Notes:
Beck returns to McCabe's Guitar Shop, a tiny room to perform a benefit for McCabe's itself. Tickets were $200 and the room is tiny (120-150 people).
Beck has history with McCabe's, when he played there in 1993, opening for Liz Phair. "Loser" was fairly big, but Mellow Gold, nor any of his main early albums, were out yet. (He also did his own show there in 1994.)
So to get the show started, Beck reminisced about the Liz Phair gig and played a number of his old folk songs to start. This led to him doing a bunch of the oldies throughout the show. Similarly, because McCabe's is a guitar shop that generally books old folk musicians, he did a number of country/folk covers.
Halfway through "Rowboat," Beck called Roger Joseph Manning Jr. down to help and he joined in on piano for the rest of the show. Then on the next song, he had Jason Falkner join in on acoustic guitar as well. They made a spectacular trio.
Jason Falkner also opened the show himself, doing a solo acoustic set of 5-6 of his own songs (and one on piano).
Song notes:
Beck talked about Ramblin' Jack Elliott before starting a quick cover, singing "brown eyes are beautiful" and noting that Jack had a bunch of songs about brown eyes. From my quick research, he's right that Jack has a bunch of songs about that... but none seem to have the line "brown eyes are beautiful" in it exactly. So I dunno, I have a placeholder song in here for now.
Also he talked about the Carter Family quickly before jamming on a Maybelle Carter riff, and Jason and Roger joined in. It was instrumental. I am not yet sure if that was a specific song, or just the generic Carter-guitar thing, but for now I have "Farmboy Breakdown" in for its place, which is pretty close to what it sounded like (except without drums).
The second "Lost Cause" was because Beck started chatting with Jason and Roger about how to make his songs more stadium friendly, and how instead of doing the fragile slow stuff, what should he do to be more like Dave Matthews. They tried to semi-reggae up "Lost Cause" for a quick second, before they remembered their more successful goth version from last year and did that.