Heretic (2024)

The directing and screenwriting team of Scott Beck and Bryan Woods is responsible for the ongoing franchise, A Quiet Place. This is a trial by faith—two young women Mormon missionaries versus well-informed religious skeptic Mr. Reed (Hugh Grant), home at his leisure. The young women knock on his door to ask if he has heard the good news of our savior Jesus Christ. He has indeed. It’s pouring rain. He invites them in. They can enter only if another woman is present. He says his wife is at home with him, baking blueberry pie. They cross the threshold. These young women don’t know it yet, but they are in big trouble. Mr. Reed says his wife, who is suddenly shy, will be with them shortly. The blueberry pie smells delicious but later they learn it’s just a scented candle. He confronts them, diplomatically, with awkward questions about polygamy. It’s all quite uncomfortable. Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) is defensive and reflexively tries to explain the Mormon position. It’s soon evident Mr. Reed has them trapped. The storm outside has grown more intense, with snow. The front door is locked and the key to their bike lock is in their coats, which Mr. Reed has taken and put somewhere. Sister Paxton (Chloe East) attempts to flatter and mollify him but he’s got them now. The main point of Heretic, of course, is Hugh Grant—with impeccable manners and stammering appeal (as always). His light-hearted bantering style morphs from charming to menacing though he doesn’t actually change that much. He’s just Hugh Grant, as we know him, but now full of religious thought and philosophy, and aggressive about it. As things get worse one of the victims cries, “Why do you do this?” With an answer that incidentally helps explain our present political predicament, he responds, “The question is, why do you let me?” Indeed. There’s some gore here, not much, but Grant typically makes the most of it. The basic idea seems to be the casting against type, turning everyone’s favorite British romantic lead into a monster. It’s fun to see Hugh Grant having so much fun, but we’re already seen this kind of religious debate many times in the movies (Dogma, First Reformed, Rapture, The Seventh Seal). Basically this one is for Hugh Grant fans and/or the religiously curious almost exclusively.

The Terrorists (1975)

So happy endings all around? In a general sort of way, yes. The democratic social welfare system remains as riddled with defect as ever, and as Dennis Lehane points out in his introduction for the 2010 reprint, the last word in the book and thus the whole Story of Crime series is "Marx." Authors Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö would likely consider themselves optimists in that regard, and so do I. But getting there is still not a pretty picture. Even so, police detective Martin Beck and his crew at least manage to get to some hard-won happy places in their lives. And bully for them. In the larger series I'm more interested anyway in the context of liberal paradise Stockholm, even more than the specific crime cases, which are artfully constructed but also tend toward the pro forma. Published in 1975, inevitably the point of view of The Terrorists is historically bound. People with the sense that terrorism started in 2001 might be interested to learn about some of the prequels alluded to here. A mastermind terrorist cell network—the Red Army Faction of the time is the likely model, but even more deadly and effective—is determined to strike at a conservative U.S. senator on a scheduled visit to Stockholm. It's up to Beck to stop the mayhem, or, well, actually his various superiors, who variously take the credit for themselves. And stop it they do. Though Per Wahlöö died of cancer the year this was published, at the age of 48 (coauthor Maj Sjöwall is still alive today), The Terrorists was always intended as the final volume in a series conceived much earlier. The novels are more episodic than working within a larger narrative arc, but they veer about carefully from touchstone to touchstone, from serial killers to police violence to a locked-room mystery to international spy intrigue and more. The larger theme is the nagging question of barbarism and civilization and the social welfare state. What's it going to be? If we give up barbarism we opt for the suffocations of cooperating with one another on a scale of numbers we can't even comprehend—presently approaching 8 billion people. You could say it's pretty well a bleak vision too. Just look around you. And Martin Beck would have to agree. Take it as a mercy for him that he ended up in a happy relationship.

In case it's not at the library.

Cop Killer (1974)

Near the end now of Maj Sjöwall's and Per Wahlöö's Story of Crime series, and main characters are making various life decisions. The police detective Martin Beck has risen high in the ranks, and even become a bit of a celebrated public figure. At first I took the title as another nod to Ed McBain's 87th Precinct series (which started with Cop Hater and had a small run with "Killer" in the title). But it's actually more of an involuted double entendre. Some cop killing does go on here—technically not really, but the details are there to be discovered—which produces a ludicrous but easily imagined overreaction on the part of the national Swedish police force. Indeed, the brooding ruminations on police power across the series reach a certain crescendo in this one. The title is also a way to describe a policeman who has killed, along the way distinguishing it as well from policemen prone to such actions, which would be more like "Killer Cop." The cop killer in this case is Beck's friend Lennart Kollberg. In spite of recent police rules mandating it, Kollberg has long refused to carry a firearm except in the most extreme circumstances. He was involved in an accidental killing early in his career which he deeply regrets. The main case at hand in Cop Killer, however, is the disappearance of a woman living next door to a known sex criminal. In fact, he's known to us too—from Roseanne, the first novel in the series. It's part of tying the whole series together, but feels a little strained as a plot element. On the other hand, the situation with the sex criminal actually has some interesting wrinkles. We see the crime in the carefully written first chapter, and see enough to know it could be but isn't necessarily him. Beck and Kollberg come to believe he is innocent and the case is interesting and fair. However, the B story, which is the confrontation that produces a dead cop, becomes the more interesting story (even though it comes in so late) because that's where police force militarism is examined most closely and lampooned without mercy. Part of the interest here, and much of my own in police procedurals, is the inherent tension of police power—its ability to routinize and stabilize daily life and its enormous potential for abuse. Those are the themes Sjöwall and Wahlöö are best on in this one.

In case it's not at the library.

The Locked Room (1972)

I was impressed with this entry in the Martin Beck series—I'm tempted to call it the best. The locked-room mystery—in which victims are found dead of violence in rooms locked from the inside and no weapon or signs of exit or entrance are in evidence—is of course one of the oldest and most enduring of mystery story types. There is only so much you can do with them, and authors Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö were rarely innovative in the whodunit realm anyway. So the explanation here is somewhat busy but fair enough. Ed McBain liked locked-room mysteries and used them often, which might make it another wry homage. What I like better about The Locked Room is how they blend the genre requirements with their social preoccupations and put it together into a nearly perfectly waterproof vessel. This is much longer than any previous novel in the series, and indeed the longest of all. There is another case the police detectives are working on as well, a series of brazen bank robberies. For his part, police detective Beck has been assigned the locked-room case to work through by himself. The ironies and paradoxes of a blended capitalist / socialist system still evolving are explored in rich detail, as usual. Social programs may be a net positive, but they have unintended and sometimes grotesque results. Meanwhile, harshly authoritarian conservatives cling to power with all their might. (They have less might in these Beck novels than they have now, and I must say some of these scenarios make me nostalgic for past times.) Beck is recovering from an injury suffered in the previous action-packed novel. We see via Beck's investigation how one woman's life has gone since being abandoned by her husband. It is an acutely painful study of the lack of support and perceived value for single mothers then. It's still bad now, but it was worse then, and the trap she falls into—once her husband has stopped providing child support—is all too plausible. The Locked Room takes an extraordinary number of complex threads and weaves them into a remarkable picture. It's not often you get to see one tied up so neatly. Start here if you're only going to read one of these Martin Beck novels.

In case it's not at the library.

The Abominable Man (1971)

In this case, policemen are being systematically killed. The first is a high-ranking official, Chief Inspector Nyman, with roots back to the military. His methods and conduct toward criminals were harsh. Mistakes by the police under him were covered up as a matter of unofficial policy. Nyman's brutal methods are described as "old school" and his own murder is equally brutal—a case of overkill. Police detective Martin Beck broods about the underlying social problems. He and most of the other detectives quickly settle on vengeance as the motive, which of course proves out. Even in this series the police are routinely credited with good instincts. Police procedures are then followed to uncover suspects. Some interesting character developments occur involving Lennart Kollberg, the closest Beck has to a friend on the police, and Gunvald Larsson, a blustering and violent man who nonetheless is possessed of the aforementioned good police instincts. Both Beck and Kollberg generally do not carry guns on principle and also for practical considerations, but Larsson scoffs at them as pacifists. As much as anything in the series so far, The Abominable Man is an action-packed thriller, with lots of shooting and clambering around dangerous places. There's even a helicopter crash. It was made into a popular Swedish movie in 1976 called The Man on the Roof. So that's all entertaining enough, but the more enduring appeal as usual is the portrait of a society in change. The police strategies of covering up mistakes and blundering about with powerful munitions are seen as having come home to roost. At the same time, many in the novel—and no doubt some of the readers as well—still believe the strength of the police is in its superior firepower. In many ways this is the freshest story in the series yet for our times, reflecting issues we have been addressing (or attempting to address) in recent years around police misconduct and the gray area between it and military methods (not to mention organized crime methods of summary execution). In The Abominable Man there is no clear right and wrong, in many instances, and when there is the right choice often seems all but impossible. As usual, the novel is pretty fair to all sides.

In case it's not at the library.

Murder at the Savoy (1970)

Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö conceived the Martin Beck series of police procedurals as a single 10-part piece called The Story of Crime. The individual novels are short but that still adds up to over 2,000 pages—ambitious. The Story of Crime is not so much about the crime plots or the characters we come to know, but more an analysis or even critique of a system of justice in what was then (and remains) Sweden's fragile democratic welfare state. Here at the halfway point of the series we know many of the characters pretty well, especially the police detective Beck, who has left his wife with this one. But the personal stories remain decidedly to the side in this series. The primary focus is always on the case at hand, which happens to be emblematic of various social ills, at the rate of approximately one per book. This time it's the murder or assassination of a wealthy and dynamic businessman, and the issue, in today's parlance, is income inequality. The series was reissued about 10 years ago with all-new introductions by various writers. This one is by a Swedish crime novelist of the next generation, Arne Dahl (aka Jan Arnold, born 1963), and I was particularly interested in his take. He feels Murder at the Savoy is a little too leftist and classifies the crime as a "1968" type. It's true that all the rich people here are portrayed as shallow reprobates, you might even say Donald Trump types, scamming everyone in sight and oblivious to everything else. In fact, that's baked into the resolution of the crime itself. Dahl wrote his introduction in 2009, before income inequality became topical again with the coming of the Occupy movement, which had worldwide impacts in terms of understanding the issue. I wonder if he feels differently now. Murder at the Savoy did not seem at all unreasonable to me. Certainly the way things go for poor people here fits into everything I've ever heard or seen for myself. People get trapped economically in all kinds of ways: unemployment due to factory closures, rents uncontrollable and destabilizing, real estate out of reach, alcoholism, domestic violence, despair. The only lever they have is the state, however unwieldy and incompetent. At the same time, and best of all (or most satisfying), Murder at the Savoy is also a great procedural, showing how a case is "solved" with systematic approaches doggedly applied. There's also a nice detail here that one of the suspects is reading an Ed McBain novel (and a specific one—'Til Death). Sjöwall and Wahlöö don't often indulge such impulses, except for McBain here and there. Instead, they were trying to work out a really big picture about society and right and wrong.

In case it's not at the library.

The Fire Engine That Disappeared (1969)

The fifth Martin Beck novel in the Story of Crime series by Swedish authors Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö uses a fairly spectacular crime as its focus, though much of the narrative is spent developing the sideline characters supporting police investigator Beck. Lennart Kollberg, in particular, gets a lot of attention here, as well as Gunvald Larsson. Both are large men with tempers, often unlikable (especially Kollberg). But they are still good at their jobs. The case at hand involves an arson of a fourplex apartment building that results in three deaths. I thought the crime was unnecessarily busy with detail—among other things, one of the victims actually committed suicide the night of the arson, which complicates the picture. In fact, the fire is not even considered arson at first, and there's some business about authorities going to a misreported address on the night of the blaze. It all hangs together more or less by story's end but by that point also seems extraneous. Typically enough, for reasons of its fiction market or maybe the times, it can mire down some with obligatory-feeling subplots of the ongoing sexual liberation of the time and place, Sweden in the '60s. The dry straightforward style occasionally verges on the merely uninteresting. And it's not always clear what these characters are doing as they work the case. Who is this Kollberg and why does he rage so much and make himself so unpleasant? It's useful to remember, again, that this is classic police procedural storytelling written in the '60s by a poet and a journalist who are involved with one another. While it doesn't really explain the attraction to police and crime fiction in the first place, it does explain much else: the precision of the language (even in translation), the continuing reliance on irreducible facts, and the way sex, love, and social pressures complicate and drive crime—indeed most human behavior. In the larger series, with The Fire Engine That Disappeared, an increasingly critical eye is turned on police bureaucracy and politics even as '60s turmoil seems to increase exponentially with each passing year. With its episodic focus on crime and law enforcement in Stockholm, The Story of Crime will turn out to be even more the story of an era.

In case it's not at the library.

The Laughing Policeman (1968)

Jonathan Franzen wrote an introduction for this novel in 2009, declaring it his favorite in the Martin Beck series by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. Franzen says he likes the bad weather of Stockholm in descending winter and he also enjoys detective Beck's chronic cold. Beck is also grouchier than we have seen him before. The crime at hand is again sensational, this time a mass murder. Someone got on a bus and mowed down eight passengers and the driver with a submachine gun. There are not many helpful clues, but among the dead is one of their own, detective Ake Stenstrom. No one has any idea what he was doing on that bus. There are again signs of Ed McBain's influence in the approach the police take to solving the crime, based on a theory that there was one intended victim and the rest were killed to cover that up, making it look like the work of a madman. This unlikely hunch was also the basis of McBain's Lady, Lady I Did It. Maybe such things happen in cases of mass murder, but I suspect not often. Also, the character of Stenstrom has a lot in common with the 87th Precinct detective Bert Kling—they are both young and capable, but still trying to prove themselves, and they are both also particularly good at trailing people. Of course, Stenstrom dies whereas Kling loses girlfriends consecutively, a critical difference. I read all this as sincere respect for McBain even though Sjöwall and Wahlöö are the better and more interesting writers. The theory of the camouflaged victim is not pursued by all the Swedish investigators. Many have their own pet theories they are chasing down. The crime is reminiscent of the movie Speed or a bus accident that actually happened in Seattle in the late '90s. It's sensational again, but already across the series there's a sense of deliberation about the cases: a sex murder (Roseanna), a notorious celebrity (The Man Who Went Up in Smoke), a serial killer (The Man on the Balcony), and now a mass murder. Sjöwall and Wahlöö obviously understood the necessity for the lurid in crime fiction—it's in practically every one of their books—yet they always feel fully in control of the material (unlike McBain and way too many others) and use it to make specific points about justice, society, and other large themes. Martin Beck is also being slowly developed into a fully rounded and complex character, but again this is in the service of larger themes. Beck's marriage has never been good and he has many problems with militaristic police attitudes and bureaucracy. There's a sense of things moving forward and coming together in the larger series.

In case it's not at the library.

The Man on the Balcony (1967)

As police procedurals go, I tend to be more attracted to the routine and mundane—I still think Adam-12 is one of the best. But for obvious commercial reasons, and perhaps because police famously "see everything," they're often at least as lurid as true-crime. Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, the Swedish writing partners behind the Martin Beck series, were hardly immune. The first novel featured a sexualized serial killer. This third is essentially the same, except the victims are young girls around 10 years old. So even more lurid. At the same time, the cast of characters around Beck and the context of his job are starting to deepen and grow larger. And the one thing you can say about Sjöwall and Wahlöö is that their language is never sensational. It is flat nearly to a fault—flatter than Hemingway, though perhaps not Jack Webb. I suppose it could be partly the translation. But they respect rules of the genre scrupulously—it feels like the way police who are serious go about investigating and solving crimes. The Man on the Balcony was written before the Zodiac killer started up in California, though quite soon after the Boston Strangler, and it is good at painting a portrait of a large city, Stockholm in this case, seized by panic as an invisible monster roams among them. There are nods and winks to Ed McBain, such as an alliterated pair of patrolmen partners, Kristiansson and Kvant (different police roles but same narrative purpose as McBain's Monoghan and Monroe). But there's much more gravity to these Martin Beck stories. It's partly the loss of McBain's sunny optimistic American voice as opposed to the more sophisticated and dour European judgments of Sjöwall and Wahlöö. Remember, pretty much all McBain did—as McBain, Evan Hunter, and under other aliases (none of them his actual name, Salvatore Lombino)—was write popular fiction and screenplays. Per Wahlöö was a journalist and wrote other novels of his own. Maj Sjöwall was a translator and poet. They were also life partners for 13 years and self-declared Marxists. Not surprisingly, they represent an interesting wrinkle on the form. As usual, the police are presented as at least well-meaning and generally competent, but here they are also specifically functionaries of the state—the beneficent but not always competent state. The ambivalent attitude toward the police even as the work of some of them is valorized is a pretty neat trick. The Man on the Balcony is very sharply done, quick and to the point, yet thorough. It's just I could just do with a little less child rapist. They get better.

In case it's not at the library.

The Man Who Went Up in Smoke (1966)

The second Martin Beck novel takes a different tack from the first, in terms of the character of the victim. It's still based on established investigative technique, etc. But whereas the victim in Roseanna was a perhaps troubled but fundamentally innocent person, here it's someone who is a bit of a rat, a drunkard, a womanizer, and worse, as we come to find out. Alf Mattson is also a talented journalist. When he disappears on assignment in Hungary, Beck is called in to work the case unofficially. I'm not sure I understand this "unofficial" point. Hungary was rather different in 1966. The Cold War was on and it was in the Soviet sphere—maybe that explains it. At any rate, Beck goes there and pokes around a bit, accomplishing nothing. When he finally contacts the Budapest police, at first unwillingly, then the case slowly starts to crack open. Mattson had traveled to Hungary on assignment. He'd reported from there before, but this time he disappeared almost as soon as he arrived and nothing was heard from him since. This case gets a bit complicated as both the crime and investigation require a lot of subterfuge, with passport and visa manipulation, black market activities, and generally a high level of paranoia. Authors Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö were not as good at spy stories, so this suffers a little in that regard. But it's police technique that solves it: a close analysis of descriptions of the victim's clothes compared with what was found in his abandoned traveling case and his closet at home in Stockholm. The most interesting point is the description of Budapest and Hungarian life, which of course in many ways is no different from Swedish life. I'm sure that was much of the intended point then, but it's lost a little in these post-Cold War times when it's harder to remember how real the divisions were. Only 10 years before publication of this novel Soviet tanks had rolled through Hungary asserting Soviet authority. Martin Beck's dour yet dogged personality is developed further, and we start to see a little more of the complex and interesting characters around him, such as Lennart Kollberg. As in Roseanna, Beck befriends a police investigator beyond Stockholm, who similarly just wants to use established technique to haul in the bad guys. It's a short novel too, perfect for an easy day.

In case it's not at the library.

Roseanna (1965)

According to the introduction by Henning Mankell for the 2006 reprint of the first novel in the Martin Beck police procedural series The Story of Crime, authors Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö were heavily influenced by Ed McBain's 87th Precinct novels. I actually hadn't known that when I set out to read through them again, beyond a general understanding that McBain is a milestone figure in the subgenre, perhaps even second only to Jack Webb. The Martin Beck novels—there are only 10, compared to 55 87th Precinct books—are better in nearly every way, more literate, more circumspect, and more carefully written (which is obvious even in translation from Swedish). More classy, as McBain might say. Or maybe that's the European glow to an American rube such as myself, but let me point out some facts about Sjöwall and Wahlöö. They were a couple during the collaboration, which ended with Wahlöö's death in 1975, and they also wrote and published separately. Wahlöö was a journalist with a bent toward social justice. Sjöwall was a poet and translator. These elements were alchemically blended to produce a foundation for what is called "Nordic noir," a kind of procedural tradition veering decidedly toward the dark, which includes Mankell, Stieg Larsson, and a raft of other books and movies too. This first novel, Roseanna, is very basic police procedural fundamentals, as if establishing bona fides. The nude body of a dead young woman is dredged from a Swedish resort lake. She hasn't been dead long, but no one matching her description has been reported missing. Investigating police detective Martin Beck and his colleagues have almost nothing to go on. They must put together the case painstakingly, one minuscule piece at a time. They use police routines, to quote Ed McBain, "based on established investigative technique." Certain familiar elements of those routines are carefully injected: the casual brutality of crime, detectives who become personally invested in solving crimes, the ways resources are deployed to track down detail. Written in the '60s, at the dawn of the imperial age of serial killers in pop culture, it's either well-researched on the behavior of serial killers or has spectacularly good instincts. It doesn't try to do any more than it has to. It's compact and dense with a momentum all its own. Don't hesitate. Start here.

In case it's not at the library.

Truth (1968)

Some years ago, after I wrote about the first Led Zeppelin album, someone dropped by and left the following comment: "Gotta admit, I loved this album the first time I heard it - when it was called Truth, by the Jeff Beck Group." This was intriguing. I knew Beck and Jimmy Page both spent time in the Yardbirds but I hadn't realized there were such invidious distinctions to be made between them, with Beck as the genuine article (and/or first to it) and Page the talentless commercial copycat, or so I read the implication. Of course, most of Zepp's various plagiarism lawsuits speak for themselves. But it's not as if Beck and company are so much above that particular fray, with two songs here credited to Willie Dixon (same as Led Zeppelin) and three to "Jeffrey Rod" (that's Beck and Stewart, respectively), with "reworkings of previous blues songs" (it says in Wikipedia). I mostly missed Jeff Beck's early albums in their day and didn't really catch up with him until the mid-'70s and Blow by Blow and Wired, which are closer to jazz fusion. I liked them very much. It's interesting to circle back finally. Plainly I missed a lot. Truth is not only Beck's first solo album, but also a big break for Ron Wood and Rod Stewart (or Sir Roderick David Stewart, Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, as he is known now). I've never known what to make of Rod Stewart. In general, his voice is so singular it calls too much attention to itself for me. It can be effective at evoking a certain melancholy with remarkable resonance, e.g., most famously, "Maggie May," but a little of that can go a long way (and radio gave us a lot of it).

Within parameters, he always sounds the same. On Truth he sounds like Rod Stewart, with all his future history which we now know, in front of a blues jam, which works as well as anything, kind of, although the most melancholy track here is an instrumental, the traditional "Greensleeves." If that commenter intended a one-on-one comparison it does raise interesting questions. Who is the better singer, Robert Plant or Rod Stewart? Who is the better songwriter / band leader / guitar player, Jeff Beck or Jimmy Page? Of course, these things are easily muddied. That's Jimmy Page himself, and John Paul Jones for that matter, on one of the best tracks here, "Beck's Bolero." Jones is on other tracks too, and not just playing bass. Yet, whatever the reason, I can't concede Truth as the superior album to Led Zeppelin—Led Zeppelin's whole mood is not only more coherent, but operating on higher levels generally (keywords: dazed and confused). Truth is a bit tentative and patched together, uncertain of its direction and confecting a few different ones: the production polish of instrumental novelties like "Beck's Bolero" and "Greensleeves" (which come to think of it look forward to Blow by Blow), the spaces for Rod Stewart to ham it up and preen (notably the show tune "Ol' Man River," which unfortunately never fails to remind me of a Stan Freberg sketch) (note that no show tune appears on Led Zeppelin), and finally, my favorite, the longer bluesy rock band workouts. They are the longest tracks here, "Blues Deluxe" (by Jeffrey Rod) and "I Ain't Superstitious" (by Willie Dixon). My answer to my first question above, by the way, is Robert Plant, flaws and all. I just always hear too much of the ridiculous in Sir Rodney and really like only one or two early albums and some of the disco singles. The second question is not as easy, but I lean toward Beck. Certainly he is more lyrical and wide-ranging than Page as a guitar player, and perfectly capable of matching the power. From "Greensleeves" to "Blues Deluxe," Truth is a hodgepodge. But an interesting one with some great moments.

Beck, "Jack-Ass" (1996)

(listen)

Another album that largely escaped me: Odelay in 1996, the Imperial Bedroom of its era in terms of rock-critical falling in line, except this time Robert Christgau was on board too. In fact, he about nails my own reservations while at the same time generally liking it more than I do: "Not quite forbidding, it embeds its lyricism in soundscape, and only prolonged, well-intentioned exposure will enable outsiders to get inside its skilled flow and ramshackle sonic architecture." It left me cold, to be perfectly honest about it, though the wearying years have also had the evident effect of helping me warm to more of these insinuating little concoctions all the time, basically the ones that creased my attention as a result of being released as singles, "Where It's At," "Devils Haircut," "Sissyneck," and "The New Pollution." Except for "Jack-Ass," which peaked at #73 in the U.S. charts and instantly at #1 in my heart, always now and forevermore. I see at Wikipedia that it's based on a sample of a cover of "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" recorded by Them in 1966, which until this moment I had not known. But yes, sure enough, checking now for myself (listen). That's where the trembly guitar figure that opens "Jack-Ass" comes from and is indeed one of its highlights. But Beck's falling-face-forward-from-a-chaise-longue melody is all his, as far as I can make out, and it's the main point here—sad, tentative, relentlessly feeling itself into existence. A real beauty. It also doesn't hurt that he ends it on a flourish straight out of Au hasard Balthazar, although I did not actually become familiar with the 1966 Bresson movie until years after Odelay came out. My favorite song by Beck by miles.

"Loser" (1994)

14. Beck, "Loser" (March 5, 1994, #10)

Beck's one and only hit (for all I know, his one and only attempt at one) is typically enough cobbled together from a lot of pieces—a slide guitar, a sitar figure, a Dr. John drum track, some random Spanish verse, a bracing tumble of words, and I think I hear George Bush (the elder) in there too. Out of this welter emerges a potent vocal hook in the chorus, easily sung and not soon forgotten: "I'm a loser baby so why don't you kill me." The album from which it comes, Mellow Gold, has little else to recommend it (YMMV) and it would be another two years still before Beck had begun to successfully transform himself into the beloved album artist that he remains even now. Compare the career flight path of Radiohead, with their hit "Creep" followed by a lengthy interval before The Bends (and especially OK Computer) and ensuing status as generational touchstone. In both cases, the early hit songs were at once aberrations from the eventual catalog and yet almost perfect anticipations of it too. In many ways, particularly at its moment in time, "Loser" seems like a kind of left-handed if obviously inadvertent tribute to self-slain Kurt Cobain, which only added to its iconic gesture. In the Rorschach morass of it can be heard strains of heaving depression, infantile sarcasm, the usual self-deprecating irony, and the kind of humor on which a person can survive, all of which only go to further compound the bewildering depths of it. Beck, walking himself back a bit from it, is reported to have later said, "The raps and vocals are all first takes. If I’d known the impact it was going to make, I would have put something a little more substantial in it." Me, I'm pretty sure it doesn't deserve the denigration.

Midnite Vultures (1999)

In which Beck seems to evince the idea that the '70s was all about sex and Kraftwerk. Just guessing here. Whatever he is about on this outing, it remains my favorite album from him. Sure, it's just plain wrong-headed when you try to add up all the elements. The charm doesn't fit the sleaze that oozes from every pore, and vice versa. Subject and object rarely find the verb to make their relationship work. There are too many ampersands in the titles. And what happened to the jokes? (Please don't tell me Scientology.) So my recommendation: Don't try to add up all the elements. Play this only where there is adequate space for dancing. Power down the brain and any instinct for rational analysis. There's no other way to do it. But there is pleasure waiting for you on the other side.

Odelay (1996)

Beck first came to the attention of the world at large with the inescapable hit "Loser" in 1994, arguably enough anthem for a generation particularly coming as it did just when Kurt Cobain had retired from everything. Yet, as auspicious as it was, the promise of "Loser" was not delivered on until this album more than two years later. (Most people would probably agree that the erraticism would become a hallmark of his career, even if they wouldn't agree on what's an up and what a down.) Teaming with L.A. producers the Dust Brothers, Beck & co. mix up a rich stew of lo-fi recordings, samples, found sound, skronk, squawk, hard drumming and fine guitar both electric and acoustic, all underpinned by confident songwriting and some pretty good jokes. The same things that made "Loser" so great, in short. For a long time, except for "Jack-Ass," I thought this was basically overrated – it was everybody's #1 with a bullet at the time. But the years have been surprisingly kind to it for me and now, 11 years on, it sounds better every time I play it.

Blow by Blow (1975)

A big, big favorite with me and much of my crowd at the time, all prog-safe and jazzy and as an instrumental with nobody likely to make a fool of themselves shrieking and hoarsing out the blooz. If you wanted to posit the Yardbirds as the big bang of "Rock," itself the natural progression of "rock 'n' roll" -- this probably made more sense then, so don't worry if you're not following along -- your choice of galaxies basically came down to the earnest heroin-addicted awthentic noblesse oblige of Eric Clapton, the satan worship of Jimmy Page (who at least spared his throat), and Jeff Beck, who was the one of these things not like the others. Satan worship evidently not to his taste, he turned here and on the follow-up Wired to the pleasantries of electric guitar sonics in the proggy context of post-Bitches Brew jazz. And makes your head spin when he steps out and gets on top of his game, which here is like always.