The recent 10th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square debacle got me to reminiscing about my experiences playing music in China between 1989-93, including two of the earliest tours of the country by non-mainstream Western groups. The second of these tours revolved around a 1991 appearance by the Seattle-based avant-rock group the Vagaries in the Sichuan-China International TV Festival, held in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province. Despite never having played together as a band before, we were chosen to represent the United States based on a fabricated press kit and my promise to deliver an adaptation of a Chinese folk song. Our unstated mission was to sneak some unusual music onto an otherwise extremely conservative and tightly controlled program that was to be broadcast throughout China. The Vagaries were Roland Barker (keyboards, wind synthesizer), Mike Davidson (bass), Dennis Rea (guitar), Bill Rieflin (drums), and Charley Rowan (keyboards, vocals).
... In late September the Vagaries alighted in Hong Kong with an entourage that included Lisa, Daniel, Frankie, photographer Spike Mafford, and friends Heather Kennedy and Deborah Pops, eleven people in all. Too small-time to enjoy the luxury of a road crew, we got an immediate taste of what was to come as we dragged around our heaps of unwieldy baggage, including a drum, two keyboards, two guitars, racks of musical accessories, and camera equipment, not to mention a couple dozen suitcases and backpacks. After two nights at the surreal Chungking Mansions budget hotel complex and a day's sightseeing, we took a train across the border to Guangzhou, where a festival representative and an employee of Guangdong provincial TV greeted us. Our hosts treated us to the first of many sumptuous meals we would enjoy during our stay in China, gave us a perfunctory city tour, and then saw us onto a late afternoon flight to Chengdu.
A few hours later we touched down at the Chengdu airport, where we were surprised to find a welcoming committee of TV cameramen, newspaper reporters, and festival staff awaiting us on the chilly tarmac. We couldn't believe that people were lavishing so much attention on a band that existed only in a phony press kit, but such was the stir created by foreign artists in those days.
The uncharacteristically tidy city was aswirl with all manner of festival hoopla. Street lamps were festooned with festival banners and lanterns, tourists and dignitaries abounded, and villagers from the surrounding countryside thronged the streets hawking local handicrafts. It looked like half of Sichuan Province had converged on Chengdu to join in the revelry or make a buck off the festival.
When our chaperones checked us into our rooms at the upscale Minshan Hotel, a festival functionary informed us that some of our instruments had not been registered properly with Customs and were therefore contraband. The matter was eventually ironed out, but not before several anxious days of sweating that our keyboards would be seized.
The next morning a festival official named Guo Yang instructed us to report to a dress rehearsal at the cavernous Sichuan Provincial Arena. On arriving at the venue we were stunned to learn that we would not be performing live as expected but would have to fake playing along to a prerecorded tape! Contrary to the festival's request months earlier that we submit a detailed list of our equipment needs, it was now clear that they had never intended to let a foreign band play live on national television. We objected vigorously but were curtly overruled by a surly, uniformed PLA officer. Guo Yang then disclosed that tonight's “dress rehearsal” was really a pre-festival concert—for 10,000 people. And here we had counted on using the three days before the festival opening ceremony for some badly needed rehearsal.
Instead of playing a live set of creative instrumental music on nationwide TV as we'd anticipated, we would now suffer the embarrassment of miming two short songs. And since the band had only materialized a few weeks earlier, we couldn't even furnish the festival with any suitable tapes of our music. Surprised that we hadn't brought any recordings, Guo Yang commanded us to record two songs that very afternoon in the Sichuan Radio studio. He handed us over to an official from China Central TV who ordered us to record "one Chinese song and one country-and-western song." We were dumbfounded. Country? We were fairly versatile musicians but hated country music. Our watchdog then hastened to add, "and no rock music!"
Our CCTV chaperone hustled us onto a minibus for the drive across town to the Sichuan Radio studio, a dark, frigid mausoleum of a room where I'd recorded some tracks for the radio station back in 1989. At a loss to satisfy the festival's ill-timed request for a country tune, we decided to record Charley's "I Was Wrong," a melodic vocal number that we hoped would pass for C&W at this geographical distance. Even this inoffensive tune was tainted by the forbidden rock music, with its climax built on booming drums and revved-up electric guitar, but it was our only hope of accommodating the festival's demand. Comically, once the tape started rolling our CCTV watchdog exclaimed, "Yes! That's exactly what we want!" Fortunately for us, this Party apparatchik obviously didn't know country music from break dancing.
Handicapped by one-eared headphones and crackling wires, we recorded a stiff version of "I Was Wrong" plus my elaborate arrangement of the traditional folk piece "Dance Song of the Yi People." The session wrapped up just three hours before show time. And since we weren't even allowed to participate in mixing our music, we wouldn't get to hear the finished songs until we were actually onstage.
The so-called dress rehearsal was really a public preview of the festival's opening ceremony, a baroque extravaganza boasting a cast of hundreds. Based on the theme "the Western Nationalities," the ceremony was a veritable sideshow featuring a dozen ethnic groups native to western China—Uighurs, Tibetans, Miaos, Yi's, Wa's, and others—all decked out in traditional finery. Most of these performers belonged to state-sponsored song-and-dance troupes that regularly toured provincial capitals to promote the government's fatuous claims of ethnic unity. In addition to the ethnic troupes and ourselves, the festival lineup included a troupe of People's Liberation Army acrobats, the State Dance Company of Belarus, a famous Taiwanese pop singer, a traditional xiang-sheng comedy duo, and scores of preteen girls costumed as red Sichuan chili peppers. The backstage scene was right out of Fellini, with dozens of musicians and dancers mingling in riotously colored garments. Meeting these people was definitely the highlight of the festival for us. One especially touching moment came when a Uighur drummer presented Bill with the gift of a grim-looking dagger.
The spectacle kicked off with superstar pop songstress and PLA soldier Mao Aming singing the festival theme song, a syrupy ditty that climaxed on the English word "television." After a few more acts we walked onstage to the cheering of thousands, feeling utterly ridiculous with our unplugged instruments in hand. The recording engineers had inserted a four-beat cue before the first song so we would know when to begin, but the sound man carelessly rolled the tape on the second beat, making us awkwardly lurch to a late start. Everyone could now see that we weren't really playing. Worse still, the Sichuan Radio engineers had mutilated our songs almost beyond recognition. Thoroughly dispirited, we struck our mute instruments mechanically and emoted insincerely. A few minutes later it was over. We slunk offstage feeling like complete frauds.
The next morning Guo Yang summoned us to a meeting and told us that a second "dress rehearsal" would take place that evening, that we should be more "active" on stage, and that our time slot was being cut back from 10 to 3˝ minutes because the program supposedly was too long. Ironically, he told us to drop my arrangement of "Dance Song of the Yi People," which had gotten us the gig in the first place; it was now considered too cerebral and "not Western enough." After having been expressly forbidden from playing rock music, our sole contribution to the festival would now be a rock song!
The once-cordial festival organizers had grown ominously cool toward us. We asked Dong Hong if we had done anything to anger them, and she confided that some Communist Party officials were outraged at the discovery that we were indeed a dreaded rock band and not a group of smiley-faced Foreign Friends playing harmless Chinese folk tunes. No doubt they would have pulled us from the program altogether if it wouldn't have meant a major loss of face for the organizers who'd invited us.
We did manage to persuade Guo Yang to let us return to the studio to remix the tape, this time with better results. During the mixing session Tang Lei unexpectedly materialized from Germany, where she had been studying in a language program. She could hardly have chosen a more opportune moment to appear, given the many communication breakdowns we'd been experiencing. She quickly took control of the situation and also set to work arranging our post-festival tour itinerary.
The band repeated the lip-synch charade at the second sold-out preview show and again the following day in the official festival opening ceremony, watched by a TV audience estimated in the hundreds of millions, including viewers in Mongolia, Pakistan, and other countries bordering China. Normally we would have been thrilled at this incredible exposure, but our satisfaction was tempered by the knowledge that we had been forced to compromise our music by manipulative government overseers.
We had failed to achieve our audacious goal of broadcasting challenging instrumental music into the living rooms of viewers throughout China, but we weren't finished yet. The opening ceremony was followed by two "congratulatory performances" at the sold-out arena, and now that we no longer posed a moral threat to a national television audience, officials finally agreed to let us perform a half-dozen songs in real time. On the afternoon of the first show we showed up at the arena for a sound check, only to find the promised instrument amplifiers missing. The soundman tried to persuade us to plug directly into the arena-size p.a. system, but we politely refused, not wanting to risk another disaster like the Identity Crisis concert at Chengdu Electrical University. A festival rep reluctantly drove us to a music shop in an attempt to borrow some amplifiers, but since the only amps available were of a different brand than the p.a. equipment used by the festival, we were told we couldn't use them without infringing on the p.a. manufacturer's advertising monopoly. We ended up using a separate p.a. system for each band member-enough wattage to power five bands.
The band nevertheless turned in its first truly representative performance in China, and exacted a small measure of revenge on Guo Yang by playing longer than we'd agreed to, rushing into an extra number as the soundman frantically gestured for us to stop; after all, we'd been hoodwinked into delivering five gigantic concerts for the price of one. Since arriving in Chengdu a week earlier, the Vagaries had not only appeared in front of a nationwide TV audience per our original agreement, but also performed for nearly 50,000 concertgoers and, in the televised final congratulatory concert, millions of additional viewers throughout Sichuan Province.
After the last arena concert we ditched our festival chaperones and hauled our gear down to the Jinhe Hotel, where Zhou Di and his band Hei Ma were throwing a semiprivate rock and roll party in the hotel disco. Fed up with festival politics, we took full advantage of this opportunity to blow out our frustrations by playing a loud, unrestricted set. The young musicians and their friends crowded onto the stage with us, whooping with glee and drowning us in tepid Luye beer. In the middle of it all a beaming Zhou Di exclaimed, "How can it get any better than this?!"
Performance situations like the Jinhe party that involved actual human contact interested us far more than the sterile pomp of stagy propaganda events like the Sichuan-China International TV Festival. Thinking that it would be a terrible waste to travel all the way to China just to make a one-song cameo appearance on a strictly controlled government TV special, we had lobbied festival organizers for months to book us public concerts, and were delighted to learn that two Vagaries shows were scheduled at the large Workers' Cultural Palace. We were really looking forward to stretching out musically at these shows, but no sooner did we fulfill our obligation to the festival than Guo Yang announced that the concerts had been canceled because the Cultural Palace was reserved for other activities.
In compensation he offered us a small concert in the provincial backwater of Luzhou, a 10-hour bus ride from Chengdu. We exploded in protest, certain that Guo Yang was yanking our chain. A discreet investigation by Tang Lei soon revealed that Guo Yang had tried to extort a princely sum from the Cultural Palace for letting us play there, and the venue had understandably declined. Appalled that China's premier media event would shamelessly capitalize on its international guests in this way, we refused the show in Luzhou and let Guo Yang know exactly how we felt about his profiteering. Unfortunately, the task of translating fell to the already overstressed Dong Hong, who was mortified at being caught between her Party superiors and some testy foreign musicians. We eventually settled on playing three afternoon shows in the tiny Minshan Hotel disco for an audience made up mostly of petty gangsters. It came out that the avaricious festival organizers were charging an exorbitant 30 RMB at the door while telling us the concerts were free. And in a final display of contempt for the foreign guests, the estimable Guo Yang even tried to slip away from Chengdu without paying our return airfare as promised.
Government officials were obviously trying their damnedest to shield us from the public, or rather to shield the public from us. The Sichuan-China International TV Festival was not a happy experience for the Vagaries, but our stay in Chengdu ended on a happy note with an underground concert at the capacious Night Salon discothèque. About 500 people turned up to watch us play on an outlandish two-level wedding cake of a stage crowded with thick pillars that made it nearly impossible for us to see and hear each other. Despite this impediment we managed to crank out a vigorous set, and the audience reacted so wildly that the frightened club owner asked us to cut our performance short, afraid that his disco would be trashed by overexcited patrons.
Though we'd been taken for dupes by the politicos that ran the festival, we had the last laugh in the end. Believing that the ignorant American musicians had gone back home, Guo Yang and his cronies never found out that we used their invitation as a springboard for a month-long guerilla tour of four Chinese cities, sowing viral seeds of unauthorized music wherever we went.
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© 2003 Dennis Rea/Nunatak
Dennis Rea | Preface | Chinese Elvis | The Gang of Formosa | Cui Jian
Identity Crisis | The Vagaries | The Beijing Jazz Festival and the Rise of Jazz in China
e-mail: dennis at dennisrea.com
