One by one our instruments floated out along the turn belt and we collected them to assess the damage. Judging by the way the check-in lady back in Pudong Airport had handled the ‘fragile’ stickers - - as if they were incomprehensible math problems - - I knew we were in for at least some bad news. The keyboard suffered the most damage and came to us with the highest key jutting upwards into the sky like a broken tooth. Morgan’s bass also suffered a hit, as we noticed the nut at the top of the neck had been gouged leaving the heavy D string resting on the wood of the guitar. After some anxious smiles we piled into cabs and headed for The Vox, where we would be headlining a three-band line up that night.
The hour-long ride to the bar was strangely tranquil as our taxi driver took us over a winding, tree-lined road surrounded on both sides by a massive lake. Old men dangling 15 foot bamboo fishing poles sat by the waterside and young couples floated out in the lake on rented boats. I had the feeling that this is the way Reader’s Digest would most likely portray the Chinese May Day holiday.
Arriving at the bar we were lead up three flights of stairs which were exceptionally dark in contrast to the bright afternoon sun outside. The Vox is a large long space with cement walls and huge elevated stage. We unpacked our gear and got set up for sound check. As we got started, I noticed that each note I played reverberated of the concrete walls of the bar and entered into a seemingly perpetual echoing dialogue with every other note. I started sweating almost immediately trying to get the right tone out of my new distortion pedal and fighting against the perpetual feedback resonating all around us. When we all commenced to play together, all I could hear was a massive wall of sound as coherent as People’s Square at rush hour. Making things worse, it turned out there was a loose wire in my new pedal which created an awful crackling sound with each strum. The other two bands began to arrive to do their sound checks and so we fervorishly strove to adjust our sound as best we could and get through some of our material. We walked away from sound check anxious and hungry, wondering what sort of disaster would await us when we took the stage for our first real headlining show.
Returning from a dangerous feast at an outdoor Hubei restaurant we walked into a nearly empty Vox. I was certain that this would be another depressing performance playing our asses off to 10 people at the back of a very large bar. There is a distinct form of absurdity reserved for a man standing in a small puddle of his own sweat screaming songs out into a nearly empty bar.
As I reeled in my own self-absorbed despair the owner approached us with a small piece of wood in his hand. He asked us to write our band name on it so he could drill it onto a wall, that I had failed to notice earlier, covered with similar such plaques. There were maybe 50 other wooden pieces mounted, covering the entire spectrum of Chinese rock from unknown metal bands to high rollers like Subs and Brain Failure. In the moments it took us to inscribe our names into the Vox history books, my dreariness had dissipated. I began to notice the bar was filling up and the first band was taking the stage.
I can’t remember the name of the band or any of their songs but do recall appreciating the effort and nerve they put into their 20 minute set. The second band of the night would, for me, prove to make the entire trip worthwhile. Defy is a local Wuhan punk band with a super classy and charismatic frontman, the equivalent of a Chinese Adonis on the bass, a young Beijing rocker on lead and a sultry vixen of a drummer. They worked the crowd like professionals drawing the attention of the, by then, 70 or so people to the stage.
We took the stage to a chorus of murmurs from the audience, which was surprisingly comprised of a large number of
laowais. We hit our stride quickly and gonged through our first four numbers before switching to our mid set acoustic threesome of songs. I was, by now, sweating profusely but thoroughly immersed in the music as we started into our track about Myanmar. From the midway point of that song all the way through our next song, which was a cover of Johnny Cash's "Folsom Prison," the crowd was either moshing, stomping, yelling or clapping along with us. The energy was like nothing we had ever experienced before back in the Shanghai music “scene.”
My shirt was soaked by the time we reached the end of our hour long set. Wrapping up the set with our finale, which is a song that creeps its way from a sparse, hollow, drum-less ballad into a full-blown keyboard, distortion, infused frenzy. It is the single moment of the night that I can recall with vivid clarity. The band is fully gonging: Devin is ecstatically pounding his sticks on anything that could possibly make a sound, I am kneeling beside the amp hammering on the highest possible reaches of my electric and I look up and there is Morgan hoisting the entire keyboard above his head. The audience is either yelling like people at the Shanghai zoo or standing dumbfounded by the sheer size of the three sweaty white guys losing their shit on the stage.
We did a botched version of the Flaming Lips's "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots" for our encore before slipping off backstage collapsing into the dusty couches. In what seemed to be no time at all the Vox transformed from a full out rock venue into something akin to Windows Too, complete with the cosmopolitan crowd of low down swingers. Besides some congratulations and friendly pats on the back we were all but enveloped into post-show the multitude. We spent the remainder of the night euphorically discussing our own personal triumphs over games of fooz ball and 5 yuan Tsingtaos.
Read Part One - Bar 77 (Nanjing)
-Jordan Small
BACK TO MAIN
