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About Street roots. (Portland, OR) 1998-current | View Entire Issue (July 24, 2015)
Street Roots • July 24-30, 2015 News Page9 remember listening to them. Around the same time I started playing guitar, trying to learn these songs. It felt like discovering lost knowledge and forgotten history. At the time popular culture was all about glossy global pop and upward mobility. I was taken with the opposite. I was writing a lot of very simple, personal songs. But at that time that kind of music was met with a lot of antipathy in L.A. The reaction was completely negative. You have to remember, this was the time of the punk movement in L.A. It was all about being transgressive. The gigs were, like, fire eating guys in leather bondage or suits of armour playing speed metal on burning oil cans. So my little personal guitar songs, they didn’t go down so well. I was pretty independent when I was 1 6. 1 guess my mom was pretty laid back. REUTERS PH O TO BY M A R IO A N Z U O N I Beck Pop star Beck contributes to a celebrity series o f letters to younger versions o f themselves fo r street papers worldwide. Beck talks about the “insanity” o f public life, the hard times o f his teenage years - a n d a life-changing trip to A letter to my younger self gang violence. So I spent a lot of time on my own. And I started thinking about making a living. London. At home I had no personal space, and you need that as a teenager. I sought "W "V Then I was 16 my family was % /W / going through hard times. W T There was a pile of us living in a little apartment in LA. I found myself retreating from education. I think I fell between the cracks of the system. I was the only white boy in my class and I was harassed a lot. And when I wasn’t being harassed, I was ignored. I was too young to go to a city college but my high school was struggling, there were a lot of problems with refuge in the library I used to go to the big old city library in L.A. a lot but when I was 16 it burned down. I still remember watching it on the news. I had a tear in my eye. I sought refuge in the library, the one place I could spend as much time as I wanted and it didn’t cost me any money. Usually iw as the only kid there, and that’s where I got most of my education. There was a big music section, so I found out about old folk music and country blues, and those old Library of Congress records - 1 i 9 ES lllp rw j IB t Am like insanity, traveling every day, city to city. There was no time to breathe. And after a while I took five years out of i t I didn’t go on tour or put out records, I just spent time in my community and raised my kids. That was really important to me. If I could talk to the young Beck now I’d say, always go with your instincts. You can get lost listening to the loudly expressed opinions of other people. And I’d tell him to lighten up. I got a lot of grief for any success I had so I was always trying to compensate for that, trying to make records that wouldn’t be too successful. It was a very convoluted way of being. Now I do what I want and I don’t care if it’s too weird or too mainstream. I just care that it works. There was a real schism in the press in the late 1980s,« early ’90s between how young people were represented and how they really were. That’s just the way it was. I saw an ad in a newspaper for a plane ticket to London that someone couldn’t use Older people, civil rights I f X could ta lk to the young and I knew a kid from advocates and members Beck now X'd say, always school whose father of the previous lived in Hampstead go w ith your Instincts? you generation’s Heath. S o l took the can got lost listening to the counterculture talking plane with this guy’s loudly expressed opinions about disengaged phone number in my slackers (Beck’s 1994 hit of other people. pocket and I just Loser was held up as a showed up at his house ‘slacker anthem’.) The with a few dollars. I had way we were presented no suitcase, nothing, I was way out of touch, like a bad movie from didn’t even bring a coat. I spent weeks just the 1960s when an establishment that just walking round London freezing. I ended up didn’t get it negatively characterized young getting stuck over there until a friend of a people. Now the same thing was happening friend lent me money to get back to L.À. to us. The late ’80s were a tough time to be But that trip made a huge impression on young, we were really challenged. The most me. e iconic child of that time was Linda Blair in “The Exorcist” We didn’t live in a time I was a highly curious kid, constantly when young people were celebrated. Almost searching for information. There was no everyone I knew worked menial labor on Internet, of course, so you really had to work at finding things out. There were some minimum wage - we all had jobs, we took whatever we could g et We didn’t have any people who could help - the old map at the money. The whole slacker thing was just guitar shop would answer questions incredibly condescending and wrong. It was sometimes. So I felt like I was always a way to marginalize an entire generation. looking for clues, keeping my eyes and ears open. I would scour newspapers for free shows 'cos I had no money. A lot of the big I tried to be very conscious of the bands of the 1940s gave free concerts on time passing when my kids were very Saturday afternoons. Thé musicians were in young. I knew it would go by fast so I paid their '70s and '80s but they were still playing attention. But if I could go back and relive great I went to a lot of those. And I went to any time, I’d choose that. No matter how repertory theatres to see old movies, they hard you try, it just goes so quickly. I remind were very cheap - $2 to get in. I saw a lot of myself to stop and look around as much as I old spaghetti westerns, and some weird, can. It’s hard to remember sometimes but I non-linear, surreal movies. I took it all in, try to find something memorable in the always thinking - what does this all mean? moment, something that won’t ever be the same again, so it gets locked in my mind. I I don’t think anything that happened tell myself, this person is only going to be 7 to me when I was a teenager would years old once. And then you turn around have prepared me for the life Eve had. and they’re 12. Especially being in the public eye, I had no As told to fa n e Graham. R eprinted fro m the clue how to deal with that. It was really trial U.K.-based street paper B ig Issue. by fire. There were periods when it just felt Street Roots is proud to be a member of the global street paper movement and honored to serve the readers of
