehow slid up a ramp without moving his feet.

and regardless of what setlist.fm says, they definitely played "Debra" at the end

this has finally reminded me of Forest For The Trees, "Dream," which I think was a one-man-band

whoa didn't expect to be reminded of that!! I bought a music magazine when I was a teen and it had a sampler CD with it and one of the songs was "The Sound of Music" by this act. I really loved it but didn't buy the CD because apparently it didn't have that song

anyway I guess I missed this thread which is probably good for y'all cuz I'd be posting my dumb thoughts on it nonstop. basically I think what happened is you had all these kids who'd grown up in the 70s and 80s with parents who had good record collections who were therefore getting into a ton of different things at once. contrast to the artists of the 60s and 70s who'd grown up listening to like...two different genres and a lot of songs that all kinda sounded the same. maybe that made them more creative. like when I was growing up there was ELP and Devo and Living Colour playing in the house a lot and I always thought "if I made a band it would use elements of all of this". I know Ween never made a record like this but what they do kinda strikes me as the same thing.

Primitive Radio Gods's "Standing..." sounds little-to-nothing like Beck to me

But the mood/thesis of it does sound like a prototype for Moby's "Play" album

I must admit that I've always thought that the part of "Standing..." where the lead singer breaks his cool and starts singing along with the sample is a really great moment

If I had to guess at the creative inspiration of "Standing..." I'd say it was made after dude watched Silence Of The Lambs and heard Q Lazzarus. A quick scan of the wikipedia suggests too that "Standing..." predates "Mellow Gold" by some years

Since this thread started hopping recently, the neverending playlist in my stupid head has been replaying both "Dyin All Young" and "Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth With Money in My Hand" nonstop. Both songs. In more or less constant rotation.

By comparison, Beck's "Loser" barely charts, because I only need to hear it once every few years. Except when I am playing it at an open mic, which happens more often than you might think.

I hope this discussion runs its course soon because I really want to get my head back onto other topics.

“Standing outside….” kinda gives me some Tom’s diner vibes tbh, just slightly.

The original Tom's Diner (circa 1984) has nothing to do with this trend.

The 1990 DNA remix, yeah ok sure.

But if that is admissible, why not the version of Beethoven's fifth from Saturday Night Fever, or Also Sprach Zarathustra from the Being There soundtrack?

I saw Beck a couple of months after sleeve but as part of some event put on by 89X the Detroit area alternative rock station - it was him, Sloan, Pavement, and Soul Coughing which is such an incredibly 1997 line up to me.

Joey Waronker was playing drums and I remember it being one of the first times I was really enthralled by the drummer at a show.

yup, and Smokey Hormel on guitar!

was Justin Meldal-Johnsen there? I don't have a strong opinion of his playing but he seems like an endearingly weird person.

I always think he is really good but that seems to have been mpstly based on a live video I can't seem to find anymore of him playing "La femme d'argent" which part was created by the other guy anyway. Still he sounded great iirc.

Unless it was Jason Falkner. Maybe it is him I like.

I may be basing my opinion of JMJ largely on a documentary about fuzz pedals that was on Amazon a while ago - he just seems like a goofball music nerd, and I have a soft spot in my heart for goofball music nerds

that "beck sound" is more the influence that downtempo, hip hop triphop and the like had in music circa mid 90's. a very interesting period for music in general.

I don't think Beck sounds much like Portishead or Tricky or Stereolab, tho

Those folks didn't have their tongues in their cheeks; they were after a more coherent sound rather than the snippy-snip Beckian vibe

I do recall there being an Esquivel resurgence at the time that was hitched to all of those though (stereolab, beck, cornelius, et al). how much irony was involved depended on the players but at it's core I think everyone was sincere in their interests in this sound.

xp Yeah, I don't recall drawing a trip-hop connection at the time... and I was way into that stuff, buying comps with names like DJ Smash: Bluntz On Wax Volume 1 & 2

In 94 I loved Dummy inordinately; hadn't heard much like it. Post-Millennium Tension was the same year as Odelay, wasn't it? They reached me at different times.

I feel like this sound reached a nadir in the late 90s--like I'd go into an Old Navy store and hear this breakbeat music with sunshine pop samples. Just kind of sampledelic wallpaper.

T/S: snippy v dippy v snippy-dippy

xxp Maxinquaye came out around 6 months after Dummy (summer '95)... Pre-Millennium Tension was later, '96.

listening to the Primitive Radio Gods hit yesterday, i was struck by the otm-ness of fgti's comparison to Moby's Play. that album's gotten a couple of name-checks in this thread, and it does seem like maybe a lot of the mid-90s "oh wow music can combine all kinds of things now!!" enthusiasm for Odelay found a new home there at decade's end.

i get the trip-hop connection with Beck. it's not the content, it's the tempo and the... chunkiness? of the sound. also maybe specifically the acceptance of dirty vinyl clicks and pops and crackle (or non-vinyl-based analogs to those things) as part of the soundscape.

Old Navy and sunshine-pop samples makes me think also of "Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen)" which is another thing that, if you squint, might not have gotten recorded/released if not for Beck's success. but who knows? Like Primitive Radio Gods did at the time, it might have seemed to just exist on its own as a strange, spoken-word-adjacent novelty hit that doesn't come from or lead to anything else.

The original Tom's Diner (circa 1984) has nothing to do with this trend.

The 1990 DNA remix, yeah ok sure.

But if that is admissible, why not the version of Beethoven's fifth from Saturday Night Fever, or Also Sprach Zarathustra from the Being There soundtrack?

Broken phone booth man isn’t in line w this trend either is what I’m saying, feels strangely more a part of that weird poppy bush era 1990-91 sound in a way rather than the Odelay trend. It doesn’t come off like alt-rock hip-hop cut-up patchwork sounds. the sample is a red herring.

summer February '95
(...sorry, correcting myself above)

i was refering to an adoption of certain elements of trip hop, downtempo or (instrumental) hip hop in a rock and pop context. so that period was pretty interesting for music in general
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-GqTr8THJg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqu132vTl5Y

weird poppy bush era 1990-91 sound

I've everything to show
I've everything to hide
Look into my eyes
I turned up the radio, but I can't hear it

another interesting sonic thing about PRG: the moment fgti identifies upthread, where Broken Phone Booth Man sings the sample line himself --- to my ears, his choice of how to convey sincerity and being down-hearted owes a lot more to "alternative" and "college rock" than to "grunge" or to slacker irony, etc. it reminded me of Gin Blossoms or something.

i do however think the song bears comparison to both "Tom's Diner" and "Loser." makes sense - not every aspect of the Poppy Bush Interzone vanished at the start of 1992, and lots of people might have still been working over ideas developed in that time. over on the "positive vibes" thread we eventually cracked the code and determined that Collective Soul owed more than was ever acknowledged to the Life is a Highway/Three Strange Days axis.

PRG dude sounds like he owned the deep forest cd maybe too.

I was into a lot of this music at the time, a continuum from Portishead to Soul Coughing to Pizzicato 5, but somehow Odelay left me cold. I found the stream of consciousness rando lyrics too wacky.("Love machines on the sympathy crutches, discount orgies on the dropout buses...") I relistened the other day thanks to this thread and actually liked it better now than I did then.

also: i've been struggling to make a post out of it, but there's a significant shift in Soul Coughing's sound between their 1994/1996 albums and 1998's El Oso, which if anything suggests a receding of the maximalist multi-color sampledelic tide, but maybe more trip-hop coming in. it's leaner, meaner, grimier, and lacks those sunny midtempo summer festival type songs.

but they're an odd duck for many reasons... Mark degli Antoni was really the sampler player as much as the keyboardist, alongside what was really a jazz rhythm section, so the way they used and deployed their (sometimes wacky) sample stuff kinda worked differently. to my ears, anyway.

the moment fgti identifies upthread, where Broken Phone Booth Man sings the sample line himself --- to my ears, his choice of how to convey sincerity and being down-hearted owes a lot more to "alternative" and "college rock" than to "grunge" or to slacker irony

Compare with "Dyin all Young." While Prophet doesn't sing the whole sampled line, he does repeat the last three words in his own voice, and I don't think it's that different in affect from Phone Booth Man.

It's interesting, I'm re-reading this thread and aside from "Pepper" I still don't hear much/any influence-of-Odelay on much other chart music (if anything) aside from, maybe, Dan The Automator productions

I'm trying to think of why this might be? Production-wise "Odelay" is straight-up cribbing from crate-digging beat assemblage methods and it is that Odelay seems more of a facsimile than an original in this regard. What did I listen to subsequent to Beck? Blue Break Beats compilations, and those weren't covering famous samples from Beck songs but samples from classic rap

I guess Odelay influenced JSBX's "Acme"! But not to especially terrific effect (tho I have a soft spot for it)

sleeve's post makes me want to start a thread called:

"My Girlfriend Lost Her Fucking Shoe! Tales of concert experiences from when you were young that felt life-changing at the time (and maybe they were)"

There is nothing like being up front at a wild show when you're 14, 15, 16, 17 ... if I could go back in time right now, I would.