LOS ANGELES--Before Beck, there was Howe Gelb [ tickets ].

Best known for his work with the band Giant Sand [ tickets ] ("best known" being a relative term here), the Tucson-based Gelb, for 20 years or so, has been taking his particular style of folk-rock and blending it with genres ranging from jazz to country to grunge.

Gelb performed at Los Angeles' Knitting Factory on Friday (6/8). Though the outer area of the Knitting Factory is like a sports bar as imagined by William Gibson, the mainroom is a great place to see a band--roomy, two floors, great sightlines all around. Gelb was the middle act between Superstring, a jazz band fronted by percussionist D.J. Bonebrake, and headliner Kristin Hersh.

At stage right, a piano, two microphones standing next to each other, and a table with a CD player were all clustered together. Gelb sat in the middle of this equipment with an acoustic guitar in his hands and distortion pedals at his feet.

For 30 or 40 minutes, Gelb played recent original material, all of it slow, very little of it with easily grasped lyrics. He switched off between piano and guitar, sometimes within the same song. Occasionally, he stopped playing to pop in a CD of voice, music or, in one instance, applause. He usually sang into one microphone; the other one had a ghostly reverb that enhanced the already haunting nature of Gelb's nasal voice. It's a testament to Gelb's performance that he got the crowd of two hundred or so, most of whom were presumably there to see Hersh, to stand silently and watch.

Gelb devoted the last 15 minutes of his set to playing snippets of songs from Giant Sand's forthcoming album of covers, including Marty Robbins' "El Paso," Neil Young [ tickets ]'s "Out on the Weekend," X [ tickets ]'s "Johny Hit and Run Paulene" and Black Sabbath's "Iron Man." Gelb turned "Iron Man" into a slow piano ballad, like something Neil Young might have written in the '70s, which description suggests an unenjoyably ironic cover, but Gelb's version actually worked. On "Johny Hit and Run Paulene," former X drummer Bonebrake joined Gelb on stage behind a single snare drum. (During this set, Gelb said that Giant Sand had toured with PJ Harvey [ tickets ]--"She'd never heard of us"--and that Harvey had agreed to sing on the covers album.)

It's appropriate that Gelb covers Young: the roots-based genre explorer is Gelb's most apparent influence. However, whereas Young's music usually inhabits a single genre at a time before moving on, Gelb's mixes genres like paint. On Gelb's and Giant Sand's albums, one can sometimes find skippable, self-conscious slop--call that music a dull brown. But on Friday, Gelb took care with his mixing, and the result was a lush purple.