Blog - #beck memories
#beck memories
I think it was over 10 years ago when I would hang out all the time in the #beck channel on the Undernet. There were a lot of nice people in there all the time, and here are some memories.
First there was operator Truck. He was a very nice guy though I think he'd often speak non-sense that no one would understand, or he'd be out with a weird away message. For a while I recall he was called Pants too. Anyway, he ran a great Beck fan site back in the day at http://www.rain.org/truck/ (dead), when Beck didn't have a site for himself. It contained all lyrics known to the human species and a lot of other cool stuff. The design was simple, using frames, but it was perfect. Years later Beck hired him to start beck-web.com (dead) that later became the beck.com that we all know. Truck still runs the site to this day, and without his old fan site today's site surely wouldn't be as complete.
Tell me about a success story where a guy who does what he likes gets hired to do it better, yeah!
I also remember a guy called Port who was also almost always there, he was a good friend of Truck. He lived in the mid-east U.S. I think, while Truck lived in California. Port made some music (so did Truck), and we'd sometimes exchange our MP3s in the channel. I can't remember any of it, but well maybe it's still sitting on a hard disk somewhere..!? Or maybe not. Together they had made a beautiful Flash fan site for Warp Records band Plone.
Next, can't remember nicknames, but there was a guy in Canada (Ontario I think) who put together a fan Beck tribute tape. Users from the channel recorded covers of Beck songs, or simply a Beck-inspired original song, and all sent them by mail to the guy who put it together and sent it back to everyone. I participated with my band Glad en Mono, and it was a lot of fun! We did a version of "Hot Wax" that was much too close to the original. When submitting our track by tape in the mail, I had somehow left some unrelated outtake on the B-side, and it ended up as a hidden track on the tribute tape. I think Beck was also given a copy of the tribute.
Other people I remember well were Magoo and Beany of the Philippines. They were in an experimental band called Faust! formed of 4 teenage siblings of the Syjuco family, Magoo being the youngest at about 12. Vocals were in English but a song or two was in Tagalog. At the time they posted their entire album in MP3s on their web site (maybe it was faust.com.ph (dead)), which seemed to be an unpopular thing to do at the time, and they got some press attention from that in their country. They sent me Faust posters, which I was very proud of (maybe I was the only Canadian with a poster of their band on my wall?). I found this interview from 1998.
Anyway yesterday I was Googling these people by curiosity, and found out that Magoo (real name Maxine) has become a model and also poet and performance artist in the recent years! I was delighted to find some video on YouTube, as recent as a month or two ago. I like these bits with her band Utakan: 1, 2. More stuff here.
Why all of these flashbacks all of a sudden? It's some MySpace user representing T-shirt brand named Truck (unrelated it seems) that triggered this blast from the past. I allowed their add just because of that. Thanks!
Posted on May 11, 2007 at 21:29 | Tweet
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