Released in 1993, Beck’s Loser ended up being the ‘slacker anthem’ that Gen-X had been casually waiting for. But, perhaps appropriately, its creation was a long, drawn-out process that drew on failure, self-doubt, and a stubborn streak that ultimately paid dividends.
Beck has now been telling the story of “the first real song I’d ever recorded” to Mix With The Masters, and he says that it starts in or around 1991.
“I was playing at a coffee shop club called Jabberjaw, which was one of the main spots to play in Los Angeles at the time,” he begins. “And it was the kind of place where you'd see Nirvana or you'd see the Melvins. Everybody who came through town played at the Jabberjaw.”
Beck, though, wasn’t having a huge amount of success. “I was mostly playing acoustic guitar solo without a band. And the audience pretty much cleared out and would go outside and smoke. And so, out of desperation, I started stomping my foot for a beat, freestyling, like a rap song.”
Watching Beck play was Tom Rothrock, who would end up being one of Loser’s producers.
“It got, like, small applause, and this tall, skinny guy with long hair and a goatee comes up and he says, ‘Hey, I like your rapping,’” says Beck. “And I don't think I'd ever done that before. So I said, ‘Thank you. Yeah, yeah, I'm a rapper.’ And he said that he knew this kid who made beats. I said, ‘What kind of stuff does he do?’ He says ‘He works with this band called the Geto Boys.’”
Formed in Houston, the Geto Boys were a US hip-hop group, and the ‘kid’ in question was Carl Stephenson. Rothrock introduced Beck to Stephenson, and the two agreed to meet at Stephenson’s home studio, with Beck pondering the concept of what would eventually become Loser.
“I had this idea in my head for years: What would it sound like with a delta blues slide guitar over a hip-hop rhythm?” he says. “So, here I was at this guy's apartment. He starts making some beats and I pull out my guitar with my slide and I start jamming to it and it sounds pretty good.”
Beck says that he tried a few riffs, some more complicated than others, but settled on one of the more basic ones. A very basic one, in fact: “Just the most simple slide riff you could possibly play.”
Enter a classic ‘90s sampler – the Ensoniq ASR-10. “I don't think we had a bass. So, he got a bass sound on the ASR-10.”
We then hear Loser’s familiar bassline, but Beck wasn’t too sure about it. “I remember the part he came up with I thought was so happy. And I was trying to make the song kind of be heavy,” he says.
This was the first time that he and Stephenson had actually met, though, so Beck held his tongue. What’s more, he soon warmed to it. “I think it’s great because it adds a buoyancy and it's a nice juxtaposition with the slide guitar,” he says now.
I was at this guy's apartment. He starts making some beats and I pull out my guitar with my slide and I start jamming to it and it sounds pretty good.
Stephenson had only one other instrument in his room – a sitar – and Beck had spotted it as soon as he arrived.
“I had been fascinated by Indian music,” he recalls. “You know, obviously, I grew up with Beatles records [that] had all the psychedelia. I had never seen one in person.”
Inevitably, a sitar part was added, played by Stephenson. “He started to play it and he basically plays the same melody as the bassline,” says Beck.
When it came to writing the Lyrics, Beck remembers that he was inspired by Public Enemy’s Chuck D. “He was taking a lot of disparate imagery and using it to create a bigger emotion, a bigger picture. I wanted the lyrics to have that feeling where it's just this stream of images that create a world.”
After recording his vocals, though, our would-be rapper realised that he wasn’t quite on the same level as the hip-hop legend. “When I heard that back, it did not sound like Chuck D,” he says. “It was pretty nerdy.”
Rather than feeling crushed, Beck decided to embrace the geekiness and added the “soy un perdedor” line – Spanish for ‘I’m a loser’ – and the song was completed.
And then… nothing happened.
“I didn't hear anything for a long time,” says Beck. “I forgot about it. Never saw Carl again. It must have been nine months or a year or something go by. Tom said, ‘Hey, that song we did with Carl, that loser song, it's kind of cool. I think we should do something with that.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, OK.’”
By this point, Beck was back working in a video rental store thinking that his music career wasn’t going to happen, but the song started to attract the attention of some people in the business who were intrigued by it.
“I sat in these rooms and they looked at me. I was probably like 21 or 22. They said, ‘This is interesting. It's got potential but I don't think it'll work. We'd have to redo it. We have to make it more production. You probably have to get a haircut.’”
Beck wasn’t keen, though, and, rather than agree to their requests (“I just couldn’t be bothered”), decided to keep the song as it was – and in storage.
“The song ended up languishing for several years because of that,” he says. “It sat for another year and finally, two years later, we decided we're going to put it out ourselves. Tom Rothrock had started a label called Bong Load, and they were going to print 500 copies on vinyl.”
Beck still wasn’t sure about it, though, as he felt like the cultural zeitgeist may have moved on.
“I remember at the time I was a little embarrassed ‘cos I felt like this idea of Loser was sort of played out. Right at the same time Radiohead came out with a song called Creep. There was a Sub Pop Records t-shirt that said Loser on it. To me, it felt like its moment had already passed. It was going to be considered kind of corny at that point.”
Obviously, he was wrong: Loser became a hit and kickstarted Beck’s career. And, looking back, the star thinks that its long gestation period might have been to its benefit.
“I think actually, in fact, the song sitting around for a few years before being released, it came out at the exact perfect time,” he says. “And I hope it inspires some people to go out and make some weird things. You don't need to wait for permission. You can just go ahead and do it.”
Subscribers can watch the full Loser track breakdown series on the Mix With The Masters website.
