Odelay's Secret History

I thought Odelay might be the last time I got a chance to make a record," Beck says of his 1996 album. "I was acutely aware that I was thought of as a one-hit wonder." But almost twelve years later, Odelay is the definitive Beck album, full of funk, noise and sliced-up jokes. It's now receiving the deluxe reissue treatment, with an edition that adds nineteen outtakes, remixes and B sides.

Beck reminisces about his landmark disc at the Hollywood studio where he's quickly recording a new one with a producer he declines to name. "We're not going to get sidetracked," he says. "This one might be coming out sooner than people would think — definitely this year." Today, he's working in a modern facility full of expensive blond wood; back in 1995, it was the smallest room in the Silver Lake, L.A., house of the Dust Brothers (Mike Simpson and John King), the production team behind the Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique. "It was tiny," Beck says. "And one wall, floor to ceiling, was all records." Although Beck emphasizes that "a lot of Odelay was played, not sampled," many of those records were called into service, from Them's version of "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" (the organ part became the backbone of "Jack-Ass") to a sex-ed. album called Sex for Teens (Where It's At), which provided the funniest bits of the single "Where It's At."

The reason they had so much time to listen to records? The trio was using an early version of Pro Tools: After every take, the computer required about a half-hour to compile the data. Technology aside, Beck says he doesn't feel like much time has passed: "When I go back to it, not a lot feels different. I'm into the same things, you know what I mean?"

"Devil's Haircut" The recording of the album was split in half by Beck going on the 1995 Lollapalooza tour. " Somehow I got talked into it by Thurston Moore. So we had this weird summer vacation. Everything we did before was very complex — we would spend weeks on each track. When I came back, we did a bunch of songs really quick in two weeks. We did 'Devils Haircut' and 'New Pollution' back to back in two days." [Listen]

"The New Pollution" Odelay's third single had some of its most inscrutable lyrics, like "she's got a cigarette on each arm." "Most of the vocals on the record were scratch vocals," Beck says (For that line, he was trying to evoke the Sixties glamour of femme fatales from Nico to Brigitte Bardot). "We just grew attached to them. [Listen]

"Novacane" "We needed to subvert the aggro posturing, so we put in disco horns," Beck says of the track that blends metal guitars with Seventies blasts of brass. But the lyrical inspiration came from Spike Jonze. "Spike and I talked about doing a video together for ten years before we actually ever did one. One of our first conversations was about the movie Convoy — he was obsessed with it. He wanted to do a video where I was in a convoy, so I wrote all this truckers-going-into-oblivion imagery." [Listen]

"Where It's At" The album's first single, of "two turntables and a microphone" fame. "I came up with that little riff on the Wurlitzer organ, and said I gotta remember this. The Dust Brothers were like-minded. We were drawn to the way drums had been recorded in the Sixties and early Seventies: sort of a heavy, dry, thick, soulful sound." [Listen]

"High 5 (Rock the Catskills)" A dense sonic collage that even features a taste of Schubert's "Unfinished" Symphony. "The only people using Moog synthesizers were Stereolab and a couple of indie bands, so you could go to pawn shops and get them for sixty bucks. I had a pile of them and I'd bring one in and use it until it broke, and then go get another one," Beck says. "There's a lot of that in there. We spent at least three weeks on 'High 5.' I remember people hearing it and they were a little bit confused." [Listen]

"Ramshackle" The last track on Odelay was salvaged from an earlier set of sessions. "It was a whole record's worth of stuff, somewhere between Big Star, Pavement and Nirvana." That lost disc was almost finished when Beck first hooked up with the Dust Brothers. "Odelay was very informal. I just showed up one day with the slide guitar and a couple of harmonicas, and we started working." [Listen]