Street Roots • July 24-30, 2015
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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
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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
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