Tuesday, April 19, 2022

Beck - Rare Acoustic Performances, Volume 1 (1993-1994)

I still have lots of Beck music to post. I've been waiting for months for him to put out one more new song so I could post the latest stray tracks album. In the meanwhile, here's something from very early in his career.

In the early 1990s, it seemed Beck was writing a new song every few hours. He had so many songs that he didn't know what to do with them all. Some weren't released at all, and some were almost never played in public. There are some great sounding bootleg recordings from this time period that contain acoustic versions of many early songs. I've found enough for two albums of them; here's the first one.

This is quite similar to the BBC sessions I've been posting of other musicians lately in that the vast majority of these performances come from live radio sessions. In fact, for this volume, everything is from radio sessions. The first six songs come from a "Morning Becomes Eclectic" show on KCRW in 1993, the next four songs are from a KAOS radio show in Olympia, Washington, in early 1994, and the last five songs are from another "Morning Becomes Eclectic" show still in early 1994.

I've picked the really obscure and unreleased songs from these shows and put them on various stray tracks albums I've made. These songs basically are what's worthy and left over. All the songs are solo acoustic or at least Beck with only other acoustic accompaniment except for two songs: "Loser" and "MTV Makes Me Want to Smoke Crack." In both of those cases, he sang live vocals over prerecorded backing tracks. Both are very worthy versions. For instance, "Loser" starts out sounding much the same as the hit version, but it goes on longer, with a lot of vocal improvisation at the end.

This album is 49 minutes long.

01 Loser [Live Vocals Over Instrumental Recording] (Beck)
02 Mexico (Beck)
03 Death Is Coming to Get You (Beck)
04 Whimsical Actress (Beck)
05 Pay No Mind [Snoozer] (Beck)
06 MTV Makes Me Want to Smoke Crack [Lounge Version]  [Live Vocals Over Instrumental Recording] (Beck)
07 Mattress [Incomplete] (Beck)
08 Painted Eyelids (Beck)
09 Totally Confused (Beck)
10 Your Love Is Weird (Beck)
11 Bogusflow (Beck)
12 Dead Man with No Heart (Beck)
13 Hard to Compete (Beck)
14 It's All in Your Mind (Beck)
15 It's All Gonna Come to Be (Beck)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15288843/BeckH_1993-1994_RareAcoustcPerformncesVolum1_atse.zip.html

The cover art features Beck in concert in 1994, but I don't know the exact where or when.

3 comments:

  1. Thanks for Beck, I think I liked this era in his career the most

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  2. Thanks for all the music you share - one of my fav sites!

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  3. The cover photo is from Beck's May 8th, 1994 show at the Beale Street Music Festival in Memphis.

    Thanks for this great comp.

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