Secret History of Rock. The Most Influential Bands You've Never Heard (20 page)

HALF JAPANESE

I used to listen to [Half Japanese] on my walkman while strolling round the supermarket, right there at the heart of American culture. I though if other people got into listening to this music, they’d start to melt, to go crazy, to jump right out of their skins. So then I’d turn it up full, and imagine the music was coming from the store’s loudspeakers.

Kurt Cobain, Nirvana [from French zine Inrockuptible]:

Sometimes it’s the folks that don’t know anything who can teach us the most. That’s certainly the case with Half Japanese. Armed with only their hyperactive creativity and natural enthusiasm, brothers David and Jad Fair – two nerdy punk savants – created some of the most liberating rock music ever put to tape. Though few musicians could hope to capture the unschooled innocence of Half Japanese, hearing them has given other bands a glimpse of a world that operates on completely different rules than most rock, if indeed it has any rules at all. Experiencing Half Japanese’s inspiring freedom, even vicariously, has allowed groups such as Sonic Youth and Nirvana to expand the limits of their own music as well.

David Fair and his younger brother Jad grew up in southern Michigan in the ‘60s and early ‘70s. Though they listened to the Beatles and Motown groups on the radio, they also loved little-known garage bands that were making noise over in Detroit, such as the
Stooges
and
MC5
. During college, the brothers moved together into a house, where they found a guitar and amp someone apparently left behind. Though they’d never played music before, they decided to get a drum set as well, and before they could bother taking lessons David and Jad had formed a band.

Half Japanese, as the brothers called their band, immediately set on their quest to become the greatest rock ‘n’ roll band in the world. Though they didn’t know how to play chords, keep a proper beat, or sing on key, they managed to rock quite well on irrepressible energy alone. Though they made noise like free jazz skronkers, Half Japanese were not pursuing any particular musical concepts. “I thought it sounded great,” Jad remembers. “I didn’t think of it as noise, it was what came most natural to me, like folk music in a way. Only after the record came out, listening to it in a record store between two other records kind of brought to light for me that it was very different.”

Thurston Moore, Sonic Youth:

In retrospect they were highly crucial. It was just these two Half Japanese brothers, banging on pots and pans and screaming out their love for Patti Smith. It was something I could relate to, like “Wow, this is like me if I didn’t control myself!” When I first saw Half Japanese in the ‘80s I was convened by the complete originality, and a certain bizarro quality that was really authentic. It wasn’t a put-on or a show, this guy was just a kind of strange cat who really wore his heart on his sleeve. Jad Fair and Half Japanese were a major influence on the whole K Records scene and I remember Kurt [Cobain] was really into them.

Their first release in 1977, a nine-song 7-inch EP titled
Calling All Girls
, was a burst of rock primitivism and physicality that took familiar rock themes – hating school, feeling misunderstood, failing with girls – to a nearly psychotic, but disarmingly raw, level. By then, David and Jad had finished school and moved with their parents to Maryland. Their familiarity with underground music had led them to the
Residents
and the Los Angeles Free Music Society, groups who were producing independent music sold through the mail. Following suit, Half Japanese began making tapes of themselves.

By 1980, they’d amassed a large cassette collection of their tuneless and structureless songs and decided to compile them onto a three-record box set, to be released as their debut album,
Half Gentlemen / Not Beasts
. Though the collection was a bit much for anyone to listen to all the way through, their mix of untuned guitars with bits of electronics, and bizarre originals with barely recognizable covers, was a stunning document of homemade, completely free music, brimming with the childlike joy of making noisy music and musical noise.

Ira Kaplan, Yo La Tengo

Half Gentlemen / Not Beasts
is astonishing: the lyrics, the noise. It was, on one hand, so impenetrable, but also so inviting at the same time. That’s just a trip. Great, great record. I’ve been a big fan ever since. In the [Half Japanese documentary] there’s an amazing scene where David Fair explains how easy it is to play guitar as long as you understand the science of it, but they didn’t know any traditional ways of playing. They were just playing with all the exuberance and fearlessness that they had.

As Half Japanese progressed into the ‘80s, their music became more cogent – thanks to the addition of other musicians and to David and Jad’s growing experience – while retaining all of its unassuming charm.
Loud
, in 1981, added saxophones, which brought the band even closer to a free jazz no-wave sound, while
Horrible
delivered adolescent thrills with horror songs like
Rosemary’s Baby
and
Thing with a Hook
. Two albums in 1984, the mostly David-penned
Our Solar System
and the mostly Jad-penned
Sing No Evil
, proved Half Japanese was a seemingly endless well of inspiration, with no loss for material.

Charmed Life
, with smooth and catchy songs like
Red Dress
and
One Million Kisses
, was to be Half Japanese’s breakthrough, but label problems kept the record unreleased for years (it finally came out in 1988). Surrounding themselves with capable sidemen such as Don Fleming (later of Gumball), by the mid-‘80s the Fairs had evolved Half Japanese from radical naturalists into a reasonably competent garage group. In 1987, David fulfilled a long-standing intention to quit the group when he turned 35, and retired from Half Japanese (he now works as a librarian on a bookmobile in rural Maryland). With Jad the sole voice in the band, and Bongwater’s Kramer producing, Half Japanese made the outrageous
Music to Strip by
, with clever, often hilarious songs such as
My Sordid Past
,
Sex at Your Parents House
, and
U.S. Teens Are Spoiled Bums
.

Steve Malkmus, Pavement:

They’re just these cacophonous things. Hearing this guy that couldn’t really sing or play his instrument exactly, and just didn’t give a fuck, was inspirational to me. It was just noisy and bratty, and made us think that we could make a record too.

To keep up with his prodigious songwriting, Jad also released solo records. Beginning with The Zombies of Mora-Tau EP in 1980, his solo material ranged from confessional (1982’s Everybody Knew But Me) to experimental (1988’s Best Wishes, featuring 42 short instrumentals, titled either “O.K.” or “A.O.K.”). For 1992’s I Like It When You Smile, Jad’s guests included members of Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr., and Yo La Tengo. Over the years, Jad has also collaborated on record with fellow eccentric
Daniel Johnston
, avant-garde composer John Zorn, former Velvet Underground drummer Moe Tucker, the band Mosquito (featuring Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley), and countless others. And between gigs and recording sessions, Jad has worked as a teacher in a daycare center and in a factory, making things he was never able to identify.

In the ‘90s, Jad has continued Half Japanese with an ever-changing cast of backup musicians and a steady stream of releases, while David returned to music with an album by his ‘50s-style band, Coo Coo Rocking Time. In addition, Half Japanese was the subject of a 1994 documentary, titled
The Band That Would Be King
, and Jad has been the focus of two musical tributes, in songs by Pee Shy and the Spinanes.

In 1996, David and Jad reunited for the touching
Best Friends
record, and followed in early ‘98 with the playful
Monster Songs
, which features one horror rocker for each letter of the alphabet (
Abominable Snowman
to
Zombie
). Twenty years after he began playing, Jad still doesn’t know a single guitar chord. Perhaps their still-intact musical innocence is what has allowed the Fair brothers, now in their forties, to retain their youthful exuberance as well.

DISCOGRAPHY

Calling All Girls
EP
(50 Skidillion Watts, 1977)
; a nine-song single without any regard for convention.

Half Gentlemen / Not Beasts
(Armageddon, 1980; TEC Tones, 1993)
; the triple-album debut, a classic document of unschooled noise rock.

Loud
(Armageddon, 1981)
; still rough, but slightly more cohesive with four other band members joining the Fair brothers.

Horrible
EP
(Press, 1982)
; a collection of gruesome and twisted horror songs.

Our Solar System
(Iridescence, 1984)
; an album heavy on David’s material.

Sing No Evil
(Iridescence, 1984)
; an album heavy on Jad’s material.

(w/ Velvet Monkeys)
Big Big Sun
(K [cassette], 1986)
.

Music to Strip by
(50 Skidillion Watts, 1987)
; the first HJ record without David, Jad holds the fort with smart and funny tabloid-obsessed lyrics.

Charmed Life
(50 Skidillion Watts, 1988)
; their best-known and most accessible record, released a few years after it was made.

The Band That Would Be King
(50 Skidillion Watts, 1989)
; a record featuring saxophonist / composer John Zorn and guitarist Fred Frith.

We Are They Who Ache with Amorous Love
(TEC Tones, 1990)
.

Fire in the Sky
(Safe House, 1993)
; a good recent collection, featuring the Velvet Underground’s Moe Tucker.

Boo! Live in Europe
(TEC Tones, 1993)
.

Greatest Hits
(Safe House, 1995)
; a terrific collection of material spanning the group’s entire career.

Hot
(Safe House, 1995)
.

Bone Head
(Alternative Tentacles, 1997)
.

Heaven Sent
(Trance Syndicate, 1997)
.

DANIEL JOHNSTON

Daniel Johnston [in the Austin American-Statesman, 9/24/92]:

I knew that I was an artist. I just didn’t know it would be music. If I didn’t do it, I’d be in pretty sorry shape, ‘cause my imagination gets carried away.

Having been blessed with the gift of crafting great songs, Daniel Johnston could have been a huge success as a songwriter or musician. But his curse – a severe bipolar disorder that has kept Johnston in and out of institutions for decades – has to a large degree marginalized his music. Ironically, the condition that has kept him suffering and made him obscure is the very thing that motivates him to continue writing songs. As someone whose sanity literally depends on the music he makes, Daniel Johnston’s work – most of it only available on low-fi homemade cassettes – is an inspiring example of passion and honesty for musicians to emulate.

And they do: His songs have been covered by Pearl Jam, the Dead Milkmen, Built to Spill, Wilco, and P (which features Gibby Haynes of the Butthole Surfers and actor Johnny Depp). Sonic Youth and Yo La Tengo have recorded with Daniel, while Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain mentions him in the liner notes to the album Incesticide. Though Johnston’s eccentricities have no doubt contributed to the cult around him, much of his music stands on its own. To focus solely on his mental instability is to do disservice to Daniel’s underappreciated talents.

Johnston grew up in West Virginia in a strict fundamentalist Christian family that viewed rock and roll as the devil’s music. Regardless, Daniel idolized the pop stars he heard as a kid in the late ‘60s and ‘70s – Bob Dylan, Neil Young, and in particular, the Beatles. Though music had been an important refuge for him since his first bouts with severe depression in junior high, it wasn’t until college in 1980 – in an attempt to impress a female classmate – that he began writing songs. When she responded favorably, Daniel made songwriting (and the girl) an obsession.

From the start, Johnston documented his music. Recording himself on a simple hand-held tape recorder, he sang in a high quivery voice while he accompanied himself, on piano, chord organ, toy guitar, or any other instrument at his disposal. In the mid-‘80s, he moved to eastern Texas to live with siblings, and after some time spent working as a carny, Daniel wound up in Austin. Inside his tiny apartment Johnston spent time expressing himself and exorcising the demons of mental illness that continued to haunt him. Over the years, he’d write and record hundreds of songs and create at least as many drawings. On the streets of Austin, or through his job at a local McDonald’s, Daniel would pass out tapes and pictures to anyone who’d take them.