Puppet Show and Beck

The Beck concert was pretty damn cool. Where to begin, where to begin? I guess it makes sense to start with the opening act. The opener was a guy named Jamie Lidell, and I had never heard of him before. He turned out to be pretty interesting. He had kind of a one-man-band thing going on, he was out there all by himself with a drum machine, sequencer, and sampler. He had a great voice which he used on some soul numbers that he mixed in between some beat-heavy craziness on the drum machine. He even worked in some human beat-boxing. I thought he was really good and you could see the Beck connection (funky-ass white boy with some electronica flourishes).

It took a while for them to set up for Beck, but he finally hit the stage and launched into a heavy version of “Devil’s Haircut”. It soon became clear that there was something unusual going on. That thing turned out to be puppets. At the back of the stage there was a smaller stage set up with four puppeteers operating a group of puppets that looked like each member of the band. And before all you wacky puppet people jump down my throat, I guess they were technically marionettes. I just like the word puppet, so I’m sticking with that! There was a definite "Being John Malkovich" vibe.

There were 3 large video screens behind the stage. A camera was filming the puppets and they projected the image up on the screens. The puppet for each band member would mimic what the real person was doing. The mouth on the Beck puppet moved, so it would sing along with him. They did this for the whole show! The puppets even had little props like maracas and accurate looking instruments, although the Beck puppet didn’t have a harmonica when that made an appearance. There was one guy doing some crazy-ass dancing, and the puppet did too. The whole puppet thing sounds crazy, but it was actually really cool when you looked at the video screen and it looked like your typical music video shots. Beck said that it was an idea that they had that they just had to follow through with. He said they got the idea from that shot in Spinal Tap where the marquee says “Puppet Show and Spinal Tap” as seen below:



Musically things were pretty good except that Beck’s vocals seemed a little bit too low in the mix at first. On the acoustic stuff his guitar was just a tad too loud. There was a good mixture of his loud songs and the acoustic stuff. The band sounded great. In the middle of the show Beck did a few of his acoustic songs with only the bass player accompanying him, and the rest of the band sat down around a table that had been set up on stage, whereupon they were waited on by crazy dancing guy and brought food and beverage (mirrored in puppet world complete with table, chairs, food, and utensils). After a few slow songs Beck launched into an upbeat number and the guys at the table started using the glasses and silverware for percussion – it was actually pretty cool.

The first encore consisted of the recorded version of “Loser” performed only by the puppets. When the real band returned 2 of the guys were in bear suits (represented in puppet world as teddy bears) for one song. O-kay. There was a really funny recorded bit that they showed where the puppets went sight-seeing around Dallas. They went to Texas Stadium and Dealey Plaza. And I got a huge laugh at the beginning of the piece when the Beck puppet said: “This is Dallas, where Mexican food comes from. I’m Beck. And I’m a Mexican.”

About the only thing I can complain about was that there was only one song from the album “Mutations”, which I really like. All in all it gets the JC seal of approval!