RETURN As dressing rooms go, it’s the usual dump— complexion-draining overhead lighting, mismatched furniture, walls the varying shades of Amsterdam’s green-gray canals. Beck is sitting quietly at a table scattered with food. Absently, he dips his sweater sleeve into a smear of preserves. A drag, for sure, but he doesn’t even bother to wipe the sticky blob off the table. If his energy was low last night in Zurich, it’s not even metering tonight. The sleepless bus ride, a Spin photo shoot, a hernia he’s been nursing since a harness-stunt mishap on the set of a 2004 video shoot, all have him blanched. Ironically, he’s eyeing tonight’s set list to make sure there aren’t too many slow tunes. Otherwise, he says, the audience “ends up at the falafel hut.”

This time around, Beck is touring with a stripped-down new band and stage show, in part because it suits the leaner muscularity of the new songs, in part because it’s what he can afford. The puppet shows and Nudie suits and horn sections of the past? “Well,” he says. “I usually spend my own money trying to make the shows interesting, and I end up not breaking even sometimes. These days, it’s just ‘Get up there and play,’ and that’s all that’s important.”

Despite his stature as one of the most electric, forward-thinking, and prolific rock stars of the past two decades, Beck, at his core, is an artist with the DNA of a bohemian, a feverish noodler who’d have to make art regardless of business considerations.

He chuckles nervously. If he had his choice, “none of it would be a business consideration,” Beck says. “I mean, I’ve already blown most business considerations. I can’t tell you how many opportunities I’ve turned down.”

Like commercials? “Oh, yeah. Most people I know don’t think twice about it. It sounds stupid, but it’s just not the reason I started making music. It has to ultimately be something that is for the sake of creative effort rather than pure business. Maybe that’s because I came of age in the ’80s and saw so much commercialism. It was disgusting to me. So I’ve always tried to avoid it.”

European vocation: Playing in Madrid, Spain, July 9; son Cosimo onstage in Norway, June 15

BECK: They just do their own thing. I thought when you had kids that there were all these things that were gonna have to happen: tell ’em about this or that, sit them down and play them music and show them what art is all about. But they come out singing. Before he could talk, Cosimo had his favorite songs. And they weren’t songs I played him. SPIN: Like? BECK: He loves Joanna Newsom and Gnarls Barkley. And “Splish Splash (I Was Taking a Bath).”

high on the hog. Even after Odelay, I was still in a tiny two-bedroom house. It’s funny, my tour manager will say, “Yeah, I worked with them. They have a jet.” And I’d be like, “Really? That person has a jet?” Seriously, you’d be shocked. But they’re just better at business. It’s not my strong suit, at all. SPIN: Were you upset, then, when People reported on the $7 million home you bought last fall? BECK: Yeah, well, I don’t really own that. When you buy a house, you make a down payment, and…actually, I’m selling it because I don’t have the money to live there. I feel stupid talking about this stuff, but even if I sold everything I own, I don’t have near that much money.

HARMONIC DISTORTION HARMONIC DISTORTION “According to Duncan, sometime in their two-year acquaintance, Beck expressed to her and Blake a desire to leave the church, and they had offered him encouragement and even assistance. ‘ That’s ridiculous. Totally false,’ Beck said. ‘Had we been closer and discussed anything as personal as religion, I would have only had positive things to say about Scientology.’ ”

—From “The Golden Suicides,” Vanity Fair, January 2008

HEAD REALIGNMENT HEAD REALIGNMENT

In lining up dates for the Modern Guilt tour, Beck turned down an opportunity to play his first-ever headlining gig at Manhattan’s 19,500-seat Madison Square Garden. His current show, Beck thought, was “just not right” for the space.

LOOP “When the song [‘Loser’] was over, one of them said, ‘ We think you’ve got something here. It’s gonna need work, and we can help with that. We’ll also have to change your image a bit. But if you do those things, maybe we’ll be able to work with you.’ And I looked at them and said, ‘Goodbye.’ ”

HARMONIC HARMONIC CONVERGENCE The guest log at Amsterdam’s Dylan Hotel on Monday, June 30: Beck and family (in town for a June 30 gig), Radiohead (in town for a July 1 gig), R.E.M. (in town for a July 2 gig).

CROSSTALK SPIN: You come from a family of artists. Your grandfather Al Hansen was an influential but scuffling player in the Dada-like Fluxus art movement of the ’60s. Your dad, David Campbell, was for years a sideman in L.A. How did it feel to be a person following those same creative impulses but suddenly making a lot of money doing it? BECK: My record deal wasn’t such that I was living

CROSSTALK CROSSTALK SPIN: Have your priorities shifted now that you’ve got a family? Isn’t touring antithetical to that life? BECK: I don’t know. I don’t think I work any less with having a family. There are times when I wish that were the case. But I’m like anybody; I have to work. You give as much as you can to your children, but I’m in no position to stop everything I’m doing. SPIN: Did you always want kids? BECK: Oh yeah. For years. SPIN: Do you take something away when you see the joy and spontaneity in them? BECK: It becomes acutely apparent that you’re the grown-up! [Laughs] SPIN: Do you encourage them to make art?

PATCH-IN PATCH-IN I asked a friend, a Beck fan, if she had a question she wanted me to ask him. She e-mailed me this: “Why are you a crazy Scientologist when you seem like such a smart fella?”

Until the early aughts, Beck had managed to keep his lifelong connection to the Church of Scientology fairly private. For many people, the queasiness of that affiliation to an organization routinely reported to be a ruthless cult doesn’t quite square with Beck’s cool, which got tested big-time with the suicides last July of artists Jeremy Blake and Theresa Duncan. Introduced to Beck by filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson, Blake—a pioneering digital painter—was recruited to create the cover art for Sea Change. Sensing an opportunity, Blake’s girlfriend, Duncan, passed Beck a script called Alice Underground, which she was hoping to turn into her directorial de but. He read it as a favor, though at that point he’d turned down many screen offers. As Duncan’s project unraveled, she and Blake became paranoid that they were being stalked and professionally sabotaged by Scientologists. Beck, Duncan claimed to friends, had confided that he was desperate to break from the church but terrified to do so. Duncan’s punishment for making this public was, she thought, the source of their trouble.

After a year of spiraling hysteria, Blake and
Duncan left L.A. for New York, where her unexpected
suicide by overdose led her shattered lover, a week
later, to walk naked into the Atlantic to his death.

There are only two things in our conversation that make Beck barely audible: talk of his relationship with his wife, whose family has deep roots in Scientology, and any discussion of the church itself—not that he’s unwilling to go there in that sort of Teflon way with which Scientologists have been known to tackle such questions.

SPIN: What has it been like to have so much press
devoted to your spiritual life?