With his next album still a work in progress it was anyone’s what Beck would pull out of his pocket for a hastily scheduled show at the Hollywood Palladium on Friday: The softly sublime sounds of 2014’s “Morning Phase,” his most recent release? The quirky eclecticism of 1996’s “Odelay,” his breakthrough album?
Turns out we got all of that and a gospel choir, too, in a terrific career-spanning set – 19 songs drawn from nine different album plus a few unreleased tracks – in a night that got swampy when Beck wanted swampy, went quiet when he wanted folks to listen close, but mostly offered up the fun ’n’ funky kind of oddball show for which the uniquely talented Beck is rightly celebrated.
This was the first show for Beck this year, and the first time he’d played a show in Hollywood, the grittier days of which in the early ’90s helped shape him as a younger artist. But from the opening “Devil’s Haircut,” all squalling guitar feedback over heavy drums and bass, to the drawn-out closer, a version of “Where It’s At” that with side trips into half a dozen other songs, Beck and his band, most of which has played with him for years, were locked tightly into one solid groove after another.
And from the start, or at least his earliest hit, “Loser,” which arrived second in the set, the crowd who’d come out for this Citi Sound Vault showcase, filling two-thirds or so of the Palladium, were right there with him, singing loudly on the loud songs, following raptly on the slow, and cheering loudly at the close of each number.
While he sampled almost all of his albums, 2005’s “Guero” got special attention, with five songs including early in the set such tunes as “Black Tambourine,” which arrived with a heavy vibe and a deep rumble, and “Qué Onda Guero,” his shout-out to East L.A. street life.
At times Beck dialed down the intensity to offer softer classics from his catalog. “Think I’m In Love” was lovely, and “Lost Cause,” with its gentle acoustic guitars, had a beautiful solemnity to it.
“All right, we’re gonna get a little bit swampy now,” Beck announced by way of introducing the Jack White co-written number “Go It Alone.” And yes, it was swampy, but I still giggled at the way he said it.
After an impromptu snippet of “Tropicalia” in response to a shouted request from the crowd — that off the “Mutations” album which bumped it up to 10 albums represented in the show if you’re keeping score — Beck brought choir director Fred and his eight singers. (That’s all the introduction he gave them, tsk tsk, but we figured out later this is Fred Martin and the Urban Entertainment Institute.)
They stayed on stage for the final 10 songs of the night, adding gorgeous backing vocals to songs such as the classic ’60s orch-pop of “Blue Moon” and “Mixed Bizness” and “Sexx Laws,” a pair of funky tracks from “Midnite Vultures.”
The choir shone brightest, though, first on a cover of the gospel song “Like A Ship (Without A Sail),” introduced by Beck as a special one-off for this show, followed by “Fourteen Rivers, Fourteen Floods,” a lesser-known Beck number off “One Foot In The Grave.”
On the gospel song, one of the singers kicked things off with a long and beautiful solo. On “Fourteen Rivers” the down-home stomp of the folk-blues opened up into an almost a cappella segment with the singers bouncing bits of lyrics back and forth between them in rhythmically sublime fashion.
The encore opened with the slow-but-still-booming “Paper Tiger,” followed by Beck’s usual show-capper “Where It’s At,” or as I’ve historically misnamed it in the past, “Two Turntables and a Microphone.”
This version lasted close to 15 minutes, with each band member introduction leading into a tangent that featured him on songs that ranged from Chic’s “Good Times” for bassist Wayne Moore to David Bowie’s “China Girl” when it was guitarist Jason Falkner’s turn and so on around the stage.
“I feel like singing something for all the rhinestone cowboys out there tonight, I see you,” Beck said before jumping into a few verses of Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean,” to which the crowd all sang along. After segueing from there into a foot-stomping harmonica-driven bit of “One Foot In The Grave,” the band finally came back to “Where It’s At” to wrap up the song, the show and the night.
“Can we get together next week and do this again?” Beck had asked before launching into that final number. Looking at all the happy faces in the crowd and on stage, you know that given the chance the answer was perfectly clear.
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