Peking music
When I got to Beijing in March of 1979, it was still basically the Cultural Revolution, although things were beginning to open. The US had just established diplomatic ties with the Mainland, a turning point in the history of this country, but the reality was still Mao jackets, poverty and ubiqitous slogans proclaiming the brilliance of Chairman Mao. The foreign community in Beijing was tiny and fundamentally Eastern European Communist in nature. It was just at the start of the process of moving through to becoming the larger and basically Western Capitalist foreign community it is today.
At that time, there were also effectively no relationships allowed between Westerners and Chinese people in China beyond official contacts. It was not permitted to have Chinese friends, or really to talk to people at all. If you did talk to an ordinary Chinese person, you were endangering their safety. The Public Security authorities took a very serious view of any Chinese person who had a conversation, let alone a relationship, with a foreigner. It was two very separate worlds. China was cut off from the world, and foreigners in China were cut off from China. I was a journalist, working for Reuters, and we communicated with the outside world via a 1940s-era telex machine. We were allowed to talk to our office “interpreter”, provided by the Party, and our home “servants”, similarly provided, and basically no one else.
If you looked at a satellite night image of China in 1979, it would be thick and total darkness. If you look at a satellite map of China today, there are lights everywhere. There is no clearer indicator of the change that has taken place to China – in terms of everything but its heart – in the past 30 years. There was no rock and roll. In fact, there was hardy any music in China at all except for revolutionary operas. Beethoven and other foreign classical composers, for instance, were just being rehabilitated. When their works were played in public for the first time in 20 years, it was international news.
So for the very small number of foreigners in Beijing, a few hundred people at most, there was no live music, no bars, no nightlife. Nothing except dinner parties in one of the three foreigner compounds – Jianguomenwai, Qijiayuan, Sanlitun. It was a situation similar to being in Pyongyang today. Foreigners were not allowed to live outside these three compounds, embassy grounds and a handful of hotels. Everybody knew everybody else, and we were real strangers in a strange land. The sense of isolation was very strong, and so we had to make our own entertainment. The British Embassy used to do Christmas pantomimes for the local foreign community, for instance.
Among the foreigner residents were a few people who had some level of musical capability. Weak, perhaps, but it didn’t matter because there was no competition. There was a Canadian language student named Ted Lipman with a Fender Telecaster guitar. He was leaving as I was arriving, and I bought the guitar off him, plus a Fender twin-reverb amp. Then there was an Australian journalist, the correspondent for the Australian Broadcasting Commission, named Richard Thwaites, who had a Fender bass, and a Brazilian named Chris Arroyo, who had some bongos. We had no real drumset. Myself, Richard and Chris solidified what had been a loose and occasional grouping of foreigners that had used the name Peking All-Stars from 1978. I was lead singer and guitarist, and we were, without doubt, the best rock and roll band in China, home to a quarter of mankind. We knew we were the best because we were the ONLY rock and roll band in China.
We started to play at private compound apartment parties. Then I managed to arrange a performance for us at a Chinese university, certainly the first rock concert in China. We played Beatles songs, Rolling Stones and, yes, Black Magic Woman by Santana. After the first song in the university auditorium, the Chinese professor asked us to turn the sound down. To complete the cliché, I said: “No, this is the way rock and roll is supposed to be. We asked for requests from the audience of Chinese students, and one asked us to play the Paul Simon song Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover (I didn’t know it at that point, but I do now). The fact the request was made was reflective of the underground cassette tape revolution that was taking place in China in the late 1970s. People recorded and re-recorded tapes, often obtained from the handful of foreign students at Peking University and a couple of other institutions.
We played concerts as often as we could from 1980 through to early 1984, at the Friendship Hotel, at the International Club, at embassy events, and a wonderful night of madness at a party to celebrate the anniversary of the founding of the Organization of African Unity at the foreign languages Institute, plus two new year’s eve parties at the new Jianguo Hotel, the only foreign-managed hotel in Peking, opened in 1982. There was no original material on our set lists, beyond a 12-bar blues rocker I wrote called “Peking All-Stars”, the lyric of which was as follows:
We are the Peking All-Stars,
The best damn band in town
We are the Peking All-Stars,
The best damn band in town
When it comes to rock and roll,
We’re the only ones around.
We’re waiting to be discovered,
By the chinese people’s record company
We’re waiting to be discovered,
By the chinese people’s record company
We’ll fly into the hit parade
And make it straight to number Yi.
We’ll party with the party
And disco ’til we drop
It would take a party congress
To ever make us stop
We are the Peking All-Stars
The best damn band in town
When it comes to rock and roll,
We’re the only ones around.
We’s playing for de peoples
Just every chance we get
We’s playing for de peoples
Just every chance we get
We socialise so much
We may become socialist yet.
We’re aiming for the big time
And we just don’t think it’s fair
We’re aiming for the big time
And we just don’t think it’s fair
That they won’t let us play
Down there in Tian An Men Square.
It wasn’t much but it WAS rock and roll, and we were the evangelists, the missionaries, the golden pioneers spreading the good word of rock and roll in China, and the power that lies behind it. We had great fun, and became more and more serious, rehearsing regularly. We did a couple of performances in the hall at the British Embassy to raise money to buy some drums which we shipped up from Hong Kong. We played a wedding banquet for the beautiful Melinda Liu on the roof of the Peking Hotel! Yes!!
We found ourselves a lead guitarist, an American English teacher named Larry Vest who was 90% blind, but who played guitar like Chuck Berry. Then Richard Thwaites left so we added an American named Fred Burke as bass player – he had previously played with a punk band in Los Angeles called Toxic Shock, and last I heard was running Baker and McKenzie’s law operation in Vietnam and playing in a band called Durian Durian. Then Larry left and was replaced by another American, Tad Stoner, who was working at Xinhua News Agency as a news polisher. Then Tad left and was replaced by a Palestinian guitarist named Nassir, who looked very much like Frank Zappa and had spent several years in Munich. He played thrash guitar with abandon and great natural talent. It was wonderful, but my ears used to ring for days after each performance. In 1983 we had to cancel several performances because the Israelis invaded Lebanon and Nassir, who was a colonel in the PLO, had to fly over to drive a tank. There was one performance we did at the Philippine Embassy, which is next to the Iraqi Embassy, and Nassir was only allowed to play on the condition that he had a bodyguard. And so he was assigned a bodyguard, an Indonesian/Chinese kung-fu expert, who hung around the stage as we played. You can’t make this stuff up.
Chris the Brazilian, meanwhile, had left and been replaced by a Madagascan named Robinson, who later played around Beijing, Hong Kong, London and the world under the name Nogabe. We had a Swedish sax player of Korean-French ancestory named Frederic Cho who practiced Charlie Parker solos outside his dormitory at Peking University and is now a top investment banker specializing in M&As with Chinese private enterprises. There was a Hungarian keyboard player who joined us once or twice and a Spanish bass player who played at the Peking All-Stars’ last performance at the British Embassy and walked off the stage when the guards stopped his Iranian girlfriend from entering the embassy compound.
It was, in short, a mini musical United Nations, and the one thing we had in common was that we knew the 12-bar blues-rock chord progression. We had a language in common – the rock tunes of the 20 years since rock was born. Regardless of our mother tongues, we all knew Santana’s Evil Ways, Elvis’ Jailhouse Rock, the Stones’ All Over Now, Psycho Killer by Talking Heads, Hendrix’s Hey Joe, the Beatles’ Oh Darling and G-L-O-R-I-A. The Chinese kids who attended our concerts, of course, had never heard anything like it before. There were some cassettes tapes circulating, as I mentioned, often passed to Chinese kids by foreign students, but very few. Cassette tape players and cassettes were rare and valuable in the 1970s in China. So the whole first generation of Chinese rock and rollers – they first heard the music and felt the power from the Peking All-Stars. In the Friendship Hotel and other places where we played. Cui Jian, Dou Wei and others. Chinese rock music came out of that, and we were lucky to have been there to start it off. We weren’t great musicians, but we happened to be the only ones playing that sort of music at the moment that China was just opening up.
There were virtually no cars in Beijing at the time, and after 8pm, there was no noise. From the London Daily Telegraph apartment-office in the Jianguomenwai foreigner’s compound, it was possible to hear the main clock at the Peking railway station tower play The East is Red on the hour. Later at night, you could hear and see camels and donkey carts padding patiently along the dark and deserted Changan Avenue. One summer night in 1983, I heard a trumpet player and a sax player practicing underneath the deserted bridge at the Jianguomen intersection (remember, no cars). I drove down and introduced myself, invited them to join a Peking All-Stars rehearsal. A few days later they signed in at the compound gate, guarded by suspicious People’s Liberation Army peasant soldiers, and we started playing. They didn’t have the rock and roll feel, and so I said… nah. I turned them down from joining the band. The trumpet player was Cui Jian, the future Godfather of Chinese rock, and the sax player the talented Liu Yuan. Cui was attached to the Oriental Song and Dance Troupe at the time, and in fact it would have been a total blast to have a Chinese horn section in our rock and roll band. The reason I rejected them was not the lack of the rock and roll feel – although that was an issue – but because in my opinion it would have been too dangerous for them to take part. These were kids in their early 20s, and China at the time was in the midst of the Anti-Bourgeois Liberalization Campaign. Any Chinese who had any relationship with any foreigner was under threat. This was an arrangement set up intentionally by the Chinese authorities in order to create a sense of guilt amongst foreigners, to stop us having any relationship with Chinese people, and it worked. It was a phenomenally successful strategy. But I kept in indirect contact with Cui and in 1987 when I was back in China, I had the opportunity to play with him at Maxim’s at Chongwenmen, a venue absolutely fundamental to the development of rock in China.
To skip back to the beginning of the story in 1979 and 1980, there was only one place in Beijing where there was regular live music, and that was me, playing in the Bell, the pub in the British Embassy compound, every Friday night. At that time, it was open to any foreigner who wanted to come along, and there were a lot of Americans. The Marines posted to the US embassy used to be there en masse. It was quite a lively scene. Remember, there was nowhere else to go –nothing and nowhere. So I played acoustic guitar, played harmonica and sang tunes. I added a new song every week to my repertoire, and there was an engineer at the British Embassy who recorded them all and I think they’re all online atearnshaw.com, the Peking Tapes volumes 1 and 2.
In 1983, the first international standard hotel in China opened – the Jianguo Hotel, and I formed a jazz duo with Frederic on sax to play in the hotel bar, Charlie’s. Frederic went on to do a jazz band in the late 1980s in Beijing called the Swinging Mandarins. China at the time was just a wonderful place for firsts, and I took my guitar with me everywhere. I was the first person ever to play the kazoo on the Great Wall of China, the first foreigner, or maybe person, to perform in a bar in Shanghai since the 1950s, the first person ever to play on the roof of the Potala in Lhasa (I did not, as I often claimed, play Hello Dalai. I played Chuck Berry’s Maybelline.) There was a wonderful performance in Fuzhou in 1981, with myself and a nine year year boy singing alternate songs – me singing Dylan and James Taylor tunes, him singing Fuzhou opera melodies a capella – in front of a spellbound audience of 250 or so local residents. It was a precious moment as China opened up. The moment has now long passed, of course, but it was a privilege to have been there.
When I left Beijing in early 1984, I gave the drums to Robinson and lent my Telecaster to Eddy, another Madagascan guy and friend of Robinson’s who was later Cui Jian’s lead guitarist for many years. I think he still plays with him. Eddy first played my guitar with a band called the Beijing Underground which got started in 1984, picking up the baton from the Peking All-Stars, and while the Peking All-Stars started off rock in China, it was the Beijing Underground which really took it out into the wider Chinese world. They played concerts in cities in the provinces and even produced a cassette tape which I found on sale in the Beijing Friendship Store in mid-1985. The Beijing Underground consisted of David Hoffman, a sort of David Lee Roth wild man character who was lead singer and lead guitarist. When he was straight, he was very good. There was a Tunisian keyboard player, and Nassir played on guitar, but he was already getting pretty fucked up – he ended up killing himself in 1990 by throwing himself off a Peking University dormitory roof. Then there was a Zaire guy named Shifele, who, like Nassir, married a Japanese girl to get out of China without having to go home.
By mid-1985, on my return to Beijing as Reuters bureau chief, the Beijing Underground were on the verge of collapse due to the usual internal artistic differences, not to mention sex, drugs and alcohol. I formed a new band called the China Mugs, and another doing jazz tunes with the name The Tiananmen Squares. And so it went on, various foreigner connections and combinations, but meanwhile the local music scene was growing all by itself. The first local singer to sprang out in the mid-1980s was a guy named Zhang Xing, who had a sort of cassette hit with a cover of John Denver’s ‘Country Roads’. But he got into trouble with the Public Security Bureau because he was having his way, as one does as a pop star, with some of the female fans. Or they with he. But he played a role in establishing the role of the Mainland performer, a local pop star. Up to that point, pop stars were only something that were imported – Teresa Teng was a big name, for instance. Then came June 4 in 1989, which led to the real opening of China in the early 1990s and then you’re into what you might call the Kaiser Kuo era of China-foreign music. I did some work with Kaiser around 2002 on a book he wanted to write about his experiences with Tang Dynasty, a far more high-profile and influential story than mine. The book is still not, as far as I know, written or published, but I hope it will be one day.
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