Playing at Rage : Beck’s Stage-Savvy, Focused Show Exudes Revolutionary Intensity Without Sacrificing Goofiness

A facetious memo to the music business, regarding Beck: He’s a winner, baby, so maybe you should kill him.

After all, this unlikely revolutionary wants to kill you, or at least your most reliable golden goose of the past 20-odd years--the divide-and-profit marketing schemes that have cordoned off much of the public into disjointed, easily targeted factions of taste.

Beck Hansen is the slight, boyish, clueless-looking kid from Los Angeles who arrived in 1993 with “Loser,” a hit whose refrain--”I’m a loser baby, so why don’t you kill me?”--was taken as the epitome of slacker-generation aimlessness. Now he is purposefully firing heavy ammo at the walls of audience segregation.

It’s perhaps more than coincidence that the back cover of Beck’s new, album-of-the-year candidate, “Odelay,” shows a worried-looking Humpty Dumpty hovering above the slogan “Je suis un revolutionaire.”

It also is telling that “Odelay” signifies the sound of a yodel--a signature device of Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams, who, like Elvis Presley after them, helped lay a foundation for modern pop by melding white folks’ country music with black folks’ blues.

Like all the best revolutions, Beck’s is conservative at heart, seeking to use what’s best from the musical past as a basis for moving forward. His aim, in the striking, cannily arrayed stylistic overlays of “Odelay,” is not to tear apart, but to rebuild in a new form what had been torn asunder.

One hesitates to anoint a sweet-natured goofball like Beck as a revolutionary--revolutions generally take a lot of inner steel. But maybe musical revolutions are best carried out in the playful spirit that marked Beck’s performance Thursday night at the Galaxy Concert Theatre, the inaugural show of his “Odelay” campaign.

Playful, yes, but not scattered like some past local shows when Beck engaged in kid-in-a-sandbox self-amusement or zigzagged between his various guises as rapper, acoustic folkie and alterna-rock noisemaker, unable to hammer his disparate materials into a coherent shape.

That problem is solved, judging from this focused, well-conceived 80-minute performance, which exuded intensity and purpose without sacrificing Beck’s goofiness. How seriously can you take a fellow who comes out puffing a cigarette in a yachtsman’s peaked hat and double-breasted jacket, looking like Richie Rich trying to be Thurston Howell III? Or when he mumbles mildly, amiably and not altogether coherently between songs, attempts to break-dance and ends his show chanting “Satan, Satan, Satan”?

With the aid of some sound-cuts and hip-hop scratching effects triggered by keyboard player Theo Mondle, Beck and his flexible four-piece band were able to do justice to the densities of his “Odelay” material, which accounted for eight of the 18 songs.

The bass-and-drums team, cue-ball-headed Justin Mendal-Johnson and bushy-haired Joey Waronker, could rock with clout or provide loose-limbed funk. Guitarist Smokey Hormel, a roots-rockin’ veteran of the Blasters and John Doe’s solo band, was just the guy for the country and bluesy passages, while also serving up the meatier slabs of sound required for Beck’s noisy alternative side.

Showing attention to detail and a regard for rhythmic complexity, all hands added percussion embellishments on maracas, tambourines and the like, with Hormel even tinkling a triangle a couple of times.

Beck opened with “[Expletive] With My Head,” an appetizer of blues and psychedelic pop flavors culled from his 1994 album, “Mellow Gold.” Then he leaped into his new stuff, beginning with the hammering hip-hop and riff-rock of “Devil’s Haircut.”

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By the fifth song, the spectacular “Where It’s At,” he had the capacity crowd bouncing and quaking as rap music reunited with one of its vibrant ancestors, the Memphis R&B; tradition represented by Mondle’s nifty Isaac Hayes and Booker T. Jones licks on electric piano and organ. Keeping the scenery varied and rich, Beck veered into “Lord Only Knows,” a laid-back country-rocker that would have been at home on the Rolling Stones’ “Exile on Main Street.”

Pacing the show confidently and coherently, Beck used a cooler, avant-garde number, “Readymade,” as a prelude to his five-song solo-acoustic set. The solo segment offered the strong melodic instincts of a solid, folk-based singer-songwriter as Beck honored requests for songs from the two independent-label releases he has put out alongside the major-label “Mellow Gold” and “Odelay.”

He showed stage savvy and good manners as he invited two audience members to sing on “Satan Gave Me a Taco”--a song he said he had forgotten. When it had gone on long enough, Beck sent them on their way, but nicely.

The band returned with “Loser.” Though not tossed off, it was not a peak moment. Beck and his audience seemed to share a recognition that the hit is old business that has been surpassed and supplanted by his new agenda.

The homestretch moved from the driving, alterna-rock mass of “Minus” to “Jack-Ass,” a gentle, introspective acoustic lament that took on a Neil Young & Crazy Horse hue with Hormel’s throaty-toned guitar solo.

Beck signed off with rap (“Beercan”), an equable, movin’-on country-rock song (“Sissyneck”) and that closing bit of howling mock-Satanism whose title coincides with one of the most unprintable expletives of all.

The band’s booming through much of the show masked Beck’s penchant for oblique, Dylan-esque word play and image-flinging. On record, it reveals a delight in language that is rare in modern-rock, if not downright revolutionary.

Beck’s burry voice was tuneful and flexible but too plain to evidence the command and stature of a singer capable of making a revolution all by himself. That will require help from legions of other bands. But if Humpty Dumpty does fall, and mass tastes become reconfigured toward historically informed eclecticism, Beck can ditch his sailor’s cap for the tri-cornered hat of a Minuteman and wear it proudly.

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Opening was the Apples in Stereo, a Colorado band that reaches for some of the loftiest heights of pure pop enchantment--including a major crush on Brian Wilson--but has only the tenuous musical grasp of a sloppy garage band.

The indie-label foursome’s set offered an appealing sweetness, but Robert Schneider’s thin, creaky, wistful voice and the band’s typical low-tech alterna-band clatter wore thin on sustained exposure.

If Schneider could discover a second vocal gear that allowed for more bite, or if the band could engage a strong second singer and tighten up a lot, it might be able to tap into the melancholy moods and pure-pop aplomb that made bands such as Australia’s Go-Betweens and England’s the Jazz Butcher such pleasures.