Beck - Beck and Dava 1990

I wish I could tell you all kinds of fascinating details about the tape these recordings are sourced from, but everything I know, and seemingly everything everyone else knows, is contained in a text file included with these tracks. Thankfully, it's an interesting story, but even if we knew absolutely nothing about the origins behind these recordings, the music would be interesting enough on it's own. This is Beck with a band that may be Ten Ton Lid, a country outfit formed with Martha Atwell, but no one is really sure. Rather than continue telling the story behind this find, I'll leave it to the contents of the original text file which you'll find below.



I got this recording from a Beck fan named Paco. When I asked him where he got it he told me: Well about 5 years ago, a friend of mine knew I was a big Beck fan and handed me a tape where I was working. He got it from his roommate who got it from another person, who supposedly knew Beck. All the tape said as well as the cover was: "Beck and Dava 1990" There was no artwork. [...] It seems like it was just a small group of friends that were there. [...] It seems someone left the tape recorder on. Unlike the other early Beck tapes we've heard, this tape is not really in an album or demo format. As Paco said, the mics were left on throughout the evening, meaning we can hear them talking, goofing around, and messing up. It's personal, a little creepy, and fairly interesting.

At around the time of this recording, Beck formed a Carter Family cover band with Martha Atwell and Mike Thoman (and possibly others) called 10 Ten Lid. This time is also spent bonding with those in the L.A. music scene: Carla Bozulich of the Geraldine Fibbers and Ethyl Meatplow, and Martha Atwell (with whom he has a short-lived Carter Family/Louvin Brothers cover band called Ten Ton Lid).

[REF 1]: Beck and his friend Martha Atwell were really into old country music. They formed Ten Ton Lid, and started playing Louvin Brothers and Carter Family songs. At one point they managed to get some shows at a bar up in the mountains of Saugus: the Big Oaks Lodge. It was a weird scene because they were playing traditional folk songs and there were old folks square dancing and college kids partying. One night Mike Tyson was there training for his fight against Buster Douglas, (they had a boxing camp out back) and he got shit faced and pissed all over the drum kit. It was Xmas and he was wearing a Santa hat. Leaving a Ten Ton Lid show wasn't easy, due to the dark, winding forest road and all the drunks heading home.

[REF 2]: Pretty soon I made a few friends who were also doing the acoustic thing. Maybe you've heard of a guy named Beck? We put together a couple of bands. One sort of funny rock band called Loser (yeah that's part of how the song happened, though its idea and composition had nothing to do with me - that was all Beck), and a funny country band called Ten Ton Lid. We played alot of shows and even toured a little with Possum Dixon. Eventually, I had a falling out with Beck, because I wanted to do something different with the music, among other things. Now he's rich and famous, and I'm still trying to finish my PhD.

[REF 3]: So could this be an early Ten Ton Lid tape? Possibly, but the lack of Carter Family songs and the non-funny nature of the tape definitely weakens this theory. It is, though, the best suggestion I've heard so far. I and others have contacted a number of people who we thought might be able to give us some answers, but so far we've had very little luck. If anybody out there knows more about this tape, please e-mail me at dnewton@whiskeyclone.net.

Huge thanks go to Paco for the tape, and almostaghost, McP, comat0se and Paco (again) for helping with song identification.
-- Dave Newton, 2006-07-17

References:
1 Orr, Emily. 2002-10-03. "Beck In The Saddle Again". http://www.exclaim.ca/index.asp?layid=22&csid=1&csid1=1057
2 Hanft, Steve. "Kill The Moonlight" soundtrack liner notes.
3 Thoman, Mike. http://groups.google.com/group/rec.music.makers.guitar/browse_thread/thread/c81efd3c9efd961c/4c10c622f806a761?lnk=st&rnum=3#4c10c622f806a761

TRANSFER INFORMATION
--------------------
- Paco (unknown setup): - transferred tape to two CD tracks (side 1 / side 2) - Dave (2 GHz Intel Core Duo iMac, Mac OS X 10.4.7): iTunes 6.0.5: - converted CD to 44.1/16/stereo AIFF Sound Studio 3.0.4 (Demo): - replaced right channel with a duplicate left channel because the right was clipped and noisy - normalized to -0.18 dB (98.01%) over entire tape (both sides / AIFF files combined) - split AIFF into 56 separate files / tracks xACT 1.58 - encoded AIFF tracks to FLAC (6/8) - tagged FLACs - generated fingerprint (ffp) and shntool md5 (st5) checksums

http://www.becktabs.com/
http://www.whiskeyclone.net/



There you have it. Much thanks to Paco and the folks from Becktabs and Whiskeyclone for their efforts. They're responsible for much of the demo content that is circulating online in the Beck community, so massive credit is due to them. Pay them a visit and I'm sure you'll be pleased! And yes, there is a lot more Beck coming. I'd like to post two more tapes this month and everything else will appear in December.

Beck and Dava, Side One
Beck and Dava, Side Two


PS - If you'd like to see the original image that I created the one for this post from, follow this link. Pretty freaky :)