There's a scene in "This is Spinal Tap" where the fictional heavy-metal rockers arrive at a venue to find they've received second-billing to a puppet show. Leave it to Beck [ tickets ] to allow himself to be upstaged by puppets--for entertainment's sake, of course.

Never content to give a run-of-the-mill concert, Beck presented what he described as a "rock show/puppet show" to a clearly pleased crowd Wednesday night (5/24) at Freeborn Hall, on the UC Davis campus in Davis, CA.

The show began with the familiar opening of Beck's best-known song, "Loser." But when the house lights came up, four puppeteers were manning painstakingly detailed marionettes of Beck and each member of his band, giving a full-on air-guitar/lip-sync puppet show. As the puppeteers worked their magic inside a box at the rear of the stage, the puppet show was beamed onto a big screen behind them with cliched rock-film angles and effects.

Beck and his human band--tight from the get-go--then took the stage to play "Black Tambourine" (from last year's "Guero"), but the live puppet show continued on the "PuppeTron" screen (as Beck dubbed it) for the rest of the night.

Things really hit their stride more than midway through the set, when Beck strapped on an acoustic guitar and his band retreated to an on-stage table to sit down for a bite to eat. (They feigned ordering from menus as the bespectacled fellow serving as a dancer/jester/percussionist throughout the night acted as their waiter.)

As the band dined, Beck played a handful of his quieter songs, including an excellent rendition of "Lost Cause," from 2002's "Sea Change." In one of the show's most memorable moments, the table housing the band came alive in the midst of "Golden Age," the quartet providing the percussion by using their fists and utensils on the table.

The group returned to its instruments for the remainder of the set, finishing up with the rump-shaking "Where It's At."

After a crowd-pleasing, puppet-show vignette on the PuppeTron that showed the puppet version of the band hanging out on the UC Davis campus, Beck and the group returned to play "E-Pro," a single from "Guero," and followed it up with some random insanity involving two men in bear costumes.

All in all, it was another day at the office for Beck, who, against the odds, continues to deliver the unexpected after all these years--not to mention some pretty vital music.