In which we learn that our hero’s rock star wet dreams can indeed come true-if he just stays asleep long enough.
Since the Ron fiasco, I’ve been seriously questioning my future not only in my apartment but also with MOBA. Sometimes it seems like getting a job teaching at this school is about as difficult as finding work as a homeless person on the streets of New York. It takes no credentials whatsoever and anyone can do it, which means that in day-to-day life you run the risk of clashing with drug-addled assholes who don’t know when to shut up and go to sleep.
Or just normal everyday idiots, like Paul from Canada who recently dedicated an entire class to teaching his students the nicknames English speakers have for Japanese people, most of them extremely unflattering (“slanty-eyed midgets,” for one). When I asked him why he felt compelled to do such a thing, he said simply, “I just thought they should know.”
Then there’s Australian Mark, who recently had the brilliant idea to teach a lesson in impenetrable, slangy Crocodile Dundee-inflected speech, because “they’re gonna have to deal with it if they ever come to Australia.” I watched from my classroom as his three mid-level students had three separate mid-level nervous breakdowns.
Not that I’m any kind of Einstein. I’ve made my share of idiotic remarks in class. Sometimes it’s unavoidable when your job is to talk all day and try to maintain enthusiasm. Recently I was teaching two men, both engineers and advanced-level students, and we were talking about Japanese electronics, architecture, and design. At one point I proclaimed in a commanding tone, as if I were saying something really quite unprecedented and insightful, “Japanese engineering is just, like, totally amazing, and, you know, the architecture and, like, electronics, I mean, you know, my God…” I wanted to die even as I rambled on, and from the look on my students’ faces, they wanted the same thing.
I decide to use the whole Ron thing as an excuse to finally make the big move to Tokyo. It’s time to move on, to head north, onwards to the city to take a large, sloppy bite out of the Big Rice Ball.
I find a room in Minato Ward, South Tokyo, in what is called a guesthouse. There are two showers, two toilets, two sinks, and one tiny hot plate in one tiny kitchen.
I’ve made the unlikely and not altogether fabulous transition from living with two gaijin to living with five. There’s Talvin from England, a MOBA teacher in Tokyo; Amelia from Australia, who hates her job at a gimmicky “English Through Drama” language school for kids; Hans, a banker from Germany; Chain-Smoking Jerry, a freelance English teacher (yes, I said a freelance English teacher) from Canada who, though he’s got to be nearly sixty, hasn’t let it keep him from snagging a beautiful young Japanese woman (in this case, the lovely Keiko) and getting her to cook for him. They’re all pretty nice.
But my new best friend is Rachel from California. She’s the girl next door. Not in that bobby sox-wearing, let’s-go-to-thehop kind of way; she lives in the room next to me. I loved her immediately because, since she’s from California, she has a disposition at least as sunny as mine. She is an ex-MOBA teacher who now works at Lane, a school with four branches in Tokyo.
When I move in, I have to pay a deposit and a month’s rent in advance, but thankfully no “key money,” which is a customary monetary gift of at least three months’ rent that new tenants in Japan offer their new landlord just for being such a great guy. I avoid this odious practice by going through an agency that specializes in finding housing for poor, helpless gaijin. Unfortunately, I am also paying for my Fujisawa apartment, so right now, I’m paying two rents. And eating lots of Cup Noodle.
Because of my lack of cash flow, I had to move all of my stuff myself using only my hands and the train. A sane and more financially solvent person would have loaded all of their stuff into a cab and put any of the overflow into boxes and had them sent through his local convenience store delivery service (because there is absolutely nothing you can’t do at a freaking convenience store here). But all of this costs money, and I have zero disposable income. I’m borrowing money from teachers at the school just to eat, and if I could have gotten away with it, I would have walked around Fujisawa Station with a cane, a pair of Speedos, some dark glasses, and a coffee cup made of tin begging people for spare yen for a few hours a day. Unfortunately, if you’re a white man in Japan-even one with a limp and a vision impairment-you are (correctly) assumed to be making the big bucks, because more likely than not you are an English teacher. So that shit wouldn’t fly here. I simply had to bite the bullet and move everything myself. And though I could’ve done without having to wheel my TV/DVD player behind me on a little trolley down a five-lane city street from Shinagawa Station to my new place, I got through everything all right, and the TV only fell over twice.
Soon after I move in, I’m hanging out with Rachel on the couch in the tiny sitting room/kitchen while Chain-Smoking Jerry gives Keiko a lecture about the first Thanksgiving and what it means to Americans and Canadians alike. As he exhales a huge plume of smoke in our direction while relating the history of maize cultivation in North America, Rachel tells me that her language school is looking to hire a few new teachers.
“I’m such a dork, I totally forgot to tell you about it,” she apologizes.
“Oh my God, get me a job! Get me a job immediately!” I demand.
“Totally, yeah, I’ll put in a good word for you.”
And with that brief exchange I am on my way to a new teaching position at two of Lane’s schools in Shinjuku and Ginza. I send in my résumé, and a few days later they call me in for an interview.
This interview is a little different. While Drew, the head teacher, does ask me about my interests and hobbies, the Lane folks seem a little more preoccupied than MOBA with their teachers having a decent command of the English language. To that end, there is an hour-long, ten-page exercise that tests my knowledge of English grammar, from comma splices to misplaced modifiers to restrictive and nonrestrictive relative clauses. Although it’s a bit of a harrowing experience struggling to recall how affected and effected are different, and although I seriously doubt the need for the general Japanese population to know what distinguishes a simile from a metaphor, it is comforting to know that the school is interested in hiring me for my thorough knowledge of the language and not just my American passport, valid working visa, and jazz hands. Still, I’m more than a little worried about how I’d performed on the test.
I get a call the next day from Craig, the other head teacher, offering me a job with the school.
“Really?! Did you not look at the grammar test?” I say.
He says no, they did, and that I made a pretty good showing, actually. In fact, I received the highest score they’ve ever seen. Those Latin classes served a purpose after all.
I am ecstatic. Not only because I will be working in central Tokyo, but because I will be making more money, have more vacation time, have all national holidays off (at MOBA, national holidays have been our busiest days), and, most importantly, I will never ever have to see or hear Jill again, ever, as long as I live, ever.
“You bitch! You’re leaving me alone with that cow?!” Donna says after I sing her the good news to the tune of “America” from West Side Story during one of our after-hours drinking binges. We’ve grown very close in our time at MOBA together. We’d initially bonded out of our mutual loathing of Jill, only later discovering we also had a mutual love for text messaging, sukiyaki, and men in uniform.
But she wishes me well, and we promise each other that our life together is not over. Sitting at our favorite Kamiooka izakaya bar getting sloppy on foamy mugs of beer, we make a solemn vow that we will, as Donna put it, “go somewhere fucking fabulous on holiday together and be complete pigs.” We toast to it, clinking our glasses together and spilling beer onto our tiny plates of complimentary pickled relish.
All settled in Tokyo now, I decide it’s high time I hatch the next part of my big “I’m Waking Up to Myself” party: yes, it’s time to go out in public with my viola. I place an ad in the English-language Metropolis magazine looking for people to play music with. It would be nice, I figure, to have a regular quartet, marching band, or heavy metal orchestra to meet with, and it’s been a while since I last played music with other people, considering I typically play by myself in my apartment when nobody else is home with the shades drawn and a rolled-up towel pushed up against the bottom of the door. But even though I’ve played for years, I’m still a little lacking in confidence, and this insecurity may have seeped into the wording of my ad:
AMATEUR VIOLA PLAYER, AMERICAN
SEEKS OTHER AMATEUR MUSICIANS TO PLAY MUSIC JUST FOR FUN.
MUST BE AMATEUR. FOR FUN.
I think my ad also suffered from bad placement, since it was positioned right under an ad reading:
HI! FEMALE SINGER/DRUMMER HERE!
AUSTRALIAN, BLOND, EARLY 20’S
SEEKS PATIENT, UNDERSTANDING GUITAR TEACHER FOR PRIVATE INSTRUCTION.
I CAN TEACH YOU ENGLISH!!
I’d guess 99 percent of the people looking for musicians to work with that week answered her ad. But I do get a few responses:
Hello,
I’m writing to your ad. I like viola player. I sing, but not so well.
Let’s make a music!
Hide Saito
Dear Mr. Viola,
I play the bass and like a rock music. You like a rock? I’m not sure viola okay for this kind of style music. Maybe we try. You e-mail me.
Kenji
P.S. You like the Genesis?
Hmm. Not too promising. I’d sooner peel off my own face than play Genesis songs on the viola. Then I get an e-mail from a piano player named Toru in Yokohama.
Dear Tim:
My name is Toru and I play the piano. I saw your ad and I would be very interested in playing music with you. If you are interested, please write. Thank you.
Wow. He writes English better than I do. I write him back, and we strike up an e-mail friendship. A few weeks later we meet in Shibuya for coffee to get to know each other and discuss what music we should play. I learn that he’s been teaching himself English for about twelve years, starting when he was thirteen, and he’d improved by practicing on his foreign friends. He suggests we try the Brahms sonatas for viola and piano. Blissful in my ignorance, I quickly agree, and we are off to the Yamaha store to buy some sheet music. Toru already has the piano music, so we just need the sheets for viola, which he quickly finds among the thousands and thousands of papers on the shelf and hands to me with a smile.
I hesitate to look at the music as an old demon creeps into my consciousness: Though I’d started playing violin when I was seven, switching to viola in my twenties, I don’t sight-read music very well. When I took up the violin, I learned via the Suzuki method, which emphasizes ear training at the expense of music reading. Though I later learned to sight-read, it was always a struggle for me, and my natural tendency was always to ignore whatever sheet music my teacher had assigned for the week and just pick things out that I wanted to play (“Edelweiss,” “You’re the One that I Want,” the themes from E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial, The Golden Girls, or L.A. Law). Once I knew what a piece was supposed to sound like-either by listening to my teacher play it or by obtaining a recording of it-I could rattle it off with relative ease. But given the same piece of music and no assistance whatsoever, I’m doomed. Doomed.
Long story short, I am a string player deathly afraid of sheet music.
This phobia would’ve been my undoing had I been playing in the era of Mozart, when rehearsal time was extremely limited and most people sat down and just sight-read their way to riches, glory, and designer pantaloons. Had I had the gall to ask Wolfgang before a performance to just hum a few bars of what I was meant to play, I would’ve been laughed off the stage, my fluffy white wig a web of tomatoes, eggs, and spittle, my legs beneath my secondhand pantaloons lashed repeatedly by violin bows, my fluffy blouse ripped to shreds and set on fire, my head nearly split open with an almond cheese log.
Thankfully, I’m living in more liberated and patient times. I have a look at the first movement, and it seems pretty manageable. Then I turn to the second movement and nearly faint. The notes are crowded together on the page like, well, like Tokyoites of all shapes and sizes standing, sitting, swaying, knocking about, picking fights with each other, and looking up each other’s skirts on a rush-hour train. I stare at the two pages comprising the movement and panic, feeling like a complete phony, desperate for Toru to just agree to play sitcom theme songs and familiar show tunes and let me off the hook.
But then I think, “Hey, I never shy away from a challenge.” But then I think, “Actually, Tim, you ALWAYS shy away from a challenge. I’ve never seen you NOT shy away from a challenge.”
“This looks fun,” I say to Toru, trying to wipe the fear off my face, and we make a date for me to come to his house in Yokohama’s Higashi Totsuka area and give Brahms a whirl.
Meanwhile, I get this intriguing reply to my ad:
Hi, My name is Nabe, I saw your ad in Metropolis. I am interested in your viola to join the project that I and my freinds are doing. The project is a kind of a musical community. We have not given name for. But, the main idea or theme of this project is making music with others who have totally different background each other, but nobody force nobody. In the other words, it could be expressed as “Encounter with others through music or sound.” Well, all you need is enthusiasm and free mind about sound. So, if you are interested in our project, give me a e-mail. Of course, you can ask me any question about the project, I also got a lot of things to tell you about it. Maybe, to begin with, we should meet for each other and share the idea. In addition, I play the guitar (both electric and accoustic), didgereedoo, harmonica, termin, etc. I am looking forward your response!?
This sounds great. It is exactly the kind of laid-back, creativity-friendly atmosphere I am seeking. Just people playing music for fun. Although the project sounds like a glorified jam session, and I can’t really picture myself “jamming” on the viola, I figure what the hell, at least I won’t have to read music. I e-mail him back, saying I’d love to join his group.
The next Sunday I show up at the practice studio Nabe has reserved for us in Koenji, an East Village-ish neighborhood full of college students and aspiring musicians and artists in West Tokyo. Assembled at the studio are two guitarists (Nabe and Ryunosuke), a drummer (Kiyoshi), a tuba player (Masako), a bassist (Yu), and a viola player (me). The studio, like every other place in Tokyo, is small and cramped, and since I’m the last to arrive, the only space left is that next to Masako and her tuba, so I squeeze past Nabe, Ryunosuke, and Yu and all their amps, stepping over the tangle of black cords on the floor, and pivot into an empty chair next to Masako after dropping my viola on her foot.
“
!” I say to her. “Sorry!”
“
!” she replies. “It’s OK!”
Nabe, ostensibly the leader of our band of misfits, had spent four years in Tennessee when he was younger, which is why he can speak English. Unfortunately, no one else does, so he acts as interpreter when my Japanese fails me, which is almost every time I speak.
He gives a short greeting to everyone and talks for a few minutes in Japanese, presumably about why we are here, what we are going to do, and who the handsome white stranger is sitting next to Masako and her tuba.
Then he switches to English and says to me, “I just tell them that we going to just plug in and play and jam for little while and see how we can make a music. Is OK?”
“Sure, sure,” I nod, wishing I had an amp for my viola.
The guitarists plug everything in and start some soft strumming, and Masako and I play some scales to get warmed up. It’s nice to hear the music bouncing around me, and everyone seems to be tuning in to each other and getting in the zone. Things go a little quiet as everyone decides they’re warmed up enough. Then the drummer hits his drumsticks together and launches into a mid-tempo beat. From there, everyone just joins in whenever they feel the urge. The result is a sound not unlike a car being eaten by a lawnmower. The drums bicker with the bass, the guitars vie for supremacy, and the tuba trudges along underneath like a tortoise at a NASCAR speedway. And me? My viola is buried far, far beneath all of it, gasping for air, begging for its life and the life of its strings.
Our noise lasts for a good fifteen minutes without pause. After the first few minutes, though, I just give up trying to improvise anything because no one will hear it anyway, and I don’t want any accidental genius to be wasted. I start practicing my scales and then launch into the first movement of the Brahms sonatas that Toru and I had picked out, figuring I could use the practice. It is painfully obvious that, as great and romantic as Nabe’s idea of having “free mind about sound” is, some type of structure and order will be necessary in order to make music that doesn’t make people vomit.
As each of us tire of playing, the noise comes to a gradual finish, the last sputtering sounds that of the rumbling snare drum and a lonely little tuba. We sit in silence for a few moments, not sure what to say. Should we apologize to each other? Shake hands and say “good game”? Sniff some paint thinner and try again?
We try again without any greater success, though Yu does mix things up by putting down her bass and yelping into the nearest microphone. This time I detect more of a reggae vibe, and my viola tries its best to fit in. Things shift gears several times before finishing semi-triumphantly with a standoff between Yu and Masako’s tuba bouncing atop Kiyoshi’s ominous drumbeat, which, if memory serves, is the same as that in the song “In the Air Tonight” by Phil Collins. (Is there no escaping the Genesis?)
At the end of our session, Nabe asks me to meet again the next week, and I say I will, though I’m not sure anyone else will. Everyone says their polite goodbyes and we leave.
At work the next day, Eric, a teacher at Lane, asks me if I’m interested in renting a room in the house he lives in with a girl named Akiko, as their other roommate is moving out. The house is in Koenji, funnily enough, so I hop on it, move all my things again, and set about weaseling my way into the local scene, going to the Penguin Live House and hanging out occasionally at the Morgan Café, a tiny upstairs diner down the street from our house where the young husband and wife owners can’t speak a lick of English but love American indie rock.
The next week, we participants in Nabe’s music experiment meet in a different studio in Koenji. This time a guy named Kawano shows up, who is a singer and guitarist. There is also another bassist friend of Nabe’s, going simply by the name M. The guys plug in all their stuff and start playing, Kawano improvising some vocals. His singing style can best be described as “interpretive squawking.” Nabe tells me before we start that Kawano likes to make up his own language while he’s singing, which is fine by me, since it means I won’t be the only one who doesn’t understand him.
While they warm up and start jamming, I get my viola out to tune it and rosin my bow. But when I reach for my bow in its usual resting position in the case, I realize with horror that it isn’t there. I must have forgotten to put it back in the last time I practiced. So I am left with only a viola to pluck while the others fill the air with the screams of their own instruments. I will never be able to compete.
They continue playing while I sit and impotently pluck my viola into my microphone, which, let’s face it, won’t bring the house down. The guys eventually stop playing, remember I am there, and look at me curiously.
“Yeah, I, uh, kind of forgot my bow,” I say. “Yeah, my…my bow…it’s not here.”
Nabe informs the players in Japanese of my predicament.
“Do you play any other instruments?” he asks.
“Not really,” I say, still lamely plucking the strings of my viola, wishing I were invisible.
“How about you wanna to try drums?” he suggests. Hmm. We don’t have a drummer today, and I’ve always wanted to play. And look, there are some drumsticks right over there on the stool!
“Sure, I’ll give it a try.” Infused with a new energy, I sweep up the sticks, hop behind the kit, and start pounding away. I don’t really know what I’m doing, but psychologically it feels right. And as a gay man, I naturally have a solid sense of rhythm, of course. The guys follow my lead, and we tear through a few improvisations like fourteen-year-olds in their parents’ garage. When we finish our session, the guys bow slightly to each other.
Kawano says, adjusting his Buddy Holly glasses, which have slipped down his nose, “
.” “Cool, huh?”
The next week I get an e-mail from Nabe:
Whaaazzaaaap, Tim-san!!!!?? How was the last session? Actually, Kawano-san (a crazy singer whom you saw last week) loves your drumming. I and Kawano-san talked abuot the band, and you should play drum for us as well as you play your veola. The sound of your druming is cool, because you are the beginner. It was like a drum from some gararge bands. Well, we don’t even know where the direction should be. What we are doing now is like a trial and error, but also making music, is like a problem solving as well (that’s why I keep making music.). We are planning to have a session on this Sunday, too. So, let me know whether you are coming or not.?
Nabe
The next week I bring my bow and a new pair of drumsticks I got from the Yamaha store in Shibuya. This time it’s me, Nabe, and Kawano. Nabe had brought some of his recording equipment, so we decide to record our session. I hop behind the drum kit and start pounding. Nabe soon chimes in with some guitar, and then in comes Kawano with some otherworldly yelping, hemming, hawing, and rhythm guitar. There are no verses and no choruses, just one long odyssey of noise, piss, and vinegar. Yes, that’s what it is, a thirty-three-minute odyssey through rock and roll’s primitive passions. By the twentieth minute I’m drenched with sweat and I start having trouble holding on to the drumsticks, but I’m bound and determined not to let this moment-this exceedingly long moment-end. I hang on to them for dear life. I’m the captain of this Viking ship, after all, and it is my duty to steer the vessel through the treacherous waters of modern rock, to take up the hammer of the gods and smite any pretenders to the throne or John Mayer fans I find in my path. That’s my duty, right?
After we finally careen to a graceless finish, Nabe suggests that next time I should give them a nod when I’m ready to finish, otherwise they won’t know when to stop and Kawano might feel the need to, as Nabe put it, “keep to singing.”
We practice for a few more hours and record everything. After finishing our allotted time at the practice studio, we decide to walk back to Nabe’s place in Koenji to listen to our session on his sound system. We pack up the guitars, my viola, and Nabe’s portable recording equipment, pay our bill for the three hours we used the studio, and, all six of our arms occupied with equipment, start down the stairs to the street.
It is a sweltering August evening, and Koenji is in the middle of its summer matsuri, or festival, so we find ourselves exiting onto a narrow brick shopping street brimming with festival-goers standing on the sidelines of a long and winding parade of men and women dancing in traditional matsuri garb: men crouch and stomp around dressed in short yukata robes and handkerchiefs on their heads with corners tied together between their noses and upper lips, a misguided aesthetic choice if ever there was one; women stand in formation with their hands raised doing a more subtle and mannequin-like dance in unison, dressed in white kimono with pink sleeves, black waist wraps, and what looks like big bamboo placemats folded in half and placed on their heads; then there are the drummers, the flutists, and the blue kimono-clad band of men carrying the giant mikoshi, or shrine, on their shoulders. It is the best parade I’ve ever been to (except for that one where I saw two guys on a float dressed as hot lumberjacks making out against a giant inflated ball sack-that was a little better).
We squeeze ourselves out into the flow of traffic on the street, Nabe leading, Kawano following, and me bringing up the rear, each of us struggling to keep our grips on our instruments in the press of people around us. The smells of yakitori, grilled octopus, and beer hang deliciously in the air as we push our way through the throngs of people. After a good twenty-minute crusade through the thick of the celebration, we duck down a tiny side street leading to Nabe’s “room,” as he’d called it. We are soon there, and, well, he wasn’t lying. It is a room with a loft bed, the tiniest of bathrooms, and a hotplate.
Kawano and I take a load off as Nabe cues up the minidisk on which he’d recorded our practice. I brace myself for the inevitably disappointing result, but I am pleasantly surprised to hear that it sounds OK. Especially the drums. Can I have been a rock god all this time without even knowing it? God, the wasted teenage years spent playing in orchestras when I could have been just hitting things with sticks and getting laid!
We listen to our thirty-three-minute opus, which in all honesty really starts to drag after the first five minutes. As the music continues, Nabe and Kawano have a discussion in Japanese, their heads nodding and brows furrowed as if they’re talking about something very grim, like Japan’s strained relationship with China. Then their faces brighten into toothy smiles as if they’ve just figured out how to fix it.
“Tim-san,” Nabe says, “you wanna be a band?”
“Yeah,” I say, flushed and feeling as if I’ve just been asked to the prom. “We should give it a try.”
Nabe and Kawano further discuss China and then move on to the demilitarized zone of the Koreas. Then Kawano smiles and nods his head again, clearly having solved the problem of how to deal with Kim Jong-Il. He tries to say something in English to me.
“We…in…band. I…
…friend…have…girlfriend. She work…
…live house…”
I nod and smile, having just gotten to the bottom of the West Bank issue, and consider Kawano’s words. What do they mean, exactly?
“Kawano-san has a friend,” Nabe explains. “He knows guy who has friend who have girlfriend who work at live house. He say maybe she can help us get gig there.”
It sounds so complex, but we are all so full of enthusiasm that the odds don’t matter.
And after a number of beers, we come up with a name, inspired by our love of the Absurdists, our passion for the free-form ideals of the Beats, and most importantly the bilingual magazine that is sitting on Nabe’s floor. Our name: Thighbone Trumpet Ikiru, which translates roughly to, um, Thighbone Trumpet Living. (Better not to translate, I think.) Now, what should our first album be called, and what will I wear on the CD sleeve?
The next week we get together at the same practice studio in Koenji to rock the roof off the fucking place. We try to play the song we recorded the week before, but none of us can really remember it, so we just jam for a while, taking a journey through a rock and roll wonderland, traveling to the ends of the sonic universe, riding the gargantuan waves of human drama and emotion one can only experience when beating things with a wooden stick or screaming an imaginary language into a microphone.
As I sit at the drums, pounding away and imagining my image plastered on teenage girls’ rooms across Japan, I start writing our rock bio in my head, from our humble beginnings at a Koenji practice space to headlining at civic centers across the country. I have our band member personalities all figured out. Nabe will be the cerebral one, the real musical backbone of the band. In interviews, he will be soft-spoken, his words carefully chosen. The girls will really go for his smoldering, reserved sexuality. And he will, naturally, really go for the girls. Kawano will be the eccentric lead guy who will be just as likely to play the Burmese flute as strum a guitar and who will lie his way through interviews, saying he was raised by she-wolves on the northern tip of Hokkaido, where he lived until he was eighteen when he went south to Tokyo to study mapmaking. And I will be the big, weird, foreigner guy who in interviews always comes out with controversial sound bites that will fascinate and electrify the Japanese tabloids, statements like, “Any person who has bought an Alanis Morrissette album should be completely stripped of their human rights. Period.”
One day after completing our first national tour, during which we will have played in front of sold-out crowds from Fukuoka to Sapporo, we will come back to Tokyo a full-on phenomenon, and when asked about our early days in television interviews, I will explain playfully in a British accent, “It was quite lovely, actually, the way it all came about. I’d done something bloody stupid and left my viola bow at home, so Nabe, silly old tart that he is, suggested I pop behind the drums and, sort of, you know, give it a go…”
The next record will be moodier, with more keyboards and guest appearances by Lou Reed and Chrissie Hynde on backing vocals, Stevie Nicks on timpani, Siouxsie Sioux on eyeliner, and David Lee Roth on spandex. There will also be a massive viola solo that I will perform wearing only a sweater vest and some boxer briefs. We’ll branch out into different forms of music, ignoring the record company’s preferred pigeonhole for us and following up a platinum-selling ska disc with a brassy show tunes record. Then, when we start laying down tracks for our flamenco-flavored German rock opera…
“Tim-san!” Nabe says, waving his arms at me. He and Kawano are starting to unplug their guitars and pack them up.
“Time is over. We must to leave.”
Even though I leave my viola in its case during my jam sessions with the Ikiru boys, I don’t forsake it altogether. Under the influence of Thighbone Trumpet Ikiru, my practices with Toru become a little more spirited. My playing is less measured, I’ve developed a certain swagger (if a viola player can be said to have swagger), and I’ve begun to play like a man unafraid to make mistakes and let what happens happen. Even if it sounds like a bird being strangled by a piano wire. Toru appreciates my enthusiasm, though he really wishes I could play the damn third movement without getting to the end of the piece before he does. What he doesn’t know is that the reason I’m playing so fast is because I’m trying to resist the urge to swing my bow and hit something, like this stack of magazines or that potted plant or the grand piano over there. I’ve got drum fever in me, and like the Hulk in Bill Bixby or the gay in Tom Cruise, it’s desperate to get out.
For the next month, the three of us-Nabe, Kawano, and I-become a kind of posse, going around town together after rehearsals, hanging out at rock shows, drinking a lot, and passing out in Nabe’s room. We have nothing in common but a love of music, Beat Takeshi movies, and Kirin Ichiban beer. And yakitori. But it is a bond strong enough to hold us together at least through each weekend. I never ask much about Nabe or Kawano-san’s personal lives, and they remain ignorant of my history of manic pole-smoking, but these gaps in our awareness of each other’s lives create a healthy tension that feeds our music. Or something. That’s how I explain it to myself, at least.
It does start to bother me a little that, though we’ve been rehearsing for weeks now, we haven’t written a proper song yet. And we do have a tendency to practice for three hours, record our sessions, go back to Nabe’s place with a bunch of beers, and listen to what we’d recorded without gleaning anything more from it than that we really should start to think about adding a trombone somewhere. Sure, Kawano’s psychotic singing style has started to grate, and yeah, maybe Nabe’s guitar playing could use a little variation. But the drumming is perfect. And the backbone of any band is its drummer. Just ask Ringo Starr.
One night we go to a used bookstore/clothing boutique in Kichijyoji, west of Koenji, where Yu, the bassist from the very first music session who is a sort of punk rock performance artist who also dabbles in apocalyptic woodblock prints and illustrations, is holding court. In a small, unfurnished room off to the side of the main merchandise area, Yu kicks her drum machine on and begins maniacally strumming her guitar strings, creating a cacophony of blistering noise that she then hollers on top of. This is no verse-chorus-verse arrangement. It is more scream-strum-stomp-kick the wall-scream. While it isn’t something I would choose to listen to while, say, house cleaning or curling my hair, her performance is brilliant as pure spectacle. The ten or so people in the audience watch with rapt attention as she takes one of her guitars and starts beating it against the drum machine, shutting it off. She then moves on to the wall and the floor, smashing that naughty guitar until it’s a gangly mess, all the while screaming into the microphone, which she is holding like a phone between her head and shoulder. All the while, a tall, lanky guy dressed in black with an art house goatee and librarian glasses sits on a stool off to the side quietly strumming a mandolin with his eyes closed. At one point, as Yu is slamming her guitar against the wall, he answers his cell phone and talks for a few minutes.
When Yu is satisfied that she’s proven her point, she picks up another guitar, which is wrapped in a leather jacket and fastened with a black electrical cord, unwraps it, kicks the drum machine back on, barks three times, and starts over.
I take a break and walk around, checking out the merchandise. There’s a lot of local art, zines, self-released CDs, and photographs, plus locally made clothing, shoes, hats, scarves, and washi paper. I pick up a few things that look interesting-a yellow sticker with a radiation symbol on it that says “BIG DRUNK PIG” and a homemade manga graphic novel with a picture of a young guy on a subway reading the newspaper dressed only in tight underwear-pay, and make it back to the other room just in time to see Yu commence the destruction of some of her own giant woodblock prints.
“Damn, I would have bought that one,” I think as she jumps repeatedly on top of a print depicting two lovers making out in front of a towering inferno and then picks it up and throws it out the window.
So much destruction. A metaphor for something. But what? Is it a symbolic breaking out of the box that Japanese society has put her in as a woman with an asymmetrical haircut? A tirade against the sociocultural stoicism she sees around her? A bold, tragic statement on the ephemeral nature of art? Is she just a good old-fashioned psychotic deconstructionist? What?
The next week I have to cancel a practice at the last minute, and then the week after Kawano is a no-show. I don’t hear from Nabe about when the next practice is. I e-mail and call him several times, but he never gets back in contact with me. He has disappeared.
About a month later I run into Kawano-san at the Tsutaya video shop in Shinjuku where he appears to now be working. He is dressed in the standard blue Tsutaya collared T-shirt and carrying a stack of videos, on the top of which I see What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? We have a very difficult discussion, me speaking in my broken Japanese, him in his broken English and, I think, bits of his imaginary language:
“Why do we not meet anymore for play our song?” I ask in Japanese.
“
You no can tell…we don’t have never think to be indygooten,” is his mysterious multilingual reply.
“Ummmm. Yeah, so Nabe did not to call me very much,” I say, again in Japanese, trying to keep the conversation monolingual.
“
playing guitar
…cannot to be showing faces to phsnraaaanksu…”
I nod, smile, put a friendly hand on his shoulder, and say softly in my mother tongue, “I have no idea what the hell you just said.”
He seems distracted and uncomfortable around me. I wonder if I have at some point committed a social offence I wasn’t aware of. Should I not have left in the middle of Yu’s performance to shop around? Do I sweat too much during my drum solos? Am I just too tall? Or-oh shit-did they somehow find out about my history of manic pole-smoking?
Kawano smiles and indicates by picking up Baby Jane and angling his head towards the American Classics section that he needs to get back to work.
I wave, bow slightly, say goodbye, and exit the store.
A few weeks later I’m sitting in Morgan Café chatting with a friend of a friend of one of the owners, telling her that the bassist in one of her favorite bands, Superchunk, is a friend of a friend of mine.
“
??” she says. “Really??”
“
!” I answer. “Yes, really!”
“
.” “Cool.”
While I’m basking in the afterglow of convincing someone that I know someone I don’t, I look over and see Yu walking in carrying a stack of orange papers.
“
!” “Hey Yu! Long time no see!”
“
!?” she says, surprised. “Oh, Timsan, hey! Doing OK?”
Yu has brought flyers for her next show. This will be a more low-key affair. Just some of her drawings and watercolors. The flyer shows an impeccable drawing of a kitchen fire. I tell her I’ll definitely be there. Then I ask if she’s seen Nabe, and she shakes her head.
So, my rock and roll dreams have come to a frustratingly abrupt end, for now at least. Yes, there were problems, among them no communication within the band, no coherent plan of operation, no songs. Sure, we were unable to understand each other without an interpreter present, but we could have made it work. The language barrier disappears if you’re grooving to the right beat, man. We were going to take over the island of Honshu!
But I guess it’s time for me to take a break from the drums for a while and pick up that viola again. Brahms is calling, and there’s sheet music to be deciphered. I’m not saying my pelvis-thrusting, bass-drum-thumping, slave-to-the-rhythm days are over. Thighbone Trumpet Ikiru may yet rise again, phoenix-like, to play on a street corner or a surprise party somewhere in the Tokyo suburbs. I just need to mellow out for a while, you know? There’s more to life than being a pinup.
Perhaps David Lee Roth would agree.
# of times I’ve told my students I’m diabetic and been laughed at: 11
# of times I’ve had to explain to students that just because I’m diabetic that doesn’t mean I used to be a big fatty: 11