A rock and roll past in Taiwan

Tomorrow I'm going to a wedding. Normally, in my Harvard blog I don't write about what I do in my spare time, except to say how it impacts my studies, but in this case I will, because attending this wedding keeps me in touch with my life in Taiwan, where I lived from 1993 to 1999.

The people who are getting married are Bob Hsiung, and his bride-to-be, Jaq Chai. Like me, Bob is from the Boston area, but in the mid-1990s, we happened to meet in Taiwan and started a band and a friendship that has lasted 'til this day. I remember when we met -- 1995, a going away party for a mutual friend named Vince Morkri.

I had been in some Taipei cover bands (The Librarianz, the Freds, and Swampus) but was angling to do some original music. Bob was a bassist, and he was game. We talked about music, and playing music, and, as I recall, he knew a drummer from California named Pauline Mu, and the M-9s (named after a Chinese missle) was born. We wrote a bunch of original songs, played around some Taipei clubs (and even Taipei City Hall!) and released a tape, "Love Songs." All of the songs were in English, except a cover of an old Shanghai big band tune, "Wo yao ni de ai" ("I want your love") which was in turn a cover of an old American big band tune. We didn't make much of an impression on the local scene except at one sparsely-attended show in a basement dive called "Scum". A Taiwanese drummer named Steve Tsai came up to us afterward and said he liked the band and wanted to jam with us. This was early 1996, I was about to go off on a six-month backpacking trip thorugh China and SE Asia, so nothing came of it ....

... Until I came back to Taipei in early 1997, and decided to get back into the music scene. Bob was into it, he was, at that point, in a loud band called Smut, but this band had a guitarist named Andrew Watson, fast and heavy as hell (and can speak Mandarin unbelievably well), who was also coincidentally from the Boston area. Somehow we heard about Steve Tsai, or he heard about us, and we got together to jam, and it worked out, and Feiwu (廢物樂隊, Good for nothing, wastrel, waste material) was born.

Unlike the M-9s, Feiwu was able to plug into the Taipei original rock scene much more readily. It was a small community then, but was just reaching a critical mass in terms of bands forming, people coming to see shows on the weekends, and everyone going down to Kenting in April to attend the Spring Scream festival. Bands like LTK (Luo Tsui Kee - or something like that, I can't speak Taiwanese!), Clippers (jiazi), 1976, Backquarter (si fen zhi yi), Medicine Jar (yao guan), Ladybug (piao chong) and May Day (wu yue tian) were starting to draw fans to Vibe and a few other clubs.

The fact that we wrote songs in Mandarin, had a Taiwanese drummer, and a beer-friendly attitude helped us get our own little place in the underground scene. We recorded and released two CDs on our own (Wu Yi Lei Ju [物以類聚, "Birds of a Feather Stick Together"] and 跳火圈 ("Ring of Fire"]), were at one point signed to Crystal Records (but never saw a dime!), were included in a bunch of underground compilations, and played all over the island. You can see some photos and sample some of our tunes at the official Feiwu website, which was created in 1998 and is still online.

And we were close friends. It's kind of a cliche that you see in movies ("Georgia" springs to mind) but in our spare time, even when we weren't rehearsing, recording, or performing, we were hanging out, at clubs, concerts, Bob's apartment, cheap restaurants, etc. It was a blast.

And of course, it came to an end. I left Taiwan in mid 1999; the other guys continued on for a year or so, but then Bob and Andrew came back to the Boston area, too, to work and be with family. We could have gotten together to play, but never did, because Steve wasn't there, and it just wouldn't be the same.

Except once .... Steve came out to Boston in the depth of winter in 2003; he was here for a month studying English and all of us got together for a series of practice sessions in Allston. We didn't do any new stuff, but it was a hell of a lot of fun playing the old stuff, and hanging out at "Sully's" afterwards for pool and beer. We made a DVD out of video footage shot from the practice sessions; contact me if you are interested in getting a copy ... it's probably the only visual record of Feiwu playing together.

And getting back to the original point of this post: Congratulations, Bob. You've been a good friend for ten years, through some fun times, some weird times, and now, some stable times, and I wish you the best wih Jaq. It's kind of late, but if you need a wedding band, all the other guys will be in town for the event, and can play " 我愛台灣啤酒" if the gear is available ...