“We Want You To Play Things Cool”: The Making of Beck’s “Where It’s At”
When Beck set out to make his Grammy Award-winning, multi-platinum album Odelay over 21 years ago, he faced the possibility of forever being known as a one hit wonder. Although 1994’s “Loser” had taken him from barely making rent to the Billboard Hot 100 charts, life after a hit record came with it’s own set of challenges. “Beck had notoriety and success from his single ‘Loser’, but I think pretty much everyone had considered him a one hit wonder and no one really expected anything more from him,” Mike Simpson of The Dust Brothers told Music Radar in 2011 while reflecting on his pre-Odelay status.
Unsure of which creative path to follow for his next effort, Beck completed an entire album of stripped down, acoustic music in the same vein as Odelay’s “Ramshackle” before working on Odelay. “It was a whole record’s worth of stuff, somewhere between Big Star and Pavement, Nirvana,” he told Gavin Edwards in a 2008 feature for The Rolling Stone.
Despite having an an album’s worth of material recorded, a chance meeting with the sought after production duo of John King and Mike Simpson changed the course of his post-“Loser” project. The Dust Brothers — then best-known for their work on The Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique and their early hits for Tone Loc and Young MC — connected with Beck after catching one of his legendary live shows. It wasn’t long before Beck ended up scrapping most of the acoustic project in favor of recording something new with them.
“I think pretty much everyone had considered him a one hit wonder and no one really expected anything more from him.”- Mike Simpson
From the earliest sessions, they were a musical match made in heaven. Beck had a keen understanding of the The Dust Brothers desire to seamlessly weave live instrumentation into the cut and paste style from their earlier production due to his earlier experimentation with samplers and sampling. With sampling laws becoming more restrictive by the year, Beck’s ability to replay and interpolate sounds from The Dust Brothers’ massive record cache was an ideal skill set for their collaborative effort.
Perhaps most importantly, Beck also embraced their carefree willingness to reject perfectionism in favor of capturing unconventional sounds and loops. It was a refreshing change from their experiences working with other artists and bands for the The Dust Brothers. “They wanted to play things right,” Simpson explained to Sound on Sound in 2005. “But we don’t necessarily want you to play things right, we want you to play things cool. You play over a groove until you have a good bar, and then we take that bar and loop it.”
Wanting to straddle the line of making something fresh without alienating the fans he’d won over with “Loser”, Beck and The Dust Brothers saw Odelay’s lead single “Where It’s At” as a potential olive branch that would hook listeners and bring them in for the rest of the album. “We kind of had this idea that ‘Where It’s At’ would be this kind of bridge to connect his previous work with the rest of the album,” Simpson told Music Radar.
“It was like kids messing around in a playground playing with popsicle sticks or whatever to create something cool with no agenda.”- Mike Simpson
Although John King described the process of working together as “Beck and myself in a room, having fun, coming up with ideas, then embellishing and finishing them,” to Mix Online, making “Where It’s At” also required painstaking attention to detail. “We used Studio Vision software and Digidesign hardware with a 2-channel interface, so we could only record or play back one or two tracks of live audio at the same time,” King told Mix Online. “I had to take everything that we did and convert it into samples that could then be played back with the SampleCell card and make MIDI notes that corresponded with wherever I wanted the samples to happen.”
Though the Studio Vision software was cutting edge at the time, it was anything but efficient. “There was this old stuffed chair with the spring coming out of it. I remember sitting there for hours, just staring at that computer screen, waiting for something to back up,” Beck told Rolling Stone.
Despite the sometimes agonizing lag time, the guys didn’t let it prevent them from having fun with “Where It’s At”. They even had Beck stand with a microphone and sing the memorable hook over and over again as different characters, layering all the takes into an ultra-hype chorus. “It was really funny. It would kind of be like the big guy, the small guy, the real energetic guy,” King recalled in a 1996 interview with MTV News. “Or the old man,” Simpson injected with laugh.
“We don’t necessarily want you to play things right, we want you to play things cool.”- Mike Simpson
In addition to layering multiple Beck vocal takes, the trio found other ways to get creative on the track, including vocal samples from a 1960s teen sex-ed album titled Sex For Teens (Where It’s At). They also leaned towards sampled vs. played drums, both out of necessity and preference. “We didn’t really have the means to record drums, and at the time, drums were recorded in a particular style that I just didn’t care for: boomy, kind of ringy,” Beck told Rolling Stone. “The Dust Brothers were like-minded. We were drawn to the way drums had been recorded in the ’60s and early ’70s: sort of a heavy, dry, thick, soulful sound.”
In the end, the bizarre vocal samples, catchy Wurlitzer organ riff, layered chorus, and sampled drums in the song paid off, as “Where It’s At” charted and helped give Odelay an added level of exposure. Beyond the eventual accolades Beck and The Dust Brothers received for their work, recording both the song and the album was a freeing experience that all parties still recall fondly after all these years. “When we met Beck, it was like kids messing around in a playground,” Mike Simpson told the KEXP blog. “Playing with popsicle sticks or whatever to create something cool with no agenda.”
Connect with Beck on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and on Twitter @beck.
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