Beck!

I'm not celebrity-mad by any stretch, but there are a few people that... well, I can't help it. I'm a hopeless, slobbering fanboy when it comes right down to it because I'm simply in awe of the talents and abilities of the individual in question. To save both myself and you, dear reader, piles of embarrassement, I'll warn you to skip this entry, because what follows ain't pretty.

Friday night was Beck at the Verizon Amphitheater in Irvine.

The show was an absolute blast. The opening act was The Black Keys (mediocre two-man rock band from Akron, Ohio as it happens). Not awful, but nothing special either. Finally, though, it was time for Beck.

Beck!

I've never seen the man in concert before, but I'd heard good things. Beck is fantastic. Never taking himself completely seriously, yet never too aloof to hop around like a true rock star, his show was absolutely inspired. Jeremy Blake (who seems to be the video artist of the moment... if you've seen the hallucinogenic sequences in the film "Punch Drunk Love", you know what I mean) produced the big-screen background visuals, which provided a colorful and moody ambiance to the evening.

BECK!!

Beck, for his part, couldn't have picked a better set list. Opening with Novacane and working his way through many of my personal favorites like Hotwax, Get Real Paid, Hollywood Freaks, Beercan, and my obscure-Beck-song-of-the-moment... Thunder Peel. Of course, he also made time to dazzle everyone with the hits that everybody with a radio knows: Lost Cause, Where It's At and, of course, Loser. He covered a sweet little Flaming Lips tune called Do You Realize??? and even let his guard down long enough treat the crowd to a rendition of Nelly's Hot In Herre. He left, he encored, he left again, and he returned for a second encore with his band clad in suits of glowing white neon to finish off the evening with Devil's Haircut.

It's fairly standard concert behavior for an artist to mix up his or her hits for the sake of live performance (ex. an accoustic or piano version of an old favorite), but Beck took many of his tunes and completely re-mixed them for his tour, in ways that often had little to do with making it easier to perform live and much more to do with giving his audience something special. So many of the songs I've loved for years were done in an entirely new way... new instruments, new variations on melody and baseline and miscellaneous electronica... all terrific stuff.

By the end, Carey (who's never thought much of him) considered herself a fan.

Man, I don't know. It's the most entertaining thing I've attended in a long, long time. Big, big thank-you to my wife for hooking up tickets for my birthday.