Throwing Frisbees At The Sun: A Book About Beck

Chapter 1

‘She was in bed, dressed like Jean Harlow.’ (1915-72)

The SS Potsdam was a German-built, steam-driven ocean liner dating back to 1900. In 1915, it had been sold to the Swedish-American Line and renamed the SS Stockholm as it began transporting thousands of Swedes across the North Atlantic to the USA. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, more than 1.3 million Swedes made the journey. Most continued on to the Midwest where the weather, logging opportunities, and farms reminded them of home.

By late 1915, with the Great War raging across Central Europe, the number of people making the trip had decreased, the sinking of the Lusitania in May having sent shockwaves around the world. But despite the risks involved, nineteen-year-old Olaf Gabriel Ostlin boarded the SS Stockholm in Gothenburg in December and began his journey to the USA.¹ He arrived at Ellis Island on December 26th and was processed into the country, ready to start a new life.

Rather than head across the continent, Ostlin settled in New York. There he found work with the American Can Company and met and married Sadie Rosenberg, who came from a family of Russian-Polish Jews and was one of twelve children of Abraham and Fanny Rosenberg.² Olaf and Sadie had two children: Robert, born in 1921, and Audrey, born in 1929. Sadie committed suicide at the age of thirty-five, leaving Olaf to raise the children alone.

Audrey Ostlin was a real free spirit. During World War II, she fell in with the Beats and bohemians around Union Square. She danced, stripped, appeared on TV, and wrote poetry. In 1949, the petit Audrey appeared in a stage show that required her to have green hair. After one performance, she headed down to Greenwich Village, wearing just a raincoat, a green G-string, and a pair of emerald green sequinned pasties. At around three in the morning, she entered the Waldorf Cafeteria, a dreary place that had become the preferred hangout for painters and sculptors. Across the bar sat a group of Beats and artists. One of them, Alfred Earl ‘Al’ Hansen, was transfixed as she walked over in her green high-heels. ‘I’m going to marry that cunt,’ he was heard to mutter.³

Like Ostlin, Hansen (two years her senior) also came from Scandinavian stock. His grandfather, Nicholas Sr., had hopped on to a Schooner from his native Norway and relocated to Queens, New York. His father, Nicholas Jr., was born in a shack in the yard of a dry dock in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where Nick Sr. worked. Nick Jr. served in World War I as a motorcycle messenger, and from then on was an avid motorcycle enthusiast. On the eve of the Depression, Nick Jr. started a small construction company, which did well throughout the downturn. Later on, he bought a few gas stations. One was right next door to the family home in Jamaica, Queens. His wife, Katherine, worked for the Democratic Party; she was a ‘ward heeler’ and politically well connected.

Al grew up with a love of art, and had spent much of his childhood drawing. One of his earliest projects was a hand-made newspaper, the Daily Flash, which he produced with his brother, Gordon, and a friend, Jimmy Breslin.⁴

During the war, Al became Private Al Hansen of the 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment and was sent to Europe. He didn’t drop in—he arrived by boat on the French coast. This was the tail end of World War II. A few weeks later, Hansen and his comrades had worked their way across France and Belgium and arrived in Frankfurt, Germany. The city had taken a tremendous bombing over the previous months and was littered with partially destroyed buildings, collapsed walls, and piles of bricks where homes once stood.

Hansen’s regiment was charged with working its way across the city on a building-by-nondescript-building basis, looking for any last pockets of resistance. It was potentially dangerous work, but so far it had thrown up little excitement or real danger. One afternoon, with the last of the day’s sunshine casting long shadows that made every nook and cranny a potential hidey-hole, Hansen spied it: a grand piano on the fifth floor of a building just ahead, visible because the sidewall of the block had disintegrated into a pile of bricks and rubble.

Hansen was gripped by a compulsive urge. While the rest of his group sat around, he carefully made his way over to the building. His temerity led him up flight after flight of stairs before he opened the door into what had once been an opulent-looking living room. He put down his rifle and moved slowly over to the instrument, taking the weight with his lower legs and pushing with all his might. The piano started to edge slowly toward the precipice and then flipped, almost in slow motion, as it toppled out into the German evening.

The piano seemed to take an age to reach the ground below. As it travelled through the still air, Hansen felt a strange calm until the very last moment before the piano hit the bricks below. A moment of exquisite silence. And then chaos. A deafening crunch of the wooden casing exploding against the rubble, echoing from the surrounding buildings like a gunshot, followed by the sound of the keys and strings splitting into a hundred thousand pieces. Hansen was elated. The falling German piano was just the first of many ‘happenings’ he would perform.

Back in the USA, Al Hansen would forge a reputation among the avant-garde, but first he would use the GI Bill to fund his attendance of an art course at Tulane University in New Orleans. Then, on his return to New York, he met Audrey at the Waldorf Cafeteria. They hit it off immediately. They went on the road, just like the rest of the Beats, hitchhiking down to Miami Beach. Audrey tried to dye her green hair brown, but the mixture of chemicals turned it purple.

Later in the year, Al and Audrey were married. They decided to settle back in Manhattan, and in 1953, Audrey gave birth to a daughter. They named her Bibbe. She grew to be the spitting image of her mother.

Bibbe’s parents had divorced by the time she turned three. Al went back to studying art, and Audrey remained in New York. ‘My mother was originally supposed to play Sabrina in the movie,’ she recalled. ‘She was a dancer on the old Perry Como Show, the one who did the Thumbelina dance, and she was in those old commercials that were done live. One of the famous ones was the one she goofed up. The girl comes onscreen in elegant profile and gets her cigarette lit. Then she turns to the camera to exhale and coughs half a lung out. She could be very silly and fun.’

Growing up with Audrey was a challenge. ‘My mother was a heroin addict,’ Bibbe told the Independent’s Luiza Sauma in 2008. ‘But she took me to the opera and imparted a great love of literature and theatre.’

Bibbe found herself living in a variety of situations. She was sent to Nova Scotia for a time, and then returned to New York to be cared for by one of her mother’s lesbian admirers. Later, she was rooming with Jack Kerouac’s daughter, Jan, when they were both aged thirteen. Inspired by The Beatles, they started a band called The Whippets with another friend, Charlotte Rosenthal, and soon, after a chance meeting with a producer, they were recording a single for the Laurie Records label. ‘I Don’t Want To Talk To You’ b/w ‘Go Go Go With Ringo’ made the charts in Canada in 1964.

Later, when Al returned to New York, Bibbe moved back in with him. Al had got to know the Andy Warhol entourage, and was dating Valerie Herouvis. Bibbe would accompany him to the Factory on East 47th Street, and was chosen to appear in Prison with Edie Sedgwick. Warhol asked her to take part in the film because of her recent experiences. She’d been picked up as a runaway and truant and taken to the Manida Street Youth House, which housed up to 120 troublesome girls.

According to Beck, Bibbe was involved ‘very briefly’ with Warhol, and appeared in ‘one or two’ of his short films. ‘They would just set somebody up and film them for five minutes and call it a movie. I think, to her, The Factory was just a bunch of grown-ups. It wasn’t really where she was at. From everything she’s told me, it was just a bunch of speed freaks hanging around, and sometimes someone would bring out a camera. I don’t think it was as crazy as it seems now, looking back. You know, that time period—anything in the 1960s, but especially something like that scene—is always blown up into this larger-than-life thing.’

Splitting her time between being with Al at the Factory and around Audrey’s new partner, a prominent Jew by the name of Jimmy Shapiro, provided a unique environment for the teenage Bibbe. Jimmy was a pilot, and had served in the Navy Air Force during the Korean War. His mother, Rose, owned 50 percent of the Fabergé cosmetics company with her half-brother, Sam Rubin. Jimmy was stationed for a while at Point Judith, Rhode Island, and for a while Audrey and Bibbe lived in a small beach cottage there in Breakwater Village. When Jim left the service, the three of them moved to Saranac Lake, New York, where they started an air taxi service called North Country Airways and managed the nearby Lake Clear Airport.⁵

Back in New York, Audrey continued to lead an interesting life, as Bibbe recalled:

My mother started hanging out at society nightclubs like the 21, the Pompeii Club, the Stork Club. She was meeting all these characters, and one of them was Charlie Walker, the heir to the Hiram Walker whiskey fortune. He was hilarious, and he moved in with us for a while. My mother would be off in Boston, scoring cocaine for Uncle Charlie, and he would babysit me. He was always sloshed out of his mind. Constantly inebriated.

She met so many thieves, degenerates, and gangsters. One of the lasting images I have as a child is waking up early one morning to go to school and hearing music in the distance. I went down the hall and saw my mother’s door ajar, and I peered in and she was in bed dressed like Jean Harlow. She was saying, ‘If you listen right here, and listen very carefully to this part, it sounds like a beer bottle going through the window.’ And at the foot of her bed there were four thugs sitting in straight-back chairs. It’s seven in the morning, and she was giving music appreciation lessons to these guys. They were trying so hard to stay awake and pay attention.

In August 1968, the fast living took its toll, and Audrey died at the age of thirty-seven. Her obituary, penned by Daniel List, was published in the Village Voice, who wrote that she had ‘lived a life that might burn up any two other people [before] finally [coming] to roost in the West Village, where she had fallen in with an assortment of scurves, hop heads, and, unaccountably, some angels. … Life being the shit house that it is, the scurves won out over the good guys, and Audrey just plain burnt out.’

* * *

Al Hansen’s artistic explorations had led him to the heart of the Fluxus movement, and he’d crossed paths with John Cage and Yoko Ono. He signed up for a course given by Cage and hooked up with several artists who took the same course. He was driven by a sense of artistic spontaneity.

Al found art in everyday garbage, working with everything from candy wrappers to cigarette butts. His was an unusual chaos of style and material. This meshed perfectly with Fluxus, which was inspired by Marcel Duchamp and the idea that art need not come from a skilled artist, and that everyday items could be incorporated to make art—an ethos that Al would follow for the rest of his life.

In 1965, Al published a book about his artistic beliefs entitled A Primer Of Happenings & Time Space Art. He began churning out thousands of collages, many of them based around the image of the Venus de Milo. And he was on the scene when Andy Warhol was shot. ‘He actually ran into Valerie Solanas as she was on her way out of the Factory from shooting Warhol,’ Beck later explained. ‘He made a book about it called Why Shoot Andy Warhol? It’s really beautiful.’

Al Hansen became the catalyst for many Fluxus and Pop Art events, and his enthusiasm encouraged those around him to go on to greater things. ‘He was the life and soul of the Fluxus party,’ Beck later recalled. ‘He would hook up everybody together. At his funeral, all the Fluxus people were there, and all the Pop art people, and they all talked about how mischievous he was. He didn’t really play the game, though. He would get drunk and insult the gallery owner’s wife and get banned. He was the Bukowski of the scene.’

One day, Al gave his teenage daughter Bibbe a couple of dollars to go to the corner store. She never came back. The following weeks involved ‘sex scandals, a drug bust, and some very dicey stuff’.

By the age of seventeen, Bibbe was living in Los Angeles, where she met an aspiring violin player named David Campbell. Campbell was born in Toronto, Canada, in 1948, and moved to Seattle at the age of nine. He was a tall, softly spoken man, and in later years Beck would develop a very close facial resemblance to him, leading father and son to be described as ‘two peas in a pod’.

David started playing the violin at the age of nine, and later studied at the Manhattan School of Music. He moved to Los Angeles in the late 1960s, and began studying the music of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and Leonard Cohen. He would earn pocket change by playing their tunes on his violin to the cinema queues in Westwood Village.

David and Bibbe were married in 1969. Their first son, Bek David Campbell, was born on July 8 1970 in Los Angeles.

* * *

Beck has a unique family tree—one that juxtaposes artistry with relative poverty, and that involved him from an early age in a series of cultural shifts that would have an inevitable influence on the eclectic nature of his work. But while some critics would portray him as somebody who emerged into a life of art and privilege, his early life would be spent bouncing around between his mother and grandparents.

Neither household was particularly prosperous. Beck had to learn how to fend for himself from an early age, while also helping to support his family, and that independence would no doubt help him—if only subconsciously—to make up his own musical mind and not follow trends or movements. The reality of his own Los Angeles upbringing ensured that he did not fit into the clichéd idea of California, and he has always been keen to stress that he grew up in East LA among immigrants from Mexico and Central America.⁶

By the time of Beck’s birth, the hippie idealism of 60s California was as shot and faded as flower power. The Beatles had split up, and the spectre of Vietnam cast a long shadow across the country. The explosion of pop and rock music that had left its imprint so memorably on the previous decade had also produced casualties. Jimi Hendrix died just after Beck was born; a month later, Janis Joplin passed away in nearby Hollywood; and within a year, Jim Morrison was dead in Paris. The 1970s would be a very different decade.

Chapter 2

‘Try to turn something disposable into something beautiful.’ (1973-80)

By the early 1970s, Los Angeles had long established itself as the epic suburban sprawl, truly the city of the motorcar. For English architectural critic Reyner Banham, ‘One of the greatest sights on earth is the aerial view of the intersection of the San Diego and Santa Monica freeways.’

LA was also strengthening its position as one of the world’s great musical centres. Carly Simon and Jackson Browne were holed up in Laurel Canyon, and the Eagles would soon dominate the airwaves. Of course, LA is famously the city with no real centre. It’s so large that it is, in fact, many smaller cities merged into one. Though Beck has spent much of his adult life living in and around the ‘bohemian enclave’ of Silver Lake, within about ten miles lay Koreatown, Little Ethiopia, Hollywood, and the Central American neighbourhoods he lived in as a child. All of these neighbourhoods push up against each other, bursting with 14 million people—most of whom have come from elsewhere to call LA home.

It might be a cliché, but it is also true, to say that Beck synthesized all manner of musical styles into his own unique brew. This came about in no small part because of the myriad of cultures that surrounded his formative years. Beck, as musical entity, could hardly have broken through in the way he did at any other time in history. It was his interaction with Los Angeles—with the people who lived there and the people who arrived during the 1970s and early 1980s—that shaped his view of the world. ‘I completely take for granted what I’ve grown up around, as I think everybody does,’ he admitted. ‘I have such a fondness for the Armenian neighbourhood and the Korean neighbourhood, Monterey Park where there are hundreds of thousands of Chinese straight from Hong Kong, Guatemalan neighbourhoods. Even as an outsider, it’s something nostalgic for me.’⁷

* * *

Things began to look up for the Campbell household around 1971–72. David had managed to find some work playing with Jackson Browne, and he performed in Carole King’s touring band before arranging the strings on her album Rhymes & Reason, which went to #2 on the Billboard charts. This set him on his way. That same year, 1972, a second son, Channing Campbell was born.

While David was able to take advantage of so much music being made in Los Angeles, the young Beck didn’t take much notice of his father’s work. ‘I heard him play here and there,’ he said, ‘but it wasn’t like I went into the living room and people were jamming or anything. I just remember that he was always working. I liked what he played, but it wasn’t like I went out and picked up an instrument and started playing myself. It wasn’t until a lot later that I picked up an instrument.’

By the autumn of 1974, Beck started school in Los Angeles, and was immediately tagged as an enigma by the authorities there. ‘When I first started school, I was four or five—the administrators and the teachers, and the certifiers, the paper-registering people of the world gave the c to me. I don’t think they could deal with b-e-k. It would always become b-e-c-k, and I guess I got tired of saying, no, b-e-k. So I just went with it. Somehow I think it gave me a little more weight. I thought maybe as a kid—I was a small kid—with a name like that I was going to float away.’

Soon after starting school, Beck gave his first onstage performance …as a donkey. It almost scarred him for life. ‘All I remember is that one kid was the goat, one was the horse, and one was the giraffe. I had to get up to the front and say, The donkey goes eeyore. Everybody started laughing, and I thought I’d done something really wrong. I was horrified. It turned me off performing for a long time.’

Beck spent a lot of time during the summer months in Kansas with his paternal grandparents, Noreen and D. Warren Campbell, a Presbyterian minister. He enjoyed staying with them because they did all the things grandparents can get away with, like giving him cookies and letting him watch TV. Looking back, though, he felt they weren’t sure what was going on. ‘I had a kind of weird home,’ he said. ‘I think they were kind of concerned.’

It was in Kansas that Beck was really opened up to a lot of music for the first time—by the unlikely influence of listening to Presbyterian hymns. ‘That music influenced me a lot,’ he said, ‘but not consciously. There’s something biblical and awkward and great about all those lyrics.’ Later, after he had discovered the blues and its links to the rhythms of rap, he tied it all back to the religious songs of his past. ‘The religious energy of a minister in front of his congregation is pretty similar to rock’n’roll energy. The grunt and the groan and the punctuation of a sermon is similar to the grunt and the groan of a soul singer or rapper. It’s all connected to the blues.’

It was around this time that Beck began seeing more of his maternal grandfather, who would occasionally stay with Bibbe on his trips to the West Coast. The first time they met, Al gave him an unusual present—a machete. He surely deserves some of the credit for some of Beck’s unique lyrical styles. ‘When I was about five, I was trying to get my grandfather to explain what rhyming was,’ he recalled. ‘He explained it to me, and pull down your pants and do the hot dog dance was my first lyric. My grandfather got a kick out of that.’

As well as his performance pieces, Al Hansen was now working on bizarre sculptures, often prepared by recycling garbage. Years later, in an interview with Rolling Stone, Beck told a story that offers a good example of their artistic closeness:

He was this strange phenomenon, you know, who’d come from out of nowhere. I remember he came to stay with us when I was about five, and he brought with him bags full of junk and magazines, cigarette butts—all sorts of refuse and materials that he would use for his art pieces. I had some old toys that had broken and didn’t work stored in the back room somewhere. He found an old rocking horse, the kind you buy at K-Mart, made out of plastic with springs on it. And he offered me five bucks for it, which, for me, was an unheard-of quantity of money. I immediately said yeah, he could have it. But I couldn’t understand what he would do with it, what use he could have for it.

So I came back from school one day and saw this thing sitting at the side of the house, vaguely familiar but somehow completely unrecognisable. He had taken the thing and glued cigarette butts all over it, severed the head off and spray-painted the whole thing silver. It was this metallic headless monstrosity. I think I was interested, but something within me recoiled as well. It was, it was so raw: something so plain and forgotten suddenly transformed into this strange entity.

Beck realised that, to many, his grandfather might seem like a homeless person, carrying around bags full of old magazines and smoked cigarettes. ‘At the time, it was more of a curiosity to me. But in retrospect, I think things of that nature gave me the idea, maybe subconsciously, that there were possibilities within the limitations of everyday life, with the things that we look at that are disposable. Our lives can seem so limited and uneventful, but these things can be transformed. We can appoint ourselves to be, to be alchemists, turning shit into gold. So I always carried that with me.’

Although he got a certain amount of artistic inspiration from his grandfather, the young Beck seemed uninterested in music. His father’s playing and arranging didn’t immediately inspire him, and the various other influences he was exposed to also had little or no effect on him at the time. The first music he can remember hearing at home was, he said, ‘likely to have been a musical comedy, one of those Broadway pieces of rubbish that my mother listened to at the house. There were very few records at our house and there were some absolute horrors with melodies that made me want to vomit. The first record I really adored was Ruby Tuesday by the Stones. I knew nothing about them, not even that they were English. It was that song that I loved, that simple melody.’ He also recalled listening to Rubber Soul at the age of five, ‘though I’m not sure how that’s filtered into what I do now. And I remember hearing Hot Child In The City while driving to school’.

In the light of Beck’s upbringing, it is easier to understand his claims not to have been aware of a lot of 1970s music. Listening to a Beck record, one is tempted to jump to the conclusion that he absorbed a lot of popular music from that time. The truth is very different.

It’s sort of strange for me because I totally missed the 1970s. Sometimes there’s this notion that I’m this encyclopaedia of 1970s culture, which isn’t really true—I know much less than anyone else in the band. I wasn’t even aware of most of the music in the 1970s … maybe Blondie and Devo. You know, sometimes people will say, hey, that sounds exactly like so and so, you must have listened to a lot of their stuff—and often I haven’t even heard of them. I don’t think I even heard Black Sabbath until I was nineteen or twenty. I just wasn’t exposed to it—it just wasn’t in our house. My mum would just play show tunes and stuff like that all the time.

After a few short stays, Al Hansen moved in with his daughter for a longer spell toward the end of the 1970s. ‘He lived in the garage for a couple of years,’ Beck later told Request magazine. ‘This was probably about 1977. I didn’t have a lot of contact with my grandfather, but seeing how he worked gave me a lot of confidence. Seeing the way he worked, I never felt that I had to have schooling in order to create. He was this presence; he got people excited about the scene.’

Al would take Beck and Channing on scavenging missions along Sunset Boulevard in search of materials to use in his art. ‘He used specific materials—cigarette butts, matches, Hershey Bar wrappers,’ Beck told VH1. ‘My art is a little less focused. I tend to use ephemera from computers, diskettes; there’s imagery from muscle building.