Beck’s TV rebellion

last updated 8 January 2015

Beck will always be a musical rebel, said Ian Gittins in The Daily Telegraph (U.K.). When the acclaimed singer-songwriter-guitarist had a surprise hit single in the mid-1990s with the song “Loser,” he was invited to play at the American Music Awards. “Garth Brooks and Whitney Houston were performing, and the audience was in tuxedos in this vast auditorium,” recalls Beck, 43. “The producers told me that we couldn’t play live: We would have to mime to tape. I had never done this before, and it seemed stupid to me.” He decided to demonstrate what he thought of the whole thing. “I dressed up my band in radiation fallout suits and Day-Glo gym clothes. My keyboard player was wearing a pink cape and shorts, and my drummer was wearing a ski mask and hitting his cymbals with his hands. After 30 seconds they stopped playing and ran into the audience. Some band members stayed on stage and did exercises like jumping jacks. Two of them were wrestling.” The cameras zoomed in tightly on Beck’s face. “But in the tiny space between the frame of the picture and my earlobe you could see all sorts of chaos in the background,” he says happily. “We were never asked to do an awards show ever again.”