The year "Loser" charted at #10 on the Billboard Hot 100 (1994, probably hoisted up by cassingle-crazy prepubescents like me), Beck actually released three full-length albums: the canonical Mellow Gold; the messy, skit-heavy Stereopathetic Soul Manure; and One Foot in the Grave, a set of ramshackle folk songs about, roughly, the apocalypse.
He was 24. He was cute. He was smart, funny, and tender. Like a lot of great songwriters-- or writers, period-- he was as critical of his surroundings as he was enamored of them. He was also an entertainer, and it helped (from a marketing perspective) that his lines describing just how nigh the end is-- "Forces of evil in a bozo nightmare/ Ban all the music with a phony gas chamber"-- doubled as the kind of kooky shit that casual, young radio listeners are powerless against. In the year of Kurt Cobain's suicide and the popular awakening of bands as indescribably bad as the Stone Temple Pilots, Beck wasn't just our "consolation prize" (as Spin's 20 Years of Alternative Music later called him)-- he was our escape hatch.
One Foot in the Grave, out of print between 2005 and last week's merciful deluxe reissue, is a good companion to Mellow Gold, if not as essential on its own. Originally recorded for Olympia, Wash.'s stringently indie K Records (which spent the 80s tearing down the received image of the punk rockers and replacing it with research librarians and men who love embroidering), One Foot is Beck striking his most lo-effort, DIY pose-- one that fit not only into K's roster, but into an indie-music world where foot shufflers like Palace, Smog, and Pavement were getting traction. But it's also his personal take on Americana-- opener "He's a Mighty Good Leader" is a Skip James cover; the slide-guitar blues of "Fourteen Rivers Fourteen Floods" just sounds like one; and the folksy stasis of "Sleeping Bag" has more in common with Leonard Cohen than anything happening in the indie world. This is Beck, rustic. The guitars are not entirely in tune. His voice, removed from the matrix of samples and syncopations, sounds nasal and naïve.
But his worldview-- really, what made him something much bigger than a novelty act-- is beautifully articulated. While Beck's commonly cited forebears are the Beastie Boys and Bob Dylan, his real lineage was from sculptors like Robert Rauschenberg or Claes Oldenburg: guys who turned the unusable spillover of mass production-- "trash," to the trash collector-- into art. If Warhol's soup cans had a crisp, almost optimistic feel, Oldenburg's hamburger was a downer-- an unappetizing convenience that will, eventually, kill us. And One Foot in the Grave is the moment after we surrender to it: Tract homes and strip malls, a Midwest that the Hold Steady hadn't yet romanticized, the edges of Los Angeles County that money didn't whitewash-- all crushed, half-empty, a mess. It's just the trash and the couch and me and you.
What's seductive about this particular doomsday scenario-- i.e., what's not depressing or urgent, or even meaningful-- is that Beck sounds relaxed. (If nobody advanced the idea in 1994, when the word was inescapable, I submit that being a slacker-- if being a slacker means "not caring about what's going on around me"-- is a form of peace, self-preservation, or maybe even enlightenment.) Every other song on One Foot juxtaposes a world burning down (or burned out) with sitting on one's ass. I could quote forever in support, but because this isn't a book report, I'll offer one line, my favorite, from "I've Seen the Land Beyond": "There's no telling who'll be dead/ When the pale horse is turning red/ And the tongues will burn in vain/ And everything will feel the same."
About half these jeremiads double as love songs, a form Beck didn't revisit in earnest again until 2002's Sea Change. While SC was unimaginatively billed as his "mature" album, I'm not sure that he was actually any more mature in 2002 than he was in 1994. True, the obvious "relationship" songs here-- "Asshole" (as in "She'll do anything to make you feel like an") and "Girl Dreams" (as in the ones that "never come true")-- lean on familiar (if funny) self-deprecation. But songs like "Painted Eyelids", "It's All in Your Mind", and "Teenage Wastebasket" (the latter two among the album's 16 bonus tracks) are careful, adoring, and sympathetic. ("Teenage Wastebasket", of which we get two versions, plays like a dull slap in Neutral Milk Hotel's face: "She is a teenage wastebasket/ Paddling up the river in a casket/ Trying to experience everything at least once/ Her life is a commercial for being fucked up.")
I'm not sure that remastering an album that was already lo-fi has done much good, and I'm not sure that the bonus material here is a revelation as much as, well, just a nice bonus. The best outtake, "It's All in Your Mind", was actually rerecorded for Sea Change, and it's obvious why the rest of the songs didn't make the final round. What is good is that One Foot ended up back in print. Mellow Gold eclipsed it (and Stereopathetic) entirely. In a sense, that's fine-- Mellow Gold was the best of the three. But I remember eagerly buying all three at once, and realizing later that what saved Beck from being a novelty artist was not only life after "Loser", but the life he'd already made around it.
