Our noise lasts for a good fifteen minutes without pause. After the first few minutes, though, I just give up trying to improvise anything because no one will hear it anyway, and I don’t want any accidental genius to be wasted. I start practicing my scales and then launch into the first movement of the Brahms sonatas that Toru and I had picked out, figuring I could use the practice. It is painfully obvious that, as great and romantic as Nabe’s idea of having “free mind about sound” is, some type of structure and order will be necessary in order to make music that doesn’t make people vomit.
As each of us tire of playing, the noise comes to a gradual finish, the last sputtering sounds that of the rumbling snare drum and a lonely little tuba. We sit in silence for a few moments, not sure what to say. Should we apologize to each other? Shake hands and say “good game”? Sniff some paint thinner and try again?
We try again without any greater success, though Yu does mix things up by putting down her bass and yelping into the nearest microphone. This time I detect more of a reggae vibe, and my viola tries its best to fit in. Things shift gears several times before finishing semi-triumphantly with a standoff between Yu and Masako’s tuba bouncing atop Kiyoshi’s ominous drumbeat, which, if memory serves, is the same as that in the song “In the Air Tonight” by Phil Collins. (Is there no escaping the Genesis?)
At the end of our session, Nabe asks me to meet again the next week, and I say I will, though I’m not sure anyone else will. Everyone says their polite goodbyes and we leave.
At work the next day, Eric, a teacher at Lane, asks me if I’m interested in renting a room in the house he lives in with a girl named Akiko, as their other roommate is moving out. The house is in Koenji, funnily enough, so I hop on it, move all my things again, and set about weaseling my way into the local scene, going to the Penguin Live House and hanging out occasionally at the Morgan Cafe, a tiny upstairs diner down the street from our house where the young husband and wife owners can’t speak a lick of English but love American indie rock.
The next week, we participants in Nabe’s music experiment meet in a different studio in Koenji. This time a guy named Kawano shows up, who is a singer and guitarist. There is also another bassist friend of Nabe’s, going simply by the name M. The guys plug in all their stuff and start playing, Kawano improvising some vocals. His singing style can best be described as “interpretive squawking.” Nabe tells me before we start that Kawano likes to make up his own language while he’s singing, which is fine by me, since it means I won’t be the only one who doesn’t understand him.
While they warm up and start jamming, I get my viola out to tune it and rosin my bow. But when I reach for my bow in its usual resting position in the case, I realize with horror that it isn’t there. I must have forgotten to put it back in the last time I practiced. So I am left with only a viola to pluck while the others fill the air with the screams of their own instruments. I will never be able to compete.
They continue playing while I sit and impotently pluck my viola into my microphone, which, let’s face it, won’t bring the house down. The guys eventually stop playing, remember I am there, and look at me curiously.
“Yeah, I, uh, kind of forgot my bow,” I say. “Yeah, my…my bow…it’s not here.”
Nabe informs the players in Japanese of my predicament.
“Do you play any other instruments?” he asks.
“Not really,” I say, still lamely plucking the strings of my viola, wishing I were invisible.
“How about you wanna to try drums?” he suggests. Hmm. We don’t have a drummer today, and I’ve always wanted to play. And look, there are some drumsticks right over there on the stool!
“Sure, I’ll give it a try.” Infused with a new energy, I sweep up the sticks, hop behind the kit, and start pounding away. I don’t really know what I’m doing, but psychologically it feels right. And as a gay man, I naturally have a solid sense of rhythm, of course. The guys follow my lead, and we tear through a few improvisations like fourteen-year-olds in their parents’ garage. When we finish our session, the guys bow slightly to each other.
Kawano says, adjusting his Buddy Holly glasses, which have slipped down his nose, “
.” “Cool, huh?”
The next week I get an e-mail from Nabe:
Whaaazzaaaap, Tim-san!!!!?? How was the last session? Actually, Kawano-san (a crazy singer whom you saw last week) loves your drumming. I and Kawano-san talked abuot the band, and you should play drum for us as well as you play your veola. The sound of your druming is cool, because you are the beginner. It was like a drum from some gararge bands. Well, we don’t even know where the direction should be. What we are doing now is like a trial and error, but also making music, is like a problem solving as well (that’s why I keep making music.). We are planning to have a session on this Sunday, too. So, let me know whether you are coming or not.?
Nabe
The next week I bring my bow and a new pair of drumsticks I got from the Yamaha store in Shibuya. This time it’s me, Nabe, and Kawano. Nabe had brought some of his recording equipment, so we decide to record our session. I hop behind the drum kit and start pounding. Nabe soon chimes in with some guitar, and then in comes Kawano with some otherworldly yelping, hemming, hawing, and rhythm guitar. There are no verses and no choruses, just one long odyssey of noise, piss, and vinegar. Yes, that’s what it is, a thirty-three-minute odyssey through rock and roll’s primitive passions. By the twentieth minute I’m drenched with sweat and I start having trouble holding on to the drumsticks, but I’m bound and determined not to let this moment-this exceedingly long moment-end. I hang on to them for dear life. I’m the captain of this Viking ship, after all, and it is my duty to steer the vessel through the treacherous waters of modern rock, to take up the hammer of the gods and smite any pretenders to the throne or John Mayer fans I find in my path. That’s my duty, right?
After we finally careen to a graceless finish, Nabe suggests that next time I should give them a nod when I’m ready to finish, otherwise they won’t know when to stop and Kawano might feel the need to, as Nabe put it, “keep to singing.”
We practice for a few more hours and record everything. After finishing our allotted time at the practice studio, we decide to walk back to Nabe’s place in Koenji to listen to our session on his sound system. We pack up the guitars, my viola, and Nabe’s portable recording equipment, pay our bill for the three hours we used the studio, and, all six of our arms occupied with equipment, start down the stairs to the street.
It is a sweltering August evening, and Koenji is in the middle of its summer matsuri, or festival, so we find ourselves exiting onto a narrow brick shopping street brimming with festival-goers standing on the sidelines of a long and winding parade of men and women dancing in traditional matsuri garb: men crouch and stomp around dressed in short yukata robes and handkerchiefs on their heads with corners tied together between their noses and upper lips, a misguided aesthetic choice if ever there was one; women stand in formation with their hands raised doing a more subtle and mannequin-like dance in unison, dressed in white kimono with pink sleeves, black waist wraps, and what looks like big bamboo placemats folded in half and placed on their heads; then there are the drummers, the flutists, and the blue kimono-clad band of men carrying the giant mikoshi, or shrine, on their shoulders. It is the best parade I’ve ever been to (except for that one where I saw two guys on a float dressed as hot lumberjacks making out against a giant inflated ball sack-that was a little better).
We squeeze ourselves out into the flow of traffic on the street, Nabe leading, Kawano following, and me bringing up the rear, each of us struggling to keep our grips on our instruments in the press of people around us. The smells of yakitori, grilled octopus, and beer hang deliciously in the air as we push our way through the throngs of people. After a good twenty-minute crusade through the thick of the celebration, we duck down a tiny side street leading to Nabe’s “room,” as he’d called it. We are soon there, and, well, he wasn’t lying. It is a room with a loft bed, the tiniest of bathrooms, and a hotplate.
Kawano and I take a load off as Nabe cues up the minidisk on which he’d recorded our practice. I brace myself for the inevitably disappointing result, but I am pleasantly surprised to hear that it sounds OK. Especially the drums. Can I have been a rock god all this time without even knowing it? God, the wasted teenage years spent playing in orchestras when I could have been just hitting things with sticks and getting laid!
We listen to our thirty-three-minute opus, which in all honesty really starts to drag after the first five minutes. As the music continues, Nabe and Kawano have a discussion in Japanese, their heads nodding and brows furrowed as if they’re talking about something very grim, like Japan’s strained relationship with China. Then their faces brighten into toothy smiles as if they’ve just figured out how to fix it.
“Tim-san,” Nabe says, “you wanna be a band?”
“Yeah,” I say, flushed and feeling as if I’ve just been asked to the prom. “We should give it a try.”
Nabe and Kawano further discuss China and then move on to the demilitarized zone of the Koreas. Then Kawano smiles and nods his head again, clearly having solved the problem of how to deal with Kim Jong-Il. He tries
