Last day of "Beck Bootleg Week!"This last Beck bootleg is pretty special, mainly because I'm the one who recorded it! Back when I was active in the NYC experimental scene – with ambibat and FRANKENHÖFF – I attended a "happening", for lack of a better word, which Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth was one of many performers. During that show I noticed a flyer for a "secret" special performance with Thurston Moore and Beck at The Cooler. Beck was in town promoting his album Mutations and his book Playing With Matches.
I knew this would be a special show so I brought my portable tape recorder to document the occasion. The Cooler was a pretty small venue, in a basement of some building in the meat packing district, so the place was...packed. I could tell some of the people were waiting to see "Loser" Beck but I knew what to expect. Beck and Thurston came out with guitars and Tom Surgal joined them on drums – I'd seen Thurston and Tom improvise together before. When they began to play it was obvious Beck was out of his league. As Thurston wailed on his guitar Beck fiddled with a few blues licks and some finger-tapping. He eventually abandoned trying to keep up with Thurston and Tom and turned to performance art instead. He jumped around with his guitar up his shirt and ended the show by taking apart Tom Surgal's drums piece by piece, bringing them backstage until only Thurston was left standing. All-in-all the performance wasn't great but it was a one in a lifetime event witnessed by few.
As I started writing this post I decided to google this performance and found that someone actually released a version of it on tape cassette...I had know idea. Apparently, the piece is called "Kill Any/All SPIN Personnel", but I'm not sure if that's official so I left mine "Untitled". I found a download of it and compared their recording to mine...very little difference besides tone. I'm sharing both versions so you can choose which you prefer.First up is my recording...(I found the images of Beck on the web shortly after the performance, back in '98, and kept them in a folder until now. Unfortunately, whoever posted them cropped out Thurston)...
[DOWNLOAD] Beck / Thurston Moore / Tom Surgal @ The Cooler, NYC (1998)
01- Untitled (35:22)
01- Kill Any/All SPIN Personnel (36:15)
For more Beck click here.
6 comments:
Thanks for all the Beck stuff.
Awesome!
This reminds me of early Kraftwerk stuff, circa 1969...great noises by the three of them, THANK YOU for bringing this to my attention!
i am so glad to se this. i was at this show. actually sitting on the stage just in front of beck. man was it fucking hot there. i remember him pretty much giving up on playing early on and then swaying a fan around and jumping on thurston's back at one point. the show ended as he disassembled the drum kit.
funny, i only skimmed the post and now and pretty much writing the same thing as you.
best free show i have ever been to. at the end i actually grabbed both beck and thurston's picks from the stage.
anyway, if you have any more info or photos or anything about this show, i would love to hear from you. thanks so so much for the recording.
It's official. Master sent to me by Thurston. It was fun filling orders for this as you could tell the noise heads from the Beck folk by how upset the Beck fans got after not receiving their tape within about 3-4 days of sending their order.
Also, it should go without saying that you should take down my release.
Freedom Form,
I disabled the link to your recording. I'm leaving mine active. Hope you make a fortune selling it.
- Franklin Mint
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