Loser

It's all original music, and it was put together inspired by musicians, uh, writing songs based on them reading the book.

I gave them advance copies, this small group of musicians I trusted, and each one of them, or each one of these acts, put together a track for this album that we are calling Loser Babies, music inspired by Josephine Riesman's The Last Temptation of Beck, which was, of course, pushing us into Push based on the novel, Push by Sapphire, whatever.

You know, it, it gets a long title, but Loser Babies is what will suffice today.

And we have a very special guest who you heard, you have heard many a time if you are a listener of this podcast, and that special guest is Rachel Garrett Steele, who composed and performed the Here Comes Tomorrow theme music, which you heard today segueing itself into one of the songs that she composed for Loser Babies.

So Rachel, welcome to the show.

I mean, you've sort of been part of the show-

But, like, by now he's settled into, like, yeah, Ride Lonesome is, it's a glossy country folk record, which is, he's done two others like that, Sea Change and Morning Phase.

And prior to that, he had, like, two very sh- shiny pop albums, and, like, they were pretty internally consistent.

He's around their same generation.

But instead, he has this total oddball, almost novelty song hit that launches him into the stratosphere when he's way too young.

And his entire career has always been sort of spent catching up with the folk stuff that he kind of wanted to do

and was doing

And it just didn't happen.

And then Beck suddenly puts out this basically like anti-folk times 20, you know, hip hop track.

And it becomes this massive hit and anti-folk is like over at that point.

And Paleface never really got the shot that people predicted.

You can go check it out wherever you find streaming services and all that.

Now, if you grew up like me in the 1900s and the 1990s, then you know the song by Beck called Loser.

That song was just ubiquitous.

It was all over the place and for a good reason.

It's this weird sort of montage of hip-hop and and different samples and sounds and weird lyrics and all that kind of stuff.

And it was just a great, great song.

And so Beck kind of burst onto the scene with that song Loser.

But I think a lot of people don't realize that before he was making that kind of music, before he was doing that kind of hip-hop inspired collage sort of music, that he was making much more somber music.

He has so many faces, and you can really fall in love with one of those faces and not even know about the others.

I was on board from day one, because I was working as an intern at a rock station that played Loser.

Oh, no kidding.

Yes.

One of those off of Get a Grip.

Yeah.

But the funny thing about Crazy was it was directly competing with Loser on the charts at the same time, and, you know, his father had done the strings for it.

But anyway, um, you know, David Campbell, by David Campbell's own admission, got into Scientology in the mid-'60s when he was studying piano in Manhattan.

It was like, do tell that's interesting and he like had the posters and everything you remembered all the details and the timeline completely synced up with uh with the overall details we had about when loser was initially recorded and what really blew my mind was and carlos didn't even realize this he gives me he's like oh yeah i found the posters and it's like september 27th 1991.

What happens two nights later? Smells Like Teen Spirit debuts on MTV and the entire culture blows up.

And then what happens the following week? Beck records Loser.

This was fascinating to me.

Like, Loser didn't come out until 1993.

It sat on the shelf for a while.

But you have this moment In the fall of 1991, when Soviet communism finally fails and there is no more Soviet Union, Smells Like Teen Spirit, which had been something of a radio hit, goes on MTV and all of a sudden everybody loses their minds and Beck records Loser.

It's all happened within the space of a few weeks.