Ich Bin Ein Beijinger

Midi Music Festival 2007

The Midi Music Festival has become a real cultural phenomenon, drawing young people from all over the country and giving me increasing hope that the still-marginal rock culture has reached critical mass and momentum. This year, I hear there were 80,000 people on the first day, and the line for tickets was nearly a kilometer long, wrapping from the east gate of Haidian Park all the way around the north side. Organizers did a terrific job of crowd control and security, but I still worry whether the auhorities will squash the thing next year--especially if there's as much dope-themed stuff for sale as I saw this year:

   

With our Ayi on break, I've been on baby duty and couldn't get out to Midi for any of the other days--just Friday, the day we played. I hear Hate Space from Denmark played an amazing set on the first night--pure Thrash, delivered good 'n tight. Friday didn't see nearly the crowds as the first day, but still quite a good turnout. I got there just after noon and was greeted by a busload of fans from Tianjin, all decked out in their Metal gear. They even had an authentic, slutty-looking Metal chick in tow. One can never have enough of those, you see. I met people who'd come from as far as Chongqing for the show.

I managed to catch Robert Gonnella's new band, Raging Mob, on the Gibson Guitar stage just before we went on. Robert lives in Beijing and organizes a soccer league here, but he's still the lead singer of the vintage 80s German Speed/Thrash Metal band Assassin, which he tells me played some shows in Russia just last week. Raging Mob's quite good, and Robert's an excellent performer.

The guy with me in the picture below is called Chen Chao, and he says he came all the way from Huangshan in Anhui just to see Chunqiu. You can see him front and center in the crowd shot I snapped as we were setting up, second pic below. I could see him singing along with every song. After doing several interviews and a whole lot of mugging for pics with fans, I spoke with Chen, who paid the band a very high compliment: saying that when he listens to us he feels like he's not just listening to music, but partaking of a distinct form of culture. Very kind indeed!

The amazing thing was that all the bands were actually ahead of schedule: Usually, you get rushed on and off stage, but on Friday at Midi in Haidian Park, there was ample time, and organizers actually had us add two songs to our originally planned set.

It felt really good. I was enjoying watching the audience so much--they successfully crowd-surfed a guy who must have weighed 140 kg, and moshed in a manner most joyous--that I found myself forgetting to move around on stage at various points.

Chunqiu will be playing a zhuanchang (a nice long headlining show with only one other support act) in Beijing some time in June. Watch this space for details.

Andy McKee, "Shanghai." Amazing guitarist.

You've probably already seen this guy's YouTube videos. Absolutely amazing. Check out his rendition of Toto's 80s hit "Africa," and the song "Drifting." His playing reminds me of (an updated) Stanley Jordan and Michael Hedges, rest in peace.

Chunqiu to play Midi Festival after all

A wonderful surprise this evening! I got a call from Zhang Fan at the Midi School, who said that Miankong (面孔) can't play the Festival this year, so Chunqiu is on. (I posted earlier about my disappointment that we hadn't applied before the deadline this year). We'll be playing on May 4 (my favorite day) at 2:40 in the afternoon. It was loud where I was when the call came, so I couldn't quite make out whether he said main stage or the second (Gibson guitar) stage. That's where we were last year (the pic's from last May), and I thought there were more people at the Gibson stage than at the main, at least the afternoon we played. Either way I'm really relieved, and psyched to play. If you haven't been to Midi, by all means go. The festival just keeps getting better and better, featuring a steadily improving caliber of foreign and Chinese acts alike. As much of a draw is the crowd itself--a whole generation of rock kids who literally come from all over the country, with their tents pitched and blankets spread out on the grass, just getting into the music and having a good time. Puts a smile on my face.

Greenpeace and the Midi Music Festival - Good news and bad

First the good news: The Midi Music Festival is going Green. and Peaceful. Beijing's marvelous annual band blowout, which takes place from May 1 to 4 this year in Haidian Park, will be working closely with the global environmental organization to promote green consciousness.

Sze Pang Cheung (a.k.a. Kontau, on the left), who has headed up communications in China for Greenpeace for the last four years or so, and Fish Yu, outreach campaigner, came by the Ogilvy office today to give me the low-down on what's happening with Midi. They'll have a booth at the festival, and will debut an environmental doc called "The Planet," shot by big-name European filmmakers and featuring interviews with some serious environmental heavyweights. They've also listed 10 or so main stage bands and half the bands on the secondary stage to do short environmental spots that will be shown during breakdown/setup between bands. And they're bringing Dave Stewart, formerly of the Eurythmics, out to Beijing for the festival. He'll be busting out some old Eurythmics hits, I'm told.

I gotta say, these Greenpeace guys not only dress the part, but they practice what they preach: When the tea lady came into the meeting room with paper cups, Fish quickly asked her to bring ceramic ones--which you see before them above--instead. Respect. They're very cool guys who are obviously committed to their cause, and I'm hoping to help them out however I can. Some years back I spoke with Greenpeace's international director Gerd Leipold here in Beijing, and he impressed me, frankly, with his embrace of globalization, his pragmatism, and his PR savvy. He comes from the PR world, actually, if I recall. (Correction: I recall incorrectly, as Kontau tells me). Same is true of Kontau: He really has his head around marketing.

Okay, so now the bad news: My damned band won't be playing at Midi this year. Not on either stage. For the first time in years. It's our own fault, too, because 1) we didn't sign up because a certain Yunnanese bandmate of mine couldn't tell us by the deadline whether he was coming back from Kunming in time for Midi, and 2) because a certain high-ranking Midi School official (hint: he has the same name as my wife) told me when I called him today to see whether I could wheedle Chunqiu's way onto the roster, if only on the secondary stage, that he thinks we ought to lose our singer because his voice lacks that leather-lunged liliang that Metal singers are supposed to have. Fuckity-fuck fuck fuck. Dave Stewart's looking for some Chinese musicians to help him out on stage; maybe I'll put my hand up to play bass for him. Admittedly, I was no big fan of the Eurythmics, though I do love Annie Lennox's voice, and songs like "Who's That Girl" and "Here Comes the Rain Again" had lovely melodies despite the New Wave synth I so loathe.

A Tang Dynasty music video thought lost

I met in Shanghai on Thursday afternoon with Tudou.com founders Gary Wang and Marc van der Chijs. Just beforehand, I was showing their video sharing site--which was China's first and remains one of the handful of leaders that has a good shot of surviving the coming die-off--to some colleagues and on a whim did a search for my old band.

What I turned up, to my delight, was this video that we shot for the song "Time at my Heels" (跑在时间前面，or 时间 as it was also known) from our second album Epic. We weren't happy with it at the time, and decided not to release it, but it was broadcast once on a regional (Hunan) station if I recall only once. Lucky someone got hold of it. It's kind of cheesy, but it's the only rock video from that album, so I'm glad it's there. There's also a bunch of old TD videos from songs like "A Dream Return to the Tang Dynasty," and some live stuff from a TD show in Germany.

Gary and Marc, by the way, are totally cool guys. Wish them luck on the Lhasa-to-Kathmandu bike ride they're planning for the end of April. And watch for a big announcement from them next week.

Melted. Your. Faces.

All modesty aside, we fucking rocked on Friday night. May have been the best show we've played in years. Everything felt right: the crowd was completely amped, all throwing the horns, moshing and crowd surfing in a civilized sort of way, and doing this unison, arms-linked headbang I've only seen Chinese Metal audiences do. Our sound was good, too--at least through the monitors on stage. Yang Meng sang well, I thought: a stark contrast to the night before, when he couldn't really hear himself (Joel and Brendan were at that show, and thought the mix buried Yang Meng's vox). On Friday we performed the acoustic song "Shan Hai Jian" for the first time live, and it went over quite well. The bewitching Chinese-American radio personality Helen Feng, who also happens to be lead singer of Warner recording artists Ziyo! was there, too. She's super cool, very smart and switched on, and I value her input. Her only real criticism was that our drummer Diao Lei sacrificed a little accuracy for performance; he wasn't completely on point, she said, and I confess that's true, but he made up for it, I thought, with his enthusiasm.

Metal Fest Friday

Chunqiu/Suffocated (Zhi Xi) axeman Kou Zhengyu turns 28 on Friday, and he's celebrating as he has for the past six years by putting on a big Metal fest. Kou's one of the coolest guys and best players on the scene, well loved by pretty much everyone who knows him.

See the reminder a few posts down, which has details about our Thursday show at Star Live, which will showcase some of Beijing's Chinese folk-inflected bands. (Spring & Autumn, despite our foundations in Metal, has some discernibly Chinese minzu stuff going on musically). Hope to see some of you at one or both of the shows! Come up and introduce yourselves.

And ponder with me if you will the deep mystery of why so many Metal bands insist on rendering their logos in that illegible thorn-like font. I have no idea what the two of the three on the bottom of this flyer actually say, but the bands--Evil Thorn (there they go with the thorns again!), Ritual Day, and Bloody Climax are all actually pretty fun.

By the way, we rehearsed tonight in a new place in Beijing called Jin Nezha (金哪吒) near Gulou, at 9 Baochao Hutong (宝抄胡同9号). Great place with excellent amps and drums, clean rooms, and only 40 kuai an hour for the big room. Sorry, didn't think to write down the phone number but I'll post it later.

Reminder: Chunqiu (Spring & Autumn) Shows Thursday & Friday

Hair's gonna fly, heads will bang, and the Cloven-Hooved Prince of Darkness will have his due on Thursday and Friday night. Please do come check out my band, Chunqiu (Spring & Autumn). We're playing the Star Live (Xingguang Xianchang, 星光现场) on Thursday and at the New Get Lucky (Xin Hao Yun, 新豪运) with a few other bands--including Suffocated, which will rock your face quite off.

If you want a great venue, come to the Thursday show. If you're more into the lineup and the venue doesn't matter as much, come to the Friday show: that's bound to showcase some of the 'Jing's  finest Metal acts. Both shows start 9-ish. Oh, that's me on the right. Hail, Satan.

SXWS Day 2

I'm developing a real fondness for Austin--the hospitality of the local folks, the evident pride they have in the music culture that's grown up here, the efficiency with which the town's handled the massive inflow of people for the Festival. Wandering 6th street and hearing all this music--some of it fabulous, some of it, meh--I keep thinking whether it'd be possible, one day, to do something like this in a city in China. Maybe when my kids are grown up and playing in bands.

The panel on the Chinese music industry I just appeared on seems to have gone over well: we had one curmudgeon in the crowd to said we sounded like a bunch of condescending ugly Americans, but I think he was just put off by the fact that everyone on the panel was a North American. He seemed to paritcularly dislike me. i believe the concensus among others listening was that the guy was a dick.

The other panelists were Michael LoJudice, who runs North American operations for Beijing-based Modern Sky (he was heavily sedated, having had his wrist broken by a bounder for one too many stage dives the night before), Adam Lewis, from Planetary, which bring indie acts to China; my friend Jon Campbell, who works with the Midi Festival, also brings bands over, and is an all-around great person to know on the Beijing music scene despite our sometimes widely divergent musical tasts; and Matthew Kagler, owner of Tag Team Records, which has at least one verh good Chinese band--Lonely China Day (寂寞夏日, EP cover pictured left), a band now moving in a sort of electronic-heavy Mogwai direction but which used to play pretty straight-ahead, Chinese-inflected guitar rock and frequently opened for Chunqiu back in 2002 to 2003. Matthew says they're going lap-top, which to me, an unreconstructed rock guy, is disconcerting. He's brought them and another Beijing band I haven't heard, "Rebuilding the Rights of Statues," to SXSW and says they were well received at their show last night.

For the most part, judging from questions from the audience, they didn't approach with preconcieved notions (excpet the correct ones, about piracy and other IPR issues), were genuinely curious, and asked some very intelligent questions. I'd say a good third of them raised their hands when moderator Vickie Nauman asked whether they'd been to China.

Alas, the timing of the panel caused me to miss the Metal party--a genre conspicously absent from this festival. It's really dominated by post-punk Indie rock bands, though a few of those I've found to be quite entertaining. Tonight I'm hoping to meetup with my old colleague from Linktone, Mark Begert, who has settled in Austin. He's always fun. I'm hoping he'lll join me in seeking out some of the more brutal musical offerings available.

The musical highlight for me so far, by a long shot, was seeing Hayseed Dixie at a club called MoMo's. I had to pull Jon Campbell and Martin Hansen, project manaer of the Danish Rock Council who spends a lot of time in China, away from the horrid Brit-pop band they insisted on seeing so that we could hoof it down to Momo's in time to catch Hayseed's 1am set, and even though we arrived late, I was in utter ecstasy.

Hayseed Dixie's a Nashville-based quartet composed of: a smoking banjo player, an acoustic bassist, a guitarist who doubles on fiddle, and one of the meanest mandolin players I've ever seen. They''re most famous for their country/bluegrass covers of AC/DC songs--thus the name-- but there were some other fabulous surprises in last night's set--including Queen's "Fat Bottomed Girls", replete with vocal harmonies and sped up about triple speed, and a rollcking version of Duelling Banjos. I snagged their set list, which you can see to the right. You can see they did the Sabbath tune "War Pigs," which must have been a gas--had to content myself to watch it on YouTube here, it's awsome--as well as Aerosmith's "Walk This way" and Motorhead's "The Ace of Spades." I'd love to see these guys come to China. Jon, make it happen man!

I'm flying out tomorrow, and going to miss lots of great music. But I'll be spending the weekend with my two best friends--meeting Drew's new girlfriend, and possibly Dave's. They've both settled in the Midwest--Dave (left) in Chicao, where this picture was taken six or seven years ago, and Drew (right) in Madison. I'm glad they've lost the goatees. So late Ninetees.

A bunch of us bought Drew a banjo for his 40th birthday in October, and he made a funny little YouTube short you can see here. Knowing him he's probably highly proficient on the thing by now.

Austin, adieu. I really hope to come back next year.

Pete Townshend at SXSW

Absolutely nothing to do with China--oh wait, something the Who's Pete Townshend said about rock and politics did resonate with me and my thinking about the Chinese rock scene--but I took good notes as this massively iconic figure presented the keynote to the SXSW Conference and Music Festival, and thought I'd share some of what he said.

The Who has iong ranked among my favorite bands, and as much as I love Roger Daltrey's voice, loved the late Keith Moon's drumming, and adored the more recently late John Entwhistle's bass lines, it was Townshend who of course was always the sould of the band. For me, they're the band that produced for me ranks as the most perfect album (Who's Next, though Quadrophenia is up there among my all-time loves too) and best rock song ("Won't Get Fooled Again") to date.

So naturally I was thrilled to hear Townshend speak. He was lucid, as expected, and funny, at time way out there in space, especially when talking about his new project, which will formally launch with a webcast news conference on April 25. That project, which he calls "The Method," was based on the rather abstract concept originally behind Who's Next: that seminal album was originally written as another rock opera in the vein of Tommy called Lifehouse, but the concept-album idea was scrapped. (See the Wikipedia article on Who's Next for the whole story.)

"The Method," which will be Web-based, will supposedly allow subscribers to sit for a musical "portrait," based on inputs (physical? verbal? it's not enitrely clearr) supplied by the subscriber. The result is a unique piece of music corresponding to the subscriber. Townshend says he came up with the idea back during the creation of Lifehouse but "in 1971 there were no computers powerful enough to do what I wanted." He was told, "Nice idea--but you should get treatment. That came later. [audience laughs]."

In his own words, as nearly as I was able to transcribe:

You come to the Website and we give you a piece of music. You own a third of the copyright. This music is elaborated; we bring it all together, and play it in a big event. We gather and share our music together. My idea is that it might sound terrible, like a plane going by, or the gentle undulations of the sea.

On the Punk Rock revolution, he had this to say:

Punk triggered something. It vented something that was there, that needed to be vented. There was nothing wrong with the Electric Light Orchestra. There was nothing wrong with Ian Anderson's [sic] Yes. I was shopping the other day and heard some music, and said, "What an interesting blend of folk and classical--and it was fucking Yes."

Oh, and this is what made me think of Beijing rock, where a political/dissident patina gets painted onto so much music as a marketing ploy, or out of juvenile, misguided iconoclasm:

I didn't know what politics was when I was a kid. If we're going to make [rock music] political, let's make it fucking political.

Hallelujah, brother Pete. I have no objection per se to politics in rock music: I just want rock musicians to acknowledge that most political issues we confront just aren't that simple. For me, 99.99% of the time, reducing any issue to rhyming verses and a repeating chorus is just bullshit sloganeering that doesn't contribute to intelligent discussion. If I had a choice between allowing the ideas of rock musicans or, say, college professors to influence my political thinking, the choice for me wouldn't be a tough one.