As alluded to earlier, Beck played a short-notice show at the Echoplex last night. The show was announced via email on Friday morning and tickets went on sale at 5pm. I was lucky enough to nab a quick pair, but there were reports that there weren’t that many and that there was some sort of access code being given out to friends, family and industry folks – whatever. I was the last person to get in at will call and then they let about 50 or 100 people without advance tickets in, so it must not have been too bad.

It was my first time seeing Beck live and while I wasn’t disappointed, I think I would have preferred seeing him 10 or so years ago when he was just starting to draw attention to himself. It was the only US show and really just to prep a new band (including Beck/Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich) for a European tour so it’s okay that they were just going through the motions as first. They definitely got warmed up by the 6th or 7th song and it was a lot livelier. Luckily they played a majority of back catalog classics like “Loser,” “Mothafukka,” “Two Turntables,” etc… Definitely the songs I wanted to see live, even some stuff from Sea Change (”Paper Tiger”) and the newest albums.

Here are some sloppy photos I took and I’ll have decent YouTube video up of “Lord Only Knows” that they played during the encore, though my camera ran out of memory about 3 minutes in. That’ll learn me to never delete photos. Enjoy.