In the 1960s, Bibbe Hansen was a visual artist and part of the in-crowd at Andy Warhol’s Factory, while her husband, David Campbell, was a viola player and string arranger who worked on classic albums by Carole King and Marvin Gaye. In 1970, they produced Beck Hansen, whose artsy Los Angeles upbringing was in no small part responsible for his becoming one of the oddest and most original platinum-selling recording artists of the 1990s.
Armed with an acoustic guitar, a sampler and an 8-track, Beck took the world by storm in 1994 with the zeitgeist-defining slacker anthem “Loser.” Though it’s still his only top 10 single in America, “Loser” was just the beginning for Beck, who later received Grammy nominations for Album of the Year for 1996’s. Over the last three decades, Beck has been an acoustic troubadour, an absurdist rapper and a journeyman rock star, truly occupying a category of his own in the music industry.