BECK AT THE BACK YARD 6-20-06
I realized the world had somehow changed the day before, but how exactly hadn't fully settled in yet: I was half-sitting, half-lying in a chair cocked back on its hind legs, jabbering with a restaurateur during the afternoon off-hours in the middle of his café. As anyone who has had a career in the service industry knows, walking into any kind of place – The Ritz, a Denny's – is forevermore a pleasurable experience – the way I imagine a watchmaker feels upon climbing into a clock tower, or an old bank robber cashing his Social Security check. In the back of your head at all times is the low click-whir of the gears, and you can't help yourself from trying to work out the angles, and whether and how they might be rounded off. So I was feeling extremely comfortable, jabbering about politics over free coffee when my friend picked up his phone and said, "Excuse me, I just remembered what I need to get."

He dialed the manager who'd been dispatched to Saver's and said "We also need two cases of San Pellegrino." Closing his phone to me he said: "We literally cannot keep enough of the stuff around." That was wrong: In this decade I have cracked 1,000 bottles of San Pell at eight bucks a pop for tables that would rather have tap water, but were afraid to be seen with it. Saver's is not in the brand identity.

The last time I went to the Back Yard was around two years ago, when I caught less than the last half of a Dylan show. Then, the place was still an amphitheater surrounded by either a treacherously muddy or intolerably dusty parking lot, surrounded by wilderness. I was far too blasted to actually drive to see Dylan, so I road to the show in the backseat of my own car. We got lost on the way. I've managed to get lost on the way to every Back Yard show I've ever been too, in fact. On Tuesday, I went to see Beck with an old high school buddy who called at the last minute with a free ticket. He said he knew exactly how to get there, but he only vaguely did. We got turned around, and I still couldn't tell you how to get to the Back Yard.

Pulling in a little after nine o'clock, the traffic lady in the orange reflector vest told us to turn around, drive 100 yards, turn into the mall parking lot and park past the Best Buy.

"How long's he playing?"

"The noise ordinance takes effect at 10:30, and he'll play right up to it. So you haven't missed the whole show."

I had heard something generally about a mall springing up near the Back Yard, but I was unprepared for the extent of it: instantaneous acres of Strip Center USA had appeared like toad stools after a spring rain. Best Buy, Michaels, World Market, Lowes, hell, all of 'em, enormous cubes of merch laid side-by-side with a mathematical precision worthy of pharaoh's tomb.

A boyish rentacop with a belly larger than his buttons appreciated sat at the corner of the parking lot entrance. He got up from his undersized fold-up chair, which his weight had permanently bucketed, and waved us down. The chair backing was a pink, green and orange floral pattern – it had to be his mom's chair. Our windows were already down.

"I'm here to tell you the Back Yard parking lot is full, and if you park in front of Best Buy, you'll get towed."

My buddy asked "Where should we park?"

"I've heard there's parking in the church across the highway. But I've also heard a rumor that that's full too."

"Where should we park?" I asked, realizing immediately this was a dumb question. I was dumbfounded.

"But we have tickets," my buddy said, waving tickets at him. "How can we have tickets and no place to park?"

"Look, I don't work for the venue, I work for the property owner of this parking lot. And

I'm hear to tell you you can't park here."

"What if we want to go to Best Buy?" I asked.

"Best Buy is closed. Then he said, leaning in close enough to kiss my buddy, "I work for the property owner and they're a bunch of dicks. I don't care where you park, I just have to tell you you can't park here. There aren't any tow trucks tonight."

"So you're saying if we park here, we won't get towed?"

"Yeah. Probably."

"OK. We're heading to Best Buy!"

He turned around back to the chair, sat down, and the chair looked none too happy about it as I shifted into gear. On the walk to the gate, we each took a swig off the $7.00, 200ml bottle of Maker's Mark I bought for the occasion. Are you going to be able to bring that in?" my buddy asked. I said "Sure I will."

At the gate, Event Staff T-Shirt said "OK guys, I need you to empty your pockets."

I confidently pulled out my wallet, keys and phone but left in the bottle. He patted me down. "That's not everything."

"You're kidding me."

"Everything is everything."

So. I pulled out the bottle and laconically tossed it into the trashcan, where it clanked loudly on the other bottles. Event Staff shot me a you dipshit look but there was something about it I didn't quite get. He patted me down again and said, "That's not everything."

Jesus. I pulled out my checkbook, some wadded up receipts and some amount of change, and stood there helplessly with too much stuff in my hands to hold onto for very long. Again he patted me down again, and this time I was really pissed about. If I'd been wearing a police wire, I figured he had about a 50-50 chance of pulling up again and telling me, "Everything is everything."

My buddy, having witnessed all this, pulled out everything immediately. In the floodlight, his glass pipe and baggy glinted unmistakably in his fist. For a second, Event stared at it with a dumb look on his face –. I'm sure from his distance he could smell it. Then he patted down my buddy and said "OK, go on in." And we shrugged.

After all that shit, the first thing we needed was drinks. We headed for the back bar. The geography inside the Back Yard, at least, was the same familiar place – all sort of rumbly stone terraces and rickety wood steps. People in the trees smoking grass and cigarettes. Just a truly wonderful place to loll around and catch a show, with easy opportunity to venture into the throng if you're up for it. The glowing Best Buy marquee that hung like a moon off of stage right was the only noticeable change at first. And then the gunmetal film of a sky from all those parking lot lights that mooted any concept of heavens.

The back bar was a travesty, with a line six deep and not moving anywhere. We realized we had plenty of time to reflect on events.

"I'm a total dumbass. I don't even know how to sneak a bottle into a concert anymore. I feel old."

"Yeah, that's what you do man, you just whip that shit out and hold it out there. That's what I learned that at SXSW. They've gotten really serious. But all they're really looking for is guns."

"At a Beck concert?" Then, "Nine-uh-fucking-leven!"

"No shit, man. No shit."

The line hadn't progressed to any noticeable degree.

"Don't worry man, it happens," my buddy said. Reaching our thirties had been the subtext of much of what we talked about that evening, though neither of us was particularly interested in addressing the subject head on. The reason I was even at the show was that on Sunday, his girlfriend thought she could go rock climbing, kayaking, and binge drinking in the same day. Two days later she was still a paralyzed knot of flesh in bed. My buddy had to pick up mashed potatoes and green beans from her favorite restaurant before we could leave for the show. "She can't fucking do that," he confided, "She doesn't work out or anything."

The concert was bizarre, and from the line that wasn't moving we looked out and came to appreciate that more than that, it was actually pretty brilliant: Beck, tiny from our distance, was on stage beneath a giant video screen upon which a giant marionette of Beck in the same hat and same clothes was singing along word for word. Then you realized it was a puppet show of the whole band performing. And when you looked for it, you could see the puppet show going on behind the drums, with each puppeteer shadowing his band member, and another guy down on one knee filming it. Brilliant. Hysterical. Beck, our rock'n'roll puppet.

I have no problem standing six deep in line at a bar. I even have no problem standing six deep in line for a long time. But if I'm going to, I better have my feet planted and my shoulders turned at the best angle to maintain my spot in a throbbing human artery. And I better think I better take a long drink as soon as I get my drink because I'm liable to lose half of it on the way out if I don't. Here, the bartenders were talking people up and even shaking hands, and catching up with old friends. And trudging around back there at a snails place. Lines at Six Flags moved with greater urgency. These were the bartenders on lithium.

For the second time that evening, I started getting offended. Not about the service – or the fact that I didn't have a drink in my hand, at any rate: Bartending is a race against the clock. The mopes come in and you have a fixed amount of time to fill them with as much liquor as possible. You move fast early, because the faster you set down a drink, the faster they think they should drink. The faster and earlier they drink, the more they drink – on an exponential curve. And here it gets interesting: The more they drink, the more occasions they have to tip and the looser they get with their money. You don't have to be a great bar tender to take advantage of this – hell, I wasn't much of one – but you absolutely have to understand that when there's a crowd, you need to pick it up a notch. It's your bottom line. So you see why I was offended.

Lake Hell miraculously froze and we got shots of Maker's and cans of Tecate and ambled down into the show proper. The rear third of the crowd was heavy on mid-thirties squares, mostly of the Westlake flavor. We pressed on, felt driven on, actually, by the thickness of torsos, a reminder that if we didn't fit in, we didn't exactly stick out, either.

We walked until we could smell wafts of dope, and then on to where we felt comfortable breaking out our own. I don't know Beck. Before the show, if you'd asked me who was the "Two Turntables" and "Loser" guy, I probably would have put them on him. But given the chance, likely would've credited him the "Pouring Like An Avalanche" song also. I was here because the ticket was free and I needed to get out. However Beck was very good. I liked him a lot.

The sound was fat, the tunes veering amiably between rocky and trippy, without stumbling into the wretched excesses of either. More than anything, though, it was the puppet shtick that got me – just the concept of puppeteers shadowing rock stars gave me the giggles. That the project would dwarf the humans beneath it was particularly inspired. And they ran with it even further, at one point outfitting the Beck puppet with a mini "Puppet Cam" and marionetting him around stage to capture the live performance.

Somewhere in there Beck improvised the lyric, "I hear this place used to be real nice until they came and built a shopping mall around it," to a roar of cheers, and then "That's OK, though, they can never build a shopping mall around our hearts," to an even greater roar. But hearing those words from mouth of a 20-foot-tall, jabbering puppet head in the sulfur-colored glow of a Best Buy Moon? Well worth the drive out there indeed.
I've been to half a dozen shows in rinky-dink clubs foul with human odor that hands-down rocked harder than Beck. But I have never gone to a show and been shown such an uncanny Looking Glass Look at our Looking Glass World.

At 10:10 we hit "Show's Over," and the usual handful of nimrods picked up their stuff and made for the exit. I always wonder who these people are, since they always turn around and come back as soon as they realize there's more show. Here, after the requisite interval, the screen lit up and played a five-minute short of the puppet band's afternoon in Austin – talking smack to chicks on the hike'n'bike, worshipping at the foot of Stevie, hanging out at Cheapo. The gag ended with the stage lights back up and the puppets only wailing a fairly balls out rendition of Loser. We'd officially reached Beck-by-way-of-Beckett country: Has your platinum album turned you into plastic? Give the people what they paid to see.

At 10:20, at last, the hero returned in the flesh, amp'd up and busted out Where It's At (Two Turn Tables), at last delivering the audience into something close to the realm of bona fide frenzy. But as the clock on my phone hit 10:25 at the Back Yard on Tuesday night, on the membrane of art and commerce, love and power, Dionysus and Apollo, I found myself thinking about the Motor City Five. Whatever your take on their sound or their politics, MC5 deserves its slice of immortality for eternally branding five words onto the heart of American music:

Kick Out The Jams, Motherfucker!!!!!

Kick Out The Jams, Beck. How could you not? Motherfuck ordinances and motherfuck malls. What will they do, fine you? If money's your motivator, you'll more than make it back on the back end in increased sales and spins. They'll just pull the plug? Pick up an acoustic and howl until 1,000 voices howl with you. Give the people what they hope to see.

I am Beck, flesh and blood, a man, and here I stand with my turntables on the fault line of all that I hold sacred and profane. Where it' at. Whatever the fuck did I learn to play this thing for, anyway?

When the lights came up with intensity that said "This time it's for good." The musicians bowed, the puppets were carted off, the cattle chute opened up in the fence between the Back Yard and Best Buy, and the dazed, drunken cattle stumbled into the night. It was 10:31

Once we were out of the traffic, we pulled into an Exxon Tiger Mart to quench our thirst. For $1.19, my buddy selected a plastic bottle of San Pellegrino.