In the time of chimpanzees, Beck told us 30 years ago, he was a monkey: a baby-faced singer-songwriter crash-landing in the age of grunge with a hard-to-classify hit called “Loser.” The song from his 1994 major-label debut, “ Mellow Gold ,” put folky guitar strumming over a throbbing hip-hop beat and found the lifelong Angeleno stringing together lines of gonzo poetry that made him a reluctant spokesman for a generation that didn’t quite know what it wanted to say. Beck spent the rest of the ’90s and the early 2000s evading a fixed perception — flitting among junk-shop psychedelia, crunchy garage rock, horny R&B and spacey acoustic balladry — and ended up becoming a kind of icon for the endless variety of his sprawling hometown.
Now he’s due to play the Hollywood Bowl on Saturday night with the L.A. Phil as part of a tour on which he’s performing orchestral renditions of tunes from throughout his catalog.
At the Bowl, Beck, 53, will employ arrangements by his father, David Campbell, a veteran arranger and conductor whom he first worked with on an alternate version of his 1996 song “Jack-Ass” and who provided the charts for Beck’s 2008 performance with the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra Strings. “But that was just five or six songs, not an entire concert,” said the singer, whose latest LP, the glossy “Hyperspace,” came out in 2019. (Other recent-ish work includes 2014’s “Morning Phase,” which won the Grammy for album of the year, and productio.
