The backstory to the recording and release of Loser is a fascinating one.
Beck Hansen is invited to the home studio of Los Angeles-based producer Carl Stephenson and just over six hours later the duo had created a classic thanks to a slide-guitar riff (played by Beck) being looped onto an 8-track, to which was added a hip-hop beat, a bit of sitar (played by Stephenson) and a self-deprecating lyric, much of it made up on the spot, including the ‘I’m A Loser Baby, So Why Don’t You Kill Me? refrain which Beck came up with having heard and then thinking his attempt to rap during the session was dreadful.
500 copies were pressed up and released, on 8 March 1993, by Bong Load Records. The song gets picked up by local college radio stations and gradually makes its way to similar stations up and down the West Coast, before some of the larger Californian commercial stations begin to play it regularly. New York was next to latch onto it, with a copy being passed to someone who worked for Geffen Records whose executives then persuaded Beck to allow Loser to be reissued via its DGC subsidiary in January 1994.
mp3: Beck – Loser
DGC put it out on CD and cassette, while Bong Load, having retained the American rights to release Beck’s songs on vinyl, re-pressed the 12-inch single in larger quantities than before. Within a matter of weeks, Loser was Top 10 on the Billboard Chart in America and by the end of February, it had also gone Top 20 in the UK and most European countries.
I had long believed that here in the UK the single had only been made available via CD and cassette, but there does seem to have been a limited number pressed up on vinyl as a joint release by DGC and Bong Load, with the b-sides being different from these which can be found on the CD.
The extra tracks on the CD are all lo-fi in nature, reflecting the sort of music that Beck had been making in the years prior to becoming ‘an overnight success’
mp3: Beck – Totally Confused
mp3: Beck – Corvette Bummer
mp3: Beck – MTV Makes Me Want To Smoke Crack (Lounge Version)
The third of the extra tracks is a different version of an earlier 7″ single that had been released by Beck on Flipside Records, based in Pasadena. It was a split effort with a power-pop trio called Bean, with both acts contributing two songs. Copies of that single now fetch very decent sums of money on the second-hand market.
THE NEW VINYL VILLAIN 