Beck Again

Okay, let's try this again. I was half-hoping my previous Beck post would miraculously reappear in Blogger, but no dice.

So...

Went to see the Beck/Flaming Lips show Sunday night at Massey Hall. Stopped on the way for a quick slice of pizza at Magic Oven (great gourmet pizza). When the price of my slice and a "smart drink" came to $6.66, should that have tipped me off that the final encore number would be "Devil's Haircut"?

The start time on the ticket said 8 p.m., so we were surprised when we got there at 8:15 and the Lips were already playing! Punctual bastards!

I had never seem the Lips before, but I love their new album Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots, and I had heard their live shows were a little bizarre. As we took our seats in the first balcony, I couldn't take my eyes off the stage. With the exception of head Lip Wayne Coyne, who was sporting a white suit, the other members of the band were dressed in furry animal costumes, sans head pieces. Not only that, there were about two-dozen people at each side of the stage also dressed in costume as various furry woodland animalsóbunnies, squirrels, chipmunks, etc., all waving flashlights about. There were huge, brightly coloured, confetti-filled balloons bouncing around in the crowd, five large disco balls sat behind the band, and a gigantic screen hovered above and behind them. On this screen was the fish-eye-lensed image of Wayne Coyne, shot from a mini-cam just behind his microphone. He was dueting the album's title track with a nun puppet, whose visage, thanks to the fish-eye lens effect, appeared on the screen to be about as large as his own, lending a visual parity to the singing partners. Coyne's falsetto, seen and heard as emanating from the nun puppet, made it all the more hilarious.

It was a circus. No other word will do it justice. The spectacle made all the more amazing by the relatively reserved atmosphere of old Massey Hall (although, I wonder if similar sights may have been beheld in its Vaudeville days).

Unfortunately, a few songs later, one of the costumed creatures prancing about at stage-side apparently stepped on a vital extension cord, thus scuttling the band's special effects capability. The Goldfish was pronounced the goat, but I suspect it may have been a red herring for Massey's aging circuitry.

In any event, Coyne announced that they couldn't continue, which spawned a chant of "Massey fix your shit!" from the crowd, until the band decided to soldier on without the bells and whistles for a few more songs. They still had power to their instruments, so I found this heartening, yet a bit perplexing. Any band that needs to rely on theatrical effects for their live show, and is unsure of their ability to justógaspóplay their songs with instruments and nothing else... well, I have to wonder about their worthiness. But they were fine, and finished their stripped down set to a warm appreciation from the crowd.

About 20 minutes later, Beck took the stage, first playing a few songs solo with acoustic guitar, seated on a stool ringed by peach-coloured globes on the stage floor. Great performances. Then he "Beck-oned" the Lips to join him as his "Beck-up" band (heh, sorry) (well, not really)(double-heh). And I have so say, with the Lips, some of the Sea Change songs had more umph than on the album. Unlike the experience my friend Dean had at a warm-up show in Cali, it seemed to me that Beck and the Lips played fairly well together. I guess they must have gotten the kinks worked out since then. However, I did find Wayne Coyne's antics annoying. More than a few times during Beck's set, and a couple of times at very inappropriate points in a song, he would shake his fists in the air, triumphantly, sometimes while standing on a chair, arousing cheers from the crowd, who were at times disturbingly sheep-like in their responses. At other times he would wave his lights around (you can see him at the bottom of this picture, although that incident wasn't necessarily annoying), and sometimes act the cheerleader, egging on the crowd, even though I didn't think we needed egging. There were times when I wanted to egg him. Wayne, when you're in the back-up band, try acting like it.

Otherwise, it was a fine show. Beck almost took himself out of it when he spun his acoustic guitar around his neck, and it bonked him on the head mid-orbit. He left the stage for some medical attention and returned for the next song. Great performances of "Lost Cause", "Guess I'm Doing Fine", "Round The Bend", "Loser", "Where It's At" and, possibly my favourite Beck song, "Nobody's Fault But My Own" (performed while kneeling at a harmonium, not an accordion, as the Sun's Jane Stevenson reported in her review. People generally wear accordions Jane).

Assuming the Lips get their technical act together, this is a tour worth catching.